With three deep breaths, he filled the extra air sacks hidden beneath his jowls, and he wrapped his charge in both sets of extra limbs to keep her as warm as possible. At the last moment, he clamped his mouth over hers, dribbling his air into her.
Then he ran as rapidly as he could to the only safe haven in all seven of the Labyrinthe Stations.
“How did this happen?” Ambassador Telvino demanded the moment Jake dropped from the maintenance tube to the deck in Sissy’s wake.
Lord Lukan pressed hard on Telvino’s heels with his own questions.
Like I’m responsible? Jake thought.
Before he could formulate a reply, a flurry of lavender flocked around Sissy.
She drew each of her six acolytes and her brother and sister into one massive hug. High-pitched chatter and wails filled the corridor.
“If you will excuse me, Ambassador, My Lord. Let me settle Laudae Sissy and her charges safely, then we will speak, privately. In the meantime, you might want to summon Mr. Labyrinthe, the owner of the station.” He ducked away from the two men, arms extended to herd the Temple refugees into his quarters.
“Laudae Sissy, you need dry clothing right now,” he ordered, deeply concerned about her barely disguised chattering teeth.
He needed some himself. Deep chills raked his body.
“Where can we find a blanket for her?” Mary asked.
“When did I become the dad of this motley crew?” he muttered to himself.
“They look to you for leadership because you make a point of knowing more and staying calm when all around you scream in panic,” Sissy whispered back. Her voice sounded strained, a little echoey.
“That a prophecy?” He grinned at her, not letting conversation slow him down in pushing her toward his quarters.
“No. I . . . I lost my connections to the Goddess Harmony before I left the planet.” She hung her head sadly.
“You didn’t have to come,” he said quietly.
“Yes, I did.” She looked up at him, jutting her chin stubbornly. “You know why.”
The dying prophecy of her murdered acolyte Jilly said it all. The Covenant is broken. It can only be restored out there, among the stars.
He knew better than to argue with Sissy when she set her chin like that.
“Colonel Devlin,” Telvino snapped.
Jake jerked to a halt. The ambassador had been his admiral in another lifetime. The habit of obedience died hard. Not that it had been very strong in Jake at any time, under any of his identities. Then Sissy’s gentle persuasion had taught him there was a place for rules and ritual and chains of command.
“Yes, sir?” Jake fought the habit to salute.
“I think Laudae Sissy will be more comfortable in my quarters.”
“Um . . . With all due respect, sir, I figured you’d want to take Lord Lukan and his family there.” He continued onward.
“Then perhaps you should settle the Laudae in Admiral Marella’s quarters,” Telvino reprimanded without actually saying accusatory words. “Larger and more comfortable than yours.”
“Pammy’s off station, sir, and even I can’t pick the locks on her doors.” Jake flashed a grin. No one in the Confederated Star Systems got away with calling the spymaster by her first name, let alone an intimate and impudent sobriquet.
Except Jake.
Not that everyone knew Pamela Marella was spymaster for the CSS. But Telvino knew. And the ambassador knew that Jake had worked for Pammy during his time on Harmony.
Hastily he ushered the High Priestess and her girls into his cabin: larger than some but still crowded and . . . um . . . intimate when filled with a High Priestess, six female acolytes, two children, two dogs, and himself.
“My Laudae, you may sleep here.” He pulled a top bunk down from the wall. “Suzie and Sharan, bottom bunk. Martha and Mary, see if you can scrounge some extra pillows and blankets for the rest of you. Supply closet in the cross corridor to the left.”
“I will attend the meeting with Mr. Labyrinthe,” Sissy pronounced.
“I suppose you will,” Jake sighed. “I’d feel better with you safely locked in here. Even Pammy can’t pick my locks.”
“Jake,” Sissy said on a giggle. “This was not an attempt on my life. You don’t need to look for conspiracy in every accident.”
“Yes, I do.” He drew in a deep breath and coughed it out again. His lungs rebelled at working after so long in super-thin air.
She stared him down. Eventually he looked away. “Okay.” He should know better than to try to out-stubborn his Sissy. “You come with me as soon as I get some dry clothes on. I’ve got some jeans and a sweatshirt you can wear; roll up the sleeves and cuffs. And a pair of socks until your feet warm up and you can go barefoot again.” He yanked clothes for her and himself out of the closet and turned his back while she changed. He stripped out of the salt and ice encrusted uniform and changed, trusting the girls to look away.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been forced into close quarters with Sissy and crew. Privacy became a thing of the mind. His spacious room that seemed too big for just himself suddenly felt warm and crowded and comfortably homey.
“You stay within arm’s reach, Laudae Sissy, and you don’t let anyone else in the room get close to you,” he ordered. “If I say ‘gun,’ you drop to the deck, cover your head, and don’t move until I say otherwise.”
“Yes, Jake,” she replied with false meekness.
Jake rolled his eyes. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’d forget his orders the moment she stepped outside the door.
“You don’t have your veil,” he reminded her. “Your people aren’t used to seeing you without . . .”
“I don’t have formal robes or shoes or a toothbrush either, at the moment. Neither does Lord Lukan. We will make do. Now go to sleep, girls, I have work to do.”
Six girls ranging from ten to nearly fourteen in age bowed to her in unison. Then they all looked to each other in some silent, feminine communication.
“You will stay here,” Jake ordered.
As one, their heads jerked toward him.
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Colonel Jake.”
Satisfied with their compliance, he checked the entire lobby before allowing Sissy to follow him. The crowds had thinned. Mostly blue-clad Nobles wandered aimlessly from group to group, wringing their hands, looking over their shoulders nervously. Jake snagged a female Worker just as she settled to the deck, her back against the wall.
“Can you get them organized?” he asked. He pointed out supply closets. “There are unoccupied quarters in the light-grav sections.”
“Yes, sir.” The anonymous woman bowed and insinuated herself beneath the attention of Lady Jancee. From the way the Noble woman rubbed her swollen belly, he wondered if tonight’s alarms would send her into premature labor.
Great. They needed to get the lifts and trams operating fast to open a path to Medbay.
Telvino and Lukan awaited him at the lift. They’d gotten it working again at least.
Lukan returned his key. But he refused to budge from his solid stance in front of the moving platforms until Jake had stepped safely onto one.
Damn it! They should be the ones giving orders. High-ranking ambassadors earned their authority. Couldn’t they do anything besides yell at each other in meetings?
CHAPTER FOUR
“I must leave you now, my little bird. You will be safe here,” Mac whispered to his charge.
A delicate hand shot forth from her white draperies and grabbed his shirtfront with amazing strength. “How can I be safe anywhere? I am lost between worlds, beyond the sight and protection of the Gods,” she said, eyes still closed. The rest of her body remained still, as if frozen by the vacuum. “We have lost the sacred ritual places. We have lost everything.”
“No one will hurt you while I protect you.” Mac shook his head in wonderment at her rambling and meaningless sentences. “You can find your gods la
ter,” Mac reassured her. “There is food and water within reach. Blankets, too, if you need them. I will not be long.”
He’d stolen air from a dozen different conduits for his nest, channeling in the composition he needed at the time. As he spoke, he increased the oxygen and the heat to make her more comfortable.
He hoped the female truly was a natural NHO breather. She looked as much human as anything, but her bones were too frail and her skin and hair almost colorless. That difference could mean she came from a world with an exotic atmosphere.
“Go with the angels,” she said, stronger than before.
“First time anyone has bothered to send me off with a blessing. Usually it’s a boot to the rear. If they can catch me.” His own mother had spaced him at birth, not knowing that exposure to radiation and vacuum was the natural way of his father’s people.
Mother had wanted to kill him for the crime of not looking exactly like her. Instead, she had made him stronger and forced his Arachnoid DNA to become dominant.
Keeping his extra limbs hidden within his blousy shirt and trousers, he drew aside the curtain covering the air lock to the cargo bay.
Once clear of his home, with the hatch firmly closed behind him, he released his limbs and scuttled rapidly up the wall to his favorite listening post. Inside one of the connecting tubes he sat quietly, knowing that the other end opened just outside the door to his half brother’s penthouse wing. An unplanned chance of acoustics made conversations in his brother’s home perfectly audible at this one position in the tubes.
Labyrinthe VII, the name his brother took upon promotion to manager of the seventh station, occupied an entire wing. His apartment and space for his personal servants took up all the mid-and light-gravity levels at the “top” of the station. The heavy-gravity levels contained storage for special supplies reserved for Number Seven.
“You were only Number Seven son. I was Number Three,” Mac addressed his brother bitterly. “You got the mind and manners of a Glug. I have the cunning and intelligence of our mother.”
Every one of Mother’s twenty-six children, by twenty-six different fathers of twenty-six different races, looked exactly like her, indistinguishable from each other to clients, friends, and enemies alike. Most could not differentiate gender among them.
Except for Mac. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of allowing his father’s Arachnoid features to dominate. The DNA had become firmly fixed during his first journey into vacuum. If his mother had bothered asking for information and kept him close, nursing him in atmosphere, the Arachnoid features would have atrophied and eventually dropped off.
She hadn’t appreciated the irony of her actions.
So few Labyrinthes remained, their genes corrupted by pollution, inbreeding, and radiation that they could no longer breed among themselves and had to combine their DNA with other races.
A buzz rippling along the bulkhead alerted Mac to his intended task. He spread his ears wide to collect every nuance of sound. The voices continued softly, almost whispering in stilted and archaic Earther.
“Poverty and radiation,” he cursed in his mother’s language. The one trait he wished he had inherited from the legendary A’bner Labyrinthe was her ears. She’d used them almost as extra appendages: to fan herself, to fold over her face to hide her emotions, to drape backward in elegance and poise, to secrete small items within their ripples, to listen closely to the tiniest fragment of voices over long distances. Mac could bring his ears forward only far enough to touch his flat nasal slits. Spread wide they barely reached as far as his shoulders.
“Concentrate,” he admonished himself. Earther had been one of his favorite and best-learned tongues. Illogical and redundant compared to most, Earther could be manipulated and twisted, made to serve several purposes at once without lying. Other races only dreamed of such flexibility.
But this slow and drawled version spoken on Harmony did more than that. It cloaked insult in politeness and made threats look like compliments.
“Laudae, please sit here, in the place of honor,” Labyrinthe Seven said. His voice cut through the chaotic sludge of noise. “Now, what seems to be the problem?”
“Problem!” Ambassador Telvino shouted.
Mac could almost see the broad-chested man’s high color deepen and his eyes narrow. If he wasn’t careful, he might send his heart into full arrest.
“Problem?” Ambassador Lukan snarled. That tall and elegant man could flay skin from Glugs with his sarcasm. “There’s an outlaw cargo vessel crashed into the heavily restricted and isolated diplomatic wing. We were forced to evacuate.”
He didn’t add that his people had been contaminated by contact with “others.” He didn’t have to. His tone said it all.
“The tube hatch was locked on the inside as well as outside at the opposite end,” Telvino continued.
“The maintenance ’bots did not respond,” Colonel Devlin added. Ah, the good Military man who bridged both worlds with calm logic and daring compromises. “The specs I was given on the station suggest that the lifts are supposed to travel only one third the length of a wing, so that airtight bulkheads can close above and/or below them in case of hull breach. You did not replace the single construction lift with the three safety lifts. The entire wing was compromised because of your negligence.”
“If not for the quick thinking of Colonel Jake, my people would all have died.” Laudae Sissy completed the thought in a voice so soft that Mac had to strain to hear her.
From the silence on the other end, he suspected the others did, too. He quirked a smile. Sometimes a quiet whisper had more impact than a shout. He could learn much from her.
If she’d only look directly at him. Her gaze had slid away from him in revulsion.
“We had to rely on your phantom to save the survivor of the crash,” Jake said.
“Phantom? What phantom? We have no unauthorized personnel aboard Labyrinthe VII,” Number Seven insisted. “If such a phantom exists, I will hunt him down and personally space him.”
Sissy longed for the concealment of her formal robes and headdress with its beaded veil. So much easier to pretend to authority with them. As if the trappings made her important, rather than her mutant caste marks and her former gift of prophecy.
She hadn’t had a vision from Harmony since the explosion killed her family and damaged her hearing, long before she had left her home world to survive or fracture without her.
We can only mend the broken Covenant with Harmony out there among the stars, Jilly had said with her dying breath.
Sissy’s residual tinnitus from the explosion continued to skirl inside her head, sometimes loud and demanding all of her attention, sometimes soft, like the whisper of the Goddess. Always the noise inside her warred with the vibrations and hums of the power plants on the stations.
No Harmony within or without.
“The question, Mr. Labyrinthe, is not about the being who helped us. Rather it should be how did this tragedy happen, and what can we do to prevent a recurrence,” she said.
Jake came to stand behind her throne-like chair. The narrow seat fit her legs perfectly and allowed her feet to rest flat on the floor. She lusted after it. All the standard chairs designed for humans were too high and deep for her frame.
She breathed easier knowing Jake would supply her with vocabulary and confidence when her limited education failed her.
If only his clothes fit her better, she’d have more confidence in her words.
But then, her bedraggled refugee trappings emphasized her plight. Now that she’d warmed up, she slipped his socks off and stuffed them in the pocket of her borrowed trousers.
“Let me talk to my people in Control.” Labyrinthe Seven bowed deeply to her, nodded to the others, then turned his back. He mumbled as he touched various sections of the spectacles that covered half his face and extended almost as wide as his ears.
Sissy relaxed a little, now that she didn’t have to look directly at this alien. At home, h
e’d have been killed at the moment of birth. A fate she had almost shared because of her abnormal caste marks. No one, absolutely no one, was allowed to have more than one, and it had to be positioned on the left cheek. She had all seven arranged in a tight circle on her right cheek.
Now she knew that the marks had been genetically engineered by the first human settlers of Harmony. They’d used the caste marks to set up a totally artificial society and culture—to enslave. She also knew that the genetic manipulation had begun to break down after seven hundred years. More and more people were born every year with variations and multiplications of the marks.
Just as the order and tranquility of Harmony had begun to break down. She’d bring it down faster if she dared.
But she couldn’t leave the people she loved open to civil war and vulnerable to outside invasion when the balance of power in the galaxy teetered on the fine edge of a Badger Metal sword.
She now forced herself to accept and champion others when her cultural distaste wanted to shun them.
Lord Lukan, more liberal than his twin brother, Bevan, who now ruled the High Council, still shied away from anyone not born and raised on Harmony. He barely accepted Jake because the Military man had kept his caste mark from his months undercover on Harmony.
Even now, Lukan frowned at Jake’s proximity to Sissy.
Ambassador Telvino paced furiously, hands clenched behind his back, while they waited for Labyrinthe to consult with his Control.
“Excuse me, I must tend to this myself.” Labyrinthe turned and bowed deeply. “Please accept my hospitality in my absence. Servants will tend to your needs momentarily.” He backed toward the door, ears drooping forward to hide his facial expressions.
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