Enigma

by C. F. Bentley

  Layer after layer of her defenses peeled away, pouring into those black holes, until every soul that had died at her hands stood before her.

  Including Mac’s brother Number Seven. And the two Control techs she’d mistaken for him, who’d been absent from their posts the night of the crash.

  She hugged herself, feeling naked and vulnerable for the first time in many years. Dozens of men, women, and children ranged around her, until they crowded out her perceptions of anything else.

  “Go away,” she cried, hiding her eyes beneath her arms.

  She could not blot out their accusing presence.

  Why? they asked, each in turn, until their voices grew and compounded. The question pressed against her like the most sophisticated pressure chamber designed for torture by the Law.

  Why?

  She shook her head. The question and the ghosts remained.

  “It was necessary,” she choked out.

  Why?

  “The Messengers of the Gods commanded me!”

  Did they?

  “Of course they did. They said I had to find Spiritual Purity. All of you stood in the way of my quest.”

  Is that what they said, or what you wanted them to say to justify your actions?

  “Leave no trace, they said. Even in the memories of those who teach me. My quest must be secret.”

  Is that truly what they said? Or how you interpreted it?

  Before she could form a reply or drop into the forgetfulness that had sustained her for so long, the ship’s klaxon announced the jump back to normal space.

  Chaos erupted around her as Doc Halliday discovered Laud Gregor’s soul had left him.

  Adrial wanted to scream that he was standing right beside her. Please, oh, please, come get him.

  The hallucinations faded one by one. Laud Gregor was the last to leave. The image of his burning black eye holes lingered longest.

  Only their questions remained echoing through her mind.

  Why?

  The music of the stars connects everything, is everything, a different tune for each people, a floating mist told Jake two heartbeats before leaving hyperspace. Use the music to save them all.

  Wonder and awe sent waves of energy from him into the half-formed shape that might have been feminine. The voice echoing in his head sounded feminine.

  Normal space jolted his mind and body. He broke free of distortions, visions, and an almost tune drifting through his mind.

  The message lingered. Questions arose.

  He forced himself to get his charges back to the station safe and sound.

  The ship’s computer wanted to wrest docking control away from him. He couldn’t let it. The station was moving too fast, in the wrong trajectory for the programming to handle. He gritted his teeth and prayed no one would get hurt.

  Scrapes and bumps. Six tries, each one farther off the mark than the last. Finally, desperate, he closed his eyes and let his body feel the ship and how it wanted to move. The controls flowed smoothly beneath his hands.

  Jerk, grind. Screams of alarm. Movement ceased. The shuttle dropped into the bay and tilted wildly. More screams. He leaned into the stabilizer.

  They righted.

  Jake slumped against his restraints, exhausted. He sensed movement around him, had to let his passengers take care of themselves for a moment.

  Finally he had the energy to open a comm to Control.

  “Anything important happen while I was gone?” He sat very still in his pilot’s chair while the others bustled off.

  Pammy was first to disembark with her bag of plants. She had her head bent into her comm unit and ignored everything else.

  Sissy’s girls swarmed in and then out again, comforting her, supporting her, guiding her back to their quarters for rest. Sissy clung to the inhaler like a lifeline. At the last second she looked over her shoulder toward Jake.

  “I’ll find you,” he mouthed.

  She nodded, trusting him, as she had always trusted him.

  Then she was gone.

  Lord Lukan and Telvino left with their heads bent together, discussing how to break the news to Harmony that their HP had died and their HPs refused to go home to conduct the funeral.

  Doc Halliday stayed behind to supervise the removal of Gregor’s corpse.

  But Gregor didn’t leave with his body.

  The translucent outline of the High Priest stood before Jake with a puzzled expression on his face.

  Jake had watched him die. He’d seen how Gregor and a bunch of other ghosts crowded around Adrial. Gregor had led them. He stood tall, a commanding presence in his green clothing, more solid than the other spirits.

  But Jake wasn’t privy to the conversation.

  That was the nature of hyperspace ghosts. Each experience was private and individual, between a live person and those he or she had lost.

  The ghosts weren’t supposed to survive the jump back to normal space.

  The message from the Goddess still resonated in his head. So did the High Priest.

  Music was the key. He had to save them all with music? He couldn’t sing a note without trembling and choking in fear. But he knew someone who sang like an angel. And often sang with them.

  Gregor looked longingly at the inert body inside a black bag as the doc and her assistants wheeled it off the shuttle. Then his gaze returned to Jake.

  “Why are you here?” Jake finally asked when they were alone. His comm board blinked with all kinds of lights demanding his attention.

  He wanted to talk to real people, not this vague shadow.

  The ghost shrugged his shoulders.

  Maybe he couldn’t speak outside of hyperspace.

  Maybe he was merely a figment of Jake’s imagination, born of stress, fatigue, worry, and a total drain of adrenaline from his system.

  That must be it.

  He hit the comm icon from Major Roderick. “What happened?”

  “Major diplomatic crisis. You’ve got to get up to Control now.”

  “On my way. Orbital status?” He tried to keep his tone casual, as if that question were routine.

  “Trajectory and speed holding. But, sir, this diplomatic thing is more critical. Don’t bring anyone else with you. I’ve got Mara working from your office.” The major’s voice shook with dread, excitement, and ambition.

  Jake hadn’t thought anything could upset the man’s controlled demeanor. Maybe he just hadn’t had time to plot how to turn this crisis to his advantage.

  “On my way. Send Cortini down to Medbay; we’ve got a crisis there too. And close all outside communication, especially to and from Harmony, until I authorize differently. Heck, close down the whole board except to incoming ships. Jam everything else. And no one leaves unless cleared by me. Not Lord Lukan or Telvino and especially not Admiral Marella and her crews.”

  “Yes, sir. Your crisis is not as big as this one. Even Laud Gregor’s death can’t overshadow it. Nothing could be this big.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jake growled.

  The ghost followed him as he jumped down from the shuttle and bolted for the lift.

  Did deceased Laud Gregor count as someone who must be left behind?

  “Discord, I hope I’m the only one who can see you.”

  Laud Gregor didn’t say anything.

  Jake shrugged and let the rotating platforms carry him up to the tram.

  Disconcerting to see the ghost rising with him, facing him, within the shaft but not on the platform.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  No reply.

  Jake decided to ignore him. Maybe he’d go away when they put his body in cryo before shipping him home.

  Damn, but Sissy should go with them to conduct the funeral and Grief Blessing. Harmony needed her special touch to heal after a loss of this magnitude on top of the planetary upheaval.

  If she returned to Harmony, she might never come back to him. “I’ll find you, wherever you go, my Sissy,” he muttered to himself.

>   Laud Gregor frowned and raised a fist.

  “Screw you, you’re dead.”

  The tram ride to Control seemed to take forever. Every time Jake shifted to avoid looking at the spirit, Gregor shifted too. Always in his face, his angry silence demanding something. Jake just couldn’t figure out what.

  He continued to almost hear celestial music in the back of his head. Music that seemed to vibrate in harmony with the metal bulkheads and decks.

  Ideas began forming.

  He leaped off the tram before the doors had slid all the way open. Gregor matched his pace, as if tied to him by an umbilical cord.

  “Can’t you go haunt someone else? Someone like Sissy, who can deal with it. Or Lord Lukan, who could use some advice about now.”

  No answer.

  When he stepped off the lift into Control, the ghost seemed to fade a bit, become digitized static.

  Jake held his breath, hoping all the electronics disrupted the spiritual energy and banished it.

  No such luck. Three heartbeats later Gregor jelled back into his translucent form, perhaps a little paler, but not much. His green clothing stood out against the gray walls.

  “Sir, you need to read this,” Major Roderick rose from his computer terminal and pointed toward a message scrolling across the screen. If he could see the ghost of his HP, he said nothing. All his concern centered on the jumble of indecipherable glyphs.

  “That’s Maril!” Jake said, taking the seat. He picked out a couple of symbols he’d learned in the funerary caves on Harmony and seen repeated on the flat stone on Sanctuary. The previous message from rogue traders had come in broken and badly constructed CSS standard.

  “There’s a . . . a crude translation below it. Like they really want . . . want to communicate but have an . . . an imperfect knowledge of our . . . our language,” Roderick stammered.

  Jake watched the words in standard letters rise to the center of the screen.

  MUST MAKE WORDS. YOU KILL GOD.

  Surreptitiously, Jake compared the message with the glyphs he’d recorded on his comm. Similar symbols. Not all the same. The rock carvings were simpler, cleaner, almost primitive.

  Gregor shook his head violently in denial of the obvious message on the screen.

  But that was Gregor, alive as well as dead. He saw only what he wanted to.

  “That make any sense to you, sir?” Roderick chewed his lower lip.

  “Not much, but I get the drift.” Or maybe the tune.

  “Get someone to pull the translator program off the Squid ship. We’re going to need it. Soon.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Sissy sat patiently on a hard chair in her public office while Physician John checked her pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and who knew what else. He’d eagerly abandoned the slower and imprecise Harmony method of examination for CSS electronic scanners.

  “I’m going to replace the charcoal filter again,” he said.

  “I don’t want more surgery,” Sissy insisted. A hint of a wheeze remained in her breathing. “I’ll be fine once I’ve had a hot shower and some sleep.”

  “I’ll use fiberoptics. Go in through the same tiny incision. You’ll be awake, but tranquilized. An hour.”

  She thought, then shook her head. “I don’t have an hour to spare right now. And I have to think clearly. No tranquilizers. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day.”

  “Those are alien pollens that triggered your asthma attack. If General Jake had been one minute later with the inhaler, no amount of medication could have helped you. We’ve got to clear your lungs as soon as possible. Your immune system is compromised.” Physician John consulted his all-in-one gadget.

  “Not today.”

  “You can stay awake the whole time. Special glues to close the incision. No stitches, minimal pain, back on your feet in two hours. I can counteract the tranquilizers once I’m done.” He sounded more and more like Doc Halliday.

  Sissy wanted to giggle at how quickly her people adapted to foreign ways. She suddenly understood why Harmony had closed off all contact fifty years ago. She didn’t like the isolation or think it wise, but she understood the fear and need to retrench.

  Retrench or abandon the quest. Was that the message of Sanctuary? Change carried as much bad as good.

  “You won’t be out of contact with Harmony at all.” Physician John flashed her a grin.

  She wondered if he had recorded her thoughts on his gadget and needed to reassure her that technology didn’t change his faith.

  “I have too much to do.” The death of Laud Gregor, while not unforeseen given his heart condition, left a huge gap in Harmony politics. A gap only she could fill. Otherwise she risked civil war and the destruction of all the good on her home world as well as the hated caste system.

  “You will never be able to leave the dust-free, pollen-free artificial atmosphere of a station or spaceship if you don’t have this surgery,” Physician John warned. “I would restrict your movements in the station gardens as well. You cannot risk alien pollens. The proteins . . .” he wandered off into a long dissertation Sissy didn’t understand. Just like Doc Halliday.

  “Harmony Prime may be the only world you can visit if you don’t get a new filter and have it changed frequently,” Physician John finished.

  Sissy stopped short, half standing. She plopped down again. “That is unacceptable.”

  “I agree. Let me take you back to Medbay. I’ll do it immediately.” Physician John bowed formally, then extended his arm in an offer of escort.

  A warning whistle buzzed through the comm system throughout the Temple complex.

  “Will Laudae Sissy please honor station management with her immediate presence in Control.” Not a request, a demand.

  Sissy ignored Physician John and touched the blinking icon on her desktop. “Laudae Sissy to General Jake Devlin.”

  “Sissy, I need you, now,” Jake’s disembodied voice filled the room. He sounded desperate.

  She tested her lungs with a deep breath. Oh, how she’d come to loathe the citrus-flavored air with a metallic aftertaste. Her brief immersion in a real atmosphere scented delicately by native plants served as a reminder of what she’d sacrificed in coming here.

  “Physician John, we must delay your procedure.” She touched the comm system again. “I must change these filthy and pollen-laden clothes, General. We will join you very shortly.”

  “That had better be a royal ‘We.’ This is urgent and your eyes only. I don’t care what you are wearing. Just get up here.” He cut the connection abruptly without so much as a polite sign off. The station etiquette book, endorsed and enforced by Jake, required a sign off.

  “I saw,” Mac said quietly as he crept up behind Adrial. She stood in the docking bay reception area next to where they’d landed, turning right and then left again in uncertainty.

  She jumped and cringed at his words.

  He watched her chin quiver and her eyes dart about, never resting for more than a heartbeat. Avoiding his gaze altogether.

  “I did not want to see,” Mac continued. “My kind is not haunted by our past in hyperspace. Today I was haunted by your past.”

  “I do not know what you’re talking about,” Adrial replied. She wrapped her arms about herself and hugged tightly, keeping the truth in so that only her lies could escape. “I saw no one of import during the jump.”

  “Yes, you did. I watched Laud Gregor’s shade speak to you. He was joined by many others. I understand that you have lost your entire family to war with the Marils. But why would Laud Gregor seek you out at the moment of his death? He should haunt Laudae Sissy, if anyone.” Mac shifted so that he could grab her should she run in any direction.

  He had no doubt she would run at the first opportunity. She always did.

  That saddened him. He so wanted her to turn to him instead.

  “I did not kill Laud Gregor, if that is what you are implying. Why should I kill him?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.
” He edged closer even though her subtle perfume threatened to swamp his senses and remove his self-control.

  “I had no reason to kill him. Through him I finally saw the imbalance in the universe that prevented me from finding Spiritual Purity.” She released her death grip upon herself and faced him squarely. Her eyes cleared their hooded shadows.

  She lied, but she firmly believed her own lies.

  “And what is that imbalance?”

  “Laudae Sissy. She has to return to Harmony. Without her, the Mother Goddess is lost, adrift, alone. She cannot speak to Her people without Her avatar. Laudae Sissy has to return to Harmony. Only then can she interpret what the Goddess has to say to me.”

  Mac bowed his head in acknowledgment. She made sense to him. But did what she say make sense to the universe?

  Nothing made sense. Gregor drifted about Jake’s private office without purpose. Every time he tried to leave, to rejoin his body and find final peace, something yanked him back to Jake’s side, like a bouncing tether.

  Jake glared at him, then turned his attention back to his desk, deliberately ignoring Gregor’s presence.

  If Harmony decreed he must continue on this plane without his body, why in Discord’s name wouldn’t She allow him to get on with the work!

  This half existence had no purpose.

  None that you can see, a soft feminine voice whispered to him on the artificial air currents. Only you can bring Harmony through your death, where you could not in life.

  That sounded suspiciously like something Sissy would say.

  But his HPs was nowhere in sight. Jake had called her to join him. She was on the way. But even when touched by the Goddess, Sissy could not speak through half the station without a comm unit.

  You know what you must do if only you allow yourself to look.

  Now that made no sense at all.

  You have always wanted what is best for Harmony. Now look to see who can best achieve that without the prejudice you nurtured your entire life. What is best for Gregor may not be what is best for Harmony.

  Gregor decided to ignore that for now. He contented himself with reading the Maril message over Jake’s shoulder.