Ganwold's Child

by Diann Read

  “I suggest you keep the Sixth fleet ready to launch,” Lujan said, “to reinforce Yan, should that become necessary. Keep your First and Fifth fleets in a defense perimeter around Sostis. If the Spherzah fleet can’t achieve its objective, you’ll need those fleets here.”

  * *

  He didn’t return to the Command Section until late afternoon. Jiron and most of the office staff had already gone, making final preparations for their departure. But he found the outer office occupied.

  Ambassador Kapolas stood in the center of the reception area, tapping the corners of two envelopes into his palm. He said, “I’ve been waiting for some time to see you, Admiral.”

  Lujan motioned the man into his office and said, “What is it, Ambassador?”

  Kapolas ignored his gestured invitation to be seated. Said only, “I regret that I must be the bearer of bad news,” and extended one of the envelopes.

  Lujan accepted it. Examined it briefly before he slipped its catch.

  “It’s not an explosive,” Kapolas said. “Not in the physical sense, at least. However, you would be wise to sit down before you look at the contents.”

  Lujan looked across at him, hard, but the other’s expression remained inscrutable. Seating himself at his desk, he opened the envelope and reached into it.

  Holography film. Two or three sheets of it. With another glance at Kapolas, he slid them out onto the desktop.

  He felt the ambassador watching him with eyes like lasers and masked his horror. All but a twitch at one corner of his mouth.

  He forced himself to look at all three holograms. Kept his face impassive. He noted the transmission codes along the top and bottom of each.

  He studied the death certificate for several moments. The standard date and time caught his attention: 0423 on 7/2/3308. Only yesterday.

  But there was something irregular about it. . . .

  He looked directly at Kapolas. “Why?” he said.

  “A number of reasons,” said the ambassador, “some of which are known only to you and the Sector General. But mostly because of your failure to cooperate at earlier opportunities.”

  “To be coerced, you mean.”

  Kapolas shrugged. “Semantics are meaningless at this point, Admiral. But Governor Renier is offering you a final chance to cooperate.” He handed over the second envelope.

  Lujan pulled it open, withdrew another sheet of holography film.

  Darcie.

  She appeared very thin, very pale, with only a masuk guard on either side keeping her on her feet.

  “The picture was made yesterday as she was taken aboard the Bacalli vessel s’Adou The’n,” said Kapolas. “Obviously, Admiral, she’s in very frail health. She wouldn’t last as long under torture as your son did.”

  Lujan crushed the envelope in his hand.

  He regained control in the next instant and locked onto the ambassador’s gaze with his own. “What are you leading up to?”

  “The fact that it isn’t too late to save her—yet. Nor is it too late to recall the warships which departed Issel a few standard hours ago. But that is up to you.”

  Warships have departed Issel.

  Lujan masked that shock, too. “What does the Sector General expect me to do?” he said. “Sell out Sostis the way he did twenty-seven years ago?”

  The ambassador betrayed a split second’s surprise, and Lujan rose to his feet. “Treason is not an alternative, even at—the cost of my family.” He indicated the door. “Good day, Ambassador.”

  Kapolas paused at the threshold. “There are still forty-eight hours before the fleet reaches its first ‘skip point, Admiral.”

  “Good day, Ambassador.” Lujan let his eyes and voice turn hard.

  Alone, he sank back into his chair, suddenly strengthless.

  Warships have departed Issel.

  He punched the secure phone and passed the message to the offices of the Triune and the World Governor.

  His vision kept touching the holograms lying on the desk, finally fixing on them for several minutes until, nauseous, he turned his face away.

  Something about the death certificate drew his attention back.

  Attending Physician. I’ve never seen that before. He reached for the intercom button. Remembered before he pressed it that Jiron was no longer there. He called the Command Surgeon’s office instead, wondering if anyone would still be in.

  * *

  Beyond the diaphametal wall, Ramiscal City appeared mirage-like under the thin fog of early spring, but Lujan, leaning against the pane, scarcely noticed. He glanced over his shoulder when he sensed a presence at the doorway behind him, and turned away from the view.

  “Surgeon’s Office, sir,” said the woman who stood there. She wore commander’s rank. “You requested that someone come up?”

  “Yes.” He moved to his desk, reached for the death certificate lying there, passed it across to her. “There’s something unusual about this,” he said.

  He saw her glance up once, swiftly, when she read the name of the deceased, but he said nothing. He only watched her and waited.

  She read it through. Read it twice, in fact, and appeared to consider it for a long while.

  Then she said carefully, “Sir, the way this is worded suggests to me that your son wasn’t dead when this certificate was submitted. It gives a detailed description of his injuries but it makes no actual statement of death.” She hesitated. “I suspect it was done that way intentionally. I’d guess that someone wanted to be sure you’d know he was still alive.”

  Lujan only nodded; his throat had abruptly gone too tight to speak. He turned his vision abruptly back to the city outside, clenching his hands and his jaw.

  The commander turned her eyes from him in apparent deference to his emotions. But she didn’t withdraw. She waited until he’d regained control before she asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I will be,” he said. He managed to keep his voice steady.

  “If there’s anything we can do to assist you . . .” she offered.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so, not right now, but thank you.”

  Lujan opened up his desktop terminal after the surgeon left. It took only a few minutes to draft a set of new orders, a few sentences, brief but explicit. He read them over, then added a directive: “Dispatch at highest precedent to Commodore of the Spherzah Cerise Chesney.”

  Two keystrokes released it into secure communications channels.

  He glanced up at the timepanel on the wall. Two hours until launch.

  * *

  “Message just in for you, ma’am,” said the ensign at Comms.

  Chesney turned away from the personnel seated at the receiver banks. “Is it urgent?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s from Admiral Sergey.”

  “I’ll take it in my quarters.”

  Striding through the ship’s passages, she said under her breath, “It’s about time!”

  In her cabin, Chesney secured the door before punching an access code and MSG REL into her desk terminal.

  The text came up in green characters, barely filling a quarter of the screen. She scanned it rapidly first, narrowing her eyes. “Tristan,” she said. “I knew it.”

  But the rest made her straighten in her chair. She read it again, slowly this time, her brow creasing with concentration. “Ogata? Holy Dzhou!” She whistled. “Brilliant as usual, Jink.”

  * *

  Weil glanced over his shoulder as he touched the door switch. No one in the corridor. Stepping into the morgue, he said quietly, “It’s just me, kids,” and gestured at the light sensor.

  Pulou, huddled at the base of the slab, blinked in the abrupt illumination, squinted, and came to his feet in a serpentine motion.

  Tristan started when Weil pulled the sheet away from his head. His hair lay in a damp fringe across his forehead, and his eyes showed fear and a pain which wasn’t entirely physical. “What is it
, Tris?” Weil asked, easing the gag off. “Nightmares again?”

  “Yes.” The boy gulped a breath. “I keep hearing Larielle scream . . . and hearing them talk about my mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Weil. “I’ll give you a stronger sedative that should help you sleep better.” He checked the readouts on the vital signs monitor.

  “They’ve got my mother!” the youth said again.

  “Take it easy, kid.” Weil lay a hand on his head, looked into his face. “I know,” he said, “I know, but we’ve got to worry about you first. Take it easy.”

  He waited a little, until Tristan seemed calmer. Then he said, “Let me look at your back now,” and he drew the sheet down.

  Under the dermal seal, red lacerations had just begun to close. Much of the swelling had receded. “In a couple more days,” Weil said, “you’ll be able to move around without risk of the skin injuries pulling open again.”

  “How long’ve I been here?” Tristan asked.

  “Two days.”

  “Feels longer,” the boy sighed.

  “I know,” said Weil. “I’m sorry. That’s one of the reasons I’ve kept you asleep so much. . . . Are you starting to feel hungry yet?”

  “A little.”

  “Good.” He picked up the boy’s arm. “I’m taking you off the IV and starting you on a soft diet with a high protein content, a step up from the ice chips and clear liquids you’ve been getting. It’ll help you start to regain your strength.”

  Tristan said nothing.

  “Your temperature’s almost down to normal and your blood pressure’s good,” Weil said, “but we’ll keep you catheterized a little longer to be sure you’ve stopped passing blood.” He turned the youth onto his side and bolstered his head with rolled towels. “I’m going to put you through the range of motion exercises again, and then I’ll feed you.”

  “I hate this, being fed and tended like a baby!” Tristan said.

  Weil saw humiliation in his face. “I’m sorry, kid,” he said again. “It was the best way to relieve your pain under the circumstances.” He began the exercising with Tristan’s right arm, manipulating each finger in turn, then his wrist, then his elbow. “I’ll pull the clip in a couple more days.”

  No answer, but the youth’s listless gaze followed his actions.

  “Sir?” It was Ricker’s voice, in the corridor. “Are you down here? There’s someone at the front desk to see you.”

  “Oh, no,” Weil said under his breath. He touched Tristan’s gaze with his own and reached to draw up the sheet. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Stay with him, Pulou.”

  Sergeant Ricker, still standing in the hallway, eyed him when he came out of the morgue. “I misplaced something the other night,” Weil said. “I think I must’ve lost it while I was moving the boy’s body.”

  “It must be pretty important, sir,” Ricker said, a suggestion of skepticism in his tone. “You’ve sure been spending a lot of time in there looking for it.”

  “Yes, it is important. To me, at least.” Weil’s mouth went dry. “It’s—my grandfather’s service ring.” He forced his vision to meet the other’s. “So who’s at the front desk at this hour of the night?”

  “Somebody from Communications,” said Ricker, still eyeing him. “Says he’s got stomach pains, but he wouldn’t let me look at him. He said he knows you.”

  “From Communications?” Weil furrowed his brow.

  He didn’t recognize the man who stood beyond the front desk, one hand pressed to his abdomen. “What’s wrong, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “It started aching right after mess,” the sergeant said, “and it’s been getting worse ever since. Now it feels like somebody hit me.” He stood slightly hunched, as if doubling over would have been more comfortable.

  “Food poisoning maybe,” said Weil. “Look, I’ll give you something to counter it.”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so. This has been going on for some time.”

  “Why didn’t you come in before?” Weil could hear impatience mounting in his voice and he didn’t try to disguise it.

  “Because it wasn’t serious then,” the NCO said, and his eyes, his tone of voice took on a dangerous shade. “Now it is.”

  “What’s wrong?” Weil asked, suspicious.

  “Maybe you’d better find out, sir.”

  Weil eyed him for a long moment, feeling increasingly uneasy, before he said, “Come back here.”

  In the examining room, he touched the door switch and turned to see that his patient no longer hunched. He swallowed, his heart suddenly hammering. “What’s going on?” he asked once more.

  “You’re not going to be able to hide Tristan much longer,” the man said. “It’s too dangerous. It’s time to get him out.”

  Weil stiffened. “Who are you?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Ajimir Nemec, Unified Worlds Spherzah.”

  Weil swallowed. “I don’t have any reason to believe that.”

  “Except that right now you don’t have a choice,” said Nemec. “Your life is in danger, too, and I’m under orders from Admiral Lujan Sergey to get both of you out of here.”

  Weil stared at him, still wary. “How?”

  “There’s a ship waiting. What condition is the boy in?”

  “He’s got cracked ribs and vertebrae, and bruised kidneys.”

  “Can he walk?”

  “He’s been immobilized for two days,” Weil said, “and I just took him off the IV. With one more day he can be back on his feet.”

  “I doubt we have one more hour.” Nemec punched the door switch.

  Sergeant Ricker almost toppled into the room when the door slid open.

  Nemec felled him with the motion of one hand, like an ax at the base of a sapling, and bundled him onto the examination table. “Leave the light on and the door closed and go,” he said. “It’s a safe bet he’s already called Security.”

 

  Twenty

  “I’m back, Tris.” Urgency laced the medic’s voice as he pulled the sheet away. Urgency creased his face. He placed a backpack and a towel bundle on the counter and said, as he turned Tristan from his belly onto his back, “Listen, we’re getting you out of here. We’ll do everything we can to make it easier for you. This is sooner than I’d planned but we don’t have a choice.”

  “What?” Tristan watched as the medic peeled the monitor patches off of his chest. He couldn’t feel anything. Still, when Weil reached for the catheter, he locked his teeth and squeezed his eyes closed.

  “Your father sent one of his men to get you,” the surgeon said as he cut the tubes and withdrew them, “and one of my corpsmen overheard us talking. He probably called Security before we caught him.”

  Weil shifted him onto his side and met his look. “I’m going to pull the neural clip, kid. It’s going to hurt. I’m sorry we don’t have time to place some specific clips for your ribs.”

  Tristan felt a twinge at the nape of his neck, and then—pain! Fire through his upper arms and chest and shoulders, a dull ache down his back. He closed one hand hard on the edge of the slab before he was fully aware he could even do so.

  “You’ll have to sit up now,” Weil said, and slipped a hand under his side, under his arm. “Here, let me help you.”

  The movement sent lightning through his spine and right side, took his breath, produced involuntary tears. He tried to swallow a groan, tried not to look at Pulou.

  “Just sit still for a minute,” the medic said, and opened the towel bundle. “I’m going to put another layer of dermal seal on your back and give you another dose of antibiotic and something for pain, and then we’ll put you in a brace to support your ribs.”

  Weil applied a thermopatch to Tristan’s forehead first, then took an aerosol container from the bundle, shook it, moved around behind him. The spray felt cool up and down his back.

  Weil traded the container for a dermal infuser. It made a small
ache when he pressed it to Tristan’s shoulder. Dropping it into a trash receptacle, Weil reached for an object that resembled a microreader, about three inches long, two wide, and an eighth inch thick. It had a display and several buttons on one side and backing on the other that the surgeon peeled away, revealing a duct in the center of an adhesive surface.

  “This is a multiple infuser; it holds sixty grains of morphesyne,” Weil said. “There’s a miniature syringe here in the back.” He indicated the duct. “When you push the pad on the front, it’ll give you a small preprogrammed dosage and record the time and amount in the memory. You can use it up to six times an hour if you need to. Frequent small doses control pain better than large doses at long intervals do.” He checked the infuser’s readout against the timepanel on the wall and pressed it to the center of Tristan’s chest.

  Weil held up a brace, made of plastics with a lining like fleece. “Sit up as straight as you can,” Weil said, “and hold your arms away from your body.”

  Tristan sat motionless with his eyes closed and his breath hissing through his teeth. He didn’t have to watch the medic apply it; he could feel how each strap pulled through its eye, how each was fastened.

  “Now the clothes,” said Weil. “The best I could get you was a surgical suit.”

  Tristan opened his eyes as the surgeon pulled wadded blue cloth over his head, shook it out into a tunic, and said, “Put your arm through here. That’s it. Now the other one.” Then he said, “There’re trousers, too. You’ll have to get off the table.”

  Tristan looked down. Half a meter of space gaped between his feet and the floor. He swallowed and questioned Weil with his stare.

  “Just slide off,” the medic said. “Reach for the floor with one foot first. Yes, it’ll hurt, but I’ve got your arm. I won’t let you fall.”

  He took hold of Weil’s shoulder with one hand, placed the other on Pulou’s shoulder.

  The jolt of his feet meeting the floor sent a shock through his ribs. His knees buckled. Weil and Pulou held him by both arms, keeping him on his feet. He sagged until the swoon passed, until he could draw a cautious breath. Then he heard Pulou keening close to his ear.

  “Easy,” Weil said. “Easy. That’s the worst part.” And in a moment, “Can you stand now?”

  Tristan only nodded. Even the thought of so much as saying “Yes” hurt.