Ganwold's Child

by Diann Read

  Lujan glanced at Chesney.

  “He went after the hairball that had her,” Chesney said. “They went through the rear doors.”

  Lujan’s jaw tightened. His eyes met Darcie’s again. His fingers stroked reassurance along her face as he rose.

  * *

  Tristan put out a cautious hand and touched stone. The passage turned. He shot a glance over his shoulder. Caught a shadow’s flicker against the dim emergency light a few yards behind him. And then nothing. Soundless on bare feet, he slipped around the corner, keeping his back to the wall, and stood still, listening.

  Waiting.

  In those few moments he felt how every muscle in his body ached, how his back burned, how his right side throbbed. His legs shook, supporting his weight. He slid down against the wall, into a crouch, and closed his eyes.

  He heard the scuff of a boot upon stone. He looked up. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He could make out the masuk’s shadow on the wall facing the turn.

  He clamped his mouth closed so Pa’an wouldn’t hear the noise of his panting. Gathered himself, as if he were stalking a peimu. Turned the knife hilt in his hand.

  Pa’an strode around the corner with his knife extended—

  —and Tristan lunged up, putting all his remaining strength behind his blade.

  He felt it go in upward, under the breastbone. Felt the masuk stiffen, roaring with shock and fury as he staggered back against the wall. His knife grazed Tristan’s shoulder as it fell from rigid fingers.

  Tristan jerked his knife from Pa’an’s body. Blood spilled over his hand and spattered his uniform. His breath caught like a sob. He raised the knife—

  “Tristan!”

  The voice stayed his blade as abruptly as a hand on his wrist. He paused, panting hard. Lifted the knife again.

  “Tristan, it’s over.”

  He straightened a little, shaking. Swayed on his feet. He tried to turn around—and buckled, the knife still in his grip.

  Hands caught him by the shoulders, kept him from falling. The blade clattered, harmless, to the floor.

  “It’s over, son,” Lujan said, quietly this time, and drew Tristan to himself with both arms.

 

  Twenty-Seven

  URGENT URGENT URGENT

  151809L 2 3308SY

  TO CP ISSEL II

  FM ASSAK SHP DEPOT, UNKAI, SAEDE

  UNIFIED WORLDS FORCES HAVE ENTERED UGF. TWO EXPLOSIONS, SEVERAL FIRES, SYSTEMS FAILING, HEAVY CASUALTIES. SECURITY FORCES NOT SUFFICIENT. CANNOT HOLD BASE MUCH LON S Y S T E M F A I L U R E S Y S T E M F A I L U R E

  Sector General Renier let the dispatch fall to the desktop. He didn’t look at the messenger. Didn’t speak. He just stared out through the command booth’s panes at the tracking screens.

  They had blacked out two hours earlier.

  After several minutes he rose, slowly, stiffly, and left the Command Post.

  He entered his office alone and closed its doors before he crossed to his desk.

  He had a sidearm concealed in one compartment. He took it out and adjusted its setting with hands that shook. It would be swifter than death at the hands of the masuki.

  Only he heard its single shot.

 

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Over the years it took me to write this book, many people in many areas contributed in one way or another to its completion. However, I owe particular thanks to First Lieutenant John T. Curtis, Captain Bradley K. Jones, Captain Dan Bartlett, Captain Daniel Smith, Lieutenant Colonel Dave madden, Lieutenant Colonel Max D. Remley, and Colonel Mike Self (Reserve), my fellow officers in the U.S. Air Force; and Lieutenant Commander Warren Jederberg and HM3 Tim Moore, U.S. Navy, for all of their constructive criticism and technical assistance; to Elizabeth “Liz” Moosman, RN, for her expertise and coaching on the medical aspects; and to my longtime friends and fellow writers, Marcha Fox, Mark Rhodes, and M. Shayne Bell, for their long-distance encouragement and moral support.

 

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Originally from Smithfield, Utah, Diann Thornley wrote her first story at the age of five and never stopped writing. She taught herself to type on her father’s ancient manual typewriter at the age of six, because it was faster than pushing a pencil. After winning a statewide writing contest, junior high division, at the age of fourteen, she began her first novel, which was based on the Arthurian legends. This endeavor filled most of her high school years and freshman year of college—until a handful of friends introduced her to science fiction. Hooked, she dove in headlong.

  Ganwold’s Child, her first military science fiction novel, took seven years and countless revisions to complete, due to finishing college and entering the U.S. Air Force. Following a year-long tour of duty in the Republic of Korea, Diann completed Ganwold’s Child while stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. Echoes of Issel and Dominion’s Reach, the second and third books in the series, were also written in Ohio.

  Diann transitioned into the Air Force Reserves following Desert Storm, but her military career spanned twenty-three years and included deployments to Bosnia and Iraq. In December 2000 she married Jon Read, NASA “rocket scientist” and martial artist, and moved to Texas. Diann retired from the Air Force in June 2009 and has returned to her writing career. She is now working on The Seventh Shaman series, a new military space fantasy epic.

  If you enjoyed this book, please consider posting a review on Amazon. I read all reviews and very much appreciate your thoughts and comments.

  You can connect with Diann online at:

  Website: www.diannthornleyread.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/d.t.read.author

  Twitter: @DiannTRead

  Please enjoy the following excerpt from Echoes of Issel, second book in The Sergey Chronicles.

  Chapter One

  Tristan started when a gloved hand closed on his wrist. The grip drew him out of his dream as hands would pull a drowning swimmer from the water. He broke the surface of consciousness with a gasp and realized he was soaked with sweat.

  “Nightmares again?” he heard.

  He turned his head with an effort and stared up at the sterilesuited figure standing beside his bed. It took a moment to recognize the face inside the head bubble as Doctor Libby Moses, the ship’s surgeon. “Yes’m,” he said, and raised a hand to touch his forehead in the gan gesture of respect for mature females.

  “Sit up and let your head clear,” she said, and reached out to assist him, careful of the welts that cross-hatched his back and shoulders, and the intravenous line that ran from his arm to the hemomanagement system built into the bulkhead. He rolled over slowly and sat up, swayed in a sudden whirlpool of dizziness, and Doctor Moses steadied him. “You should try to take some water,” she said, and moved off to fill a cup from the dispenser in the bulkhead.

  Images from the nightmare flicked across his memory. He could still feel the crimson heat of blood on his hand. He tried to rub the sensation away.

  “Tristan?” Doctor Moses said.

  His head jerked up. He glimpsed her querying eyes, and his face warmed with embarrassment. He ducked his head and touched his brow again.

  “What’s wrong with your hand?” Doctor Moses asked.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” he said.

  She held out a cup to him. He had to take it with both hands because they still trembled. He managed two or three sips, keeping his gaze lowered, but he could see her at his periphery, standing there observing him. His stomach knotted up.

  “What are your nightmares about?” Moses asked.

  He shuddered. Nearly gagged on another sip of water. Hunching himself in the gan posture of petition, he said, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  Moses raised an eyebrow but she didn’t insist. Instead, she turned her attention to the monitor mounted above his headboard and studied its display.

  Beneath the bed sheet, thousands of tiny white and
black and silver beads covered his mattress and pillow. Sensors, Doctor Moses had told him, which constantly monitored his temperature and respirations, his blood pressure and pulse, even his bowel sounds and restless activity, and relayed that information not only to the display above his bed but to the med-techs’ desk as well.

  Moses pursed her mouth as she eyed the readouts. “Your blood pressure and temperature are still up,” she said, “and I’m reading a lot of activity in your brain, like combat responses to an attack. Whatever that nightmare was about, it must’ve been pretty intense.”

  Tristan barely heard her. The nightmare curled up at the back of his waking consciousness like a tendril of smoke. A shape—two shapes—solidified in his mind’s eye.

  “What did he do to my mother?” he demanded.

  “What, Tris?” Moses dropped her gaze from the monitor, returned it to his face. “Who did something to your mother?”

  Tristan swallowed. I shouldn’t have said anything. It only stirs up questions about—everything I want to forget.

  “Your mother will be all right,” Moses said. Her tone held reassurance, offered comfort. “She’s on bedrest but she’s getting her appetite back.”

  He wondered if he dared believe her. Wondered if she thought he was crazy.

  “My biggest worry right now,” she said, “is how you’re feeling.”

  He ducked his head again and turned away from her. Felt her watching him. “What are you feeling right now?” she asked.

  Scared, he thought. He couldn’t say that. He shook his head.

  Moses still studied him. Closely. But she changed the subject. “Do you still have much pain in your back and ribs?”

  Half-healed lacerations throbbed across his back, and every time he moved his cracked ribs jabbed at him, like a knife piercing his side.

  The knife went in upward—

  No!

  He fought the image down, shaking his head.

  The wound in his soul ached worse.

  Moses pulled out the fold-down seat from the bulkhead by his bed and sat down. Picked up his hand as if to count his pulse. “You’re having a hard time getting any sleep between the nightmares, aren’t you?” she said, peering into his face.

  He didn’t meet her eyes. He kept his head down and his teeth closed tight against speaking.

  He’d stiffened when she first took his hand but he didn’t attempt to withdraw it; he found something comforting in the contact. His hand lay under her sterilesuit glove, his skin hot and dry under her touch.

  She released his hand after a moment, rose and unlocked the medications cabinet, and returned to her seat with a packet in her hand. “These will help you relax,” she said as she tore it open.

  The tension that had just begun to ebb shot up again as she tipped the little discs into her palm, and rose still more as she peeled the backing from one. His whole body went rigid.

  “What’s wrong, Tris?” she asked.

  “The patches.” His mouth dried so he could barely rasp out the words. He indicated the discs in her hand. “I don’t want them. I don’t want to sleep.”

  “These aren’t sedation patches,” Moses said. “They’re electromagnetic buttons. They pick up your normal brain waves and stimulate the ones that help you feel relaxed. Those are called alpha waves.”

  They looked like sedation patches to Tristan. He flicked his vision from the buttons to Moses’ face, his eyes narrowing with distrust.

  “At least give them a try,” she said. “If they don’t help, I’ll take them off when I come back later and we won’t use them again.”

  He eyed the patches once more. Probed her eyes with his. He finally nodded and said, still dry-mouthed, “All right.”

  He couldn’t keep himself from clenching his teeth as she pressed the miniature transmitters to his temples and forehead.

  Moses patted his hand when she finished. “You’ll start feeling better in a few minutes.” She paused then, frowning for a moment before she reached for the keypad above his headboard. “I’m going to put you on NonRem, too,” she said. “It’s a sleep inducer that keeps you from entering REM, the dream state of sleep, which means it’ll prevent the nightmares. We can only use it for a couple of nights, but that should be enough to get you over the exhaustion so you can start to heal.”

  When the prescription appeared on the small screen beside his monitor, she looked it over and keyed in something else. “There. That won’t kick in until tonight.” She glanced up at him. “How do you feel now?”

  The tension had left his muscles and stomach, he realized at once. His hands had stopped shaking. The gnawing, guilty fear had subsided. “Better,” he said.

  “Good,” Moses said, and then, “Your father would like to see you today, just for a couple of minutes.”

  Tristan swallowed reflexively. His guts knotted back up on themselves; his palms grew suddenly damp. “Do I have to see him?”

  Moses’ features remained neutral. “Not right now, if that’s what you want,” she said, “but you’ll have to deal with these things eventually in order to really heal.” She studied him again. “What is it about your father that makes you feel uneasy?”

  He shook his head a little. Let it droop. He wasn’t even sure he knew, except that he didn’t know his father. All he knew were the terms others used when they talked about him:

  Admiral.

  Assassin.

  Hero.

  Traitor.

  Fighter pilot.

  Brilliant strategist.

  Religious fanatic.

  The terms tumbled in his mind, rising from his mother’s stories during his childhood and the accusations of Sector General Mordan Renier.

  He shuddered at recent memories.

  Doctor Moses still watched him when he lifted his head at last. He made a resigned motion with one hand. “Let him come,” he said.

  “Okay, Tris.” She rose. “I’ll see you this afternoon.” She squeezed his hand and left the room.

 

  Two

  One glimpse of Darcie’s eyes, one glimpse of the color that rose along her cheekbones when she recognized him, left Lujan feeling as awkward as a teenage boy alone with the prettiest girl in the class; he suddenly felt incapable of putting one coherent word after another.

  He’d felt that way for the last several hours, sitting beside her while she slept.

  “Darcie?” he said.

  She studied him sleepily for a full minute before she said, “I guess I wasn’t just dreaming, then. You’re still here.”

  His hands grew damp inside the sterilesuit gloves he wore, but he smiled. “I hope that’s a good thing.”

  The smile with which she responded appeared uncertain. Her gaze searched his for a moment longer, then slipped away. “You’re an admiral now,” she sighed, “and I’m a right mess. My face feels like peimu leather, my hands are calloused, and my hair—” She broke off, coughing, and turned to cover her mouth.

  “I’ve never seen anyone with hair as long as yours,” Lujan said. He hesitated, then added, “I—like it that way.”

  Her hair tumbled loose and wavy around her shoulders, and when she’d gathered it earlier and drawn it free of the bedcovers, he’d been startled to realize it would reach nearly to her knees if she stood up.

  “It’s all gone gray,” she said.

  “So has mine,” Lujan countered.

  “At least yours looks distinguished.”

  He laughed at that, but she lowered her attention to her hands, interlocked tightly in her lap, and he found he was once more at a loss for words.

  Several silent seconds followed, each more strenuous than the last, until Darcie asked, “How is Tristan? Have you seen him yet?”

  Lujan sighed, partly with relief at the change of subject and partly out of anxiety for their son. “Not yet,” he said. He leaned forward on the fold-down seat and planted his elbows on his knees. “Doctor Mos
es says his temperature’s still elevated and he had nightmares all night.” He glanced up from the deck, met her gaze. “Did she tell you the rest of it?”

  “She said that he’d been flogged,” Darcie said. Her voice trembled, reinforcing the maternal anguish in her features.

  Lujan nodded. Returned his vision to his boots. “Mordan Renier did it to try to coerce me. He sent me the holograms.” He suppressed a shudder. But he couldn’t keep his jaw from tightening, his eyes from narrowing with fury and horror at the memory of the images.

  He felt Darcie’s stare. “Mordan beat Tris to coerce you? To do what?”

  “To sell out Sostis,” Lujan said. “The way he did during the Great War. I wouldn’t, of course. I . . .” He couldn’t finish. He shook his head. Couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes.

  The silence stretched on forever after that, until she finally said very quietly, as if it were a eulogy, “He looks like you. Your blue eyes, your mouth, your hair color. . . . He’ll be nineteen in another few months.”

  Lujan raised his head at that and studied her face. A shade paler now, he thought, than she’d been when he came in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did everything I could.”

  “Libby had told me already.”

  “Then you didn’t need to hear it again.” He sighed and straightened on the seat and rose to his feet. “I should probably just leave and let you rest.”

  She didn’t say anything, but he felt her gaze follow him as he crossed to the door.

  In the isolation lock between her room and the main corridor, he clenched his teeth as he stripped the sterilesuit off from over his uniform. Pretty lousy way to get reacquainted, he berated himself. Almost as bad as the first time.

  He headed up the corridor out of sickbay still scowling.

  * *

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced the spacer at the situation room doorway, “the Commander!”

  The situation room had remained mostly empty for the briefings given earlier during the spacecraft carrier’s simulated night, but he found every chair and holograph pad occupied now. Every combatant in the Spherzah fleet was represented, and every officer, whether Destrier’s own, present in the flesh, or the other ships’ captains attending via two-way holographic transmission from their vessels, came to attention as Admiral Lujan Ansellic Sergey strode into the room.