by S. L. Viehl
“You can stop there.” I didn’t want to hear the story of his big romance again. I looked at Maggie, who had taken her hands away from the reservoir. “Is it ready?”
“Yes.” She released the clamp on the transfuse tube and allowed the clear fluid to slowly seep into my daughter’s veins.
“If this poisons her,” I said in a low voice, “I will spend the rest of my existence finding a way to kill you, Jxin.”
She looked more puzzled than worried. “Even if you could, then you would die.”
“Why would I want to live without her?” I felt dizzy and closed my eyes.
It took what felt like an eternity before I saw the first signs of color returning to my daughter’s small face. Then her blood pressure rose and her heart rate steadied. As I removed the needle from my arm, her breathing became more regular.
I didn’t relax; what we had done was beyond foolhardy. But after another hour of constant monitoring, and no signs of any toxic reaction to the transfusion, some of the tension eased out of my shoulders.
“She will be well now,” Maggie said. “You have saved her life.”
“So did you.” I studied her lovely, indifferent face, and wondered how she could rip apart a man and then save a little girl, all within the space of a few hours. “Thank you.”
She imitated my smile. “Now will you tell me how you were able to use the collector?”
ChoVa and Shon took over monitoring PyrsVar and Kao in recovery so that I could stay with my daughter. Maggie seemed content to watch the maintenance crew repair the damage from the vortex, and when that palled, she created exotic concoctions at the prep unit and tried to coax the nursing staff into sampling them. To be safe, I summoned a couple of security guards to keep an eye on her. That left me alone with Reever in the isolation room where I’d moved Marel so she could rest undisturbed.
I expected that my husband would want to know what had happened to us since the Sunlace had been swallowed up by the rift. When he held his hand out to me, I realized giving him access to my mind was the simplest and quietest way to update him. So I let him initiate a link, but I didn’t try to project any thoughts to him. Instead I let him search through my memories and see whatever he wanted.
You have not discovered how to return to our time, he thought to me. Can Maggie re-create the rift that brought the ship here?
I don’t know, I admitted. Maybe. She has tremendous power, but she’s also unpredictable. I’d rather find our own means of getting back home.
I could attempt to communicate with the protocrystal and persuade it to help us. He winced as the memories of the Core plague and the possession of the oKiaf welled up into my thoughts. Then again, perhaps not.
After seeing what it did to Shon, I vote no. I could feel the edge of something dark in his mind, an emotion he was trying to suppress. All of it centered around Marel. I have been through this before, Duncan. If my blood had hurt her, I would have found the beginning stages of toxicity by now. She’s going to recover.
I believe you. He seemed a little uncomfortable that I had picked up on his negative emotion. I can’t lose her now, Cherijo. Not after losing both you and Jarn. I would not survive it.
You found me again. Resentment still filled a few corners in my heart, but the prospect of never seeing my family again had made his betrayal seem less monstrous than before. If I was going to be completely honest, he hadn’t betrayed me; he’d simply tried to cope. It wasn’t his fault he’d fallen in love with Jarn, or because of it he’d realized that he’d never been in love with me. None of this had happened by my choice or his.
Maybe, I thought, if I let go of the last of my pride and tried to take Jarn’s place in his life, eventually he might learn how to feel some affection for me again.
What are you thinking?
You’re occupying my mind, Duncan. If you can’t tell, we’re both in a lot of trouble.
He laced his fingers through mine. You are not as simple to read as you once were. Part of your mind is closed to me now. It has been since you returned.
I was thinking I’d rather be a poor substitute for Jarn than go on living alone. I squeezed his hand. When all this is over and we’re back on Joren, we should do like you said, and talk about it. Try to work things out.
You would do that? He touched my cheek.
My motives are completely selfish, trust me. I glanced up and broke the link between us as I saw ChoVa gesturing at me from the view panel. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I murmured before I slipped out of the room.
“I regret disturbing you, but the Jorenian male has regained consciousness,” she told me. “Shon thought you should be the one to first speak with him.”
“Signal the captain and ask him to come down here,” I said. “Assign one of the nurses to keep an eye on Marel and Reever for me, too.”
It wasn’t easy to walk into recovery and see Kao Torin sitting up in his berth and looking around him with his gentle, curious eyes. When he saw me, he made a simple gesture of greeting and smiled when I returned it.
“How are you feeling, ClanSon?” I asked as I scanned his chest.
“I fear I am a little confused.” He politely waited until I had completed my first scan before he asked, “Where am I?”
“You’re on the Sunlace.” Giving him too much information might cause him to panic, so I kept the details to a minimum as I briefed him. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I cannot say for certain. I had left Joren to serve as a pilot at a new colony. I remember being on patrol.” He peered up at me. “May I know your name, Healer?”
“I’m Cherijo Torin,” I said, watching his face. He gave no reaction to my name. “Your HouseClan adopted me some time ago. I’m the Senior Healer on this vessel.”
“Tonetka Torin retired at last, did she?” He chuckled. “Captain Pnor often despaired that she never would. May I speak with the captain?”
“Pnor embraced the stars some time ago, ClanSon.” His readings were in good ranges; he was simply weak from blood loss and, I imagined, the shock of being built out of an alterform’s spare parts. “We have a new captain now.”
“Kao?”
Xonea strode into recovery and stood over his ClanBrother, his eyes wide as he looked all over him and then at me. “How has this happened?”
“You would have the Senior Healer explain the matter of our kinship, ClanBrother?” Kao joked. “Surely you have not forgotten the hundred times ClanFather has told that tale at the gatherings.”
“Mother of all Houses. He is Kao.” Xonea turned chalk white. “Returned to us as you were.”
“There’s a bit more to it than that.” I touched Xonea’s arm. “Your ClanBrother’s last memory was his last assignment as a pilot.”
He pinned me with a sharp glance. “He does not recall you?”
“Have we met before, Healer?” Kao asked mildly. “Your pardon, but I do not remember you.”
“No pardon is required, ClanSon. Would you excuse us for a moment?” When he nodded, I led Xonea out of recovery and closed the door panel. “Maggie removed all the Jorenian organs and DNA from PyrsVar, and re-created Kao from them. He has retained some memory of his past life, but evidently nothing beyond his transfer to K-2.”
“These organs taken from the Hsktskt were cloned from my brother’s cells. This male never lived as Kao Torin. And yet . . . he is my ClanBrother. His voice, his hands . . .” He looked through the viewer. “I know that bodies can be duplicated, but how could anyone re-create a life lost?”
“His life was not lost, Jorenian.” Maggie came to stand by the viewer and looked in on our patient.
“That man died in my arms ten years ago,” I told her, my hands curling into fists. “Don’t you tell me he was still alive when we put him in that capsule.”
“The body died,” she assured me. “Before that, you gave him your blood. It changed his cells. It preserved what he was.”
“No.” I swallowed. �
�My blood is what killed him.”
“This is because you are impure. Like the other, but more complicated.” She regarded me. “Do you wish me to separate you?”
I thought of Jarn, and how happy Reever would be to have her back. “Sorry, but I don’t have another body sitting inside my chest.”
She shrugged, and started to say something else, when she frowned and turned toward the starboard side of the ship. “There is another vessel approaching.”
“You claimed that you did not have any ships,” Xonea said.
“It does not belong to the Jxin.” Her expression cleared. “It is only the undesirables.”
Something hit the side of the Sunlace, rocking the deck under our feet.
“They are shooting at you,” Maggie said helpfully.
Thirteen
Xonea left Medical while the staff and I secured our patients and prepared for incoming wounded. I went to the isolation room to check on Marel, who was still sleeping, and brief Reever on the situation.
“Unless Xonea needs you to negotiate with these people,” I told him, “I want you to stay here with her.”
“I am not leaving her.” He glanced out at the nurses hurrying to prep our staging area. “What provoked this attack?”
“We’ve been signaling for help since we got here.” I bent down to kiss my little girl on the brow. “This is probably why they didn’t respond.”
Maggie didn’t protest when I put her to work preparing triage gurneys and instrument trays, although she seemed a little bewildered by our response to the attack.
“They have a faster vessel, and more powerful weapons,” she told me. “You should not shoot back.”
I’d already heard the sonic cannons booming as Xonea returned fire. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Why are they attacking us, Maggie? What did we do?”
“It is not what you did; it is what they do.” She shrugged, and then said something even more ominous. “That is why there are no others. They attacked and killed all of them.”
The first wave of wounded arrived from a lower level that had suffered heavy damage and some sort of explosion. The crew’s injuries were a combination of impact fractures and serious burns. Whatever weapons the Odnallak were using employed a lethal phosphorous compound I’d never seen before: one that flash-burned on contact and then continued to burn through the derma down through the muscle and bone tissue, charring everything in its path. Three crew members died before I found the right counter-agent to neutralize it.
Shon joined me as I finished assessing a navigator with spinal trauma. Jorenian blood spattered the front of the oKiaf’s tunic, and he looked ready to maul someone. “I will do what I can here.”
“Don’t overextend your ability,” I warned him. “I’m going to need you in surgery.”
Grimly I reported our status to Command, issued orders for the neutralizer to be administered to every burn victim who came in for treatment, and then took my first patient, a female with severe head trauma, into surgery.
The battle raged on, and as the ship shuddered and jerked around us, I wondered how long the stardrive core would hold up. If the Odnallak were able to successfully locate and target it, this fight and the ship wouldn’t last much longer.
I worked as fast as I dared to remove tiny fragments of bone from my patient’s brain before I closed and called for the next patient.
Time and faces began to blur as I operated to save patients with crushed rib cages, fractured spines, and battered organs. At some point I realized the fight had ended, but then we began having disruptions in our power supply, and I had to give the order to switch the bay over to the emergency generators in order to maintain life support systems for the critically wounded.
When I had a minute between cases, I looked in on Shon and ChoVa, who were working in the other surgical suites, and the residents, who were handling the now-overflowing triage. I issued orders to our logistics technicians for them to set up every available chamber on our level as temporary patient wards. Our caseload surpassed twenty, then fifty, then reached a hundred before security stopped carrying in wounded.
Six hours after the battle, almost one-third of the crew had reported or had been brought to Medical for treatment.
Xonea signaled me sometime that night. “We have negotiated a cease-fire.”
“Thank God.” I stripped off one bloody glove before I rubbed my tired eyes. “What are the terms?”
“We are to follow them to their homeworld and surrender some of our people to them for questioning.”
I didn’t like that. “Who do they want?”
“Maggie, you, Duncan, the Hsktskt, and the oKiaf.” Before I could ask, he added, “They would not explain how they knew your names, or why they wish to question you.”
I glanced at the isolation room. “Can we jump away from here?”
“Only if we wish to finish what the Odnallak started. The stardrive is inoperable and on the verge of implosion.” He sounded old and very tired. “Cherijo, we cannot escape or continue to fight. Presently the only thing holding the ship together is the protocrystal. If I am to make repairs and save the crew . . .”
“I’ll speak to the others, and we’ll get ready,” I promised. I already knew what their answer would be. “All I want in return is for you to protect Marel, and get everyone home. Do whatever it takes, even if it means leaving us here.”
“I will, ClanSister.”
We arrived at Odnalla two days later and assumed orbit above the planet. I caught a few hours of sleep now and then on a cot in Marel’s room in between caring for our patients. Reever never left her side and ate only when I brought food to him, and slept in the chair beside her berth only when I threatened to sedate him. Our exhausted daughter slept a great deal, but the few times she woke, she was alert and coherent, if a little confused. She had no memory of teleporting to the Sunlace, and in particular watched me with wary eyes.
“Healer Cherijo,” she said on the second day, when I paid her a visit during my morning rounds, “you are my mama, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” The lapses in her memory did concern me, but considering the trauma she had suffered, they weren’t unexpected. “Do you remember being with me on Joren?” Her curls bounced as she shook her head. “I came to see you after Jarn left.”
She looked at me, and then her father. “Daddy? Who is Jarn?”
Reever exchanged a look with me before he said, “She was a friend of ours who stayed with us while your mother was away.”
“Oh.” She yawned and her eyelids began to droop. “Was she nice?”
“She was very nice.” I sat down on the edge of the berth and held her hand. “Marel, try to stay awake a little longer. I need to ask you some questions to see how well you can think now. Do you know how old you are?”
“Four.” She frowned. “No. Nine. I’m nine years old.”
I didn’t have time to run a full neurological series on her; I’d have to hope I’d have the chance when we returned from the planet. If we returned. “Can you tell me where you were before you and Daddy came to the ship to see me?”
“In the courtyard at the pavilion. I was finishing my schoolwork. I was sad.” She sighed. “I’m very tired, Mama. Can’t I rest now?”
“All right, baby. Go back to sleep.” I held her hand until she drifted off, and then gestured for Reever to come with me.
Outside her room, we both watched her through the view panel.
“Has she suffered brain damage?” my husband asked, his voice tight.
“I don’t think so.” I rested a hand on his shoulder. “This amnesia was trauma-induced, and it’s not completely retrograde. She remembers only select events and facts. I think her mind has chosen to forget what has hurt her most.”
“Losing Jarn.”
I nodded. “She feels responsible for what happened to Jarn.” I related what Marel had confessed to me during the surreptitious signal she had sent from Joren, and added, “I tried to reassure he
r that it wasn’t her fault, Duncan. I wasn’t happy about her transferring her affections to Jarn, but I would never allow her to think she was to blame for her death.”
“She tried to warn Jarn and me of what was going to happen,” he said slowly. “Somehow she knew when we left Joren for oKia that she would never see Jarn again.”
Xonea signaled to let us know that the launch was ready to take us down to the planet, and that during preflight checks the bay chief had discovered the protocrystal had already retreated from the hull doors.
“It wants us to go down there,” I said as I peered through the viewport at the Odnallak’s dark and dismal-looking homeworld. “But why?”
“Perhaps we were meant to meet them as well as the Jxin,” Reever suggested.
None of it made sense to me. Both species had advanced well beyond our capabilities; even if the Odnallak were less evolved than the Jxin, the massive ship they had sent to attack us had more than enough firepower to vaporize the Sunlace. One of the technicians I’d given a follow-up exam to had mentioned scanning a number of worlds we had passed on the sojourn to Odnalla. All of them were dead worlds that appeared to have been attacked from orbit, so viciously that every trace of life had been wiped out.
“PyrsVar was displeased when I told him we were sojourning down to the planet,” ChoVa told me as we left Medical. “I was obliged to sedate him so that he would not try to follow us.”
“Smart idea. His body is still adjusting to all the changes.” I glanced at Maggie and lowered my voice. “She doesn’t seem to be worried about meeting the enemy.”
“I can hear you,” Maggie said. “I do not worry. The undesirables can do nothing to me.”
ChoVa flicked out her tongue. “She has no fear.”
“Or common sense,” Shon put in.
Maggie sighed. “I can still hear you.”
None of us were carrying weapons, but Reever went to weapons storage and helped himself to several daggers. After a thoughtful glance, Shon joined him, and the two returned looking slightly more at ease.
