Saving Grace

by Merry Farmer

  Acknowledgements

  I owe an immense debt of gratitude to the many people who helped this book take shape, including Samantha Warren, J.R. Tague, Keira Montclair, Katherine Allred, and my brother Stewart, who knows more about ships than anyone I know. A special and huge thanks to Dave Farmer (no relation, he’s just awesome) for giving me priceless feedback from a male perspective. Another very special thank you to my editor, Aven Rose, who is pretty darn amazing, and who took me to task for the 275 exclamation points that were originally part of this manuscript. And finally, where would I be without the Mistress of Badass herself, my publicist Anne Chaconas, who is BAM-alicious.

  And because I know you hate me after that ending, keep clicking for a preview of Fallen from Grace, the second book in the Grace’s Moon series….

  Fallen From Grace

  Chapter One – Winter

  “Danny! Danny, help!”

  Danny yanked open the door of his lonely cabin and stepped out into a world that had lost all its color. He took a deep breath of frozen air that stung his lungs and frosted over his scarf as he exhaled. With eyes narrowed behind his glasses, he scanned the stark white landscape he grudgingly called home, looking for whoever had called him. The settlement that Grace Hargrove had fought and sacrificed for spread out across the gentle slope of the hill, its snug, snow-covered cabins cozy with smoke rising from their chimneys. He raised a mittened hand to block the glare of the overcast morning light on white, searching for the source of the call.

  Aside from the cry, the settlement was quiet. The pavilion in the center of their small valley was still. It had snowed again in the night. Another six inches of powder on top of the thick snow and ice that had piled up for weeks without melting. They may have crashed on the moon in a summer that took its sweet time blending into autumn, but winter was moving just as slowly and had shown no mercy.

  “Danny!” the cry came again.

  He twisted, scanning the hillside, and opened his mouth to answer. His reply froze on his lips. A shaft of sunlight lit up the forest near the edge of the clearing where they’d made their homes. The snow at the edge of the forest glittered. His chest squeezed tight as he turned his head up to the expanse of sky above him. The grey clouds that had pressed down on them for weeks were breaking up overhead, moving on at last. But it wasn’t the hint of blue sky or the sparkling coral of the planet Chronis’s rings that caught his attention. He scanned the sky, searching for lights that shouldn’t be there, vapor trails, any sign of Vengeance.

  Vengeance was on its way. Rumors of the ship controlled by Brian Kutrosky’s men, the ship that was hunting them, drawn by a homing beacon in Kutrosky’s possession, had hung like a specter for months. Whispers that it would find them and take them away, home to Earth or on to Terra, had filled the shadows of their settlement during the long, cold nights. Vengeance would bring death for him personally. Every day the people in his settlement searched the skies, waiting. Three seasons had come, stayed, and gone, but Vengeance had not. Yet. Even though he’d been missing for months, Kutrosky’s threat was ever-present. Danny clenched his fists at his sides. The man had destroyed too many lives. Once he found him, he would pay.

  “Danny!”

  He jerked at the call, scanning the settlement once more. Across the valley, on the other side of the pavilion and halfway up a second hill, a fur parka-clad figure pushed through drifted snow. With his hood pulled up it was hard to be sure who it was, but he was coming from Sean and Carrie’s house. By the length of his strides and his height, Danny assumed it was Sean.

  He let out a breath and relaxed his fists, dropping his shoulders. A different, deeper resentment for the part Sean had played in Grace’s defection lay smoldering in the pit of his stomach beside his rage for Kutrosky. He clenched his jaw. If Sean hadn’t abandoned their plans in the final negotiation, Grace might not have left. She might have—

  A bright red bird took off from the roof of his cabin with a scolding flutter, as if catching him in the lie. He scowled and watched it alight on the branch of a nearby tree. There was no point in holding on to the lie he still told himself. Grace had left because of him, because of everything he’d done, and he knew it. She was miles away across the river, living in the soldier Kinn’s settlement, living with Kinn, and it was his fault. The thought turned his heart to stone.

  “Danny!” Sean called, closer now.

  At last, Danny raised a hand in acknowledgement. Sean waved back, frantic. He climbed through the snow with desperate strides, slipping in his haste and sinking waist-deep in the drifts. Puffs of frost formed in rapid succession around his scarf-wrapped head. He disappeared entirely at one point, only to pull himself up and scramble on without dusting off the snow that covered him.

  Danny watched his struggle, his arms limp at his sides, feeling nothing for the man’s obvious alarm. So what if Sean was worked up about something? He should have come around by the pavilion instead of risking his neck in the snow. If not, he should have worn snowshoes. Foolhardy as ever.

  Danny turned his attention across their valley, through the last remaining trees by the riverbank, and out across the river itself while he waited for Sean to reach him. What would Grace say about Sean’s impetuousness? He didn’t know where she was over there on Kinn’s side of the river, if he was even searching in the right direction when he looked for her day after day. The hollowness that had consumed him since she’d discovered the truth, denounced him and everything he’d done for her, since he’d watched her cross the river and disappear into the forest, spread deeper.

  Halfway through lowering his head, a dark cloud to his right, further upriver, caught his eye. No, not a cloud. Smoke. On their side of the river. He shifted to get a good look at it, pushing back the hood of his parka to clear his line of sight. Yes, there was a broken column of smoke rising up through the forest several miles off. Too small to be a forest fire. Too big and too far away to be a campfire set by any of the scouts he’d sent out looking for game or for signs of Kutrosky. He held his breath and stared at it, watched it undulate. Its pattern was somehow deliberate.

  “Danny!”

  Sean’s exhausted voice was only feet away. Danny stopped studying the smoke long enough to shift his focus.

  “What?” His voice held no expression.

  “Danny, you have to come quick,” Sean panted, bending double to catch his breath. Half a second later, he straightened, desperation in his eyes. “It’s Carrie. The baby’s not coming.”

  Sean’s alarm barely dented the fog surrounding Danny. “What do you mean ‘not coming?’ Babies come, Sean.”

  Sean shook his head and swallowed. “Something isn’t right. I don’t know what. Maybe…maybe the cord is caught around the baby’s neck or something. I’m not sure. She needs you.”

  The fact that Sean didn’t start an argument or take a verbal swipe at him as he had at every opportunity since the summer was a bad sign.

  “You think I can help?”

  Sean gaped at him. “You’re our doctor.”

  “I’m no obstetrician. My expertise is more conception than birth.”

  “Christ, Danny, what is with you? Carrie’s in a lot of pain.”

  Danny held his ground, waiting to feel the compassion he knew should be there. He’d spent too much time with Grace for there not to be a spark of humanity buried under the bitterness of loss. Nothing. Not for Carrie. Not after the part she’d played in the drama that had changed his life for the worse. He turned to fetch the shovel that he kept on a hook outside his cabin’s door, blocking out his pain and guilt with work.

  “Did you hear me?” Sean shadowed him to the edge of the path. “I said Carrie’s in trouble. She needs you.”

  Danny clenched his jaw. He jammed his shovel into the new snowfall and tossed snow aside. He owed nothing to Sean or to Carrie. Carrie held as much responsibility for Grace leaving as he did. She had been Brian Kutrosky’s mole, had hid her true purpose from Grace for more than a year. Ca
rrie was far more culpable in the murders of everyone who hadn’t made it off of the Argo than he was. Carrie had a hand in planning it. His only crime was enabling it for his own ends, for love. Grace had left as much because of Carrie as she had over his betrayal.

  “I knew you were cold, but this is an all-time low,” Sean panted. “A woman is in labor and needs your help and you’re so wrapped up in yourself that you’re ignoring her?”

  Danny continued shoveling. Sean hovered over him.

  “You think you’re such a great leader now, telling everybody when to hunt, when to scout, how to ration the harvest, but you don’t give a shit about any of us. Once a cold-hearted geneticist, always a cold-hearted geneticist.”

  Danny paused, leaning on his shovel as his cheeks grew pink with offense beneath his scarf.

  “I don’t know why people bother to listen to you anymore,” Sean went on. “You live up here by yourself, sulk at social functions, and never bother to talk unless you’re telling someone what to do. You’re an asshole, that’s what you are.”

  “Feel better?” Danny muttered. “I know you’ve been wanting to say that for months.”

  Sean balled his hands to fists in his fur mittens. “You know what else I’ve wanted to say? That you’re getting what you deserve. You’re proud of being a miserable son-of-a-bitch while the rest of us have moved on. I cared deeply about Grace, so much so that I would foolishly have done anything for her. But I’ve got a wife now and a child about to be born, and if you don’t pull your head out of your ass and help them….” He clamped his lips shut over his words then burst out with, “Leaving your sorry ass was the smartest thing Grace ever did.”

  The ever-present gnawing in Danny’s gut flared hotter. He could argue. He could spend all of his black energy on rage, but Sean was right. He paid his dues for his sins with every breath he took, but he was as far from proud of it as a man could get. That was his business. The least Sean and Carrie could do was man up and deal with the blood and the pain and the mess themselves. He turned to head back to his cabin.

  “Danny.” Sean grabbed his arm to stop him, grip tight, anger flipping back to desperation. “Please. Please. Carrie was Grace’s best friend.”

  Danny hesitated, breathing in the sting of ice. Carrie was Grace’s friend. He squeezed his eyes shut. Was. None of them had seen so much as a glimpse of Grace since the summer. He kept waiting, searching the horizon for some kind of message from her. The only word they’d heard of her was sly innuendo and second-hand gossip from Kinn when he and his men had shown up the day after the confrontation with Kutrosky to start building their cabins. Grace had sent no messages, no explanation. Kinn had given his soldiers orders not to speak of her, orders that the soldiers carried out with sharp unease and wary glances at their unmoving leader. They were all tense. It was a new world, but no one was comfortable in it.

  “Grace saw something in you,” Sean said. The emotion in his voice revealed how distressed he was. “She stood by you when everyone told her she was a fool. She insisted you had a good heart. Carrie needs your help. Don’t make Grace a liar by turning your back on her friend, no matter what you blame Carrie for.”

  Danny let out a breath in a frosty cloud. His will to fight crumbled to dust around his feet. Living without Grace would have been infinitely less painful if she wasn’t constantly in his heart and mind.

  He grunted and jammed his shovel into the snowbank by the side of the path. Without a word, with only a grim scowl over his shoulder to Sean, he kicked his way through the unshoveled new snowfall on his path and headed down the slope to the pavilion. Sean hurried behind him.

  It had taken Kinn’s soldiers a month and a half to build twenty stout cabins in the patch of forest Danny and Sean and the others had claimed as theirs. They had been built using the trees felled in the area of their original camp. When Grace left, when Kinn and his men showed up to begin construction, Danny had ordered the site of their settlement moved half a mile south, closer to the river where the forest was thinner. He moved them all away from the caves, from the home he had shared with Grace for less than a day, from the memories.

  After the cabins had been constructed and Kinn’s men had left, their group of survivors had continued building. The pavilion in the center of the settlement had been their most ambitious project. It consisted of a broad, high roof with a hole in the center to let the smoke of their central campfire out, and thick posts spaced every ten feet to hold it up. It could house all thirty-eight of them and the dozen or so new babies for meals and in emergencies.

  When the winds of autumn had set in, they had used the canvas from their old tents and the tarps from the treasure chests to enclose it. The corners were sectioned off to create private space, and canvas walls had been erected at one end to form a combination office and laboratory for Danny. Once the snow had come, they had banked it against the sides for further insulation. The result was one central building that was safe from the elements, where everyone could get together to keep warm and sane as the impossible winter dragged on. The path to every one of their houses passed through the pavilion.

  With Sean on his heels, Danny ducked under the tent flap closest to his side of the building. He didn’t wait for his eyes to adjust or the fog to clear from his glasses as he charged through the warm communal area toward his lab. The pavilion was dim and smelled of cooking fires and wood. It already hummed with activity as the morning meal was prepared.

  “Morning,” Stacey greeted them from the table where she sat nursing her infant son, Jasper.

  Gil sat beside her, scratching out something with a stylus on a wax tablet. The last of their handhelds had long since run out of batteries. The distance of the Ovid system’s sun from the planet Chronis and the fact that much of the life-giving energy that sustained the moon came from the planet rather than the sun, rendered their solar-powered devices almost useless. They’d constructed alternatives—like the wax tablets and tallow lanterns—as fast as they could think of them.

  “You guys want something to eat?” Stacey called after Danny and Sean.

  Gil blinked up at Stacey’s greeting, then snapped to full attention.

  “Danny!” He stood, tripping in his effort to free his legs from where they were tucked under the table. “I’ve been doing some calculations. The barometric pressure these last few days has been unlike anything I’ve seen. The upper atmosphere of the moon—”

  Danny marched past him as though the pavilion was abandoned. Sean huffed in disapproval.

  “Hey! What’s all the hurry?” Stacey called after them. She got up and chased them across the length of the room. Jasper fussed in protest. “What’s wrong?”

  “Carrie,” Sean answered without slowing or looking at her. “The baby’s coming and something is wrong.”

  “Shit.” Stacey handed Jasper to Gil and tucked her breast into her shirt of homespun fabric. She caught up to Sean and continued to follow him and Danny. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Sean gave her a tight shake of his head.

  “Where are you going?” She caught up to Danny’s heels. “Sean and Carrie’s cabin is that way.”

  Danny ignored her, passing through the screens that separated his lab from the rest of the pavilion. His lab was stacked with shelves of dried herbs, samples of bark and minerals, and small hamster-like creatures in cages. He had discovered a lot of medicinal uses for the plants and minerals around them, but it was all just a drop in the bucket of what was waiting to be discovered. He ran his hand along a shelf of dried herbs, crossed to the desk and picked up a stack of rough homemade paper. His herb box was out on the desktop, but there was no way to tell if it had what he needed. He didn’t even know what he needed.

  “Are you just going to sit here while Carrie suffers?” Sean pressed him, running a hand through his hair.

  “Give him a break. He’s looking for stuff.” Stacey tried to settle Sean.

  Danny huffed, lips curling in a half-hearted sneer. He
r trust in him was misplaced at best.

  “There isn’t time for—”

  “Danny!” Sean was cut off by Jonah’s deep call.

  Danny clenched his jaw and balled his fists at the interruption. He pivoted to the lab entrance and watched Jonah jog toward him from the far end of the pavilion. Heather was on his heels. He left his desk and stepped into the main part of the pavilion.

  Heather met his eyes with a relieved smile as they zigzagged through the long tables. The subtle bulge of her belly, only slightly visible at this point, stood out from her unbuttoned parka. Grace would kill him if she knew Heather was pregnant, that he’d not only given permission for her romance with Jonah, but encouraged it for both of their sakes. By Earth calculations Heather was sixteen and fully capable of contributing to the essential growth of the population. Beyond that, since transferring over from Kinn’s camp, she had proven she was clever enough to be more than a baby-maker.

  “Danny, you’ve got to come quick,” Jonah panted when they reached his small group.

  “I’m a trifle busy at the moment,” he said, nodding to Heather.

  Jonah shook his head and caught his breath. “There’s smoke over the tree-line. Coming from the north, in the direction where Kutrosky was last seen.”

  “Don’t distract him,” Sean warned Jonah. “Carrie needs him. Now!”

  “I know.” Danny frowned in answer to both men. He started across the pavilion with long strides toward the exit that would take him to Sean and Carrie’s cabin. Sean, Stacey, Jonah, and Heather all followed him, drawing curious looks from the handful of others who had come to the pavilion for breakfast. “I saw the smoke a few minutes ago.”

  “Someone is sending signals.” Jonah lunged to catch up to his side.

  Danny stopped, turning to him with a frown. “Signals?”

  “Yeah, smoke signals.” Heather shifted, glancing from Jonah to Danny. “Like the ancient sentinels used to do back on Earth to communicate across distances, you know?”