Halcyon Nights (Star Sojourner Book 2)

by Kilczer, Jean

  “The czar knows we're on the planet, Briertrush. Those were his people at the tunnel entrance.”

  He nodded. “We have watchers on hills surround thre village, an' place ta good hide you an' Lisha. Stray you with thre people.” He put a hand on my knee. “Julesh, alwaysh stray you with thre people. Othrerise all in trouble.”

  I nodded.

  Lyella sat beside Briertrush and stroked his back. ”What's the code to contact the rebel movement?” I asked and fingered buttons on the sublink.

  He looked at the ceiling and I thought his expression turned sour. “Ah. Move ment no more. Move no thring 'tween czar an' Terran mines.”

  “What are you saying? The rebels have been defeated?”

  “Hear only thris one message, come you an' Lisha. Tell Briertrush no thring more. No plans from RECOILish.”

  RECOILish? The rebel movement?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Thrink move no more ta rebels.”

  I put down the coffee, got up and stood by the cave entrance, staring down the dark shaft. Joe Hatch, my former father in law and former W-CIA operative and a thousand other military tags could run a counterterrorist war better than I. They could flick this czar off Halcyon like a flea off a dog's back. So could Interstel. Couldn't they?

  I was sorry I never questioned Joe about Interstel. Though if Interstel were corrupt, he'd carried that secret into retirement. Speaking of which… Was secrecy so vital to the silver alien that he only wanted my help? And Lisa's? I rubbed a hand over my eyes. What was the alien hiding? Continuance, he'd stated. Of what? Observe, learn, he'd ordered. Develop your tel skills. To what end? Just to kill the czar? Why couldn't his Kubraens do it? Or the rebels? I moved in darkness deeper and more twisted than these passages, while Althea and Joe and Abby lived with the anguish of not knowing what had happened to their little girl.

  “Shit!” I slammed the wall with an open palm. “Briertrush. I saw a glow in the west on my way here. What was that? Is there a village in the mountains?”

  He stoked the fire pensively. “Home Kubraish Mountain.”

  I sat down near the fire. “You mean your people's home before the czar?”

  He dipped his head. “Mean the center ever thring, before thre human colony, before thre mines, before thre czar.” He looked up. “Our Spirit.”

  “Your God?”

  He chuckled, said something to Lyella in Kubraen. She hissed through parted lips as she removed steaming cakes from the pot.

  “No, humane,” Briertrush said, “Kubraish Spirit.” He stared at the fire.

  The silver tag? A chill crept up my arms. Then what sort of being was he? I restrained more questions. I needed time to think. I watched Lyella cut the cakes precisely, in what seemed almost ritual fashion. She separated the pieces into three portions, small, I thought, for people of their size. She laid them on dishes and gave Briertrush two portions.

  He murmured to her, picked up a piece and chewed slowly, obviously savoring it.

  I lowered my head and realized how scarce was their food.

  “Why don't you just take it all back?” I said. “Terrans came here with the hope of starting a community that wouldn't desecrate this world.”

  He lifted the wooden poker and studied it. “Thris good fo cook.” He flicked a glance at my empty holster. “Not so good fo weapon against humane fire.” He wiped his plate with the last piece of cake. “Kubraen people have not thre…aris tre fo killing.”

  “The experience?” I offered.

  He shook his head, brows knitted. “Canna explain, thris concept na plain ta humane mind.” He dragged a long finger through dirt, drawing the inevitable circle. “Aris tre,” he repeated and hissed, frustrated, as I also was, at the limitation of language.

  Lisa licked her fingers. “Daddy, I gotta go potty.”

  “Where are your bathrooms?” I asked.

  Briertrush said something to Lyella.

  She got up, took Lisa's hand with a smile and led her down a passage.

  I stared at Briertrush's silver eyes. “I think it was your Kubraish Spirit who summoned us to Halcyon. And not gently either.” He turned to Ruef and spoke softly in his native tongue. Ruef got up and left.

  Firelight danced on Briertrush's thick warm skin, fluttered his tunic with its draft. He placed another log in flames and watched it spit bubbles of fluid. “Know only thris, Julesh. Star Speaker, she who ish center now, tell thre people welcome here two humanes.” He looked up and his eyes caught the red light of fire sparks.

  “Did Starspeaker have a clue as to how I'm supposed to complete my mission?” I asked the question softly, controlling a desire to shake him by his pulpy ears until the Great Kubraish Plan bounced out of his mouth.

  “'You will know', Speaker shay, 'when time ish ripe as fruit on winter mountain trees'.” He threw the wooden poker into the fire and stretched out on his mat, hands behind his head. “Till time ripe,” he said sleepily, “jush observe, learn, an' develop tel skills.” He closed his eyes and exhaled through nose slits.

  No fucking kidding! Tel skills? Then they knew! What else did they know and weren't saying? It took me hours to get past my mistrust of the aliens' motives and finally fall asleep. Something awakened me. The three Kubraens were asleep on their mats.

  Lisa slept beside me, huddled under a fibrin blanket someone had covered her with. Lyella had washed Lisa's face and brushed her hair.

  I lay awake and watched my daughter. Firelight touched her round cheeks, her delicate mouth, curved slightly downward. She looked even more innocent in sleep than when awake. I touched her mind lightly but she wasn't dreaming and I withdrew. Was she really as beautiful as I thought, or was it just the instinct to believe one's offspring is perfect? She had dreamed this place while still at home. So the silver tag prepared her for the trip even before my visit to Joe and Abby. Was my daughter's function here simply to awaken the maternal and paternal instincts in the Kubraens? If so, he'd accomplished it with a heavy hand. I sighed. Would that it were that simple.

  I studied a wall rug of golden stars and intricately detailed planets, none familiar. If the silver crote was powerful enough to rip apart a stuffed doll on Earth from here, why did he need me?

  The fire was dying. A ray of sunlight from the ceiling grate lit curling smoke. My alien friends were nocturnal. By nature? I wondered. Were those slitted eyes evolved for night vision? Or was nocturnal necessary now that the czar ran their planet?

  But something had awakened me.

  I lifted my head and looked around. A small tailless lizard, wearing a braided collar around his black neck, shuffled across a wicker basket and watched me with a cold green eye. I lowered my head, sighed and was half asleep when I felt a pressure against my mind. I tried to open my eyes, couldn't!

  Someone was probing. Not Lisa, but someone close. Get out, I mentally ordered. Out! The intruder slid past verbal thought with a power I'd never encountered except from the silver crote. I tried to yell, to sit up.

  My limbs were rigid. This was not dream, unless it were a megadream. Whoever he was, he was going for a deep probe. I felt him…no, her, I intuited, drill through layers of resistance, deeper than the silver being had ever gone, or even Sye Kor's devastating interrogations. With a frantic surge of energy I imaged a mountain between us. Red fault lines cracked. Lava spewed and the mountain exploded.

  Fear tightened my throat. Or was that the intruder's grasp? I tried to cry out and my throat clamped. A warning? I was afraid to draw in breath, afraid I couldn't. The grip loosened and I gasped in a lungful.

  I moaned as she dissected my mind, past culture, past memory, past instincts, down to a wet response to light and touch. I was aware of my heart beating with a primal determination that spoke of early creatures crawling doggedly out of shrinking tidal pools. This being could subdue personality, I knew on some level, or drive down to subconscious depths…and all that resided there.

  Great Mind. Don't let Lisa be under attack!

  A ter
rifying plunge into blackness. The beat of my heart seemed faint, a distant drum from another plane of existence.

  Drifting, while her probe burrows like a mining laser. She plunges into that protected mind womb where our deepest feelings abide in their true form. I block her with a vision of Shiva. Fear not, Shiva whispers, His arms and legs sway in a cosmic dance. He holds up a palm. All rests well in God. The hand reaches out to me. Blood flows from its pierced wrist. For your sins. Christ smiles, becomes Buddha, beneath his Bo Tree, pressing the ground with fingertips. She curls the fingers into a fist that breaches the walls I erect.

  I empty my mind and she flounders in a void. We touch…a non-state of being. My defenses weaken in that eternal place so close to geth state. I feel myself drop into a black well of my own making. My dead sister's face begins to materialize.

  Quickly the probe withdraws. The well develops an iris of light that expands and envelopes me. Layer by layer I put on desire, hostility, illusion, those garments of life, and close back into self.

  I heard myself moan. Had the munger found what she was looking for? I didn't think so, and that was grounds for smugness. I tried to sit up but a command in my mind kept me down. I managed to open my eyes a slit. My breath came in quick shudders as a female Kubraen disappeared around the cave's entrance. Beneath her robe, her wrinkled legs were transparent. Muscle, bone, arteries, reflected firelight like frosted glass. I wanted to follow her, but my muscles refused to respond. Sleep, was an implanted command the creature had left behind. One of the commands? I pried my eyes open and moved them to see Lisa. She slept soundly.

  I drifted off.

  And had a dream, also implanted, I knew, as I observed a Terran mining crew gouge deep into the planet's bleeding heart.

  Chapter Nine

  Something brushed my face. I awakened to silence and the pungent odor of burned wood. The fire had died. I sat up, my mind my own again, and touched my cheek. In the blue light of a drifting blob I saw that the cave was empty, including Lisa's mat! I threw off the blanket.

  “Lisa!”

  The only sound a scurrying lizard. I scrambled up, grabbed a glob light by tendrils and dragged it with me as I ran into the passageway. Dark sockets of caves there. “Lisa!” My call echoed down empty halls.

  I ran through the winding shaft, past hanging wooden masks and gourds with painted faces. My breath kept catching in my tight throat.

  After a sharp right turn, the passage broadened into a cavern with a maze of branching tunnels. I turned, there in the center of it, the floating lamp spotlighting me. “Lisa!”

  “Wha?”

  I spun. Gwis was a pale ghost in blue light, hands held behind her back, stretching her tunic over sagging breasts.

  “Where's Lisa?”

  She swung her arms around her frail white body and extended my jacket to me. Was she the attacker in my sleep? I stared into her silver eyes, pictured my mental shields lowering like canal locks and probed her mind for an image of my daughter. I couldn't read her expression but she casually scratched under a thick ridge of flaking skin on her cheek and scraped it off. Beneath, her flesh was transparent. Pulsing veins showed through. It distracted me, which might have been her purpose. The silver being's tel power rose up between us and lashed out to shatter my probe. I took a step back and retreated mentally as well.

  He was gone. I grabbed Gwis' arm. “Where's – “

  A narrow, many-legged creature wiggled around our feet, lifted the horny strip of discarded skin between pincers and raced away. “Where's Lisa?”

  Gwis smiled, as though approving my anger, and handed me the jacket. “Come.”

  She led me through a wide corridor with broad Kubraen footprints in soft soil. Paintings of animals, mountains, stars, and the inevitable three circles with a black dot in the center, lined clay walls as I followed her up a passage lit by hanging bowls of candles.

  Ahead, pale light and the sound of deep Kubraen chanting. A sudden shriek pierced me like jagged glass. ”Lisa!” I dashed through a stone portal and out into night. “Li – “ She sat on a tree stump by a small fire, dressed in her snowsuit, and clapping her hands in time with the chanting. I felt myself go weak with relief. Gwis hissed out a chuckle behind me. I turned and threw her a harsh look. She lowered her gaze.

  Five Kubraens, wearing only tunics and capes in the snow, chanted around the fire, throwing a tune to each other. A sixth played a curled wooden flute. Their ivory and buff-colored bodies rippled with red hues of firelight. Black shadows slashed their puckered skin as they swayed and clapped softly. Lisa picked up a shrill note, charged it with a simple melody that ended in a giggle and passed it to an ancient male who sat beside her. He took up the giggle deep in his rutted throat and put an arm around her as he lengthened the sound to the staccato hoot of an animal. I watched as he nodded it on to a lanky toast-brown female across the fire.

  Lisa lowered her hands. She stopped singing and stared at the flute player, who suddenly released his instrument. Instead of dropping, it floated inches from his nose. She laughed as it drifted across the fire and began to dip into flames.

  “Ah, grive it back, Lisha,” the flute player pleaded, as though she'd managed the feat. “Prease?”

  She just giggled.

  I smiled at Lisa's delight as the flute spun slowly back to its owner. He reached out and caught it.

  Starspeaker's diversion? Whoever had devised this bit of magic, I was grateful. My daughter was long overdue for some fun in her life.

  I shrugged into my jacket, glanced around and saw that we were in a meadow dotted with groves of trees and lit by blobs. Hundreds of Kubraens, perhaps the entire community, sat or moved about in shadows. Then I looked up and drew a breath.

  A spiral arm of the Milky Way blazed above a dark sweep of mountains like a bent bar of luminous silver. Three small moons hung yellow and orange and white over the sky glow.

  “Jesus,” I breathed.

  A Kubraen carrying an armload of wood squeezed past me with a head wag as he went through the portal. “Jayshus!” he whispered and I moved aside.

  The air was warmer than last night's storm. Lower altitude or just clear skies? Beyond the meadow, a crescent river lay frozen, caught between forest and mountain, its frosted surface reflecting the sky's spiral curve like a shadow thrown by the galaxy.

  Gwis came around to face me. She smiled, touched her hand to the right side of her neck and licked her fingers. “Kubraish destriny,” she whispered in what I took to be a humble tone, and lifted her gaze to the sky.

  “Kubraish destiny,” I repeated, touched my own neck and started toward Lisa.

  She took my arm. “Lisha learning lesshon good. Come!” She tugged on my sleeve. “Come.”

  Blue and green light blobs lit the meadow from different levels. Some were tied close to stumps for those who dug up roots and tubers and threw them into baskets. Others were returning from the black woods beyond, swaying blobs tracking their paths, with full sacks of something slung over bare shoulders.

  Gwis guided me around a sitting male who worked a marbled rock slab with a chisel of stone and a real mallet. A gift from their human friends in Laurel? When I paused to study the design, the artist drew back to give me a clear view. The carved figure was a lot closer to human than Kubraen. Behind it a large amorphous silver being drifted before a field of stars.

  I stiffened. The silver crote who had summoned us to this world! I turned to Gwis. “Terran destiny?”

  She smiled, lifted my hand and touched it to her neck. My fingers came away sticky and I smelled a tangy aroma. I restrained a reflex to wipe my hand on my pants.

  Gwis' broad bare feet were silent on flat stones as she led me up a path, past chattering youths, by their gangly look, who scooped handfuls of white paste from a large common pot and rolled the stuff into thin sheets.

  I stopped to watch a charcoal male squeeze out a hard breath, then wipe a hand across his neck and knead the sticky fluid on his fingers into t
he mound of paste. By the light of a tied blob, I saw an opening beneath the youth's stringy ear, covered by membranous tissue and smeared glossy now. Drying white sheets that were stretched across the ground fluttered in a sharp breeze.

  Food or clothing?

  These people were a xenologist's dream. Why weren't they being studied? Perhaps xenologists were not welcome in a Terran colony that had abandoned its high ideal of conservation for the more human reflex of greed, or was I being too critical of Laurel? I shrugged.

  Gwis yanked me to a halt before a series of three red engraved portals where the path ended in a grove of majestic spiky trees. The aroma of molasses was strong. She touched her hand to her neck, then to her forehead. I did the same.

  A crash at my feet! I jumped aside as a heavy wooden pod rolled to a stop. A ball of green leaves plunked down beside it. ”Shorry,” a Kubraen called from high branches, his prehensile feet glued to the trunk.

  “Sokay,” I said, looking up, and wiped stinging dust from my eyes as an amber-skinned female vigorously scraped fungus off a lower bough. I rubbed my tearing eyes, stumbled back and felt a jagged edge of something press my hip. I turned.

  Set atop a glass column of symbols and figures, a black marble globe rested in an embossed silver clasp. Fresh tubers, small woven straw figures, roots, nuts, strange flowers fashioned from painted wood shavings adorned the column's base. I reached a hand to the globe, hesitated, and turned to ask Gwis about this altar.

  She was gone.

  If it were taboo to touch the globe, she would have warned me. I laid a hand on the round smooth surface and felt a warm tingling. After my experience with the crystal globe, I'd expected no less. From the crest of a dark hill, a glimmer of light flickered and grew.

  The musician and singers stopped. Only Lisa continued the chant until someone hushed her. Overhead, the rustling of the Kubraen in the tree ceased. I bowed my head as a tentative mindprobe touched my thoughts like the brush of bird wings. Gwis! You weren't so gentle with me in the cave, I sent to her.