A Stellar Affair

by Laurel Richards

  “That’s interesting. Where was that?” He asked the question casually, but she wasn’t fooled.

  She frowned, but the suspicious look she gave him didn’t seem to bother him. Instead, his expression turned sympathetic.

  “You look tired,” he told her. “I hope you didn’t have a bad night.”

  Ardra rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn. After she and the other passengers of the Oberon had been taken aboard the Roimiran ship, they had been transported down to this planet and separated. She assumed the guards had thrown Tarrin and Slade into a holding room too, but she had no way to be sure. Then last night, the guard who had escorted her here had told her she would be taken to the precept for interrogation in the morning. Although she had nothing to hide, that announcement hadn’t helped her get to sleep. It had been a long night.

  Jack took a big sip of his iced tea, and she gulped in envy as she watched. The next thing she knew, she was lifting her own glass and allowing the cool liquid to flow into her mouth. He smiled at her.

  Maybe the tea would perk her up. She had to fight the dozing sensation that came over her.

  “Are you really a precept?” she asked, still thrown off by how normal Jack seemed.

  He looked a little surprised by the question. “Yes, I am. Not what you expected, huh?”

  She shook her head. God, why was she so lethargic all of a sudden?

  “I know,” he said. “Precepts are getting a reputation as the bogeymen of the galaxy, aren’t we? I promise you I’m not that bad.”

  “And you work here?” she asked.

  He laughed, and the sound was as pleasant as the tinkling of the wind chimes. “I’m a homebody. I live here, and I work out of the house. It’s convenient.”

  “And where is here? What planet is this?”

  She didn’t think he would answer, but he must have figured there was no harm in sharing.

  “You’re on Ryso,” he told her. “It’s one of our better kept secrets, a temperate planet not far outside of Tetch space.”

  She took another sip of her drink. Her hand shook so badly she nearly spilled. For some reason, it had become difficult to concentrate, but the more she fought it, the more her adrenaline surged. She felt like something was wrong, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  Jack sensed she was feeling threatened again. So far, he was happy with the way this was going, but he wanted her more relaxed before he pushed. Although she was talking to him and he was learning quite a bit from what she didn’t say too, she required a delicate touch. He tried to put her under a little deeper.

  “Rosemary,” he said, using his most soothing voice, “what would help you relax? If a loved one were trying to comfort you, what would you want them to do?”

  He waited for her response and was surprised when she didn’t answer him. Perhaps she didn’t understand?

  “If you’re frightened or upset, what helps? Do you like to be petted or have your hand held or your back stroked? Did your parents used to hug you as a child?” This was usually important to know if he was going to interpose himself into her personal memories later on.

  Once again, she remained silent, and he realized she was fighting against his influence. He reminded himself that this woman wasn’t a voluntary patient seeking his help. She was a captive—something he shouldn’t have forgotten for even a second. She looked so vulnerable right now that he wanted to jump in and make it all better, but he controlled himself.

  She was a member of the Tetch who could be carrying vital and potentially dangerous information. That was his primary concern. He’d be damned if he would let another Bok-10 massacre occur just because she had a pretty face.

  He released his hold on her psyche and tried the direct approach. “I think it’s only fair to offer you a choice from the outset. I’ll let you make the decision. Will you cooperate with me and give me free access to your mind? We need to know where the Tetch are going to attack next or anything else you know.”

  Ardra shook her head. “I’m a civilian. I don’t know any military secrets or anything that would be of value to you.”

  She was probably telling the truth as far as she knew, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a carrier.

  “The Tetch would have taken great measures to suppress your memories of any information you’re carrying,” he explained. “Will you work with me to see if this is the case?”

  She hesitated a moment. “I’m not a traitor.”

  “If you really have no information,” he pointed out, “then what could you betray to me?”

  She stared at him and remained stubbornly silent.

  Jack skimmed her surface thoughts, but he didn’t make any more progress. It was noon by the time he concluded their first session. Nash dropped by about an hour later. Apparently, he was the spare resource Walter was giving Jack as a research assistant.

  “So you’re the one who’s stuck with me on this, huh?” Jack teased him.

  Nash smiled. “I’d hardly say stuck. Do you know how big this is? This could really turn the war.”

  “Pace yourself, young patriot. We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He motioned toward one of the living room chairs. “Sit down.”

  His friend accepted the seat and already had a tablet out so he could take notes. “So what do you have so far?”

  Jack gathered his thoughts. “Private Tarrin Thales is exactly who he says he is. As far as he knows, two weeks ago, he received orders to report to Algoron. His travel papers were done up for him, and he followed them to the letter without question. He boarded the Oberon on Nintu V and had never met the other passengers before.”

  He paused to make certain Nash had gotten all that before he continued.

  “Mr. Slade is definitely Mr. Basner Slade. He was on his way to visit an old friend on Algoron, having received an invitation around the same time that Thales was issued his orders. He also boarded the vessel on Nintu V and was a stranger to the others on board. Apparently, the Oberon was not a comfortable ship. The bed gave the old man more than a few aches and pains.”

  “All right, go on,” Nash said. “What about the woman, Rosemary Warner?”

  Jack grinned. “That isn’t her real name. I was convinced from the get-go that she was using an alias. That name didn’t feel familiar enough to her to be her own, but I don’t think she invented it out of thin air. It’s probably a friend or an acquaintance’s name, maybe even an enemy’s. I don’t know much about her yet, other than the fact that her mother’s house had wind chimes, which is sort of odd for the Tetch. Through the others, I can conclude that she boarded at Nintu V and had never seen or heard of her fellow passengers before. I could find out her name from the other two, though she may have used the same alias with them. Wait a minute. Do we have the ship’s passenger manifest?”

  Nash shook his head. “The guys from the Alcor gave me everything they had, but it wasn’t much. The Oberon’s passengers really did a number on that ship. The navigation computer was wiped clean before our guys boarded, although it doesn’t matter since we had already hacked into it to bring the ship to us. There were dozens of little shards scattered around one of the rooms—presumably our mystery woman’s identifying documents. One of the prisoners also destroyed the manifest before we could get a look at it.”

  “You can’t run a memory trace and recover the data?” Jack asked.

  “No, it wasn’t erased. It was trashed—literally destroyed. Somebody beat up the manifest.”

  “I suspect I know which passenger did that,” Jack said. “Can you get the list from elsewhere? This woman isn’t who she says she is, and I need something to go on. I want background information on all of them.”

  Nash stood up. “I’m on it. It will take some time, but I’ll get that for you as soon as possible.”

  “Thanks.”

  He looked at the vacant room after Nash left and thought about the pretty young captive. “Who are you really?” he wondered aloud.

  Despite his self-
warnings, Jack had more than one reason for wanting to know.

  Chapter Five

  Roimiran compound, several weeks later

  Sunlight spilled into Ardra’s holding cell from a long, narrow window set high in the wall to her right. A chair in the far corner by the door was the only other furniture, but unlike her bed, it was not welded to the floor. She had lost track of exactly how long she had been here. Her time on board the Oberon was turning into a distant memory, and it worried her that she was getting used to this place.

  She sat on the bed and wiped the sweat from her upper lip. This morning, she was scheduled to see Jack again. He sent for her every other day, and she could only assume he interrogated other prisoners in between. In the beginning, she had felt confident that she could handle anything he might do to her, but now she wasn’t so sure. Her last confrontation with him had taught her to be scared of his abilities.

  It had started out much like their previous meetings. He offered her a glass of tea and made small talk as if they were old friends. Then she started to feel sort of lightheaded or lethargic—what she had learned was a sign that he was using telepathy on her. Try as she might, she couldn’t shake it, and then it happened.

  She didn’t really notice the transition or understand how it occurred, but suddenly she was back on Nintu V, and it was her second week of work with GEHD PD. The worst part of this mental shift was that she didn’t sense anything odd. She felt as if she were really there and didn’t question it.

  Ardra was sitting across from Sonja Ward in the lab, just as she had her second week on the job. But as they talked, Sonja started saying things she had never said the first time.

  “What made you come here to Nintu V?” Sonja asked.

  “I saw this job as a great opportunity,” Ardra told her. “I hope to be able to settle here permanently. I’m sick of moving around so much.”

  “Oh?” Sonja tossed her dark ponytail over her shoulder. “Have you moved around a lot in the past?”

  Ardra continued jotting down her lab notes. “Yes, though I don’t remember most of it. My family moved almost constantly when I was a kid. Actually, my mother had it worse. It sounds like she followed my father around their whole married life. By the time I was born, it was a tradition. Wherever his job took him, we uprooted and went with him.”

  “That must have been hard,” Sonja said.

  “Sometimes it was.” She rubbed her forehead. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. After I went off to school, it was a whole different story. Shortly after I left, my father decided to break into the mineral business out of Dirdurak, but my mother put her foot down. She wanted to stay on Nintu III, and she wasn’t about to go chasing his silly hide across the universe anymore. Unfortunately, by then my father was so used to taking her for granted that he got stubborn. He packed up and left on his own, and he was shocked when she didn’t run after him.”

  Sonja tilted her head. “So where are they now? Is your mom still on Nintu III?”

  Ardra tried not to let her sadness show. “Sort of. My mother died in one of the terrorist attacks on Nintu III—the one where the Roimirans blew up Bio-Tech. I was still in school at the time.”

  “And your father?”

  “Killed in an asteroid mining accident not long after he left my mother. One of the hazards of the job, I guess.”

  Ardra gave up on finishing her lab notes. She squeezed her eyes shut to see if that would dispel the strange feeling of lightheadedness, but it didn’t work.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sonja told her. “Do you at least have a lot of memories of them?”

  That’s when Ardra woke up. Whatever Jack had done wore off or broke down or something. With a jolt, her senses returned to the immediacy of the precept’s house, and she discovered she was sitting on the sofa, leaning forward with her forehead against Jack’s shoulder. He sat opposite her on a chair he had pulled close. He was sort of hugging her with his hand on the back of her head, and he got really worried when he realized she was awake.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “You’re all right.”

  She was groggy enough that it took her a moment to push him away. “What the hell?”

  “It’s all right,” he kept repeating. “Don’t be startled. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  She didn’t believe him. Her whole body trembled as she realized what had happened to her. This was what the precepts did. This was the kind of mind game Jack could play with her. How many times had he done this to her? Every day since she had first gotten here? Could he do this without her realizing it? The sinking feeling in her gut told her he could.

  And now she was going to have to face him again.

  Things were progressing more slowly than Jack would have liked, but he could tell Nash had finally come through for him when his friend showed up at his house early.

  “I found them,” Nash announced. “I’m a genius.”

  Jack smirked. “You can never be too sure.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Go ahead.”

  Nash plopped down on the living room sofa. “Basner Slade is a retired machinist and a staunch supporter of our opposition’s biomedical initiatives. He’ll be ninety-seven next month, and he’s living with an artificial heart, kidney and eyes engineered to see 20-10. His wife, Ester, died five years ago. It looks like he blew most of his credits once she was gone.”

  Nash glanced up before he continued.

  “Private Tarrin Thales lost his parents when they died on a debtors’ colony when he was seven years old. They were in the asteroid mines. Thales was sent to the Saros Children’s Center, an orphanage on one of the Outer Belts run by neo-religious comet worshippers. He stayed there until he met the minimum age requirement, at which point he joined the Tetch military, presumably to see the system and earn some credits. Then we come to Rosemary Warner.”

  “Alias of the woman we have here,” Jack said.

  “Wrong,” Nash told him. “I’m talking about the real Rosemary Warner, our missing fourth.”

  “What?”

  “It turns out the real Rosemary Warner was supposed to get picked up at Simos, but she was afraid to fly. She never got on the transport ship. The lady we have here is Ardra Kelly.”

  “Ardra.” Jack liked that name. “So Ardra Kelly met Rosemary Warner for the first time on Simos, and then she gave us the other woman’s name when we captured her?”

  “It gets better, or maybe I should say worse,” Nash said. “Who is Ardra Kelly? I used almost every source I have to find out, but all I could uncover was that she works as some kind of botanist at GEHD PD. There’s no record of family, place of birth, schooling—nothing. It’s like she showed up out of nowhere a year ago. Records indicate that she received a transfer order and was on her way to Algoron to start her new job. I’m guessing that was the document she tore up.”

  Jack sighed. “They sure picked a great crowd. These people have no connections, no real background and no trace. They’re the perfect instruments.”

  This was going to be difficult.

  “You must have some idea of who the carrier is by now,” Nash said.

  Jack hated to disappoint him. “The old man, Basner Slade, is the obvious candidate. He’s the most typically Tetch, and they would view him as especially expendable because of his age. However, Thales is in the military, and they might have found it easier to use one of their own. Obviously, Ardra is the shrewdest and the one with the hidden past. I’m not even sure she is who she thinks she is.

  “It could be that all three of them know a piece of the message, or perhaps we’re looking at three different messages. We have no idea what the Tetch planned for them once they arrived on Algoron. They might have been shipped to different points across the galaxy from there.”

  “All right,” Nash agreed. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Keep digging,” Jack told him. “Despite Private Thales’s presence, none of this strikes me as an official o
peration. If these people are really carrying what we think they are, there had to have been some major credits transferred. I want to know who was involved in the deal. Who was selling, and who on Algoron was buying? There has to be a trail.”

  “If there is, I’ll follow it. Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “I want to know exactly who Ardra Kelly is. I’ll learn what I can on my end, but any details you can give me will help.”

  Nash nodded and left to get to work.

  The door had barely closed behind him before Gabriella Bastian, one of the security officers, arrived. She entered with Ardra, who he was happy to see no longer had her hands bound.

  “Go on,” Gabriella told her. “You’ll be fine. He doesn’t bite.”

  Ardra sat on the sofa and waited, though it was clear she wanted to be anywhere in the universe but here.

  “Thanks, Gabriella,” Jack said. “We’ll be all right.”

  The guard nodded and walked out.

  He sat in the chair opposite Ardra and noticed how pale and tense she looked. Although she hadn’t exactly been relaxed with him before, she had never reacted this strongly. Could she have remembered their last session? She had shocked him when she had become conscious in the middle of an altered memory, but he thought he had finally soothed her and made her forget. Touching her thoughts now, he realized he had been mistaken.

  Jack gave her a light mental push—not a thought, but a feeling of peacefulness. He wanted her to feel safe. “I’m sorry if I upset you the other day. I never meant to scare you. This could be a very easy, relaxed process if you’d cooperate. I think I can really help you.”

  “Help me?” she scoffed.

  “Help you uncover the truth about who you are,” he said. Please, Ardra. Don’t be afraid of me.

  Jack only thought the last part in his head, but she narrowed her eyes. “You know my real name.”

  “Yes, Ardra.” He tried not to appear too surprised, but he was beginning to have some suspicions about her.

  She sank deeper into the couch. “How did you know?”