Mourner

by Irene Radford

  Lord Lukan, on the other hand, could still demand it.

  Sissy disconnected and turned to retrace her steps, the joy of returning home blighted. Did she see a smile flicker across the face of the pilot?

  He was high on her list of suspects.

  Protocol. She had to follow caste protocol and allow Spacer Captain Kalek first rights of investigation.

  “My Laudae?” Gil whispered. Then he backed up from the hatch and paused at the bottom of the shuttle steps. “We must find the body. Without it, legally Gregor still lives and still presides as HP. His policies and his temporary successor still rule the Crystal Temple and the High Council. Your position as HPs, High Priestess, is still in jeopardy. You can’t sing your enemies into complacency as you did the planet in the middle of a quake. They don’t listen like our goddess does.”

  The ground beneath them trembled as if agreeing.

  Chapter Three

  “As you wish, m’lord Mag. I hear it is a lovely day in the hydroponics garden on Labaryinthe Prime,” Ianus d’Mag said with mind and the words of the new race they would encounter soon. Obediently he bent to kiss the deck at the lizard’s feet. His knees protested kneeling so long on the hard metal plating. Mag had kept him down longer than usual today. The Dragon was pissed.

  “You may rise.” The mental communication, along with the dragon version of language, a series of hisses, grunts, tail twitches, color shifts, and claw flexing, came with a stab of pain behind Ianus’s eyes. He expected nothing less. Mag was always displeased, and whichever of his slaves was closest felt the brunt of his remorseless anger.

  Today’s anger was deeper and more prolonged. Not even an age-old joke would penetrate the Dragon’s ire.

  Slowly Ianus leveraged himself upward. The pain in his joints flared hot and sharp. What had been a constant background discomfort for the past three annums now dominated his every move. His time was coming to an end, as it did for all slaves. The dragons of d’Or lived through at least eighteen teams of their slaves.

  I haven’t had time to sire my replacement! Ianus wailed inwardly, being very careful that Mag did not intercept his thoughts.

  The lizard twitched his fat tail again and scratched the deck with a reflexive dig of his pedal claws. But only the tip of his forked tongue slipped free of his muzzle, a tasting of the air rather than a warning hiss.

  “May your enemies fall below the event horizon,” Ianus offered in parting.

  That made Mag smile—a gape-maw expression showing three rows of very sharp teeth.

  Ianus backed out of the hottest cabin on the space ship, decorated in red and gold—real gold gilding a design in the bulkheads and spun into threads for embroidery and tassels—to match Mag’s coloring. Only Mag’s personal slaves could find his mind within the camouflage. As it should be. The other dragons did the same, communicating with each other and the rest of the galaxy through their telepathic slaves, rarely meeting each other except for mating—a ritual that often took fully five crew shift cycles and ended in severe injury to one or both.

  Mag had multiple battle scars that he displayed proudly.

  Once free of the grinding heat in Mag’s quarters, Ianus stood a little straighter, not quite so weighed down by the thick atmosphere and gravity. He made his way toward the ship’s bridge as rapidly as his deteriorating body allowed.

  A mixed team of slaves ran the ship from here. Ianus greeted each in turn in their own language preserved for thousands of years in private and known only to them. “All Hail!” He lifted a fist straight up, as high as his aging shoulder allowed. “Hail to our ancestors who inhabited Terra.” He tried to infuse some enthusiasm in his greeting.

  “Hail Ianus!” they replied in unison with a similar gesture. They all returned to their work rather than repeat his last phrase.

  Only one of them was young enough to have full shoulder movement, Scylla. The lightly boned girl had lived barely fifteen annums and recently replaced her mother on this crew of twelve—four triads in Dragon terms. Every one of the telepaths in the circular room filled with monitors and control screens belonged to a different dragon lord. But they were all related to each other, all had the same light hair, fair skin, and pale eyes. Unlike their masters.

  “My master requests a meeting of all Banker lords in the center chamber,” Ianus told them. “Alone, no attending slaves. We are free of them for the duration of the meeting.”

  Surprise brightened their faces before they relayed the message telepathically to their teammates, on call to serve their lords.

  “A meeting before the takeover of the new race?” Janae d’Hess asked from the captain’s chair. She’d lived an amazing twenty-five annums and held this post by seniority—though they all trained to fill every post on the bridge. Her mistress, Hess, took pains to keep her humans alive and well.

  Mag didn’t care about longevity. He wanted control of the Keeper, in this case Ianus, and therefore he had no duties or training on the bridge.

  Time was running out for Ianus. He had to find a mate soon, to pass on his hereditary position and knowledge.

  Mag would slaughter the lot of them if Ianus did not present him with a new keeper before dying.

  “First time they’ve met in private in a decade,” Timæus said from the navigation station. Two annums younger than Janae, he’d sired her two children five and eight annums ago.

  Ianus expected both of them to collapse and surrender their bodies to the Gods any day now.

  “Who will attend the lords during the meeting?” Bonifaceus asked. He kept his eyes glued to the power supply and fuel consumption graphs.

  “No one,” Ianus replied. He kept his eyes on Scylla, assessing her fertility. A little young. But if he got a child on her right away, she might live long enough to teach the child how to speak and how to love. Both qualities their masters frowned upon.

  “If they meet in private, how are we to soothe their tempers and keep them from killing each other?” Janae asked.

  “Only Mag knows. Maybe he wants to lighten our burden by letting them all kill each other while he watches, and then he can inherit all their treasure,” Ianus replied as he moved toward Scylla and placed a gentle caress on her cheek as the opening move in their own mating ritual, much gentler than the dragons’.

  Jake’s desk lit up with incoming messages from all over the station, more messages than Major Mara in the outer office could handle. He touched the first one with the icon of Harmony Noble flashing insistently.

  “We are in danger! You have to order evacuation. The Dragons will eat us all,” Lady Jancee screamed.

  “Calm yourself, my Lady. We have everything under control,” he tried to soothe Lord Lukan’s wife. How did the head diplomat from Harmony, a reasonable and logical man, end up with such an irrational tyrant of a wife?

  “But the Dragons! An unknown alien race, they will permanently taint us. Bad enough we have to put up with barefaced trolls running this station.”

  Jake tuned her out. When she paused for breath he quickly inserted the only placating phrase he could think of. “Lady Jancee, I will order the Harmony freighter docked at the heavy gravity level of your wing to prepare to evacuate as many of your people as will fit in the cargo hold.”

  “But . . . but . . . that’s a cargo vessel. I can’t possibly be expected to—”

  He cut her off, only to find twenty-three more icons flashing around the perimeter of his working screen. All of it seemed to be overflow from Major Mara’s system. She was supposed to screen and monitor all incoming calls.

  “Mara!” he called through the open door between his office and hers. There wasn’t a single line of communications unoccupied. “What’s going on?”

  “The Dragons broadcast their conversation with you on an open channel, sir.”

  “So much for privacy,” he muttered.

  “And, sir?” A note of hesitancy flattened her usually unflappable voice. “Sir, Ambassador Chtackah of the Maril diplomatic delegati
on is here. She insists upon . . .”

  The tall, befeathered creature appeared in Jake’s doorway before Mara could finish.

  “Good morning, Ambassador,” Jake said, rising from his chair and turning on the universal translator device recently embedded into his desktop. He never quite managed the tongue clicks involved in her name and tried to avoid using it rather than insult her and thus restart a generations-old war. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  He bowed with both hands clasped in front of him. The ambassador returned the gesture, her red feathered head crest flared to full length, making her look a foot taller than Jake’s own one point eight meters. She wore a matching red cloak and pencil-shaped gown temporarily hiding the drapes of feathered skin that folded beneath her arms or stretched to hook onto a dew claw on her ankle so she could fly—or glide—in light gravity. Her face, neck, hands, and clawed feet were all white, and textured like plucked turkey skin.

  Hard to believe their DNA suggested the Maril might have been human once. More and more of their children were born without feathers or wings.

  The avian race usually insisted upon meeting in a neutral, light gravity or no gravity section of the station claimed by no other race. For the ambassador herself to come to him was special. Jake knew that special led to trouble.

  As the First Contact Café became more widely available as a hub for trade and diplomatic meetings, he was running out of empty spaces to hold such meetings.

  “If you allow the Dragons to dock, we will leave.” The artificial voice from the translator lagged behind the clicks, beak clacks, agitated arm flaps, and weight shifts that made up the Maril language. Her red crest bristled and flattened rapidly. The ambassador’s cloak twitched as if she had a long feathered tail. But Jake knew that the genetic mutations and manipulations had not evolved a tail for these once-human fliers.

  “We have not met these Dragons previously.” He hesitated. He clicked a remote that would reconfigure the guest chair into an inviting perch. Usually the furniture waited for a being’s weight to trigger reformation.

  The ambassador looked at the perch with disdain. “We have encountered the Dragons once before in ships the size of a city. We shot them out of the sky.”

  “Ambassador, you came to the First Contact Café for a reason. You need us, we need you. We seek an end to the war between us. These negotiations cannot proceed if you leave. Perhaps together we can find a way to control or neutralize these bankers.”

  “They grow sluggish in cold weather.” The ambassador flipped her crest once and turned to leave. She paused two paces away. “General, the Dragons disguise their true intentions behind the descriptive Banker. They seek to enslave the entire galaxy through money. But what is money? My people value our honor and pride. Your people value bits of shiny metal. Harmony values their isolation. What do the Dragons value? Power, control, tyranny.”

  “My people knew slavery many generations ago, among ourselves. We saw the error of our ways. We will not be slaves to the Dragons, even if it means war,” Jake said. That would make Admiral Pamela Marella happy. If the galaxy was at peace, she’d be out of a job as spymaster for the Confederated Star Systems.

  “Nor will we.”

  “Then we are agreed? We work together to counter them?”

  “I agree that I and my delegation will not depart the station immediately, but we will remain isolated in our wing until the issue of your mortgage is settled, one way or another.” She stalked out like an angry bird of prey.

  Chapter Four

  “Welcome home to Crystal Temple, Laudae Sissy.” Laudae Penelope bowed formally, with hands clasped tight against her chest, the gesture of a near equal.

  Her purple Circle caste mark glittered in the artificial light, indication that she’d been born and bred in the Crystal Temple rather one of the outlying provinces or elsewhere in the city. Laud Gregor had been her father, but not much of a dad. Her red-rimmed eyes showed her grief. Her quivering chin betrayed her outrage at the desecration of his body.

  Penelope held seniority near the peak of the hierarchy of clergy, but no one outranked the High Priestess, not even the High Priest.

  Sissy’s rank should have been Penny’s. But Gregor had found Sissy and elevated her above all the others at Crystal Temple. She and Penny had moved beyond resentment to true friendship.

  Sissy returned the bow, hands equally high on her chest. But she did not dip her head or lower her eyes. She’d been away from this rigid protocol so long that she had to think through all the subtleties of each gesture. None of it came naturally.

  The moment Penelope lifted her head, Sissy ran forward and engulfed her friend in a tight hug. “Oh, Penny, I’ve missed you terribly,” she confessed. She prolonged their hug as long as possible, keeping their chins on opposing shoulders and ears pressed together.

  Her acolytes imitated her gesture of friendship with Penny’s girls. The two teams of six had mingled and run rampant all over First Contact Café mere weeks ago. They’d formed the best information gathering network either Sissy or Jake could hope for.

  Dog and Monster lifted their muzzles, sniffed, and added their own barked greeting as they circled and twined among the girls, greeting everyone with tail wags, head butts, and pleas for ear scritches. The lethargy of space travel had lifted.

  Except for Martha. Only she hung back, withholding enthusiasm or even speech.

  “You need to get into your formal robes quickly so you can greet the rest of the staff,” Penny whispered into her ear.

  “Oh.” Some of the joy of coming home drained out of Sissy. No chance to rest and catch up on all the gossip. No chance to unpack and reclaim the suite as her own. No chance to draw Martha aside and talk to her. Maybe the hyperspace drugs had lingered in the girl.

  As they all trooped into the front parlor of the suite, Sissy automatically counted heads, a habit since before her days at Temple, when she lived at home with six brothers and sisters.

  Six girls in pink belonged to Penelope. Six girls in lavender belonged to her. Two . . .

  “Where are Marsh and Ashel? Didn’t Mr. Philip find them?” she called out to everyone, not daring to let her panic surface. Her youngest brother and sister were all she had left of her family.

  Mary, the oldest of her acolytes reared her head up, echoing her alarm. “Weren’t they in your cabin on the Star Runner?”

  “I thought they were with you.” Sissy’s chest tightened, making it hard to breathe. “Mr. Guilliam sent Mr. Philip to look for them at the airfield. I trusted him to find them.”

  Mary shoved an inhaler into Sissy’s hands and then guided them to her mouth. “Breathe, my Laudae. Breathe.” When Sissy had depressed the plunger and inhaled the life-saving drugs, Mary counted heads as well. “Martha, were Marsh and Ashel with you?”

  Martha shook her head, eyes wide in panic.

  “Maybe they attached themselves to crew,” Penny offered.

  Distantly, Sissy heard the comms chime in the next room, her public office. Mary ran to answer it. “My Laudae, you need to take this.”

  “What now?” Sissy couldn’t move. Her lungs still labored.

  “Just come.”

  Martha pushed Sissy in the small of her back and guided her inward into the maze of rooms.

  “Jake!” Sissy gasped in relief as his familiar face appeared on the screen embedded in the huge desk. The desk where he’d taught her to read properly, where he’d translated political statements that were more posturing than actual information, where . . . he’d saved her life when fire broke out. A fire that killed Jilly.

  “Missing something?” he asked, a smile giving his face a bright glow.

  “Do you have Marsh and Ashell?” She sank into the chair, her knees suddenly turned to water.

  “That I do.” Two smaller faces peeked through the screen at her. He must be holding her six-year-old brother and eight-year-old sister on his lap.

  “Jake gave me colors!” Marsh crowed, holding
up a red stylus. He hadn’t spoken much since losing his parents and the rest of the extended family in a fiery explosion. The incendiary bomb had targeted Sissy but missed because she’d taken the two youngsters to the park for fresh air and play.

  “And a portable we can draw pictures on,” Ashell said. She held up the small screen for Sissy to see her drawing of a Maril.

  “I made her feather red, just like the ambassador,” Marsh added.

  Sissy didn’t expect that many words to spill out of his mouth all at once.

  “Walk in Harmony.” She breathed a prayer of relief.

  “Not so sure about that. But it seems these two munchkins decided they like my home better than yours.” Jake hugged both the children.

  Ashell giggled. Marsh continued to look solemn, reverting to his silent ways.

  “I . . . have to come back to First Contact Café. I need to keep them close. They’re all . . . they are all I have left of my family,” she said.

  “Sissy,” Jake said. His tone shifted from jocular to concern. “You don’t have to come back just for the kids. I can take care of them for a while. You need to stay on Harmony. Once things stabilize after the funeral, we’ll figure out who goes where.”

  “Oh, Jake, that’s just it. We can’t bury Gregor. And we can’t do anything but drift until we do,” she wailed. Once more she turned to him as protector and mentor when she faced a dire situation she didn’t know how to handle.

  “What do you mean?” The children disappeared from the screen and he sat forward, bending his face close.

  “Didn’t Spacer Captain Kalek talk to you?”

  “About what? I received a ping notifying me of your arrival home, nothing more. Standard protocol. Sissy, you know how insular the castes are. He won’t call me about . . . whatever . . . until he’s exhausted all other resources.”

  “Gregor’s body . . . he’s disappeared.”

  Jake flicked his gaze up and toward the dim inside corner of his office. Gregor’s shade stood there, impassive, still clad in his green everyday trousers and shirt, thin white hair drifting in some celestial breeze, bald pate shining with an ethereal glow. Barely visible but definitely there. “So that’s why you’ve been haunting me,” he whispered.