Soothing coolness washed through from those thoughts. Then the machine that fed him drugs activated and oblivion trickled through him.
Not before he absorbed the girl’s message and sent it back out to all of his shipmates.
His angel of salvation was coming.
Martha and Mary exchanged a brief glance. Martha felt her friend’s panic. So she thought calm in her direction.
“I’m waiting,” Admiral Marella said, tapping the toe of her elegant, but practical shoes.
“Laud Gregor? That’s what Laudae Sissy came to find out,” Martha said, forcing her eyes wide, feigning innocence.
“I know his body didn’t make it back to Harmony. So either someone sent it out an airlock in hyperspace—the epitome of stupidity if you ask me—or it never left the station.” Pammy remained rooted in front of the girls. Somehow, she’d acquired weapons, one for each hand.
Martha wouldn’t be able to scoot around her without getting shot.
If the spymaster dared.
Her eyes were cold, emotionless. Martha met a wall of determination in her mind. If injury or death served her purpose, Martha had no doubt she’d follow through with it.
“Why couldn’t an agent of our enemies push it out an airlock in normal space?” Mary asked. “We traversed hours of black both before and after we jumped to hyperspace.” She inched closer and closer to the spiral stairs around the lift.
The admiral took one long step to keep herself between Mary and escape. “Sensors on the bridge and in base control would have picked up evidence of an airlock opening,” Admiral Marella said, as if speaking to two very stupid children. “They’d have to do it in hyperspace. Most people sleep through the journey. A single operative would have the coffin and the airlocks to themselves. Stupid. There’s little reality in hyperspace, no way to be certain that they actually did the job until the jump back.”
“We all saw the coffin being loaded . . .” Mary insisted
“You saw the coffin, not the body inside. Besides, everyone was looking at General Jake and Laudae Sissy in their rather infantile display of affection. Why indulge if they can never follow up on it? I suppose, knowing Jake, he just couldn’t control himself. When it comes to women, he never could control . . .”
Martha recognized the lie behind Pammy’s words, trying to drive a wedge of doubt between Jake and Sissy. She shuffled to the left, putting distance between herself and Mary. The admiral might be the spymaster for the CSS, but she couldn’t watch in two directions at the same time.
“Not so fast, Missy.” Said spymaster grabbed Mary’s collar and dragged her back to Martha.
“Jake set up a distraction so that someone could steal the body,” Pammy said. Her lies sounded dark and menacing to Martha’s new talent.
“The coffin was sealed with a Temple latch that can only be opened with a Badger Metal key, of which there was only one, made especially for that one latch and then destroyed,” Mary said.
“If the body was stolen, it had to have been done here, before the coffin was sealed.” Martha finished the thought.
“That’s why we came back,” Mary said. A tiny jerk of her chin toward the lift sent a clear message to Martha. They needed to get away, and now was the time.
“The body is still here,” Pammy said in a soft echo while her thoughts moved faster than Martha could follow. “I just needed you to confirm it. Where is it now? More important, why bother? I need to know more of your politics. Since Jake returned from his undercover job, I haven’t been able to get a new operative in to Harmony. At least not one who can get close to the Great Council,” she said aloud.
Martha dashed for the lift, Mary close upon her heels. They jumped upon a rising platform together.
But the spymaster seemed lost in her thoughts, staring at the cargo bay doors, not noticing or seeming to care that the girls had escaped.
Before they had risen out of line of sight, Mary realized they’d helped Admiral Marella sort through the information so she could do their job in finding the body of the High Priest of all Harmony.
Presuming she’d turn it over to Sissy when she found it.
Martha suspected the spymaster might have other uses for it. The word leverage kept repeating in her mind over and over.
“Now what?” Mary asked when they were in light gravity and well beyond earshot of the admiral.
“You find Laudae Sissy and tell her what just happened,” Martha replied, eager to be rid of the responsibility.
“What are you going to do?” Mary grabbed Martha’s upper arm tight enough to leave bruises in the shape of her fingers. Tight enough to keep Martha from flying away as soon as they hit the nulgrav hub.
“I need to find Jake.”
“What for? We’re supposed to be helping the little ones unpack and see that Laudae Sissy is on schedule for her rituals and meetings and reports and stuff.”
“I . . . I caught a peek into Pammy’s mind.”
“And?” Mary didn’t loosen her grip.
“I think she had planned to steal Laud Gregor’s body to discredit Jake. She’d be in place to take over the entire station and run it her way. But someone beat her to it!”
Chapter Seventeen
Jake tried to sit up. He’d lounged around Medbay too long. He had work to do and Sissy to hold tight. What time was it? A big digital chronometer on the wall said early morning. He hoped Sissy had found a bed somewhere.
“Oh, God, it hurts.” He eased himself back to the flatness of the bed as stars burst before his eyes, blinding him to the too-white walls and the array of monitoring equipment but not the ghost in the corner.
“Why can’t you haunt someone who can actually help you? Like Sissy?” he asked Laud Gregor.
The ghost just hung there, a misty resemblance to the old man who’d made Jake’s and Sissy’s lives hell, but in doing so had brought them together.
“You’re a manipulative old grouch. That’s the only reason you’d hang around me.”
Was the mist paler, more transparent? Maybe it was only a trick of the light and his concussed brain.
The ghost glided closer, coming to rest near Jake’s head. He looked like he was reading all the graphs and numbers on the monitor. And he looked as puzzled as Jake in deciphering the arcane language of medicine.
“The kid wants to see you,” Doc Halliday said from the doorway to the tiny room.
Laud Gregor didn’t fade like he usually did when real people confronted Jake.
“Why?” Jake winced at the sharpness of Mariah Halliday’s tone.
“Don’t know. Says he’ll only talk to you. Admiral Marella asked to be notified of any such requests. You want me to call her?”
“No. Let Pammy stew in her own juices for a while. Send her to the Maril delegation with the universal translator. Have her strongly suggest internment in the brig for what they did to me. No diplomatic immunity.” Jake turned his head slowly toward the door and away from Laud Gregor. He contemplated shifting his legs to the edge of the bed, then thought better of it.
“Hurts to have your brains scrambled, doesn’t it?” Doc Halliday commented. The sharpness oozed out of her tone, leaving her the quiet and soothing healer, rather than the annoyed administrator. She must really dislike Pammy.
That was okay. Jake didn’t like Pammy much either. But she was a useful ally.
“I can give you something to ease the pain, but your perceptions will be fuzzy. Do you want to go into this interview not thinking quickly or straight?”
“I can’t think straight or see anything but fuzzy because of the pain.” He eased out of the bed, hanging his head a bit, afraid if he stood tall and straight like the military had trained him to do, he’d fall flat on his face. Or his butt. Didn’t matter. He couldn’t hold his head up either way. “I need to get up and get moving anyway. Give me enough drugs to get me through today.” Jake held out his arm, expecting a shot.
Instead Doc Halliday moved close, held his arm firmly
with one hand and slapped something sticky to his left temple.
He reeled a bit from the cool numbness spreading from the patch. She held on tight until his vision cleared and he could stand on his own two feet.
“Put your trousers on.” She handed them to him from the tiny closet against the far wall. “Don’t bother with a uniform jacket or shoes. Just come. I hate to deny the kid anything at this stage of his illness.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After Jake had pulled on his underwear and pants—hospital gowns hadn’t improved much in the past four centuries and still left a man’s butt and privates hanging out—he looked at the ghost. “You coming?”
Laud Gregor floated into the corridor and then up through the ceiling to the next lighter gravity level.
“Wish I could do that.” Instead he shuffled toward the central lobby and the lift where Mariah awaited him.
“Your eyes are still a bit glassy, but you’ll do.” She stepped onto one of the platforms rotating upward.
Jake took the next platform in the continuous loop that ran day and night for easy passage through the station and its many wings. Next time he’d take the stairs. Today he didn’t have enough strength. Or concentration.
Two levels up, Mariah waited for him with two “clean” suits, complete with breathing masks.
“Is this necessary? The kid himself isn’t toxic, is he?”
“No, we’ve been monitoring the air in his lab and he doesn’t emit any mercury, but his immune system is so fragile that I’m not taking a chance on us contaminating him.” She stepped into her one-piece disposable suit with self-contained booties, gloves, and hood.
Jake did too, only wincing a little when he had to bend over to adjust the leggings and foot coverings. No wonder she’d told him not to bother with shoes.
Maria led them to a cross corridor that curved around the ring of the hospital wing. Jake couldn’t see that much was happening there: a few labs emitting noxious smells, a few empty rooms, and then yellow caution tape hanging from top bulkhead to the deck in a big X.
Mariah lifted her wrist with attached comms link toward a sensor in the wall. The red light blinked green. The light shimmer of a force field dissolved. Jake hadn’t noticed the difference in lighting, so the field wasn’t strong enough to kill someone, only burn slightly to discourage going any farther. And there was probably an alarm attached to it. Most everything on station was attached to an alarm of some kind.
Mariah pushed aside the loose tape and stepped through.
Jake lifted his own wrist toward the sensor. “My link! It’s been stolen.”
“Confiscated, not stolen. Knew you’d get no peace as long as you had it. So I tucked it away in a locked drawer in my locked office. You’re fine. The alarm won’t sound if you step through in the next fifteen seconds.”
Jake hastened past the flimsy barrier just as the light shifted from blinking green to solid red with a disappointed chirp. He swore the thing was sentient and really wanted to blast an annoying klaxon throughout the station.
Stranger things had happened aboard the First Contact Café.
The corridor opened into a full treatment room, complete with scanners and testing labs, oxygen tanks, and blood synthesizers. All for one pale young man resting uncomfortably on the narrow bed propped up to a forty-five degree angle.
“General Devlin, how is it that you have a female telepath aboard and did not tell me?” Ianus demanded the moment Jake stepped into the open area. “I must see her. The fate of my people depends upon her.”
Jake felt as if the boy had punched him in the gut. He looked to Doc Halliday for confirmation.
She shrugged and shook her head slightly.
Jake hesitated. “We have not been informed of any telepaths other than you and your shipmates.”
“In fact we had no verifiable evidence of true telepaths until you came here,” Doc said. She worked her way around the room, checking readouts and syncing them with her personal tablet. “Initial scans indicate a single anomaly in the DNA that is dormant or non-existent in most humans. I want more scans and test of the others to make sure.”
“But she is here. I spoke with her. A troubled angel,” Ianus insisted.
“Can you speak to her now?” Jake asked. He stayed as far away from Ianus as he could. No sense tempting him to read all his secrets, including the security codes to open the door to the Dragon lair. If the Maril sneaked in—and he wouldn’t put it past them to try—they’d have the information from the frail boy/man in seconds.
Only diplomatic immunity and doing his best to prevent another war with the birdlike creatures prevented Jake from throwing them out on their ears. Maybe he should let them into the Dragon wing to die slowly, painfully, of mercury poisoning.
Ianus chuckled. “I find the pain drugs limit my telepathic distance. It is refreshing to have you close enough to read without effort.”
“You read my mind?” Jake didn’t know if he should be outraged or grateful he didn’t have to explain the situation to Ianus.
“Why is this new telepath so important to you, Ianus?” Doc asked the question Jake should have. “You must know that we will not allow the Dragons to take her as their slave.”
“I . . .” Indecision showed in the vagueness of his eyes to the biting of his lower lip.
“Spit it out, Ianus. We can’t help you if we don’t know what to do or why,” Jake said with authority, just as if interrogating a reluctant witness to a bar fight. Which he’d had to do too many times to count.
“Among my people I was born the Keeper.”
“What does that mean?” Doc coaxed as she fiddled with gadgets and drips and things.
Ianus drew in a long breath as if he needed extra air to say everything at once, before he lost his nerve and the drugs shut him down again. “It means that all our history, all our lore, our language, even our jokes, everything about us is stored in my genes. I must pass it on before I die.”
“Can’t you just record it and give it to one of the others?” Jake asked. He didn’t like that phrase “stored in my genes.”
“It doesn’t work like that. My child will be born knowing it all.”
“You’ve managed to get one of your shipmates pregnant.” Jake felt the heat drain out of his face. Ianus looked both ancient and mid-teens, either age outside the normal breeding range.
“No. I have not been able to attract a female of age.” He closed his eyes and let his head fall back to the support of the bed. “This new telepath is our only hope.”
Sissy carried the warmth of Jake’s love all the way back to the Harmony Temple wing. She wasn’t looking forward to reporting to Lady Jancee da Gemma du Lukan that her husband had remained on Harmony to bring order to the High Council—mostly to undo the damage caused by his brother Lord Bevan and Laud Andrew. So, she’d found a small bed in a servant’s alcove and slept a few hours before doing what she must.
Undoubtedly the lady would see her husband’s abandonment of her as a setback in her personal agenda. She took everything as a direct insult upon her personally and her caste in general. Laudae Sissy, the upstart High Priestess with no credentials, background, education, or manners, was, of course, the perpetrator of this insult.
If she weren’t so clumsy and frail from her pregnancy, she could easily have orchestrated the theft of Laud Gregor’s remains. Her son, Garrin, was considered too inept and lacking common sense to do something so audacious, even with help and prodding from his mother. He couldn’t figure out how to tie his own shoes, let alone unseal the coffin.
First things first. Sissy opened the door to her own suite—nearly a quarter of the circular wing—to a chaos of purple. Purple in seven shades (at least) from palest lavender to a dark regal shade that could almost double for mourning black. Her four youngest acolytes flung clothing, curtains, bedding, and precious beaded regalia about in search of something.
“It’s not here!” Bella wailed. Her brown curls bounced and
tangled with every jerky movement of her head.
“What is not here?” Sissy asked, hoping for a measure of calm in the midst of frantic energy among four girls dashing from baggage to closet and back again while little Bella stood in the middle of it all wringing her hands, tears flowing copiously down her chubby cheeks.
“J…Jilly’s bra…bracelet.”
Jilly. Sissy’s lost apprentice. The little girl who made life a joke and had prophetic visions. The best of all of them. Dead in a fire meant to eliminate Sissy.
Jake had saved them all. All except Jilly who went back in to try to save a favored pet bird.
Sissy had to stand very still for a moment to catch her breath. They all continued to grieved for Jilly, though she’d been gone a year or more.
“Why . . .” gulp, “why did you have Jilly’s bracelet? I don’t remember seeing one . . .”
“Jilly kept it hidden. It was something she brought from home when she entered the Temple,” Sarah said, neatly folding lavender panties with lace ruffles on the back—Suzie’s.
“We’re supposed to leave everything from home behind,” Sharan informed them. She stood tall and straight and tried looking down her nose, an attitude she could only have learned from Laudae Maigress. “Jilly broke the rules.”
“Jilly was only a small child, frightened at being taken from her mother and everything she knew and held dear,” Sissy muttered, still resentful of the Temple Caste educational system. Those born in the Crystal Temple in the center of Harmony City knew no other life. To them the Temple was home, all the Laudaes their mothers, the Lauds their fathers. They lived in dormitories with their own age group until assigned as acolytes.
Jilly, however, had been born in a rural area, her parents as much farmers as priest and priestess to the community. But at the age of six, she needed to begin her education in the Temple so that she too could one day become a priestess and minister to the needs of one community or another.
Tell that to an unhappy six-year-old who misses her mother.
Mourner Page 13
