Contact

by Susan Grant

  With some amusement, he noted her sly manipulation of his father’s words. Although he had no intention of disobeying the commodore, he stared hard at the floor to keep his admiration for Jordan’s cleverness from appearing on his face. “It does not matter what you call it, Jordan, as long as your people stay where they are put.”

  And stay put they would. As much he shared in common with Jordan and her people, his loyalty remained with Moray, and his duty was to ensure that the refugees didn’t interfere with shipboard security in the risky days ahead.

  In grudging agreement, they stopped outside the hatch to the refugee quarters. Jordan smoothed her hands over her hair as if she could conquer the matted mass of curls. “They must be worried about me by now.”

  “If only in their dreams. They’re asleep. I asked that the antidote not be administered until you arrived. I assumed you’d want to be with them when they woke.”

  Surprise and gratitude were apparent in her voice. “Yes. I did.” But when he opened the hatch, she didn’t step through it. Her fists, tight at her sides, opened and closed.

  “You may enter the room,” he prompted.

  She took a couple of deep breaths. “I know.” She rubbed her hands on her trousers. “The original captain is dead. I’ve taken his place, and I’ve accepted that. But . . . damn it . . . it doesn’t mean I’m ready for it.”

  She swallowed the rest of her words, as if mortified that she’d divulged so much. “It doesn’t make a difference if I’m ready or not,” she muttered. “Let’s do it.”

  “You are correct, Jordan. It does not make a difference. I’ve seen many types of leaders, good and bad, in the best and the worst of circumstances. I was in the war before this assignment, you see.”

  Assignment? A laughable description of the current state of affairs, he thought. He was here on the Savior only because of his father’s charity, his celebrated benevolence now extended to his son.

  Regardless of the scornful discourse in his head, Kào continued, “The best leaders’ skills are instinctive and not necessarily learned. This perhaps is the case with you, Jordan. Go with your gut. Tell your people what you think you must, and I believe you will have nothing to worry about.”

  She tipped her head so that she could study him over her glasses, her searching stare intense as she studied his face. He felt her penetrating gaze as if it were a physical thing. Likely it was only for seconds that he lost himself in those sea-blue eyes, but it felt like an eternity. “Thank you,” she whispered, jolting him back to rationality.

  By the Seeders! She unbalanced him, this woman. He opened the hatch. “No need to thank me,” he replied in a crisp tone.

  Appearing somewhat flustered—had she sensed how she affected him?—she preceded him through the door. Her rigid shoulders reflected her renewed discipline. Clearly, she, too, knew that any interaction between them that was less than strictly professional was unbecoming.

  Inside, four armed security guards waited, reminding him quite clearly of the promise he’d made to Moray: Handle this situation so that the commodore didn’t have to. Refocused on his duty, he followed Jordan into her temporary new home.

  Chapter Ten

  In the newly assigned refugee quarters, Jordan stopped at the last of the beds, all of them full. It had taken an eternity to count all the sleeping bodies. Fighting bleariness, she added up the slashes representing passengers and crew that she’d made with a light pen on a scroll that was really a computer screen. Not including Brian, whose body was supposedly being kept safe until she arranged for his funeral, and not counting the infants who, because their parents hadn’t purchased seats for them, weren’t logged on the passenger manifest, she was three people short.

  She whirled on Kào, her escort, a man who was unintentionally charming in his aloofness and frighteningly ontarget with his understanding. “Not everyone’s here. Where are they?”

  The guards, instantly alert, swung their attention her way. To her relief, these men had normal pigmentation. It wasn’t that she cared about skin color; but something about the albinos unsettled her, something in their eyes—though she couldn’t define what it was. “Did we count wrong?” she asked Kào in a more civil tone. She didn’t want to get shot by security for no other reason than reaching the end of her emotional rope.

  Kào dropped his gaze to his handheld computer. “I logged two hundred and eighty-six.”

  She waited until the numbers translated to English. “We’re supposed to have two hundred and eighty-nine, not including me.” She knew her tone was terse, but she couldn’t help it. When it came to priorities, courtesy was running a distant last place. She was gut tired, nauseated, and cold deep, deep inside. All she wanted to do was collapse into a tight little ball. But her personal problems were last in line to far more important considerations. “I have a missing crew member.” Ann. Her partner in crime, the levelheaded flight attendant who’d helped her make the escape slide into a defensive weapon. “And two passengers.”

  Kào lifted his arm and barked an order in his computer that also served as his communicator, or “comm,” as he called it.

  “I’ve put someone on the task,” he told her. “They’ll recheck the vessel. And the morgue.”

  “The morgue?” Her heart sank. Had her glasses translated correctly?

  “What happened to your captain could have happened to others, as well.”

  Anger boiled up unexpectedly. “Death from fright, you mean.”

  His mouth hardened into its usual grim slash. He could go from bleak to unintentionally charming to bleak again so quickly that she couldn’t figure out which was his true self. And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know. “Couldn’t you have thought of a less terrifying way to accomplish a rescue?”

  “Had we paused to think on it, we would have lost all of you.”

  God. She wiped her hand over her face. He and his shipmates had saved her from certain death, and she was attacking him for it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Let’s do a recount.”

  Kào agreed. “Perhaps we miscalculated.”

  They headed back across the huge common area, a triangular-shaped room from where three passageways housing individual bunkrooms sprouted. Kào’s people had a thing with threes. Even their day was divided into thirds. What resembled very ordinary cots were grouped in nines and twenty-sevens, separated by molded privacy walls, soundproofed and glowing incandescently from within, lighting Jordan’s way as she passed by her sleeping passengers and crew.

  They finished the second head count and exchanged notes. Ann and the two passengers were still missing. A call came in over Kào’s communicator. He answered it, pacing in front of her as he argued in his language. Then, his expression bleak, he lowered his comm.

  She tightened her abdominals, knowing she was about to receive another kick in the gut emotionally. “What happened?”

  “Two of your adult males died from encephalitic shock. A severe allergic reaction to the sedative gas.”

  Jordan’s heart raced. Her churning stomach made her throat burn. “And the third?”

  It appeared to be an effort for him to form a translation she could understand. “Your crew member hemorrhaged from the loss of an unborn child. They discovered the bleeding too late to revive her.”

  Ann. She’d been pregnant, lost her baby. And then bled to death in her sleep. Instinctively, Jordan placed her hand over her womb.

  Kào followed the gesture with his eyes. Then he glanced away, his jaw flexing.

  “Apparently, the gas caused spontaneous abortions in all the pregnant females.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” she whispered. There had been three pregnant women—that she’d known about. How many others had lost babies as a result of the gas? Impotent fury and horror clogged her throat.

  “Trust me when I say that I’m as revolted as you are by the consequences of the gas. But that is of little comfort to you now, I imagine.”

  She answered with a sound that was a cross
between an enraged huff and a sarcastic snort. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered.

  “Jordan. . . .”

  She cringed. Kào’s voice was almost tender. She didn’t want tenderness. Not from him. Not from anyone. Anything soft would seep into the hairline cracks in her armor and shatter it.

  Hugging her arms to her ribs, she marched away. Kào didn’t follow. But his face remained imprinted in her mind like the afterimage of bright lights behind closed eyes. She “saw” the wall’s glow illuminating the harsh hollows of his face, and the glasses that hid his eyes. His expression hid his feelings just as well. But he’d seen his share of suffering; instinct told her that. And now, that same gut feeling screamed at her to trust him, to take his remorse at face value. The problem was that she didn’t want to trust him.

  She wanted to pummel him with her fists, scream at him for treating the people on her airplane like animals. It made her so goddamned angry. And she had the feeling that she was going to be angry for a long time, maybe forever. Angry for not being with her daughter in the darkest possible moment, angry for being alive when everyone she’d cared about was dead. Angry for being in charge when it was the very last thing she wanted.

  Some say it’s worse to be the one left alive, Kào had said.

  A choked moan escaped her. I’d give anything to change places with you, Boo. She forced away the image of her daughter cowering as the sky fell, her mother not there to hold her, and she pressed her fists into her ribcage, as if that could somehow blot out the other, unspeakable pain slashing at her broken heart.

  It’s not about you, Jordan.

  That’s right. She couldn’t let her own pain take over when nearly three hundred people depended on her. And already she’d lost three of them—on her watch. Self-pity wasn’t going to be an option.

  Slowly she turned around and faced Kào, who waited. Silent. Enigmatic. She wished she could appear the same way; it might prove useful someday when the passengers’ shock wore off and they started questioning her decisions, but she didn’t have an enigmatic bone in her body, unfortunately. “Waking them up isn’t going to kill anyone, is it?” she asked.

  “I should hope not.”

  Hope. What was hope when your life had turned into its antithesis?

  She gave her head a curt shake. Straightened her spine. Cleared her throat. “Okay, then let’s do it. Let’s wake them up.” The people of United Flight 58 had a right to know what she’d learned. All she could do now was pray she was up to the task of telling them.

  Not everyone roused immediately from the sedative. Even after she’d gathered her crew and passengers in one place, the central section of their quarters, a vast triangular area designed for meetings with large numbers of people, the effects of the gas lingered. Nausea and cold sweats; uncontrollable shaking and mental confusion. A whopper of a dose they’d been given.

  Jordan fought the urge to put the blame on Trist Pren, the albino woman whose nose they’d broken. Had she been in Trist’s shoes, she might have been tempted to crank up the dosage, too. Nothing beat a little revenge.

  Though if it had been “a little revenge,” three people and a still unknown number of unborn babies died because of it. That was unforgivable, if that was how it had gone down.

  For a few hours, fury overcame her grief, and she welcomed it, but by morning—the Savior’s version of morning—numbness had cloaked her like a cocoon. Just as well. It was time to brief Flight 58 on what had transpired. And so she did, repeating what the commodore and Kào Vantaar-Moray had told her.

  “The comet broke up before it came close enough to detect,” she explained. “And no one was prepared for what happened. Maybe it was a blessing. I don’t think there was anything anyone could have done to stop it.” Her voice grew hoarser, and she swayed on her feet. But she barely felt her exhaustion, let alone anything else. Only a persistent coldness that erupted in periodic shivers reminded her that she was still alive.

  At last she reached the end of what she had to say. Although most were strangers, the people of Flight 58 huddled together as if they were one family. Wan and shocked, they drew on the elemental need for human companionship in the face of unimaginable tragedy.

  “I asked about survivors,” Jordan told them. “They told me that no one could have lived through it. I wanted us to go back, to make sure. But they can’t—or won’t—do it.”

  Outraged grumbles broke out. Her own bitterness on that particular point must have been more apparent than she’d intended. Kào was monitoring the briefing from near the door leading outside to the disorienting curved hallway and the rest of the ship’s hallways. She felt his intense regard shift to her. The back of her neck tingled as those black eyes burned into her. She bit back her personal opinion on the no-return-to-Earth policy, because she knew what he was thinking: If she couldn’t keep her people calm, his people would take over.

  No way would she let that happen. She might be new at this game, feeling her way using training, not experience, as her guide; but she knew enough not to give away what little power she had. Once you abdicated command, you never got it back. She’d better keep the peace. “As soon as we’re settled wherever we’re going to be settled, we’ll work on going home to Earth. If not to live, then to see what’s”—she swallowed—“left.”

  She cleared her throat and checked the notes she’d scrawled on her notepad. There were many issues to cover, and she didn’t want to miss any.

  She was flanked by her flight attendants with the conspicuous and heartbreaking absence of Ann. Natalie stood on her left side, and Ben, ironically on her right. The chief purser was being anything but her right-hand man; he’d been a mess ever since she’d informed him of the situation. She found herself hoping he’d transform into one of those quiet, dependable guys who were there when you needed them. Men like her father and brother. But if he didn’t, she had Natalie to appoint in his place, a smart-talking kick-boxer whose guts had impressed her.

  She turned to Ben and asked encouragingly, “Is there anything I missed? Anything you wanted to say before I wrap it up?”

  He whispered in her ear, “I wish he’d get lost.”

  She blinked. “Who?”

  “Scarface.” The purser hunched his shoulders. “He gives me the creeps. Look at the way he’s staring at us.”

  Jordan’s gaze tracked down the front row of passengers and she caught a good number of them sneaking dread-filled looks at Kào. Good Lord. They were terrified of him.

  But she saw that Kào was too engrossed in the gathering to notice. He seemed to observe them with an intensity that bordered on fascination, just as he’d done on the airplane. She tried to see the scene as if through his eyes: several hundred grieving people hunched together, sobs and whispers, children squealing or whining, a baby crying irritably. Coughs and occasional sneezes added to the commotion. Jordan hadn’t seen much of the Savior, but what she had seen left her with the impression that the ship was run precisely, efficiently, and with discipline. Yet here was Kào, gazing at the people of Flight 58 with such hunger that it left her with the indelible impression that he was lonely onboard this ship.

  A heartbeat later, her sympathetic thoughts were shattered by the sight of a guard passing by on his rounds behind him. An armed guard. It reminded her that Kào’s people were dealing with the sloppy aftermath of war; that their enemy consisted of a bunch of psychos who got off keeping slaves and worse, practicing their perversions on them. An enemy that, apparently, hadn’t been completely defeated, making the prospect of a real abduction a horrifying possibility for Jordan and her charges.

  Her chest constricted with apprehension. Kào wasn’t their problem, she wanted to say. The Talagars were. But few were ready to hear the news that Kào and his people were all that stood between getting to a resettlement port safely and capture by aliens who’d make them slaves.

  She prayed that Kào was right about leading by gut instinct, because that was what she was doing.


  “I can’t ask him to leave,” she whispered back to Ben. “He’s the only intermediary between his crew and us. If he goes away, who’s going to take his place? Frankly, I don’t want anyone else.”

  Ben’s breath brushed her ear. “So you trust him already?”

  “Not completely. But he hasn’t done anything to make me suspicious, either.” As for Kào’s kindness . . . well, Ben had no proof of that, only what she’d told him and the rest of the crew. “I agree that he’s not exactly Mr. Cheerful. But that’s no reason to make him a scapegoat. What happened to us isn’t his fault.”

  “How do we know?”

  In truth, they didn’t. At that thought, her stomach plummeted. The passengers were straining to hear what she and Ben were saying. She lowered her voice further. “Look at them—do you want mass panic? It’s a miracle everyone’s as calm as they are. Don’t screw with it, Ben. Don’t scare them.” She clenched her teeth together. “Or me.”

  Ben raked his jet-black hair away from his forehead. “Didn’t mean to. I’m not myself right now,” he said under his breath.

  I hope not, she wanted to say, but somehow she dug deep and acted civil. That’s what leaders did, right—acted civil? They didn’t strangle their second-in-command.

  She returned her attention to the others. “Sorry,” she called loudly, for the room was large and her voice was growing hoarse. “The purser and I wanted to compare notes. We want to make sure we cover everything.”

  “Take your time, Captain,” a Good Samaritan shouted to her from the middle of the crowd.

  She smiled, appreciative, and inspiration seemed to come out of nowhere. “For now, though, we’ll postpone the rest. Our main concern is just to survive. All of us. No giving up. We have to force ourselves to face tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days after that, even though many of us feel like we’d rather have died with our loved ones. I know it’s going to be a difficult path, but we’ll endure. We have to. We owe it to those we lost at home and here on this ship to keep their memory alive.” The faces of her family flashed in her mind, and her throat constricted as the passengers hung on her words with teary eyes and sympathetic nods.