Contact

by Susan Grant

  Go numb. She brought the pad closer to her face in the guise of scrutinizing her messy handwriting. Who was she to think she could give a pep talk when she so desperately needed one herself? Who boosted the captain’s spirits, for crying out loud?

  Courage is mustering the strength to stand up when it’s easier to fall down.

  She could almost hear her father’s voice as his advice came to her, boosting her. “Are there any questions?” she asked gruffly.

  “When will our stuff get here?” someone called out. “I have medication in my suitcase.”

  Ah, the grassroots concerns—those she could handle in the state she was in. “The luggage is on its way to us. Plus anything they find in the cabin. The shipboard medical staff is synthesizing medicine for those they determine need it. But keep taking what you have with you until you hear otherwise.”

  Natalie asked her, “Do you want me to go around and see what other immediate needs there are? I’ve got a spare pen and paper. I can find out the details of everyone’s medication. What they take and how much.”

  Jordan nearly fainted with gratitude. “Yes. Do that.”

  Another passenger raised her hand. A middle-aged woman. “We’re sleeping in dorm rooms.”

  “That’s right.” Jordan was the only one with a private room, small as it was.

  “My sister’s not in my area. I want to sleep near my sister.”

  More people called out with their personal preferences for sleeping arrangements.

  “Tell me this is a good thing,” Jordan muttered to Natalie. “That they are more concerned about roommates than Earth being vaporized by a comet.”

  “I think this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

  An iceberg sank the Titanic. Jordan sighed through clenched teeth. “We’ll work everything out tomorrow,” she assured the crowd.

  “Our food, too?” a man wearing a skullcap queried in a Middle-Eastern accent. “I have special dietary requirements.”

  “Tomorrow.” She lifted her hands, fingers spread, as if she were calming a room full of Boo’s play-pals. “Your flight crew is working overtime. Everything will be solved soon.” To the rest of her flight attendants, she said, “We’ll meet later, after we all have some time to recover.”

  Natalie stayed behind after the rest walked away. “How are you doing, hon?” she asked.

  Jordan was afraid to admit how upset she was. “It’s too surreal to grasp . . . that we’re here and Earth’s gone. It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Because it’s nothing we could ever imagine,” Natalie said, sounding a bit husky herself. “Like when the World Trade Center towers collapsed . . . only a million times worse.”

  Jordan took the translation glasses out of her pocket. Staring at them, she didn’t really see them. “Yep.”

  Natalie’s dark eyes radiated sympathy. “And you had a kid, too.”

  Jordan’s laugh was clipped and false. “Now I have two hundred and eighty-six kids.”

  But the flight attendant saw her joke for what it was: an attempt to cover up the pain. She rubbed Jordan’s arm in a caring caress. Then her chin jerked up.

  “You’ve got company coming, and I’m outta here. Call if you need me.” With her braided ponytail bouncing behind her, Natalie strode off on her assigned mission.

  Jordan shoved on her glasses and turned around. Kào’s own glasses glinted in the soft overhead light. So did the nubs of his beard on his chin and above his upper lip, but not where the scar sliced across his face. She tried not to think too hard about what Ben had asked: How do we know?

  “It is time for me to take my leave,” Kào informed her in a careful tone, the way he’d sounded in the commodore’s briefing room. His voice took on a certain husky quality when it deepened like that. She swallowed. How much had he heard, and understood, of her conversation with Natalie? She hoped little. As it was, he saw too much of what she tried to keep hidden.

  Suddenly her voice was tight from too much talking and a throat thick with the unrelenting need to bawl her eyes out. She didn’t like the way the guy was able to get under her skin like this. Ben was right—Kào was dangerous. But in a way that the purser never imagined. “I’ll see you at our meeting tomorrow,” she responded crisply.

  “Only after you take your much-needed rest.”

  She tempered her tone. “You look like you could use some oblivion yourself.”

  For a moment, he looked as if he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Oblivion,” he agreed bleakly. “One of the few things in life that is not overrated. If the chance presents itself today, in any form, take it.”

  Leaving that uncomfortably true statement echoing in Jordan’s head, Kào turned on his heel and left.

  Later, alone in her quarters, Jordan took his advice. But oblivion turned out to be elusive. And the sobbing session she’d expected never came. The next day and the ones afterward were a blur of shock and mourning for everyone on Flight 58. The crew and passengers asked little of her, respecting her sorrow as they nursed their own. If ever there was a time to fall apart in the privacy of her room, those first days were it. But the pain never broke her.

  She couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or bad.

  After that, she busied herself keeping up with everyone’s requests, complaints, and questions. Kào returned every day, once a day, as they’d decided. He declined to enter the refugee quarters unescorted, and she’d overheard him instruct Commodore Moray’s aides, Rono and Poul, to adhere to the same code. Now, when those red-eyed assistants came around with their administrative questions—“Is anyone ill? Do you have enough bedding?”—they waited until Jordan met them at the door and spoke to her there.

  She wanted to believe that it was Kào’s way of respecting Flight 58’s sovereignty over this small area. But he might only be using caution. Despite her efforts to create a climate of understanding, many, including Ben, the chief purser, inexplicably focused their bitterness on the aliens for what had happened to Earth—and shot Kào the dirty looks to prove it.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, Kào showed up with two handheld computers. “Hi-tech, palm-sized language converters made from an improved database that transforms speech to text,” he began without preamble. “Handheld translators, we call them. There are too few pairs of conversion-glasses onboard, so we will use these now.”

  He thrust out his hand. She removed her glasses and dropped them into his huge palm. In exchange, he gave her the new translator. It fit perfectly in the hollows of her cupped hands. “How does it work?”

  “Read the text scrolling across the screen.”

  Like before. Only now all the letters were correct, whereas some had been mirror images or upside down when using the glasses. “I thought I’d miss the glasses. But this is better. Much better.”

  “You can thank Ensign Pren. She programmed three hundred of these devices, enough for all of your people, with leftovers to spare.”

  Jordan sensed a tensing in his demeanor whenever he mentioned the ensign’s name. He didn’t like her, she guessed. But there was something else, too, hidden from her, hidden by this man whose face revealed little. Her eyes searched for and found the terrible brand on his neck, the puckered tip of which peeked above his collar. When it came to secrets, she’d bet that his issues with Trist were only the tip of the iceberg.

  “Contained in the translator is an educational database, as well,” he explained. “Alliance history, language, science—it is all there. Study it. The more you know, the better off you will be. Extensive information can also be obtained at the workstation we provided.”

  “Yeah. Dillon’s new best friend,” she said wryly.

  Even as she spoke with Kào, the charming Irishman was struggling to learn the ropes of the new computer mounted in the wall. He’d lunged at the machine as soon as it was installed, his hunger to see what it contained comparable to a starving dog’s. “When are we going to get our own computers back? People are aski
ng for them.” While the luggage had been returned, there had been no sign of the laptops and walkmans, or of any of the electronics.

  “Now that the language database is complete, I see no reason why you can’t have the items returned,” he said to Jordan.

  The crew and passengers straggled back from the dining area, where meals were dropped off three times a day. The chatter was louder today. Some were beginning to feel more like themselves, she guessed. The children certainly were, weaving between the adults in a rowdy taglike game, the rules of which only the kids could understand.

  Kào watched them with curiosity and longing. “Your people remind me of a large, noisy family.”

  His wistfulness told her that he was homesick. She imagined that life on a starship was similar to a navy man’s life, being at sea more than at home. “You must come from a big family. Or have one.”

  He appeared taken aback by both observations. “I’ve no life-partner, or mate—wife, in your language.” To her shock, he’d used the English word. “As for being from a large family . . . if I am, I have no memory of it. I was orphaned when I was not quite three Earth years of age.”

  Jordan’s hands clenched. For a moment, she forgot her own sorrow. Kào hadn’t been much more than a toddler when he’d lost his parents.

  “My situation wasn’t the tragedy it might seem, Jordan.” He had the strangest way of answering questions she hadn’t asked. “I had a solid upbringing, although not a conventional one, by any means. I was adopted by a widowed but well-to-do military officer, and I grew up aboard star-ships, a series of them. They were Perimeter vessels, like this one, tasked with patrolling the border areas. At times, it was treacherous duty, and no families were allowed aboard. Thus, I found myself the only child among hundreds of adults: one father, who was busy for three thirds of the day—and then some—and more self-appointed parents than I could count. I never had to learn what it was like to compete for attention as one of many siblings.” His eyes unfocused, as if he were searching for memories. A flicker of deep sorrow brought clarity back to his gaze and his attention back to her.

  “Do you want to sit down?” she offered quickly. Everyone she’d encountered all day had desired direction, or had complained, or had been needy of support. Kào asked nothing of her. Suddenly she found she longed for a few moments of quiet conversation, of simple, undemanding companionship. “I constructed a briefing room today. Would you like to see it? We can meet there from now on, instead of here in the middle of Town Square.”

  “Town . . . Square?” He scrutinized his translator.

  “We’ve dubbed it that, yes. It means a central place. And while we’re at it, I might as well welcome you to New Earth.”

  He nodded, his eyes dark, unreadable. If his mouth hadn’t softened, she wouldn’t have known he approved. “New Earth it is, then.”

  With soldierly formality, Kào followed her to a corner she’d blocked off from the rest of the expansive room by a movable divider. There she’d dragged a table and enough chairs for all the flight attendants. Office supplies had been gathered from those who had them, and stored. The activity had given her an hour or so of distraction. “It’s working out well,” she said with satisfaction. “Less noise, and much more private.”

  He gazed at her efforts in that peculiar, careful way that males do when you call their attention to something you want them to admire. “It is quieter,” he agreed, peering between the divider and the wall, looking almost disappointed that he’d lost his full view of New Earth. From what he had just told her, he probably was.

  With deference, he pulled out her chair. “Please, sit.” His formality was endearing, the way he acted like such a gentleman around her. Chivalry had become a dying art on Earth.

  Then, holding his own floating chair in place, he sat, releasing a breath when he was finally settled. He was strong, athletic, but today he moved like an old man.

  “What happened? Were you hurt?” she asked.

  “I spent the day in medical. My ribs had to be broken and reset.”

  Uh, yeah. “Thanks to me.”

  He read the translator. His expression didn’t change. But then, it rarely did. “A hazard of the job,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was goading her or not. “No need to worry, however. It was a minor procedure. Just time-consuming.” He pointed to his abdomen. The gray-blue fabric stretched across his chest. It wasn’t hard to imagine the hard body he kept hidden beneath his uniform. “The medics forced me to lie prone for two full thirds of the shipboard day to make sure the bones fused to their liking.” He took a deep breath as if to prove he was fit for duty. He didn’t need to prove anything to her; the evidence was clear.

  She swiped her Earth-made clipboard and pen off the table, trying to focus on the list she’d made. It was tough to decide what made her more uncomfortable, knowing that she was responsible for his injuries, or that she’d bothered to admire his male attributes in the depths of grief. “Okay. Next item on the list,” she said a little too sharply. “The people who are eating enough to care have complained about the food. It’s bland. Tasteless.” She put down the clipboard. “I understand if you’re worried about allergic reactions after what happened with the sedative gas, and I’m grateful, but this food—some of it tastes almost synthetic.” She remembered trying the white patties mixed with rubbery purple flecks that had stuck to the roof of her mouth like sunflower seeds mixed with peanut butter, only without the flavor—any flavor.

  He sat back, not seeming to care that his chair bobbed like a duck on water. “Odd. We don’t switch over to synthetics until near the end of a voyage, and only if it’s a particularly long one.” He typed something into his computer. “I’ll look into it.”

  Kào’s comm beeped. He exhaled impatiently and answered the call. Trist Pren, Jordan wagered. The woman had perfect timing—ten, fifteen minutes into their appointments, she always interrupted Kào. Jordan hadn’t seen her in person since that first day, but found it interesting how she’d managed to disrupt all four of their meetings. On purpose, or not? To thwart Jordan’s efforts as leader, or coincidence? Either way, Jordan hoped to set things right between them eventually. She’d acted in self-defense the day when she’d injured Trist with the escape slide, not out of spite. She wanted Trist to know that, if the woman didn’t already.

  Sure enough, the ensign appeared in the tiny, high-resolution, three-dimensional screen on Kào’s computer. If Jordan hadn’t recognized Trist by her pink skin, white hair, and unsettling red eyes, she would have by her bright lavender lips.

  Jordan flipped over her translator to keep from eavesdropping on Kào’s conversation. His clipped tone said it all: Whatever he heard, he didn’t like.

  Kào closed his comm and looked at her. “The rest will have to wait until tomorrow,” he said, standing with some effort. “I’ve been called away.”

  He was even more reserved than usual as she walked with him to the exit, which was good—he didn’t notice the dozens of wary looks following him across Town Square.

  At the doorway, he stopped and frowned down at her. “Have you informed your people of the risks of traversing the Perimeter?”

  “So far only my crew. As a group we’ll brief the passengers.”

  “Good,” he said sharply.

  Her heart skipped a beat. “Why?”

  “The vessel the commodore has been tracking reappeared. It may be independent merchants thinking they can operate without clearance—that is not uncommon. Or it may be Talagar.” He said the word with such revulsion that it made the hairs stand up on the back of Jordan’s neck. “Likely it is a false alarm. Every ship we have encountered so far and cleared has been of Alliance registry. But I thought you should know of the development, nonetheless.” With a curt bow, he left.

  She stared after him, again feeling as if she’d been dragged into someone else’s war.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was springtime. Birdsong and the sound of laughter, Boo’s laughte
r, floated in the crisp, clean air. Jordan climbed down from her mount and raced her daughter across the meadow. Hands clasped, the two whirled around, making circles of trampled grass. It cushioned their fall. Above was a dome of perfect blue. The clouds floated past. Boo’s sun-warmed head was tucked between her mother’s breasts. Then there was a deep voice. Big gentle hands. This was Jordan’s lover . . . the love of her life. She threw open her arms and embraced him, too. A scratchy cheek and soft lips, warm against her neck, moving playfully lower . . .

  A giggle woke Jordan. Her own giggle, she realized belatedly and with a good deal of private mortification. “Crap.” Her head fell back on the pillow, and she stared into the twilight of her quarters on the Savior. She was on a starship, untold miles from home. Yet she could still smell the flowers and green grass, and the clods of moist dirt the horses’ hooves kicked up. And the sounds—she could hear them, too: Boo’s delighted shrieks of laughter, and another voice, a man’s voice, in a quiet, sexy, loving tone she knew instinctively he used only with her.

  In her dreams, he was her lover. By day, he was Kào Vantaar-Moray, the grim mediator between her people and his.

  He’d kissed her, Kào had. In the dream. And her pulse still raced from the fireworks he set off inside her. Ay-yi-yi. As for the psychological implications—well, she didn’t want to go there. The man was off-limits, she reminded herself. He was an officer on this ship, and she was a refugee on it.

  Why, then, had he started showing up in her dreams?

  She groaned, dropping her arm over her eyes. A muffled chorus seeped into her private quarters from the common area. Singing. The multidenominational prayer service had begun. Jews, Muslims, Christians, and members of a few smaller religions gathered together every morning now. Three weeks into their odyssey, they needed all the routine they could get. Pastor Earl said that routine led to ritual, and ritual comforted. Sooner or later, comfort would heal.