Contact

by Susan Grant

  “You must make haste, Captain. Time is short.”

  Jordan forced aside thoughts of Kào. “Don’t worry. We’ll be on the airplane.” She was a professional, a leader; her duty was to keep focused on her responsibilities, not her personal heartache. Her task was to keep her people safe and get them all home.

  “I will leave you to your swift preparations,” Trist said.

  As the flight attendants fanned out into Town Square, barking orders, Jordan watched Trist go. The roller coaster of her life was crawling up another long ascent. Was there a way to end the ride without a fall? She didn’t know. Loss had become such a staple of her life that it was easier to imagine a future without Kào than one with him. But the thought of a life without him broke her heart.

  As the crews of both ships worked through the complicated details of the upcoming docking of two dissimilar vessels, Kào’s attention remained riveted on the Talagarian admiral. With his long white hair gathered at the back of his neck in an ornate clasp, and blood-red eyes glowing in a face that looked as if it were chiseled from ice, Steeg would have been considered a handsome man among the Talagars. And his military bearing was without fault. Undoubtedly, he’d been a favorite of the once-Emperor, to have won himself his own command. Before the war, he’d probably maintained a household with hundreds of slaves, performing duties ranging from floor sweeping to fellatio. Now he’d been forced to obey the summons of an Alliance vessel, where he’d be stripped of his power, his command, and eventually sent to Sofu to face trial.

  But such was the ugly reality of defeat.

  Buoyed by a surge of patriotism and pride, Kào stood taller. Steeg sized up the Savior’s bridge crew with disturbing keenness. That look, it must be genetic. The prison interrogators’ eyes had glinted just as eagerly when they made the rounds, selecting fresh prisoners for their attention. But this time Kào was the victor, not the vanquished.

  As Steeg considered the instructions given to him by Moray, his hand rose to cup his square chin. He wore a ring. Uncannily, at the same moment the thick gold band caught the light, the Savior decelerated, adding a physical jolt to Kào’s awareness of the crest. In its square center was a bird of prey with wings of fire. Involuntarily the word escaped Kào in a choked whisper, “Fire.”

  Fire. . . .

  Running, terrified, the ground burning the soles of his shoes; he couldn’t find his mother, his father, couldn’t see, blinded by light that was as hot as fire and seared his eyes, his skin. . . .

  Kào sucked in a mighty breath as a memory opened to him, a rupture in his mind torn open by the sight of Steeg’s ring.

  He was a small boy. His mother threw him onto a horse. Smacking its flank with the flat of her hand, she yelled, “Haiyah!” sending the horse into a gallop. But it sickened and then fell, spilling him, forcing him to run on, half blinded by the heat and smoke.

  Kào remembered how the air had seared his lungs. But the desire to survive burned hotter. He’d heard voices, and ran toward the sound.

  Laughter. Gruff and deep. “What do we have here?” A hand came out of nowhere, grasping him by the collar and hoisting him off his feet. He couldn’t see the man’s face, but his skin was pink, like that of the white-haired soldiers who had descended from the sky and slaughtered the horses.

  Kào swallowed convulsively. He remembered how he’d fought wildly, convinced that Death himself had snatched him.

  “Mama! Mama!” he bellowed, spurring more laughter.

  “Kill the thing,” someone had said.

  Whoever owned the hand that held him laughed along with the others. “I know someone who’ll enjoy the task more than I. In fact, there he is now.”

  That was when Kào had wet his pants.

  Humiliating heat streamed down his thighs. Concentrated from dehydration, his urine stank sharply. “You wet my boots!” The hand rose up to cuff him on the side of the head, adding a new shriek to the chorus of agony that encased his body. “I have a mind to crush your head right here.” The fist remained before his eyes, taunting him. On the middle finger was a ring. Its square crest was wet with blood, his blood, soiling a bird with wings of fire.

  Steeg’s ring.

  A second blow to his head nauseated him and brought about a loud humming in his ears. The man carried him swiftly away from the laughing soldiers. Kào was dropped in front of a pair of huge boots he was certain belonged to a giant.

  At three years old, he’d learned the meaning of irony. Steeg had saved him only to deliver him to his executioner. He remembered staring at the toes of those boots, scarred and dust-coated with the remains of Vantaar’s razed prairies, the ashes of his people’s livelihood.

  “It’s too small. And it’s not housebroken,” the ringed man added contemptuously. “Here, put it out of our misery, Ilya.”

  Ilya? Kào gripped the railing. Ilya Moray?

  A metallic scrape indicated a gun being withdrawn from a holster. “Stand still, little one.” But he didn’t. He ran.

  He didn’t know in which direction he fled; he knew only that he must escape the giant. He sprinted across the charred grasslands, zigzagging as he’d seen the rabbits run when chased by prairie-lions. His breaths scraped his throat raw, tears streamed from his burning eyes. Overhead, frightening silver ships, sleek and deadly, crisscrossed the sky like giant dragonflies. They dropped objects that erupted in greenish lightning. He felt the surges of the distant explosions in his ears. Black and orange clouds boiled on the horizon, where his village had been; the stench of dead horses was so heavy that he could taste it. But he ran, hard and fast, until the sound of thundering boots hitting the hard-packed earth caught up to him.

  In his mind’s eye, Kào saw that horrible hand descend, snatching him off his feet. “Gotcha!” I know someone who’ll enjoy it more. . . .

  He fought the giant until every last bit of strength bled from his thin, wiry body, until he was too exhausted to raise a fist or lift a leg. He dangled like a strangled chicken from that enormous fist, drained but not defeated. “Look at me, boy.” He obeyed, half expecting the butt of the gun to come crashing down on his throbbing, bloodied skull. But the giant hadn’t the red eyes of the others. His were the color of coal smoke and unexpectedly kind. “An admirable little fighter you are. I know men who could stand to take a lesson from you.”

  Only days ago at dinner Moray had expressed that same sentiment: “It was your swift feet that saved you that day. Your spirit, Kào, your will to survive, it glowed so brightly that it touched me in a way you cannot imagine.”

  And it had saved Kào from dying that day.

  “What’s your name, boy?” the huge man asked. “You must be old enough to know it.”

  It took a while to work sufficient saliva into his parched mouth to answer. “Kào.”

  “Kay-oh,” the man had repeated, drawing out the sound. “A strong name. A name worthy of your spirit. I’ll let you keep it. Your surname, however, will be mine.” With that, the benevolent giant tucked Kào under a brawny arm and carried him away from Vantaar. And into a new life.

  The giant had been Moray. Moray! A man who’d loomed larger than life to him ever since.

  Kào glanced wildly about the bridge. A few aides poked up their heads from their stations. Meeting his quelling glare, they ducked quickly back to work.

  Dazed, he turned back to the screen, but it displayed only the stars; the admiral’s communication with Moray had ended, for now. But the image of his ring was seared into Kào’s mind as brutally as the brand on his neck. On that long-ago day on Vantaar it had represented imminent death, the incarnation of a tiny boy’s nightmare: “I know someone who’ll enjoy it more . . .”

  A drumbeat of disbelief thundered inside Kào as he grasped for composure. He’d been taken in and raised by an Alliance turncoat who had experienced a moment of mercy, taking a little boy off-planet instead of killing him or handing him over to the Talagars.

  It was more than a moment of mercy, Kào’s conscie
nce argued. He raised you, cared for you, taught you morals, and right from wrong.

  Kào’s stomach rolled. His hands sweated. His thoughts swerved once more to the recent dinner he’d shared with Moray, when the man had confided that he’d been a bitter and disillusioned man for years after losing his wife and children. “When I took you home it all changed,” he’d said. “I was a man without a family. And you, Kào, a little boy who needed one.”

  But how bitter was Moray? How disillusioned? Enough to betray the Alliance? He was seen by many as one of its greatest heroes. Was he in fact their greatest traitor?

  “Ah,” Kào said hoarsely, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth to tamp down an almost overwhelming gag reflex. Was he supposed to love Moray or hate him? Both emotions fought for dominance. Moray had saved him, a traumatized orphan, but only after participating in the destruction of Vantaar as a thug admired for his mercilessness by a Talagar who beat defenseless children.

  Every deed the commodore had accomplished over the years was now tainted by treachery in Kào’s mind. He’d saved thousands from certain death on the Ceris space station, but was it only so he could siphon off a countless number and hand them over to the Talagar Empire? By the Seeders, he’d been patrolling the Perimeter for years. How many Talagar ships had he allowed to pass through? And during the war, how many more? The idea of such duplicity from the man he so admired sickened Kào beyond the nausea that gripped him.

  How could his father have remained such a stranger to him? How? Even the worst of the Talagarian torture sessions hadn’t generated this much agony.

  If he hadn’t been on the bridge, he’d be ignorant still. But he wasn’t unaware any longer. He knew what his father was. Memories didn’t lie. Moray was a slave-broker disguised as a champion, and now he planned to hand over Jordan and her people to Steeg.

  She was all he’d ever wanted, and he would lose her. She and her people would meet the same horrible fate as his family. He’d been helpless on that long-ago day on Vantaar. Was he still? Anger and anguish twisted sharply together until he could no longer separate them. History would not repeat itself, he vowed.

  Find Jordan. Warn her.

  A sense of urgency propelled him away from the railing.

  The bridge hummed with activity as Moray, by all appearances a loyal Alliance officer, led his well-trained crew through the gauntlet of taking over the Talagar vessel. It was an elaborate ruse Moray and Steeg had concocted. Surely, Trist and the other Talagars were in on it. And who else? Kào scrutinized the faces of those who worked diligently at their stations. It was a small crew. He’d heard that many had been transferred to other ships recently. Now Kào wondered why. But those working appeared to be loyal Alliance citizens, scientists here because they wanted to explore the outer reaches of space with a famous man. Perhaps hero worship had rendered the crew blind to the traitors lurking among them.

  As for the crew members of Talagarian descent, in Kào’s opinion, anyone with red eyes was suspect. But what about Moray? He wasn’t a Talagar, yet he acted like one. Certainly, that day on Vantaar he had been ready to kill like one.

  No, an inner voice argued, a different Ilya. Not Ilya, your loving father. Not Commodore-elite Ilya Moray, the highest-ranking officer in the Perimeter Patrol Corps. Not a humanitarian credited for saving thousands of lives over the years at the risk of his own. But even as Kào’s heart told him one thing, reason demanded that he face the facts that had eluded him for twenty-four years.

  The truth about his father.

  Find Jordan. Warn her. With emotions forcibly disabled, he stalked past Moray with the barest of nods. A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, bringing him to a halt. But only because Kào allowed himself to be stopped.

  Moray’s smile was one of fatherly concern. “What’s wrong, Kào?”

  He felt like that three-year-old boy again in the way the contents of his bladder screamed for release. But he had a man’s control. And a man’s pride. “I’ve spent long enough looking into the eyes of Talagars,” he said truthfully. “Now that I have the freedom to decide, I don’t care to spend another moment doing so. If you’ll excuse me, I must go.”

  His father stayed in front of him, his boots planted wide. “It wasn’t wise of me to allow you to view the battleship,” he said. “The war is too fresh in your mind. Now I see it was too soon for you. My apologies.”

  Moray’s tone conveyed both worry and a father’s love. Kào wasn’t sure if it was genuine or fabricated, but Moray had spoken loudly enough for the entire bridge crew to hear. It hit him that Moray might be using the impromptu forum to reassure those on the crew who weren’t directly involved in any treachery.

  Find Jordan. Warn her.

  Kào shifted from boot to boot in his impatience to leave. The need to find Jordan and ensure her safety gripped him as nothing else ever had. He saw himself fully capable of murder if his father kept him from going to her. But bringing on himself death or imprisonment would defeat his plan. Calm. He reached deep for composure, but a tremor wobbled his hands.

  With the accuracy of proton torpedoes, the commodore’s eyes honed in on that reaction. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m tired.” Now it seemed that everyone on the bridge was watching. Sympathy filled some eyes. The rest he could tell saw him as a mentally and physically wounded ex-POW who suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome. And they were probably right. “You’re keeping me from my bed, Father.”

  “You were always frank with me,” Moray persisted. “Why not now? What troubles you?”

  Kào exhaled. “Steeg. I don’t trust him.” He waited, curious to see what Moray’s reaction would be.

  There was no reaction. Either the man was a sociopath or he truly with all his soul believed his cause was just. Or perhaps it was both.

  Moray spread his hands. “What is the admiral going to do? His weapons are disabled. Everything in our arsenal, is aimed at his bridge. He poses no threat. Steeg will soon be on his way to the detention facility on Sofu. They’re done, my boy. Through. They won’t trouble us again.”

  “I must brief the refugees on the matter,” Kào said and again tried to walk past Moray. The man stopped him with three fingers on his forearm.

  “Trist will brief them.”

  “She hasn’t been on the job long enough. I have.”

  “You’re agitated, Kào.”

  “Agitated? I am not agitated!” He winced inwardly, knowing that he must sound just as Moray accused.

  “Medical will give you something to help.”

  The crew looked on, caring and sympathetic. Why was it that when you were trying to act sane, you came across as anything but? Kào fisted his hands at his sides and swallowed hard. Play along, sudden instinct warned. Yes. He could put on a show as well as Moray, could he not? He’d been raised by a master of deception, he thought bitterly, and now it was time to use what he’d learned. It would buy him time, of which he had very little.

  He winced and rubbed his head. “Ah. You’re right. I’ll see about getting myself something to help me sleep. And once I wake, I’ll search out my cold-weather gear for Sofu.” He forced a smile.

  His father’s face brightened. “You’re excited about the trip.” The commodore’s hand landed on his back, and Kào did his best not to go rigid at the contact. He didn’t want the traitor touching him. It was bad enough having to speak to him in a civil manner.

  But civility would save Jordan. And her people. “About our dinner tonight, sir. I don’t know if I’ll be up to it. I’d better rest for the journey to Sofu.”

  “Ah. Just as well. I’ll be debriefing the admiral this evening.”

  Debriefing? More like reminiscing about old raids and the latest Talagar perversions.

  “And it’s best I do that with my intelligence staff only in attendance.”

  Wise choice, Father. If I’m there, Steeg won’t survive the encounter.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” Moray said. As he walked with Kào t
o the exit, he shook his head sadly. “Soon enough you’ll be gone.”

  “Soon enough,” Kào agreed. Moray regarded him strangely. Kào couldn’t care less. The commodore dropped his hand, tacit permission to leave. Kào clicked his heels together and strode away from the bastard.

  Docking was imminent. He didn’t know where he was going to hide two hundred and eighty-seven Earthers, but a plan would come to him. It had to.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “Darth Vader’s here!”

  At the sound of little Christopher’s familiar call, Jordan spun around. Kào was walking toward her with the boy nestled in his muscular arms. If it weren’t totally inappropriate and unprofessional, she would have thrown her arms around him. They were well into the evacuation. Three quarters of the people were gone. About seventy remained. And time was short, according to Trist.

  “You came,” she said, relief swelling inside her.

  “Darth Vader’s here,” Christopher repeated, affectionately rubbing his hand up and down Kào’s scarred cheek.

  “I see that,” Jordan whispered, her throat thick. Kào dropped the boy to his feet. As he watched the child scamper away, his eyes clouded with sadness, and he appeared exhausted to the bone.

  “You look like hell, Kào,” she said quietly.

  Her voice seemed to call him back from somewhere far away, a painful place. “Hell?” he inquired.

  “It’s an Earth expression. Technically, it means the place you go after death if you’ve lived an evil life. Eternal damnation. In other words, you burn in horrible agony for all eternity.”

  Kào’s dark eyes narrowed. A muscle in his cheek jumped. “May such comeuppance await the beasts on this vessel.”

  “The ones who lied to us, yes.” Jordan grabbed him by the elbow. “Talk to me on the way. We have to hurry. Trist wants us to take shelter on the airplane. So much has happened. I’ll tell you. And we’re going home!”