Desert World Rebirth

by Lyn Gala

  “What did you trade to the AFP?”

  Temar narrowed his eyes, wondering how much of this related to Shan and how much was Verly trying to get information for his own side. “A few pounds each of antimony trioxide, zirconium, and lanthanum oxide, samples of optic-quality glass, artwork, and a whole lot of broken computers we wanted fixed or replaced.”

  Verly grimaced. “Did that guy know the details of the deal?”

  Temar nodded.

  “Those are critical supplies. He’ll probably force Shan to apologize and then he’ll do the same thing—torture and/or execute him on screen.”

  A cold chill went through Temar. “That can’t happen.”

  “Do you have rescue close enough to intervene?”

  “We are the rescue,” Temar said. Verly didn’t look convinced of that. “We need to find a way to get in that room. Captain Helgen is focusing on his ship, so he isn’t even trying to rescue the hostages.”

  “The FFA does like to blow themselves up with the ship.” Verly sounded like he sympathized with the captain’s position, but that wasn’t not what Temar wanted to hear.

  “We have to find a way in there, either in person or through communication. Would Pentalia want to talk to you, since you’re Planetary Alliance instead of AFP?”

  “Unlikely.” Verly shook his head. “They know we condemn their actions, even if we sympathize with their position.”

  “And encourage it?” Temar asked, the words slipping out even though he knew it was stupid to antagonize the only person offering any help. Rushing on, Temar asked, “How many people do we have on this ship? Could we rush the corridor if we could get the door open?”

  “The crew is you and I,” Verly said. “This is a long-range scout, designed to monitor from the deep.”

  Temar looked around, as if some hero would miraculously appear from the air. That had happened before, when Naite had saved them from Ben’s schemes. Right now, no one could follow any clues to them.

  “Verly,” Temar said, weighing every word before letting it escape, “I warned the AFP already that my people are stubborn. Your alliance left us to die of thirst, so we thrived, with farms and towns still running. The desert sends sandstorms to wipe us out, and we pull on sand veils and pull closer until it passes. If a terrorist group supporting your side murders Shan, it’s not going to end well for your side.”

  “Meaning?” Verly asked.

  Temar looked at him. “Meaning, I don’t know. I don’t know if the councils would vote to send tons of materials up on the condition it be used to hunt these terrorists down and deliver them to Livre or if my people would demand training and ships to track these people down themselves. On Livre, we expect justice.”

  “That’s not how the universe works.”

  Temar nodded. He understood that. “Yes, but are you going to convince a planet full of people of that when their whole life has been about fixing whatever broke, even if it meant doing the impossible? If this is broken, I don’t think anyone will like the consequences, so I’m telling you, you need to find a way to get me in that room. If Shan and I both die trying to fix this, that actually wouldn’t go over nearly as bad as me going home and telling everyone that I watched two ships sit and do nothing while Shan was murdered in cold blood. You have no idea how badly that will go over.”

  “I don’t have authorization to take action here,” Verly said carefully.

  “I don’t care. Good people don’t sit still while someone dies. Get me on that ship.”

  Verly fingered one of the controls on his panel. “You do know you’re being unreasonable, correct?”

  “Yes,” Temar agreed.

  “Just making sure you knew it.” Verly turned his chair to face his control panel. “I’m not promising anything, but let me get a full set of scans before I tell you that you’re going to have to accept that sometimes people die.”

  “Oh, I know people die, Verly. I’ve seen death. However, I won’t sit here while Shan dies.”

  Verly didn’t answer, and for some time Temar watched the green shadows on the vid. The angle was odd, as if they were several feet higher and looking in on the room. The two standing people had to be Shan and Pentalia, since the one on the floor was the injured assistant and Melton sat in the chair where Temar had last seen him. The two people who were standing slowly circled, and Temar imagined Shan trying to edge closer, talking about God and forgiveness and moral right. Normally Temar had a lot of faith in Shan’s ability to talk. However, Shan had had his share of failures in that department, and Temar had to think that anyone who could blow up a ship of crewmates he’d lived with wouldn’t care about Shan’s God. Pentalia was more like Ben—convinced he was right while being utterly wrong.

  “New message,” Verly said before his fingers went back to their steady work on the control board. Temar watched as Pentalia appeared on the screen again. This time Shan was on his feet, standing to the side of the screen.

  “Those who attack the people have to expect the people to attack back,” Pentalia announced, his voice carrying a cold fury that frightened Temar.

  “Gary, don’t do this,” Shan begged, taking a step forward. Melton was utterly white, and Pentalia pointed his weapon at Shan. Temar clutched the edge of the panel and leaned forward. Shut up, Shan. Shut up. Don’t get yourself killed, he silently begged.

  “And those that align themselves with evil can expect the same fate,” Pentalia said. In a flash, he lowered the gun and pulled the trigger. Melton’s head exploded, a spray of red spreading across the room. Shan flinched back, but Temar could see the red freckles of blood across the pale blue shirt Hannal had made especially for this trip. “People will die until freedom means free for everyone,” Pentalia announced before the image vanished.

  Temar stared at the blank screen, not realizing that he’d stopped breathing until the world wobbled uneasily. Sucking in air, Temar turned to Verly. “What now?”

  “Now he tortures Shan until he can get an apology for supporting evil. He’ll want that on a vid before….”

  “Before he kills Shan,” Temar finished when the silence continued too long. “Tell me you have a way into that ship. I don’t care what kind of risk I have to take or what I have to promise him, but I want Shan back now.”

  “There is a plan. It’s a bad one, but it’s a plan,” Verly offered carefully.

  “Bad? How bad?”

  “Compared to a bullet to the brain, it’s a great plan. Compared to anything else, it’s stupid, dangerous, and utterly unthinkable.” Verly used the controls to bring up an image of the damaged ship. Temar could see where large chunks were missing, blown into space, leaving only ragged metal and floating garbage. “He’s blockaded them here.” A section of the undamaged ship glowed red. “Diplomatic quarters.”

  “There’s only one way in there.” Temar said. “It’s a series of rooms that opens one into another.”

  “Security, which is great unless the terrorist is an inside man, and then all your security gets turned against you. The doors have manual locks from the inside that would require hours to cut through.”

  “By which time Shan would be dead.” Temar’s chest hurt.

  “Exactly.” Verly clicked the computer and the corridor connecting the sections the terrorists controlled glowed in red. “So, when you’re cut off at the pass, go around.” An animation of a stick figure floated into the picture. “I plant explosives here, and blow out the side of the chamber.” The small stick figure touched the station and then floated away. Almost immediately, an explosion made little animated bits of station fly out. Tiny animated bodies flew out through the hole in the bulwark. “The sudden loss of pressure would pull them all out into space before they can detonate the explosives.”

  “But… that would kill him.” Temar could feel his chest grow too tight for his pounding heart.

  “Not if we move fast. I would grab him, and then you would winch us both back into my ship.” The animation image withdrew
like a camera pulling back to show more of the picture, and now Temar could see a small, animated version of Verly’s ship, and the small Verly stick figure and Shan were speeding toward it. “I could use the computer’s scanner to identify which of the people in the hull is Shan, based on unique mineral compositions in your body created by living on Livre. Then I would detonate when Shan was closest to the blast point, minimizing the amount of time it would take me to get to him. The human body can last fifteen to twenty seconds before passing out, another thirty before suffering significant swelling, and up to two or three minutes before there’s any dangerous damage.”

  “So, it’s safe?” Temar asked. If this was Verly’s definition of safe, Temar didn’t trust the man as far as he could throw him.

  “Not even. I could miss catching him, and any lengthy maneuvering to try and secure him could leave us outside the three-minute window. At that point, anything from brain damage to death is possible. The explosion could send debris into him, leading to any number of injuries. Pentalia could detonate any explosives the captain hasn’t cleared from his decks, and Shan and I would both be killed.”

  Temar nodded, oddly reassured by the honesty. The plan was dangerous, but it was a plan, and the way Verly explained it, it might actually work. “What odds do you give it?” Temar asked, fighting to keep his voice even.

  Verly turned off the animation and turned the chair around to look at Temar. “I need to tell you that I don’t have the best reputation for plans. My plans… at least one of my plans… is rather infamous for going horribly wrong, leading to a lot of innocent deaths. This has less than a fifty-fifty chance. I’d put the odds at about 20 percent of us both getting out clean and 20 percent that we both die horrible deaths.”

  “And 60 percent chance of something in the middle,” Temar finished, his voice weak. He didn’t want to make this call, but Verly kept looking at him as if he expected an answer. How could Temar make this choice for Shan? What if he made the wrong choice? What if he did nothing and these people shot Shan in the head? Temar’s stomach roiled with fear until he felt on the verge of throwing up on Verly’s nice, clean floor. All these people had such clean floors. Staring at the metal seam that ran along the decking, Temar knew that he had lost the train of logic somewhere, but his brain balked at the idea of considering anything more significant than space-people’s obsession with clean floors.

  “It’s a hard decision. If you want me to make the call—”

  “No.” Temar looked up. “No, he’s my… friend. If someone is going to make this call, it’ll be me.” Temar didn’t add that if it turned out badly, he’d be the one living with the guilt, but from the sympathetic look on Verly’s face, Temar was sure he knew it. Shan had told him once that it was horrible being the survivor, being the one who hadn’t been hurt. Twice in his life, Shan had been the one who escaped a horrible fate unscathed, and Temar could admit that he hadn’t understood. He’d called Shan lucky. Maybe he hadn’t said that to Shan’s face, but he’d thought it. Shan hadn’t been raped. He hadn’t been tied up and abused. He hadn’t died even when armed hunters had chased him through the desert. It was as if his God had shielded him and let everyone around Shan suffer. Naite, him, even Ben… how many victims did Shan know?

  Now Temar knew how Shan felt. When someone hurt you, you knew you had to reach inside and survive. There was this stubborn determination to put one foot in front of the other and just keep pushing through until something changed. But in some odd way, there was a power there. Temar had manipulated Ben on the good days. And when he came too close to relaxing into a life that was hell, he’d manipulated Ben into having bad days. When he could feel that rotting center in his soul start to feel good when Ben touched him gently, Temar would aggravate Ben into picking up a whip and laying into him. It reminded him to cling to hate. The power was sick and twisted—the rot in his soul sometimes stunk so bad that he wanted to gag, and other times the sweetness of that rot drowned out everything else. However, no matter how corrupt, there was a power there.

  But now Temar didn’t have any of that power. He couldn’t make the choice to try and placate his captor or aggravate him into violence. Trapped on the outside, he could only sit and watch. The pain left him almost unable to think straight, and now… now Temar understood what Shan meant when he talked about how the ones who weren’t hurt still suffered. Temar would give anything to be in there, to be at Shan’s side, and he couldn’t be. He could, however, make this choice.

  “Do it,” Temar whispered.

  “I’ll get the equipment ready. I’ll be back in about twenty minutes to see if you want to still do this.”

  Temar nodded mutely.

  Verly stood, but then he stopped. “You have good instincts, Ambassador Gazer. In the service, we always say there are watchers and flailers. Watchers stand back and gather intel until they understand a situation. Flailers go flying into a situation half blind. I’ve done my share of flailing, but you’re a watcher through and through. So, if you pull the plug on this, I’ll follow that order, and I won’t question it.” Verly turned toward the hatch.

  “Lieutenant Commander?”

  Verly turned around, and Temar took a deep breath as he tried to control the pain that ripped at him. “Can you think of any other plans?”

  For several seconds, Verly looked at him, and then he shook his head. “No.”

  Dropping his gaze, Temar stared at the seam in the floor. He wouldn’t lose Shan. He wouldn’t. “Do it. Tell me when you need me to come down, and I’ll learn how to operate the winch, but I need a few minutes up here first.”

  “Yes, sir,” Verly agreed before he headed off the bridge.

  Sitting at the navigator seat, Temar stared out into the black. The ship was turned the wrong way for him to see the Brazica other than in the vid displays, but Verly’s animation haunted him.

  “God, you’ve protected him this long, please don’t take him away from me,” Temar prayed, the words little more than a rough whisper, but that was all he could force out through his painfully tight chest. “Please save him. Please don’t take him, not yet. We need him here. Oh God, we need him here.” Temar could feel the cold tracks from tears sliding down his face, but his hands shook so badly he felt like he had to hang on to the arms of the chair to keep from breaking apart. “God, please. Please.”

  Temar kept whispering his plea as emotions rolled through him. He would have to pull himself together to play his part in the plan, but right now, he cried and prayed and hoped that Shan was right about someone listening.

  Chapter 30

  “ARE you clear?” Verly asked. His voice sounded strange coming through the communicator built into his space suit, like he was standing in a very small cave with sounds bouncing around him.

  Temar nodded, touching each control in turn. “Release, let more line out, retract the line, speed.”

  Verly nodded. “Repressurization?”

  “Three dials.” Temar gestured toward the wall.

  “Emergency autopilot?”

  Temar gave Verly a cold look.

  “Right, you know. Try to avoid letting me die out there, okay?”

  Temar nodded. “Wait,” he blurted. “What about the other assistant?” Guilt rose as he realized that he’d forgotten there was another person in that room they were about to blow up. Temar had no problem with Pentalia dying, but they hadn’t talked about the other assistant.

  Verly turned awkwardly in his bulky suit. “He’s shot, Temar, probably dying if not dead already. And as soon as Pentalia is done, he’ll be dead. You aren’t changing his fate by trying to save Shan.”

  Temar clenched his teeth, but he couldn’t disagree with the logic.

  “Your call, Ambassador.”

  “Go,” Temar said as firmly as he could. Verly nodded and walked toward the open door into the airlock, clicking the retractable line to his belt and pulling on it before he closed the heavy door. Temar could only wait now. He watched the screen while
Verly floated out into space, his dark space suit almost invisible except for the tiny pinpricks of light that appeared as tiny thrusters nudged him first one way and then the other. Slowly, he approached the giant Brazica; until Temar watched a human form approach the ship, he’d had no idea how truly massive the Brazica was. Everyone in Livre could probably fit inside without spending too much time stepping on each other’s toes.

  The pulley attached to the retractable line gave three long beeps. Verly had signaled.

  Temar turned on the communicator. “This is Ambassador Gazer calling Captain Helgen.”

  It took several seconds before the captain’s voice answered him. “Ambassador?”

  “I’m getting Shan back, Captain.” Temar turned off the communicator and gave the pulley’s retract button one quick push to let Verly know he had warned Helgen. Verly had actually argued against that, claiming the terrorists were monitoring the communications. They probably were, but Temar didn’t want to blow a hole in someone’s ship without at least some warning. It seemed rude.

  With his hand hovering over the pulley controls, Temar watched the screen as Verly’s barely visible body slid closer to the main, cylindrical part of the Brazica. The explosion was silent, which seemed odd, but one second the flat wall of the ambassador’s quarters were there, and the next, debris spilled out into space. Verly’s suit flashed as he maneuvered closer to the field of rubble, reaching out. Temar held his breath, his fingertips tingling as fear rushed through every cell. Verly caught at something, and as it rotated, Temar could see the blue of a shirt. Temar gasped, desperate to hit the retract button, but if Verly hadn’t secured Shan to his own body first, he might lose his grip. Instead, Temar watched the controls, his hand shaking now.

  Three long beeps. Temar pressed the retract button so hard that for one second he had an irrational flash of panic that he’d break it and be forced to watch on screen as Shan died. He didn’t. The cable pulled the two of them in much faster than Verly had gone out, but suddenly everything changed direction. Verly and Shan flew off the side of the screen and debris soared across the scene. Temar’s mouth fell open as most of the arm that contained the ambassador’s rooms disintegrated, chunks of metal radiating out into space and toward the Brazica and through the area where Verly had Shan in this ridiculous attempt at a rescue.