“Risks,” Ren said softly.
Sully was breathing hard, his mouth a taut line. My heart pounded, my hands suddenly clammy. Rainbows—very dark, ugly, storm-filled rainbows—hung between the three of us. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them.
Sully lowered his arm, flexed his fingers. His gaze locked on Ren’s.
I glanced at the console on my left. Fifteen minutes to outer beacon. “What option?” My voice shook.
Ren released his grip.
Sully shot a quick glance toward the corridor where Kingswell glared at us and the curly-haired lieutenant leaned wearily against the bulkhead, an Englarian monk’s robe wrapped around her shoulders, her face pale.
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants, stared down at his boots for a moment. When he brought his gaze up, his eyes were shadowed again. “Mind-wipe,” he said. “Their memories of all this can be altered.”
Fear slammed through me like a ship hitting a jumpgate cold. They’d lied. Even blind, the Stolorth could rip minds apart. Shred them, destroy them. Ren wasn’t a harmless empath. He was a Ragkiril. I closed my eyes, willed my heart to stop hammering in my chest, ignored the nauseous feeling in my stomach.
Grabbed for facts.
I knew Ren. Granted, only for a few days, but even in that short time he’d been nothing but gentle. Calm. Controlled. Logically, I had more reason to fear Sully. Known terrorist, smuggler, mercenary. A passionate, volatile man. Angry, for valid reasons, he’d said. Gabriel Ross Sullivan. Poet. Warrior. Lover.
But it would be Ren doing the mind-wipe. He would be considerate, if such a thing even existed in tandem with the destruction of a mind. The thought sickened me, but Ren was right. It was the only option. It left them both alive. Murder sickened me worse.
I opened my eyes, took a steadying breath. “I need to know two things. First, is it painful?” I was concerned for the young lieutenant. She was the most innocent. Kingswell could do with a little discomfort. “Second, how much damage will it do? Turning them into vegetables is not an acceptable option.”
Sully glanced at Ren, then answered. “It doesn’t have to be painful, no. It won’t be. It’s zral, a memory-wipe. Not zragkor.”
I remembered the Stolorth words from my training. Zragkor. Mind-death. At its worst, hideous. Painful. Terrifying. Complete. At its best, still terrifying. Still a complete negation. But one done under the guise of a false ecstasy so that the victim would be totally unaware of the hideous process. It took a Ragkiril’s telepathic link to perform a zragkor.
But not for a zral. It was easy to forget the distinction between the two. It had been twenty years since the war, and even then zral and zragkor had not been common terms. A whole generation had been born since, one that no longer heard daily reports of atrocities committed by Ragkirils. Ren, blind, couldn’t do a zragkor. But he could perform a zral. Still, an invasion of the only thing we humans feel is totally our own: our minds, our thoughts. But it wasn’t a total negation of the person. Something would remain.
I hated the words even as I said them. “You’ve got ten minutes, Ren. Twelve max.”
“I cannot do a zral, Chasidah.”
“But you just said …”
But he hadn’t. Sully had.
An abysmal, foul cold wave gripped me. I forced myself to look at the man I knew, but didn’t know at all. Gabriel Ross Sullivan.
Obsidian eyes like ice. Hands jammed in pockets. And a mind that could alter another’s with a touch and a thought.
“Ten’s all I need.” His voice was hoarse.
He spun around and strode toward the corridor.
11
I sat hunched over in the command chair, elbows on my knees, my chin resting on my hands. My fingers were steepled over my mouth as if holding back words I couldn’t bear to say. Words that stabbed my mind as if they were carved out of ice.
Sully. Mind-wipe.
“He will need my help getting them into the pod.” Ren touched my shoulder.
I nodded.
“Chasidah.”
I shook my head. Chasidah wasn’t here right now. She was on a little trip, looking for someplace warm and safe and quiet. Someplace no one would ever find her. Someplace with no ghosts, no handsome bastards. Someplace with no mirrors reflecting back the face of a fool.
Ren left, closing the hatchway of the bridge behind him.
I breathed a shuddering breath against my hands, straightened. Mechanically, I checked all screens and monitors. We were on course for the jumpgate. All systems optimal.
Good ship, a P40.
A light flashed, a soft double chime. Two minutes to jumpgate outer beacon. Where had the time gone? Must be having fun.
Three chimes. The quintessential beacon calling card. I keyed back my answer. Hello out there. Nice to meet you. Have any minds you need destroyed? We’re having a sale.
My hands shook as I moved them from the keypad. I clutched them to my midsection, doubled over. Took long, deep breaths. I can deal with this. Just as I accepted Ren as an empath. I can deal with this. We are, after all, on the same side, aren’t we? A team? Friends? Not lovers—no, not that. It’d been only a kiss or two. Nothing serious. A few overly emotional moments resulting in some playful behavior.
I straightened. Sully wasn’t doing a zragkor. Just a blanking of a small part of memory. He wasn’t a Ragkiril. He must be an empath. Like Ren, only human. And Ren’s okay.
I can deal with this. I can.
The hatchway cycled open, admitting the sound of footsteps. I didn’t turn around.
Ren’s voice sounded gentle, like raindrops pattering against a placid stream. “They’re in the pod. Secure. Comfortable.”
I tapped the screen, brought engine controls to my keypad, decreased power. Engines cycled down past one-quarter sublight. I angled thrusters, arcing us around the beacon.
I tabbed on intraship, spoke to my invisible crew. My ghosts. “Stand clear. Pod clamps releasing—”
The lights on my short-range scanner suddenly flared. Sirens wailed through the ship, red alerts engaging automatically. I stared at the screen in disbelief. Incoming. Two armed Imperial cruisers, running hard and fast. And heading directly for us.
I slammed my hand on the keypad. “Releasing pod. We got bogies, two. Coming in hot!”
I lunged for engineering, threw the sublights into emergency overdrive. The Meritorious surged forward with a wrenching jolt. I careened back toward my chair. The ship lurched. I stumbled against Sully, heading for his seat.
For three long seconds his hands grasped my wrists. His gaze, wary, tired, locked on mine before I wrenched away, pulled myself into my seat. I raked the straps across my chest, dragged the armrest controls in front of me.
I heard Ren’s straps click to my left, at communications. Then another click, from engineering on my right. I checked status, swore. We were fifteen minutes out from the working edge of the gate. At top speed, the cruisers would never catch us. But we were under one-quarter sublight moments ago. We might as well have been standing still.
I disconnected safety overrides with three quick taps. “Bring hyperdrive online, now!”
I hated hitting a jumpgate cold, but I had no choice.
Sully worked the board quickly, his movements sharp, precise. No hesitation in his fingers, no second thoughts.
No time.
I called out shield status, distance to jumpgate, time to intercept with the cruisers streaking toward us.
“Got it.” Sully’s voice was sharp. “Got it.”
“I need those hypers!”
“Working on it.”
A shimmy racked through the ship. The hypers were cold, and angry at being awakened. Another alarm blared. Pressure warning. An unhappy sound.
Then a third. Weapons. “Cruisers in range. They’re targeting us.” I segued power to defense. “Aft shields at max.”
Movement on my screen flickered in a deadly staccato. Incoming from the cruisers. Small. Lethal.
“Birds incoming. Taking evasive action.”
I banked my ship, hard. It skewed us off the course to the jumpgate, sent us away from our only chance at freedom. But the plasma torpedoes heading for us gave me no choice.
I released a scatterfield from the ship’s underbelly, hoping to confuse the torpedoes’ guidance systems. Two followed the debris, veering. The other kept coming straight on.
I slapped the alarms into silence. I needed to outrun the bogey, get back to that jumpgate. I needed the hypers, pulsing, online.
“Sulliv—”
“Returning fire.”
“Damn it! We don’t have time. Hard edge in two minutes, ten seconds!”
Hard edge, no hypers, and a torpedo, hot, with my name on it.
The shimmying quieted, the pulsing began.
“Hypers online. Twenty percent.”
Smirking. Damn him, he was smirking. I could hear it. Bastard. It felt good to feel angry at him. I didn’t want to think about why.
“Two minutes.” I flattened vanes, scanner dishes. Torpedo still closing but losing speed, the looming gatefield muddling its tracking sensor.
“Thirty-five percent.”
“Minute forty. I need sixty percent at crossover.” God. Sublights were still online. They had to be disengaged before hypers hit fifty percent or the ship would rip apart. Like a mind undergoing a zragkor.
“Forty-seven percent.”
“Edge at thirty seconds. Cut sublights!”
“No can do, Chazzy-girl. Fifty-three percent.”
I felt the gate grab us, felt the ship skew, slide. “Damn it, Sully!”
Ren’s voice answered, soft, serene. “Merciful Abbot Eng, grant us now your everlasting protection—”
We slammed through the jumpgate, screens erupting, sparking. Drives pulsing, sublights grinding up the neverwhen, the nowhere–everywhere of jump.
My body jerked forward. The straps cut into my chest, branding my shoulder. I couldn’t breathe. Bridge lights flashed off, flickered on, died.
Someone groaned, grunted in the blackness.
Then a piercing sound, like metal screaming, torquing.
I was whipped to my left, the armrest impaling my ribs. I clawed at my straps, tried to pull myself upright, away from the pain coursing through my body. Something slammed me back, lifting my feet off the decking, my arm off the control pad, my body—
—ached. Must’ve been one hell of a party. My head throbbed. My arms and legs felt as if they weren’t a part of me yet.
My eyes wouldn’t open. Then something warm surrounded me. Something gray and fuzzy and soft. For a moment, I felt as if I knew it, recognized it. But no, how could I? Still, I let it surround me, let it draw me back together, piece by piece.
I opened my eyes. The world was dimly lit, red-tinged on the edges. Lights twinkled in the distance. Nice colors, red, green, yellow. I was in the middle of a room. No. A ship’s bridge. A chair, my chair, the captain’s sling, was in front of me.
Interesting. If I wasn’t sitting in it, where was I? Something soft and warm was behind me. I tried to turn but my shoulders protested. I glanced down. Decking, under my legs. Another pair of legs, longer, angled against mine. Black-sleeved arms crossed over my midsection. Large hands covering mine.
Mine.
I forced myself to be very, very still.
“Chaz.” A deep voice, soft, rumbling. “Back with us?”
Sullivan.
A shadowy movement on my left edged my vision. Ren, kneeling down, a few inches away, cloudy eyes studying me. His braid had partly unraveled and his lips were pinched. He looked worried, or in pain.
I drew a deep breath, struggled to sit up away from the enveloping warmth. Away from a man who could perform a mind-wipe. But one who needed my help with Marker, I argued mentally. Needed my help because of the Takas. The jukors. Needed my help with this ship. I was still alive and thinking, wasn’t I? He needed me that way. I was the only captain he had. Sully wasn’t trained as a pilot. He needed me alive and my mind intact. Time to remember that.
“Status?” My voice cracked.
Sully answered. “We’re fifteen minutes into transit. Hypers working at seventy-two percent efficiency. Sublights took some damage but we’ve got them operative.”
By all that was holy. I’d been unconscious for fifteen minutes? Then I remembered slamming into jump, cold, sublights grinding. I wrenched around, my concern for my ship overriding all else, even my fear of the man sitting next to me. “What in hell did you think you were doing?”
A half smile quirked on his lips but didn’t reach his eyes. His mouth, like Ren’s, was taut. “What I’ve done before, when I had to. Used the torque of the sublights to slough off the resistance coming into a jump cold.”
I stared at him. Why did all the handsome ones always have to be such brilliant bastards? And why did they have to have minds that could—
I halted the thought, threw that into my mental duro-hard container in cold storage with all the others. “You could’ve warned me.”
He could’ve warned me about a lot of things. Jukors. Disks with strange symbols. Mind talents.
“We were all busy with other matters.”
Understatement of the century.
I drew my knees up and rested my elbows on them. My fingers found the release points on the Grizni bracelet on my wrist. It tingled reassuringly. I took another deep breath.
Fifteen minutes into jump. Probably an hour forty yet to go. I’d know more when I read the data at my console. Good old, consistent, reliable data. “No one followed us in, I take it?” That should’ve been one of my first questions, if I’d been thinking like a captain. But I hadn’t finished putting Chasidah back together yet.
“They saw us go in pretty cold. Probably figured we wouldn’t make it.”
The torpedo wouldn’t have been able to cross the gatefield. So we were safe, for the time being. I pushed my hands flat against the deck, struggled to stand. Sully grabbed me easily under the armpits, lifted me, turned me to face him when I wobbled on my feet.
“I suggest you sit for a while, Captain.”
Good idea.
Bridge lights were back on. I adjusted the straps locked across my chest. They were half torn. Just as well, because they didn’t chafe the bruises I knew were blooming on my skin. Bruises that matched, no doubt, the one on Sully’s right cheek. Even Ren moved stiffly, probably wishing he’d remembered to bring his cane.
We all looked like we’d been through one hell of a good pub fight.
It took me fifteen minutes to run a thorough systems check from the controls at my armrest pad. I knew Sully had already done one, but I needed to see for myself that we were alive and slicing through the neverwhen without any more than the usual problems. I needed to keep my mind busy with ship operations, ship data. I didn’t need it wandering, asking questions, until I’d calmed down and could face answers I might not want to hear.
I couldn’t even face Sully right now. Because that started the questions surfacing.
I finished the check, shoved the arm pad away. My body ached for reasons I didn’t care to explore. I leaned my head back against the cushion and stared at the ceiling, listening to the ship’s noises. Sensors beeped softly every five minutes, signaling the completion of a sweep and initiation of a new one, like wings reaching outward from the skin of my ship, brushing through the neverwhen. Other data clicked, trilled. The sound of the hypers was a soft but familiar hum. I glanced down at my armrest controls. I had systems to coordinate, but my body was reluctant to cooperate. A few minutes later I forced myself back to work. When the aching resurrected itself we were thirty-eight minutes to exit. I rested my head against the cushion, tried to will the ache into a far galaxy. Footsteps sounded on my left. Ren’s face came into my field of vision. His braid was almost completely unraveled, blue strands tangling around his shoulders.
If he were reading rainbows, he had to know I was unraveling too.
“Commissary panels are off-line. But I can get some water. Would you like some?”
“Thanks. Big mug.”
He brought back one for Sully, one for myself. Mine was in a mug marked with the captain’s insignia. It was standard issue, but Kingswell had probably been the last to use it. I thought it was just coincidence until I realized the insignia was raised. Ren could feel it with his fingers.
“I washed it clean first.” His webbed hand rested lightly on the armrest on my right.
I tried to make my voice light, not reflect the strange numbness I felt in my soul. “I’ll put a commendation in your file.” I took a sip, my fingers tracing the same raised areas his had. My thoughts rested for a moment on the other captain. I wondered if he’d know me if we ever met again. Would he thank me for sparing his life? Did he even know he had one, or was the Lew Kingswell placed in the rescue pod more than an hour ago someone else now?
“Ren?” I hesitated, anxiety clashing with fear. I forced myself to ask. I had to gather my facts. It was the only thing I knew how to do, the only thing that had never failed me. “Kingswell. And the woman. They’ll be okay?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sully turn at his station.
Ren answered. “No worries, Chasidah.”
Oh, yeah. My rainbow. I wondered what color worry was. “They’ll remember nothing?”
Sully’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward. “They know who they are. Where they’re from. Things in their past.”
I took another sip. “How far past?” I asked the hazed, starless jump darkness through the viewport. Not Sully. I couldn’t look at Sully. “Childhood? Academy? Current Fleet posting?”
A long silence. “It depends. I … I did what I could. There wasn’t a lot of time.”
So it had been an imprecise cut. Jagged. Memories torn away like the fabric of a sleeve caught in a doorway, ripping, unraveling. Events trailing like broken threads. Hopes, dreams, shredding.
I felt sick.
“I did Kingswell last. I took more time with Tessa because I know you—”
“Damn you, Sullivan!” I wrenched around to face him, anger, shame rising in me. “Don’t tell me her name.” I didn’t need to make her real and personal. Didn’t need to add her to the list of the other sixteen.
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