“Parker,” said Mina. He ignored her.
Chase racked his brain. “She said … I should know the safe place, and I should go there and ask for help.”
“And I don’t suppose you remember this safe place, do you?” Parker looked at him hopefully. “No. That would be too easy. What else?”
Chase dug deeper into his memory. “She said ‘guide the star,’ like I did—”
“Would be useful if we knew what that meant.” Parker squinted. “So I guess we go look for this Colonel Dornan?”
“Parker,” Mina repeated.
He turned to her. “How do we find the Fleet medical center again?”
Mina shook her head. “It’s time for us to go. I’m going to contact Asa now so he can come and pick us up.”
“Absolutely not.” Parker narrowed his eyes. “You can tell him to come and get us afterward, but first we get Chase’s sister. Then we can all go live happily ever after with Asa.”
Mina frowned. “This is not up for debate. We have to leave now.”
“No!” Parker raised his hands as if he were about to shove her, but he stopped himself. “Look, I’m giving you an order. My life isn’t in any danger, so you can’t override me. I know you have a map of Qesaris somewhere in that positronic brain of yours, so let’s go find this Dornan lady and see what she can tell us about Chase’s sister. Or tell Asa to come join us, if you think he’d like to help.”
Mina shook her head. “He won’t come to Qesaris himself. It’s too dangerous for him.”
“Of course it is!” shouted Parker. “And we all saw for ourselves on the Kuyddestor that Asa Kaplan puts Asa Kaplan first.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Parker, they were going to arrest him,” said Chase. “He had to get out of there.”
“Oh, he had to, huh?” snapped Parker. “He had to abandon me there, then, did he? Just like he’s abandoned me my whole life? Why did he even agree to be my guardian? Why didn’t he just throw me in an orphanage?”
“He wanted to keep you safe,” said Mina quietly. “You’re very important to him.”
“And he shows that by leaving me stranded on a Fleet ship in the hands of a madman. Come on, Mina, you’re going to have to try harder to sell me on that one.” Parker turned and threw his arm around Chase’s shoulders. “Let’s go find your sister.” Without a glance back at Mina, he raised his voice and added, “You’re welcome to come along. But you’re not stopping me.”
Parker started to lead Chase down the alley, and when Chase looked over, Mina was already walking at his side. “The Fleet medical center is in the Meolon District,” she said calmly. “We can take a jettaxi.”
* * *
Chase, Parker, and Mina stood in the shadow of a warehouse across the street from the looming hulk of the Fleet medical center, watching the soldiers that marched in and out of the main entrance. “So, that’s a pretty big place,” said Parker. “How on Taras are we going to find Colonel Dornan in there?”
Chase considered this. “She’s a doctor. Pretend that we’re sick?”
“You’ll end up in an exam room,” said Mina. “And in deep trouble when they realize you’re faking.”
Parker looked around at the ground. “Find something to hit me in the head with. I’ll tell her the lasobind didn’t hold.”
Chase rolled his eyes. “She said something about wanting to send you over to recruiting.”
“That’s right!” Parker snapped his fingers. “She wanted to recruit all the orphans into the Fleet.”
Chase flinched at the word orphan, thinking of what Lennard had said about his parents, but a sly smile had spread across Parker’s face. “We’ll go in and tell them we’re new recruits, here for our physical exams. And we’ll tell them we were instructed specifically to ask for Colonel Dornan.”
“What about Mina?” Chase asked.
“What about you?” Parker turned to face her. “What’s your story?”
Mina shrugged. “I’m your personal property.”
“Good enough.” Parker started to walk toward the entrance.
“And once we’re inside, how do we get back out?” Chase asked, jogging after him.
Parker flashed him a grin. “I’m counting on you to figure that part out. Hey, so your sister—she can do what you do? Jump through walls?”
Recalling how she’d vanished right in front of him, Chase shook his head. “I don’t think so. She was just there, and then she wasn’t.”
Parker gave him a strange look as he pulled open the main entrance door. “Whatever, mystery man. Let’s do this.”
The first thing that hit Chase when they walked through the entrance was the noise: chattering, shouting, wailing. The lobby was even more packed than it had been a few days earlier. The majority of the crowd was still humanoid, but now mixed in was the occasional glimpse of dangling tentacles or glossy black fur. Stressed mothers chased bawling children while scowling seniors hunched on chairs, giving everyone the evil eye.
Parker edged his way through the crush to the front desk, where the soldier on duty looked up and narrowed his eyes. Following on jittery legs, Chase didn’t know how he was going to pull off lying to the guard. Luckily, he didn’t have to.
“Brother, we are so late! You’ve gotta help us,” trilled Parker in a high, funny accent.
Chase had to stop himself from turning to stare at him.
The soldier shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Your old lady officer, I can’t remember her name—Dobbin? Domain?—she helped us out with some wound control back on T-day and said we had to come here and report to her—I guess it was yesterday? Day before? I don’t know, brother, time has gotten so mixed up since this whole thing went down, and today somebody found my android—can you believe it? My freaking android, in all this! But, man, we’re so done because we totally missed the appointment for our physical, and your lady Doskin seemed really interested in recruiting us, and—”
“Shut up,” snapped the soldier. Chase blanched as the man whipped out a handheld console and scrolled through the screen. He was probably calling for security to come and take them into custody. He nudged Parker on the arm, preparing to turn and race for the doors.
The soldier looked up again with a sour expression. “Physicals are taking place on the eighth floor. Elevators are over there. You can find the way yourselves.”
“Oh, brother, thank you so much!” said Parker, taking a step away from the desk. “And this officer lady, Dalton—”
“Dornan,” said the soldier.
“Yes! Where can we find her to apologize?”
“If she wants to see you, she’ll find you.” The soldier turned to the next group and started barking orders.
They backed away and headed for the elevators. “This place is a mess,” said Parker in a low voice.
“Are all these people refugees from Trucon?” asked Chase.
“The news said three million people were displaced.” Parker shook his head. “And Qesaris isn’t big enough to handle them all.”
They took an elevator up to the eighth floor, where Chase approached a tired-looking orderly and asked where they could find Colonel Dornan. The orderly told them her facilities were on the twentieth floor before heaving himself to his feet and plodding away.
The elevator would only take them as far as the sixteenth floor, but they had Mina break open a stairwell door and climbed the last four floors. They hung back by the stairwell, scoping out the situation. The halls on the twentieth floor were white and sterile, and only a few hospital staff patrolled this level.
“Stay here,” whispered Chase, stepping out into the hallway.
“Forget it,” said Parker. They slipped down the hall with Mina following like a guard dog, pressing themselves into doorways to avoid crossing paths with any of the hospital staff. In the end, Colonel Dornan’s office wasn’t hard to find.
It was the one she was standing outside of.
/> Chase recognized her broad, rosy face and bobbed blond hair from their brief interaction at the refugee registration. She was discussing something with another officer, waving her hand around as though she were describing something large. Another soldier approached them and said something in a low murmur.
“What?” Dornan’s sharp voice echoed down the hall, carrying her evident displeasure with it. Chase pulled his head back slightly, his heart pounding. Had someone spotted them? A moment later, she led the two officers away and they vanished around a corner.
Chase waited for a few moments and turned back to Parker and Mina. “Come on!” he whispered, and ran down the hall to Dornan’s office. The door was locked.
Without a word, Chase lowered his head and jumped through, shaking off the tingling sensation with a shudder. It was a sleek room, lined with tall cabinets and a console-topped desk square in the middle. He unlocked the door for Mina and Parker, who stared at him in awe.
“Just start looking for anything you can find about a girl,” Chase urged. “Her name is Lilli Garrety.”
Chase began sifting through all the cabinets, finding mostly books and medical supplies. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Mina sorted through objects in a storage room in the back of the office, while Parker tried to hack into the desk console.
“Shh!” Mina stepped out of the supply closet, her head cocked. A second later Chase heard the voices approaching in the hallway.
“Hide!” he whispered.
Mina pulled Parker into the storage room, but there was no room for Chase. He climbed inside a cabinet, leaving the sliding door cracked just enough so that he could see out.
The hallway door opened and Colonel Dornan entered, her face twisted into a furious scowl. “How dare you come here! What were you thinking?”
Chase frowned when he saw the towering man-beast who entered behind Dornan. Tawny, ratty knots of hair hung around a face that was covered with a jumble of tattoos. Chase’s mind raced, trying to remember where he’d seen the man before. A heavy musk scent filled Chase’s nose. He’d smelled this somewhere else, he was certain.
“I told you, he couldn’t be reached and I had nowhere else to bring this. I’m not carrying it around any longer.” With an animal snarl, the man pulled something from a satchel slung across his chest and slapped it down on Dornan’s desk with a crack.
“Drad it, Fersad, would you be careful?” said Dornan. She picked up the object and rubbed her sleek desktop. “Tell me you at least found the Lyolian.”
A rushing sound filled Chase’s ears as he stared at the slim silver object in her hand.
Vo had lied. Rezer Bennin didn’t have Maurus’s case.
The Fleet did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A chill trickled down Chase’s spine like ice water as comprehension settled in. This was Vo’s revenge. Angry about losing his ship, he’d lied about who attacked him, setting a trap that they’d all blindly believed. He had sent Maurus right into the hands of Rezer Bennin, a man who wanted him dead.
With this realization came the memory of where Chase had seen the tattooed man, Fersad: in the Shank port, where he’d been looking for Maurus. He, not Rezer Bennin, had attacked Vo’s ship, stealing the case when he couldn’t find Maurus.
Maurus was walking into a trap. Chase wished he could contact him somehow to stop him from going, but all he could do was stay silent and watch as Fersad tried to explain to Dornan why he still hadn’t caught the AWOL pilot.
“The Shartese smuggler had the case, but he told me that Lieutenant Maurus had already escaped, and by the time I tracked him down to a Zeta planet, there was no trace. It’s possible that he drowned on the planet.”
“Possible? Is that what we’re paying you for, Fersad? Possibly dead?” As she spoke, Dornan removed two identical disks from the silver case and laid them on her desk. She slid her fingers across the console. “At least you managed to get these back.” She turned and walked directly toward the closet that Chase was in.
Chase leaned back from the door, and with a gut-twisting wave of nausea, rolled sideways through the side and into the next cabinet. The burning, tingling sensation didn’t subside, and he realized with a start that his body was divided up into three pieces by the low shelves inside the cabinet. When he heard the door slide shut a moment later, he rolled back into the first cupboard and pressed his eye against the crack again.
Dornan was emptying a bottle into a plastic bucket.
“Don’t you think he’ll want to see them?” asked Fersad.
“I think he’ll take my word for it that the disks have been destroyed, don’t you?” snapped Dornan. “It was his foolish idea to make a hard copy in the first place.”
She dropped the two disks into the bucket and stepped back, covering her mouth as a thick column of vapor rose from the bucket. The acrid tang of disintegrating compounds reached Chase in the cupboard, and his heart sank even further. She was destroying the disks. Now Maurus had no way to prove his innocence. Not that he would need to, once Rezer Bennin got hold of him.
Dornan coughed and opened a compartment on her wall, setting the bucket inside and pressing a button that resealed the compartment door. She turned on her heel. “Now I suggest you go out, find Lieutenant Maurus, and end this catastrophe of an operation. Are we understood?”
Fersad grunted and turned to leave.
“Oh, and Fersad? Don’t ever come back in this building unless you want a gaping blaster hole in your chest in lieu of payment.”
The mercenary stomped out the door, and Dornan took a seat behind her desk.
Chase’s mind raced. Could he stop Maurus from falling into Vo’s trap? It was probably too late to stop him from contacting Rezer Bennin, although there might still be time to help him. But Chase’s sister was still out there too, possibly in just as much danger as Maurus. And only she could give Chase the answers he needed about who he was and what had happened to him.
He looked around the cupboard for a weapon and saw only papers. There was no motion from Parker or Mina in the supply closet. Chase looked back at Dornan. A black baton rested on her desktop.
Quickly counting to three, he jumped out of the cabinet and snatched the baton from her desk.
Dornan whirled around in her chair, her hand flying to the blaster at her waist. When she saw Chase, the color drained from her face, and her mouth fell ajar.
“What are you doing here?” she croaked.
Chase took a step toward her, noticing the slight movement she made away from him. “Where is my sister?” he asked in a trembling voice.
“This isn’t happening. You can’t be here,” said Dornan. The hand that wasn’t gripping the blaster gun crept across her console.
She recognized him. Chase stared at her in disbelief. Yet another person who said things that made no sense, who knew more about his past than he did. The truth was right there in the officer’s stunned blue eyes. All the frustration and fear Chase had felt in the last weeks boiled up in a rush, spilling over.
“Why can’t I be here?” he exploded. He swung the baton with all his strength at the console. She jerked her hand away with a cry and the baton slammed into the screen, shattering its glass top into a thousand crystals. He raised the baton to strike again. “What!” Crash! “Am!” Crash! “I!” Crash!
“You’re dead!” cried Dornan. “You were…” She trailed off, her mouth hanging open like the last word was stuck in her throat. Chase raised the baton threateningly. “Dispersed!”
Chase stopped, arm hanging over his head. “What?”
The words began to rush out of her. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. The soldiers went beyond my authority.”
“You were there?” A nasty feeling had started to snake its way up from the pit of Chase’s stomach, and he clenched the baton tighter. “You were there when they killed my parents?”
Dornan pinched her lips together. Her eyes were wide and terrified. “It was necessary for
the defense of the Fleet.”
Chase gaped at her, feeling like he was going insane. Here was someone who knew exactly what had happened to him—happened to Chase Garrety, at least. He pointed the baton at her neck. “You’re going to tell me everything that happened, or else I’m going to—”
“Whoa there, Chase,” said a voice behind him. Parker had stepped out of the supply closet, with Mina right behind him. His gray eyes were cautious as he reached for Chase’s shoulder. “We’re here about your sister, right?”
Mina took the baton from Chase’s hand in one smooth movement. She tucked it under Dornan’s chin, pressing it to her throat as she reached down and removed the blaster from her hand. She tossed it on the floor. “Chase won’t hurt you because he’s human, but I’m a machine. Tell us where to find Lilli Garrety.”
Dornan lifted one shaky hand and pointed toward the hallway.
“She’s here?” asked Chase incredulously. When his sister said, I’m being held by the one who led the end, had she meant Dornan?
“Why don’t you take us to her?” suggested Mina, pressing the baton harder against Dornan’s throat. She hid the weapon as they moved out into the hall and held the woman’s hand as if they were old friends. Dornan led them down the antiseptic corridor to a small, inconspicuous door guarded with a three-part locking system.
What Chase saw on the other side of the door knocked the breath out of him like a punch to the gut. The room was filled with various blinking machines, with a long table in the center, and laid out on the table like a tiny corpse was the girl from the café.
Thin cables from a few of the machines ran to her body, connected to her with tape and bandages. Her blond hair stuck out in all directions, and the deep circles under her eyes stood out like purple crescents in her pale skin. She wore the same light blue pajamas that he’d seen her wearing before. How had she ended up like this, when he’d seen her so alert and aggressive in the café?
“Wake up,” Chase whispered, laying his hand on her arm. He half expected her eyes to open when he touched her cool skin, but they remained closed. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breathing. He pinched her arm lightly. “Hey? I’m here. I’m sorry it took me so long to come get you.” He wanted to pick her up and carry her out, but didn’t know where to begin with all the cables that ran from her body.
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