“I was born on a heavy-gee world,” she explained. “Hwesta.”
“Ah.” He didn’t care, or perhaps the name didn’t register. Few bothered monitoring the many frontier worlds. He did eye her up and down. She didn’t blame him—she didn’t look like a heavy-gee mod. Hells, she didn’t even look like most of the beef-head soldiers who had served alongside her. She was tall and slender, wiry instead of bulky, and although much of her muscle was gone after years of cryo-sleep, she remained stronger than she appeared.
“Then this should be like coming home to you,” the ambassador said.
Melin inhaled deeply, delighting in the fresh sea air. There was no pain in her chest, and the aches and pains were fading. “A bit,” she admitted.
“Unfortunately, all offworlders are confined to the island,” he said. “The natives have been rather restless of late, so much so that I’ve had to curtail all ventures offisland, aside from regular patrols. This is the first trip off-site we’ve made in two weeks.”
“Oh,” Melin managed. So much for running through the streets of Jidda.
“My staff planned a welcoming party at my manor tonight,” he said. “For you and for the others. We’re a small community, and we are all welcome to the idea of a war hero such as yourself joining the team.” He paused again to access his implant. “I would give you a tour of the embassy myself, but something has arisen, and I must see to it. Until tonight.” He shook her hand and departed in a swirl of attendants, Calderon flitting behind him in a chair of his own.
Melin frowned after them.
“Um, Sera Grezzij?” a voice asked at her elbow. The young man behind her wore huge glasses—statements of respectability rather than necessity—and a gray suit cheaply mimicking the cut of the ambassador’s black. Thick black hair was slicked tight to his light brown scalp. He oozed bureaucrat. “I’m Temir Asante, Ser Koshkay’s second assistant. I’ll be showing you to your residence and giving you a tour around the embassy if you so desire.”
“Please.” A roll of electricity washed over her again, and she shuddered. It wasn’t unpleasant, just odd. Judging from Temir’s lack of reaction, he hadn’t sensed it.
He eyed her travel-worn carisak like it was filled with gila slugs. “I’ll have a servant bring that in for you.” His eyes unfocused as he accessed his implant, face contorting in a grimace as he tapped the back of his head. “Damn blasted thing.”
He held up his hand and snapped his fingers impatiently until a man in a brown uniform trotted over.
Without a doubt he was a Saturan. It wasn’t the easy way he moved along the ground, and he looked like every other unmodded human she’d ever met, but something was—the only word she had to describe it was other. She hated that word, but she couldn’t describe what she felt. Other, and the same, all at once.
“Take Sera’s luggage to the Yellow House.” Temir spoke loud and slow. “The Yellow House where the other girls live.”
The Saturan bowed, eyes down submissively as he stretched a hand for her carisak. Something about the hitch in his shoulders suggested he acted a part.
“No thank you, bojan,” she told him in Saturan, giving him the term of respect her great-grandmother had taught her. “I can carry it.”
At her words, the man’s head snapped up, mask dropping as he stared at her in actual shock. His perplexity deepened when their eyes met, and he dropped to his knees, babbling rapidly.
“What the blasted hells—” Temir fumed.
Melin knelt beside the Saturan as he spoke rapidly in a dialect so different than the smooth and melodious inflections Anikki spoke that she only caught one word in ten.
“Please,” she said. “A little slower. I don’t—I can’t understand.”
The man glanced up, meeting her gaze again and flinching. She wondered if her eyes, so obviously engineered, bothered him.
“Please,” she repeated.
He looked down then back up and flinched again. “Csira, I am no bojan,” he whispered. His hands shook. “Don’t tell the Isair—”
“The king?” she asked, dropping to Standard, having trouble following his dialect. Satura didn’t have a king. Not for centuries. Had she misunderstood?
He stopped abruptly and stared at her even more closely. “You are not Saturan,” he whispered in Saturan, and reached toward her, still half in shock.
“Hey!” Temir stepped forward as if to smack the man, but Melin waved him off.
The Saturan touched her cheek, and a slight thrill went through her, subtler to what she experienced stepping off the shuttle. She wondered if this entire planet had a stockpile of static electricity built up to zap unsuspecting strangers. The man rocked back as if burned, and she was grateful that at least he felt it too.
“No, but yes,” he murmured. He rose smoothly, brushing the front of his pants. “Csira, know we will offer you no harm.” He spoke as if to a child, his language now the same as Anikki had taught her. “But Satura is not what it once was. You would do well to leave this place and return to wherever you came from. We will try to protect you as much as we can. Speak of this meeting to no one, Csira Grezzntlktezc.”
With that, he strode off, fast and hurried. He didn’t look back, and he certainly didn’t pause at the furious shout Temir gave him. Melin stared after the retreating Saturan, wondering what the hell that had been. Why would he offer her protection? What the hell was a csira? More importantly, how could he possibly have known her name? Or something very close to her name.
“What the hell was that?” Temir asked, struggling for comprehension.
Melin pulled herself to her feet, shaking her head in wonder. “I have no idea.” She curled her lips into what she hoped resembled a smile. “I think I’ll carry my own bag. Where’s the Yellow House?”
He straightened. “This way.”
Chapter Three
The Yellow House wasn’t truly yellow but a more off-white gray that only resembled its namesake color when the sunlight hit it just right. Melin fought a sigh. She shouldn’t have been expecting something more in line with those ridiculous dreams and childhood stories. One thing for certain, there was no palace with a ballroom of mirrors and white marble floors and painted ceilings that changed according to the weather. She had danced under that false sky once, in a dream so real her feet ached when she woke up.
All mental fabrications.
Temir had given only the briefest tour of the island—she didn’t have it in her to call it Veskia—since “the tech was down” and he had to see to the ambassador’s party. Before he left her in the middle of the gardens, he mentioned she should probably show up to the party in uniform, and the probably was actually mandatory. She bit back a groan as he left. So much for a clean slate.
As she returned to the Yellow House, candles replaced the fading sun, and handfuls of people moved out of the embassy and into their own residences. They walked through the trails, mostly in gaggles, their voices trickling over the open space. There were more than a few hoverchairs with wheel modifications, which were all being pushed by an attendant since the tech was down.
Melin walked into her new home and flicked the lights. Nothing. The power indicator didn’t even register, completing her frustration. Apparently, the tech went down hard. It was strange, but she figured the IASS built a pretty shoddy grid when they were laying down the network in addition to the triple magnetic whatever. It wasn’t uncommon on newly established worlds. But this wasn’t a newly established world. The IASS had incorporated Satura two hundred years ago and had had a presence onplanet three hundred years before that.
She headed through the darkened hallway and made her way to a bedroom with an open door and no personal effects. It was four yellow-gray walls with a small dresser, a bare narrow folded bed with a pile of linens stacked at the end, and a tiny shelf with chair shoved underneath. The console atop the shelf—desk—was dark. It was roomier than many places she’d lived, but utterly devoid of personality or soul. So much for li
ving in the same castle as her great-grandmother.
Melin sat down on the bed, careful not to disturb the tidy stack of sheets and comforter, and shoved her face into her hands. What the hell was she thinking, coming to this place? Running off on a dream was the stuff of silly rom vids, not real life. This place was nothing like Anikki’s stories or her dreams, not that she had paid much credence to either.
But still, she had expected something else.
Something more than an IASS outpost where the citizens had set up their own world, isolating themselves from an indigenous population intent on dislodging the IASS from their planet. Melin had wanted more although at this point, she figured she should settle for what she had and not hope for anything different. At least the wars were over even if all her friends and everything familiar were long gone, no chance of ever returning. She was separated from everything by the one thing that could never, ever be circumvented.
Time.
A soft laugh rasped out of her chest. Despite it all—the endless jungle campaign, that caged cell, the ship, the sleep that wasn’t—time had marched on, advancing everyone and everything and leaving her behind.
Everyone—literally, everyone—had told her how lucky she was to be alive. How fortunate the scavenger crew had found her escape pod and hadn’t chucked it into the recycler but brought it to the nearest IASS waystation, thinking it contained a lost survivor of the Blood Sun Empire’s elite. They wanted a reward and delivered and left when they discovered the pod contained merely an IASS soldier, not bothering to stick around to learn her identity or if their long-iced popsicle was revivable.
Melin hadn’t been conscious for that station. Fort Sherman-5046 didn’t have the facilities to crack open an enemy box sealed seventeen years ago, so the station shipped her to IASS Fleet Headquarters in Ariel for revival and interrogation. Another stroke of luck.
Hells, when she had awoken, she had wanted to go back into cryo-sleep.
The pain of being alive overwhelmed her.
Cryo-sleep preserved a lot, but there was deterioration. Muscles seventeen years forgotten had atrophied until she couldn’t work her own lungs to breathe, much less speak. She had been a captive of another sort in that hospital bed two months, relearning basic motor functions.
At first, the doctors assumed her nonresponsive state was due to the torture-removal of her implant until she regained the ability to blink, to move her eyes in their sockets. With that came finger jerks, then taps, then, agonizingly, speech. They regrew her left forearm and hand, creating skin grafts and regen on the burns, retaught her all she’d forgotten.
Melin had attacked her physical therapy with vigor, hating the confinement, the finger probing, the sad, sympathetic looks and the dreams that continued to haunt her. She had been outraged to learn the video of her being awoken and pulled from the pod had been broadcast all over the net, set to the rousingly patriotic IASS anthem.
The hero’s return, seventeen years late.
When she had recovered enough, her first visitors were what remained of her family. They stayed long enough for photos of the brass pinning both the Order of the Lion and a Silver Galaxy to her chest before leaving again with the promise to visit again soon. They didn’t. The tensions that had driven her to military service hadn’t been erased after seventeen years of her presumed death.
Breece had visited, hand-wringingly apologetic and sixteen years moved on. She had teenagers now, a spouse, a house, and pets. Breece cried. Melin didn’t.
Melin’s heartbreak had been muted as though she were the one with decades of mourning instead of months. She’d been so muddled she’d kept asking “Why?” which made Breece cry harder. Melin had lacked the ability to clarify, to comfort. It had not been a why of how could you move on, but the why of why bother. It had been years since their engagement was broken by her supposed death. Surely Breece had gained closure in that time.
They promised to keep in touch, but both knew they wouldn’t. There was too much—and not enough—time between them.
When they released her from the hospital and the military with a medical discharge stating twenty percent disability and orders to return every month for updates on the regen and arm, Melin tried to find her feet again.
But too much had changed in seventeen years. She hadn’t been familiar with the inner planets before her cryo-sleep, and they were even stranger now. Aside from the brief and loudly broadcasted news of her revival, the Redelki Wars had ended nearly sixteen years ago, and she was a relic. It didn’t help that she hadn’t aged, despite her obvious disabilities.
Oh, get over yourself. She shoved herself off the bed and grabbed her carisak. Stop being angsty in a dark room.
It took a moment of digging, but she found her torch and clicked the button. Nothing. She clicked it again, thumping it against her palm before checking its power source. Dead. Growing increasingly frustrated, she rummaged for the spare battery because she wasn’t about to be caught on a ship—or anywhere else—with no damn light again. The second battery was brand fucking new, but like the house lights, the power indicator didn’t even flicker.
“What the hell,” she muttered, tossing the torch and second battery onto the bed.
At the other end of the house the front door opened. Melin’s good hand instinctively went to her thigh, for the gun she no longer carried. She dropped her hand, but paused in midcrouch, slowing her breathing.
“Ugh, I hate when the tech fails,” a female voice groaned. “This planet is just spazz.”
“I know,” a second woman agreed. Her voice grated like the first, but with that odd, inner-planet titter gaining popularity among the elite college-educated youth.
“I wonder if the new worker came in,” the first said. Underlying her own accent was an outer-planet drawl, pinpointing her origin to someplace in the Ursa Major Sector. “Apparently the shuttle ride down was pretty intense.”
“Whatever. It’s not like its ever crashed. I heard we’re getting some old relic from the wars to replace Tameria,” the second replied. “She’s some combat vet or something. Probably just as annoying as Undersecretary Calderon. We’ll hear nothing but blah, blah, glory days, blah, war, death, blah, blah.”
Melin decided now was the time to meet her roommates before her eavesdropping embarrassed them all. She stepped extra loudly, walking down the hallway to the common room so she wouldn’t alarm them. Even so, each woman shrieked when Melin’s silhouette appeared in the hallway, illuminated by the lantern they had brought with them.
The tall girl shrieked again, held her hand up to her implant, and shrieked a third time.
“I’m sorry for frightening you.” Melin kept her hands away from her sides, palms forward, to indicate she wasn’t armed. Neither caught on to her body language.
“Who are you?” the short one demanded.
“Melin Grezzij.” Melin held out her hand. “I came in on the shuttle, and they assigned me here. I guess we’re housemates.”
The woman looked at her hand like it was poison, and Melin lowered it, refusing to be put off by the snub. “Melin Grezzij is old,” she snipped. “You must be mistaken.”
Melin dropped her head, hiding her frustration for a second before she was able to give a polite smile. They couldn’t see it in the dim light, so she let it go and replied, “No, I’m the same one. Cryo-sleep is great skincare.” At their blank looks, she added, trying to joke, “I don’t recommend it.”
After a couple of beats, Melin decided to shelve all jokes for the remainder of her life.
“Izzie G’Darion,” the short one said, remembering her manners at last.
“Accalia Meridian,” the tall one said. She was much softer spoken than Izzie, but her last name was familiar.
Both women were young, like they had attended and graduated college immediately after their secondary prep schools. Redheaded Izzie was short, pale, and thin, and Accalia was tall, dark, and thin. Her curly black hair coiled in a crown about her head. Each wo
re a gray uniform too tailored to be general issue. Both moved as though they were swimming in sludge.
Somehow, they’d gotten access to this planet. Neither looked like they had any special qualifications and both oozed money. Of course, she had no special qualifications either.
Neither offered their hands for a shake but continued to stand stiffly in the threshold.
“Meridian, like the mining company?” Melin asked.
Accalia flushed and waved her hand. “Oh, we got out of mining ages ago.” She put a hand to her mouth, aware she’d erred. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean— “
Melin shrugged. “I’m a bit behind on quite a few things,” she said. “So, where are you two assigned?”
“Interning for Ambassador Koshkay,” Izzie replied. “We’re taking two years off at the University of New Singapore to do hands-on field work with the diplomatic corps.”
“It’s not very diplomatic though,” Accalia muttered. She caught Melin’s eye. “The locals don’t speak Standard, and their language doesn’t register with our implants. When they work, that is.”
“Ah.” Melin wasn’t sure if Accalia meant the Saturans or her implant in that last sentence. There was a lapse. As time stretched and they eyed her expectantly, it hit her. They were waiting for her to say what she was here to do. “I’m a general assistant.” Her roommates shared a knowing glance, confirming their own household hierarchy with them on top and Melin somewhere near the bottom with her unskilled status. Melin mentally rolled her eyes.
“Well then, nice to meet you. I’m going to freshen up for the ambassador’s party,” Izzie said. “It’s for the new shuttle arrivals—I guess you and some of the others. The ambassador usually does it to welcome newcomers into our family here.” Her tone indicated she didn’t consider a general assistant to be an immediate member of the family, but more along the lines of a perverted second cousin with an affinity for farm animals. They were likely questioning her presence in the house.
That Distant Dream Page 3
