"Hoffen, I learned a long time ago in training that there's always a guy like you around. For me, it was a guy named Pete Bargan. Good guy. Likeable. Smart. Talented even at a number of things. Never had to work for it either and that was the problem," Alderson said. "Because he was able to get what he wanted without working for it, he never put any effort into anything. He was lazy. He took shortcuts. You know the problem with lazy people? I'll tell you. They get other people killed. You know how many good men and women got killed over Cradle? How about the Kroerak invasion of Earth? Cat got your tongue? What about Kroerak invasion of Abasi Prime? Or Zuri?" He spluttered.
"You can't lay all that crap at his feet," Marny barked back, having remained quiet up until now. "Belirand had free reign under your watch, Alderson. You could have stopped them. Instead of blaming Liam, how about you look inside and figure out just what you were doing when Belirand was feeding humanity to the Kroerak. I was there. Don't try to bull-shite me."
I sucked in air, trying to catch my breath. In my darker moments, when I unpacked the list of sins I saved for special times, I knew exactly who was responsible for the timing of the Kroerak invasion of Earth. Sure, you could sugarcoat it any way you wanted, but we'd poked the bear. It was a demon I would never be able to put back in the bottle and I would do anything to end the pain I'd caused.
"Hit a nerve, didn't I?" Alderson said. "I've made plenty of mistakes, but you're that guy, Hoffen. Worst of all, you don't realize that you're worse than any live cobra. You get people killed and you don't even know it."
"This isn't productive," Sterra said. "Admiral, why don't you take a break. Liam, your terms are acceptable. We'll initiate communication with the Confederation of Planets and keep you apprised. I am surprised, however. I would have expected you to persist in your demand to come along with the battle group."
"Haven't you heard?" I asked, the wind having been successfully knocked from my sails. "I'm Bold Prime, head of House of the Bold. If you're bringing Abasi, I'll be part of that fleet."
I reached over and turned off the comms. It had been a long time since I felt this low. Between Tabby's plight and Alderson's attacks, there was nothing left.
"You can't let him get to you," Marny said. "He's using emotion as a weapon. He's exploiting your feelings of guilt."
"I am guilty," I said. "There's nothing to exploit. I'm exactly who he says I am."
Chapter 19
Hunger
Galaxy unknown, Mendari system, Intrepid
"At least take Sendrei with you," Ada argued, standing between the airlock and her beleaguered friend.
"There's no need," Tabby said. "I'm not an invalid yet. If I'm not back in two hours, come looking for me. I'll drop tracker dots as I go."
"Have you told Liam?" Ada asked.
Tabby locked eyes with Ada and considered shading the truth just to get her friend off her back. In the end, it didn't matter. Her course had been chosen and no amount of talking would stop her.
"No," she answered. "Liam and I talk about important things — like what he had for dinner and how bad Little Pete's poop smells."
Ada smiled in spite of the circumstances. For both women, Marny and Nick's baby was a favorite conversation and there was no detail too small. "I won't withhold it from him," Ada said.
"I know," Tabby said. "He’s going to be mad, but I'm okay with that. I just wanted normal to last as long as possible."
"What part of this is normal?" Ada asked, spreading her hands widely in the space between them.
"I need to go, Ada," Tabby said, using her grav-suit's buoyancy to propel herself forward.
"Don't make me regret this, Tabby." Ada forestalled her friend, pulled her into a hug, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "You're important to all of us. Remember that."
Tears welled in Tabby's eyes as she pushed away, avoiding eye contact with Ada. She turned, partly to hide the pain caused by their physical contact. She raised her face shield and entered the readied airlock. Tabby could still feel the spot on her cheek where Ada had kissed her. The small act of love, given freely, spurred her onward.
Once outside the ship, Tabby first looked up. According to Jonathan, the crater Intrepid sat in had been created by a powerful weapon setting off a chain reaction. The residual radiation of that weapon still burned hot. If not for the nanites in her blood and the grav-suit's exceptional shielding, she wouldn't have survived even a few seconds in this environment. As it was, she'd be required to apply a course of med-patches daily for at least ten days to replace the protective little workers who dealt with the toxicities. The dangers were common to anyone who'd grown up on a mining colony, however.
Intrepid had settled at the bottom of the crater, not far from the point Jonathan identified as ground-zero. Shards of shiny black glass glittered everywhere around her, poking up from sand of the same material. Their edges were worn smooth by half a millennium of winds, unhindered by vegetation or structures beyond the crater's tall walls.
The Mendari's bomb had missed the mark, if only by a small margin. With that instinctive knowledge came the understanding that a direct hit would have indeed wiped the Iskstar from the now-barren planet.
The bomb's crater was uneven; the end result of the powerful explosion affected by the composition of rock where it had been dropped. As a result, the shape varied considerably in its width, from only a kilometer across where dense rock had directed the energy up, to several kilometers where less dense rock had been either vaporized or blown outward.
It was as she struggled across the barren landscape that Tabby began to understand the depth of her communication with Iskstar. Until recently, she and Liam had discussed at length each of the dreams they'd experienced. They'd continued to search the dreams for hidden meanings and context, often frustrated by the sheer obscurity of what they'd observed.
Perhaps it was the physical changes to her body, as non-critical tissues transformed to crystal, that caused her to become more attuned to Iskstar. Tabby now realized the communication she and Liam were receiving was much less about the physical events depicted. They had been focusing entirely too much on what they'd seen and not enough on what they had felt during the dreams.
Tabby smiled as she recalled the juvenile Piscivoru, Boerisk – or perhaps it had been Baelisk? – who'd tried to explain Iskstar to them. It had been easy to dismiss the child's wisdom. Now she recognized the truth of his words when he'd explained how the Iskstar spoke in whispers. At first it had been impossible to recognize the messages as anything but her own active mind proposing explanations. Tabby now realized that creating visual images to share with her and Liam through dreams had been equally difficult for the Iskstar.
"I know," she said, mostly to herself, but also to the sense of urgency she felt toward a fissure in the ground almost a kilometer from her position.
"Come back?" Ada answered immediately. "I didn't catch that last."
"Sorry, talking to myself," she answered, gliding across the surface.
"Where are you going, Tabby? Jonathan says we're right on top of ground-zero."
Tabby glanced at the menu on her HUD and pulled down the communication controls. She muted all incoming feeds and visual prompts. It was a mode sometimes described as 'going native.' It was also something few people ever chose to experience.
As she approached, the fissure became more prominent: a jagged, lightning-shaped hole stretching out from the crater floor like a spoke on an ancient, rotating space-station. The crack was too narrow to enter, but it ran for well over a kilometer. Soon there was enough room and Tabby floated beneath the lip of the fissure, descending even deeper. At some point, Tabby’s AI popped on her suit’s external illumination. She paused to switch it off, her Iskstar-enhanced vision now perfectly suited to the darkness.
Listening to the urgings of the quiet voice, she navigated through a network of subterranean tunnels. Tabby paused as a cloud of mist marked a group of thick stalactites that had broken free and crashed
to the tunnel floor. Worry entered her mind and she wondered what force had caused the solid structure to break apart. She pushed aside the insistent urging of the Iskstar and turned her electronics back on.
Tabby remembered her promise to Ada. She'd neglected to drop the repeaters that would allow her signal to escape the cavern.
She mentally shrugged. If there were issues topside, Ada, Sendrei and Jonathan were more than capable of dealing with them. A sense of calm filled her as she resumed her forward progress, turning one final corner to enter a small chamber. A faint blue glow drew her forward and she settled to the ground, preferring to walk the final meters. Similar to the surface of the crater above, the material she walked on crunched underfoot, a sound like walking on tiny shards of glass.
Tabby paused as a thought eluded her. Something was off, and she chased the problem. There was no way the bomb's blast had penetrated so deeply into the ground, yet the fused and blackened glass looked nearly identical to what had been above in the crater. A great sense of sadness washed over her and she fell to her hands and knees, the magnitude of what she was seeing finally reaching her conscious mind. The glittering shards that littered the surface of the crater were not clumps of sand turned to glass by the heat of the explosion. They were the remains of not millions, but billions of Iskstar.
Tabby let out a great wail and rolled onto her side in agony, experiencing deep, uncompromising grief. Curled into a ball, she lay sobbing as she mourned for a people she'd never known.
Time passed. Had it not been for being struck by a dislodged chunk of the ceiling, Tabby might not have found the strength to move again. Barely thinking and her motions mostly on autopilot, she worked to free her trapped legs from the pile of shattered, dead crystal. There was no compelling reason to stand, so Tabby sat on the scree and closed her eyes. A cool sensation fluttered on her cheek, right where Ada had kissed her. Tabby could have sworn Ada was beside her, kissing her cheek once again. She cried new tears as the love of that single, innocent gesture filled her being.
Slowly, Tabby opened her eyes and was met with a throbbing blue glow coming from beneath a great pile of broken crystal. Holding onto a sense of hope, she fought against despair and clawed at the crystal chips, shoveling material to the side. Even though her hands felt like they were on fire, she continued, pushing down into the pile as a child would do to sand on a beach.
More time passed, but Tabby felt nothing beyond her need to reach the faint blue glow. Finally, she saw the tip of the remaining live crystal. She was incapable of holding back, reaching for the crystal and running her gloved hand along the exposed surface. The contact was not enough, so she fumbled with pained fingers to remove her gloves, gasping in the poisonous air as she opened her suit’s helmet so she could use teeth to peel back to the material. She gagged and would have vomited from what she'd pulled into her lungs, but she hadn't been eating and only managed a few dry heaves. Her suit's AI took over and closed her mask, recognizing imminent peril.
Her efforts had been enough. She tossed the gloves from ruined hands to the side, flicking them off with a painful shake of her arms. Flopping to the ground, Tabby wrapped her hands around the top of the buried crystal, having no idea just how deep it might go. Recognition, gratitude, and finally joy filled her being, pushing out the feelings of despair. She cried, this time for the salvation of the remnant of Iskstar.
It was no simple matter to extract the crystal from its grave, but Tabby labored tirelessly, finally extracting the narrow, three-meter-long crystal. In the process, she'd discovered a break in the shard’s substrate. In that moment, she realized the purpose of her body's transformation. With only a touch, hundreds of thousands of Iskstar sentients transferred to the crystalline structure that had replaced most of her left side.
"Tabby, can you hear me?"
Tabby's eyes fluttered open. The man who was looking at her was familiar; she recognized his close-cut, curly hair and resonant voice. The latter carried a tone of concern.
"Sendrei," she said, trying to reach out and touch him. Her arm didn't answer her call and she just smiled. "You found us."
Sendrei looked around. "Us?"
Tabby looked around. She was sitting atop the large Iskstar crystal on the lip of the fissure within the bomb's crater. She recalled laboring to reach that point because she knew Ada would find her.
"Tabby, it's been five days. We've been looking everywhere for you," Sendrei said. "How did you survive? You had no supplies and your hands – they're blue."
"I am thirsty, now that you mention it," Tabby said. The pain in her limbs had long passed. Sendrei pulled a water pouch from his pack and held it out to her. Unfortunately, she found she was unable or more possibly, unwilling to move her arms. "Maybe a little help?" With her eyes she instructed her AI to provide a hydration straw to her lips and she watched as a very concerned Sendrei squeezed the contents of the pouch into her suit's reservoir.
"Ada, I have Tabby," Sendrei called over comms. "Coming in hot. I'll get her into the bay."
"That is ridiculously delightful," Tabby said, her mind wandering as she enjoyed the refreshment. Sendrei's anxiety felt mismatched and she focused on his words. "Why hot?"
"Mendari have ships," Sendrei said. "They've been harassing us. I'm here to rescue you, but we have to be quick. Can you move?"
"Probably," Tabby said, dopily shaking her head up and down as if she'd solved one of the world's greatest problems.
"Never mind," he said. "I'll get you in, but we're going to have to go fast. Mendari ships are swift and we won't have much time."
"Iskstar too," Tabby said, leaning over and falling onto the crystal she'd worked so hard to unearth. "Don't forget them or we'll really be sorry."
Tabby's voice was sing-songie and Sendrei looked between her and the perfect, blue crystal that she lay on. She was obviously delirious, and he wasn't certain he could save both her and the crystal.
"Twenty seconds." Ada's voice pierced Tabby's consciousness as comms started making sense.
"You got anything to eat?" Tabby asked sleepily. "Maybe something with berries. They're the best." She chuckled drunkenly.
Sendrei scooped Tabby from the crystal as a great cloud of sand covered them ahead of Intrepid's rapid approach. He leapt up, using arc-jets to boost his speed, surprised to see Jonathan jump from the open cargo hold to the planet's surface.
"Jonathan, what are you doing? We have to move, now!" Sendrei words were punctuated by blaster fire that stitched into the crater wall.
"Help with Iskstar," Jonathan said, his robotic body unable to lift off with the burden of the crystal.
Sendrei carefully set Tabby down and looked around the hold frantically, finally finding what he was searching for. He grabbed the end of an old winch line and flipped the lever so the spool free-wheeled as he jumped to the planet's surface.
"Attach this to the end," Sendrei ordered, hearing Intrepid's turrets returning fire. For days, Intrepid had been on the run from the relentless Mendari hunters. He knew full well that to be caught on the ground put them at a huge disadvantage, but he wasn't willing to lose Jonathan.
"We gotta move!" Ada said into the comms.
"Buy us thirty seconds," Sendrei called back.
"The sling won't bind," Jonathan calmly intoned. "The crystal’s surface does not have sufficient friction. Wrap it around me."
"What?" Sendrei watched as Jonathan lay face down on the large crystal, wrapping one arm around the back side and holding the sling at the end of the winch cable out to Sendrei with the other.
"Trust," was Jonathan’s simple response.
Sendrei worked frantically as blaster fire erupted near them, ricocheting off Intrepid. He'd barely affixed the sling when Intrepid lurched to the side, skidding a few meters under a barrage of fire. The cable jerked, sending Jonathan and the crystal flying. The force clipped off the sentient’s lower half and it fell away, cartwheeling behind the crystal as it was jerked from the ground.
Sendrei lay into his arc-jets and directed himself into Intrepid's open bay. Pushing Tabby out of the way, he steadied himself in front of the winch controls and reeled in the crystal and Jonathan's upper half.
"Jonathan, are you okay?" Sendrei asked, not releasing the winch.
"We are without harm. Ada Chen, please apply all haste to evasive maneuvers," he added.
"Am I going to get anything to eat?" Tabby asked, oblivious to the fact that she was skidding across the cargo hold deck as Ada engaged Intrepid's powerful engines.
Sendrei punched the controls to close the cargo bay and raced after Tabby, concerned she no longer had the sense to protect herself.
Slowly, Tabby opened her eyes. An itch on the side of her nose prompted her to reach up, only her arm refused to move. Panic filled her and for a moment, she flashed back to a time when she'd been grievously injured and confined to a grav-chair, only having the use of her right arm.
"Tabby, calm. I'm here." Ada's cool hand slipped into Tabby's and gave a reassuring squeeze.
"What … where are we?" Tabby asked.
"We're still in the Mendari system," Ada answered. "We're being pursued by a fleet of Mendari warships."
"Mendari? I don't know…" Tabby found the name familiar but couldn't quite put her thoughts together. She recognized the room she was in as the officer's quarters on Intrepid, but she wasn't sure how she'd gotten there.
"Man-spiders," Ada answered.
"Oh. Those I remember," Tabby said. "They have ships?"
"Not too many," Ada said. "And they're nowhere near as fast as Intrepid. That is, if we had a full tank of go-go."
"My arm." Tabby tried to sit up and with Ada's help, she was successful. She reached across her chest and felt for the arm she was sure was missing, only it was there. The feeling confused her. She continued to probe for her legs, which were also there. "I don't understand."
Judgment of the Bold Page 22
