Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  He remained silent for a moment as he contemplated her words. The only world he knew was Nova Angeles, and it was everything Iradia was not: lush, covered in oceans, civilized. From the time he could barely walk he had played in the water; he’d learned to swim long before Miala did. In fact, it was Jerem’s love of the water that had finally forced her to put her fear of the waves aside and join him in the ocean. She’d told herself that it was necessary so she could keep a closer eye on him, but she’d known better. Even at four the boy could swim rings around her. It was more likely that he would have to come to her rescue, rather than the other way around.

  In the end she’d gotten him to reluctantly agree that Iradia sounded like a very dry, dull place, and with promises of a special trip to the Marinis Islands, which were a popular resort not very far from their home in the the large city of Rilsport, Miala was able to get herself away without too much more argument. The guilt she was feeling now was just a normal mother’s separation anxiety, she told herself. She could get past that.

  They landed at the spaceport at San Drea, which was marginally larger and of better repute than the ’port at Aldis Nova. Besides, apparently this Mungar’s home sat only an hour or so outside the city limits, making San Drea the logical destination.

  Miala had never been there before, but as she stepped outside, she reflected that San Drea didn’t look much different from Aldis Nova. The city around her boasted the same squatty structures of sun-bleached stone or adobe painted in shades of ochre and rust, the same motley mixture of humans and a few aliens, all of whom seemed to have a rather furtive look—although that, she thought, might simply have come from squinting against the brutal glare of the planet’s sun.

  She lifted her own pair of photo-reactive glasses out of her satchel and planted them firmly on her nose before moving all the way out into the sun. Several men went to retrieve the rest of her baggage, since mechs were too valuable on Iradia to be used for such menial duties. Master Dizhan waved her toward a sleek, dark enclosed aircar that looked somewhat out of place in the shabby surroundings.

  The car’s climate controls were working at full blast, and a welcome wave of cold air surrounded her as she maneuvered her way inside. The Eridani followed her and settled himself across from her on the expensive lizard-skin upholstery of the passenger compartment. Whoever this Mungar was, apparently at least he had the means to back up his inflated offer for her services.

  Miala felt the car begin to move, and the shabby surroundings of San Drea flashed past outside the heavily tinted windows until at last the vehicle moved out over the open desert.

  “About an hour outside of town, you said?” she inquired, wondering whether she should pull out her computer and do a little more preliminary work.

  “A little farther,” Master Dizhan replied.

  Something in his voice made her hesitate, and she looked back over at him. But his face, as always, held no expression that she could interpret. Shaking her head at herself—barely less than ten minutes back on Iradia, and already jumping at shadows, she thought—she leaned down to retrieve the tablet from her satchel.

  Much more quickly than she would have thought possible, the Eridani man grasped her shoulder with one hand and then slapped something against the side of her neck. Miala couldn’t even cry out—the soft hiss of a hypodermic was the last thing she heard before the world swirled crazily into darkness.

  Her head felt as if it had been dropped from a very great height and then split open. Wincing, Miala put her fingers up against her forehead, but everything seemed to be intact as far as she could tell. Then she opened her eyes.

  She sat in a small cell whose walls seemed to be carved from the native Iradian sandstone. Dark metal rods like teeth barred the opposite side of the cell, which opened out onto a walkway with a sand floor. The whole place looked very primitive, but also oddly familiar. But somehow Miala couldn’t get past the pain in her head to make the connection, so instead she carefully stood, glad that at least she was able to do so without too much difficulty. Her satchel sat on the ground near the rough bench where she had lain. It didn’t appear that anything had been taken from it, including her tablet.

  What the hell? she thought. The whole situation was so surreal that she couldn’t even summon up the fear she thought she should be experiencing at finding herself in such a place. Instead, absurdly, she felt more angry than anything else. What exactly was going on, anyway? Did they think they could coerce her into working for them for free, now that they held her captive?

  “Awake, I see,” Master Dizhan’s voice came from down the hallway, and Miala immediately approached the bars and glared at him.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. At least her voice sounded reasonably steady, although she wished that her once-pristine synth-linen suit wasn’t quite so rumpled and stained. “Do you realize I’m a prominent citizen of Nova Angeles? Once they find out what you’ve done—”

  “And how precisely are ‘they’ going to discover that, Ms. Fels?”

  Miala opened her mouth to snap a retort back at him, then realized suddenly that he had addressed her by her real name, not the one she had adopted after settling on Nova Angeles. The words seemed to die in her throat, and she stared at the impassive alien face, feeling the first stirring of fear somewhere down low along her spine.

  He nodded. “You begin to perceive something of your situation. Very good. Now you are awake, Lord Mungar will want to see you. Immediately.”

  The Eridani tapped some sort of code into the lock, and the bars retracted into the floor and ceiling. Miala moved toward him, wondering if she dared tackle him—he wasn’t that much taller than she, and between her home gymnasium and chasing after a boy who was Eryk Thorn’s son in more than just looks, she’d kept herself in shape over the years. But then she saw the small but deadly-looking pistol he held pointed toward her heart, and realized it was useless.

  With a meekness she certainly didn’t feel, she waited as Dizhan closed the cell behind her and then indicated that she follow him down the walkway and up a set of narrow, poorly lit steps. As they emerged onto the main floor, Miala cast a few quick, surreptitious glances around her. She saw curved ceilings, also of the same native reddish sandstone, dark metal wall sconces, a large circular staircase at the end of the hall they now traversed.

  Eight years had passed since she last walked through this corridor, but it still haunted her dreams. Mast’s compound. The place where she had toiled in anonymity, seeking to break the security system her father had built for Mast and for which he had subsequently died. The former monastery where she had brought a mortally wounded Eryk Thorn and kept him from death, only to lose her own heart to him.

  She could have been out for many hours. The compound was located on the opposite side of the planet from San Drea, but of course she had no way of knowing whether they had driven all the way here in the aircar, or whether they had simply transferred her into an orbital skimmer or other short-range craft once she was safely unconscious. She supposed that it really didn’t matter.

  This Lord Mungar must have taken up residence in the empty compound once it became known that Mast was truly dead. Or perhaps he was just the last in a long line of petty warlords who had quarrelled over ownership of the dead crime lord’s quarters. Miala had never paid attention to Iradia after she had escaped it so many years ago. That part of her life she had put as resolutely behind her as she had her old name. She’d never thought it would return to haunt her in such a spectacular fashion.

  The compound seemed cleaner now than it had in Mast’s heyday. The guards she passed in the corridor were all human. And the odd smell that had seemed to linger in the hallways of the building and which she had never been able to place was gone at last. However, these refinements didn’t do much to improve Miala’s opinion of this Lord Murgan, whoever he was.

  Then they entered what used to be Mast’s audience chamber. When she had last seen it,
the vast space had been empty and still; neither she nor Thorn had any real reason to spend any time there during the short week they spent in the compound together.

  Now roughly twenty people occupied the audience chamber, a far cry from the motley horde with which Mast had surrounded himself. The current group consisted mostly of humans and Eridanis, but the creature who occupied the throne was neither of these. He was a large male, his golden skin and the mass of metal-studded braids down his back proclaiming his Stacian origins. His robes were well-made, but not overly elaborate; then again, a Stacian male generally made his impression through his sheer mass.

  His copper-eyed gaze fell on Miala and Dizhan as they entered the chamber, and he smiled—but Miala found no comfort in that smile. It seemed too practiced, an expression he had put on because he thought it might be useful, not because the sight of her pleased him.

  “Lord Murgan,” Dizhan said. “This is Miala Fels.”

  She didn’t bother to contradict him. If they knew who she had been, it was possible they knew far more than that. So she merely stood her ground and waited, trying to ignore the unfriendly, speculative stares of the other occupants of the chamber.

  “The famous Ms. Fels,” commented Murgan, and his eyes narrowed a bit as he looked down at her. Then he stood, stepping off the dais and approaching her. Up close he was even more overwhelming. Miala had never been in such close proximity to a Stacian before, as the Stacian Federation and the Gaian Consortium were always on the edge of war, and the two races did not often mingle. But she managed to hold herself still, lifting her chin as she gazed up at him.

  “You’re quite young to have such a reputation,” he continued, after a pause. If he was disappointed by her lack of reaction, he didn’t show it. “But even with that reputation, it took me some time to finally ascertain that the successful Mia Felaris of Nova Angeles was one and the same as Miala Fels, formerly of Aldis Nova on Iradia.”

  Miala didn’t blink. “Nice detective work,” she said. “So what is this all about? Blackmail?”

  To her surprise, he threw back his head and laughed. “No, dear girl, nothing that crude.”

  “Then what?”

  He did not immediately reply. Instead he made an expansive gesture that indicated the audience chamber and, by extension, the compound which surrounded it. “Many pretenders sought to control this place, to become another Mast. And they all lost. I have called this place home for the past three years, and my network has grown at the same time.” He stepped closer to Miala, so close that she could feel the heavy rolled collar of his over-robe brush against her hip. “But I inherited a compound that had been plundered of its treasures. All my predecessors claimed the treasure was long gone by the time they took control, save for some crates of silk left down in the vaults. But what of Mast’s vaunted storehouses of hard currency, precious metals, and gems? Apparently they had all vanished into thin air.”

  Miala knew where this was going. The fear that had lain coiled at the base of her spine seemed suddenly to spread, to move upward and out, strangling the breath in her throat. But she still said nothing.

  The Stacian reached out and ran a finger down the side of her face, following the curve of her cheekbone. “You’re lucky I don’t have Mast’s tastes, my dear,” he said. “I’m sure he would have found you delectable. I, on the other hand, am interested in only one thing.” With fingers that felt like iron he grasped her chin, forcing her to meet those inhuman copper-hued eyes. When he spoke again, the words were colder still. “I’m only going to ask this once, Mistress Fels.

  “Where is Mast’s treasure?”

  14

  Jerem Felaris was bored. The most probable cause of his current ennui was his mother’s continuing absence from Nova Angeles, but he would rather have died than admit that to anyone. In fact, a few months ago when Petyr Varlsen had accused Jerem of being a “momma’s boy,” Jerem had pounded the hapless Petyr so hard the other boy had run screaming home to his own mother. That particular incident had earned Jerem a week’s worth of solitary in his room, but the results were worth the hard time. None of the other boys at school had even dared look sideways at Jerem after that.

  No, it just seemed as if his mother’s absence had somehow left a huge gaping hole in the house, a hole that couldn’t be filled by Els-E, their overworked and now somewhat obsolete nanny-mech, or even the presence of Risa, his mother’s assistant and friend, who had bravely volunteered to help watch over Jerem while Mia was off on Iradia. Jerem liked Risa well enough; she was friendly and pretty, and unlike most adults she didn’t have the need to butt in every five minutes and interrupt anything interesting he might be doing. But she wasn’t his mother, and for the short eight years of his life his mother had been pretty much the whole world.

  This wasn’t her first business trip, but in the past she’d only traveled as far as the next continent over on Nova Angeles, and once or twice to New Chicago, Nova Angeles’ twin planet. The travel time involved was negligible, and she’d only been gone two nights at the most. It had been almost exciting to see that she trusted him to more or less behave himself while she was gone, even though she’d apparently felt compelled to fix him with a stern eye and make him promise not to blow anything up.

  At the time he’d just dug his toe in the ground and heaved an exaggerated sigh. She was never going to let him live that down. Just because he and his friend Mikhal had gotten a hold of some rescue flares from Mikhal’s stepdad’s boat and shot them off inside the garbage compactor behind the house didn’t mean he’d actually blown it up. True, the outer wall of the compactor had become positively convex, but it wasn’t as if they’d exploded it or anything. But his mother had reacted as if he’d set off the flares inside the house instead of safely outside.

  Adults tended to overreact about the strangest things, he and Mikhal had agreed, but their parents had gotten together and made them consent to a mutual non-explosion pact, so that particular avenue of recreation had been cut off. He could probably have gotten Risa or Els-E to take him to the park or over to Mikhal’s or Alic’s house, but none of those ordinary amusements seemed particularly appealing to him right now.

  He sat on top of the fort he and the other two boys had built in his mother’s expansive backyard—the biggest yard in the neighborhood, a neighborhood unusual for Rilsport because it had real houses with real yards, instead of apartments or townhouses stacked on top of each other. From his perch he could just see past the lacy blue-green trees that edged the property and all the way down to the harbor. The sky was a pale delicate turquoise, streaked with feathery clouds, and the air smelled sweet and warm. He should have been off exploring with Mikhal and Alic, or riding his bike, or...something. Instead he sat here, kicking his heels against the synth-wood of the fort and thinking, which wasn’t something he normally did a lot of. He’d always been more the action type.

  His mother had been gone for three days now, which according to her was only enough time to get to Iradia and start on the security project. She hadn’t gone into any details, not that Jerem had expected she would. Computers bored him, and he could never understand her fascination with them, or the way she could spend hours staring into a screen, her silences punctuated by staccato bursts of rapid-fire typing. He’d once complained of how dull the machines were, to which she’d only replied, “Why does that not surprise me?” and given him a rueful grin.

  But because he knew very little about what her job entailed, it was hard for him to visualize exactly what could keep her busy for so long on Iradia. The very fact that she’d gone there at all puzzled him a bit. She’d been born there, but she didn’t like to discuss the fact, and she’d always admonished him not to talk about it with anyone else. Jerem never could figure out what the big deal was, but because it was obviously important to her he had kept the secret. Iradia wasn’t really a place to be proud of, he guessed; he’d read about it on the ’net and the UEG (Unabridged Encyclopedia Galactica), and it sounded like a
hot, dry, dusty slagheap populated by crime lords and lots of other unsavory types. No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it.

  The other thing she simply wouldn’t talk about was his father. Oh, she’d given Jerem one or two tiny details, mostly to get him to stop pestering her, so he knew his father had been a pilot with the GDF and had died in the fighting in the siege of Arlinais against the Stacians. Mia called Jerem’s father a hero, but she said very little else about him. The lack of a father had never bothered Jerem particularly. His father had died before he was born, after all, and it was difficult to miss someone you’d never known. What did bother him was the complete lack of any evidence of his father’s existence. Some of the other boys’ fathers were also dead, or just gone—Mikhal’s real father had died on Nylos in a mine collapse, and Petyr’s father just decided one day he’d had enough and had moved away to New Chicago. Mia said that was half of Petyr’s problem right there, not having a dad, but why it should be a problem for Petyr and not for Jerem, when he didn’t have a father, either, she’d never satisfactorily explained. But at least the other boys had pictures of their fathers, and Petyr even went to stay with his dad once or twice a year.

  Jerem had nothing. He could only guess at his own missing parent’s appearance because he had decided early on that his dead father must have looked like him. Certainly Jerem, with his wavy dark hair, deep olive skin, and brown eyes, looked nothing like his mother. She had warm red hair that fell straight down her back when she didn’t wear it up, and her eyes were an unusual mixture of gray and green and amber—definitely not brown.

  When he’d asked Risa why his mother would travel so far to take on a commission, Risa had laughed and said, “Because they’re paying her a lot of money, that’s why. You like your nice big house with your nice big yard? Well, none of that’s free, you know.”