. . . gonna have to tank her, boss. She can’t take no more of this.
Yeah, okay. Tell ’em a full cryo set. I want Ling there with bells on . . .
Gotta A-firm on that.
. . . fine. Okay, lift now. Get that pallet there. Easy. Good. Alright, hook her up. Ty, get ready to put her down. Watch it, watch it . . . Okay, now . . .
The gray light dimmed, running to a deep dark blue, with shadows reaching out to wrap around her face, feather-soft and warm. Talking shadows, whispering in her ears with a ghosting sigh.
Huron?
“Yeah, Kris. You can relax now. We’re going home.”
End of the Beginning
Verdun Military Hospital
Weyland Station, Vesta, Eltanin Sector
Another hell, this one full of tubes: tubes of different diameters and colors, snaking through oxygen-saturated nutrient fluid. Tubes that ran into every natural orifice, and several unnatural ones, delivering a myriad of chemicals that assisted the nanocyte tissue regenerators as they labored heroically to repair the wreckage left by Quist’s bullet. They controlled her raging endocrine system, combated necrosis of the liver and the various infections flourishing in her leaky abdominal cavity, and reversed the generally bad systemic effects of stim-tabs.
The tubes didn’t hurt exactly—pain didn’t seem to be allowed here—but they did impart a singularly crawling sensation to her entire body. Every offended muscle and invaded passage quivered on the brink of a spasm to eject the protoplastic intruder. It was, she decided, a singularly hellish sensation.
She spent a week in hell, which she later found out was Verdun Military Hospital on Weyland Station. The first few days were mercifully indistinct. On the fifth day, she’d come around, and they cleared out the nanocyte regenerators to let the pharmaceuticals have free reign. By the sixth, the intubation began to really piss her off.
The Lord of Hell, one Dr. Venn Tsai Ling, considered this an excellent sign and had her untanked. The quick absolution surprised her; she had thought her sins were greater.
She was given a real bed and the invasive tubes were reduced to two. After a day of mercilessly starving her—her new GI tract was now awake and ferociously hungry—they allowed her to eat what they called “real food.”
Real food turned out to be a disgusting white pabulum. The medical staff assured her it was high in calories and had many other virtues. When it had the desired effect on her alimentary tract, they pulled the remaining tubes. Then she suffered the pabulum another day.
On the third day after her release from hell, she took her first walk, the pain in her whole body competing with the exhilaration of getting out of bed. They fed her a gelatinous substance that they swore was much better than the pabulum and equally virtuous.
It was—very marginally. Kris wondered how truth had come to be held in such low esteem by the medical profession. The gelatinous stuff came in various colors, purple being the best, amber the worst. Amber seemed to be for breakfast. She’d never liked breakfast anyway.
By the end of the week, Dr. Ling finally declared her gastrointestinal system operational, and they brought her the first food she could recognize: an omelet. She was eating it with great enthusiasm when the duty nurse—who defied expectation (if not stereotype) by being young and pretty—came in and announced a visitor.
“A visitor?” Kris asked, wiping omelet crumbs from her lips. That could be good or bad. Had they repaired her just so that when they locked her up, she could enjoy it longer?
“I can hardly call him a visitor now,” the nurse quipped. “For the first week, he was a perfect nuisance. Dr. Ling took his life in his hands just trying to get him out of surgery.”
Huron? Dare she hope?
“Of course, Commander Huron’s like that.” The nurse smiled sunnily. “Shall I send him in?”
Kris choked on her omelet, tried to speak, gave up, and settled for nodding animatedly. The nurse tossed a cheery “I’ll get him” over her shoulder as she left the room. Kris, finding herself in a proper panic, swallowed frantically. “Wait!”
The nurse leaned back through the doorway. “Yes?”
“Um . . . Can I—I mean—do you have a comb I could borrow? Or something?”
The dark slashes of the nurse’s eyebrows quirked together for a moment and then her expression cleared. “Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”
She hurried back into the room and helped Kris out of bed. Not that she really needed help—it wasn’t weakness making her knees shake. The nurse paused, motioning to wait a moment, then tapped her ear piece and spoke to the air. “Sheryl, is Commander Huron still there?”
“Sure,” a tinny voice from the air answered. “I was just about to send him back.”
“Could you hold him for a little, please?” Her tone glinted with happy conspiracy.
“Uh, well—I guess . . . sure. How?”
The nurse waved her hand in aimless little circles. “Oh . . . have him fill out something. Anything. We need about ten minutes.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be back in a second.” She breezed out of the room and came back moments later with a small makeup compact in her hand. “Always keep one of these on hand in case you have a last-minute date.”
By her look, Kris believed she was no stranger to last-minute dates.
The nurse took Kris by the elbow and smiled. She had a very nice smile. “Come on.”
Urging Kris into the adjoining bathroom, the nurse hooked a stool over with her foot.
“Here. Sit down.” She opened the compact and laid the contents out with crisp efficiency, like a surgical set.
Kris eyed it nervously. “That’s okay. You don’t hafta—”
“Pooh,” the nurse contradicted. “The way your fingers are, you’d be dropping stuff all over the place. No, let me.”
“No, really—um—” Kris’s lips closed abruptly, embarrassed at not remembering her name.
“Rachel,” the nurse supplied helpfully, without a hint of taking offense. “Now, let’s see. Don’t have a lot of options here but we’ll make do.”
“I don’t—uh, do makeup—I mean, not norm—”
“Oh nonsense.” But seeing the look on Kris’s face, Rachel softened. “We’ll just do a little, okay? Just some liner, maybe? And some gloss. For luck.”
“Luck?”—swallowing twice.
“You are feeling lucky, aren’t you?”—in a voice edged with a giggle.
“I—dunno.”
Rachel laughed. “Of course you are. Now lean back. This won’t take a sec.” Working swiftly, she kept up a running patter. “Hmm, what are we going to do with this? I wish the regenerators were as good for hair as they are for the rest of you. Oh, I know . . . Yeah, that’s better. You really do have lovely eyes, you know. The guys must say so all the time . . . Look up. Isn’t it amazing that we can clone people, but we can’t make a machine that will apply lipstick? Don’t laugh . . .”
Finished, she replaced her arsenal and turned the mirror on. “There. What do you think?” She sounded pleased with herself.
Mastering her apprehension, Kris looked and decided she was pleased, too. Rachel had selected a simple but effective eye liner that called out the green in Kris’s eyes, the barest hint of shadow and a subtle gloss that nonetheless gave the strong curve of her lips a distinct emphasis. The protelaise solution had returned her abused hair to something approximating its original sheen. Pulled straight back, it accentuated the shape of her face—thinner now, but that only made her more striking—and Rachel had tied it with a ribbon that brought out the red highlights.
“Yeah—ah . . . Thanks.”
Rachel continued to consider her work critically. “Hmm. I suppose you like that scar.”
Kris’s fingers rose and traced the thin line on her cheekbone. “Well, I—”
“I like it,” Rachel decided. “It gives you a certain . . . edge. A little contrast. I like that.” Then she frowned, plucking at the shapeless, powder-blue hospita
l gown. “Wish there was something we could do about this . . . Wait, I know.”
She scooted out the door and returned within a minute with a long, complexly colored scarf. “Here. It’s not the best, but it’ll help.”
“Where did you—”
“It’s mine. Don’t worry about it.” Then Rachel frowned, reached out, and poked her expertly in the lower abdomen. Kris jumped.
“That hurt?” Rachel asked severely.
“No.”
Rachel skillfully palpitated Kris’s abdomen and lower back. “At all? Even a twinge?”
“No. Tickles though.”
“Tickling’s okay.” Rachel stepped back and bit her knuckle. “Don’t you dare lie to me. If you go and make us do this all over again—”
“Really,” Kris implored. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Rachel’s white teeth continued to worry her knuckle for another moment. “Swelling’s gone down. No lumps . . . Well, okay.” Swiftly, she draped the scarf skillfully around Kris’s shoulders and waist. Rachel took a last appraising look and activated her comm again.
“Sheryl? Yeah. Send him back.”
By the time they heard Huron’s footsteps in the hall, Kris was back in bed, sitting up expectantly. His tall, lean form breezed through the doorway.
“Hi, Kris. I heard—Oh.” Huron stopped suddenly, trying not to stare. “Ah . . . Hello, Loralynn.”
“Hello, Rafe.” She smiled at his discomposure. It substantially relieved her own. She indicated a chair next to the bed. “Would you like to sit?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Rachel, who had been pretending to be busy with something on the far side of the room, intercepted Huron on his way to the chair and stage-whispered in his ear, “Now, you be nice to her.”
“I’m always nice,” Huron rejoined. “Patient too. Ask Sheryl. Of course, now that I see what you were up to with that diversionary maneuver— Hey!” This last as Rachel poked him shrewdly in the side.
“It’s more than you deserve.” She waggled her finger at him. “So be nice!”
“Yes, ma’am”—with an ironic bow of his head as she left the room.
Rachel winked at Kris and closed the door.
“Rachel seems to know you,” Kris observed, with a knowing squint.
“Well, yeah,” Huron answered matter-of-factly. “We’re acquainted.”
“Oh yeah?” Kris asked, one eyebrow arched. “How acquainted?” Last-minute dates?
Huron looked her straight in the eye. “She was on my phys-rehab team for my second bout of SMS.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows descended and pinched together. SMS—Submesodermal Microrupture Syndrome—was a serious and painful condition caused by sustained ultra-high gee maneuvering. Kris had had her own bout of it, and since Huron’s second case had led to him being transferred to ship duty, it was partly responsible for their meeting. “You two weren’t fucking, then?”
He smiled at Kris’s characteristically blunt approach to the topic. “No. Rachel’s happily married to a very nice woman. One of the trauma surgeons here. Would it have bothered you if we were?”
“No.” Kris dropped her eyes away from his unsettling gaze. “I was teasing.”
“It’s okay.” Huron’s smile clouded slightly.
Kris tried to ferret something out of his expression that would account for the change. His many affaires had been a staple of the gossip trade most of his adult life, and while the war had toned things down on that front, she had no reason to assume he’d changed his stripes in any fundamental way. That didn’t bother her—the sexual mores of others didn’t concern her much. She thought he probably understood that, so whatever it was, it must be some new thing she’d not encountered yet. Before she could contemplate that further, she saw him take a small breath and then pull the conversation firmly in another direction.
“Anyway, I came to see how you are. How are you? You look—fine.”
“I feel fine, too”—going along with the change. “I gather you made quite a nuisance of yourself.”
He snorted. “They’ll get over it.”
“But in surgery!”
“I brought you in. I had a vested interest in how you came out. So when are you getting out?”
“I just got a clean bill of health. Rachel’s going to talk to Dr. Ling. Maybe tomorrow AM.”
“I’m impressed!” He sounded like it. “I hadn’t expected . . . well, given your condition, I thought it would be longer.” She saw the shadow of a worry still haunting him, lurking in the creases around his brown eyes.
“My condition? I thought two weeks was plenty. Hell, creation only took half that.” Her eyes followed his and their glances slid together towards the floor. “Was it that bad?”
Huron nodded without looking up. That old worry could still ridge the muscles in his neck.
“Tell me.”
“Well . . .” This clearly wasn’t the tack he’d wished the conversation to take, but he went on. “When we got there, you were pretty much gone. Still on your feet, sort of, but that was only because of the stim-tab. When we got the hatch open—”
That struck her blindingly. “That was you?”
“Yeah. We tried to patch a line through but couldn’t get a connection to the other side.”
“I shot it out,” she said sheepishly.
“So we noticed. Anyway . . .” Huron’s hands wrestled in his lap. “Well, let’s just say it wasn’t too good. You still having a sidearm and all.”
“Oh.” Kris slumped back into the pillows. Should she be gratified her reflexes were in the right place?
“Yeah,” Huron said. “Anyway—”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Not much. I think you eventually recognized our uniforms.”
“And then?”
He didn’t answer immediately. It seemed to her that the lines around his eyes had deepened. “And then it didn’t get a hell of a lot better. We had to tank you. Full cryo set.” The knuckles of his tangled hands were white. “A lot of people don’t come out of that quite . . . normal.”
No. Postmortal cryonic dementia was not in the least normal. A shudder ran up her spine.
“That’s why I made such a nuisance of myself,” Huron continued. “If that had happened to you, I felt—well, I was thinking that maybe you’d have preferred I never . . .” He stopped, unable to go on, the last words dribbling across the space between them.
Sudden wetness filmed her vision. “Thanks. I—I’m surprised you bothered to come after me.”
Unexpectedly, Huron smiled. “Hell, I got blue in the face trying to talk them into it. We weren’t sure if you’d survived ejection, and the Old Man wasn’t hot on invading Halith space to check damage on an unauthorized mission. I was trying to get him to go for an off-the-books operation, but he didn’t like the lead time. Then I pointed out that he’d have to recover you if he wanted to skin you personally—”
“Gee thanks.”
“Don’t laugh. He was about to go for it. We bumped the alert status and pushed right up to the edge of Asylum. Nobody came out to hassle us and that was weird. We did a deep probe and couldn’t find the Asylum Fleet. That was really weird. Then we started getting hints about Halith fleet movements. The admiral said to hell with it, and we decided we should go in force or not at all. We were almost there when we got your message.”
Kris vividly remembered the little red icon. “I thought you were the bad guys.”
“Well, from Ilya’s perspective, we were.”
“Yeah . . .” Then, to cover her embarrassment, Kris asked, “What about the data dump?”
Huron’s well-shaped lips spread in that one-sided smile. “Five-by-five. G2 is still going over it. Wish you’d been there when we put it on the tight-beam. You never saw so many public orgasms in your life.” Then his face fell suddenly. “That was before we ran into that other—”
“Huron?”
He glanced up. “Yeah?”
“Thank y
ou.”
“You’re welcome.” Huron slapped his palm on his knee as he hunted for a different subject. “Well . . .”
“What else happened?” Kris prompted.
“There’s a report,” Huron said, his voice denoting his happiness to be off such tender ground. “It was pretty simple. Cake walk all around, really. The Grand Senate’s gonna take a while to sort out the repercussions—they’re not used to so much good news all at once. Looks like we’re going to get that treaty, but I’m sure they’ll still find some way to screw this up, so we’re not unemployed yet—” Abruptly, he stopped and looked down at his fingernails. “Look, do you really want to talk about this?”
Kris shook her head, sensing his lingering edginess. What was bothering him? The silence was a strain on Huron’s features. Kris didn’t think he was going to speak, but he did.
“I saw Heydrich’s body in there.” He paused, trying to fit his voice around the spiky subject. “Did anything . . . happen? Unusual, I mean?”
“Do you mean: was I tortured?” So much flint in so few words. “Yes. Don’t ask about it.”
He paused for a moment, sizing up Kris’s aspect. Discretion certainly appeared to be the better part of valor. “Then I won’t.”
Silence now, not looking at each other, just conversing with their private ghosts and feeling the space between them. It went on for a while. Minutes. Kris spoke first.
“Rafe?”
“Yes?”
“Did you get the rest of my message?”
“Yes.” Huron continued to look away. That slight buried unease she’d been sensing had come to the surface. “I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“What did you want to say?”
“I wanted to give you an invitation.”
Not what she’d been primed to hear. “A what?”
“An invitation.” Huron’s smile danced uncertainly on the corners of his lips. “There’s this place, you see. This place I know. A meadow, not very large, above a few miles of lilacs that grow all down this little valley. It’s beautiful. Have you ever seen lilacs?”
“Pictures.”
“Not the same.” He was smiling fully now. “You’ve got to see them in the spring, when they bloom. It’s incredible—masses of white and purple as far as you can see. The fragrance is amazing.” She watched him, but his gaze was elsewhere now. “Of course, if you go there in the fall, the lilacs aren’t out, but you can watch the leaves turn. Colors like you’ve never seen. It’s like an ocean, Kris. They turn red and orange and yellow-gold and all sorts of colors. In the summer, you can sometimes see the auroras late at night. I used to think that was the best of all, but they’re pretty rare. I’d lie on my back all night, trying not to sleep, hoping . . . And in the winter, it snows. Not much. They don’t allow really bad blizzards, of course.” He shook his head. “It has to be seen, Kris. And you can see it all from this meadow. That is . . .” He looked up.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 122