Enigma

by C. F. Bentley

  Music that rivaled for beauty the stars singing to their planets!

  Laudae Sissy tapped the next crystal with a tiny glass wand. A sixth note swelled forth to join the lingering tones of its fellows. She chanted something. Adrial had trouble understanding her dialect of the CSS standard language. But the lieutenant closed his eyes, and a blissful expression relaxed his face.

  The chord of six notes almost stilled, as if it held its breath in anticipation.

  Adrial didn’t dare breathe.

  She watched as the priestess slowly touched her wand to the last crystal, a black one, bigger than its fellows, more slender, and flashing a wild prism of beautiful rainbows.

  The crystal bellowed forth a deep tone that complemented and completed the other six, bringing them into a full circle. Definitely celestial in origin.

  The chord seared deeply into her mind. The music cleared her pain and hurtful memories.

  All of her wounds seemed to fade in importance as joy washed through her in a cleansing tide.

  And then the priestess sang. Her clear voice rose above the clamor of all the machines on the station, unifying the crystal notes in a hymn more beautiful than the bird chirps of the Messengers of the Gods.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jake’s comm vibrated silently on his wrist. He brushed it lightly. Yeah, I heard you, but I’m busy. It started up again almost immediately. He pressed the hold portion of the screen harder.

  Blessed silence while Sissy sang her final benediction. As her voice soared up to the final satisfying note, the obnoxious comm vibrated again, so violently that he thought it would burn the hair off his wrist.

  He bolted from the Temple the moment Sissy raised her arms in benevolent dismissal.

  He didn’t have time to linger and admire how much she’d grown in spirituality and authority since High Priest Gregor had dragged her out of the factory wreckage and tried to make her his puppet on the Council of Guardians.

  He didn’t have time to properly thank her for the gift of his new insignia.

  “What?” he growled, the moment he was clear and had some sense of privacy.

  “We found the beast,” Lieutenant David da Jason pa Lukan/FCC said. He sounded anxious and excited at the same time.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be guarding the survivor?”

  “I am, sir. The beast dropped into her room from a vent. He’s badly wounded. And, sir, he’s really, really strange. Stranger than I thought possible.”

  “Yeah. I noticed that. What do the medics say?” Jake jumped aboard the upward lift. He had to see this for himself.

  “Um . . . Our physicians are just staring at it. They don’t want to touch anything so . . . alien.”

  Jake spat a couple of curses he thought he’d forgotten.

  “Sorry, sir, they had enough trouble working on the survivor—her name’s Adrial, by the way. Seems like she’s some kind of exotic half-breed they can’t identify. Partly human at least. The beast doesn’t appear to have anything human about it.”

  “I’m calling in a CSS trauma surgeon. See if you can get those xenophobic paranoids to at least make it comfortable. I want it alive for questioning. On my way.”

  His mind replayed the record he’d watched with only half his attention an hour ago. Something about the oddly shaped body and extra limbs reminded him of . . .

  Definitely something to think about.

  He transferred from the lift to a waiting tram in a single weightless jump. As he cleared the open doorway of the tram, his fingers brushed the glyph of Harmony. No time to pause for a ritual kiss requesting a safe journey. No time to think. He keyed the tram to the Medbay on the Spacer wing on the Harmony side of the complex. His comm buzzed again.

  “If that alien has died, Lieutenant . . .” he growled.

  “What alien, sir?” Mara asked.

  “Sorry. I thought someone else was calling.” He forced himself to take three deep breaths, as Sissy had taught him. He remembered that last clear note of the Grief Blessing and found calm. “What do you need, Mara?”

  “Admiral Marella awaits you in your private conference room, sir.”

  Pammy. Damn. He thought he’d have another hour before she came looking for him.

  “Mara, I will make you my second-in-command if you will entertain the admiral for a bit. And while you’re at it, see if she will send her ship’s surgeon to the Medbay.”

  “I guess I can do that. You’d really make me your second?”

  “If my plans come together the way I want, yes, I will. I want a fully integrated staff from both Harmony and the CSS.” He touched the black crystal stars on his collar. A faint thrill of energy tingled against his fingers, sort of like a bell in the final phase of stilling after a hard knock with the clapper. “I think Laudae Sissy just started the ball rolling on that.”

  “I’ll order the surgeon to meet you.” She discommed without further explanation. Seconds later she came back on line. “And, sir, I think I’ve cracked the code on the spectacles.”

  “How soon can I start using them?”

  “Unknown, sir. Cracking the code is only half the job. Downloading another, uploading to them a third.”

  “Get on it.”

  The tram slid to a smooth halt. Another flight through zero G to the lift. Rather than wait for it to make its ponderous way down five levels, he hopped onto the stair railing and slid down through increasing gravity until he jumped clear in the last light-G level of Medbay. He followed the signs through a maze of rooms to Intensive Care and Post Op.

  The knot of white-clad medics gathered around a door drew Jake like a magnet. “What are we looking at?” he asked mildly.

  At least three of them jumped and held their hands to their chests as if to calm overactive hearts. Everyone looked about with wide, frightened eyes. They all wore a green triangle caste mark. One had been lauded with a purple circle, two ennobled with a blue diamond, and three more with the Spacer yellow star.

  He noted that the Spacer medics were closest to the door.

  Rather than answer, they all backed away, making a space for Jake. He stared at the apparition sprawled on the floor of the typical hospital room. It looked like some giant mutant spider on steroids. Same voluminous blue shirt he’d worn yesterday. The green pants were different but contained enough fabric to disguise the seam at the center. His upper limbs, four arms Jake guessed he should call them, twitched and convulsed in a grasping movement. The lower limbs lay limp and useless. His round belly heaved with each breath.

  But his head looked like a trimmed down version of Labyrinthe Seven.

  “Get Labby down to Medbay ASAP,” he demanded into his comm.

  “You,” he pointed to the two medics authorized to work with Spacers. “Get in there and do what you can to make him comfortable.”

  “But . . .”

  “Do it now or lose your augmentation.”

  They stared at him gape-jawed.

  “Do I have to get Laudae Sissy down here? She can have you barefaced and exiled in an eyeblink.”

  The woman and two men edged around him on tiptoe. Slowly, looking at the creature as they circled it. Finally one male knelt and straightened one of the secondary legs.

  A high-pitched screech came from deep within the creature.

  “He’s not numb,” he said. He pressed two fingers against the ankle, counting a pulse. Then he reached to compare it to the throbbing blood vessel plainly visible beneath his throat skin. “Limb pulse is slow and thready compared to neck. In a human I’d say spinal injury. Nerves intact but brain is not connecting. He can’t voluntarily make them move.”

  “The men who chased him said he took direct hits from a blaster,” Lieutenant David said from his post by the bed.

  Jake grew cold, feeling as though all warmth and blood drained from his face.

  He’d murdered enough innocents on Harmony in the name of quelling a riot and cleansing the populace of mutants. Just because the desperate inmates of
an asylum had botched caste marks, they had been treated worse than animals, reviled more than aliens.

  On Harmony, no clean and remote blasters or even bullets. He’d had to kill people with his sword and dagger. An act of such extreme intimacy that he felt he’d died a bit with every one of them.

  “Then he fell about ten feet out of that vent,” Lieutenant David continued. “I think his . . . arms? took the brunt of the fall. He nearly fell on the patient.”

  Jake noticed the slight figure resting in gel floats on the bed. She must have serious bone damage, hence the light G and the immobilizing padding all around her.

  “Blaster fire,” the kneeling medic said. “Okay. I have some ideas. We need to get him onto a table so we can work on him.”

  “What is the meaning of this, Colonel Devlin?” a stocky woman of middle years with a cap of board straight, iron gray hair said from the vicinity of the lift. She wore the everyday khakis of a CSS colonel with a medical caduceus pin next to her eagle insignia. Pammy’s ship surgeon.

  “It’s General Devlin, and we have an injured alien. Thought you might have a bit more experience in helping station staff figure out what to do.” Jake touched the stars on his collar. Again he felt that tiny tingle of energy from the Badger Metal grown in the crystal matrix.

  “I don’t care if they’ve promoted you to God. You can’t order me off my ship.” She stood firm, hands on hips, feet braced. But she craned her neck to peer around him.

  Jake knew that medics rarely resisted a curious challenge. Except maybe those from Harmony. The Spacer docs had held true to his theory.

  “As commander of the First Contact Café, all ships’ personnel come under my authority the moment the docking clamps lock in place.”

  She still bristled.

  “Please, Doctor. We need this being alive and talking. He seems to be the only one who might know how and why an alien ship crashed into the highly restricted Harmony diplomatic wing.”

  “Saw that from the monitors when we came in. Looks like one of your strands of spaghetti got overcooked and went limp.”

  A good analogy.

  “Everyone get out okay?” She took one step forward, still looking curiously at the Medbay floor.

  “No. We lost five, Worker caste. Two of them children. We almost lost Laudae Sissy. If she had died trying to rescue our other patient, we’d probably be at war with Harmony this very minute.”

  “Mariah Halliday.” She thrust out a hand to shake his, but her attention remained on the medical puzzle. “I’ll take a look at what you’ve got. First glimpse suggests Arachnoid in the mix. Maybe some Labyrinthe too.”

  “Never seen an Arachnoid. Heard bits and pieces though,” Jake admitted as he stepped aside for Doc Halliday. He wanted to chuckle at the name. “Any relation to . . .”

  “No, I’m not,” Colonel Halliday snapped. Then she knelt beside the Spacer physician. Heads bent together, they consulted and ordered the others about.

  Jake breathed a little easier. “Lieutenant David, is Adrial up to talking yet?”

  “Not much, sir. She keeps drifting off to sleep. Sometimes in mid-word.”

  “Keep an eye on her. She goes nowhere without Military escort. Your relief will give you the password.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Time to go meet Pammy. He backed away from Medbay and turned to face the lift.

  Admiral Pamela Marella, spymaster and damned fine-looking woman, stood between him and the doors. At fifty-two and thirty pounds overweight, her personality seemed to fill any room she entered. The extra fullness on her round face and cap of curly brown hair only added to her cuteness and belied the cunning intellect and ruthless determination inside. She crossed her arms beneath her magnificent bosom and tapped her foot in impatience. The frown on her face would have made Telvino run for cover.

  Jake had seen Telvino play chicken with his badly damaged heavy cruiser against an intact Maril battle wagon. The Marils, who knew no fear and suicided rather than surrender, blinked first and broke off the battle.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Do not call my brother,” Mac croaked. His throat grew dry from more than just his injuries. “I will not have Number Seven see me thus.”

  “Number Seven?” the female pushing her forward through the crowd said. She moved briskly to his side. Worry lines radiated from her eyes and mouth. A thick layer of cosmetics did not hide them from close inspection. “Old Lady Labyrinthe referred to her children by number. Are you one of her get?”

  Mac nodded. He held the female’s gaze with determination, though the pain in his back made him want to close his eyes and give in to oblivion.

  He couldn’t afford that. He had to make sure they treated his little bird correctly.

  “Which one are you?”

  “Call me Mac,” he ground out. His birth order made no difference to anyone. Mother had died before Mac had proved his worth and brought down a favored son.

  “Excuse me, Admiral, he’s in no shape to talk. I’ve got to get him into a treatment room now.” The older of the two physicians elbowed the other female aside.

  “This being is a prisoner. I need to interrogate him.” The admiral did not move.

  Mac decided he did not like her. But others respected her. She could be useful.

  “If you don’t let Doc Halliday take care of him, we aren’t going to have a prisoner to interrogate, Pammy.” General Jake grabbed the admiral by the collar of her civilian suit and hauled her to her feet.

  “Put me down, Jake! I outrank you. I’ll demote you and send you back to flying patrols around Prometheus XII.”

  “Nope. On this station I now outrank everyone but God, and maybe Laudae Sissy. We’ve got other things to discuss. In my office.” He dragged the female out of Mac’s line of sight. They continued to argue all the way to the lift.

  “Let’s see, now. You’re half Labyrinthe and half Arachnoid. Anything else I should know about your anatomy? Where can I find your previous medical records?” Doc Halliday asked. Her delicate fingers poked and prodded Mac.

  “I do not exist.” Mac tried to smile at her. “The other? My little bird?”

  “Okay, no med stats. Is your half brother’s blood compatible if I have to give you a transfusion?” She pointed to others in the room and showed them how to lift Mac.

  No answer about their other patient. He had to know. He couldn’t let them put him off.

  Before he could form an answer, he found gel floats inserted around his limbs and against his back. Near instant relief.

  Until they lifted him to a gurney. Fire lanced from the small of his back down all eight limbs. Endurable. He gritted his teeth. He knew he grimaced and tensed, but no scream escaped him this time. He’d not give them that pleasure.

  If he had feeling below his belly, then his body had begun to heal itself. His exoskeleton had protected him well. If necessary he could lose his secondary limbs and regrow them. He’d done that with fingers and claws. But the primary limbs, the ones that hurt the most, obeyed his Labyrinthe DNA.

  “Don’t pass out on me now, Mr. Mac. What about your blood?”

  Mr. Mac. He liked the sound of that. Respect. He’d never expected anyone to show him respect. Though he’d earned it.

  “Your blood, Mr. Mac. Can I give you a transfusion from your brother?” Doc Halliday tapped his face lightly, demanding his attention.

  “No.” He’d take nothing from Number Seven even if it saved his life.

  “What about hemosynth? Can you tolerate that?”

  “Unknown.” He had a sense of movement. They were moving him away from his little bird. He tried to reach toward her. The gel floats confined all of his limbs.

  “Well, I’m not doing spinal surgery without something. We’ll have to take a blood sample and clone it. Best way to deal with half-breeds anyway. But that will take time. Do you need drugs for the pain?”

  “No drugs. I wish to be awake. I need to know that my little bird fares well
.” Every word cost him in strength and spreading fire inside his body.

  “Little bird?” Doc Halliday asked.

  Mac swallowed and licked his lips. He didn’t have the strength to explain.

  “He probably means Adrial. The sole survivor of the crash. She has delicate bones, like a bird’s,” the Harmony physician replied. “I’m John da Samuel pa FCC Spacer Battalion by the way.”

  “Someday someone is going to have to explain that string of names to me. Right now I need full three-D scans of Mac.”

  “It’s very simple. John is my birth name. Da is for males, du for females. Samuel is my father—my sisters take our mother’s name of Sadie. Pa indicates my locator, pu for females, in this case the First Contact Café, and that I’m authorized to work with Spacers,” he said as if instructing a small child.

  Mac took note of his explanation. It made sense. Much like Mother’s designation of numbers for her children until they grew into a managerial position. Then they took the name of their station.

  “About the female, is she half Maril?” Doc Halliday looked worried.

  Doctor John shrugged. “I’ve never seen a Maril.”

  “I’ve only seen a couple of full bloods myself, and those were dead. But we’re starting to see a lot of refugees from the rim worlds. Many of the women are pregnant with half-breeds. Takes some DNA manipulation for the cross to happen, more gene therapy to carry the baby to term. Not as much as I’d expect from true aliens though. I aborted several before the alien DNA turned toxic. But in others they carried to term with no complications and no further therapy. How old would you say that patient is?”

  “In human terms, perhaps thirty, maybe a little more.”

  “Oh, shit. That means the Maril have been playing gene games for a lot longer than we suspected. We’ve got to find out where she came from.”