Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  Genys admired her friend and chief communication officer's poise and self-control as she heard what her child had just done. Treinna did look a little paler than usual as she sat next to Tress, held her daughter's hand, and listened. Then they walked the girl through what could have happened, all the things that might have gone wrong, if she had managed to leave the isolation area with a live hoople and walked through the ship.

  "Just how were you going to get it on board the Nisandrian ship?" Treinna asked.

  "M'kar wanted to … oh." Tress frowned. She tipped her head to one side, eyes going unfocused. "That's funny."

  "What is?" Treinna rolled her eyes and gave Genys a thin smile.

  "She wanted to use a catapult. That wouldn't work, would it?"

  "M'kar told you she wanted to use a catapult to get a hoople on board a Nisandrian ship that hasn't even docked at the station yet?" Genys had to say it aloud, just to test that it was as crazy as it sounded in her head.

  "Well … no … There was just this picture …" Tress let out a little sigh and leaned against her mother. "Am I in big trouble?"

  "Hmm, maybe," Treinna said.

  "She gave Trascue a good scare, and that's not easy to do," Genys pointed out.

  "Don't encourage her."

  The upper level door slid aside and Veylen walked in. He met Genys' gaze, grimaced, and came down the steps. Trascue had obviously filled him in on his version of the incident.

  "Picture?" Genys said, feeling like a light had come on. "When did you get this picture from M'kar? Where were you?"

  "Mommy and Dr. Tahl were checking the screen after she climbed in her tube. Oh." Tress nodded slowly. "She didn't say it, did she?"

  "M'kar may have broadcasted while she was sliding down into hibernation," Treinna said. "If she was upset, and who wouldn't be, with those kascquaks showing up? Well, she might have been thinking really loud and Tress was close enough to catch it." She sat up, eyes widening. "Tress was close enough to catch it."

  "Talent. From Jasper, maybe?" Veylen said. "Along with being naturally immune to hoople … ah … transmissions?"

  "It's a good thing we're in spacedock." She caught hold of her daughter's hand and stood up. "Time for a long visit with Tahl. Too bad M'kar is out for the count until the Nisandrian ship leaves."

  Veylen waited until the Lores left, then let out a long, low whistle. "Immune to hooples and catching telepathic images? That little girl is going to be very popular when she goes to the Academy in another nine, ten years."

  "If she lives that long." Genys shuddered and waved her hand. "Forget that. I'm still unwinding from the Ankuar and hoople crisis."

  "Ankuar and hooples." He snorted. "Brilliant."

  "We'll see how brilliant I am when the effluvia hits the ventilators."

  ~~~~~~

  Ankuar turned out to be immune to the addictive effects of mechanical hooples. They shot the living hooples out the refuse port and caused a ruckus along the docking arm by tossing the mechanical ones up in the air and using them for target practice.

  They were not, however, immune to other side-effects of mechanical hooples. Namely, nauseating headaches, vertigo, and hives. The last, according to the station medics, when they were called in two days later, was entirely a psychosomatic reaction to the stress and anxiety resulting from the headaches and vertigo. The Ankuar captain and his ship's doctor both protested labeling their suffering psychosomatic, insisting that Ankuar had no psychoses or psyches to be affected. They protested in muted voices while suffering headaches that necessitated them wearing helmets to dim all lights and sounds.

  "Well, that's one way of dealing with the hoople problem," Veylen remarked, when the reports of the first episodes of target practice, interspersed with Ankuar falling to their knees, retching across the decking, reached the Defender.

  Genys had temporarily cancelled all shore leaves and confined to the ship anyone who didn't have errands to run vital to the refit process. Most members of the crew knew about the whole hoople incident, and assumed they were avoiding Ankuar reprisals. They were busy, helping new arrivals get settled or adjusting to the changes in the ship. The ship’s children were especially pleased with the expanded zero-gravity portion of the recreation deck, which had tripled in size.

  Confining the crew to the ship delayed hearing about the Nisandrians skulking everywhere, triggering thoughts that might betray M’kar’s presence to any eavesdropping mind-hunters. It was easier to decline requests from the Nisandrian ship's captain to visit and bring her command crew for a dinner, "in the interest of bolstering the ongoing dipolomatic negotiations between our governments," if she could claim her crew was too busy with upgrades. No one leaving the ship for R&R validated that excuse.

  Gleaners were making a ruckus trying to get onto Docking Arm Three and access to a survey ship docked there. They had been caught falsifying security clearance documents. Genys was too busy to pay much attention to the Gleaner trouble, but did find some satisfaction in identifying the Gleaners as the ones who had accosted her in the bar. Security images showed several of them with what looked like long, sharp cuts and patches of burned skin, clothes, and hair. She supposed clothes as filthy-greasy as Gleaner pseudo-uniforms were prone to spontaneous combustion. Why they blamed the crew of the Corona, she could only speculate. Which she did, with several friends, when her duty shift was over.

  "Wait." Treinna stepped over from the dispenser in the mess hall with a fresh cup of tea. She hurried around four tables to where Genys, Dr. Maora and Taggert, head of the Gate search crew, had been sharing a slightly humorous griping session about the general foibles of Gleaners. "Did you say the Corona?"

  "Do you know someone on board?" Taggert said.

  "No, M'kar does. What happened to the crew?" She tugged out the bench, frowning absently when it stuck at the end of its guide track.

  "Nothing, so far. Gleaners are blaming them for some damage. Cuts and burns." Genys got that shiver she had seen Rob Hollis suffer, just before something blew up and threatened the quirky luck of the Defender. "What do you know?"

  "Are they secure?"

  "So far. Why?"

  "M'kar met up with a Talent named Dulit, serving on the Corona.”

  “That’s right. I forgot.” Genys supposed she could be excused. That had been just minutes before the problem with Cynes and the hooples exploded around her. “What about Dulit?”

  “M'kar didn't have time to tell me much. We were kind of busy getting her into her tube. He gave her a box to put in stasis and a data wafer. She asked me to get to work decoding the data."

  "Decoding?" Maora said, putting down her ever-present knotwork.

  "Someone scrambled their ship's files before Dulit downloaded the data. The thing is, we can't even get into the files to decode and unscramble them because he put them behind a password."

  "What is in stasis?" Genys asked. That shiver was getting stronger.

  "I don't know, but M'kar trusted Dulit. However, I’m sure it's alive. I'm not asking anyone to risk something happening, maybe some process they're trying to stop, before we get it to Le'anka."

  "When were you going to request we go to Le'anka?"

  "I was hoping I wouldn't have to. M'kar could explain all of it to you herself. I was only supposed to send the box to Le'anka and her teacher's family if anything happened to her. Like if the Nisandrians got their hands on her tube." Treinna hunched her shoulders, looking for a moment like she wanted to shrink down a few sizes.

  "You said a data wafer?" Taggert said. "I'm guessing information on whatever is in stasis will be on the wafer."

  "M'kar asked me to get decoders working on it while she was out. We can't do anything until we answer the password question." Treinna picked up her cup of tea. Her fingers tightened around the mug and she gazed into the steaming depths without drinking.

  "What kind of question?"

  "Something about an infrenx."

  "Infrenx?" Genys flinched. "Like, the tatto
o on her palm?"

  Treinna's eyes widened. She put down her mug hard enough to slosh the tea. "I am so oblivious. Never thought of that."

  "What about it? What's the question?"

  "Who will be the infrenx? That's it, that's all, word for word." She went very still, as if she could hear the churning of Genys' thoughts. "You have an idea?"

  "Let's go see." Genys stood, scooping up her half-finished sandwich. She munched on it as Treinna led her, Maora and Taggert to the language lab.

  Treinna inserted the data wafer into the central console. The screen blanked, then showed an image of the central gardens of the Academy on Le'anka. The question scrolled across the screen in prosaic Standard, not in Le'ankan, as Genys had half-expected. Taking a deep breath, she put the last bite of her sandwich in her mouth and slowly chewed as she brought up the input board and tapped in the name, Thyal.

  The screen cleared, then offered data pockets, each labeled with a nonsense word.

  "Well, that's further than we've managed to get for the last two days," Treinna muttered.

  "Who is Thyal?" Maora asked.

  "Thyal was, is, M'kar and Dulit's classmate, under Master Reydon." Genys waited for the other three to react.

  Reydon was one of the rare breed known as Overarching Talents. He had the ability to tap into and access the minds of other Talents, against their will, when necessary, and was entrusted with training new and unusual Talents. He was the teacher half the Alliance turned to when someone suffered some physical damage that made it difficult or impossible to control their psionic gifts.

  "About two years ago, some terrorists disguised as Gleaners found a monster from Le'ankan mythology, called a dymcrait, and smuggled it onto Academy grounds. The big threat is its ability to take over Talented minds."

  "On a planet of Talents, where all the Talents in the Alliance come for training?" Treinna muttered. "Disaster worse than what the Gatekeepers faced."

  "M'kar and her classmates fought it while Security was still on its way. Thyal was stung by that thing. He's slowly regaining control of his body. M'kar doesn't like to talk about it, any more than Jasper talks about his past." She nodded to Treinna. They were still working on tests for Tress and Jasper. They needed M'kar to come out of hibernation to help them do some psionic exploration of Tress's theorized Talent.

  "So why did M'kar tell me to send whatever is in stasis to her teacher on Le'anka?"

  "My guess," Maora said, "is that it has something to do with Thyal. Maybe it's a plant, some rare medicine."

  "This Dulit didn't plan on M'kar going into hibernation," Taggert said. "I think the situation has gotten tangled enough, we should go ask him directly."

  Easier said than done, Genys discovered a short time later. The Corona had tried to leave soon after M'kar met Dulit and accepted what looked like a harmless ti box from him. The same Ankuar who had run afoul of hoople intoxication had delayed the Corona's departure by posting demand after falsified claim after libelous claim against nearly every member of the survey ship's crew. When they filed claims against the underage children of the crew, Sheffroab Station notified the Ankuar that they had disqualified themselves from filing any further claims and gave the Corona permission to leave. Then the Gleaners joined in, filing their own claims and demands. By this time, Sheffroab personnel were in no mood to consider the claims. Sympathetic station personnel had played bureaucratic games with station records and delayed filing the departure reports for twelve hours. While the Corona slipped away from the station, behind a shielding wall of maintenance craft and an unscheduled evacuation of various processing tanks.

  ~~~~~~

  "I don't like this," Genys said, stepping back from the palm-sized oval viewport that let them see the ti box inside the stasis chamber. "M'kar trusts Dulit. I usually trust her judgment, but …"

  "But what?" Veylen leaned back against the wall in the narrow hallway outside the row of stasis chambers.

  "Those burns and cuts on the Gleaners. The Corona's crew wouldn't have had weapons on them that would cut or burn. Then there's what looks like cooperation between the Ankuar and the Gleaners. Since when does that happen?"

  "Only when it profits them, or they think it'll profit them."

  "Exactly." She sighed and leaned back against the opposite wall. How did she ever luck out, having Veylen assigned as her Exo? She found it hard to believe she had ever been able to be a calm sounding board and support and second pair of eyes, second brain for Rob Hollis when he was captain of the Defender. "What makes me itch, so I want to shed my skin, is the infrenx thing."

  "It's a tattoo, and a mythological creature from Le'anka." He shrugged.

  She didn't buy his "so what?" act for a second. He was just encouraging her to talk, vent, work things out verbally, without feeling like a delusional paranoid. She was grateful.

  "The infrenx burns. Not sure whether it can turn the flames on and off, but it's a bird, a big bird, with long talons. Legends portray it as a messenger from Enlo, with the power to turn back death. One ballad M'kar showed me had an infrenx leading a band of adventurers into the land of the dead to bring back souls. It turns to ash, turns everything around it to ash, and then it regenerates."

  "Sounds like --"

  "Yeah, a Gaean ashwing, a Nisandrian ember bird, a Torykian firebird. On and on." She took a deep breath. "I keep thinking about that battle M’kar and her classmates were involved in at the Academy. A definite attack on the safety and security of the Academy, and through it, the Alliance, and all Talents on Le'anka. Everyone who saw the thing before it self-destructed --"

  "Self-destructed?"

  "It's got a corrosive poison in its talons and stinger that just rotted it from the inside out when it died." Genys shuddered and felt some validation when Veylen swallowed hard. "Those who saw it insist that it was a dymcrait. Besides being mythological, until that battle, it’s the nemesis of the infrenx in Le’ankan lore. Thyal, the only son of Master Reydon and a premier Talent in his own right, was stung by that thing."

  "You think M'kar and her friend are trying to find an infrenx to heal him?" Veylen said, pitching his voice low, as if he feared someone hearing him. He turned to glance at the window into the stasis chamber. "You think we have an infrenx in that little box?"

  "Baby infrenx, maybe. I'm not inclined to risk waking up something that can burn entire cities when it's pissed."

  "Uh, yeah, smart." They shared a grin.

  ~~~~~~

  The Ankuar left Sheffroab. Half a station day later, the Gleaners left. Their path was so clearly the opposite direction from the Ankuar, Genys almost started a betting pool on how far they would go before changing course to rendezvous. She didn't start one, because after discussing all the data with those assigned to watch the Gleaners and Ankuar, someone suggested the Ankuar would change course to rendezvous with the Gleaners. Theory: the galactic garbage pickers were supposed to follow the Ankuar, but when they didn't, they would be hunted down. She recorded the theories in her log and filed them, but walked a thin line between being open with speculations and possibilities and actually reporting them. Someone higher up could be even more paranoid and suspicious than her and would order the Defender to investigate. Since they were already involved.

  "Of course, this is one of those times when being the Nanny Ship won't do us a lick of good," she confided to M'kar, in the dead time of the ship's night. It was just the two of them in the hibernation lab. Genys always had the sneaking suspicion that despite the psionic-dampening properties of the tube, M'kar could still hear her. Those hyper-sharp Nisandrian senses often supplied her with information suitable for blackmail. "I really, really want some boring survey work for a while, know what I mean?"

  M'kar didn't respond. Genys didn't discount the possibility that her half-breed friend might just bring up the conversation at the most awkward time possible. Probably when she had her mouth full of something. It would go up her nose from the effort not to spew it across a table full o
f the worst possible witnesses.

  She was glad she had a friend like M'kar. They both had secrets and problems and things that worried and embarrassed them. That made them loyal and kept both their mouths shut about each other. That was the kind of people Genys knew she could trust.

  The Nisandrians did not leave as soon as Genys wanted them to. She feared someone had been talking to them. She had proof when she met with Administrator Wexel a few hours later for dinner. He showed her security images of the Nisandrians talking with the Gleaners before they left. Genys wondered if the Gleaners had left Sheffroab because they had been talking with the Nisandrians, and not because they had failed the bidding of the Ankuar.

  She then had to explain to Wexel why she got that I've-got-the-ship's-sanitary-disposal-tank-in-my-mouth expression when she saw the picture. About the smelly encounter in Friggley's and M'kar intervening.

  "They're going to be coming after you next," he said. "Even if no one can link your Talents chief to you, there's the fact a Nisandrian woman stepped between you and Gleaners."

  "Plus the whole sticky situation, playing nice with the Nisandrians and allowing them diplomatic courtesies." She sighed and slouched in her chair and decided now was a good time to work on her diet. "They'll probably want a tour of the ship, a chance for their crew to mix with mine for the sake of good relations with the Alliance. If I refuse, I raise their suspicions."

  "Two can use that knife." Wexel's smirk made him look about thirty years younger. "If they expect diplomatic privileges, they'll have to give some diplomatic courtesies, too. Ah, yes, I do miss the days when paperwork involved actual paper. Piles of it."

  Genys thought she might be getting her appetite back.

  In anticipation of mind-hunters getting too close to her crew, Genys stayed up late, studying the records that were M’kar’s province. If M’kar was available to handle her normal duty, monitoring the Talents of the ship, they wouldn’t need to take these precautions.