by Valerie Parv
Facing her, Garrett felt a flash of empathy for her victims. In the studio, playing bestselling science fiction writer to her affable host was very different from how he felt now, like a deer caught in headlights. All the scene lacked was the barrage of cameras revealing his guilt to the world.
Damn it, he wasn’t guilty of anything except trying to save that same world. He’d done it, too, with the help of Elaine’s alien vision and Adam’s technical wizardry.
“Have it your way,” he fired at her, his voice vibrant with anger.
Amelia picked up the coffee and took a sip, her gaze steady over the rim of the mug. “I usually do. Who were you talking to when I came in?”
He kept his gaze averted. “Myself. Writers often do.”
“So do aliens who can contact each other over long distances.”
She’d spoken so mildly that the actual words took a second to hit home. “I don’t know what you’re—”
Her hand sliced the air. “Cut the crap. You were talking to your buddy, Elaine Lovell. I heard you use her name and I know for a fact she’s in Hawai’i with her lover. If the rumors are true, she’s expecting his child in a few months’ time.”
“Where Elaine’s concerned there are always rumors,” he said. “But she is pregnant.”
Amelia’s expression hardened although he’d thrown her a bone of gossip juicy enough to get most talk show hosts salivating. “So there will be another generation of … whatever you are.”
“I’m a man. A writer. Nothing special.”
“A writer whose work reveals a great deal of knowledge about the universe, yet who isn’t a scientist. A man who can go into space and save the world with only basic astronaut training received while he was in the US Air Force. I’d call that special, wouldn’t you?”
He recognized her trick of inviting his confidence. It’s just you and me, having a chat together. You can tell me anything. Her interview subjects often did, and regretted it later when they realized how much they’d revealed to the TV cameras while she sat back and let them.
Refusing to be led, he gave her a palms-up gesture of innocence. This wasn’t his first rodeo either. “I did what needed doing.”
“And if you hadn’t stopped that asteroid, somebody else would have.”
“We’d want to hope so.”
“What was it you really stopped?”
“You have all the answers. You tell me.”
“From what I found on the UFO sites, a spaceship, maybe. Something so terrifying that our government – and the other world leaders they persuaded to join them – cooked up the asteroid story to keep the truth from getting out.” She’d nailed it, but her tone suggested she was still fishing.
He folded his arms. “A fascinating theory.”
“But not a theory to you. You were there and saw what we’re really facing.”
Something in his expression must have given him away because her own eyes darkened with horror. For once, this wasn’t the polished TV presenter drilling for the truth, but a woman Garrett knew he could like a lot under the right circumstances. He resisted the feeling, along with the urge to take her face in his hands and soothe away her look of alarm.
“I’m supposed to be the fiction writer,” he said as innocently as he could.
The alarm persisted. “Except this isn’t fiction. You really met something up there that scared you. They’re coming back, aren’t they?”
Dropping all pretense, he stepped closer to her but kept his arms at his sides. All right, see how she liked the truth. “Not necessarily. We don’t know if they got a message out before we – before I destroyed their ship.”
It was the first time he’d owned his actions out loud to another person. He suspected Elaine and Adam knew how haunted he felt, especially Elaine. Their lovemaking had been as much a joining of minds as bodies, leaving him with few secrets from her.
In the air force, he’d seen action in the Middle East, but war was different from what he’d done to the Kelek. Telling himself it was them or humanity had given him the resolve to aim the nuclear device at the ship knowing that, if it did its job, it would destroy all life on board.
The flux had spared him the sight of the Kelek crew flailing in vacuum as they were blown out into space. Even so, he should have heard screams from within the ship, cut off by the great silence outside it. But concussion had damaged Garrett’s alien hearing for a time. He hadn’t heard the screams in reality, but they’d echoed in his nightmares ever since.
Later on Mount Ekin, he’d met Ryn Zael, the sole survivor of the crew who’d put a face to the beings Garrett had killed. Zael had told him the ship’s name, A’zard. Sometimes Garrett thought it would have been easier if Zael had succeeded in killing him. His guilt over the deaths would be gone.
But Garrett wasn’t ready to give up. He might wake from nightmares drenched in sweat and screaming soundlessly, but he did wake up. He wrote. He ran himself to exhaustion up Mount Ekin, saving more than his sanity, as things turned out. At the site of a thermal energy plant being built on the side of the extinct volcano, Zael had set explosives to trigger with a signal from his cell phone. He’d intended to create an environmental disaster beyond imagining.
His mountain runs had led Garrett to discover several communications black spots. When Zael demanded he be taken to the space center to board the shuttle, Garrett had landed the helicopter in one of the black spots, ending the threat. He’d been forced to kill Zael to stop him, but he could handle that. Zael had tried to kill him first. Destroying a ship full of beings only doing their jobs was far harder to live with.
“Garrett? Are you okay?” She’d asked out of concern for him, not in the manner of an investigative journalist.
“I’m all right,” he insisted, his voice unsteady.
“But you don’t like what you had to do.”
“It was … necessary.”
She cupped her hands around the mug. “An asteroid would have been easier on you, wouldn’t it?”
“Who’s asking – you or the TV journalist?”
“Both,” she said, sounding apologetic.
He hadn’t heard this tone from her before and wasn’t sure how to respond. “I wouldn’t have served in the military if I were a pacifist,” he said. “But I’d rather not deal in wholesale death.”
“Whereas your opponents had no such compunction,” she guessed.
“No.”
Setting the mug aside, she stepped into his personal space. “Who were they, Garrett? Who are you?”
He didn’t mind her closeness this time – wanted her even closer, if he was honest with himself. Was it because of the caring in her voice, or because she was beautiful and desirable, and it had been a long time between serious relationships?
He’d already told her more than was wise. He couldn’t let her lure him into confessions he had no right to make, for Adam’s and Elaine’s sakes, if not for his own. Amelia wasn’t his confessor. He’d get no absolution from his crimes by sharing them with her. Instead, he’d be buying the beacons a shipload of trouble when Amelia used the information against them, as her job would require sooner or later.
Turning on the charm that served him so well with his readers and the media in general, he let a smile play over his face. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
Anger replaced her concern. “I do want to know and I will find out the whole story, one way or another.”
Her expression said that trusting him was the last thing she’d do. Regret coiled through him as she stepped back, ending any promise of closeness. He wanted it back, even as he saw it was useless. Should he trust her instead of battling this situation alone? Perhaps if she hadn’t been what she was, and he hadn’t been what he was, he could have taken the risk.
She carried the mug to the sink and dumped the contents. Anything he could say would only fuel her anger, so he kept his mouth shut, disturbed by the strength of the temptation to open up to her.
A vibra
tion had him pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. The screen showed the state governor’s private number. Shana Akers looking for Adam. As one of the kingdom’s Indigenous Mayat people, Shana possessed her own kind of mysticism. It was thanks to her that Adam had been able to contact the Prana homeworld. The two were so close, Garrett shouldn’t be surprised if Shana had sensed Adam’s disappearance.
About to push past him to leave, Amelia stopped, and he saw her go on alert when he said Shana’s name.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said for the benefit of both women. If he’d been Shana, he’d be tearing the island apart to find Adam. “Amelia Takei is here. She was with him when he vanished,” he added.
Shana was quick to take the hint. “I’ll send some people out to the house.”
“It won’t help. He didn’t fall, he didn’t take off, he simply disappeared.”
The TV presenter gestured for him to give her the phone. “Amelia wants a word,” he said and put the device on speaker.
“More than a word, an explanation,” Amelia told Shana.
Shana slid into politician-to-media mode. “When I have it, you’ll be the first to know.”
Chapter 3
The Kelek helmsman glanced over his shoulder. “Approaching target waypoints, captain.”
“Match the moon’s rotation. Keep the satellite between us and the Earth. I don’t want them to know we’re here until I’m ready to reveal our presence.” Then she would go in with all guns blazing. Her own kind of guns, anyway.
Captain Akia Zael gave orders with only half her concentration, her thoughts busy with other matters. Her people knew their tasks well; they didn’t need her second-guessing them. Her ship, Storm, would soon shelter on the far side of the satellite, a body her charts identified as Ya-Ska – the child – and the Earthers called the Moon.
Given the number of moons Akia had visited, she smiled. May as well call their planet the World, although she’d come across variations of that often enough, too. The name would serve for the mission’s duration, just as she would identify Earth by its local name instead of its Kelek name, Ya-Stin – the parent.
Lagrangian points were also an Earth term, referring to what she called waypoints, areas where the combined gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon roughly balanced each other out. The effect allowed her ship to be synchronized with the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, so that Storm effectively hovered over the satellite’s far side.
Ya-Ska’s – the Moon’s, she amended – rotation caused one side to always face Earth, and the other side to face away. Human missions to the far side had been few and strictly observational, she had discovered, perfect for her needs. At a mean distance of three hundred and sixty-five thousand kilometers from Earth, the journey to their moon took humans a handful of days, but her ship could cover the distance far more quickly, as the humans would soon find out.
The far side was also shielded from Earth’s radio noise, enabling Storm to pick up signals from other Kelek ships far out in the void, as well as the deeply redshifted signals from the early history of the universe, before the stars and galaxies were formed. Not that she’d have much time for research. A pity, as there was much to be learned from this region of space.
“Captain!” The helm officer’s urgent cry interrupted her thoughts.
“What is it?”
“We just experienced a huge power drain of some kind.”
Instantly alert, Akia leaned forward, annoyed not to have noticed the outage herself. Usually she was in tune with her ship enough to feel every variation in its rhythm. The duration of the outage must have been barely measurable. “Source?”
“Unknown. Everything is back to normal now. No damage.”
“Monitor for any more outages and let me know immediately.”
Acknowledgments echoed back to her. They were in unfamiliar space. Anything could have caused a drop in their power levels. With no adverse effects reported, she decided to worry when and if it happened again.
She returned her attention to the mosaic of impact craters, ridges and peaks on the body below them, the details clear on her chair’s viewscreen. Gradually she became aware of a presence at her elbow. “Kam,” she said without looking up.
Kamarg Iroi was one of the most powerful adepts in the Kelek fleet. She’d found long ago that he broadcast a kind of carrier wave of his own. Perhaps being his lover had something to do with her ability to detect it.
“Captain,” he said in his deep, mellow voice. When they were alone, he called her Akia, but never in front of the crew. While she appreciated the consideration, they both knew she would have tolerated no less.
“There’s no sign of the Earthers detecting our arrival,” she murmured. “Do you feel anything from the beacons?”
Kam’s adept sense had guided them to the blue-green planet turning beneath them. The brief distress signal they’d picked up from Rikel Zimon’s ship, the A’zard, before it was destroyed had confirmed there were beacons in this region. She hadn’t needed the message, although she was grateful for it for personal reasons. On his own, Kam had sensed the beacons of Earth from light years away.
“They know we’re coming,” he confirmed, “but something has happened.”
She did look up then. “Are you planning to share it with me?”
He didn’t react to her dry tone. “Of course, captain. One of the beacon triad has vanished.”
“What do you mean, vanished?”
“One minute I could sense his presence, the next he was gone.”
“Gone where?”
His narrow shoulders lifted a fraction. “I have no other details.”
“The remaining two beacons?”
“The watcher and the listener have begun to sense us, although the disappearance of their messenger is confusing them and possibly impeding their abilities.”
An unexpected bonus for her. Bracing her elbow on her chair arm, she rested her chin on one hand. “I thought an adept could only sense the presence of the beacons. You seem to have more information.”
“I am unusual in that regard,” he said without a trace of arrogance. “If I concentrate, I can see them in my mind. It’s difficult to describe.”
“To one without your inborn talent,” she finished for him. “It’s all right, I know my limitations.”
“You are a master geoengineer,” he said, his face impassive.
”True.” She had her own special skills. When it came to what she could do, she also lacked arrogance. While still a student, she had discovered a talent for manipulating weather and geological events, never suspecting it would lead to the captaincy of her own ship. Even so, there were times when she’d give a lot to have his abilities.
Like most of the Kelek deep-space explorers, her previous captain had preferred to deal in slaves to finance his voyages. Then one of his captives had escaped and killed him with his own ceremonial dagger. As senior officer, she had succeeded to the job and immediately decreed an end to slave trafficking aboard her ship. Her crew had been uneasy until she’d shown them the profits to be made using geoengineering to subdue the systems they visited.
There were no more hulls filled with misery and death. No more negotiating with the scum of the universe to take the living cargo off their hands. Why go through that when the threat of a devastating quake or tsunami could achieve so much more? Usually, only one demonstration was required to bring a planet to its knees.
“What else do you sense?” she asked Kam.
His look told her he knew she wasn’t asking about the beacons this time. How well he understood her. “We are close to the place where the A’zard was destroyed.”
“And my son?”
“He escaped the destruction of the ship and died on Earth, at the hands of a beacon.”
She twisted her hands together. “The one who disappeared?”
“No, the listener.”
She hadn’t wanted to believe Kam’s assertion that her son, Ryn
, had been an untrained adept. She still thought of him as a soldier like his father, Gath, who had also died in a distant corner of the galaxy. Ryn had been more like Akia than she’d guessed. Would he have lived if he’d been trained as an adept instead of a military man? Not that his father would have allowed such a thing. To Gath, scientists were of lesser value than soldiers. Akia’s passion for weather, even when weaponized, had annoyed him, mainly because he hadn’t understood it. His stubbornness ultimately drove them apart.
At least she’d been open with her partner; Ryn had chosen to conceal his talents from everyone. Speculation wouldn’t bring him back. All she could do was avenge his death.
She forced herself to ask the question she’d been avoiding. “This close to Earth, can you sense what happened?”
Kam nodded. “The truth is in the listener’s mind. Hoping to reach Prana, your son had taken hostages, demanding to be put aboard a space vehicle being launched from the planet. He was being flown to the space center in a helicopter piloted by the listener when there was a struggle.”
“They crashed?”
He shook his head. “The pilot set them down in an area of jungle and they fought. Your son died bravely.”
“How many of them did he take with him?” That was the real measure of bravery as the Kelek understood it.
Kam paused, an answer in itself. “He tried to sabotage a volcanic energy project. Had he succeeded, the cost in human lives would have been great.”
“But he failed.” Her tone was edged with bitterness. “A useless death.”
“As useless as revenge,” Kam said.
Her gaze sharpened. “Are you saying I should accept that Prana is as lost to us as my son?”
“Two beacons on their own can’t show us the way.”
“Then we must locate the third, and force the three of them to do our bidding. I’ve already detected the energy field called the flux. The beacons must be made to take us through it to Prana. We will make the journey in my son’s name.”
Kam looked grave. “Captain Zimon had the same idea. His ship was destroyed and his crew lost.”