by blood wind
“I did not want to wake you.” She lifted her hands to his cheeks, brought his face down to hr level and took his mouth in a brazen kiss that left nothing to the imagination of those watching. It also produced a much loved, but at the moment, much unwanted response in her lover. He pulled his mouth from beneath her assault and took her by the upper arms to set her away from him.
“This is not the place to be doing this.”
“I don't want you to go!”
“I don't want to go, but I have orders, Bridget.”
“Kam, please!” she pleaded with him, her hands digging into his forearms. “Tell them to send someone else!”
“I can't do that,” he said sternly. He slid his hands down to hers and gripped them tightly. “You know I can't.”
“If you go, he will-” she started to say but a harsh voice cut her off.
“What the hell is the meaning of this, Cree?”
Cree stiffened, cursing under his breath. He let go of Bridget's hands and turned to face Admiral Kahn as he strode toward them. He put Bridget behind him, protecting her with his body.
“Dr. Dunne came down to see me off, Sir,” explained the Reaper.
“How touching,” the Admiral sneered. “Stand aside, Cree.”
A low warning growl issued from the Reaper's throat. Instinctively, he reached down for Bridget's hand, not surprised when she clutched his as though he had thrown her a lifeline. “I will not let you harm my woman, Sir.” There were gasps from those gathered both inside the airlock and on the gangway. Men backed away from the confrontation and scurried off, not wanting to be a part of this.
Kahn's eyebrow quirked upward. “Have I given you any indication that it was my intention to harm the lady? ” Cree held the Admiral's stare then, not seeing any danger to Bridget in the man's gaze, shook his head. “No, Sir.”
“Then stand aside.”
Cree hated backing down, but he had no choice. Not only did this man outrank him, Kahn would send him to the nether reaches of space if he did not stop provoking him. With his jaw firmly set, Cree stepped away from Bridget, their fingers lingering until all contact was broken by the separation.
“Now,” Kahn said in a reasonable voice. “You have said your goodbye, Dr. Dunne. Lieutenant Cree has a mission to perform and he cannot perform it while standing on this gangway. I want you to go back to his quarters and remain there until he returns.” Bridget knew why Tylan Kahn had come this morning: he hadn't trusted her to do what she had sworn to do. That she had proved him right had turned his gaze dark with irritation. She turned to Cree, wanting to tell him what the Admiral had planned, but found her lover looking down at the metal floor.
“Do as he says, Bridget,” Cree said without looking up.
“Kam…”
Cree lowered his voice so that only she could hear him. “Will you shame me by arguing with me when I tell you to do something, woman?”
She knew he would believe he had lost face with Kahn if she did, so she ducked her head. “No.”
“Then go back to our quarters.”
“You will be careful?”
His head came up and he locked his eyes with hers. “I am always careful.” Kahn folded his arms, wondering if Bridget would say anything else. When she didn't, but turned and ran as fast as she could away from them, he turned the full force of his displeasure on Cree. “We will discuss your unseemly behavior when you return, Lieutenant. Dismissed!”
Cree nodded, spun on his heel, and entered the ship. If he stayed one nanosecond more, he knew he'd either wind up in the brig or swinging from a stanchion in the air lock. Once inside Captain Feis Coure's ship, he slammed into the Shepherd's chair and turned so that no one on board could see the hopelessness on his face. He listened without interest or comment as the other five members of this strange crew went down the list of pre-flight checks. When it was his turn, he gave his readings in a monotone, and then slumped down in the chair, tuning out everything around him.
Something wasn't right, he told himself later as the Med Off injected him with hypersleep. He could sense it.
And he knew Bridget could, too.
That was what worried him most of all.
Chapter 20
THINGS DID not go well on Cree's last mission to Earth. Everything that could possibly go wrong, did. From the moment they entered Terran orbit, one thing after another caused delays that put them weeks behind in the Retrievals. Solar flares drove them out of orbit and behind the protection of Terra's satellite moon before they could be detected by Terran radar. Malfunctions in the ship's sensory probes caused further headaches. The communication console went haywire and started blaring some hideous Terran music called bluegrass. The warp drives shut down. The ship's cybot developed a virus and kept banging into the ship's hull.
“Can't you turn off that gods-be-damning screeching?” bellowed Captain Coure.
Lieutenant Saur shrugged. “I wish to the gods I could, Sir,” he said, sick of the twanging string instruments. “Does anyone have a notion what an orange blossom special is?”
Cree could have told them it was a train, but he doubted anyone really cared. He resumed his watch on the sonar and kept his mouth shut.
“Cree?” Commander Hesar asked, scooting his chair over to the Reaper. “Do you think the Resistance is behind this because you're on board?” He wagged his brows at Cree.
Kamerone Cree stared at the Keeper for a long time, then slowly smiled. He lowered his voice. “I'm sure you'd know more about that than I would, Commander.”
Tealson Hesar grinned in return. “Good man,” he stated, and then rolled his chair back to his console.
“'Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me,'” Cree quoted. He heard Hesar chuckling.
“I do not need this now!”
Every eye turned to Captain Coure who sweated profusely. Faces paled and eyes grew round in their sockets.
All except Cree's. He ducked his head, grinning maniacally.
“Cree!”
The Reaper pushed back from his console. “Aye, Captain?”
“I am in Transition!” the Captain of the Sirocco screamed.
“Aye, Sir, I believe you are,” Cree agreed. He knew there was no one else on board the ship capable of handling an enraged Reaper except him. He reached out, took Coure's arm. “Let's go.”
“This can not be happening!” Feis Coure exclaimed.
“Keep telling yourself that.” Cree tightened his grip for his Reaper brother was altering rapidly.
Tealson Hesar watched until Cree had their captain tucked safely away in one of the containment cells. The loud thumps and shrieks set everyone's hair on end and he was grateful Cree was on board. But, he thought, as he returned to his communication console, if Cree hadn't been on board, Coure would not have gone into Transition in the first place. In the nine years he'd been on Coure's crew, he'd never once seen the Reaper alter. And he never wanted to see it again.
Cree returned to his console and sat down. “How far are we from home, Commander?” he asked Hesar.
“Roughly sixteen hours. Why?”
“We've got a slight problem.”
“Oh, god!” Hesar gasped. “Don't tell me you're going into-”
Cree shook his head. “No.”
Hesar sighed heavily. “Thank Alel for that! Then what's wrong?”
Cree ran a hand through his thick curls. “We had approximately eight pints of blood left on board when we left Terran orbit.
That should have been enough for both of us. Feis and I were both transfused before we left the station.” Hesar frowned. “And?”
“Someone miscalculated, Teal. Two Reapers, five months? There should have been around a dozen or more pints left upon return. No one counted on one of us going into Transition.”
“Damn,” Hesar breathed. He looked toward the sleep units where four very important Terran females were lying. “Are you going to have to…”
“I hope not. It will be necessa
ry for me to give the Captain at least five of those remaining pints to keep him from going insane with hunger. Just keep your fingers crossed that I won't need any more than two pints to see me home to FSK-14.” Hesar shuddered. What the hell would he do if Cree went into Transition, too?
The Reaper turned away from the worried look on the Keeper's face. He stared blankly at his navigational screen. It wasn't necessary for Hesar to know that he would remand himself into one of the containment cells where recalcitrant Retrievals were kept should he feel the telltale signs of Transition coming on. That he was willing to subject himself to certain misery and possible lingering death to prevent even one drop of blood from being taken from the Terran women amused him.
Ah, Bridget. Look what you've done to me, woman.
****
BRIDGET SAT before the magnificent sweep of Tylan Kahn's port windows and stared out at the array of passing asteroids beyond the thick Siliplex. Behind her, the soothing sounds of David Arkenstone's Spirit Wind played.
“Extraordinary,” she heard Kahn say. “Our Rysalian music pales in comparison.” She swiveled away from the lonely view, glancing only cursorily at a ship coming in for docking. “It's more than twenty years old.”
“Music, though, is timeless,” he replied and closed his eyes, waving his hand in the air as though he were conducting an invisible orchestra.
Bridget couldn't help but admire the man as he lay sprawled in his chair. He looked deviously handsome in a white Chrystallusian silk shirt that he had left unbuttoned to the waist. With his tight black leather pants and boots, the golden Chalean hoop in his left ear, all the man needed was a red scarf around his thick mop of black curls and an eye patch to make him look every inch the pirate.
“Pirate?” he questioned, opening one eye.
She blushed to the tips of her toes. Even after five months of living with the man and his uncanny psychic powers, he still unnerved her.
“I don't mean to,” he saw, drawing in his long legs. “Forgive me. It's a political habit I have. My surrogate mother taught me well. She mistrusts everything and everyone.”
Bridget understood. “Know your enemies?”
He grinned. “I try not to do it when I'm with you, but the truth is: your thoughts are so distinct they just come at me like laser blasts.” He sat up in his chair. “Most people shield what they are thinking when they're around men like me.”
“I had no trouble hiding my thoughts from Cree. Why not you?”
“I don't know,” Kahn replied. “Maybe my powers are more advanced than his.”
“Or you've had less tampering with your mind,” she observed.
“Now that is a distinct possibility,” Kahn agreed. He took a sip of his Chalean brandy, then swirled the remainder around in his glass. “You know, of course, what they did to him when he was a boy?”
“The implants?”
“Aye.”
“I was told we had to be extremely careful not to dislodge one of them when he was undergoing reinforcement.”
“I doubt you could have.”
Bridget played with a loose thread on her skirt. “What happens to all the Reaper cadets if the Resistance wins?”
“When we win,” he corrected. He shrugged. “They will be rounded up and confined until we can deal with them. The platinum implants will be deactivated since it would be dangerous to try to remove them. Their parasites will have to be terminated by whatever means the Ministry of Public Health has devised. But most important of all, their minds must be wiped clean of Empire teaching.”
“Cree included?”
Kahn nodded. “In order for him and the other Reaper caste to exist in harmony with the rest of us, they have to be like the rest of us. All those merciless tendencies and brutal instincts have to be purged. If not, they will be as great a danger to us after the rebellion as they are now.”
****
DR. HAEL Sejm straightened up from the microscan and shivered. “Ugly little thing, isn't it?” Dr. LeJong Kym acknowledged the remark with a slight inclination of her elegant head. The Chrystallusian biochemist removed the culture from beneath the microscan and placed it carefully inside the containment field.
“Is it safe in there?” Admiral Cree asked.
Beryla Dean put a reassuring hand on her lover's shoulder. “Do you think we would take a chance of it not being?”
“Please roll up your sleeve, Admiral,” Dr. Kym asked.
The vacuum needle pierced Drae's flesh and he winced as the thick liquid spread. “By the gods, that hurts!”
“But think of the benefits,” Dr. Sejm suggested. “The alternative to injection has an even more painful sting, I am told.”
“Precisely so,” Dr. Kym agreed as she withdrew the needle.
“You should retire to your quarters and rest. The antitoxin will take full effect within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. In the meantime, you will no doubt experience some nausea, headache perhaps and mild fever. Nothing to worry about.” She put her hands into the pockets of her lab coat and cocked her head to one side. “There might possibly be a touch of joint discomfort.
Nothing that you haven't experienced before during your yearly viral inoculations. ” She glanced at Sejm. “Is there anything you would add?”
“Consume plenty of liquids,” advised Sejm.
Drae Cree rolled down his sleeve, frowning at the continued string that had raised a good -sized lump on his upper arm. He nodded absently at Hael Sejm's suggestion. “Who is next on your list?”
“Tylan Kahn,” Dr. Kym replied. “After him, the five Reapers and each of their four man crews.”
“The five Reapers and their crews who just happened to dock on FSK-14 within an hour of one another.” Beryla laughed.
“And who have been ordered to report for their annual antiviral injections.”
“Ninety percent of station personnel are cowering in their quarters with that many Reapers on board, ” said Drae. “Once Kamerone and Coure arrive, there should be little or no one about to see what we're doing.” He rubbed his arm and felt a wave of nausea leap up his throat.
“I think I'd better get you to bed,” Beryla told him.
“Good idea,” Sejm agreed. “I'll take the injection to my son. We won't need you until the Sirocco docks, Beryla.” Once Beryla and her lover left the lab, Hael Sejm went to the refrigeration unit and removed thirty-two vials of antitoxin, placing them on a tray with just that many syringes. She began loading the syringes with a dark tyrilian liquid. Dr. Kym watched her intently.
“I will take these with me,” Sejm suggested. “You can do the others when they arrive, if you will.” Dr. Kym nodded, mentally calculating the amount of syringes she needed. “Kamerone Cree's crew as well as Coure's. That's ten.”
“Nine,” Sejm corrected.
“Nine?” Kym calculated again, then shook her head. “I make it ten, Hael.”
“Kamerone Cree is to be given the same inoculation you gave his father,” said Hael.
Dr. Kym froze. She lifted her head and one think black brow arched upward. “What do you mean?” A murderous glint sparked in Hael Sejm's eyes. “Did you think I would let that monster live? I wish for the son what I have set into motion for the father!”
LeJong stared at her. “You can't kill Kamerone. We need him!”
“No, we don't,” Hael snapped. “Once we start, there will be no obstacles in our path. We don't need Kamerone Cree to win this war!” She picked up her tray and left the lab.
LeJong sat down behind her desk and stared at the remaining vials of antitoxin in the refrigeration unit. Ten vials, ten lives, she mused. Not counting Kamerone Cree, only forty-one chosen men were to be left virus-free after the rebellion was over and the retrovirus had been spread through the exhaust systems of all fifteen space stations and leaked into the atmosphere over Rysalia Prime. Only forty-one men among the eight hundred and seventy-nine thousand Rysalian men and boys.
R4V7, she had named it: Revenge f
or the V-7.
Kym glanced up at the memorial plaque that the Daughters of the Multitude had commissioned after the Plague had destroyed the entire female population of the Rysalian Empire more than forty years ago.
“Two hundred twenty-three thousand, six hundred and fourteen,” whispered Dr. LeJong Kym. Every woman from eleven worlds knew that total.
“The men of Rysalia condemned us to a lifetime of hell,” Hael Sejm had once said. “They made us pay for their mistakes. Their desire to be the masters of the universe! If we, in turn, can find a way to sterilize them without them knowing it, then we can stop this insane program of warrior making! We can stop the forced abortion of innocent children! We can stop the killing of men who want to stay on Earth and live with the women they have come to love! We can stop the heartache of our Terran sisters who are brought here against their wills!”
“We can fashion a retrovirus similar to V-7, but with safer results,” Dr. Dean had suggested. “Our virus will sterilize the males, not kill them as theirs did the Rysalian women. Wouldn't you call that tit for tat?” LeJong lowered her head. Tit for tat wasn't how she would describe the retrovirus that had come out of Dr. Sejm's lab. The virus that was about to be released on the Empire was even more destructive than V-7. It did not sterilize; it destroyed. The virus Hael Sejm had designed in her lab of horrors would kill within a matter of minutes. Men would drop like flies and neither Beryla Dean nor any of the other men and women involved in the Resistance knew that.
“I wish for the son what I have set in motion for the father!”
Dr. Kym looked down at the syringe that had shot its payload into Drae Cree's body. The liquid inside the syringe was lethal. It would take several hours to thoroughly saturate the Admiral's body but when it did, there would be no antidote for the virulent poison that had been given to him. It would appear as though there had been an intense reaction to the antitoxin; there would be no telltale signs that the man had been murdered.
“Drae Cree must not survive the Rebellion,” Sejm had declared months before. “He can and will cause us great trouble if he is not put out of commission early on. We will inoculate him first and he will die in agony, Beryla at his side to keep her out of our way!”