He opened the door.
Bleak darkness spread across her middle, devouring her feelings, blanketing them.
Forcing her limbs to move, she walked stiffly out of the room and heard him shut the door behind her.
Chapter Thirteen
Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187
Bedivere leaned against the door, his arm stiff, his forehead resting on it, letting his heart calm and the raging need to quiet, even a little.
He had been so close to telling her about Devlin. Right at the end, when she had asked that final question. The fear had leapt at the finality in her voice and that was when he had considered telling her Devlin had been lying all along, just to claw back some sort of hope that this wasn’t as final as it seemed.
Yet relying on his own instincts and decisions had proved so disastrous, he didn’t have the courage to do that anymore. Everyone thought Devlin was a great man. Brant didn’t give a damn that he might be Varkan. There may have been other people who had seen Devlin fall that night and had come to the same conclusions as Bedivere, yet they were not heralding the fact to the world, either. They were letting Devlin keep his secret.
Why should Bedivere ruin it for Catherine? She was doing work she liked and everyone seemed to find it completely natural that she would end up working with Devlin. They were a good pairing.
He trembled as he realized how close he had come to ruining this for her. First, the kiss, then the truth about Devlin. He was an asshole. No matter what she said about loving him, flaws and all, he didn’t deserve her, not when he could so selfishly consider kissing her or ruining her good opinion of Devlin.
The kiss would have merely complicated things, yet he still ached from the need to kiss her. It had throbbed in him like a fever, stronger even than the cravings for peace and escape that had stepped up the volume to screaming pitch as soon as he had closed the door and faced Cat alone.
They were making themselves felt now. He was trembling, not with the fallout over talking to her, but with the yearning for the quick hit, the mental escape into oblivion. It was a siren song in his mind.
He closed his eyes, trying to find calm and failing.
* * * * *
Devlin’s gaze found her almost as soon as she stepped out of the room. He beckoned her over to him and Catherine moved with as much grace as she could muster. It was as if her body wasn’t her own and she had to concentrate on walking.
The people in the room had diminished. There was just the core household now—Connell, Lilly and Brant, Yennifer and Nichol, Devlin and Mael and Wayna. More and more, Devlin was including the pilots in his war councils, because he had to turn more of the responsibilities of the Hana over to them.
As Catherine reached Devlin’s side, she saw from the corner of her eye that Connell and Brant were standing with their heads together, talking quietly. Both of them looked grave and Connell glanced at her as they spoke. His expression was accusatory. Did he blame her for something?
Then Brant headed for the room she had just left.
With a jolt, she realized that they were circling the metaphorical wagons, protecting Bedivere.
From her.
Which was laughable, given the damage he had just handed out. Unless…was there even more about that darkness in his recent past that he had not told her? If he couldn’t remember everything then there was more to know. Why couldn’t he remember? That alone was a frightening question.
Devlin touched her arm. His touch was warm and after the chill of the stripped-bare room, it was welcome, too. “You look like hell,” he murmured.
“I feel worse.” Her voice was a croak.
“Bedivere?” he asked even more softly.
She nodded and just barely held back even more tears, narrowly avoiding making herself look even more pathetic. “We…settled things.”
His hand curved around her arm in a comforting hold. “I know it feels bad right at this moment,” he said. “Only, now you can move on.”
“That’s doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Then why are you here, Catherine?” he asked.
Catherine looked around the room. Absolutely no one was paying them any attention, a rare event that could only happen in this room, with these people. Then she looked Devlin in the eye. “Bedivere reminded me how much I like the work we’re doing. How it makes me feel to see the changes we make.”
Devlin’s black eyes were steady. Contemplative. Then the corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile. “Good,” he said. His voice was still low and now it took on a husky quality. “He made you see the difference you make everywhere you go. I should thank him.”
Catherine looked at him, startled. “The difference I make? It’s your work, your goals. I just help.”
“And I’ve just let you think that for far too long.” His hand tightened for a moment then he let it drop, as if he was suddenly aware of his grip. “Let’s go home. You look like you could use a drink. I know I do.”
Home. To the Hana Stareach.
It felt oddly right…even as it sounded wrong in her mind.
She shivered. The chill from that bare room was lingering. It made her think of her big room aboard the Hana and the bare walls there. As Devlin lead her to the front door where Zoey stood waiting patiently to open it for them, she said, “By the way, I’m going to be drawing heavily on energy reserves for a while.”
Devlin looked at her and raised a brow.
“There’s a few things I want to do to my room…if you don’t mind?”
Devlin’s smile was answer enough.
* * * * *
Bedivere knew it was Brant pushing on the door from the other side, even before he hissed through the crack, “Bedivere! Let me in!”
He moved back, taking his weight off the door.
Brant slid in and shut it behind him. He looked at Bedivere, measuring him. “No open wounds.” There was no humor in his voice.
“They’re all internal,” Bedivere said. The shaking was growing worse.
Brant noticed. “Glave above. Whose smart idea was it to have a showdown with her now?”
“I don’t think I was ever going to be ready for it.” His teeth were chattering. He was so cold.
Brant turned him around and walked him over to the bed. “Come on. Time for sleep, or whatever you do to calm down.” He helped him lower himself to the mattress.
Bedivere resisted lying down. “I’ve slept enough. It doesn’t help anymore.”
“Fine.” Brant pulled the warm covering off the bed and wrapped it around Bedivere’s shoulders. Bedivere pulled it in closer. The warmth was good. The shivering went on, though.
Brant swore softly and sank down onto the bed next to him. “What can I do? How can I help?”
Bedivere shook his head. “It’s done now.” He meant merely that the confrontation with her was over. Then the deeper meaning of what he had said registered and echoed her final question. The wave of agony swept over him and he dropped his head and screwed up his eyes, fighting the reaction, trying to hide it.
Brant’s arm came around him. “Cry, you stupid idiot. Why do you think we have tear ducts?”
“I don’t…I can’t…” It was all locked up in his chest. He sucked in another shuddering breath. “I thought I might be able to…get her back. I just couldn’t do it to her, in the end.”
“And you keep saying you’re not good enough for her….” Brant sighed. He pulled Bedivere in closer, comforting him. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”
Bedivere smiled even as he wept. That told him he might just survive this, after all.
Chapter Fourteen
Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187
The door to Devlin’s captain quarters swept open as soon as she got near it. Catherine was still getting used to the new privileges Devlin had given her without asking. She was free to walk into his
private quarters without clearance, which she found odd. As a captain of her own ship, she would not have allowed anyone such freedom. Even though they were technically private quarters, she knew very well that most of the really critical decisions were reached right there in the private office at the front of the quarters, where the entire flight deck was not witness to the transactions.
That meant that anyone with influence on the ship would want to conduct any business with the captain of the ship in private, where they could negotiate a better deal.
It paid to keep everyone at arm’s length and Devlin was no fool when it came to handling people. Except that she was apparently an exception.
“Devlin?” she called out as soon as she crossed the threshold.
“In here, Catherine.” It sounded as though he was in the sitting room just behind the office. The sleeping quarters were beyond that room—or at least, she supposed they were. She had never been beyond the sitting room.
Nichol August was sprawled on the sofa opposite Devlin’s comfortable, upright chair. He had a glass in his hand and looked up at Catherine, his eyes narrowed.
“Nichol,” Catherine acknowledged.
“Catherine,” he drawled back. He drained the glass, put it on the table beside him and flexed to his feet. “Time I was heading back, anyway. Yennifer will be home by now.”
Catherine didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Nichol. He was a good mayor and did seem to have the best interests of the village as his priority. Perhaps she simply didn’t know him well enough.
“Wait for me here?” Devlin asked her as he stood, too.
She nodded.
Devlin walked Nichol to the door of the suite. She could hear them talking quietly, but didn’t strain to hear the actual words. Devlin was a fully functioning and self-aware adult. He didn’t need paranoid warnings to trip him up.
Devlin came back into the sitting room, flexing his shoulders and stretching. “Nichol August and I go back a long way. From before I met you here on Charlton. I lived in his village when I first arrived here.”
“He was mayor even back then?”
“I may have helped his ambitions along here and there.” Devlin smiled.
“I don’t trust him,” Catherine said, then grimaced. So much for not tripping Devlin up with useless warnings.
“You’ll notice there isn’t a glass on my side of the table?”
There wasn’t.
“Nichol August has a large ego and self-centered vision, which makes him completely predictable,” Devlin added. “However, he has managed to go far with such short-sighted flaws and that makes him powerful in his own way. He’s a useful ally. That’s all.”
As he spoke, he swept up the glass and bottle of liquor and put them away, leaving the table bare. “Have a seat,” he added.
“You asked me to stop by,” she reminded him.
“I did. Although that didn’t mean drop everything and run here.” His smile was warm, though.
“I noticed that the docking schedule has us listed for another month,” she said as she sat down. “No plans to leave Charlton yet?”
Devlin shook his head. “It hasn’t ended up being much of a vacation. The arrival of the aliens means the world is coming here instead of me having to go out and meet it halfway. We can do more good if we stay right here.”
“I agree,” Catherine told him. “I just wondered what your reasons were.”
“They certainly weren’t to torture you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I know being in Charlton is difficult for you.”
“Not so much, anymore,” Catherine said, although her heart started thudding anyway. At least it wasn’t one of the wholesale panic attacks she had suffered through for the first few days after Bedivere had turned her away. She was sleeping through the night now. Almost.
She kept her smile in place. Devlin didn’t need to hear any of that, even though she suspected he was already aware of most of it. He had ways of learning about the private concerns of everyone on board. She had seen him invite Varkan from the far end of the ship to his room to sit down and talk through their problems. There was more than one village in Charlton and probably cities and towns across the galaxy that had received anonymous credits that got them out of tight spots and economic squeezes.
Just having the Hana Stareach visit a planet could stimulate that planet’s economy for a year or more, as the excitement and activity surrounding Devlin’s visit reached a crescendo.
Staying here in Charlton made sense for more reasons than the direct aid and leadership Devlin was supplying. Catherine had been working for weeks to help with the re-fitting of docking bays into living quarters. Even some of the bigger ships had been attached to the superstructure with permanent docking collars and turned into living space as well. In the last few weeks, they had managed to find homes for all of the official immigrants and a lot of the unofficial ones, too.
It had been Devlin who had resolved the stupid argument over which village got to locate on the sun-side of the city and who missed out.
“Give the whole city some spin,” he told Lilly at one of the lengthy admin meetings where the subject had come up yet again. “Like the old space stations. Have it rotate, slowly enough so that ships can dock without too many troubles, in a way that gives every side of the city a few hours of sunlight each.”
“The mathematics and engineering needed to pull that off would be impossible,” Lilly protested.
Devlin nodded to where Connell and Yennifer were sitting, both frowning and with far-seeing looks in their eyes. “Ask them. Ask any Varkan. It’s not impossible and they’ll find a way.”
And so a way had been found. The firing up of the cannibalized engines from the ships that had been used for living quarters was set for a few days’ time. Once the city had spin, then all that would be needed would be occasional thrusts to keep the spin stable.
Bedivere didn’t attend any of the meetings. She hadn’t seen him since confronting him in that bare, cold room and she was glad of the reprieve. She knew he was still in the city, because Brant and the others would refer to him in passing in casual conversation. No one avoided talking about him in front of her. No one went out of their way to speak of him directly to her, either.
From references and implication, she knew that Bedivere was spending a lot of time on the Aliza, investigating the very few leads they had about the aliens—the Periglus, they had been named by someone with an ear for the ancient languages. Catherine recognized the roots of the word. Danger. It was a fitting name for the aliens. Even Yennifer had stopped insisting that perhaps they were not as dangerous as everyone supposed.
Connell travelled with Bedivere on many of his trips and was frank about their discoveries. Most of the new information they had about the Periglus came from their jumps to Kashya, where they would float among the abandoned ships and once or twice, enter one of them.
“These things are big,” Connell said. “Everything is made for someone at least twice as high as us. Maybe three times. We can’t figure out if they sit, or not. If they do, then they’re even bigger than we thought. Wider, too.”
Zoologists, who had spent their lives studying non-sentient animals, were suddenly faced with analyzing a new sentient race based on circumstantial evidence alone. One of the best of them, Draven Tucker, went with Bedivere and Connell on a handful of tours to Kashya. His report to the village mayors and reeves and the planetary governors who travelled to hear him speak had been stiff, formal and inconclusive, but what he had said after the evening presentation had ended and he’d been plied with Brant’s brandy, had been the stuff of nightmares.
“Oh, they have DNA, yes,” Tucker had said expansively in response to someone’s question. “Of course they do. It’s the basic building block of the universe. We also believe they’re warm-blooded, that is, if we understand some of the equipment and facilities on the ship. They are very big. The biggest a warm-blooded species can evolve to, on a world w
ith near-Terran gravity. As that is the type of world they chose to terraform, we must conclude that is the type of world they come from.” He tugged at the bottom of his jacket uneasily. “Consider the cockroach, which has accompanied humans onto every single planet we’ve ever settled. We can’t rid ourselves of them despite every effort we’ve ever made. They even survive a vacuum, so exposing a ship to space doesn’t do the trick, either. We stamp on them, poison them, trap them, train pets to eat them. We’ve tried to hybridize them into a sterile state so they can’t reproduce and they found a way around that, too.”
Everyone around the table shifted uncomfortably.
“Are you saying, Tucker,” Devlin said in his best diplomatic tone, “that we are just cockroaches to these aliens?”
“The scale is wrong. The attitude, though, just might be right,” Tucker said slowly. “To a Periglus, we would appear bigger than a cockroach looks to us, but we might be just as much of an irritant. How many times have you opened up an unused room, only to find it overrun with cockroaches who have chewed their way through even the plasteel structures and completely ruined the room?”
There was some clearing of throats. Catherine could understand their discomfort. Tucker was used to thinking in terms of survival while it was difficult for a non-professional biologist to consider themselves as merely another species in the food chain.
“You mean, when they finally pop out of the gate and find a world overrun with humans, they’re just going to….” Lilly began.
“Exterminate us? Quite likely,” Tucker said. “There’s nothing on their ships that says they understand the concept of coexistence. No evidence of pets, or knowledge of other species or cultures.”
Brant looked a little ill. “So, there’s no negotiating with them at all?”
“If you can figure out how to communicate with them in the first few hours after they emerge from the gate, you might get them to pause long enough to consider the novel idea that spring cleaning a planet and getting rid of the vermin might not be such a good idea. Only, we don’t even know if they have vocal cords, yet. Maybe they use telepathy or wiggle their ears…if they have ears. There’s too many unknowns and not nearly enough data.” Tucker looked around the table, only just realizing the impact of his insights. “I mean, this is all sheer speculation,” he added hastily. “We’re behind a closed door and…well….” It was his turn to clear his throat. “Perhaps more of that brandy?” he asked Brant, pushing the glass toward him.
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