Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea

by Helena Puumala

  “Carl had called the midwife who had agreed to do what the woman asked of her—in fact, she had officiated at the baby’s birth, she had said, and had hidden the mother and child for the last week at her residence.

  “The whole thing had seemed miraculous to Jane who had given up hope of ever having a child—even an adopted, high needs one. People just were not having unwanted children, anymore, was the way she put it, and the ones who did become available were quickly snapped up, no matter how difficult their care might prove to be. To be handed a healthy, squalling baby, the only caveat being that she was to call him her own, and not let on that he was adopted, was a deal which she could not refuse. And Carl, though a bit more leery of the circumstances, was right there beside her; the deal was made. Without ever telling the Mackenzies her name, the woman had dried her tears, breastfed the child one more time, and left, never to be seen again.”

  “Good grief!” Sarah was shocked. “And Grandma and Grandpa kept their part of the bargain all this time—right up until you went snooping around their place!”

  “Yeah, and they would have stuck to their guns in the face of my snooping ways, had I not pointed out to them that their beloved granddaughter was very much in danger, and we needed to be able to gauge the extent of the threat to her.”

  Sarah bit her lip again. It seemed these days like she couldn’t open her mouth in Coryn’s presence without saying something snotty. She knew that she had been difficult the last time she had spent a few days at the Liaison Officer’s Official Residence, sleeping in one of the nice guest bedrooms, and being squired about town by the Liaison Officer himself during his off hours. Back in her apprentice cubicle at Ferhil Stones she had promised herself that the next time she saw him she was going to behave better. Then he had taken his time about contacting the Stronghold of the Twelve, and now that he was here, she was sniping at him again.

  And he was telling her disturbing things.

  “Do you think that my Father and Cam’s disappearance is connected to this?” she thought to ask.

  Coryn did not miss the contrite tone of the question. He had a lot of sympathy for Sarah. She had had to endure plenty of life changes in the recent past. Part of his job was to keep her safe, and that also meant keeping her content enough on Kordea to not bolt in frustration, leaving her studies in Witch-lore unfinished. The hope was that once she could control and apply her talent of harnessing the power of the Witches Stones, also known as amartos, she would be able to take care of herself even in the face of whatever assault the Organization scientists were capable of mounting against her with their infernal amplifying machines. However, Sarah’s question brought up the weakness in the theory. The Witch Anya had obviously been keen to keep her genetic legacy from somebody. In the end had she failed? Had the son she had protected by giving him up, been kidnapped, after all, along with his son? And had the true target of that abduction been Peter’s daughter, Sarah, who had remained safe at the time only because her father had been annoyed that the folk inviting him on an expensive jaunt had failed to acknowledge the fact that he had two daughters, not just one?

  “The Mackenzies and I tossed the notion back and forth,” Coryn said in answer to Sarah’s question. “When the disappearance happened, they had immediately suspected that there might be a connection to the danger that Peter’s birth mother had spoken of. Carl had done as much digging as was possible for him to do, about the incident, while at the same time Jane had taken it upon herself to make sure that you were kept safe.”

  Sarah nodded.

  She remembered how, suddenly, when they all should have been grieving her father and brother, her grandmother had insisted that Sarah’s mother allow her to take Sarah with her to visit relatives in a northern farming area known as The Clay Belt, an obscure place not known to many people even in Laurentia.

  “She took me to her sister’s who lived in the back of the beyond boonies, and we stayed there the whole summer. It was fun; I had a bunch of second cousins who were great company, and it was beautiful country with lots of outdoorsy things for kids to do. It would have been a perfect summer, had Cam been there, but everyone avoided talking about him and my Dad, and that sort of spoiled everything.”

  “Apparently some strange men did come around that summer to harass your mother,” Coryn said. “They asked a lot of questions about Maris, but once they saw her, and how fair-haired she was, they went away. Your grandfather had warned your mother to not even mention your existence, should anyone strange to her happen to ask questions about her children. Your mother had complied; she told me that Carl’s obvious worry that you might disappear, too, affected her deeply, even though he had not explained to her why he was anxious. But she did know that he had been looking into Peter and Cam’s apparent space accident, and had not been completely satisfied with the answers that he had received.”

  “Still, Grandma and Grandpa accepted the deaths,” Sarah protested. “The company Dad had worked for hosted a Memorial Service for them in the fall, and my Mom took the life insurance money. Mom eventually remarried. I seemed to be the only one who didn’t accept what the accident investigators were telling us.”

  She had had a strong sense that something about the story she was being told was all wrong, even though she had not been able to pinpoint what it was. But no-one had listened to her; she had been told to do her grieving and get on with her life, even as everyone else was. Her Grandfather had never hinted to her that he was not satisfied, either.

  “Once the strangers who had eyed Maris had gone away and left the family alone, Carl decided that the best thing for you, your mother and your sister was to leave sleeping dogs lie. What could he have done, anyway? Your grandparents weren’t rich; they hadn’t the funds to hire a Private Investigator even had they thought that one could have done them any good. And they had the memory of the frightened woman who had handed over to them her child; she had been aware of some danger which had driven her to take the extraordinary step of hiding her child in one of the lesser Space Port cities of Old Earth. It was not hard to believe that whatever she had been afraid of was somewhere in space, and the fact that Peter and Cameron had died—or not died—in a freak space accident seemed to fit with that.”

  “So Anya must have got herself mixed up in something that she could not handle, quite early on,” commented Marlyss. “I presume that we can make the assumption that she was the one who handed her child over to the Mackenzie couple.”

  “The genetic evidence does point to that,” Coryn agreed. “Plus, the midwife who helped Carl and Jane falsify the records, as well as having had helped with the boy’s birth, told the Mackenzies that the woman—who had not identified herself to her either—had said that she was inordinately glad that the child was a boy. ‘Had I borne a girl those people would not have rested until they found her, and they would have assumed that I’d try to hide her,’ she had said. ‘A boy is not so critical to them, though he does have my genetics, and could, conceivably, someday father a daughter who would be of interest to them.’

  “Somehow, we don’t know how, her enemies must have found out that Peter existed, and that he had fathered a daughter who might have been of interest to them.”

  “Sounds to me like it was lucky for Sarah that there was an older sister whom her father adopted as his own,” said Karina.

  “Agreed,” Coryn said. “And fortunately the searchers didn’t bother to probe deeply enough into the birth records to determine that Maris was not Peter’s biological daughter. Cara told me that Peter had, throughout their marriage, treated Maris with the same love and consideration which he showed his natural children, and Maris adored him. He was the only father she had known, and had anyone asked her who her father was, she would have named Peter.”

  “True,” Sarah sighed. “And I was horribly jealous because she was so pretty, and I was just plain Sarah, the skinny, little one with straight black hair. I thought that my parents surely must have loved her more than they
loved me, since she was such a charming, pretty girl.”

  “Jane said that you were the headstrong, mercurial one of the three grandchildren,” Coryn said with a grin. “Always getting into trouble, and dragging Cameron into your schemes—not that he was difficult to entice, she said. But, she also added, that it was hard not to actually prefer you over Maris, and that she often felt guilty about that. ‘The difficult children are often the ones that take up the most room in your heart,’ is what she said, ‘even though you know that, really, it’s not fair to the sweeter ones’.”

  “Well, she certainly succeeded in hiding that preference from me,” Sarah groaned. “If I heard the words ‘Why can’t you be more like Maris?’ once, I must have heard them a thousand times. And I couldn’t be! I didn’t look remotely like her!”

  “Sounds like you took exasperation with your behaviour to be a comment on your looks,” Coryn said. “The sort of a mistake a child might make!”

  “I guess. Mind you, it was my Mom who was always saying that, not Grandma. And Maris looked so much like Mom, and it was obvious that Dad adored my mother, so I guess my reaction made its own kind of sense. Even at this late date, it annoys me to find out that Maris’ presence in the family is what kept me safe from those searchers, whoever they were.

  “What would have happened to me if they had found me, Coryn?”

  There. She had said it. She had asked the question which could generate nightmares.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nightmares, not just for Sarah, Coryn mused, on his way back to Trahea. The night was well-advanced; he had accepted Marlyss’ invitation to dine at Ferhil Stones with the Witches, and Sarah—he could not think of Sarah as a Witch, and was glad that her robe was cream-coloured instead of green. Afterwards he had given Clarisse a lift back to the Stronghold of The Six, before turning his flyer in the direction of Trahea. A staff pilot was at the controls of the flyer which was ferrying Karina a quarter of the way across the Kordean globe to her Stronghold. Texi had the instruction to return the flyer to the Port, and to stop by at either the Office or, if the hour warranted, the Residence to report (and to get fed by either the office staff or the house servants). He was a young Kordean, from a servant-class family, but a capable flyer pilot and mechanic, someone Coryn was keen to keep as a satisfied worker. As the Chief Liaison Officer, he made a point of not behaving dismissively towards the man, the way the upper class Kordeans tended to treat help, and had even encouraged him to chat with Sarah about flyer and ship mechanics whenever she had been visiting.

  Coryn had swallowed his jealousy at the easy banter the two younger people had indulged in. Sarah had obviously relished the opportunity to talk knowledgeably about a topic which she was familiar with, but which had nothing to do with amartos, or extra-sensory powers. Listening to them, it had crossed the Liaison Officer’s mind that a romantic attachment to some young man such as Texi—who himself was not available since he had recently married—would probably have done Sarah good, perhaps eased the pricklish tendencies which she was displaying. But Coryn was not about to endorse, or even suggest, anything of the sort; with an exasperated groan at himself, he acknowledged that he was developing some strong feelings for the young woman whose interests it was a part of his job to protect. The thought that she might welcome the advances of some man other than himself had him gritting his teeth; he wanted her to belong to him, and to no one else.

  It was an utterly ridiculous attitude for a fellow who had spent a decade living the life of an alyen, on the Space Station RES. One who, before that, as a teenager, had relished the opportunity his good looks had given him to make his way from bed to bed, populated by women who all had adored him, and some of whom had been his mother’s age. He should have been encouraging his protégé to be sexually active; he knew the subject well enough to realize that part of Sarah’s problem was that her studies at Ferhil Stones were interfering with the normal growth of lascivious and romantic tendencies. Sarah was a healthy young woman at an age at which she should have been discovering the pleasures of falling in love and lust. Instead, she was confined to an environment of women—which would have been all right if she had had a sexual interest in women, but clearly she did not—and servants who were barely acknowledged as human by the respected ladies in the green robes.

  Had Trahea been a true Confederation city, he might have encouraged her to explore it, and maybe even make some connections with young people there, but, as it was, Kordea’s social stratifications and other peculiarities had turned much of it into something of a cesspool, loved by the low-lifes of the galaxy, thanks to the variety of hallucinogenic drugs available. Many of those were distilled from Kordean plants—the flora of the world had some odd adaptations to the blistering daytime heat—and others were imported from elsewhere since there were few controls on such trade. Kordeans, used to relying on the healcraft of the Witches, did not think of drugs in terms of medicines, and were quite tolerant of mind-altering substances since they could be used by the people of lower classes to put up with demanding work environments and bad living conditions.

  The Confederation was not into telling member planets how to run their worlds, and Kordea was not even a member, but only an affiliate which had allowed a Space Port to be built on its soil, even though the Port’s main function was to facilitate travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The Trahea Space Port was a pit stop, a place to get a ship which had taken its maximum of omega-jumps, serviced, before continuing on. It did not handle much traffic between Kordea and the other worlds simply because there was little of it. What legitimate trade there was, consisted, almost totally, of Kordean woods which were prized for their strength and beauty, and some of those weird plants with their weird properties that pharmaceutical companies elsewhere had adapted to medical uses.

  Therefore, if Trahea was a cesspool, that was none of the business of the Kordean-Confederation Liaison Officer. But it was a part of his job to keep one amarto-sensitive, Terran, young woman safe. Thus on any outings into Trahea, whether into the Trade City (those constructs seemed to grow around Space Ports everywhere), or into the city proper, Sarah was always accompanied, either by himself, or by another member of the Liaison Office staff. Usually, if Coryn was not free to do bodyguard duty when Sarah wanted to go and purchase something that was not available at the Port, he sent his second-in-command, Jillian Ashton, a very capable, enthusiastic, if young, Agent (armed with a stunner), with her.

  Most of his staff were like Jillian, referrals from The Agency, and eager to become seasoned operatives. The Diplomatic Corps, which was nominally in control of the Office, tolerated this because they had not been able to activate the Liaison Office themselves. No-one in the Diplomatic Corps had ever shown interest in relocating to Trahea, and there had always been plenty of other postings available. Not that all of the bureaucrats had minded; some had been siphoning the funds allocated for the Trahea Office to other, likely more personal, uses. The top levels of the officialdom, however, had understood that the failure was seen to be theirs, and had welcomed The Agency’s meddling. And they had recognized that Coryn Leigh had the makings of an excellent diplomat; he would have done well anywhere in the Corps.

  The rest of the Liaison Office staff were natives, recommend to Coryn by the Port Official who had been seconded to help him get organized. This Official, a very capable woman, had explained that the Port kept its relations with the citizens of Trahea sweet by hiring Traheans whenever that made sense, and paying them decent wages. The Confederation jobs were a coveted plum for many of the inhabitants, and the Port had found the workers loyal, and willing to learn to do whatever was required.

  “Kordeans, even of the servant classes, are not stupid,” Jana had explained. “I think that you’d do well to take advantage of their abilities.”

  She had been right. Texi, for one, had become an employee on whom Coryn relied. And he had known a number of people, relatives and friends, who had been eager to hire on with the
Liaison Office, even in the capacity of house servants for the Official Residence.

  While checking in at his Office, Coryn considered the fact that he was going to have to bring Sarah to Trahea once again, and soon. He could have done it this very night but had vetoed the notion. Sarah had had classes scheduled through most of the night. He himself was tired from the long trip to Earth and back, followed by the debriefing at Ferhil Stones. He was still a young man, barely past thirty, but space travel could be exhausting, if boring, and sleep was sometimes hard to come by on Kordea thanks to the need to turn the diurnal cycle upside down. Plus, he had returned to Kordea after spending a few weeks on Earth, the ancestral home of most of his forebears—the ones not originating on the planet Calliga. He had slept well there in spite of the tensions involved in his investigation; the day-night cycle had somehow seemed so—natural—in the city of Laurentia. Sleeping through a hot Trahea day on his return had been even more difficult than it normally was.