by Viehl, S. L.
The three of us returned to the patient’s room. The female’s eyes darted toward the open panel leading out to the corridor before she moved to sit up. The motion made her grimace.
“The exercises are helping, but sometimes my stomach yet pains me,” she said almost apologetically. “The nurse says it will be some days before I may rise from the berth.”
I saw Xonea watching us. “Shut the door panel, Squilyp.” I made my voice loud enough for him to overhear. “The lady deserves privacy for her exam.”
“I do not think I am well enough to walk.” The patient made a gesture toward the corridor. “But Captain Torin said he would provide me with a glidechair when he transports me to security headquarters.”
“Captain Torin is not taking you anywhere,” I informed her. “My name is Jarn, and I am the surgeon who removed the grenade from your abdomen. I would have first obtained your consent, but your delirium made that impossible. Also, aside from the obvious risk of explosion, the device was leaking trace amounts of arutanium, which would have quickly poisoned you. I had no choice but to immediately operate.”
“So I have been told.” She gave me a tentative smile. “The Senior Healer has said that I would be embracing the stars now, if not for you.”
“I regret that we cannot do more about your memory loss.” No, I didn’t, as she might be the only thing to stop Xonea from wreaking havoc in my name. “Perhaps someday a new treatment will be found for your condition.”
“It frightens me to think about it,” the patient admitted. “I cannot fathom why someone would do such a thing to me.”
“We believe that you were used in order to get to me,” I said. “The explosive planted in your body was designed to kill any Terran who touched it. But the one who did this to you knew that I would recognize the device, and that I had the skill to remove it safely.”
She frowned. “Then why was this done, Healer?”
“The goal was not to kill me, but to force me to leave Joren.” I saw her confused expression. “The circumstances are difficult to explain. It was a complicated situation that has now been resolved.”
“I am happy to hear it.” She reached out and touched my forearm briefly.“I am also grateful for my life, Healer. Anything I have is yours.”
“I must ask you to do something for me,” I told her. “When Captain Torin and his men return to this room, I want you to shield someone.”
“I may only do that if someone has threatened to harm me or one of my kin in my presence.” She seemed bewildered now. “No one has done so, and the Senior Healer is unable to determine who my kin are. Whom shall I shield?”
“The male who implanted the grenade in your body.” I sat down on the edge of her berth and gazed into her shocked eyes. “I know what he did to you was a terrible thing, lady, but I assure you, he has been made to pay for his crimes.” When she didn’t respond, I added, “I would not ask this of you, but more than what was done to you is at stake. Many innocent lives are in danger. Your forgiveness may be the only thing that can protect them.”
“The one who did this might have easily killed us both.” She hesitated and placed a hand over her abdomen. “You saved my life, Healer. If it is your wish to have his life in return, then I make it yours.”
“I thank you, lady.” I nodded to Squilyp, who called Xonea and his men back into the room. “Captain, by operating on this female, I saved her life. DNA tests indicate that she does not belong to the Torin. Do you dispute either of these facts?”
He peered down at me. “Why should I?”
“If you do not understand the question,” I advised him, “I will request another representative from HouseClan Torin to attend me.”
His normally elegant hands made choppy motions as he spoke, betraying the anger underlying his impatience. “I do not dispute that you saved her life or that she belongs to another House. That does not prevent me from questioning her.”
“No, it doesn’t. But first the lady has something she wishes to say before witnesses.” I turned to the patient. “Madam?”
She glanced at Xonea before she said, “I shield the one responsible for implanting the grenade in my body.”
“How know you to . . . ?” Xonea’s face darkened as he realized the implications of her statement, and swung around to glare at me. “This female may shield whom-ever she wishes, Cherijo, but it changes nothing.”
“Actually, it does,” I said, stepping between him and the berth. “By shielding her attacker, my patient has forgiven the harm done to her and, by extension, the indirect threat made to me.”
“There was nothing indirect about that grenade,” he grated. “It was designed to explode the moment a Terran touched it. You were the only Terran surgeon on Joren. Do not bother to deny it.”
“I have no intention of doing so,” I assured him. “But I recognized the device and took care not to touch it while I was operating. Thus the grenade was a threat only to her life, not mine.”
“There were other patients present,” he said. “Nurses.”
“The grenade had a contact trigger,” I reminded him. “By the time I took the lady into surgery, which is the time when the device presented the threat, the facility had been evacuated. I used only a drone assistant.” I smiled at him. “Try again.”
“She was sent here to assassinate you,” Xonea shouted.
I shrugged. “Whoever made her into a bomb has been shielded. Everything related to that act is irrelevant now.”
“The lady brought a bomb into this facility,” my ClanBrother sneered. “Willingly or not, that was a direct threat. You are not permitted to shield her without my consent. So I can just as easily declare her my ClanKill.”
The Omorr hopped over to stand beside me. “You will first have to claw your way through me.”
“No, Senior Healer, that won’t be necessary,” I said softly. “By law, any injured warrior treated by the healer of another HouseClan is shielded for the duration of their treatment and recovery. No word, intent, or act on their part may be declared as a threat to the House.”
Xonea looked ready to declare everyone in the room his ClanKill, starting with me. “You invoke the law of mercy?”
“I do. I even brought a copy of it for consultation purposes.” I gestured toward my husband. “Duncan will read it out loud to you, if you like.”
“I know the law, and it grants only a temporary reprieve.” Xonea spat the words as he would a curse. “I can wait until she recovers.”
“Then you will spend a lifetime waiting, Captain,” I said. “The lady will never recover completely from all of her injuries.”
“Drug-induced brain damage has caused her permanent memory loss.” Squilyp handed him the datapad with the neurologist’s report. “Read for yourself.”
Silence fell over the room, growing thick and uncomfortable as Xonea skimmed through the data. The datapad went flying across the patient’s room, smashing into the wall and dropping in pieces on the floor. The patient’s eyes widened, and she yanked her linens up over her head. Squilyp went to the wall panel and signaled security.
Reever, his face blank and his eyes so dark they looked black, took a step toward Xonea.
I put a hand on my husband’s arm. “No.” I watched my ClanBrother’s face. “Wait.”
Xonea regarded me as he spoke to his men. “We are finished here. Return to your stations.”
I felt a twinge of sympathy for him. “Xonea, I know you were only trying to do what you thought was best. But your efforts on my behalf are not necessary.”
“Your behalf?” His tone may have been soft, but a lethal rage filled his eyes. “I have done nothing for you.”
I gestured from the patient to the shattered datapad. “Then why all this?”
“Your neurologist is wrong, Omorr. Nothing lost is gone forever.” Xonea looked down his nose at me. “You think because I do not use your name that I do not know who you are? I know. You are not Cherijo. You may have her skills, h
er voice, even her bondmate and child, but you can never be Cherijo.”
“No.” My spine turned to ice. “I can’t.”
He leaned down, his voice going soft. “Do not become too comfortable in that skin, Akkabarran. Someday my ClanSister will return to us, and when she does”—he looked from my head to my footgear and back again—“she will take back all that you have stolen from her.”
Three
Xonea’s prediction sat like tainted food in my belly for some time after we left the medical facility. I had long wished him to acknowledge that I was not Cherijo, but now that he had, I could take no pleasure in it.
He had been angry; I knew that. His reason for saying such things to me may have been only to strike back at me for depriving him of revenge. Still, the blow was a heavy one. To be called an Akkabarran, as if I didn’t deserve my name, was surely the worst. Since leaving my homeworld, I had struggled daily to prove my worth. I did the work and adjusted as best I could to ensleg ways. I believed that I had helped those in need.
In Xonea’s eyes, however, it meant nothing. Just like me.
Despite my own curdled feelings, at least now I grasped the cause of all of his maneuverings. He was not simply angry at us for leaving Joren. He saw me as an intruder, a thief who had stolen what did not belong to me. He wanted me gone and Cherijo returned. Which was the same as wishing me dead.
Reever said nothing about Xonea or his ugly behavior as we went to the HouseClan pavilion to return the scroll to Xonal, but I sensed his concern hovering between us, silent and watchful.
I stopped in the courtyard and turned to him. “Stop it.”
His eyebrows rose. “Stop what?”
“You are watching me out of the corner of your eye, waiting for me to have some sort of hysterical female reaction,” I told him. “I was an Iisleg woman. A skela. I have been despised for simply breathing. I have been shot, beaten, starved, and left for dead. I have walked the ice fields and dragged the dying from them as Toskald ordnance exploded all around me. Believe me when I say that some harsh words thrown at me by one angry man will not make me collapse.”
“I would, but I have this one problem.” He tucked the scroll case under the belt of his tunic and then framed my face with his scarred hands. “I love you.”
“Well.” I rested my hands against his chest. Once I believed that he had loved only my body, as it was all he had left of his dead wife. Now I knew better. “I suppose I could tolerate it a little longer,” I said gruffly.
“Xonea does not know you,” Reever continued, stroking the curves of my cheeks with his thumbs before taking his hands away. “He looks at you, but he sees Cherijo.”
I recalled the set of the Jorenian’s face, and the savageness in his voice as he lashed out at me. You can never be Cherijo. “Evidently, he did not see her today.”
“Jarn, Duncan.” Darea entered the courtyard and crossed it to join us. She also carried a cylindrical case, but this one had been fashioned of clear plas and held other, marked rolls of plas inside. “Do you have a moment? My ClanDaughter discovered something quite interesting about the scan you sent us.”
We went to a table and sat down together. Darea removed several rolled sheets of marked plas from her case and spread out one of them onto the surface of the table.
“Fasala studied the copy of the original map, but she was not able to decipher some of the Aksellan symbols,” Darea said. “Over the centuries, Joren has collected an extensive star chart library, with records from all known space-traveling species. I scanned the map’s symbols and input them for comparison, but they are not recorded in our database.”
“The Trellusan who gave us the map claimed it was very old,” I told her. “Perhaps they predate your records.”
“We believe the same—and there is more. As Fasala could not use the symbols, she filtered the scanned image to show only the star systems and the Aksellan’s marked travel routes. Here is what the map looks like without the symbols.” Darea pointed to circles and lines on the transparency. “Salo has traveled through some of this region, so he was the first to notice the mistakes in the route patterns.”
I knew little of star charts, but Reever had extensive pilot training and had traveled a great deal on his own. “What is wrong with them?”
Reever frowned as he leaned over to inspect the plas. “The lanes are too long and convoluted.”
Darea smiled at him. “My bondmate was not so diplomatic; he called them utterly ridiculous. He said no ship’s captain would waste the time or resources by following such courses over more direct routes. But to be certain, we checked each course on the map against the trade routes presently being used in those systems. The lanes the Aksellans marked on this map are three to five times longer.”
“Perhaps it was for trade purposes,” I suggested. “They may have diverted their ships to worlds in need of the ore they mined.”
“These routes took the ships away from the most populated planetary systems,” my husband murmured as he studied the transparency. “The Aksellans were diverting their ships away from these worlds. It may have been to protect from raiders the ore they were transporting.”
Darea nodded. “I, too, thought they may have taken the routes as a security tactic, until Salo began checking the symbols I had removed.” Darea unrolled another sheet of plas and placed it over the transparency of the planets and shipping routes. “The systems they avoided had two things in common: inhabited worlds, and a dark triangle marking all of them. But we do not know what that symbol means.”
“We do.” Troubled now, I met my husband’s gaze over the map. “The miners were avoiding worlds with deposits of black crystal.”
My former self had encountered the black crystal several times in her past. She had found it to be the cause of diseases on Catopsa, Taercal, and Oenrall. I, too, had witnessed its effects on Trellus, when it mesmerized Reever. But we knew that nearly all of the worlds presently infected with the mineral were not even aware of its existence, or how it might be affecting their population. “How could they have known it was there so long ago?”
“The Aksellans have always been a highly intelligent species, but I do not believe these map makers knew of the crystal,” Xonal said, startling me as he appeared at my side and leaned over to inspect the transparency. “According to legend, they were far more reserved than their modern descendents. They avoided other sentient species, and mined only unclaimed comets, asteroids, and meteor fields.” When we all looked at him, he moved his hands in an easy gesture. “As a youth I was as interested in geology as well as exploring space. I spent two years serving as chief navigator on an Aksellan ore hauler.”
Reever straightened. “You think that they avoided these worlds because they were inhabited, not because they have deposits of black crystal.”
“This symbol here.” Xonal traced one of the dark triangles. “It is a greatly simplified form of two modern Aksellan glyphs. One represents the number three, the other means ‘outsider.’ Used together, they translate to threat.”
That made more sense, until I considered another interpretation. The black crystal affected only living, sentient beings. If it was as lethal as my surrogate mother had promised, it might infect worlds only where it could find some prey. “Are there any inhabited worlds on the map that are not marked with the dark triangle?”
Reever consulted the transparency. “Yes. Joren, Akkabarr, and oKia, in the Saraced system.” He pointed to each planet.
Joren was on one end of the map, Akkabarr in the center, and oKia on the opposite. “Is it possible that at the time this map was made, the black crystal had not yet reached these three worlds?”
“The mother’s cloak has always protected our planet,” Xonal said. At my surprised look, he added, “Her cloak is a thick layer of volatile gases in the upper atmosphere. Free-falling minerals cause them to ignite, so that nothing smaller than a large asteroid could pass unprotected through the layer successfully.”
&nb
sp; “Akkabarr’s kvinka—the storm currents enveloping the planet—do the same for the Iisleg,” I said. “What of oKia?”
“I cannot say if they have escaped the black crystal, but it seems unlikely,” the ClanLeader told me. “It is an ordinary, cold-climate world with no unusual atmospheric conditions. The dominant species, the oKiaf, are sentient tribal hunters, much like our ancestors were.”
“Are they primitive?” If they were, that would present different problems.
“Not since the turn of the century,” Reever said. “The League recruited oKia to join them by offering advanced technology in exchange for the service of their trackers in the military. oKiaf were said to be the best troop marshals in the quadrant.”
I used my datapad to access Joren’s planetary database, but it listed only a scant amount of statistics on its solar system and planetary surface conditions. “There is hardly any information recorded about this world.”
“Few sojourn to oKia or any of the planets within the Saraced system,” Darea admitted. “That region of space is too remote and sparsely populated to tempt many traders, and too ordinary to lure our explorers. After Skart was destroyed during the war, many have avoided it.”
“oKia recently resigned from the League, canceled the contracts of all their people serving in the military, and recalled them to the homeworld,” Reever said. “They also banned all contact with offworlders.”
“They follow Joren’s path.” Darea exchanged a wry look with Xonal before she added, “They are not the first to break with the League since the war, Duncan. After Raktar Teulon revealed the truth about the Jado Massacre, and how the League’s finest officers were responsible for causing it, many worlds have chosen to do the same.”
“I would agree with your theory,” my husband said, “but they have banned contact with all other beings, not merely the League. No member of any species is permitted to travel through their space.”
“During the war, the Hsktskt destroyed Skart, one of the neighboring worlds in oKia’s solar system,” Darea said. “That may have decided everything for the oKiaf.”