Not Fade Away

by Donna S. Frelick

  “I assure you I did not. I pride myself on my ear for languages.” Kwai spoke again, a long string of sounds that reminded Del of a household pet begging for tuna. He concluded with a hiss. “I just told you that the man is here from his home planet of Felix to consult on the tunnel. Then I used a common curse word to tell you to mind your manners.”

  Shef laughed even harder. “Well, hssssst, and fuck you, too!”

  Del ignored him. “So we know what this guy is,” he said. “We need to know why he’s here.”

  “Talked to Smith and Jones as I went through the line for chow,” Shef said. “They overheard the guards say he was brought in to oversee construction of ‘the chamber.’ He’s supposed to be here for three months.”

  “A chamber? What kind of chamber?” Kwai looked from Del to Shef and back for his answer.

  Del shook his head. “Not the right question. The question is: a chamber for what? We’ve been digging a tunnel so they could construct this chamber underground.”

  “Deep underground—I’d say we’re at about 1500 meters now,” Shef said. “And have you noticed it’s getting warmer? When we started it was nice and cool, maybe around 12 degrees Celsius. Now it’s heated up—we’re probably at about 37.”

  “Geothermal activity,” Kwai said.

  “Fucking hot,” Shef countered.

  “Obviously the Grays planned for this,” Kwai added.

  Del agreed. “Which means they plan to use the heat for something in the chamber.”

  “Living quarters, maybe,” Shef speculated. “The little slime devils hate the cold.”

  “Ha! It’s plenty hot enough on the surface,” Del replied.

  Shef shook his head and climbed under the thin blanket of his bunk. “Shit, I have no idea. Maybe they need it hot and dark. I don’t care if they fry their little gray skins to a crisp. I’m beat. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Sensible as always, my friend,” Kwai said. “Good night.” He made his way quietly back to his own bunk nearer the front of the barracks.

  But Del didn’t find it so easy to sleep that night. The thought of what use the Grays might make of a chamber deep underground in the heat and the dark kept him awake and wondering for hours.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rafe stood on the porch of the cabin and watched the mist rise from the valley floor into the wooded mountain slopes. The frost still lay crisp and thick on the sleeping grass. The night’s chill was sharp in the morning air, but, then, it was still godawful early, just after dawn. And the coffee steaming in the mug in his hand was not yet working its magic on his sleep-deprived body.

  The Old Man had had a rough night, tossing and turning and mumbling in his sleep all night long despite the meds he’d been given both at bedtime and when he’d woken in terror at about two in the morning. Rafe had just stayed in the room with him, afraid to leave him alone after that last episode. When the Old Man had finally dropped off into a restful slumber at around four o’clock, Rafe had caught an hour or two of sleep himself before he got up and came out to the kitchen. His weekly check-in with Rescue was due soon. He was afraid he’d sleep through it if he wasn’t careful.

  Because she had known Del as he once was, Rayna would want to know how the Old Man was doing.What would he say? Things were slightly better than they’d been last week—he could say that. He and his father had settled into a routine here in Masey that seemed to suit the Old Man. Charlie and Happy came every day except Saturday and Sunday. While they were here, the Old Man was calm and mostly lucid. When they were gone, Del spent a lot of his time “somewhere else.” Rafe tried not to take it personally. He felt himself light up whenever Charlie was around, too, though why was something he couldn’t explain. He’d even begun to warm up to the dog. The cabin seemed lonely when they weren’t in it.

  But if Rescue had any hope of having Del shed any light on the mystery of Admiral Sheffield’s warning, they could forget about it. The Old Man was calmer; he was happier; he was, above all, safe. But he would never sort out the tangled skein of interwoven delusions and experiences that haunted him. If anything, Del lived in that fantasy world as much now as he ever had. And whatever secrets it held were lost in there with him.

  The comp in Rafe’s pocket pinged to alert him to the incoming live link request. He hit the pad to connect and saw Rayna on the screen.

  “Chief Murphy.” He noted the captain wasn’t with her today, and she was also without her trademark grin.

  “’Morning, Rafe. I have news. And it ain’t great.”

  Not a good start to the conversation; she usually just took his report and signed off. “Ma’am?”

  “We found Kwai Tone Ze at last, but we were too late. He was poisoned two days ago on Bix.”

  Shef—and now Kwai. They had been among Del’s closest friends. They had all been together since—“It’s about that labor camp somehow, isn’t it.”

  Rayna nodded. “Kwai was convinced of it. He had time to speak briefly to the two agents we sent to warn him, but the assassin had already been there ahead of us. He planted poisoned fruit in Kwai’s quarters. I’m sorry, Rafe, for both your sakes.”

  His chest constricted. The great mystic had been a warm and comforting uncle to him as a young boy, a bright light in a dark, confusing time. But it had been circuits since he’d experienced the joy of Kwai’s presence. So many circuits with nothing to show for it but battle scars.

  He paced down to the end of the porch and back, struggling to corral his errant thoughts. “Was he able to tell you who is behind the murders?” Before he died. Gods that hurts!

  “Kwai agreed with Sheffield that the Grays are behind them,” Rayna said. “We’ve since connected his and Sheffield’s deaths to two others within the last half a circuit. All the original six Resistants who escaped the T7 labor camp with your father are now dead. Your father is the only one of the group left alive.”

  Rafe scanned the trees circling the cabin as if the assassins could be climbing toward him even now. “But why now—so long after the men escaped?”

  But he knew the answer almost as soon as he asked the question. The men must have seen something, something not in the official record that only now was becoming relevant. He listened while Rayna filled in the details the two agents had gleaned from Kwai as he died.

  When she had finished, he summed it up. “Now you want to know if the Old Man remembers any of this.”

  “Specifically, we need to know the location of the T7 camp,” Rayna confirmed. “Before this thing—whatever it is—reaches maturity.”

  Rafe released a bitter laugh. “The Old Man couldn’t tell you the location of the bathroom most of the time. On his bad days, he doesn’t even live in a place or time any of us would recognize. And he has more and more bad days.”

  “Isn’t that nurse I set you up with working out?” Rayna asked. The note of worried anger in her voice put Rafe on the defensive.

  “No, no, Charlie is great! When she and Happy are here, Del does much better. He loves the two of them.”

  Rayna looked confused. “Who’s Happy?”

  “The dog. Works with Charlie.” Rayna’s expression grew even more puzzled. Rafe shook his head. “Look, I’m just trying to say the best you’re going to get with Del is calm and content. With Charlie and the dog around, that’s what you get. You can even get him to be present in the moment. But remember the details of something that happened forty-five years ago? No.” He’d explained this before. Rescue had Del’s medical record. Why weren’t they getting it?

  “Okay.” For a long moment, the Chief said nothing else, but just sat looking at him. His heart was pounding; maybe he’d raised his voice. Damn it, he had to get himself under control.

  Finally, she spoke. “What if we brought Gabriel in to talk to him? The agent we sent to warn Kwai. He has . . . skills. That’s how we learned so much about what happened at T7. Maybe he’d pick up something.”

  Rafe’s anger boiled over. “Skills—you mean he’
s a telepath.” In Rafe’s experience that meant only one thing. “He’s some kind of fucking Thrane.”

  Rayna’s face got that oh, shit look on it. His file should have told her why suggesting he work with a Thrane was a very, very bad idea.

  “He’s half-Thrane,” she said. “He identifies as human. But he does have the psi talents of his father.”

  “All due respect, Chief, but if you think I’m going to stand by and let some fucking Thrane bastard mind-rape my father, you’ve got another think coming. The Old Man may be out of it, but he would know if some alien ghoul was rooting around in his brain. He gave Rescue the best part of his life and now you want to do this? Hell, no!”

  He was shouting now, he knew it, but he didn’t care. What were they going to do, fire him? It wasn’t like he was fighting any Gray slavers sitting on this mulaak porch! He had one job now, and that was to protect the Old Man. By the gods, he would do it, even if it meant protecting him from the people who should have been Del’s friends.

  His boss met his anger with calm acceptance. “I get it, Rafe. What happened to your mother was horrible; it put all of us in a killing rage for a long time. But Gabriel is not like the Thranes who attacked that farm colony—on Gray orders, I would add. He has been my friend and Sam’s for a long time; we can trust him. He would be gentle with your father, and kind. But we need this information, Rafe. I’m not sure we can get it any other way.”

  Rafe shook his head. “You’ll have to figure it out.”

  The silence stretched out between them. Rayna stared through the screen at Rafe; Rafe stubbornly refused to meet her gaze.

  At last, Rayna lifted her chin. “Okay. I can’t order this. But I will order that you review the materials I’m loading into your comp. You will send me a detailed report on what you’ve found within 48 hours. Is that understood?”

  Fuck! She’d found the worst possible punishment for him. Reading reports was torture.

  But he had no choice. “Understood.”

  “One hour late and I’m docking your pay, Agent. CFO out.”

  Rafe resisted the urge to throw the mulaak comp deep into the woods and settled for a long streak of cursing he was sure was loud enough to be heard all the way into Masey. He loved his father, he really did, but now he was stuck here with nothing to do but sit and wait, while the Grays stalked them across the galaxy and the Grays grew some kind of fucking death machine. Rescue was letting some bastard Thrane do the fighting—when he wasn’t busy digging in someone’s brain—while he played shalssiti babysitter!

  Rafe could not keep the thought of what the Thranes did to his mother on Xinhua II out of his mind. Rayna had no idea what a killing rage really felt like until she felt it from a 17-year-old boy’s perspective. By that time, he’d already been fighting for two years in the field with his parents. He thought he’d seen the worst the Grays could do—torture, starvation, labor camps full of mindwiped slaves, in-fighting among the Resistants. But that day he saw what the Grays did when they encountered the resistance of a whole colony—they sent in the Thranes.

  The Grays wanted Xinhua not only for its people, but for the rich agricultural resources those colonists had developed. They had Taken several colonists and found them all to be Resistant. So they planned a rare open takeover using Thrane mercenaries.

  Rescue sent a team to support the colony, but it was too little, too late. They barely escaped with their lives. All except Mariela Gordon and two others. The Thranes made examples of them in the village square. Unable to intervene against overwhelming force, her husband and son saw every bloody detail, heard every scream, while they waited in hiding for Rescue’s delayed pickup. Rafe had never forgotten—or forgiven.

  His frustration now was more than emotional; it was physical, wrenching his muscles and gnawing at his bones, shrinking his skin until it felt too small for his body. He shrugged out of his jacket, down to his tee-shirt, though the sun had only just broken through the mist, then dropped to the deck of the porch and began counting off push-ups. He had to move or he would break something. Without a killing workout, he’d never be able to face those mulaak files he’d been ordered to read.

  Vaalad Zouk had inherited little of his grandfather’s Thrane psi talents, but he did know a few things. One of them was how to stimulate the pleasure centers of a woman’s brain during sex. The woman beneath him appreciated his skill; she screamed as she came again—was it for the fourth time? he’d lost track—and urged him with whispers and sweet squeezes to join her. In time he did, though by the end, his pounding grew brutal and even she had had enough. They would both be sore in the morning, but he doubted they would regret it.

  He kissed her, hard, as he withdrew. “Something to remember me by.”

  “As if I would forget you,” she murmured. “Are you traveling again?”

  “Soon.” He lay on his back and stared at the holographic ceiling—the stars above Terrene. The hotel had done a good job with it, but, then, at the price he was paying, they should have. “What about you, Elisa? Any buying trips coming up?”

  “No, stocking up is not exactly the priority around Rescue these days.” She said nothing else.

  The silence was uncharacteristic for Elisa Chaudry, who served as Assistant Director of Logistical Support at the headquarters of Rescue on Terrene. She was usually very chatty, which was why Zouk cultivated her as a contact. The sex, which she craved, made it easy.

  He rose on one elbow to look at her. She was not hard to look at—with the long black hair and dark skin and eyes of her Earth-Indian ancestors. He liked the hair in particular, liked to grab fistfuls of it in the hottest moments of sex. But that was not why he was here.

  He feigned outrage on her behalf. “What is so important that they won’t allow you to do your job?”

  She laughed. “Oh, it’s not like that. It’s just that we have other things going on at the moment. I’m sure they’ll get it all sorted out soon.”

  “Would it have anything to do with these assassinations we’ve experienced lately? Admiral Sheffield! And Master Tone Ze within weeks of each other. What a loss!”

  Even Elisa wasn’t quite that dumb; she gave him a look. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a religious man.”

  “Of course, I’m not. But others are. And instability is bad for business.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy her. “Guess I never thought of it that way. But why would you think the assassinations would have anything to do with Rescue? They are a matter for ConSys Intel.”

  He gave her his most disappointed frown. “Forgive me, sweetling, but that sounds like something you were told to tell the media.”

  She stonewalled again; he’d overplayed it. Why was she so reticent on this subject when usually information flowed from her after sex like water from a Doulian spring?

  “Well, I’m not just a successful businessman, you know.” Charm was needed now. And manipulation reinforced by all the psi talent he possessed. “I do pay attention to the media. And everyone is saying that the assassinations are related. They’re part of a Gray plot—and that Rescue is next on the list.” Of course they’d said no such thing.

  Elisa laughed. “That’s ridiculous. I haven’t heard anything like that.”

  “You haven’t been listening.” He’d hooked her now. He tugged on the line. “I’ve heard the target is the Director herself!”

  “Marlena Oksaka? Please. She has so much security around her no assassin could get near her.” His pretty little Rescue insider sat up in bed and pushed her hair back over her shoulders. “The media always gets it so wrong.”

  He sat up with her and laid a hand on her thigh. “Oh, so there is a story! Tell me.” He added a psychic push to the whispered command.

  “Now, Val, I’m not supposed to be talking about this.” But she wanted to tell. His insistent pressure on her mind compelled her to tell. She couldn’t help herself. “Swear you won’t say a word.”

  “I swear on my mother’s life.” His m
other had been dead since he was a child; he used this oath frequently to excellent effect.

  “Okay.” Now she was eager to speak. Her eyes sparked with excitement and she leaned forward as if others could hear. “There’s an old man who used to be the Chief of Field Ops—and everybody is in a crazy because they think the Grays may be after him. I’m not sure anyone knows why. Just after Admiral Sheffield was killed, my boss—the Director of Logistics—was called into a big meeting about this guy. Seems the grand poohbahs needed to stash him someplace safe for a while. That’s why Rescue is involved with these assassinations.”

  Zouk made a noise to indicate he was suitably impressed at her insider’s knowledge. “Who is this guy?” He needed confirmation.

  She shrugged. “I’d never heard of him. He was before my time. Name’s Delaney Gordon.”

  “Hmm. Never heard of him either. Where’d they end up taking him?”

  She’d lost interest now, his compulsion fading. “Search me. It was all so hush-hush. The DL handled all the details himself. I never saw the orders.”

  Borazt! So close, but missing that last crucial piece of information. The Grays should have been able to provide him with a place to start, at least—the place Delaney Gordon was Taken from as a child. But so many records were lost in Rescue’s raid of the Del Origa processing center. Gordon might have been Taken from Earth, or from Terrene, or from any of a hundred colony planets. So Zouk was forced to use his own resources.

  Plying this particular resource involved finesse, and now it appeared he’d have to wait a little longer for his intel. “Well, you’re right, sweetling, the media so often gets only half the story,” he said. “It’s so much more fun to know someone on the inside.” He pushed her back down to the bed and covered her body with his. “I particularly love knowing you on the inside.”

  He used the sex to distract her, knowing by morning she would have forgotten about their conversation. Later, while she slept, he would implant a suggestion that she infiltrate the office comps for the details he needed. It might take a few attempts before he got all that was required. But the work was pleasant, and, for now, there was no hurry.