Class five. It was the highest classification. There was no way he could achieve it in a public hotel. “Let me return to the palace. Brief me there.”
“Please hurry, sir!” Desperation edged every word.
Forty minutes later he walked into Jaakon’s office. “Took you long enough,” the aide snapped.
Boho flushed. “Since this was so hush-hush I figured you wouldn’t want me to commandeer a police escort. So, what’s the problem?”
Jaakon brought all the security systems online before he spoke. “We’ve lost communication with the strike force.” Boho started to respond, but Jaakon rushed on. “And a distress call was triggered from her Highness’s life capsule.”
“What’s the location?” he demanded.
“They were following up on reports of a Hidden World. I have the coordinates here.”
“Contact the port to ready the imperial pinnace. Inform Vice Admiral Pulkkinen to prepare a squadron for me. I’ll undertake the search myself.”
“The Emperor?”
“I’ll inform him. You get me ready to leave.”
“Yes, sir.”
For the first time Boho heard a note of respect in Jaakon’s voice.
He rushed down the hall toward Fernán’s study. Sometimes there were hiccups with the Foldstream, but the news that the emergency beacon had been triggered on a life pod meant this was serious. It meant a ship had died, but perhaps not Mercedes with it. Died. She could be gone. For the past ten years their marriage had felt like a still life of a marriage. Perfect in every detail but lacking that one essential component—life.
Oh God, if Mercedes really was dead Paloma would expect him to marry her. Or maybe not. He had discussed the complex waltz of power that he was dancing with the del Campos. Paloma had seemed fine with him marrying Sofia, understanding the reality and necessity, but with Mercedes gone would the del Campos still need his support? Musa and Mihalis were the heirs. They might withdraw the offer of Sofia. No, they’d want him as proof of an orderly transition. That however much the old man might rage, the consort, bent with grief but still thinking of the good of the League, would show his support by marrying a del Campo daughter. Yes, that was how it would play out.
God, my wife might be dead and here I am gaming out the political ramifications. His steps slowed and he leaned against the wall. Guilt shook him. He had humiliated and betrayed Mercedes over and over. Why had he done that? Because he was merely the consort? Because she didn’t satisfy him? Because he needed that look of adoration, the excitement of discovery, which only happened at the start of a love affair? Or because he was a cad? Ugly thought, that.
What if he never discussed a concert with her again, or tried a bite of her entree during a dinner out when they delighted the press and the citizens by pretending to be approachable and no different from the people they ruled? Boho recalled the way her lips would purse and a small frown furrow her brow when she was concentrating. The way her hair curled around his fingers. What if she really was gone and he’d never made things right? What if he never had the chance to remove the look of contempt and disappointment that lived deep in her eyes after his scheme with the promotions board had been revealed?
He pushed off from the wall trying to outrun his grief, the level of which surprised him. He would find Mercedes and bring her home and they’d do better. He would end it with Paloma. Pull back from the dangerous game he was playing with the del Campos. He would do better.
* * *
The life capsule had clamped itself, limpet-like, to the stony surface of the moon. The capsule’s tiny brain had concluded that floating in a battle zone probably wasn’t optimal for the survival of its occupant, had looked for refuge and landed. As they came in for a landing, Tracy reflected that the long black box looked eerily like a sarcophagus. He prayed that it was more a cocoon from which Mercedes would emerge unscathed.
The landing struts adjusted for the uneven surface. Tracy popped the dome and pushed out of his couch with such force that he almost hit escape velocity from the tiny moon. Jahan’s tail wrapped around his ankle and pulled him back down.
“Whoa, whoa there, pardner,” she drawled in a fake Old West accent.
“Sorry. Thanks. Hurry.”
Once his boots were on the surface he set off in long flying thirty-foot strides toward the life capsule. At first Jahan kept pace with him, but then she fell behind.
“Uh, Ollie… Tracy.”
“What.” He turned back, impatient at the delay. The capsule was a mere hundred feet away.
“You need to look at this.”
“At what?”
“Come here, but slowly. Don’t bounce.”
There was something in her tone that told him not to argue. He shuffled back to her, trying to stay close to the surface despite the low gravity. She stood gazing down into a neatly drilled hole in the moon’s surface. An antenna nestled in a mound of rocks was blinking slowly. Tracy snapped on his helmet light and directed it into the hole. He reared back.
“That’s a bomb, isn’t it?” Jahan asked.
“Yeah. A big one.” He scanned the moon’s surface to the edge of the very close horizon drop-off. He spotted a number of the rock cairns. He gestured and Jahan followed him to a couple more. It was the same setup. They exchanged glances.
“Looks like we know what took out the ships,” Tracy said.
“Good thing the Talon doesn’t weigh much. Or us,” Jahan said.
“I think we’re okay. It looks like this was designed to be remotely detonated.”
“Still—”
“We should get off this rock as quickly as possible.”
They moved quickly to the capsule. Tracy’s breaths were loud inside his helmet and there was a fluttering in his chest and it wasn’t all due to exertion, or the fact the moon had been turned into a giant bomb and they were standing on it. He bent and shined his helmet light across the capsule. The surface was etched with a message in every known League language, urging the finder to contact O-Trell headquarters on any world upon discovery. There was also an additional message that the DNA of the human inside was not to be harvested or altered in any way.
“I guess they didn’t bother to update the message now that the Cara’ot are gone,” Jahan said dryly as Tracy brushed away the fine layer of dust and ice that had formed over the faceplate.
He gazed down into Mercedes’ face. Snow White in her crystal coffin. Sleeping Beauty awaiting—He jerked away from that thought. She was in a deep coma induced by the drugs the capsule had injected into her bloodstream. A few wisps of hair, dark brown and iced with streaks of gray, had come loose from her braid and had caught in her lips.
“Hmmm, I thought a princess would be prettier,” Jahan said.
“She’s beautiful!” he flared.
Jahan stared at him, then nodded. “Ah, now I see… You’re in love with her.”
Before the conversation could become any more awkward, Tracy said, “The capsule won’t fit in the Talon. We’re going to have to clamp it to the hull.”
Jahan nodded and picked up one end of the sarcophagus. Tracy grabbed the other and they hopped and shuffled toward the Talon. The negligible gravity on the moon made it possible, but the bulk was still awkward to handle and they were giving the buried bombs a wide berth. Several times they lost their grip and bounced the capsule on the rocks, which made them both freeze and stare nervously at the blinking antennas. They finally reached the Talon, and Tracy pulled clamps out of the locker. He double- and triple-checked the clamps. Jahan stood, hands on her hips, as she studied the arrangement.
“Seems a pretty disrespectful way to transport royalty.”
“It’s not like we can open it here,” Tracy said. “Come on, the sooner we get back to the Selkie the sooner we can get her out.”
16
SHE LOVES ME
Luis radioed them before Tracy could hail the Selkie. “That was a quick trip.”
“We found a survivor,�
� Tracy responded.
“And is that ever an understatement,” Jahan muttered.
The bay doors opened and Tracy brought them in slow. He landed so softly that the landing gear of the Talon just kissed the flame-scorched surface. He killed the engines. The bay doors closed. Tracy flipped on the radio.
“Once we’re re-pressurized get Dalea down here,” Tracy ordered. “And pull us back. Well back from any moon.”
“Why?”
“They weaponized the moons,” Jahan answered.
“The Pope’s holy wickerbill,” Luis breathed.
When the panel went green, Tracy climbed out of the fighter and put aside his helmet. He could feel the rumble of the ship’s engines through the soles of his boots. Good, Luis has us moving out of this kill zone.
He and Jahan wrestled the capsule off the hull of the decommissioned fighter. The whine of the lift announced the medic’s imminent arrival. The crew rarely used the lift, saving it for when they had to move bulky or heavy items. Dalea had a fold-up stretcher, her medical bag, oxygen. Jahan ran to help her carry the equipment. Tracy was relieved to see that Luis and Graarack had remained on the bridge.
Dalea studied the capsule from every angle, ending at the screen that registered heart rate, respiration, blood pressure. Tracy jigged impatiently. “You just open that panel, hit that release, and it blows the seals,” he said and pointed at the panel.
“And I will after I finish reading her vitals,” the Hajin said placidly. She returned to her study of the readouts. After what seemed like hours she touched the release. The seals blew off, and the top lifted, releasing a puff of bitterly cold air into the hold. It formed a dense white cloud that was then torn to tatters by the atmosphere scrubbers.
Tracy gripped the end of the capsule and gazed down at Mercedes. A tangle of IV tubes snaked across her body. Where the needles that kept her in her deathlike coma had been driven into her body her uniform was stained with blood. Her skin had a grayish hue. The life capsule sensed the presence of atmosphere and warmth, gave a chime and the needles withdrew.
“When will she wake up?” Tracy asked.
“It’s going to be a few hours. Let’s get her on the stretcher,” Dalea ordered.
Tracy slipped his arms beneath Mercedes and lifted her out of the capsule. He ignored the stretcher and carried her to the lift. He had to work at it for Mercedes wasn’t much shorter than him, and she had a powerfully muscled frame.
The alien women joined him in the lift.
He was panting as the lift slowly rose to the second deck. “Don’t have a heart attack,” Jahan said. Tracy glared at her.
“You could have used the stretcher, and we would have helped you,” Dalea added.
“Not going to happen,” Jahan said in a conversational tone to the Hajin. “See, he’s in love with her so of course he has to play the knight errant.”
“Shut up,” Tracy gritted.
“Ohhhhh,” breathed Dalea.
“Both of you. Not another word.”
* * *
Tracy stood at the sink in the closet-sized bathroom in his cabin holding the mother-of-pearl-handled straight razor he had inherited from his grandfather. He had caught a glimpse of his face reflected in the mirror over the sink in the med bay, and realized that being the captain of a tramp trader had allowed him to fall down on the spit and polish. He had three days’ growth of stubble on his cheeks and chin, and his hair was shaggy. He didn’t recall the last time he’d gotten a haircut. So now he stood with one smooth cheek, and the shaving cream drying on the other, trying to analyze his feelings.
Soon Mercedes would awaken and… then what? The initial joy had melted into a roiling sludge of resentment as he remembered their last interactions, and worried over how the League was going to react. That had apparently not occurred to several of his crew, who were just excited once the identity of their exalted passenger was known.
Forty minutes ago, Luis and Graarack had stopped by the med bay to see the survivor and stood gawking in the door until Dalea had driven them all out, Tracy included, and closed the door.
Luis had started for the ladder and the bridge saying, “I’ll get in touch with the capital and let them know we found—”
Tracy had grabbed him roughly by the arm, and pulled him to a stop. “No! Not yet.”
“But—”
Graarack caught on. “Ah, of course, we’re orbiting a Hidden World.”
“Not only that,” Tracy added. “At least four, maybe five ships got destroyed here. One of them a flagship—”
“Oh, shit, you think they’d blame us?” Luis asked.
“Why wouldn’t they? We’re here and convenient.” The level of bitter gall in his voice startled him as well as his crew. “There’s more than just our safety to consider, there are politics too. Let’s wait for the Infanta to wake up and find out how she wants to handle this.”
“And here I thought rescuing a princess was going to be a good thing,” Luis had muttered as he went to fix a cup of coffee.
The Sidone spider had given Tracy a sideways glance out of several of her faceted eyes. “It’s interesting how those human fairytales never continue after the princess gets rescued. Maybe they knew something.”
Tracy wiped away the now nearly dry shaving cream and lathered his face again. He finished shaving, and was pleased that he had managed to avoid even a single nick. He ran a hand through his hair. Nothing could be done about that short of sticking a bowl on his head and cutting it himself. He wasn’t going to trust it to any of his crew… well, maybe Dalea. He then realized how much he would be mocked and quickly discarded the notion. Why did he care how he looked anyway? She had fucked him over, destroyed his career. His conviction had broken his father’s health. Add to that she was another man’s wife. Whatever he might have felt for her it was gone now… it had to be.
He wiped away the excess cream from beneath his ears, rinsed his face, and headed to the galley. As he expected, all of them, except Dalea, were waiting for him. Luis was pulling a pan of nachos out of the oven while Jahan brought over five different kinds of hot sauce. Tracy fished a beer out of the refrigerator, opened it, and sat down at the table.
“Still no response from Kusatsu-Shirane?”
“Nada,” Luis mumbled around a bite of nacho.
“We need to find out what’s happened,” Graarack said.
“That capsule’s been broadcasting a distress beacon,” Jax said as he snapped on his preferred light over his chair. “At some point the League is going to show up.”
“We’ve got a few days before a ship can get here,” Tracy replied.
“We could always dump her Highness’s royal heinie on the planet and beat cheeks,” Jahan said.
“We are not leaving an unconscious woman on a planet, we’re—” Tracy began.
Jax interrupted, “Eventually she’s going to wake up and then our real problems start, unless we are far, far away from here.” He began ticking off points on his waving fronds. “We were trading illegally with a Hidden World. We didn’t report said aforementioned Hidden World to the League as required by the Hidden Worlds Act, 23 SLR subsection127.”
“You have the regulations memorized?” Tracy asked, not really surprised but still amazed.
“All of those relevant to our particular situation and the violation of which might put my leafy ass in jail. Going on, a close audit of our finances will reveal that we received monies from an unknown source that might eventually be revealed as yet another Hidden World. You have been operating under an alias to avoid your debt to the League’s star command. So yeah, rescuing the Infanta endangers us in a major way. I hope she’s appropriately grateful.”
“So, we should have just left her, let her husband and O-Trell come find her,” Graarack mused. “Can we put her back in the box?”
“No,” snapped Tracy, and at the same time Jahan said, “Not going to happen. The captain’s in love with her.”
He slammed the bottle
onto the table. Beer sloshed out the top and spilled over his hand. “Would you stop!”
“Tell me I’m wrong,” the Isanjo challenged. Tracy sat chewing on words, tasting and discarding them. “Ah ha!”
“It’s… complicated,” he finally said.
“So you did know her,” Luis said.
Tracy was saved from answering by Dalea’s hail over the ship’s intercom. “She’s coming around. The face of someone she knows might be helpful.”
“You were eavesdropping,” Tracy accused.
“Monitoring. Merely monitoring.”
Tracy left the galley, hurried down the short hallway and into the small med bay. Dalea was just withdrawing a needle from Mercedes’ arm. The princess was moaning. Tracy stiffened.
“What was that shot?”
“Painkiller. She’s coming out of a coma and cold sleep. It’s going to hurt.”
“Oh, okay.” He broke the magnetic seal on a chair and pulled it close to where she lay. Mercedes’ left hand hung limply off the side of the bed. The elaborate wedding set glittered under the lights, mocking him with each flash of the facets. Dalea slipped out of the room. Tracy studied Mercedes’ face. A furrow of pain marred her forehead. She still seemed to be unconscious so he risked it. He lifted her hand and softly stroked it. One of the sharp points on the central diamond pricked his finger, drawing a speck of blood. It seemed a fitting rebuke from the universe. He laid her hand back on the bed and released her.
Thirty minutes later she was still emitting faint little moans, her eyelids were twitching, but she was still unconscious. Tracy called Dalea. “Should it be taking this long?”
“Everybody’s metabolism reacts differently, Tracy. Relax. Apart from a few cuts and bruises she is fine. She’ll wake up when she wakes up.”
“Okay. I was just worried.”
More minutes crawled past. He found himself in a daydream that was edging toward an actual dream about what it would have been like to awaken next to this woman. To have her scent in his nostrils, her hair wrapping around him as they made love, her warmth—
“Tracy.” He came bolt upright in the chair. She was staring at him. A gentle smile curved her lips. “I dreamed I heard your voice. But you can’t actually be here. You’re dead… I cried.”
The Hidden World Page 16