Gates of Hell

by Susan Sizemore

  “I have no idea where that came from. I think it’s time you and I got back to reality for a while.” She stood up slowly and looked around. “It’s a little claustrophobic in here, don’t you think?”

  He crossed his arms. “It’s supposed to be, Roxanne.”

  “This is a place for extracting information from your enemies. If you want information, I suggest you take me out for a cup of coffee first.”

  “You’re suggesting we behave like civilized beings?”

  “You have to admit our first couple of dates have been a bit traumatic.”

  “We could go back to my place,” he suggested, and failed in the effort to smirk when he said it. Linch would have been proud.

  “The whole ship is your place.”

  “The Pirate League might disagree with that.”

  She took this scrap of information with a calm nod. After her reaction to Kith, he’d expected a certain amount of outrage. “I’ve got Leaguers in my family,” she told him. “I can live with the disgrace if you can. But I would like to know why you’re in league with the League.”

  “The explanation is simple enough.”

  “But is it innocent or evil? For or against the Systems? It’s a little claustrophobic in here too.” She tapped a finger on her forehead as she spoke. “I’ve spent a lot of time at war. It’s gotten me into this mindset of thinking that anyone who isn’t on my side is automatically an enemy.”

  He nodded reluctantly. “It is the same with me since the Bucon Empire started falling apart. My mission on the border was fending off Bucon trade incursions and Systems spies, until the plague came along. I’ve been trying to keep the plague away from the People, and the People from starting conflicts we cannot win. But I have never been at war with your people.”

  “We don’t know anything about each other, Pyr—other than the fact that our telepathic selves have the hots for each other.”

  “Which is my fault,” he added before she could. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, Roxanne?”

  He did not hold his hand out to her, and she carefully clasped her hands behind her back as she came toward the door. They left the room side by side anyway.

  ———

  Pyr didn’t understand coffee any more than the other Terran food Kristi cooked. He always ate the food, even liked some of it, but he often suggested that there were many other cuisines he found acceptable. She continued to make Terran food, and Pilsane encouraged her because he had a fondness for sweets made from Terran chocolate. Pilsane told him that Kristi made excellent coffee. From the way Roxanne cradled the mug of steaming brown liquid after he brought it to her from the galley, Pyr assumed Pilsie must be right. It pleased him that the koltiri was pleased in this small thing. She took a sip, smiled up at him, and the lights in the common room brightened for him.

  “Good?” he asked, taking a chair opposite Roxanne.

  “Oh, yeah.” She sighed, and took a long pull on the mug.

  It was disconcerting to realize that sitting on the other side of a table rather than beside her had to be a conscious decision. He watched her carefully look away from him after their gazes had been locked for a few moments.

  “Martin’s here,” she said. “Making friends as usual, I see. Who’s the woman with him?”

  “That’s Tinna.”

  “Great legs,” she said, and her gaze moved from table to table. “And your friend, Linch, in the opposite corner, is watching Martin. What’s that he’s playing?”

  Pyr was so used to the background sound of the stringed instrument he didn’t always notice it. “Ligret.”

  “He’s good.”

  “He should be on the bridge,” Pyr answered with a frown.

  Do you have any idea how many hours have passed since you left me with the con, Dha-lrm?

  “Excuse me.” Pyr got up and crossed to where his second in command was sitting. “Report.”

  “Mik has the con. He was very worried about you, until the sexual temperature of the ship warmed up and we figured you had a better idea than torture in mind.” Pyr refrained from commenting, or even being embarrassed, so Linch went on, “Pilsane and I have been going over everything we have on Halfor’s home base, but I’m on a break. We spaced Kith’s remains. I killed one of his people and the others have decided that they won’t miss him after all. The Terran boy is watching us for weaknesses, and I am watching him. Currently the Raptor is cloaked and pretending to be one more asteroid in a belt in the Canyer system. If we don’t move the ship, we shouldn’t be noticed.”

  “And why are we pretending to be a rock?”

  “No pirate activity, but there’ve been Bucon military patrols in the area. I didn’t think you’d want to talk to anybody.”

  Pyr took in the information and nodded his approval. “At least you haven’t been idle while I was—away.”

  Linch looked up from his ligret, and peered around Pyr. “Nice to see that you two are getting along better. Crew’s been talking about making another Rust raid,” he added when Pyr refused to respond to the bait once more.

  “We don’t need Rust.” Pyr nodded toward Roxanne. “We have the koltiri to heal us.”

  “The way she did Kith?”

  “The way she did me.”

  “I think I’d rather take my chances with—”

  “And you will be the first to volunteer to be healed.”

  Linch’s hands stilled on the ligret. The silence was brief, but thick. “As you wish, Captain.” He bent his head and began playing once more.

  Pyr returned to Roxanne. Her coffee mug was nearly empty on the table before her. Everyone in the room watched them, not surreptitiously at all. After years of being careful, he simply did not care anymore. Let them watch and listen; now was the time for honesty. Pilsane would be annoyed at this lack of discretion, but Pilsane would also make sure no information left the ship.

  Pyr sat down and she slid the cup toward him, a hopeful look on her face. Her face mesmerized him for a moment. High cheekbones, huge eyes, a complexion like gold dust mixed with cream. People stared at them, he stared at her, she stared at the coffee cup. It was all quite ridiculous.

  He said, “You must have gained twenty pounds since we met.”

  “Could stand to put on ten more,” she replied. “I’m a big girl. Rare steak is always appreciated,” she wheedled.

  “I promised you coffee on this date,” he reminded her, and she stuck out her tongue at him. “Talk first, eat later.”

  She sat back in her chair and stretched out long, long legs. “Where do we start? What’s the one thing you most want to know?”

  “What do you want to know?” he countered.

  They looked at each other, then both spoke at once.

  “Who’s Axylel?”

  “What’s basketball?”

  “Axylel is my reason for being this deep into Bucon space,” he told her. “Axylel is the reason I am going to destroy the head of the Bucon pirate guild, because Robe Halfor is holding him prisoner. Axylel has vowed to help me stop the plague from harming the People. Axylel is my son.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair, pushing the concealing strands away from his sharply pointed ears in public for the first time in years. He hated all this concealment. It was time for pretense to be over. He wanted very much to—

  Don’t you dare cut that gorgeous hair!

  He slanted an eyebrow at Roxanne as she looked at him with a calm that pretended she had not just shouted loudly inside his head. “And in order to save your people from Sagouran Fever, you’ve decided you have to save every other world as well. Lucky guess,” she added as he tilted an eyebrow at her.

  Some things were better left unsaid. Many, actually. But discretion didn’t seem likely between them. More’s the pity. Pyr reached across the table and took the mug from her and drained the rest of the coffee. He would have preferred beer, but found the slight buzz from caffeine more satisfying than usual. Perhaps he could learn to like this
stuff. Roxanne watched him with an air of proud anticipation that worried him greatly. Finally he met her warm gaze and said, “I’ll do whatever I have to do. I made a vow. Your turn to answer my question,” he added before she could make a fuss.

  “Basketball,” she told him, “is the one thing I know I’m really good at. When I’m playing basketball, I’m happy. It’s an ancient Terran game,” she added, “that my daddy taught me when I had this huge growth spurt when I was only ten. Everywhere else but on a basketball court I was awkward and clumsy, but he showed me a place where I could shine and make him proud. He died when I was eleven,” she added.

  They looked at each other for a few moments, and neither gave in to the urge to touch the other in any way, except that they both knew that they wanted to. “The People need to be protected from outsiders,” Pyr went on, rather than dwell on indulging their personal curiosity any longer. “I do not say this out of xenophobia. Contact with other worlds has proved painful and disastrous for us, and cannot be allowed if we are to survive. I say this because I am a member of a telepathic people that, as a whole, do not have the shielding necessary for contact with beings who think and feel differently than we do.”

  “You do.”

  “I and my men, yes. At home, we are considered freaks of nature. Mine is a fragile race, Roxanne. Even though Mik, Pilsane, Linch, Axylel, and I are vowed to the protection of the People, the People want nothing to do with us. We hurt them. In ancient times, people like us were sent out into the wild empty places to die.” He shrugged. “We still are.”

  “Us, too.”

  He had expected a goddess-like telempath to argue that such fragile shielding was impossible for an entire people, to ask questions about how they had survived long enough to develop a space-going culture, possibly even sneer at the weakness of his people. Instead, she said something enigmatic and confusing.

  “What do you mean, ‘us, too’?”

  “Maybe I’m being a little melodramatic. Koltiri aren’t sent out to die. Our job is to help, serve, and spread it around, but the effect is the same. Still gets us off planet.” As his bemused look turned into a glare, she smiled and said, “There are Koltirans, and there are koltiri. Your average, regular telepathic Koltiran can no more interact with alien sentients than one of your people can. Being able to interact telempathically within a mindset that’s evolved over millions of years is one thing. Being able to communicate with seedling cousins that have thought processes that developed while being equally isolated for millions of years is another gift entirely. It’s biological and electrochemical as much as it is cultural, when you get down to the nitty gritty of how people think. We all come from the same root stock, but the environment where the seeds took hold contributed to how the seeds grew.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. What I started to explain is that it’s only koltiri who interact with beings from other worlds while the rest of our people go quietly about their lives. Very quietly. Koltiri leave our world, but no one else, and no one comes in. You say your people fear the strong ones. The Koltirans worship the strong ones. We’re still outsiders in our own cultures.” She shrugged, with no great concern. “Them’s the breaks for being different.”

  He had never heard of Koltirans—any more than she had heard of the People. He was willing to bet that the United Systems knew very little about Koltirans as well. The koltiri protected their own from outsiders, while still wielding power within the United Systems. How had they managed that?

  “Skill and cunning and thousands of years of practice.”

  “Your people live your secret lives more out in the open than mine do.” She smiled and nodded at this summing up. “Are there many races like yours and mine?”

  She shook her head. “There are two races we know of that can easily share thoughts with people from other worlds. Most telepaths have to rely on translating and enhancing hardware, like that little torture machine of yours. Many telepaths can touch other minds, but not without damaging the non-telepath involved. Non-telepaths have been known to become hostile about getting their minds stripped,” she admitted. “Telepaths are wary of being overwhelmed by numbers, since we’ll always be in the minority. There is a certain paranoia on both sides.”

  “Which argues my case for keeping the People separate from other worlds.”

  “Or contact could help them. Depends on who does the contacting. Most seedlings—sentient species, in official Systems language—develop some form of telepathy and have the potential to develop even further, but very few have the time and luxury to evolve to that potential. It is our belief on Koltir that we are one of the oldest of the sentient species. The population has always been small, the climate gentle. We didn’t have to fight off predators or each other, so we developed our mental abilities. The strong ones developed certain aggressive tendencies, which were channeled into eradicating disease by using their minds. The koltiri took that skill out into space, eventually, after another telepathic race contacted us and taught us a few things.” She waved further explanations away. “You don’t want me preaching a detailed lesson in koltiri history and religion.”

  He did, actually. He had just learned what he had suspected but cautious spying had not been able to prove while exiled to patrol the unsophisticated border planets: that his world was not the only one where everyone had mental gifts. And she wanted to move on to other subjects!

  Yes. She leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table. “Tell me what a nice man like you is doing working for the Pirate League, and then maybe I’ll tell you what I know about Sag Fever and Rust.”

  That answer came easily. “Four men I could trust, one ship, manned mostly by the dregs of the border. I needed the League’s technology to give me an edge in keeping the border clear.”

  “They do have the best toys money can buy, even though their greatest engineer defected to my side.”

  “But their associations with the Trin makes up for the loss, or so Kith assured me.” He scowled, and she scowled back. “No. I didn’t really know what he was—and it makes me feel naive. The League’s price,” he explained, “was to take a significant share of the booty from every pirate, slaver, and illegal trading ship I stopped from crossing the border. All Kith did aboard the Raptor was ensure that the League got their fair share.”

  There were many more things he could have told her. About the governments on border worlds that he controlled, his many other alliances, his spy system, the moles he planted wherever he could, mostly among the Bucons. Of course, there were many things she must know that she would not tell him. They were working on trusting each other on levels that were more than personal, but they weren’t fools or traitors to their own loyalties.

  “Tell me why Stev Persey tried to kill you.”

  “Simple business vendetta. I hijacked one of his Rust shipments. Why’d he try to kill you? And what were you doing on a slaver ship?” He thought back to where and how they’d met. It seemed years ago, rather than hours. Something tickled irritably in his memories, a faint connection was made. “You were on board a slaver ship where the ambassador to the United Systems was killed,” he said, suddenly very sharply suspicious. “Why is that, Roxanne? Who is also an officer in the United Systems Military Service. How are you connected to Persey, and Glover?”

  Roxanne considered him for a few moments. “It has everything to do with Rust,” she said. “You might want Linch in on this.” She looked across the room, and called out loudly. “Martin, stop fomenting revolution and get over here.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Martin was quite happy to join the conversation. Roxy and Captain Pyr looked far too comfortable together for Commander Martin Braithwaithe’s peace of mind. Besides, he hadn’t been able to overhear too much of their conversation from where he was sitting. He was more than a little anxious to find out what was going on between them, and interfere if necessary. When Pyr dragged Roxy off, Martin had been under the impression that dire things w
ere planned for her. When they came back they were practically holding hands, and trying not to gaze romantically at each other. Knowing koltiri, Martin wasn’t altogether surprised at Pyr’s reaction to Roxy. It was Roxy’s returning the attraction that was disturbing.

  Pyr looked sternly around the common and made a sharp gesture. It was enough to send everyone but Martin and Linch quickly out the door. Martin rose from his seat and moved to the table with an easy-going slouch as he continued to ignore Linch paying close attention to his every move. Despite his efforts to project “harmless kid” as he gathered information, he figured the only reason he wasn’t dead or locked up was that Linch was curious to see what he would do. Linch, Martin thought sourly, reminded him of himself. He shrugged half-apologetically at the pirate captain and pulled out a chair as Linch moved to the table as well.

  “Glad to see you’re still alive,” he told Roxy.

  “I said she’d be fine,” Linch told him. “He was worried,” Linch added to Pyr. “So I let him work on an escape plan to take his mind off things.”

  Too damn much like me, Martin thought, perfectly capable of projecting that much of a thought to the group of telepaths. “So, what are you,” Martin asked as he glanced at the captain’s pointed ears. “An elf?”

  “He’s not working for the Trin,” Roxy rushed to answer as the pirate captain turned a glower on Martin. “That’s as much as you need to know. Elves are magical creatures from Terran mythology,” she explained to Pyr. “So he didn’t insult you.”

  “Much,” Martin added. “I know they aren’t working with the Trin,” Martin answered Roxy. “I’ve been asking around.”

  “Perhaps if you’d asked around sooner—” Linch began.

  “You see a Trin, you react,” Roxy cut him off. “Those are the rules we play by.”

  “We’re going over old ground.” Pyr’s gaze settled on Roxy. “First, I want to know what you know about the plague, and Rust.”