Roxanne wanted to protest, to announce angrily that such treatment was not right or fair or deserved. To tell him that his strength was wonderful, that he was a good man, a great man—a man who deserved understanding and support and love as a gift freely given. But to say those words would be to offer them, and she could not, would not. Millions of lives stood between them; the security and interests of the United Systems stood between them. What she could give to him was not the same as doing her duty as Physician and MilService officer. She wished desperately that she had never put on either the green or black uniforms of the services that defined who she was and what she had to do.
She could see how lonely it had been with Pyr, how his daughter had gone back to their people and he had raised his son, the boy an eager exile from a culture he’d never known. His three fellow anomalous telepathic friends, Axylel, and his stubborn honor were all Pyr Kaddani had. And her. She could easily see herself running into his arms and promising to ease his loneliness, to stay with him forever.
She concentrated on the commonplace. “You should check on Axylel and the rest of the troops.” She glanced toward the fresher. “You have the universe to save, and I need to take a shower.”
Pyr nodded, and stepped aside to let her go into the other room. She heard him activate the comm unit as she closed the door between them.
“Who are you?”
The hostility in Axylel’s voice was not unexpected. Martin kept his expression carefully blank as he turned from the medical workstation to face the young man on the bed. “Martin Braithwaithe.” He had gotten some information about Pyr’s son from the other elves, enough to help him decide on his initial approach to the young man.
Axylel was sitting up, glaring at him. The peace of healthy sleep had left him. Awake, every tense muscle spoke to Martin of remembered pain. There was hate for the world and himself in Axylel’s eyes, but the young man tilted his head at Martin’s answer, interest pricked. “I’ve heard that name.”
“I have been told that you are the Raptor’s chief datarat.”
Axylel swung out of the bed and came toward him, a lean young predator with more curiosity than caution in his eyes. “Why don’t I feel like shit, Martin Braithwaithe?”
“Long story. Tall blonde. But she likes your dad, so don’t get any ideas.” Inquisitiveness: Axylel fairly quivered with it. It overrode, if only briefly, the hell inside his own head. Good.
“Martin Braithwaithe’s famous. You don’t look famous.” Axylel touched him. Martin stayed very still. He detected no use of telepathy, but the young man said, “You feel like a Terran. Braithwaithe is Terran. MilService Sector Security Chief, Sector Eleven, stationed aboard the USS Odyssey. Secondary and tertiary specialties for sector ship assignment involve medicine and poetry.”
“Song lyrics. I write song lyrics, not poetry. Real men don’t write poetry, datarat. I’m flattered you have files on mere sector chiefs.” And need to find and eliminate your source when I get home, he added to himself.
Axylel took the second chair at the medical station. “Why would Commander Martin Braithwaithe tell an alien spy who he is?”
“To distract you from your troubles,” Martin admitted. He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Anybody tries to interrogate me, my head explodes, effectively getting rid of me and the interrogator. Besides, if you’re as good a datarat as Pilsane says you are, you’d figure it out when you get filled in on what’s happened while you’ve been missing.” Axylel’s expression went blank. He grew even stiffer with tension. “Hungry?” Martin asked. He reached across the console to let his hand hover over a comm button. “Should I call Kristi?”
Axylel looked interested for a moment, then a hint of controlled panic flashed across his face. He shook his head. He wasn’t ready to face friends and family.
“People are going to be in here demanding to know all you know pretty soon,” Martin told him. “You’re going to say you don’t remember a lot of it.”
“I don’t.”
He wouldn’t. Martin had seen the way Axylel looked before Roxy went to work on him, and had removed the deadman implant himself. Only a combination of drugs and pain would have kept a telepath from calling for help. Linch and Pilsane and Mik had each been in to have a look at Axylel while he slept. Martin had garnered a little information from each of them. Linch had told him about Pyr’s not being able to contact Axylel. So, lots of drugs were involved. Pilsane had told him about Halfor sending a message about training a replacement for Pyr to the Pirate League. Mik had told him about Axylel’s insatiable curiosity and skill at finding information. Only he’d been caught, tortured, and used against his father and people. Between the drugs, Halfor’s attempt to condition him, and his own sense of failure, Axylel was going to bury everything that had happened to him for a while.
Martin supposed telling the young man about some of his own bitter failures might sound condescending at this early point. He said, “Want me to tell you why you don’t feel like shit? Starting with when the koltiri and I come into the story?”
Axylel perked up again. “Koltiri? Talk.”
———
Roxy made sure the door slid all the way shut, but the controls wouldn’t lock the door at her voice command. Of course, Pyr could override any lock on the ship, so true privacy wasn’t possible. She laughed silently at the notion of being private from Pyr at all; the man was inside her head, for the Great Goddess’s sake! And he would stay there, and she would remain a part of him, but she would leave him. She would be another Siiyel.
“But for a better reason,” she murmured, with her hands balled into fists and tears streaming down her face.
He would be alone and so would she, but Sagouran Fever would be wiped from all the worlds where this ugly death had been spread. You paid the price you had to. He would understand that. He had a Door, she had her own way of traveling through space in a blink. It was difficult, teleportation terrified her, but she was strong enough, had to be, even though she’d spent much energy in healing Pyr’s son.
In fact, she and Pyr fed energy to each other, the connection already ran that deep without the shalsae connection that was possible between them. Shalsae. The full, complete, total completion. Her Terran father called it finding your soulmate, in spades. The Koltiran concept—reality for a very few koltiri—of shalsae was the great quest, almost as important for koltiri as continuing the Genesis. That she and Pyr could achieve shalsae was fanciful nonsense, or so she would tell herself in years to come. Centuries. Millennia. Being functionally immortal was about to turn into a real emotional pain in the ass. Perhaps she’d cut her hair and drape herself in mourning black—or the memory and melancholy would fade in time, and either way she should stop stalling.
It occurred to her that Martin might have lied to her about the telepathic spy to get her to do just this. Martin could lie to God and get away with it, and he would do it for God’s good, too. And the United Systems’. They were two good men, Martin and Pyr, but each saw only as far as their own borders.
Roxanne took a very deep breath and closed her eyes. The way to teleport was really quite simple. You only had to think of somewhere you wanted to be, and then be there. Of course, the trick was that you had to want to be there so badly that you could bend space, time, and reality to get you there. Where did she want to be that Pyr was not? The only place that came to mind at first was the final 1998 NBA game between the Bulls and the Jazz, but that was a few centuries away from the current crisis, and time travel really was too hard for most koltiri, despite any claims to the contrary in the recruitment brochures.
There really was nowhere she wanted to be that Pyr was not.
She opened her eyes and took another deep breath before closing them again. Where was the best place for what she needed to do? Easy answer. Nightingale, of course. The whole planet was a hospital and medical research facility, and deep, deep within United Systems territory. Pity she didn’t have any Rust on her, then she wou
ldn’t have to work completely from memory. Maybe she should go to the sickbay and get some. No, that was an excuse, she had all the information from her research stored in her head. Damn, she wished she knew what data Halfor had on the plague and the drug. Were the people inside his fortress Rust addicts or had they been given an already existing vaccine? She bet Pilsane knew. Another excuse. No time to talk to him.
Just go.
Nightingale. Right. She’d studied there, worked there, knew the place well enough to envision the exact room where she wanted to be. All it required was the power of a demi-goddess and an act of will.
Stop crying, you idiot, and go!
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Decryption of Halfor’s files coming along nicely, Captain,” Pilsane said. “But the news isn’t promising. Lots of great information about the guild and the League, but no luck yet in finding out if Halfor knew where the Rust originates. I think I have his list of suppliers, but haven’t broken the code to know for sure yet. Too bad you took his head off before you or I could get into it.”
“I was in a hurry.”
“Understood.”
“Did the guild have a vaccine? A cure?” Roxanne would want to know.
“Don’t think so.”
Damn. “Keep at it.” He keyed another channel. “Mik?”
“Door shields upgraded. Working on cloak at the moment,” the engineer answered. “Figure it might be fun to be able to slip away from those six ships if you decide you’d rather not visit the emperor.”
Pyr laughed. “I would like to be ready for that contingency. How close to the Shireny cloak have you gotten our cloaking device?”
“Not close enough. As it is, we could disappear, but the Bucons would pick up our signature within eight minutes. I’m trying to get it up to ten.”
Ten minutes would be a nice head start, but Pyr would like better odds than that if he was going to have a fleet on his tail. Cloaks were useful for quietly hiding, but only the Shireny design completely masked the use of a stardrive for more than a few minutes. “Keep working on it.”
He turned off the bracelet and pulled on a blue shirt from a pile of bright clothing. He would go see Axylel now. He might go through with the agreement to take the koltiri to the emperor. He was not opposed to keeping his word on principle, but it was wise to be cautious, and always prepared to bolt if things got complicated. Where were his boots?
A throbbing ache grew in his head while he moved around his quarters. He stopped looking for his boots and ran his hands over his face as he muttered, “Why do things always get complicated?” His vision blurred for a moment when he took his hands away.
He turned toward the door, but froze on a sharp intake of breath. The room around him shifted and changed. The walls went all white, the floor a cool empty blue; a curtained window looked out over a blooming garden. The temperature in the room dropped like a stone. There was a taste of tears in his mouth. Emptiness swelled up and around him. He stretched out, and fell forward.
Space. Cold and dark and endless. He hung in darkness and all he heard was a far-off, anguished scream.
Roxanne. Where was Roxanne?
Pyr wrapped his body around him in a fierce rush of will. He stood in his messy cabin, made his lungs and eyes work and looked around. Frantic urgency tugged at his heart. Fury raced through his blood, along with fear. He had to hurry, do something. Now!
Where was Roxanne?
He stepped toward the fresher, but knew that was no good. He stood in the middle of the room, gathered all his power.
Roxanne!
Darkness turned into a long, endless tunnel with twined threads of gold and fire running through it. He followed the fire. Chased the gold. Was tangled in both.
Roxanne!
She moved ahead of him, beside him, in him, all at once. She was there and gone. Her pain drew him, filled him, became him. Her longing was his. She was leaving. Going. Gone. He ran and fell in the dark and ran again, reeling in the gold that was her, gathering her in, held her soul in his hands, fueled his determination with fury while she fought for freedom. She would not leave him. Not her. He would not be alone. Not again.
Roxanne!
She screamed and he loved the sound.
Roxanne!
Claws and teeth bit into his flesh. A hard blow connected with his jaw. A kick smashed his knee. He kicked back. Blocked a second blow to his head. His smile showed all his teeth. A stone knife flashed toward his gut. He broke her wrist and took the knife.
“Roxanne.”
“What?”
She turned, tossed her hair, and put her hands on the curved flare of her hips. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. Fierce, furious, beautiful-when-she-was-angry Roxanne.
He didn’t let her get away with yelling at him. “What am I doing? What by all the demons beyond the veil do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m in the middle of teleporting. You’re in the middle of getting us both killed.”
“You’re trying to escape.”
He looked around and saw that they stood close together in the middle of nothing. Empty blackness stretched away in this place where only they existed. Inside the mind, infinity is distracting even more than it is disconcerting. He recalled another time they had been locked within each other’s thoughts. Subjective reality, she’d called it, and had passed the understanding of how to manipulate it to him without thinking. He used the knowledge now to put ground under their feet. It was a desert, an empty place under a harsh red sky, a reflection of his own bleak rage.
Pyr watched Roxanne look around and frown, and then a few succulent green plants appeared on the stony ground, and a tiny spring bubbled up out of a rust- and red-striated boulder. Small gray and green birds settled to drink at the shaded pool beneath the boulder. She did not change his creation, but added life to it.
“Improves the real estate a bit,” she said when she looked back at him. She stepped back but he followed her, keeping barely a breath’s distance between them. She finally bumped into the boulder and stayed put. She put her hands on his chest and tried to push him away. He noticed that his chest was bare. He hadn’t noticed before now, but she was naked, too. He smiled. He liked her naked, and it was his subjective reality.
“What were you trying to do?” he demanded, before his attraction to this alien woman overrode his outrage.
“Escape, of course. Why else would I be trying to teleport? You ever tried teleporting?” Her hands had moved to his shoulders. She continued to try to push him away, but the effort was desultory. “It’s a wonder I’m not throwing up all over you right now. Actually,” she added, as she looked past his shoulder at their desert world. “We’re probably in a coma. We might even possibly be dead.”
“How inconvenient.”
He then kissed her. Her hands had stopped pushing him away and had drawn him closer instead, until kissing her was the only possible response he could make. It didn’t feel as if they were comatose or dead from the way they responded to each other. When her hands moved slowly over him, he became quite certain that he was not dead. She didn’t taste dead, or feel anything but soft, warm, and female. He kissed and stroked her for a long time. There was a lot of her to touch. She moved beneath his hands and made small alive sounds that deepened his own desire, sent him searching for more ways to please her.
Then subjective reality set in again and he found himself standing at least ten feet away from Roxanne, aroused, but shaking with outrage as much as with need. She stood opposite him, fists balled at her sides, her anger and need a mirror of his own. He did not know which of them had moved from the other. He didn’t think Roxanne knew either, as her angry eyes looked dark as midnight and as lonely.
“What are you doing?” he heard himself ask, forlorn and aching when he wanted to be outraged and righteous. “Why leave me?”
“You think I want to leave you?”
The words were sharp with sorrow, sharp enoug
h to tear at his flesh and heart. She did not want to leave him, and he could hardly bear the happiness and confusion brought with that knowledge. It was not because of him! Not because he was an alien outcast. Not because he frightened her. They were one and the same being breathing in two different bodies.
“Why?” He was not sure from which of them the word came.
Roxanne waved her hand and the desert became a sea of corpses—all with dead, accusing eyes turned on her. Another gesture and the bodies were gone. The chill of death remained just the same. It was a cold wind that blew between them.
“What choice do you give me?” she asked. “What else can I do but leave?”
“It will kill us both.”
“It will kill my soul,” she agreed. “Your People have yours.”
It was an unfair and damnably true thing to say. But not so true as it had once been. “Your soul is a part of me.” He held her in his arms again. Roxanne clung to him, her head resting on his shoulder. She shook with sobs as he touched her, gentle and fiercely protective at once. He felt her heart beating against his, with his, the same heart, stronger for being doubled.
Roxanne lifted her head and looked deep into his eyes. “Your soul is a part of me.” The words were part of a ritual they knew without having been taught. There was nothing of ritual in the way their mouths sought and clung to each other, sharing a hard, demanding kiss that gave away every last secret of need and desperate wanting. Their souls were naked, vulnerable, and trusting. And they rushed together at the speed of light and with the inevitability of the rise of continents. Nothing could stand between them. Nothing should.
RoxannePyrmylovemylife.
It was but a step, a movement that had no actual movement, but Pyr sensed himself take one small step—off a cliff, into infinity, across a boundary of smoke and fire. A whisper-thin barrier blew away.
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