“She won’t, Vidor. Think with your brain. Don’t do this.”
He hesitated, something in her tone, pierced his thoughts. Was it fear? What could she fear from this woman? Their people feared one woman and soon he would take care of her, too. Bana needed to trust him.
“I do what I must, old friend. Trust me in this.”
She sighed. “It’s not you I do not trust. She worries me.”
“Let me worry about her and the other. I will deal with them both.”
Tonight he would give her a choice, but not the one she expected. She didn’t fear death, so that was off the table.
As if she sensed his thoughts were on her, Morticia met his gaze. She deflected his effort to pierce her thoughts. She revealed only what she wanted to reveal. He got that now. He’d learned the lesson. It was her turn to learn that everything was going to change.
And then a cry broke the happier sounds of the encampment. While he and his men reached for weapons, Morticia turned toward Riven’s wife. The girl was bent, her hand at her back, her face showing distress. Morticia crouched next to her, her hand on the girl’s distended stomach.
“Has your back been hurting a lot today?”
The girl nodded, her eyes wide, her fear obvious. Vidor and Riven both stepped back, and he saw a flash of annoyance in Morticia’s eyes.
“Did you have a plan for when the babies start coming?”
“Bana.” Vidor nodded at her to help the girl.
“That’s your plan?”
“I don’t want her! I want my mother!”
Morticia’s gaze chilled. He might as well have been dipped in the lake again.
“You’re all complete and utter bastards. Can’t you see how frightened she is?”
Vidor made himself step toward the grouping. “Bana will care for her. She will be fine.”
The girl clung to Morticia’s hand, sobbing in panic. Vidor could tell Morticia felt torn about something. What did she know? What did she seek to hide from him?
“Bastard,” she said again. She turned to the girl. “Let’s get you to bed, sweetie.” She looked at Riven. “You will help your wife have this baby or I will personally see to it you never have another child. And I think we both know I can do it.”
Riven looked as white-faced as his wife, but he followed them into the tent.
The night that followed was long, noisy and not what Vidor planned. At the end of it, Riven had a small daughter with a crumpled red face, and Vidor had something new to worry about.
Outside the birthing tent, Vidor looked at Bana. “Well?”
“She is a doctor.” Bana did not sound surprised.
Vidor kept his scowl. “You suspected this.”
She avoided his look. “I wondered.” Finally she looked at him. “The Doctor came from this galaxy. We both knew this.”
She’d asked them to return her to this place. They should have listened, should have tried to help her, but Sellmin had wanted her the moment he saw her. In the years since, Vidor had judged him, condemned him for allowing lust to cloud his judgment. How ironic that he’d traveled so far, for so long, only to find himself in the same place, fighting the same weakness.
“If she is the one, you can’t take her home.”
“It would be different this time.” But they both knew it would not.
“You have to think of your people, not what you want.”
He didn’t want to kill her. He couldn’t release her. The fate of his people depended on him dealing with her. History could not be allowed to repeat itself.
“She might not be the one.”
Bana didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. He didn’t believe it either.
* * * * *
When Giddioni’s ship dropped off tracking, the General had a moment of panic.
Sometimes the impossible might be impossible.
And with the Leader in the mix, the odds against possible turned astronomical.
“Do you think he knew we were tracking him?” And how was that possible? The Gadi were flooding the galaxy with scan signatures. How could he pick theirs out of that mess? But he knew the answer to the question before Smith weighed in. Giddioni was a twitchy bastard.
“Which zone was he headed for before he dropped out of sight?”
“Zone Two.”
Halliwell sighed. That might be where he was going or it might not be. No way to know now. He’d have to deploy cloaked ships close to all three zones.
“Try to reacquire the target,” Halliwell ordered. He cut the connection and rubbed his face.
She could be dead. Sometimes the impossible might be impossible.
If she’d been taken because she was female, well, worse things than death could be happening to her. Three damn days. A lot could happen in three days. She was older than the other missing women. That might matter. Whoever was doing this had managed to do it on the QT for almost a year. There might be other missing women that had gone unreported. No one was keeping close track of the Dusan women, though he felt sorry for anyone who went hunting there. Those were some scary women.
He got up and paced over to the wide view port that made his ready room appear larger than it was. Kikk orbited off to his right and a big bunch of empty space was everywhere else. When he looked out on this, he felt small. He didn’t like feeling small. He didn’t like thinking of any of his people lost out there somewhere.
“Come on, Doc, give me a crumb, give me something to work with.” What part of space was she looking at? Could she still look and feel? He remembered that moment when she’d reminded him of the Key, when he’d been aware she was a young woman and not just the Chameleon. Briggs was worried about her, and he never worried without cause. Risk was part of being in the military. There were acceptable losses, like losing people in battle. The rest were unacceptable, and he fought them with a passion.
A discreet buzz broke into his grim thoughts. It was a message from the Leader. Halliwell activated it. Voice only. Not a surprise, since he’d suspected the Leader had gone back to his Ojemba roots with this move.
Halliwell had first heard of the elusive and mysterious leader of the Ojemba from Kiernan Fyn, the alien who’d helped Sara Donovan when she crashed on Kikk. Connecting Kalian to Giddioni took too much time and a near disaster. Halliwell tried not to think of Giddioni as Kalian because it made him want to hit the Leader, and they were supposed to be allies. Giddioni was challenging enough without his other identity in the mix. If Giddioni had dusted off Kalian, it couldn’t be good for anyone but Giddioni.
The report was brief, no surprises until the man made a request.
“There are many nomadic settlements and small enclaves where those who wish to avoid others reside. It will take many months to search them, and even then, there is no surety of finding the Doctor if someone wishes to conceal her presence.”
A pause that told the General this was the part he wasn’t going to like.
“I began to wonder if your scientists had a way to differentiate your people from ours. A way to do this from space, perhaps?”
Months. Halliwell rubbed his face yet again. If he kept this up, he’d be rubbing skin off soon. They didn’t have months. And Giddioni knew it. Now that he was looking, Halliwell could see the signs of a restive Gadi people. Scientists dirt side on Kikk would appease them for a short time. Once the Gadi saw what was there they’d want it even more.
The Major would have him killed if he found out he’d shared information about the Doc’s personal locater with anyone. The death would be painful and prolonged if he found out it was Giddioni. He wanted to kill himself for considering it. But, this was also an opportunity. The geeks would be able to track the data burst. Giddioni would route it through his flagship, but the geeks could track it from there to his current position. Until the Leader twitched again, they’d know where he was.
“This information can only go to people you trust absolutely. If this fell into the wrong hands…” He didn’t have
to spell out which wrong hands to Giddioni. He knew as well as Halliwell what his enemies would do with the information
“You have my word, General.” The Leader’s neutral tone wasn’t that reassuring.
“How do you know one of them won’t double-cross you?” He’d trained these people and they both knew double-crossing was a personal favorite.
“No one double-crosses me, General.”
If that was meant to be reassuring, it wasn’t. Only reason they didn’t was because he beat them to it.
“I’ll arrange a data burst. Just be careful with it.”
“You have my word,” he repeated.
Yeah, that made him feel better. What did make him feel better was the knowledge that three cloaked squadrons were positioned to monitor the three zones identified by the geeks. He also had a decoy squadron ready to go out, without cloaks, if anything twitched out there.
The geeks had been tense when the ships moved out, but there was no sign that anyone had seen the deployment. On the good news front, it wasn’t enough.
* * * * *
When Doc left the shell-shocked parents she had two desires: to sleep and to take someone down. Riven had seemed guileless when he asked if they could name their little girl after Doc, but Doc wasn’t fooled. Nor was she impressed. Actually, she was kind of insulted. She’d have expected Conan to know her better by now. He’d had more clues than most. She left before they could try again. Her first stop was the pit toilet for a pee and a wash. While a relief, neither soothed her lacerated feelings. She remained pissed. She stalked up to Conan.
“This is not an acceptable level of care for these girls. They deserve better. You owe them better. You owe them contact with their families—”
He brushed her comments aside as if they were a fly he was shooing away. “You are a doctor.”
It sounded like an accusation, like she was guilty of hiding something from them. Of course she was trying to hide everything about herself that she could. That’s why she’d hesitated to act initially. It went against her grain to give him any information about her capabilities, but it was still a relatively minor piece of information. She had bigger, much more dangerous secrets. Why did this one matter? It didn’t show on his stone face, but she felt it, knew it. All kinds of alarms went off inside her head.
“EMT training is SOP for my people.” She used the acronyms on purpose. The statement rang with truth because it was sort of the truth. She’d taken the training, even though she didn’t need to. She did a lot of things so the wrong people wouldn’t know what she could do.
He arched his brows. “EMT?”
“Emergency medical training. Babies tend to arrive when least expected, i.e. emergency.”
“SOP?”
“Standard operating procedure. That means something that is always done. Everyone gets the training because we don’t know who might need it.”
He didn’t believe her. She didn’t blame him. She’d had to be a doctor to deal with the delivery. If Doc hadn’t been there, mom and baby would have died. That’s why she was so pissed. Even if Bana had midwife training, she couldn’t have handled that birth. What she didn’t understand was why did he care, why did it change things? Was death by Conan off the table just because she was a doctor? Or had he put it to the top of the list again? She never liked not knowing her options.
“Was there something else you wanted to say? Because I need to sleep. In case you didn’t notice I was up all night and I’m whacked.”
He so wanted to say something, he vibrated with it. Last night had been her deadline, and the night hadn’t gone the way she planned either. They’d both have to deal.
He studied her, his usual frown pulling his dark brows together. Doc let him look. She didn’t have to pretend to be tired. The bags under her eyes were so big, even she could see them. He gave a short, sharp nod and stepped out of her way. Doc started toward her tent, but a rogue flow of air stopped her in her tracks. The wind whispered out of the tree line, lifting and swirling the dead leaves at her feet into a mini vortex. It rose to the height of her knees, circling her a few times, before it moved on across the clearing. She looked up. Studied the sky. Were the clouds moving in a curve?
She tipped her head to one side, then the other. Extended her arms so the air could travel across her skin. It was still hot and heavy with moisture. The heat had been beyond bitch levels since her descent into this primitive hell. Maybe there was a reason for it. She turned her hand, trying to catch small variations in movement and temperature, trying to home in on the core of her unease.
Exhaustion was a dead-weight on her concentration. She rubbed her face. Put her feelers out and started processing what was different today from the other days she’d been here. Was it hotter? Was it possible to get hotter? The wind was heavy with moisture, depositing more than it dried as it passed over her skin. It wasn’t just the intense heat. There was something else, something she hadn’t felt since Mexico. The Yucatan Peninsula. Hurricane season. Then, a storm was supposed to come ashore as a tropical storm, but the bitch ballooned into a cat three just before slamming into the coast. Doc had been impressed and that wasn’t easy to do. If the Major hadn’t kept her on a short leash, she might have become a storm chaser. It was a total rush.
If one of those bad girls was heading toward them, they wouldn’t be chasing it. It would be chasing them.
“How far are we from a coastline?”
Conan stepped into her bubble, like that would help him see what she saw. “Why?”
“Storm coming.”
“We are overdue for rain.” He sounded more curious than concerned.
This wasn’t Earth. Storms here might not be the same, might not feel the same. So the fine hairs on her skin were sticking straight up and her brain was playing “Bad Moon Rising.” It didn’t have to mean what it felt like it meant.
She looked around. They used small soft-sided bottles for their moonshine, kept them in baskets by the dwarves’ table. She crouched by the basket. The bottles were all deformed. Conan’s shadow fell over her.
“Why are they shaped like that?”
“Pressure’s dropping and fast. Where I’m from, that would be very bad.” She stood up and looked at him. “Are we close to the coast? Is there ocean out there? A large body of water?”
“Yes.” He nodded in the direction of the curving clouds. “That direction. We often get storms from that direction. They are not so bad.”
Doc considered the situation. If the encampment got slammed, it would be a good teaching moment for Conan. On the other hand, if Conan had to evacuate his happy campers to his ship, that put a huge energy signature up there for a ship with feelers out. It was practically sky writing. Way better than a bread crumb. If the Doolittle got close, they’d be able to pick up her personal locater.
“This one is going to be a very big storm. You need to get your people out of here.”
His brows arched a bit mockingly. “My people?”
“Well, I think we both know I’d be an unstable element on board that ship you claim you don’t have. Besides, I like storms, the bigger the better.”
Conan snorted. He looked up at the wide, blue sky for a pointedly long moment, before returning his skeptical gaze to hers. “A storm?”
“A kick your ass all over the forest storm,” she corrected.
“Now you predict the weather?”
Doc shrugged. “Don’t believe me. Just wait—though while I was waiting, I’d nail down anything I didn’t want getting blown into next week. Or washed away—depending on how close we are to the coast. Storm surge is more of a bitch than I am.”
She felt, rather than saw, doubt hit him. She was playing him, but she was playing him with the truth as she knew it. She could be wrong, but wrong wouldn’t cost her anything she hadn’t already lost.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check for light leaks.” She used the slang for taking a nap almost absently—an indication she was ma
inlining her military training.
She turned and walked away. She’d wanted to stalk, but that was Conan’s gig, not hers. Thankfully Bana wasn’t in the tent. Doc stared at her table, too tired to climb up and lay down. She frowned. It had been a long, difficult night, but that was SOP. She shouldn’t be this tired. She’d worked three straight days and nights on the Doolittle, after almost getting blown up, and had enough left in her to get hot and bothered over Hel. She was on short rations and had been pushing herself pretty hard. Lots of stress, too, but stress was her mother’s milk. She fed it to her demons and got sharpened acuity in the exchange.
This was more than exhaustion. Doctor kicked on, assessing symptoms. Her head felt thick and heavy, like her neck couldn’t hold it up anymore. Pulse was shallow and fast. Her throat felt dry and scratchy. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the butt if she were getting a cold?
She dug into her first aid kit and found a thermometer. While she waited the requisite time, she further parsed her symptoms. She removed the thermometer and studied it.
Crap. 102? It could be a cold or an earth-based flu, but she wasn’t in the Milky Way. What if she’d caught the Garradian Influenza? It was a nasty illness that was common among the indigenous peoples of the galaxy. For them it ranged from mild as a head cold to relatively severe—not unlike an Earth influenza outbreak. Since the expedition had different antibodies, it was bad for them. Six of their people had come down with it and all had died inside a week. Symptoms started out somewhat mild, but then progressed into a malaria-like fever and chills. All six had gone through a symptom-free period. Everyone thought the worse was over, then found out it wasn’t.
Fever had spiked again and their lungs began filling with fluid. Death had followed within twenty-four hours from resumption of symptoms. Doc felt a pang for Conan’s people. The brides and the baby should be all right. They were indigenous to the galaxy, but Conan and his boys were as at risk as the Earth expedition. They had people working on an immunization and a cure, but it had only manifested in the last month. No one was sure why. There’d been significant contact between the expedition and the people of the galaxy for the last two years with no discernable ill effects.
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