Castro bit her lip and rocked back on her heels, her eyes darting between the autodoc, him, and the front door.
“Someone should be here when she wakes up,” said Jess-the-bomber, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Any news on Pitt?”
His words had the desired effect on Castro. “No. I need to be… I can’t stay.”
Jess-the-bomber shrugged, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “I can, at least until you get another medevac here.” He tilted his head toward the sealed autodoc. “She’s not going anywhere.”
Castro frowned, clearly torn. At last, she turned and took a step toward the door, then turned back and glared at him. “If anything is missing, I’ll be targeting you first.” Her attitude said she’d be targeting him, regardless, if only because he’d called out Pitt’s negligence.
Jess-the-bomber shrugged again. “You know where the farm is.” The clinic had nothing of interest to him.
Castro hesitated a moment longer, then strode out the door.
Jess-the-man made Jess-the-bomber and Jess-the-medic retreat, leaving him with a splitting headache and stiff shoulders, a room full of painkillers that didn’t work for him, and a deluge of powerful memories all centered around the woman in the autodoc. A wave of icy nausea chilled him.
He staggered outside into the sunlight and leaned against the side of the clinic, dragging in deep, cleansing breaths of fresh air.
CHAPTER 2
* Planet: Branimir * GDAT: 3242.002 *
KERZANNA NEVARR DREAMED she was dreaming, which even her dream self knew was weird.
In her dream, she dreamed of flying, but without a planet-fall mech suit. The wind and the empty sky exhilarated her. The brown and green plains below her transitioned to the northern ridge of blue mountains on the horizon, where Branimir’s multitude of mines operated. Her chest hurt a little, but that was probably the thin air in the high altitude. Below her, a small town drew her eye, and she dove for it, but her dreaming dream ended, and she woke in the tilted-back nav pod pilot’s seat of a private interstellar starship. Too soft for military, too purple. Too filled with dead people.
Well, one dead person, standing to the left of her seat. Jessperin Orowitz, her very dead ex-lover. She remembered his messy death, but her dream self didn’t care about facts. The love of her life was back, and she was happy. She reached out for his hand, and his fingers curled around hers.
She smiled at his always too-serious expression and gazed into his mismatched green and brown eyes. His brown face looked good with its bronzed highlights, as if he’d been kissed by the sun. His wavy black hair was long at the top and back and cropped close at the sides. The scruffy beard she’d often teased him about was gone, making her want to kiss him to see how his smooth skin felt. She squeezed his warm, capable fingers. “You look pretty damn good for a dead man.”
A surprised look crossed his face. He cocked his head a little, then brushed gentle fingers across her cheek. “You’re dead, too.”
“This is the afterlife?” She looked down at her inert torso and legs, then back to him. She sniffed her shirt. “Smells like shit.” She giggled at her own joke. Life—and death, apparently—was funny.
She smiled up at him. “I moved to Branimir for you, since you never got the chance.” Once she’d finally fallen off the CPS’s detain-and-restrain list, she’d looked for a quiet place to ground herself, and remembered Jess’s plans before she’d derailed them. It seemed a fitting way to honor his memory. “You’d like it.”
“What about you?”
She shrugged. “Branimir has been good for me.” She’d outgrown her family’s rural ranch community and left as fast as she could for brighter lights, so a planet known for farming, mining, and business-centric minimalist government wouldn’t have been her first—or even hundredth—choice. Jess’s death and her health changed her priorities.
She knew her dream would end soon, and she needed to tell him something. “I used to hate you for splitting us up that day. You spied on the Minder Veterans Advocates for the police, and got yourself killed right in front of me, but I’m not mad any more.”
“Why not?” His voice caressed her ears. She remembered her body twined with his, fitting perfectly, skin to skin, and the steady rise and fall of his chest, drawing in the scent of him with every breath. She sighed. “Because I lived. I had to forgive myself for bad choices, and that meant forgiving you for making better ones.”
Jess smiled, and made her want to get a lot closer. His smile always had that effect on her, even on a crowded public transport.
She gave him her best sultry look. “Let’s get naked.” She struggled to sit up, but something was tying her down. She tried to move her legs, but couldn’t. “Afterlife tanks.”
She looked more closely at her restraints and realized they were medical lines. Oh, frelling hell, she was in a goddamn autodoc. Or as she liked to call them, control freaks. “Why am I here?” Another question arose. “Where is here?”
“Easy.” Jess touched her face again, and she turned her cheek into the warmth of his hand. “You were piloting a high-low flitter and stuck a hard landing at Markalan Crossing’s commercial landing port. You’re in the town clinic.”
At least she wasn’t in a Jumper treatment tank. The town’s name rang a bell, something about a meeting, which was odd. She did most of her business at the mines, the ore processing plants, and Branimir’s only spaceport, not in the middle of crop farming country. More flashes of memory bubbled to the surface, of flying a flitter, pinging for a traffic control system, an explosion behind her, of grabbing the manual controls, loose objects, tumbling sideways. She tried to sit up again, but the autodoc lines kept her immobile. Adrenaline started to spike, then leveled off. The autodoc’s happytime drugs made it all seem like a hilarious tri-D show.
It wasn’t funny. Dreaming of Jess again wasn’t funny, it was heartbreaking, but the autodoc didn’t care. It wanted her to be happy, so it pumped her full of happytime drugs so she’d be farkin’ thrilled while they replaced yet another part of her with cybernetics, since cloned parts didn’t work for Jumpers with waster’s.
And there was the proof. A medic in white with a red armband approached and peered at her. He was shorter than Jess, but who wasn’t? “No more biometal,” she told him, but he shook his head and vanished, leaving only her dream lover, looking haunted and sad. His fingers slipped out of her grasp, and he faded into the darkness before she could say goodbye. Dammit, not again.
All things being equal, she preferred the afterlife. A tear slipped from her eye as the darkness closed in and took her sinking into nothingness.
Kerzanna woke with a jolt, chest arching skyward in response to lightning in her veins. She sucked air like a ramjet engine as her heart pounded. The blackness receded from her vision to reveal a decorated purple ceiling and walls. She was on a bench… no, an open autodoc bed. She lifted her arms in time to see microneedle threads withdrawing from her skin. An insistent beeping cut off abruptly.
She began her survival checklist. First, adrenaline spikes were the enemy. She concentrated on her breathing, ensuring she wasn’t taking in more air than she needed, and expelling it all before inhaling again. For the next few breaths, she took inventory of how she felt, relaxing any tension she found as she went over each part of her. The lights brightened, or maybe her brain was coming fully online.
Next, status. She’d been in a rented flitter. She remembered fighting the manual controls to control the axis and skid the flaming hulk down onto the landing pad, but nothing after that. No clue as to what had damaged the flitter. So how did she get to the autodoc? Hazy memories stirred of a short, older medic and…
“Jess.” She barely whispered the name. She’d spent countless meditation hours trying to let the memories fade with time, but all it had taken was one injection of happytime drugs to bring them back. Goddamn autodocs.
She doggedly went back to her checklist. Health. Her head ached like she’d use
d it to smash asteroids. Her chest felt heavy and tight. She started to look down, but her stiff neck told her she’d regret it. She slid her hand up and discovered what was probably a bone regenerator adhered to her sternum, in the valley of her breasts. A quick check of her internal systems said the cybernetic central processor lodged under her breastbone was online and responsive. Some thoughtful medic had put a soft knit blanket over her for modesty. Jumpers gave that up in recruit training, but she appreciated the gesture.
“How are you feeling?” The man’s voice was professionally caring and so like Jess’s, down to the faint French accent he sometimes had. No wonder the happytime drugs had dredged up his memories.
She snorted. “Like I crashed a flitter.” Medics were all the same. How did he think she was feeling? “How long have I been in here?” She patted the autodoc bed.
“Forty minutes.” She heard the sound of a throat being cleared. “I’m sorry, but there’s no time to ease you into this.”
“Ease me into wha…” Her voice failed as Jess Orowitz, the man of her recent dreams and old sorrows, stepped into full view. She cleared her throat. “Oh, frelling hell.”
He had to be real this time, because she hurt too much to still be in autodoc dreamland.
The demons of chaos had ignored her for the last few years, but they were back in her life with a vengeance. Never mind the unforgettable memory burned into her psyche of his execution death on a bloody sidewalk, or that for two years, she’d been on a CPS detain-and-restrain list for the events in the Mabingion Purge “police action”—a galaxy-famous debacle—that led up to his death. Reality was standing in front of her, in loose, olive-green cargo pants and a form-fitting orange knit shirt that hugged his wide shoulders, well-defined chest, and narrow waist. “You’re alive.” Her fingers tingled with the urge to touch him just to be sure.
Maybe she was in end-stage waster’s disease, a prisoner in her own body, and her sense-deprived brain busy hallucinating to make up for it. If so, someone should tell her stupid brain to quit with the aching head and chest.
“You’re alive, too. I was told otherwise. The police report and holos of your body were graphic.” His expression was haunted. The lid of his right eye, the brown one, drooped slightly every few seconds, and the one over his left, green eye twitched faster, at heartbeat speed. His head must be hurting, meaning the crowd of voices in his mind hadn’t gone away. She would have wished otherwise for him.
His shoulders hunched as he shoved his hands in his pockets. “What name do you go by these days?”
“Kerzanna Nevarr.” She twitched a corner of her mouth, realizing he was testing her. One of the stronger voices in his head—the one that sounded a bit Nordic—was paranoid to a fault. “Malory Solis sends her regards.”
Solis was the cover identity he’d hastily cobbled together for her the last day they’d been together. At first glance, Jess looked like a handsome but thick-headed security enforcer or a heavy laborer, and he wasn’t a people person, but that all hid an inquisitive mind and stellar data manipulation and coding skills. The ID he’d created had gotten her off planet and held up well on a succession of frontier planets, where the CPS had little official presence, but wasn’t above non-judiciary rendition if they’d discovered who she was.
A bit of his tension eased. “Sorry for the emergency re-entry from the autodoc. I woke you early because a friend looked at the wreckage of your flitter and said it was sabotaged. I wanted to give you the option not to be here in case someone comes looking.” His right eyelid twitched more noticeably.
If she’d had any doubts that it was really Jess, the twitches would have reassured her. The best body shops in the galaxy might have been able to make someone look exactly like him, for whatever bizarre reason, but she’d bet they wouldn’t know how to duplicate that behavior pattern.
“What should I call you?” Axul Larsson had been the identity he’d created for himself to escape the mass police and CPS arrests of the riots that came to be known as the Mabingion Purge. The mischievous game Jess had invented for himself, of creating mythical people and events and finding sneaky ways to get them into official data hypercubes, had turned out to be quite useful.
He ducked his head diffidently. “Just Jess.”
Memory slammed hard of the first time he’d walked into the Jumper-friendly pub she’d been working at five years before. He’d caught her attention immediately, especially when she realized the tall, handsome man wasn’t a Jumper, and was shy but sharp. It had taken two more visits before he’d told her his name, with that same look and those same words.
She shook her head. Distracting side trips to the memory gardens would have to wait. “I don’t know who would be looking for me. I’ve done nothing to make anyone’s hit parade.” She frowned, remembering she’d said something similar to him four years ago, right before everything had gone horribly twisted. He’d probably figured out she hadn’t told the whole truth back then about what Minder Veterans Advocates had been doing, and her involvement.
She took two deep, centering breaths, then carefully sat up. The pain in her head and chest had teeth, but nothing a Jumper couldn’t handle, and she didn’t feel dizzy. The blanket fell, but the bone knitter stayed in place. She tapped it. “How much longer should it stay?”
“Four hours, minimum, six hours would be better. Your bone sternum has a sixteen-centimeter crack. The underlying biometal is thinner than usual, but your central processor appears undamaged.” The subtle French accent was back. “Where are you going?”
“Right now? The fresher.” All medic centers had at least one. She swung her feet off the bed and to the ground. She tensed her legs briefly to make sure she could feel them both, then stood up. She was grateful that Jess stayed where he was, instead of trying to help her. Maybe he remembered she didn’t like being crowded. Her favorite brown pants were torn and blood-stained, and smelled faintly of manure. The medic had probably cut off her shirt and bra to make room for the bone knitter. “Did my luggage survive?”
Jess tilted his chin toward an exam table to his left, where her bag, a portable case, and her few extra clothes were spread out. She’d only planned for an overnight stay, if that. She couldn’t wear a bra over the bone knitter, so her breasts were on their own for a while. She grabbed the loose-knit top she usually slept in and discovered new rib-muscle pain when she pulled it on over her head. The pilot seat’s web had kept her from bouncing around the flitter’s cabin, but it hadn’t kept things from bouncing into her.
She relieved herself in the fresher and winced at the sight of her bruised and swollen jaw and cheekbone in the mirror. She’d need a trip to a Jumper-certified medic clinic to get them fixed. Autodocs only cared about the big stuff, and civilian clinics couldn’t treat her.
Simple physical activities like washing her face, rinsing her mouth out with mint-flavored orajet, and tying back her gunky long hair helped flush some of the cobwebs out of her head. She owed Jess honesty and distance.
He was leaning against the wall by the autodoc when she got back. His hands were in his pockets, and his face was enigmatic. She wanted to watch him, talk to him, see if real life on Branimir met his expectations, but there was no time.
She grabbed her socks and boots from the table and sat in the room’s only chair to put them on. “I don’t believe the sabotage was targeting me. I don’t owe money. I haven’t had a relationship since we… in years. I’m not involved in any organizations, unless you count the Branko Regional Commerce Council, and I’m only in that because I inherited the membership when I bought a mining transport business. We endorse governor candidates and argue about trade rules.” She paused to give him time to speak, but he’d never been much of a talker. His expression gave her no clue as to what he was thinking. He didn’t used to be so guarded with her, but she couldn’t blame him for not trusting her.
She shook her head and started stuffing her belongings into her bag. “But even if I wasn’t the target, you�
�re right. Someone could come looking to clean up the mistake, which means you, the medic who treated me, and your friend who investigated the flitter could be in danger because of me.” She sealed the bag and opened the portable case to check that the mineral test equipment had survived. Her spare percomp was terminally cracked, but everything else looked good. “So, point me to where I can rent something that flies, and I’ll lead the trouble as fast and as far away as I can.”
She closed and sealed the case, then turned to watch him, letting the silence settle. Only after his death… not-death, had she realized she’d rarely given him time to think or choose his words, not even once she’d figured out he had a frelling committee in his head that rarely agreed on anything. However much they’d been in love at the time, her volatile temper and impatience hadn’t been good for their relationship. Or, as it turned out, her health, once the waster’s disease really took hold. Controlling herself, redirecting her angry impulses, learning to choose her battles, had been hard-won lessons while on the run. She was still learning them.
“That’s too predictable.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets and stood up straight to meet her gaze.
She raised an eyebrow at him, but said nothing.
“Worst-case scenario. They targeted you, personally. They find out you’re alive, and expect you to find a way to fly out. A rental is too easy to trace, because it’ll have to be delivered from Szmarko.” The corners of his lips sketched a smile. “The only rental in Markalan Crossing is an articulated-tandem ground hauler with a top speed of six kilometers per hour.”
He’d obviously been giving it some thought, and her brain was still stuttering. Although the prudent part of her argued that people could change a lot in four years, she was inclined to listen. She’d always listened, although she hadn’t always agreed. “What do you suggest?”
Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4 Page 2