Mourner

by Irene Radford

  “I did not think most people knew the names of any of the Temple Caste except their own local priest and priestess.”

  “They know you now, my Laudae. My caste has made it our special mission to disseminate truthful information throughout our empire. We all know that the quakes and storms are Harmony’s temper tantrum because the Crystal Temple is trying to suppress the contents of the Covenant Stones.”

  “I imagine that many of the Temple and Noble Castes work just as hard at finding ways to shut you down.” She could not help a tiny smile. She and Jake had been co-conspirators in revealing the original Covenant Stones that listed the Media as a free and independent caste. Modern adjustments to the Covenant had lumped the Media among the professionals, under the control of a Caste Leader appointed by the High Priest. Now they had their own Leader elected from within and vowed to defy all powers in order to keep the adjusted truth public knowledge.

  “Promise me that this message will not be heard by anyone until after Star Runner has jumped to hyperspace.”

  “My word of honor, my Laudae.” He bowed again, more deeply and solemnly.

  “Then I must take my leave. The window of rotation to the jump point waits for no man or woman.” She stood, smoothing her purple slacks with damp hands—she’d changed out of mourning black since Gregor was not officially dead. Normally she chose to wear dresses in soft materials that floated and swished gracefully with her every movement, but today she wore more practical garments for long travel.

  “Surely the High Priestess of all Harmony could command the jump points,” he joked.

  “Not even for me. And my enemies will try to use that fact of physics to delay my departure so that they can undermine my mission.”

  The reporter cocked his eyebrow up in question. He lived by his curiosity.

  “You will know all in good time.” She nodded with more self-assurance than she felt, maintaining the illusion of grace and dignity.

  By the time she reached the street she gave in to her instincts and ran to the long black automobile awaiting her. Her six acolytes made room for her in the back seat and she scrunched in, grateful for their company and unquestioning support.

  “Where are Monster and Dog?” she asked, looking for evidence of their shaggy coats.

  “We decided to leave them in Laudae Penelope’s care. They don’t really enjoy life on the space station, and the trip through hyperspace upsets their tummies for days,” Martha said. She sounded assured in her understanding of the two dogs. Dogs that had protected and rescued Sissy more than once.

  “You know that General Jake has to consider all of the resources on First Contact Café, and the space and air and food that the dogs consume needs to be allocated to humans,” Mary said, patting Sissy’s hand.

  “Not to mention waste disposal.” Bella scrunched her nose at that chore.

  “I suppose. But I shall miss them,” Sissy said on a sigh. Her lungs felt heavy, and she stuffed her hand in her pocket looking for an inhaler. Sharan handed her one. Sissy took an experimental breath and nearly coughed it out again. After a dose of the drugs, she allowed herself to wonder why Harmony and the air of her home rejected her.

  Perhaps the goddess merely pushed her to complete her responsibility to find Gregor’s body and bury him properly.

  Your destiny is out there, among the stars!

  Jilly had prophesized that with her dying breath.

  “Here.” Suzie thrust an inert pile of fuzz into her lap.

  Sissy examined it and found a stuffed toy in the shape of a small dog, about one tenth the size of Monster the shaggy black water dog. The imitation looked just like him, but much smaller.

  “Thank you.” Sissy nuzzled the toy, holding it close. Not as good as a real animal, but close.

  “We thought you might need something to cuddle tightly at night when you are alone,” Mary said.

  “Or in hyperspace when your ghosts haunt you,” Martha added on a whisper as she gazed out the window at the passing landscape on the road to the landing field.

  Chapter Eleven

  “How did you survive the destruction of Terra?” the boy Ianus asked. Joy as well as puzzlement colored his thoughts.

  Jake had to pause a moment. Terra? Wasn’t that an old name for Earth? Very old.

  “I’m not familiar with a planet named Terra that was destroyed. We humans started on Earth. It’s still there. We’ve moved out and occupied hundreds of planets and space stations over the last thousand years or so.” He sensed Pammy listening closely, but she didn’t offer anything new or interesting. “Admiral Marella, your education in the classics is more extensive than mine…?”

  She shrugged. “Ask Doc Halliday. The word sounds Latin. She knows more of the language than I do.”

  “Terra is still there? How can that be?”

  “Presuming we are talking about the same place,” Jake said.

  The platforms jerked as the dragon above them stepped off into the nulgrav hub of the station. Anything resembling a private conversation neared an end. “My office, two hours,” Jake said sotto voce. He tried to picture a map of the station, hoping the boy really could read his mind.

  Wouldn’t that enhance Jake’s resume to find an entire branch of humanity lost for millennia that had mutated into telepathy! He’d dealt with genetic manipulation in the Maril and on Harmony. He wondered if this was a deliberate enhancement or natural.

  No human before had ever convincingly manifested a natural psychic gene. All of the deliberate genetic engineering he’d encountered had begun to break down, the Maril losing their ability to fly, Sissy’s multiple caste marks, and a few others had all begun to revert to normal human or break apart and fall into serious deformity.

  The kid beside him looked thirty with the beginning of wrinkles and a touch of gray in his indeterminate brown hair. But his body, in a long crimson tunic that matched the lead dragon, and black trousers, looked twelve. A very frail and sickly twelve. He moved with the stiffness of old age arthritis. His eyelids drooped.

  Mercury poisoning?

  If he and his companions had been born and bred within the toxic atmosphere, wouldn’t they eventually evolve a tolerance? That might take several thousands of years.

  Just how long had the humans been slaves of the Dragons?

  Jake stepped aside and touched his link. “Medbay. Please have Doc Halliday join me in my office in two hours. I may have an interesting patient for her.”

  “Interesting from you means trouble for me. Big trouble,” the querulous doctor replied.

  A boxy tram slid to a stop beside the docking ramp. Sissy and her girls had painted a crude glyph on the doors of each tram, the same glyph they’d seen carved into rock cave mouths and funerary niches on Harmony and Sanctuary: two half circles nearly touched each other with the open side facing outward representing wings. In the narrow space between, a tiny circle near the top looked like a head, and an arced line down a ways suggested the hem of a gown. The goddess Harmony cropped up nearly spontaneously in every occupied wing of the station.

  Jake and his crew had accepted the sign as a marker of good luck or safe passage, sort of like the old military graffiti of Kilroy. The simple drawing indicated that friendly troops had passed through the vicinity and it was now clear of the enemy.

  Big Red . . . er . . . Mag reared back from the tram as the doors opened. He stood rigidly with the tip of his tail twitching, tongue flicking in and out rapidly.

  Ianus turned toward Jake and said, “My master says that this tram is cursed.” He smiled briefly, then swallowed it, presenting a once more neutral face. “He will not occupy it. If the wing prepared for the delegation of D’Or is not far, he will walk. Walking is easy without gravity.” The boy bowed first to Mag, then to Jake.

  Pammy turned her back on the crowd, barely hiding a huge smile.

  “This way.” Jake gestured to his right, trying not to bow. He’d gotten into the habit of bowing to a superior officer or caste dur
ing his months on Harmony. Hard to break the habit even though he knew that on this station no one outranked him. Not even Pammy or Ambassador Telvino, though they both thought he belonged to them.

  Jake scanned the gathering for sign of Telvino. He lingered near the lift platforms talking rapidly into his link. He made no move to join the group headed for the dragon’s wing—Toxic Central.

  Telvino the Hesitant? Ianus asked.

  Telvino the Devious and Wary, Jake returned.

  And Mara? She was in another alcove also talking into her link. Jake trusted her to be dealing with the logistics of greeting and housing this new race of aliens—new to humans from the CSS anyway. Telvino he didn’t trust any further than he could throw the man in heavy G.

  “Then walk we shall,” Jake said and took point. He rather enjoyed bouncing forward five meters at a step. Almost like flying. Why weren’t the Maril up here all the time spreading their leathery arm flaps? He half expected to find Sissy and her girls flitting around from dock to dock, learning every corner and alcove of the station.

  His heart sank. Sissy had a major, governmental crisis erupting on Harmony. He had Zach Mallory, his own security chief—not Telvino’s or Pammy’s—looking for Gregor’s body and asking questions. Sissy, though, was likely stuck at home for a long, long time. To emphasize that point, Gregor’s ghost materialized beside him, floating at the same pace as he bounded. He seemed pressed closer to Jake than usual. Why?

  They reached the lift platform leading to the C wing in this cluster of four. He took up a stance beside the shaft leading “Down,” and waited for Ianus to catch up to him. “Our blast doors are efficient, but you must understand, the requested atmosphere is so toxic to us that we must insist all three seals—one at each gravity transition level—remain closed at all times, and only opened for the short time it takes for one of your party to move in and out of the habitat. We have configured the automatic controls so that only one door may open at a time.”

  “I understand. But my people have lived with this atmosphere all our lives, for many, many generations. Why do you fear it so?” The boy cocked his head and looked at Jake with genuine puzzlement written on his face.

  “We will discuss this later in the privacy of my office,” Jake said firmly. In the back of his mind he hummed an old hypnotic hymn over and over again to drown out any stray thoughts that might leak through to the telepath.

  Ianus shook his head and touched his temple as if to clear his thoughts.

  Mag must have agreed with the precautions since he nodded to the hazmat-suited crewman to open the blast. The other eleven dragons followed suit, wisely allowing four lift platforms between them so that the mechanism was not overtaxed as they descended into heavier and heavier sections.

  The human telepathic companions remained topside with Jake. “Achais our steward will arrange for transportation of furnishing once our masters have decided how to divide up the space,” Ianus said.

  “The control panels are in the alcoves directly behind the spiral staircase,” Jake said, picturing the configuration in hope the boy could pass the image along. Surely the Dragons could figure out the touch screens by themselves. Then again, maybe one of the humans needed to manage that. He didn’t want to think about a reptilian claw penetrating the sensitive controls.

  Ianus chuckled. “They can manage. They perform similar operations aboard our ship without the aid of their slaves.”

  Slaves! No civilized planet known to the CSS still kept slaves. Not allowed. Not tolerated. Unthinkable.

  “It has been the way of things since time before time,” Ianus said, clearly expecting nothing else.

  “We’ll see about that. My office. Two hours.”

  “There is nothing you can do to change the natural way of things. The Dragons of D’Or hold the mortgage on this station, and half the worlds in this galaxy. What they want and how they conduct their lives rules everything.”

  Garrin trundled back into the bar where he had watched the dragons dock. What was he to do? Everything his mother had schemed for was about to end in total ruin. The hired docker had chosen the unused wing 27C of the station to hide Gregor’s dead body precisely because it was unused. And out of the way at the far end of the station. Now the newcomers—those giant loathsome lizards that couldn’t even be counted as people, let alone sentient—had moved in. Warming the wing would begin the decay process. Quite soon, the smell would lead to discovery of the body.

  As long as the body remained missing, Mother could work toward disgracing Laudae Sissy and removing her as High Priestess. Then life could revert to normal, the way things were before the little upstart discovered the original covenant stones and upset everything, changing an established order where every person knew their caste and their place in life.

  What was he to do? General Jake (who at least kept his caste mark, a properly lauded Military red square) must know that only Garrin and his mother had the resources and intelligence to steal the body. No lesser caste person had enough brains to think up the audacious plan.

  Strong drink beckoned him deeper into the bar. Not beer. Not wine. Whiskey. A single shot of the “fists of the gods wrapped in velvet” ought to settle his mind and help him think up a solution.

  Or maybe two. Definitely two drinks of the lovely amber liquid from the heavy green glass bottle at the back of the bartender’s shelf would help him figure it all out.

  An hour later, as he ran his tongue around his mouth, capturing the last drop of the heavenly liquid, he decided that Harmony must begin distilling whiskey. An excellent use of surplus grains. No need to store them against drought and storm. Why bother feeding the Poor or even the Workers when the Nobles could make much better use of the harvests.

  That was a solution to one of his problems: take whiskey home, if he ever got to go home.

  Mother would want his head for failure once Gregor’s body was found.

  “Barkeep, one more drink.” He needed one more to figure out what to do with a stray body. He must preserve it. Laud Gregor had been a respected Temple leader. He’d known what was right and proper. Burning the body, or even dumping it into space was not allowable—though that was what the docker had suggested.

  Harmony forbid such disrespect!

  Maybe he still had time to move it. The maintenance shafts connected the wings of each cluster at every gravity level. All he had to do was access one from the still empty B wing, crawl through, grab the body and haul it back.

  If he could remember where his minion had stashed it.

  If he could remember which wing was still empty and which was occupied.

  If he could remember why it was so important . . .

  Just one more drink.

  Klaxons chimed through the space ship Star Runner announcing, politely, the three minute warning to hyperspace.

  Sissy made a show of inserting her hand into the glove that would dispense sleepy drugs. Across the cabin two Spacer crew, women she hadn’t paid much attention to, nodded to her with approval as they relaxed into their bunks and prepared to sleep through the ship’s transit to the First Contact Café. The ship was full with extra crew to help man the station as well as a hull stuffed to overflowing with Badger Metal to construct space ships for the CSS, so Sissy had to share with two officers who’d had their Caste Marks lauded at some time in the past. Her acolytes were crammed all into one cabin.

  “I’ve met ghosts in hyperspace. I don’t care to do it again,” she said to the officers.

  The two women murmured agreement. They barely took the time to make certain the luggage was strapped into place and their own restraints in place so they wouldn’t float about while they slept.

  The second alarm sounded more strident as well as insistent. The Spacers sighed in unison and let the glove inject sleepy drugs into the backs of their hands.

  Sissy eased her hand free, cautious to keep her movements smooth and small so the Spacers wouldn’t notice and try to force her to drug herself
insensible for the duration.

  The final bell chimed, subdued and polite again, with the announcement that hyperspace had been achieved.

  Sissy opened her eyes and keenly watched as the color spectrum shifted to the left and the walls thinned to translucence. The flesh of her companions seemed to melt away, revealing their skulls trapped in a perpetual grimace.

  “Please, Laud Gregor, show me what happened to you,” she whispered into the wavering shadows between reality and . . . and something else.

  Movement at the edge of her vision made her twist her neck into a nearly impossible angle. Bright jewel tones stood out among the vague walls and sparse furniture. At first she thought the slow procession was the ghosts of all the High Priests and High Priestesses that had gone before her, marching with funereal regality. They wore the padded brocade robes with large headdresses decorated in strands of beads and crystals forming a full veil over the face. Strange incense drifted on the celestial wind, intriguing, but sharp. She used lighter scents that didn’t make her sneeze for rituals.

  She also sang her hymns in the soprano range, letting her voice soar above the others in a descant meant to reach toward the heavens, enticing the goddess to listen. This chant plunged deep into basso profundo ranges, more nonsense grunts of determination than songs of praise.

  She listened closely for the accompaniment of glass wands striking specially tuned crystals. That crucial element was missing from this ritual procession.

  Then she noticed another anomaly. Long snouts protruded from the scanty beaded veils. Not just scanty veils, only two or three strands apiece on the dozen figures. The strands hung from fully flared crests of more scales, scant highlights to natural ornamentation in their hides.

  Then she realized their robes were not padded, nor were they brocade. Scaly skins reminiscent of Godfrey, the exotic lizard she’d rescued. But Godfrey was merely a pet, barely two feet long with another foot of tail, weighing perhaps five pounds. These ghosts were huge, as tall as a human male and as broad as two men put together.