Mourner

by Irene Radford

  The Nanny lingered.

  Sissy stood up and faced her with as much courage as she could muster. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at the moment. General Jake seems incredibly worried about the children’s safety.”

  “Have there been any . . . any attempts to harm them?”

  “Only one. A masked man got no further than the General’s office before being subdued and hustled off to the brig.”

  Sissy gasped and had to cram her fist into her mouth to keep from crying out. “Was he from Harmony?”

  Nanny Guilford shrugged. “Didn’t see his face to look for caste marks. The general never said anything more about it.”

  Sissy finally noticed the woman’s physique. Not plump, muscular, with an easy carriage that spoke of grace and speed. If she’d worn a caste mark, it would be a Military red square, like Jake’s. Perhaps she’d had it removed as Mara had.

  “Thank you for telling me. I have duties. But I will do my best to return in time to eat with the children, or send a message if I can’t. Call my acolytes and have them come here when I do not require their presence. Suzie and Bella especially will benefit from your teaching.” She bowed, hands clasped before her.

  “Very good, Laudae.” Mistress Guilford bowed again and retreated in the direction the children had taken. She hadn’t said my Laudae. If she was from one of Harmony’s colonies, she’d forsaken much of her heritage. Which explained why she became a nanny.

  “That was interesting,” Martha said, coming up behind Sissy. “She wasn’t lying, or hiding anything.”

  “Yes.” She had no other words. The knot of guilt in her tummy tightened into dread.

  “Damn you, Jake!” Pammy said through gritted teeth. Double damn and a number of other curses in six languages. Even in her own private thoughts she was no longer Admiral Pamela Cassandra Marella. No she’d become Pammy in Jake’s sarcastic, slightly endearing, sneer.

  No more. She repeated her proper name and rank over and over in her mind to cement it in place and banish all traces of Pammy.

  Sam was just as bad as Jake. No, worse. He’d allowed himself to be caught by Jake. Her two best trained operatives were in open rebellion against her.

  For the first time since . . . since she couldn’t remember when, she did not know what to do, or how to go about it.

  “One thing I’m not going to do. I’m not going to trust this to anyone. I’ll have to do it myself.” In her own wing, she took the lift down two levels to the secret room in the cargo bay between MG and HG. No human voluntarily ventured this far into heavy grav. Except Jake. He kept a full gym in HG1 of his own wing. Pammy, Pamela! had to seal off the truly heavy levels here. The very end of the wing still had an empty space ship stuck half into where it had crashed several months ago. She’d removed the salt water atmosphere and the corpses of the last two known Squid People.

  The autopsies had been very interesting. But Jake had found the universal translation device first and maintained close security around the original. He’d cloned it and given her one copy. Somehow it didn’t work as well as the original. None of the copies did. Now if she had a telepath like one of the Dragon slaves . . .

  The presence of the ship gave credence to the idea that the entire wing was haunted and therefore empty. She and her people had the most sophisticated intelligence headquarters in the quadrant here. Only the one on Earth rivaled her tech or her information-gathering network.

  But Jake still surpassed her in speed and completeness in station intelligence. Maybe he had a telepath . . .

  With renewed vehemence, she yanked open the hidden door to her secret room. “Lights, medium,” she commanded the isolated computer. No spike in energy use would show on any monitor anywhere in the station. She’d made certain of that.

  A full duplicate of her office two levels up came into view. A brief glance at her simple traps showed the place undisturbed. Transparent sewing thread strung at random intervals glittered in the overhead lights. All of them remained in place across all of the logical paths through the room, and a few illogical ones as well.

  Beyond the front office lay her private bedroom and sanitary facilities. She longed for a vibe shower to ease the muscles across her shoulders. Absently she rubbed her lower back where new pains plagued her.

  “No time,” she muttered to herself. She opened her closet door and pushed aside an array of military uniforms and business suits that might as well be uniforms. Then she placed her left palm flat against a security screen made to look like normal wall paneling. A sigh of air pressure change and the panel swung inward. Sixteen different outfits hung on the closet rail of this second closet. All of them oversized and the uniform for people and departments the real Pamela Marella wouldn’t be caught dead in.

  She wasn’t Pammy. She was Admiral Pamela Marella. The best spymaster ever, because she’d been the best spy in the galaxy. And still was.

  If Jake only knew how easily she moved about the station without anyone suspecting her true identity.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “General Jake?” Martha whispered softly.

  His eyes twitched as if he’d heard her but didn’t want to wake up.

  Sissy approached closer and touched his shoulder.

  He smiled in his sleep, grumbled something, and snuggled deeper beneath the knitted blanket.

  “Jake,” Sissy said a little louder. She reached to remove the blanket.

  Martha had to smile. She had trouble imagining Jake, the hero of First Contact Café, needing a blankie. Even Suzie had given up hers a year ago, soon after the girls had settled in as Sissy’s acolytes. She didn’t need it anymore as long as she had Sissy.

  Jake didn’t have Sissy. Yet. They both wanted to be together (she didn’t have to read their minds to know that—their posture shouted their need to be together) but Sissy was HPs of Harmony. And Jake belonged here running the station.

  Maybe he did need a blankie.

  “Don’t you dare,” Jake growled and grabbed Sissy’s hand before she could do more than touch the satin binding of the blankie. “I’m warm and I don’t hurt anywhere.”

  “Not for long, I’m afraid,” Martha said. “Sam’s shuttle will dock in your private bay within three minutes. Security is already waiting with blasters charged and ready. They also have something new . . . force bracelets?”

  “Yeah, plastic wrist bindings with electromagnetic wires running through them. Twist the ends once and they lock in place. Anytime the prisoner struggles to get free they tighten more, reducing circulation. Pretty quickly, violent serial brawlers become submissive rather than lose their hands.” Jake touched the far side of his chair and came upright slowly.

  “Whatever Doc Halliday gave you seems to be working,” Martha said.

  “So why do I have to meet the shuttle? I thought I delegated that chore.”

  “You need to be there, because I need you there to back me up,” Sissy said. She stood firm, glaring at him as if he were a small boy trying to wiggle out of some noxious chore.

  “And why do you need to be there?” He captured Sissy’s hand again and began running his thumb along her palm.

  Martha had to turn away and build a barrier in her mind to block out their thoughts. That was perhaps the most valuable lesson Ianus had taught her.

  Ianus. He’d eased out of her mind some time ago. He’d controlled withdrawing their thought merge so well she hadn’t noticed. Until now. Now he was back, a little jittery and weaker than before.

  “Ianus reports that Mag and Bok have finished their . . . um . . . battle and are now demanding return of the snack you so kindly offered them.” Martha choked back bile.

  “I need to take custody of Laud Gregor’s body. He . . . we . . . I will not tolerate any further desecration!” Sissy insisted.

  “Gotcha.” Jake rose to his feet cautiously. When he didn’t wince, he took a moment to fold his blankie and place it carefully on the seat of his chair. “Martha please have Ia
nus relay the message that the Dragons can stuff their appetite where the sun don’t shine.”

  Martha wanted to giggle at the image he presented with that insult.

  “Come along, ladies, we have a rendezvous with death.” He offered Sissy his arm in escort, expecting Martha to follow.

  “Lady Jancee ordered Garrin to steal Laud Gregor so Laudae Sissy would have to resign as HPs and Temple would be discredited. She wanted to go back to the old ways that put Noble above the law, and she’d be above Temple. She needed to prove that Noble had always been higher than Temple,” Martha said. She didn’t know why. She’d wanted to hold in the information until . . . until Mary was with her to hold her hand.

  Instead Sissy reached her free hand out to pull Martha close.

  “Lady Jancee would like the power to take my head for being a telepath,” Martha sobbed into Sissy’s shoulder.

  “Not going to happen, no way, no how,” Jake decreed. “As soon as she’s able to travel, I want her off my station!” His link beeped

  “General.” Major Mara’s came through the gadget, hesitantly. “Doc Halliday just reported that both Lady Jancee and her baby have died. The baby was probably three days dead when the lady went into labor.”

  Pamela heard the message about Lady Jancee through her own link. She’d set it to monitor Jake’s communications months ago. He found the bugs, usually within hours and banished them. She’d reset with more sophisticated tech, and he’d banished that. This time he’d been laid low by the concussion and hadn’t gone looking. He didn’t even bother closing the comms when he’d finished ordering arrangements to send for Lady Jancee’s husband. Like he wanted her to hear everything, including a long discussion with one of Sissy’s acolytes about what she’d overheard. Since the “conversation” took place after Garrin’s death, which could only mean . . .

  Jake had his hands on a reliable and healthy telepath.

  Interesting.

  Interesting enough to divert her from her path toward the shuttle bay beneath Jake’s office?

  Recruiting the girl to work for Pamela as a spy could wait. Somehow Pamela had to divert the girl’s loyalty from Sissy and Jake to herself. Not the CSS or Harmony, to Pamela and only Pamela. That would take time and careful thought. Meanwhile, she needed to get custody of Laud Gregor’s body before Jake did. Presuming Sam had taken it with him in his fruitless attempt to escape.

  But why would Sam risk it?

  Surely the corpse was of no value to anyone other than the Harmonite Empire. But considering the political disarray on Harmony and the power grabs between Temple and Noble, someone on H Prime would pay nicely for possession.

  If Sam could get into Harmony space.

  If Sam could convince the High Council that the half-rotted corpse was indeed Laud Gregor.

  If . . .

  Damn, the man was stupid beyond belief. If only he’d come to Pamela first. She’d have taken care of him and Laud Gregor’s corpse.

  Too many variables. She needed to meet the shuttle before Jake did.

  Anxiously she counted levels as the lift lowered from the hub down. She skirted the blast doors between LG and MG by way of a little-known trap door and chute. When she stepped onto the next platform down, she adjusted her cap and wig to shadow her face. A twist of her shoulders and rib cage pushed padding around to make her appear slightly hunched as well as fifty more pounds overweight. She brought her clipboard digital pad—beloved by all bureaucrats and spies despite the transition to smaller and more portable methods of recording technical notes—up and peered at it closely as if having trouble reading the fine print.

  At MG5 she chanced a look up. No sign of Jake or Sissy and her acolyte. With a sigh of relief she continued down another level and stepped off the rotating platforms into a stark tableau of motionless people and tension so tight it nearly hummed in the air.

  The boxy shuttle sat inert on a pad. Five heavily armed security people, wearing the gray uniform Jake had designed for station personnel, stood in front of the hatch, blaster rifles aimed right where Sam would emerge. The weapons whined with full charges begging to be released.

  And Jake stepped forward with a palm-sized piece of electronic equipment that Pamela did not recognize.

  “If he won’t open under the threat of violence, then I’ll have to open it and inflict some,” Jake said, waving the device over the lock.

  A whir and a click released the latch. The hatch started to iris open, then closed, then opened a bit more, then closed again.

  Pamela had to do something or risk losing Sam to Jake. And quickly.

  Laudae Sissy and her girl hung back. Sissy twisted her hands in a classic gesture of worry. The girl—one of the two Pamela had confronted earlier—hung her head and hid behind Sissy even though she was now taller than the woman by several inches. If she was indeed a telepath, she seemed too preoccupied with Jake and his violent intent to notice Pamela lurking behind the armed security forces.

  A tall man with medium-colored hair and space-pale skin turned his head slightly to take note as Pamela eased forward. A raw patch of skin on his left cheek told her all she needed to know about him. He’d left Harmony with enough of a grudge to have his caste mark removed. He’d only do so if he’d given all of his loyalty to Jake.

  “Excuse me, if this is a crime scene, I need to be first in so the evidence isn’t tainted,” Pamela said to anyone listening in one of her thicker accents. Actually she mimicked her Russian Jewish great-grandmother, complete with the authoritative martyr complex that trumped every argument. One didn’t need to be Russian or Jewish, just a grandmother to make that attitude work. But the combination added weight.

  While all eyes turned toward her, she briefly lowered the electronic clipboard, ran her finger across one corner and raised it again.

  “Not a crime scene yet,” Jake threw back at her, keeping his eyes on the stalled, quarter-open hatch iris. “Come on out, Sam. I don’t want to have to shoot you,” Jake called into the shuttle. As he spoke, he pressed hard on a button on his gadget, and the hatch stopped fighting him. It opened fully to reveal a dead body sprawled across the opening, eyes staring lifelessly at the bulkhead.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Who shot him?” Jake whirled to face his troops. The forensics officer stood off to one side, quaking and mumbling into her clipboard. Actually it was a full analytical screen with voice and video recorder, but galaxy wide, techies loved the things to look like an old fashioned paper holder.

  He fixed his gaze on the suddenly lowered rifles and the guards who wielded them.

  “I heard nothing, General,” newly recruited Corporal Jenks said, coming to full attention with a salute. “These blasters make a racket when fired.”

  “I know that, Corporal. So why is that man dead?” He pointed backward while keeping his eyes on the six gray-clad people. They all looked bewildered beneath their protective blast helmets and body armor.

  He chanced a glance at Martha, the telepath, who stared, mouth agape, and eyes just as wide and frightened. Without a word Sissy took the girl’s hand and calmly led her toward the lift. “Later, General,” Sissy said as she and her acolyte rose out of sight.

  A flicker of movement in his peripheral, pulled Jake back from watching Sissy. He whirled to find the forensics tech sidling toward the open hatch.

  “If I could just examine the body, I’ll be able to tell you what killed him,” she whined.

  “Nope. You are just a tech. No one goes in until a medical examiner sees this.” Jake lifted his link and barked orders into it, calling for medical and full forensics teams.

  “I happen to have full credentials in this area.” The tech stood up and pierced him with a glare worthy of Sissy in full regalia HPs mode.

  “Show me your creds!”

  The tech touched the bottom left corner of her clipboard, the standard place to store such things on any authorized CSS screen. Then she handed it to him. Masters in pathology from a respected m
ed school, masters in forensic tech from a less prestigious but fully accredited university, and his own signature on her employment papers for the First Contact Café. He didn’t remember signing it, but then he signed hundreds of such documents every day, most without reading.

  “Very well.” He nodded to the tech to proceed.

  She wasted no time in approaching the body and kneeling beside it. Then she ran her clipboard over Sam from feet on up. Why had Sam’s toes burst through his boots? And his hands were black and raw, as if burned.

  “Electrocution,” the tech said in her annoying whiny accent. “Looks like he overrode some circuits from the flight deck and didn’t close them properly before touching the hatch. Beginner’s mistake.” She stood up and looked around the small craft. “May I examine the consoles?”

  Jake nodded. He decided he needed to examine the same consoles and strode inward with three long strides, catching up to the tech just as she sat in the pilot’s chair and began peering at blinking icons and fuel levels.

  “Why is the engine still idling?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. Tractor beam should have cut power to all but life support.”

  “Life support. Ah.” She slid her clipboard into the leg hole beneath the dashboard and fiddled with it. “Yah, here is the place where he tried to override your commands to open the hatch.” She yanked a circuit board from inside, a place where hands were not meant to intrude.

  Jake couldn’t tell if that small square was out of place before the tech pulled it out or not. The fine hairs along his spine stood straight up in suspicion.

  Voices and thuds of heavy equipment dropping cut off his questioning the tech.

  “Medical is here. My work is done.” The tech slid out of the chair with more grace and agility than Jake thought possible considering her loose bulk.

  She disappeared out the hatch just as he caught a glimpse of green cloth caught in the closed door of the storage bin that ran across the back interior bulkhead. About the size of a coffin.