“Is that why you killed Sam? He didn’t deserve to die. He was a decent agent. Not brilliant, but decent.”
“But he didn’t have your flair. Your creativity. He gave up the body without a fight.”
“Would you take on a Maril warrior without a blaster? Even with a blaster? I’ve got the concussion to prove how quick and how strong they are.” Said concussion was threatening to lunge forward again. Already the backs of his eyes ached from the glare of the dim lighting. “Put the blaster away, Pammy.”
He shifted to stand in front of her, between her weapon and the place where he expected Sissy to emerge at any moment with at least one of her acolytes, possibly Martha, the one he thought of as his daughter already.
“You know that this weapon is the only leverage I have left to gain control of this station, Jake. I need this station as a base of operations.”
“You have a base here on the station. A base that is well hidden because I choose to look the other way when your flyboys come in and out. Because I choose to keep that wing supposedly empty even though traffic is picking up and I could easily rent it out, if I’d just remove the wreckage of the Squid ship and repair the hull. But because the Squid ship is stuck half in and half out, the air leaks sealed only by saltwater ice leaked from the cockpit, all the residents of my station avoid that wing because they believe it haunted.”
He had to pause and control his growing contempt for this woman. He had trouble remembering a time when he stood in awe of her, respected her, was grateful to her when she came to his bed.
“You and your spy operations are safer with me in charge. If you ran this place, all you’d do is run this place. You wouldn’t have time or energy to run your spy operations.”
“You may as well give it up, Admiral Marella. No one wins an argument with Jake,” Sissy said, from behind Pammy.
He wasn’t nearly as surprised as Pammy. After all, his daughter Martha had probably read his mind when he took the stairs. So she had done the same.
“She’s the reason you deserted me,” Pamela snarled. She leveled her blaster at Jake’s heart. “A mealy-mouth, uneducated wimp. Gregor only elevated her to HPs because he could manipulate her.”
“Have you ever murdered someone, Pammy?” Jake looked at the muzzle of the weapon, inches from his chest. If he nicked her throat with his blade, she’d still have time and instinct to pull the trigger. Except . . .
“Of course I’ve killed, and been wounded. It’s part of the job requirement.”
He repeated the first lesson he’d learned on Harmony. “Killing someone with a blaster at a distance is detached. You aren’t responsible. The gun is.” He played with the Badger Metal blade in his hand, remembering the first life he’d taken with a blade. “You pointed out to me, after my first mission, the difference between shooting a cannon from my fighter and watching friends die in my arms. One is just lights on a computer board, the other is personal. Very personal. Intimate.”
“There’s a reason Harmony has outlawed blasters and projectile weapons,” Sissy said, as if she were teaching a lesson. She was. “If you need to kill someone, you have to take responsibility, participate in the other’s death. Share it.”
“You have to watch the light of life fade from your victim’s eyes. And die a little bit inside yourself. It is the most intimate thing you can do with another being. Even more intimate than sex,” Jake finished. “Are you prepared to do the deed yourself? Or do you need distance to take my life? In front of witnesses. Face the consequences.” Jake tweaked his knife to the side and stepped back, surrendering. He just hoped that the pressure of her job, the lust for power, and the extreme secrecy of her work hadn’t broken her mind. A brilliant mind that worked faster than most people.
“I can’t arrest you, Pammy. I don’t have enough physical evidence. But I can stop you. I can make the CSS pull your budget and transfer you to the back of beyond.” Jake took another step backward, angling to make sure he stood between Pammy and Sissy.
“In case you haven’t noticed, this already is the back of beyond,” Pammy sneered. But her grip on the weapon grew slack. The muzzle dipped. And her finger lost tension on the trigger.
But her thumb moved to the safety. To click it on, not off.
She was still dangerous.
“Give me the girl, the telepath. Let me train her.” She shifted her aim to the semi-circle of girls standing behind Sissy.
“No.” Jake moved with the muzzle of the weapon.
“She’s the most powerful weapon at our disposal!” Pammy insisted. “If I call the CSS first, they will give her to me.”
“No they won’t,” Sissy said. She stepped up beside Jake, still carrying the awkward headdress under her arm.
“She’s an orphan.”
“Not any longer.” Martha stood on Jake’s other side.
Damn. What were these women doing, trying to protect him? He was supposed to protect them.
“I filed adoption papers for Martha this morning,” Jake said. She’s mine, and you have to go through me to get to her.” He advanced on her again, back within easy stabbing, or slicing range.
The staircase clanged under the charge of booted feet. Armored and armed security people spilled off the lift and down the steps. “Are you okay, General?” Mara asked from the back of the pack. “I got your message to meet you here as soon as Captain Kalek sent an all clear.”
“We’re fine now, Lt. Colonel.”
Mara beamed with pleasure. “Thanks for putting through the paperwork, sir.”
“Stand down, Pammy. You’re outnumbered. Pull that trigger, and you won’t get out alive.” Jake reached for her blaster, taking it easily from her hand.
“You can’t win, Jake,” she murmured.
“Maybe not everything. But I won this one. I’ll take that.” He sheathed his blade.
“I didn’t kill the Dragons,” she said. “I ordered my boys to trade a translator unit for half their treasure and any blueprints for their tech, then sent them on their way unmolested. They work for me now.”
Jake closed his eyes, trying to blot out that image.
“If you are going to work with pirates, I suggest you move your base of operations to Prometheus XII. You think alike. I want you off my station within twenty-four hours. No longer. And take the ghost with you. I have fulfilled my duty to him.”
“My agents?”
“Five. You can keep five analysts here along with your monitoring equipment. They report to me before they report to you.” He glared at her, daring her to defy him.
She didn’t blink or back down.
“Come along, dear. We have a ritual to perform before the Star Runner casts off and I return Laud Gregor to Harmony,” Sissy said, taking his arm and yanking him away.
Yeah, that.
Chapter Forty
“Harmony bring your peace to us in this re-balance of our family,” Sissy intoned on a somber chant. She lit a candle, and Bella slipped a protective chimney over the flame. “You, Lady Harmony, together with your consort Empathy, and your children Nurture and Unity, along with your step-children, Anger, Fear, and Greed, banish Discord and open our hearts to . . . acceptance.”
“Bring us understanding while maintaining our love.” Mary carried the chant a tone up a third and lit her candle. Suzie covered her flame with a chimney.
“Harmony, help us expand our family by severing the bonds within,” Martha concluded, lighting the third candle. Sharan protected it with another chimney.
Jake, Ashel, and Marsh lit the remaining four candles. Jake’s jaw worked as if holding back strong emotion. Martha smiled and nodded to him.
Then Sissy choked, recognizing that her second acolyte had already shifted her sense of belonging from Sissy to Jake. At the same time, Jake draped an arm around Marsh and Ashel. They looked up at him with the same adoration they used to give their own father and . . . and Sissy. Marsh reached up and took Jake’s right hand where it hung over his shoulder. The
other thumb crept relentlessly toward his mouth, a behavior he had resumed right after the death of the rest of their family and hadn’t indulged in since coming to the station.
Ashel, on the other side of Jake, also took his hand. Martha tapped a crystal beside her candle with a glass wand and ceremoniously removed her lavender robe and beaded headdress. Beneath them she wore a new pair of the ubiquitous blue slacks called jeans and a close-fitting knit shirt. When she’d folded the robe and placed the headdress on top of it, she stepped back from the circle and walked deasil all the way around once. She lifted Sissy’s hand to her lips and kissed it gently, then continued around the circle and took her new position with Jake and the little ones.
Hope.
Sissy closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She wanted to believe the voice came from Harmony herself. But it could have been Martha.
Hope!
She loosed the last long breath she’d been holding and opened her eyes to look around the circle. Her family. No matter where they were, or how far apart, this was her family. A bit of joy crept into her heart.
“Martha, you wish to leave my service and become Jake’s daughter. You will live with him here on the First Contact Café. You will have your caste mark removed. From this time forward you will cease to exist on Harmony and within your caste. You will be able to attend Holy Day services in the Temple wing of this station, but otherwise may not enter that wing without invitation. Do you agree with this?”
Martha gulped and nodded.
“You have volunteered to give up something precious to you to symbolize your severance of ties to Harmony and . . . and to me.” That brought a barbed lump to her throat.
Hope!
“I struggled with this decision. What is most precious to me are my memories of you and our life in Crystal Temple and here. No one can take those memories from me, nor can I give them away.” She paused and looked down, blinking rapidly. “You gave me one of your own purple scarves as a birthday gift. It is precious because it came from you, my Laudae. I give it back as a symbol of leaving your service to become part of General Jake Devlin’s family. But I will never leave your friendship.” She produced the silky swath of cloth that matched Sissy’s robes and dropped it in the center of the circle of candles and crystals.
“Ashel, my sister, one of the last of my blood family, you wish to transfer your guardianship from me to Jake, to embrace him as your father, not to replace our own beloved P’Pa, but to become an addition to him.”
“Yes,” Ashel said. Her throat worked hard as she tried to refrain from crying.
“And what do you wish to give up to symbolize this change?”
“The day before the bomb, P’pa took me to the park, just me, none of the others. He was good about that, giving each of us special time with him. He made me a daisy chain. I was wearing it when he . . . when he and M’ma and all the others died, so it wasn’t destroyed in the explosion. Mary showed me how to dry the flowers so they’d keep. It’s the most special thing I ever owned. I give it to you, sister.” She dropped it on top of Martha’s scarf.
Without prompting, Marsh pulled a red coloring wand and dropped it into the pile. “Jake gave me colors and a tablet to color on when he first found us after you left. Red’s my favorite color.” He turned back and buried his tear-streaked face into Jake’s thigh.
Ashel’s eyes filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. Martha held her head high, chin up.
A tear trembled on Jake’s eyelashes. He didn’t bother to wipe it away, just let it spill.
“On the day I took over the running of this station, as you prepared to give all of us a Grief Blessing after the Squid ship crashed into the Temple wing, you helped me celebrate my promotion with these. They came from you, therefore they are beyond value to me, regardless of the intrinsic value of the Badger Metal.” He unclipped the two black stars from his collar and added them to the pile.
“Harmony accept these sacrifices as a symbol of the re-alignment of our family. Give us grace, and peace to accept these decisions and make them work.” She bent and tapped six crystals, leaving Martha’s silent. Mary blew out the candles. Tiny embers lingered on the wicks.
Hope!
Chapter Forty-One
“I don’t believe this,” Doc Halliday said, shaking her head. “Temperature almost down to normal, blood pressure still low but functional, heart rate coming up. If I believed in such things, I’d say that getting the Dragons off the station nearly cured you, Ianus.”
“My mind feels . . . empty,” he said. Not so much empty as full of holes. He’d never not had a Dragon inside his mind. “My mind is like your Swiss Cheese.” With the image in Mariah’s mind came a memory of a taste. “My ancestors used to enjoy it.”
“I’ll get you some so you can remember it for yourself. Don’t know what to do about holes in your mind, though. You are the first telepath I’ve ever had as a patient. To satisfy my own curiosity, and see if there is a problem I should—or rather could—address, I’d like to do another brain scan. On you and the other telepaths. And Martha. I feel an academic research paper coming on.”
Ianus groaned. “You have poked and prodded every inch of my body inside and out. Surely you know what is different about me from normal humans.”
“This one doesn’t hurt. It’s an in-depth hologram of your brain. Comparing it to previous scans, and doing the same to the other telepaths, will help me understand what is going on with you. We can use this information to find more telepaths among the human population. We’ve scattered pretty far and wide across the galaxy. Surely a few people have the genes, or brain mutation, or whatever to become telepaths.”
That sounded good. With only the original twenty-four telepaths from Diamond plus Martha, the talent was in danger of dying out.
“I’m going to get Martha down here too. She’s never had a Dragon dominating and controlling her thoughts.” Doc Halliday went about fussing with her machines, lowering some, raising others, adjusting something else.
“If I am so much better, may I get up and walk around?” Ianus asked, hopefully. “I’ve only seen a few places on this magnificent station of yours.”
“I don’t know about that. Your muscles are still pretty wasted. Maybe a short excursion in a float chair, with a medical aide beside you all the way.”
Doc Halliday walked around his bed to the other side and fiddled with more machines. “Okay, that’s done. Maybe now I’ll have some time to examine and compare all this data I’m collecting. I’ll send a nurse in with a float chair and let you breathe some different air for a bit.”
“If the air is recycled and filtered, how is it different in here than elsewhere on the station?” he asked.
“Just an expression, boy.” She wandered off muttering to herself.
Ianus practiced adding and subtracting by sevens to block out her thoughts. He’d heard enough arcane medical terms—most of them made sense since they came from the same language root as his own, Latin they called it—to have vague ideas about what they meant. Sometimes it was better not to know.
A few minutes later Martha bounced into the room. “Dad has given me an hour off of school work, so I came to see you,” she said. She tried to keep her gaze on him, but her eyes kept flicking right and left to view all the monitors. Her face lost some of its brightness.
“Are you still enjoying your lessons?” Ianus asked. She’d blanked her mind so he couldn’t read her.
“Yes. I’m working with the Maril, learning their culture as well as their language. If I’m going to be a translator, I need to know their metaphors and prejudices so I can tell serious thoughts from sarcasm and jokes. Next I’m going to work with the few Labyrinthians still on board. Did you know that no outside culture has ever even seen their language written? And most of us haven’t heard them speak it. Their ability to learn other languages is as fluid as their DNA mixing with others to stabilize their own. Dad also wants me to try understanding the ammonia breathers
. They use breathers outside their own wing very readily, and try to learn languages, but their short term memory is terrible. Their ancestral memories are supposed to be well preserved.” She babbled on.
What was she hiding? She’d gotten good at that since he’d first suggested nonsense rhymes and math to stop the bombardment of other people’s thoughts.
“Martha, what is wrong?”
She gaped. Then she clamped her mouth shut and shifted her gaze elsewhere. “Doc Halliday says I can take you in a float chair anywhere you want to go. She gave me a portable kit to monitor you, in case you get too tired or something.” She held up a palm-sized device, so like all the other gadgets on this station. “So, what would you like to see? The hydroponics garden has a rooftop view screen programmed to display real-time starscapes. You can look up at them and smell the green just like the ancients used to do, when they first dreamed of traveling among the stars.” She summoned the chair with her device.
The reclining seat settled beside his bed and rose high enough that he could easily scoot from the mattress, into its jellied depths. When he settled and adjusted just so and nothing hurt, much, he used the keypad on the armrest to guide him toward the door.
Martha faced him then with a smile on her mouth, but not her eyes.
Then two words leaked through her controls. Temporary rally.
“I’d like to see the stars as they appear on Earth.”
Sissy indulged in sleepy drugs to get her through hyperspace. She didn’t care if she slept two hours or two months. Just so long as she didn’t have to think and remember. “A ritual doesn’t make something right, it just makes it easier to endure,” she told herself over and over.
So why did her midsection feel as if it had been ripped to shreds and put back together with some of the pieces missing?
When Star Runner cleared the jump point and the antidote to sleepy drugs brought her back to life, she stumbled through her duties, still half asleep, her heart and mind still at the First Contact Café. This time she kept Laud Gregor’s coffin in her own room, and opened it before she took the drugs and after she woke up to make certain he was still there. Security had locked her door inside and out.
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