She stood up so she was in his field of vision without him having to turn his head.
“Hey,” she said, following it with a *Hey.*
He blinked and frowned as if trying to force his eyes to focus.
His lips twitched as if he was trying to speak. It might have been, “Hey,” but no more than a breath of a whisper came out, so soft she couldn’t quite catch it. He didn’t answer the mental *Hey.*
“You’re back with us.” She stuck to words.
He blinked. Maybe that was a slight nod.
“I’d ask how you feel, but I can see from looking at you.”
His mouth tightened. He widened his eyes and glanced upward in a brief look that said he was both affronted by his condition and resigned at the same time. Sometimes it didn’t take more than half a second to transmit a world of feeling. She was used to doing it with thoughts, but looks worked as well.
“Are you hearing me?” She asked the question aloud, tapped her forehead, and transmitted it mind-to-mind at the same time. “In here?” It was like trying to talk to a deadhead.
His eyebrows knotted together in a frown and he raised his right hand to his forehead and poked with his fingers. His mouth moved as he worked himself up to say something.
“Gone.” He managed at last. “Im . . . plant.”
Cara felt as though spiders were crawling up her spine. *Ronan!* The young medic jerked awake in an instant. *We have a problem.*
Chapter Seventeen
CIVILITY
KITTY SLIPPED INTO THE BACK OF THE CHAPEL behind three uniformed guardsmen. They were calling it a Service of Respect for the dead guards, now numbering six in total because one had died later from his injuries. There were a lot of faces she didn’t know, mostly in uniform. Gupta was there, too, and Wenna, probably as a token of respect and to represent the Free Company. She knew Cara and Ronan Wolfe were at Dockside Medical where Benjamin was still in critical condition, so she didn’t expect them to show up.
Mother Ramona and Norton Garrick had come to pay their respects, though. That was kind of them. She didn’t know much about the rest of the dead, but Wes had only been on the second pay grade, one step up from a grunt, not especially important. Even so, the head of Crossways had come.
“Kitty, don’t hide at the back.” Captain Syke came in and shepherded her to the front to stand beside Ellen Heator, who had declared her to be Wes’ next of kin. She felt a fraud. Wes was there, or at least his ashes were, in a polished black medonite cylinder about thirty centimeters tall, standing on a small pedestal in front of a holographic scene of his face superimposed on woodland, the leaves of the trees rustling in a gentle breeze. Wes would have liked that. There were other cylinders as well. The bodies of the guards sucked out of the air lock had been recovered by Finders and brought home.
She’d been very fond of Wes, despite latching onto him originally for a purpose. More than fond, perhaps. She’d not lied to Cara when she’d said they might have been more than friends, given time, though she was always acutely aware that neither her life nor her time were her own. She’d never fully committed herself.
Lately she hadn’t felt good about the information that she passed back to Alphacorp on a regular basis, but she consoled herself that the Free Company, as far as she was aware, had no plans that would be detrimental to Alphacorp and none of the information that she’d passed on would really hurt the Free Company. It wasn’t as if she was passing information on to the Trust. She’d reported Benjamin’s loss and early this morning had reported his miraculous rescue, leaving out her own part in it.
Syke stood up and read out a list of the dead and said a few words about each of them. He said how good Wes was at his job. An elderly woman stood up and said what a good boy he’d been when the port immigration officer had brought him to the orphanage. “He was all elbows and knees.” She smiled. “Took him a while to grow into his height.”
There was no one there from the farm. Had they even been notified? Wes hadn’t said he kept that part of his life separate from his job, but maybe he had.
“Do you want to say something, Kitty?” Syke asked.
“Me?”
“Don’t be shy, just say what you feel.”
She stepped out to the front. “I didn’t know him long, but Wes made me laugh. He was kind and gentle and loved animals and children. He volunteered at the community farm.” There was a small susurration of surprise among his fellow guardsmen. “I wondered if you knew about that. It would be the biggest thing you could do for him if you went and visited there, and maybe volunteered sometimes. They’ll miss him. I’ll miss him.”
When she ran out of words she stopped and sat down again, her eyes moist. Wes Orton had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and the Trust had killed him. He was collateral damage. That whole segment of the station could have been collateral damage but for Ben Benjamin’s insane idea to fly a bomb-laden ship into the Folds where it could do no damage.
Thank you for my life, Ben Benjamin.
She suppressed a flare of anger directed toward the Trust and the team it had sent. The best she could do for Wes was to keep Alphacorp strong, otherwise the Trust would be the uncontested pack leader of all the megacorporations, and that would be a disaster.
Ben felt like a freak.
Ronan, two more doctors he’d already forgotten the names of, and an implant specialist had all trooped in and out of his room in Dockside Medical, each offering different opinions about how and why his implant had disappeared. One doctor said it had dissolved, the other held to a weird alien technology theory. There was also the odd question of why his hair had reverted to his old style, adding a year’s worth of growth in just a few days. It didn’t seem like a big question in itself, but it raised plenty of others. He didn’t think he’d been in the Folds for long, but his hair said something had happened.
He remembered being meat and rebuilding himself. Ridiculous.
The implant specialist wasn’t interested in sudden and unexpected hair growth. He just shook his head and said he needed to call in someone else, a specialist.
“I thought you were a specialist.” Ben managed a soft croak.
“He’s special, even among specialists. Not the most charming of characters, but he knows his stuff.”
Which was how Civility Jamieson came to be standing at the foot of Ben’s bed, frowning down from a striking height. Ben was tall, but if he were standing next to Jamieson he’d be looking up. The man was cadaverously skinny, pole-like in stature, with steel gray hair and eyes to match.
He didn’t offer an opinion as to how it happened, just tilted his head to one side as if Ben and his lack of implant were a particularly interesting puzzle to solve.
“I’d like to see if you can be reimplanted, if, that is, you wish to be.” He tilted his head to the other side. “Under the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?” Ben asked. His voice was a little stronger today, but his chest still felt raw.
“Well, it’s not as if you’re a Telepath,” Jamieson answered, as if that was the only specialization that mattered. True, Telepaths were the ones who tended to go nuts without their implants. Ben wouldn’t go nuts, not screaming-and-banging-your-head-on-the-wall nuts, but he’d been open to the tides of the whole universe since he was sixteen years old. You couldn’t lose something like that and remain the same. Being a Navigator was what he was.
Even though . . . He heard his own pulse pounding in his ears. Even though he didn’t know whether he’d ever have the guts to go into the Folds again.
Did he have a choice? Maybe he did.
Part of him wanted to walk away from it all. Never have to fly anywhere again. When he thought about what had happened, the deep cold returned to gnaw at his bones.
Had it all been real?
Space-burned lungs and a broken wrist told him it had, but common sense told
him it couldn’t have been. Void dragons? EVA without a suit? Not possible, not for more than fifteen seconds anyway. Fifteen seconds to loss of consciousness, then death. Yet he’d been outside, not only in space but in foldspace, and removed four limpets from the hull of Solar Wind. Fact—otherwise he wouldn’t be here now.
He dragged his mind back to Civility Jamieson.
Cara had come in on the tail end of Jamieson’s last comment. She drew down her brows and pressed her lips together. He didn’t need to be telepathic to know she was angry. Some communication must have flashed between her and the specialist’s specialist that Ben wasn’t privy to. Jamieson suddenly stiffened and then flushed red.
“I’m sorry, Commander Benjamin, I didn’t mean to . . .”
Ben waved away the apology with his good hand.
“I can arrange for some tests: scans; a synapse map; a full assessment; aptitudes.”
Cara walked around and insinuated herself between Ben and Jamieson. Bastard, she mouthed silently where Ben could see her lips and Jamieson couldn’t.
“I think Ben needs a few more days to recover before you start taking his head apart, Mr. Jamieson.”
“Yes, of course. Whenever you’re ready, Commander Benjamin.”
“Take your time,” Cara whispered as Jamieson departed. She reached for Ben’s good hand and squeezed it briefly, their only touch since he’d returned, not that he was counting. She’d been there when he woke and had been back and forth several times in the last few days, but conversation was still difficult. He missed having her in his head almost more than he missed having her in his bed.
Almost.
He was as weak as a kitten in that department, too, right at this moment. He hated to admit it, but, in all respects, he needed time.
He groaned inwardly. Nan to rescue, and a boatload of settlers to find. He didn’t have time. He needed to be functional, and quickly, with or without an implant.
“What happened out there?” Cara asked the question he’d been dreading. Tell her the unbelievable truth and sound like a madman, or avoid saying anything?
He shook his head, “I really don’t know.”
And that was the truth. He didn’t know. He knew what his memories told him, but was that what had actually happened?
Ben didn’t need to be an enhanced Empath to know that Cara was worried and trying not to show it. He’d never been able to rely on his telepathic abilities, so he’d always been sensitive to body language, naturally good at reading people without needing to be in their heads.
She squeezed Ben’s hand briefly. The touch, skin on skin, was electrifying and he tried to hold on to her fingers for a few moments before she slipped out of his grasp. She flopped back into the chair, just out of his reach.
Ben stared at the hand she’d just released. That touch still thrummed through him. She really cared, despite all she’d been through and everything that had conspired to come between them. Here he was, feeling sorry for himself after just a few days and she’d been powered down for almost a year while she was on the run from van Blaiden.
“How did you do it?” Ben’s voice was still little better than a grating whisper.
“Do what? Rescue you from Solar Wind?”
He shook his head. “On the run. You kept your implant powered down. Pretended to be a deadhead. How did you do it . . . and not go nuts?”
“I didn’t have any choice. I knew they could track me the instant I used it. I wanted to live. I wanted to live more than I wanted to be a Telepath.”
He huffed out a breath and touched his fingers to his forehead. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
“I know. Things to do, people to rescue. Windmills to tilt at.”
“Don Quixote. Nan likes old books.” He cracked a rueful smile. “Used to tell us the stories. I guess she figured we’d never read them for ourselves.”
“I’ve made a start.”
“On Don Quixote?”
“On rescuing Nan and Ricky. Mother Ramona tried to negotiate their freedom, but Crowder found out you’d survived before she finished the deal.”
Ben started to bristle. Rescuing Nan was his job.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. We thought you were dead. If you had been dead wouldn’t you have wanted us to finish off what you started, free your family and find the settlers?”
He felt a shiver run through him. Of course he would, but not at the expense of any more lives.
“I . . .” He shrugged. “I’ve got a bad reputation for getting people killed.”
“You’re in no position to be overprotective.”
“I guess I’m not.” It galled him to admit it.
She searched his face, possibly wondering if he meant it. Finally she must have been satisfied because she nodded and continued, “I’ve sent Tengue and Gwala to Chenon to nose around. They’ve taken Fowler.”
“Fowler? The mouthy woman with the burns?”
“That’s the one. She sent you her best wishes—well—not phrased quite like that.”
“I can imagine.” Ben smiled. He liked Fowler. She said what she thought, not what people wanted to hear.
“She needs reconstructive surgery,” Cara said. “Ronan recommended a burn unit in Arkhad City.”
Ben nodded. “Neat.”
“Well, it was one way of giving them a good excuse to get in. I wanted them there as fast as possible. So far, so good. Hilde’s gone independently. Max has given her the details for that contact of his in central records.”
“Lorin?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hilde will scare her off.”
“I don’t think so. You’d be surprised at Hilde out of uniform. She cleans up well and looks as though she’s got a few thousand credits to spare. Lorin responded to bribery last time, right?”
He nodded. “Though Crowder will be operating off-record, so I don’t know what Lorin can find.”
“She doesn’t have to find anything. Hilde’s going to bribe her to introduce an anomaly bug into the system. Mother Ramona has a backdoor analyst who claims she can find where the holes are in accounts and see where things aren’t. That’s where you’re likely to find the things Crowder’s hiding.” She sat forward. “Once we’ve got likely areas of search we’ll go in via the normal shuttle routes. Just a small team. Me on comms, Lewis Bronsen as Finder, Archie Tatum and his bots. We’ll rendezvous with Tengue, Gwala, and Hilde for muscle. A six-man team—”
“No!” Ben pushed his voice and it came out sharper than he’d intended.
Cara jumped visibly. “What do you mean, no?”
“There are too many people to get hurt. I should—”
“Oh, yeah, right. What did we just say about overprotective?” Cara jumped up, paced toward the window, pivoted around and leaned on the foot of the bed, arms stiff. “You should just get out of your sickbed, make an instant recovery and do it all your fucking self. Again. Well, fuck that!”
Ack! Was it what he’d said or the way he’d said it? It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, he just didn’t want to put her—or anybody—in any danger. A good commander shouldn’t send other people out to do what he wasn’t prepared to do himself.
She flushed with anger and then swallowed whatever she’d been going to say. The flush faded to normal and then beyond, to pale. She took a couple of deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, and then straightened up. “Try it if you like, but if you leave me now, don’t expect me to be here when you get back.”
And then she simply turned and walked out.
Ben felt as though someone had doused him in ice water.
“Cara,” he called after her. “Cara!”
But she just kept on walking without looking back.
Oh, shit, he’d done it now. She’d taken it as a slight on her competenc
e. In truth it was a good plan, a lot better than the one he’d had, which was to get Rion to start screaming to the news networks and watch Crowder to see where his key people were concentrating their efforts. His hand hovered over the comm unit, ready to pick up and send a message. What could he say that would make it any better?
At that moment Civility Jamieson arrived with an entourage of young student types and proceeded to ignore Ben completely while he explained the barrage of tests that he was going to conduct and which student would be assisting with which test.
“Now?” Ben asked, surprised by the haste.
“You’re a very interesting case, Commander Benjamin. As Miss Carlinni reminded me, quite forcibly, this station owes you a debt of gratitude which medical attention can hardly begin to repay. Now, Nine, here will make notes on everything you can remember, while—”
“Nine? That you?” Ben turned to a moon-faced kid who barely looked old enough to be out of school.
She nodded, shyly.
“Got a name?”
“Vina. Vina Daniels.”
“Well, Miss Daniels, your job is easy. Just write down CRAFT.”
“Craft?”
“Can’t. Remember. A. Fucking. Thing.”
“Commander Benjamin,” Jamieson said.
“Yes, you’re perfectly correct, Doctor. I shouldn’t be rude to your students. I guess you never are.”
“Oh, I’m rude to them all the time. They’re hardened to it. Just don’t get in my way while I connect this.”
He came at Ben with an electrode and a tube of snot glue.
Half a day later Ben had been hooked up to four different machines, had had a succession of scanners pointed in his direction and had been tested eight ways from Sunday and still Vina Daniels sat waiting patiently with her recording pad.
“All right, Miss, Daniels. What do you want to know?”
“Everything you can remember.”
“Hmm, well, okay. I was half-dressed from the shower when a team of bastards I think I recognized tried to blow me and my ship to atoms without much care for station safety. I sprang the ship for the air lock and straight into the Folds before she blew. While in foldspace, I floated through the hull of my ship, had my wrist crushed, breathed vacuum for hours and rode a void dragon to peel off four limpets. Then I ran out of luck, and air, and warmth. I managed to get to safety through an emergency hatch, whereupon I crawled back to the flight deck and let the ship find an exit point back into realspace.”
Crossways Page 25