He stepped back, clasped his hands behind his waist. “My CMO tells me your injuries aren’t serious. Your ship has significant damage, however.”
The exam room’s utilitarian overheads were harsh, bright, but their light played through her short, pale hair in a mixture of silver and gold like moonlight and starlight. There was an almost ethereal beauty about her. Mack felt as if he knew her, but from a dream.
He halted this additional imaginative mental wandering. “Your ship also has no sanctioned Confederation ID. I need to know, Captain, just who you are. What you’re doing here.”
“Recuperating in your sickbay is what I’m doing here, Admiral.” The edge of her mouth quirked upwards slightly. “It’s not as if Cirrus One was my intended destination.”
Obviously, neither his rank nor his tone had managed to intimidate her. He tried to keep the frown off his face. She wasn’t military. His infamous frown would be wasted on her. “Where were you headed?”
“The Ziami Quadrant.”
“Ziami?” His frown was back. In a huntership as powerful as the Vedritor, that would be four months and two jumpgates. In a small freighter like hers, that could take eight months, maybe a year, if the ion storms kicked in around the Sultana Drifts again. What in hell would a young woman be doing in that Godsforsaken quadrant? Cirrus was bad enough.
“My family runs a depot in Ziami. When we trade here, we run our ships under a Khalaran Kemmon flag. I was headed home, running empty. I’d already archived my Confed clearances. However, if my ship’s not too damaged, I should be able to pull them up for you.”
That sounded reasonable. But Mack rarely accepted reasonable, especially in explanations without documentation that might concern one of the more volatile Khalaran states, such as one of the rim Kemmons. “Which Kemmon do you trade with?”
She shrugged. “Depends on the commodity and the destination.”
“No, Captain. This run.”
“Not the Fav.”
“The Fav’lhir and their Kemmons haven’t plagued us for over three hundred years, thank the Lady. That wasn’t my question.” Yet in a way, it was. He’d watched her face when she’d answered, noted the dislike when she’d said the name of the longtime enemy of the Khalar. Not that the emotion couldn’t be a sham. But she didn’t strike him as a Fav’lhir agent. Plus, he’d seen her ship. That definitely wasn’t up to Fav standards.
“I had a transfer for a Kemmon-Drin tri-hauler,” she said after a long moment. “Then I had some personal business to take care of. I may have overstayed my clearances.”
So that was it. He relaxed slightly, matching a fact to his suspicious feeling. Now he knew why she’d avoided answering his questions. Not quite a smuggler. A rim-trader, and that’s what he was sure she was, could have any type of interesting “personal business,” from a genuine love affair to an illegal trade in drugs and weapons. Or, more likely, rune stones. Life-crystals. Most of which were probably fakes but willingly snatched up in the market, as anything even remotely connected with the Tridivinian Gods, or Lady Kiasidira, always was.
“When do you intend to release her, Doc?”
“I want another scan of her concussion. An hour.”
“Your ship’s in a repair bay on D11-South, Captain.” He tried to ignore the color of her eyes, the softness of her mouth as she leaned against the diag-bed’s pillows. Straightening his shoulders, he reminded himself that he wasn’t in sickbay to notice such things, but to get answers. “You can show me those Drin clearances in one hour.”
She seemed about to say something, but then only nodded and smiled.
The exam room door opened completely this time. He took it as a signal that his departure was advisable, as well as an omen to try the lifts. Either way, he had to get out of her exam room before the decidedly unprofessional imagination he didn’t have got the best of him.
Ops Command 2 was on Upper 6-North. Or rather, it was being slowly integrated back into its rightful section, as Mack viewed it, of Upper 6-North. Eventually, his office would be there as well. The previous administrators of Cirrus had firmly declared their priorities when they’d appropriated that square footage, as well as a large portion of Ops, and transformed the space into a casino gaming parlor. One of his first projects had been the reclamation of that space, back to more functional—at least in his opinion—utilization.
For now he could deal with his temporary office. Getting a real operations and command center running was more important. The Rim Gate Project would depend on them.
He headed for the left side of Ops’ lowest level. A stocky red-haired woman monitoring enviro readouts glanced his way briefly, nodded. She was one of the station’s civilian techies, in a wrinkled orange jumpsuit that showed no insignia. Another orange-jumpsuited man leaned over an engineering console beyond her. He was deep in argument with someone on station intercom.
Tobias was at the long communications console, his muscular frame shoved into a chair, his thick fingers moving quickly over the screen pads. Like Janek, Fitch Tobias was a former Vedritor officer. One of nine who’d volunteered to follow Rynan “Make It Right” Makarian to Cirrus One. Ten Fleet officers from the Vedri plus one hundred and seventy-five from other Fleet ships and postings comprised Mack’s current staff, with Tobias as his second-in-command. One hundred eighty-five of his people versus five hundred and fifty—give or take a couple dozen illegals—longtime residents of Cirrus. And their parrots.
That his staff was outnumbered by an eclectic, somewhat eccentric civilian population was a fact Mack rarely forgot. But that wasn’t his only problem. He rested one hip against the comm console, crossed his arms over his chest.
“Still working on the avian invaders, sir,” Tobias said, without raising his close-shaved head.
“I’m not here about the parrots. I’ve been trying to make some sense out of this past week’s PSLs.” Especially the ones in the Runemist sector. That’s where his patrols had found the intriguing Gillaine Davré. Who occupied his thoughts at the moment only because of her ship’s location in Runemist, of course.
Tobias shoved his heel down on the chair’s deck lock release. He pushed the chair to his right, slid down the track to the empty station at the secondary sensor screens. Fleet HQ on Cirrus had yet to officially open for business. Stations were understaffed. Everyone, including Mack, did double duty or more.
“This quadrant’s known for unreliable Perimeter Sensor Logs. Sir,” he said when Mack caught up with him.
“Agreed, Lieutenant. But this unreliable data was a bit too regular. Plus it came out of Runemist. If someone uncreative wanted to create sham unreliable data there, that’s probably what it would look like.”
“Like this, sir?” Tobias’ screen flickered to life.
Mack leaned his palms on the edge of the console. “Like that.”
The screens in Ops were better than the hastily constructed setup in his temporary office. They were on a direct link to the main data banks. His office, well … the parrots soaring up and down the atrium core were probably a more effective means of data transport than what he worked with.
He saw now what had been missing from the data on his screen. And didn’t like at all what he saw.
The toe of his boot found the deck lock tab at the base of Tobias’s chair. He unlocked it. “Get me the Vedri on high priority scramble.”
Tobias pushed the chair to his left, sailed back to communications. “Hailing.”
“I’ll take it on your screen when you’ve reached her.”
It took ten minutes—he absently timed it on Ops’ main clock—before Iona Cardiff’s face flickered onto the screen. “Vedritor. Comm Officer Cardiff.”
Cardiff was second shift. At least, she had been, four months ago. He didn’t think the Vedri’s new captain, his former first officer, would have changed things that quickly.
He was right.
“Tranferring your call to Captain Adler’s office right now, sir.”
�
�Admiral. What can I do for you?” Steffan Adler was a short, wiry man a few years older than Mack. They’d served together for almost seven years. Adler had learned Rynan Makarian rarely made social calls. Mack could see Adler’s hand poised over an open datapad, ready to take notes.
“I’ve got PSLs out of Runemist I don’t like. We have three patrol ships posted in that sector. Need you to take a closer look.”
“What do you think I might find?”
“Someone, or something, that shouldn’t be there and is doing a barely passable job of covering their tracks.”
“Smugglers?”
“That’s my best guess. Patrol may have brought in one of their friends earlier. Says her name’s Davré.” Mack permitted his imagination to resurrect, briefly, Gillaine Davré’s image. But only because he was discussing her in a professional manner.
“What was she running?”
“It appears she might have been running from someone. Her ship took considerable damage to the starboard side. She’s sitting in sickbay right now.”
“Is her ship in our files?”
“I won’t know until I access her clearance. Her ship was in full shutdown when we towed her in, a few hours ago. We have no ID on it, or her. But she was found not far from my suspicious PSLs.”
Adler glanced down at his console. “Receiving your data now, sir. We’re on it. I’ll report back as soon as we’re in range.”
The screen flickered to black, then filled with Cirrus One’s logo.
There were fifteen minutes yet before Janek would release Davré from sickbay. Mack still had work to do before he met with her. He took Ops’ internal stairway up to Ops Main and the primary scanner console.
Stationmaster Johnna Hebbs’ dark scowl greeted him as he unlocked an empty chair and slid it to an open scanner station. She leaned against the command sling, watching him with undisguised disdain. Amazing how this woman could be so beautiful yet so unattractive at the same time.
Hebbs was old guard, second in command when Stationmaster Quigley had controlled Cirrus One for the Cirrus Quadrant Port Authority. The Port Authority was a branch of the Khalaran Department of Commerce and not known for its enthusiasm for the Khalaran military. But in this instance, CQPA agreed with Fleet that Quigley, and his gambling operation, had to go. They insisted, however, that Mack retain Hebbs as stationmaster because she knew Cirrus. And because she was popular with stationers. The tall brunette was popular with male stationers, Mack had learned. Female stationers knew better than to cross her.
Mack acknowledged the stationmaster’s tight nod with one of his own, then turned his attention to the console. He brought up the logs again. Frowned. Something was definitely going on in Runemist and at a time he could least afford interruptions. Three jumps out from the major space lanes, the Cirrus Quadrant was too remote for such unusual activity. The Runemist sector, with no habitable worlds and only a few derelict miners’ rafts, even more so.
No one came through Runemist unless she had a damned good reason. She was either looking for trouble, or running from it.
The intriguing Captain Gillaine Davré had better be prepared with some very good answers to his questions, and documentation to back it all up. Or else Mack intended to make sure her troubles in Runemist would be the least of her problems.
After all, she’d just added to his.
GABRIEL’S GHOST
A Bantam Spectra Book / November 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Linnea Sinclair
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90204-4
v3.0
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