Sonata in Orionis (Earth Song Cycle Book 2)

by Mark Wandrey

  She finished the last of the arrangements in a transport on the way back to Steven’s Pass. Mostly higher-ranking Chosen packed the crew compartment. Aaron and Gregg sat and waited in the row behind her, not talking. As she was finishing her last message, Dram came down the center aisle of the transport. He had to bend almost double to walk inside the craft. “Mind if I sit?”

  “Sure,” she said and picked up the extra tablet she’d put on the seat. He wedged himself into the chair. “What can I do for you?”

  “We lost a lot of Chosen in the fighting,” he said.

  “I know, and we aren’t due for the next Trial for almost two years.”

  “The Chosen Council is considering changing that, in more ways than one.” He had her full attention, but he suddenly changed the topic. “I understand you lost Terry and Alijah from your team.”

  “They died in the fighting,” she said, not really wanting to deal with those emotions just yet. “They might have been Science branch, but they fought like Scouts.”

  “They did you proud.”

  “They did us all proud.”

  He nodded, took a deep breath and started to say something, then let out a long sigh. “You need to tell her,” Aaron growled, his voice surprisingly full of emotion. She turned to look at him. Gregg sat next to him with, of all things, tears on his cheeks. Aaron looked on the verge of crying himself.

  “Is it Christian?”

  “No,” Dram said right away. “We’ve had no word from him and his team. We can hope they’re staying low to keep safe.”

  “So tell me what’s happened.”

  “Oh, goddammit,” Gregg moaned.

  “I’ll tell her,” Aaron said.

  “Tell me what?”

  Aaron leaned forward. Minu couldn’t remember ever seeing him look more crestfallen. “No one wanted to tell you until after the vendetta was over.”

  “It’s been over for more than a day. What happened?”

  “Then we couldn’t decide who should tell you,” Gregg said.

  “If someone doesn’t tell me what happened…”

  “Pip was critically injured,” Aaron blurted.

  “What? He was right behind us when we stormed back to the facility.” She thought frantically, trying to remember when she’d last seen him. They’d kept her so busy, she hadn’t had time to think about him, but he was injured in the fighting, too.

  “I know,” Aaron said, “he was so wasted on buzz, when I looked back I thought he’d fallen asleep on the ground. Turns out, it was a lot worse.”

  * * *

  Minu didn’t want to hear any more. She told them she wanted to see Pip right away. The flight was the same one she’d rode to Tranquility during the vendetta, only this time, it seemed to take an even longer eternity. The ground rolled by below like a slow-motion movie. She watched the hills and farms as she fought back tears. Pip would make four dead under her command. Add Alexis Krum to the list, even though she knew he’d gotten what was coming to him, and that made five. How could she go on? Little Pip, who was her closest friend; she’d spent innumerable hours with him, talking and drinking mead. They’d left him out there, alone and helpless on the grass, against the surviving Rasa. They’d been so eager for more alien blood, they hadn’t checked on him. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. Big hot tears dripped from her quivering chin and splattered on the legs of her jumpsuit.

  The transport landed in the parking area at Steven’s Pass, and she jumped clear before it came to a stop. The pain in her right calf was excruciating, and she stumbled and nearly fell. Aaron was there to steady her. She shook off his arm without a word of thanks. The lifts were out of service, so they climbed the stairs instead. Every step hurt, but to her, each jolt of pain was penance, no more than she deserved. They had temporarily repaired the hallway into the medical center. Bjorn’s old office was no longer a triage center. As she went by, Jasmine stood in the doorway looking at a computer. When she saw Minu, she stepped in front of her.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Get out of my way,” Minu said and tried to step to the side. Jasmine moved to intercept, and Minu exploded. Jasmine yelped in surprise when Minu snagged her by an outstretched wrist, turned, pulled her over a hip, and threw. The yelp of surprise turned into a cry of dismay as Jasmine crashed into the wall and slid down, landing in a painful pile on the floor. The obstacle removed, Minu continued her march to the medical bay.

  “Mess with the Kloth…” Aaron said as he went by.

  “And you get the teeth,” Gregg finished. Jasmine didn’t comment. She lay crunched against the wall, head down, bent into a fetal position. She appeared unconscious. Dram noted she was breathing and didn’t stop.

  The medical center was not extensive. The Chosen often used civilian facilities for their medical needs, so it was mainly for emergencies such as this. There were beds for 40 patients, two operating theaters, and a small intensive care ward for ten that could double as an isolation unit in the rare cases where someone brought back an alien bug. As Minu walked in and looked around, the doctor in charge stepped out. He was a civilian brought in by the Chosen to help with the large number of casualties. Those still in Steven’s Pass would either recover shortly or wouldn’t survive if moved. Pip was the latter.

  “I’m afraid you can’t go any farther,” he said. As Minu tried to push past the much taller man, he put a hand on her shoulder. Minu looked down at the hand, then up to his face, with an expression of malice that made him swallow and pull his hand back as if he’d been shocked.

  “You’d be wise to let us see our friend,” Aaron said with just as much venom as Minu felt.

  “Pip,” Dram said to the frightened doctor, who was wondering what had possessed him to work for the crazed Chosen, even temporarily.

  “I don’t know of any Pip,” he said indignantly.

  “Pipson Leata,” Minu said through clenched teeth.

  “Oh, why didn’t you say so?” No one spoke. He cleared his throat and indicated the ICU. “But there is no way I can let you—argh!” Minu clenched her fists, and the doctor took a step back.

  “Let the Chosen through,” Dram said, “before she hurts you. Can’t you see she’s family?”

  “Let them in.” Minu looked up and saw Doctor Tasker coming from a surgical theater. He wore scrubs stained with fresh blood and was pulling off surgical gloves. “He’s just trying to do his job, and if you hurt him, we’ll have to hire another doctor to replace him.”

  The doctor was quaking in fear and trying to find the nearest exit. After a moment, he nodded toward the ICU and got out of the way.

  “Pip,” Minu said, “now!”

  “Right this way,” Tasker said, casually tossing his gloves into an overflowing receptacle and walking into the ICU. He stopped just through the door, put on a mask, and handed them out to the others. “Put it on, or you’re not seeing him. I don’t care if you break both my arms and legs. If you want to give him any chance to survive, you will follow basic hospital protocol.” They put the masks on without protest.

  The procession moved down the line of ICU beds. A retractable moliplas barrier shielded each bed, and they each had a self-contained filtering environment. Minu was acutely aware the beds held Chosen, fighting for their lives. They stopped at the end, and Dr. Tasker turned to face her. “Have they told you about his condition?”

  “No,” she said and glared accusingly at her friends.

  “Pip was shot through the head by one of their flechette darts. They’re hard enough on bone, but they’re hell on soft tissue. The dart hit him just above the right occipital ridge and entered through the eye socket. The dart fragmented, and the plastic did some widespread, incidental damage to his frontal lobe. We won’t know the extent of the damage until the brain swelling goes down enough for us to do a good scan. What we’re most worried about is his motor cortex and his amygdala.”

  “Go on,” Minu said, sounding much calm
er than she felt.

  “The largest fraction of the dart cut sideways through Broca’s area of his motor cortex. This is the area that controls speech. The dart effectively destroyed it. His amygdala was also damaged, and it seems to be sending out waves of neural lightning storms to the rest of his brain. I can’t conjecture what those will cause. He may never regain consciousness.”

  “Can’t you fix him?”

  “It isn’t that easy.”

  “With all the Concordian technology,” she held her three-fingered cybernetic hand a centimeter from his face, “you’re telling me nothing is possible?”

  “I’m telling you that we’re technological babies. There might be a thousand things we can do, but we haven’t adapted the technology for our use! The network has all kinds of devices for use on brain injuries, but we have no idea what they might do to human physiology. While we give him time to heal from his wounds, we can start working on it. If we just start slapping alien tech into his brain, with no idea of the ramifications, then death might seem like the lesser of two evils.”

  “I understand,” she said and put her arm down. “Can I see him?”

  “He’s in a coma. We aren’t sure he’s even in there anymore. The noise from his motor cortex is making his brain scan hard to read.”

  “I know, but I want to see him.”

  “Okay. Keep the mask on.” He touched a control, and the moliplas barrier opened. She stepped in and saw her friend wasn’t alone; a girl sat on the far side of the bed. She was relatively short and a little overweight, and her face was wet with tears. Though she’d never met her, Minu knew she must be Pip’s girlfriend from Chelan, Cynthia. She glanced up at Minu, nodding slightly and sniffing. Minu returned the nod and looked at Pip.

  Bandages covered his face, right eye, and head. They’d elevated his leg, which sported a bone-healing cast to repair the ankle. They’d attached him to dozens of machines via leads, and he had little antennas from remote devices pointing at him to monitor bodily functions. A tube leading from the left side of his head twitched occasionally. She could hear a machine hum, then a few drops of dark blood would ooze down the tube.

  “Oh, Pip,” she said and moved to the head of his bed. The others came in but stayed by the end of the bed. Every few seconds, Pip’s chest would rise and fall, a monitor beeping each time he breathed and his heart beat. She took his hand and squeezed gently. There was no response. She leaned over next to his head and whispered in his ear. “I love you, Pip, I’m so sorry.” The devices continued to beep, and he continued to breathe, but there was no change. She didn’t cry; she didn’t have any tears left. After a few minutes, she turned to leave.

  “He’d be glad you came,” Cynthia said.

  Minu stopped but didn’t turn. She couldn’t face the girl right now. “I’m sorry,” she said simply then left the ward.

  “We need to look at that leg,” Dr. Tasker said outside. She nodded and spent the rest of the afternoon allowing them to operate on the injured muscle. She was under local anesthetic and watched with some interest as they cut apart her muscles and put them back together. They sewed in a device that would stimulate her body to grow replacement muscles and skin, then they enclosed her leg in a short cast. It looked unusual under her uniform, but not freakishly so.

  “Thanks,” she said as she got up to leave.

  “We’ll do everything we can for Pip,” Dr. Tasker told her.

  “I’ve said my goodbyes,” she said and left.

  “You going to be okay?” Aaron asked in the hallway. Gregg and Dram stood nearby.

  “No,” she said and headed for the stairs. In her billet, she crawled into her bed and turned the lights off. Here, it was like nothing had happened. More than two hundred Chosen and twenty-five hundred civilians weren’t dead. Her best friend wasn’t lying in a room with chunks missing from his brain, waiting to die while machines stubbornly kept his body alive against its will. She’d almost used her cybernetic arm to destroy those machines. It wouldn’t have taken a great deal of effort, but something had stopped her. Maybe it was because a chance existed—a very small chance—that Pip would come back to her, and he’d want that chance. She’d taken enough human biology in school to know that even if he woke up, he wouldn’t be the same Pip. That man was the last, lingering casualty of the vendetta, too stubborn to die.

  “Tomorrow is another day,” she said and drifted off to sleep.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 12

  Julast 24th, 518 AE

  Basic Billets, Chosen Headquarters, Steven’s Pass

  Nobody bothered Minu for days. She woke up, went and got food, returned to her billet, ate, used the bathroom, and went back to sleep. She didn’t know how many times she repeated that ritual. The sleep was mostly dreamless, aided by the medical pack on her leg. Along with drugs to stimulate the growth of new muscle, it trickled a minor anesthetic into her bloodstream. Occasionally, she saw images of friends living, dead, and not quite dead. Finally, she woke up with a start.

  “Who’s there?” she asked the darkened room. Only the quiet humming of the air circulation system answered her. Of course she was alone, but what had she heard? It was the unmistakable echo in her brain of an incredibly familiar voice speaking one word. “Sapphire.”

  “Sapphire…” she said, feeling the word run across her tongue. Just saying it made her brain itch. She knew it was a gemstone, the most valuable on Bellatrix. Once, a long time ago on Earth, diamonds were the most valuable stones, but on Bellatrix they were common, and sapphires were rare.

  “This belonged to the matriarch of our family,” she heard a distant memory in her mind.

  In a flash she leapt up and began digging under her bed, sending boxes of family pictures and other things skidding across the floor. She’d left most of her dead family’s things stored in the basement of the Chosen Tower back in Tranquility, and she’d only taken a few keepsakes. At the bottom of a box full of childhood art, she found a dusty wooden box. Someone from the Peninsula Tribe, the people who lived the simplest lives on Bellatrix, had made it. Her fingers shook as she lifted the lid. Inside was a necklace, sitting on green velvet. Attached was a single large sapphire so dark blue it was almost black.

  She suddenly remembered sitting on the dock outside their family cabin in the woods, miles from Tranquility. She was five, and her father was giving her something very important. “This,” he’d said, taking the necklace from the box, “belonged to the matriarch of our family, Mindy Harper.” They’d gone to the cabin many times; it was where her mother and father had fallen in love. That time, when she was five, was the earliest visit she could remember. Her mother had known the importance of that necklace and carefully made sure her daughter only wore it at home, then secured it away when she finished. Minu had loved the necklace so much, it’d become her father’s pet name for her. Sapphire. He’d presented it to her formally at her graduation from the Keeper’s Academy, an acknowledgement of her adulthood. An adult no longer needed to guard it for her. She’d taken it from storage and kept it in her bedroom without really thinking about it.

  Minu unhooked the clasp and put the necklace on. When she was five, the chain had reached her nonexistent breasts. Now it was more like a choker, the heavy sapphire hanging in the hollow of her throat. The chain was a delicate serpentine gold, and she made a mental note to replace it with something more robust. “Sapphire, sapphire,” she said over and over. The voice that spoke in her dream wasn’t her father’s; rather, it seemed inhuman.

  She got up and stripped before climbing into the shower, turning the spray as hot as it would go. The water eased the tense muscles in her neck and body and cleared her mind. She finished her shower, dried herself off, and sat naked on her bed, legs crossed, mind deep in thought. After a minute she reached over to her desk and snagged the closest tablet. Without understanding why, she stood and opened the tiny secure safe in her room and removed a little metal case. From the case, she took a computer chip she�
�d only used once. Sitting back on the bed, she loaded the chip, and the encryption program came alive, requesting a password. “I’m pretty sure it’s eight letters,” Pip had told her, “even if we use known words and names, there’s thousands of possibilities. And there is a danger that only a limited number of attempts are allowed.” With trembling fingers, she entered “SAPPHIRE.” An instant later the chip’s file directories opened to her. “Dad!” she sobbed, tears falling onto the waterproof keyboard.

  Minu scanned the file list and tried to control the trembling in her hands. She clicked on the first file and found it encrypted. “Damn,” she said. There were hundreds of main files with thousands of sub files. Many showed names with corresponding dates, others simple words, and still others planet names and designations. The files with dates made her think. This is his personal diary, she realized. During training, the instructors had urged them to keep a log or diary, a practice initiated by her father years earlier. There was so much, where should she start? He must have hidden a key, a final level of security, somewhere. But where? There amidst the files she found one labelled “Start Here!” Minu laughed and wiped away her tears. That was her father, through and through! She opened the file and found a series of nested text files, numbered one to five. Naturally she opened number one.

  “Minu, my daughter, my Sapphire. I am sorry you’re reading this, because it probably means I’m dead.” The tears formed again, but she held them at bay. “However, don’t write me off just yet. I’m confident that you’re reading this, but knowing the level of sophistication of Concordian programming, I’m not one hundred percent certain. I have installed a level two cypher that will allow you access to all these files. The contents of many will leave you stunned, amazed, and more than a little outraged. I’m sorry for my paranoia; it comes with the job. Go to where you found the necklace, and we’ll take the next step, together.” She tried the other four files and found them all encrypted. She had to seek the treasure.