When she landed at QSE Outpost, Rhianni didn't check in with the magistrate immediately. Burkan Fray was practically family. She had called him Uncle Burkan as long as she could remember, even though he wasn't a blood relation. He would understand the delay.
Rhianni had an errand to run.
She took a sealed pouch from her bag and held it close to her chest with both arms as she walked up the muddy, gravel-strewn trail, past the magistrate's house. The lights were on but she saw no movement in the one room that had open shutters. She walked through the residential section. Her destination lay past the houses, down the shallow slope leading to the river. She stopped, though, when she saw the houses.
There were so few left. Some streets were completely empty, with only pre-fabricated polymer footers remaining of dismantled homes. Other streets were muddy trails with overgrown bushes where houses had been removed like bad teeth.
It made no sense. The Talroqi hadn't vaporized QSE like they had outposts closer to Core. These houses should have been left standing, for the survivors when they resumed settling the planet. Instead, houses had been dismantled for buildings closer to and even inside Core.
This, more than any report, convinced her that the world of her birth had a disease deep in its heart. It was up to the Rovers to destroy the problem, like a medic who had to cut out flesh and bone to save the body. Still, Rhianni looked around the decimated outpost and shivered in the spring cool.
Mallachrom was still a frontier world. Explosive growth had been expected. QSE Outpost should have been a minor city by this time, not a ghost town serving as a supply drop for only Taken settlers. What kept people clustered around Core? This problem had been building far longer than the Rovers had guessed. Anything she did could set off destruction or bring healing.
Rhianni knew she owed this to her parents, who had loved Mallachrom. She owed the truth and resolution to the Taken, because her childhood friends were among them.
She would have been a Taken, if she had been here.
Wouldn't she have wanted the Rovers to find a solution?
"Swear, Da, Mama," she whispered. "Whatever it takes. Then I'm out of here forever."
Chapter 3
Rhianni surveyed her surroundings as a Rover would, preparing to entrench for the long haul.
The Outpost office, a long boarding house for trappers and explorers, dining hall, two dormitories for QSE's workers, two houses for government workers, and the warehouse. That was all that remained of an outpost that once boasted a clinic and school, a field office for the science division of the Council, twenty residential streets, two restaurants, and three boarding houses for numerous transients.
Her mother would have wept over this. Mandia had loved the wilderness of Mallachrom. She loved to explore, making her the best guide possible when Joras Day's team had arrived thirty-two years ago to survey for a defense post against Talroqi activity.
Now nothing marked civilization beyond the tiny nucleus of QSE. Mostly trappers worked out of the outpost, following the migrations of legally hunted animals. People who worked survey for the government didn't count. The only permanent settlers were Taken.
This was all wrong. Every shred of her being shouted it. Rovers saw all unresolved mysteries as potential dangers. Rhianni vowed to solve this mystery. She took a deep breath, savoring the clean, sweet air, and kept walking.
The abandoned houses and neglect vanished behind her as she walked the perimeter of the outpost, along a shallow, sloping path. She soon reached a parcel of ground that had once been neatly fenced, claiming a large square from the forest. The fence had vanished, but for a few rotten posts. Rhianni passed what remained of the cemetery gate. This had been a restful, well-maintained place the last time she saw it.
Her mother's grave lay where Burkan's letters had said. The budding creeper vines showed signs of recent pruning. Stones ringed the gold stone pillar with Mandia's name and stats inscribed into it. There was no casket, no moldering bones under the pillar. Mandia's ashes had been mixed with the soil, as requested. Rhianni saw few other graves that had regular care. How many people who died in the Talroqi invasion had been lucky enough to be buried? How many survivors cared to remember?
Rhianni knelt in the moss that carpeted the ground in scarlet, olive and dull blue streaks. She set down the pouch and slit the seal. Inside was another pouch emblazoned with the Rover emblem. The wet ground soaked through the moss and the knees of her pants. Rhianni dug with her fingers into the soft, wet soil at the base of her mother's pillar until she had a deep, narrow hole. She pulled open the tab sealing the pouch, paused to take a deep breath to steady her hands, then poured out the remainder of her father's ashes.
No breeze disturbed the slow sifting into the hole. A few birds twittered far away, barely loud enough to mask the whispering hiss of the falling ashes. She thought she heard a child's voice, silenced before she could be sure.
After the last bit of ash had sifted out, Rhianni covered the hole with mud and torn moss and sat back on her heels, waiting for tears.
Her face stayed dry, though the ache returned, pressing on her chest, making it hard to breathe. Rhianni tipped her head back, gazing up at the bit of sun visible through the tangled canopy of branches overhead. Her throat contracted in a sob that would not emerge while she waited until her back and legs protested, but still no tears.
"Hello."
The child's voice, coming out of the quiet with no warning, jerked her to her feet. Rhianni swallowed a yelp and turned. She had to lower her gaze by a good forty centimeters to meet the brilliant blue eyes of the little boy sitting on a clump of moss to her right. When had he sat down, how long had he been watching her and why hadn't she heard or sensed him?
He smiled at her, chubby cheeks glowing rosy in the morning chill. Black mud glopped his boots past the ankles. His thick black hair lay in wind-blown tangles. His clothes had the dull, multi-hued brown gleam of undyed puffball fiber, with fuzzball fur trimming the collar of his little jacket. This beautiful child embodied her second reason for accepting this mission.
She intended to make Mallachrom a world where all children would be safe and happy.
"Hi," she finally said, after a few seconds of mutual inspection. She guessed the boy was maybe five years old.
"Dada said not to bother you until you finished. What'd you do?" He pointed at the empty pouch.
"My father died and I brought his ashes to bury with my mother." She rested her hand on the edge of the stone.
"You're Rhianni?" When she nodded, he chuckled with delight, startled silent for the second time. "Dada told me all about you and Captain Day and Mistress Mandia. He helped make her grave. She was a nice lady."
"What's your name?" It was the only clear thought in the swirling mass of questions.
"Danil."
"Are you here all by yourself?"
"Uh uh. Dada's getting more flowers--." Danil gestured at two of the tended graves Rhianni had noticed, with flowers scattered across them.
Then the boy's father was somewhere in the cemetery. Rhianni stood and stowed the pouch in her jacket pocket.
"Can you show me where to find some flowers? I need some for my parents' grave." She held out her hand.
Danil slid his grubby fingers into her grip and started off across the cemetery at a run. Rhianni grinned at the incongruity of trying to run without tripping over her feet or the boy and bent over so she wouldn't strain his arm. He led her down the slope toward the river.
A man trudged up the slope, his boots sliding on the muddy, rocky trail. His hands were full of pocket flowers that nodded and spattered drops of dew with every step he took. He raised his head and looked her directly in the eye. For two seconds he froze, then a chagrined smile brightened his face.
"Danil, I told you not to bother the lady."
"But she's done." Danil tugged on Rhianni's hand, threatening her balance as they slip-walked down the slope.
Rhianni knew him. Not con
sciously, his name and where she had seen him before. Something deep inside her, where she had already fallen in love with Danil, recognized the boy's father. His eyes, dark, wide, deep and touched with somber sadness. They were eyes she remembered, eyes that never lied to her. His thick, black hair hung in tangled curls to his shoulders. Too long for most settlers.
Not too long for one of the Taken, but he couldn't be a Taken, could he? Danil's easy acceptance of her and now his father's calm presence flew in the face of all the rumors that labeled the Taken as anti-social. Rhianni nearly laughed aloud at this first proof that her gut instinct refusal of those rumors and official reports had been dead on. Then her delight at meeting a Taken so soon on landing took over. She tried to stand back and really look at him, mentally filing details for her first report. Rhianni had heard stories of how the Taken had been living like wild animals when they were supposedly rescued from the custody of the Shadows, after the liberation of Mallachrom. Despite the attempts to rehabilitate and re-educate them, they preferred living on the outskirts of civilization now, settlers and hunters, explorers, and harvesters. Their detractors claimed they were psychosomatically allergic to processed foods and synthetic clothes and medicines. They mocked the modern fashions of clothes, hair and decoration, and preferred their rough clothing. Their stringent moral codes made the people in Core seem like participants in an orgy.
This half-familiar stranger moved with a light agility and strength that Rhianni associated with trained warriors. He possessed grace despite the mud that clung to his boots and made him slip. His wide shoulders and the muscles evident under his simple clothes proclaimed him a man who lived outdoors and could handle any kind of physical labor.
"What do the Rovers want now?" he asked. A crooked smile caught one corner of his mouth when Rhianni just stared blankly at him for several seconds.
"Oh, sorry." She slapped a hand over the patch on her sleeve, as if she could hide it and make him forget what he saw.
"If you're trying to recruit Taken for the Corps again, forget it. We knew ten years ago we'd die if we left Mallachrom, but nobody listened to us. Nothing's changed. You won't get any more volunteers to murder with your tests, and there's no war on, so you can't conscript us."
"No. I'm on leave. No Rover activity here at all." She fought the urge to cross her fingers against the bad luck of that particular lie.
Her stomach twisted, part-guilt and part-sorrow for the pain hidden under the chill in his voice. Rhianni had felt sick when she read the report on the deaths of the Taken who had volunteered for intensive testing. Their hyper-sensitivity could have been a powerful weapon for the Rovers, if they hadn't sickened five days of space flight away from Mallachrom. If they hadn't declined and died with terrifying speed.
The details of the wasting illness reminded her of her mother's decline and death. Rhianni had never finished that particular report.
"Dada, she's Rhianni," Danil said. He frowned and looked back and forth between the two adults, as if he expected something from them.
"Anni?" the man breathed. Blue sparks glimmered in his black eyes for a heartbeat.
Rhianni's knees nearly folded under her. The crack in his voice spoke to something deep inside her. He knew her--why couldn't she remember him? The frustration nearly wrung a whimper from her.
"Took you long enough," he said. "You kept your promise. Never doubted you. Even if it's not the right..." He shifted the flowers to one hand and gestured around the muddy river clearing as if she could understand what went through his mind.
"Promise." Rhianni blinked, momentarily dizzy.
He held out his hand, thumb up. Her gaze fastened on his thumb and the thin white scar across the pad. A scar that matched the scar on her own thumb.
"Petroc." Rhianni laughed and flung her arms tight around him. A thousand questions tried to pour up through her mouth, mixed with laughter, tears and apologies for all the years of silence and her fear for him. They clotted into a thick knot that threatened to strangle her. Heat shot through her as his clean, musky, leather-and-wood-smoke scent invaded her head and made her feel hollow inside.
Petroc didn't move, didn't even breathe. Her trained Rover sense of danger, of something innately wrong, iced her blood. Rhianni's stomach twisted as if she had suddenly dropped into free-fall. His utter stillness stabbed her, when he should have wrapped his arms around her and laughed.
She wanted his arms around her. She wanted to be pressed tight against him. She wanted the taste of his mouth to wipe away the bitterness and shame and regret.
What was wrong with her?
She clung to her training. Personal feelings were a luxury she couldn't afford until her mission was over. She had to remember that.
Rhianni remembered the flowers filling Petroc's hands and the little boy watching them. She felt the stiffness move through his body like quick-frost turning a river to jagged ice. She stepped back and forced herself to meet his gaze despite the heat moving down from her face through her entire body.
"Guess you're glad to see me." Petroc Ash grinned shakily. He cleared his throat, then looked at the slightly crushed flowers in his hands. "Danil." He handed most of the flowers to the boy. "Run and put these on Mama's grave."
The boy opened his mouth, visibly ready to protest. Something in his father's eyes stopped him. He glanced at Rhianni, then at Petroc, and held out his grubby hands.
"He obeys better than we did at his age," Rhianni murmured, when the boy had started up the slope again. She wiped her sweaty hands on her pant legs.
"If he doesn't behave, he doesn't get bedtime stories." Petroc shrugged. He gestured up the slope. She nodded and let him lead the way. "So, are you and the Captain--sorry, he was promoted to Colonel, wasn't he?"
"Yes, Dad made Colonel. Several years and missions ago." She was grateful for the slippery footing that kept her from looking at him.
Rhianni realized she had been half-expecting to see Petroc unchanged from the boy she had left behind. She needed time to get used to this strong, handsome man, a head taller than her, with a feral spirit that made her coil like a spring inside.
A Taken. Petroc wasn't just a statistic, one of the profiles she had studied until they were engraved on her eyelids. He was a Taken. A real person. A problem. A mystery.
A father with a son. Petroc's first kiss hadn't been her. Petroc had made love to someone else.
She hated him. She wanted to cry. She felt like an absolute idiot.
What makes you think he had to wait for you? You certainly haven't been pining for him, she silently scolded.
There hadn't been anyone she wanted. Her dream-lover had been enough--until this morning, when she gazed into Petroc's eyes. She had never let herself see men as males, or even remember she was female.
She was simply unbalanced since her father's death. In a few more days, when she had settled into her mission, she would be fine. These hormonal imbalances were temporary. Nothing to worry about.
"So you two are back here to settle?" Petroc's words dragged her from the silent struggle in her mind.
"Not quite." She swallowed the sudden obstruction in her throat. "I'm on rest leave. Dad died on our last mission. I was burying his ashes with Mama when I met Danil. He was taking me to find flowers," she finished in a slightly breathless rush.
"I'm sorry." Petroc pressed his flowers into her hands, the warmth of his skin startling her more than the gesture. Flashes of dream memories nearly destroyed the wall discipline had built. Those dream hands had been just as calloused and warm. Sparks raced through her blood and settled low in her belly. "I'm sorry about your father. I liked him a lot." He paused as they reached the top of the slope. "You brought him back."
He gestured across the mossy, muddy wreck of neglected markers toward her parents' grave. The gold pillar stood out among all the brown, scarlet, dull blue and green like a beacon. A few meters away, Danil squatted by a black headstone with a carpet of golden moss spread before it, carefully a
rranging his handfuls of flowers.
"Mallachrom was always home to him. Even without Mama." She shook her head, refusing to let her thoughts go that direction.
She wanted to blurt that three squads of Rovers had already settled in on Mallachrom, with more only two jump-gates away, waiting for the call. All poised to help the Taken.
Looking at Petroc, her gut screamed that the rumors and fears of the Taken were all a cruel plot to restrain them from spreading across the planet. A good Rover always listened to his gut, but Rhianni knew that explanation wouldn't wash when she stood before the Galactic Council.
She had to find proof for what her heart and soul told her.
If the Taken were the victims, she had to identify the enemy and the motives. Profit, most likely. But what kind? Monetary? Power? Territory? A planetary monarchy or slavery or drugs made of native plants? She had to sift through all the theories and possibilities for the truth.
Until then, Rhianni couldn't tell anyone, not even her childhood friend, why she was here and what she was doing.
"I didn't expect it to be like this," she said, gesturing at the neglected cemetery. "Doesn't anybody want to improve things? Doesn't anybody want to get out there and explore and make the colony what it could be?"
"Explore?" Petroc's mouth twisted, and for a moment she couldn't tell if he might yell at her or burst out laughing. "Nobody explores anymore. We found out the hard way, Mallachrom is a nasty place if you go too far away from the security fences and sensor drones."
"We were going to explore the whole planet. Just the two of us," she said. Rhianni kept her voice soft enough that he could ignore her if he chose.
"You've been gone too long." He shrugged and looked everywhere but at her. "Maybe you're better off not staying."
"I made a promise--"
"We were kids, Rhianni. Stupid kids who thought the monsters were only in stories. It was a kid's promise we made. I'd never hold you to it."
Shadows of Mallachrom, Book 1: Blue Fire Page 3