DarkWind: 2nd Book, WindDemon Trilogy (12 page)

“Are you sure?” Nyndham asked.

“Aye, I’m sure. Blow it-”

“No,” Cree whispered, using the last of his dwindling strength to grab his friend’s arm. “Leave it.”

“The hell I will!” McGregor snapped. “And have it waiting for us on the other side of the wormhole to blow us out of the heavens?”

“Brother on board ship,” Cree mumbled then passed out.

“Captain?” Nyndham prompted. “What’s it to be?”

McGregor bit his lip. Khiershon would never forgive him if he issued the order to disintegrate the Amazeen ship and a Reaper was on board. He looked to Caitlin.

“My advice would be to let them go,” she said quietly.

“We don’t know there’s a Reaper on board her!”

“Then why was he suffering so?”

“If that is the cause of this,” McGregor said, nudging his chin at the unconscious man, “then the humane thing to do would be to put the prisoner out of his misery, don’t you think?”

“Captain? They’ve almost reached the wormhole!” Nyndham reported urgently.

“Let them go,” Caitlin advised.

The warrior and the physician stared at one another for a long moment then Nyndham informed them the decision was moot. The ship was out of range and into the wormhole.

McGregor turned away, his eyes dark. He pushed past Lisa and left the sickbay.

“I hope we did the right thing,” Lisa said.

Caitlin nodded. “So do I, sweetie.” She shook her head. “So do I.”

Iyan went up
to the bridge and sat down in the captain’s chair. His gaze was locked on the panoramic sweep of the asteroids darting toward the viewing screen. The crew he had brought on board The Orion from The Ravenwind was going about their duties, monitoring the ship’s instruments and environment. He had nothing to do but sit there and watch them work. Putting a hand to his forehead, he lowered his head into his palm and closed his eyes.

The female called Barb had related to him the horrors of her childhood in a country called Nambulia on Earth. With quiet dignity, she had explained the excruciating details of her ordeal. Her acceptance of her fate had angered him at first, but when he failed to make her rail against her situation, he realized she had come to terms with the degradation and had moved on. Like him, she would never be able to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, but it did not seem to bother her a fraction of the way it troubled him.

“I can still marry,” she told him. “I can even bear my husband children. One day, I will do this. Until then, I am content the way things are.”

A deep resentment at what had happened to this petite woman brought McGregor’s eyes open. He was looking at the viewing screen, but he was seeing her pretty face. Dark as copper with thick black hair that glistened with blue lights, the one called Barbara-he refused to call her by the nickname that reminded him of torments he would not discuss even with Khiershon-had garnered Iyan’s respect and admiration in a very short length of time.

“Why should I rant against the gods for what has happened to me?” she asked. “It serves no purpose. Why allow the ones who did this to me to win? What will I gain by turning against all men for what a few misguided, foolish old ones did?”

“You are not enraged by this?” he demanded.

She had put a hand on his arm. “I asked: what purpose would it serve?”

“I am enraged for you!”

Her velvet-brown eyes had softened. “Then be my friend, Captain McGregor.”

“Friend?” The concept of a female as a friend was alien to him.

“Aye, Captain.” She held her hand out to him. “Friends are those who understand one another and respect the feelings of the other. Will you be my friend? If so, take my hand and we will seal the bargain.”

He had looked at her small palm, wondered at the pale gray color of the flesh-so different from the dark hue of her face and arms-and surprised himself by clasping that fragile hand in his callused one.

“Nice to meet you, Captain McGregor,” she said, shaking his hand.

He half-smiled at her. “Iyan,” he said, ducking his head. “My name is Iyan.”

As he sat there remembering their conversation, he was astonished to find himself grinning foolishly. As soon as he realized he was doing it, he stopped, his face returning to its normal stern, forbidding cast. But the little dark woman flitted across his mind’s eye once again and the smile returned to its lips.

“I think our captain has found himself a female,” the warrior at the navigational console whispered to the one at the communications console.

“The gods help her,” the other man sighed.

Caitlin dipped the
washcloth into the basin of iced water and wrung it out. Her attention was on Cree’s gleaming face as she folded the cloth and placed it on his heated brow. Almost instantly, his eyelids opened and she found herself staring into the Reaper’s golden depths.

“Did he...?” Cree croaked.

“No. He let the ship pass unchallenged.”

Cree sighed, closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he seemed to be looking past her. “Have we entered the wormhole?”

“Not yet. The captain was concerned about leaving the Orion’s crewmen on Montyne Vex. I believe he’s decided to bring them along so he sent The Ravenwind to fetch them.”

“Why?”

“McGregor believes if there was one Amazeen cruiser on this side of the wormhole, there may be more. He didn’t want to take a chance of leaving our men there and have them tell the Amazeen about the existence of the Orion.”

Cree grunted his approval of the idea. “Wise decision.” He reached up to take the wet cloth from his forehead. He laid it on his thigh.

“You’re feeling better?” Caitlin asked, taking the cloth and putting it aside.

“My blood feels as though it is boiling inside my body. Whatever they were doing to him, he was in terrible pain.”

“You think they were torturing him?”

He shook his head. “I believe they injected him with something that caused the reaction. They would not have killed him. They were taking him to Rysalia. I could hear their conversation.”

She pulled a chair up to the cot and sat. “McGregor told me what happened to your uncles on Rysalia Prime. I am very sorry.”

Cree turned his head toward her. “The same thing will happen to my bloodbrothers and bloodcousins at the Feast of Alluvia if we do not reach them in time. They will have already been brought to the Titaness.”

“Will there be a trial?”

His answer was a contemptuous snort. “They were condemned the moment they were conceived.”

She nodded and looked down at her hands. Several minutes passed and she remained silent, her gaze lowered.

“What concerns you, Lady?”

She shrugged, but did not reply.

He lifted his hand weakly and touched the back of his fingers to her right cheek, smiled tiredly when she raised her head and looked at him. “You fear me still?”

“No.”

He trailed his fingers under her chin then slid his fingertips along the left side of her face, caressing her. “Yet something is bothering you about me.” He ran his thumb over her lips, reveling in the feel of her full flesh. “What is it?”

She smiled. “I just don’t understand my reaction to you,” she answered. “This isn’t like me at all.”

“What isn’t like you, Sweeting?”

“This,” she said, lifting a hand to clutch his. “This strong attachment that is forming. I don’t understand it. I’ve only known you a few hours, yet I feel as though I’ve known you all my life. That I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Perhaps you have.”

“But we’re so different,” she protested.

“Are we?”

“Yes! We are literally from two different worlds. Two different galaxies. We are different races and...”

“I suspect,” he said, threading his fingers through hers, “we are of the same heritage.”

“How can you say that?” she asked.

He grunted, let go of her hand. “Help me to sit up,” he said, pushing up on the cot.

She stood, put her arm around his shoulders and helped to lever him to a sitting position. Fluffing the pillow behind his back, she adjusted the covers over his legs. “Would you like some water?” At his nod she poured him a glass, held it to his lips. When he was finished, she sat down again.

“Many years ago,” he said, wiping the moisture from his lips with the back of his hand, “a Rysalian Fleet officer named Kyrish Brell happened on the wormhole that leads into your part of the megaverse. He eventually found Terra, as he named it, but we now know it had been called that many centuries before Brell ever stepped foot on your world. He brought back with him twenty young women of childbearing age to help repopulate our world. From that time forth until the Resistance took over Rysalia and most of the surrounding planets, women were brought from Terra and used as breeders.”

Caitlin said nothing, but her thoughts were on the hundreds of missing women about whose disappearances nothing had ever been discovered. She wondered if they could be on Rysalia.

“Most are,” he said, reading her thoughts.

“Go on,” she said, shuddering at the thought of her fellow females being abducted for such a vile purpose.

“Brell was not the first from our side of the megaverse to find your world. Apparently star travelers from another planet got there before him but never told anyone. If you compare the cultures of Chale to your Ireland you will find similarities too close to be coincidence.”

“Such as?”

“The Chalean High Speech is almost identical to the Irish Gaelic language,” he replied. “Many words have different spellings but are pronounced alike. Terra and Tara being one of them. Brell had no way of knowing this when he named Terra, which in Rysalian High Speech means land of green mountains. In searching back through the archives on Chale, we found ancient manuscripts alluding to clandestine trips to a place called Eyre’s Land. As best can be determined, Kaelin Eyre, a Commodore of the Chalean Fleet, discovered the wormhole in much the same way Brell did, but several generations earlier. His ship, The Banshee, was loaded with political prisoners from Chale, Rysalia, Serenia, and a dozen other worlds. Their destination was Ghurn Colony for most and Helios Five for a select, dangerous few. Encountering a solar storm that blew them billions of miles off course, The Banshee wound up being sucked through the anomaly. None of the worlds they passed were habitable until they found Terra or Tara as Eyre named it. Upon landing on this new world, Eyre decided to leave the prisoners there. The atmosphere was the same. There was vegetation and animal life to sustain the prisoners. Unpopulated at that time, the land seemed an ideal place to strand the Unwanteds, as the prisoners were labeled.”

“Brell knew none of that,” she said for clarification.

“No, he did not.”

“Ironic they used almost the same name.”

“The words mean the same,” he said. “Terra and Tara both mean land of green mountains.”

“So you think they both landed in Ireland.”

“We know Eyre did for he left behind cromlechs to mark his landing sites.”

“Sites?”

Cree nodded. “He and his crew went back many times to drop off prisoners.” He looked away. “Including some of their scientific disasters.”

“Reapers?” she asked, sensing that was what he meant.

“Dearg Duls,” he replied. “Aye. The generic inferiors of the modern day Reapers.” He looked up. “I would rather not discuss why these men were different.”

She let that pass. “I can see why you would think since I’m of Irish descent that I would have something in common with the Chaleans, a common ancestry, but you are Rysalian. What...”

“I am a hybrid. All Reapers are,” he interrupted. “My sire is Ry-Chalean. My dam is from Ireland.”

Caitlin blinked. “You have human blood in you?”

He smiled. “In more ways than one,” he said, reminding her of her own life essence traveling through his body.

She blushed. “Where was your mother’s home?”

“I know nothing of her save she is from Ireland,” he replied. “The records of my birth are on Rysalia Prime and I’ve never stepped foot on that evil world. The only reason I know her birth land is the symbol on my Reaper tattoo that marks my hybrid race.”

“I didn’t notice a symbol,” she said, craning her head to look at the tattoo.

“This,” he said, looking down at the stylized imprint of a reaper. He touched the image’s scythe. “The marking stands for Terra/Ireland.”

She looked closely at the place to which he was pointing and saw the strange symbols that looked like a lightning bolt and an elongated X turned on its side burned into the blade. She sat back in the chair. “That must have hurt like hell.”

“I barely felt it,” he lied.

She sighed. “So we have a common ancestry and you believe this is why I have such strong feelings for you so soon after our meeting.”

“That and the gods put us in each other’s path. I told you I knew you were coming. I let the mining ship pass because a part of me knew there was help of a different kind on its way.”