A Stellar Affair (3 page)

She glanced up from her bowl when her fellow passengers sat across from her with their own meals. “Are you both heading to Algoron too?”

Tarrin nodded. “Military orders. I’m surprised they put me on a civilian vessel, but I guess they didn’t have any other ships heading that way.”

He took a big bite of stew and actually let out a satisfied hum. Either the young soldier hadn’t eaten for a while, or she had to wonder what the military had been feeding him.

“How about you?” he asked after he swallowed.

“I work as a botanist for GEHD PD,” she told him. “I’ve been given a work transfer.”

“You must be good with plants then.” Slade gave her a small smile. “I never could get anything to grow. My wife was always the one with the green thumb.”

The old man’s grin faded, and Ardra picked up that his wife was no longer with him. She swallowed a last mouthful of stew and tried to lighten the mood.

“So I won’t be working with you at GEHD PD?” she teased him.

Slade let out a breathy laugh. “No, I’m a machinist. Retired now. I’m going to Algoron to visit an old friend.”

Ardra envied him that. She wished she had a friend waiting for her at the end of this trip.

Wanting to be polite, she stayed and talked for a few more minutes before she got up and stowed her dishes. Then she returned to her room, where she cleaned up and crawled into bed. Unfortunately, although she was tired, she struggled to fall asleep.

She was always stressed when she traveled, and the hum of the vessel’s engines and the intractable mattress conspired against her. Even the red exit light over the door irritated her. She rolled onto her side so she wouldn’t have to look at it and had a weird impulse to reach for the empty space next to her in bed. As if she might suddenly find someone there.

“Just stress,” she said aloud.

She had occasionally had this sensation before and had learned to ignore it.

Shutting her eyes, she forced herself to go to sleep.

Space Station Simos

It took four days to reach Simos, but five to actually board the space station. The
Oberon
hit a traffic jam coming in for docking and was delayed a whole extra day. Several times, Ardra held her breath watching some of the larger transports brush past them. The computer pilots were supposed to be better than humans, but despite her Tetch upbringing, she found it hard to have faith in a bunch of wires and outdated programming. She was relieved when they finally disembarked.

Laid over until the next afternoon, she had plenty of time to stretch her legs. She stepped away from the platform and looked around to get her bearings. Simos was one of the largest space stations on this side of the galaxy, and it was the undisputed hub of travel for this region. There were people everywhere, some desperately searching for the right platform, others running to catch their flights and more than a few just milling around and biding their time.

She glanced at Tarrin and Slade and saw they looked as overwhelmed as she felt. Pulling her travel papers out of her bag, she found the name of her hotel, the Mimosa Inn. She wondered if the men were also going to stay there, but she was distracted before she could ask. A dark-haired fellow wearing what she presumed was the station uniform jogged up to them. He was sweating and sounded out of breath.

“Mr. Slade? Mr. Thales? Miss Kelly?” He glanced at all three of them in turn. “I’m Victor Sargas. I was supposed to meet you right at the ship, but they changed your landing dock at the last minute. I ran all the way over here from platform C. Please, if you’ll come with me, I’ll take you to your rooms.”

Before Ardra could respond, he turned and walked quickly through the crowd. Afraid she would lose him, she followed at a trot with Tarrin and Slade right behind her. She shook her head in disbelief. Her employers flew her coach but hired an attendant to meet her at the station? What was wrong with their priorities?

She breathed a little easier when they reached the Mimosa Inn. The place looked clean and comfortable even though the accommodations were a little small. She hated the asteroid paintings some unoriginal person had hung on the walls, but at least the beds stood on legs.

Once she and the other passengers had their room codes and had dropped off their luggage, Victor met them in the large dining room downstairs. This area was more comfortable and better decorated, with a fair amount of potted plants to soften the aesthetics. Music piped in from somewhere overhead, and there were just enough tables occupied to make the place feel cozy but not overcrowded.

After they were seated, Victor added a fourth to their group. The woman was short and slender like a bird and had ginger hair that stuck out in every direction. She couldn’t seem to stop fidgeting.

“Everybody,” Victor said, “this is Rosemary Warner. She’ll be flying out with you tomorrow.”

“Hello.” Rosemary greeted them in a squeaky voice.

She shook hands with everybody and then sat beside Ardra.

Victor still stood next to their table. “Your vessel departs at 1500 hours tomorrow. I’ll meet you right here two hours before that and will walk you to your departure dock. That means you can look around or do some shopping in the morning, but you have to be back here by lunchtime. It’s my job to make certain no one gets left behind, so please keep track of the time. Okay? Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Having delivered this curt briefing, Victor walked away.

“Isn’t that the strangest thing?” Rosemary said. “I didn’t even hire a travel agent or know one came with the flight, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh goodness, Rosemary, how are you ever going to find your way to the right flight? You’re going to get yourself lost or end up on the Outer Belts without a way home.’ But then Victor showed up at my door and took me right over here, and now here I am. It’s great that I’m with all of you. You seem very nice, and we can all board the ship together. Only it’s very strange because we don’t even know each other, and I never asked for a travel package, although I’m just going where they told me to go. My friend told me to just do it because I won a free trip, and I never go anywhere, so here I am, but I certainly didn’t expect to meet such nice people.”

Ardra was left speechless by Rosemary’s monologue. The woman clearly had a hyper, nervous disposition—the type that made people like her talk excessively and at nearly incomprehensible speeds. Although she was probably very nice, Ardra prayed they wouldn’t end up sharing a room together on board.

“So,” Rosemary said, thankfully slowing down a bit after this initial outburst. “Why are you all going to Algoron? You are all going to Algoron, aren’t you? Or is it another stop for some of you?”

“No, we all have the same destination,” Ardra assured her. “I’m going as part of a work transfer, Tarrin is following his military orders and Slade is visiting a friend. You won a free flight?”

She didn’t bother to ask Rosemary how she had won it, but she figured it was a good sign. Algoron had to be an attractive planet if they had vacation giveaways to visit it.

Dinner was served, and Ardra noticed Rosemary’s hands continued to shake with a constant tremor even as she ate. She wondered how someone could stay that high-strung and not snap. The woman had the most amazing ability to keep up a steady stream of words, and she gabbed endlessly throughout the meal. Slade retired directly afterward, but his juniors lingered at the table for a while.

“I’m sorry,” Rosemary said. “I get to talking, and I can’t help myself sometimes. I don’t mean to be a bother. It’s much worse when I get nervous like this, because then I use talking to try to cover up the fact that I’m nervous. But, of course, everybody can tell that I’m nervous because I’m talking so much, and I can’t stop. I just don’t know if I can do it tomorrow—get on that ship and fly away. I’m afraid to fly. I’ve always been that way, or at least I think I’ve always been. Anyway, I’m definitely that way now, so I hope you’ll forgive me.”

Ardra smiled. “You’re afraid of space travel?”

“Uh-huh. Terrified. Yep.”

“But don’t you live here on the space station?” she asked. “How did you get here?”

Rosemary giggled. “Oh, I know, my friends are always telling me, ‘Rosemary, you live on a space station. This is one of the busiest traffic centers—people fly in and out of this place all the time, day and night—and you flew here, didn’t you?’ And I tell them yes, I flew here, only I don’t really remember flying here, or at least I don’t remember being so nervous. Now I’m stuck here because I’m afraid to fly, but I’m trying to be brave. The thing is, it’s so dangerous to fly these days. I heard that report—you know the one?—that report about how the government is drafting people off the bigger ships and then making them deliver military secrets for them. That would scare me to death if someone I didn’t know came up to me and said, ‘Miss Warner, we need you to take this information to our people on whatever planet,’ because that could be dangerous if the Roimirans ever caught me. I don’t think I could bear that, although it’s not that I wouldn’t want to help our cause.”

“That’s not true,” Tarrin said.

Ardra wondered which part of Rosemary’s statement he was addressing.

“Our government would never use our citizens without their consent,” he explained. “We’ve got plenty of soldiers ready to fight for the Tetch way of life, and we use highly trained operatives to handle our most sensitive military secrets. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“What about the Roimirans?” she whispered. “We’re still at war with them, and I heard they’re trying to infiltrate our society, and they have these telepaths called precepts who can read our thoughts and kill us with their brainwaves.”

Ardra rolled her eyes. Again with the precepts. These mythical Roimiran telepaths originally took the name percepts for their ability to perceive others’ thoughts. Over time, the name gradually became corrupted into precept because it tripped more easily off the tongue. This often confused the issue since many people didn’t understand that these perceptive individuals had no capacity for precognition. Ardra wondered how many communication broadcasts were requests for psychic readings. Though, even if she ruled out all the ridiculous hype, she still found the thought of these Roimirans scary.

Tarrin replied to Rosemary’s concern with a dismissive scoff. “Oh, please. Those backward Roimirans probably can’t guess what number you’re thinking of, let alone infiltrate our whole society. You have nothing to worry about. If anyone comes after our little space ship, they can have the hunk of junk.”

Ardra laughed. “Oh, no. Do you really think we’ll be back on the
Oberon
for the rest of the trip?”

He turned a rueful smile on her. “Didn’t you look at your ticket?”

The next afternoon, Victor collected them as scheduled, and they trudged after him as he led them through the crowd. Ardra wondered if the congestion ever died down on this station or if it was always one big honeycomb of busy bees. She certainly couldn’t live someplace like this. Come to think of it, maybe prolonged exposure to this frenetic pace had made Rosemary the way she was.

Ardra looked at the other woman as they shoved their way through the throng. “Are you all right?”

“Oh…uh…oh.” The woman kept repeating that awful groan as she wrung her hands.

“Rosemary?” she said.

“I don’t know,” the woman muttered. “I don’t know if I can do this. Oh.”

“It’ll be fine,” Ardra told her. “You’ll see. Once you board and get settled, you’ll wonder what all the excitement was about. It’s really peaceful in space, and after a while it just gets boring.”

“I don’t know,” she kept chanting.

As they drew closer to the boarding zone, Ardra could see their diminutive vessel beyond the rushing people.

Rosemary must have spotted it too, because she stopped dead in her tracks. “I can’t do this. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t get on that thing! Who cares if it’s free? No. No way. I’m not doing it.”

“Are you serious?” Ardra didn’t mean to sound hostile, but she was flummoxed. Was this lady really so terrified of flying? “You’re not getting on?”

“No,” Rosemary repeated. “Forget it. I’m not going. There’s no way. I can’t do this.”

She backed away. Ardra almost reached out to stop her but changed her mind. This woman wasn’t her responsibility, and if she was so anxious about it, maybe she was better off staying behind. The rest of them certainly didn’t need to be penned up with a neurotic for the next few months.

Instead of halting the woman’s retreat, Ardra gave her a short wave goodbye. Then she hurried to catch up with the others.

When they got to their platform, Victor hustled them aboard ship. She was the last to reach him, and he looked behind her.

“Where’s Miss Warner?”

“Rosemary panicked at the last second and decided she wasn’t going. She took off back there somewhere.”

“What?” The color appeared to drain from his face.

“Gone,” she summed up. “She took off.”

Victor definitely looked pale. “We can’t wait for her. I have to get the rest of you out on time.”

He rushed her inside before disappearing into the station crowd. That was the last she saw of him, and they almost took off before the doors were closed.

In a strange way, even the
Oberon
was a relief after the hustle and bustle of the space station. At least here she could get some peace and quiet.

Chapter Three

The
Oberon
, in transit, six days later

Boom!
Ardra heard a deep thump against the hull, and it startled her to her feet. They were nearly a week out from the space station, passing through what should have been clear space on their way to Algoron. Before she could cross her room to the door, a second impact nearly jolted her off her feet.

Were they in some kind of meteor shower? Her heart beat wildly as she reached the door. She stepped into the corridor only to collide with Slade in the process.

“I’m sorry,” she said after she sent the old man staggering.

He waved his hand to dismiss the apology, but he was apparently too out of breath to speak. They both looked at the ceiling as a series of knocks sounded overhead. Something was tapping its way along the dorsal side of their vessel.

“What are we hitting?” She posed this question more to herself than the wheezing old man in front of her.

It was Tarrin who answered. “We’re not hitting anything. Something is hitting us.”

He raced past them toward the front of the ship. She followed him to the control room up at the bow, and the three of them crowded together behind the blinking instrument panels. Although there was no living pilot, the ship had still been constructed with windows in the cockpit. She looked out and upward as much as possible. What she saw just about stopped her heart.

“A Roimiran ship,” Tarrin said.

The metal walls groaned around them, and Ardra went numb. Where there should have been stars shining outside the window, a huge attack craft loomed over them. With its black metal construction, it seemed more like shadow than substance—a shadow that was moving into position to attach itself to the
Oberon
.

They were being taken captive.

“What do they want with us?” Tarrin asked. “We’re not carrying anything important.”

“It’s piracy,” Slade said. “They’ll steal even this sorry ship for its parts, and then they’ll lock us up as prisoners of war.” He took Ardra’s hand and gave it a comforting pat. “Be brave now.”

His words only filled her with greater dread. “Is there anything on board that might be of use to them? Are either of you carrying any information or something of value?” She looked at Tarrin, their resident soldier.

“No,” he said. “I’m just a private. I’m not transporting anything but myself.”

“And I’m an old man,” Slade added. “Anything I ever knew is now obsolete.”

“They wouldn’t be after me either,” she told them. “Unless they want to know about plants and soil conditions, I can’t help them. Is there anything in the computers they could exploit? Stellar cartography? Locations of our bases?”

If they and their ship were about to be captured, they had only minutes to destroy anything the enemy might use against them.

“I’ll try to erase the computer.” Tarrin started working on the system of keys and buttons in front of him.

“I’ll delete the passenger manifest,” she said.

She ran down the corridor toward the back of the ship. When they had first boarded, she had thought it was silly to bother with an inventory for three people. Now she thought it might be dangerous. She snapped the slim tablet out of its hanger on the wall. Although she turned the thing over in her hand a couple of times, she couldn’t figure out where the controls were located.

A loud, ringing shudder ran through the walls and ceiling as some new strain was placed on the integrity of their ship. She didn’t have much time. Instead of digitally wiping the tablet, she opted for a more expedient method. With one hard swing, she smashed it against the wall and then stomped on it until she was certain it was broken.

Almost as an afterthought, she sprinted back along the corridor toward her room. She upended her bag on the floor and snatched her transfer orders out of the pile. The sound of rending filled the room as she furiously tore them into tiny pieces. When she was done, she scattered the confetti just to be certain.

“Attention passengers of the Tetch ship
Oberon
,” an unfamiliar voice barked at them over their own internal com system. “You have been captured by the Roimiran ship
Alcor
. You will be boarded, and all passengers and personnel will be taken into custody. There is no escape. Do not try to resist.”

“Like hell,” Tarrin shouted up front.

She knew he would go down fighting.

Something grated against the outer door of their ship, and Ardra shot around the corner to confront the noise. As she did so, the commotion jumped to a high-pitched squeal. Then there was a loud hiss followed by a metallic shriek.

“Don’t open it!” she screamed, but Slade and Tarrin were still near the controls up front.

In a moment of terror, she saw a flash image of men with weapons and someone opening the door for them. In real time, it took several minutes longer for their assailants to pry open the door. There were a dozen armed men waiting on the other side, and the enemy forces surged down the corridor toward Ardra in a violent burst of lights and shouting.

“Freeze!” they yelled. “Hands where we can see them! Hands! Against the wall! Don’t move!”

Her whole body shook as she tried to obey the cacophony of orders. Although she had already put up her hands, two soldiers slammed her against the wall and secured her wrists behind her back. Whatever they used to cuff her cut into her skin, and one of the men remained pressed uncomfortably close to her. She could feel his heat and his rapid breathing. He was cued up to kill. She held still with her left cheek smashed painfully against the wall, only able to see in one direction.

She watched more men pour in, but she couldn’t see what was happening up front. By the sound of it, she guessed Tarrin was swinging away. The noise of the scuffle temporarily replaced the shouting, and then she heard a lot of cursing. The enemy soldiers outnumbered Tarrin and had clearly bested him, but it sounded like maybe he had gotten in a few good blows.

What seemed like a century passed before she was jerked away from the wall. One man held her arm above the restraints. Tarrin was being escorted with a guard on each side, and they pushed him through the corridor first. His face was red, but he didn’t appear to be seriously injured. As he passed her, he gave her a nod to confirm that he had taken care of the computer. She was proud of him.

Slade followed close behind, but the old man was clearly no threat to the Roimirans. He looked pale and unwell, and he shot Ardra a pitiful look. She wondered if his heart could withstand the stress.

“Move,” the guard holding her said.

His fingers just about fused themselves to her forearm. She gritted her teeth and did what he said, leaving the
Oberon
behind. On board the Roimiran vessel, the guard forced her into a flight chair and strapped her down. She knew all she could do now was hold on to her wits and strength in the trials ahead.

Roimiran base, planet Ryso

Jack whistled as he crossed the compound. The weather was nice and sunny this morning, and they were heading into late spring here on Ryso. He hoped the heat wouldn’t be too bad this summer.

When he reached the door to the communications building, he stamped his feet before entering. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light inside, but he already knew what he’d see. This building was split into three rectangular rooms that opened into each other in a long chain. He walked into the first room on the left—one of two with a door to the outside.

He smiled as his vision cleared. Sure enough, there was Nash, sitting at his consul with his headphones on, monitoring the long-range communications. As usual, his friend had his shoulders hunched at a funny angle because of a stiff neck. Farther back in the room, Norma paced back and forth as she checked her readings and jotted down notes on her clipboard. Neither had noticed him yet.

Norma never looked up from what she was writing. “Nash, I really need those logs. You can’t fall behind. We’ve got to get them analyzed while they’re still current news. The information is no good if it’s outdated. Hot off the waves.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Nash retorted. “Do you want me to monitor or do you want me to report? I can’t do both.”

“Stop whining. We need both, so you’ll do both, and you had better do it right.” She finally glanced up. “Jack!”

Her booming welcome made Nash jump and wrench his neck. “Damn you, Norma.” He flung the headphones off and sat cringing.

Jack laughed and walked over to him. Ignoring his friend’s objections, he grabbed Nash’s neck and gave it a massage.

“You carry all your tension between your shoulders,” he told him. “You should practice those relaxation exercises I taught you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nash grumbled. “I’d like to see what condition you’d be in if you had Norma nagging at you all day.”

“I heard that,” Norma said.

Nash let his head roll forward as Jack’s ministrations began to take effect. Just then, the door opened, and Celia Roberts walked in.

She stifled a laugh when she saw them. “I’m sorry. Am I interrupting something? I could leave you two alone.”

Nash’s face flushed bright red—not an uncommon occurrence around Celia. “Very funny.”

Jack arched an eyebrow. “Jealous?”

Celia rolled her eyes and handed some documents to Norma. As soon as she was gone, Nash dropped his head and let out a self-pitying groan. Jack knew what his friend was thinking, so he gave him a pat on the back.

“Why don’t you tell Celia how you feel?” he asked for the hundredth time. “You’ve been dying to go out with her for months now.”

The young man feigned a sob. “What’s the use? She probably doesn’t even give me a second thought. I’m just some guy she sees when she’s delivering the latest downloads.”

“I’ve already told you she likes you. If you wait too much longer, though, she’s going to lose her patience.”

Nash raised his head. “I don’t know what to say to her. Can’t you give me some kind of mental zap? You could feed me the right words to say next time she’s here. You’re good with women.”

Not exactly. Jack did know women’s minds. After all, he was a high-level precept, and he had been raised by a mother and aunt with the same gift. His upbringing had given him a great deal of insight, but that didn’t mean he was good at relationships. It was hard to be himself when he was bombarded by his date’s thoughts and feelings. Reading a woman’s desires made him an excellent lover, but it also created a lot of performance pressure.

Jack shook his head. There were some things a man needed to do for himself, and pursuing the object of his affection was one of them.

“You’re the one who has fallen for her,” he told his friend. “You need to do this for yourself. I know better than to get in the middle of someone else’s romance.”

“All right, you two.” Norma pointed at the headphones and then up at the sky. “Nash, you’re supposed to be listening to the chatter from out there, not from in here.”

Nash grunted but popped his headphones back on.

Jack walked to the back of the room where Norma was flipping through the new data. “You shouldn’t give him such a hard time. He’s just a poor fool in love.”

“I believe the fool part,” she said. “Besides, you’re a fine one to give advice. What’s happening in your love life?”

He winced. “I’m still searching for the right woman.”

“Happy hunting,” she said with a chuckle.

“So what’s up?” he asked. “You said you have a message for me?”

She nodded, but she was still preoccupied with her work. “That’s right. I wanted to let you know that Terrah is back. We got a short-range transmission from her yesterday. She says she had a nice visit with your mother, who sends her love. Terrah is busy right now, but either she or Damek will stop by as soon as they can.”

This was good news. Terrah was one of Jack’s oldest friends—practically a sister—and she was a high-level precept like himself. His mother had mentored her, which is how they had met. Now Terrah was an established precept healer, and she had her own apprentice, Damek. Jack liked him too. Damek was one of those special young people who seemed to have been born with the wisdom of the ages.

“That’s wonderful,” he told Norma. “I wish I could have gone with her to see Mom on Edalus. I’ve just been so—”

“Busy,” Norma said, but she was talking about herself.

With a last glance at the figures in her hand, she turned and darted down the hall to deliver her report. That was Norma—short and to the point. Jack knew her too well to be offended.

“Bye, Norma,” he called to her back. “See you later, Norma. Thanks for stopping to talk to me, Norma.”

She waved over her shoulder, and he could tell she was amused.

The minute he stepped out the door, he ran into the superintendent of the compound, Walter Rigel. A thin, prematurely balding man, Walter managed to project an intimidating image with his angular features and piercing gaze. In a bygone era, he might have been a business tycoon.

Walter was one of those people who feared the abilities of the precepts but worshipped them as some kind of all-powerful instrument. At heart, he was an honest man but a little too calculating. Jack didn’t have nearly as much respect for him as he’d had for Superintendent Kaplan. After the battle at Bok-10, Kaplan had been taken prisoner and tortured for days before being put to death. As far as they could tell, the man had never revealed a thing.

“Hello, Walter.” Jack refused to call him Superintendent Rigel.

The man was really the equivalent of a colonel, but their politicians shunned the use of military titles as part of a semantic war to further differentiate themselves from the Tetch.

“I was looking for you,” Walter said. “Walk with me. I have something I want to discuss.”

Normally, Jack might have given him a hard time for the hell of it, but he sensed the guy had big news. Walter was clearly excited, but he took his time to make certain they weren’t overheard. They walked down the central pathway of the compound, heading in the general direction of Walter’s office.