Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall (2 page)

Reichert's jaw tightened. He looked full face at Sun. "Commander, I don't want to be the bad guy here, but I don't have the capability of putting out a probe. We're losing water."

Peg Davies' gasp near Dusty's ear echoed those being broadcast. Sun lost his expressionless mask.

"How bad is it?"

"Not tremendously bad, but consistent. Maybe half a gallon a day. We can't find the leak."

Dusty looked at the botanist. The older woman looked grim. "What's happening?"

"It's a closed ecosystem. We can't replace that water if it's boiled out. It could be a seam or rupture losing it. Eventually it comes down to water rationing or some such . . . and if the leak continues," Peg halted. She didn't have to finish her sentence.

Dusty looked back to the screens. No one on any of the three ships remembered the fourth ship which had started the mission with them, the
Gorbachev.
The
Gorby
had not made it past sixty years before it had slowly, lumberingly, agonizingly, gone to pieces, like a staggering aged beast. She wondered if
Magellan
could make it home.

"Then," Sun said, "there is little we can do until we're within range for our normal sensors."

"Eight years," said Reichert, "to confirm what we already suspect."

Heredia said nothing, her crew silent at her back. Her eyes blazed a challenge at them.

No one answered.

It struck Dusty suddenly that perhaps the Gemini experiment hadn't been a failure. She and her sister had talked for the first few decades, each sleeping and waking on a delicately timed cycle before the silence. It had been thought that distance was what tore them apart.

Dusty stood. "Wake me," she said. "When we're ready."

She did not go back down to sleep immediately, her system was not geared for it. She helped Peg with the solars, setting out vegetable beds, splicing new varieties together and looking over seedlings generated from cuttings that had never seen Earth. She ran her fingers over the purple furred tops of a vegetable similar to what her mother had called mustard greens and she had never liked. Her waking hours were precious to her and she did not like to waste them. Even eating a purple mustard green could be an adventure.

She spent many morning hours in the ship nursery, telling the stories and songs of her youth, and playing with children who would be teens when she woke again. Dusty was afraid they would not remember her if she did not play with them now.

Warfield, whom she had wanted as a lover, had been just such a youngster not too awfully long ago.

She tried not to think that the Earth had gone peculiarly quiet, though she and Peg talked about it from time to time. Peg was for war, her faith in the ability of men to govern themselves peacefully gone skeptic. "They can't even manage a marriage," she said, hand troweling a bed of newly planted cuttings. "Although ... it could be pollution. They could have suffocated in their own refuse."

"But we were trying. ..." Dusty countered. She trailed off. They, to Peg, and we, to her. The Earth she knew was not so far off, in either her daily thoughts or her dreams. To the other crew members, it was a thrice-told tale, handed down through generations.

Peg looked crisply at her. "We'll know soon enough," she said and stabbed some more at the vegetable bed.

Dusty fell silent and remained that way, troweling as much through her thoughts and memories as through the garden bed.

When it came time for her to sleep again, her last conscious image was that of the
Maggie,
and the
Mayflower,
as she'd seen them from the observation deck, cruising closer on the horizon as the three ships drew together for the ride in.

Chapter l

"The best enemy is a dead one."

—Sir Thomas Blade, 2280

September, 2285

Santa Ana winds had stripped the haze from Saddleback Mountain, leaving its hump-shouldered profile easily seen from the courtroom among the city ruins. It whistled through rusting pillars where concrete had crumbled from these metal skeletons and made dust devils in what passed for roads. Unfortunately, the same dry winds had also stripped the roof from the courthouse and while repairs were being made, the court session was being held outdoors, a makeshift resemblance to civilization.

Civilization was not what it had been in the Seven Counties, even forgetting the plague and the disasters that had torn the world apart. Those days had been survived. Those who had done the surviving were not quite the same as the humans responsible for civilization either, but they tried.

It seemed to Sir Thomas Blade as he sat among the remnants that the effort was sometimes not worth the price. But he was tired today, the justice circuit over the summer one of the longest he would ride as a Protector, and he felt that tiredness like ice settling into his bones.

A rough-hewn platform had been cobbled together for the judge's bench and the witness stand, faced immediately by the defendant and his attorney and the prosecutor, backed by rows of chairs for onlookers. The horse-line had been tethered downwind, but occasional gusts wafted its pungent aroma across the crowd. Bicycles in the racks behind the platform glinted the late afternoon sun in their eyes. The winds had died down, leaving only the dry, hot day behind them, good enough weather for mid-September. Blade shifted in in his chair and eyed the sky above. Faded out blue, no clouds, 110 sign of the rain they needed. Orange County would be a dust bowl if the winds continued and the rains did not come. Never mind the deceptive mildness of Indian summer.

He adjusted a long, silken white scarf about his neck. The wind gave him sore throats, his gill membranes outraged by the desertlike air. As soon as the trial was over, he was heading for a tall, cold beer with the judge. Judge Henry Teal would not drink with just anyone, but Blade was the Lord Protector of Orange County, and the executioner.

Blade pulled at his scarf again as excited murmurs rose from the audience. The jury panel shuffled in from the courthouse basement where they had been sequestered and Thomas knew from the looks on their faces what the verdict was. The nester crouching defiantly in his chair knew, too. He was an unkempt mass of hair and dirt and sores and did not look up when his attorney touched his shoulder to get his attention.

Thomas sat with his boots hiked up on the rung of the chair in front of him—he was surrounded by empty chairs, people who normally would not mind rubbing shoulders with him shunned him now—because they knew why he was attending the trial and what was expected of him. The trial's verdict was a foregone conclusion. No renegade nester could poison water wells and expect to walk away.

The shirt-sleeved crowd consisted mostly of farmers and ranchers. He saw a few craftsmen among the onlookers, but not many. The spectacle of a murder trial whose outcome was certain was not enough to pull them away from their trade. The farmers were here only because the wind had kept them from their labors anyway and they wanted the satisfaction of seeing a nester pulled down.

Judge Teal listened as the jury foreman talked quietly to him, then nodded. He tapped his gavel down.

"Get the defendant up to hear the verdict."

That was not how the proceedings usually went, but the nester had been far from cooperative. His attorney now dragged him to his feet and onto the platform in front of the judge's bench.

Teal stood as well. He was an aged, once eloquent man, dressed immaculately despite the warmth of the day. White and silver strands of hair were far sparser than they had been, and his face was no softer or paler than that of any of the men in his audience who earned their living out of doors. He had an eye that wandered a bit off track, making it hard to look him in the face from time to time. He looked sternly at the nester now and Blade wondered what the judge saw in this defendant who barely resembled anything human.

He leaned forward across the chair back, not noticing his hands had gone white-knuckled as he gripped it and listened to what Judge Teal said.

' 'It is my duty, as judge appointed to this court of the survivors of Orange County in the year 2285, to render the verdict as given me by a jury of your peers. John Doe, you stand accused of one count of murder and three hundred and twenty-six counts of attempted murder and one count of water well poisoning. The jury has found you guilty on all counts. Accordingly, I sentence you to death and order that sentence to be speedily carried out."

The nester knocked his attorney aside and crouched in his shackles. Rifles came up all over the outdoor yard and Blade heard the click of vials being tapped into barrels.

Judge Teal pointed his gavel at the nester. "I guarantee you'll find Sir Thomas an easier way to go. By the authority vested in me, I hereby remand you to his care."

With a sigh, Blade got to his feet. A slight breeze ruffled his thinning yellow-gold hair and tugged at his scarf. His leather jacket creaked as he moved forward. Dust motes caught in the wind's stirring swirled away from his shoulders like flecks of diamonds as the sun streaked slantwise across the yard. Rifles wavered, then lowered as he approached the nester.

John Doe was not his name, of course. He'd refused to give them his name and Blade eyed his face, searching for landmarks of familiarity, cheekbones, the curve of his ears, gillmarks, anything that might tell him what family i he nester had come from originally. In the deep leathery creases of his forehead, Blade saw the telltale scars of what had once been a third eye, an abomination even the nesters had obliterated. Lines tightened about the nester's mouth. He was so weather-beaten Blade could not tell if the man were older or younger than his own twenty-eight years. Bruises that had once been angry blue-black were laded to yellow and there were knobs on his arms where his bones must have healed. He'd taken quite a beating. Blade was a little surprised the man had made it to a trial.

"Just tell me," Blade said softly, his voice pitched to carry no farther than the two of them, "if you did it."

The nester's eyes shifted to him. There was a quiet dignity in them.
Still water runs deep,
Thomas thought. "I don't want to die," the nester said.

"No one does." He nodded to Judge Teal. "But that's the sentence for murder and attempted murder by water poisoning."

The nester's attention flicked off. He looked back, sullen and tired. "I ain't told them nothing and won't tell you."

Blade smiled gently. Of course, the man told him, not verbally, but he Read him and knew the truth for himself. Within the nester's tumbling thoughts was the clear image of him butchering a sheep and then throwing it down the well, with full intent to foul that water. He
had
poisoned the well. As foregone as the trial's verdict had been, it had also been correct. The knowledge steeled Blade for what he had to do.

The nester went rigid then, as if he'd felt Blade inside his thoughts. He shook. Dust flew from his ragged, ill-made clothes.

"You chose this end," Blade told him. He stretched out his hand.

Tears of fury brimmed in the man's eyes but he did not flinch away. His stare bored into Blade. "Your eyes," the nester spat. "Your truth."

Blade stunned him with a chop of his hand and as the man sagged to his knees, the Protector pulled his garrote and finished him off. The man was strong. The cords on his neck stood out as the wire cut deeply, but he did not struggle. Blade did not let up until he was certain the prisoner was dead. He let go and the nester's limp form toppled to the wooden platform. He had forgotten there was an audience and felt a faint blush of embarrassment heat his face as he looked up to see them watching. His gills stirred beneath the scarf.

Someone murmured, "Coldhearted son of a bitch." He did not see who.

With a collective sigh, the crowd began to disperse. Bailiffs unwound the garrote from the nester's throat, coiled it, and handed it back to Blade as they took the body away.

Teal dropped a callused hand to his shoulder. "Come on, Thomas. The women are waiting for us. Wouldn't want the beer to get warm. I'd like to talk to you about the election before you finish your circuit."

Blade pulled himself away from the sight of the nester's heels dragging a groove into the dirt and grass as the body was hauled away. Remorse he shouldn't have felt lanced through him.
Your eyes, your truth.
To hell with it. The truth was the truth . . . wasn't it?

Another judge took the platform and gavel as a bailiff called for Small Claims Court to convene. Their job was done here. Teal never looked back.

He matched Teal's lanky stride as they crossed the courthouse lawn. Teal snapped his fingers and one of the bailiffs caught up with them.

"Get Sir Thomas' horse. He'll be staying with me and my wife this evening."

That meant at least a hot bath and decent meal. "What is this going to cost me?" he said warily.

Teal stopped in the road and gave him a look, both eyes examining him. "Now, Thomas. Don't go balky on me. Lady's waiting up at the house."

The judge's distinctive gaze was reminiscent of that of Lady Nolan, but her eyes were cast, one blue, one brown, and at the mention of her name, he keenly felt the lack of her company. They had not managed to cross paths in the past three months, but two of her letters had caught up with him.