Contact (19 page)

“Yes, the Original Ones. Their purpose, their history, their triumphs are a mystery. Except for one: the sowing of their DNA across the galaxy.”

“On Earth, we didn’t know that. But we had many different beliefs as to the origin of life. Of human beings. The scientists say that we’ve evolved from earlier forms of life. Creationists believe that God made Earth and everything on it.”

“And you?” Kào asked.

She sighed. “Tough question. Both, I’d say. I’m an evolutionist. But I also have faith in God. And now I see that that view may not have been as crazy as I thought.” From what she’d learned in her nightly studies, the Seeders were to Kào’s people what God was to her. In the past weeks, she’d prayed to, cried to, and screamed at God—
her
God. Did Kào do the same? Did having scientific evidence to prove the beginnings of life strengthen faith or weaken it? Did it demand the human need for religion or denounce it? She didn’t know. But it hit home how little she grasped about the culture and history of the Alliance, and how much she had yet to learn.

“Did you know that Seeders fought to keep humanity alive in the shadow of their demise?” he asked. “They knew their time in this realm was ending, yet they never turned their backs on the future, they never stopped looking ahead, looking forward. They never gave up hope.” His dark eyes bored into hers. “Don’t you, either, Jordan Cady.”

Her heart leaped, and her gaze jerked up from the translator.

He regarded her steadily. “I saw the way you gazed after the children, and how you speak of your brother as if he
were still alive. But walk among the dead, and it will leech all the pleasure out of your existence. When you cease caring, you become callous and cold.” He lifted his arm toward her, making a fist as he abruptly dropped his hand.

She almost whispered. “Is that what the stars tell you?”

“Look to the future and not the past—yes.”

He’d reached out to help her without her having to ask, without him thinking her weak in some way.

“What about you, Kào?” she dared, her heart beating hard. “Do you look to the future and not the past?”

A soft, harsh laugh escaped him, though no smile accompanied the sound. His fingers came to rest briefly on the horrible brand on his neck. “What kind of man asks others to do what he himself cannot?”

For a heartbeat, she thought he might end their visit to the observatory. But he stayed, turning away from her to glower out through the clear barrier at the starscape. “The brooding routine won’t work with me,” she said. “I know all about you big quiet types.” And their aversion to accepting comfort. Seeking out help meant you were weak—that’s what they thought. She knew, having grown up surrounded by men just like him. Being like him in some ways, herself.

She walked up to him and stopped. “Are you going to tell me why you have numbers burned into your neck?” Gentler, she added, “I want to know.”

His tone was flat. “It was how the Talagars told their prisoners apart.”

He’d been a POW. Now, so much more about him made sense. “I couldn’t imagine being in one of their prisons,” she said, suppressing a shudder.

“No, you couldn’t.” His hand slid to the back of his neck and massaged the muscles there. She would have done that for him, soothing him with her own hands, had she known
him better. If anyone was in need of a little tender, loving care, it was Kào.

“Tell me about the scar,” she persisted.

He scrubbed his face with one hand. “I was in the Alliance Space Force, a weapons officer, though my father had high hopes that I’d advance into visible, influential leadership positions, once I’d made a name for myself as a celebrated war hero,” he said with a certain irony.

“What does a weapons officer do exactly, besides blow up things?”

“Very simply put, that summed up the job. My area of expertise was weapons of mass destruction.” He stated it so easily that she could only stare at him in fascinated horror. “There were many different types of weapons from which to choose, and that required much interaction with the battleship’s onboard computer. I enjoyed that, and every aspect of my duty. I wanted to purge the Talagars from the galaxy, because they killed my father’s family, his first family, in a long-ago raid. That nearly broke him, losing his wife and daughters.” He stared outside at the stars. She couldn’t help thinking about Trist and the others aboard the
Savior
who looked Talagarian. Jordan liked to think of herself as tolerant and unbiased, but it must be difficult for the Alliance crew members to work with descendants of Talagars, knowing how bestial their ancestors were.

Kào’s fingers dragged over the numbers etched in his flesh. “But you wanted to know how I got this, so I will tell you. The Alliance declared war against the Talagars. As soon as I was of the minimum age, I enlisted. Now I could finally avenge my father’s family, and do something for
him
,” he said with such loyalty-driven passion that it tempered his shocking declaration that his job had once entailed producing as many casualties as possible. “My father is a great and honorable man. He saved my life and gave
me a new one. I owe him everything. And I’ve given him
nothing
.” His voice was thick, revealing the intense emotions his face could not.

“Kào. . . .” She stepped toward him, not sure what she intended to do when she got there.

But his hand shot up, a barrier between them. “A year into my service, my warship and the six others traveling with us were to join the rest of our squadron, which was massing in preparation for a major offensive to free the Daldénne system. It was a strategically critical area comprised of many populated worlds that were being ravaged by the Talagars. It was one of my duties to decipher and verify the encoded targeting messages that came in from intelligence scouts posted throughout the galaxy. That day, my message stated that a large Talagarian weapons and shipbuilding facility had been left virtually undefended because of other clashes draining what was becoming our over-extended Space Force. It was a crucial target, Jordan. If we could destroy it, it would cripple the Talagar force in that vital area. We’d be heroes. Such honors meant little to most of us, though. All we wanted was to bring down the Talagars.”

His eyes unfocused, as if he were living the day all over again. “But we needed more than just one battleship if we were to take out that facility. The commanders met. All six heeded my recommendation. We went after the target expecting an easy victory.”

He squinted, and his mouth stretched thin. “But the facility wasn’t undefended. The message was wrong, or had been a ploy. A Talagar battle force five times our size was waiting for us when we arrived. Since I hadn’t expected significant resistance, I led the ships in closer than I would have deemed prudent otherwise. And indeed, it wasn’t prudent.” He looked to be in physical pain, but she sensed it was emotional agony that gripped him. “The fighting
was intense. But all who weren’t killed outright in the battle met a fate far worse.”

“Talagarian prison,” she whispered.

His jaw pulsed. “Yes. As you’ve probably noticed, our technology is superior to what you knew on Earth. The Talagars have taken that technology and used it to perfect ways to induce human suffering and obedience. There was no way to resist them, if they wanted something from you.” He stiffened, fists at his sides, and swallowed forcefully.

They broke you. Oh, Kào
, she cried silently. It explained so much, why he was so bleak and reserved.

“To this day I don’t know who told them,” he went on. “It could have been me. I don’t remember. Or it could have been another. Either way, the interrogators learned of the plans for the Daldénne offensive, and used the information to bring about the biggest Alliance defeat of the war.”

If Kào’s expression was any indication, he carried the weight of that entire catastrophe on his shoulders to this day. She wanted to remove some of it. She said: “That’s right. Anyone may have given up that information. Maybe all of you were drugged, beaten, and tortured into talking. You’re the only one left alive for your people to blame though. A ‘scapegoat’ we call it in my language.”

“It translates,” he informed her with an expression that told her placing a label on his shame brought little consolation. That same expression told her that he truly wished he’d died along with his comrades.

Her chest tightened. What a nightmare he’d lived, and lived still. But how could she, a woman who hadn’t been able to help her own husband, a man whose troubles paled in comparison to Kào’s, possibly be able to offer solace? Surely, anything she said would be totally lacking. But she tried anyway. “When I was a girl, my father taught me what he called the three laws of courage. Whenever I’m afraid, or I don’t know if I can take the next step, I pick the
law that fits and repeat it in my head.” She took a breath. “Courage is doing the right thing even though you are scared. Courage is accepting the challenge though it’s easier to give up. And courage is mustering the strength to stand up when it’s easier to fall down.”

After a pause, Kào said: “A wise man, your father.”

“He had so much wisdom to offer. He was a fighter pilot; he’d fought in a war—the Vietnam War, we called it. Some of his friends were shot down and taken prisoner, brave and honorable soldiers. Like you, Kào.”

He grimaced at that, but she continued. “But you wouldn’t know it from talking to some of them. Like you, they didn’t see themselves as brave and honorable. One man never forgave himself for what he perceived as cracking under the pressure of torture, starvation, and drugs. Impossible odds for anyone.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “My father wanted me to know this. He sat me down on the day of my husband’s funeral and made sure I listened.”

“Your husband died before Earth’s destruction, then. That is what you meant when you said that you had no mate.”

“Yes. He was killed in a car wreck when my daughter was an infant.” She couldn’t believe she was telling a man she hardly knew her most personal secrets, her deepest insecurities. But she was. She filled in the details as best she could, taking into account language, planetary, and cultural differences, explaining Craig’s difficulties with her success, how the happy-go-lucky part of him shriveled into resentment. And how he’d died, drunk and despondent.

“My father said he couldn’t bear to see me take the blame for what was out of my control. ‘You did the best you could,’ he told me. You did, too, Kào. You did the best you could. You can’t ask more of yourself than that. No one can. You’ve lived through so much. It probably doesn’t mean
much, but I admire you for all you’ve done, all you’ve been through. I truly do.”

He read her words on his translator. Then he swallowed thickly and stared out at the stars, seeking out the streaks of light as if they were old friends. “It does mean something, Jordan.” He turned around.

“I’m glad,” she whispered back.

A glimmer of awareness passed between them. She’d felt it before, this attraction, but here on the observation deck they were alone. It gave their rapport, their developing friendship, a dangerous edge. Dangerous because her developing feelings for him were unexpected. And dangerous because it felt too damned good.

She swallowed hard, finding sudden interest in the toes of her white Nikes. Kào moved closer. His scent was definitively male: a mix of musk, clean, hot skin, and the work-worn leather fittings of his uniform, ludicrously softened by a hint of apples from his shower.

Her heart thumped harder as she dragged her gaze upward, past the thick belt around his waist, up to his broad chest, and finally to the scarred and unconventionally handsome face she’d come to see nightly in her dreams.

His eyes turned darker than midnight as he dropped his gaze to her mouth. Her breath caught.

He wanted to kiss her.

Desire coursed through her in a heated rush. Unbelievably, she
wanted
him to kiss her, hard and hot, taking her to another place, a place where she could forget, where she only had to think of
now
—she and a man she hardly knew, but who somehow no longer felt like a stranger.

Her awareness of him flared hotter, throbbing like her pulse, burning like her skin.

Lord
. She wrenched away her eyes, breaking the crackling tension. But the heat between them still sizzled. Jordan had never felt anything like it in her life.

She took a moment to catch her breath, grateful for the starlight so Kào wouldn’t see as starkly how flustered she was. “I didn’t tell you about the fourth law of courage,” she whispered. “My mother’s law. ‘Courage is feeling happy and alive when it’s easier to feel sorry for yourself.’ ”

Kào read the translation. His jaw muscles flexed.

“It always sounded overly simplistic to me, but now I think I finally get it.” She gazed into infinity. “Look to the future and not the past.”

His eyes blazed. “If I try, will you?”

The question, spoken with such directness, took her completely aback.

Her hand flattened at the base of her throat. There, her skin was damp with perspiration. Only then did she realize how affected she was by their rollercoaster conversation.
If I try, will you?

Could she? Could she focus on the future without forsaking Boo? Her heart, her
life
.

“You still have not given me your answer, Jordan.”

She clutched her computer until the blood left her fingers. What drove Kào to work so hard to draw her out? Having someone so intent on dismantling her defenses was exhilarating. Exhilaration in the throes of grief; it made no sense. But what did make sense anymore?

Courage is feeling happy and alive when it’s easier to feel sorry for yourself
.

“I will,” she said. Two words, sealing their pact.

Satisfaction warmed his harsh face as he lowered his translator. “I had better return you to your people.” His tone was low, intimate, reflecting the fact they’d shared their darkest secrets—and almost a kiss. “They’ll be wondering what happened to you.”

They’d come here in silence, and they now departed in silence. A long and exhausting afternoon loomed, but afterward Kào would be back for his usual visit. She didn’t
care how many lists Natalie had given her by then, or how many times she’d had to give Ben a pep talk. She’d have Kào’s company for a while. For now, it was all that mattered.