Crossways (30 page)

*Ben!*
she tried.

“Save it, Cara, he's totally out of it.” Ronan administered a shot and then another. “Get some blankets. I don't want to move him.”

Cara could feel Ronan's talent for healing pouring energy into Ben. As she came back from the nearest cabin with an airquilt she heard Ronan saying to Kitty, “Is this thing flyable, and if so how quickly can you get us back to Crossways?”

“Yes, and thirty minutes. Whether we'll be able to dock is another matter altogether. I don't know if there's any external damage.”

“Docking clamp four has sustained minor damage,” the ship cut in.

“Where were you when he needed you?” Cara asked.

“Offline as ordered.”

“Damn and double damn. Just get us home.” Cara wasn't sure whether she said it to the ship or to Kitty, but she sank down on the floor beside Ben and Ronan and wondered whether Mother Ramona's prayers might be effective, but decided Ben's best chance lay with Ronan.

She connected with him.
*Need some extra whammy?*

*I'll take anything I can get right now.*

She felt the clunk as the Dixie disengaged and saw that Kitty was taking care of business, flight-wise.

*Coming in,*
she flashed to Mother Ramona.

*Have a medical team standing by for immediate transfer to Dockside Medical,*
Ronan said.
*It looks like Ben's been trying to chew on hard vacuum.*

Cara looked at him sharply.
*How did that happen?*

Ronan shrugged.
*If we get him through this, we can ask him.*

Ben wasn't sure how long he'd been away.

There was a point when he felt as though he'd walked into a crowded room and everyone had stopped talking at once, then resumed in hushed tones.

The next time he walked into the room everyone was leaning at an odd angle and he realized that he was horizontal.

He recognized Ronan first and then Cara's face swam into view. She looked puzzled. Perhaps she was trying to contact him mind-to-mind. Good luck with that.

He tried to make his mouth work to tell her about his implant, or lack of it, but neither his tongue nor his throat would obey him.

“Ben.” She spoke out loud.

He tried to twitch his lips into a smile. Maybe he managed it. Maybe he didn't, but she smiled at him anyway.

“Relax, we've got you.”

Maybe he should do as he was told for once.

For the first twenty-four hours in the High Dependency Unit Cara didn't move from the chair outside Ben's door except to stand and look through the clear panel and to pace up and down in short, tight turns to get the blood flowing in her legs again.

“He's strong,” Ronan told her. “If anyone can pull through, it's Ben.”

But despite his words, Ronan spent a lot of time in there pouring as much healing energy as he could spare in Ben's direction.

What had happened? Ben had been away for five days from her perspective, but how long had it been for him? His hair had been just starting to grow again after the all-over shave to change his appearance before tackling Crowder—she counted back—less than sixty days ago. Now it was back to being long and bound into a tight plait, long enough to dangle down to his shoulder blades. It looked like it did when they first met. How had that happened?

It seemed such a small thing to focus on when he was so sick, but it was a puzzle her mind couldn't leave alone.

First Gen and Max came and sat with her. Then it was Wenna's turn. While Wenna was still there, Serafin arrived in a float chair, guided by a pretty nurse who fussed about him in a way he seemed to like.

*Hey, there has to be some compensation for being in this place for so long,*
he said.
*She may be young enough to be my granddaughter, but a man can appreciate a good-looking woman, can't he?*

Wenna and Serafin left together and when Archie Tatum arrived it became obvious that they'd set up a rota to keep her company. Kitty, Yan, even Tengue, who said he was just passing through on his way from visiting Fowler. Fowler sent her best regards to the worst gurney driver in the system.

Some time in the middle of the night it was Jussaro's turn.

“Hey, Carlinni.” He sat down next to her.

“Hey, yourself.”

“How is he?”

“Still too early to tell, but he's hanging in there.”

“You know I'm going to have to report this to Crowder, right?”

“I know. Maybe you could delay a short while. Mother Ramona's been trying to get him to release Nan and Ricky.”

“Maybe I could, at least until Ben's out of danger.”

“Thanks.” She covered Jussaro's hand with her own. “You're a pal.”

The next day she was allowed to sit in with Ben as his vital signs had stabilized. He still hadn't spoken. Cara hadn't been able to get a flicker out of him mind-to-mind, and a machine was breathing for him. A temporary necessity, Ronan assured her, but it was scary as hell.

The rota of visiting psi-techs continued. Jussaro came again in the middle of the afternoon. “I still haven't reported, but I'm going to have to do it now.”

“I know. Thanks for being straight with me.”

“Do you want to ghost in on the link?”

“If you think you can keep me hidden.”

Jussaro nodded.

“Let's do it, then.”

She connected to Jussaro with the lightest of touches and felt him reach out and find Leyburn, Crowder's Telepath.

*Tell Mr. Crowder that my earlier report was a bit hasty,*
Jussaro said.
*Ben Benjamin is not dead after all.*

*Mr. Crowder knows that already,*
Leyburn said.
*He wants to know why you didn't tell him right away.*

Cara felt a cold chill between her shoulder blades that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the station air. Did that mean Crowder had another informer planted in the Free Company? Or did it mean he had someone on Crossways who'd heard the news and reported back?

*Mr. Crowder asks me to remind you that he has options where you are concerned,*
Leyburn said.

She felt Jussaro's level of anxiety rise.

*Tell Mr. Crowder that until this morning Benjamin didn't look likely to pull through,*
Jussaro said.
*He's still very sick, but he's stronger now.*

*He says that wasn't your call to make. Next time anything happens he wants to hear about it immediately.*

*Of course.*

*See that you remember.*

*How could I forget?*

Cara felt Leyburn disconnect.

“Damn!” Jussaro leaned back against the wall.

“We've got a leak,” Cara said.

Jussaro nodded. “Another leak—and it's not me.”

The following day Cara stood back with Ronan, watching anxiously as a med-tech took out the tubes connecting Ben to the machine that had been breathing for him. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few seconds, Ben's chest began to rise and fall on its own.

“I told you it would be all right,” Ronan said, but his voice trembled with relief.

“You could have warned me . . .” Cara said. “You could have said how bad it was.”

“Then there would have been two of us sick with apprehension.” Ronan slumped into a chair by the bedside, his face as pale as Ben's was bloodless.

“I had a right to know.”

“Yes, you did. I . . . I'm sorry. I just couldn't . . .” He scrubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Ben's my friend, too, you know, not just my patient.”

“Oh, gods, Ronan. You're exhausted. You've poured so much energy into him, you don't have enough to keep yourself upright. Get some rest.”

“I'm all right. I'll just close my eyes here for a moment . . .”

In an instant he was deeply asleep. Cara found a spare blanket in a cupboard and draped it over him, then perched on the remaining chair.

It broke her apart to see Ben semi-reclined on the bed, so still. His left arm was a mottled blue-black bruise, darkening his brown skin alarmingly from fingertips to elbow, or at least what could be seen of his arm beneath the protective sheath that held the wrist flexed slightly inward.

She stared at him, wondering exactly what it was that Ronan did to transfer healing energy. She'd never shown any aptitude for healing, but she'd felt the flow when Ronan had drawn it from her. Maybe she could . . .

Ben's eyes flicked open, slightly unfocused.

She stood up so she was in his field of vision without him having to turn his head.

“Hey,” she said, following it with a
*Hey.*

He blinked and frowned as if trying to force his eyes to focus.

His lips twitched as if he was trying to speak. It might have been, “Hey,” but no more than a breath of a whisper came out, so soft she couldn't quite catch it. He didn't answer the mental
*Hey.*

“You're back with us.” She stuck to words.

He blinked. Maybe that was a slight nod.

“I'd ask how you feel, but I can see from looking at you.”

His mouth tightened. He widened his eyes and glanced upward in a brief look that said he was both affronted by his condition and resigned at the same time. Sometimes it didn't take more than half a second to transmit a world of feeling. She was used to doing it with thoughts, but looks worked as well.

“Are you hearing me?” She asked the question aloud, tapped her forehead, and transmitted it mind-to-mind at the same time. “In here?” It was like trying to talk to a deadhead.

His eyebrows knotted together in a frown and he raised his right hand to his forehead and poked with his fingers. His mouth moved as he worked himself up to say something.

“Gone.” He managed at last. “Im . . . plant.”

Cara felt as though spiders were crawling up her spine.
*Ronan!*
The young medic jerked awake in an instant.
*We have a problem.*

K
ITTY SLIPPED INTO THE BACK OF THE CHAPEL behind three uniformed guardsmen. They were calling it a Service of Respect for the dead guards, now numbering six in total because one had died later from his injuries. There were a lot of faces she didn't know, mostly in uniform. Gupta was there, too, and Wenna, probably as a token of respect and to represent the Free Company. She knew Cara and Ronan Wolfe were at Dockside Medical where Benjamin was still in critical condition, so she didn't expect them to show up.

Mother Ramona and Norton Garrick had come to pay their respects, though. That was kind of them. She didn't know much about the rest of the dead, but Wes had only been on the second pay grade, one step up from a grunt, not especially important. Even so, the head of Crossways had come.

“Kitty, don't hide at the back.” Captain Syke came in and shepherded her to the front to stand beside Ellen Heator, who had declared her to be Wes' next of kin. She felt a fraud. Wes was there, or at least his ashes were, in a polished black medonite cylinder about thirty centimeters tall, standing on a small pedestal in front of a holographic scene of his face superimposed on woodland, the leaves of the
trees rustling in a gentle breeze. Wes would have liked that. There were other cylinders as well. The bodies of the guards sucked out of the air lock had been recovered by Finders and brought home.

She'd been very fond of Wes, despite latching onto him originally for a purpose. More than fond, perhaps. She'd not lied to Cara when she'd said they might have been more than friends, given time, though she was always acutely aware that neither her life nor her time were her own. She'd never fully committed herself.

Lately she hadn't felt good about the information that she passed back to Alphacorp on a regular basis, but she consoled herself that the Free Company, as far as she was aware, had no plans that would be detrimental to Alphacorp and none of the information that she'd passed on would really hurt the Free Company. It wasn't as if she was passing information on to the Trust. She'd reported Benjamin's loss and early this morning had reported his miraculous rescue, leaving out her own part in it.

Syke stood up and read out a list of the dead and said a few words about each of them. He said how good Wes was at his job. An elderly woman stood up and said what a good boy he'd been when the port immigration officer had brought him to the orphanage. “He was all elbows and knees.” She smiled. “Took him a while to grow into his height.”

There was no one there from the farm. Had they even been notified? Wes hadn't said he kept that part of his life separate from his job, but maybe he had.

“Do you want to say something, Kitty?” Syke asked.

“Me?”

“Don't be shy, just say what you feel.”

She stepped out to the front. “I didn't know him long, but Wes made me laugh. He was kind and gentle and loved animals and children. He volunteered at the community farm.” There was a small susurration of surprise among his fellow guardsmen. “I wondered if you knew about that. It would be the biggest thing you could do for him if you went and visited there, and maybe volunteered sometimes. They'll miss him. I'll miss him.”

When she ran out of words she stopped and sat down again, her eyes moist. Wes Orton had been in the wrong
place at the wrong time and the Trust had killed him. He was collateral damage. That whole segment of the station could have been collateral damage but for Ben Benjamin's insane idea to fly a bomb-laden ship into the Folds where it could do no damage.

Thank you for my life, Ben Benjamin.

She suppressed a flare of anger directed toward the Trust and the team it had sent. The best she could do for Wes was to keep Alphacorp strong, otherwise the Trust would be the uncontested pack leader of all the megacorporations, and that would be a disaster.

Ben felt like a freak.

Ronan, two more doctors he'd already forgotten the names of, and an implant specialist had all trooped in and out of his room in Dockside Medical, each offering different opinions about how and why his implant had disappeared. One doctor said it had dissolved, the other held to a weird alien technology theory. There was also the odd question of why his hair had reverted to his old style, adding a year's worth of growth in just a few days. It didn't seem like a big question in itself, but it raised plenty of others. He didn't think he'd been in the Folds for long, but his hair said something had happened.

He remembered being meat and rebuilding himself. Ridiculous.

The implant specialist wasn't interested in sudden and unexpected hair growth. He just shook his head and said he needed to call in someone else, a specialist.

“I thought you were a specialist.” Ben managed a soft croak.

“He's special, even among specialists. Not the most charming of characters, but he knows his stuff.”

Which was how Civility Jamieson came to be standing at the foot of Ben's bed, frowning down from a striking height. Ben was tall, but if he were standing next to Jamieson he'd be looking up. The man was cadaverously skinny, pole-like in stature, with steel gray hair and eyes to match.

He didn't offer an opinion as to how it happened, just tilted his head to one side as if Ben and his lack of implant were a particularly interesting puzzle to solve.

“I'd like to see if you can be reimplanted, if, that is, you wish to be.” He tilted his head to the other side. “Under the circumstances.”

“Circumstances?” Ben asked. His voice was a little stronger today, but his chest still felt raw.

“Well, it's not as if you're a Telepath,” Jamieson answered, as if that was the only specialization that mattered. True, Telepaths were the ones who tended to go nuts without their implants. Ben wouldn't go nuts, not screaming-and-banging-your-head-on-the-wall nuts, but he'd been open to the tides of the whole universe since he was sixteen years old. You couldn't lose something like that and remain the same. Being a Navigator was what he was.

Even though . . . He heard his own pulse pounding in his ears. Even though he didn't know whether he'd ever have the guts to go into the Folds again.

Did he have a choice? Maybe he did.

Part of him wanted to walk away from it all. Never have to fly anywhere again. When he thought about what had happened, the deep cold returned to gnaw at his bones.

Had it all been real?

Space-burned lungs and a broken wrist told him it had, but common sense told him it couldn't have been. Void dragons? EVA without a suit? Not possible, not for more than fifteen seconds anyway. Fifteen seconds to loss of consciousness, then death. Yet he'd been outside, not only in space but in
foldspace
, and removed four limpets from the hull of
Solar Wind
. Fact—otherwise he wouldn't be here now.

He dragged his mind back to Civility Jamieson.

Cara had come in on the tail end of Jamieson's last comment. She drew down her brows and pressed her lips together. He didn't need to be telepathic to know she was angry. Some communication must have flashed between her and the specialist's specialist that Ben wasn't privy to. Jamieson suddenly stiffened and then flushed red.

“I'm sorry, Commander Benjamin, I didn't mean to . . .”

Ben waved away the apology with his good hand.

“I can arrange for some tests: scans; a synapse map; a full assessment; aptitudes.”

Cara walked around and insinuated herself between Ben and Jamieson.
Bastard
, she mouthed silently where Ben could see her lips and Jamieson couldn't.

“I think Ben needs a few more days to recover before you start taking his head apart, Mr. Jamieson.”

“Yes, of course. Whenever you're ready, Commander Benjamin.”

“Take your time,” Cara whispered as Jamieson departed. She reached for Ben's good hand and squeezed it briefly, their only touch since he'd returned, not that he was counting. She'd been there when he woke and had been back and forth several times in the last few days, but conversation was still difficult. He missed having her in his head almost more than he missed having her in his bed.

Almost.

He was as weak as a kitten in that department, too, right at this moment. He hated to admit it, but, in all respects, he needed time.

He groaned inwardly. Nan to rescue, and a boatload of settlers to find. He didn't have time. He needed to be functional, and quickly, with or without an implant.

“What happened out there?” Cara asked the question he'd been dreading. Tell her the unbelievable truth and sound like a madman, or avoid saying anything?

He shook his head, “I really don't know.”

And that was the truth. He didn't know. He knew what his memories told him, but was that what had actually happened?

Ben didn't need to be an enhanced Empath to know that Cara was worried and trying not to show it. He'd never been able to rely on his telepathic abilities, so he'd always been sensitive to body language, naturally good at reading people without needing to be in their heads.

She squeezed Ben's hand briefly. The touch, skin on skin, was electrifying and he tried to hold on to her fingers for a few moments before she slipped out of his grasp. She flopped back into the chair, just out of his reach.

Ben stared at the hand she'd just released. That touch still thrummed through him. She really cared, despite all she'd been through and everything that had conspired to come between them. Here he was, feeling sorry for himself after just a few days and she'd been powered down for almost a year while she was on the run from van Blaiden.

“How did you do it?” Ben's voice was still little better than a grating whisper.

“Do what? Rescue you from
Solar Wind
?”

He shook his head. “On the run. You kept your implant powered down. Pretended to be a deadhead. How did you do it . . . and not go nuts?”

“I didn't have any choice. I knew they could track me the instant I used it. I wanted to live. I wanted to live more than I wanted to be a Telepath.”

He huffed out a breath and touched his fingers to his forehead. “I don't have time for this shit.”

“I know. Things to do, people to rescue. Windmills to tilt at.”

“
Don Quixote.
Nan likes old books.” He cracked a rueful smile. “Used to tell us the stories. I guess she figured we'd never read them for ourselves.”

“I've made a start.”

“On
Don Quixote
?”

“On rescuing Nan and Ricky. Mother Ramona tried to negotiate their freedom, but Crowder found out you'd survived before she finished the deal.”

Ben started to bristle. Rescuing Nan was his job.

“Oh, don't look at me like that. We thought you were dead. If you had been dead wouldn't you have wanted us to finish off what you started, free your family and find the settlers?”

He felt a shiver run through him. Of course he would, but not at the expense of any more lives.

“I . . .” He shrugged. “I've got a bad reputation for getting people killed.”

“You're in no position to be overprotective.”

“I guess I'm not.” It galled him to admit it.

She searched his face, possibly wondering if he meant it. Finally she must have been satisfied because she nodded and continued, “I've sent Tengue and Gwala to Chenon to nose around. They've taken Fowler.”

“Fowler? The mouthy woman with the burns?”

“That's the one. She sent you her best wishes—well—not phrased quite like that.”

“I can imagine.” Ben smiled. He liked Fowler. She said what she thought, not what people wanted to hear.

“She needs reconstructive surgery,” Cara said. “Ronan recommended a burn unit in Arkhad City.”

Ben nodded. “Neat.”

“Well, it was one way of giving them a good excuse to get in. I wanted them there as fast as possible. So far, so good. Hilde's gone independently. Max has given her the details for that contact of his in central records.”