Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (37 page)

Both women stared at her.

“Allacazam knows the things that are in your mind,” Reese said, working it out as she spoke, “that’s how he communicates with you. He’s hung in Hirianthial’s arms long enough to pick up something of what’s in his mind. Maybe he’ll have a memory of putting a needle like this in!”

“I’m not sure I followed that,” Kis’eh’t admitted.

“Me neither,” Irine said. “Try it anyway!”

Reese reached for the Flitzbe’s mottled fur, patched in magenta and deeper purple. Her hand creased the fibers. “Allacazam?”

A distracted bobble made her close her eyes and brace herself. She hadn’t realized the Flitzbe could make her doubt her senses.

Please
, she said.
We need help—

A wall this time. Not slammed before her, but just there. Was the Flitzbe actually turning her away? She listened carefully and heard a low buzz, like an annoyed insect. It didn’t seem directed at her. She caught edges of images that made no sense: a monitor above a patient, maybe. A distant alarm.

Is this a bad time?
Reese asked.

“Reese! Come back!”

Reese blinked a few times to clear her vision; as she pulled her hand away she saw the wound again, a translucent hole barely pulled together with brilliant white stitches. Allacazam’s fur wriggled as it released her fingers, and the vision vanished. The thick white lashes lining Hirianthial’s nearest eye trembled, then parted to reveal something mostly pupil, a great black hole with the slimmest rim of dried-blood red.

“He’s awake!” Irine squeaked.

“Hirianthial?” Reese said, hesitant with the name. She couldn’t quite believe his open eye above the taut gray skin of his cheek. He couldn’t possibly be conscious.

“Reese,” he whispered, and she bent lower to hear, low enough that his breath warmed her ear and lifted the hair along her arms. A few moments later, he finished, “They were alive. They
thought
.”

Her stomach clenched tighter. “I don’t understand.”

“The crystals. They were alive.”

“No,” Reese said.

Hirianthial’s eye closed, and Allacazam’s brilliant plum-purple faded to dark red.

“Reese!” Irine’s head lifted, golden eyes rounder than ten-fin coins. “He can’t be right... can he?”

“Crystal people?” Kis’eh’t mused. “That would be new. Not impossible, though.”

Reese could only look at Allacazam. How long had it taken the first humans to understand that the Flitzbe were sentient? A species that ate like plants, looked like furry volleyballs, reproduced by budding and talked in a way that could be mistaken for a brain disorder? Reese reached again for the soft fur, fingers trembling. She let her hand sink on top of the rippling fibers, closed her eyes again.

Is it true?
She asked the Flitzbe. She’d only known Hirianthial a few months, but Allacazam had been her companion for years. She trusted him.
Did we kill them?

A complicated mesh of color and sound resulted, blacks and lurid reds, blood and void, hues translated from the Flitzbe’s discordant electrical signals into ones with the proper associations. From the back of her mind, the crash of a thousand cymbals, like ice shattering against a stone floor.

Reese yanked her hand away.

“Reese,” Kis’eh’t said, touching her arm. “Keep him awake. He can talk us through the IV.”

“I think it’s too late,” Irine said.

It was too much at once, and anger had never been one of her easier masters. Reese grabbed Hirianthial’s shoulder and shook him, ignoring the jangled alarms Allacazam sent through her other hand. “Wake up! You need to drink something.”

Lashes parted again. The lines beneath his eyes were so deep they almost convinced her to let him die in peace. Instead, she said to Kis’eh’t, “Get the water. Real water, not whatever’s in that bag.”

The tools on the blanket scattered as the Glaseah lurched to her feet and grabbed a bowl.

“You,” Reese said to the eye. “You will stay awake until you finish whatever Kis’eh’t gives you. And you,” to Allacazam, “will only let him sleep once his body has what it needs, and not one moment earlier. Understood?”

Muted unease and an unexpected surge of dry humor. She imagined him saying ‘Yes, lady’ and added, “And stop calling me lady!”

“He didn’t say anything,” Irine said in a small voice as Kis’eh’t rejoined them.

Reese ignored her. “Watch him,” she said curtly to them both as she rose to her feet. “Keep him warm.”

Before the arrival of the crew, Reese had preferred to brood in the
Earthrise’s
vast cargo bays, perched on one of the horizontal spindles that would ordinarily have hung swollen with bins had she made a normal run. Instead she’d opted for a long flight to an icy middle-of-nowhere and ended up killing three boxfuls of crystal people. Same amount of money, but now she had blood on her hands. Water. Whatever.

Reese sighed and cupped her chin in small dark hands. One booted foot against the docking clamp braced her on her perch. The floor hung fifteen feet below her, but she had no fear of heights, particularly in the lighter gravity of the bay. The childhood she’d spent dashing across the branches of the eucalyptus that had grown unexpectedly tall on Mars had prepared her so well for her chosen profession. She’d climbed more than one tree, of course, but mostly the eucalyptus. And now those were trees she could no longer return to. Maybe it bothered her more than she let herself accept. She was very good at not looking at things she couldn’t let herself accept.

A shadow painted itself against the cool gray floor, bristling with feathers. Reese frowned, sliding her hands onto the spindle and leaning over.

“Bryer.”

He stopped under her and met her gaze.

“I came here to be alone.”

The Phoenix spread his wings and leaped easily onto the spindle alongside hers. Great clawed feet grasped the cylindrical axle as he crouched, tail fanned.

Reese sighed. “Look, I don’t want to talk.”

He trained that impenetrable eye on her, too much iris for his eye socket. One eye ridge twitched in a credible imitation of a raised brow.

She looked away, dropping her head. If he wasn’t going to leave until she talked, then she might as well get it over with. “Bryer... we’re murderers.”

He canted his head.

“The crystals,” Reese said. “They were living beings.”

He considered that for a few beats. Then, “A mistake.”

“Fine. So it’s manslaughter. It doesn’t matter if it was an mistake or not. Those things... we killed them.”

“Certain?”

Reese glanced at him so sharply her braids whipped her neck. “Hirianthial said so.” She looked down. “Besides, Allacazam agreed.”

“So now what?”

She twisted around to face him. “Now what?” she asked, incredulous. “Now what? Bryer! We’re killers!”

“That’s past now. Cannot be changed. Now what? What will you do?”

“I... I hadn’t really thought about it.”

The Phoenix mantled his wings. He looked alarmingly like a real bird in the heavy shadows of the cavernous bay. “Think now.”

Reese rubbed her forehead. “I guess I’ll call our buyer and tell him we can’t sell these things. Corpses. Whatever. Then contact the sector authorities and inform them of our findings.”

Bryer’s crest slicked back. “Better. You focus now on what needs to be done.” He straightened, leaped lightly off the spindle. “Do not lose focus, Captain.”

“No, Bryer,” Reese said softly.

His shadow receded. She strained her ears in the following silence until she heard the soft hiss of the door.

Reese hugged the axle and let her feet slide off so that she dangled above the ground. She landed lightly and headed toward her quarters with so little enthusiasm it surprised her that she even arrived. How should she tell her employers that she was backing out of the contract? They’d be upset, though perhaps they’d understand once she explained why. They might even be upset themselves. There was the cachet of having discovered a new alien species, even by accident... surely that was something to celebrate?

Of course, making first formal contact with aliens by presenting them with over a hundred corpses wasn’t ideal.

Reese dropped in front of her terminal with a sigh and entered the contact code the contract had stipulated for emergency use. The screen glowed blue and a status indicator in the lower left corner scrolled through the connection and handshake messages. The Alliance sigil popped up on the screen seconds later as the
Earthrise
punched the call through the loopholes some Tam-illee engineers had found in Well space. It took a few minutes to reach their destination and the screen de-pixellated on a pale weed of a human man whose narrow limbs and hunched posture made him look harmless... until one spotted his cold eyes.

“Captain Eddings? We weren’t expecting you.”

“Mm. Yes. I’m afraid we’ve run into a problem.”

The man leaned toward the screen. “I’m afraid you’ll have to solve your own problems, Captain. Just get to the delivery point within the specified time frame.”

“I can’t deliver,” Reese said.

He stopped. “Pardon me?”

“The crystals you asked us to get? Well,” Reese paused, then rushed on, “They’re living things. Or they were before our harvest killed them.”

The man’s mouth stretched into a grim smile. “And you discovered this how?”

“Our on-board esper evaluated them,” Reese said, alarmed by the glint of curiosity in his eyes.

“Your on-board esper? Curious, Captain. I had no idea you had one.”

“He’s a recent addition,” Reese said.

“Ah. Not your Glaseah, then,” the man said. “Perhaps this is the Eldritch.”

“How did you—” Reese stopped and composed herself. What did it matter if they knew about Hirianthial anyway? “It doesn’t matter, sir. What matters is that I can’t give you these people.”

“Corpses, Eddings. Not people. When will you be arriving?”

“You misunderstand me,” Reese said. “I can’t give you these things. They’re bodies! Of a new alien species! They need to be reported!”

She knew instantly she’d done something wrong, though the man’s voice remained calm and measured. “The contract you signed holds you to silence, Captain Eddings.”

“Silence about something like this? You must be making a joke,” Reese said and then stopped as a cold wave passed through her body. “Unless you knew.”

“A pity you didn’t read the paperwork more carefully,” the man said. “We would encourage you not to renege on the contract, Captain. We would hate to have to send someone to enforce it.”

Reese stared at him.

“You’ll be along, won’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” Reese said, and then galvanized by the threat, “Of course. They’re bodies right now... there’s nothing we can do about that. Why raise a fuss?”

He smiled again, though the smile never made it to his eyes. “We love a reasonable woman, Captain. We’ll see you soon.”

As soon as the screen blanked, Reese ran to the bathroom and dropped over the toilet, not trusting her stomach to remain calm. With her fingers clutched on the rim, she thought of the boxes full of dead people and the cold in the man’s eyes. It was no mistake that they were heading back to Sector Andeka, where Fleet had been trying to clean out the pirate and slaver activity. Somehow she’d signed up to do the dirty work for a criminal. The question was why?

“Why?” Reese asked. She wanted to pace; she wanted to shout, wave her hands, something. But Hirianthial’s body remained coiled on the floor and she couldn’t bring herself to wake him. So instead she sat, hands folded so tightly her knuckles hurt, on the stool just vacated by Sascha. “That’s what I want to know. The client’s given us enough money to make three boxes worth all the cargo we could stuff into the bays. He knows they were living—” her voice quivered, “So my question is... why?”

Kis’eh’t sighed as she rubbed her lower back. Then she removed the specimen and traced its flaws and cracks with delicate fingers. “I’m not sure. I’ve been examining them for several hours and all the tests I’ve run have been inconclusive... but that might be completely meaningless. This isn’t my specialty, but on the other hand, this isn’t exactly organic chemistry, either.” The Glaseah studied the read-outs scrolling across the screen. “Maybe he just thinks they’re pretty.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Reese said.

The Glaseah nodded. “I do too. This... this is a body, correct?”

Reese nodded.

“And we were not contracted for a specific amount of bodies, were we?”

Put that way, Reese couldn’t help but flinch. Nevertheless, she said, “No. Just to fill the boxes.”

“Then this specimen won’t be missed,” Kis’eh’t said and pulled a set of goggles over her eyes.

“Uh, Kis’eh’t—”

“Stand back, Reese.”

“What are you—”

The Glaseah whacked the crystal with chisel, shattering its base with a sound like claws on glass. Most of the column remained unmarred but from the broken middle oozed a translucent sludge. Kis’eh’t captured it in a vial and slid it with practiced motions into the sample station. She started a test running and washed her hands while waiting. “Let’s see what that wins us.”