Gates of Hell (35 page)

“You mean you need me to keep control of the Bucons.”

“I will provide your services to the emperor for a price, yes. But that is not all—”

“You owe me, Kaddani.”

“I will buy you jewels and pretty dresses.” He smiled at her sneer. “You are not going to try to talk me into sending all the information you have gathered about the plague to the Systems. Not until I know I am in complete control of the situation. What advantage will that bring to the People?”

“What harm?”

“Perhaps none,” he admitted. “But what profit?”

“You sound like a Bucon.”

“I’ll take that as the insult it is intended to be. I have dealt with the Bucons for years, kept them and the Systems and the Pirate League away from the worlds I love.”

“But who don’t love you. The fools.” She caught her breath, and damned herself for drifting into personal territory again. “We should not spend time together,” she told him. “The more contact, the worse it gets.”

“Worse?” His high-arched brows came down over his bright sapphire eyes.

“We’re—
blending
—you and I.”

“Bonding.” He looked like he wished he hadn’t said it. She’d been trying not to even think it. “To bond with someone from outside the People is unthinkable.”

“You’re thinking about it right now.” So was she. With unsettling longing. What was taboo for him was a religious obligation for a koltiri. And lord knew what sort of unguarded frolicking their subconscious minds had gotten up to while they’d cuddled up asleep together in the same bed.

“And I have named you of my clan. That, too, is not done with outworlders. Even at the time, I knew it was a foolish romantic gesture.”

“We are avoiding romantic gestures.”

“Not with any success, you will have noticed. Perhaps…” He sounded way too thoughtful, as though he was contemplating what they’d already decided would not be expedient. She unconsciously backed up a step, and ran into a piece of furniture. It turned out to be a chair, so she sat in it rather than stand there making melodramatic gestures that he could snicker at.

Pyr, however, continued to look thoughtful. “You asked once why I didn’t force a completion of the bond.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “And you gave a civilized response.”

“But I am not a civilized man. Any more than you are a civilized woman.”

How very true. She thought about them together, what they could do. Probably conquer the galaxy, if they wanted to. It would be fun. But it wouldn’t be right. “What about Siiyel?” she asked. “You said you didn’t want to replace your marriage bond with her with another.”

“Siiyel was my flimsy excuse.” Pyr threw back his head and laughed. The harsh pain of the sound drove her out of the chair. She was just barely able to stop from rushing to crush him in a comforting embrace. “Siiyel?” The name came out bitter, almost a curse. “Siiyel left me years before she died.” He looked at her and through her, down into her soul. “My marriage was as much a sham as yours.”

“But—you were bonded.” People who were bonded didn’t abandon each other.

“But still she went,” he answered her appalled confusion. “The bonding was arranged. She came to me like a sacrifice, a form of payment to the protector of the clan, but I loved her. We were happy enough, when I kept my thoughts as far from her as I could. I was still too strong for her. When she could take my intrusions no more, she found an honorable excuse to go away. Leaving me with no one in my bed, no one beside me, because she was afraid to stay.”

Roxanne wanted to protest, to announce angrily that such treatment was not right or fair or deserved. To tell him that his strength was wonderful, that he was a good man, a great man—a man who deserved understanding and support and love as a gift freely given. But to say those words would be to offer them, and she could not, would not. Millions of lives stood between them; the security and interests of the United Systems stood between them. What she could give to him was not the same as doing her duty as Physician and MilService officer. She wished desperately that she had never put on either the green or black uniforms of the services that defined who she was and what she had to do.

She could see how lonely it had been with Pyr, how his daughter had gone back to their people and he had raised his son, the boy an eager exile from a culture he’d never known. His three fellow anomalous telepathic friends, Axylel, and his stubborn honor were all Pyr Kaddani had. And her. She could easily see herself running into his arms and promising to ease his loneliness, to stay with him forever.

She concentrated on the commonplace. “You should check on Axylel and the rest of the troops.” She glanced toward the fresher. “You have the universe to save, and I need to take a shower.”

Pyr nodded, and stepped aside to let her go into the other room. She heard him activate the comm unit as she closed the door between them.

“Who are you?”

The hostility in Axylel’s voice was not unexpected. Martin kept his expression carefully blank as he turned from the medical workstation to face the young man on the bed. “Martin Braithwaithe.” He had gotten some information about Pyr’s son from the other elves, enough to help him decide on his initial approach to the young man.

Axylel was sitting up, glaring at him. The peace of healthy sleep had left him. Awake, every tense muscle spoke to Martin of remembered pain. There was hate for the world and himself in Axylel’s eyes, but the young man tilted his head at Martin’s answer, interest pricked. “I’ve heard that name.”

“I have been told that you are the
Raptor’s
chief datarat.”

Axylel swung out of the bed and came toward him, a lean young predator with more curiosity than caution in his eyes. “Why don’t I feel like shit, Martin Braithwaithe?”

“Long story. Tall blonde. But she likes your dad, so don’t get any ideas.” Inquisitiveness: Axylel fairly quivered with it. It overrode, if only briefly, the hell inside his own head. Good.

“Martin Braithwaithe’s famous. You don’t look famous.” Axylel touched him. Martin stayed very still. He detected no use of telepathy, but the young man said, “You feel like a Terran. Braithwaithe is Terran. MilService Sector Security Chief, Sector Eleven, stationed aboard the
USS Odyssey
. Secondary and tertiary specialties for sector ship assignment involve medicine and poetry.”

“Song lyrics. I write song lyrics, not poetry. Real men don’t write poetry, datarat. I’m flattered you have files on mere sector chiefs.”
And need to find and eliminate your source when I get home
, he added to himself.

Axylel took the second chair at the medical station. “Why would Commander Martin Braithwaithe tell an alien spy who he is?”

“To distract you from your troubles,” Martin admitted. He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Anybody tries to interrogate me, my head explodes, effectively getting rid of me and the interrogator. Besides, if you’re as good a datarat as Pilsane says you are, you’d figure it out when you get filled in on what’s happened while you’ve been missing.” Axylel’s expression went blank. He grew even stiffer with tension. “Hungry?” Martin asked. He reached across the console to let his hand hover over a comm button. “Should I call Kristi?”

Axylel looked interested for a moment, then a hint of controlled panic flashed across his face. He shook his head. He wasn’t ready to face friends and family.

“People are going to be in here demanding to know all you know pretty soon,” Martin told him. “You’re going to say you don’t remember a lot of it.”

“I don’t.”

He wouldn’t. Martin had seen the way Axylel looked before Roxy went to work on him, and had removed the deadman implant himself. Only a combination of drugs and pain would have kept a telepath from calling for help. Linch and Pilsane and Mik had each been in to have a look at Axylel while he slept. Martin had garnered a little information from each of them. Linch had told him about Pyr’s not being able to contact Axylel. So, lots of drugs were involved. Pilsane had told him about Halfor sending a message about training a replacement for Pyr to the Pirate League. Mik had told him about Axylel’s insatiable curiosity and skill at finding information. Only he’d been caught, tortured, and used against his father and people. Between the drugs, Halfor’s attempt to condition him, and his own sense of failure, Axylel was going to bury everything that had happened to him for a while.

Martin supposed telling the young man about some of his own bitter failures might sound condescending at this early point. He said, “Want me to tell you why you don’t feel like shit? Starting with when the koltiri and I come into the story?”

Axylel perked up again. “Koltiri? Talk.”

———

Roxy made sure the door slid all the way shut, but the controls wouldn’t lock the door at her voice command. Of course, Pyr could override any lock on the ship, so true privacy wasn’t possible. She laughed silently at the notion of being private from Pyr at all; the man was inside her head, for the Great Goddess’s sake! And he would stay there, and she would remain a part of him, but she would leave him. She would be another Siiyel.

“But for a better reason,” she murmured, with her hands balled into fists and tears streaming down her face.

He would be alone and so would she, but Sagouran Fever would be wiped from all the worlds where this ugly death had been spread. You paid the price you had to. He would understand that. He had a Door, she had her own way of traveling through space in a blink. It was difficult, teleportation terrified her, but she was strong enough, had to be, even though she’d spent much energy in healing Pyr’s son.

In fact, she and Pyr fed energy to each other, the connection already ran that deep without the
shalsae
connection that was possible between them.
Shalsae
. The full, complete, total completion. Her Terran father called it finding your soulmate, in spades. The Koltiran concept—reality for a very few koltiri—of
shalsae
was the great quest, almost as important for koltiri as continuing the Genesis. That she and Pyr could achieve
shalsae
was fanciful nonsense, or so she would tell herself in years to come. Centuries. Millennia. Being functionally immortal was about to turn into a real emotional pain in the ass. Perhaps she’d cut her hair and drape herself in mourning black—or the memory and melancholy would fade in time, and either way she should stop stalling.

It occurred to her that Martin might have lied to her about the telepathic spy to get her to do just this. Martin could lie to God and get away with it, and he would do it for God’s good, too. And the United Systems’. They were two good men, Martin and Pyr, but each saw only as far as their own borders.

Roxanne took a very deep breath and closed her eyes. The way to teleport was really quite simple. You only had to think of somewhere you wanted to be, and then be there. Of course, the trick was that you had to want to be there so badly that you could bend space, time, and reality to get you there. Where did she want to be that Pyr was not? The only place that came to mind at first was the final 1998 NBA game between the Bulls and the Jazz, but that was a few centuries away from the current crisis, and time travel really was too hard for most koltiri, despite any claims to the contrary in the recruitment brochures.

There really was nowhere she wanted to be that Pyr was not.

She opened her eyes and took another deep breath before closing them again. Where was the best place for what she needed to do? Easy answer. Nightingale, of course. The whole planet was a hospital and medical research facility, and deep, deep within United Systems territory. Pity she didn’t have any Rust on her, then she wouldn’t have to work completely from memory. Maybe she should go to the sickbay and get some. No, that was an excuse, she had all the information from her research stored in her head. Damn, she wished she knew what data Halfor had on the plague and the drug. Were the people inside his fortress Rust addicts or had they been given an already existing vaccine? She bet Pilsane knew. Another excuse. No time to talk to him.

Just go.

Nightingale. Right. She’d studied there, worked there, knew the place well enough to envision the exact room where she wanted to be. All it required was the power of a demi-goddess and an act of will.

Stop crying, you idiot, and go!

“Decryption of Halfor’s files coming along nicely, Captain,” Pilsane said. “But the news isn’t promising. Lots of great information about the guild and the League, but no luck yet in finding out if Halfor knew where the Rust originates. I think I have his list of suppliers, but haven’t broken the code to know for sure yet. Too bad you took his head off before you or I could get into it.”

“I was in a hurry.”

“Understood.”

“Did the guild have a vaccine? A cure?” Roxanne would want to know.

“Don’t think so.”

Damn. “Keep at it.” He keyed another channel. “Mik?”

“Door shields upgraded. Working on cloak at the moment,” the engineer answered. “Figure it might be fun to be able to slip away from those six ships if you decide you’d rather not visit the emperor.”

Pyr laughed. “I would like to be ready for that contingency. How close to the Shireny cloak have you gotten our cloaking device?”

“Not close enough. As it is, we could disappear, but the Bucons would pick up our signature within eight minutes. I’m trying to get it up to ten.”

Ten minutes would be a nice head start, but Pyr would like better odds than that if he was going to have a fleet on his tail. Cloaks were useful for quietly hiding, but only the Shireny design completely masked the use of a stardrive for more than a few minutes. “Keep working on it.”

He turned off the bracelet and pulled on a blue shirt from a pile of bright clothing. He would go see Axylel now. He
might
go through with the agreement to take the koltiri to the emperor. He was not opposed to keeping his word on principle, but it was wise to be cautious, and always prepared to bolt if things got complicated. Where were his boots?

A throbbing ache grew in his head while he moved around his quarters. He stopped looking for his boots and ran his hands over his face as he muttered, “Why do things always get complicated?” His vision blurred for a moment when he took his hands away.