Jenna Starborn (14 page)

He gave her a lazy smile, but I was able to read into it goodness and sentiment and affection. He helped her into the aircar, then climbed in himself. They waved good-bye to me and sped off toward the airlock, and within minutes were out of my sight. But I stared off into the distance where they had disappeared and I thought, as I had thought the first day I met him,
There is a rare and complex and intriguing man indeed.

T
he next two days, we again saw almost nothing of Mr. Ravenbeck. I was busy with routine maintenance and the implementation of the Arkady upgrades, so naturally I had no time to wonder about his absence. However, if I chose to rise early or go to bed late, I did catch glimpses of the estate hovercraft making its way toward the mining compound, or his larger Vandeventer returning from the direction of the airlock. Mrs. Farraday claimed not to know what his business was, though I was very grateful to Ameletta for posing the questions I would not bring myself to ask.

“Oh,
where
is Mr. Ravenbeck today? And
why
does he stay away so long?” My thoughts exactly, but no one could answer.

Nothing of any note happened during that time until late in the afternoon of the second day. I was making my customary rounds of the incandescent fencing when I encountered that strange woman Gilda Parenon hurrying across the lawn, a look of anxiety on her face. I changed my route to intercept her and called her name rather sharply.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. “You appear distressed.”

She gave me one quick, assessing, and somewhat apprehensive look. “No—nothing wrong. What should be wrong?”

“I merely inquired. If I can offer you assistance—”

“You'd
not be the one I'd ask for help in this matter.”

“Then there is something wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Good day, Miss Starborn,” she said, and hurried off without a backward glance. I looked after her thoughtfully, to see if she exhibited any erratic behavior, but though I distrusted her, I could not see that she did anything amiss.

Dinner was the usual counterpoint of calm feminine conversation, intermittent wails from Ameletta asking after Mr. Ravenbeck, and clinking of china and silver. Miss Ayerson excused herself early and dragged a complaining Ameletta away, I think to send her to bed merely to quiet her protesting. Mrs. Farraday and I retired to the library to read a while in companionable silence, and then I too went up to my room. I updated my journal and went to sleep.

A few hours later I woke from a strange, depressing dream to a sense of utter terror. My heart was pounding, my head felt like it was wrapped in terrific pressure, and I was gasping for breath as if my lungs had filled with fluid. For a moment I thought I was developing a malevolent virus, and then I felt the mattress under me seem to sway and swell.

The air-filled mattress, more comfortable than any I had ever slept on. Expanding rapidly as the confining weight of atmospheric pressure bled away.

The reactor! Failing in the middle of the night! I forced myself to my feet, for light-headedness was making me lethargic, and threw on a robe over my thin sleep-dress. All the rooms of the house were equipped with small portable oxygen tanks for just such an emergency, and I snatched mine up and clipped the mask over my face. Immediately I felt a return to my normal alertness, the oxygen no doubt aided by a spurt of panic-driven adrenaline.

I rushed out of my room and down the stairs helter-skelter, not pausing to wake any of the other residents. We would have a few hours of barely sufficient air left, for the fact that I was alive at all indicated a slow leak, not a catastrophic one, and I was better off to attend to the equipment than rouse the house. So I was thinking as I leaped down the second flight of stairs ... to see Mr. Ravenbeck's crumpled body lying half in and half out of the doorway.

My sob could not have been more theatrical had I been Ameletta. I threw myself down the final few steps and flung myself to my knees beside him. “Mr. Ravenbeck! Mr. Ravenbeck!” I cried through the muffling medium of my mask. I shook his shoulder but he did not respond; his face was ashen. Oxygen deprivation—no doubt the atmosphere outside was even thinner than that inside the shielded house, and he had fainted just before he could make it to safety.

I ripped the mask from my face and held it over his nose and mouth, letting him breathe the oxygen until I myself was in danger of fainting. Then I held the apparatus to my mouth, took a few more breaths, then held the device again to his face. He stirred on the floor and his eyelids fluttered. I saw him try to speak through the mask.

I shook my head, and gave myself another breath before returning the mask to him again. “Don't move. Don't speak. I'll get you a tank but I need to take this with me. I'll be back momentarily.”

I snatched away the mask and saw his lips form a word:
who
or
what,
I could not be sure. I did not wait to find out, but ran as fast as I could to the nearest room, the library, and grabbed the tank installed there. When I returned to Mr. Ravenbeck's side, he had fainted again. I attached the lines securely to his face, made sure he was breathing, then left him there and ran headlong to my basement workroom.

I was expecting a fouled fuel line, a meltdown in one of the cores, or any number of small emergencies that should have been signaled by an alarm bell that would have roused the house. What I found was sabotage. I stood in the doorway, frozen and appalled, staring. The damage had been crudely done, an instrument panel crushed in, an electrical wiring system ripped from its connector and the alarms themselves smashed in. The reactors had not been touched, but it would take some time to render the whole system operable again.

But who would do such a thing? And why? It was not only homicidal, it was suicidal, for anyone who stayed in this house unprotected would die.

No time to solve that puzzle. I hurried forward and began the task of rerouting the electrical circuits to the secondary generators, which could easily supply enough power to fill our needs, at least for a few days. It was not long before I could feel the eerie pressure on my chest subside as the forcefield reasserted itself and the voracious vacuum of space was forced back outward again.

I was so absorbed in my task that I did not hear Mr. Ravenbeck come in, and only when I had turned to go did I realize he was standing in the lab, watching me. I started, but did not scream. He had laid aside his mask and tank, though he leaned against the door frame like a drunkard and his color still was not good. He was watching me with a great and analytical intensity.

“Will we live?” he asked. There was an undertone of sarcasm to his voice that let me know he was not really afraid of the answer, but I was not in a mood just now to banter.

“I believe so, though I would like to check on the others,” I said sharply. “And I think you or someone should call out to the mining compound to make sure all is well there.”

“They are independent systems,” he said. “Theirs will not fail just because ours has.”

“It will if its failure is triggered by the same event.”

“Which would be what?”

I gestured at the smashed instrument panel. “Willful destruction. Someone took a hammer to the board and slashed through the wiring. The intent was clearly to disrupt the forcefield, and, I must assume, to kill us all.”

He stared at me in sheer incredulity. “Unbelievable! That would be an act of madness. Whoever would do such a thing would have to expect to die as well.”

I shrugged. “Take a look for yourself. I assure you, such destruction does not spontaneously occur even on the most ill-maintained machinery.”

But his eye had followed my first gesture, and a look of grim comprehension was tightening his features. “I see. Yes . . . you must be right. But—then—the awful question arises—”

“As to the identity of the vandal,” I said, somewhat eagerly, “I believe I may have a clue. In fact, I think I encountered her this afternoon, acting strangely out on the lawn.”

“You saw her! Impossible! Whom did you see?”

I thought his tone of voice a bit extreme even for the situation, for he seemed almost thunderstruck at the notion that I might be able to identify the culprit. “A woman named Gilda Parenon. She claims to be a tech support worker in the dubronium mine compound.”

“Ah,” he said, on a low, thoughtful tone, and his whole body seemed to relax. “Gilda Parenon is the one you saw. Well. I see. It is true she is subject to fits of—strangeness—but I hardly think this is her handiwork.”

“I think you should go investigate, sir,” I said urgently. “For if not Gilda Parenon, then who? And
if
Gilda Parenon, then why? I think you cannot trust her to stay in your employ—not when Ameletta and so many others are depending on you to keep them safe.”

“Gilda is well enough. You do not have to fear for her,” he said somewhat absently. Completely ignoring my advice to go look for answers, he strolled deeper into the room, his gaze running over the jury-rigged equipment and the merrily flashing lights on the instrument panels. “But why were we not alerted to danger? Is there not an alarm that should have woken us all before our lives began to ebb away?”

“There is,” I said shortly. “It was disabled. Chance alone led me to wake up in time to save the house—but it was almost too late to save you.”

His perambulations had brought him quite near me, and now he turned on me the full force of his regard. His eyes were so dark they appeared devil-black, and just now they were focused on me with an unnerving intensity.

“Yes. I have not forgotten. You need not remind me that you saved my life. I doubt I will forget from now till the day I die. I am not used to owing anything to anyone—I never borrow a dollar because I hate debt so much that it leads me to despise my lender. But, is it not strange? I am happy to be your debtor in this. There is nothing I can think of that I would rather owe you.”

I was a little embarrassed at this speech. “I merely happened to wake, and I happened to find you. Anyone could have done as much.”

“But no one else in the house has stirred,” he said quietly. “What supreme delicacy of constitution led you to wake when everyone else has merely slumbered more deeply? What small voice whispered ‘Danger!' in your ear and roused your fierce protective instincts to safeguard the ones you love? For there are many in this house you love, are there not, Miss Starborn? When you worked with such concentrated efficiency—I know, I watched you a good half hour—you were laboring to save Ameletta and Mrs. Farraday and Miss Ayerson and ... others. You would have worked just as hard to save strangers, I know—that is the kind of woman you are—but knowing that a slip on your part could result in the deaths of people you care for—that must have given your fingers greater quickness, must have sent the mental orders sizzling through the synapses of your brain.”

“I did not want anyone to die, sir,” I said quietly, for his talk was strange and made me uneasy, and I thought a sober answer might soothe him. “As I am one of the inhabitants in the house, some of my liveliness may be attributed to a sense of self-preservation.”

That made him smile, but the expression erased little of the intensity on his face. “That is the Miss Starborn I have gotten to know over the past week—valiant in such an unpretentious way that you cannot even get her to admit her heroism. Very well, we shall tell none of the others how close they were to oblivion, so that you need not suffer their gratitude as well. But I at least insist on thanking you—with all my heart, Miss Starborn.”

He held out his hand and, wondering, I put mine in his. I could not recite a dozen times in my life when a level-one citizen had touched me of his own accord; it was the highest mark of favor. He clasped my hand with a grip so firm it drew me a pace nearer to him, and he peered down at me from those black eyes as if he would devour my own soul to light his darkness.

“The first moment I laid eyes on you, when I saw your small figure stealing across my lawn, I knew you would exert some amazing and terrifying influence on my life,” he said, very softly and very rapidly. “I was trying to argue myself out of this conviction when I lost control of my aircar, so you see, you instantly fulfilled my dark predictions. You and I are destined to meet in confrontations more strange and violent than this one, Miss Starborn—that I tell you with no fear of contradiction. You are my good angel or my bad angel, I know that for sure, but I could not say for certain which you will prove to be.”

“I hope I am no man's bad angel, Mr. Ravenbeck,” I said, as calmly as I could, though his wild talk made it hard to speak without agitation.