Chapter 5
The next morning Gillie dutifully sent Mack the ID and clearances Simon had manufactured and tagged to her repair report. An answer came back almost immediately; a small transnote with the simple header of R.K. Makarian, Admiral - Fifth Fleet: My office, fifteen minutes.
She wasn't sure what to expect. Had he unraveled her lies yet? She thought not, or it would be a contingent of security personnel or perhaps temple guards, not a simple transnote, requesting her presence.
It was 0830 hours and Mack's prickly attitude of the previous day was gone, replaced by a professional demeanor that was probably, she felt, more like his usual self. More like the aggressive, but respected, senior captain she'd read about the night before in the station's personnel files.
If he had a failing, it was that he worked too hard. Though Fleet probably didn't consider that a failing.
She waited while he reviewed her clearance papers and transit logs. His previous aura of suspicion had dissipated.
"Coffee?" he asked, in the middle of questioning her about recent shipments-totally fictitious shipments-with a Kemmon-Drin export firm.
She smiled, slightly surprised by his offer. "Coffee would be great."
He keyed in a request. An ensign appeared with a tray, moments later.
"Thanks, Wallace. I'll handle it from here." Mack dismissed the young woman with a nod. "I've never been one to be waited on," he added as his office door slid closed. "And I never, well, I'm usually not so short-tempered. Like yesterday."
"That's all right-"
"It wasn't. My apologies, Captain."
His sincere tone tugged at her. "Apology accepted, Admiral." She smiled, took the cup of coffee he held out to her.
The following morning, coffee was waiting when she hand-carried in her repair reports. She decided Mack was simply being efficient and thoughtful. After all, it was early and they both needed coffee. No reason not to share that ritual. She showed him her datapad bearing a schematics problem-a totally fictitious problem-that he'd offered to work on for her when she'd voiced her not totally fictitious frustration the day before.
The third morning Mack had a pot of coffee on his desk, two cups and a plate of fresh fruit.
How romantic! Your first meal together.
Stuff a sock in it, Simon! But the gesture touched her. This wasn't the Admiral Mack that Petrina had complained about. But this was, she had a feeling, the one the crew of the Vedritor knew.
Gillie sipped her coffee and watched a frown crease Mack's forehead. Her latest repair report, with its fabricated damage assessment, was closer to the truth and not overly optimistic. In spite of Simon's protestations to the contrary, her ship wasn't in very good shape. The destruction of the Fav'lhir ship in the tight unstable confines of the Rift had done considerable damage to the starboard neural interfaces that allowed Simon to integrate with and control the ship. Being the ever-efficient Simon, he'd transferred much of his functions to his portside systems. But even a Sentient Integrated MObile Nanoessence had his less than perfect moments from time to time.
Mack tapped one finger on a highlighted section of her report. "I have two Dal-Four analyzers due on station this week. If they come in I might be able to spare one for a few hours. It could help trace this power fluctuation glitch."
That would also require Simon to maintain the false image of the Serendipity in unerring detail while Khalaran techs crawled over her ship. He wasn't up to the strain, in her opinion. And things had gone so well to date. She didn't want to slip up now, didn't want anyone on station to even suspect who or what she was. She tried to sound appreciative but not encouraging. "There are a few things I'd like to work on first."
"If you need help-"
"Thanks. Not yet."
Something that felt like disappointment trickled briefly through the telepathic shield she tried to maintain around him.
"You have enough to do here," she added, feeling guilty.
His dark gaze held hers for a moment. "Sometimes too much."
"Easier to fix other people's problems?" She offered him a smile. It was almost 0900. Their initial five minute meetings had hit the half-hour mark. And their conversations were less about repairs and more about the odd quirks of living on Cirrus. She had a feeling she provided him with a diversion from some of those things he had to do.
He nodded, a glint of humor sparking in his eyes. His intercom trilled. He shot it a dismissive, somewhat annoyed glance that vanished when he looked back at her. "Oh-eight-thirty tomorrow?" he asked as she stood. "If that's convenient."
"No problem."
"Good." His intercom trilled a second time. His gaze didn't move from her face. "Tomorrow, then?"
"Tomorrow." She nodded then stepped through the opening door as she heard him answer the call with what sounded like a short sigh of frustration.
Bet you he'd rather it was breakfast in bed.
Oh, shut up, Simon.
She took a shuddering lift down to the repair bay, worked through lunch, nibbled at dinner while running three synchronized loop tests and wondered, briefly, as her head hit the pillow, if Mack weren't the only one working too hard on Cirrus.
She was jolted out of a sound sleep by pain searing through her. She knew immediately what it was. The strain of repairs on top of maintaining the freighter emulation, plus his constant monitoring of Cirrus's sensors, had triggered a cascade collapse in Simon's primary systems.
"Simon! Talk to me!" She dragged on the first articles of clothing her hands could find: a pair of workout shorts and an oversized sweatshirt. She stuffed her socks in her pockets and ran for the bridge.
"Simon!"
No need to shout, Gillaine Kiasidira. I am quite... awake.
"Where does it hurt?" It felt like everywhere.
'Where' is not the most functional concept at the moment.
"Gods damn it, Simon! Tell me what to do!"
Calm down.
"After that?" She brought up all screens as quickly as she could, engaged four different diagnostic programs. The bridge around her shimmered, lost its metallic components. Crystal was everywhere.
Don't let anyone come into this bay. I need...to phase back for awhile.
Phase back. Shit. More than the bridge was reverting to crystal.
She tore through the bridge hatch, raced down the corridor to the airlock. She had to secure the bay. Simon, dear beloved Simon, was coming undone.
* * *
She was late. Mack glared at the time stamp on the edge of his screen. Ten minutes late. The aroma of hot coffee was still strong and pleasant in his office.
Twenty minutes. The coffee had cooled. He considered calling her, dismissed it. He didn't want to hear she'd simply forgotten. Forgotten him. That would hurt, though he didn't want to think about why. The Gods knew he had more crucial things to fret over, between the current state of affairs on Cirrus One, and the most recent PSL reports.
Twenty-seven minutes. The fruit, carefully arranged on the plate, had ceased to glisten. And an edgy impatience wrapped around him like damp, clinging curtain.
He worked on other reports, but kept seeing the lavender and green depths of her eyes. Kept wondering what it would be like to hear her laugh. Wondering what it would be like to feel her lips against his. Wondered if his wonderings would matter to her at all.
Yesterday, he'd begun to think they might. There'd been something in her smile, a warmth in her voice that had made him want to hear that same voice in a different setting, saying words that had nothing to do with data feeds and errant system loops. Words that might answer his question of why he felt so illogically drawn to her. And why did it feel so right?
Those weren't words to be said in Admiral Makarian's office. His heretofore unimaginative mind played with images of Gillaine in his arms, soft and achingly sweet against him. He wanted to rub his face against her moonlit hair, his mouth over her...
He leaned back in his chair and squeezed his eyes shut. Counted to ten. Twenty. Worked on slowing the sudden rapid beating of his heart.
He had to get control of his inexplicably unruly imagination. He had too many problems on his desk, security patrols to coordinate, repair techs with no equipment to organize. He had no time for imaginings. No time for Gillaine Davré, especially if she didn't have time for him.
Though if she did. And if he did. Gods, if they...
Thirty. Forty. Seventy-five. He took a deep breath. Let it out slowly.
One hundred.
His intercom trilled. It jolted his newfound composure. He tapped the screen, saw Iona Cardiff's face. He assembled his own into what he hoped was typically "Make it Right" Makarian.
"Captain Adler wishes to speak with you, sir."
"Put him through." He arched the stiffness out of his shoulders while he waited. His imagination seemed to be back under his control.
"Admiral Makarian. Is this a convenient time to go over some data?"
"You sent a report?" Mack glanced at his inbox on the screen. It was empty. But then things had been known to sit for hours in Ops when Hebbs was there.
"I preferred to discuss this off the record with you first."
"Tell me."
"Those PSLs from Runemist." Adler leaned back in his office chair and folded his hands over his stomach. Mack remembered that padded chair, missed it sorely. In more ways than one. "In the past twenty-six hours, our sensors have recorded small flashes of what, for lack of a better term, I'm going to call an anomaly."
"Smugglers? Fightercraft?" Or the return of that mysterious Fav'lhir ship? He'd doubled sensor sweeps since the attack but things had been blissfully-almost eerily-quiet.
"Neither. At least, that's the best my science officer can determine."
"Not a ship of any kind."
"No."
"Then what, Captain?"
Adler pursed his lips for a moment. "We don't know."
"That's unacceptable."
"I fully agree. I wish I had something more to offer you. You'd requested we watch all movement in Runemist, and we are. This is the only thing we've seen. And there's no known explanation for it. Right now."
Just like the phantom ships that had attacked his station three days ago. He'd never filed a report on Tobias's findings. It would go through too many eyes before it reached HQ. The more he thought about it, the more he realized he couldn't risk a riot.
Or risk someone at HQ questioning his sanity.
"What's your science team's best guess?"
Adler wasn't comfortable with the question, nor his answer. "It's not a wormhole. And there's never been a jumpgate at those coordinates that might disintegrate, cause...this anomaly."
"We're talking energy field?"
"Possibly."
"Antimatter? Black hole? Did your science team give you anything at all to work with?"
"Only this." Adler tapped his screen, brought up an image from the Vedritor's science labs. Something suspended in an anti-grav containment field.
Mack leaned forward. "Magnify."
The image of the object doubled, tripled, until all Mack could see was a wide jagged sheet of crystal. It glistened in the overhead lights, giving off a faintly purple hue. There were indistinct black markings trailing across its left quarter.
Mack forced himself to blink. "Tell me, Adler."
"It's a sheet of crystal, sir."
"I can see that. Where'd it come from?"
"From, or through, that anomaly."
"Yesterday?"
"We sent a probe in. This came out."
"Why is it under containment?"
"We did that as a precaution. After we tested it."
"Is it radioactive?"
"No, sir." Adler hesitated. "It's Raheiran."
* * *
Mack made sure the conference room door was locked securely before he tabbed the screen back on. Steffan Adler's face came into focus. The long object behind the Vedritor's captain was slightly blurred.
He pointed at Fitch Tobias, seated at the conference table. There was no one else in the room.
"Tell him," he ordered Adler.
Adler did. Tobias listened quietly until Adler was finished. "May I see it on close-up?"
Adler stepped aside.
Mack paced. Tobias's parents were part of the Kiasidiran temple in one of the Kemmons on Nixara. He was an unofficial expert on the technologically advanced yet mystical, and skeptics said mythical, Raheira. And Raheiran crystal. If Tobias couldn't determine what this was, Mack would have no choice but to go to temple authorities on Traakhalus Prime.
He didn't want to do that. Not until he did a little more research. And had a chance to go over Tobias's report, for the tenth time, on their phantom, possibly Fav'lhir, attackers.
The Raheira and the Fav'lhir. By the eyes of the Holy Goddess. If this didn't get him a permanent suite in the Home for the Devotedly Delusional, he didn't know what would.
Tobias was nodding, manipulating the image left and right, up and down. Three times he ran the vidcam's lens over the scrawling black markings, then made notes on his datapad.
Finally, he sat back. "Admiral? Captain Adler? Thank you. I think I have what I need to work with for now."
Adler's face flashed on screen. "Admiral?"
"We'll get back to you."
The screen blanked. Mack glanced at the door one more time. Then back at Tobias. "Tell me."
"I have no reason to question what our-their-science labs determined. It's apparently a large sheet of Raheiran crystal."
"From?"
"A ship."
"A ship?" Mack felt like an idiot's echo. He lowered himself into the chair across from Tobias.
Tobias put his datapad between them, tabbed the screen up at an angle. "Those black marks are Raheiran symbols. Writing."
Mack's mouth suddenly felt dry. "Can you read them?"
"I can read the part that's there."
There were times when Tobias's literal-mindedness chipped away at what little patience Mack had. This was rapidly becoming one of them. "Fitch!"
"L'heira Ixari." Fitch Tobias ran one thick finger across the top of the screen. "It's part of a blessing to the Goddess of the Heavens for protection. Most Raheiran ships carried that on their hulls."
As far as Mack knew, the Khalar had been visited by only one Raheiran ship in recent centuries. But he let that fact pass, for the moment. "And this?" He pointed to the series of markings underneath. A large section of the middle was missing.
"The first part is the Raheiran honorific, Lady. The broken section, of course, we have no way of knowing. Most likely, given the honorific, it held the Lady's given name. It appears to end, however, in the letters 'N' and 'E.'
"And this," he said, pointing to the final series of markings, "is the other part of her name." His fingers traced the markings on the screen as if he needed to reassure himself they were actually there. "Kiasidira."
"Kiasidira." That damned echo was back though this time it sounded distinctly strained. "Do you have any idea of what you're saying, Lieutenant?"
"Quite, sir. You know my parents-"
"I know about your parents. Tell me exactly what's sitting in the Vedri's science lab!"
"A part of Lady Kiasidira's ship. That's my best guess."
"Guess? You don't guess about something like this. What are the chances it's a fake? A prank?"
Tobias laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles with a loud pop. "Always a possibility. With most other substances, we could run a Maxor test to determine approximate age. If this were part of the Lady's ship, it should be about three hundred and forty years old."
"You're talking Raheiran crystal."
"Yes, sir. I believe what you're getting at is that Raheiran crystal defies age testing."
"That's exactly what I'm getting at. What are our options?"
"We only have one. See if we can't find the rest of the ship. Sir."
* * *
Mack had always found peace by just sitting in the Lady's temple, yet this time, that sense of respite eluded him. Maybe it was because he could only spare a few minutes; his usual, twice weekly meditations took at least fifteen. But it was a few minutes he sorely needed to try to calm the unsettled feeling hovering around him.
He left the temple still edgy and headed for the officer's mess on U4. All the tables were empty. It was too late for lunch, too early for dinner. He grabbed two sandwiches then strolled quickly toward his office. If the Gods were with him, there'd be a message from Gillaine. He hoped it would be friendly; it didn't even have to be an apology. Friendly would do. He needed friendly right now if he was going to navigate successfully through the rest of his day. The morning's events-and for some reason the adjective cataclysmic kept coming to mind-had put him more than several hours behind schedule. As well as in a decidedly unsettled mood.
The fact, if it was indeed a fact, that a portion of the Lady Goddess Kiasidira's ship should appear in a quadrant under his command might have been considered by many to be a blessing. But given his current situation, with the rehabilitation of the Fleet's portion of the station and the lack of cooperation from Hebbs and her people, for him it wasn't. Plus there had been the disappearance of just about everything he had requested from Fleet Procurement... And then there'd also been the mysterious attack on the station and Tobias's supposition about the Fav'lhir, which had resulted in increased security patrols. And all of this had been underscored by the constant screeching presence of the parrots... He couldn't forget the parrots! Given all that, this was just another item on a long list that Mack had titled "What Now?"
Still, the mysterious piece of crystal was one of the more intriguing entries on that list, the appearance of Captain Gillaine Davré notwithstanding.
Temple priests were forever looking for omens to signal the pleasure (or displeasure) of the Gods toward the Khalaran people. There had been few, very few, as far as Mack could remember. A holy statue of Merkara toppling for no reason. A strange discoloration appearing for a brief time on a revered piece of Raheiran crystal.
Interpretations were vast and varied.
But to the best of Mack's knowledge, nothing of this sort had ever occurred before.
There were only three genuine articles that the temple authorities put forth as confirmed Kiasidiran relics. The most well known was the Lady's sacred ceremonial sword with its short blade and jewel-encrusted hilt. That, according to temple historians, had been found in her quarters in Port Armin after that fateful day over three hundred years ago. It was now heavily guarded in the main temple.
He'd viewed the sword twice; once as a child traveling with his grandfather, and once while in the academy, when he'd felt the need for the Lady's special guidance.
There was also the original datapad bearing the first six of the Lady's Holy Guidelines for Life. That, too, had been found in those same quarters and was now secure in a vault under that same temple.
The least known, and least viewed artifact, was a brief section of a holovid of the Lady herself, attending a celebration. The vid's encryption was fragile with age, preventing any duplication. He'd never seen it. It was said to be viewed only by the privileged and most devout of her priests, and rarely spoken of except in hushed tones.
He wondered if Tobias's parents had ever seen it.
There was, of course, a veritable plethora of one-of-a-kind, guaranteed-to-be-genuine Kiasidiran relics. Most of those fraudulent items were hawked in mass quantities by beady-eyed merchants on every station and populated world in the Khalaran Confederation. Since Raheiran crystal reacted physically only in the presence of a true Raheiran, and since Lady Kiasidira was the only true Raheiran the Khalar had seen in several centuries, these merchants were free to profess their crystals and runestones as the real thing, without fear of refutation.
Mack even owned a few crystals. A spacer could never have too much luck. He just wasn't sure what kind of luck this latest find would bring him.
He knew that it was imperative the find be kept secret. Until he, Tobias, and the science team on the Vedri were very, very sure. Because he didn't know what would be worse: a mass exodus resulting from a rumor about the return of the Fav'lhir, or a mass influx resulting from a rumor about a section of the Lady Goddess's ship on Cirrus One.
He finished his second sandwich, leaned back in his hard office chair-maybe there was a spare on the Vedri he could appropriate-and noticed his inbox flash on his screen. A message from Gillaine had not been waiting when he'd walked in. His finger hesitated only a moment before it tapped the icon. Admiral Makarian. Your assistance is required in Bay 15 D11 immediately.
There was no signature. Not even a transmitting terminal designation. But he knew Bay 15, D11.
Gillaine.
He sprang from his chair.
It wasn't quite the end of main shift. Lines at the lifts were few. He grabbed the first one, keyed in a command override to keep it from stopping at other levels.
"Down 11," the autovoice declared through the overhead speaker. "Fleet and commer-"
He lunged out of the lift before it finished announcing its terminus, strode quickly down the corridor. And almost smashed his face against the sliding doors to Bay 15 when they didn't open automatically.
The palmpad showed the auto-sequence was disconnected. Something was wrong, very wrong. Had he been prone to imaginings, he might almost feel it in the air.
He slapped his commbadge. "Makarian to Ops. Put me through to the Serendipity."
Silence for ten, fifteen heartbeats. "Serendipty's not responding, sir."
He shoved the small scancorder from his belt against the palmpad, keyed in his override commands. He should've done that to begin with.
The doors slid open.
The ungainly Rondalaise-class freighter, still showing signs of damage, was in the middle of the bay, servostairs at its bow and stern. A toolbox was at the base of the ramp. She'd evidently been working on repairs. Everything looked normal.
He trotted quickly up the ramp stairs, noticed the exterior hatch was closed. He was about to hit ship's com when it slid open.
But no one stood in the airlock.
A chill ran up his spine. "Gillaine?" His voice echoed in the narrow corridor.
There was no response.
He wondered if he weren't mistaken about the message, or if it weren't a prank - another prank?
Then he heard a soft, pitiful sound. A low moan.
He bolted toward the bridge, his heart in his throat.