Starfire Saga, page 58
The disruptor had to be destroyed beyond hope of repair, and I didn’t have any time to pathfind it. I took one of the operators and made him overload and subsequently fuse the beam guidance system, still on pause for the resetting. While he was doing that, I persuaded the other operator to take hold of a nearby charger stalk and begin smashing the control panel with it. I implanted in her the need to keep smashing until nothing was left but shards.
Without bothering to check for normal fire that might be aimed in my direction, I held the minds as long as I thought I could, then fired the liftoff jets of the capsule and let the ship haul me in. Under acceleration, I managed to get my faceplate closed, feeling stupid that I hadn’t thought to do it before lifting.
Jemeret was already on the capsule deck, out of his own capsule, and as I climbed out of mine, he hugged me hard, pulling open my faceplate again and probing for the strength of my reserves. He had preserved most of his own strength, leading me to believe that he’d accepted a much harder hit from his disruptor than I had from mine.
While I was still recovering my equilibrium and clinging to Jemeret, the crewman manipulating the retrieval beam called out, “I’ve got them!” A few moments later the third occupied capsule had been pulled through the airlock and dumped on the deck. Jasin Lebec signaled that he was all right, and Jemeret set me aside to haul Sandalari out of the cramped quarters. She was very pale, very nearly drained. Keli ran forward and caught her other arm as Coney started toward her.
I had to stop him. “Coney, seal up your suit.”
Jemeret told Keli to pump some restoratives into Sandalari, then went on, “We’ve got to get back down there before they realize what’s happening and have time to regroup at the remaining disruptor sites.”
We left Sandalari with Keli and ran for the second lander bay, where another stack of about a hundred capsules waited to be launched.
We had decided earlier that we needed to accomplish the second raid as fast as possible, even though it was only twilight at two of the sites, and we assigned the night site to Jasin Lebec and Coney. I felt a stab that I’d made him leave Sandalari before he knew that she was all right, but there was no avoiding it. We sealed ourselves into the three guided capsules and were dropped for the second time in less than a quarter hour.
This time, the blast from the disruptor was much harder to take, and I had to control as strongly as I could to keep from being sick, which magnified the nausea. It was a greater effort to release the flares, and when the beam lessened at last, I was gasping. My capsule was less under my control, and I hit the disruptor too hard and slid from the cabin roof to the support deck. I had my faceplate up before the capsule stopped bouncing, and my sweep for minds showed three—two inside the cabin and one approaching the capsule. I lashed once at the closest mind to incapacitate it, but restrained the blow even as I rushed to make the operators duplicate the destruction of the first raid. I couldn’t wait as long this time; my reserves were too low now. I pushed it further than I should have, but then I suppose I always do. The capsule had sustained one direct hit from a conventional needle beam, but I got the liftoff jets to fire, slammed the faceplate just as the gravity dragged on me, and then fought to stay conscious while the Megalume pulled me back in.
I was swimming in and out of awareness when the capsule was opened in the landing bay, and all I could see in a somewhat limited field of vision was Jemeret, looking exhausted, but certainly still stronger than I. He stripped me out of the power suit and picked me up, and I vaguely heard him say something like, “Don’t let anyone near her until she’s recovered.” I didn’t know who he was talking to. I felt his arms tighten around me, and I slipped gratefully into deep.
I was alone in the large bed in our cabin when I awoke. The bed field was off and the lights dim. Their faint flicker spoke of an energy drain, which startled me. I sat up, pushing aside the cover that had been laid over me to compensate for the field’s absence, and felt for the level of my reserves, finding them two-thirds replenished, but not full. I hadn’t been in deep long enough; something had awakened me. Tentatively, for the reserves had been drained more than was safe, I gathered. There was no pain.
Immediately, I swept a sensory scout outward in a search. Jasin Lebec was in his cabin, deeping. So was Sandalari. Tynnanna was pacing restlessly in his own cabin, but he had not attempted to come out the door. No one else was in this arm of Megalume.
I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stood up so fast that I had to gather to thrust away the resultant dizziness. My dark blue jumpsuit was lying crumpled on the carpet; I vaguely remembered it being soaked with sweat. I pulled another jumpsuit from the dispenser and yanked it on without pausing to alter the gold color to dark blue. Something was wrong.
I ran out of the branching arm toward the central bubble, sweeping for Jemeret, Coney, or Keli, but found none of their signatures as I rounded the bridge. I ignored the two cargo arms and the crew quarters, turning instead to the high watch arm with the conference room in it. My sweep this time caught the unmistakable sign of Jemeret’s presence, and I ran toward it as quickly as possible without accelerating.
It was issuing from the med. This door didn’t iris automatically to my presence—med doors were double, creating the possibility of a containment area within the ship—so I laid my hand on the control, pathfound it, and made it open. Once the outer door had closed, the inside door opened, and I nearly leaped into the inner med itself.
Keli spun, falling into a crouch, then straightening when she realized it was me.
There were four other people in the med, and I saw at once why power was reduced throughout the ship. It takes an enormous amount of energy to maintain a stasis field.
Coney hung in stasis, naked. He looked very much as I must have looked those years in the radiant fluid, except that my hair was longer and would have moved sluggishly, with the circulation in my tank. The horror of years of shut-off memory crashed once again upon me, and it was as if a blinding flash snapped through my brain. Even as the scream sprang out of me, I was fighting it, but the massive weight of the horror, so familiar, was threatening to overwhelm me. Coney was dead.
Distantly, I heard Jemeret’s curse and felt his mind capturing mine instantly. I could barely see, and in the grayness his face was very close. I think I might have started to collapse, but his hands on my shoulders were supporting me. Then I was unconscious.
Memory can be such a treacherous thing. Jemeret had truly thought I was ready to remember when he brought back the rape and the killing. But he’d been there, in my mind, when I remembered—keeping the negative emotions at a minimum, holding me up, bolstering a self-image still raked by self-condemnation. I had never faced it, suddenly, without him. Seeing Coney in stasis, thinking that I was responsible for the death of my other childhood friend—this time a man who had done me no harm, who loved me unselfishly—it all crashed back, like a wall exploding over me, burying me.
This time he caught me soon enough. This time I only lost a tenday. And, in some ways, we learned later, it was almost fortuitous because the MIs had observed it, and they suggested to the Tribunal in the strongest possible terms that the government make no attempt to separate us, so the theoretical examination of the validity of our marriage was unceremoniously dropped.
VI. The Spoken Waysong
“I’d’ve been able to wake you sooner if I’d have had more energy to draw on,” Jemeret said with an edge of regret. “You blew when Jasin and Sandalari were unusable, Coney was gone, and I had less than a tenth of my reserves left.”
I was lying pressed tightly against Tynnanna’s side, on the warm earth of one of Barbin 3’s wilderness areas. There were I scars from the war here, but there were also birds singing and the caress of sun-warmed breezes.
Coney and Sandalari had chosen to swim in the nearby lake, and we could hear them laughing. “Thank the stars he was reparable,” I said softly.
“Thank the stars you were,” he added. He sat down beside me, stroking my bare leg. “If I’d been a second or two later, you’d still be unconscious.”
“I started with my sight,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at him. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”
His hand went on moving slowly, gently, circling my ankle, cupping and molding my calf, rubbing my thigh. “Sight was what brought you the picture of Coney that you didn’t want to see,” he said, his voice as soothing as the movement of his hand. “That’s why you attacked it. I restored it last, and I woke you as soon as I could.”
I was strangely detached. “I’ve got to stop doing that.”
“You weren’t responsible for what happened to Coney.” He took my hand and raised me off Tynnanna, who sprang to his feet and leaped off across the grasses, tearing up the turf with extended claws.
“I don’t even understand why I did it,” I went on.
“The past is powerful,” he said, lying back and drawing me against his chest. “I suppose I should have expected some sort of recurrence, but I didn’t anticipate it at that moment.”
“Will I—will it keep—” The detachment seemed to sink away into the ground. “I can’t—”
He drew me in tightly. “It’s a problem,” he said flatly. “You now consider yourself responsible for humankind, as I believe you told me before we had a war to stop. And so you hate it when you feel responsible for anyone’s death, and the death of someone with power is even more abhorrent to you. Then you internalize the feelings and turn them on yourself.”
“I’ve got to learn to control it,” I said. “It took me entirely unaware, and I couldn’t stop it because I didn’t know what was happening.”
Jemeret pulled me higher on his chest and spoke against my forehead. “People are going to die, love. You and I haven’t the power to stop it from happening. Sometimes we may even have to kill them; sometimes there are no choices. I don’t want you to destroy yourself over them. There are some things we simply can’t control.”
“You brought Coney back.”
He nodded. “It was a question of how fast the ship’s personnel got him into stasis, and then it was just a question of refilling his reserves and reanimating him. Jasin didn’t realize how completely he’d drained him, because he was used to the size of his own reserves, and Coney’s were smaller even than Sandalari’s.” He sighed, his chest lifting me, lowering me. “If they’d been a minute or two later getting him into the stasis field, I’d have lost him. And I don’t like to lose.”
“I thought I didn’t either.” My voice sounded strangely wistful, even to me. “And I keep losing myself.”
He sat up, almost spilling me, took my shoulders and turned me toward him. “You aren’t losing yourself, Ronica,” he said, so strongly that I trembled. “You’re trying to throw yourself away, and I won’t let you do it.”
I heard Sandalari laughing, and I leaned in against my lord, letting him surround me with his arms again. “Then you’d better not leave me alone,” I said.
We had helped set in motion the end of the war on Barbin 3, and then we’d slept through it. Jasin Lebec recovered first, because his reserves had remained full, even though he was working hard accessing those of Coney and Sandalari. By the time he awakened, Coney was alive again, and we were all four asleep, so he was the only one of us who had actually been able to follow the remainder of the war. He was, therefore, the one in a position to tell us something about it.
Once the plasma disruptors had been put out of commission, the planetary corps units were able to retake the spaceports and bring in some MF reserves. The corps had, however, something to prove, and the bulk of the people supporting the rebels fled when no longer protected by the shield of the disruptors. Cephalic ray devices were turned over to the corps members without any argument, and it turned out that most of them had never been used. Arming a populace that does not care to use its arms is an interesting exercise in futility. The desire for a peaceful solution was not part of the thinking of the government decision makers once the war began; it never left the minds of the loyal citizens.
The government of Gayli Hatlo quickly reasserted itself, and the surface was calm. Most of the systems were in the process of being restored. The rebel leaders, who had been identified by DNA spectrograph, were apprehended and being transported by the rollship Felume to Orokell for trial. And, of almost no real importance to us, but somehow of surpassing importance to the government of Barbin 3, when we were recovered, they wanted very much to hold a banquet for us.
After a while I detached myself from Jemeret and walked away along the edge of the lake. I’d asked to speak to Jasin Lebec alone—it would be only the fourth time in our lives we met without anyone else present—and he agreed. Even though I knew there would be no such thing as complete isolation on the surface of a Com world, except, perhaps, in the wild, I decided I was going to speak as honestly as I could. I had decided that Coney might have been mistaken about my not showing the MIs that Jemeret had changed me. Though the MIs were seriously flawed when it came to understanding human beings, they understood the conservation and wise use of resources, and they had just seen Jemeret save me for a second time. If their analysis programs were working, they would already have computed that it took a Class A to save a Class A from a Class A.
We had emplaneted in the city of Jansen, named after the captain of the exploratory mission that identified the telusite deposits on this world. The city itself was peripherally touched by the war, but it had not been a major site, being primarily a recreational area for the mine workers. The wilderness area was not wild at all, but it was the largest of four on the planet.
We’d put Tynnanna in the open and warned everyone to stay out of it unless they had a pressing desire to become a klawit meal. Then we accepted lodgings in the lakeside villas reserved ordinarily for those with the highest productivity records. The rules would probably change after we left; the recreational complex for government managers had been destroyed in the early days of the fighting, and it was likely they would take over this one.
Jasin Lebec waited for me at the lakeshore, looking just as I remembered him—contained, controlled, and pleased to see me functioning again. “Are you recovered fully?” he asked me, gesturing to the bench beside him. “Your first assignment was an arduous one.”
I perched on the bench cross-legged, watching him. “As much as I could be, since I took myself by complete surprise and did more damage than the plasma disruptors,” I said. “Jasin Lebec, tell me honestly. Did you nearly drain yourself every time you went out on assignment? If not every time, then any time?”
He shook his head. “I never found it necessary. I was able to do subtle work. This war would never have reached a gross stage if I’d been able to turn aside the dissatisfaction of the rebels before the plasma disruptors or the Drenalion. That’s the way it generally happened in my term as Class A.”
I rested my hands on my knees. “Did you ever kill anyone?”
He seemed to reflect on that for a long time, his eyes distant, his face serious. Then he refocused on me, as if just remembering that I was there. “Directly?” His mouth twisted a little. “Not until I stupidly drained Coney in the battle capsule. But indirectly? I believe I was probably responsible for a number of deaths. They’re unavoidable in Com politics, even when a Class A is involved—here, anywhere, or anytime else.” His gaze was direct, level. “Do you ask me that question because you’ve killed a number of people, Ronica McBride?”
“Drenalion aren’t people,” I said with real conviction. “The part of them that would render them human got left out in the cloning, and any vestige of it that might slip through gets eliminated in the successive clone runs.” I remembered Evesti of the Ilto, and then the hitch, both of them my enemies, both of them out to harm me and those I valued. “Then sometimes someone you believe to be human turns out to be a Drenalion after all. And there’s no real regret necessary.” I looked away from him, across the placid surface of the water. “But killing a human being is something entirely different.”
Jasin Lebec said quietly, “And so it continues to haunt you, having killed Kray.”
My eyes flew back to him, startled.
“You’re no different from any of the rest of us, Ronica McBride, except that you’re a woman, and you have a woman’s way of internalizing the fault for things which cannot be helped.”
I heard him, but barely. I was thinking that if I had killed the brutish guard at the Lewannee estatehouse, it would not have bothered me, that if, when I first found myself on Caryldon, I’d had to kill Dogul to escape, I might have done it without a qualm. And yet over Kray and then again over Coney, I had punished myself immediately. The deaths that affected me most deeply, most overwhelmingly, were the deaths of people with talent. I was almost embarrassed by the revelation. I had just recently declared that to be Jemeret’s obsession, not mine.
Then I told myself that these were also people I loved. I know it’s perfectly normal to feel the deaths of those closest to us more than the deaths of strangers, but I felt that was somehow unworthy of me, of the honor the starfire had given me.
“My education has taught me that nothing can’t be helped, not when you combine technology and talent.” It was a basic lesson. He would know I’d been taught it.
