Urgent voices came from outside and the scrape of booted feet. Eldrinson’s sensitized mind reacted to nuances his ears couldn’t yet discern. “No! She must not—see me—”
“Who, Father?” Shannon asked.
The voices resolved into Skolian Flag, a tongue flat and harsh after Shannon’s Trillian. Then a woman spoke in Trillian, almost chiming, though she had never learned to make the true sounds. Didn’t have the right vocal cords …
“They’re here!” Shannon’s boots crackled as he jumped to his feet. Eldrinson reached out to stop him, but Shannon’s footsteps were already receding across the tent. Rustles came from the entrance, then the scuff of feet and someone’s abrupt intake of breath. The sharp odor of the oil Brad used in the flyer cut through the air. Currents moved across his face as people knelt around him, creaking, scraping, clinking.
“Eldri?” A soft palm cupped his cheek. Tears filled her voice. “Eldri, can you hear me?”
He pulled his head away. “Roca, leave me.”
“I can’t.” She was crying now. Her hair brushed his arms, his hands, his face, its clean fragrance painful in a way that no medicine could help. She pressed her lips against his forehead and he wanted to weep with the bittersweet agony of knowing he could never again be the man she had fallen in love with.
Other people were doing things, placing cool strips on his neck, moving blankets from his body, no doubt examining him with marvels of medical technology he couldn’t see. A syringe hissed against his neck. He felt Roca’s anguish and it tore him apart. Someday their children could be the ones lying broken and tortured, victims of the Traders, and he couldn’t stop it from happening no matter how hard he tried, because they had chosen to fight and nothing he did, nothing he said would ever stop them. A father had to protect his wife and children, always and forever, but he couldn’t, not even in his own lands, and it was killing him more than his shattered body.
He meant to tell Roca to leave. But for the first time in days, forever it seemed, the pain was leaving his body, truly leaving, not muted by herbs but genuinely going away.
“I can’t feel anything,” he whispered, switching into Skolian Flag for the doctors.
A man whose voice Eldrinson didn’t recognize spoke in Flag. “We’ve given you a neural blocker, Your Majesty.”
Majesty. He wished they would stop calling him that. But he was grateful they had stopped the pain.
“Can you heal him?” Roca’s voice asked.
Silence followed her question. Then another voice spoke. “We will do our best, Councilor.”
“Where is Shannon?” Eldrinson asked.
His son answered from farther away. “Here, Father.” The scrunch of cloth and mail came from Eldrinson’s right. Then Shannon spoke next to him. “The doctors will fix everything.”
Eldrinson reached out and his knuckles brushed a tunic. Someone grasped his hand.
“I’m right here,” Shannon said.
“You saved my life,” Eldrinson whispered. “Even more. You stopped Vitarex … from taking me offworld. He was ready to leave.” Roca and ISC wouldn’t have made it in time to stop him.
“I should have never run away.” Shannon wasn’t trying to hide his guilt-torn emotions. “Then you wouldn’t have come after me and he wouldn’t have caught you.”
Roca spoke in a murmur. “Shannon, no, it’s not your fault.”
“Listen to your mother.” Eldrinson took a breath, determined to put strength in his words. “Had Vitarex not captured me while so many people were searching for you, we would have never known he was here. Until too late.” He kept going despite the drugged lethargy overcoming him. “His plan might have succeeded. You stopped that. You. Shannon.”
Silence followed his words, as everyone in the tent absorbed the implications. By running away, Shannon may have averted an interstellar war.
“But what about Althor and Soz?” Shannon sounded bewildered. “What if they are captured?”
A man, one of the unfamiliar voices, spoke quietly in Flag. “Jagernauts have options. If necessary, we can end our lives using the biomech web in our bodies.”
Would it come to that? Would war force his children to commit suicide? Would they die in the cold reaches of places unknown and unimaginable? Nor was it only Sauscony and Althor. Kelric would go someday, when he was old enough. Wanderlust drove the boy. It was too much. Unbearable. Eldrinson rubbed his useless eyes. If only he, too, had a biomech web so he could finish this, for he couldn’t live in a universe as harsh and inexplicable as the one his wife’s people and their enemies had created.
“Love, don’t.” Roca brushed her knuckles against his cheek in that way he loved. “You will get better. Our children will be fine. We will protect Lyshriol. You will see.”
He wished he could believe her. But those pretty words meant nothing against the truth.
The white ceiling blurred. Soz lay on her back, aware only of the pain in her legs. It shouldn’t hurt this way. The tests all said her body would easily take the biomech. She refused to believe they had been wrong, that her body was rejecting the augmentation.
A blurred face moved into her line of sight. A gold face.
“Kurj?” she asked.
Her half brother raised his inner lids. He regarded her with gold eyes, his usually impassive face creased with concern. “How are you feeling?”
She wanted to say she felt fine, just great. But they had to know. Today she had become among the most expensive and complex pieces of military equipment built by ISC. They had designed a biomech web from her own DNA and woven it into her body. It included many components: threads that linked to sockets in her neck, lower back, wrists, and ankles to an internal mesh node in her spine; bioelectrodes that spurred her neurons to fire according to directions from either her node or brain, allowing communication between the two; nanomeds that patrolled the implants, healing and repairing, dispensing chemicals to prevent rejection, and working with the other nanomeds she already carried that maintained her health and delayed her aging. And that was just the start. They hadn’t yet given her the operations to increase her speed and strength or the microfusion reactor to supply energy.
“My legs hurt,” Soz said. “My sight blurs.”
A long silence followed her answer. Too long. She hadn’t expected to awaken this way. Doctors and biomech techs should be here, checking on her, testing how her body had taken the web. Although it made sense that Kurj would want to see how she dealt with the operation, he should have come with the doctors. She couldn’t see him clearly, only the blur of his face.
Then he stepped away.
Disquieted, Soz probed his thoughts. His mental shields glinted bright and metallic in her mind, like his inner eyelids. She didn’t push at his barriers. It would never work. No one had his mental strength. But just as someone with less strength might be more nimble than a heavier fighter, so she had more finesse as an empath than Kurj. She edged around his mind looked for chinks in his shields. She found a hint, something serious, something he didn’t want to tell her—
Her father?
Soz strained to focus. What was wrong with her eyes? The operations included no optical enhancements. It shouldn’t have affected her sight.
Over the next few moments, her vision cleared. She was lying in a hospital room with a glossy white ceiling and walls which could also project holographic images. Turning her head, she saw a long white counter that stretched along one wall and ended in a console molded from seamless curves of Luminex. A multi-tiered, wheeled cart-bot with supplies stood by her bed. No, “bed” wasn’t accurate. She lay on a mech-table with embedded components that could recognize tension in her body and adjust as necessary for her needs. Right now it moved subtly beneath her, probably to ease her stiff muscles. A robot arm was folded against the table, silver and chrome, quiescent now but with lights glittering along its length.
Then she realized she and Kurj weren’t alone. He stood across the room with Secondary
Tapperhaven, the two of them deep in a conference, communicating with the comms in their gauntlets by tracing messages on the screens. Kurj towered over the Secondary. He wore khaki trousers, knee-boots, and a pullover with a single gold line of ribbing across the torso that accented the width of his chest and shoulders. His uniform had no adornment, no medals, no indication of rank anywhere. He needed none. Everyone knew he commanded ISC.
Soz squinted at them. Here she was, just waking up, worried about her father and these changes in her body, and they were over there having a secret conference. She sat up and winced as pain stabbed her legs. The glimmering white sheet fell down around her hips, leaving her in a white medshift that fortunately was smart enough to keep itself closed in the back. She crossed her arms and scowled at Kurj and Tapperhaven. Neither had noticed she was fully awake yet.
“Are you done telling secrets?” Soz asked.
Tapperhaven jumped and Kurj glanced up. Soz had no idea how she looked, but for some reason Kurj smiled. “Good evening,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Soz slid off the bed and stood next to the cart-bot. Her legs wobbled but she caught the cart in time to hold herself upright. Then she glared at Kurj.
Tapperhaven strode over. “Cadet Valdoria, you should get back into bed. You’ve just had several major operations.”
“Is that an order, ma’am?” Soz asked.
The Secondary spoke dryly. “Yes, Cadet, that is an order.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Soz pulled herself back up on the bed and sat with her legs hanging off the edge, waiting to see what they were planning. Kurj joined the Secondary, his expression concerned. That worried Soz more than any rebuke he may have given her. He never looked at her that way.
Soz spoke uneasily. “Is my body rejecting the biomech?”
Kurj’s inner lids came down to shield his eyes. “No, it doesn’t appear so.” What was up? “Is it normal for my legs to hurt this much?”
He spoke carefully. “The pain will pass.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” Soz’s muscles bunched under the hospital shift. “What went wrong?”
Tapperhaven spoke quietly. “The operations succeeded.”
Soz had always been a good judge of whether or not a person was lying. It came with being an empath. Tapperhaven had given her the truth—as far as the response went. Soz wanted to insist they tell her, but she knew it wouldn’t work if she pushed too hard. She took a calming breath. “Sir, if my father has been hurt, I request you let me know.”
She thought he would say nothing had happened or tell her in some taciturn manner that she had no need to know. The last thing she expected was the grief in his voice. “In many ways, Soz, it is easier to deal with you when you are glowering like an irate warrior goddess.”
Soz didn’t know what to make of his response. “What happened?”
Kurj glanced at Tapperhaven. She nodded, accepting some unspoken command, and withdrew across the room. She took a post by the door as if she were a guard. That disturbed Soz even more. An officer with a rank as high as Jagernaut Secondary wouldn’t act in such a role unless this dealt with a far more serious situation than her biomech.
“Tell me,” she said.
Kurj spoke with difficulty, something she had never seen from him before. “Your father has been hurt.”
Ah, no. No. “How?”
He indicated her legs. “It should be impossible for you to feel what happened to him across so many light-years. But it has affected both you and Althor.”
“My father hurt his legs?” How? A fall in the Backbone? A seizure? She had seen him have a tonic clonic attack once, and it had scared the blazes out of her. He had been out of danger for so many years, she had forgotten the severity of his condition.
“I’ve been in communication with Colonel Corey Majda,” Kurj said. “She commands the Lyshrioli ODS.” He gave her the information without pause. “The Traders got into Lyshriol. We aren’t yet sure how. Majda’s people found only the jamming equipment and one comm with off-planet range. ESComm apparently planted one agent and meant to pick him up when he finished his mission. However, they have denied any connection to his presence there, and he covered his tracks too well for us to prove their involvement.” He lifted his hands, then let them fall back to his sides. “Soz, I’m sorry. They took your father.”
“No!” She heard his words, but she couldn’t believe them. It couldn’t be true. “Has ISC caught them?” Her words tumbled out. “Did he escape? Will he be all right?”
“Yes, he escaped. We don’t yet know how ESComm placed an Aristo on the planet.” Fatigue came through in his voice. “But your father is receiving the best care ISC can provide.”
Soz didn’t miss what he left out. “How badly is he hurt?”
“We don’t know for certain yet.”
“Tell me.”
“Soz—”
“Tell me!”
Kurj answered with more regret than she would ever have expected him to show for the stepfather he hated. “He may never walk or see again.”
Soz clenched the table until her fingers and thumb hurt, her thumb, on her Skolian hand, just like Kurj’s hand, so unlike her father’s four-fingered, hinged hand. “That must be wrong. Surely ISC can help him.”
“We will do our best.” Kurj spoke quietly. “I won’t deny I’ve never done well with your father. But I would never have wished this on him.”
This was an aspect of Kurj she had rarely seen, indeed, one she doubted most anyone alive had witnessed except their mother. The iron-hard dictator had a human side. Kurj’s decades of dealing with the Traders had scarred him so deeply he would probably never heal, but the passage of years had ameliorated his antipathy for the man he had almost killed to prevent his marriage to Roca. His inner demons and outer horrors had made him into the unyielding Imperator, but a human being, an empath, existed beneath those hardened layers.
“Will you let me know when you find out more?” Soz asked.
“Yes. Immediately.”
A ping came from across the room. Soz glanced up to see Tapperhaven speaking into her gauntlet.
Kurj spoke to the Secondary. “Are they asking about Cadet Valdoria?”
Tapperhaven nodded to him with the extra respect J-Force officers reserved for the Imperator, who had once been one of them. “They want to come in and continue the tests.”
“Very well.” Kurj gave Soz a dry smile. “You up for being poked and prodded?”
She sat up straighter. “Yes, sir.” The sooner she could start to use her biomech, the better. She thought of her father. She had even more motivation to become as deadly against the Traders as possible.
As soon as Tapperhaven spoke into her comm, the door slid open and three people entered. Soz recognized the two in white jumpsuits: Dr. Callie Irzon, the primary biomech surgeon assigned to Soz; and Dr. Tine Loriez, a lanky man with intense eyes, the surgeon who had assisted in the operations. Both had the J-Force insignia on their shoulders, the stylized symbol of a Jag in flight.
A biomech-adept came with them. Tall and long-legged, the woman wore a form-fitting blue jumpsuit of metallic cloth. She had the dark hair and black eyes ubiquitous among the noble Houses. The ID holo on her chest had no name, just the five-star symbol of the House of Rajindia. Soz didn’t know her, but she recognized the family. The Rajindia line was ancient, dating back to the Ruby Empire. The House had almost died out on Raylicon during the Dark Ages, but it had rebounded again after the Raylican people regained the stars several centuries ago.
The officers saluted Kurj, clenching their fists and crossing their wrists as they raised their arms out to him. He inclined his head, his eyes shielded by the gold lids he could see through but that appeared opaque to everyone else. “At ease.” He indicated Soz. “Your patient awaits.”
They gathered around her then, all business. Loriez tapped a panel in the mech-table and a console in the headboard activated.
“How do you feel
?” Irzon asked.
“Normal,” Soz said. It was disappointing. She had thought she would notice a difference, more strength, an enhanced sense of her body. Something positive. “My legs hurt when I came to, and my vision was blurry. But those problems have cleared up.” She was aware of how closely they were all watching her.
Rajindia spoke in a dusky voice. “Activate.”
Soz blinked “Ma’am?”
“We activated you,” Irzon said.
“Oh. Yes.” Soz knew the terminology, but recognizing the words and having the process applied to her were two very different things. It felt strange to hear, as if she were a machine. But it was true. The operations would have taken several days and her recuperation even longer. Someone today had apparently decided she was ready to wake up. So they turned on her biomech.
Soz tapped the table where she sat. “Did this activate my web?”
“That’s right.” Rajindia lifted the sheet and showed her a long rod along the edge of the table. Blue light glowed within it. “The signal came from these bars. They extend down your body.”
Soz ran her hand over the rod. It was odd and intriguing that her conscious mind responded to signals from this machine. Loriez was at the head of the mech-table, working at the console in the headboard, studying holos of her body that floated in the air. He scrutinized them the way she had seen officers study equipment.
Disconcerted, Soz turned back to Irzon. The doctor was simply waiting, neither checking monitors nor performing any other visible doctor activities.
“Why don’t I feel anything?” Soz asked.
“You aren’t stiff?” Irzon asked.
“I ache everywhere.”
“That’s expected.” That neither Irzon nor the adept asked about the pain in her legs made Soz suspect they knew what she had discussed with Kurj, and were already examining her for problems.
Soz turned her wrist up to the ceiling and rubbed her thumb over the socket there. The circle was the color of her skin and smaller than the tip of her little finger. She tried to sense a change, a difference, an itch from its implantation. Anything. Leaning over, she turned out her feet so she could see the socket above each heel. Without knowing to look, she wouldn’t have noticed them. She sat up straight again and slid her hand under her hair, fingering the socket at the base of her neck. Then she moved her hand down her back, searching—yes, there it was, the spinal socket just below her waist.