Authors: Pauline Baird Jones
* * * * *
Conan’s boys transported him to the ship. Daylight was long gone when Delilah saw the transport flash light up the interior of the tent in a break between squalls. A few minutes later, Eamon and Cadir arrived, weapons ready and back to back, in the center of the encampment. At least she’d taught them to cover their backs. It was kind of cute that they thought that would work against her.
Doc sighted on Cadir, keeping watch while Eamon checked out the tent. She didn’t think they’d see her if they stepped on her, but the weapon’s lock helped her think about something other than how awful she felt.
When Eamon emerged, he showed off his rudimentary tracking skills, his
very
rudimentary skills. Her pig wallow puzzled them both. They circled it several times. Doc was glad it had rained heavily since she used it. They might have figured out she’d rolled in it. Their math skills weren’t obvious, but even they might put two and two together. She needed them to believe she was gone or dead. They conferred on the evidence and concluded she’d headed toward the lake.
“Could she use the cold of the lake’s water to disguise her body heat?” Cadir said with a frown.
Eamon shrugged. “Possibly. The water is very cold.”
Good thing their knowledge of biology was as poor as their math. Cold tended to make the body produce more heat until it ran out of fuel. That would be why she’d piled on the branches. Between her fever and the cold rain, she’d have been glowing like a star going nova on their scans.
He lifted his wrist, requesting transport to the lake. In the pause while coordinates were configured, Eamon looked at his brother.
“There is another reason she might not have a heat outline.”
That was the math she wanted them to do. Before Cadir could respond, the transport whisked them away. In the distance she heard the rumble of another squall moving in. It was going to be a long night.
* * * * *
As Hel’s ship dropped out of hyperspace just off Feldstar, he made sure the planet was between him and the last sighting of the unknown ship. He charted the low orbit the General claimed was necessary and started scanning for Delilah’s beacon. He’d used the transit time to create a program that would scan all the frequencies the General had noted in the data burst. He expected to have to wait for it, but got a weak read almost immediately. He fixed on it and adjusted course. On one level he realized he was too relieved she wasn’t gone, though he could not think of a good reason her captors had transported to their ship and left her behind.
As he tracked toward her position, he played with his scan settings, hoping to crack the unknown ship’s cloak. Instead he found that the
Doolittle
had been playing with their cloaks, too. He had a squadron coming in significantly ahead of the visible squadron that had deployed when the unknown ship dropped cloak.
Hel smiled. The General was a clever and devious adversary. If he’d stumbled on them, they might stumble on his settings. As soon as he had Delilah on board, he’d reset them. He started calculating their arrival time planet-side as his low orbit took him toward Delilah’s location. It also brought him into the start of a new day. Her location was still dark, but not for long. He bumped his scanners to maximum. It made him more detectable, but he needed the data. He pulled up real-time imaging of the planet surface and saw the slow turn of the horizon over Feldstar’s immense ocean. The sight of a massive storm made his gut clench. He cursed silently.
He’d been in one of these storms and it hadn’t been this large. The white mass was almost perfectly round when viewed from space. Half of its mass was on the land, half still out over the ocean. This was bad. It meant the heated ocean was still fueling the storm. It wouldn’t begin to weaken until the rest made landfall. According to Delilah’s locator, she was in the worst of it, close to the center but not close enough.
She hadn’t moved since he started tracking her. He turned to his heat-sensing equipment, honing in on the area with the beacon. Trees and shrubs popped out of the black background, fiercely whipped by the wind from the storm, but no discernible human shape. He tightened the focus more. He could think of one reason her body wasn’t giving off heat—unless her captors had discovered the beacon and removed it. If they had, they—and she—would already be long gone.
* * * * *
It felt odd to find clarity in so much chaos, but that’s what the long night gave Doc. She’d told the General she would fail sometime, but she hadn’t believed it. Calm certainty that she could think or slug her way out of anything was gone, replaced by the realization she lay in the mud, being pounded by wind
and
rain, waiting for someone else to find her. No, she needed to face facts. She lay here waiting for
rescue
. When did she become so arrogant? She could be on Conan’s ship, warm and dry and dying. She’d thought it was miserable sitting out a hurricane in sub-standard housing in Mexico. She’d been wrong about that, too. Throughout the endless night, trees had bent and crashed around her. One fell so close the branches half buried her. She told herself that it boosted her infrared cover and provided some protection from flying debris. It was easier than facing the truth.
This wasn’t smart. This was stupid.
Something had changed her. Even if she wasn’t dying, she couldn’t have gone back and worked for the Major. She’d lost her edge. But it wasn’t just that. She felt different inside. She’d been changing before Conan, perhaps before she boarded the
Doolittle?
The tendrils of change reached all the way back to Sara Donovan, she realized, threading through Briggs and even taking a small pass through the General. When she went into situations with the Major as her reference, well, she was used to getting looks like the ones she got from the General. They didn’t used to bother her. She knew who and what she was, but this time, it had bothered her. And the General
sensed it
. He’d seen through her and the sting of it had left her with an aching desire for his respect—something that had never happened to her before.
Hel was part of it, too.
The Leader and the spook
. She snorted, the sound lost in the roar of the storm. It would never have happened, even without the whole dying part.
And if that weren’t enough humiliation, she was going to fail. She’d gotten caught like a
girl
and was going to die in the mud while experiencing every variation of miserable the universe could supply—just in case she hadn’t gotten the message it was humble pie time. Pride had her trapped like she a rookie on her first op.
Nothing like a night out in a hurricane to gain a true understanding of what it meant to get your ass kicked. And that was before things got bad. She should have been freezing, but she wasn’t. The heat from her body had probably boosted the storm’s intensity, though the fever broke for a while, replaced by bone-rattling chills. This cycle had repeated through the night.
And that had been the warm up act.
The eye wall was the main event.
Her plan to play possum went south when the eye wall delivered the storm surge. Luckily for her, it was only about a foot of water, and it had lost most of its oomph before it reached her. It forced her up off the ground and into the branches of the tree that almost fell on her as the water tried to sweep her legs out from under her.
It was pitch black, but the occasional lightning flash lit up her personal hell. She found she could still be awed by Mother Nature on steroids. Even
they
paused to watch the show.
A flash of lightning showed her a stray branch incoming. She tried to duck and whacked her head against the tree’s trunk. And the branch hit her anyway.
At least the circle of stars only lit up the inside of her head.
* * * * *
Hel locked his transport system on Delilah’s beacon but hesitated to transport her with so much electrical activity in the atmosphere. He’d never tried it in a storm such as this one. Flash after flash blanked his heat-sensing screen as the worst of the storm passed over the spot where she lay. A failed transport attempt would not help her, if she even still lived. He had to assume the beacon could transmit after death until he learned otherwise. The General had been as sparing as possible with information about the unusual device.
He could think of one other reason besides death, that he couldn’t find a heat pattern. If she knew or suspected they could track her heat pattern, she was clever enough to do something to disguise it. During her capture, she had eluded them for some distance. She would learn from that. She adapted. Her people called her Chameleon for a reason. If her captors were still in orbit, that meant they hadn’t found her beacon. It also meant they were still looking for her. Scanning showed some residual energy traces lingering in the atmosphere, but it didn’t mean they were still here. He had tried to play with scan settings, but there was a faster way to find a cloaked ship if it was close by.
He’d come in low to avoid intersecting with that ship and to scan for Delilah. He checked the status of the incoming, cloaked squadron, then shut down sensors and scanning, going almost dark. He adjusted his sublights, aiming for gentle lift. If a ship was there, it should be sitting in orbit just above his ship. His ship drifted into a higher orbit, the only sign of movement the alteration in light outside his front view port. Just because they weren’t here, it didn’t mean Delilah was dead, he told himself. If they were convinced she was dead, there would be no point in remaining—
Without sensation to give warning, his ship passed through the lower cargo bay of a large ship. He halted sublight thrust. It was a disturbing experience, no matter how many times he’d done it the past two years. He might be curious to see the bridge of this vessel, but that would have to wait. He reversed thrust and the cargo bay slid from view. When he’d once again put distance between the two ships, he lit up the scanners, turning to the heat-sensing screen with new eyes. The only reason he knew where to look for her was because of the beacon. She had to be there, but all he saw a mass of white scrub and trees moving in the wind. He focused closer. The center of the storm moved closer, too. She’d be in the clear soon.
The cloaked squadron would be in sensor range about the same time the center of the storm reached her. There would be a small window of opportunity if he worked fast.
Once the alien ship knew he was here, they’d be looking for energy anomalies, too. He’d have to go dark and hope they assumed he’d gone. The arrival of the cloaked ships from the
Doolittle
should muddy any signatures he’d left behind. He’d set course down their back trail. He checked the progress of the
Doolittle’s
visible squadron. There’d soon be a lot of ships in the area. It was almost amusing. And it would further aid his retreat from the area.
He stayed focused on the foliage where her beacon still intermittently broadcast, was about to admit defeat when he saw a movement.
And a booted foot.
* * * * *
Vidor woke slowly to pain, lots of pain. A gray bulkhead loomed over him. He was aboard his ship.
Morticia.
He sat up with a jerk that intensified the pain.
“Would you like something for the pain?” Bana asked.
Vidor looked at her through a haze of it. She’d exchanged the robe for her regular clothes.
“Where is she?” He’d tagged her, like they were all tagged. Why hadn’t they found her?
“We were hoping you knew. The storm’s properties interfered with our tagging mineral. Eamon and Cadir searched as long as they could, but the storm got worse very quickly.”
She didn’t remind him she’d told him to kill her. She didn’t have to. He knew it, knew they had to find her again before she doomed their people again. He got up, wincing as his groin protested. “Heat scans?”
“Nothing.” She hesitated. “It is possible she is—”
He made a sharp movement with his hand. “She isn’t.” He rubbed his aching head. “Any more bad news?”
“Would you consider a wave of ships incoming from the Earth expedition bad news?”
“How long do we have?”
She half shrugged.
“How long have I been out?” The pain in his body failed to completely disguise the other pain. She’d been in his arms, and now she was gone. When had she become so important to him?
“Most of the night.” She rose, put her hand on his arm. “She could have killed you. She didn’t.”
He wanted to believe it meant something. He feared it just meant she’d wanted him to wake in pain. He pushed past Bana and made his way to the bridge. Color stained his face when his men averted their gazes and tried to hide their smiles.
“Let me see the heat signature scan data.”
Eamon scrambled to get it up on the screen. “This is from right after we transported you to the ship.” He hesitated. “The storm has been very severe. It is possible she—”
Vidor silenced him with a violent slash of his hand. Morticia was not dead. She’d been difficult to track the first time. Movement had been her downfall that time.
“Check close to the encampment.” While Eamon worked the controls, he looked at Cadir. “Where’s the storm?”
“The worst of it is over the encampment.”
“It’s as bad as she predicted,” Bana added.
Cadir pulled up real-time views for him to observe. The wind bent the trees almost to the ground. One lost its grip and was swept away. Other trees lay tumbled all over the clearing where their tents had been. Rain beat against everything with a force he had not previously seen. If Morticia was out in that—belief in her survival faltered, until he recalled how unrelentingly she’d fought capture. This woman did not give up.
“Data is up, Vidor,” Eamon said, sounding subdued.
Vidor strode over the screen, scanning the areas around the camp. “Is this the latest data?”
“No, since the storm hit, the data stream has been poor. There is much interference from the electrical properties of the storm.”
“Combine all scans and replay them slowly.”
The current screen flickered and jumped, as Eamon predicted. Now there was too much movement.