Rebel Ice (5 page)

They had begun as a silent prayer and grown into a merciless directive. Presently they formed the taut, four-ply thread of will that enabled control in a situation where he had very little left.

Go. Find her. Hurry.

These days, those four words were all that kept Reever from going mad.

Logic provided the only structure and reason that he would accept in his current state. He had to go. If Cherijo had been capable of returning to him, she would have done so by now. He had to find her. Something had prevented her escape, something she could not overcome on her own. When he found her, he would free her. He had to do so quickly. He could not stop, could not rest, not for a moment. Thanks to his wife's unique genetic qualities, she was the most hunted, coveted fugitive in the galaxy. If Reever did not find her, someone else would.

Logic provided direction on the path, according to the Jorenians, but no comfort. They referred to it as "the indifferent whip across the soul's shoulders."

The whip made no difference. Reever had made a vow all those years ago, a promise to protect Cherijo and watch over her. To stay with her for as long as he lived. As long as there was even a remote chance that she was alive, he would not stop searching for her.

To stop would be the same as walking through an open air lock into space.

That Cherijo was more than a wife to Reever was something no one understood. He had never attempted to express what he felt for her to anyone but her. Even with her, words failed him.

Why do you love me, Duncan?

He felt the only adequate answer he had given her had been after another of her endless double shifts in surgery, when she had been too tired to strip out of her bloodstained scrubs. He had been obliged to undress her and help her into the cleansing unit.

I'm an arrogant, bad-tempered
—she brushed back some hair from her eyes to look at him—
inconsiderate shrew, and that's on my good days
. She placed one slim hand on his shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of her trousers.
You should work on your wish list. You know, just in case something happens to me
.

Aware that the intensity of their connection and his own feelings often frightened her, he hadn't told her that there would never be anyone else. She had frightened him, too. It was all there in his old journal files.

The detail is astonishing; when I concentrate, I can feel the adrenaline pumping in her veins and the precise focus of her thoughts as she works. My limbs ache with the ghost weight of her exhaustion after she finishes a double shift in Medical. I can count her breaths, smell her scent, and occasionally—to my dismay—even taste what she eats.

Through her, I have discovered needs that I never knew existed. They twist inside me, these peculiar, foreign demands—and I am almost certain they are not coming from her. The old priest Arembel, who cared for the injured after bouts in the arena, once told me how it could be, but I did not expect this.

I did not expect her.

His gaze drifted toward the end of the entry, where he had written,
The good doctor dreams of me
. To his knowledge, no one had ever done that—dreamed of him—and at first it had puzzled him.

Does
she still dream of me? Does she miss me? Does she wonder, every waking moment, if I am well? Is she frightened? Have they hurt her
?

If nothing else, Reever at last understood the killing rage the Jorenians felt whenever their kin were threatened or harmed.

He shut down the console and went to finish his last task. Halfway through his packing, the door chime rang. "Come in."

Xonea Torin, a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall Jorenian and captain of the Torin HouseClan's ship the
Sunlace
, entered Reever's quarters and closed the door panel behind him. "Linguist."

He had been expecting this visit. "Captain."

"You will not find her."

"I already have." Reever stowed another weapon in his gear pack and glanced through the viewport. Below the ship's orbit, the white-and-blue sphere that was the planet Akkabarr swelled like a bubble of ice. "She is down there."

"You cannot know this. There has been no word of her on this world, or any other." Xonea, who was also Cherijo's adopted brother, came to stand beside him. "No one from the League will confirm that the slaver transport crashed here."

The League had never confirmed anything since the Jado Massacre, which had occurred just after Cherijo had saved two worlds and had subsequently been sold to a pair of Rilken slavers. She had overpowered her diminutive abductors, had taken control of their ship, and had been flying to rejoin Duncan and Marel on the
CloudWalk
, HouseClan Jado's ship. While she was en route, the Jado That signal was the last thing Reever clearly remembered before waking up in medical bay on the
Sunlace
and being told that Cherijo's ship had vanished during the battle. The League placed Cherijo's name on the official list of those who had gone missing and were presumed killed during the Jado Massacre.

"The computers salvaged from the transport were sold by the Toskald." Reever had personally hunted down and interrogated the Bartermen involved in the transaction. "I ran the logs myself."

"The logs simply showed that the ship was one of many in the vicinity of Oenrall at the time of the massacre," Xonea reminded him.

"That transport received orders to depart Oenrall for Akkabarr on the same day Cherijo was abducted. It arrived. It never departed. She was on it." And she was down there, waiting for him. It was all very logical.

"The Mother of All Houses prove you right." The big Jorenian rubbed a dark blue, six-fingered hand over his brow. "You cannot land on the surface. It is too dangerous. Every pilot who has attempted it is dead."

Reever glanced briefly at him before he selected a dagger from his weapons storage unit and tucked it into his sleeve sheath.

"Very well, what say you somehow succeed where so many have not, and make a successful landing."

Xonea stepped between Reever and the storage unit before he could take out another blade. "The surface dwellers are in revolt against the Toskald. If they find you, they will kill you."

"They can try." Reever knew precisely how dangerous the natives were; he had been studying all known aspects of Iisleg culture, along with their origins, for weeks. They might try to kill him, but many had tried, and all had failed. Besides, he had other plans for the rebels.

There is only one thing better than defeating an enemy
, the old priest Arembel, another Hsktskt captive who like Reever had been forced to fight in the slaver arena, had told him.
Make the enemy work for you
.

"You may go to your death for nothing. We have not seen her for—"

"Two years, forty-six days, nine hours, and eighteen minutes." Reever reached around him and took out two more knives. These
were
Omorr-made, and slid into the sheaths strapped to the outsides of his thighs. He preferred fighting with Omorr weapons in subzero conditions; extreme cold did not affect their brilliantly forged steel.

"Duncan." Although the Jorenian people were accustomed to making frequent physical gestures of affection, Xonea did not make the mistake of touching him. "You must be prepared for the worst."

"That is why I am packing." On impulse, Reever picked up a handheld voice recorder and tucked it into a pocket.

Frustrated, the larger man made a careless gesture toward the viewer. "So you survive it all, to do what? Find what is left of her? You would scan every pile of bones down on that ice ball for her DNA?"

The ghost of Cherijo's first love, Kao Torin, looked out at Reever from Xonea's solid white eyes. Before

The captain of the
Sunlace
wasn't finished. "What say you if she is? What do you then, Duncan? Will you lie down with her remains? Will you embrace the stars while you hold a corpse in a bed of snow?"

"She is not dead." He couldn't explain why he was convinced of it. He knew only that if she had died, he would have felt her go. He was sure of that.

As sure as he knew that he would do exactly as Xonea predicted if he discovered he was wrong.

"There is nothing I may say that will persuade you to abandon this quest, is there?" Xonea, not expecting an answer, turned to leave, and then hesitated. Without looking at Reever, he said, "I say these things not to wish her gone, Duncan. I honored her. We all of us honored her."

There was no Jorenian word for
love
. The closest to it was
honor
, which still did not equate the same word in every other language Reever knew. Jorenian honor meant far more than mere admiration or respect. It encompassed a degree of personal devotion greater than most humanoids were capable of feeling.

Reever's wife had lived with that sort of honor. He had lived for her, and now he lived for those four words.

Go. Find her. Hurry.

The door panel opened before Xonea reached it and a petite Terran child with bubbly blond hair darted into the room and dodged around Xonea to fling herself at Reever's legs. Her small arms formed a tight cinch around his knees. "Daddy, don't go."

"Marel." Reever gently loosened his daughter's grip and lifted her up, holding her carefully as her small arms encircled his neck. The child buried her face against his chest. She smelled of the Jorenian herbal cleanser that bore close resemblance to Terran vanilla.

Xonea gave him one final, wordless look before he left them alone.

"Please, Daddy." Marel's voice trembled even more than her diminutive form. "Please don't go away. Please."

Some Terrans still believed in hell. Reever could see why.

"I am not going away." He carried his daughter to the chair where once he told her bedtime stories, and sat down with her. How long had it been since he had held her like this? He could not remember. He had been so busy looking for Cherijo. "I am going to get your mother."

"I don't want you to." Marel lifted her small face and stared at him with eyes that changed color from blue to silvery gray, just as his own did. The shape of her eyes, however, was identical to her mother's.

"I am the only one who can find her, Marel." Reever had to make her understand. He was the only one who could go. The only one who could move fast enough. Who could safeguard her. Who would kill for her.

His daughter's brow furrowed. "Daddy, everyone says Mama is gone to the stars."

"If she's not with the stars, then why did she leave us alone for so long?" The child's hands became small, hard fists. "You said Mama loved us."

"She does." Cherijo had been gone too long for Marel to retain any substantial memories of her. To his four-year-old daughter, "Mama" had become the face smiling out of a two-dimensional photoscan, the central character in one of many tales, lovingly told.

Marel was not aware of what her mother had done to save and protect her. Cherijo had been utterly ruthless about concealing their daughter, pretending to lose her during a miscarriage, while in reality having Marel successfully transferred to an embryonic chamber. She had even kept that from Reever for more than a year. Cherijo had since erased all of Marel's medical records and had enlisted the Jorenians in concealing Marel's existence. He knew that his wife would go to her death rather than let anyone harm their daughter.

Reever had not told Marel any of this because he had always felt that it was not his story to tell. That may have been an error on his part. "Your mother loves us very much, my delight."

"Then why doesn't she come back?" Marel demanded.

For his daughter's sake, he wished again he could be anyone other than who he was. Not a battle-hardened warrior and telepathic linguist. Not someone who could kill with his bare hands, fly combat missions, and translate words and concepts into several hundred thousand languages. The man he was could not give his child the reassurance she needed.

You could start, Duncan
, Cherijo would say,
by telling her the truth
.

"Marel." He waited until she met his gaze. "If you were lost, and could not find your way back to me and the HouseClan, would you wish me to come and find you?" She gave a reluctant nod. "That is what I believe has happened to your mother. She is down there, on that planet. Her ship crashed there, and the winds above the surface are so strong that she cannot leave. That is why I must go and find her, and bring her back to us."

The child thought this over. "What if
your
ship crashes?"

He had refused to think about what his death would do to his daughter. As much as he loved her, even the prospect of making her an orphan could not stop him from going to Akkabarr to find his wife. Nothing could.

Go. Find her. Hurry.

It was for the best. Soon there would not be enough left of him to make even an adequate pretense of being a father to Marel.

The Torin will protect her and care for her. "I
am a better pilot than your mother," he said, quite truthfully. "Mine will not crash."

Marel pressed her cheek against his chest and closed her eyes. "Take me with you. I'll help you look for Mama. I'm good at helping."

As if hearing his name as a summons, a large, silver gray cat with blue eyes walked into the room. He was followed by his mate, Juliet, a completely black female with large golden green eyes. The two felines looked at Reever, then at Marel, and came over to sit at Reever's feet.

Marel sat up and gazed down at them, her bottom lip pushed out and trembling. "Jen has Jules to love him. If you don't come back, I won't have anyone." Before Reever could respond to that, she flung herself against him once more. "I love you, Daddy. Please find her this time."

Reever, who had never learned how to weep, felt his eyes burn and saw his visual field blur. "I will, Marel. I will."

Two decks below Reever's quarters on the
Sunlace
, Senior Healer Squilyp stared at the patient charts waiting for his review. The modest stack contained routine cases being supervised by the Omorr's medical and surgical residents, all of whom were extremely capable and hardly in need of his direct supervision. He always reviewed the charts anyway; being the primary physician and chief surgeon on board the
Sunlace
was a responsibility he took very seriously.