Songs of Love & Death (18 page)

D
ALEA WAS WAITING
for us. I wasn’t sure if Dalea had a medical license, but whatever her training was, she was very good. There had to be a story about why she’d signed aboard a ship, because she was Hajin, and the herbivores weren’t common in space, but I hadn’t managed to worm it out of her yet.

Her coat was white with streaks of red-brown, and a thick shock of chestnut hair curled across her skull and ran down her long neck and even longer spine to disappear beneath the waistband of her slacks. Somewhere along the evolutionary chain, a creature like a cross between a zebra and a giraffe had stood upright, the front legs had shortened to become arms, and the split hoof that passed for feet developed a third digit that served as a thumb.

I laid Mercedes on the bed, and Dalea began her examination. I was jiggling, shifting my weight from foot to foot, waiting. Finally, I couldn’t contain my anxiety any longer.

“Is she hurt?”

“Bumps, bruises.” Dalea filled a hypodermic. “She took a pretty good dose of radiation, probably when the flagship blew. This will help.”

She gave Mercedes the injection. A few moments later there was a reaction. Mercedes stirred and moaned. I laid a hand on her forehead.

“She’s in pain. What was in that shot?” I asked, suddenly suspicious of my alien shipmate.

“Nanobots that will repair her damaged DNA. That’s not why she’s moaning. She’s coming out of a rapidly induced coma, and she’s got that feeling of pins-and-needles in her extremities.”

Dalea exchanged a glance with Jahan, who shrugged and said, “He’s in love with her. What else can you expect?”

“Would you stop saying that,” I said, exasperated.

“So stay with her,” said Dalea. “I’m assuming that if you love her, you must know her, and she should wake up to a familiar face.”

The two alien females left the sick bay. I broke the magnetic seal on a chair,
pulled it over to the bedside, and sat down. I took Mercedes’s limp hand where it hung over the side of the bed, and softly stroked it. It was her left hand, and the elaborate wedding set seemed to cut at my fingers.

She should wake up to a familiar face.
What would that have been like? To sleep next to this woman? To have her scent in my nostrils? To have her long hair catch in my lips? Once, twenty-two years ago, I had experienced only the last of those fantasies. We had violated lights out at the Academy and met on the Star Deck. We had kissed, and her hair, floating in free fall, had caressed my face.

I was lost in a daydream, tending toward an actual dream, when Mercedes sighed and her fingers tightened on mine. My eyes jerked open, and I shot up out of the chair. She looked up at me, smiled, and murmured,

“Tracy. I dreamed I heard your voice. But you can’t actually be here.”

“But I am, your highness.”

She frowned, and reached up. I leaned forward so she could touch my face. She looked around the tiny space, and she accepted the truth. “Once more you rescue me,” she murmured.

W
ALKING ONTO THE
bridge, I was met with three conversations all taking place simultaneously.

“Why are we still here? No trade, no money,” from Jax.

“Are you going down?” from Baca.

“I think I know what killed the Imperials,” from Melin.

I answered them in order of complexity. “Because I say so. Yes. What?”

Melin picked the question out of my surly and laconic reply. “Kusatsu-Shirane only has three moons now.”

I sat down at my post. “They blew up two of their moons?”

“Yep. Apparently, the Imperials closed with the planet in their normal arrowhead formation. Given the regularity of the moons’ orbits, the folks on Kusatsu-Shirane picked the two moons closest to the ships to destroy. The resulting debris went through the ships like shotgun pellets through cheese.
Boom!
” Melin accompanied the word with an expressive gesture.

“That would imply that the other three are booby trapped too.”

“Most likely.”

“
Madre de Dios!
I landed us on one of the remaining moons.” I wiped away the sweat that had suddenly bloomed on my upper lip.

“I think it took a person with a finger on the trigger to set off the explosions,” Melin offered. It was comfort, but not much.

“New plan. Let’s stay away from the remaining moons,” I said to our navigator.

“Good plan,” she said, and turned back to her console.

Baca spoke up. “Then why the dirge from the planet? They won a mighty victory.”

“But short term,” Jahan said. I jumped. Damn it, she’d done it again. Her fur tickled my left ear.

I nodded. “What Jahan said. The battle group’s course was filed with Central Command on Hissilek. When they neither call home nor come home, the League will come looking for them. Kusatsu-Shirane is going to be discovered.”

“Tracy’s right.”

Mercedes’s voice had always had this little catch in it. Very endearing and very sexy. I stood and turned around. She was on the platform lift, and she looked shaky. I hurried to her side, and assisted her into the chair Baca hastily vacated. He was staring like a pole-axed bull. I couldn’t blame him. How often did an ordinary space tramp meet the heir to an empire?

“Uh… hello, ma’am, Luis Baca, communications. I’ll get a message off to Hissilek.”

“Where are you bound for next?” she asked me.

“Cuandru.”

“A message won’t reach League space faster than this ship. There will be military ships at Cuandru.” She was right about that; Cuandru was the largest shipyard in the League. Mercedes smiled at me, but I noticed that the expression never reached her eyes. They were dark and haunted. “You’re the captain.”

“I am,” I said.

“Congratulations. You finally made it.”

“On a trading vessel.” I hoped that the resentment didn’t show too badly.

“Believe me, it’s better than being an admiral,” Mercedes said softly.

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

“So why are you still in orbit?” she asked.

“We have no communication from the planet,” Jax trilled. “We are uncertain if there is anyone to trade
with.
”

“Tracy was on his way to the planet when he picked up your distress signal,” Melin said.

“Did they evacuate?” Mercedes asked.

“It’s possible, but not likely. There were close to a million people on Kusatsu-Shirane,” I said.

Mercedes stood. “Then let us go and find out what has become of them.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I’m not asking. You’re still my subject.”

The final words came floating back over her shoulder. I followed her onto the lift.

T
HE WIND WHISPERED
down the deserted streets of Edogowa. There were no vehicles parked on the streets. It was all very tidy and orderly. It was near sunset, and to the west magnificent thunderheads formed a vibrant palette of blues, grays, reds, and golds. Two long but very narrow bands of rain extended from the clouds to the chaparral below. The bands looked like sweeping tendrils of gray hair, and where the rain hit the ground, the dust on this high desert plateau boiled into the air like milk froth.

“Where is everybody?” Baca asked. His eyes darted nervously from side to side.

Jahan came scrambling down the wall of a four-story office building. “Nobody’s there. Lights are off. Computers shut down. It’s like everybody’s taken a holiday.”

Mercedes shivered. I started to put my arm around her shoulders, but thought better of it and drew back. “Let’s go to a house,” she said.

“Why?” Jahan asked.

“When you think something terrible is about to happen, you want to be with your loved ones,” Mercedes answered.

We had ended up landing the
Selkie
at the small spaceport. The
Wasp
could only comfortably carry two, and the melancholy music and the lack of human voices had me jumpy. I wanted backup. Jahan radioed our plan back to Melin, Jax, and Dalea.

Our footfalls echoed on the sidewalk and bounced off the sides of the buildings. I realized that something else was missing besides the people: the smell of cooking food. There were hundreds of restaurants in Edogowa. Most business was conducted over a meal, and deals were sealed with alcohol. Food was a ritual on Kusatsu-Shirane. But now all I smelled was that pungent mix of dust and rain and ozone as the storm approached.

The business district gave way to small wood houses with shoji screens on the windows, and graceful upturned edges on the roofs. Now we found vehicles, carefully parked at the houses. The clouds rolled in, dulling the color of the flowers in perfectly groomed beds. Overhead, thunder grumbled like a giant shifting in his sleep.

We picked a house at random and walked up to the front door. I knocked.
Silence. I knocked again. Mercedes reached past me, grasped the knob and opened the door.

“Trusting kind of place,” Baca muttered.

“They want us to come in. To see,” Mercedes said in a hollow tone.

No one asked the obvious
see what
question. It had taken me longer, but I had finally come to the same point as Mercedes in my analysis. Japanese-influenced culture, imminent loss of their children and their way of life—for the people of Kusatsu-Shirane there was only one possible solution.

The family was in the bedroom. The children lay in their mother’s arms. Her lax hands were still over their eyes. She had a neat hole in her forehead. The children had been shot in the back of the head. The father slumped in a chair, chin resting on his chest. Blood formed a bib on the front of his shirt. The pistol had fallen from his hand.

Mercedes remained stone-faced as we toured more houses. It was the seventh house before she finally broke. A sob burst out, she turned toward me. My arms opened, and she buried her face against my chest. She was crying so hard that in a matter of moments, the front of my shirt was wet. It made me think of the father in the first house, his shirt wet with blood. I closed my arms tight around Mercedes, trying to hold back the horror.

“
Why?
They would have had a good life! Especially the children. Why would they do this? They’re insane!”

“Because the life we offered wasn’t the life they wanted,” I said softly. “This was the last choice they could make for themselves, and they made it. I’m not saying it’s a good choice, but I can understand it.”

“They killed their
children
,” Mercedes whispered. “Thousands of children.” She broke out of my embrace, dragged frantic fingers through her hair. “Why? To keep them from us? We’re not monsters!”

“That depends on where you’re sitting in the pecking order,” Jahan said in her dry way.

There was a silence for several long moments. Mercedes stood in the living room, surrounded by the dead. She looked lost and terribly frail. I stepped to her side and put my arm around her.

“Let’s go,” I said softly. “There’s nothing here.”

“Ghosts,” she whispered. “They’ll be here.”

M
ELIN PLOTTED OUR
course for Cuandru, the Isanjo home world. We boosted out of orbit, heading for open vacuum between the planets before we entered the Fold.

I left the bridge and went to visit Jax in his office/cabin. He was standing in a wading pool of water rehydrating his leaves, and holding a computer while he ran figures. Nervous whistling emerged from the sound valves that lined his sides. Each valve emitted a different, discordant tone. It was like a dentist drilling.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Bad. We didn’t sell the low-tech farm equipment on Kusatsu-Shirane, which meant we didn’t pick up loads of lacquer knickknacks to sell to your jaded ruling class on League worlds. We must hope for a big reward for rescuing the Infanta,” Jax concluded.

“That’s it? That’s your only reaction to the death of a million people? We couldn’t make the sale?”

The seven ocular organs around the alien’s head swiveled to regard me. “What was it one of your ancient dictators said? One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. And, bluntly, they were not my kind, nor is it a choice I can condone.”

And that’s why they call them alien
, I thought as I left. I decided not to ask the other alien members of the crew how they felt.

The bizarre philosophical discussion had meant that I hadn’t voiced my real concern: that the League would decide we were somehow behind the destruction of the fleet and slap us in prison. It would be a black eye for the navy and the Infanta if the government had to admit that the citizens of a Hidden World had destroyed a battle group. Better to blame a slightly shady trading vessel commanded by a disgraced Imperial officer. I decided that it couldn’t hurt to clear things up with Mercedes.

I had given her my cabin. It was slightly larger than the crew cabins, and the bed could actually hold two assuming they were friendly. Privacy on ships is the opposite of what one might expect. You’d think that people living in close confines inside a tin can would want the closed door and a private place. Instead I found that crews tended to live in a constant state of togetherness, like a group hug. We walked in and out of each other’s cabins. When we weren’t on duty we played games that involved lots of people. I think it’s because space is so vast, so empty, and so cold that you want the comfort of contact with other living things.

Which is why I just walked in on Mercedes. She was kneeling in front of the small shrine I maintained to the Virgin, and she was saying the rosary. The click of the beads set a counterpoint to the bass throb of the engines, and I was startled when I realized she was using my rosary. But of course she would have to. Hers had been reduced to dust and atoms along with everything else
aboard the
Nuestra
.

She gave me a brief nod, her lips continuing to move, and the familiar prayer just the barest of sound in the room. I sat down on the bed and waited. She wasn’t that far from the end.

I closed my eyes and took the opportunity to offer up a prayer for my father, still laboring away in the tailor shop on Hissilek. A stroke—brought on, I was convinced, by my court-martial and subsequent conviction—had left him with a crippled right leg, but he still worked, making uniforms for the very men who had ruined me. Sometimes it felt like the most personal of betrayals, and I hated him for it, but in more rational moments, I realized that he had to eat, and that he had spent a lifetime outfitting the officers of the Imperial Navy. It wasn’t like he could become a designer of ladies’ fashion at age sixty-eight.