Alpha Rising (38 page)

In a near panic, Kaz flailed her arms and
shrieked, “I’m not going in there.” She pounded the short guard’s
chest. “I don’t care if you kill me, I’m not going.”

The brawny guard pulled Kaz back and
restrained her while he spoke to his short counterpart. “Roman,
they’re too rebellious. Labor camp would be too easy. In my
opinion, they should all be placed in isolation—spend a little time
all alone in maximum.”

In my
opinion
? That familiar phrase caused Bach’s
mind to stop, and got the attention of all the captives, except
Star. In the doomsday setting, the words were like a father’s
voice. Bach, Deni, and Kaz looked beyond the broad-shouldered
guard’s headgear and saw G.R.’s Neanderthal brows and dark eyes
looking back. He winked.

Intuition hit Kaz and Deni at the same time
and they scrutinized the tall, lanky guard on the sly. He had
Lynch’s close-set blue eyes.

Kaz whispered, “Lynch?”

He cleared his throat and moved away.

The shorter guard, Roman, sensed something
strange and paced around the prisoners. “What’s going on?”

Nobody spoke, but Bach clamped his hand
around the back of Kaz’s arm.

Roman strutted back and
forth like a peacock in heat. “Yes, I think the isolation
jail
is
the place
for you wise guys.”

With the artful dodge of Br’er Rabbit, Bach
said, “Oh, please, Roman, don’t send us to isolation. Anything but
that.”

Kaz didn’t get the ploy at first and stared
at Bach as if he were deranged. Then she got it. “I’ll kill myself
if you put me in isolation,” she declared. “I’ve been there before.
I’ll kill myself. I mean it!”

“
Oh, that would be my
pleasure,” Roman said with a snarl as he pricked at her with his
bayonet.

She slapped the air. “Stop it.”

“
Silence,” he
growled.

Star didn’t know that two of the guards were
also Bach’s crewmates, but the waste of time annoyed her. She
looked at Roman with resolve in her eyes. “An alert will go out in
Dura if we don’t return at a scheduled time, and Altemus will
eliminate you from the co-op exchanges. You won’t exist long on
just seafood.”

He smirked. “You have no leverage with your
words.”

Lynch’s familiar southern drawl came from
behind his faceplate. “Roman’s right. You whiners deserve isolation
for gettin’ outta line.”

G.R. corralled Kaz and Deni, and Lynch
pushed Bach and Star toward a prison shuttle boat visible in the
distance. While the detainees played their defiant roles to the
hilt, Lynch spoke to the short guard. “Good job, Roman. Now you’re
dismissed. We’ll handle this. We’ll take ’em to the facility.”

Roman complained. “There are four
prisoners—you’re outnumbered.”

Lynch hovered over him. “There are three
women and one man. We can handle it. I’m the lead, and I’m tellin’
you, you’re dismissed!”

Roman stormed off in a huff as Lynch and
G.R. shoved the “prisoners” toward the boat.

Bach whispered to Star that they were
safe—in the hands of his former crewmates.

G.R. monitored Roman’s departure. As soon as
Roman crossed the bridge, G.R. quietly said, “Okay guys, we have to
make it look official, so keep movin’. I can’t believe we’re all
together.”

Lynch’s lanky, uniformed body paced from
behind with an authoritative cadence. He spoke in a hush, “As soon
as we’re on the boat we gotta think fast. If anyone out there puts
two and two together, they’ll be here by the hundreds and I
guarantee we’ll never see each other again.”

G.R. contained his excitement, whispering as
he walked, “Lynch and I never thought we’d see you again, Bach. We
heard you were alive in Dura, but we didn’t trust the word of those
in the Ultimate World. We worried that we’d lost Deni and Kaz
forever.”

Lynch stepped close to Bach and whispered
from the side of his mouth. “They keep us separated here—men and
women. Overpopulation, rain, and no land created a crisis. Physical
contact between genders is forbidden. Birth is by scientific
methods—test tubes. One can’t be born until someone dies.” He
waited for a moment then shared another troubling fact. “And the
dead aren’t buried or cremated; their tissues ’n’ organs are used
in research or converted to usable materials.”

G.R. added, “There’s no feeling between the
sexes. Intimate contact is dead.”

With the prison shuttle boat in sight at a
small pier ahead, Lynch quickened his pace to Kaz’s side. “I
couldn’t wait to find you, honey,” his voice wavered. “I’ve been
tryin’ to get to you ever since me ’n’ G.R. got here, that’s why I
trained as a guard, thinkin’ maybe somehow I’d find you.”

Kaz wept.

A flashing cringe, like the jolt from a
shaving nick, struck Bach’s heart at hearing Lynch profess his
affection for Kaz. Eyes focused on nothing, he ambled on half-numb,
remembering when the Specter appeared and taunted him with the
threat that Kaz would fall in love with Lynch. He thought back to a
half-hour earlier when he found Kaz at the gyroscope tournament.
She’d shown no affection for him—only a plea for rescue.
Bewildered, he snuck glimpses of Kaz and Lynch, trying to picture
them together.

No one spoke the rest of the way to the
dock. But as soon as they got there, G.R. whispered, “Act reluctant
to board the boat. We’ll force you, so let’s make it believable—in
case someone’s watching from afar.”

The detainees displayed admirable acting
abilities, balking on the walkway and creating a generalized
ruckus. Lynch and G.R.’s award-winning performances included
tormenting their charges with bayonets and barking stern orders.
For no reason, with a strange twist of violence, Lynch confined
Bach in a headlock and pushed him aboard.

Somewhere in his psyche, Bach felt his
rival’s perverse pleasure in the unnecessary force. He muttered an
obscenity under his breath.

G.R. ferried the cabin cruiser from the
lagoon. As the island faded from view, he and Lynch tossed off
their headgear, Kaz flung herself crying into Lynch’s waiting arms,
and Deni brushed tears of relief from her big dark eyes. Bach sat
in stunned silence. Star looked on.

The more Bach thought about Lynch’s words to
Kaz, the more he struggled to hold his emotions and his tongue.
Suddenly, he blurted out, “Kaz, are you under mind control? Are you
and Lynch a couple?”

Lynch reacted first. “It’s not mind control,
Bach.” He brushed a lock of hair from Kaz’s face. “Our confinement
on Ulwor led to trust, and trust led to love.”

Kaz dropped her left hand to her side. “I’m
sorry, Bach. The Rooks took the ring you gave me.”

An uncomfortable silence followed and Bach’s
clenched jaw seemed set in concrete.

But as the others rushed back into
conversation and shared their latest experiences, the chatter
escalated. G.R. rose from the captain’s chair with a shout.
“Quiet!” Then he snorted a laugh and whispered, “This isn’t a party
ship. You’re prisoners, ya know.”

Holding Kaz at his side, Lynch looked out
the cabin window. “Cut the motor to half throttle as we near the
isolation jail. We need time to come up with a plan.”

Bach hid his resentment and focused on the
matter at hand. He looked at the others. “I have to apologize. You
all haven’t met Star Rider, Altemus’s daughter.”

“
Pleasure,” Lynch said with
a gentlemanly nod.

“
Star Rider?” G.R. gulped.
“Star Rider? There’s a real old song on Earth called ‘Starrider.’ I
loved it when I was a little kid. That song sparked my dreams of
being an astronaut.”

“
I was named for a song
about a child who travels on a star,” she said.

G.R. flashed a toothy grin. “A beautiful
name for a beautiful woman with eyes like blue stars. Pleased to
meet you, Star Rider—”

Bach interrupted, “How soon can we get out
of here, G.R.? We’re short on time—fulfilling a divine
calling.”

“
Divine calling?” G.R.
mused.

Star added, “The Creator conveyed a message
to Bach to pick up two inhabitants and animals from every
planet.”

Lynch mumbled, “Bach talked to the
Creator?”

“
Two people and animals
from each of the planets? Where do you put all these people and
animals?” Deni asked.

“
In our ship, the uh, Ark,”
Bach said.

Kaz looked at Bach with huge eyes. “Ark? Are
you kidding?”

“
Stop it,” snapped Deni, “I
want to hear this.”

Kaz wrapped her arms around Lynch. “Like
Noah’s ark in the Bible?”

“
It’s starting to seem that
way,” Bach replied. “Acting on the Creator’s instructions, Star’s
father and I reconfigured and restored the space station and the
two smaller ships. Now we call it the Ark. It’ll accommodate
everyone. It’s a long story.”

“
Where are you taking your
passengers?” Kaz asked.

“
Back to Jenesis, to
Dura.”

“
So we can go too, right?”
Kaz asked.

Bach sighed. “Uh, there’s a problem.”

Lynch narrowed his eyes. “A problem?”

“
We can only take one man
and one woman, and we’ll recognize them by a certain symbol. All
four of you have that symbol.”

“
What symbol?” asked
G.R.

“
The one you’re wearing. To
you, it’s planet Earth’s identifier, but here in space the Creator
called it a symbol of hope.”

G.R. and Lynch grasped their pendants. Kaz
studied hers. “Well,” she said. “You said the Creator sent you, so
I want you to know I’ve gotten reverent big time since seeing the
Specter’s evil works.” She clung to Lynch, eyes flitting back and
forth between Deni and G.R. “Who else are you going to take?”

Deni calmly said, “You aren’t any more
reverent than I.” She looked at Bach. “Both Kaz and I communed with
the Creator.”

“
Now wait just a minute.”
Lynch jumped from Kaz’s grasp. “Me ‘n’ G.R. got religion too. G.R.
found a grotto where the light beamed down through a crack in the
rocks. We’d sit there in a canoe, in the light—it shone right on
us. That’s where we got strength to get through this.”

“
We all have the symbol.”
G.R. flashed his pendant. “Why can’t you take all of
us?”

After thinking about G.R.’s comment, Star
whispered to Bach. “We still have extra spaces on the roster.”

Bach almost shouted, but caught himself in
time. “It’s another challenge! Another time for spiritual
discernment.” The crewmates all stared at him. He shifted in his
seat and looked Star squarely in the eyes, as if seeking
confirmation. “I can’t see where we’d find any other man and woman
to bring in this situation—the way the planet is divided. And we
didn’t see any other symbols. We have to take them.”

She nodded.

“
Plus that,” Kaz said
slyly, “I can get you all the sea life. You said you need animals.
I can get them for you.”

“
Where you gonna get ’em?”
asked Lynch. “We can’t go fishin’ now. Then how would we get ’em to
the Ark?”

“
Deni and I discovered a
test lab one day,” Kaz replied. “We were on the supply boat and
took a wrong turn, sorta on purpose, my idea, and found dozens of
aquariums with babies set aside for experimentation. The mermaid
you saw on the way over is a result of the Specter’s pleasure in
scientific tampering. She’s the only one he’s raised to
adulthood.”

Bach said, “The only one?”

“
Yeah, it’s sad. She
longingly looks to the shore, but swims away when we try to
communicate with her.”

“
Then we can’t take her,”
he said.

“
Why not?” asked
Kaz.

“
We’re taking two of all
species.” He looked around. “Back to business. So the animals we’ll
be taking aboard are hatchlings and baby sea life in
aquariums?”

“
Yeah,” Kaz said. “All
marine species are there, categorized by stages of
experimentation.”

“
How do you know which
stage is which?” asked G.R. “In my opinion, we shouldn’t be taking
mutants.”

Kaz sighed hard. “It’s obvious, G.R. The
newly captured sea life are held in aquariums outside the lab in a
screened area with wooden walkways between them. We won’t even have
to enter the water or the lab.” Her tone softened when she spoke to
Lynch, “Do you know who’ll have guard duty tonight at the labs—male
or female?”

“
It’s male
tonight.”

“
Good,” she said. “In your
uniforms, you and G.R. can detain them, then stand guard while we
smuggle the sea life to the boat. Then we can lower the spillway
and get right to the co-op landing site. There are carts there used
to load and unload co-op ships and local vessels. It won’t be too
hard. So as soon as it gets dark….”

“
How long?” Bach
asked.

“
Should be any time now.
The light source here is a man-made satellite that switches on and
off automatically. You’ll love it; it just slams to darkness.” She
snapped her fingers. “Just like that! No dusk, no dawn—just slam,
pitch-black night. In the morning, bam!” she clapped her hands.
“Daylight!”

“
That might be a problem …
pitch black,” said Bach.

“
No problem,” Deni said.
“The satellite switches off at night and the planet’s rotation and
dissipating heat create an east wind. We’ll know which way is east.
And the main pathways are dimly lit, so we’ll eventually see
them.”

#

The isolation jail lay dead ahead—a lone
building on a platform on stilts, with iron bars on the
windows.