Extremis (47 page)

The door opened and a shock of red hair poked in. “Sandro?” she breathed, hardly able—or, more accurately, hardly daring—to believe it was him. Then she was on her feet—“Sandro!”—ready to race into his arms.

But he either missed those physical cues or elected not to see them. He moved directly toward a chair located well away from where she stood—and the farthest from her bed.

Jennifer stopped in mid-stride and stilled a growing sense of both panic and rage.
Okay, don’t jump to any conclusions, Jen; this is a completely unnatural environment and there’s no knowing what he’s been told, or whether we’re being watched, or
…She again stilled her racing mind and started to move toward him, hoping to be drawn more slowly into his embrace. But she saw that might not be the right move, not just yet. He was tense—terribly so: his hands and forearms were sharply corded by broad veins. And gone was any sign of the playfulness that had made their most recent hours together so golden: neither the accent nor the swaggering posture of Ruari Mac Ruari had returned with her beloved. Well, maybe a little nudge at the memory of that persona—and how it had facilitated their meeting and courtship—was a useful approach, a means to rekindle some of the personal intimacy they so desperately needed to bridge this gap now.

“So, where’s me Ruari?” She put a hint of sass into her broad and burlesqued Geordie accent.

Sandro shrugged.

She kept herself from blinking in surprise and persisted. “What? All I get is a shrug when I’m wantin’ a buss? Come now, where’s that great oaf of a Highlander?”

Sandro didn’t look at her. “Dead, I guess.”

Jennifer let herself sink into the chair across from his and felt some desperate hope sag within her; she suddenly felt more alone among humans than she had for months amongst the Arduans. All she knew was that she needed Sandro—to talk to, to hold—now more than ever. “Sandro,” she whispered, “please tell me what’s wrong. How are you?”

Then he looked at her and smiled—and he was absolutely not there. The expression could not have been more artificial had it been painted on a mask. “I’m fine, Jennifer. How are you?”

Hurt by an acknowledgment so impersonal that it was infinitely more painful than a complete silence, Jennifer fired an arch reply. “Well, I was better before you came in with that plastic smile. And before I woke up without my baby. Where is Zander, Sandro?”

She had hoped he’d act surprised, outraged, grief-stricken: something that would indicate he hadn’t known this was coming, or that it tore him up inside. But instead, Sandro just looked away. “He’s someplace safe, Jen.”

“Someplace safe? You won’t even tell me where he is?”

“Jen, I don’t know where he is—not exactly.”

“And why the hell not?”

He turned to look at her. “Because what you—and the rest of the hostages—have been revealing about mental contact with the Baldies means we don’t really know the limits of their powers. Maybe they can read our minds through yours—and maybe you wouldn’t even know it. Maybe they can locate us through minds they know—maybe even little Alexander’s, who’d be too young to know to resist them.”

Jen leaned back and laughed. “Sandro, this is nonsense. Pure bullshit and nonsense. None of what you’ve said has anything to do with how
selnarm
works, or how the Arduans use it.”

“Maybe, but how do
we
know that?”

“You know that because—because I’ve told you so.”

Sandro kept looking at her.

And that’s when she understood. “Oh, so that’s it? Now it’s presumed I’m on
their
side?”

“Not just you, Jen. All the artists. You’ve got to see it from their side. They just don’t know if—”

“No, you—all of you—have to see it from
my
side. I was in captivity. I had a baby…with aliens all around me. I saw humans twice—
twice
—during the whole time I was there. And the Arduans were good to me, even kind, once they started understanding us humans a little more. Oh, Sandro, you have no idea how much they don’t understand us—and we them. That is why it is so important for us to—”

But Sandro had risen. “Jen, look. We are so in the dark about the Baldies’ mental powers that I can’t even be sure that when my feelings or opinions start to shift that it’s me—my own mind and heart—that is changing. How do we know it isn’t some mind trick they’re exerting through you? So when I start feeling sympathy toward you, or being convinced that maybe I should consider your claims, how do I know—
know
—that I’m not being tricked by them?”

“Meaning that you think I’ve become their agent? That I
am
a traitor?”

“Jen, how could we determine that, either? What we have learned is that they have a method of communication that simply leapfrogs everything we know. The only people who have any details about its operation are the same ones the Baldies have had in captivity for months. So how do we know they haven’t brainwashed you? You might believe that everything you tell us about them is true because they
programmed
you that way. If that’s the case, what happens to us if we start believing the intel you’ve brought us on the nature and limits of what you call
selnarm
and telempathy? We’d be believing what the Baldies
want
us to believe—which means they’d probably be setting us up to walk right into a trap, or to make plans based on critically flawed information. Jennifer, we’ve got no means of independent verification, of determining the truth of what you and the other artists are telling us. And until we do—I’m sorry.” And with that, he rose and started toward the door.

Jennifer was too surprised, enraged, terrified, and hurt to cry or do anything other than scream at his retreating back. “My baby! God damn it, you can at least bring me my baby, you fucking bastards!”

Sandro stopped: he did not turn around. “I told them that removing Zander was extreme. I’ll make them return him—soon.”

“Well, thank you so much, lover,” she spat at his back. And then collapsed into the chair, sobbing.

Sandro closed the door so quietly she did not hear him leave.

* * *

Sandro turned the corner that led away from the observation rooms—and almost ran into Heide, with Harry Li in tow.

Heide stopped and looked up at him. “I’m sure that was difficult, Sergeant. Or should I say”—and he proffered a black box—“Lieutenant?”

So, the Hider had promoted him. “I don’t need—don’t want—these.”

“You may not, but this is wartime, McGee, and you do not have the luxury of refusing. We all have a job to do, and you did yours flawlessly.”

Heide thrust the box into McGee’s hands, who reached it back toward his CO. The Hider did not make a motion to take it back; McGee let it slip from his hands and hit the floor. “A flawless operation doesn’t come back with two casualties, Captain.”

“McGee, you know better than I that we were expecting thirty- to fifty-percent casualties, best-case estimates. There was a reasonable chance that you’d all be lost. Instead, you acquired the objective, disrupted their counterintelligence operations by reclaiming the artists, inflicted no small number of casualties, and—if the survivors are to be believed—uncovered evidence of dissension within the enemy ranks. All in exchange for two personnel. That, Lieutenant, is—by any standard—quite a bargain.”

A bargain. “Yeah, I’m sure Simonson and Chakrabarti would be gratified to know that because they were willing to get blown to bits, we got to go shopping for some real great deals at Baldy-mart.”

Harry’s voice was soft; for once, not a hint of teasing or irony was in it. “C’mon, Tank. You know they wouldn’t blame you. We all know the rules of this game, this uniform. We put ourselves at risk to move the fight forward.”

“Except they didn’t have to die, Harry. If I had pulled them back the first second I knew there was any possibility of new trouble, if I hadn’t stopped to—” And McGee could not go further: his jaw muscles bunched and his teeth ground. He started to walk away.

“You mean because you stopped to kiss Ms. Peitchkov?” finished Heide with inhuman smoothness. “Understandable, that. You are, after all, only human. Besides, that may not have been your doing, McGee.”

“
What?”

“McGee, watch your tone—and a little more decorum please, now that you are an officer again. As I was saying, your succumbing to the urge to kiss your girlfriend may have been an example of enemy mind-manipulation. Using her as a ‘transmitter,’ so to speak, they may have seen this as a way to try to delay you further, so that their response teams could catch up with you. She was quite possibly their geisha-marionette.”

McGee turned to face Heide directly, his immense fists in knots on either side of his body. “Go ahead, Heide. Say that just one more ti—”

And Harry was around and between them. “Captain Heide, I think this may be a little too hard for Tank to hear. The news that his girlfriend might be an enemy asset—willingly or unwillingly—is very disturbing to him. He’s likely to get…er, emotional.”

The Hider seemed completely unaware that his continued existence had been anything but certain for the past ten seconds. “Very well. But McGee, be warned. I will not stand for any more insolence. You will address me by my rank, or I will throw you in the brig, regardless of your recent record. Now, get some rest. Dismissed.”

“On one condition. Put my son back with his mother.”

“McGee, this is not wise. We need some separation between the two in order to assess if there is any linkage we are missing, which could be a control mechanism that the Baldies—”

“Captain, you don’t even know what to look for. Meanwhile, with every passing minute, you make Jennifer more hostile and intractable. And if it’s determined that she is
not
under Baldy influence, then you’ll want her to be happy and cooperative when it comes time for her to be fully debriefed on Baldy procedures, communication, et cetera. She’s an intel gold mine—but if you withhold her baby, that gold mine will have collapsed and you’ll have no chance of digging it open again. Trust me—I know.”

Heide considered Tank’s weary but earnest face and nodded. “As you suggest, then. Go to bed, McGee.”

Tank turned without saluting; slump-shouldered, he headed toward his bunk.

Heide crooked a finger behind him. “Li?”

Harry came closer, not enjoying the proximity. “Yes, sir?”

“Pass these orders to the security-oversight team. The infant is to be restored to his mother. But she is to be watched carefully. And so is he. Be ready to intervene with the child at a moment’s notice.”

“Why? Are you concerned that Jennifer might attempt to attack her own child?”

“No, I am concerned that he might attack us.”

“Sir?”

“We already have plentiful evidence that the enemy has managed to alter her thoughts, has managed to get deep inside her mind. Do we know they haven’t done the same to the boy?”

“But the boy is an infant, sir!”

“So what? The enemy is evidently capable of psychic manipulation, possibly communication. He might be their ears, their eyes, even their remote-weapons platform. Whatever powers they might have and be able to confer, we can only guess.”

“And if the boy is doing something that the security observers think might be dangerous?”

“Then he is to be dealt with as any other captive attempting to attack us or break out.”

Li laughed, not believing. “You mean, lethal force.”

“I do indeed, Sergeant, I do indeed.”

Li gaped after Heide’s receding back.

* * *

Ankaht felt as well as saw the two pirates close in, their dual-bladed knives flashing in the dreaded Summer-Lightning pattern that was the trademark of their
zhetshotan
Renegade Brotherhood. She saw and felt herself begin the traditional parries—the same ones she had rehearsed upon waking up from her long cryogenic sleep to New Ardu, hundreds of lifetimes after the last of the
zhetshotans
had been hunted down and purged from the Inner Sea of Qez’em’frek.

But then this vivid
shaxzhutok
avatar of her earlier self moved differently than she would have. Instead of a tumbling semicartwheel away from her attackers, her ancient incarnation had feinted at a backflip that turned into a falling twist: she went sideways as the pirate blades came in, slipping between them. As she went beneath the insufficiently down-corrected sweep of their knives, she crouched low so that she remained poised on one foot only; a precarious stance, not maintainable for more than a second. But in that second, she swept her other foot into the back of one opponent’s knee, even as she swiped at the other’s heels with her
skeerba
. With a pair of shrill cries—Arduans had been far more vocal in the early Pre-Enlightenment—they both went down. She rolled up to her feet, all claws out and diving for the one whose legs she’d swept—

—and Ankaht fell to the mats, sweating, suddenly pushed out of her
shaxzhutok
recollection of a fighting style that had been lost from all memory and record. And understandably so; it trafficked in moves that were very risky, but very lethal if successful. The style had fallen from use as the
Destoshaz
caste became more uniformly populated by the tall, golden variety of her species. This
maatkahshak
’s prevailing strategies—of close maneuver and sudden inversions that rewarded a low center of gravity and shorter limbs—had been a useless discipline to the tall, lean, deadly physiology of the increasingly uniform
Destoshaz
. And so this fighting style had been forgotten, lost in a history that was becoming all the more dim, given the small number of
shaxzhu
awake to impart it and the disinterest of the majority
Destoshaz
.

But it had not been the strangeness, and yet odd suitability, of the forgotten
maatkahshak
that had ejected her from immersion in the
shaxzhutok
, but the repetitive persistence of her last full memory of Ipshef and Orthezh. For some reason, it intruded itself with greater frequency the closer she came to this afternoon’s meeting with the Council of Twenty—the first since the chaotic incidents of last week. The fact that she did not choose to linger upon the memory, but that it was nonetheless increasing in frequency as she came closer to the meeting, suggested that it was telling her something, was guiding her to a true and powerful
sulhaji
that she had either not yet seen—or did not want to see.