Redemption of Light (The Light Trilogy) (41 page)

A pause. A soft whisper of muted voices.

“I dreamed that my mom was in the Mashiah’s palace, up in the light, and my dad was down in the darkness. My mom hunted and hunted for Daddy, but she couldn’t find him. I remember in the dream, she was crying all the time. It scared me so badly I dove out of my bed and ran around for twenty minutes in the dark to find your room.”

Still holding Tahn’s eyes, Baruch replied, “I remember. You felt like ice when you climbed into bed with me. Stand by, Sybil.”

Baruch hit the patch again and braced his elbows on his chair arms, steepling his gloved fingers. Inside his visor, Amirah could see that perspiration had glued his blond hair to his cheeks. “No one but Sybil would know that.”

“And if they’re holding a gun on Mikael?”

“She could lie easily and no one would know.”

“Unless"—Tahn whispered ominously—"they have her attached to the probes and are monitoring truth or falsity, while simultaneously holding a gun to Mikael’s head. I suspect in that case, she’d tell the truth no matter what it meant for you and me, old friend. How does she sound to you?”

“Within the range of normal, given the tense situation she’s been enduring for days.”

Cole flopped back into his chair. “Well, what do you think?”

Baruch laced his gloved fingers over his stomach and studied Cole intently. “I say we use Operation Shevirah.”

Cole sat forward abruptly, his helmet no more than a foot from Baruch’s. “I thought that was a last resort? I lean toward Operation Yacob.”

Baruch said through a long exhalation, “In that narrow space, they could cut off the ends of the tube and box us tight with no effort at all.”

Cole laughed, a low unpleasant sound. “If Woloc has his ship back, Jeremiel, he’s going to box us anyway. He just has to mine all the approaches, get us inside, and we’re dead, friend.”

“Shevirah’s a better plan.”

Amirah could hear Cole’s rapid breathing hissing through his helmet. Quietly, he informed, “My ardor for mind probes has dwindled over the years, Jeremiel.”

“Mine’s not exactly zesty, either, but at most, it would be two days’ worth. We can hold out for that long.”

Baruch glanced at Amirah and cupped a hand to Cole’s helmet pickup. He lowered his voice so that she couldn’t hear no matter how hard she tried. She caught the words, “Palaia,” and “Carey,” and “once we’re in,” then something about someone saying Slothen wanted Mikael badly, but she couldn’t make any sense out of the connections. Tahn nodded occasionally, but he grew increasingly nervous as the low interchange continued, his glove tightening more and more over his knee.

Both men eased back into their chairs, gazes impaling each other. They sat like that until Cole vented a loud, “Goddamn it,” and began fussing roughly with his helmet. He adjusted and readjusted it, as though his air supply had gotten pinched and he couldn’t get quite enough oxygen. Baruch steepled his fingers over the base of his visor and watched.

“Well?” Baruch inquired calmly.

Tahn stopped manipulating his helmet and clenched a fist over his head. He let it hover in the air, as though he desperately wanted to slam it into something, but instead he slowly let it fall to the white control console. “It’s insane, Jeremiel.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll never work.”

“Probably not.”

Cole drummed his fingers manically. “You’re supposed to be brilliant, why can’t you think of something better?”

The reproachful tone made Baruch smile. “I’m working on it.”

Cole’s eyes narrowed in disgust. “Oh, I get it. You mean maybe something will come to you as we go along?”

“Hopefully.”

“You inspire a lot of confidence, Baruch,” Cole noted. He gave Amirah an imploring sideways glance, as though she somehow played a part in this plan. Without losing eye contact with her, he grabbed his taza cup, turned it over and shook out the last drops of brown liquid onto the gray carpet.

Amirah grimaced, seeing them splat to form a grimy starburst. Baruch lifted his brows. When Cole noted their responses, he leaned toward Jeremiel and whispered, “We’re not coming back here anyway, are we?”

“Seriously doubtful.”

Cole tossed his cup into the corner, listening to it land with a sharp crunching sound. He swung back to his console and hit the com patch, calling, “Mikael, this is Tahn, we’re coming in through bay twenty-three. Stay in Engineering. We’ll meet you there.”

“Affirmative. We’ll be waiting.”

Amirah let out a long relieved breath as Baruch input the thrust commands and the fighter nosed downward, sliding smoothly toward the landing bay. When they eased inside and settled to the floor, Amirah’s heart lurched. She’d been in this bay a hundred times. Two hundred feet square, three Magisterial shuttles sat along its right wall, gleaming like black isosceles triangles. On the other side, supply niches lined the walls.

Cole reached into the island compartment between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats and drew out a crystal sheet. He resolutely stood up and came across the floor to kneel in front of Amirah.

“Here. You’re going to need this.” He took the sheet, folded it, and slipped it into the side pocket of her vacuum suit.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A list of all the Magisterial files we’re aware of that detail government atrocities against Gamants.”

“Why would I want to review them?”

He passed the EM key over her ankle restraints. They broke open into his waiting glove. “You’re a decent human being at heart, that’s why.”

Baruch hit a series of patches on his console and the side door slipped open, revealing the white-tiled bay lit with glaring lustreglobes.

Cole glanced outside and Amirah saw his breathing go shallow. He stood up and pulled out one of his pistols, then, with a medieval flourish, he bowed and presented it to her.

Her eyes darted over his face in confusion. Pillowed on his white glove, the weapon beckoned. “What are you doing, Cole?”

“Saving lives.” He shoved the weapon closer, practically under her nose and sighed bleakly when she took it. Both he and Baruch unfastened their belts and let their guns down easy onto the gray carpet.

Amirah stared in utter disbelief.

Cole raised his hands over his head and grinned casually. “Come on, Captain. This ought to get you another Naassene Cross.”

As though the words had triggered it, a shudder went through the
Sargonid.
Amirah clutched wildly for one of the wall braces. Her vision clouded, her balance wavered. For two haunting seconds the universe seemed to spin with no orientation. Everything went hazy, images jumping in and fading away at the same time, like standing on the canvas of a surreal painting when the artist splattered it with the brightest of colors. Then it stopped.

Baruch gave Tahn a look that made Amirah’s blood turn to ice. “Just like twelve years ago on the
Hoyer,
remember? It was like the very fabric of space heaved.” Tahn pulled himself straight. “I remember.
Phase change.”
In a low foreboding voice, he asked, “What the hell are we into?”

Fragrant river-scented breezes tousled Rachel’s black hair. She huddled on a barren red hilltop, her face buried in the green robe over her drawn-up knees. The universe trembled around her.

“It’s working, God,” she whispered. “Can you feel it?
Can you?”

And from somewhere far ahead of her in time and a long distance away, she
felt
Aktariel lift his hands to cover his ears so he couldn’t hear the screams that vibrated through the fabric of the Void.

Calmly, she lifted her head and gazed at the goats grazing placidly in the green valley below. A few mud houses dotted the shores of the river. An old woman sat combing wool on her front step, laughing at the children frolicking in the dirt street.

Rachel let their happiness soak into her very tissues. Maybe, just maybe, Nathan could….

In a burst of black and gold, Aktariel ran out of the whirling vortex, sprinting across the hilltop toward her. His blue cloak billowed out behind him. “Rachel? Rachel! Do you know what you’ve done?”

She serenely buried her face in her robe again, nuzzling her cheek against the soft silk. Like a wildfire, he’d said, it could
catch
across the voids.
Yes …
The heat from the blazing fire already roasted her soul. She could sense the strands flaming, shaking loose, reweaving.

As his sandaled feet pounded closer, Rachel lifted her head. He stopped, fists clenched tightly at his sides. He gazed down at her through bittersweet amber eyes, eyes that seemed to bear the entire weight of universal suffering in their gleaming depths.

“I’ve laid the first stone for the foundation of the Kingdom, Aktariel. That’s what I’ve done.”

CHAPTER 43

Jason grabbed his stomach when the
Sargonid
stopped shaking and the dizzying torrent of disorientation passed. He felt ill, his belly threatening to empty itself. He struggled to separate the dim lustreglobes from the blur of purple uniforms in Engineering.

“What the hell was that?” Rad demanded. His flat features seemed two-dimensional.

Jason shook his head emphatically and rushed back to bend over the visual com that monitored the landing bay. Had it been some Underground trick? No, the fighter still sat like a docile silver spear point. He whirled and waved at the four Gamant prisoners, “Get them out of here! Everybody else get into position for the ambush!”

Technicians scurried to inject the Gamants with sedatives to make them more manageable, then disconnected the probe units from their heads. Sybil Calas thrashed about wildly, but the men seemed quiet enough. Jason strode into the center of the room and stared up, surveying the preparations. Soldiers got into position on all three levels of Engineering, checking their rifles, licking lips nervously. A round of giddy laughter echoed. Tension hummed. Every man and woman aboard had dreamed of capturing Jeremiel Baruch and Cole Tahn. Long ago the Magistrates had ordered that both men be probed until their brains yielded no further information. The process would leave them vegetables, but after all the innocent people the Gamant Underground had slaughtered in the past quarter of a century, they deserved whatever they got. Tahn! The most infamous traitor in Magisterial history. If Jason could capture the man, the Magistrates might award him his own ship and then he wouldn’t have to ache….

“Lieutenant?” Engineer Rad said. Disbelief tinged his voice. He peered steadily at the bay monitor. “You’d better take a look at this.”

Jason ran back and braced a hand on the control console, gazing down. His mouth gaped as he watched two tall men, both in vacuum suits, step out of the fighter, their hands up. A smaller figure—a woman?—stepped out behind them, a pistol in her glove. She marched the men ahead of her to the bay exit and hit the wall com unit.

“Lieutenant Woloc?” Amirah’s strong voice echoed all through the ship.

A cheer went up from the soldiers in Engineering, loud and exultant. Disbelieving voices chanted, “The captain captured Baruch and Tahn by herself!” “Good God, can you believe it? Jossel can do anything!”

Jason pounded the response patch. “Amirah! You’re alive!”

“Alive and very tired,” she responded wearily. “Could you and a security team meet me in the hallway and take these two prisoners off my hands? I could use a good dinner and ten hours of sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am, Captain,” he answered formally, but a softness invaded his voice. “We’re on our way.”

He cut the connection and ordered, “Sergeant Qery, gather your team and follow me.”

“We’re ready, sir,” Qery announced.

Jason strode hurriedly out of Engineering and down the hall, pistol in his hand. His chest ached with emotion that he couldn’t show. In the past few days, he’d worried so much about her safety that now he longed to run to her to make certain she really was all right, that no one had hurt her. But he couldn’t do that. Duty obliged him to proceed in a cautious professional manner. He had to treat her return with the reserved joy that he’d accord any other shipmate.

They rounded a corner, heading down another long white hall to crowd into the transport tube. The tube descended smoothly, but for a moment, Jason felt as though a jolt of electricity had gone through him. He stiffened his knees. A nightmare feeling of futility and frustrated longing swept him up.
It would all begin again, now. All over again.
Anguish wailed through his heart like a wounded animal crying out in fear at the sight of the hunter.

When everything had settled down he’d … Yes, yes, he promised himself, he’d reapply for transfer.
This time, Amirah, please, let me go.

The tube stopped and Qery and his team flooded out, dispersing down the corridor, lining the walls of the final approach. Jason brought up the rear. He gripped his pistol in a clammy palm before edging out in front and striding forward to peer around the comer.

Amirah and her two prisoners had removed their helmets. Blonde waves fluffed in luxurious disarray about her shoulders. Her turquoise eyes glistened with a combination of suspicion and curiosity. Baruch stood calmly, his face blank. But Tahn paced erratically, starting and stopping, whispering gruffly to Baruch, who simply nodded in response.

Jason signaled Qery to come forward and a sudden torrent of men washed around him. Charging down the hall, the security team slammed Baruch and Tahn up against the walls and searched them. Amirah stepped back and Jason hurried into the corridor. When she saw him, such relief came over her face that a fire of yearning raced through him.

“Good to see you looking so healthy, Captain,” he said as he came up alongside her.

“You, too, Lieutenant.”

She swayed slightly on her feet and Jason lunged to grab her elbow supportively. Her scent enveloped him; she smelled of sweat and some faint fragrance, like flowers after a rainstorm.

Quietly, he asked, “Are you all right?”

“Just exhausted.”

“I’m sure.” He squeezed her arm tenderly, more for himself than for her. Being this close salved some of his own desperate need to hold her. He cast a glance at Baruch and Tahn and his back crawled. Tahn stood watching him intently. When Jason lifted a condemning brow, Tahn gave him stare for stare, but an odd, almost pitying light glistened in the traitor’s eyes. Jason reluctantly released Amirah’s arm. “I can’t wait to hear the story of how you captured the two most infamous desperadoes in the galaxy.”

Her gaze went to Tahn—searching. Tahn stood passively as the security team clapped EM restraints on his wrists, but a bright savage glitter lit his eyes. Jason glanced back and forth between them. They seemed to be asking each other harsh, if silent, questions. Tahn broke the tug-of-war when he threw Amirah a smile so cavalier it felt like a slap in the face. She dropped her gaze and responded to Jason’s earlier query, “I can’t wait to tell you. Could we get together over drinks tonight? My cabin. Say 19:00 hours?”

Nervousness tightened his throat. “Yes, I’d like that. Why don’t you go and get some rest. I’ll send a dattran to Paiaia telling them you’re all right and that we have custody of Baruch and Tahn, then I’ll get us into light vault and talk to Doctor Hilberg about setting up the mind probes so we can—”

“No!” Amirah blurted. Shock strained her beautiful face. “No, just … just put them in the brig until I can think more about it.”

Jason’s brows drew together. “Whatever you say, but it’s standard operating procedure when you capture—”

“I’m well aware of that, Lieutenant,”
she said so sharply that the security team jerked their heads up, looking from their captain to their first lieutenant.

Jason spread his arms apologetically. “I meant no disrespect, Captain.”

And then Amirah did something she’d never done. She frowned in self-reproach and walked forward to put a fond hand on Jason’s shoulder. Her touch comforted him immeasurably.

“I’m very tired, Jason. Forgive me. I need to rest.”

“I understand. I’ll take care of the ship. Go and get some sleep. I’ll see you tonight.”

She patted his hand before walking away down the hall.

As the security team started dragging Tahn in the opposite direction, he struggled, shouting, “Amirah?
Amirah?”

Jason opened his mouth to tell the prisoner to shut up, but he noticed how his captain’s steps faltered. She stopped dead in her tracks as though she’d run into a brick wall. She didn’t turn, but she lifted her face toward the ceiling and seemed to be waging some inner battle. “What is it, Cole?”

Startled at the first name usage, Jason stood speechless.

In the gentlest voice he’d ever heard, Tahn said, “If you need … anything … just send for me.
Understand?”

Jason snorted incredulously at the implication that Amirah needed anyone! But he stifled his outburst when she turned. A worried expression ravaged her face.

She nodded at Tahn. “I understand. But I’m home now, Cole. I’ll be all right.” She turned and marched around the corner.

Jason tried to connect the sequence of events to figure out what they’d been discussing, but gave up. “Qery,” he ordered, “get the prisoners to the brig.”

“Aye, sir.” Qery waved a hand and his security team lowered their rifles into firing position and herded the prisoners down the hall. Jason stayed where he was, watching their retreating backs. Baruch said something inaudible and Tahn chuckled insolently. Then Tahn quietly added, “Well, at least we resolved our problem about breaking through the defense net.”

Jason frowned. An ominous feeling of disquiet plagued him as he headed for the bridge.

Amirah entered her cabin and slumped back against the wall. Her white vacuum suit felt heavy, pressing the air out of her lungs. She bashed a fist into the patch to close the door. A queasy sensation grew in her stomach. Why had Tahn and Baruch given themselves up to her? If they’d truly suspected that Jason had recaptured the cruiser, they could have simply flown away. Why hadn’t they? Baruch had pushed for the surrender. Why? Gamants were such strange….

“You’re
a Gamant, goddamn you!”

She clenched her fists as she gazed around her cabin. The familiarity soothed her a little. In the ten by ten foot cubicle, a table and four chairs sat on her right. A small bookcase depressed the wall over it. In the rear, her bed crowded the narrow space, the white sheets and gray blanket still rumpled—as she’d left them. A lattice divider separated her bed from the main part of the cabin. On the shelves that adorned the divider, precious knickknacks from all around the galaxy glimmered: tiny ruby-studded tapestries from Giclas 7, petite porcelain cups and saucers from Sculptor 3, rainbow wine glasses from Hevron on Old Earth. A pain lodged in her throat when she looked at them. Her grandmother had given them to her, so long ago she barely remembered the year. But she recalled the tender, loving look on Sefer’s face when she’d helped Amirah wrap them in bright yellow paper to put in her hope chest.

Feebly, she repeated, “You’re a Gamant, Amirah. The granddaughter of a great Gamant hero.”

Madly, she flung off her vacuum suit and purple uniform, throwing them into a pile by her table. Bewildered, she put her hands to her head, squeezing, trying desperately to force the sound of Cole’s voice out of her brain:
Someday you’ll have to stop running away from yourself.

She hurried into the shower and stood beneath the hot spray for a blessed twenty minutes, concentrating on the fragrant vanilla scent of her favorite soap. When she stepped out, her body tingled. She felt a little better. She fluffed her blonde hair and wandered naked around her cabin.

Being home engendered a deep feeling of warmth and security. The
Sargonid
throbbed with soundless virility, holding her like a lover. Her ship had always been her mate—for better or worse, in sickness and in health. She reached out and stroked the wall, projecting all the hope and affection she could, hoping it sank into the very hull.

“Now, get some rest. You’re going to need it.”

She walked to her bed and climbed in, tugging the covers up around her throat. Valiantly, she fought to sleep, but she kept tossing and turning, her thoughts returning to the cryptic conversation aboard the fighter. What had Baruch meant when he talked about going to Palaia? What could two,
two,
men possibly hope to do to help Gamant civilization on such a strictly guarded facility? They couldn’t break through Palaia’s security system—
even if they were free!
Which obviously they weren’t.

After two more hours of endless flailing, she sat up. The Iustreglobe over the table sparked in response to her movements, throwing a dim silver hue over the cabin.

Groggily, she got to her feet and crossed her cabin to retrieve her vacuum suit. Reaching into the pocket, she jerked out the sheet Cole had given her and squinted at the file listings. She’d expected five or six, not seventy-seven. Scrutinizing the titles, she selected a series on Tikkun that she hadn’t read on the fighter.

Going to her com unit on the desk by her bed, she slumped down into the chair and input the request, directly accessing the main computer on Palaia. Minutes later, the com answered tersely:
“Files sealed. Please input clandestine authorization code.”

She railed, “What?”

Simple neuro files required a captain’s security clearance to gain entry? She slammed a palm on the desk and input the numerical and alphabetical sequence. Out of fear, she used up half an hour with a request that all the files be transferred to the
Sargonid’s
data banks.

She hesitated, her fingers poised over the key patches. A wash of adrenaline made her breathing go shallow. She lowered her hands and requested all the data on
Amirah Malkenu Jossel, Captain, Serial Number: AZIZ-9151666.
Her hands quaked when a flood of information streamed in. Did they know so much about her?
How much?
Over four hundred files worth.

Pulling her blanket off her bed, she draped it over her bare shoulders and snuggled back in her chair, trying to decide which files to read first.