Redemption of Light (The Light Trilogy) (42 page)

“If they’re not here,” Rudy demanded through gritted teeth, “where are they?” He held his injured leg as he made his way across the bridge of the
Orphica
to slump down into the navigation chair.

The ten other officers monitoring the consoles or conducting repairs on various units, stared worriedly at him.

Merle braced an elbow on the arm of her command chair and stared at the Mainz system stars depicted on the forward screen. Two dozen starsails and an odd number of freighters had begun arriving minutes ago. They dotted the black velvet blanket of space like fireflies. But no other cruisers had come through yet. “If they’re not here, they’re at Palaia.”

Rudy felt like a hard fist had slammed him in the stomach. He hunched forward over the nav console and shook his head miserably. “What the hell are we going to do? If the Magistrates ambushed us at Horeb, Merle, the same is certainly waiting for Jeremiel and Cole at Palaia. Even if they managed to capture the
Sargonid
—”

Merle jerked up a silencing hand. Her eyes widened and Rudy spun to stare at the screen. Two cruisers streaked space like blue-violet tubes.

“Ours, Kopal?”

Rudy swiftly input the request into his com. “Yes,” he sighed in relief. “Mass readings suggest the
Zilpah
and
Hammadi.
”

Merle sank back in her chair, a stony look on her round face. “Kopal, let’s find out their status. If they’re both functional, maybe we can load all the surviving refugees onto one ship and dispatch it to Shyr. Then—”

“Yes!”
Rudy shouted. He slammed an eager fist into his console. “With two cruisers and some starsails and freighters, we just damned well might be able to do it, Merle! Let’s go for it!”

CHAPTER 44

Jason scrutinized himself in the mirror over the table. Straightening his purple uniform one last time, he combed his hair, retrieved the “confidential” dattran, books, and the necklace they’d taken from their Gamant prisoners, and stepped out into the hallway, briskly walking toward Amirah’s cabin.

When he reached it, he lifted his hand and let it hover over the entry patch. Blood surged in his ears. She’d only invited him to her cabin once before, and it had devastated his personal life. Yet, he’d craved this—a chance to be alone with her again.

He hit the patch and called, “Amirah? It’s Jason.”

“Come in.”

The door slipped open and he stepped inside. Oil lamps lit the room, scenting the air with the fragrance of rain-drenched forests. As his eyes adjusted, he saw Amirah standing over the com unit on her desk. Her uniform shone blackly in the dim light, but her hair shimmered like golden waves of silk. She held a half-empty glass of amber liquid in her hand. She turned to look at him and he tensed. She appeared sodden with fatigue. Her eyes looked more red than turquoise. Hadn’t she slept in the past eight hours? He’d deliberately held back the spectacular news from Slothen, because he’d assumed she’d be resting. Shadows spawned by the lamps accentuated the hollows of her cheeks, bringing into prominence her button nose and heart-shaped mouth.

As she started across the floor, she swayed slightly and his brows lowered. Had she drunk so much, or was it just the exhaustion taking its toll? The latter, he assured himself.

“Please sit down, Jason,” she said and gestured to the table. “What can I get you to drink?”

“Brandy.” he said as he slid into a chair. He set the books and necklace down on the table. “We took these from the prisoners. I haven’t had a chance to look at them, I thought you might—”

“We’re in vault?”

“Yes, and have been for four hours. Our ETA at Palaia is forty hours.”

She nodded and went to the refrigeration chest at the foot of her bed, removing a faceted crystal bottle and a glass. She brought them back to the table, along with her own glass. As she poured his full, he studied the way her hand trembled.

“Amirah? Are you all right? Did you get any sleep?”

She dropped into the chair opposite him. “No.”

He glanced at her com unit, seeing the screen full of words. “You’ve been studying?”

“Yes, but let’s not discuss it—yet. Tell me how the ship is. Did you contact Palaia?”

A surge of pride and happiness expanded his breast. He leaned across the table and smiled. “I did. When I first told Slothen about you capturing Baruch and Tahn, I thought he was going to faint. But he got hold of himself and acted almost giddy.”

“Really?” She lifted her glass and drained it dry. “What did he say?”

Jason sifted through his pocket and found the dattran. He reverently handed it across the table and waited with quiet esteem. “Slothen wanted to make it public immediately,” he informed her. “But I told him I thought it would be better to wait until you’d had time to absorb it.”

Amirah’s flesh paled so that her freckles stood out across her nose. She looked as stunned and offended as if she’d just been convicted of a crime she hadn’t committed. In a violent move, she crumpled the sheet and threw it on the floor, then lurched to her feet to pace across the gray carpet.

Appalled by her response, Jason’s mouth dropped open. “What’s wrong? I thought you’d be so delighted you’d dance on the table. Only ten other people
in history
have been awarded the Magisterial Medal of Honor. I’m so proud of you I could burst!”

Her eyes flared. “Are you?”

“Yes!”

“Well, then, let me explain the glorious details of how I captured the two most wanted criminals in the galaxy.”

He braced his elbows on the table and sipped his brandy. Though her face bore her typical captain’s stoic mask, he could see her fists shaking. What had happened during her capture to tear her apart so? “I’d hoped you would.”

She strode over to stand directly in front of him. Golden lamp glow danced across her captain’s bars, catching in the silver threads adorning her epaulets. The diabolical gleam that flickered in her eyes made him flinch.
“They gave themselves up to me.
Tahn very politely handed me a pistol, then he and Baruch dropped their gunbelts and raised their hands over their heads.”

For a moment, he was too shocked to respond. “They put up no resistance?”

“None.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either.” The lamp spat and wavered, shimmering with a flaxen radiance over her taut face. “There were a thousand things they could have done. They could have used me as a bargaining chip to exchange for Calas, or kept a weapon and opened fire when you rounded the corner. They could have brought in explosives, mined the corridors and blown up half the ship. Their actions were totally irrational.”

Jason smoothed his fingers over the beads of moisture that had formed on his cool glass. Amirah’s confused voice lashed at him like a storm wind.

“Jason,” she said adamantly. “Have you ever heard about Creighton’s brain experiments on Gamants on Tikkun twelve years ago?”

“No.”

Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted an arm and swung it around to point at her glowing com screen. “Slothen authorized the surgical mutilation of subjects, then ordered them ‘disposed’ of.
He murdered innocent people.”

Jason’s mind sought to find some framework to place the data into—but couldn’t. He took another drink of his brandy. “What do you mean ‘murdered’? The government would never—”

“The file on my screen now delineates the series of orders received by Major Johannes Lichtner, Block 10’s commander, over a period of approximately sixteen months.”

She drew a breath and met his gaze squarely. The wary look she gave him made his stomach roil. Did she fear he’d retreat to the classic “loyal officer” routine? No, she couldn’t possibly. They’d seen too much horror together over the past few years to believe the quaint propaganda about the near-divine perfection of the Magistrates. But—murder? No, in her weariness she must have misunderstood the documents.

He stood up and extended a hand toward her com. “May I read what you’ve found?”

She gazed at him with such genuine gratitude that he had to fight his hands. They wanted to reach out and pull her into his arms to assure her he was, above all else, on
her
side.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

He went across the room and dropped into her desk chair. The opening line read:
GENERAL ORDERS REGARDING TIKKUN RESEARCH CENTER: Opened the 10th of Shebat, 5413. Closed the 15th of Nisan, 5414.

Amirah brought both their glasses and the bottle of brandy over. She placed them on the desk, refilled their goblets and backed away with hers, sinking down on the edge of her disheveled bed.

“Thank you,” Jason said and smiled.

She nodded obligingly and returned his smile, but a dark worry filled her eyes.

He forcibly tugged his gaze back to the green letters on the screen and concentrated.
General Order No. 1: Major Johannes Lichtner is ordered to assist, in any way requested, the needs of the neurophysiological team under the command of Colonel Jonathan Creighton for the entire duration of this project.

“That’s strange,” Jason murmured.

“You mean the blanket authorization to do whatever Creighton said?”

“Yes.” He swiveled around in the chair. “Have you ever seen an order before that didn’t limit the authority of the officers involved based upon constantly updated progress reports?”

She took a long swallow of her brandy and hunched forward to brace her elbows on her knees. “No. I didn’t know such orders were possible.”

“Neither did I.” He squinted back at the screen, considering the implications. “But they’re convenient. In the event that something politically unpalatable occurs, such ‘I wash my hands’ orders give the Magistrates the ability to maintain they were not informed about the operations and therefore aren’t responsible for any debacles.”

“Keep reading, Jason. I
need
your input.”

Bravely, he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. Some of the tension went out of her back, her muscles relaxing beneath his fingers. He squeezed gently. “Do you want to try to sleep while I read? I have to be back on the bridge in five hours, but I’ll be here until then, if you wake and want to talk.”

Her usually hard expression softened, as though he’d just offered to guard her back against a thousand enemy soldiers. He smiled warmly and she reached up to grasp his hand. “Thank you. I think I will.”

He winked confidently and watched her curl into a fetal position, facing him. Her hair spread like a pale veil of cornsilk across her white pillowcase. She closed her eyes and in only a few minutes, her breathing slowed to the deep rhythms of sleep. For the first time in their lives together, he let his gaze drift openly over the perfect contours of her body, lingering on the swell of her breasts and her long legs. The
Steel Woman,
as her crew affectionately called her, looked so vulnerable, so patently frail, that he had trouble turning back to his file.

But turn back he did.

He accessed the second file on Tikkun. A holo film taken in the camp began to roll, introducing the file. Jason’s muscles contracted at the sickeningly sweet sound of the narrator’s voice which explained,
“Eliminating useless subjects.”
On the screen, a line of fifty or more people labored digging a deep ditch. Misty rain drenched the air, glistening like dew in the hair of the little children who struggled to lift their shovels high enough to throw dirt over the lip of the channel. A major, from his uniform, strode up, smiled smugly into the holo camera, and haughtily surveyed the channel, then ordered the people out.

“Hurry it up!”
He shouted.
“You filthy Gamant swine are about to learn a new lesson in Magisterial mercy!”

He lined them all up in front of the ditch, telling them to raise their hands over their heads and turn to face the deep gash in the crimson soil. People reluctantly complied, gazing fearfully over their shoulders. Ten soldiers marched up to stand behind them, braced their rifles, and opened fire. Jason twitched, watching the violet beams slash down mercilessly through men, women, and children. Screams rode the rain-soaked wind. A few brave souls tried to run, leaping their dead compatriots only to be sliced in half by soldiers further down the line. Most of the victims fell into the ditch, but those who didn’t were casually pushed in by huge mechanical scoops.

Jason stopped the film and propped a fist on Amirah’s desk.

“I can’t believe
…”

He shook himself out of his shock and entered the command to continue the film. The scene changed. A little boy dressed in a pancake hat and short pants stood with his hands up, tears streaking his five- or six-year-old face. He screamed, “No! No!” over and over as two guards took turns slamming him in the face and stomach with their rifle butts—cruel laughter split the sunny afternoon.

Jason clamped his jaw hard, hate rising like a hot wall of water to drown him. He pounded the patch to fast-forward the film. He stopped it randomly and gazed down on a group of emaciated, dead children lying in the rain. Their blood flowed in tiny channels down a slope toward a series of gray windowless buildings. The narrator noted simply,
“Useless subjects about to be buried.”

Hatred brought tears to Jason’s eyes. He rubbed a callused palm over his face and glanced back at Amirah. She slept soundly, though her eyelids spasmed with dreams. Had she seen this file? He prayed she wasn’t dreaming of the pitiful faces of the children.

Bracing himself, he forced his hand forward to hit the patch to continue the file.

Two hours later, he pushed away from the desk and stared agonizingly at Amirah’s slumbering form. She hadn’t even changed position.

He dropped his face into his hands and rubbed his forehead. A wretched headache pressed behind his eyes. But inside … inside he seethed. He felt betrayed by his own “beneficent” government—a ruling force that could at will suspend its own regulations, reinterpret policy to make it fit situational needs and discard its ironclad Ethics Directive without so much as blinking.

No wonder Amirah had been distraught. His own mind couldn’t adjust to the brutal reality. He desperately wished Amirah were up so he could share his feelings, but he couldn’t bear to wake her. Her beautiful face looked so peaceful, and she needed the rest so badly.

He toyed with the edge of the desk, thinking about the implications of the studies—about Gamant brain structure and Magisterial cruelty. His eyes darted over the room and he noticed, by accident, the folded crystal sheet that lay tucked beneath the corner of her com unit. Only the glittering white tip showed. Gingerly, he pulled it out and unfolded it, reading the awesome list of files. He glanced back up at the screen. Were they all like this one?

He swiveled back to the com and requested the file on the planet Jumes.

Three more hours swept by—hours of torment and despair that made him sick to his stomach. The clandestine project claimed to have isolated a genetic anomaly which caused dangerous abnormalities in the basal ganglia. In response to the discovery, fifteen thousand Gamant women had been forcibly ushered into the research installation and sterilized. And when the populace found out and rose up like a huge deadly beast in revolt …
Cole Takn, then captain of the
Hoyer
had been ordered to scorch the planet.
Tahn had obediently complied. A level one attack, the entire central portion of Jumes had been devastated.