Dream Called Time (24 page)

“Angry, worried, saddened, frightened,” she chanted as she passed different crew members. “Longing, angry, hungry, angry.”

“What are you doing?” I asked as we entered Command.

“That is what they are feeling,” she said. “You should know this so you do not mistake them for the old one.”

“That’s fine, but you don’t have to say it out loud.”

Her brows rose. “But you cannot read my thoughts.”

She had a point. “If I suspect someone is the shifter, or you find him, do this.” I winked. “That will be our signal.”

“But that is an eye movement, not a data transmission.” She grinned at my expression. “I am having fun with you.”

God help me, she was joking. “Just wink if you identify him. What will he be feeling, by the way?”

Her amusement vanished. “Not what you do.”

“They have no emotions?” I’d seen plenty of anger on the Odnallak’s homeworld.

“The undesirables knew only greed and hatred.” She frowned. “The old one has lost those feelings, but he replaced them with something uglier. He is filled with endless rage.”

I stopped to inform Xonea of what we were doing, but refused his offer to send a detachment of guards with us.

“You need your men on the launches. Maggie can handle whatever Joseph throws at us.” I glanced at his busy console. “How are things on the surface?”

“The council is doing what they can to provide sanctuary for the offworlders and defuse tensions,” he said, “but there have been several attempts by refugees to take control of our territories.”

He didn’t have to tell me they’d failed. “How many dead?”

“Forty thus far, and they will not be the last.” He gestured toward the image of Joren on the viewer. “Soon there will be more refugees than we can accommodate, and our ships will move into position around the homeworld.”

I knew things had grown desperate, but surely it wasn’t this bad yet. “You can’t fire on refugees, Xonea.”

“We will not attack them,” he said. “We will try to turn them away. If they still attempt to land, then we will disable their engines.”

Leaving the refugees adrift in space.

“There’s something you should know.” I related what Maggie had told me about the refugees being infected with the black crystal brought from their homeworlds. “You have to tell the council so they can prepare.”

“I will,” he promised. “Cherijo, there is another decision that has been made by the HouseClans. Joren has never fallen to an invader, and we do not intend to begin now. When it is clear that the black crystal has come to our world, the HouseClans will send out one final signal to our kin. We will board our vessels, leave the homeworld, and fly into our sun.”

He was talking about committing mass suicide, I realized. “Isn’t there some other way?”

“There are many paths,” he reminded me, “but under these circumstances only one destination. We will not run in terror. We will walk within beauty together.”

“If it comes to that, just do one thing for me, please.” The tears I thought I’d lost stung my eyes. “Save some room on the
Sunlace
for Reever and Marel and me.”

He kissed my brow. “I could not go without you, little ClanSister.”

My wristcom chirped, and I answered the signal from Medical. “Yes?”

“Healer Torin,” one of the interns said, “you are needed here. A nurse on her way to report for her shift was attacked in the corridor. She was struck from behind and suffered a skull fracture and internal hemorrhaging. We have treated the injuries, but we cannot stop the bleeding.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes. Prep her and take her into surgery.” I excused myself and went over to where Maggie was making rounds of the helm officers. “One of my people was attacked. We have to return to Medical.”

As she followed me out to the lift, Maggie said, “These people do not hurt each other. The old one must have attacked your nurse, to stop us from finding him.”

I nodded. “That or he attacked her to serve as bait to lure us back to Medical. I want you to scan everyone in the bay as soon as we get there
.
”

“He should not have hurt the nurse,”she said suddenly. “They are kind and helpless. He is an evil bastard.”

At the rate she was picking up all my bad verbal habits, she’d be talking like the Maggie I’d known in no time.
Not that we have much time left.
A thought occurred to me. “Maggie, if the black crystal attacks us and destroys Joren, what will happen to you?”

“Nothing.” She glanced around the lift. “I will be left alone here until I can return to my time.”

If I didn’t fly into the sun with the Torin, I might face the same fate. “Doesn’t that scare you a little?”

“Once I spent two hundred solar years in solitude, so that I could rid myself of uncertainty.” She grimaced. “I would rather be with my people, or you.”

I felt a surge of unwilling pleasure. “I thought we primitives bored you.”

“You did at first,” she assured me. “But now I think you are the most interesting prim—female that I have ever encountered. I am very glad that someday I will create you.”

“When you do this next time,” I said as the lift came to a stop, “could make me a little taller?”

We entered Medical, where Maggie scanned the minds of the staff, and then looked at me and shook her head. I went to scrub and put on my gear while the charge nurse identified my patient for me.

“Intern Qrysala found Manal unconscious in the corridor,” she said. “He attempted to slow the bleeding, but his scans indicated the pressure on her brain was increasing.”

“How diligent of Qrysala.” And highly suspicious, as well. I turned to Maggie and deliberately dropped one eyelid. “Why don’t you come in and observe the procedure?”

She winked back. “I would very much like to do that.”

Before we went into the suite, I had Maggie put on scrubs and a mask. If the Odnallak assumed at first glance that the Jxin was a nurse, we might be able to catch him off guard.

We found the wounded nurse on the table and Qrysala busy hooking up her monitor leads. He saw us and gave me a very convincing, relieved smile.

“Healer Torin, thank the Mother you have come.” He walked around the table with a tray of instruments. “Manal’s condition is rapidly deteriorating. I would like to remain and assist you, if I may.”

I glanced at Maggie, who gave me another wink. “Oh, I think you’ve done enough, shifter.”

As Maggie came up behind him, the intern’s smile faded. “Why do you call me that?”

“I guess because every time I even think of the name Joseph, I want to puke.” Why was Maggie moving past him? “You do remind me of him, though. Attacking a woman from behind is the same kind of cowardly thing he would do.”

Manal suddenly sat up, the terrible wound on her head disappearing as she slid from the table. “You jump to conclusions so easily, daughter.”

I lunged at her, but she pushed me back with a simple sweep of her hand. Qrysala caught me before I fell, and held on to me with one arm as he extended his claws with the other.

“You’ve failed, shifter,” I told him. “Miserably. Your people are dead, and you didn’t stop the black crystal from being created. But I’ll give you another chance to try again.”

“Will you?” Manal seemed amused as Maggie took hold of her.

“You’re going to help us create another rift,” I told him. “Then we’ll all go back together to an earlier time, when the Odnallak were more reasonable, and you’ll tell them to stop the experiment.”

“We were never a very reasonable people, Cherijo,” was all she said.

“Or clever.” Maggie watched as Manal’s form shifted into the Odnallak. “This ruse was especially foolish. You have no avenue of escape now.”

“Why would I want to leave, now that I have you both exactly where I need you?” He tossed a sphere at her, and when it struck her chest, it exploded into the liquid he’d used to restrain us on Odnalla.

This time, however, it was black.

Maggie looked down as the liquid wrapped her in its tendrils. “You know this will not kill me.” She froze as the tendrils inched up and pierced her ear slits. “Cherijo, you must . . .” She fell silent, her jaw still hanging open.

“Maggie?”

“No matter how one feels about the Jxin, one has to admire the stunning breadth and depth of their conceit and arrogance.” Joseph pulled a gurney up beside the operating table. “Doubtless she has told you ad nauseam how inviolate her body is. But while the young Jxin may be invulnerable, their minds are still not disciplined enough to resist true power.”

I didn’t know what he planned to do with Maggie, but he had black crystal, and I had to protect the Jorenians.

“Qrysala,” I said, never taking my eyes off the shifter. “Get out of here. Evacuate the bay. Tell the captain to initiate emergency breach protocol.” Sealing the entire level wouldn’t save the ship, but it might give the crew enough time to abandon it.

I stood between Joseph and the intern, prepared to do whatever I had to in order to give the Jorenian the chance to get away, but Joseph didn’t attempt to stop him from leaving. I reached out and groped for a panel, then punched in the code that engaged a quarantine seal.

“You have wasted entirely too much time and effort on these beings,” he said as he and Maggie moved around the table, coming at me from each side. “Now it is time for us to stop playing hide-and-seek. We will finish the work and return to our homeworld.”

“Terra doesn’t want us,” I said as I backed up against the door panel.

“A part of you has always known you were not Terran, Cherijo.” He stopped in front of me and reached out to catch some strands of my hair between his fingers. “Just as you know that I am your father.”

I struck his hand away. “You didn’t make me. Maggie did.”

“Interfering in my work does not constitute maternal privilege. But this time I am rather grateful that she meddled with you.” He glanced down and back up again. “Your new radiance is lovely, but it is not entirely natural, is it? ”

“Maybe I’ve been exercising and watching my weight,” I countered.

“Maggie has deceived you,” Joseph confided. “How do you think the last pure source of the infinity crystal ended up in your body?”

“I’m just lucky that way.”

“Maggie put it there.” He brushed his knuckles against my cheek before I could move my head. “She has never cared for you. You’re a primitive. The unnatural offspring of an undesirable. You might have a formidable immune system, but to the Jxin you were nothing more than a suitable storage container.”

I kept my expression blank. “Maybe I volunteered.”

“Give up your precious humanity to serve the Jxin? I think not. But you needn’t worry about it.” He patted my shoulder. “Maggie and I will be separating you from the infinity crystal, and everything else that has tainted you. Then you will assist me in saving our homeworld.”

“Odnalla is a great big dead scorched rock,” I reminded him. “So are your people.”

“Now they are.” He gestured at Maggie. “When the Jxin opens a new rift for me, we will do exactly as you wished. We will return to an earlier time in my people’s past, and use the crystal to help them finally attain what is rightfully theirs.”

I shook my head. “You’ll just blow up the planet and create the black crystal sooner than you did the last time.”

“Not if we go back to the time before the Jxin marooned us on that wasteland of a world.” He smiled. “When those self- righteous idiots were still mortal enough to be killed.”

The Jxin hadn’t simply created me. They had been the mythological founding race, the first species of intelligent life in the universe. Before they had vanished from history, they had planted the seeds of life on countless worlds. If the shifter murdered them, he would wipe out all life in my time.

“Maggie,” I said carefully. “I know you can hear what we’re saying. You have to fight this. You have to help me.”

Her gaze shifted to my face, and for a moment I saw a glimmer of understanding. Then the whites of her eyes disappeared, swallowed up by liquid black.

I turned to Joseph. “I’m not the only immortal in this time. One of the others will stop you.”

“Who? Reever? He is on the planet with your brat. The oKiaf and all the others will soon be infected.” He grabbed me by the throat. “Now it’s time for surgery, daughter.”

I fought him, of course. I punched and kicked and clawed as he dragged me over to the table and strapped me down. Maggie followed him like a drone, moving equipment out of the way and helping to hold me down as he put me in restraints. She didn’t respond to anything I said to her, and when I looked into her eyes, I could see the black crystal glittering inside her, ugly and cold.

Joseph grew tired of me fighting, I suppose, because he slammed a mask over my nose and mouth and held it there until whatever he pumped into my lungs made my vision blur and my body go limp. It seemed I was still human enough for him to knock out, because I went from there into blackness.

I woke up stretched out on my back, staring up at Terran sky. I was in a shockball stadium, dressed in a uniform, holding the object of the game, the beautiful cold silver sphere. The shockball that had been programmed to murder my husband.

Someone helped me to my feet, and led me out onto the field. It was a drone official, moving me away from the crowd. Everyone had fallen silent.

“We cannot disable the game computer,” the official was saying. “If you do not release the sphere, you will die.”

Even now, if I released the sphere, it would automatically seek out Duncan. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Going out on the field was to protect everyone else, I realized. I stumbled along, ears ringing, vision blurring.

Jericho was dead. Joseph was dead. I clutched the hot sphere tighter between my palms. They were dead, but Reever would live.

The official checked the players’ board. “The last penalty shall be administered in five, four, three . . .”

The hysterical crowd chanted down the clock, then suddenly hushes. Behind me, a woman screamed. Everyone was standing on their feet, looking up at a lone figure, standing on the edge of the highest tier of seats.