A Stellar Affair (8 page)

“You said it yourself,” Walter had reminded Jack. “Out of the three of them, she’s the most likely to be carrying the coordinates. I want you to get us the information we need to save lives.”

“At the expense of one?” Jack had asked.

“If it comes to that.”

“How does that make us any better than the ones we’re fighting against?” he’d demanded. “If you let me do this the right way, I can get us the intel and help these people.”

“People?”

“Yes, they are people, you know? Human beings.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Walter had said. “Are you sure you’re really out to save all of them or just the woman?”

The question had taken him aback, but he had sworn to put the good of his people first.

“It’s more complicated than you know,” Jack told Damek. “Ardra is a precept.”

This announcement clearly took his friend by surprise, so apparently not all secrets were out yet.

“I don’t know where she’s from, but she’s not Tetch. Like with any precept, her mental abilities are natural enough, but this is the first time she has ever really used them. I think my contact with her mind brought the talent out of dormancy. The only problem now is that she’s learning too quickly. That is what is giving me such a hard time interrogating her. She recognizes when I’m pushing her, and she shoves right back. I glean only little bits of information at a time.”

“She sounds like a fighter,” Damek said. “If Terrah didn’t feel the way she does about the military, I’d say she could help you, but you know there’s no changing her mind about that.”

“That’s for sure.” Still, Jack wondered if she might at least bend her beliefs if he asked her for help. It was something to think about.

“Does Ardra know she’s a precept?”

“No. She’s smart and not afraid to try new things, though, so she may eventually figure it out on her own.”

“You’re not going to tell her?” Damek asked.

“If she’s this much trouble for me already, can you imagine what a battle I would have on my hands if she knew?” Jack tried not to smile, but he had to appreciate Ardra’s daring. “It took me a while, but I finally figured out that she has been tapping into my mind. It was only after the third or fourth time that I caught on. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to stop her. She brushes my mind quickly and at random moments, and by the time I know she’s doing it, she has already withdrawn.”

“What is she after?” his friend asked. “Does she know what she’s doing?”

Jack shook his head. “She thinks of the ability more as intuition. She hasn’t applied her talent in a deliberately conscious way. I don’t understand how she does what she does without ever having trained with anyone. As for what she’s after, I have a good guess. I think she has succeeded in mapping out most of the compound.”

Damek looked aghast. “Have you told Walter?”

“No, he’s too much of an alarmist as it is. Besides, I’ve already got her under extra guard. She’s not going anywhere.”

“But you said she’s a precept, and a clever one at that. If she is, then you know she can get past the guards.”

Jack held a finger to his lips. “
I
know that, but
she
doesn’t. As long as she doesn’t think of it, there’s no problem.”

“And if she does think of it?”

“I keep a close eye on her,” Jack assured him. “The moment the notion occurs to her, I’ll fly out of the house and go fetch her myself. I’m not too worried. She doesn’t seem to be thinking in that direction.”

“I don’t know, Jack. I’d be careful if I were you. She’s already given you more than one surprise, and you seem to have a lot to distract you these days. I may be young, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s never to underestimate a woman.”

His friend had him there.

Chapter Seven

Confinement cell, one week later

Ardra had been working on her escape throughout the day, but she had been interrupted several times by the guards. Thankfully, they had made enough noise that she had been able to hop off the chair and return it to the corner before they opened the door. She wondered why they were checking up on her so often lately. Were they suspicious of her, or had they tightened up security for another reason? It wasn’t as if she could ask them.

Listening for a moment to make certain the guards weren’t coming, she continued to scrape away at the layer of mud and paint covering the closest screw head. As soon as she uncovered it, she turned her makeshift tool so that the thin, circular chair foot fit into the slot. She began the long and tedious process of turning the piece of metal out of its hole. With each twist, more of the threading showed until the head rose high enough for her to grab it.

“Got you!” She loosened the screw the rest of the way and yanked it out.

It would still take a while to finalize her escape, but she was close to freedom. Leaning to the side, she began scraping at the next fastening. She had to use quite a bit of muscle, especially on the first layer. The paint had dried hard and slick, which made it difficult to get the angle and pressure right. Eventually, flecks of gray paint began to rub away, growing lighter as she dug deeper. She had just gotten down to the builder’s mud beneath when she was suddenly walloped by a wave of dizziness.

Her face felt flushed, and she figured maybe she was overheated. All her hard work had raised her temperature enough to make her sweat. Although she was tempted to ignore the sensation and press on, her position on the chair was precarious. She didn’t want to risk a fall. Besides the danger of injury, the commotion of her toppling over would certainly lead to discovery.

She climbed down and covered up any sign of her work by putting the foot back on the chair and dragging it into the corner. When she stepped back, she had to catch herself against the wall to keep her balance. What was happening to her? Her chest ached, and her lips started to burn.

Realizing she was in serious trouble, she reached out to the only person she could think of.
“Help me, Jack!”

Beige blotches multiplied in front of her eyes until they were all she could see. Then her teeth made a funny clicking sound as her face hit the floor.

Jack knew immediately that something was wrong. He heard Ardra’s cry for help and could barely breathe as he sprinted across the compound toward her cell. By the time he reached her, she was sprawled unconscious on the floor.

He dropped to his knees and rolled her over to examine her. Blood spotted one corner of her mouth where she had split her lip in the fall. She was breathing, which was a relief in itself. He picked her up, and she remained limp in his arms as he raced to the infirmary. When he got to the infirmary door, he kicked it wide with his foot. There was a ruckus as the doctor and techs answered his call for aid, and then they took Ardra from him and placed her on an examination table.

He stepped back to get out of their way, but he didn’t go far. He watched—a helpless spectator—as the med team examined her. The doctor checked her pupils while the techs drew blood and hooked her up to monitors to record her temperature, heart rate and other vitals. This wasn’t the first time he had watched the staff work on someone in here, but he had never felt this kind of gnawing worry.

“She’s got a Tetch drug in her system,” one of the med techs told the doctor after screening her blood sample.

The doctor grabbed the tablet the man handed him and looked at the report himself. He frowned at whatever was on the screen.

“Could it be self-ingested?” the tech asked.

“No.” Jack was the one to answer. He knew Ardra had been taken by surprise, so there was no way she could have done this to herself.

“Run a full-body scan,” the doctor ordered.

“Already on the main screen,” another tech told him.

The doctor leaned in for a better look at the image. “Run it again at a higher resolution.”

It took less than a minute to load the second scan. Jack knew the moment the physician found the problem. The man gave off an extra buzz of energy as he zoomed in to magnify an area behind Ardra’s rib.

Jack would never have spotted the two small shadows on his own, but one look at them and even he knew they didn’t belong. “What is that?”

“A tracer.” The doctor didn’t turn to look at him, and he sounded distracted.

“What does that mean?”

The physician gave several orders to his techs before he answered Jack’s question. “The Tetch planted two tiny capsules inside her. One has already opened, but the second is still intact. We’re running tests now to be sure, but I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Each capsule contains a different chemical. When released and mixed together in the bloodstream, they form a tracer—something the Tetch use to track bodies that don’t show up at their destination on time. If I had to guess, I suspect this patient was implanted during her pretravel medical exam.”

“I don’t get it,” Jack said. “If you’ve seen this before, why didn’t our scans pick it up when she first arrived?”

“Because no one has used an implant like this in more years than I can count. It’s outdated. We scan for all the most cutting-edge timer systems and nanotechnology, but not for this anymore. Whoever did this simply chose a capsule material that would dissolve within the designated time period. I’ll send out an alert so we don’t overlook this again, but my take is that whoever implanted this went on the cheap.”

Cheap or not, it had worked.

“So the Tetch know where she is?” Jack asked. “Why did it knock her out? Did they plan to pick up her unconscious body?”

The man shook his head and ignored Jack for a moment as he looked over the results two of his techs showed him. Jack resisted the urge to get his answers straight from their minds.

“No,” the doctor finally told him. “We got lucky. As I said, the capsules inside her were engineered to time-release if she didn’t get to her destination as scheduled. The thing is, the one that opened wasn’t supposed to release yet since she’s not overdue at Algoron. It must have had a defect.”

“So we’ve had a heads up on this?”

“You have no idea. The chemicals are harmless to most people. This one could have been circulating in her system for months without our ever knowing it, but we lucked out. She’s allergic. Her body reacted as if it were an infection. We’re flushing her system right now, and I’ll remove the other capsule. Usually the Tetch take so many drugs that they build up a tolerance, so I’m surprised this hit her so hard.”

Jack understood this may not have been usual for the Tetch, but he already knew Ardra wasn’t really Tetch. He stayed with her as the med team worked and then followed them when they moved her to the adjacent room. She looked so fragile lying in the medical bed, especially with needles and tubes running in and out of one arm. It seemed like such a crude filtration method for this day and age, but he knew it would effectively remove the offending drug. Still, he hated to see her like this.

Without thinking about it, he took her hand. She wasn’t so deeply under anymore, and she shifted her legs and let out a miserable groan.

“Shhh.” He squeezed her hand and used his free hand to stroke her hair.

She opened her eyes and squinted at him. “Stevin?”

“No.”

“Stevin, please,” she pleaded. “I want to go home.”

“I know.” He touched her forehead and was glad she no longer felt as warm.

She blinked, and he could tell the moment she recognized him. Her mind brushed his like a caress.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“You fell sick. You’re in the med room now.”

“Sick? I remember feeling faint. Have you been here long?”

“Awhile,” he told her. “Are you all right?”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and then opened them again. “I feel funny. Bad funny.”

He nodded. “You’ve had quite a night. You’re lucky you didn’t break anything when you fell.”

“What happened?”

She struggled to lift her head, and Jack pressed on her shoulder to get her to lie still.

One of the techs came back into the room. “How’s that working? Is she coming around?”

Ardra managed to sit up and gasped when she spotted the IVs in her left arm. Jack caught a nightmarish flashback from her mind—a memory of other tubes running into her veins.

She jerked her hand away from his. “Don’t touch me!”

She grabbed the needles to free herself, but Jack stopped her before she ripped the first one more than halfway out. He used his mental influence to will her back into bed, forcing her to be still. She fought it for a moment, but she was too tired to resist for long. Her head sank into the pillow.

“You’ll only hurt yourself,” he told her. “I promise we’re not drugging you. We’re trying to help.”

The tech came over to check the lines. Jack held her hand again and placed his free palm lightly over her forehead.

“Hold on,” he said. “Relax.”

Ardra whimpered as the tech pushed the loosened IV back into place. Then she gave him a mental shove and turned her face into the pillow.

With a sigh, Jack let go of her hand and straightened the sheet around her. She rolled onto her side to give him her back, but he didn’t pay that much mind. This whole ordeal had taken its toll on her, and he was sure she would fall back to sleep soon.

He walked out of the room with a name echoing inside his head. She had been reaching out to someone named Stevin. Jack was certain this man was very important to her. The emotions she felt toward him were strong and of a romantic nature, which meant Stevin had to be a boyfriend or husband.

“Hopefully not her husband,” he said aloud.

He gave his head a violent shake. Never mind that. Finally, he had a lead, a name from Ardra’s true past. That was a whole lot more than he’d had before.

With a big yawn, he shot one more glance behind him before he went home to bed. He would put off interrogating the others so he could get some sleep.

As it was, Jack fell into slumber only to wander in strange dreams. At first, he was back in his childhood home on Edalus, and he was introducing someone to his mother and aunt. Before he could tell them the newcomer’s name, though, two men charged into the house. He must have become a child again, because his body was smaller, and he couldn’t fight the intruders off. They threw him to the ground. He heard a woman screaming, but he couldn’t tell if it was his mother or his aunt. Then, all at once, the dream shifted.

He was an adult again and back on Ryso, only there was a huge lake in back of his house. Even in the dream, he thought this was strange, but he walked to the shore and stared down at it. There was no reflection off the surface, but that was because he wasn’t looking at water. Pooled in front of him was a vast body of thick, black slime.

He heard someone screaming for help, and he saw Ardra trapped in the quagmire about thirty feet away. She was flailing her arms and yelling for him. He knew she would drown if he couldn’t reach her, so he took a running start and dove in. Although he tried to swim to her, the more he struggled, the farther away she got.

Just as his desperation reached its highest pitch, he woke up in bed. The sheets were twisted around his body, and he’d apparently been thrashing against them in his sleep. Freed from the nightmare, he disentangled himself and lay back down with a sigh of relief.

From a distance, he thought he heard Ardra mutter his name, but when he concentrated, everything was silent. He slipped into a more restful sleep and didn’t get up until well past noon.

When Jack went to visit Ardra a couple of days later, she was even more obstinate than usual. He had given Nash the name Stevin to cross-reference, but he wanted to see if he could find out more from Ardra herself. Although she was still under medical supervision at the infirmary, she looked much better, and her powers of resistance had returned. He was having trouble keeping his focus.

“This would be a lot easier if you cooperated,” he told her.

She sat on the narrow bed with her back against the wall and her arms crossed.

“You read minds,” she said hotly. “Read this.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” he scolded her, but he had to repress a smirk. “All right. You win for now. If you don’t want to share anything with me today, I won’t push you. I just thought maybe you’d want to know why you woke up talking to Stevin.”

She frowned at him. “I did?”

“Yes.”

When she didn’t say anything else, he let it go. “Fine. Maybe you’ll want to talk about it later.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Why don’t we see about getting you checked out of here?”

“So I can race back to my comfy prison cell?” she asked.

“Are you unhappy with your room?”

She looked at him askance, but he could tell she wasn’t nearly as angry at him as she wanted him to believe. “Only with its function.”

He sat back. “You want your freedom?”

“Of course I want my freedom,” she snapped.

“And you think walking out of here will solve everything and give you that liberty?”

She stalled for a moment. “I certainly wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re just after a damn number. You don’t care about me.”

Was she finally admitting she could have the information he wanted?

“I am after a number,” he told her honestly, “but I’m also trying to help you. You think you can ever be free with a Tetch download jackknifed in your skull? As long as you have that intel, you’re nothing but a puppet—a political pawn. You don’t even know who you are.” She looked hurt, so he softened his tone. “And I do care about you, probably more than I should.”

Her gaze collided with his, and he saw a feeling there that he couldn’t quite read. Hope? Affection? Before he could say anything else, he heard a loud call from outside.

“Jack!”

He turned to look as a member of the med team burst through the doorway.

“Jack, it’s Thales,” the man said. “The guards found him. They say they caught him trying to commit suicide.”