Ghost Ship (43 page)

Warm leaves surrounded and cherished her, and the whole world smelled like mint. It was a puzzling place Miri found herself in, but comforting for all of that. Maybe she slept, a little. Must have, actually, because she woke up, impatient with the fuzzy, indeterminate landscape, and wondering where Val Con was.

“Here,” she heard him say, and all at once the leaves melted, reshaping into pillows, a blanket, a bed.

She opened her eyes to his face, brilliant with wonder, damp with tears. He was cradling something in his arms.

Carefully, he bent and showed her—an impossibly tiny, scrunched face beneath a shock of fuzzy red hair.

“
Cha’trez
,” Val Con said, and his voice was shaky with pride and love. “Behold our daughter.”

EPILOGUE

Pod 78

Moonstruck

Dulsey had proposed to go down to the asteroid’s surface and reconnoiter. It would have been wise.

Uncle was not, at the moment, feeling particularly wise. He’d already allowed connection to the place to fog his thought and action, and having owned that much recognition of investment in something that ought to have been mere fact, he measured the words he’d said to
this
yos’Phelium, and recounted them against his debts and promises.

And so he went himself, down the center of the main corridor, through the blown hatch, into the inner sanctum, and nothing worse befell him than his boots got wet; their shiny blackness marred by streaks of pale mud.

The control cavern . . . the floor on which he and Theonna yos’Phelium had madly embraced, so very long ago, was sticky with blood. Bodies, likewise sticky, lay in stiff, graceless poses. He checked them all for vital signs, starting with the one nearest the door.

Dead.

Dead.

Decapitated.

The fourth body, left arm nearly severed, blood sheeting the sharp, ironic face. As unlikely as it seemed, given the surrounding carnage, and the wounds which must surely have pained him, he was smiling.

Uncle sighed, remembering the murdered ship scattered on the drifted snow and across the wind-swept rocky plain outside, and wondered if, indeed, the pilot would have chosen this, had he known.

He wondered, but recalled that the pilot had not come here to smile, as much as he may have expected to die, but that he’d come to—

No manual control reacted to his demands, none to the remote he’d built so many years before.

Yes, of course. The lighting and other such housekeeping protocols were powered by the planet’s seasons, and they would go on, but the weapons and devices of Pod 78, those were in fact not merely disabled by automatics—the controls were severed from their aims. The brain of it was gone, the very links from controls to devices had been physically eliminated.

Pod 78 was useless.

He considered that, realized it might not quite be the case. Perhaps some of the pod’s devices might be salvaged; certainly in the long run of time they should not be permitted to be discovered for what they might tell an ardent investigator. A project to be added to his years ahead.

But there, this man of Korval had done what he had come to do, and perhaps that was what the smile meant—he had succeeded at his last task.

Well.

In the interest of thoroughness, he bent once more, placed his fingers against the pulse point in the throat—and straightened, snatching the comm from his belt, finger on the call button.

“Dulsey,” he said in answer to her inquiry. “I need a field ’doc. Immediately.”