Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (25 page)

“The aliens won’t let us go there
anymore,” Red clarified.

Mercy said, “Sounds like one of us
broke a rule in the charter. Do you think it was Lou?”

Red put her arm around Mercy.
“Perhaps . . . okay, likely. The interface is also prompting for some input
from the previous pilot. Every pilot action is now accompanied by a warning
bell. It may only be a bug in the interface because the helix being raised
never registered or something—like a car-door-open light on the dashboard.”

“I never learned to drive, so I’ll
have to take your word for that. The prompt could also indicate the desire for
confession and the selection of a punishment from the list we gave in the
charter.” Mercy gazed at Red’s face, searching for a clue. “That’s the sort of
choice Snowflake might provide. Only, Lou can’t read the options with damaged
optic nerves.”

“We won’t know for certain until we
talk to Sensei, but we can’t do that until the hull of the storage area can
pressurize. Otherwise, there’s no return from the decontamination area.”

Zeiss raised a finger. “This is board-level
security. Please don’t mention the interdiction to anyone else. Aside from the
obvious fact that someone else could be to blame, I don’t want to spread
unfounded rumors.”

Snorting, Mercy said, “Everyone’s
going to guess why you’re visiting Sensei. They’re not stupid.”

“That’s my problem,” insisted
Zeiss. “Please follow the simple order.”

“Is this the reason you were
interrogating everyone before?”

Red nodded.

“And you trust me now?”

“We need your opinions. Together,
we represent a quorum of the planners. Auckland signed his voting proxy over to
you, and Sojiro has entrusted me with his.”

Mercy knew that Sojiro would jump
into a volcano at a word from Zeiss. She was surprised, however, that the
doctor had so much faith in her. “Sounds serious.”

“In the event that Lou
is
the culprit for accidental manslaughter, we need a new sixth planner. I was
thinking of Nadia. She’s demonstrated a talent for the alien materials. Red
wanted Risa, who is almost as strong in that area, but has a broader base and
works better with others.”

“No,” Mercy said. “We made Yuki
alternate.”

Red said, “She’s on the disabled
list. If it weren’t for her watching Toby, she’d be back at camp looking for
work, too.”

“We want a thorough map of planet Alcantara,
for our own purposes and to radio back home. Yuki is the gravity-sensor expert.”

“That data will take forever to
collect and fifteen years to reach Earth receivers. Aren’t we hoping to be back
by then?” Red complained.

Zeiss licked his lips. Mercy could
see wheels turning in his head, examining the idea from all angles, like a
gemstone he wanted to purchase. “We have to plan for all contingencies. Okay,
compromise. We put Yuki to work mapping, but induct a new alternate in case she
can’t handle the load.”

Red stated the obvious. “With
week-long shifts, Nadia would be best to work with Park. I’ll support her as
backup planner.”

Mercy nodded her assent.

Restoring his headset, Zeiss called
up Yuki to give her the news. After his final congratulations, she replied, “I
accept, Professor. Toby has offered to help me start tonight.”

“He’s talking?” Zeiss asked. “That’s
wonderful.”

“It’s complicated. He’s a little  .
. . shy.”

“Understandable. We’re cutting back
on the staff in Olympus. That should help.”

“I hate what I’m about to say
because Mercy’s probably the one who got me this job.”

“Affirmative,” he replied, trying
not to tip off the others who weren’t on the radio.

“Mercy reminds Toby too much of . .
. the nurse. The two women were always together. They even fix their hair the
same way. Worse, Mercy spends so much of her spare time searching for the body.
I know I sound like a hypocrite because she never gave up on me. Toby
appreciates the sentiment, too, but every time Mercy mentions . . . that name, he
crawls back in his shell for another day.”

“I see,” Zeiss said, looking at
Mercy. “For how long?”

“Toby’s refusing to even talk on
the radio. He can resume medical duties this week, but he’s very fragile—in a
Rain
Man
sort of way.”

The commander sighed. “We’ll play
it by ear, then. Zeiss out.” Removing the microphone, he said, “Looks like we’ll
be using that new alternate sooner than we thought. Mercy, you need to stay
groundside to help Auckland and take care of Lou.”

“What? Why? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. The doctor finally came
out of his autistic state and claimed it was because you finally left Olympus.”

Mercy felt punched in the stomach
and struggled to hold back tears. Her voice broke as she said, “I’ll go tell
the others the good news.”

She ran to the empty kitchen to get
a grip on her emotions.
There’s no I in team
. Then she walked calmly back
to her dorm, wanting to confide her pain to Lou. However, he wasn’t there.
Oleander handed Mercy the lab coat. “Good, he found you. One of the chicks
stopped trying. We need to know whether to intercede or let it fail.”

“You sent him to ask me?”

“Yeah, a couple minutes after you
left.”

Mercy searched everywhere before
she enabled her microphone. Lou wasn’t answering, so she called security. “Herk,
have you seen Lou?”

“He left the caves to harvest more
headache tea. I know it’s dark, but the lizards will be dormant at night and
the path is easy to follow, even for him.”

Zeiss had turned his comm to “off-duty”
mode, so Mercy had to run to their cave and clap, the convention when there was
nothing to knock on. “Mira?”

Her friend came out a few seconds
later, wearing a Tasmanian devil T-shirt and not much else. Last time she’d
seen that particular shirt, Commander Zeiss had been wearing it.

“What’s wrong?” Red asked.

Mercy’s voice broke again. “We have
a problem. I think Lou overheard us. I’m afraid what he might do to himself.
Because he doesn’t have a link to the Collective Unconscious, Oleander won’t be
able to find him. It’s dark and cold and . . .”

“Shh. He’s one of us. We’ll find
him.”

Mercy paced in the Garden Hollow longhouse. “We need to go
out there. He could be lying in a ditch.”

Red’s sole job was to keep her from
running off alone to search. Her friend kept realigning to stay between Mercy
and the door. “He passed winter survival in Mongolia. He can survive in a
room-temperature, oversized garden.”

“What if he fell in the water?”

“He raced yachts in military school
growing up.”

“The waterfall might sweep him hundreds
of meters down to smash him against the rocks.”

“Sojiro!” Red bellowed over the
radio.

“Roger,” replied the artist. “Lou’s
turned off the locator beacon on his comm gear, but his audible GPS is still
active.”

“GPS?” asked Red.

“A prototype. It can tell Lou the
relative direction and distance to any landmark.”

“Oh, good. Where is he?” Mercy
asked.

“I just have a bearing for now,
near the Prime Meridian,” Sojiro said as he rustled through underbrush. “I need
you to be quiet.”

“Why?” Red asked.

“Because he picked Mercy’s voice to
program the GPS, I need to listen for her to tell him where to go.”

Red raised her eyebrows as she
muted. “Something you want to tell me?”

Mercy bit her lower lip. “No. He
likes my voice when I read books to him because I do the voices. His parents
never read to him like mine did.”

“We’re the only ones here. Tell me
what you’re not saying.”

“It’s my fault Lou’s out there. He
hates
me.”

“No one could hate you.”

“Then why can’t I go to Olympus to search for him?”

“Because Toby starts to twitch
whenever someone reminds him of his bond-mate. It’s nothing personal; we just
need our doctor coherent for the sake of the mission.” On her comp pad, Red
brought up tracking for the search party’s transponder signals to distract
Mercy.

Long minutes passed before Herk
announced, “He’s headed for the dock. We’re going to try to cut him off.”

Labored breathing broadcast over
the shared channel as they watched the red blip close on the waterline. Red had
to hold the screen for fear Mercy would snap it. Eventually, Sojiro said, “Lou
took the raft.”

“He must be heading for the big
island,” Mercy guessed. “We have to stop him.”

Zeiss came over the channel.
“Negative. Captain Llewellyn can make it on his own, or he wouldn’t try. He
took an ocean-survival kit and his own bedroll. We have to wait till dawn to
build a new boat. He won’t starve or go thirsty before then.”

“But. . .”

“He’s a big boy, Mercy. He’s trying
to give the rest of us a chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exile is one of the options for
punishment. If he is the violator, Sensei may let the rest of us go free.”

“It’s not fair,” Mercy whined.

“It’s the law, and we all agreed to
it.”

“Can I call Yuki and tell her how
to find him? I need to know if he lands safely.”

Zeiss weighed the silence. “Okay.
Until her next official shift starts, she can do anything she wants to help.

At just after midnight, a frantic
Mercy called Olympus. Yuki replied, “Of course, dear. Anything for you—on one
condition. You get some sleep. If Oleander tells me you’re wandering around, I’ll
stop searching.”

“Okay,” Mercy said. Red walked her
back to her room. Mercy lay down on the mattress but didn’t sleep.

At five in the morning, Mercy
thought of something that could solve everything for Lou and possibly wreck her
own life. However, she didn’t tell anyone because they’d never let her make the
sacrifice. Every minute that passed, she examined the idea from a different
angle. By sunrise, she’d decided that she had to commit to the plan—she’d
driven him to exile, after all. What happened to her didn’t matter.

At eight in the morning Garden time, Yuki called, “Mercy, wake up, girl.”

“Already am.”

“I found your sailor. Lou’s on a
beach on the big island. He’s already made a lean-to out of the raft and built
a fire.”

“Thank you! What coordinates?”

“That’s classified information. Z
has declared him off limits for now. Lou broadcast a message after landing. He
threatened to cut his own throat if anyone set foot on the island.”

“I’ll call him. He’ll listen to
me.”

“No means no, girl. Give him time.
It’s not like he’s going to get lost. There’s plenty of fruit, and he’ll call
if he has a problem.”

Mercy might have continued arguing,
but Oleander snatched the radio off Mercy’s head. “Please, I need sleep. No
more drama.”

Sulking, Mercy walked to the mess
hall to help with breakfast. After she built another raft, she was certain
Zeiss would let her sail to the island to convince Lou. Another boat should
only take another two or three shifts of daylight. Unfortunately, the
construction could take every spare hour next weekend.

****

All Yuki received from Snowflake
the first session Saturday was a headache. Red had to come up to grant access
and demonstrate. During her second session Sunday, Yuki started a high-resolution
gravity scan of the entire desert planet. She coordinated with Toby’s window
probe technique to match light-refractive qualities to densities in order to
determine the minerals on the surface.

After a day of background
computation, they’d covered a band the height of Florida. Red nodded when she
saw the results. “This is awesome, but it’s going to take another two weeks.”

“I can lower the resolution.”

“No. Relax. It’s not like we have
anything else to do. Keep up the good work.”

“Thanks,” Yuki said.

When Red departed, the Japanese
woman asked the stoic biologist, “What was that about?”

“They’re stalling for some reason,”
Toby guessed. “I smell Conrad Zeiss’ caution.”

“Should I ask him? I mean, as a planner
I have a right to know.”

“No. Don’t confront him directly.
He’ll obfuscate. Ask another planner, pretending you already know. Ask for
advice on how to stall the others and for how long.”

Yuki’s mouth quirked up in a smile.
This called for a reward.

That night, as they slept together,
Yuki teased his body into a response before he woke up fully. With the light
out, she nearly pressed her case to successful completion. However, Toby began
hyperventilating in panic. No one was on duty in the control room, but several
were asleep in the spare rooms. To keep him from waking the others, she smacked
him firmly across the face. This caused his erection to return. This was new
territory for her.

Assessing the situation, she
whispered, “So, you
want
to be punished?”

“I deserve to be disciplined. I
need it. Spare the rod, and you spoil the child.”

“Um . . . the others might hear you
if you cry out.”

“They won’t hear us in the storage
room.”

****

Monday, during Yuki’s work shift,
Snowflake and her comp pad did most of the hard work. She took the opportunity
to do a little educational reading about masochism and submission.

Wednesday, Sojiro let slip, “We
need to tread water until at least a day after the hull is airtight.”

“Do you want me to slow down the
scan?” Yuki asked.

“No. We’ll delay the release of the
results, though. Analysis can take a while.”

She nodded.

On Thursday, she examined the log
of Red’s experiments. The pilot kept trying to access the same file, to no
avail. Red also asked several questions about Lou’s activities.

Later, she asked Toby to interpret.
He said, “I changed some files to hide the evidence. Lou wasn’t really drunk. I
faked that. Red might be trying to clear him, but Zeiss has already put the
letter of reprimand in his permanent file. I can’t tell you more, due to
patient confidentiality.”

Yuki almost laughed in his face.
The Ethics page drove him to strange permutations. “Come with me to the storage
room,” she said ominously.

There, she practiced various forms
of discipline on him until Toby was thanking her with tears in his eyes. As she
was his personal attendant, no one else would see the red marks. He fell
asleep, gripping her tightly. The doctor was so grateful to her that he would
do absolutely anything.

As second-in-command, and nominal
commander of Olympus when Zeiss was groundside, Toby had access to a treasure
trove of confidential data. Whenever he left his pad behind, say to use the
bathroom, she could read files freely until he returned. There was so much data
that she gave up reading and started photographing it.

The next Saturday, she used Yvette’s
leather sandals to lash him, pushing the game further than ever. When it
reached the time for her to dole out pleasure, Toby leapt away from her hand as
if burned. He snatched the leather sandal and ran to the showers, talking to
himself into the wee hours.

When Toby returned, he had fresh
scratches on his back. Yuki had taken such care to leave no permanent marks,
but he had made a botch of it. She’d have to lay down stricter rules. The next
morning when she went to shower, someone had used her razor and left it in a
shower stall.

Was he shaving with a woman’s
razor? She wouldn’t embarrass him by asking. However, he refused to speak to
her Sunday morning or even look her in the eye. When Mercy called that evening,
Yuki asked, “Does Toby  . . . shave anywhere?”

“No, but he loves to ogle and
fondle women’s legs that are. He’s a real freak about the feet,” Mercy
explained.

“You mentioned something about this
before. Give me some details.”

“Yvette got a pedicure for the
wedding. She even got the materials folks to concoct some nail polish.
Bridezilla chose the color, of course. The medical kits up there have a
complete set of tools for nail trimming. I’m sure Batty would
love
to
watch you clip and file.”

“Most enlightening. What favor can
I do for my best friend and champion of the oppressed?”

“Can you tell me Captain
Llewellyn
’s exact location on Exile Island?”

“Sweetie, he’s bad news. Toby
explained to me why women fall all over him—it’s the page influence. The Ideal
Planets page has a kind of Svengali allure to women of science. The more he
talks, the tighter you circle in his orbit. You need some distance, and you’ll
see. Lou doesn’t care about anybody.”

“Please. I gave you so much blood that
I passed out. Why can’t you let me help him?”

“He doesn’t need help. We check on
him every day. He’s getting good at hunting crabs. He has everything he needs
there—better than Bora Bora.”

“All I’m asking for is a number.”

“You’re not planning to go out
tonight in the dark, are you?”

“No. Some glue has to set. I’ll
head out tomorrow just after supper.”

“Okay.” Yuki fed her the
coordinates of the ex-pilot’s camp.

After a few minutes, Yuki called
Oleander. “Hey. A hypothetical question: if a certain mutual friend were about
to disobey orders, would it be wrong to stop her before she gets fried?”

“What’s Mother Hen planning?”

“She’d going to commandeer a colony
boat tomorrow after dinner and take it somewhere off-limits.”

Oleander’s stream of curses
impressed Yuki, and she’d lived with circus people. “I’ll make sure the boat in
question is locked up or destroyed before she has a chance to break any more
rules. Red won’t be able to save her a second time.”

“You’re a good friend.”

“This can’t end well. If she makes
it out to that island, she might as well stay. Thanks, Yuki. I owe you one.”