Treasure of Light (The Light Trilogy) (77 page)

A terrible silence engulfed them. Neither of them breathed. “It’s all right,” he assured. “It’s over.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “All over.”

He felt her tears running warmly against his face. He slipped his arms beneath her shoulders and embraced her tightly.

“Cole?” she shouted. “What’s that?”

He spun, staring at the holo which still gleamed with a bright silver wash. Two tiny streaks burned through the planet’s atmosphere. He got to his feet, extending a hand to help Rachel up as he watched the specks of white soar downward.

“Fragments of the ship?” she asked.

He shook his head, frowning. “Not from the
Hoyer.
Discounting the ferocity of the explosion, the timing’s wrong. To be entering the atmosphere now, those had to have been cast away minutes ago.” He leaned forward, accessing the navigation console. He traced the paths of the specks, noting their straight line flights. “They dropped somewhere in the south. Near the Hentopan Sea.”

He heard Rachel’s sharp intake of breath. “Shuttles?”

“No,” he said certainly. “Mass readings are too small.” Then his eyes widened.
“But they could sure as hell be pods!”

She clutched her throat. “Hurry. Let’s hurry.”

“Damned right. We’ve got to find them before somebody else does.”

He climbed into the pilot’s chair and began powering up as Rachel hit her EM restraints.

CHAPTER 58

Carey lifted a crate of food rations and carried it out of the pod, setting it on the sandy shore. Twenty people worked around her, lifting, carrying crates and boxes into the nearby caves that bordered the sea like an intricate honeycomb. A dense jade forest spread on the other side of the caves. Just after their landing, Millhyser and two other Magisterial soldiers had made a break for it, vanishing into the tangled vegetation. Carey hadn’t assigned a search party. She couldn’t spare anyone—and she hadn’t the heart to kill those people.

She wiped a hand over her sweating brow. The dusty radiance of sunset glimmered on the beach, setting each grain to sparkling like a diamond. In the distance, Tikkun’s sun hung like a crimson ball over the azure water.

She inhaled deeply of the warm salt-scented air. She’d awakened in the pod, hurtling toward the planet, but she’d seen the demise of the
Hoyer.
Her heart still ached—for her ship and the friends she couldn’t save—and for a man she’d despised for too long. Surely, it had been
that
Neil Dannon that Jeremiel Baruch had called his best friend.

A numbness swelled in her chest. She shook herself, not daring to think about Jeremiel or Cole yet. She lifted her gaze to the pearlescent skies of dusk, searching for ships. Already the military installations would have mobilized, having seen the pods on their scanners. They’d have watched the battle, noted the
Hoyer’s
treason, and jumped into their ships before it was even over to come looking for the traitors. Before that happened, she wanted to scavenge everything she could and hide it away in the thousands of caves and crevices of this area. She and what remained of the Gamant crew would undoubtedly need the supplies in the coming months while they scrambled for cover.

“Pray to Epagael, we can avoid capture.” She anxiously fingered the pistol on her hip.

“Lieutenant?” Sandy Joad called. A young man, short and skinny, he had a calm sallow face. His pinkish hair dangled to the collar of his brown jumpsuit. She’d only met him in the shuttle, but already she’d grown to like his competent quiet ways. He’d taken over organizing the salvage parties, leaving the more critical duties for Carey.

“What is it, Sandy?”

“Ma’am, what should we do with the injured? We’ve got about six that are sure to die if we don’t get them tended pretty quick.”

Smoke inhalation and bums had taken the most serious tolls. “There are two antigrav gurneys in each pod. Find somebody to break out the med supplies in the emergency lockers, then put the injured in the largest, most sheltered cave you can find.”

“On my way.” He sprinted toward the far pod, sitting like an octagonal ball at the edge of the trees.

Carey stretched her aching back muscles and picked up her rations crate again, hauling it across the damp beach to the foot of the caves where the others were stacked. She saw Joad rushing the first victim, an old Gamant woman with straggly gray hair, into a cave tucked into the forest about a hundred feet from her.

Using her dirty purple sleeve, Carey wiped her face and started back to the pod for another load.

Joad’s voice stopped her. “Lieutenant!”

She spun and saw him running toward her. “What’s wrong?”

“We got company, ma’am.” He pointed to the sky, glowing carnelian now in the fires of sunset.

She shaded her eyes, looking up. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s there. I saw a glint of silver.”

Carey pulled her pistol and gripped it in a sweaty hand, gaze darting madly across every tatter of cloud that drifted westward. Nothing. Yet, her spine tingled.

“Sandy, get the people into the caves. Go! Move it!”

She slapped him on the shoulder and they ran across the sands, waving arms, yelling, “Take cover. Get in the caves!
Run!”

Everywhere, people dropped crates and picked up their feet, fading into the honeycomb of tan rock like ghosts in some misty netherworlds. Carey and Sandy ran into a tiny niche no more than six feet high and five around. She slid back against the wall, peering out cautiously. Remnants of sunlight flashed in gold and silver from the deepening blue of the sea.

“If it’s the government, Sandy,” Carey said huskily, “I’ll try to provide covering fire. Take as many people as you can and head for the forest. You’ll have to have solid rock between you and them or their ships will find you. You understand that?”

He nodded once. “I do.”

Carey heard the splash of sand as a ship landed. She eased forward, peering out. Silhouetted against the lavender skies, a shuttle sat. A tall man stood in the dark shadow at its side, pistol drawn.

He took a step forward, out of the obscuring shadow, and Carey felt as though her heart would burst. She darted out of the cave. A few steps later, Cole saw her and broke into a run.

“Carey?”

He caught her up and swung her around, his arms crushing her ribs. She laughed with sheer jubilation.

“I thought you were dead,” he said softly.

“I wasn’t so sure about you either.”

He held her at arm’s length, gaze caressing her face. “But if that wasn’t you that pulled that brilliant maneuver—”

“Neil Dannon.”

He seemed stunned. He tilted his head in thought, then nodded his acceptance. “Well, I suspect Baruch will be interested to hear that.”

Carey’s heart fluttered. “Jeremiel’s all right? Where is he? Why isn’t he. …” She tried to break free from his grasp to run to the shuttle, but he held her wrists in a viselike grip.

“Carey. He’s not all right.”

She felt the ground beneath her boots tremble. For a moment, she couldn’t speak. “What’s wrong? Tell me quickly, Cole.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and headed her in the direction of the shuttle. The sun had set, but its hidden rays burned through the drifting clouds like flame.

“He’ll be all right,” he said gently. “Lichtner apparently took out all his pent up frustrations with Gamants on Baruch. He’s got third-degree burns over about seventy percent of his body.”

A cry of anger and futility caught in her throat. She put a hand to her mouth and then forced it down. “Is he conscious?”

“Barely. The entire flight down, he’s been delirious. We have painkillers in the shuttle, but very little else.”

She nodded. “I understand. We brought…. Dannon had the Gamant refugees pack every shred of med supplies he could find into our pods.”

“Maybe he had a premonition about his ex-best friend.”

As they neared the shuttle’s side doors, she stopped, bracing her suddenly weak knees. “No,” she said softly. “Just
his best friend.”

Rachel emerged from the shuttle, running, face taut.

“Halloway? My daughter? Is she….”

Carey shook her head, then realized the implications and quickly amended, “She’s at Palaia with Mikael.”

Rachel’s steps faltered. “What?”

“Just before the battle began, we were ordered to turn Mikael over and Sybil demanded to go with him. I sent Funk and Calas along as guardians. I think they’re probably all right.”

Rachel’s face darkened, but she nodded.

Carey strode past her, climbing into the shuttle. The bright white lights seemed an abomination after the subtle pastel shades of the planet. Jeremiel lay on the far side, covered by a white sheet. Carey clenched her jaw. Her gaze lingered on the burns on his pale cheeks, the bandage around his right eye.

“Damn you, Jeremiel,” she murmured, walking forward. “I tell you I love you and you almost get yourself killed.”

A faint smile curled his mouth. “Didn’t mean to,” he said weakly. His unbandaged eye opened drowsily. It glistened with fevered brilliance. His lungs filled as though he fought to find the breath to speak. “What happened?”

“It’s a long story. A Neil Dannon story. How strong are you? Do you want to hear it now or—”

“Now.”

She nodded. “We were being hit hard by the Underground. I….”

He looked at her with dire hope. “Kopal?”

“Yes, but he’s gone. He left when he had the first opening.”

“Good.”

“We’d sustained six hits. I thought for sure we were dead. Neil took over the nav console and just before Kopal reached firing range in his second run, Dannon pivoted the
Hoyer
and fired into the oncoming Magisterial wave. We—”

“Opus move. Neil … best weapons strategist I ever knew.”

“Yes. Me, too. We gridlocked.” Jeremiel’s face slackened with fear and she reached down to tenderly stroke his wounded cheek. His one eye struggled to stay focused on her face. “That’s when Neil attacked me and dragged me down to a bay to shove me into a pod. After he jettisoned us, he flew into the Magisterial formation, firing, and the three remaining Underground ships beat hell for the vault.”

“Singularities … evaporating?”

“Yes. Dannon saved nearly everyone aboard and three of Kopal’s vessels.”

He closed his one eye and his mouth tightened with restrained emotion—as though remembering and hurting for the friend he’d loved, not the man who’d betrayed him. When he spoke, his voice whispered with pain. “He … knew what he was doing. You all right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Glad you were there … with Neil. Would have never worked … if Tahn had been. They’d have killed each other.”

“I suspect so. Not only that, but I doubt Cole would have known what to do when the….” She hesitated, lifting her brows and venting a long sigh. Behind her, she heard someone enter the shuttle to stand silently and turned to see Rachel silhouetted in the entry.

“Go on,” Jeremiel urged.

Carey lifted a shoulder. “Well, I know it sounds like I’m mad, but an angel appeared on the bridge just before the
Hoyer’s
systems came back on line. It was him, the angel, who convinced Dannon to take the nav com.”

Jeremiel stared fearfully at her. “What did he look like?”

“Beautiful. Like a golden glowing god.”

The shuttle went silent. The proverbial pin could have been dropped with thunderous effect. Neither Jeremiel nor Rachel so much as moved a muscle—as though they both walked a silver thread over the abyss.

Jeremiel’s eye flashed darkly over the shuttle’s ceiling panels. “Must have been. Mustn’t it, Rachel?”

“Yes. I—I think so.”

Carey frowned, looking from one to the other. “Been… ?”

She straightened when she saw Cole come up behind Rachel.

“How is he?” Tahn asked.

“Awake.”

“Fine,” Jeremiel insisted.

Tahn lifted his brows and shook his head. “He’s as stubborn as a Giclasian. Anybody else would have died with dignity by now.”

“After I see you in an Underground uniform.”

Tahn scowled and walked forward. “Where the hell did you get the energy to be so goddamned brassy? I thought that shot I gave you knocked you out?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, here, then,” Cole said, drawing a curious necklace from his pocket. He placed it on Jeremiel’s stomach, next to his hand. “I understand this is yours.”

In a shaky gesture, Jeremiel touched the gray globe. After a moment, he snaked his hand closer, wrapping his fingers around it. To Carey’s eyes, the gray quality seemed to deepen, as foreboding as roiling storm clouds on the horizon. Slowly, Jeremiel lifted his gaze to Rachel. Her eyes flared like full black moons—as if the globe in Baruch’s hand answered all the cataclysmic questions that wedded her soul to the Darkness.

“Forsaken?” Jeremiel whispered. “Both of us?”