Whispers on the Wind (7 page)

He did not have one. Nor did any of the others. The unexpectedness of the window to here and now had prompted such swift action that there had not been time to counterfeit and imbed such a device in the wrists of the Octad.

“You’re a big fella, I have to say that about you.” The man interrupted Minton’s flying thoughts as Minton descended from the vehicle. “Name’s Harry Jenkins,” he added, shoving a hand out in front of Minton.

Almost at once, Minton remembered this was a greeting, one that needed to be returned in kind. He extended his own hand and the man gripped it, gave it one quick shake, then released it, looking quizzically at Minton. “And you are?” Harry Jenkins prompted.

“Oh! Minton. Minton, uh, Ames,” he said, remembering the man had offered two names for himself. “Ames” he took right out of Harry Jenkin’s mind because when he’d commented on Minton’s size, he’d thought about a family who’d once lived nearby, all big men, by the name of Ames, and wondered if Minton was related to them.

“Well, Mint, come along in, then, and we’ll get some breakfast into you.”

Minton agreed and followed the man inside, where he met Harry’s wife, Trinity, who served both men a huge meal, which Minton enjoyed far more than he’d enjoyed anything since Zenna’s disappearance.

“Now,” Trinity said, setting down her coffee mug, “I guess we’d better get the law informed so our guest can lay his complaint. Shouldn’t be too hard to track down the rig with a satellite search for its chip, but the meat—” She looked at Minton and shook her head sorrowfully. “You know that’ll be long gone, don’t you?”

Minton sought for some sense of what she was talking about. Theft. Theft of foodstuffs. Was there so little to go around that such theft was a frequent occurrence? He dared not ask, could only nod as if he understood.

“Okay, hon,” Harry said. “You take care of that, and of Mint, will you? I’m back to plowing under that rye. One of my fallow fields,” he said to Minton, as if that would explain everything. It explained nothing, because Minton was too focused on what the woman was doing to give Harry much attention. The door slammed as the woman waved the back of her hand in front of a small, infrared dot on the edge of a table.

At once, a holographic image leapt into being, a man with dark hair over the lower half of his face, as if to replace that which he did not have on top of his head. He held his fists linked before him on some kind of structure behind which he sat.

“Jerry, this guy is Minton Ames. He’s got a tale of woe to tell you. Minton? Click your chip in right here, will you?”

Knowing he could do no such thing, Minton gathered himself, narrowed his focus...and left.

As Minton translated out of the sure danger of being found out by the local authorities, he heard distinctly, and felt strongly, Jon’s unmistakable signature behind the ragged sound of his own name:
Minton!
He fixed his focus on it, tried to home in, but it had come too quickly, broken off almost before he was fully aware of it.

Where?
He demanded of the ether.
Jon! Again!

But the only mind his met was one that, at the moment, carried far greater power than Jon’s weak and uncertain signature—and one that was infinitely more dangerous.

Rankin!
Minton reeled and fell from his translation.

Rankin’s rage slammed into Zenna at the same instant as she responded instinctively to the unexpected surge of a cherished, familiar signature. Her psychic cry of
Minton!
was lost in the fury of being snatched from where she stood, snatched from her child, snatched into blackness that seemed never to end until she awoke to warmth, to safety, security, to being five years old.

Without opening her eyes, she knew she was curled, cuddled on her grandfather’s lap, listening to the story he told while the scent of spicy nut-bread fresh from her grandmother’s oven wafted to her on the breeze. She snuggled closer into her grandfather’s cushiony warmth, reveling in the resonance of his voice taking on the character of each animal in his story. When his rumbled
grumpion
-voice changed to a falsetto, mimicking the sounds of a terrified
welligan
’s squeak, she giggled, opened her eyes and smiled up at him. “Say it again, Grandfather.”

Sunlight, filtered through the leaves of a
belgrina
tree, played across his face. The wicker chair creaked as he rocked. She wanted nothing more than to stay there, to be safe, hidden in a place where nothing bad could ever happen. But slowly, agonizingly, adulthood returned and the knowledge that Rankin’s anger could destroy...
someone
?
something
? if she remained hidden in safety. At first, she knew not who Rankin was—only that he was an entity to fear, a presence to guard against. She didn’t know why he was angry. Nor was she fully aware of what or whom might be in peril if she failed to respond to his insistent probing, only that she must return to his where/when if she were to protect...someone.

Her body lifted and slammed onto a hard surface, jolting the last of the safe image from her mind, leaving her gasping with pain as the toe of a hard boot kicked her side.

“Open your eyes, woman!”

It was Rankin. Of course it was. And she knew he was the enemy. She opened her eyes to prevent being lifted and slammed against the floor again. He bent over her, one hand fastened in the front of her clothing, black eyes glittering with malice, face drawn taut. In his other fist, he clutched a small, silver device she recognized, if only vaguely. Amplifier...

“Where is he?” he demanded.

Who?

Breath knocked from her lungs, she was unable to vocalize, as he had—and she loathed knowing she had let Rankin into her mind without so much as an attempt at shielding. Luckily, his anger had kept him seeking only one thing from her. He had not probed deeper.

“Speak, woman. You know who. You heard him. I heard him. Where is he?”

Zenna pulled in a difficult breath and, clutching at a wooden pillar of some sort, drew herself to a sitting position. She tasted blood in her mouth, on her lips, and knew Rankin had struck her face. One tooth rocked loosely as she probed it with her tongue. Swiftly, she called on her
Kahinya
to heal it, but the healing was already underway, as was the curing of the pain in her ribs. Her
Kahinya
was undamaged, which meant Rankin had no intention of killing her. Yet. Had he ripped it from her neck, though...

She struggled to her feet, realized she had climbed up with the assistance of a table-leg, and leaned on its top, steadying herself as her vision swirled. The cold air, the low level of oxygen, and the view through the open door told her Rankin had translated the two of them to one of his other camps, this one high in the Andes. She sensed nothing of B’tar. Nothing of Glesta. And once more, as it had been for so very long, but for that one, unbelievable instant, nothing of Minton.

Upright, she felt better, more able to face the man she hated, but still she refused to speak, kept her thoughts firmly cloaked from him. The amplifier, she knew, would be of little use to him for several more hours. She was surprised he had managed to translate them so far, with the amplifier as depleted as it must be by the recently completed trip from Aazonia to Earth. Only his rage and undoubted terror had permitted such an effort. She fixed him with a contemptuous stare. The only way to handle Rankin was to show no fear, to remain stronger than he. He held her daughter hostage, but despite that, she knew he needed her expertise to continue with his illegal practices. Without her to keep it tuned, the amplifier could fail at any moment. It could, anyway, but so far, she had been able to keep it working.

“You refer, of course, to my devoted mate.” It was not meant as a question.

Rankin returned her glare. Finally, as she had known he would do, he broke the silence she had imposed by refusing to speak further.

“Yes. Minton. He is here on Earth. Near where we were.”

She laughed. “He is not.”

“You sensed him. I sensed him. He was searching, not for you, but for your brother.” He set the amplifier in the broad beam of sunlight slicing low through the door, where it would gather power. “Both must be here. On Earth.” His dark gaze narrowed. “I will find them, Zenna. And when I do, they will die. Unless you send them back.”

She kept her tone cool, amused. “Unless my brother finds us first. At which time, he will kill you both, and me, too.”

She perched one hip on the edge of the table, hoping Rankin would fail to notice her shadow lying across the amplifier’s absorption cells. It wouldn’t stop the regeneration, but it would retard it. Full-strength sunlight was by far the best. The angle of the rays told her darkness would fall soon. The longer regeneration took, the more chance Jon would have to contact Minton—or Minton to contact Jon without Rankin’s enhanced senses detecting them.

“Really, Rankin, your naiveté amuses me. What we heard was nothing more than an echo. You will recall, we translated through the trailing edge of a solar storm. If you had put your moderate intelligence to more legitimate and less criminal usage in your youth, you would know, as do most people who study even elementary science, that such storms bounce signals through both space and time. Perhaps my former bond-mate was calling to my brother from elsewhere...or elsewhen, and because I am, naturally, receptive to both their signatures, I heard them. With the aid of the amplifier, so did you.

“But,” she continued, leaning toward him to keep her shadow over the receptors, “to assume that they are on Earth is to show your great ignorance of the facts. Not, of course, that I should expect better of you.” Her scathing tone tightened his face. In reality, Rankin had a fine, sharp—but badly misused—intelligence. It pleased her, though, to keep him angry with her by denigrating it whenever a chance arose. Angry, he tended not to think as clearly as he might otherwise.

“Let me explain in terms you might be capable of comprehending,
patán
.” She spat the last word at him, leaving no doubt that she meant it as an slur on his intellectual abilities. His mouth tightened and his fists clenched, but she ignored those symptoms of his rage. Here and now, with the amplifier out of commission, he was helpless against her superior powers.

“When an Octad is translating—as my birth-mate’s must—without the mechanism you force me to employ, much energy is concentrated by those eight minds. When that energy is caught in a vortex, it is swirled around and can be cast out in many directions, not merely the direction it is aimed. Translation is not what you might call an exact science. That is why it takes a full Octad to translate between the links of space and time to achieve a certain objective—such as a window to Earth, in this time-frame.

“The window through which we translated is narrow and ragged. No one of any sense would attempt to translate through it without the amplifier. Not if they expected to live.”

Rankin’s small eyes narrowed even further in suspicion. “What was to stop your mate reconstructing your experiments? He may have an amplifier now.”

She laughed. “No, Rankin. Your own fears render you paranoid as well as foolish. Minton knows as well as I do how unsuccessful my experiments were. He recognized before I did the instability of the invention. That is the reason he and I parted on such poor terms. I chose to believe in the validity of my own work. He chose not to.”

She narrowed her eyes and twisted her lips in a show of scornful ire toward her husband. “He also chose to report what he saw—rightly, it turns out—as my failure, in order to stop me taking what he considered unacceptable risks. Yet, despite its having been a failure, at least scientifically, I cannot, will not, forgive Minton for what he did. Thanks to him, my permission to continue my studies was withdrawn before I had a chance to perfect the device.”

She shrugged as if none of this was of great importance to her now. “Nor will he forgive me for refusing to believe him. We may have been bond-mated, but we were also competitors in our field. Bitter competitors, it turned out. Our espousal was terminated the moment he saw fit to denounce me. So if you think he’ll come searching for me, you are wrong.”

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “My brother, of course, is a different matter. Trust me on this. When there is a window adequate for him to bring an Octad through to Earth, he will do so, and his purpose will be our deaths. Mine. B’tar’s. Yours.”

“There won’t be another of those for ten years,” Rankin said, clearly gloating. “So you rattle nothing more than empty threats, woman.”

She smiled. “The Federation does not forget criminal activity,
patán
, nor does it forgive, so what I tell you is not a threat, but a promise. And I will do nothing to try to prevent or forestall that death. I would rather be dead than continue to assist you in your efforts to maim other civilizations with your poison.”

“If you die, your child will die. I, personally, will see to that.”

“You will not have a chance to do that,” she said evenly.

“Oh?” He sneered. “You plan to do it yourself? If that were the case, you would have done it long since.”

Zenna held her tongue still and her thoughts severely cloaked. Somehow, she would, through sheer strength of will, send Glesta to The Other before the moment of her own death came. The Other...whom she had found by accident, while carefully seeking another Aazoni mind. Any other Aazoni mind. It was a weak presence, and untrained, but receptive both to her and to Glesta. The Other, Zenna knew, longed for a child and she ruthlessly used that longing to create in The Other the perfect foster-mother for her daughter should one become necessary.

She shivered. With Jon on Earth, however unexpectedly, however impossible it might seem, that time could be much sooner than she had anticipated.

L
ENORE
.
SHE WASN’T SURE
if it was a spoken word or an echo of something from her memory, another whisper on the wind.

Lenore!
It came again and she turned her head, gasping at the sight of Jon. He was there! Really there. Beside her. As in the dream, bronzed, lying in a golden glow that emanated from him or maybe from his strange necklace. He lay naked, injured. And large. He was larger than life, larger than she’d dreamed. He must, standing, be six-and-a-half feet tall. His shoulders, sleek and exquisitely muscled, were broadest she’d seen. And his legs...