Lifemates (Tales of Wild Space Book 1) Page 4

  “My darling, accept my gift of love ... and be my only mate forever.”

  My voice had broken into a quaver as I read the letter, and my house mother picked it up when I dropped it. A moment later, understanding, she dropped it as well as she sank down to my side and embraced me while I cried, opening the gates of my long-held anguish and grief, in a torrent that I could not control: a flood which I had released only in my prayers to the Creator those three lonely months. I thought that I had shed my grief in that time of mourning, but my hunter’s letter began it anew.

  “Ta vu’ra-na,” I whispered in the midst of my tears, the words from my muzzle dripping with leaden grief and pain. I choked on more tears as my fallen hunter’s question echoed in my heart. “Ta vu’ra-na … I accept. My silly, foolish hunter … Of course, I accept.”

  I reflect on these events while bound for An’Re’Hara: bound for a world that I had not seen in nearly a decade, and with a hybrid child in my womb, the product of the love between myself and the hunter that loved me: a child whom I can now keep. Sadly, the birth will happen before the ship arrives. My time is quite near, and so the medics have been keeping close watch over me.

  My lost hunter … my Li-ah … I feel your child –our child … our son, as the medics have told me, kicking and moving more strongly every day. He is such a strong child, and I pray to the Great Creator that he will be as strong as you. And though our time was too short, and you were taken from me, I will teach him as much as I can about you.

  I carry the many stories that you shared with me, and I will tell him each and every one, until he knows them by heart. I will make certain he knows his father, and knows the best of you. You thought your pendant and the money would be your final gifts to me, but feeling the life I carry within me (which seems to grow more impatient to meet the broader universe each day), I must confess that you will never know just how much you gave me. It is more than just your love, or the pendant, which I wear in spite of your absence. My hunter … my only love … you have left a part of yourself with me in the most beautiful way. In our son, you will never be truly gone. For that, I cannot thank you enough.

  And “Hunter” is such a nice name.

  Or perhaps, “Tiger?”

  THE END

  Combat Pay Blues

  By Brandon Hill

  Siberna Prime’s narrow, labyrinthine streets were nightmare for the common visitor, especially during this time of the year, with the press of crowds for the annual Gestalt tournaments. But Isibar spent much of his youth on these twisted lanes, and knew his destination well: a small café near the city’s edge, far away from the main congestion of pedestrian traffic. In the distance, he could hear the low, thunderous claps of metal upon metal and elated cheers from the titanic Million Man Stadium. The minor league championship matches were in full swing, and he wondered in passing if his cousin Xerxes, a talented Gestalt pilot himself, was in the running to place this year. Last he heard, Xerx had nearly made it to the major leagues the previous year. He considered sneaking in some time to take in one match, but with a wistful sigh, dismissed the thought; this was strictly a business trip. Though it was seldom enough that he’d run into family outside of An’re’hara, knew he would have to look up his cousin another time.

  His contact had arrived first: a Victor unit that had identified himself as Seven over their video exchanges. Androids were notoriously punctual, and also conspicuously dressed -neat as a pin in a suit of pale blue and antiseptic white amongst the earthy tones and casual wear of the natives and sightseers.

  “You are late.”

  Isibar expected this. Rolling his eyes, he sat down in the waiting opposite chair.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering your usual,” Seven said, exuding politeness on the next breath. So typical. He gestured congenially towards the tall, foaming mug of lager on the table.

  “Thanks; don’t mind if I do,” Isibar said, for once grateful for the courtesy, despite its having been borne of programming, rather than genuine kindness. Siberna was perpetually hot –a climatic after-effect from the Imperium Wars. He drained half the mug in one draft, and put it down heavily. “So, Mr. Seven, you said you have a job for me?”

  “A most unusual request, actually,” Seven said. “Our other contacts were… less than enthusiastic about taking the job, however.”

  “My good android!” Isibar crossed his arms and fixed him with a condescending look, clicking his tongue “You went to all those people before me? You do wound me to the quick.”

  “You may change your mind, once you know the details of the mission,” Seven warned, and reached into his right coat pocket. He removed a cylinder that housed a rolled-up dat-sheet, which he unfurled from a smaller cylinder inside. Upon its stainless steel surface, a biohazard symbol was printed in bright red. Isibar noted the words, TOP SECRET in large, red letters upon its transparent, paper-thin surface, as well as a small square sectioned off at its bottom right corner.

  “You know the procedure,” Seven said, and gestured towards the small square.

  Isibar frowned. “I don’t like nano-machines. And I like having them swim up into my brain even less.”

  “It’s for our protection, as well as yours,” Seven needlessly reminded him, and Isibar’s frown became a grimace.

  “Yeah, I know, but every time I do this, I think that one of those things is going to ‘accidentally’ wipe out more than it’s supposed to.” He knew the rules; safety first, and all that. Should he refuse the mission once he heard the details, the nanos would wipe his memory of the conversation.

  “Human paranoia,” Seven remarked flatly. “You can refuse right now, if you so choose.”

  Isibar frowned, and pressed his thumb onto the square.

  The warning scrolled away, replaced by a series of ones and zeroes. Seven spun the sheet around and began reading.

  “Section-R of the Colonial Alliance Provisional Council requests your assistance in countering the clear and present threat of the Second Imperium. Should you agree to the following mission, you are hereby ordered to Icona-”

  “Wait just one moment; rewind!” Isibar said, flailing out a halting gesture. “I could be going senile, but did you just say ‘Icona’?”

  “Yes,” Seven answered.

  “The Icona? Capital of the Second Imperium, Icona?”

  “Yes.” There was no frustration held within the android’s verbal stoicism. “Do you wish to know more, or should I activate the nano-machines?”

  “No, no; please continue,” Isibar waved dismissively. “I was just making sure.”

  “You are hereby ordered to infiltrate the north wing of the arcology labs in the city of Bistran, and download intelligence about the technological capabilities of the Second Imperium from the mainframe. If you are able to accomplish this, you are requested to perform a second, non-obligatory task, which is to confirm rumors of extraterrestrial assistance and ascertain their capabilities. Payment is quadruple your usual service fee; half in advance paid to your account, plus an extra three million if you are able to achieve any part of the secondary objectives.”

  Isibar gave a low whistle. “Well, I can certainly understand the government’s little pay raise with this mission. You do realize that there hasn’t been a successful infiltration of Icona, covert or otherwise in about fifteen years?”

  Seven raised one of his thick eyebrows, as contrastingly white to his deep olive skin as the hair atop his head. “How have you come to know this?”

  “Now that would be telling,” Isibar replied smugly. “But at least I know why no one else would take this mission. It’s plain suicide.”

  “Does this mean that you refuse?”

  “Did I say that?” Isibar allowed smile to creep slowly upon his lips. “No, Mr. Seven. Today’s your lucky day. Under normal circumstances, I’d tell you to go to hell and wait, but today, I just happen to be a little desperate. However, it’s not going to come cheap.”

  “The terms of th
e mission are written very clearly,” Victor said with an air of finality.

  Isibar stifled a guffaw. “Please. You know just as well as I do that your superiors are willing to negotiate, especially with someone with my reputation. And my terms aren’t that steep … relatively speaking, that is.”

  “I’m listening, then,” Seven said, folding his hands together.

  “You see, to do my best for you … which is what I really want to do,” Isibar sat back, flashing a congenial smile, “I’m going to have to ask for no less than five times the normal amount.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, that’s business. And it’s my final offer; take it, or go ahead and turn this conversation into a daydream. The choice is yours.”

  ***

  Isibar thought himself to be the most insane man in the universe.

  Moreover, if Cala discovered that he had accepted this mission that Seven seemed so desperate to give, he knew that he would have such a reason to fear her as love her. Still, the unbelievably massive payoff was a lot of incentive for virtual suicide. But if he could pull off the impossible, it would be easy enough to silence his wife with awe at the diamond Na’li necklace he had always wanted to purchase for her, as well as keep their impressively large family in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives.

  But actually sneaking onto Icona was, in practice, about as close to a French kiss with death as one could get, even with all his toys. His ship, the Pedantic Mistress was kept fully loaded for a challenge; he had always been doubly cautious on any assignment, and luck had always been on his side, but this went way beyond risky. He was now practically waving his pant-less backside in the air with this mission, waiting for Murphy to lay down the law.

  And this time, Murphy nearly did.

  Almost as soon as Isibar left Siberna’s blistering heat for the absolute zero vacuum of space, exhilaration at the swelling of his bank account lulled him into a confident sleep and a dream of his lifemate on faraway An’re’hara, both sensual and sensuous: Cala’s striped skin glistening in the summer light, her voluminous falls of cyan hair blowing in the sea breeze, and her ever-enticing scent, which segued into intimate activities ...

  ... Which ended in disappointing, and then frightening wakefulness.

  Proximity alarms blared klaxons as if they had devloped their own sense of urgency. One look at his navicomp told Isibar all he needed to know. It was stuck, and the IFF signature on his sensors was urgently alerting him to a fast-approaching Imperium capital ship.

  Despite his situation, it seemed that Lady Luck had intervened on his behalf, having challenged Murphy to a duel that turned out -barely- in Isibar’s favor. He had awakened just in time to detect and then dispatch the scouting hammerhead fighter that had been sent in advance of the capital ship, and this gave him just time enough to plan. He frantically switched on his cloaking device, then waited and prayed. An hour passed, slowly and painfully. The hulking capital ship arrived, floating directly above him, mere inches away from scraping the Mistress’s paint job. Its sensors made sweep after blind sweep, ineffective against the tried and true piece of reverse-engineered Felyan technology. At last, after about an hour, it gave up the search and departed, vanishing into a hyperspace corridor. Isibar, once his momentary terror gave way to cautious confidence, tore into the cockpit’s instrument panel to recalibrate the navicomp. Without it, he would be flying blind, and he was not about to chance an SOS in the middle of Imperium space. Thank God the cloaking device worked. Still, despite living for nearly a decade among the impressively advanced Felyans, he never was terribly confident in alien technology. Despite its holding up well thus far, doubt led speed to his fingers in his investigation as he zeroed in on, and then purged the damage to the navigational system’s programming with a cold reboot. In the process, he learned that the glitch had been caused by the very software that held the data he needed for the mission With a sour face, he yanked Seven’s microdrive from the control panel’s port, and threw it across the cockpit. He then grabbed two analgesic tabs from the first aid kid, and swallowed them to fend off the now-throbbing pain in his head as his nerves steadied themselves.

  Cheap android junk.

  Maintaning the cloak, Isibar guided the Mistress the rest of the way to Icona without further incident, and plotting a landing course towards Bistran: the capitol of the capitol. The Grand City was a glittering jewel, spanning hundreds of miles on the planet’s sapphire and emerald surface. Here, he would face his first problem. Keeping invisible was easy when cloaked in the vacuum of space, but a planet’s atmosphere produced sound, which had the nuisance of blowing cover, to say nothing of the heat signature that re-entry produced. Fortunately, he had not stayed in this game without knowing a few tricks.

  Cutting his engines after leveling out, Isibar let the Mistress’s antigrav drive do the rest of the work as he trailed behind one of the larger cargo haulers, masking the ionization trail of his descent. Once on a safe approach vector, he carefully wove through the aerial traffic, bobbing in and out of sky lanes as the press of ships became more harrowing to navigate without causing an unexpected wreck. After scouting a landing site that would suit his needs, he made short bursts with his relatively quiet steering thrusters and brought the Mistress down upon a bare rooftop of a high rise, soft and silent as a whisper.

  Isibar slinked down through the building with feigned nonchalance that distracted curious eyes, and then merged seamlessly into the morning crowds on the overhead walkways and parallel-running maglevs, disguised in the inconspicuous black and gray of a common citizen. Looking around at his surroundings brought a memory from long ago to mind. He had been to Icona before, when he was very young, long before the Second Imperium had formed and spread its claws to the surrounding colonies. It had been a peregrination with his father, a trip to visit all of the colonies: a common educational venture according to custom among the noble clans of Rhoma. Things had changed dramatically since then; there had been far fewer armed police on the streets, and virtually no military sweeps in the air, passing over at regular intervals. The streets were now disturbingly clean, devoid of the sights, sounds, and smells of the open air vendors and performers that he recalled. The passersby were quiet, and their expressions as grave and drab as their choices of clothing: a stark contrast to the noise, color, and laughter of his childhood memories.

  A policeman had shouted his way. Isibar froze and turned, doggedly suppressing his fight-or-flight instincts with training, his hand moving slowly to his gun, concealed behind its sheath of diffraction cloth. Several officers flanked him, seemingly materializing out of his peripheral vision, and his insides froze as if they had suddenly begun to hemorrhage coolant. He waited for them to make the first move, ready for trouble, despite however brief and futile the fight might be.

  There was a shuffling noise behind him. Isibar turned, and realized, much to his relief, that he had not been the target of the cops. Instead, they were manhandling a young boy who had been walking beside him a moment earlier. The entire thing had been executed so quickly, that there was barely a sound; even the boy had not cried out until the police had him in cuffs. Several fruits and protein bars fell from the hidden pockets of his clothes as they dragged him away, struggling and crying.

  Isibar felt his headache returning, even as relief made him shudder where he stood.

  ***

  Shaken by what had happened on the street, but undaunted, Isibar arrived at the main gate of the arcology labs, staring at the mountain of glass and plascrete that sealed off the miniature city within. All of Seven’s data was supplied in wetware wired into his brain by the nanomachines after he’d agreed to the mission, and reacted like second nature memory, directing him where to go. At least those worked.

  And at least the I.D. works better than the nav system, Isibar thought as he flashed his data pad’s forged Iconian secret service I.D. to the receptionist in the main building. Like the guards at the front gate, she nodded an
d opened the security doors without question. Confident and silent, he strode into the adjoining hallway.

  Unfortunately, this was the last of his good luck.

  After two hours of aimless, frustrated wandering in the lab’s veritable maze of unmarked corridors, he came to the conclusion that the location of the arcologies had been the extent of Seven’s reliable data. Confidence inexorably waned into confusion and desperation as Isibar kept up a crumbling facade of self-assuredness while playing a constant game of inching along, and then hiding from any passing scientists and guards. He hoped desperately for something -anything- to bring recognition to the data the nanomachines had encoded into his memory, but to no avail. The schematics of the facility were all wrong, and he was steadily becoming more certain, and angry, that he would have to scrub the mission, costing him all of the promised bonus, as well of a heavy chunk of the advance pay, leaving him with little more the pittance that the androids considered “combat pay.”

  It was when he was on the verge of making the heartbreaking decision that Isibar spotted someone approaching. He paused, ready to duck again into a corner and switch his diffraction cloth to full mode. He relaxed, once he saw the man turn several meters short of where he was, and make his way into a nearby restroom. The man’s face struck him as familiar, but his glimpse of it had been brief and from too far away to see clearly. Curious, and almost certain of what he saw, Isibar followed behind at a respectable distance, and once inside the restroom, positioned himself in front of the sink beside the urinal stall. He cast a sideways glance at the man who was relieving himself. He was dark-skinned, lean of build and just about matched him for height, with the beginnings of a prominent beard growing from what used to be a goatee, and a cumbersome-looking cerebral relay unit anchored to his skull and cradling the back of his bald head.