Songs of Love and Death

I shrugged. “Orders are orders. I cleared a Hidden World once. When I was a newly minted lieutenant.”

“And now you trade with them and keep them secret,” Jahan said.

“Making me a traitor as well as a cashiered thief.” I changed the subject. “We need to find out what happened down the gravity well.”

“It will take a damn lot of fuel to set the ship down,” Jax tweeted. Flutes were famous for their mathematical ability, and Jax was no exception. He was our purchasing agent, and I was pretty damn sure he was the reason the Selkie ran at a profit. He counted every Reales and squeezed it twice.

“I’ll take the Wasp,” I said, referring to the small League fighter craft we’d picked up at a salvage auction. The cannons had been removed, but it was still screamingly fast and relatively cheap to fly.

Melin had given us enough gravity that I could grip the sides of the access ladder, and slide down to the level that held the docking bay. Even so, Jahan, using her four hands and prehensile tail, reached the lower deck before me.

“I take it that you’re coming along,” I said as I hauled a spacesuit out of a locker.

“I will need to report to the Council.”

“Chalking up another human atrocity,” I said with black humor.

“It’s what we do,” the creature said shortly and she removed her suit from its locker. Isanjo suits always looked strange. They were equipped with a tail because the aliens used their tails for their high-steel construction work.

“And what happens when the ledger gets filled?” I asked as I stepped into the lower half of my suit.

“We will act,” she said, and I knew that she was speaking of all the alien races. “There are a lot more of us than there are of you.”

“Yeah, but none of you are as mean as us.” I shrugged to settle the heavy oxygen pack onto my shoulders.

“But we’re more patient.”

“You’ve got me there.”

I reflected that Isanjos now built our skyscrapers and our spaceships. Under human supervision, of course, but my God, there was so much opportunity for mischief if the aliens decided that it was time for them to act! I had a vision of skyscrapers collapsing and ships exploding.

I thought about the Hajin who worked as servants in our households. How easy it would be to poison a human family.

And the Tiponi Flutes did our accounting. They could crash the economy.

Humans were fucked. Good thing I worked on a ship crewed mostly by aliens. Maybe they liked me enough to keep me around.

We secured each other’s helmets, and headed for the Wasp, which sat in the middle of the bay. Even sitting still, it looked like it was moving a million miles an hour. The needle nose and vertical tail screamed predator.

I took the front seat, and Jahan settled into the gunner’s chair. The canopy dropped, I flipped on the engines, instruments, and radio, and called to the bridge. “We’re ready.”

For a few seconds, we could hear the air being sucked out of the bay and back into the rest of the ship. No sense wasting atmosphere. It cost money to make, as Jax frequently pointed out. Once the wind sounds died, the great outer doors swung slowly and ponderously open. Our view was dominated by the curving rim of the planet. Green seas and a small continent rolled past us. Beyond the bulk of the world, the stars glittered ice-bright. I sent us out into space, and immediately dodged a piece of broken ship.

“Do mind the trash,” Jahan said.

Something was niggling at me. Something missing in the orbital mix—but I was too busy negotiating the floating debris to figure it out. Instead of heading directly to the planet, I took the time to explore the expanding circle of debris that had been the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. We soon saw bits of floating detritus that had once been people. I studied each frozen face haloed with crystals of frozen blood.

“She’s dead,” Jahan said.

“I know,” I said. But I couldn’t accept it. She was the heir to the League. There may have been added protection for Mercedes. There had to have been. She could not be gone. Twenty minutes later, I admitted defeat, took us out of the debris field, and headed toward the planet.

We were passing relatively close to a small moon—Kusatsu-Shirane had five but the others weren’t presently in view—when I heard it. A distress beacon, sending its cry into the void. We locked on and followed it. The life capsule had clamped itself limpetlike to the stony surface of the moon. The tiny computer brain that controlled the capsule had rightly figured that it was safer for the occupant not to be floating in a battle zone, and found refuge.

I landed the Wasp, popped the canopy, and pushed out with such force that I almost hit escape velocity from the tiny planetoid. Jahan’s tail caught my ankle, and pulled me back.

Moving with a bit more caution, I approached the body-shaped container resting in a small crater. The black surface was etched with messages in every known League language, urging the finder to contact the navy headquarters on Hissilek. There was also a dire warning to any that might stumble upon the body that the DNA of the human inside was not to be harvested or touched in any way.

I brushed away the layer of fine dust and ice that covered the faceplate of the life capsule. It was Mercedes. Placed into a deep coma by drugs injected by the capsule. Her long dark brown hair, streaked now with silver at her temples, had been braided, and the braid lay across one shoulder. A few strands of hair had come loose, and caught in her lips at the moment that the capsule had slammed shut around her. I wanted to reach out and brush them away. I studied the long, patrician nose, the espresso-and-cream-colored skin. She was so beautiful—and she was alive.

“Hmm, I thought a princess would be prettier,” Jahan said.

“She’s beautiful!” I flared.

“Ah, I see now. You’re in love with her.”

WE RETURNED TO the Selkie. There was no way to fit the capsule inside the Wasp. I reprogrammed the clamps and secured Mercedes to the hull. It made me uncomfortable treating her in such a disrespectful way, but I couldn’t open the capsule in vacuum and I had no suit for her.

“That was a quick trip.” Baca’s voice filled my helmet.

“We found a survivor,” I radioed back as I brought us in through the bay doors and dropped the Wasp onto the deck.

It was the work of minutes to unclamp the capsule from the side of the Wasp, and blow the seals. I eyed the tangle of IV tubes and the pinpricks of blood that stained her arms and legs where the needles had driven through her clothes and into her veins. While I was trying to figure out how to remove them without causing her pain, the capsule sensed warmth and atmosphere, and withdrew the needles that kept her in a deathlike coma.

I slid my arms beneath her and picked her up. I’d like to say that I swept her into my arms, but at five feet eight inches tall, she was not much shorter than me, and I had to work to carry her.

“You could have waited for a stretcher,” Jahan said as she listened to my panting breaths, and noticed the way I braced myself against the wall of the lift. I shook my head, not wanting to waste the air. “And have you considered that you have put us all at grave risk by bringing her aboard? We were smuggling to a Hidden World. The League will not only imprison us for that, they will assume we know the location of other such worlds, and they won’t be gentle in trying to elicit that information.”

“I couldn’t just leave her there.”

“Because you’re in love with her.”

I summoned up a glare. I didn’t have the breath for a response. We reached the fourth deck level, and I carried Mercedes into our small, but well-equipped, sick bay.