"But that wasn't the only reason she headed here," the colonel resumed after a moment. "She used her allotment as the core claim on four prime sections, and she and her family settled out here."
Okanami sucked in air, and McIlheny nodded. His voice was flat when he continued.
"She wasn't there when the bastards landed. By the time she got back to the site, they'd murdered her entire family. Father, mother, younger sister and brother, grandfather, an aunt and uncle, and three cousins. All of them."
He reached out and touched the sleeping woman's shoulder, the gesture gentle and curiously vulnerable in such a big, hard-muscled man, then laid the long, heavy rifle he'd carried in across the bedside table. Okanami stared at it, considering the dozen or so regulations its presence violated, but the colonel continued before he could speak.
"I've been out to the homestead." His voice had turned soft. "The bastards didn't get any of it cheap. Her grandfather was out there, too-Sergeant Major O'Shaughnessy. He was one of ours, and he took four of them with him. It looks like her father got five more … and he was Ujvбri, Doctor."
The colonel looked at Okanami, then back down at the doctor's patient.
"Then she got home. She must've been out after direcat or snow wolves-this is a fourteen-millimeter Vorlund express, semi-auto with recoil buffers-and she went in after twenty-five men with body armor, grenades, and combat rifles." He stroked the rifle and met the doctor's eyes once more. "She got them all."
Okanami looked back down at her, then shook his head.
"That still doesn't explain it. By every medical standard I know, she should have died then and there, unless there's something in your download that says different, and I can't begin to imagine anything that might."
"Don't waste your time looking, because you won't find anything. Our med people agree entirely. Captain DeVries -" McIlheny touched the motionless shoulder once more "-can't possibly be alive."
"But she is," Okanami said quietly.
"Agreed." McIlheny left the rifle and turned away, waving politely for the doctor to precede him from the room. The surgeon was none too pleased to leave the weapon behind, even without a magazine, but the colonel's combat ribbons-and expression-stilled his protests. "That's why Admiral Gomez's report has a whole team of specialists on their way here at max."
Okanami led the way into the sparsely appointed lounge, empty at this late hour, and drew two cups of coffee. The two men sat at a table, and the colonel's eyes watched the open door as Okanami keyed a small hand reader to access the medical download. His cup steamed on the table, ignored, and his mouth tightened as he realized just how scanty the data was. Every other entry ended in the words "FURTHER ACCESS RESTRICTED" and some astronomical clearance level. McIlheny waited patiently until Okanami set the reader aside with sigh.
"Weird," he murmured, shaking his head as he reached for his own coffee, and the colonel chuckled without humor.
"Even weirder than you know. This is for your information only-that's straight from Admiral Gomez-but you're in charge of this case until a Cadre med team can get here, so I'm supposed to bring you up to speed. Or as up to speed as any of us are, anyway. Clear?"
Okanami nodded, and his mouth felt oddly dry despite the coffee.
"All right. I took my own people out to the DeVries claim because the original report was so obviously impossible. For one thing, three separate SAR overflights hadn't picked up anything. If Captain DeVries had been there and alive, she'd've showed on the thermal scans, especially lying in the open that way, so I knew it had to be some kind of plant."
He sipped coffee and shrugged.
"It wasn't. The evidence is absolutely conclusive. She came up on them from the south, with the wind behind her, and took them by surprise. She left enough blood trail for us to work out what must've happened, and it was like turning a saber-tooth loose on hyenas, Doctor. They took her down in the end, but not before she got them all. That shuttle must've been lifted out by remote, because there sure as hell weren't any live pirates to fly it.
"But that's where it gets really strange. Our forensic people have fixed approximate times of death for the pirates and her family, and they've pegged the blood trails she left to about the same time. Logically, then, she should have bled to death within minutes of killing the last pirate. If she hadn't done that, she should have frozen to death, again, probably very quickly. And if she were alive, the thermal scans certainly should have picked her up. None of those things happened-it's like she was someplace else until the instant Sikorsky's crew landed and found her. And, Doctor," the colonel's eyes were very intent, "not even a drop commando can do that."
"So what are you saying? It was magic?"
"I'm saying she's managed at least three outright impossibilities, and nobody has the least damned idea how. So until an explanation occurs to us, we want her right here in your capable hands."
"Under what conditions?" Okanami's voice was edged with sudden frost.
"We'd prefer," McIlheny said carefully, "to keep her just like she is."
"Unconscious? Forget it, Colonel."
"But-"
"I said forget it! You don't keep a patient sedated indefinitely, particularly not one who's been through what she has, and especially not when there's an unknown pharmacology element. Her medical condition is nothing to play games with, and your download-" he waved the hand reader under the colonel's nose "-is less than complete. The damned thing won't even tell me what a half-dozen of the drugs in her pharmacope do, and her augmentation security must've been designed by a terminal paranoiac. Not only do the codes in her implants mean I can't override externally to shut them down, but I can't even go in to empty her reservoirs surgically! Do you have the least idea how much that complicates her meds? And the same security systems that keep me from accessing her receptors mean I can't use a standard somatic unit, so the only way I could keep her under would be with chemicals."
"I see." McIlheny toyed with his coffee cup and frowned as he came up against the captain's Hippocratic armor. "In that case, let's just say we'd like you to keep her here under indefinite medical observation."
"Whether or not her medical condition requires it, eh? And if she decides she wants out of my custody before your intelligence types get here?"
"Out of the question. These 'raids' are totally out of hand. That's bad enough, and when you add in all the unanswered questions she represents-" McIlheny shrugged. "She's not going anywhere until we've got some answers."
"There are limits to the dirty work I'm prepared to do for you and your spooks, Colonel."
"What dirty work? She probably won't even want to leave, but if she does, you're the physician of record of a patient in a military facility."
"A patient," Okanami pointed out, "who happens to be a civilian." He leaned back and eyed the colonel with a marked lack of affability. "You do remember what a 'civilian' is? You know, the people who don't wear uniforms? The ones with something called civil rights? If she wants out of here, she's out of here unless there's a genuine medical reason to hold her. And your 'unanswered questions' do not constitute such a reason."
McIlheny felt a grudging respect for the surgeon and tugged at his lower lip in thought.
"Look, Doctor, I didn't mean to step on any professional toes, and I'm sure Admiral Gomez doesn't want to, either. Nor are we medieval monsters out to 'disappear' an unwanted witness. This is one of our people, and a damned outstanding one. We just need to … keep tabs on her."
"So what's the problem? Even if I discharge her, she's not going anywhere you can't find her. Not without a starship, anyway."
"Oh, no?" McIlheny smiled tightly. "I might point out that she's already been somewhere we couldn't find her when all the indications are she was lying right there in plain sight. What's to say she can't do it again?"
"What's to say she has any reason to do it again?" Okanami demanded in exasperation.
"Nothing. On the other hand, what's to say she did it on purpose the first time?" Okanami's eyebrows quirked, and McIlheny grinned sourly. "Hadn't thought about that, had you? That's because you're insufficiently paranoid for one of us much maligned 'spooks,' Doctor, but the point is that until we have some idea what happened, we can't know if she did whatever she did on purpose. Or what might happen to her if she does it again."
"You're right-you are paranoid," Okanami muttered. He thought hard for a moment, then shrugged. "Still doesn't matter. If a mentally competent civilian wants to check herself out, then unless you've got some specific criminal charge to warrant holding her against her will she checks herself out, period. End of story, Colonel."
"Not quite." McIlheny leaned back and smiled at him. "You see, you've forgotten that she wasn't Fleet or Marine, she's Imperial Cadre."
"So?"
"So there's one fact most people don't know about the Cadre. Not surprising, really; it isn't big enough for much about it to become common knowledge. But the point is that she's not really a civilian at all." Okanami blinked in surprise, and McIlheny's smile grew. "You don't resign from the Cadre-you just go on inactive reserve status. And if you don't want to hang onto our 'civilian' for us, then we'll just by God reactivate her!"
Chapter Thirty-Five
The being men had once called Tisiphone roamed the corridors of her host's mind and marveled at what she found. Its vast, dim caverns crackled with the golden fire of dreams, and even its sleeping power was amazing. It had been far too long since last Tisiphone touched a mortal mind, and she had never been much interested in those she had invaded then. They had been targets, sources of information, tools, and prey, not something to be tasted and sampled, for she was an executioner, not a philosopher.
But things had changed. She was alone and diminished, and no one had sent her to punish this mortal; she had been summoned by the mind in which she wandered, and she needed it. Needed it as a focus and avatar for her weakened self, and so she searched its labyrinthine passages, finding places to store her self, sampling its power and fingering its memories.
It was so different. The last human whose thoughts she'd touched had been-the shepherd in Cappadocia? No, Cassander of Macedon, that tangled, ambitious murderer. Now there had been a mind of power, for all its evil. Yet it was no match for the strength, clarity, and knowledge of this mind. Man had changed over her millennia of sleep, and even cool Athena or clever-fingered Haphaestus might have envied the lore and skill mortals had attained.
But even more than its knowledge, it was the power of this mind which truly astounded her-the focused will, crystal lucidity … and ferocity. No wonder that echo, that flash of mirrored power, had troubled her dreams, for there was much of her in this Alicia DeVries. This mortal could be as implacable as she herself, Tisiphone sensed, and as deadly, and that was amazing. Were all mortals thus, if only she had stopped to see it so long ago? Or had more than man's knowledge changed while she slept?
Yet there were differences between them. She swooped through memories, sampled convictions and beliefs, and had she had lips, she would have smiled in derision at some of the foolishness she found. She and her selves had not been bred for things like love and compassion-those had no meaning for such as they, and even less this concept of "justice." It caught at her, for it had its whetted sharpness, its tangental contact with what she was, yet she sensed the dangerous contradictions at its core. It clamored for retribution, yes, but balance blunted its knife-sharp edge. Extenuation dulled its certitude, and its self-deluding emphasis on "guilt" and "innocence" and "proof" weakened its determination.
She studied the idea, tasting the dynamic tension which held so many conflicting elements in poised balance, and the familiar hunger at its heart only made it more alien. Her selves had been crafted to punish, made for vengeance, and guilt or innocence had no bearing on her mission. It was a bitter-tasting thing, this "justice," a chill bitterness in the hot, sweet blood-taste, and she rejected it. She turned away contemptuously, and bent her attention on other gems in this treasure-vault mind.
They were heaped and piled, glittering measurelessly, and she savored the unleashed violence of combat with weapons Zeus himself might have envied. They had their own lightning bolts, these mortals, and she watched through her host's eyes, tasting the jagged rip-tides of terror and fury controlled by training and science and harnessed to purpose. She was apt to violence, this Alicia DeVries … and yet, even at the heart of her battle fury, there was that damnable sense of detachment. That watching presence that mourned the hot blood of her own handiwork and wept for her foes even as she slew them.
Tisiphone spat in mental disgust at that potential weakness. She must be wary. This mortal had sworn herself to her service, but Tisiphone had sworn herself to Alicia DeVries' purpose in return, and this mind was powerful and complex, a weapon which might turn in her hand if she drove it too hard.
Other memories flowed about her, and these were better, more suited to her needs. Memories of loved ones, held secure and precious at her host's core like talismans against her own dark side. Anchors, helping her cling to her debilitating compassion. But they were anchors no more. They had become whips, made savage by newer memories of rape and mutilation, of slaughter and wanton cruelty and the broken bodies of dead love. They tapped deep into the reservoirs of power and purpose, stoking them into something recognized and familiar. For beneath all the nonsense about mercy and justice, Tisiphone looked into the mirror of Alicia DeVries' soul and saw … herself.
Jade eyes opened. Darkness pressed against the spartan room's window, moaning with the endless patience of Mathison's winter wind, but dim lights cast golden pools upon the overhead. Monitors chirped gently, almost encouragingly, and Alicia drew a deep, slow breath.
She turned her head on her pillow, studying the quiet about her, and saw the rifle on her bedside table. The weapon gleamed like memory itself in the dimness, and it should have brought the agony crashing in upon her.
It didn't. Nothing did, and that was … wrong. The images were there, clear and lethal in every brutal detail. Everyone she loved had been destroyed-more than destroyed, butchered with sick, premeditated sadism-and the agony of it did not overwhelm her.
She raised a hand to her forehead and frowned, thoughts clearer than they ought to be yet oddly detached. Memories flickered, merciless and sharp as holovids, yet remote, as if seen through the time-slowing armorplast of the tick. And there was something there at the last, teasing her … .
Her hand froze, and her eyes widened as memory of her final madness came abruptly. Voices in her head! Nonsense. And yet-she looked about the silent room once more, and knew she should never have lived to see it.
Of course you should have, a cold, clear voice said. I promised you vengeance, and to avenge yourself, you must live.
She stiffened, eyes suddenly huge in the dimness, yet even now there was no panic in their depths. They were cool and still, for the terror of that silent voice eddied against a shield of glass. She sensed its presence, felt it prickle in her palms, yet it could not touch her.
"Who-what-are you?" she asked the emptiness, and a silent laugh quivered deep at her core.
Have mortals forgotten us, indeed? Ah, how fickle you are! You may call me Tisiphone.
"Tisiphone?" There was an elusive familiarity to that name, but -
There, now, the voice murmured like crystal, singing on the edge of shattering, and its effort to soothe seemed alien to it. Once your kind called us the Erinyes, but that was long, long ago. Three of us, there were: Alecto, Megaira … and I. I am the last of the Furies, Little One.
Alicia's eyes opened even wider, and then she closed them tight. The simplest answer was that she'd been right the first time. She must be mad. That certainly made more sense than holding a conversation with something out of Old Earth's mythology! Yet she knew she wasn't, and her lips twitched at the thought. Didn't they say that a crazy person knew she wasn't mad? And who but a madwoman would feel so calm at a moment like this?
For all your skills, your people have become most blind. Have you lost the ability to believe anything you cannot see or touch? Do not your "scientists" deal daily with things they can only describe?
"Touchй," Alicia murmured, then shook herself. Immobilizing tractor collars circled her left leg at knee and hip, lighter than a plasticast yet dragging at her as she eased up on her elbows. She raked hair from her eyes and looked around until she spied the bed's power controls, then reached out her right hand and slipped her Gamma receptor over the control linkage. She hadn't used it in so long she had to think for almost ten full seconds before the proper neural links established themselves, but then the bed purred softly, rising against her shoulders. She settled into a sitting position and folded her hands in her lap, and her neck craned as her eyes flitted about the room once more.
"Let's say I believe in you … Tisiphone. Where are you?"
Your wit is sharper than that, Alicia DeVries.
"You mean," Alicia said very carefully, a tiny tremor of fear oozing through the sheet of glass, "that you're inside my head?"
Of course.
"I see." She inhaled deeply. "Why aren't I hanging from the ceiling and gibbering, then?"
It would scarcely help our purpose for me to permit that. Not, the voice added a bit dryly, that you are not trying to do precisely that.
"Well," Alicia surprised herself with a smile despite the madness which had engulfed her, "I guess that would be the rational thing to do."
Rationality is an over-valued commodity, Little One. Madness has its place, yet it does make speech difficult, does it not?
"I imagine it would." She pressed her hands to her temples, feeling the familiar angularity of her subcutaneous Alpha receptor against her right palm, and moistened her lips. "Are you … the reason I don't hurt more?" She wasn't speaking of physical pain, and the voice knew it.
Indeed. You are a soldier, Alicia DeVries. Does a warrior maddened by grief attain his goal, or die on his enemy's blade? Loss and hatred are potent, but they must be used. I will not let them use you. Not yet.
Alicia closed her eyes again, lips trembling, grateful for the pane of glass between her and her loss. She felt endless, night-black grief waiting to suck her to destruction beyond whatever shield this Tisiphone had erected, and it frightened her. Yet there was resentment in her gratitude, as if she'd been robbed of something rightly hers-something as precious as it was cruel.
She sucked in another breath and lowered her hands once more. Either Tisiphone existed, or she truly was mad, and she might as well act on the assumption that she was sane. She opened her hospital gown and traced the red line down her chest and the ones across her abdomen. There was no pain, and quick-heal was doing its job-the incisions were half-healed already and would vanish entirely in time-but they confirmed the damage she'd taken. She let the gown fall closed and leaned back against her pillows in the quiet room.
"How long ago was I hit?"
Time is something mortals measure better than I, Little One, and it does not exist where you and I have been, but three days have passed since they brought you to this place.
" 'Where you and I have been'?"
You were dying, and I am not what once I was. My power has waned with the passing of my other selves, and I was ever more apt to wound than heal. Since I could not make you whole, I took you to a place where time has no business until the searchers came to find you.
"Would you care to explain that a bit better?"
Would you care to explain blue to a man born blind?
"You sound like one of those assholes from intelligence."
No. They lied to you; I know what I did, and would tell you if you could grasp my meaning.
Alicia pursed her lips, surprised by Tisiphone's quick understanding.
How should I not understand? I have spent days examining your memories, Little One. I know of your Colonel Watts.
"Not my Colonel Watts." Alicia's voice was suddenly cold, and a spurt of rage took Tisiphone by surprise, squirting past the clear shield, as Alicia remembered the utter chaos of the Shallingsport Raid. She shook it away, suppressing it with a skill the Fury could not have bettered.
"All right, you're here. Why? What are you going to do?"
You asked for vengeance, and you shall have it. We will find your enemies, you and I, and destroy them.
"Just the two of us? When the entire Empire can't?" Alicia's laugh was not pleasant. "What makes you think we can do that?"
This, the voice said softly, and Alicia's head snapped up. Her lips drew back from locked teeth, and a direcat's snarl caught at her throat. Rage flooded her veins, loosed from beyond the shield within her, distilled and pure and hotter than a star's heart. Loss and grief were in that rage, but they were only its fuel, not its heat. Its ferocity wrenched at her like fists of fire, and panic touched her as her augmentation began to respond.
But then it vanished, and she slumped back, panting and beaded with sweat. Her heart raced, and she was weak and drained, like a chemist's flask emptied of acid. Yet something quivered within her, pacing her pulse like an echo of her rage. Determination-no, more than determination. Purpose which went beyond the implacable to the inevitable, ridiculing the very thought that any power in the universe might deflect it.
You begin to see, Little One, yet that was but your anger; you have not yet tasted mine. I am rage-your rage, and my own, and all the rage that ever was or will be-and skilled in its use. We will find them. On that you have my word, which has never been broken. And when we find them, you will have the strength of my arm, which has never failed. If I am less than once I was, I remain more than you can imagine; you will have your vengeance.
"God," Alicia whispered, pressing trembling hands to her temples once more. An icicle of terror shivered through her-not of Tisiphone, but of herself. Of the limitless capacity for destruction she had tasted within her fury. Or-she swallowed-was it within her Fury?
"I-" she began, and chopped off as a man in nursing whites charged through the door and skidded to a stop when he saw her sitting up in bed. His eyes widened, then dropped to the bedside monitors, and he lifted a neural lead from the central console. He pressed it to the terminal on his temple, and Alicia hid a twisted smile of sudden understanding. Her vital signs must have gone off the scale when that bolt of distilled rage ripped through her.
The nurse lowered the lead and regarded her with puzzlement. And with something else. There were questions in his eyes, fusing with sympathy into a peculiar tension his professional facade couldn't quite hide. He glanced away from her, eyes darting for just a moment to the intercom panel, and Alicia swallowed a groan. Idiot! Of course they'd left the com open! What must he think after hearing her half of the insane conversation with Tisiphone?
Shall I take the memory of it from him?
"Can you?" Alicia spoke aloud out of sheer reflex, then cursed herself as the nurse took an involuntary half-step away from her.
"Can I what, Captain DeVries?"
"Uh … can you tell me how long I've been here?" she improvised frantically.
"Three days, Ma'am," he said.
You need not speak aloud for me to hear you, Little One, Tisiphone said at the same instant, and Alicia wanted to tear her hair and scream at both of them. The concerned caution in the nurse's voice vibrated bizarrely in her ears, cut through with the amusement in that silent mental whisper.
"Thank you," she said aloud, and Could you do that? Make him forget?
Once, certainly. Now … She felt the strong impression of a mental shrug. I could try, if you can touch him.
Alicia glanced at the wary nurse and smothered a totally inappropriate giggle. No way! The poor guy's convinced I'm out of my mind, and he called me by my rank, so they must know I'm a drop commando. I'm surprised he's still here, and he'll jump out of his skin if I try to grab him. Talk about a dangerous lunatic-! Besides, they probably had a recorder on it.
Recorder? Mental fingers plucked the concept from her mind. Ah. It seems I have much yet to learn about this "technology." Will it matter?
How do I know? It depends on just how balmy they think I am. Now be quiet a minute.
A sense of someone else's surprise echoed within her, as if Tisiphone were unused to hearing orders from a mere mortal, and she suppressed another manic grin in favor of a reassuring smile.
"Thank you," she repeated aloud. "I wonder … I can see it's the middle of the night, but could I see the duty doctor?"
"Captain Okanami is on his way here right now, Ma'am. In fact, I was waiting for him when-that is …" His voice trailed off, and Alicia smiled again.
Poor guy. No wonder he's already called in the big guns. There he was, listening to the prize booby blathering away to herself, and then her vitals went crazy. Too.
"I see. Well, in that case-"
The opening door cut her off in mid-inanity. A Fleet captain came through it, his stride brisk but measured, though something suggested he found it difficult to keep it that way. His Medical Branch caduceus glittered in the dim light, and he paused as if surprised to see her sitting up. No, not to see her sitting up; to see her looking rational. Odd, she didn't feel as if she looked rational. One of his hands made a tiny shooing motion, and the nurse tried to hide his relief as he vanished like smoke.
"Well, now," Captain Okanami said, folding his arms across his chest as the door closed, "I'm glad to see you with us again, Captain DeVries."
Yeah, and surprised as hell. She hid the thought behind a smile and nodded back, watching him while she wondered what he was really thinking.
"You're lucky to be alive," he went on gently, "but I'm afraid-"
"I know." She cut him off before he could complete the sentence. "I know," she repeated more softly.
"Yes, well." Okanami looked at the floor and unfolded his left arm to tug at an earlobe. "I'm not very good at expressing my condolences, Captain. Never have been-a failing in a physician, I suppose-but if there's anything I can do, please tell me."
"I will." She looked down at her own hands and cleared her throat again. "I take it you've figured out I'm a Cadrewoman?"
"Yes. It came as quite a surprise, but, yes, we figured it out. It leaves us with a bit of a problem, too, medically speaking."
"I can imagine. I'm just glad you didn't hit any landmines."
"Actually, we did." Her eyes flicked up, and he shrugged. "Nothing we couldn't handle-" she had the definite impression that remark was sliding over slippery ground "-and we've got partial specs on your augmentation. I don't anticipate any more problems before the Cadre med team gets here."
"Cadre med team?" she asked quickly. "Coming here?"
"Of course. I'm not competent to handle your case, Captain DeVries, so Admiral Gomez called them in. I understand there was a Cadre detachment at Alexandria and that they're en route aboard a Crown dispatch boat."
"I see." She chewed on that thought. It had been five years since she'd seen a fellow Cadreman. She'd believed-hoped-she never would again.
"We really don't have a choice, I'm afraid. There are too many holes in the data we've got."
"I see," she repeated more normally. "And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime, I'm keeping you right where you are. We had to do a lot of repair work, as I'm sure you've already realized, and I want someone versed in Cadre augmentation to check it over." She nodded, and he cocked his head. "Are you experiencing any discomfort? I wouldn't want to get into any fancy meds, but I suppose we'd be fairly safe to try old-fashioned aspirin."
"No, no discomfort."
"Good." His relief was evident. "I wasn't sure, but I'd hoped your augmentation would take care of that. I'm glad to see it is."