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  MOURNER

  Confederated Star Systems #3

  Irene Radford

  writing as

  C.F. Bentley

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  December 22, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-572-4

  Copyright © 2015 Phyllis Irene Radford

  Show me the manner in which a nation or community cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of the people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.

  —William Gladstone.

  Prologue

  Martha da Selene du Sissy Crystal Temple checked the sleeping harness of her two cabinmates. “We’ve done this before,” she reassured the younger girls as they wiggled into more comfortable positions on their bunks. “Put your hand in the glove. Just before the ship enters hyperspace the machine will automatically inject you with sleepy drugs. When you wake up we will be in orbit around Harmony. Home. We’re going home.” That didn’t come out as joyful as she wanted.

  “But . . . but First Contact Café is home,” Sharan, the littlest of the holy acolytes, protested. Her blond curls tumbled over her forehead where she usually insisted they be held back by a band or cap.

  “Maybe. We’ll miss General Jake, but for now our duty is to Laudae Sissy and she needs to be on Harmony, the center of the universe and where we were born,” Martha said firmly. She took hold of Sharan’s wrist and thrust it into the rigid glove meant for a much bigger hand.

  She needn’t have worried about Sarah, her other charge during the flight. The dark-haired girl meekly tightened her own harness and slipped her hand into her glove, anxious to prove that she was nearly as old and senior as Martha. But her eyes squinted and her brow furrowed with worry. Travel through hyperspace was dangerous. One ship out of a thousand disappeared. Forever. Sarah always over-thought the consequences and never took a chance on her own volition.

  Martha retreated to her own bunk and made a show of strapping herself in and putting her hand into the waiting glove. She knew that next door, Mary, the oldest of the six girls who attended Laudae Sissy, performed the same chore for Suzie, the youngest yet taller and sturdier than Sharan, and Bella, the middle child in size and age, and the peacemaker of the bunch. But Mary was obedient to a fault. She would not dare stay awake through the mysterious and dangerous passage through hyperspace between the trade station known as The First Contact Café, which orbited a young planet not yet evolving life in a burgeoning solar system, and Harmony.

  Home.

  She presumed that Laudae Sissy in the cabin on the other side of this one performed her own rituals. She would have her youngest brother and sister with her—all that remained of her family—and her last two pets, Monster and Dog. The canines didn’t like hyperspace at all. Laudae Sissy had had to drug them before the crew could carry them aboard. But only Sissy could coax the dogs into taking pills or injecting sleeping drugs. They trusted no one else.

  Martha had reasons for staying awake on this trip, even if it broke several rules. General Jake had taught her to look at rules carefully and understand them, then make up her own mind about obedience.

  She counted off the minutes as the space ship undocked and slid seamlessly through vacuum toward the jump point.

  An alarm bell chimed delicately over the comms. “Warning, two minutes to hyperspace. Sleep drugs available now.”

  Surreptitiously Martha removed her hand from the glove.

  “Is it time yet?” Bella whispered.

  “Yes. Touch the middle finger of the glove with your free hand. You’ll hardly feel the needle and be asleep in seconds.”

  Strident bells sounded over the comms, louder than before. “Warning, one minute to hyperspace. Sleep drugs ready and required.” The computerized voice sounded more insistent. This time the bells elevated to an annoying klaxon.

  “This is it, girls. Before you know it we’ll be home and we can watch our approach to Harmony in the viewscreen,” Martha said with false cheer.

  Neither Bella nor Sarah answered her. A quick peek showed them curled into sleep, eyes closed, locks of curly blonde and straight dark brown hair drifting over their faces in the breeze generated by the ventilation system.

  Martha unlatched her harness and sat up, back pressed against the bulkhead, legs bent with her feet crossed under her knees.

  A loud bong startled Martha more upright but did not disturb the girls. “Warning, hyperspace imminent. Hyperspace imminent.”

  Then, without warning, the metal walls thinned to transparency. The bunk beneath her lost coherence. For a few heartbeats Martha hung suspended in the blackness between the stars. Alone.

  She gasped, not certain her lungs and heart truly worked anymore.

  Oh, don’t be such a scaredy cat. Jilly giggled from somewhere in the region of what should be the ceiling of the cabin.

  “You’re dead, Jilly. You died in the fire that nearly destroyed the Crystal Temple. You died and took your gift of prophesy with you,” Martha stated, as much to reassure herself as the wraith drifting across her vision.

  I know! Isn’t it deliciously funny? I’m dead and I’m the only thing real in hyperspace. As Jilly spoke, outlines and shadows began to form around the two sleeping girls, giving them form but not solidity. The bunks, and maybe the bulkheads and deck, became discernible, but not the ceiling or Jilly.

  “Jilly, there’s something I need to know. You’re the only person I trust to tell me true.” Martha’s chin trembled in uncertainty. This was why she’d risked wakefulness through hyperspace.

  I’m not a person anymore. The ghost sank to sit cross-legged in front of Martha, elbow on knee, chin in hand, an exact copy of Martha’s position. Her soft brown curls swirled into a cloud, or an aura of gold, around her head. The free hand gestured in a big arc to indicate the otherworldly surroundings.

  “You will always live in our hearts, Jilly. You were the glue that kept us all working as a team when the world fell apart and everything we’d been taught about the Goddess Harmony and her family was proven false.”

  Laudae Sissy resurrected the covenant tablets from beneath the high altar after I died and discovered how our religion had been corrupted for the convenience of our High Priests.

  “Before that. When we went to the funeral caves and discovered them so full of unsorted bones there was no room for the newly dead. The priests had buried our families in the desert in unmarked places rather than admit they couldn’t keep them in the womb of the goddess anymore.”

  Yes, there was that. But we fixed it. Laudae Sissy fixed it.

  “And then you died and nothing has been totally right since.”

  How so? The room grew more solid, but Jilly faded as a frown replaced her perpetual smile and good humor.

  “It’s like . . . it’s like a part of you invaded me.”

  The ghost wavered into and out of view. When she didn’t respond, Martha plunged ahead with her questions. “I think I can hear people thinking. Especially when they lie. I know it. I hear what they really think.”

  Oooooh, that sounds fun! I could never do that.

  “But . . . the Goddess used you to speak words about the future.”

  Rhymes and riddles that meant nothing and everything. What you do is different. It’s even more special than prophesy.

  “It’s dangerous, and no one will believe me.”

  Rhymes and riddles that mean everything and nothing. Nothing and everything.

  “Warning, coming out of hyperspace. Antidotes to sleep drugs available upon command.”

  “That’s stupid. If people are supposed to be asleep, how can they give themselves the antidote?”

  Not everyone sleeps in hyperspace. Some
of us never sleep anymore. We continue to haunt you so that you’ll respect us. That’s the joke. I’m supposed to keep you laughing so you won’t cry yourself into emptiness.

  Chapter One

  Garrin pa Lukan pu Lukan First Contact Café carefully composed a text message. Oh how he hated affiliation with the alien space station, though that was where he was stationed now. He wanted to return to Harmony as his father Lord Lukan had. Soon. Soon Laudae Sissy and General Jake would be in total disgrace, and he’d sit on the High Council in place of his father.

  “That should do it, Mother,” he said.

  Lady Jancee da Suzzette du Lukan First Contact Café ceased her awkward pacing and rubbed the sides of her engorged belly. Her seventh child lay heavy and uneasy. “Are you certain you have copied General Jake’s private transmission codes?” She started pacing again, still rubbing the unborn child.

  Garrin knew that his mother was too old to endure another pregnancy. But something compelled her to try for a lucky seventh child to honor the Goddess Harmony and her family. Harmony and her consort Empathy, planet and sun, presided over their children Nurture and Unity along with their adopted stepchildren Anger, Fear, and Greed. Together they formed a natural balance in order to banish Discord.

  Lately Discord had re-emerged and looked to be winning the constant war of the elements. Mother’s plan to oust the alien influences had to work. Only then would the planet calm herself and cease her temper tantrums of monstrous quakes, out-of-season-storms, and droughts.

  “Yes, Mother. I have bribed the proper person to steal the codes for you.”

  “Then send the message now. Before Laudae Sissy’s ship drops out of hyperspace.” Her face pinched as the child kicked from within, a kick hard enough that Garrin could see a disruption in her gown that stretched tightly rather than fall in graceful folds.

  “The ship has been gone for over two weeks. It may already have—”

  “Stop arguing with me. Must I send it myself?” She reached over his shoulder to grab the encoded crystal from his hand.

  “I’ll do it. Just don’t blame me if it comes too late.” He inserted the smaller end of the crystal in its assigned spot. Icons on the communications screen whirled as it read, accepted, and transferred the data.

  “Now we must go. Your bribe to the technician to leave his station unguarded can only last so long.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Garrin offered her his arm. Regally, she placed her own atop it, but leaned too heavily. He wondered if she had the strength to walk back to their own wing and her quarters.

  “When all the dust settles, I will see your father among the accused and you, as his eldest child, will take his place on the High Council.”

  Garrin thought she was trying for a reassuring tone. He’d expressed his misgivings of her plot often, and she’d dismissed them as his timidity. Instead, she sounded timid herself.

  Or was she only panting in pain and exhaustion?

  Not good omens for the success of their plan.

  General Jake Devlin of the Confederated Star Systems and commander of the First Contact Café stared at the spiral of incomprehensible text that bounced around his desk top. The Maril language meant nothing more to him now than it did before the translator programs had dug into it and discovered the three dimensional nature of the scrawling bird scratches.

  He touched an icon to the side of the display and froze the swirling glyphs. Not just scratch marks left by bird claws, each symbol represented an entire word, sometimes a full and complex idea reduced to a few ideographs.

  He’d given up dot to dot puzzles as a small child. Maybe Sissy’s youngest brother and sister could find the patterns here where an adult—a logical adult—mind could not. He could hear the children reciting a lesson in the schoolroom three rooms away around the circle of his suite. He saved the puzzle of the message to a portable unit and sauntered over to them.

  The moment he left his desk behind him, the weight on his neck and shoulders vanished. This small move felt like freedom. The desk acted like a slave master, chaining him to onerous tasks.

  “I’m going crazy trying to make sense of this puzzle,” he said.

  Nanny Guilford frowned at his interruption of the children’s lessons that sounded like rhyming games to him. Sissy had found the woman among the refugees from the Maril War and suggested Jake use her to set up a school for all the children on the station. Only a few parents had agreed to trust their children to anyone outside their own immediate family. Three Maril, and five human refugee children joined the children in mid-afternoon for three hours. Those lessons were more about getting along with each other than actual school work.

  So Jake employed Nanny Guilford to teach and look after the two children who’d run away from their beloved sister rather than go home to Harmony—which wasn’t very harmonious lately.

  Ashel grabbed the portable and cocked her head sideways to peer at the message with one eye, then turned his head to the other side and looked with his other eye.

  “How do you know how to do that?” Jake asked.

  “The Maril read that way,” Marsh explained while his sister shifted the screen to another angle.

  “May I?” Jake asked the little girl and retrieved the portable. He imitated Ashel’s cockeyed view of the messaged. One symbol resembled a carving he’d seen on the arch of a cave entrance on the planet Sissy had nicknamed Sanctuary—an ancestral spiritual retreat for the Maril that they’d abandoned, then lost. Another symbol spiraling off from the first resonated with his mind, then another and another. Something about a cave, seven beings gathered in a circle around a fire.

  A meeting. The Maril wanted a peaceful meeting.

  Yeah, he knew that. His translator gadget—retrieved from the vessel the now extinct Squid people had crashed into his station—told him that much. But he needed to puzzle out the message himself. He needed to understand how the diplomatic contingent from the long-time enemy of the Confederated Star Systems thought, how they reasoned, and what they really wanted.

  Merchants had initiated the contact. But they’d sent Chtackah, a senior diplomat with credentials as long and wide as her wings.

  Peace had never been high on the Maril’s list of priorities. Casualty and damage reports from their latest raid on a medical station in Sector 9 proved that.

  But all had been quiet since then. And that raid had been more about taking three doctors and lot of data hostage to guarantee this meeting took place.

  His wrist comm unit beeped. He noted the channel and decided he’d better not ignore it. “Thanks, kids, but I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Please make an appointment next time you need to interrupt lessons,” Nanny admonished him.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  When he returned to his slave master desk, he averted his eyes from the Maril message, hoping to see something different when he looked back. “Yes, Major Mara?”

  “General, sir,” she replied in her slow drawl, left over from her days as a member of the Harmony Military. She no longer wore that uniform, or a red star caste mark, but speech patterns remained for a lifetime. “There’s a live message for you streaming in from Labyrinthe Prime.”

  “About time. Have they finally acknowledged we had reason to confiscate the station? Like their representative’s total incompetence to the point of lethal negligence. How are we on the lawsuit seeking recompense for the loss of life and damage to the station?”

  “Our legal team is still arguing wordage with their legal team. I’ll channel the signal to your desk top, sir.” She discommed without further courtesies. Unusual for someone raised on Harmony, where courtesy, status, and staying within caste kept the empire—well, harmonious. In theory.

  An alien face flashed on the open screen on the inclined desktop.

  Jake touched the corner with his finger and dragged it to the center of his vision field, displacing the Maril document. He tried not to show his alarm as the face resolved into a green scal
ed muzzle with patches of brilliant vermillion, orange and blue on cheeks and forehead. Beady yellow eyes with vertically slitted pupils focused on him quickly.

  No emotion showed on the face, unless the vermillion patches flashing to yellow and the blue patches deepening to dark teal meant something he couldn’t fathom.

  Then a bright voice—he couldn’t tell if it was a husky female or a high tenor male—spoke in a language he didn’t understand. The reptile hadn’t moved its pointed maw other than to flick a forked tongue in and out.

  “Excuse the translation,” the apparent female said again. “I do not receive you well over this distance.” She had a slight Mediterranean inflection, Jake thought. “The Bankers of D’Or have business with the governor of the station.”

  “General Jake Devlin, Confederated Star Systems, commander of the First Contact Café,” Jake introduced himself with a slight nod of the head. “How may I help you?” At last count, he’d never heard of reptilian aliens. But then this call originated at the Labyrinth Prime Space Station. Who knew what kind of species came and went from there on a regular and unreported basis?

  “Your mortgage is overdue,” the female said. He decided he’d defer to female by default. The avian Maril used females as diplomats and comms officer, why shouldn’t reptiles? Her voice dropped suddenly deeper and more clipped, as if not her own. Again the mouth had not moved on the image that filled his screen.

  “I was not aware that confiscation of the First Contact Café came with any encumbrance. Our contract with Labyrinthe Corporation and interplanetary law within the CSS allowed us to remove the negligent and potentially criminal representative of the corporation. Any mortgage that exists must be paid by the Corporation.” He moved to terminate the signal.

  “A mortgage exists. Labyrinthe refuses to pay, as they no longer possess the station. And it is a station, not a planet, therefore your laws do not apply. Prepare to evacuate within twenty-four of your hours. My triad of Bankers D’Or will repossess at that time.” The lizard flicked its tongue twice, and the signal dissolved into a mass of incomprehensible pixels.