Treasure of Light (The Light Trilogy) (5 page)

“Kell?” He lunged for her arm, supporting her. Her beautiful face twisted hauntingly. “What’s wrong?”

Obliviously, the rest of the team raced down the hall toward the transport tube.

“What’s … what’s happening?” she whispered.

“What do you mean? Are you okay?

She stared wide-eyed at the blank wall, almost as though she sensed the faint outline of some bright alien form. He traced the path of her gaze, feeling a little eerie himself, like something invisible stood just beyond his shoulder, watching.

“I can’t seem to … I thought I saw a shadow as we turned the corner. “I—I don’t feel very well.”

“I can tell. You act like you just looked into the abyss and it looked back.”

She put a hand over her stomach. Kell, the tough rock-steady woman every security team hoped to have in its ranks, trembled like a leaf in a gale. His brows drew together. He gently enfolded her in his arms. Trying to make light of it, he teased, “I thought you looked pale when we first left the mess hall. Must have been that soup—I told you it smelled like something we scraped off the bulkheads after the last party.”

“Don’t…. Something’s wrong somewhere, Jamie.
Terribly wrong.”

He swallowed hard. “I hate it when you say things like that. The last time Janice Cogle didn’t come back from that routine mission on Ikez III.”

He let himself drown in the familiar feel of her body against his. “Hey, Kell, why don’t you go to the infirmary and I’ll report you sick. We can pick up another member for the security team when we pass Defense.”

“But it’ll make you even later. You know how jittery the captain’s been. He’ll roast you.”

“Don’t worry. I know how to handle Tahn. You just have to look pathetic and he commutes your sentence from a year of hard labor to a week.”

He kissed her gently, then put his hands against her hips and shoved her in the opposite direction. “Love you. See you in a couple of hours.” He charged off, trying to catch up with his companions.

As soon as he rounded the corner, anxiety pressed hard fingers into his throat. Goddamn, she wasn’t the flighty type. Her dependability and ability to sense danger were legendary among a half-dozen starship crews. Like a sixth sense, she’d often
felt
ambushes or traps, saving her teams before they ever got in trouble. Was that what this was all about? A warning?

He ran harder, dodging around the corner for the transport tube. Lieutenant Sam Morcon held the door open, scowling. Short, with sandy hair, his mouth had a hard set to it.

“We were wondering if you’d gone to hell or something, Ryngold. What was the delay? Where’s Gilluy?”

Jamie slipped into the tube and hit the patch for level nineteen. He damn sure couldn’t tell Morcon what Kell had said. The entire team would get the jitters so bad they’d be incapable of functioning at top level. “Kell’s sick. I sent her to the infirmary. We need to pick up somebody else for the team.”

“Sick? She looked fine. When did—”

“I don’t know,” he answered tersely, waving it off. “I told her it must have been that cheese soup she had for lunch. Did you
smell
that stuff? Sheesh, like slime that’s been breeding for a month.”

Morcon looked slightly relieved. “Yeah. I did. That’s why I sat on the opposite side of the table. Well, okay, let me near the com.” He pushed between Jamie and Norman Linape, going to the black patch on the wall. He input the numerical sequence for level nineteen security standbys.

“Security,” a laconic voice boomed through the tube.

“Banders? This is Morcon. We’ve had an illness in our team. Have somebody meet us at tube nineteen-three immediately.”

“Aye, Lieutenant.”

Morcon stepped back and lazily leaned a shoulder against the wall. Jamie quietly exhaled and turned his gaze to the numbers that flashed in blue on the wall as they descended.

CHAPTER 3

Neil Dannon grinned as he entered the
Hoyer’s
fifth-floor lounge. He’d been diligently avoiding responding to any of the urgent calls coming over the ship’s com system. He didn’t want to talk to any of these despicable purple-suited martinets. If they wanted him, they could damn well hunt him down.

His gaze drifted around the large room. It reminded him of some of the nicer taverns on Farben. Lit with jasmine-scented oil lamps, it had thirty small wooden booths and a series of magnificent holographs lining the walls. The holos pictured mountain scenes so breathtaking a man could almost feel the chill of the snow that frosted their peaks. The raucous music came from Giclas V. Its painfully sharp notes affected him like darts shot out of an old-style cannon.

Forty off-duty officers crowded the lounge tonight, most sitting, but several stood in the center of the room, just beyond the rim of the empty marbleoid dance floor. The white oval shimmered pearlescent in the soft light. Neil took another sip of his Ngoro whiskey and eyed Farin Wyncol admiringly. A petite shapely brunette with enormous green eyes, she noticed his attention and smiled seductively. He returned the gesture.

The officers standing nearby gave her disdainful, almost malignant looks. Dannon took a good long swallow of his whiskey. It was his sixth drink in two hours, and much of his pain had receded into a blessed haze. For the past four days he’d tried to stay as drunk as he possibly could. He started drinking before breakfast mess and went from one lounge to the next throughout the day, until he fell into bed at night ill, but too numb to feel, too stupefied to have any of the nightmares that tormented him like demons with fiery pitchforks.

That way he didn’t have to seriously think about Kayan being scorched or do the horrifying silent calculations of how many Gamant lives had been lost. The ache in his gut started to rise again. No.
No!
He took another long drink and forced it down.

Farin smiled coquettishly. He strolled boldly toward her, melting into her circle. The other officers glared with repugnance, some gritting their teeth so hard they set their jaws at awkward angles. He knew why they despised him. Military fanatics had an unwritten law: Any soldier who betrays his own people is beneath contempt. Even though his act of treason against the Underground could have greatly benefited the Magisterial government—if they hadn’t screwed up the operation—they still hated him for it.

But Farin didn’t care. She knew only that he was exceedingly handsome, a superb lover, and Gamant. To a Magisterially born and bred woman, all things Gamant rang with the exciting timbre of the forbidden. Gamant civilization had alternately warred with the government and fled its tyranny, hiding in the most inaccessible, hostile regions of the galaxy.

In the soft golden light, Farin’s dark mass of curls glinted. He let his gaze caress the smooth lines of her oval face, lingering on her full lips. Her turquoise off-duty clothing drew his attention even more fully. The sheer, formatting gown belled at the sleeves and below the hips, clinging like the finest of shimmering spiderwebs. His gaze lingered on her protruding nipples. Large, dark nipples, he recalled.

She surreptitiously watched the movements of his gaze and when he again looked into those magnificent eyes, he saw the dilated pupils, the silken flush of her skin.

“Farin, dear, your beauty soothes even the most persistent of concerns.”

Her lips parted provocatively. “Are you concerned about something tonight, Neil? I’m sure we can figure a way of—”

“For God’s sake, Wyncol,” Lieutenant Jason Delio turned sharply. A short man with bright orange hair, he had a crooked nose and thick brows. He jabbed a thumb in Neil’s direction. “What do you hang around with scum like him for?”

“Mind your own business, Delio,” she snapped. “I’ll keep company with whoever I damn well please!”

Anger stirred in Neil’s breast, but he gave no evidence of it. He’d endured this sort of treatment for months now. He ought to be accustomed to it—but he wasn’t. He sipped his whiskey and draped an arm possessively around Farin’s shoulders.

Delio grimaced as though ready to spit. “You like turncoats, do you, Wyncol? Prefer ’em over the rest of us?”

Neil unconsciously glanced down at his purple uniform. Old friends and familiar places flashed in his mind and his heart began to pound. He squelched the feeling, forcing happy memories away before they slashed through the alcoholic haze he’d nurtured so carefully.

Farin propped a hand on her hip. “What I do or don’t—”

“You’ve got no more pride than a Giclasian sewer rat,” Delio accused. “At least have the decency to go hide somewhere if you’re going to sidle up to trash like—”

“Shut your goddamned mouth!”
Neil shouted.

A hush descended over the room. The shrill strains of the metallic music seemed louder, more poignantly violent. Delio’s freckled face glowed beet red and he clenched his fists, spreading his feet as though ready for a fight.

“You’re filth, Dannon!” he spat. “Drunken, cowardly filth!”

Coward… coward….
The word stung like salt in a gaping wound. Dannon pushed Farin an arm’s length away. A good fistfight might be just what he needed. Maybe it would ease the ache caused by the bitter indictments hurled from the darkness of his soul.

“Jealous, Delio?” he asked, smiling. “Because she has better taste than to cast her pearls at the feet of a swine like you?”

The little man’s jaw shook with rage. He clutched his glass so hard his fingernails went white. “
Me
a swine? Do you know what this ship is doing right this very instant, Dannon? Or have you been too drunk since Kayan to know anything?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tahn just headed for Transportation to pick up your friend Baruch. Once we’ve got him, we’re scorching Horeb. It’s a level
one
attack. The entire middle section of the planet’s going to get wasted. This is definitely Baruch’s last stand. You tried to betray him on Silmar and got a hell of a lot of his people killed, even though he escaped. How does that make you feel? Another Gamant named Ornias finally finished your work for you. We’re going to deliver your friend to the nearest neurophysiology center and have his brain probed until he’s nothing but a vegetable.”

Neil paled.
Jeremiel… on board?
How had he missed such talk? Surely the crew had been discussing it everywhere. But then, no one would have seen fit to whisper it to him so he could prepare himself.

Farin shouted, “What do you care, Delio? Baruch’s been your enemy since the day you stepped out of Academy! You sound like you want to hold a wake in his honor!”

Some of the anger faded from Delio’s face. He frowned down into his drink. “Anybody who’s fought against Baruch respects him—that doesn’t mean I like him. I hate his filthy Gamant guts.”

From the corner of his eye, Neil saw Doctor Iona stride into the lounge with two security guards. The white in his hair glimmered in the lamplight. His gaze darted anxiously around the room, then, spotting Neil, he trotted forward.

“Dannon, move. Tahn wants you in Transportation, now.”

He eyed the security staff, one red-haired, one black-haired. Both with hard faces. “What for?”

“Baruch will be here any minute. Tahn wants you to give the positive ID.”

“What?”

Iona waved him toward the door. “Come on. You haven’t got much time. Baruch should just about be here.”

In a staggering moment of lucidity, memories burst wide in Neil’s mind. His thoughts riveted on strategy sessions held over a few cool amber ales, just he, Jeremiel, and Rudy Kopal.

“Oh … God.”

Terror welled. No, it couldn’t be.
Operation Abba?
Seven years ago, they’d been stretched out on the lush dry grasses of Lysomia VI, drinking ale, watching the towering clouds, bantering strategy.
Insane strategy
—
things to be tried only when they were already dead men, trapped, and no other path lay open to them.
An autumn-scented wind blew up the canyon, dry and brittle, rustling in the maple forests. A few crimson leaves spiraled from the limbs to cartwheel across the meadow.

Jeremiel had contemplatively brushed his fingers over the dry grass, his blond hair shimmering a reddish gold in the slanting rays of afternoon light. His deep voice rang like thunder in Neil’s ears.
“No, six would be too many. If you’re going to take a cruiser, it’ll have to be a small strike force. Maybe three or four. They’ll have no more than forty-five seconds total to …”

Neil threw his glass to the floor and ran for the exit. Behind him, he heard Iona shout, “Guards! Stop him! I don’t care if you have to physically drag him, get him to transportation!”

Neil almost made it to the door before two men tackled him and knocked him to the floor. He rolled, punching, kicking, struggling to get away. One of the security men slammed a hard fist into his solar plexus and Neil gasped, unable to catch his breath.

“You … fools!”
he croaked.
“You stupid… stupid fools! Baruch is going to … to take this ship! I have to get to Tahn. For God’s sake! Let me go!”

When the tube stopped, Jamie Ryngold and the security team flooded out. Sergeant Yocup met them, still hastily fiddling with the charge in his rifle. Together, they trotted in single file into Transportation. Jamie saluted, glancing quickly at Tahn, expecting a reprimand for being late. He frowned when it didn’t come. Tahn looked like hell, nervous as a tiger on a hunt, sweat matting his brown hair to his forehead. His blue-violet eyes gleamed with such desperation and uncertainty Jamie tensed involuntarily.