Gardner, James Alan - Hunted by Gardner James Alan

Author:Gardner, James Alan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

Part 4

ENTERING THE CATHEDRAL

28

SAILING THROUGH SPACE

I left Prope's cabin before she woke. Spent the rest of the night in the lounge. In the morning, two female life-support techs woke me and said I looked terrible. They were nice to me, in a spend-time-with-the-cute-stranger way, but they weren't voracious or anything. Whatever I'd had the night before must have worn off.

Later in the day, Festina and Prope tried to act like nothing had happened ... but for a long time, Festina wouldn't look me in the eye, and Prope was always staring at me when she thought I wouldn't notice.

Wrapped in its Sperm-tail, Jacaranda sped its milky way through the silence of space. Nothing happened as we crossed the line out of Celestia's system ... nothing beyond a few tense faces easing up, and people suddenly remembering gossip or jokes they'd been meaning to tell each other. We'd all survived another one. Life goes on.

As Tobit predicted, Kaisho claimed she'd put the spores outside my door and in my bed just as a joke. "To see the look on your face, Teelu" she said; which was kind of scary in itself, if she could see the look on my face when she was nowhere in sight. She swore the Balrog had always known I'd find the spores without stepping on them... so where was the harm?

Festina still gave her a real good chewing out, and Kaisho promised not to play such tricks again. None of us really trusted her; but Festina was reluctant to lock her up or invent some other punishment. Explorers liked to keep things in

the family-it was one thing to yell at a fellow Explorer in private, but nobody wanted to take measures that might be noticed by the crew. Anyway, leaning on the Balrog too hard might backfire: if we got it mad, there was no telling what it might do ... or what we could do to stop it.

So we pretended everything was all patched up. I spent my mornings with the Explorers-Festina, Kaisho, Tobit, and Benjamin-answering their questions about Troyen. They soon saw I knew nothing about the twenty years of war (nothing specific enough to be useful), so we turned to subjects like how to incapacitate a warrior without killing him, and the personalities of Queens Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. Since they were the longest-established queens, maybe one of them had come out on top ... except they were also the most obvious targets for the outlaw queens, so maybe they'd been eliminated early on.

No way to know. All those records kept by observers on my moonbase were marked TOP SECRET, and even Festina couldn't get at them. Some higher admiral didn't want us learning useful stuff about Troyen-likely the admiral who sponsored the recruiters, and Willow's mission. Or my father, trying to hide how badly Samantha had failed.

About Samantha's failure-in those days on Jacaranda, I finally realized how crazy it was to put an inexperienced twenty-year-old in charge of a diplomatic mission ... then to leave her in charge for fifteen whole years, as things went from bad to worse.

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