"What are they doing in there?" Siris asked.
Hephaestion leaned into the wall and regarded her over his shoulder. She didn't look frightened, though he knew that in a deeply profound way she was frightened. There were the basics. She was afraid of injury, and afraid to witness harm done to others. But she was also afraid to fail, and that somehow her lack of military expertise might allow many people to be slaughtered. Otherwise, she'd swathed her mind against awareness and was operating under a kind of shock. Only certain topics were, presently, acceptable, and none of them contained reference to terrorists, murder, rape, or torture.
"They're voting," he said.
Siris blinked, and her soft mouth turned down. "I didn't know you were allowed to do that in the military."
It was a suicide mission. "Some jobs in the military are historically volunteer only," Hephaestion said, quietly. "They'll all go."
"Did you read their minds?"
"Yes."
"What about me? What am I thinking?"
They were in the back room, where Siris had gone to gather her things. The sun had passed its apex and was moving away from the window, leaving long, somnolent shadows and a breeze with a chill in it.
Zoa had gone. She operated her glider under a Priority One diplomatic clearance, but habitually lowered the craft's shield screens while on the deck. He couldn't be on the glider while she attended the homeland security briefing that had been arranged with Volodya's top intelligence masters as a cover to meet (and brief) the operatives who'd rescued John Manegold. If he'd gotten back on her craft, Hephaestion would have popped up on thermal, or else she'd make the Volods wonder why their Holland-Tchey inspector had taken suddenly to running her vessel's shield on auxiliary power while her high-tech glider was hangered in a secure bay.
The easiest solution was for Zoa to go to the briefing, and leave "Bojidar" at the farmhouse. The plan solved the issue of Volod security, but did not allow for thermal scanning by a satellite under Holbek control. A thermal scan of the farmhouse would penetrate the structure and paint a nice picture in real time of movement between the rooms. It would also tell the trackers how many people were in the house. Once Zoa went airborne, the disruption field went with her, which meant any and all satellite imaging would resume. This was good. They wanted Holbek to relax and be happy. So, Zoa left behind a portable shield that masked Hephaestion's thermal signature as long as he kept within a three-meter radius of the generator. The shield wouldn't make anyone-- or any area --invisible, like Zoa's ship did, but it hid the heat signature of an additional body, which was good enough. Hephaestion wasn't planning on going outside until Zoa, on the return flight, swung by for the pick-up.
The pick-up.
Hephaestion answered Siris. "You're thinking rather like a doctor. You're thinking that if your patient is going north, your place is northbound with him."
The doctor rolled her eyes and smiled a bit. "What a mess." She'd just about pushed everything she had into her pack, which was a generic-looking but highly specialized field pack similar to the ones hauled by the ops team. Her pack was light blue and carried the international logo of a popular energy drink. With the pack's broad, rugged straps in her hands, she looked around for something she might have missed.
Hephaestion straightened. "It's going to get messier."
"And I'm not guaranteed to survive."
He looked at her. Said nothing. She didn't want him to. She wasn't ready to plunge into those waters, at least not consciously. She said, "What will you be doing?"
"For starters, Zoa said we can track you. It gets tricky upland, where the tree cover is too thick for visual. Depending on what's happening, we may be okay with thermal. We'll stay with you."
"While staying far away indeed."
"That's somewhat the idea. Aviation control will be prompted to acknowledge non-existent hand-offs of Zoa's craft. Her flight plan says she's going back to the UKSB. ITAN is aware that Zoa is investigating a lead in Volodya, so it will handle the control board. ITAN was not given the particulars due to the fear that its interest in John might jeopardize the mission. But we'll be flying at reconnaissance altitude. That's very high but no so high we can't detect Quiranium and Cedium if there is any."
"Cedium, why are you looking for Cedium?"
"For starters, it's illegal to line anything that moves across international lines with Cedium. And in-country, it's so heavy no private interest would haul it unless there was good reason. If it's out there in the mountains in quantity, it's probably being used to hide something. Cedium-lined stuff blinds Holland-Tchey sensors just like it blinds our less remarkable technology. I can tell you there's Cedium present, but as far as what's on the other side of it, I don't do that well there myself."
"Something you're not great at, I can't believe it." Siris hefted the pack to slender shoulders, saw his expression. "Please don't look so sad."
"I must be slipping, if you can see it."
"Why wouldn't you want me to see it?"
"A poor send-off, that's all."
"It feels very strange to me, to speak to you this way."
"Candidly?" He advanced, lifted her pack from her shoulder, and settled the weight properly. "You've no idea, do you, that for me it's the opposite. The sounds your voices make are like ... noise, like humming is to you. It's the way you speak, you, here, that makes me listen, and so, for me, you've always spoken candidly. What you say, and what you feel come together inside me, and it's been ... harmonious. He's noticed, too-- John has. How rare you are. We can't help it, actually."
"You make it sound like you're in love with me."
He hadn't been looking at her directly. Now, he did, his irises flickering as though he was taking tiny pictures of every centimeter of her face. "How do you know I'm not?"
"I'm not afraid of you," Siris said, momentarily, "and I would be, if I thought you were."
"Well said. Take care, now, will you?"
"I plan to do my best." Then she asked how the alien knew John was trustworthy.
If what he said previously made Siris feel like she was in the fold, then what he said next drove homeward that she wasn't, and never would be, one of them.
"She recorded his wave pattern and used her computer to get past his internal shield. She's quite good at it. She matched his responses with biological data picked up by her computer, and with the data coming to her telepathically. Even I could tell he wasn't lying, and she's better at it than I am."
"Okay," Siris said.
"Okay? What about you? I remember when you felt another way about the Manegold."
"Well ..." She gave that little, tentative smile again. "He didn't wake up the way you said he would. There was that. And other things. If he was Holbek and he wanted to get back to his own, he could have just let us keep going the way we were going and never warned us away. He did warn us away, you know."
"I heard."
She looked past him quickly. "Yes? Has it been decided then?"
Hephaestion had been aware of Skocz's approach. Now he turned, his gaze passing slowly over the sullen face of the captain.
"Yes, it's done. I see you're packed. Moving out in ten." The captain swung away.
"There it is," murmured Siris.
Hepahestion lowered his head and let silence speak to that.
* * *
"I'm receiving telemetry," Zoa informed. It was fully evening in the farmhouse, and it was just the two of them.
The four soldiers, Manegold, and the doctor were two hours and forty minutes on the Razgrada highway, which put them a hundred and seventy kilometers west of Skaja-Volz. By Zoa's estimate, the hauler they were using was about out of fuel. Hurdle number one, but, along with other good things to have, she'd brought an untraceable credit wand. The wand was better than they had, so it wasn't a high hurdle.
"How much longer?" Hephaestion wondered. He wasn't looking for an answer. He already knew the answer.
The answer was days. Days. There were two mapped highways going into the Goraneg from the team's position. These ran east and west. The lower lands didn't want, nor did they have the same connection to the Goraneg that they possessed with lower-lying rural areas. To head out over the Goraneg range into Alina by vehicle, one needed to pick up one of two tenuous roads out of Skaja-Volz or Ulka. Even so, the Skaja-Volz and Ulka highways soon narrowed to a single lane, wending through unmapped towns, cutting across vast, untenanted stretches of woodland.
There were no roads after the foothills the way the team was going. The westward slopes were steep, forested, and trackless.
The Goranegi had a word for the place above Serdice in the west. The word was Malino. In Cobrivan, the word meant bad. In Volodyan, Malino translated this way: Not Meant for Man.
In Volker, Malino was, simply, wilderness.
Describing the hike, John had told the soldiers what he knew, and Hephaestion had listened. It was late spring, so the middle passes were useable. But that meant, too, that the rivers were fast and swollen with run-off. The Daranic wouldn't be safe to cross until mid-summer, John warned, if they got that far in. The Daranic was the last challenge, seven days of hiking through deep forest and over rocky slopes. If they somehow could get over the river, they'd be a day out of hills the Alinans called the Alba-Abruda, which was on the Alinan side of the border. If they made it that far, the plan was to scrub the mission-- no one watching would wait that long, overlook so many opportunities to snatch them --and prepare for evac by the Science Commission, which would get in and out under diplomatic clearance with no explanation to the Volods or, for the present, ITAN.
Hephaestion liked the idea of the Science Commission as allies, but he knew he liked it better than Kinder was going to. For one thing, no one on the team had a realistic grasp of Zoa's telepathy. What Zoa and her people had begun to understand about Hephaestion, about John and Kinder was enough to identify and confront the member nations. Instead, the Science Commission had proposed a back-channel, unauthorized joint operation. Tell that to an official like Peter Weihing or Anselm Gakhal. It just wouldn't work, and Hephaestion wasn't going to be the one to reveal the level of penetration the Science Commission was capable of. He'd rather continue to pretend Zoa thought he was Bojidar Rambach from Borazjis. Which she didn't. Not anymore.
He and Zoa were together in the back room, the same room in which he'd said good-bye to Siris. When Zoa returned, the others had gone. She'd been in curious mode, walking slowly, almost reverently through the deserted places of the farmhouse. Hephaestion had followed and they ended up sticking to the last room. The sun fell, though neither noticed or cared, because they could see as well by night as by day. Zoa appeared unfazed by hunger, and Hephaestion had no appetite. The cool air was fragranted by the meadow, so they kept the window open. The temperature was irrelevant. They could be quiet, too, when they wanted to, and still communicate.
-- They've just passed a small village. I'm receiving imaging that appears to be another village, ten kilometers ahead. They'll get fuel then, and perhaps stop.
Zoa had made a study of Volodyan history, and for a while passed the evening hours checking her knowledge against the memories of her companion.
"Volodya was somewhat inconsequential, a pawn," Hephaestion told her. "Everyone invaded it. The ones who stayed the longest were the warriors of Volney. The Volker were legend. They broke the hold of the Misenians before anyone else and ran the dragons back to their own cities. After that, everyone wanted a Volker army. By the time I was born, they were selling themselves to the highest bidder, and they were worth it. They fought with two swords, a long sword and a shorter one, and they did it from horseback. They could breed a war herd like no other race. They were three kingdoms, the way they are now, but with three royal houses, and when they lacked an enemy they went at each other. Two names come to mind. Brune and Valten, both of Ludkhana. The former rode with the Maid, Genowefa, against the Misenians, and won. He got some of his seed somehow into the royal house of Brenna. The latter was of my kind, an affarite, born and destroyed before my time but revered for what he was, because he had managed somehow to get right the first time he heard the message of the goddess."
"Is that a rarity?" She sat in an armchair. He sat on the bed.
"The affarites of my time made a battle with one another on the New Continent, because the Enegris drove us mad--" He stopped, and studied his hands. "I just realized I do not speak of this, ordinarily."
"You needn't now."
He raised his eyes to search her face. "The Enegris was the term we gave to the surge of power, which we did not understand, but which we felt suddenly, real as the pulse in one's own neck. One day we were ourselves. The next day, we felt fire in our blood, and in our minds, and a consciousness that was not there before. We had always heard the voice of a god, of all the gods, and there are many--"
Zoa smiled quickly at this, and nodded. This, she too believed.
"--but this new voice, it was not a voice at all. It was like a breath deep in the night that was not your own, a rising swell, and there was no word for it. Adepts all over were sniffing the air. New cults were formed, and died. Others felt the pull westward and went. I didn't. The Sheppard, Vallis of Brenna, you have heard of him?"
"No."
"He was a minor king who wanted to be more. He slaughtered many, including others of our kind. Some could not bear the fire. Some sought the source, and one day Constantine Parnasus ordered the construction of a temple. It was the greatest temple ever built-- it still is. The span of a city. For decades, men traveled to Amorium to see what he was doing. The report was that he was a young man, although I'd been hearing tales of him for hundreds of years. I thought he was one of my kind."
"Was he?"
"He was another kind of being, but close enough. I'd no interest in a battle of affarites, so I'd stayed away. But the Enegris was strong, you see, and one day it was too strong. I gathered my army--"
"You had an army?"
"For longer than I have not, yes. I wasn't very old before I felt that I must, and once men saw what I could do, they stayed with me. I went to the outskirts of Amorium, the city, by land. You cannot march upon that city, and there was an army there to greet me. But there was a woman, too. I knew right away that she was endowed, but it was more than that. She was an illusion, a-- dream. She was making me see what I wanted to see. Most of the people in that place, they fell down for love of her and never guessed the trick. But we knew, Constantine and I. That she was a fraud. And that she was the most important, most beautiful being that had ever drawn breath.
"I remember thinking that if she did not at least look at me, I would die of want there on the spot. A look from her could satisfy a thousand men all dying of thirst at the same time. He was at her side, and I hated him for that. I hated myself for waiting so long to seek her. It was she had caused the Enegris. She was from the New Continent, and it was my turn to go mad."
"Did you? Go mad?"
"I thought I did. But I was already, you know. Mad, I mean. She smiled at me, and I took away my army, took it across Ussuria toward Aiglentina, and when I dared go no closer to the Aiglentine empire, I veered back toward Misenos. Whatsoever I conquered, I made build temples to the Lady. I tried to carve her likeness. I ordered men to worship her. It was Crusade. When I turned east, Constantine brought out his army to stop me. Just him, not her. We fought together, man to man, and used what the gods gave us. I was Tithonus, then."
"So, then," said Zoa faintly, "you are the man who killed Constantine Parnasus."
"I killed him, and took his head--"
"--back to lay at her feet."
"You have read our history."
"Some of it. How were you able to kill him?"
"I was the elder by about three hundred years. I burned what I didn't bring back, and let free his soul."
"Is it true that she wept?"
"It's true." Silence ensued, and Zoa got up and went to him and sat with her knee touching his, the way he and Siris had sat in Bhavaja when he spoke to her of his past. "I thought that if she had been on his side, she would have been with him when he rode out to stop my army. When I brought back his head, she came to the field where I camped, waiting. She took from me his head, and then gave it without flinching to her attendant. I thought I was in love, and the brightness in her eyes was admiration. She came within a breath of me, and touched me, and spoke three words. That was the real Enegris. You can touch her, or be touched by her, and learn nothing of your soul. Or you can learn everything. I think it must do with what you can bear, for to have your soul wrenched from you while you live and flung back with its deeds plainly upon it, that is the hell of which the priests teach. When you die, you return to innocence. I wish that she had killed me."
Zoa had sat up straight. "Your thoughts, your words, they run at odds. You speak as though she hated you, but your thoughts are saying something else."
"Yes, well, you are walking in my steps. Pulled one way, thrown another. She said, I forgive you, by the way. Then tore out my heart. I went away from her, but returned when I could not stand the pain. She told me to disband my army, and to walk the world, and I did those things just to find grace in her eyes. That has been rich irony, you know."
"How so?"
"She needs nothing from us. Before we were, she was. To be loved without condition, that is the spring that nourishes the world. With her, there is no thirst. She is the water. Her forgiveness comes at no price. It is because it is. The only being from whom I require forgiveness is with us in this room, and from him I cannot get it."
"The mission is not your fault."
"The module was recovered because I was not thorough enough, or because I was too thorough, and there was no one with authority present to prevent its theft from the rubble. Eight hundred lives rendered for the crime of showing up to work."
"You have seen war."
"I know what war is. I know, too, what makes a casualty. Don't try to shift this burden. You know, in any case, only I can do that."
"Well, then, show me-- I wonder if you would show what the Enegris feels like?"
He looked at her, and away, looked at her again and sighed. The sound rang with unease. "Do you ask because you know I won't refuse?"
"Partly." She held his stare.
"I haven't your control. You get all, or you get nothing."
At that, Zoa sighed too. "If we can have this time for ourselves, you must tell me, and with your own voice, your true name."
"I am Hephaestion."
"Hephaestion." Another sigh. Of course, she knew this. It mattered, then, that she got it from his throat. "Don't worry about control. I think I can handle it."
* * *
He wondered if she would love in a manner he found accomodating, and then she let him into her mind.
The sense of touch heightened. He had already brushed her skin, but now the electricity that brought the fine hair on her arms to stand up was experienced in a shared consciousness, a bound awareness that guided him and returned a reward enjoyed simultaneously.
Vision slipped into twilight. Perception of contours, warmth, came through apparatus honed to savor the inner life. The landscape of their coupled bodies, changing with mood, deepened their excitement.
What fell-- or rose --under his fingertips translated into a mental pattern that merged with hers, taking his breath. He was aware of the shape of Zoa's lips, the taste of her breath, the smoothness of her skin, but only after such was amplified by his power. The ebb and flow of information was primal, like the sexual appetite, both of which were satisfied in time. He felt, always, what she felt, and so knew that for Zoa it had been a long time too.
When it ended, he gradually connected to his physical self, the air brushing damp skin, and knew that Zoa was satisfied.
She curved her form against his, closed her eyes, and slept.
He stared, alternately, into the rafters, at the sculpture of her throat, at the rippling curtains and the soft curl of her fingers; at the hand-held computer, the quiet movement of her breast.
There was, in him, no desire to sleep, but even if he'd been able, he would have feared to. In his world nothing this good went unguarded, ever.
-- Next Chapter
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