Chapter 15

My job in the getting organised evolution consisted of taking off my boots and pants and climbing into bed. Maiga sent Jia and Vim off to rustle us up some food. The others unpacked the gear and stowed it away, except Tesla, still milking the shaken up bit and sitting recovering on another bed with Ilyan beside him, talking quietly to him, stroking his back.

That sickened me, frankly. I felt damn sure now that Tesla had full access to Maiga's goodies and poor Ilyan didn't have a clue. But my instinct still told me to keep my nose out of it. Anytime I'd ignored that instinct I always came off worst. No man ever thanked you for giving him that news. Even if you had proof. Especially if you had proof. I had no proof.

Best leave it alone. I sighed and tried to put it out of my mind. Instead I looked around the room that would be home for nearly a month. Pleasant but bland décor. Typical hotel room basically. Neutral colours, stamped out furniture. But my nice soft bed had some kind of heater in the mattress, warming it, and me, gently. A nice touch.

This boat called itself a liner but, despite a few basic leisure facilities, really wasn't much more than a transport. Suited our low profile, I suppose. I hoped I'd get a chance to get out and check out the facilities soon. Once I felt strong enough I needed to start working out again, before I got too flabby.

~/~/~

I fell asleep not long after the others finished organising and when I woke up only Ilyan remained in the room, reclining on the other bed, reading his Snapper. I'd glanced at it a couple of times. He had a library on there.

"Time is it?" I asked thickly, sitting up, holding my side.

He looked up. "About 19:30. How are you feeling?"

"Hungry," I said. "Where's Tesla?"

"With the others. They went to the observation deck to watch us leave orbit."

I frowned at that. "Tesla shouldn't be wandering around. He's not meant to be on board."

"We're underway," Ilyan said. He shrugged. "At this point they tend to assume if you're already on board, you're meant to be here." He gave a quirky smile. "Like a wasp once it gets past the soldiers and into a beehive."

A wasp? Yeah, I could see Tesla as a wasp.

"You should stay out of sight though," I insisted. He looked at me for a while, and then smiled.

"Maiga's right about you."

"What about me?" I asked, frowning. What's the bitch being saying now?

"Never mind. We have something to discuss with you, but we'll do it later."

"You can't leave me hanging like that!" I protested.

He grinned at me. "Oh and what will you do about it, Sergeant? Going to pin me?"

I winced at the thought of sparring with him just now. Even so, I put on the 'scary grunt' scowl. But then I couldn't help smiling and flopped back on the pillow. Okay, patience, Jadeth.

A few minutes later Maiga came in with food. She gave me some, then sat on the bed beside Ilyan and shared out the rest.

"Maiga, I'd like to discuss your idea with Jadeth now," Ilyan said.

"Okay," she said, nodding.

"Jadeth." He sat up straight, looking at me. "Maiga thinks you ought to become my bodyguard. Officially that is."

Maiga shook her head, gestured with a piece of bread in her hand.

"Not just your bodyguard, but in charge of security generally," she said. "He seems to have a knack for it. He's suspicious of everybody after all."

Funny cow. Her idea though. That surprised me.

"We need someone who is focused on security," she said to me. "You seem to be the best person for that."

I'd never agreed with her more.

"Yeah," I said. "I'll do it. Always been good at security."

"You do seem to have a natural guardian instinct," Ilyan said. Maiga nodded agreeing.

"Like a dog," she said.

I almost choked. "I'm like a dog?"

"I meant that in a good way!" She added hastily.

"I'm like a dog in a good way?" Oh, I couldn't let her off with that one.

"Dogs are fiercely loyal and protective," Ilyan said, quietly. "I like dogs."

That shut me up. His way with words again. He took her mistake and turned it into one of the best compliments I've ever had.

"Right." I cleared my throat after a while. "I can't cover two men at once. I want to make Rish responsible for Tesla's personal safety. The lad's not a bad soldier."

"Good idea," Ilyan said, looking at Maiga, who nodded. He smiled at me. "Straight down to work eh, Sergeant?"

"Yeah."

As if I'd not been waiting for this moment since I met him.

~/~/~

Now I felt even more motivated to recover my strength so Security Chief Jadeth would be ready to hit the ground running when we got to Kitsnujitar. The doc checked me over every day, asking a lot of charming questions like about how I was pissing. "Standing up" became my usual answer.

I spent most of my time either resting or pottering around the suite of rooms. The others usually stayed out all day enjoying the ship's facilities, leaving Ilyan and me alone. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes I just rested and dozed while he read. Sometimes he read aloud to me, old books, stories, and I drifted, barely following the story, just soothed by the sound of his voice.

About three weeks in I'd started feeling a lot stronger and could even do some light exercise. After I finished a session of that one afternoon, I lay on the bed snoozing while Ilyan read. I'd almost dozed off when he spoke for the first time in a couple of hours.

"Jadeth, do you remember your mother?"

I woke up and looked over at him, wondering what brought that thought up.

"Not really, not much."

"Did you see her again after you went to school?"

"No." I shook my head. "She wrote to me a few times. She was KIA when I was nine. She was mechanised infantry. Tank crew." I paused for a while, thinking about her. "She had blue eyes and brown hair, I think." I tried to picture her face, but the details had long vanished. I shrugged. "What about you?"

"She used to visit me at least once a year after I went to school. She was a Marine."

"She dead?" I asked.

"Yes." He didn't elaborate and I didn't push it.

"I guess she'd have been proud of the way you turned out," I said. "Top advisor to High Command and all that. And now you're the Prophet --"

His face twisted when I said the P word.

"I'm getting damn tired of that name. In fact, I was damn tired of it about a week after Tesla coined it."

"I'm sure he meant it as a compliment."

"Well it's not." He sounded unusually testy. "I'm a scientist, not a mystic. I analysed data and found patterns. I didn't get visions from a god."

I didn't answer. Didn't really know what to say, just made a note to myself that I wouldn't ever call him "Prophet" again.

"Besides, my so called prophecies were self-fulfilling. That's like predicting a house will catch fire, then tossing a match into it and saying 'I told you so.' Is that prophecy?"

"No, boss, technically that's arson." I grinned as I said it and he smiled wryly and shook his head.

"Too true, Jad, too true." He looked thoughtful for a while and then smiled at me.

"You know, I seem to recall promising to buy you a nice cold beer, Sergeant."

~/~/~

We wandered along a parade of shops, trying not to look in any way like wanted men. My side ached. This was the furthest I'd walked since being wounded. Perhaps I looked pale because Ilyan gave me a concerned glance.

"Shall we sit?" He led me to some small tables outside a café bar, which had the words Café de Paris painted in gold letters on its big front window. We sat and in a moment a waiter with a prosthetic arm showed up. Ilyan ordered us a pair of cold beers.

"There's Jia and Vim," I said, spotting the two of them strolling along the parade, holding hands. They didn't see us, too deep in conversation. Jia wore a gauzy white dress tied at the waist with a green sash. Her hair hung loose down her back. I suppose Vim had clothes on too, I didn't notice.

"Young love," Ilyan said, smiling.

"Nice legs." I said, with an evil grin. I wished I'd persisted a bit with Jia. I could have cut out the boy easily enough. But I suppose she's better off with Vim. More compatible. And they do make a cute couple.

Speaking of which, where might Maiga and Tesla be? These liners usually had rooms you could rent by the hour. A sort of no-tell motel set up.

"Anything wrong?" Ilyan asked.

"Sorry, just thinking about something," I said, forcing a smile, wondering what my face had been betraying. The waiter with the fake arm brought our beers and Ilyan raised his glass to me. I raised mine in response and we clinked them together.

"To my bodyguard."

I didn't know how to respond to that at first. Then I said, "To your success." Generically useful. We drank the well-chilled lager.

"How will we measure my success, Jadeth?" Ilyan asked, putting down his glass.

"What about the rumours coming through?" I said, "Chatter about units bugging out and heading for Earth. Plus - well - High Command did try to kill you. They're afraid of you. You must be having an effect."

"Hmm, so I can measure my success by the number of assassins sent after me?"

Not a pleasant thought. We both sat there glum for a while. Then I gave myself a mental slap around.

"Right," I said. "Drinking game?"

He looked at me and smiled.

"Okay. Rules?"

"One sip for..." I glanced over at the waiter. "Anyone with a prosthetic arm. One for anyone in uniform. One for… any one member of our party."

"Two for a couple." He took it up. "Two for a prosthetic leg."

"A big gulp for a couple in uniform or for a prosthetic arm and leg."

"Two gulps for an alien." He came back with quickly. He's done this before.

"And drain the glass for a mixed human alien couple," I added on, which made him laugh.

"Love is blind," I said, grinning

We sat there the rest of the afternoon, playing our stupid people spotting drinking game. Of course, like any drinking game the longer we played it the worse we got at it and the more we argued over it.

"Oh, they were not a couple!" Ilyan insisted nearly three hours later. He brushed his hair back from his flushed face.

"They couldn't keep their hands off each other. Drink up."

"She was thirty years older than him!"

"Love is blind." It had become my refrain. Grudgingly he took two sips. We weren't likely to get too drunk on the rather weak lager, not unless lots of mixed species couples suddenly turned up. But it felt nice to relax with him like this.

"Oh!" He pointed and sipped twice. "One for a member of our party. Two. Two of them."

I followed his weaving finger and saw Maiga and Tesla heading towards us. I sipped once twice, three, four times. One each for members of our party. Two for a couple.

"Four sips?" Ilyan pushed his hair back again. He looked puzzled. "What's that mean?"

I shrugged. "Means I was thirsty."

"Hello!" Ilyan called, too loud, and waved as Maiga and Tesla arrived. "Join us! Jad and I are playing a drinking game."

"Nah, they can't jump in at this stage, everyone has to start out equal." I didn't want them to play. I wanted them to piss off and leave us alone.

Maiga sat down by Ilyan and he put his arm around her, kissed her cheek, more clumsy than usual. I caught the black look Tesla gave them.

"Perhaps it's time you went back to our suite," Maiga suggested, in that special voice women use for talking to their man when he's drunk. "Jadeth looks tired."

Ilyan at once became serious, looking at me with concern.

"You're right." He put his hand over mine on the table. "Jadeth, we should go back now. So you can rest up before dinner."

I shrugged. "Whatever."

Party's over.

Obviously civilian liners and transports didn't go into war zones, which meant we had to get off as near to Kitsnujitar as possible and find someone to take us the rest of the way.

The nearest stop was a space station. First built a thousand years ago by the Wassawan people, who are all gone now, it had changed hands dozens of times since. All the various species who'd owned it over the years had expanded it, changed its name and moved it around. Right now, it sat on the edge of an exclusion zone around Kitsnujitar space. The current owners, a commercial company based on Sigthoni 5, called it Station Olojimi. Grunts called it Hollow Jimmy.

The liner would stay docked at Hollow Jimmy for a couple of days, loading fresh supplies and letting the passengers take in some of the weird sights, sounds and smells of the huge marketplace the station housed. People came to Hollow Jimmy to strike deals. A half credit cup of coffee or a mining complex that covered half a moon; you could buy and sell it all, no questions asked.

'No questions asked' suited us. We disembarked the liner, Maiga insisting that those who went onto the ship in the smuggle boxes came off in them too, including her. Tesla claimed he still needed 'someone' in the box with him to keep him calm. Somehow, I think he'd have been disappointed if I'd volunteered to ride with him this time.

We found a hotel, low key again, only a couple of steps up from a flophouse. Maiga settled down to hack into the station's network to find transport and monitor the comms for news about us. Tanashi and Diliph went to track down some medical supplies. We'd not been able to steal any on the liner. Too much security.

The rest of us decided to explore the station to see what supplies and gossip we could pick up. We explored the marketplace and the byways around it. In the little alleyways off the market small facilities offered every kind of service imaginable and plenty of unimaginable ones.

As we passed the door of one place a woman with too much chest on display called out to Ilyan.

"Hey, Colonel, you want to treat your boys to a good time?"

"Shut it," I said as we hurried on past. Vim and Jia both blushed and looked shocked.

Ilyan frowned. "Why did she think I was a colonel?"

"They call anyone they think is a soldier 'colonel'." Rin said. Seemed to know a lot about it.

"I see." Ilyan frowned again. "But how did she know I was the leader of the group?"

"Sir," Jia said. "There are microscopic bacteria living off the dirt on this floor that can see you're the leader of this group."

Ilyan stared at her, then at me. I grinned.

"What she said."

"So much for low profile," he muttered. "Perhaps we should split up for a while."

We did and Rish and me stuck with Ilyan and Tesla, while Jia and Vim strolled off together and Rin went off on his own.

~/~/~

When we four lads went back to our accommodation, Maiga reported she had found us a smuggler willing to take us to Kitsnujitar, for a hefty price of course. We'd leave in the morning.

The medics returned with the supplies they'd bought. Not long after that Vimal and Jia came in, with a takeaway dinner for us all.

Rin didn't show up for dinner. Ilyan and Maiga seemed kind of worried about that, but I figured he'd just gone looking for a girl to call him colonel. Though when we couldn't contact him on his Snapper either even I started to get nervous.

Finally, as midnight approached and Ilyan and Maiga had been pacing up and down for at least an hour, I stood up.

"Me and Rish will go look for him."

Rish nodded at me. I looked to Ilyan for confirmation and he nodded too.

"Be careful."

"Yeah. You tooled up, Marine?"

"Of course."

"Then let's go."

~/~/~

We headed straight for the same back alley where we'd seen the lady with too much chest and found her still working the door. A few credits got us the info that Rin had been around here, not long after we saw her before. He'd paid for a girl for an hour and left again. She pointed out the direction he'd gone and we headed that way, past the colourful stalls and booths. Mixed scents of human and alien food and drinks wafted over us.

"You've known Rin a long time," I said to Rish. "Think he'd run out on us?"

Rish glared at me, dark face darkening further. "No! He wouldn't run out on us!"

I didn't push it. The lads seemed close. If Rish said Rin wouldn't abandon us then I believed him.

"Police," Rish said, slowing his pace. I looked up to see the station rent-a-cops fussing around the mouth of an alley.

"Maybe we should --" I began, when both our Snappers beeped. We flipped them open in unison. Maiga's face appeared on the screen. She looked half-crazed. I could hear a babble of voices behind her.

"We have to get off the station," she said, sounding breathless. "Meet us as port 134b."

"What?" Rish gasped, beating me to it.

"I just intercepted a message. They know he's here." 'He' meant Ilyan, I knew. And 'they' meant High Command.

"Shit!" Rish beat me to the punch again.

"Meet us at 134b right away. Our transport has agreed to leave early."

"Wait!" Rish said. "What about Rin?"

"If he's not with you then we have to leave him behind. I'm sorry." Her face vanished as she cut the connection.

"We can't just leave him!" Rish protested, turning to me.

"That bitch can." Now what? It's been drilled into me. It's fundamental. Never leave a man behind. But Ilyan's safety had to be our priority. My priority. Okay, how long did we have to find Rin before Maiga left us behind too? Would Ilyan let her? Where the hell had the damn idiot Marine gone anyway? Why the hell didn't he answer his Snapper?

I looked up slowly at the trouble ahead of us. The small knot of gawping people. The police officers. The taped off alleyway.

Oh, fuck. No.

I started walking. Had to be a walk, not a run. A running man attracts attention near a crime scene. A murder scene. Rish caught up to me and I knew by the look in his eyes he feared the same thing I did.

When we got to the small crowd, I didn't want to draw attention by pushing to the front. Luckily, Rish was tall enough to see over the heads of most of the people. He stretched up to look into the alleyway and I saw the blood drain from his face, leaving him looking grey and sick.

"Oh no," he whispered.

I didn't need to hear anything else. I grabbed Rish's arm and led him away. Not too fast. Just a couple of soldiers who'd seen so many corpses that one more couldn't hold our interest.

One of the little battery cabs that buzzed around the station stood nearby. The driver, a bored looking human bloke well past military age, leaned on the steering panel reading a paper. I shoved Rish into the cab and piled in after him.

"Port 134b, quick as you like, mate," I said. As we set off I glanced at Rish, who had a hand over his eyes. I didn't dare talk to him about what had happened. Most of the cabbies around here are intel gatherers for some organisation or other.

We got to the port in about ten minutes and paid off the driver. Maiga waited, pacing, at the airlock that led to the boarding walkway.

"Hurry up," she ordered as we walked up to her and stopped. "The others are aboard."

"Aren't you going to ask about Rin?" I asked, not moving.

"Well since he's not here you obviously didn't find him. Will you move?" She looked about a hairsbreadth from really losing it.

"We did find him," Rish said, his voice hoarse with grief and anger. "He's dead. He's fucking dead, Captain!"

Her jaw dropped and she went white. Rish didn't say anything else, just pushed past her and strode into the airlock. The clatter of his boots wore away down the walkway.

I waited for Maiga to unfreeze. When she did, she turned to me and spoke quietly, barely above a whisper.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

I walked past her too and after a moment, she followed me down the walkway. Even her footsteps sounded subdued, her stride shorter than usual. For a moment I felt ashamed. Disgusted that I'd just used Rin's murder to score more points off Maiga.

Sometimes I think that if I could meet myself I'd beat the shit out of me.

I stepped through the open airlock into the smuggler's ship. Our gear lay scattered around the floor. Jia and Vimal sat side by side on one of the smuggle boxes. She sobbed, her face in her hands, while he stroked her back, looking pale and sick.

The others stood around stunned. As I boarded Ilyan spun around away from Rish.

"Jadeth! What the hell happened?"

"Had to be..." I started, but stopped when Maiga shoved me further inside and started closing the inner airlock door.

"Wait!" Ilyan called, staring wild eyed at her, his face flushed. "What are you doing? We can't just leave! We have to find out who did this!"

"We have to go!" Maiga insisted. She flicked the intercom switch. "We're all aboard." At once I felt the vibration through the deck plates increase and heard thumps against the hull as the ship released docking clamps and disengaged from the station.

"Wait!" Ilyan insisted again.

"No!" Maiga shouted back at him. "Military Intelligence knows you're here. They killed Rin!"

"She's right, Ilyan," I said. "They must have picked him up and made him confirm you're here."

Rish scowled and surged towards me. Diliph grabbed his arm, held him back.

"Are you saying he betrayed us?" Rish demanded.

"They could have had him for hours. More than enough time to..." I stopped, not wanting to say it, not wanting to make Jia cry any harder. Surely I didn't have to spell it out

Rish calmed down, though still glared at me. He turned away as Diliph released his hold. Tanashi wrapped her arms, around him and stretched up on her tiptoes to talk quietly to him.

"Lucky you intercepted that message," I said, glancing at Maiga.

"Lucky?" She glared at me. "Do you know how long it took to hack into the network and then the encoded transmissions? It was not lucky!"

"Oh, excuse me," I sneered. "I forgot that protecting your ego is the priority right now."

And this time she did lose it. She slammed into me and shoved me back against the airlock door. Her fist rammed into my guts, taking my breath and making me double up. She didn't get a chance to land a second one. Ilyan, looking utterly horrified, and Tesla the same, grabbed her arms and dragged her off me. The rest of them stared in shock as our XO tried to get free to beat the crap out of me.

"I've had enough of your shit, Jadeth!" She yelled as she struggled in their grip. "I've fucking had enough of you!"

"Please, Maiga," Ilyan pleaded. "Calm down, please."

I straightened up, rubbing my gut. Not a bad punch for a Marine, a girl Marine at that. She jerked her left arm away from Tesla with a sudden movement and I tensed, ready to defend myself, but she didn't come after me. Ilyan let her other arm go and she stalked to one of the seats against the wall where she dropped her head into her hands, gripping her hair nearly tight enough to pull it out.

"Are you all right?" Ilyan asked me quietly, as I stood rubbing my healed up side. I nodded, not quite able to speak yet, breath still short. Tanashi appeared at my side and ran her med scanner over me.

"He's fine," she said a moment later.

Ilyan looked at me with pained eyes and nodded, then went to sit beside Maiga. The horrible tension in the room started to ebb away, replaced by an even more horrible gloom. Looking helpless, the others drifted to the seats.

I found a seat well away from Maiga and settled down, closed my eyes. The journey would take nearly a day. I needed to rest and to sort my head out.

Rin's dead. I let the reality of it sink in. It felt like I'd only just got him straightened out from Rish. Well I've been through that before plenty of times. A guy or gal joined my unit and sometimes died before I'd learnt their name at all.

So I felt sorry for Rin, but had to think priorities. What had he told Military Intelligence before they finished him? Our heading had to be a given. Our identities. Or enough information for High Command to confirm them.

My conversation with Ilyan about how we measured his success came into my thoughts. How he said we'd measure it in the number of assassins they sent after us. So we could see Rin's murder as a clear measure of Ilyan's success. I didn't feel like drinking a toast to celebrate.

~/~/~

A few hours later I woke up to some hushed talking. Ilyan, Tesla and Maiga, sat on the smuggle boxes, all huddled together, heads down over a snapper.

"What's the problem now?" I asked Diliph who sat beside me.

"Money," Diliph explained. "We're short on cash apparently and getting hold of any on Kitsnujitar is going to be very difficult."

"Everything on Kitsnujitar is going to be very difficult." I stood up and walked over to the three of them.

"We need cash, right?"

"Yes," Ilyan said as the three of them looked up at me. "We're short on ready cash. We meant to pick some up on Olojimi, but..." He shook his head. "We're running short on money in the bank too."

"Your money."

"Tesla and Maiga have used their money too," Ilyan said, sounding defensive.

"I've got a tidy sum saved," I said. A smart soldier saved up as much of his pay as he could, for when he retired. If he lived that long of course.

"No," Ilyan said firmly.

"It's just sitting in the bank."

"No!" Ilyan said more emphatic now. He glanced around at the others too. "That goes for all of you, before anyone else offers."

"Anyway," Maiga said, "there's no way to get at it until we get back to friendly territory. That doesn't solve our cash problem."

Damn, these so-called smart officers overlook the obvious even when it's right under their noses. Or in this case their arses.

"This ship belongs to a smuggler, right?"

"Yes. So?" Maiga said, giving me a 'piss off' scowl.

"So maybe we have something he'd be interested in taking off our hands." I kicked the smuggle box Maiga and Tesla sat on. "Two somethings."

The three of them looked down at the boxes, then up at me.

"Excellent idea, Jadeth," Ilyan said, with the first smile I'd seen from him for hours.

Maiga stood up. "I'll go and talk to the captain."

"Stick it to him good," I said as she hurried away. Her back stiffened, but she didn't turn around, just strode on.

"I assume that means 'negotiate a good price'," Ilyan said, in a chilly voice that implied that better be what it meant.

"Yeah," I said, letting a sheepish tone into my voice. I looked at him more closely. He had dark circles under his eyes. "Have you slept? You should rest."

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I will try. I think I'm still... I just can't believe about Rin." Tesla put his head down. "He must have suffered horribly before he died." Ilyan said quietly. Tesla put his hand over his face and groaned. Seeing he was only upsetting Tesla even more Ilyan stood up and walked back to his seat. I followed and sat beside him.

"He was so young," Ilyan said quietly and glanced around at the others. "All of them are." He looked back at me, his eyes going red, shining. I reached out and put my hand over his. I knew a dumb grunt like me couldn't say anything to make it better. But I could just be there, stay strong for him.

I heard Maiga coming back then, and an unfamiliar voice, the smuggler. Ilyan looked at them, but I never took my eyes from his face, never let go of his hand.

Maiga and the smuggler passed us and he started inspecting the boxes. I heard him running a scanner over them and then sucking his teeth and making tutting noises. I didn't interfere. Maiga could handle it. He'd be a brave man if he tried to drive the price down too far. She'd probably cut his heart out.

After a few minutes of intense talk he left the room for a few minutes and returned with a couple of bundles of what I recognised as Kitsnujitar currency notes. I watched him count them out in front of Maiga then shake her hand. She gathered up the bundles of notes and stowed them in her pack.

"Right," she said. "Someone help me get our stuff out of these."

I didn't rush over to give her a hand. Diliph and Vimal volunteered and started to dump out our gear into a heap on the floor.

When I looked back at Ilyan he'd fallen asleep. A couple of tears had escaped him, leaving still glistening tracks down his cheeks. Carefully, not wanting to wake him, I let go of his hand and went to sort out my kit.