Looking up at Jodi and seeing her shocked expression, Nicole apologized. “Jodi, I am sorry for bringing up such unpleasant a subject.” Pretending she had something in her eye, a convenient excuse to wipe away a tear that threatened to fall, she asked, “Did you wish to go see the show tonight at Wilmington’s, or… Jodi, what is wrong?”
“Did… did you say Hallmark?” Jodi rasped.
“Yes,” Nicole said, confused and growing concerned at her friend’s alarming change in expression. She looked like she was going into shock. “Jodi, tell me what’s–”
“What was his name?” Jodi demanded suddenly.
“Jodi, why–”
“Dammit, Nicole, what was his name?” Jodi practically shouted from across the table. Around them, conversations ceased as people turned to stare.
“Reza,” Nicole said, looking at Jodi as if she had gone mad. “Reza Gard. Why? What does it matter? What is wrong with you?”
Jodi felt her heart hammering in her chest, and she was becoming lightheaded to the point of dizziness. “What did he look like?” she asked, licking her lips and leaning forward as if she were physically starving for the words that were to come from Nicole’s lips.
“He… he was just a boy then–”
“Did he have green eyes that you couldn’t turn away from?”
That shocked Nicole. “Yes,” she said, her face knotting with concern. “How–”
“Did he have a scar over his left eye, like this?” Jodi ran a fingernail over her left eye, just touching the skin of her forehead and cheek. “And dark brown hair?”
“Yes. Yes,” Nicole croaked. A strange sense of déjà vu was creeping over her, leaving her skin tingling and a distinctly unpleasant feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Jodi–”
“Did your mother’s cross have ‘3089’ engraved on the back of it?”
“Yes. That was the year my parents were married.” She suddenly reached for Jodi’s hands. “Jodi, what is going on?”
“Oh, God, Nicole,” Jodi said, fighting hard to contain her excitement, oblivious to the crowd of onlookers who had forsaken their dinner to watch the spectacle these two were providing. “He didn’t die on Hallmark,” she blurted, her words rushing forth in a stream. “He showed up on Rutan, carrying an endorsement letter from some Colonel Hickock and your mother’s crucifix. He was brought up by the Kreelans, as one of them. He taught me his name. He’s on his way to Earth right now aboard–”
“That is not possible!” Nicole shouted. But how else could Jodi possibly know these things? she demanded of herself. And who else could it be? Jodi began to fade behind a curtain of swirling black spots that suddenly began to pool in Nicole’s vision.
“Nicole, it’s true! I swear!”
“Reza… alive?” Nicole, wide-eyed, shook her head as the blood drained from her face.
“Nicole, I’m sorry, but – Nicole? Nicole!”
But Nicole could no longer hear what Jodi or anyone else was saying. Her eyes rolled back to expose the whites, and she fell from her chair to land at the feet of the shocked restaurant manager who had just emerged from the kitchen to see what all the fuss was about.
Jodi sat in a chair next to Nicole’s bed, keeping watch over her friend as the sleep drugs did their work. In what had seemed like a trek born of a novel of the surreal, Jodi had somehow gotten Nicole back to the Hood. The chief surgeon examined her and put her on bed rest for twenty-four hours with a diagnosis of emotional trauma. Jodi felt awful.
But as she sat there, holding Nicole’s hand, she realized why Nicole had reacted so strongly to the news that Reza had not died, but had been raised by their enemies: even though she had been so young, she had never let go of him, never stopped loving him. She had taken on the occasional lover, but never had she allowed the relationship to blossom into something more substantial than the satisfaction of the most basic primal needs. Somehow, inside, she had gone on believing that he could not really be dead, that somehow he would return like a fairytale hero to claim her heart, a modern Prince Charming, snatched from the jaws of Death. While Jodi knew that Reza was not – or at least did not seem to be – bent on the destruction of humanity, and perhaps just the opposite, his Kreelan upbringing and all the negative implications that lay therein could not be ignored. And to Nicole, who had not yet given Jodi time to explain all the things that had happened on Rutan, it must have seemed like her long-lost knight in shining armor had returned as some infamous Black Knight, corrupted and evil. The Reza Jodi had seen would be nothing like what Nicole remembered. She was bound to be taken aback, Jodi thought, perhaps even horrified.
“It’s not that way, Nikki,” Jodi said quietly, although she knew Nicole could not hear her through the narcotic fog that had been required to sedate her shocked brain. “I just wish you could have been there to see him. Maybe, maybe when that stupid bitch Rabat finally gets done with him, you’ll get your chance. But…” Jodi sighed.
Despite the guilty feelings that the thought evoked, Jodi could not help but wonder if such a meeting would be a good thing for her. Reza represented a change in the equation of her relationship with Nicole, and that was something she was distinctly uncomfortable with.
On the other hand, if the two of them did share something, it would be so much more than Nicole had now.
An idea suddenly congealed in her mind, and she acted on impulse, calling the captain’s yeoman.
“Yes, ma’am?” the young man answered.
“I’d like to speak to the captain as soon as possible,” she said. “Please tell him it’s extremely urgent.”
“Just a moment.” The boyish face was replaced by the Hood’s coat of arms for a moment.
“Yes, Mackenzie, what is it?” The captain’s face suddenly appeared, his short-cropped gray hair forming a silvery helmet on his head. From the rough leather jacket she saw on him, she knew he had just gotten back from shore leave, and his face made it clear that whatever she had to say, it had better be good.
“Sir, I’d like your permission to go to Earth with Commander Carré. She has knowledge that is vital to an ongoing Confederation intelligence project…”
Twenty-Two
Deliha Rabat was her usual flawless self. Despite too little sleep and horrendous stress, most of it produced by her own imagination, she was outwardly calm and collected. But under the plastic veneer she wore in front of her masters, there lurked a seething core of disappointment with herself and resentment toward the successful members of her team, her jealousy at their success a mountain that towered beyond the shadow of her own failure.
Now, standing before the Council and the president, she had to submit herself to what many lesser souls would have considered the final humiliation, the results of the debriefing that they had conducted on the Aboukir on the way to Earth. But to her, it was a challenge, and one that she eagerly accepted. She knew the human mind well, in all its various malignant forms, and was thus well prepared for her time before the Council.
The other researchers had told the Council their golden tales of success: of how phenomenally Reza had scored in language, spatial concepts, and certain types of mathematics; of his superhuman physical strength and mental acuity; of how his physiology was still basically human, yet fundamentally different in ways that were not entirely understood, as if Reza were the product of an extremely successful genetic engineering project that was well beyond human means to fully understand, let alone duplicate. Even the things at which Reza did not excel, but was merely human and thus flawed, were laid at the Council’s feet where they were examined with the enthusiastic but often myopic vision of those disposed to power but often ignorant of the value of the individual.