Thirty-Nine
The world was strangely white, so unlike the darkness of Death, so unlike the place where the First Empress’s spirit had waited all these generations for Her awakening, and where only he, among all mortals, had ever been. He could not imagine the power, the wonder that must come to the Empire upon Her return, and his heart stopped beating for a moment as he thought of Keel-Tath’s spirit encased in Esah-Zhurah’s body. He would have given anything, everything he had ever had, to see her in the white robes and slender golden collar, high upon the throne, the most powerful Empress his people had ever known. His only regret would be that he could never again call her by her birth name.
In the whiteness that was now the Universe, he saw strange shadows hovering above him like odd birds fluttering above a snow-covered field. Their jerky movements were accompanied by noises that were sharp and purposeful, but not threatening. Were they other spirits, perhaps?
But he knew that this could not be; the place of the banished was forever dark and cold, and all those who dwelled there did so in eternal solitude. Or did they?
The world seemed to turn slowly, the white turning to gray, the strange noises drifting away into silence.
He slept.
If any time had passed, he was unaware. Dreams of life, and things that were beyond life as any other human had ever known, came to him, played their parts upon the stage that was his slumbering mind, and left to wherever such dreams go. While he would never be able to recall the exact moment, at some point he became aware that he did, in fact, possess a body. He gradually became sure of this because of what his mind perceived with gradually increasing clarity: pain. It was not the sharp, excruciating pain of a weapon cutting flesh, the kind of pain that he had been trained and toughened to withstand, to endure; it was the slow, throbbing pain of his body struggling to heal itself. This pain also was something he was well accustomed to. But this was deep, to his very core, and he realized in that instant that he was still alive.
The shock of that realization was sufficient to send enough adrenaline through his sluggish body to bring him to the threshold of consciousness. He opened his eyes. He was still in the white place, but saw no shadows.
“Reza,” said a voice, so softly that he could barely hear it. “Can you hear me? Squeeze your right hand if you can. Do not try to talk.”
Not questioning the instructions, Reza tried to carry them out. Sluggishly, he traced the nerves from his brain to his right hand, commanding it to close. Nothing. He concentrated harder, ordering his hand to obey. At last, he was rewarded with a slight twitching of the muscles in his forearm, causing his fingers to move fractionally.
“Can you feel this?” the voice asked with barely contained excitement. Reza felt a gentle pressure around his fingers, the squeeze of another’s hand. He replied with another feeble movement of his fingers.
In his vision, he saw a shadow appear above him that gradually resolved into something that, after a moment, he recognized. It was a human face.
Nicole.
He tried to speak her name, but somewhere in the complex chain of physical operations that made speech possible was a breakdown. His lips, feeling swollen and numb, parted. The tip of his tongue curled toward the roof of his mouth, behind his teeth, to its accustomed position for making the “n” sound. But that was all he could do. His lungs were too weak to force enough air into his larynx to make the sound of her name. He tried again, hard.
“Ni…cole,” he breathed faintly.
“Please, mon ami,” she said softly, placing a finger gently against his lips, “do not waste your energy trying to talk. We will have plenty of time for that later.”
She smiled, and Reza saw tears brimming in her eyes. It took him a moment, but it finally struck him that she looked exhausted, haggard. Her face was pale and drawn, her normally flawless ivory skin creased and sallow. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark rings beneath them.
She mourns, he thought absently. But that was at odds with the light that shone in her eyes now. They were joyful, relieved.
“You will be all right, now,” she said. It sounded to Reza as if the words were more to reassure herself. “We were very worried about you for a while. You were hurt very badly.”
“How… long?” he asked, ignoring her pleas to conserve what little strength he had. His range of vision began to constrict, the periphery of his world turning to a dull, featureless gray until all he could see was Nicole’s exhausted face.
She hesitated for a moment, and Reza sensed a general feeling of unwillingness to tell him the truth. His senses were terribly dulled, blunted like a rusty sword, but they told him that much.
“Six months,” she said finally, her eyes questing, hoping the news would not send him into shock. When she saw that he was not fading on her like he had so many other times over the last months, she went on, “It has been six months since we left Erlang. After you got Eustus and Jodi to Gneisenau – however it was that you did it – the surgeons worked on you for many hours.” Her smile faded with the remembrance of how agonizing that time had been. She herself had to be anesthetized, to shield her from the pain that Reza was feeling as the surgeons worked on him, trying to reconstruct his shattered body. “You never came out of the anesthesia, never fully regained consciousness,” she went on. “Until now. You have been in a coma all this time.” Her own recovery from the psychologically-induced trauma had taken two months, and the news that she was being forcibly retired from combat duty sent her into a bout of depression that she had still not entirely recovered from.
“You… all right?” he whispered.
“I am… better, now. I know I must look awful, but I have not been able to leave you.” She looked down at her hand holding his. “I had a great deal of leave built up, so I decided to take some. To be here for you, when you woke up.”
Reza’s heart ached for her. He sensed the long, lonely hours she had spent at his bedside for months, wondering each moment if the next he would be dead, or would never wake up at all. “Thank you, my friend,” he sighed.
“I could not leave you here alone,” she whispered. Tony had understood, and had supported her after Gneisenau had returned to Earth on Fleet HQ’s orders. He himself had spent many hours beside her, beside Reza. The two men had not seen each other in a long time, since the wedding that had made Tony and Nicole husband and wife, but there was a bond of trust between them that went far beyond the measure of their acquaintance.
“Erlang?” he asked as his strength began to wane, his range of vision narrowing again.
“The Mallorys, and what few Raniers are left, are well,” Nicole said, still marveling at how that was possible. While the cities and major townships had been totally destroyed with grievous losses among the population, the vast majority of Erlangers – almost exclusively Mallorys – had survived. The Kreelans, after retrieving whatever it was that they had come for, had mysteriously departed without inflicting further harm. “Several convoys of ships have taken them the things they need to help rebuild. Ian Mallory sends his hopes for your recovery, and his thanks.”
She did not add that he had also petitioned to be a witness in Reza’s defense at the court-martial that had long since been planned for him. He was charged with multiple counts of murder, including those of President Belisle of Erlang and Chief Counselor Melissa Savitch, as well as high treason against the Confederation.
Reza sensed that there was something deeply wrong, something that she was not telling him, but his body demanded that he rest. “I am glad that Ian lived,” he said quietly