The Returned, Part III Read online

  The image of Nyos appeared on the screen. He was grinning broadly. “Captain! Are you calling to congratulate us on disposing of our mutual enemies?”

  “You need to stop firing on them.”

  Nyos’s smile remained in place, but the expression in his eyes made it clear that he was not thrilled with what Calhoun had said. “We have been over this, Captain. You knew going in what our intention was. You thoroughly supported it. We agreed that the D’myurj did not deserve to live.”

  “There are females and children down there,” said Calhoun. “To the best of our knowledge, they have done nothing to deserve a death sentence. I am asking you now to cease firing upon them.”

  “And if we refuse?”

  Calhoun’s response was to his crew, not Nyos: “Tobias, activate the cloaking device. Kebron, take us to red alert and bring weapons on-line.”

  The red-alert klaxon promptly screamed through the bridge. Since it was not a status that Calhoun tended to employ, the noise was unsettling for his crew.

  If he was attempting to make an impression on Nyos, he succeeded. There was clear astonishment on Nyos’s face. “You are serious? You truly intend to engage us in battle?”

  “If necessary,” said Calhoun. He certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. He hadn’t forgotten Burgoyne’s candidly negative assessment of just how slight a chance they would have in a pitched battle against the Dayan warship. But he simply couldn’t sit here and let them continue to pound away at the planet’s surface. He had to do something, and if it meant engaging in a pitched battle against an opponent who would likely demolish them, so be it.

  Nyos stared at him incredulously. Then Calhoun watched as one of Nyos’s men came over and whispered something into his ear. He listened for a moment and nodded. Then in a loud voice, he called, “Cease fire.”

  Calhoun couldn’t quite believe it. He had been braced for a major head-to-head battle, and instead the Dayan had given in. This was enough to prompt him to become immediately suspicious. He tried to push it away but he wasn’t able to accomplish it. “Thank you,” he said formally to Nyos. “I appreciate your display of mercy.”

  “What display of mercy?” Nyos asked. “I was simply informed that our job here is finished. The D’myurj are dead. We have killed each and every one of them. We are now going to survey the immediate area and see if there are any other vessels in the area. If there are, we will dispose of them as well. We shall be back shortly. Do try not to go anywhere while we’re gone.”

  With that offhand comment, the Dayan ship pivoted and angled away from the planet.

  For a long moment there was silence on the Excalibur bridge. Then Calhoun said, “Tobias . . .”

  She was ahead of him. “Scanning the planet’s surface now, Captain. A thorough scan will take twenty minutes.”

  “Tell me what you find out,” said Calhoun distantly. Slowly he got to his feet. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  “Where are you going, Captain?” asked Burgoyne.

  “To inform the last of the D’myurj that their people are dead.”

  iv.

  QUENTIS AND THE newly identified Sulentus were in adjoining beds. Sulentus was saying nothing, simply staring up at the overhead. When Calhoun entered the room, however, Sulentus took one look at him and immediately flinched, as if afraid that Calhoun was about to start pounding on him again.

  Doctor Lochley immediately strode forward, her face set in a determined frown. “Do we have an issue, Captain?” she demanded.

  He put up a hand to ward her off. Speaking as softly as he could, he said, “I simply need to convey some information to your patients, if I may.”

  She could discern from Calhoun’s attitude that he wasn’t there to start any trouble. Nevertheless, the doctor remained where she was as she nodded to him, indicating that he should speak.

  He stared at the two D’myurj and, to his surprise, found it difficult to talk for a moment. Then, finally, he spoke: “I feel obligated to inform you that the Dayan have destroyed your people. As near as we can determine so far, no members of your race remain alive. We are continuing to scan your world to see if any have managed to escape, but so far the results do not look promising.”

  Sulentus screamed.

  Calhoun had not been sure what sort of reaction to expect from Sulentus, but a high-pitched screech had not seemed likely. But screech he did, and Calhoun knew that it was a sound that he would take with him to his grave.

  Lochley was shouting for sedatives as Sulentus continued screaming inarticulately, babbling words in some language that the Universal Translator didn’t know. Then it seemed as if Sulentus suddenly remembered where he was, and he shifted his attention to Calhoun and started shouting at him in a voice that was low and deep and sounded like an animal’s snarl. Apparently his dislocated jaw had been healed.

  “Are you satisfied, Calhoun?” he demanded. “Your world is dead and now mine is dead! The fate of the Xenexians has been visited on my world as well! We are both men with no race! You must be so satisfied from this! You must be so pleased! Go ahead, Calhoun!” And he raised his voice, which was cracking with every other word. “Go ahead and laugh! Go on and bark your triumph! You have your revenge! All you had to do was kill innocents and women and children! Laugh, Calhoun! Shower me with your joy!”

  Lochley was now at Sulentus’s side with a hypo. At first Sulentus took no notice of her because his ire was focused on Calhoun. But he spotted her just before she injected him and slapped the hypo out of her hand. “Come on, Calhoun!” he howled, and suddenly his hand lashed out and grabbed the startled Lochley by the throat. “Why are you standing there? Finish it! Finish me!”

  Calhoun was across the room, trying to pry Sulentus’s hand from Lochley’s throat. To his astonishment, he was unable to. The D’myurj was out of his mind and his fury was giving him extraordinary strength. “Come on! Finish me! I’m giving you an excuse! Kill me to save your doctor’s life! Take out your weapon and shoot me down!”

  At that moment, if Calhoun had had a phaser on his hip, he might well have done it. But he had left the weapon back in his quarters.

  Lochley was becoming pale, trying to yank Sulentus’s hand clear of her throat. She wasn’t having any luck.

  And suddenly, before Calhoun could move, Quentis was standing next to Sulentus. He was holding the hypo that Sulentus had struck out of Lochley’s hand, and before Sulentus could react, Quentis shoved the hypo into the Visionary’s upper arm and drove it home.

  Sulentus arched his back and gasped, and his hand immediately fell from Lochley’s throat. The doctor staggered, and Calhoun was there to catch her before she fell. Two nurses ran up on either side of her and eased her into the nearest chair. “I’m fine,” she managed to say, but her voice was a rasp. “Thank you for intervening.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Calhoun.

  She fired him an annoyed glance and said, “I was talking to him,” and she indicated Quentis.

  “I am very sorry that you had to be a part of that,” said Quentis. “His reaction was inappropriate.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” replied Calhoun with grim amusement. “Losing your race can prompt some rather extreme reactions.” He paused and then looked at Quentis curiously. “Are you all right? It was your race as well. Your family, your—”

  “I know,” said Quentis. He was still looking at Sulentus, but now he shifted his attention to Calhoun. “I was wondering if you could provide me a service, Captain. Bring me down to the planet’s surface, to my home . . . or at least what I assume is left of my home.”

  “I very much doubt there’s anything there that you’ll want to see.”

  “There are my scrolls.”

  “Scrolls?” Calhoun frowned. “I’m not sure I understand . . .”

  “My history. The detailed history I wrote of our people.”

 
; “You wrote it on scrolls?”

  “It was the ancient way of my people,” said Quentis with a shrug. “I felt it appropriate that if I were going to keep a history of the D’myurj, it should be done in the traditional way. It is my life’s work, and I would like to see if it survived the Dayan assault. I am not trying to trick you, Captain,” he said when he saw the suspicion on Calhoun’s face. “I have no reason to attempt any manner of trick. My family, I assume, is deceased.”

  “You don’t seem especially concerned.”

  “I have not fully assimilated the reality of it, I suspect. It is very likely,” he said with forced dispassion, “that once the full scope of the situation descends on me, I will have an utter breakdown. At the moment, though, I am simply focused on salvaging what may remain of my life’s work. I am, after all, a historian, now with no race of which to keep a history. At the very least, I would like to see if the record I spent so much time maintaining managed to survive.”

  Slowly Calhoun nodded. “All right. But I’m going with you.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I’ll bring a security team.”

  “I would have expected that.”

  Sector 221-G

  XYON HAD NEVER been so happy over the prospect of getting out of a section of space as he was at that moment. If he never returned to Sector 221-G, it would be far too soon for him.

  He sat at his control board, staring at the viewscreen as space rolled past. “How long until we’re out of here, Lyla?”

  His hologram aide stepped into view. Her long white dress fluttered around her knees and her blond hair hung about her shoulders. “At present speed, three minutes, twenty-seven seconds.”

  “Good. I can’t put this place behind us soon enough.”

  There was a co-pilot’s chair next to him, and Lyla dropped down into it, gazing lovingly at Xyon. At least it seemed loving to him. That made sense, since that was what she was programmed for. Lyla was, in every way, a full-service assistant.

  “Why?” she asked, her eyes wide with curiosity.

  He shook his head. “It’s stupid.”

  “It concerns you, Xyon, so therefore it cannot possibly be stupid.”

  “Ohhh . . . it’s that Shintar Han guy,” Xyon said with obvious irritation. “I thought I could work with him to somehow mess up things for my father.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not really, no. Robin Lefler turned herself over to New Thallon, and McHenry’s with her, and Dad’s probably gone through the wormhole by now and he’s off somewhere else and I’m . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “You’re where?” she asked. When he didn’t immediately reply, she prodded him gently. “Where are you, Xyon?”

  “I’m nowhere,” he said, so softly that she could scarcely hear him. “Floating in space in the middle of nowhere. Pissed off with my father, except . . .”

  “Except you’re wondering why?”

  Slowly he nodded. “I mean, it’s so easy to blame him for the death of our people. So damned easy. Except he really didn’t do anything to them. It was that other race, the D’myurj. They and their associates, the Brethren. They’re the monsters who showed up and destroyed everyone on Xenex. Dad wasn’t responsible. From what I understand, he was driven over the edge by it. Spent months wandering around on Xenex, long beyond the point where it made any sense, looking for someone who had survived.”

  “And you are just realizing this now? You didn’t know it before?”

  “Yeah, I knew it before. But I had so much anger that was threatening to eat me alive, it made it much easier to have someone to blame.”

  “So what are you saying? That you regret the way in which you treated your father?”

  “I don’t know, Lyla.” He slumped back in his chair. “I don’t know what I think anymore, what I believe anymore. I mean, it felt so good going onto the ship and doing something that I knew would definitely screw them up. Planting that tracing device so that their brand-new cloaking device wouldn’t do a damned thing for them. But now I don’t know. It seems pointless. Cheap. A waste of time.”

  “Perhaps that’s because it was pointless, cheap, and a waste of time,” Lyla suggested, sounding entirely too chipper about it.

  He glanced at her and then, despite his foul mood, actually laughed. “You certainly have a way of getting to the core of the problem, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. What is the core of the problem?”

  “The problem,” he said slowly, “is that I may well have screwed things up for my father and his ship. And I felt really good about that. But the more I think about it, and the more I think about the fact that Robin Lefler is now a prisoner on New Thallon and Shintar Han is going to do who-knows-what to her, and my father can be targeted by Thallonian vessels . . .”

  “You’re beginning to feel as if you are evil?”

  He turned and stared at her incredulously. “Evil? Where did you get that from?”

  “You are not evil?”

  “No!”

  “Through your actions, you endangered hundreds of lives, including that of your own father. You caused a woman and her infant to become prisoners on New Thallon. You have caused harm to befall more or less everyone who ever counted themselves as your friend. By what definition are you not evil?”

  He had no answer.

  Finally, he found one.

  “Damn,” he said.

  D’myurj Homeworld

  THE SECURITY TEAM consisted only of Zak Kebron. Truthfully, Calhoun wasn’t really expecting there to be any trouble, since the population had been effectively annihilated. He brought Kebron along simply to play it safe.

  Unlike his previous sojourn to the surface, he did not see quite as much devastation as he previously had. That was because the coordinates that Quentis had provided them were not in the midst of a city but in a relatively isolated area. Nevertheless, it had not been spared the assault of the Dayan weaponry. A short distance from where the away team had materialized, there were the blasted remains of what had obviously been a house. There was nothing left of it; it had been shattered to pieces. Calhoun heard Quentis gasp when he saw it, but then he regained control of himself. He walked toward it quickly, moving surprisingly fast for someone who had been on his back in sickbay mere hours before.

  Calhoun and Kebron followed him, neither of them speaking.

  Quentis reached the rubble that had presumably been his home and tried to pull aside some of the debris. But his upper body strength was relatively nonexistent. Kebron stepped forward and silently gestured for Quentis to step aside, which he did, and then Kebron set to work as he tossed aside chunks as fast as he could. Quentis stood there and simply watched him.

  Within thirty seconds, Kebron had uncovered a body.

  Not the entirety of it at first; just an arm. Kebron hauled the rest of the rubble from it, and the body of a male D’myurj was discovered. Half of his face had been crushed by the debris that had fallen upon him.

  “That is my son,” Quentis said softly. “Or what is left of him.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Calhoun. “Do you want us to . . . ? Do you need a moment?”

  Quentis didn’t respond at first. Instead he walked over toward the body and knelt next to it. He gripped the young man’s hand as if he were somehow capable of willing life back into his body. He whispered something under his breath that Calhoun was not able to make out, although he assumed that it was some manner of prayer. Once he was done, he released the hand and stood. Without seeming to be aware that he was doing it, he wiped his hands on the side of his clothing. Then he pointed toward the far end of the damage. “Over there,” he said. “Would you mind digging over there?”

  Kebron nodded as best he could, since nodding was not exactly possible for his anatomy. He made his way over to where Quentis had i
nstructed him and began to shove pieces to either side. It took a few minutes this time, but eventually his boot struck against something metallic.

  “That’s it,” said Quentis.

  Kebron reached down and gripped hard the sides of whatever the metal object was that his searching had uncovered. He pulled upward, and the container caught the red light of the setting sun against it. It was a large cube, and it seemed capable of withstanding quite a lot of battering, which it obviously had. It was about a meter on each side, and Kebron walked over to Quentis with it. He held it out to Quentis, who took it from him without a word. Quentis sagged slightly under the weight of it but managed to keep it upright.

  “Is that it?” asked Calhoun.

  Quentis nodded. “My life’s work. You may read it if you would be interested. It might help you to know something about the race that you destroyed.”

  “The Dayan destroyed you.”

  “How did they overcome our defensive arrays?” asked Quentis. “The arrays that would have battered them back the moment that they were perceived. I am aware of some things, Captain. I listen to conversations in sickbay. I am aware of your cloaking device.” He was speaking in a consistent, steady voice, keeping it remarkably even. But the anger was there, bubbling just below the surface. “You were the ones who made it possible for them to destroy us.”

  “They could have done it themselves,” said Calhoun.

  “Yes, they could have. But they didn’t. They chose you to aid them.”

  “Why? Why did they?”

  Despite his inner fury, Quentis actually managed to smile at that. “Isn’t it obvious, Calhoun? They were testing you. Testing the efficacy of your cloaking device. Seeing just what manner of technology you have. There are only two reasons for it: because they are testing the power of a tech that they think can be used against them. Or they are testing the power of a tech that they are planning to take for themselves. The simplest way for them to do that is for you to show it to them. Which, of course, you did. Very considerate of you, that was.”