The Star Princess (37 page)

Adrenaline rushed through Ché. "If Klark truly intends to harm Ilana, he can find her easily now that she's left the protection of Earth space."

The king held up one hand. "If our family issues a galaxywide alert, the embarrassment will be many times worse than what Klark brought us last year. We will find the princess, but we will do so without anyone else finding out— the B'kah king excluded, of course."

Che's jaw tensed. "Understood. But if this endangers her, I will intervene. Her welfare comes first, Father."

Ché stormed the comm table where the flickering image of Hoe hovered. He'd felt the compulsion to protect Ilana before, but never so acutely. He vowed he would keep the woman he loved out of danger at the cost of family pride, his own life… and that of a beloved brother. "Get me the location of Princess Ilana's speeder."

"Er… how, my lord?"

Hoe was usually resourceful. Such helplessness was not what Ché would expect from him. "You arranged for the speeders. Give me the transponder identification code for the princess's craft, and I'll do it."

"Shouldn't you go after Prince Klark instead?"

Ché balled his hands into fists. "Do as I ask, Hoe." While Hoe anxiously complied, Ché turned to the grim men surrounding him. "Arrange for a battle-cruiser— the fastest we have," he told the council-men. Then he told his father, "I'm going after her."

To his shock, his father, king of the Vedlas, waved to the group. "All in this chamber will come. No one who knows of this will remain behind."

Except Hoe, Ché thought. Good. Tucked securely away on Eireya, the man would serve as a source of outside information, should any more news come in to help them. "Pass on any new data that you see," he told his advisor. "Do not screen it first. Send me everything."

"Yes, my lord. I won't fail you."

Ché gave a curt nod, then strode with the determined group of Vedlas to the docks.

For Ilana, cruising in hyperspace was always tougher on the mind than the body. The concept of how it was accomplished was nerve-wracking, though the flight itself was as smooth as glass.

They'd been traveling for about a half-day. After they ate, Linda put her seat back all the way and fell asleep. Ilana draped her with a blanket, so that all that showed of her friend was a tousled fluff of bright red hair. But Ilana herself couldn't relax. She could breathe, which was good— it helped to breathe, kept you conscious, though sometimes she wondered if she'd be better out cold— but actual relaxation remained for her the Holy Grail of flying.

She gripped the armrests, her fingers throbbing. Periodically, she'd let go to flex her cramped fingers. That helped her mark the passage of time, which seemed to crawl.

She wished Linda would wake up. They'd brought a deck of cards. And they could talk. But Linda slept on. Finally, Ilana took out her palmtop and tried to write more notes for the documentary.

Every few minutes, she glanced at the pilot. Ché had mentioned that starpilots used "go-pills" to avoid getting sleepy on longer flights like this one. Since they were traveling with only one pilot, there would be times when he'd have to sleep. The idea of that was unsettling, as the sleep period would take place in his chair, a high-tech bucket seat crisscrossed with spidery extensions, some of which disappeared into various places in the pilot's uniform. She hoped one of those wires shot out a wake-up shock triggered by unscheduled sleep.

Gripping the armrests, she sat up straighter, staring at the pilot: the girl watching the starpilot watching the computer that was watching the ship…

The pilot's body gave a couple of sharp twitches. Ah-ha. Caught in the act. He was falling asleep. She waited to see if any of the connectors attached to his uniform would set off an alarm. But his head slowly fell forward, and no alarm that she could see or hear went off.

Ilana sat in disbelief as the man's upper torso followed his falling head like a freshly chopped redwood. Not only had the pilot fallen asleep, he'd turned his worktable into a pillow.

"Hello!" she called, but he didn't answer.

Maybe he was just exhausted. She remembered her father returning home from airline trips that way, entirely out of energy. But this pilot had enjoyed at least a week off before having to fly today. There was no excuse for such exhaustion… unless he'd been out at the Earth clubs all night. Her heart began to pound. Had he been drinking? Could he still be drunk?

Stop it. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to work moisture into her dry mouth. Eyes open again, she told herself in Che's voice that the speeder would fly just fine with a sleeping pilot at the helm. But it didn't seem right; it didn't seem like professional behavior on the pilot's part. She'd have thought anyone working for the Vedlas would have more discipline than… this.

A shudder ran thorough the ship. In an instant, Ilana's heart was in her mouth. They were traveling in hyperspace and many times the speed of light— there shouldn't be any bumps. Her gaze swung to the forward view window. The stars, stretched into streamers of light in hyperspace, were shrinking back to normal size. Shit! They'd dropped out of light speed. "Wake up!" she shouted in Basic. "Something is wrong."

Linda threw off her blanket and rooted around for her glasses. She slipped them over puffy eyes. "Wrong? What's wrong?"

"We've slowed down, and I don't know why. The pilot's asleep!" Ilana squeezed the armrest so tightly that she could no longer feel her fingers. The blood had gone out of them. Keep calm, keep calm. Those sensors in his uniform, they might detect… incapac-itation. The ship might be designed to stop if the pilot."— she took a couple of deep breaths— "dies."

Linda snorted. "You and your worst-case scenarios, Ilana. He's asleep."

"He's lying on his face!" She was shouting now, and the pilot still didn't move. "Isn't that uncomfortable? And look at his arms; they're hanging straight down. I nap all the time like that, don't you?"

Linda pressed her lips together. "Now you're scaring me."

"We have reason to be scared." She yelled to the pilot, "Hey! Wake up, damn it!"

The pilot didn't stir. Ilana licked her dry lips. "That's it. He's getting a kick in the ass." She forced her stiff hands to unbuckle her harnesses.

She crossed the cockpit— a miracle in its own right. Trying to keep her temper in check, she shook the sleeping pilot by the shoulder. He remained slumped over. His body was strangely rigid, as if every muscle were pulled tight. "Open eyes!" she shouted in Basic. "Big sleep is not good."

But there was no response. Holding her breath, she felt for a pulse in his neck. Nothing. "Linda," she whispered hoarsely. All her worst fears were realized. "He's dead."

Unda brought her hand to her mouth.

A trickle of blood and spittle glistened on the dead pilot's lips. "He bit his tongue. I think he had a seizure," Ilana guessed.

Her heart pounded in her head. "Shit, shit, shit," she squeezed out. A dead pilot. She wanted to scream almost as much as she wanted to laugh hysterically. If she were alone, if she were here without the recentness of her experience in the Cessna to steady her, she would have panicked. Instead, she turned to Linda. "We've got to get him out of the seat."

Linda joined her. She undid the harnesses as Ilana pulled out the cables connecting the pilot to the ship. Then they pushed his bulk off the seat. He wasn't a small man, and fell heavily.

Ilana jumped into the seat. Unda dragged the body away, into the back. Breathless, she joined Ilana at the controls. "What do we do now?"

How the hell do I know? Ilana wanted to say. The control panel was just as Ché had described it. But talking about flying while naked in a bathtub and doing it for real were two different things.

Ilana stared straight ahead. If she looked at Linda's face and saw fear there, she'd lose it. "Ché told me a pilot always has to think several steps ahead. That includes knowing what airfields are nearby in case an emergency requires an unexpected landing. But I have no idea what stars have planets." She held tight to her unraveling composure. "Or even how far away they are."

"Let's look for some kind of button that calls for help."

"Good idea." The Cessna had been so simple. This starship's control panel was a kaleidoscope of readings, and all in Basic, which made it even more difficult to know what she was seeing.

A klaxon interrupted them. Both Ilana and Linda shrieked. Above their heads a screen flashed. In Basic, Ilana squinted up at it. Half the navigation panel was blinking like Christmas-tree lights. "It's warning us of a collision."

"With what?"

"With that"

Linda's gaze jerked outside. "Oh, my… "

A starship rilled the center of the forward views-creen.

In the back of her mind, Ilana wondered if the ship's computer would help them avoid the collision. But what if it didn't? What if she was wrong?

The ship closed on them. From where she sat, it looked as if the other guys wanted to play a game of galactic chicken.

"Damn it! I can't just sit here and die." Ilana pulled the control stick hard to the left. And lost sight of the oncoming ship as the speeder rolled away, wing over wing. The stars whirled counterclockwise so fast that vertigo almost overwhelmed her senses and made her pass out.

The other way, she thought. She had no clue what she was doing, but she clenched her teeth and shoved the stick clockwise to counter the roll of the ship.

Too hard. The movement threw them the opposite way. Ilana jerked sideways in her seat, transverse whiplash. The speeder groaned, metal straining as it switched from spinning in one direction to the other. Dizziness she could handle, but the thought of the speeder breaking apart in space made her want to puke.

Crying out in frustration, she countered the new spin. This time she moved the stick less abruptly and they leveled out. She and Linda bounced in their seats as the speeder reacted like a bucking bronco. But determination overpowered Ilana's panic. Concentration erased her nausea and cold sweats. And then the flight smoothed out.

"I think we're straight and level now," she said, looking out at the trillions of stars all around them.

Linda glanced over at her. The woman's face was chalky.

"Though who's to say what's up and what's down?" Ilana added.

"Ilana. Don't do that to yourself." Linda smiled weakly. "And don't do that to me."

Ilana scanned the stars ahead. "Where did that ship go?" Boy, she sounded calm. What a joke.

"Let's hope he's not coming back for round two."

Ilana snorted. "It's just my luck, isn't it? In the infinity of space, I almost have a head-on collision with what has to be the only other ship for miles— I mean light-years— around."

Incredibly, they both began to laugh. If Ilana stopped to analyze why she was laughing while tears streamed down her cheeks, she'd go crazy. So she didn't. Didn't stop to think, for once in her life. She was barely hanging on to sanity as it was. When her crazed giggles subsided, she wiped her eyes. "We're alive because of Ché, Linda."

"No. We're alive because of you."

"Well, then he gave me the means to do it. The means to save myself. To save us." Emotion threatened to steal her words but she tamped it down somehow. "His culture is so paternalistic, so old-fashioned. His family is the worst of them all. But, somewhere along the line, something went right with Ché. He's like them, Linda, but he's not. He's… an evolutionary step in the right direction." She smiled. She could imagine what Ché would say to that. But it was true— he'd taken what his culture demanded of him and turned it into something better. And in doing so, he'd given her the ultimate gift: control.

Of course, Linda brought her back to reality. "What do you think happened to the pilot?"

"A seizure? Epilepsy, maybe? I'm no medical expert." She heaved a weary sigh. "But then I'm no pilot, either."

"Tumors can cause seizures out of the blue. But you'd think a starpilot would be checked all the time."

Ilana pondered the cables hanging from the seat, the ones that had been connected to receptacles in the pilot's suit. "Where do those wires lead once under his suit? Do they penetrate the skin? Or make contact?"

Linda went pale again. "Are you saying that something entered his body from the ship and hurt him?"

"I don't know," Ilana said quietly. "Everyone knew how I was— how I am— about flying. His death could be some kind of sabotage. Kill the pilot, kill the chick, you know?"

"Why would someone want to kill you?"

There was no use keeping the secret now. "Ché asked me to marry him." She smiled. "And I said yes."

The parade of emotions on Linda's face would have been comical had Ilana not been so shaken. She reached across the space between the seats and gave Ilana's hand a joyful squeeze.

"Do not turn your craft," boomed a voice in Basic over the cockpit speakers. "I will retry docking."

Both women jumped apart. Outside, off the nose, floated the ship they'd swerved to avoid.

Chapter Twenty-four

Onboard the battleship, Ché paced in front of the forward viewscreen. He kept alive the hope that the coordinates Hoe supplied would bring him to Ilana before Klark got to her. By the heavens! Would his brother do such a thing? Hadn't he learned from his mistake in the frontier? Hoe had evidence to the contrary. Computer records. Data trails. Hard proof— all of it obvious and indisputable. Ah, Klark, why?

Frustration vibrated inside him. Love had made him forgive Klark for things he should not have tolerated. But if his brother did anything to hurt Ilana, an innocent in all this, Ché would kill him with his own hands.

Was Klark unspeakably evil? Or had his fanaticism pushed him to insanity? Regardless, if he harmed Ilana in any way, he was a dead man.

Ché tried to ignore the twisting in his chest, the sense of betrayal that Klark's actions conjured. Reaching deep, he silently summoned Cheya, the ancient warrior-prince whose blood he shared. Help me to see… To see the truth.

Before his confidence faltered, he turned to the lead pilot. "How much longer?"