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  No Safe Haven

  A Cracked Mirror Press book

  ISBN: 978-1-7325317-0-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-9831871-1-0 (Ebook - Kindle)

  ISBN: 978-0-9831871-3-4 Ebook - EPUB

  Published by Cracked MIrror Oress

  Rockville, MD 20852

  Cover design by Danielle Fine

  https://www.daniellefine.com/

  Copyright 2011 © Karen Wester Newton

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  No Safe Haven

  by

  Carmen Webster Buxton

  Cracked Mirror Press

  Rockville, MD

  USA

  Dedication

  For my mother,

  who found my stories under the mattress

  and told me I should be a writer

  Chapter One

  Ran-Del watched his son press his face against the glass museum case. Christopher seemed entranced by the navigation control panel from a Terran starship. Having grown up in a wood and leather hut in the Sansoussy Forest, Ran-Del had no feeling for technology. The array of lighted displays, buttons, and levers perplexed him without inviting further interest.

  “Just think, Dad,” Christopher said, straightening up to his full height. Eight seasons old and tall for his age, he didn’t quite come up to Ran-Del’s shoulder. “That was made on another world.”

  Put that way, the device did seem more intriguing. Should he remind Christopher that he had been instructed to address his father properly? Ran-Del decided against it. Rebuking his son in public didn’t seem like a good way to win the boy’s respect.

  “What about that?” Ran-Del pointed to a coffin-like metal container that stood against the wall. “Someone born on another world spent over three hundred seasons sleeping in that thing.”

  “Being in hyperstasis wasn’t the same as being asleep.” Was there a faint hint of contempt in Christopher’s voice? Ran-Del’s psy sense told him Christopher felt nothing but curiosity and eagerness. It must be Ran-Del’s own feelings of inadequacy—still faintly present after nine seasons of city life—making him look for disparagement where none was intended.

  A sudden sense of someone being close behind him made Ran-Del put his hand to the dirk on his belt.

  “It’s only me,” Eduardo Merced’s voice said. “Don’t go all Sansoussy warrior on me right here in the museum.” The senior guard advanced to stand beside Ran-Del and grinned at Christopher. “I wouldn’t worry too much about what hyperstasis is, Master Christopher. These days we can’t put anyone into stasis for more than a few days.” The grin slackened, and his brow creased as he grimaced at Ran-Del. “And if it comes to what we know how to do, sir, why did I bother training you in how to use a stun gun, a shock pistol, and a beamer if the first thing you reach for is still that Sansoussy toy?”

  Ran-Del took no offense. Merced was a friend as well as an employee of the House of Hayden, and city life had taught him to cherish friendship when he found it. “Old habits are the most difficult to break. And I’m still better with a knife than with a more modern weapon.” He didn’t want to point out, in front of Christopher, that Merced had witnessed Ran-Del’s execution of a murderer with the dirk he had just called a toy.

  Perhaps Merced was thinking the same thing because he made no further comment, but only eyed the throng of people, half of them children, strolling through the long gallery. He nodded once at the two other Hayden guards stationed nearby, one of whom was discreetly checking the display on a hand-held device. None of the guards wore uniforms. Francesca followed her late father’s philosophy that security staff were more effective if they could blend in with the crowd. “Are we about ready to go?”

  Ran-Del looked at Christopher. “Have you seen everything you wanted to see?”

  Christopher pointed to a row of large silver pylons that stood at the near end of the gallery. A boy and a girl about his age were inspecting the surface of one of them as if looking for something. “Yes, except I want to find our ancestor’s name.”

  Ran-Del suffered a pang of disassociation. His son meant an ancestor on his mother’s side. Francesca’s people had founded the city of Shangri-La, building roads, factories, and houses where wilderness had been, and had recorded their efforts for posterity. Ran-Del’s ancestors had settled in the forest, intent on living at peace with the new world around them. They had found a renewed sense of purpose in learning about the mental gifts endowed on some of their offspring by the long journey in space, but they had lost most of their knowledge of technology, even of reading and writing, and relied on oral traditions to keep knowledge and memories alive.

  Christopher trotted over to the pylons, and Merced hurried to keep up. Ran-Del followed, feeling the presence of the other guards, nearby but not too close. Most of the times that he went out in the city by himself, Ran-Del refused to take more than one guard, but with Christopher in tow, he agreed with Francesca’s caution.

  Both sides of the pylons were covered with names. The boy and girl already there had found the name they were seeking and touched it. The air in front of them lit in a half-life-sized hologram of a young black-haired woman, who smiled at them as if she could see them.

  “There!” Christopher said, pointing at the same pylon. “There’s Nicholas Hayden’s name.”

  Ran-Del reached up and touched the name of the first Hayden to live on Haven. The man who appeared in front of them was older and more serious than the young woman, whose image overlapped his at its edges. Instead of smiling he kept his gaze neutral, rather like he was assessing them. He looked nothing like the only Baron Hayden that Ran-Del had ever known.

  “Well, Christopher, he doesn’t look much like your grandfather,” Merced said, echoing Ran-Del’s thought. “No sense of humor that I can see.”

  Ran-Del had been reading the small block of instructions on the pylon’s face. “Do you want the biographical data?”

  His son shook his head. “I read that already, at home. I just wanted to see his name here, with all the other Landers.”

  A sudden sense of claustrophobia came over Ran-Del. He wanted to be out of this room, with its horde of strangers, and out in the open. “If you’re ready, then let’s go. I promised your sister I would listen to her reading lesson.” At least he could help with those lessons. He enjoyed reading, but a glance at Christopher’s mathematics text had convinced him that he had come to that subject too late in life to ever learn to master it.

  Christopher fell in step beside Ran-Del as they made their way to the exit. They picked up a fourth Hayden guard as they passed through the wide doorway. This guard was new on the Hayden force, but his face struck Ran-Del as familiar. It took him a second to place the young man as Enos Toth, whose father had been Hiram Toth, the late Baron Hayden’s most trusted guard. Hiram Toth had shared the Baron’s fiery death because of that trust.

  Ran-Del hadn’t thought of that terrible afternoon in a long time. He tried to put the thought out of his mind as they stepped into the sunshine of a warm autumn day and the bustle of a busy street in downtown Shangri-La.

  Merced was on his com, speaking to their skimmer pilot as Ran-Del glanced around, recalling the first time he had seen the city from the tall tower of the Hayden compound. It had panicked him then, to see so many people at once, so many strangers he would never know.

  He felt a little panicked now, and it came to him that it was his psy sense, nagging him to be careful, almost as it had on the day Baron Hayden died.

  Ran-Del took a deep breath and hastily glanced around, looking for any sign of hostile intent. A feeling of impending danger overwhelmed him so suddenly he couldn’t concentrate on the myriad thoughts of the crowd around him.

  “Merced, something’s wrong,” he said, stepping in front of Christopher. “Something—” before he could finish the thought, a sharp pain hit his side. He looked down to see a brightly fletched dart protruding from his shirt, right above his belt.

  Déjà vu struck Ran-Del at the same moment that a peculiar fuzziness overcame his mind. Nine seasons ago he had been brought down by a dart fired from a Hayden employee’s dart gun. Then he had fallen; now his limbs seemed suddenly heavy as he tried to lift a hand to remove the dart.

  This drug must be different. Ran-Del had no sense of losing consciousness, only of being in a mental fog that made it hard to move or even think. He knew he should be worried for Christopher, should draw his weapons as all the Hayden guards had done, but all he could do was stand and watch as the street erupted into chaos.

  Merced shouted orders; he and the other guards raked the crowd with their shock pistols. Ran-Del heard the combined hum of the weapons as pedestrians began to jerk and twitch and totter over, like game pieces knocked down by an invisible ball. People screamed in fear and ran for cover.

  Christopher clutched Ran-Del’s arm. “What’s happening?”

  Ran-Del couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak at all. He wanted to scream at Christopher to stay behind him, but the words merely reverberated in his mind and
refused to reach his tongue.

  Merced jerked suddenly and then staggered a few steps. He kept on his feet but his left arm hung at his side and twitched.

  “G’ back inside!” Merced shouted, the words slurring together as if he were drunk.

  Two men who had been crouched behind a bench suddenly jumped to their feet and raced toward Ran-Del, weapons in their hands. Merced tried to fire at them, but his right arm wavered and his shots seemed to have no effect.

  Just then the Hayden skimmer shot forward onto the sidewalk, swooping over fallen bodies and barely avoiding impact with a staggering woman and two children. Ran-Del could see the pilot’s horrified expression as the skimmer’s nose hit the two attackers, knocking one man flat and throwing the other one three or four meters forward.

  Reality took on an eerie quality, as if Ran-Del were watching a video instead of being in the middle of the action.

  Sirens blaring, a police flyter dropped out of the sky and set down abruptly in the street. Just as uniformed officers jumped from the flyter, two Hayden guards, a man and a woman, hustled Ran-Del and Christopher back into the museum. The guards herded them away from the entrance, and the horde of museum visitors who were all trying to look through the doors without actually going outside.

  “Are you two all right?” the younger guard asked, giving them both a head-to-toe glance once they were at the pylon end of the gallery. It was Enos Toth. “You don’t look so good, Citizen Jahanpur.”

  “Dad got shot with that!” Christopher pointed to the dart.

  The woman guard reached out and touched the fletching on the dart. “This might hurt,” she said, and then she yanked.

  It hurt a lot, but Ran-Del didn’t react, even when blood stained his shirt.

  “Must be drugged,” Toth said. “How do you feel?”

  Ran-Del couldn’t answer. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if he could. He didn’t really feel anything. He tried reciting the mantra for the First Discipline in his mind, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. He couldn’t reach samad state, and he realized with a detached sense of alarm that his mental control had waned so quickly, the thoughts of those nearby were seeping into his consciousness.

  The woman guard flicked on her com and relayed the information to an unseen someone that Ran-Del was drugged and dazed, but Christopher was unharmed. Ran-Del couldn’t hear the answer, but he knew from her thoughts that she was told to stand by and stay vigilant.

  Ran-Del could feel Christopher gripping his arm; the boy exuded fright bordering on terror, an emotion so strong it dampened Ran-Del’s awareness of other minds and spared him greater confusion. Ran-Del shuddered, horrified to be relieved by his son’s fear. Not since he had awakened in the hospital after his own death and resurrection had he been so out of control of his psy talent.

  Time slowed to a standstill and yet somehow things seemed to happen while he wasn’t watching. Someone appeared and ran a medi-scanner over Christopher and Ran-Del, and then took the dart away. Someone else brought two chairs, and the guards pushed Ran-Del into one of them and directed Christopher to sit in the other.

  Finally, the door opened and a female figure stood outlined by the afternoon sunlight.

  “Over here, Baroness,” the woman guard said.

  Christopher jumped up. “Mom!”

  Francesca’s face swam into focus as she came closer. She gave first Christopher and then Ran-Del a quick hug, then stepped back to look at them. Ran-Del could smell her perfume. She looked well, if anxious. She wasn’t showing yet, but she had just recently told him she was pregnant again. He was glad she hadn’t been with them during the attack.

  Francesca let out a deep breath and spoke to the guards. “You can take them home now. It’s safe to go outside.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the woman said.

  Ran-Del wanted to say his wife’s name, but his tongue was still disconnected from his brain. Toth had to pull him to his feet because he couldn’t make himself stand.

  “You’ll be all right soon, Ran-Del,” Francesca said. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Ran-Del could tell from her thoughts that the kidnappers were no longer an immediate threat, but she was still worried. A thought floated into his mind like a twig dropped into a river; if he wasn’t careful, he would find himself locked up in the Hayden compound again because Francesca would be afraid to let him leave it.

  FRANCESCA folded her arms across her chest. The inside of the police station was a good deal more orderly than the street in front of the museum, and she felt safer for the moment, but it would be a relief to get home inside the walls of the Hayden compound. Knowing she was pregnant made her feel more vulnerable. “So, what are you proposing?”

  The lieutenant in charge of the case lifted his hands. “I’m not so much making a proposition as asking a question. What do you think you could gain by claiming dominion?”

  “Claiming dominion?” She put some steel into her tone. “This was an attack on the House of Hayden. My rights are without question.”

  “Your right to defend yourselves is without question, Baroness.” He might have used her title, but the lieutenant’s voice was every bit as hard-edged as her own. “Even killing the attackers would probably be upheld. Mowing down a street full of bystanders with shock pistols is something else.”

  Francesca got to her feet. “My guards took the steps necessary to ensure the safety of my husband and my son. Shock pistols are never fatal, and they didn’t even draw their lethal weapons.”

  The lieutenant stood up to face her. “That’s the only reason I’m willing to play nice.”

  She bit back a sharp retort. She needed to rein in her temper, or she would say something unwise. “I repeat, what are you proposing?”

  “I’m suggesting you give up dominion rights in this case.” He raised one hand in a questioning gesture. “Do you really want to put the House of Hayden into the prison business?”

  It was true that exercising her rights meant she had to be willing to follow through on the punishment. Could she impose a death sentence on a failed kidnapper? In the heat of the moment, she would kill to protect her children. She had faced that about herself when Christopher was a baby. But in cold blood, after a botched attempt, could she order someone’s death? She hadn’t even been able to press the firing switch on the man who had killed her father and tried to kill Ran-Del.

  That left corporal punishment or imprisonment. A flogging might look suitably bloodthirsty, but was unlikely to deter future kidnappers. The thought of more drastic maiming made her cringe. And where could she hold prisoners securely? “What do I get in return if I yield dominion?”

  A moment of surprise flickered over his face. He must have expected her to dig in her heels and refuse to consider surrendering her dominion rights. “What do you want?”

  Security. Or if not absolute security, the knowledge that these particular kidnappers were out of circulation and couldn’t hurt her family. “You have two suspects in custody. If you question them under nempathenol and let me attend—and record—the interrogation, then I’ll let you deal with them—provided my guards don’t face any criminal charges.” Her lawyers could handle the individual civil complaints. A lavish application of money would smooth over any problems with aggrieved citizens.

  The lieutenant held out his hand. “You have a deal, Baroness.”

  She shook his hand, but asked a question. “Why did you want dominion over this? A lot of cops would just as soon walk away when a Great House is involved.”

  He grinned. It made him look younger and much less stern. “Because the more we can diminish Great House dominion rights, the more we can assure the citizens of Shangri-La that we can maintain order in the streets.”

  Possibly he was a secret—or not so secret—republican. She decided not to comment. He was, after all, a police lieutenant and not a good person to aggravate for no discernible gain. “And when will you interrogate the suspects?”

  He glanced at a desk monitor. “It looks like the datawork has come through on the use of nempathenol. We can start as soon as the medtech gets here.” He cocked his head as he looked at her. “Have you ever seen anyone under the influence of nempathenol, Baroness? Don’t worry. Those two will spill whatever they know.”