The Sky Is Crying Read online

  “What’s wrong with him?” Lilly asked as she tugged Bechet towards her.

  Once free of the driver’s seat, the captain slumped backward onto the floor of the hovercraft. Murmuring incoherently, he didn’t budge as Lilly undid the buttons of his dark brown shirt. She assumed he’d been injured during the battle and stubbornly refused to inform anyone, Dreyla included. Glancing upward, Lilly spotted Dreyla in the driver’s seat, trying to keep one eye on the path ahead and the other on Bechet.

  “Is he OK?” she asked, her eyes wide with worry.

  Lilly shrugged and resumed her inspection.

  “Where does it hurt, Remy?” she asked, surveying his torso. “Are you losing blood?”

  “Urrgh… Tosh,” he mumbled.

  As Lady Ris removed a first-aid kit from a side compartment, Lilly laid the back of her hand on Bechet’s forehead. Feverish. Then, as she unfastened the last two buttons, she noticed an increasingly large blood stain across his abdomen, almost at his waistline.

  “Where’s he hit?” Dreyla asked in a frenzy, alternately glancing between Lilly and the windshield.

  Any anger and dismay the girl had felt over Bechet’s decision to leave Bane without Tosh had fled. Now, she only had concern for her father.

  “Looks like he was shot in the lower abdomen,” Lilly said.

  She grabbed the gauze Lady Ris had offered and applied pressure to the wound as Dreyla accelerated to the craft’s top speed.

  By the time they pulled into the complex, the Ladies of Morbious were waiting with their medical staff. Lilly had never felt so grateful to be in the presence of skilled doctors and nurses, even if they were all wearing the customary monastic garb of bikinis and robes.

  Everyone on Lilly’s team sported wounds, but Jacer, Milo, and Bechet were in the worst condition. While several monks guided or carted the wounded inside the medical outbuilding, Lilly asked Bellia about Piper, the monk who’d lost her arm in the battle.

  “Sadly, she did not survive the journey home.”

  “Oh,” Lilly said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “We lost Sienna, too.”

  Lilly’s eyes teared—and not from the hot desert wind. She felt guilty about losing two of the monks, but even more guilty over losing Pierce, Davis, and Brand.

  She wandered listlessly toward one of the other hovercrafts, where Davis’s body lay beneath a blanket. If he’d been wearing his body armor, he’d still be alive, but while planning their mission, they had decided not to risk it for the sake of the diversion. Hard to blend in with a rowdy bar crowd if you resembled law enforcement.

  But perhaps it had been a mistake. Perhaps, at the very least, she should have smuggled in some more deputies.

  As if sensing her inner conflict, Lady Ris touched Lilly’s shoulder. “Our casualties were for a good cause.”

  Wiping away her tears, Lilly merely nodded. Although they had managed to reclaim the precious nans and transport them back to Trame, the mission had cost them all dearly. Even Bechet and Dreyla had lost someone they loved. And none of them were out of the woods yet.

  OK, back on the clock.

  Lilly had no time to grieve or second-guess herself. She had much-needed medication to distribute.

  Hastily, she assembled a task force of able-bodied monks in the same meeting hall where this critical mission had begun.

  “We should get the word out about the meds,” she said. “Put it on every broadband signal around the planet.”

  “I believe it will require a combined effort of Naillik, Yerdua, and Elocin to deliver the nans quickly enough,” Lady Ris said.

  Lilly nodded. “The three capital towns will be easy enough, but I’m worried about the people living in the smaller villages and isolated mining operations. It might already be too late for them.”

  “We can take some of the nans,” Lady Ris suggested, “and begin making… house calls.”

  Lilly almost laughed at the image. How would the grubby miners react if the gorgeous Ladies of Morbious showed up at their door to administer life-saving nano-biotics?

  “I’ll get word to our hospital in Naillik,” Lilly said, “but I think I’ll let Milo and Jacer communicate with their people.”

  Lady Ris’s eyebrows rose, a characteristically polite form of disagreement.

  “I’m not a politician,” Lilly explained, “but I suspect there may be some strain between the races.”

  Together, Lilly and Lady Ris oversaw the transfer of several med crates to waiting transport vehicles and the rest to a secure location beneath the monastery. As it turned out, the monks had also helpfully loaded all the trunks from the two hotel rooms into the other two hovercrafts, so after unloading them as well, the time had finally come to carry the bodies of Sienna, Piper, and Davis to a sacred chamber, where they would await a proper burial.

  After saying a silent goodbye to her faithful deputy, Lilly followed Lady Ris to the medical building, where Jacer, Milo, and Bechet were all awake, alert, and, of course, complaining. After tending to their injuries, the medical staff had apparently administered a special energy potion to each of them, so despite their need to heal and recover, they all wanted to join the task force.

  Before entering the recovery room, Lady Ris hesitated. “I still do not understand. Why should there be any strain between the humans, dworgs, and aflins?”

  “It doesn’t matter that we got the meds back,” Lilly reasoned. “Yerdua and Elocin will still blame the humans for stealing them in the first place.”

  Lady Ris gave no response, but her furrowed brow said enough.

  Lilly led the way into the recovery room, where Dreyla was pushing Captain Bechet against his mattress, trying to keep him from getting up and busting open his wound.

  “No,” he cried, “we need to go back for Tosh!”

  “Captain Bechet,” Lilly said, rushing toward his bed. “Remy…”

  He stopped struggling and looked at her, his hazel eyes burning with purpose.

  “We don’t know where he is,” she said. “Or Brand either. We don’t know if Darkbur has them, or if they managed to escape.”

  “Captain, that city is now a hornet’s nest,” Lady Ris interjected smoothly. “We have not even heard from Char and Maia, the monks that originally took Tosh in.”

  Remy’s mouth flattened into a hard line, his gaze dropped to the floor, and his shoulders sagged. Lilly understood his dismay—oh, how she understood. Even though they had reclaimed the meds and would be able to save countless lives, the losses were hard to bear.

  In the melancholy silence that ensued, she caught part of an argument that had erupted between Milo and Jacer, and her heart sank even further.

  “Jacer received a message from his home world,” Bellia said, stepping beside her. “The Aflin Council on Elocin has declared a state of war between them and the humans.”

  “But I can explain that Naillik had nothing to do with it,” Jacer protested from his bed. “Once they hear we’ve recovered the meds, they will understand. What they don’t yet realize—”

  “It won’t matter,” Milo interjected.

  “You’re just being stubborn,” Jacer retorted. “The message was sent before we even entered Bane. I’ve only just received it.”

  “Unfortunately, it went out on all aflin frequencies,” one of the attending monks announced.

  “But we have the nano-biotics,” Remy insisted, who seemed to have emerged from his temporary funk.

  Frowning, Milo shifted his eyes to the floor and cupped his hand over his right ear. After a moment, he pulled it away and turned back to the group.

  “Oh, no,” he groaned. “Yerdua has also declared war.”

  Lilly had removed her own comms earpiece during the journey across the desert, so she hadn’t heard the bad news. Not that it would have mattered. The one she’d worn had only been tuned in to the rest of her fellow liberators. She suspected Milo had switched comms after awaking in a hospital bed.

  “Look,” she said
staunchly, “we, the people of Vox, can get this straightened out.”

  Milo shook his head. “As with the aflins, this decision also came from my home world, Sheriff. Directly from the Minister of Defense herself.”

  “We’re supposed to treat any human as an enemy,” Jacer lamented, as if relinquishing his position that the situation could be explained and diffused.

  “That’s just dumb,” Remy said.

  “So, you two,” Dreyla asked, pointing to the dworg and the aflin in turn, “are at war with us?”

  “Don’t be daft, girl,” Milo growled. “We’re not going along with this.”

  A tense moment passed as all eyes landed on the aflin. But then Jacer nodded, too.

  Thank Zog for small wonders.

  After what they’d just endured, their little party seemed to be intact.

  Well, not fully.

  Brand and Davis might have been occasional pains in the ass, but they were her people… they were her friends… and despite striving to remain detached from her colleagues, she had cared deeply for them.

  Remy wiped a tear from Dreyla’s face with his thumb. The small, loving gesture gave Lilly a strange sense of comfort—as if he were vicariously wiping away her own tears—the tears that, at the moment, she seemed incapable of shedding.

  “What are we gonna do?” Dreyla asked.

  “You will all stay here until you are well enough to travel,” Lady Ris said in a maternal voice. “Longer, if you wish. We have already started shipping meds out to Naillik, Yerdua, and Elocin. Perhaps tensions will ease when the people begin receiving their nans.”

  The room fell nearly silent, the only sounds made by the women tending to their three stubborn patients.

  Lilly watched as Remy further consoled Dreyla with whispers and hugs. The girl was so young—too young to deal with being stuck in the middle of a war. Then again, she had serious strength and was smart as hell.

  As if proving her point, Dreyla suddenly straightened up and wiped any lingering tears away. “Wait a second. Don’t the people of Bane need the meds, too?”

  Lilly sighed. “When we were divvying up the crates, I realized that a good ten percent of the nans were missing. More than likely, Darkbur’s already sold them to the highest bidders of Bane. And as for the rest… yes, the people of Bane need them, too. But it’s dangerous for us to go back just yet.”

  Dreyla winced, then nodded. No doubt she understood that Lilly was doing the best she could.

  Leaving the patients to rest, Lilly quietly slipped into the corridor. But she’d only made it halfway to the outer doors when she heard hasty footsteps behind her.

  “Sheriff Lilly!”

  Turning, she spotted Dreyla hastening toward her.

  Breathlessly, the girl said, “I just wanted to thank you. For helping Remy back there in the hovercraft. He might’ve bled to death otherwise.”

  Lilly smiled. “Of course.”

  Dreyla chuckled awkwardly. “Funny, though, since you threatened to shoot him.”

  Lilly blushed. “I wouldn’t really have done that, you know. I just needed to get those meds as far from Bane as possible.”

  Dreyla nodded. “Guess it worked. He wouldn’t have left Tosh behind for anyone else.”

  Lilly shook her head. “He didn’t turn around for me. Or the planet. He did it for you. To keep you safe.”

  Dreyla blinked. As sharp as she was, she still possessed a teenager’s naivete and temperament. Easier to blame Lilly for leaving the old doctor behind than to face her own guilt.

  In an unusual moment of maternal compassion, Lilly embraced Dreyla. “Don’t worry. Your old doc seems pretty resourceful. Don’t give up on him yet.” She stepped backward. “Now go take care of your father before he tries to escape again. He was shot, for Zog’s sake!”

  Lilly smiled reassuringly, then hurried outside and ventured to Trame’s communications outbuilding. She needed to contact her remaining deputies and tell them to put Naillik’s defenses on high alert. She had intended to warn them of Darkbur’s men, but with a possible war on the horizon, the town had even bigger worries now.

  Chapter 9

  REMY

  Between the pain in his gut and his restless thoughts about Tosh, Remy didn’t get much sleep during his first night of recovery. By early morning, though, he felt strong enough to emerge from his sickbed. Leaving Dreyla snoozing in a nearby chair, he quietly dressed, slipped on his boots, and ventured outside in search of Sheriff Greyson.

  During his initial visit to Trame, he hadn’t had much time to explore the grounds and enjoy the full experience of this isolated sanctuary. Sheltered by a rocky cliff and protected by formidable walls, the monastery and its many outbuildings were the loveliest structures he’d yet seen on this arid planet. But even more remarkable were the gardens—lush, green, and very un-Vox-like. His short time on this unappealing globe had given him the impression that the entire rock was just that… a rock. In Naillik and Bane, he’d only seen a small amount of foliage, mostly shrubs and tiny saplings. But Trame, with its blooming flowers, exotic plants, fruitful trees, gorgeous fountains, and inviting pools, boasted as much beauty and tranquility as the most vaunted paradise on Earth.

  How had the Ladies of Morbious established such a wondrous haven on Vox of all places? More to the point, how did they manage to keep the foliage alive in the midst of a scorching desert?

  After wandering among the pathways for a while, he finally encountered the sheriff in a cozy flower garden. He’d recognized her from behind as she bent over a bush of oddly-shaped blossoms with purple, gold, and green petals.

  How appropriate. Just like Dreyla’s smoke bombs.

  Grinning, he cautiously approached her. He didn’t want to startle her as she examined and perhaps sniffed the flowers, but he felt an overwhelming desire to talk with her.

  “How the hell did the Ladies of Morbious manage to create such an oasis here in the middle of nothing?” he asked.

  “There are natural springs beneath Trame,” she explained, straightening up and turning to face him. She’d obviously been aware of his presence.

  “And here I thought it was magic.”

  Ignoring his wry comment, she said, “It’s why they settled here in the first place. They felt it was a sign from Morbious herself. That, as long as they maintained their faith and hard work, this small piece of heaven would forever provide them with the fertility necessary to sustain life.”

  “Fertility? I haven’t seen any little ones running around here.”

  She chuckled. “Not that kind of fertility. More like abundance.”

  He glanced behind him and noticed a couple of monks tending to the flowers. The sheriff was right about one thing: the Ladies of Morbious were a hard-working bunch. And despite what had initially seemed like a hedonistic way of life, they hadn’t hesitated to help his team recover the nano-biotics. They’d even lost a few of their own in the process, and even more impressive, they seemed at peace with it.

  Reflecting on their losses compelled him to glance at the sheriff again. Perhaps reading his troubled mind, she let her smile melt away, and sadness again clouded her lovely eyes.

  “I’m sorry about Davis and Brand…” he faltered. “They were good people. Good deputies.”

  She nodded. “They were… friends, too. As with a lot of my deputies. Since I lost Tim, my husband… they’d become my family, I suppose.”

  “I know the feeling,” he said quietly.

  She stared at him for a long moment, then asked, “How long had the doctor been with you?”

  Her question sparked a memory in his mind, tugging him back to the first time he’d met Tosh. The day the old man had talked his way onto the Jay. Remy, young and ambitious at the time, had had no intention of letting him on board, but as it turned out, the doctor had offered more than just his extensive medical skills. He’d also possessed an unusual, infectious quality—an unrelenting ease for approaching life.

  Recalling some
of Tosh’s more ridiculous antics, he unleashed a hearty laugh that pained his sore stomach. “Fifteen years.” Then, he sobered quickly. “Not long enough.”

  She nodded, her eyes radiating sympathy.

  “Some of the crap he pulled…” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Brand and Davis, too,” Lilly said wryly.

  A comfortable silence fell between them. Standing side by side, they both turned back to the flowers.

  Suddenly, a strange notion popped into Remy’s mind.

  “Damn!” he exclaimed.

  Startled, the sheriff widened her eyes. “What?”

  “In all the craziness of the battle, I didn’t get a chance to test out my grav-speakers,” he said. “Really wanted to blare some B.B. King at those guys. Figured it would at least distract them a bit.”

  “Really, Bechet?” she asked in mock disgust.

  Even after slipping a few times and calling him by his first name, it seemed her barriers hadn’t fallen away completely.

  He raised an eyebrow. “It’s Remy,” he reminded her, “and you ain’t heard music until you heard the blues.”

  “It’s Lilly,” she said, a tiny smile lighting up her face. Sighing, she added, “And perhaps you’d better explain your fascination with this... blues?” she asked.

  “Well, Lilly,” he said, beaming, “it’s only the best music in the galaxy, the universe… well, anywhere.”

  Her face still wore a puzzled expression.

  Remy unbuckled his satchel and removed his tablet. As she patiently observed, he took a few moments to swipe through the menus. Finally settling on one of his favorite tunes, he tapped the selection, and a few seconds later, the song emerged from the tablet’s tiny speakers.

  After a moment of listening, she tentatively asked, “So, this is that B.B. King guy you mentioned?”

  He shook his head. “No, this is Elmore James, singing ‘The Sky Is Crying.’”