The Second Star, page 27
“Y-yes, ma’am,” the nurse stammered, saucer-eyed.
Stella slipped through the archway, and into an area that opened up larger than she had expected. A locker wall divided the area into two separate sections. The front one, almost directly in line with the archway entrance, was empty. Stella made a sharp right and slipped past the middle locker section, peering past it into the back area. At first all she saw was Philip crouching over something in the far corner, and for a horrible moment she thought that it might be Lily Mae’s body left folded up and abandoned there. But as she came closer Stella realized that Philip was not concealing Lily Mae’s’ corpse… but, instead, a living woman whose eyes were wide with shock, the pupils black holes which had almost completely obscured her irises, and whose face was streaked with tears. She sat on the floor, her arms around her knees which were drawn tight against her chest, and her feet, clad only in a pair of blue socks, pigeon-toe folded against one another with her toes curled under.
Stella dropped onto one knee beside Philip, reaching out for the woman’s hand. It was icy with shock.
“It’s her, isn’t it,” Philip said softly. “The one from the surveillance video. The one from Lily Mae’s quarters.”
“Aisha,” Stella said, gently, as though she were addressing a lost child. “Aisha. Look at me. Look at me. You know me. It’s all right.”
“She’s terrified,” Philip said.
“I know,” Stella said, without turning to him, still keeping her eyes on Aisha’s face. “Aisha. What did you see? Tell me what happened.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the crumpled note that Rob had passed onto her. “Did you send Lily Mae this? Aisha, we know about the bottles…”
Aisha’s breath caught and her hands flew up to her face, covering her mouth and nose.
“Aisha. Where is she? What happened to Lily Mae?”
Philip glanced back towards the scrub area. “Stella, that nurse said the day shift is about to come in. We need to be out of here before then. If they don’t find the body…”
“I know. We’ll be the ones they will be asking questions of. But I can’t leave her here. Help me.” Between them they leveraged Aisha upright, and then Philip stood beside her, a steadying arm around her shoulders, while Stella turned back towards the archway that led out of the locker room. “I’ll take care of the nurse,” Stella said evenly. “We’ll call this a need-to-know thing, and she does not need to know it. When I call you, follow me out with Aisha. We’ll get her out of here and somewhere safe and quiet where we can calm her down. And maybe we can get an answer out of her.”
“Stella.”
Stella turned, mid-step. “What?”
Philip, his own face white and drawn, gazed back at her over Aisha’s bowed head.
“She looks like she saw a ghost,” Philip said.
“She may have done,” Stella said, after a moment, the pause sharp with the shards of shattered secrets. “She may well have thought that she was just doing a good deed, helping a young woman escape from what really does look like jail, no matter how luxurious, on the face of it, the cage is. But if Lily Mae is not as dead as we thought—if she’s alive, and moving—then it is entirely possible that what’s driving her… is no longer… human…”
Stella left Philip talking quietly and soothingly to Aisha and went back out to the vestibule area where the night shift nurse still waited, as ordered, looking almost as wild-eyed as Aisha.
“Right,” Stella said to her, “this is what you are going to do. The last time you are perfectly certain of anything, that was back when you came here—with others, who will corroborate that—to bring Lily Mae Washington’s body down here, and put it into the cold storage area awaiting the arrival of the day shift medical staff whom you understood would be performing an autopsy in the morning. That was the last time you were in here. We were never here, Father Carter and I, you never brought us to the morgue, you never took us to show us the body, you don’t know anything about the body not being where you left it. Go back to the lab, wait for the day shift to come in and hand over, they will want to know about what happened last night, keep them out of here as long as you can by simply telling them about the things you did see and do know. Then go. Go off shift, sign out, get as far away as you can, leave them to find out what they will find out all by themselves when they get here. They will want to ask you questions, no doubt, when you come back on shift but that will be a long time from now and who knows what else will have happened before then which might make you and what you know obsolete. But your best and safest course of action is, go, and say nothing to tie yourself to this night. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the nurse said, very quietly, and Stella saw her tight shoulders relax just a little.
“Try and give me as much time as you can. Go, now. And thank you.”
“What are you going to do?” the nurse asked, unable to help herself.
“What I have to,” Stella said quietly. “I will not fail a woman who was my charge, my patient, my responsibility. I will find out what happened.”
“Ma’am,” the nurse said, giving Stella a small nod of respect, and fled. The door of the surgery suite closed behind her, and before it had finished doing so Stella had turned and hurried back into the locker room area.
“Hurry,” she said, speaking as she rounded the central locker wall. “We don’t have much time.”
“I think we’re out of time altogether,” Philip said, looking up as Stella stepped into the back locker aisle. “I’m trying to calm her down, to get her to tell me what happened—but the most coherent things I’ve got so far is ‘she took my shoes’…”
“Just the shoes?” Stella asked abruptly. “But she must have been left down here prepped for that post mortem in the morning—probably naked on that gurney, covered with that sheet that was still on it—but what might she…” She checked herself. “The closet was open,” she said. “There’s scrubs—she must have taken a spare set of scrubs—or Aisha got them for her—but there weren’t shoes to go with it, and so she took…”
“She also said something about a phone—but it isn’t hers, I found that back there in the corner. She might have procured one for Lily Mae, as part of this scheme. And she repeatedly mentioned someone who—as best as I can make out—is her nephew… she mentioned two names, Arslan and Emin, and I don’t know which, if either, is the nephew, but I am guessing it’s to one of those that Lily Mae is heading, out there…”
“That doesn’t give us much to go on,” Stella said grimly. “I don’t know who Lily Mae was manifesting when she came to—or took this woman’s shoes—but whoever it is, that persona is not going to find anything she can make sense of out in that street. She has no money, she doesn’t speak the language, and she is lost in an unfamiliar city.”
“Maybe not completely—one more thing—there’s that phone. It might be a preloaded burner loaded with necessary information, and Lily Mae is tech savvy enough to make use of that, even if it’s just a map to take her to a pre-appointed destination. And if this Arslan, or Emin, is expecting her—they may have resources waiting. And Aisha’s own phone—I just glanced at her contacts, and there’s a name—Arslan Ilhan—”
“Bring the phone,” Stella said. “That’ll help. Lily Mae has a head start, but not a big one. She’s out looking for this Arslan—and if she can find him, so can we—come on, we need to…”
“Stella. We can’t do it.”
“We can’t do what?”
Philip indicated Aisha with a terse nod. “She is in no shape to be moved. At best, she will be a dead weight; at worst, she will resist and struggle and scream and she will get whoever tries to help her nailed to the wall by security within five minutes flat.”
“I know, but we can’t just abandon…”
“Her best protection might be precisely the state she is in,” Philip said. “And I hate myself for saying that. But it’s the truth. We may be doing her more harm than good if we try to haul her out of here—and we are not going to do any favors to ourselves either. We can’t save everybody…”
Stella stared at him, her eyes big and haunted. “I hate this.”
“I know. I’m not happy. But what do you want to do? Whatever it is, do it now—because every moment that passes you will not have again. And I truly think it would be worse if they found us in here right now, than if they just found her.”
“But we can try and save Lily Mae,” Stella said. She took a last long look at Aisha, still sobbing and trembling, and closed her eyes, clenching her hands into fists. “All right. Put her down. Maybe it was just Alabastra that scared her, at that, and not anything… else…”
Aisha whimpered at the name of Alabastra, as Philip eased her back down onto the floor, and curled up again into the same tight little ball of terror and misery that she had been when he had first found her.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Aisha, as he straightened. “I don’t know how else to help.”
“I’m going after her,” Stella said abruptly.
“Going after… after who? Lily Mae?” Philip said, turning his head sharply to stare at her. “How…?”
“If you want to go back and lie low, I will understand,” Stella said, already turning away. “But I’m going out there, after her. She was given to me to care for, to understand, to help. I will not abandon her.”
Philip, after a last anguished look back at Aisha, turned to follow, lengthening his stride to catch up with her.
“What are you planning to do? If you find her? If you don’t?” Philip demanded. “Think this through for a minute.”
“They took a hit, with Boz,” Stella said. “They survived it. They took another, with Lily Mae, and when this all spills out—and it will, it has to—and the Parada crew find out that she isn’t dead, that she is gone, it is going to wreck things up there. They were a tight-knit cohesive group—of necessity—and it’s all starting to unravel—they are losing everything, and how they respond may be borderline catastrophic for everyone. But at least… at least… they still have each other, those four up there. Lily Mae is now on her own. She hasn’t been on her own for a very long time. She may not… handle it well.”
“None of them are alone,” Philip objected. “Not really. Not carrying twenty people inside of them. There’s always… company.”
“You’d still be talking to yourself,” Stella said. “They may present as differentiated but in the end all those twenty people are still you. It isn’t that simple.”
“But there’s the other thing. Which… as far as we know… is still with her.”
“Yes,” Stella said. “I know. That is not something I forget. Not for a minute.”
“But maybe it would even be best if…”
Stella came to a sudden stop and Philip braked hard to halt beside her.
“Do you think for a moment,” Stella said evenly, “that they will not go straight out looking for her themselves, the minute they find out what has happened? And what do you suppose will happen if they find her first? Do you think they might stop to ask questions…? And if they shoot first and ask later… what is going to happen… to that thing you are worrying about? What do you think is going to happen to this city if they find out—after she’s dead—what they might have released out there?”
“It isn’t a plague,” Philip said. “It’s a single…”
“Panic doesn’t pause to examine facts,” Stella said. “Don’t you think a part of me doesn’t take fierce joy in the fact that at least one of them is out there, is free, as they should be? Even if it has to be in secret, incognito, and uncelebrated, which she should so rightfully be…? God, if I could ignore this, let her go—let her go free—and if I knew that the others would not be penalized for it in some way—I’d go back to my quarters right now and curl up under my covers and cover my eyes and ears and insist I know nothing, nothing at all… but I am terrified. And in the face of that fear, I’ll go look for her. Because I may yet be the only thing that can stand between her and disaster.”
“You may be,” Philip said, after a beat, “but how do you expect to…”
“I read up on a lot of stuff,” Stella said grimly, “back when I was doing my research in the library. When you gave me the drawings. Now come on, if you are coming, we are wasting time.”
Philip said no more, simply falling into step beside Stella as she moved off again.
It was with a sense of déjà-vu that he saw her heading for the security station where she had already led him once, to demand access to a roof garden for the six dispossessed star-farers in her care to reconnect to the earth and the sky of their world. This time, the stakes were much higher. But the woman who bent her steps towards this obstacle in her path wore an expression of someone who would not be denied, and Philip spared a moment to consider Stella Froud as the personification of the irresistible force which assailed the immovable object of Martin Peck’s security arrangements for the underground base they were in and through that challenging the entire monolith of the military and government administration system that underlay it all. He almost felt sorry for the officer in charge who was about to have to deal with the onslaught.
Three security officers looked up in alarm as Stella flung open the door to their station room, sized up their insignia in one swift glance, and turned to the highest-ranked officer.
“I need immediate clearance to topside,” she said. “Right now. Don’t bother calling anyone for confirmation or permission, my name is Dr. Stella Froud and I am on record as a senior medical officer of this facility. I hold no military rank but I have looked up the regulations that would apply and as senior medical officer I have the authority to overrule anybody else in the case of a medical emergency. And I am stating for the record that I am invoking a medical emergency right now, that time is of the essence, and that any time you spend delaying me or putting any impediments in my way could have life or death consequences for the patient under my care. One of your men will accompany me through the checkpoints, with all the pertinent codes and passwords, and I am to be escorted to an exit right now. Immediately. Make it happen.”
“Wait—what—what medical emergency? I haven’t been given any instructions—”
“An emergency doesn’t always leave time for a proper briefing,” Stella said. “That is by definition the nature of one. And I am the person qualified to inform you that such an emergency is ongoing.”
“What is the emergency?” demanded the security chief stubbornly.
“We could call it an unexpected resurrection, if you insist,” Stella said.
“Resurrection?” the officer echoed, looking almost offended. But he happened to glance sideways, and caught Philip’s eye, and Philip nodded gravely.
“I concur,” he said.
Stella shot him an almost disbelieving look, but he managed to keep his expression suitably solemn. She turned back to the officer.
“You may register your reservations on the report that you will be required to submit on this matter. Until that opportunity, do as I tell you. You have already wasted precious time.”
“But I don’t—”
“Now,” Stella barked. “If you won’t delegate an officer, then it’s you.” She stepped to one side and indicated the door with a sharp gesture. “After you. I will give you my own personal security clearance codes to back up my authority. You may discuss it with whomever you wish after you return from escorting me through the perimeter. And you—staying behind—” She glared at the other two officers, who stood there slack-jawed. “You will do nothing further about this matter until my escort returns from having delivered me to where I wish to go. After that, you may report the incident wherever and to whomever you feel the need to do so. Am I understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said one of the two officers she was addressing. The other merely nodded, looking like he was fighting an impulse to salute.
“Go,” Stella said.
The senior officer reached for a communications tablet, looked up to meet Stella’s gaze, glanced at the two frozen men in the station with him, and dropped his hands to his sides in resignation.
“Bring an emergency credit chit,” Stella said. “I will require one. Now let’s go. Move.”
The officer moved. Stella followed. Philip nodded politely to the two still motionless men left behind in the security station, and fell in behind.
“You can still…” Stella began, but he flung up a hand to stop her.
“I can, hell,” he said, sacrilegiously. “I’m coming with you.”
9.
Stella and Philip followed the security officer through the checkpoints, but not the same route that Stella and Martin had used to gain access to the streets of the city. Instead, they ended up in the same staging area that they had been taken to when Stella took the Parada crew up to the rooftop garden, with the two utilitarian grey-doored service elevators opening up into a wider vestibule area. The security guard ushered them into one of these, and the elevator disgorged them into the vastness of a parking garage—still underground, by the looks of it, but something that clearly had egress to the outside world. It was cavernous, and mostly empty, except for a bank of the ugly squat lime-green little CitiCars, the communal automatic self-drive vehicles that were used as convenience transport in the streets, plugged into their charging stations across the huge expanse of unoccupied parking spaces. The guard pointed across to them.
“You have access to those,” he said. “They’ll take you out to where you need to go.”
“Fine,” Stella said. “That’ll do. Thank you.”
The guard handed her a couple of credit chits, still looking very unhappy, as though he had more to say. He seemed to decide against it, on reflection, and abandoned the two of them there, stepping back into the elevator and letting the doors close on the unspoken words. Stella strode across the garage towards the cars. Philip, pausing to glance in what was almost bewilderment back at the elevator as though he couldn’t believe that they had just been left to their own devices like that, scrambled to follow.
