LEFEBVRE’S eyes snapped open. There weren’t too many things that could rouse him like this from an exhausted sleep, but a footstep in his supposedly empty cabin was one of them. He lay still, breathing easily, trying to identify the location of the intruder.
There!
He lunged over the side of his bed, sweeping out both arms. The unseen figure gave a sharp cry of pain as Lefebvre’s momentum drove them both to the floor in a pile of covers and limbs. He kept one hand wrapped around what felt like a neck, reaching back with the other to snap on the light.
Then Lefebvre let go. “Sir?” he exclaimed, squinting down at Kearn. “Are you all right? What are you doing in my quarters?”
Kearn’s eyes were watering, his mouth working without words coming out. Lefebvre offered his hand, but the other Human refused, pushing free of the tangle of covers as he stood up unsteadily. “I w–wanted,” Kearn began, then rubbed his throat as though it helped. “I needed to talk to you, Captain. Privately.” With a familiar trace of affronted dignity in his voice, he added: “I hardly expected to be assaulted trying to wake you up. That’s a nasty habit. You could have killed me.”
“Sorry, sir,” Lefebvre said, hiding a smile. He offered Kearn his desk chair, then, on a whim, grabbed two glasses and the half-bottle of Brillian brandy Timri had kept from the Feneden for him, before taking the remaining chair. “Drink, sir?”
Kearn blinked slowly. Lefebvre took in the puffy, shadowed eyes, and sallow skin. Kearn looked pasty at the best of times, but now it was as if he hadn’t slept for weeks. Without waiting for a reply, Lefebvre poured a generous dollop of brandy into each glass and pressed one into Kearn’s unresisting hand.
“Cheers, sir.” Lefebvre tossed back his own drink in one gulp, welcoming the soothing burn on the back of his throat. Kearn followed suit, coughing as the alcohol hit, but keeping it down. Lefebvre refilled both glasses before asking: “What can I do for you, sir?”
“Sir?” Kearn stared at the glass in his hand like someone suspecting poison, then downed the next shot in two quick swallows, barely wincing this time. “Sir.” He gave a bitter laugh. “As my commission is unlikely to continue once our current mission ends, Captain Lefebvre,” he said, matter-of-factly, “you might as well call me Lionel.”
Lefebvre didn’t argue the point. As if my career will last any longer, he reminded himself, toasting the person most likely to destroy it. “Rudy,” he invited, before draining his glass.
“Rudy. Thank you.” This as Lefebvre filled their glasses a third time. “Rudy, I have a question to ask you,” Kearn continued. “Off the record. Just you and me.”
Lefebvre kept his face open and neutral, despite the alarm bells ringing in his head. “That’s fine, Lionel,” he said, “as long as ‘off the record’ means you aren’t recording this.”
“This isn’t a conversation I want recorded either.” Kearn thumped his empty glass rather hard on the desk. “I dream about the Esen Monster every night, you know,” he began slowly, heavily. “Fifty years, I’ve dreamed Her. Sometimes, I win—and everyone believes me. Sometimes,” his pudgy fingers reached out into the air, “I almost catch Her, but she escapes, running away. But since I found out Ragem was alive, I’ve been losing, Rudy. I’ve been losing to Her—and She destroys everything.” There was, Lefebvre decided, something appalling about the haunted look on Kearn’s face. It was the look of a being who has faced his own death over and over again. No one deserved that.
“Ask your question,” Lefebvre said, knowing he was being a fool, but pitying Kearn nonetheless. He shared the last of the bottle, sucking out the dregs before tossing it behind him. “After all, this is just the two of us, Rudy and Lionel, chatting in the dark, having a few drinks.” Fair warning, Lefebvre decided. He wouldn’t promise the truth or future verification.
Kearn nodded, as if acknowledging what was unsaid. “I thought She’d killed him, you know,” he began, keeping his eyes on the glass in his hand, tilting it so the amber liquid flowed from side to side. “Ragem was like you—he didn’t take orders, my orders, well. He was bright, smart, ambitious. A gifted linguist, mind you. Truly gifted. He was my second, but I knew he’d outrank me within a few years; less with luck. He seemed to have that, too.” Kearn paused, then went on as if the brandy or Lefebvre’s attentive silence was a goad. “I didn’t like him, but I depended on him. Like you.
“Then our Captain was murdered, and I was pushed into command. I needed Ragem more than ever, but that’s when he brought Her aboard. It all changed. I could see it, we all could. She—this Esen—was everything to him. We were nothing.” Kearn paused, taking a huge mouthful of brandy before going on. “He insisted She was harmless, innocent, well-meaning—even after the killings started. There was nothing I could say to convince him and, then, She killed him.”
“But she didn’t,” Lefebvre said very quietly, remembering a delicate, green-eyed face. “You know that now.”
“No,” Kearn agreed. “She didn’t. She’s protected him, hasn’t She? All these years.” He looked up, straight at Lefebvre, a mute demand for the truth.
Lefebvre nodded, once.
Kearn squeezed his eyes shut for several seconds. Lefebvre waited, more curious than concerned. Maybe it was the brandy, he warned himself. Or the lack of sleep. He hadn’t had much lately either.
Kearn’s eyes snapped open. “Has Ragem been Her pet?” he sounded bitter. “A plaything?”
“You knew him,” Lefebvre countered. “Do you believe that?”
“Yes.” The smaller Human rubbed his gleaming forehead, then sighed. “No, I don’t. Ragem told me Esen was his friend. I thought, all this time, She’d betrayed him.”
“That’s not what happened, is it?” Lefebvre’s temper flared. “You’re the one who betrayed him, Kearn. You branded Ragem a traitor, cost his family the memory of their son. You’re the one who tried to charge him with crimes he didn’t commit and, when that failed, spread rumors until no one could separate the truth from your lies.”
His outburst brought only a shrug from Kearn, deep in his contemplation of a now-empty glass. “Ragem could have defended himself,” he said almost mildly, but his hands were perceptibly shaking. “He could have returned to his family. Instead, he chose to hide, to leave everything—for Her. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Lefebvre said, hearing the truth in it. Paul hadn’t explained, not yet, maybe not ever. A tiny flicker of anger burned at that thought, then faded to resignation. “He had his reasons.”
“Does She control his mind? Does She rule him by fear?”
“Those must be quite the dreams you’ve been having,” Lefebvre snorted.
“I don’t recommend them,” Kearn replied, without irony. “Then what is it? What is it about the Esen Monster that could draw such loyalty from someone like Ragem? That’s my nightmare, Captain Lefebvre. That I—that I—” Kearn seemed to lose his voice.
“That you’ve been wrong for fifty years?” Lefebvre finished for him, unsure what was more dangerous: Kearn’s vulnerability or his.
Again the urgent glance, this time from eyes filling with tears. “Can you tell me that, Captain—Rudy?” Kearn pleaded. “Have I been wrong? Or is Esen a monster? I’m going to catch her. What will I be facing when I do? My destruction? Do you know?”
“What I know—what I know is that we’re both overtired and need to be fit to deal with the Feneden in the morning. Anything else, you’ll have to find out for yourself. Sir.” Lefebvre took back the glass, hating himself as he watched the desperate hope on Kearn’s face fade to despair alone.
Paul warned there’d be a price for keeping Esen’s secret, Lefebvre reminded himself.
He hadn’t expected it to be Kearn.