Author's Note: Bendal is a character who appeared in the original Tracker "bible" but never actually made it into the series… Just guessing on what Nodulians actually look like. Eijan and the others, as well as Migar's current political situation, are just figments of my own screwed-up imagination.
Chapter 2 -- Rude Awakening
Mel woke with a smile as memories of the previous night filled her. "Good morning, Cole," she murmured.
"Good afternoon, Mel," he replied in a cheerful voice, snuggling closer and nuzzling her throat.
"It is?" she yawned, opening her eyes.
"Yes, Mel."
"How long was I asleep."
"Ten hours."
"You did that thing. With your hand… to put me to sleep."
"Yes, Mel." He nodded.
She sighed and shook her head. "You need to stop doing that without permission."
"Yes, Mel. May I kiss you now, Mel?"
"Okay, Cole, now that you do not need to ask permission for…"
Cole smiled widely and leaned over her, kissing her in his gentle, firm way for several minutes. "One down," he whispered as he pulled away.
Leaning over her, his hands resting on either side of her slender body, Cole smiled in his unabashed way. Mel's eyes traveled from his face to his chest, so close it was almost touching her own. Just enough room between them for a hand, she decided, lifting hers to his chest and running it slowly across the rock-hard expanse of very warm flesh. When he did not seem immediately inclined to move from his position, she continued caressing him like that. Her fingers absently traced the lines of his muscles and she felt him shiver in spite of the heat of his body.
"Nine to go," she murmured, winking up at.
"At least," he amended, his entire body flushing at the thought of at least nine more kisses like that one, more gentle caresses from Mel, more…
Mel bit her lower lip, amused by his amendment. She felt the amount of heat pouring off of him abruptly increase and, as much as she wanted him, felt a little intimidated, too. "You hungry?" she asked, needing time to compose herself.
"Yes, Mel."
"Okay, tell you what. You go into the war-room and get me my waffle-iron back and I'll make us a huge breakfast."
"Yes, Mel." He rose and pulled her to her feet and into his arms, smiling down at her.
She smiled back up at him, liking his new way of acting around her. She felt more like a giddy, love-struck teen than anything right now, and found that she did not mind that in the least. She caressed his chest, reflecting that she could definitely get used to this state of affairs.
Cole pulled away reluctantly. "I'll get the waffle-iron. We should eat before we do anything else."
"Anything else?" she repeated, raising an eyebrow at him as he pulled on his slacks.
"Yes, Mel," he said, smiling a little shyly at her. "I have a lot to learn about… being human. You're going to have to show me."
He glanced at Mel with wide, anxious eyes and she suddenly realized exactly which aspect of human life he was requesting instruction in. Without even realizing it, Cole seemed to have mastered the art of the innuendo. He was asking her to teach him about…
"Being human," she repeated, grinning. Something told her that it was going to be a long and tiring but incredibly rewarding day. The first of many. "Maybe after I've taught you all about… being human, you can teach me a thing or two about being Cirronian?" she suggested, grinning shyly at him.
Cole felt his body flush again at that thought and nodded gravely. "I'd like that very much, Mel."
"Thought you might." She walked past him into the hallway. "Go get me my waffle-iron," she said over her shoulder. "I'll be in the kitchen."
"Yes, Mel." Cole smiled and nodded, vanishing into the war-room as she entered the kitchen.
She was pulling out the big mixing-bowl when she heard a horrified shout in a language that had definitely not originated on earth. "Cole!" she called, worried, running to the war-room. Cole never raised his voice.
He met her at the door, looking stricken. "Mel," he whispered, tears in his eyes, pulling her into his arms and cradling her against his bare chest.
"Cole, what's wrong?" she whispered, reaching up and stroking his face gently, smoothing away his tears and doing her best to comfort him with her touch the way he had always comforted her with his. "What happened, honey?" she asked gently.
"Look… at the screen," he whispered, shaking his head and closing his eyes.
Mel looked, her jaw dropping at the several hundred blue blips covering the map, each representing a fugitive life-force. "No…" she whispered, tightening her grip on Cole and burying her face in his chest and sobbing. "How?"
"I don't know, Mel," he whispered. "I don't… I don't understand. I brought them back…" He moaned softly, shaking his head against the reality of their situation.
They held on to each other for what could have been minutes or hours, before the were startled back to reality by a voice filtering over one of the computer's speakers.
"Daggon? Daggon? Kedriss Daggon?" There was more after that, in an undeniably alien tongue.
"Bendal!" Cole said, looking up quickly. "He'll know what has happened. Excuse me, Mel," he added, stepping around her to the computer. He quickly typed a few commands on the keyboard, activating a translation matrix, and spoke into the microphone. "Here, Bendal. I'm here."
"Daggon! This is… there aren't words…"
"I know, Bendal, I know." Cole nodded. "I know what has happened, I just do not know how… Can you tell me how?"
"Who's Bendal?" Mel asked.
"Eijan's security second," Cole told her. "Eijan was made Warden on Sar-Top after I went AWOL."
"You went AWOL?" Mel frowned. She had always assumed that he had been under orders to follow Rhee to Earth, or at least that he had been given permission…
"Daggon, who are you talking to?" Bendal asked.
"Melanie Porter, the Terrestrial woman I told you about." Cole typed in some more commands. "Hang on, I'm going to beam you in…"
"Understood."
"Beam him in?" Mel repeated, gaping.
"Only his image, Mel. Nodulians communicate far more fluently visually, like Cirronians."
"Right, whatever."
"So, I finally get to see what a Terrestrial looks like, Daggon?"
Cole smiled faintly. "If' I can ever get this damned thing to work…" he grumbled, hitting keys far harder than was strictly necessary.
"Damned? What is that?"
"Never mind, Bendal! Where is Eijan?"
"Coordinating recovery attempts all over the system! After you left, another ship… Kree!"
"Swearing will not help, my friend," Cole said into the speaker. "One moment… There." He gave a satisfied nod as a three-dimensional image appeared in the center of the war-room.
Mel gave a startled yelp and jumped backwards, flattening herself against a wall. The 'person' whose hologram had just appeared in her apartment had four short legs, gills, gray rubbery skin, flippers, iris-less black eyes, and a pronounced snout. It blinked in Mel's direction.
"Excitable creature, is it?" Bendal asked, his gills flapping in amusement.
Cole smiled faintly. "You get used to the way the species looks," he assured both Mel and Bendal.
"It has so much fur!" Bendal protested, tilting his head at Mel. Flippers shivered as he took in the half-dressed Cirronian. "So do you, Daggon… In fact, you seem to have more than it does… Is that fur on your face?" he demanded. "And your torso?" he added, disgusted.
"Bendal, the escape?" Cole asked, raising his hands to chest-level and splaying his fingers.
Mel glanced at Cole, realizing that he was moving his hands a lot more when he spoke, obviously conveying more than he was with his voice, or perhaps simply supplementing or emphasizing his words the way humans sometimes did. He had said that Nodulians communicated better visually. Obviously whatever software he was using to translate was not perfect and worked better in tandem with body-language. Or perhaps that made it more perfect…
As her initial shock wore off, she decided that Nodulians were not that bad-looking or even that alien-looking. In spite of his obvious agitation, Bendal wore a dolphin-like grin. A lot about him was reminiscent of the aquatic mammal, actually. Bendal kept curious eyes fixed on Mel as he spoke, supplementing his words with flipper-gestures, gill-movements, and facial expressions.
"It was late last night, after you left… The primary shields went down for routine maintenance…"
"Still?" Cole demanded, making an angry-looking gesture. "The procedure was supposed to change after the first escape!" He pointed at the Nodulian. "You and Eijan are far too intelligent to allow something like this to happen again, Bendal!" he shouted.
Bendal went up on his hind legs, defensive. "The procedures did change!" he shouted, adding a high-pitched, dolphin-like squeeing sound to the end of the sentence. "Three shields with rotating maintenance schedules, never more than one down at a time…"
"Then how did a ship penetrate the other two shields?" Cole asked in a low voice, closing his eyes.
"We have no squeeing clue…"
"Could you watch your language, please?" Cole demanded, gesturing towards Mel. "And… give me an anatha sequence of events…" He shook his head in frustration.
"There are probably three people in the entire Migar Federation who are smart enough to pull something like this off, Daggon. Alicia, who we can pretty definitively factor out of the equation since she's one of the good guys. Lana, who has been missing for better than five years now…"
"And Zin…" Cole sighed, shaking his head.
"So it must have been this Lana person, right?" Mel asked softly.
"Or Zin is no longer trapped in your Vault," Bendal sighed.
"Which means he was never, truly trapped," Cole breathed. "Anatha!" he shouted, knocking what was left of a blender onto the floor.
Mel and Bendal both recoiled, startled by the uncharacteristic display of anger.
"I need to check the Vault," Cole said finally, in a tightly controlled voice.
"Daggon," Bendal said softly. "The Migar Security Council is not pleased."
"Imagine that," Cole muttered. "What does Alicia say?" he asked, shaking his head.
"That the squall-line has made landfall."
From his tone of voice, Mel suspected that this was the Nodulian's way of saying that the shit had just hit the fan. Not that she really needed to be told that with the look on Cole's face. A second escape? So soon after the first batch had been returned? Not only had the 'squall-line made landfall', but heads were going to roll for sure.
Cole closed his eyes and covered his mouth with one hand. He grabbed a chair and pulled it in front of Bendal's image, nodding. "Where is the blame going to fall?" he asked in a low voice, rubbing the back of his neck. "Does she know that?"
Bendal's eyes closed. "Eijan and I may make it out of this with our jobs in-tact but there are people trying to blame you for both escapes, saying you went mad after Nallia died, pointing up your old friendship with Zin… Alicia is doing what she can, but the odds are very good that one of the four of us is going to end up with a neurodebilitator and half our life-force in a storage-unit. The SST is flowing with the rip-tide on this, and unless we can conclusively prove that it was Zin or Lana…"
"You get me five minutes with Etala…" Cole began in a low voice. "I will get you your proof."
"Etala is missing, too. We took her into custody after you returned with proof of Zin's culpability and she was among the escapees."
"Wonderful!" Cole snapped.
"Oh, it gets better. Her life-force was still in-tact."
Without taking his eyes from Bendal, Cole said, "Mel, may I please have some alcohol?"
"Yeah. I'll, um… get us both a glass. And a dust-pan."
"You're drinking again?" Bendal asked when she was gone.
"I am now…"
"Daggon, we need you in top form."
"And I need you to get me Lana. If Etala was on Varda until you took her into custody, then she was not involved anywhere along the line or she would have gone to ground the instant that I returned."
"Gone to ground?" Bendal repeated, blinking.
"Vanished like a Dessarian at midnight." Cole shook his head. "Have Eijan transmit me a list of the escapees. Right now, specifically, I need to know if the Nodulian Kres was involved. He owes me a favor."
Bendal shook his head. "No, not this time. We made special note of the initial escapees who did not escape this time. There were… seven." Bendal reeled off the list.
"And Aiko was the only Dessarian?" Cole asked as Mel returned with a bottle of scotch and two glasses.
"Yes."
"Thank you, Mel," Cole said, accepting a glass. "Nestov is back, too," he told her in a low voice.
"This time you are not keeping me from Collecting his sorry… life-force."
"Wouldn't dream of it, Mel," Cole assured her grimly, taking a long drink. "How long do I have?" Cole asked Bendal with a sigh.
"Not long. We both lost a lot of our credibility with the SST when you pulled your little vanishing-act. Right now, Alicia and Eijan are the only two people standing between us and life terms for treason."
"Wonderful." Cole sighed. "And they're losing ground just for supporting us if they're the only ones."
"Exactly."
Cole closed his eyes, thinking. "I need Lana."
"Unless she's already on Terra, I can't get her to you…"
"Then I need Alicia or Tallinn… or…" Cole sighed deeply, aware that his list of trusted friends was growing small indeed, and that neither Alicia nor Tallinn was really in the best position to help him from his end. "Nallyn? Can you get her to earth?"
"She's a sociologist, Daggon!"
"She's also one of the few people we have left to trust," Cole pointed out, sighing. "The Dessarians laying odds on this yet?" he asked.
"Safe money's on Lana, but Zin is becoming less of a long-shot every day. 100 to 1 that it was Zin and Lana. Last night it was 200 to 1."
"I'm sorry, is betting on the ponies actually helping?" Mel asked, shaking her head.
"What is 'ponies'?" Bendal asked.
"Like a nak-jan, Bendal," Cole told him absently. "And yes, Mel, it might. Dessarians are very good with numbers." He frowned thoughtfully. "Lana vanished… five years ago?" Cole asked.
Bendal nodded. "Yes."
"And before that she studied physics under Zin?"
"Common knowledge. She's almost as good as he is."
"Call up your files on Etala and Zin. Look for unexplained expenditures in the last five years."
"Zin's records are full of unexplained expenditures!" Bendal protested.
"Not like this one." Cole shook his head. "It's large, almost what Zin was funneling back through to Etala for her research, and constant over the last five years, possibly an expenditure in the form of precious metals or energy as opposed to actual money. And get me every thermal scan of Terra you can get your hands on." He rose, pushing the chair away and pacing the war-room. "I'm looking for any unexplained dip at this co-ord in the past month."
"Wormhole activity? At your habitation, Daggon?"
"Under it, Bendal. Several klicks under it. My regards to Eijan, Alicia, and Tallinn. And my love to Nallyn, if you would. Oh, and empty my credit-account and place it all on Zin/Lana."
"I'm on it," the Nodulian announced, his image fading.
"A wormhole into the Vault," Mel whispered, sighing.
Cole nodded, rising and draining his glass. "Mel, do we have a sledge-hammer?"
"What do you want with a sledge-hammer?" Mel asked quietly, eyeing the broken glass on the floor.
Cole picked up the dust-pan and swept up the mess. "To test a theory."