Gates of Hell by Susan Sizemore Read Free Book Online Page A

Can’t see Eamon letting me have a sample onboard.”
    Dee gave a loud sigh. “For which we are all grateful. I don’t want to go near that stuff. Sims are fine with me.”
    “Chickenshit.”
    “You bet, Merkrates.”
    “Ladies.” Hernandez got sarcastic looks from Roxy and Dee. She waved a hand at them. She’d been reading through data updates while they talked. She fiddled with a stack of datacubes as she said, “Says here that a group of koltiri have volunteered to go to the quarantined worlds.”
    “I know,” Roxy answered. She tapped her forehead. “Got a call from Racqel—telepathic call,” she explained at both women’s puzzled look.
    “From Racqel?” Dee sounded affronted.
    “My feeling exactly. One of my sisters,” Roxy told Bonita. “The old one.”
    “Doesn’t sound like you’re friendly, and I’m not going there,” Bonita wisely replied. “Your family life is already more complicated than I want to know about.”
    “Besides, Eamon doesn’t want you hanging out with your family.”
    Roxy gave Dee an annoyed look, but stuck to business. “I thanked koltiri Racqel for including me in the invitation, but told her that I was otherwise occupied.”
    Roxy didn’t tell the other women that her annoyed sister—the one Roxy had never met until she went to Koltir Prime to finish her empathic healer training at the age of fifteen and hadn’t seen in the flesh since—had been less than enthusiastic about asking someone as “strange and violent” as Roxanne to join the other koltiri in their peaceful healing pursuits, but supposed it was all right since it was an emergency situation with uncounted lives at stake. Racqel was insufferably self-satisfied and superior, not to mention having a naive and innocent view of the universe from the vantage of her safe, cloistered existence where war hadn’t intruded.
    “Eamon thinks having the koltiri show up on infected worlds to perform healings will serve more as a public relations gambit than as practical solution. Says it’ll look good on the newscasts, but what real good will it do?”
    “Save lives?” Dee suggested. “Do
you
have any opinion on the subject?” Roxy didn’t rise to the bait to contradict the captain, not in front of Bonita. She merely glared at Dee, who nonchalantly finished her coffee and got to her feet. “I’m going back to the life sciences lab before you decide to strike me down with lightning, Merkrates.”
    “Good idea, Nikophoris.”
    Bonita rose. She glanced toward the ward doorway where one of the medtechs stood waiting for her. “And I’ve got patients to see.”
    ———
    “Can we talk?”
    “Reine?” Roxy tapped the flatscreen in surprise. “What are you doing on there?”
    Reine Shirah was the last person Roxy had expected to see when she slid into the privacy booth and keyed her ID into the comm panel, though why Reine was calling wasn’t hard to guess. Sagouran Fever, and they were both koltiri. Roxy had had other contacts with the koltiri in the last six days as more and more planets reported outbreaks. Every time she’d had to give the same answer, each time with more reluctance. Rebellion simmered in her, but every time she approached the captain she got a stern, firm “No.” Off duty, Eamon used more personal arguments.
    The count was up to twenty systems’ worlds infected, and now here was Reine to prey on Roxy’s already aching conscience. When she’d been called to the media center to take a personal transmission, she’d been expecting someone from MedService, not someone who didn’t need technology to make her voice heard to a mind across the galaxy. Of course, nobody loved technology more than her big sister.
    Reine was four years older than Roxanne, and ninety years younger than Racqel, but Reine was the heart and head of the family. If Reine had one fault, in Roxy’s estimation, it was her tendency to never meet anyone she didn’t want to marry. Actually, Reine had many faults.