Free Diuturnity's Dawn by Alan Dean Foster Page B

to jibe with what she was feeling and seeing. Though the first words she heard were in themselves entirely innocent, their import was uncompromisingly ominous.
    “She’s awake.”
    She recognized the voice. Ambassador Toroni had a distinctive, measured way of speaking, slightly nasal but memorable. It matched his face, which moments later was smiling down into her own. There was relief in his countenance, but no humor.
    A voice she did not recognize said, “I’ll leave you alone with her for a while. Her vitals are fine, but she’s liable to be less than completely coherent until the comprehensive neural block has fully worn off. The aerogels will keep her comfortable. If anything untoward occurs, or something doesn’t look right, just hit the alert.”
    “Thank you, nurse.”
    Nurse.
Anjou liked the sound of that even less than the absence of humor in her superior’s expression. She struggled to sit up. Reading the relevant cerebral commands from the patch fastened to the back of her skull and ascertaining that rising did not contradict her medical profile, the bed complied.
    Sitting up, she found that the light did not hurt as much. In addition to Toroni, Sertoa was also present. He did not even try to fake a smile. “Hello, Fanielle. How—how are you feeling?”
    “Sleepy. Confused. Something hurts. No,” she corrected herself, “everything hurts, but something is muting it.” Looking past them, searching the hospital room, she did not see a third face. Especially not the one she sought. “I’ve been in an accident.”
    Toroni nodded, very slowly. “What’s the last thing you remember, my dear?”
    “Packing to go to Daret. No,” she corrected herself quickly, inspired perhaps by their stricken looks. “I was already on my way there. On the transport to the airport. With—” She looked past them again. “—Jeremy Hyguens.”
    “He was a good friend of yours,” Sertoa commented softly.
    “Yes. We are—” She broke off as Toroni threw the other man a look of quiet exasperation.
    He was. That was what Sertoa had said.
He was.
She sank back into the cushioning aerogel, wishing it was solid enough to smother her. When she had finished crying, when the tears had subsided enough for her to form words again, she believed that she heard herself whispering, “What . . . happened?”
    Bernard Toroni sat down on the edge of the bed, the transparent aerogel dimpling under his extra weight. He wanted to take this exceptional young woman’s hand, to hold it tightly, to make things better. But that was not a procedure allowed for in the diplomatic syllabus, and circumstances dictated that he keep a certain distance. He did not want to keep his distance, though. He wanted to hold her the way he had once held his own children back on Earth, before he had begun to receive assignments to other worlds.
    “You were on a transport capsule in line for the airport. There was an empty cargo carrier on the strip ahead of you. No one knows exactly how it happened, but there was a program failure. The cargo unit’s drive field reversed. The two capsules hit very hard.”
    “The kinetic energy released—” Sertoa started to say before a look from Toroni silenced him.
    “Once engaged, transport capsule fields don’t ‘reverse.’ The programs are designed to be fail-safe. At worst, onboard in-line safeties should have cut its drive. Had that happened, your capsule’s onboard sensors would have had time to detect the failure ahead and bring it to a stop prior to impact.” He paused for reflection. “There were a total of twelve people on board the capsule you were traveling in. You and a fellow named Muu Nulofa from Engineering were the only survivors.”
    “Jeremy—” She did not swallow particularly hard, but her throat was on fire.
    Toroni shifted his position on the edge of the bed. No one else had been willing to pay this first visit. “The lifesavers who extricated you from what was left of the capsule