Authors: Bernadette Gardner
reeling.
She fought the instinct to scold him, to berate him for
trampling her feelings and essentially mocking her purpose in
his life. There would be time later for recriminations. Right
now, she needed to do her job. "Caleb, we need to put all
that aside for a moment. What's important right now is your
health and your physical link with the symbion. Let me call
the lab so Ray can start working on this problem."
Caleb scrubbed a hand over his face. Though worry lines
creased his brow, he looked remarkably good for someone
who'd woken up not long ago with a lungful of water and a
face full of sand. He didn't look terminally ill, not by a long
shot. Though, if what he'd told her was true, he would
probably continue to appear perfectly healthy almost until the
day he died.
"You're right. I just ... don't want the symbion to die.
Danson will want to remove it."
"Jidar won't let him. The Icarian terms of the joining are
very clear. The symbion would not be removed except in the
event that maintaining the link was proven a danger to your
life. It will die without you now."
"It will die anyway."
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Icarus Rising
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Suddenly angry, Zara bolted up from the floor. "Are you
going to let that happen? Or are you going to at least fight for
it?"
Shock widened his eyes, and Zara stepped close to him.
"I'm not sure how well I know you anymore, but the only
thing I'm still certain of is that you're dedicated to the
repopulation project. So if there's anything that can be
learned from this ... you'll do what has to be done to help the
Icarians, right?"
His mouth worked for a moment. "Right."
"Good. I'll call the lab and get someone over here with a
cart to pick us up."
Caleb continued to pace the tight confines of his sleeping
alcove while Zara retrieved the portable radio transmitter
from his work area. Each moment he waited made him more
and more agitated. While his confession had relived a great
weight from his conscience, he still wasn't sure he was ready
to face Danson and the others.
He'd already caused so much trouble. They would never
believe his original intentions had been good. He'd sincerely
wanted to help the Icarians boost their flagging population.
After studying their complex culture for years, he fully
understood their reluctance to simply accept donated DNA
from humans.
The only way they could accept help to rebuild their
population was to bring in new adults who could not only
contribute mating material, but remain within the society to
help raise and nurture their offspring. Danson's solution
involved a true hybridization of two species. Caleb wasn't sure
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now that he could live with the shame of having screwed that
up.
Jidar and his people would never trust him. Raymond
Danson would want to dissect him, and worst of all, Zara
looked at him as though he were lower than the crabs that
infested the island's south beach.
She seemed calm and professional right now, but he knew,
underneath, she was hurt. He could never begin to explain
which of the things he'd shared with her were real and which
were embellished to feed his lie.
The symbion wanted to stretch his wings and propelled
Caleb involuntarily toward the living area. Zara's urgent
whisper stopped him though, and despite the guilt it caused
him, he remained out of sight behind the wall, which divided
his sleeping quarters from his work area.
"We need to do this carefully, Ray. It's clear he doesn't
have the kind of control over the symbion he should have,
and I'm worried about his emotional stability."
Caleb almost laughed out loud at her remark. What
emotional stability? He was carrying around a pair of sentient
wings on his back, and all they wanted to do was grab the
nearest female and fuck her senseless. He'd be lucky if he
saw "stable" again this century.
"I don't have access to a sedative. I'm sure he's got
nothing stronger on hand than an analgesic. How fast can you
get here?"
Caleb tensed at the word sedative. An emotion surged
through him he wasn't sure he'd ever felt before, and it made
his body shake.
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Icarus Rising
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The symbion remembered being sedated by Danson. The
pain of an injection followed by lethargy and disorientation
had left it angry and frightened. Rudimentary communication
through Jidar's symbion had reassured it no permanent harm
would come to it, but that hadn't made submitting to the
wingless creature's strange tests any easier.
"No more of that."
Caleb opened his mouth to respond, then thought better of
it. Zara could hear him talking to himself and that would
further convince her he needed to be restrained in some way.
"I wouldn't let anyone hurt you."
"No more. Others are coming to capture us."
"They're coming to help."
"Ray, I'm not sure I should be the one to tell you this, but
I'm a little bit afraid Caleb might not."
His anger flared. How could she tell his secret to Danson?
The knowledge of his illness would virtually assure a forced
separation from the symbion.
"No! Not die."
"You won't. I won't let them."
"Caleb?" Zara appeared then, her features a carefully
composed mask.
Panic ignited all his nerve endings, and his wings shot out,
knocking objects from shelves in the small space.
The commotion of broken glass and falling books startled
Zara, and she jumped back, toppling a small table and a
chair. The noise frightened his symbion even though the
creature only heard through Caleb's ears now. It flapped its
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wings, stretching them out to their full span and creating a
turbulence in the bungalow.
Zara scrambled back, hands up to fend him off. "Calm
down Caleb, no one's going to hurt you."
"No one
is
going to hurt us," he said. "I'm not ready to go
back to the lab."
"No one's making you go back. Ray is coming here."
"To knock me out. I'll wake up strapped to a bed with my
wings cut off. Zara—"
The mental image terrified the symbion, and instinctively it
took flight, ignoring Caleb's mental protests. Everything
began to fall from the shelves as the creature beat its wings
frantically, seeking escape from the confined space.
Zara managed to slip toward the door and ran outside, but
Caleb followed, painfully scraping the fluttering wings on the
door jamb as he exited. He feared once free the symbion
would take flight, but instead it zeroed in with his new night
vision on Zara who had taken off through the waist-high sea
grass that formed a barrier between Caleb's bungalow and
the next.
"Female."
"Leave her alone. Let's just get out of here before they find
us."
"Female is necessary for mating."
Hawk-like, Caleb tracked Zara's movements as the
symbion launched him into the air. With the instinctive skill of
a creature born to hunt, Caleb swooped over Zara, and once
again scooped her up in his arms.
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He had lost control completely again. His symbion ruled
this frantic moment, and once again they took off over the
water, careening south toward the deserted column islands
that stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers across the
planet's otherwise desolate southern hemisphere.
Zara screamed and struggled, and the symbion bade him
tighten his hold just enough to cut off blood flow to her brain
for an instant. She went limp, assuring that she would not
accidentally free herself from his possessive grip mid-flight.
Now that he had escaped capture by his enemies, he
needed to find a secluded, easily defendable place to rest, a
territory of his own where he could claim his mate. He flew
into the night sky, determined that the humans would never
put their hands on him again.
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Arilani had managed to control her rage and indignation
thus far, but her hold on her emotions was wearing thin. She
stood in a very small conference room in the largest of the
research station's laboratory buildings, squeezed in with Jidar,
Namara and Dr. Danson and a number of the geneticist's
human staff members.
She felt trapped and again wondered how the humans
could stand living in such confined spaces without access to
the sky.
"How can we be sure Dr. Faulkner abducted Dr. Abbott?"
one of Danson's underlings asked. Arilani stifled her
immediate response and deferred to her leader, who seemed
unnaturally calm in the face of this unmitigated disaster.
"Marks on the ground near Dr. Faulkner's dwelling indicate
Dr. Abbott was lifted into the air mid-stride ... as she seemed
to be running toward the next building. Because she
expressed concern over Dr. Faulkner's mental state, we must
assume she was taken against her will."
"Why? Just how dangerous is he?"
"The symbions are non-violent."
"Why is Caleb doing—?"
Danson shushed his colleagues and took up the discussion.
"We really have no idea what he's capable of in this state.
Zara told me over the radio that there was something we
didn't know, something Caleb hadn't told us, and that's my
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greatest concern right now. Whatever his secret was, that
could be why the joining went wrong."
A jumble of voices erupted in the conference room then,
and Arilani had to cover her sensitive ears. She shot Jidar a
pleading look, silently begging him to stop the commotion.
He did. His warning call echoed around the room, silencing
everyone and drawing their attention to him. "I have once
again sent out search parties, and I believe in daylight we will
have a better chance of locating them both. We will do
everything we can to bring them back here safely. Symbions
have a homing instinct, however, and I do believe eventually
Dr. Faulkner's will lead him back where he belongs."
Danson spread his arms wide, and Arilani tensed. She had
to remind herself among humans such a gesture was one
meant to invite calm acceptance. In essence the doctor was
embracing those assembled and asking for their support and
cooperation, not declaring his intent to fight as an Icarian's
spread wings would indicate.
"What we all need to do right now is get back to work. Our
purpose here is still to find a solution for the Icarian breeding
problem, and that can't stop just because we've had a
setback in our main project."
Arilani scoffed at his words, but fortunately no one in the
worried crowd noticed. As Danson's Icarian equivalent, she
knew better than he did that the joining of symbions to
humans was their last hope. Jidar and Namara had staunchly
refused to allow sperm and egg donations and would not
submit their subjects to the process the humans called
"artificial insemination".
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Centuries of dwindling population had left them with little
option. Male and female Icarians with DNA patterns that were
too similar could not breed successfully. The only way to
literally infuse new life into the dying race was to accept alien
mating material, and Jidar insisted the only way to do this
was to bring humans, joined with symbions, fully into their
society.
If Danson's project failed, there might not be another
generation of Icarian children, and their race would die off
completely in less than a century.
"Thank you all for your help," Danson said as his people
and Jidar's began to file out of the room. "Together we can
succeed."
Arilani bristled. She despised Danson's motto. Those four
words, in her estimation, would be chiseled on the death
marker of Icarus. This noble cause had gone terribly wrong,
and at the moment, she had only Danson to blame.
When everyone else had left, she remained, glaring at her
human counterpart. "You know exactly what happened at
Caleb's bungalow, don't you?"
With a quick glance into the corridor to make sure none of
the others had lingered, Danson shut the door of the
conference room. "Ari, we can't be certain anything
happened, and we shouldn't jump to conclusions."
"You knew an adult symbion's first and strongest instinct
after joining would be to mate, and that mate should be
me
."
Again, Danson spread his arms, and in response this time,