by R Coots
Did she even want to see what this was? The hole in her heart kept growing. Tendrils of anguish crept out of it, threading along her veins like water in a newborn stream she’d once watched grow during a rainstorm. Sitting under the shelter of the ship, nestled up against . . . against someone. Someone large and warm and smelling of grease and soap and the wine he’d stolen for her. Their picnic had been interrupted, so they’d had to move.
Who?
Hope. That was the name for the fluttery feeling. Hope. Maybe it was him! Maybe he’d have answers!
Inch by inch, she pulled herself upright, hooking her elbows over the edge of the mattress to steady herself. Then she stood fully, trying to find a place to put her hands that wasn’t covered in trailing tubes and wires. And finally, finally, she got to see who the table held.
She nearly fell again. She did wobble dangerously as her knees buckled and firmed.
“Delfi,” she breathed.
No response. Nothing. Not even when she reached, somehow, with that part of her that always knew where her sousi was.
Hand shaking, she managed to find fingers, pale and dry against her own, among the needles and sensor pads. Was that what they were? Oh well. There were more important things to worry about now. Such as the fact that the other half of her existence was lying on a table. Asleep. More than asleep. If she were only sleeping, there would be something leaching through the contact. Nothing. Even skin to skin was a failure.
Now she remembered. Goris must have put them in the caskets. The pain. The weakness. She was waking from cold storage.
Waking first.
So where was Goris? Where were Bajak and Sender and Adan? Where was Denz? He wouldn’t have left Delfi here alone.
Where was Rui?
She reached out again. Nothing. Not even flickers. Was the problem with her? Was she being blocked from the outside? Or was she really alone? Someone had to have taken them out of the caskets. Someone must have given them the wake drugs.
Patting Del’s hand carefully, she turned her attention to the walls. They were curved, fluid even. Sinuous lines drew patterns among the spiked metal brambles as they wound their way from floor to ceiling. Rooms had doors. People did not just materialize in places. So, where was the door for this room?
There. Not so far. And so far. Light years away.
She tried again to find someone nearby. She couldn’t even place Del. Just the sucking, aching hole of agony, growing wider by the second. If she didn’t find someone soon, if she couldn’t find Rui soon, it was going to swallow her.
And then she’d be back in the dark place.
No. No. She could do this. Even if Del was asleep, the sousi bond should still be working. It had worked through cryo before. It had to keep her sane now. Rui had probably just gone to find some food. Or relieve himself. He couldn’t be far.
She lurched from the safety of the table to the wall over an arm’s length away and fetched up next to what must be the door frame. The metal was cool on her skin, and she could feel the engraved vines with their hidden snakes waiting to bite at her. None of the buttons on the panel looked familiar; but one was bigger than the others, so she tried that one.
And then she did fall, as the wall under her hand warped, twisted, and melted into the edges of the door frame. Pain blossomed through her whole body as she landed. Then the agony in her nose took precedence and she lost herself to another whimper.
The floor was cool and smooth under her skin. Not the fine latticework of a ship’s deck plates. Maybe she’d just lie here for a bit. Until the crew came back and found her. Then she’d have help. They’d all hug and cry, and Rui would hold her, and together they’d wake up Del and they’d all be safe. No more running. No more danger.
Safe.
But as she reveled in the bliss of cold metal on too-warm skin, she started to feel again. Arousal permeated the room. Anguish too. A pain all outside what was going on in her heart beat at her. She tried to shield, but her concentration could not hold beneath the weight of all that emotion. Fear seeped in. She couldn’t tell if it came from within herself or elsewhere.
The smell made it worse. Musk of a particular sort, spicy and warm. Perfumes of varying strengths.
She craned her head around, rolling to her side with a hiss of pain.
The lights were down. It was hard to see clearly from this angle. But the size and shape hadn’t changed much in the centuries since mankind left the Home Planet. She doubted someone would have made many innovations to the construction of a bed.
Except if she was seeing this properly, it was a huge bed. Far larger than the one in her first passenger cabin. Larger even than the one she shared with Rui.
There was only one answer.
No.
No. No. No.
Tears burned their way out of her eyes and down her cheeks. The hole in her heart turned to a gaping maw, a Barbican in full decay. It couldn’t be. It was supposed to have worked. They were supposed to go to sleep and then Rui was going to come back for them and—
She choked on a sob, and desperation gave her the strength to get her arms under her and push herself up. Fear energized her, got her on her feet and moving towards a door in the wall opposite the one she’d just come through.
No. This was never supposed to happen. How could they have failed? How had they been found?
She scrabbled at the panel next to the door. Portal? She didn’t care. It was an opening. And if she wasn’t locked in she should be able to—to what? To do something. Find help?
Foolish, foolish little bittehek. She knew better.
She still had to try.
Something finally answered to her hand. The wall moved, melting back into hiding and revealing a hall. Or at least, she assumed it was a hall. The lights were brighter here. She blinked against them for a few seconds. And reached again.
There. People. They should have been stationed at either side of the door. They weren’t. At the end of the hall? She peered around the edge of the door and looked. Nothing there, just a niche with a helmet of some sort in it.
Other direction? She nearly fell through the door as she craned her head around.
Yes. A person’s shape. Shaped like a person in her mind, too. She couldn’t get a clear read on them. But it wasn’t the flat dullness of the guards in the Palace.
Maybe the fuerrus hadn’t found her. Maybe Rui had found a new place to hide instead. Maybe they were going along their back trail. They’d done that a few times. It never lasted long, taking cover in places people never expected them to try; but now that they were “dead,” maybe he’d decided to risk it again.
“Rui?” She eased through the door, braced herself against the wall, and started inching her way towards the person at the end of the hall. “Denz? Is that you?” It was certainly large enough to be Denz, mobile mountain that he was.
She still couldn’t get much of a read off whoever it was. Maybe it was Goris, checking on something the room wasn’t equipped to tell her. The medic was never very forthcoming with either thought or emotion. But Jossa hadn’t wanted to invade the other woman’s privacy by doing a full scan. Surface skimming had never yielded much, but manners required limits. Now those limits were coming up to bite her in the achek.
Hope started to flutter again. Even though that room behind her felt like the bedroom of the fuerrus himself, nothing else about this place compared to his quarters. Nothing seemed like it belonged anywhere in the Empire.
Then the person at the end of the hall was in front of her. And her heart stopped in horror.
Lust. Greed. Triumph. Most of all, rage. He was made of it. Whatever other emotions the man held in his soul, rage was the framework. The foundation. The engine that pushed him forward.
She whimpered and tried to curl in on herself. Tried to back away. Tried to fight through the morass that was the being in front of her. She couldn’t make her feet move. She had to move, to run. Run! Rui didn’t come for you. He failed. He failed.
Just like we all knew he would. Suicide run. Gone. Forever and gone. Run!
A hand on her breast, squeezing and pulling and sending the contact burn of the sick, sick soul in front of her right down to the core of her being. Someone laughed, but the sound echoed in her ears.
They had failed.
Her wail of agony and anguish rang from the walls around her as she collapsed. The fall of her hair shut out the world as she clung to the floor and wept.
And wept.
> Chapter Nine
Syrus
Predominantly female, Feels, or empaths, were among the earliest of the psych abilities developed, but by no means the most common. Some only received the outside emotions. Others, rarely, could project as well.
-“History of the Sai: A Scientific Overview”
Women and children. Push came to shove, Syrus always found himself stuck in a room full of terrified women and children. Every base the Fleet took, noncombatants squirreled themselves away in the vain hope of survival. He could have told them that even if you lived through a Fleet assault, you didn’t actually survive. Not that any of them would listen.
A base like this had hundreds of nooks and crannies an adult could hide in. Hundreds more where only a child would fit. Some had life support separate from the rest of the base. Some just had a tank of air and a bucket to shit in. No matter the size or resources, each little rat hole was a place where people breathed shallow and prayed to their Ancestors for deliverance that would never come. The smart ones killed themselves instead. They knew the Ancestors would do fuck all to help.
What it boiled down to was that every time the Fleet gassed a base with concentrated Seed, sweeps crews had to go in while the place was still toxic and look for signs of life. No innocks against the Seed. No leniency from the invaders.
The men were shot on sight. The male children were rounded up and sent to the Training ships, so they could help take over and colonize other systems and bases in the future. Any female past puberty got slapped with a set of grav-shackles and sent off to one of the Breeder ships at the back of the Fleet. There was a reason these fucks had that rule about Challenging each other while on Campaign. They’d all be so busy stabbing each other in the dick over the newest piece of ass, they’d never make it past the first trading post in a system.
Nobody was likely to fight over the woman on the table next to him. His nerves already felt like they’d been doused in acid, what with all the fear in the room. It drove him fucking nuts, but it was a comforting sort of nuts. A way to keep from being infected by that easiest of diseases to succumb to.
Rage.
The woman on the table wasn’t afraid. She was pissed as fuck. And thanks to Fleet custom, he had to keep his helmet off so the fresh meat knew the face of her oppressor.
He would’ve fucking killed her if it didn’t mean he’d have to explain his reasoning. That he hadn’t lost his temper for no reason anyone could see. Well, he could just keep on killing people once he offed the woman. Then he wouldn’t have to justify anything, and all the fear and rage around him would be gone. He’d finally be alone in his head. And Quinn would be proud to see his outFleet warlord becoming more and more like the Fleet born.
Syrus sighed and rubbed his nose. Habit. That was his problem. A lifetime of hiding was hard to break. That and the fact that wearing a sai-blocking bucket on his head night and day would only give people a reason to wonder what he had to hide.
The woman on the table made a muffled snarling noise and he frowned at her. “You wouldn’t be in this position if you hadn’t decided to stick foreign objects up your cunt.”
She glared at him.
He raised an eyebrow, then stepped down to the foot of the table. “Status,” he asked Iira.
“This would be easier, milord, if you had let me sedate her.” The med-tech didn’t look at him. She had forceps and a probe in either hand and was poking around like, well, like a med-tech looking for something in someone’s innards. “Or at least approve power to this sector so I can use imaging to find out how far up this thing is.”
Syrus snorted. “You going to sit there and gripe or you gonna get that dick-eating thing out of her sometime this week?”
The look Iira gave him was pure venom. A fresh flare of anger broiled his face as the captive woman jerked against the straps and shackles that held her to the table. Iira muttered something to the effect of “outFleet cunt” and went back to prodding at the woman’s, well . . . cunt.
Syrus decided to leave her to it. The prisoner was trussed up like a bird for roasting. The other captives were getting a lesson in what not to do where the Fleet was concerned, and he didn’t know the first thing about pulling inorganic objects out of a vagina. For all he knew, she’d had it fused to her muscles before the Fleet dug her out of that little cupboard.
“Milord?”
He looked around to see a com-tech at his elbow, slate in either hand.
“Give,” he said.
She handed him one of the slates, then held the other where he could see the display. “Milord, preliminary reports are in.”
He looked. The last few safe holds in the base had been found, but the people in them had either killed themselves or suffocated before the Fleet troops could crack things open. Standard lifeform scans had been done, just to rule out anyone hiding in a mechanical maintenance room or the ductwork. He shook his head and kept reading. That last was just stupid. But protocol was protocol, and it had been around longer than he’d been alive.
Syrus gave the slate in his hand a thumbprint for verification and reached for the other one. “Warlord Kizen checked in yet?” he asked the tech as charts and data readouts spun on the new slate.
“His second sends his compliments, sir. Three quarters of their Branch has made it through the Barbican. They are on their way. He says they have sent strike-sats out to block the in-system communications relays.”
“Tell him to pull them back. We’ve already got people on it.” Which was guaranteed to piss Kizen off even more—but wasting people on a job already done was just as smart as running out ahead of his command and trying to take over the Trunk of the Fleet without backup. Man deserved it. Same as he deserved to park his ass in the Barbican Customs base while he waited for the rest of his ships. Bastard.
“The girls still in the market?” He gave the screen another thumbprint and brought up the next set of numbers. Lines crawled and Kuchen script flew across the slate.
The tech curled her lip, but she nodded. “Letten Uytalaa has them well contained, milord.”
The hiss-pop of scorn up told him all he needed to know about the tech’s opinion of that little arrangement. Syrus took a tighter grip on the slate to keep from shaking his hand out and grinned down at the woman. “You married . . .?”
“Tech-Ataoch Anaoa,” she said stiffly.
The numbers on his slate settled. Some red. Some green. A few dark orange. He frowned. “Me neither.” He pinched and dragged at the numbers. “But something I’ve noticed about women is that they don’t like wearing rags. I destroy a fuck-ton of their clothes. If I didn’t let them out every so often to go ‘shopping,’ they might actually try to murder me in my sleep.” He looked up at the frowning tech. “Be a shame to have to kill them when I can just—” He stopped as the slate dinged at him. “We got a system map yet?”
“Partial, milord.”
The woman on the table thrashed again and cried out. Syrus stiffened and snarled as fear and anger lashed at him. The tech next to him gave off her own small burst of terror. She tapped faster on the surface of the slate. “Got it,” she breathed.
Syrus took it from her, compared the readout to the one full of numbers, and growled. “Where the fuck are those ships going?”
“I don’t know, milord,” the tech replied. “Survey drones didn’t—”
Grief came from everywhere and nowhere at once. Just like a gut wound, death wasn’t instantaneous. But it was coming, sure as could be. Afte
r a few heartbeats, Syrus wished it would hurry up and finish him off. He wanted to grab a blade and do the job himself, if only he could make his hands move. Just get rid of that unending agony.
If it weren’t for the fact that half the room had collapsed in the same moment, he would have been done hiding. Syrus caught himself on the edge of the table and looked around. The tech was on the floor by his feet, tearing at her hair and keening like a dying animal. The soldiers in full armor hadn’t been hit as bad. Not that they weren’t doubled over, clutching at their chests, but neither were they crying and aiming weapons at their heads.
A whimper at his elbow cut through the emotional overload. The woman on the table writhed against her bonds, gulping out sobs as tears streamed down her face. He wasn’t worried about her. She could swallow her tongue for all he cared.
Iira on the other hand. She had drawn the little gun she kept strapped to her hip when she had to go off ship. And she had the barrel right up under her chin.
“It’s all wrong,” she whispered when she saw him looking at her. “I gave it up. Gave it all up. Should have never given it up. What have we become? How could we have fallen so far? I’ll never—” She choked and wobbled. How could someone shake that hard and not be a piece of machinery?
“I’ll never be enough. Never be able to help him fix it. Useless! Worthless! Don’t need med-techs. It’s all about strength, don’t you see? I just—I can’t!” She choked again, gulped, and put her finger to the trigger.
Syrus leaned over the captive woman’s leg and slapped the gun out of Iira’s hands.
“My thanks, milord.”
A pinpoint of calm in the ocean of heartrending horror. Syrus turned his head to see Quinn, face as impassive as ever.
What the fuck?
“The fuck?” When you can’t come up with anything coherent, turn off the brain-mouth filter.
“Oona has closed off the bridge. They are safe there. But she reports that . . . something . . . has caused every unarmored person still in the ship—and about half of the base—to collapse. And many of the armored as well. If we do not find the cause—”
