by Lauren Esker
Lyr uncurled from his protective clench around the woman. Immediately she tried to pop up and look out. "No!" he snapped, jerking her down.
She said something in her language, and he realized he'd clamped a hand on her arm and quickly let go.
"Just stay here, all right?" He stabbed a finger down at the pavement. "Hide."
Her stare was uncomprehending, and she tried to look around the vehicle again, perhaps looking for the companions she'd been protecting. Before she could put up more of a fight about it, another beam stabbed out of the sky and struck Tamir's ship. The small ship's shields shimmered into visibility for a moment, an opalescent gleam turning a brilliant, shivering violet before the beam winked out again. The woman gasped and clutched at Lyr.
Can't take another of those, Lyr thought. And if that ship goes, we're stuck here and pinned down, at least 'til the cruiser gets around to sending someone to pick us up.
He gently detached the woman's grip. "They're not shooting at you, understand? Stay here and you'll be safe." As safe as anyone could be in this mess.
She shook her head and grabbed at him. Somehow she seemed to have latched onto him for safety. He could have laughed at that, but instead he jerked away his arm from her attempt to touch him, suddenly hating the gentleness of her touch, the trusting way she looked at him.
Another eye-searing beam stabbed from the sky and raked across Tamir's ship. The shield failed; the ship's skin split and peeled, and the engines went up with a whoomp! that shook the ground. The beam winked out again, leaving Lyr's vision dazzled with afterimages and the troop transport a smoking wreck.
So much for their ride home.
This time, he was able to trace the angle of the beam to see what was shooting at them. Like the smaller ships, the pirate mothership was running dark; little of it could be seen except for a great black shape blotting the stars. But it was big. Not as huge as the Galateans' orbital battle cruiser, but built along similar lines. There could be an entire complement of chaser-class ships in its spacious cargo bay.
They couldn't fight a ship that size, even with backup.
Well ... most of them couldn't. He might be able to.
"Stay here!" he ordered the woman, and backed it up with a mental command this time. She seemed to understand, or at least she didn't try to follow him as he bolted away from the vehicle, staying low as he darted toward the last place he'd seen Tamir and the rest of their squad.
He found that Tamir had rounded up most of them under some trees that provided limited shelter from the air—not that anything would help if one of those beams hit them. Tamir's fur was dirty and singed, but he didn't appear to be hurt. He was crouched beside a badly injured soldier, tending the other's wounds. The smell of scorched fur and flesh was strong in the air.
When Lyr dropped into a crouch beside him, Tamir looked up quickly and his face relaxed in relief. "You all right?" he asked, clapping a hand on Lyr's arm.
Lyr didn't bother dignifying that with a response. "Where's our backup? Are they coming to get us or not?"
Tamir wouldn't meet his eyes. "They're staying concealed behind the moon. They'll take on the pirate ship once it breaks orbit—"
"But they're perfectly willing to let us get slaughtered down here."
Tamir's lip curled, exposing his fangs. "Our orders are to avoid discovery. That's more important than—"
"What the hell do they think is happening down here?" Lyr stabbed a finger above them, pointing at the vast bulk of the pirate mothership. "Unless these humans are blind and stupid, that egg has already hatched."
"Think about it," Tamir shot back. "Can you imagine the consequences of a full-scale aerial battle right over a populated area? There'll be mass casualties."
"So we cower like frightened hatchlings and let them pick us off?"
Tamir shook his shaggy head. "They're not really trying. I think they're simply covering the others' escape."
Lyr looked out. Tamir was right; rather than pressing their attack, the pirates on the ground were retreating to the grassy verge of the road, along with their handful of captives.
Tamir hissed through his teeth and checked the charge on his cuffs. "We might be able to get the rest of the prisoners back before the ship can pick them up. Selvyn, Zain." He pointed to two of his men. "I want you to circle around, get behind them. If we can flank them, trap them between us—"
"It's not going to matter," Lyr interrupted.
He felt the wobble first of all in his inner ear, a sense of dizzy unease as if gravity had stopped working properly. The group of pirates at the road began to rise into the air, floating, tumbling. So did every nearby human and everything small and light that wasn't tied down.
Tamir cursed. "They're not landing at all, they're using a tractor beam!"
Set on low power, the beam wasn't moving the cars or anything else heavy (it would probably have crushed the humans had that been the case). But all the nearby humans, anyone who hadn't managed to hang onto something, were dragged up toward the ship's slowly opening cargo door. Lyr was incensed to see the woman he'd rescued among them, looking terrified and flailing at the air. He hadn't saved her just so the pirates could get their hands on her again!
Without thinking, he started to lunge forward. Tamir caught his arm, heedless of the deadly spikes that could extend with a stray thought. "What are you going to do?" Tamir demanded. "One of you against all of them? What's that going to accomplish?"
Lyr turned on him. "Then help me," he snarled. "You know I could do it." He touched a finger to the cold metal of his collar. "Without this, I could do it. You've seen what I'm capable of, as a dragon."
"What am I supposed to do about that?"
"I know you have the controller with you! Unlock my collar! Or at least turn off its energy-damper. Let me shift!"
Tamir didn't move.
"Unlock it, damn you! I can take them."
Tamir shook his head slowly. "Is it them you want to kill?" he asked softly. "Or yourself?"
Lyr cursed at him, and then tore away from him and ran into the beam. Behind him he heard Tamir shout an order at his men, followed by the pounding of boots on pavement.
He felt the beam catch him, the ground fall away beneath his feet. It was unexpectedly disconcerting, tumbling through the air with no control over it, no sense of up and down. Nothing at all like flying.
"You son of a bitch," Tamir's voice yelled at him.
Lyr looked down. Tamir seemed to be having even more of a problem than Lyr at getting himself oriented in midair. Under other circumstances it would have been hilarious watching the Galatean soldier tumbling with all his limbs flailing, but it only reminded Lyr how high up they were. If they fell from this distance, they'd be killed.
And the cargo doors above them were closing. They weren't going to make it.
"Your cuffs!" Tamir shouted up at him. "Use them to magnetize yourself to the hull—"
Anything else he was saying was lost in the clang of the doors closing, and suddenly there was no more lift.
With the speed of thought, Lyr ordered his cuffs to magnetize themselves. He hadn't even known they could do that, but it worked. He slammed into the nearest part of the hull, not the cargo bay but an external tank of some kind. He looked down the side of the ship to see that Tamir had not only managed to do the same, but had also grabbed onto an access ladder meant for working on the outside of the ship.
Show-off.
The ship vibrated against him, and wind screamed across him, tugging at his hair.
"They're headed for space," Tamir called, crawling up the ladder toward the access hatch. "Get over here, you idiot."
"Turn off my collar! If I can shift, it won't be a problem. I can survive in deep space just fine as a dragon."
Tamir just shook his head.
Cursing furiously, Lyr made his way across the tank, with only the tenuous grip of the magnetic cuffs to stop him from tumbling into the void below. Streamers of clouds traile
d across the ship's exterior. The air was growing noticeably colder. Lyr raised his personal shield again, and noticed the opalescent gleam around Tamir that meant the Galatean had done likewise.
By the time Lyr reached him, Tamir was cutting his way through the hatch with a controlled beam from the cuffs. "Basic boarding training," he said over his shoulder. "I've never done it on a ship that was actually flying before." He started to look down and then wrenched his gaze away; they were high in the air now, roads and towns dwindling to a hair-fine web of light against the world's dark nightside. "Give me a hand with this. If we're still out here when our ship starts firing on them, we're twelve kinds of screwed."
Lyr clung to the ladder beside him and started cutting the other side of the hatch. "You didn't have to be here, so shut up and quit complaining."
"It's your recklessness that got us into this."
"There is no us!" Lyr snapped.
The hatch gave way. They tumbled into the small airlock. Behind them, the ship's automatic vacuum-sealing system diverted a part of its shields to seal the leak; it glimmered brightly against the star-studded darkness outside the ship.
"They'll know they have a breach," Lyr said. "We'll have company in a minute. Do you have a plan for that?"
The inner airlock wasn't locked; it slid open on a dark hallway. "Run?" Tamir suggested.
"A prince of the Well of Stars does not—"
Tamir grabbed him by the arm and hauled him out of the airlock. "That's an order, you stubborn ass. Besides, we have to find the prisoners."
4
___
M ERI LANDED IN A BRUISED HEAP on a metal floor. There was a tremendous clang as the doors slammed shut.
She was in a large, echoing space, an enclosed hangar with girders overhead. There was an entire row of sleek, teardrop-shaped ships parked side by side, as well as a dozen or so people picking themselves up off the deck, pirates mixed with terrified, crying, and in some cases unconscious humans.
As she huddled on the deck, clinging to her clownfish purse because it was the only thing she had to hold onto, Meri reassured herself that Cora and Toni were still down there in the parking lot, hopefully okay.
She had to believe that.
It was easier than thinking about where she was.
At least the terrifying flight through the air was over. She still didn't know what had happened, though advanced alien technology was obviously involved. It had felt like being sucked up by an enormous vacuum cleaner. Gravity had restored itself again as soon as she was through the big metal doors, and she'd fallen several feet to the deck.
As the initial panic began to pass, leaving her able to think sensibly again, she started to pat herself down for anything worse than bruises. But she didn't get a chance. Rough hands seized her, dragging her to her feet.
She and the other captives were marched out of the big open space and down a hallway with scarred, filthy metal walls. So far this place was living up to every space pirate cliché in those ridiculous science fiction movies Cora used to liking watching. Meri wasn't at all a science fiction person, herself. Oh, she'd watched Star Wars when she was a kid, like everyone did. But she always preferred to keep her feet on the ground. She liked reading romances about bosses and their secretaries, and mysteries about little old lady sleuths, nothing with aliens or superheroes or wizards. She didn't even like those werewolf books that were so popular now.
It seemed completely unfair that she, of all people, had just found out that spaceships were real and was now being kidnapped by one of them.
I can't believe those stupid supermarket tabloids with their abducted-by-aliens stories were right!
The captives were dragged into a room with long worktables, cabinets, and large pieces of equipment bolted to the floor. The place looked sort of like a machine shop, although Meri didn't recognize a single thing she saw around her except some coils of cable.
Before she had a chance to do more than glance around, her captor flung her through an open door into a tiny closetlike room. The door slammed shut and Meri was about to start yelling for someone to let her out when a weird pink powder, like a cloud of talcum powder, poured down from the ceiling. She accidentally inhaled some of it and started coughing. It didn't really have a taste or a smell. As she tried to stop coughing long enough to hold her breath, more of it settled on her clothes and shoulders and hair, and then fans kicked on suddenly, whipping it up into a whirlwind around her. Just as suddenly, the blowing turned to suction and it was all sucked back up. The door opened and Meri was dragged out, still coughing, as two more captives were thrown in. She guessed she'd just gone through some kind of alien de-lousing process.
Wheezing and giving off clouds of pink powder whenever she moved, she was hauled to one of the workbenches, where another pirate picked up a gun-shaped thing off the bench. Meri sucked in her breath, inhaled more pink powder, and was coughing too hard to put up much of a fight as something cold was jammed behind her ear. There was a hissing noise, and a sharp pain spiked through her skull.
She was handed off to another pirate and a new captive dragged to take her place. It was all done with rough, fast efficiency. They tried to take the clownfish purse away from her, but Meri kicked one and bit another, and possibly at that point they decided it was some sort of strange pet and let her keep it. She got a series of bruising shots in her arm and then she was dragged out of the room, stumbling along as she tried to keep up with the longer legs of the pirate who had her arm in his callused fist.
I'm not supposed to be here! she thought dismally. I thought I wanted to go new places and see new things, but I changed my mind! I just want to move to Kansas City with Cora and Dave, and settle down in the suburbs, and maybe go out to a jazz club every now and then ...
Instead, she was flung through another door into a new room. She got a brief impression of a whole bunch of people packed into a small space, standing around or slumped hopelessly on the floor. Several of them stood up or looked around when she and the new captives were dumped among them. Then the door slammed shut and they were left alone.
Meri sat up slowly, shivering and clutching the purse to her chest. She still shed pink powder every time she moved, and her skull throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
The nearest person to her was a delicate alien woman with green skin, long fingers, and huge violet eyes. She reached a hand toward Meri and said something in a light, musical voice. At the same time, Meri thought she heard a faint shirring of whispers, just below the edge of hearing. They seemed to echo painfully through her head and stopped when the woman stopped talking, but started up again immediately when two other alien captives near her, a furry man and a woman with purple skin and pointed ears, began talking quietly between themselves.
"I'm okay," Meri said shakily, mostly to herself. "I'm okay." She brushed at her clothes, trying to get the powder off. The green woman smiled and brushed at some of it for her, saying something that sounded sympathetic. This time the echoes beneath the speech were frustratingly familiar, as if she could almost understand them, but not quite. The pain in her head spiked, and Meri grabbed behind her ear, moaning. Her fingers found a hot, painful nub. There was something under her skin. That gun-shaped thing had implanted something in her.
"What did they do to me?" she asked. "Where are they taking us?"
The woman shook her head. She had silver hair that whispered over her shoulders, so light and fine it almost seemed to float, and a silver collar around her neck. She touched behind her own ear, then touched her lips and reached toward Meri.
Meri jerked back as the woman's dry, cold fingertips brushed across her lips. "I don't understand," she said helplessly, and looked around.
The room was no bigger than her old apartment in Ohio, and there were, she guessed, probably about fifty people crammed into it. Most of them, including the green woman, wore loose gray coveralls, and most of them also had silver collars like the green lady, which Meri was starting to get a s
inking feeling were more than just a fashion accessory. There was nothing to sit or lie on, just the bare floor. The room was lit by white light strips in welded metal cages, resembling fluorescent lights but without the characteristic flicker.
Meri took a deep breath that threatened to set her coughing again and turned toward the other Earth captives who had been thrown in with her. "I'm a nurse," she said. Her voice came out shaky and weak. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Is anyone hurt? Can I help?"
"I can't wake up my wife." The speaker was a man about ten years older than Meri, with silver streaks in his hair and a cheap houndstooth sport jacket over his soft gut. "They shot her with something, and I think she hit her head when she fell."
Meri didn't try to stand up—her legs still felt too shaky to hold her. Instead she scooted on her butt over to him. There were five other human captives besides herself, two more unconscious women besides the one with the attentive husband and one woman who didn't seem to have been knocked out, but was hysterical and crying. To Meri's vast relief, Cora and the baby were not among them. She could only hope Cora was still where Meri had last seen her, safe in the car.
"See if you can calm her down," Meri told the man. One thing she'd learned about dealing with crises as a nurse was that giving people things to do helped keep them steady. When he hesitated, she patted his arm. "I've got your wife. What's her name?"
"Pam." His voice wobbled. He cleared his throat. "Pam Sears. I'm Frank. We've been married thirty-two years and I don't know what I'd do without—"
"Listen to me, Frank." She gripped his arm firmly. "She's going to be fine. Now you help me and see if you can get the young lady settled down, and I'll have a look at her, okay?"
To her relief, it seemed that she hadn't lied to him. Pam and the other unconscious captives really did seem to be basically unhurt. Their color and respiration was decent. Whatever the aliens had done to them, it didn't appear to have injured them, and one of the women was already stirring weakly, looking like she might be about to come around. Meri loosened their clothing and rolled them onto their sides in the recovery position. It was all she could really do.
