by T J Mott
Slowly, the imagery began to still itself, becoming less fantastical, more mundane, yet just as incomprehensible. All color began to melt away, fading into a near-monochromatic palette.
He tried to sit up. He thought he felt his body move, yet at first he wasn’t sure if he was successful because nothing in his vision moved. Shouldn’t that dark vertical line have changed place, twisted around as he rotated his torso upwards?
Then, slowly, lazily, everything around him swirled incoherently. Except for the things that didn’t swirl. They were fixed in place, or maybe nonexistent. He didn’t know what that meant.
He felt around with his hands, and realized by touch that he had succeeded in sitting up, and was now seated on the edge of something. He turned his head to look around, and a few moments later his visual field warped around him in lazy, unreal compliance, stirring in a pattern that didn’t really seem to match the movement he’d thought he’d made.
Gray walls. Or maybe just gray.
Yes, he decided after a moment. The gray was walls. Gray on its own wouldn’t make sense. Color couldn’t exist on its own. It had to be on something. Right?
“You are the same Thaddeus Marcell that High Prince Saar, and many others, have a bounty on?”
The voice brought him a bit closer to reality. It didn’t quite seem like a dream, he thought. It sounded like someone talking to him. Another presence, not one within his own imagination. “Yes,” he answered, and he thought his mind cleared up more as he tried to pick out the voice and separate it from his own inner thoughts. Or maybe it was an illusion?
A chuckle. “Did you once kill an entire continent on Tor by dropping a damaged antimatter reactor on it?”
Thad groaned, hoping he wasn’t starting to dream about that again. “Wasn’t my fault,” he stammered. “Bad ship. Should never been in combat. Saar’s mistake.”
His visual field continued to swirl around him. Almost everything was gray, but there were blurry streaks and blobs of different gray within. They didn’t all move in the same direction, nor was he sure if they were even moving at all. And there was something very bright above him. A painful source of light which pierced through the grayness. He vaguely recalled his frigate being attacked, but the memory seemed so far away, so…fuzzy. He frowned as he considered the obscure nature of the light. Did he die, and was this his judgment?
“Wouldn’t listen. Said it was his best ship, ignored me. I tell ya, not my fault.”
“I don’t care about that at all.” Another chuckle.
“Really?” Thaddeus’ mind was still clawing its way towards alertness. Gone was the senseless, unconscious state of confusion he often felt while dreaming, the kind he was not aware of during the dream itself but could easily remember upon waking up and reflecting upon his dreams. Now he was alert enough to consciously understand that he was very confused, that something was very wrong, but he just didn’t have the awareness to figure out what yet.
The voice laughed. “I just needed to confirm your identity. You’re worth a lot of money to a lot of different people.”
“I…what?” Thad looked up. He realized that the brightness above him was a light panel, embedded in the ceiling and illuminating everything.
He looked around again, more slowly this time, trying to pick out details through his distorted sense of vision. “I’m not dead…” he announced to the room. “I’m drugged.”
The voice laughed again, sounding amused, and ominous. “Ah, there it is, that legendary Marcell cleverness. Welcome to my ship. You’re in my brig. You’re very lucky, too. And your luck is my luck.”
Through squinted eyes, Thad thought he perceived a small cell-like room. It was mostly gray. He was sitting on a cot. But that was about all he could pick out through the hazy, blurred sensations which still surrounded his perception.
His mind continued on its journey towards consciousness, passing through another layer of fog, and suddenly he realized his sense of unease at answering the earlier questions. Normally he had a mental stockpile of aliases and cover stories, but they’d drugged him and confirmed his identity well before he was aware enough to be on his guard.
“My ship—” he started to say, but caught himself before going too far, though it was likely too late for that, he sadly realized.
“Yes, your ship,” the voice said. “I came and picked through the wreckage, wanted to see what kind of strange things the notorious pirate, treasure-hunter, and Earth-freak Thaddeus Marcell keeps aboard his starship. You can’t imagine how surprised I was to find you, still alive, trapped inside a frozen inter-section passageway that was completely separated from all the other debris, barely pressurized. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
A new thought formed, precipitating from deep within his confused mind and emerging painfully into his consciousness. A deep, cold pit suddenly formed in his chest, as if he’d just been stabbed through the heart by an icicle, and part of him longed to run from reality and return to the relative bliss of confusion he’d been in just moments before. “Adelia?” His voice was a weak, pitchy croak. “Is she okay?”
“Was she the woman we found you with? Was she important to you?”
He nodded, and immediately wished he hadn’t as the motion set everything around him to swirling again. “Yeah,” he managed to say. His mouth was now very dry and the cold in his chest was spreading everywhere.
“She died. Hypoxia.” Thad thought he sensed schadenfreude in the slight chuckle that followed. “And you weren’t far behind. Interestingly enough, you might have just set a new record for the lowest air pressure a human has survived in. I’ll have my men research it further. It could be an amusing footnote to place at the end of your life record.”
Thad leaned forward. Using only his sense of touch, since he didn’t trust his eyes yet, he placed his head in his hands and rested his elbows upon his knees. “No,” he tried to scream, though it came out as a weak whisper instead. “No…”
“Your ship was quite a mess. I still can’t believe my fortune at finding you alive. Everyone believes you’re dead…which is good for me. Your live bounty was so high, we all knew there’d be another set of battles once someone picked you up.” The voice clicked its tongue disapprovingly. “Bounty hunters can be so foolish and greedy. Especially the amateurs. They all vied for position, knowing it would be a winner-take-all, and that the winner would then get picked off by the losers. It would have been a bloodbath. Sutton tried to settle for your dead bounty instead. Yet here I am, with you in my possession. Alive, and completely unknown by anyone outside my ship.”
Thad ignored the voice, repeating one word, the word that was resonating painfully, endlessly within his still-drugged mind. “Adelia…”
Something clicked, maybe an intercom channel being terminated? The voice sounded like it was in the room, but Thaddeus didn’t think he saw a person anywhere.
He laid back down on the cot and closed his eyes. His vision swirled again, his drugged brain unable to correctly interpret the motion, and continued to swirl for several seconds. “No. Adelia…” he whimpered to himself, and he cried himself back into a hazy, drugged semi-conscious state.
Chapter 19
“I don’t understand why the door is locked!” she shouted angrily as she tried to open the door yet again. “If we’re supposed to be passengers, why lock us up!” Lieutenant Poulsen was an untameable bundle of anxiety, anger, and pent-up energy, and she was actually starting to get on Captain Reynolds’ nerves.
He sighed. He felt just as trapped, but at his age he couldn’t waste the energy required to pace the suite and test every door, cabinet, computer terminal, access panel, and power socket every few minutes. At one point she’d even taken to searching for loose deck plates in the flooring, with no success. And when the main door still didn’t open, she groaned loudly and kicked it this time, a full-power kick that probably hurt her more than the door. But if it caused her any pain, she didn’t show it.
“The captain just picked up a stray lifepod after a devastating battle against a notorious mercenary. Even if he does make good on his promise to drop us off at his next stop, it’s understandable that he doesn’t want us roaming his ship.” Reynolds frowned as he watched her yank forcefully at the door’s handle again, cursing and grunting with each effort. “And throwing a tantrum doesn’t help us at all.”
She glowered at him. “No, but it sure feels good. And I don’t believe Captain Dontun! Something about him is just slimy.”
“There are no bounties I know of against Marcell’s crew,” he said. “They’re only against the Admiral himself. Dontun has absolutely no reason to hold us.”
“He could sell us into slavery,” said Poulsen. “Slavery’s what got us into all this in the first place. Damn that Marcell!”
Reynolds laughed. “We’re hardly slave material, Lieutenant.”
She finally sat down, for the first time in an hour, taking up a chair in the suite’s living space. She leaned forward and glowered at him again. “Do you have any idea what being a slave means for a woman?”
He raised an eyebrow. “To be fair, Poulsen…you’re a very attractive woman. But you’re what, probably a hundred ninety centimeters tall? Strong, athletic, with hand-to-hand combat skills? And always angry?” He shook his head. “You’re not quite what most men have in mind when shopping around for sex slaves. And no handler could control you, you’d be a liability.
“And me, well, I’m just an old man rapidly approaching the end of my life.” He leaned back into his seat. “Truthfully, with our experience, we’re more likely to get hired than sold.”
“And is that something you’d do?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, reflecting on his career with Marcell’s organization, and the Keide Defense Force before that, and shook his head. “No. I’m already well past retirement age. Perhaps it’s time I retire for real. Once I get things in order, I should move back to the Keide Sector and start acting like a real grandfather.”
Her expression softened slightly. At least for her it passed for a soft expression. “Dammit,” she said. “We were so close to escape…I just can’t believe Green…that bastard. I should have seen it coming, too. He said things that worried me. I didn’t think he meant it though. I thought it was just talk, more of that stupid fake tough badassery some idiots do when they’re trying to impress a woman.”
“What’s already done is already done. Don’t kick yourself over it. You can’t change anything and you’ll just make yourself miserable. Besides…Green was fairly new to the fleet. He was isolated and hard to read, the type that is very hard to accurately predict.”
Reynolds felt a smile stretch across his face. “Speaking of hard to accurately predict,” he said, “that hyperspace maneuver you wanted to try was commendable. Unorthodox, unexpected, and groundbreaking. If it had worked, I’d dare call it Marcellian.”
“Please don’t compare me to that crazy drunk fool!” she protested. “That dead crazy drunk fool,” she added, and Reynolds thought he actually detected a touch of sorrow in her voice.
Upon retrieving the lifepod Reynolds and Poulsen had shared, Captain Dontun had informed them that they were the only survivors. The Caracal’s course when she lost power was set to skim the carbon star’s outer atmosphere, and only one lifepod had survived the insane point-six c journey to the other side. At that speed, the pod had passed through in just a couple seconds, but the heat from the star and the compressive heating from the brief reentry period had warmed up the pod’s interior to the point that they were certain they’d burn to death. Yet somehow they survived, and the battered, scorched lifepod cooled off, waiting to be discovered and taken aboard by an old retired starship captain who, out of sheer boredom, had decided to follow and watch the search for the Caracal as it ran from Waverly.
“Tell me about the Hyberian Raiders,” Reynolds finally decided to ask.
Poulsen’s reaction was strong, and immediate, almost as if by unconscious reflex. Her back instantly stiffened up straight as a board, her fists clenched, and her eyes shot open in shock. She quickly recovered and glowered at him. She met his gaze, held it for an uncomfortable number of seconds, glaring laser beams at him. Finally she shook her head, just once, the movement so slight he almost didn’t catch it.
And then she stood up and once again began to examine every nook and cranny in their locked suite with unnecessary violence.
***
Something slammed loudly, a sharp, overwhelming sound that washed over his consciousness, and Thad startled to sudden wakefulness. An intense burst of adrenaline flooded through him and he sat up quickly, his eyes wide open, heart racing, looking to and fro for the disturbance that threatened him. A few seconds later his mind caught up to the action and he was aware enough to take in his surroundings.
He was sitting on a cot in a prison cell of some kind. It was small, no more than three meters by three meters. There was the cot, a toilet, a sink, and an unenclosed shower head, with a small drain in the center of the room. A painfully-bright, bluish-white light emanated from a source in the ceiling. On the wall to the left of him was a heavy door, and on the floor in front of that was a plastic tray of bland-looking food and a cup of water.
Someone must have just slammed the door shut after placing the tray there.
Now his memories rushed in. Rescuing Adelia. Green’s sudden betrayal. The destruction of the Caracal. Being trapped in a floating piece of debris with Adelia, resigned to death. Being drugged and interrogated. Being told that Adelia did not survive.
With that last memory, he felt that cold pit reform in his heart, and his stomach became instantly queasy. A few tears formed in his eyes so rapidly that it surprised him.
I found her. And she’s gone. And she was my clue to Earth. Now it’s all gone. All of it. Everything.
Her lovely face hovered before him in his imagination. But she was frightened and pale, sitting next to him in the Command Box as she faced her imminent death. A death that came far too soon after finally being rescued from the horrors of slavery.
Nausea violently overtook him. He staggered to the toilet, barely crossing the short distance in time, and retched into it.
He remembered their brief time aboard the Caracal. He knew she’d felt tortured by her time in slavery. The way she’d collapsed in that bunkroom, the few things she said when she allowed herself to open up to him, still disturbed him greatly. What things would she have revealed had they been together longer? He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the pain she must have carried.
He retched again. I’m so sorry. Rest in peace, Adelia. Your pain is gone.
“Ah, this looks to be the start of a good morning,” said a voice from a hidden speaker somewhere in the room. It was the same fairly high-pitched voice as before, and now that he was no longer drugged he thought the man sounded elderly.
“Go to hell.” Thad’s voice was a low, throaty growl, and he tasted bile as he spoke.
“Ah, cheery today, aren’t we?” The voice sounded more amused than insulted.
“You would be too, if you were about to be handed over to an egomaniac like Saar.” He spat in the toilet a couple times, crawled back to the cot, and laid down.
“I’m not giving you to Saar,” the voice said.
Thaddeus frowned in confusion. Saar’s bounty was by far the highest—that he knew of. Had something changed? “What?”
“Well, not necessarily. No, I’ve got something better in mind. More entertaining, and more profitable.”
The voice paused, perhaps expecting Thad to inquire. He stayed silent though. He did not feel like indulging his captor.
“Quite chatty today too, I see. Well…I did some querying, and there are a lot of people who want you. Some want you dead. Some want far worse. And many of them are just as wealthy as High Prince Saar. So, I realized that I am sitting on the business opportunity of a lifetime!” The voice laughed. The man behind it was clearly pleas
ed with himself.
“Of course, you might still end up in Saar’s possession, but that remains to be seen. I’ve organized an auction for your life, and I’ve invited the entire galaxy!”
“Lovely.” Thad’s eyes scanned the room, looking for something, anything, that could help him escape.
“Yes, it really is. High Prince Saar will be there too, and since his bounty is currently the highest, that will be the starting bid. This will be very interesting, to see how badly he—and others—want you. And as the broker of all this, I will be very wealthy once it’s all over.”
“Saar can’t be trusted. He might just kill you and take me.”
“Not likely. I’ve taken plenty of precautions. Most importantly, I even convinced the Xionne Star Kingdom to supply an entire peacekeeping fleet for the auction site! For a cut of the final proceeds, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Enjoy your meal! You look like you need it after that last purge. At the very least it should refuel you for the next one. And have a toast in honor of my incoming great wealth while you’re at it! After all, you’re the one who made it all possible!”
“Go to hell.”
The hidden speaker clicked as it turned off, leaving Thaddeus alone with his thoughts. There was nothing he could do, and he felt consumed by utter hopelessness.
***
