by K. Gorman
After a minute, the group of generals appeared to ripple, with Kozawa taking Crane aside for a second chat, and Nomiki broke away. She gave a small, cheerful wave as she approached. Looking at her face, one wouldn’t have known that she’d stayed up all night—even Brindon was showing some signs of wear, and all four of them cradled coffee packets in their hands—but that was just another facet of Nomiki’s ability at work.
Karin blinked, suppressing the urge to yawn. Yeah. Sometimes, her sister just got all the gifts.
“So,” Nomiki said, making a gesture toward the three of them. “You made it.”
“Was that in question?” Karin asked.
“Not really, but it’s nice to see you, anyway.” She shot her a broad grin.
“Well, it’s nice to see no one’s declared war while I was en route.” Karin glanced to the window, where the Alliance ship had grown larger in the window. “What’s the deal?”
“They pretty much agreed to all of our terms, though they changed a few—” Nomiki made a flapping gesture with her fingers. “Just minor details like location and transit allowances and such. We’re going to transfer some of their Lost over for you to heal, then send them back. Kind of a good faith thing. They’re still not telling about whatever’s happening on Nova, but I think they’ll start once you do your thing. After that… well, I guess we’ll need to find somewhere with more space for them.”
Karin’s stomach did a small flip. “I’m not going over there, am I?”
The ship still wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but Fallon’s scanners had it in full view, and a three-dimensional model was visible on a nearby screen. The familiar, streamlined behemoth outline of Alliance cruisers gave her a sick feeling in the back of her throat.
“Ten hells, no.” Nomiki almost choked on herself. “That would be blindingly stupid. No. They can bring their shit over here for us to clean up, and we’re going to keep an eye on everything.” She shook her head, fumbling for the appropriate swear. “Clio, I am not letting you go anywhere.”
Karin rolled her shoulders and breathed out a slow breath. “Well, that’s good, then. It’ll be nice to help them now that they aren’t trying to make me a heal slave.”
Nomiki gave her a pat. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”
Behind her, the generals and the rest of their entourage—a mix of officers and technicians—turned to face a new screen that flickered into place in front of the bridge’s secondary balcony. A small tone rang out, and a second later, a face appeared, staring down at the group with steel-gray eyes. The sharp white of an Alliance high command uniform beamed out like a beacon from the bottom of the screen. He had a broad, squarish face, and a skin tone that, combined with the coarse silver-gray hair that had been cut close to his scalp, suggested some amount of African lineage in his past.
He looked familiar, but Karin couldn’t place him.
“Commander Arren,” Nomiki filled in helpfully. “We got the big guns involved.”
“Good morning, Generals Brindon, Kozawa.” He nodded to them, and Karin presumed that, despite all four generals standing there, they were the only two he could see. Ramesh and Crane hunched close to the end of the switchboard, both facing the screen but leaning into each other and having a low conversation. “It’s good to see your faces again so soon. We’re about five minutes out.”
“Yes,” Brindon said. “We know. We’re opening the forward hangar for your shuttle. After you dock, a security team will check your ship and crew. Then we can unload and get down to business.”
Hearing her words, Karin frowned—what business? She still had only a minor idea of what was going on. Everything had happened so fast, and except for Nomiki, the people who she’d spoken to did not have the clearance to fill her in.
Seeing her face, Nomiki gave her another pat, which she turned into a small pointing gesture before breaking off.
Karin watched her go, resisting the urge to raise her eyebrows.
Guess I’ll find out later, when I’m needed.
At least, she knew some of it. She would be healing some Lost. She would not be going to the Alliance. Fallon would oversee everything with an iron comb.
“Understandable, of course, but will you insist on a security sweep for every boatload we send over?”
“Yes, we will. And I’m sure you understand that, as well.”
“Yes, yes. Protocol.” He made a small, discontented waving motion with his hand—Fallon was infamous for sticking to its protocol in all situations, which was what made it both very bureaucratic and very effective. The empire never slacked on operations. “I’ve been instructed to continue negotiations on the possibility of bringing one of your ships above Nova to start healing our people.”
Even from her distance, Karin caught Brindon’s eyebrow twitch.
“Perhaps we’d consider it if you told us what in Sol’s name is going on over there? As you know, we’ve heard some… odd reports.”
Ah, yes. She remembered Nomiki’s words about the strange energy—what was going on over there? Some weird effect of being closer to the suns? If that were the case, she imagined Fallon would have ruled that out, so it must be something really strange.
“Nothing has happened that Alliance can’t handle,” Arren said, his voice a smooth rumble.
“In which case, the answer is no, we can’t put a Fallon ship in Novan orbit. If you’d like to heal your people, you’ll have to bring them to us.”
“That would leave us vulnerable, planet-side.”
“Vulnerable to whom?” Brindon asked. “From what I recall, you considered us to be your number one enemy, and we are currently under negotiations. Has something new occurred?”
“Just protocol. You understand.” The man on the screen gave Brindon a thin smile and continued, “As it happens, Nova, Belenus, and Enlil are all already arranging transport for the victims through civilian circuits.”
He went on, but Karin drew back—politics. She wanted nothing to do with it, and made to lean back into her position on the railing when movement from the main entrance caught her attention. Saia entered the bridge with some kind of weird avionics arm-terminal in his hand and began scanning the crowd, his brows furrowed to a point.
She resisted the urge to swear when he caught her eye, but she did grit her teeth when he started her way.
Shit, shit, shit, shit. There was no place to hide, and right now was not the moment to make a scene, and the worst thing about it—the thing that made her feel really petty and disgusted with herself—was that it wasn’t her inability to help him that made her cringe at the thought of speaking to him; it was the act of telling him no herself.
When it came to that kind of weird, personal confrontation, she’d do more than cross the street to avoid it—she’d run around the entire damn block and hide in the bushes.
Maybe there was something she could do. Surely, there must be safeguards in place. If she brought it up with Brindon that some of her people were about to be evicted by what she could only assume were shit-tier landlords, she imagined the general would do something about it. Saia couldn’t be the only one affected, and instability at home created instability in the workforce—which was something that Fallon could not afford. Especially right now.
She extracted himself as he came close, shifting behind Marc’s back to meet Saia’s approach and keeping her voice low as she spoke so that few of his colleagues would overhear. “Look, Saia, I’m sure there’s something we can do about your family. I—”
She faltered, not expecting the stony, rigid look that met her gaze. There was a different kind of pain in his expression, as if he’d found a solution and was determined to sacrifice himself for it—Clio, are they firing him?
“No. They’re right. I just came you to thank you for listening to me, and to apologize.”
With a straight back and a grim expression—the quintessential soldier—he held out his hand for her to shake.
She gave him a sad smile as
she took it, still unsure. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The rawness to the tone felt off, somehow. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but he sounded like a man on death row—which didn’t jive with what she knew of military punishments. But this was his family they were talking about, and she didn’t know the whole situation. Maybe it was even more serious than she’d thought. Maybe…
She frowned as his grip tightened on her hand. With his other arm, he brought up the device he’d been carrying.
“What are you—” she started.
Her words turned into a surprised squeak as he lunged.
She flinched back as the device clicked into place on her forearm and her light shot up between them like a wave—a defensive reaction she rarely saw.
With a quick grabbing strike, Marc hauled Saia off her and shoved him across the floor. One of her escort guards secured him within a second, a blaster aimed at his head.
On her wrist, the device began to hum. Her eyes widened, tracing its components—it looked like a bunch of circuits, maybe a transmitter of some sort—before someone bumped into her from the back.
Energy seemed to draw toward it. She could feel it in a similar way she could feel the lights in the room, an abstract part of her gift affecting her awareness. As it ramped up to a crescendo, the whine becoming audible even to those around her, Marc seized her arm and ripped at it with his fingers, trying to get it off. Across the room, Nomiki had spun and sprinted, already halfway across the distance.
But, as the energy peaked and she felt a shock course through her, none of that mattered. The room began to fade out. She gasped, ripping at the air, fighting against the fade.
The last thing she felt before everything went white was Marc’s hands on her arm, trying to get the device off.
Chapter 9
The world spun. For a second, she came free of herself, as if time had paused mid-skip and lay splayed out around her. Lights flashed. Children yelled. Guns. The smell of flowers and smoke on the wind.
Then it vanished. She landed hard on her feet, slamming into a bifurcated metal floor in a manner that was both sudden and awkward as gravity kicked in again. A second later, Marc half-fell on her. They stumbled together, his hands still on her wrist, nearly tripping as her feet hit a lip in the metal below.
Well… that hadn’t been there before. Where were they?
They’d been deposited into what looked like a glass cylinder—and for a second, she had a flashback to the suspension tanks they’d found in Dr. Sasha’s pocket dimension, except this one was about three times the size, ran from the floor to the ceiling, and was not filled with stasis fluid. Which was a good thing, because then, she and Marc would have been lost and alone and submerged in greenish goop instead of just being lost and alone.
“Okay.” Her voice shook as she looked around. Beyond the round glass walls, the room was a simple rectangle. Metal walls, white concrete floor, a closed, thick-looking door with a generic key panel next to it—none familiar. “You’re seeing this, too, right?”
“Yep. I’m seeing this.” Marc had stopped fidgeting with the device on her arm. His hands still encircled her wrist, but he’d turned his attention to their enclosure with a grim look—a contrast to the panic that was swelling inside her lungs.
As her hands began to shake, she forced herself to take a quick breath. Two tube lights suspended from the ceiling, but most of the illumination came from the photon ring that wrapped around the base of the cylinder they were in. Her foot found another lip in the metal beneath her, and she looked down. Concentric rings moved out from the base’s center, expanding to its edge in segments. As she caught sight of numerous scratches around three of them, she connected them to the glass that contained them, finding it attached to a similar lip.
A cage adjustable for size.
“What the fuck?”
More than her hands were shaking now. Her light had come into play, as well, but she shoved it back inside her skin and tried to ignore the tingle as its energy zinged through her.
Another step back stubbed her heel into another lip, but this time, she looked up instead of down. The cage had matching rings on its ceiling, and its metal had the kind of matte finish that made her think of the non-stick surface on a new cooking pan—and another thing. She frowned at the lens inset into the ceiling at the exact center of the device.
A camera? No, it seemed different.
Her jaw slackened as another idea came to her, shock racing through her. “Marc, does the Alliance have transporter technology?”
The tech was a common theme throughout many of the netdramas they watched, but she’d thought it relegated to the distinct fictional side of the shows. She’d never even considered that someone could actually make one—and especially for that someone to be the Alliance. Unless it wasn’t them who’d taken her.
Hells, had Seirlin stepped up its game? Or perhaps another weird, shadowy research organization? Or—
On the wall, the security panel flashed green. A half-second later, a squadron of Alliance troops poured through the door, answering her questions for her. She straightened as they surrounded the container, her face slipping back into a tense, neutral expression that mirrored Marc’s steely frown.
As the movement of troops thinned from the door—she estimated twenty inside the room—another soldier walked in on their tail, the bright white of his high command uniform catching her attention among the blues and grays that crowded the room. The group shifted to let him through. He stopped just short of the glass, the glow from the light bands at the base of the device underlighting his features.
Karin didn’t recognize him. As far as Alliance military went, she recognized airplanes and spacecraft rather than people. Nomiki would have known him, but Karin had made it a point to not keep track of the military and to, in fact, avoid them at all costs—something which had worked well for her before, but not so much now.
He was younger than she’d expected of his rank, in his late twenties if she’d have to guess, with features so East Asian that they reminded her about Soo-jin’s comments on ethnopurity. His black hair was cut short and kept in a more-styled version of the typical military cuts she saw, which was an excess that made her guess he was from Nova, where beauty and fashion had a much larger share of the population’s thoughts than on some of the other planets.
“Welcome back, Miss Makos.”
His gaze trailed from her over to where Marc stood. He had a smooth voice, low and confident, and it made her want to rip his throat out. It was an urge more familiar to her sister rather than to her, but the way the corners of his mouth twitched back and his dark, underlit eyes narrowed when they looked at Marc—as if he were an insect—brought out a more violent tendency.
“And friend,” he added.
“Boyfriend,” Karin corrected him, her own lips curling back, all too aware of Marc’s vulnerability in this situation. There might be a piece of glass separating them from the guns, but she suspected that he had not been invited to this kidnapping, which made him expendable to them. “So if you’re going to negotiate with me, I’d recommend that you don’t harm him.”
Beyond her crazy transporter theory, which was beginning to look less and less crazy as the minutes ticked on, she still had no idea where they were or how they’d gotten there—but the plethora of Alliance soldiers, the appearance of an Alliance high command officer, and the complete lack of anything Fallon-related gave her a clear idea of just how far the table had flipped on her. And the man knew it, too.
His lips twitched again. She wanted to smack him.
“Negotiate?” He made a slow, quiet gesture to the men and women surrounding them. “Why would we need to negotiate? You’re a prisoner. You will do what we say.”
“And it’s that kind of attitude that led to the Caishen incident and the Fallon cruiser Agni blowing up all your shit,” she said.
His eyes narrowed.
“You actively resisted us.”
“And you actively enslaved me with no regard to my health, putting both my life and the lives of your people in danger,” she replied back. “And my resistance was successful, thank you very much.”
He let the quiet fill in the gap. She noticed he was looking at her now, rather than Marc, giving her a cool, assessing stare. She stared right on back, channeling as much of her inner Nomiki as she could.
“You know,” she continued. “Had you people asked instead of trying to capture and enslave me, I would have been happy to work on your side. I even tried to do that.”
“An oversight in the chain of command,” he said. “Things were chaotic, back then. The people responsible have been dealt with.”
The tone of his voice suggested there was a lot he wasn’t saying, and she suddenly had many different thoughts popping into her head—unlike Fallon, the Alliance didn’t have the benefit of her powers to heal their leaders. They would have had to make do, find replacements. Improvise. Which, from what she’d heard, meant a lot of martial law and a lot of swift justice.
When she got out of here, she decided she’d find out just what had happened to Hopper, the man whose betrayal had begun the Caishen incident.
The crowd behind the man rippled again, and an attendant—a man dressed in the same uniform as everyone else but bearing no arms—ran up to the officer’s side. He bent down as the attendant whispered a message into his ear, his eyebrows drawing down.
The frown vanished when he straightened, a kind of chilled, falsely-pleasant mask settling into place as he directed his gaze back to Karin and gave her a smile.
“We’ll have to continue this conversation later.” As he turned to leave, he jerked his head toward the soldiers that surrounded them, all of whom had been quiet so far. “Take her to her cell.”
*
“Well, fuck us,” she said as the door closed behind them.
They’d been led to a small room similar to the last one, with metal-lined walls and a single door in the front wall. They’d just replaced the weird device—she still didn’t want to call it a transporter because the idea just seemed impossible—with a bed, a small counterspace with a sink and cupboards, a toilet, and a garbage pail. Her gaze went first to the vent in the corner, which looked far too small to escape through, to the toilet below it. Its solid white pre-fab paintjob made it like a beacon amidst the room’s dark chrome and slate-gray color scheme.
