by K. Gorman
Why? To preserve samples? It’s not like this was a freezer. Had she been wearing anything more than the paper-like gown they’d given her, she would have barely noticed. And it wasn’t like they were going to run out of samples. Dr. Lang—he was the biologist, among other things—had only taken blood samples, so unless they were planning to move her elsewhere, to a place where he couldn’t replenish his stock…
But no, it didn’t feel like that. Were that the case, she imagined there would have been more than the blood, tissue, and body scans they’d done today, and she suspected he would have been in a greater hurry instead of the casual manner he kept.
Was there another reason for the cold? Something they weren’t telling her? Pranav had been avoiding her, something which should have been difficult when contained in a room with her, but something that he still managed, despite her attempts at engaging with him. Well over an hour had passed since he’d botched the lie on why she wasn’t healing people, and he’d found one excuse or another to ward her off. Currently, he was on the other side of the lab, washing what looked like take-out containers in the sink.
Gods, were they eating in here? Wasn’t the whole ‘don’t-eat-food-in-a-lab-ever’ rule kind of at the top of the rule list when dealing with laboratories? Right along with ‘don’t play with fire near chemicals’ and ‘wear sexy underwear in case you get acid on you and you need to strip for an emergency shower in front of your colleagues’?
What do I know? I’m not a scientist. Maybe blood samples did need chilling.
Or maybe the doctors just liked it cold.
She huffed a breath loud enough to make Dr. Ma, working two counter-rows away, glance up. She was the quantum scientist. A light box, similar to the trap she’d funneled light into during her most-recent lab visit on Chamak—which made her think that the empire really had been earnest in sharing its findings—sat on the counter, working away.
Karin had already given her a light sample and, through the connection she maintained, she could feel the device still cycling through scanning protocols. Different scales and graphs shivered into life on the screens, visible through the back of the transparent screen.
She could reach out to those, too, if she wanted. Mess with them. With her light so quick within reach and her powers active, it wouldn’t take much more than a thought…
Gods. She was bored. She would kill for a netlink. Of course, they wouldn’t give her one on account of her being a prisoner who could use it to contact Fallon and tell them where she was, which would be remarkable since she didn’t know where she was. So far, she was failing at even the basics of her escape mission. And she’d managed to become nearly naked in the process. And cold. Nomiki wouldn’t have gotten naked. Or, if she had, she’d have made herself feel better by turning everyone around her into a bloody corpse.
Karin was not like her sister. Not in that way, at least.
The click of a door caught her attention—finally, something to look at other than the lab work—and she glanced over as a man let himself into the room and spoke a few words to the closest of the four soldiers that still guarded the door. Then he turned her way.
A zip of concern tingled through the front of her chest, and she sat straighter. Though he wore a uniform similar to the Alliance blue, he wasn’t a soldier, and she didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t young. Pushing sixty, if she’d guess, though body mods these days had a tendency to mess with her age estimations, especially around Nova. He had a thin face, slim build, dark, combed-over hair, and a mixed skin tone that gave him a lighter overall appearance but dark features, as if his eyes had permanent bags underneath them.
“Miss Makos?” he said, his head tipping up as he paused at a respectful distance. “My name is David Strick. Commander Baik would like a word.”
She gripped the edge of the table with her right hand, out of sight, willing her jangling nerves to ease down and her voice to remain steady. “Great. Where are my clothes?”
They’d vanished some time after she’d taken them off, whisked away by an attendant who’d stopped in only briefly to offer her water and a plate of crackers, cheese, and raisins.
“Being laundered. Fresh clothes will be provided upon return to your room.”
Her cell, he meant. She gripped the edge of the table harder, forcing herself to breathe. “Oh, so I get to meet with him half naked?”
That sounded odd and sexual. Was it some kind of power trip? She couldn’t imagine a military installation having a lack of clothing to wear, assuming they kept their uniforms here, but maybe she didn’t warrant a uniform in their eyes.
Or maybe they weren’t at all a military installation.
There’d been twenty-ish soldiers in the room where she and Marc had… transported in. So far, she hadn’t seen anything to suggest there were any more. Her current four, and the eight earlier, could have been part of the original twenty.
The man hesitated. “I apologize for the inconvenience.”
She sat for a moment, staring straight ahead. Hospital gowns were more than an inconvenience for her—they spiked memories of her time at the Eurynome Project. But, fortunately, the past few months had seen her deal with that trauma enough that this current weird bullshit did little more than add an extra mental tally against the commander in her head.
She slid off the table, her bare feet hitting the cool floor with a soft splunk. “I’m taking the blanket, then.”
Chapter 11
He led her out into the hallway, the four guards peeling away from the wall to join them. Now that some of her earlier panic had abated, wound down after an hour of nothing happening, maybe she could get a better idea of the place. They didn’t turn toward the windows farther down the hall, which had dimmed their glow from earlier, but she did catch some of the labels on the doors she’d passed.
Engineering.
Robotics.
Animatronics.
RIPH Program Module.
Spectrometrics.
Light Lab.
Obviously some kind of engineering thing, except now, they’d shunted Dr. Lang’s biology in—but even he had had some weird mishmash of degrees, a minor in genetics and a major in something she couldn’t quite remember but which had sounded unwieldy and complicated when Pranav had said it. If healing the Lost wasn’t their priority, just what were they trying to do? What could possibly be more important?
Unbidden, Nomiki’s words from last night came to her.
We’ve been detecting some weird energy coming from Nova. It’s been growing steadily for about a month, but the Alliance has been shutting down all our inquiries to find out what it is.
Did that mean they were on Nova?
She had no idea. She’d been to Nova before, but hadn’t explored the place much. If she saw outside, she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to recognize it except by ruling it out against Belenus, Enlil, Amosi, and Clemens, planets that she either had lived on well enough to know or that happened to be so recognizable that anyone would know where they were. She still hadn’t even decided if she was on a planet or a space station. They may even be on a ship, although that possibility was growing less and less likely the more she saw.
Her bare feet made quiet, tacky noises against the floor’s worn, shiny surface. She tried to ignore the cool air that touched up past her thighs and onto her lower back and abdomen by tugging the blanket closer. The place was quiet. Apart from the noise of her feet and the tap and stomp of the soldiers’ boots around her, the halls were so quiet that she picked up on the quiet hiss and thump of the ventilation and plumbing systems and the occasional baseline thrum of an ill-fitted tube light.
The building she was in felt government-owned—even if it hadn’t shared certain design elements of official sites across the three main planets, the five interlocking loops of the Alliance logo crept up ever so often, appearing in both the stripe of paint that had started bisecting the wall a ways back and on some of the directional signs—but they had yet to pass
another person, which meant that either the Alliance had been hit much harder than she’d thought by the Shadows, or this wasn’t a central military installation they’d taken her to.
They entered an elevator, which became mighty full once all the soldiers had piled in, and rode it up several floors. Beside her, David stood still and professional, watching the indicator tick upward. Stubble shadowed his jaw and neck, and she found a few gray hairs close to his ear. They didn’t speak.
When the door opened again, they stepped out onto a different kind of pre-fab flooring—white, this time—and the style of the hallway had shifted. Wider, for one, with walls paneled with wood instead of patched, pre-fab drywall. Square, brighter-colors box lights replaced the tubes from the last level, forming a scattered pattern down the hall, and the air was fresher here. She spotted a vent opposite the door, its black grating complementing the hallway’s tones instead of hiding in them.
Had she been in a basement, then? Or a ground level, since there had been windows?
Abruptly, David guided her to the left and stopped at a door midway down the new hall. He gave it a knock, and the panel flashed green a few seconds later, the door hissing back on its track to reveal the office within.
David stepped aside with a gesture for her to go first.
The wood theme continued on the inside. Carpet met her feet, a welcome change from the hallway’s chill, and she had to resist the urge to press or curl her toes into it as she spotted Commander Baik by the window at the opposite end of the room with his back to her.
Her eyes widened.
A window.
About two meters high, starting from the ceiling and ending just above Baik’s waist, it took up the entire curve of the outer wall of the room, impossible to miss. Outside, a large valley folded away in the near-distance, its gentle slopes of hills and fields, the dark ribbons of the rivers and tributaries, and the fringed strands of riparian troughs and hedgerows and isolated standing woods all draped in deep, sleepy blues and browns that led up into a series of low hills and then jagged, rough-cut mountains in the distance.
To the right, where the mountain range had slipped down into a plain, the primary sun was either rising or setting in a subdued burst of reds and pinks and oranges on the horizon, mixing in with the circular, bulbous disks of skyscrapers in a city at the far edge of her vision. Closer, a few towns and villages made bursts of light in the valley, but none of them large. Above, a few scattered stars—either the first few of the night or the last few of the morning—shivered above.
Nova. I’m definitely on Nova.
The ice on the mountains, and the shape of the distant skyscrapers, had clinched it. While cities on other planets contained modern building and notable building design, Nova had a unique style of architecture when it came to its largest buildings. It was inspired by its twin capitals, Liber Pater and Pomona, which had been built on a series of discus levels in part to accommodate their massive population, but mostly as an excuse to show their wealth. Nova Earth was home to many of the system’s rich and political elite. It had the most population of the planets, and the most power defense—which meant that it made sense for them to transport her here, of all places. It was the Alliance’s heart of power. Even the Alliance’s other four planets combined couldn’t match Nova’s muster.
But the Fallon Empire could, which was why they’d been so successful in pulling out of the Alliance’s folds twenty years back. And why the Alliance was so testy when it came to dealing with them.
“Welcome, Ms. Makos.”
So focused was she on the world outside the window, the commander’s voice came as a shock to her. She snapped her head around, realizing she’d taken several steps into the room without noticing.
He’d turned his attention away from the window and was looking at her with some amusement, a drink of something cradled in his left hand. “How are you feeling?”
A quiet hiss sounded behind her as the door to the office closed. She glanced back, noticing that her military escort had not entered with her. David stood to the right of the door, his dark blue uniform framed by the light-toned wooden panels of the wall. His stance looked oddly formal, but not stiff.
“A bit cold,” she said, turning her attention back to the commander. “Any reason you guys took my clothes away, or did you just want to look at my legs?”
His eyebrows twitched upward at her last sentence, and by the pause that followed and the awkward transition of silence, she gathered that her state of dress hadn’t been his priority.
“A mistake on housekeeping, I assume.” He glanced past her to David by the wall. “I’m sure it will be remedied shortly?”
The man bowed. “They’ve already been delivered to her room, sir.”
She resisted the urge to stare—okay, that bow had been weird. Was there something in Alliance culture that she’d missed in the seven years she’d spent with them? Although Alliance people did bow to their superiors, the practice tended to be super formal, and she was getting the distinct impression that this was not a normal situation.
The feeling only grew when the commander gave David a sharp nod and dismissed him with a wave. “Leave us, please.”
David bowed again and left. The door hissed closed behind him.
They were alone.
Her earlier panic wormed her way back into her chest with an electric tingle. It took her a few seconds to remove her gaze from the door, forcing her jaw to unlock and her breath to remain steady. When she did, she found the commander watching her—as she knew he would be. He brought his drink up to his lips with a slow movement, then put it on the desk next to him.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“You haven’t guessed, yet? I thought someone as magical as you could’ve just glanced at the stars and found out.”
That made her snort.
“Before the Shadows attacked, I was barely more than a human flashlight. Don’t expect too much from me.” She unlocked her legs, hesitated for a second, then took the few steps that would bring her to the window—she wanted to check its corner without making it obvious, make sure it wasn’t a screen. She narrowed her eyes on the city and the sunset. “My sister, on the other hand…”
“Nomiki Makos,” he said. “Smalltime merc, part-time thug. Lived in an apartment on Enlil. Does she have abilities like you, too?”
She almost smiled at that—he didn’t know it, but he was almost quoting the gangster she’d faced last night—but instead filed that little tidbit away for later. When she saw her sister again, she’d have to let her know that her apartment had been compromised. “Not quite like mine, no.”
“No healing, then?” He shook his head. “A shame. Fallon and Alliance could have gotten an equal share.”
She resisted the urge to reprimand him for that—she and her sister were people, not shares—but his assumption that Nomiki was just like her continued to amuse her. Although her sister had spent some time dressing battle wounds, Karin guessed that she’d spent quite a bit more time putting people into the hospital rather than helping them out of it.
“I’m actually kind of surprised I’m here and not in a center or something,” she said. “Don’t you have boatloads of people lined up for me to heal?”
“We do, and you will. We’re a bit far from the city, and your ETA was in flux, which is why we hadn’t set up yet.”
The way he spoke made the explanation seem like a concession to her—not an apology, but perhaps a boon for her good, co-operative behavior—and it was a first hint of a location, even if ‘somewhat far from that random city over there’ was somewhat vague. She might have figured out the planet, but planets weren’t small.
“You still haven’t told me where I am,” she said.
“Nor will I. It would be tactically disadvantageous for me to do so.” He gave her a smile. “Please, while we wait, tell me about yourself. How did you come to be…” The appraisal he gave her now was more obvious, but, to his credit, she didn�
��t see his eyes drop to her bare legs. “What you are?”
Hadn’t he received her files? Perhaps the Alliance didn’t have such stringent reading comprehension policies among its high command as Fallon did.
“I assume you don’t mean my pilot and navigator certification,” she said, her tone dry.
“No.”
“I was concocted in a test-tube following a genetic blueprint and between fifty and seventy different biological sources, developed in an artificial womb, and delivered into a scientific compound on Earth where I was brainwashed and fed a regular treatment of various drugs and a shitload of LSD—” Okay, maybe not the LSD, but why not? Some of the shit that was on her charts was at least that bad or worse. “—from that, my powers manifested at age eight, and I escaped at age twenty.”
“Twenty.” He frowned. “Isn’t that around the time of the Gate Incident?”
It took her a second to follow his train of thought—he was smarter than she thought, calculating it against her age and connecting the historical dots—but when she did, her gaze sharpened on him. She hoped the blanket hid the new burst of tension that stiffened her shoulders.
Their escape had been exactly around the time of the Gate Incident that had locked the ERL Gate between the Sol and Sirius systems for the past seven years. And it had been Nomiki who had locked it.
“Maybe,” she said. “Must’ve happened just after we got through. My sister and I went to ground once we were through.”
All technically true, which was good because she was starting to suspect that he was a lot more observant and badass than she’d originally thought—those eyes of his were a little too sharp and knowing.
“Mhmm.” He watched her for a few more seconds, then dropped his attention to the desk, opening one of its drawers with the touch of a button. A prepackaged fruit and cracker set appeared in his hands when he reached in. He slid it across the desk surface to her, disturbing the latent projection of the touchscreen in the middle. “Here. They’ll have more for you in the gymnasium.”
