In Enemy Hands

by K S Augustin

  They sat at the table at the far end of the room and spoke quietly. Moon wanted to sleep—it was late and she was tired from the terror of her early morning wake-up call and what had ensued—but the strange vulnerability in Drue’s eyes pulled at her. She clenched her jaw to stifle a yawn, and blinked quickly when it made her eyes water.

  “I thought all the creases were mapped,” she said. “And immovable.”

  “All our transport routes have been mapped and used for a couple of centuries now,” he agreed, staring at the surface of the table. “And in ninety-nine percent of cases, they remain safe.”

  “There’s a one percent that isn’t?” she asked. Anomalies in hyperspace? The concept was unheard of. The back of her neck felt cold, as if an icy blast of wind had just hit it.

  “It’s classified.” He looked up at her then, and she read a myriad emotions on his face—worry, stress, a pleading.

  She shrugged, a wry smile twisting her lips. She was in such a vulnerable position, she couldn’t imagine betraying Drue’s confidences.

  He searched her eyes, trying to detect potential betrayal, then his shoulders sagged.

  “The reports first started coming in twenty years ago,” he said. “It took the loss of a few military-grade, scout-class ships before we realised it wasn’t due to mechanical failure or pilot error, but that there was something wrong with the creases themselves.”

  Moon knew enough about hyperspace travel to know that ships used the creases to travel, in much the same way as a marble follows the path of a shallow runnel. Shallow, so it could be slipped into and out of with relative ease, yet still definite, so it could be followed. Sometimes creases met other creases and a decision had to be made regarding which one to take. That navigation work was done by computer, since hyperspace was incomprehensible to the human mind. Pilots who tried to gaze upon its unfiltered form often went insane. Through centuries of exploration, a network of transport routes had been compiled. But now Drue was telling her that all their information might be in vain.

  “They’re shifting?” She was alarmed. Without the creases, intergalactic travel was impossible. And shifting creases were almost as bad as no creases at all. She didn’t relish the thought of being stranded on an unknown planet somewhere, with all avenues of further transport cut off.

  “Either they’re shifting, or new creases are being formed. It’s not like the explosion of data we accumulated during the Great Exploration. What’s affecting us is happening in tiny pieces.”

  “But I haven’t heard anything about this.” True, communication was minimal in the detention facilities, but Moon was sure that—as a scientist—she would have picked up at least some inkling of what was going on.

  The look he gave her spoke volumes, and she flushed.

  “The incidents we’ve had so far have been easily camouflaged. In more than half the cases, the ship was flung out of hyperspace—as we were—with repairable damage. Some ships were heavily damaged, a couple exploded upon entry into normal space.”

  “And the rest?” she prompted.

  “Disappeared. Lost in hyperspace is my guess.”

  “Why is it happening?”

  “We don’t know. We always have our sensors tuned up to maximum sensitivity whenever we do a hyperspace traverse, but we’ve picked up very little meaningful data.”

  His words were serious but there was added gravity behind them. There was something Drue wasn’t telling her.

  Her eyes narrowed as she gazed at him, taking in the deep furrows on his forehead and the way his hands were clenched in front of him. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  He arched one eyebrow. “If it’s that obvious,” he said, dryly, “then I’m in trouble.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I could be,” he answered cryptically.

  “Because of the accident?”

  He nodded.

  “But how could you’ve known?” Her voice was puzzled. “If this has been happening all over Republic space—”

  “This isn’t the first time it’s happened to me.”

  That stopped Moon dead in her tracks. “Oh.”

  She didn’t know the exact details, but she knew the rough picture of what Drue was sketching. In the Republic, even a hint of misbehaviour was enough to imprison someone. As in her case. But she still couldn’t see the direct link between the Differential’s accidents and suspicion falling on Drue. She was under the impression that once the navigation computers took over, just seconds short of a traverse, human control was limited to emergency override. The act of sabotaging the computer was not only overwhelmingly complex, but would require the expertise of a team of experts, not just one Space Fleet captain, no matter how competent he was.

  “Two years ago, the Differential was caught in another crease anomaly, very similar to this one. We punched in the emergency override and brought her out of hyperspace. That time there were injuries, but no fatalities.”

  Moon had been ashamed to admit that the last thing she had thought of was the Differential’s casualties when Drue walked through the door of her lab an hour earlier. At the time, she was still trying to puzzle out Srin’s attitude toward Savic and convince herself that the damage done would not appreciably slow down her research. The diagnostics from the cargo bay had come through. They showed that the fission crucible had escaped miraculously unscathed, but she was still unsure of the damage sustained by the databanks. She wouldn’t know for sure until her lab’s circuits were put back on the main energy system. When Drue entered, Moon could see the obvious exhaustion and tension in his body, but had assumed it was due to the amount of clean-up work entailed. She couldn’t think of any other reason, until he told her four of his crew had lost their lives while they fell back into normal space. It was only then that she recalled her brief conversation with Dr. Jonez in the infirmary. One of the severely injured men he mentioned must have succumbed.

  “It’s a tragic coincidence,” she conceded, “but how can the Space Fleet believe you are responsible in any way for what happened?”

  “They can believe it because the Republic has a long memory. Do you have any dispensers in here?” he asked suddenly.

  “There’s a water dispenser by the far wall,” she told him.

  He smiled his thanks, but it was a tired and worn acknowledgement. He stepped to where Moon indicated. She used the dispenser often herself; it was a convenient way of quickly getting some refreshment without needing to wander farther afield. She watched as Drue punched up two tumblers of water and walked back to the table. He moved as though he was an old man, already eyeing the end of his life. Moon frowned.

  He set one tumbler down in front of her then sat, taking a deep mouthful of water from his own and swallowing slowly.

  “Have you heard of Journi Thrijan?”

  It sounded like a non-human name, that much she knew, but there was no sense of familiarity about it.

  “No.”

  “She was my grandmother. She was also a dissident. One of the all-lifers.”

  Now, that group she had heard of. The proper name was the “Life for All” group. They pushed for a full recognition of all non-humans within the human-led Republic. If Drue’s grandmother had been a member of the group, then she had probably adopted a non-human name to indicate her solidarity with those Republic citizens who couldn’t trace their lineage back to the planet Earth. It was as true now as it was in Drue’s grandmother’s time, that if a citizen couldn’t prove genetically that they were human, they were treated with little more than barely concealed contempt.

  “What happened?” Moon asked quietly, her voice full of sympathy. She put a hand over one of Drue’s clenched fists and it was hot and tight under her fingers.

  “She was part of the Novin Revolt. When that failed, the survivors were taken into custody and put on trial. Not that there was much doubt about their eventual fate.”

  His eyes darkened, and Moon knew he was someplace else? som
ewhere where he couldn’t feel the vibration of his ship beneath his feet, or the touch of another’s hand against his.

  “They sent her to Bliss and we never saw her again. We were never even informed when she died. If she died.” He shook his head, as if to shake off the bad memory. “Of course she did. There’s no technology on Bliss, no facilities, no help. It’s a prison planet, after all, and people live and die there like animals. I’ve transported some of them myself.”

  He looked up and Moon saw clearly the pain on his face. She had to close her eyes briefly against its blinding intensity. She never guessed. When she came on board, she never knew that the tall, cool, contained captain of a combat-ready vessel carried such anguish in his heart.

  “My father…my father said that, at the trial, she did nothing to save herself, but everything to save her family. She even spat in my father’s face, and called him an unthinking whelp of the Republic before they led her away. Because of her actions, her husband? my grandfather? and her children were spared her fate. But we always knew we were never forgotten.”

  “They kept their eye on your family.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “For years. Every time we thought they lost interest, something would happen that convinced us they were still watching us. A performance review of my father’s would be routed to Central Administration for no discernible reason, or my sister’s security clearance would get held up, even after she began work for a private communications company. When I told my father I wanted to join the Space Fleet, he didn’t object, because he thought I’d be thrown out on my ear within weeks. When that didn’t happen, he became more and more agitated, convinced that I was being set up for some nebulous Republic plot against the rest of the family.”

  “And now?”

  “He’s retired, but I think he’s a bit unhinged. He thinks every letter I send him has been somehow faked by the Republic Security Force and, most times, he refuses to answer because he thinks they’re trying to trick him into betraying the family. He’s still deathly afraid we’ll all be sent to Bliss.”

  He clasped Moon’s hand between an open palm and the top of his closed fist and his voice strengthened. “Why my family’s ancient history matters now is that the Republic hasn’t ruled sabotage out as a possible cause of these accidents. And, as the grandson of Journi Thrijan, I’m an obvious suspect.”

  It was on the tip of Moon’s tongue to reassure him, and say that surely they wouldn’t do anything without proof, but she hesitated. They didn’t have proof of perfidy at the Phyllis Science Centre either, and that hadn’t stopped them. All she could do was squeeze his fist, and it galvanised him into action. He exhaled noisily and dropped his hands from hers, straightening in his chair as he did so.

  “But, of course, suspicion isn’t the same as accusation,” he told her in an artificially bluff voice. “Any fool can reasonably speculate that the laws of normal space don’t hold in hyperspace, and that perhaps the shift in creases is just a normal part of how that paraverse operates. You would think our government would start its investigations from the same assumption. The only problem is, you’d be wrong.”

  “Will they relieve you of command?”

  “I don’t think so. They’ve spent too much money on me? on training an officer of the Space Fleet and putting a ship under his command. But they’ll definitely be watching. Which is why, Moon,” his gaze sharpened, “it’s imperative that this experiment of yours works.”

  Moon’s eyes widened. No, she didn’t want to be here again. All she wanted to do was work in safe anonymity as a brilliant researcher and applied stellar physicist. And that truly was all. She didn’t want to be remembered as a dissident, or someone who undermined the Republic. She couldn’t help Kad. She couldn’t help Srin. And now Drue was in the position of seeking what she didn’t have.

  “It’s the first experiment of its kind, Drue—”

  “Will it work?” he cut in.

  She lifted her arms and let them fall, mirroring her helplessness. “Yes. In theory. But that’s what this trip is all about? to obtain more data, fine tune my equations.”

  “But haven’t you been doing that for the past eight years? Isn’t that why the Science Directorate gave you this ship to begin with? To test what you’d been calculating for so long?” His voice was insistent.

  Moon wanted to bury her head in her hands, to blot the look of feverish hope on Drue’s face from her mind.

  “Yes,” she finally ground out, and the word seemed to echo through the room. She paused. “Yes, that’s why I’m aboard your ship. Do I think I can do it? Yes, I do. But I can’t give you what you want, Drue. I can’t tell you with one hundred percent certainty that it will work. I can only tell you that I’ll do my best.”

  “I hope that’s good enough, Moon. I really do.”

  She could feel her mind twisting, slowly aligning itself to a new reality. Moon looked up at the ceiling of her cabin, idly trying to find the line that indicated where one panel stopped and another began. First Kad’s cryptic comments, then Srin’s, now Drue’s confidences. Why, when she was previously so sure of what she was doing, was she revising her opinions now? What had changed?

  Could it have been the years of bullying and questioning by officers of the Republic? Had it been that, and the desertion of her friends, that had turned her from a loyal supporter to a small scared mammal content to cower in a corner with her hands over her head? She remembered how pathetically grateful she was to have been given back her pet project, and shut her eyes in the dark, squeezing them tight until she saw stars behind her eyelids. The Republic had known exactly how to use her, by dangling the prospect of her old life in front of her, with its promises of fame and intellectual achievement.

  Maybe Srin had not been so compliant. Maybe he had demanded a life with meaning, rather than the sterile one without meaning she led, and so that’s why they drugged him. Or maybe he was just too precious a resource to risk. As a brilliant astrophysicist, she might be rare, but there was probably only one Srin Flerovs in the entire galaxy.

  And wasn’t it ironic that the person who was most under the Republic’s control was the one who planted the first, most powerful, doubt about what she was doing in her mind. Even Kad hadn’t managed to achieve what Srin had with one question.

  Could it destroy a star system?

  At one time, she thought she had it all figured out. She would succeed in re-igniting a star, present papers on what she had accomplished across Republic space, take a senior professorship at some prestigious institution, and rebuild her life. Maybe she could ignite the fire in her own self and destroy the chill that seemed permanently wrapped around her hibernating psyche. At one time, she considered herself intelligent, focused and committed.

  And now here she was. She wasn’t sure what she was doing anymore. She knew she couldn’t help Srin—as she told him, and truly believed, they were both prisoners. But the expectations regarding her experiment weren’t clear-cut either. The consequences of a successful test, for herself personally and the galaxy at large, were not as compelling as they were even one month ago.

  As if such ruminations weren’t bad enough, there was also a figurative itch in her groin that was driving her crazy. Srin again. She marvelled at how one human-sized package could cause such havoc.

  Havoc. Loss of control. Oh, how she wanted to lose control with Srin Flerovs. She knew he didn’t think of himself as good-looking. The self-deprecating twist on the tail of his smiles, especially after a conversation with the handsome Drue Jeen, told her that much. But there was something about his lived-in face—the rugged features suggesting an abiding strength—coupled with his wide-shouldered build that hinted at determination and a reassuring solidity. And it didn’t hurt that he had proven his masculine appreciation of her time and time again. Every two days, in fact. She might have considered one flirtatious approach to be transiently flattering, but his steady ardour, as regular as clockwork, wore away at her resistanc
e. How could a woman not appreciate such constant and abiding approbation?

  And she was a woman, no matter that she herself had doubted it over the past few years. She kept to herself in the detention centres, aware of the dark stink of possible blackmail and coercion, and safely huddled behind mental walls of mathematics and science. She slowed her emotional responses until she thought she resembled a robot, impervious to sexual blandishments from members of the opposite or her own sex, content to sleepwalk through the months until final vindication. Even as she stepped aboard the Differential, she thought she still carried that solid casing of armour with her. But there was a chink. A sliver of fatigued casing that let in desire. Desire for Srin.

  Slowly, her right hand moved down, under the waistband of her loose-fitting sleep pants. Her groin felt hot and damp. Had she drifted off, dreamt about him and forgotten it? Wouldn’t that just fit the on-off pace of their romance, she thought.

  But it was a physical need that was driving Moon now, and she was determined to enjoy it. Her kinked hair was rough but she dipped below that with two fingers, parting her labia in one smooth movement. The hood of her clitoris was still dry, but as her fingers explored farther down, they touched silky wetness.

  Dipping into that pool, she brought the moisture back to her clitoris, massaging it over and around the small nub, feeling it getting hard and erect. Would this be how Srin touched her? Would his masculine fingers be subtle in their wanderings, or direct? She matched imaginings to actions, spreading her legs so she could once more sink into the musky lubrication, and her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had touched herself like this, let alone somebody else.

  But, no, this wasn’t her. It was Srin plunging into her. It was him she could feel pressing against the wall of her vagina. She contracted against the welcome intrusion, consciously at first, and then her body took over, spasming rhythmically as she moaned.