Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  A touch to her arm woke her sometime during the night. Anise sat next to her in the shadows, all of the animation gone from her face. Instead, dread and fear haunted her eyes.

  “I take it the drugs wore off,” Tamryn murmured, not wanting to alert the guards that they were awake. Maybe that was a vain wish. If they all had the superior senses that Anise had described, they could probably hear the heartbeats of everyone in the room. Whispered conversations would be easy to decipher.

  “Yes.” Anise rubbed her face—she had to use both hands since her wrists had been tied together.

  Tamryn was stuck in a similar situation, with wrists and ankles bound. At least the guards had tied her hands in front of her again, muttering something about not letting the hostages die. The med kit was on the floor where Tamryn had left it earlier, and she’d found that injector she had left out under Powell’s leg. Both soldiers were sleeping, and Gruzinsky was unconscious, a repair device fastened to his abdomen.

  “Any news about the ship?” Tamryn asked.

  The three men guarding them hadn’t said a word about it, at least not while she had been awake, and the craft wasn’t visible through the portholes on this side of the station. She had no idea what kind of vessel had arrived. Fleet? Pirate? Trader? The alarms had been turned off before Tamryn and Anise had been dropped off in the lounge, so who knew if the ship even remained in the area. It might have left when nobody on Frost Station Alpha responded.

  “None,” Anise said, lowering her hands. “Tam, will you testify on my behalf at my court-martial?”

  “Only if you testify at mine.”

  Anise snorted. “What have you done?”

  Did letting Makkon paw over her in Comm and Control count as a crime? Tamryn felt as if it should. “I had the opportunity to order Gruzinsky to blow up the station, and I didn’t.”

  “Well. That’s somewhat understandable.” Anise turned her head toward the wall and whispered in Tamryn’s ear. “Have you told them that you have rich relatives?”

  Tamryn shook her head. “They have enough bargaining chips.”

  “Especially now.” Anise winced. “But it would keep you safe, maybe protect you from those who think their power gives them the right to take whatever they want.”

  Tamryn thought of Makkon again, heat flushing through her at the memory of him sucking on her earlobe. “We don’t know what they want.”

  “Were you there when they contacted Fleet?” Anise asked. “Did they make any demands?”

  “They requested some equipment in exchange for the hostages. I didn’t see what was on the list.”

  “Equipment? Not ships? That’s what I would have guessed they wanted. That’s what they wanted last time.”

  “Last time?” For a moment, Tamryn thought Anise meant that the invaders had been to the station before and tried this tactic, but she would have heard about that. She’d been warned about pirates, nothing more dangerous.

  “About a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  Tamryn slumped against the wall, watching the closest of their guards—he kept glancing over at them. “Captain—Anise. Can you tell me what you think is going on? From what you’ve said, I get that you think these are the descendants of the genetically engineered super humans made back in the ninth century, but I’m not sure how they could exist, since everything I’ve ever heard said those people were imprisoned, then, centuries later when they got out of their prison, wiped out.”

  Glaciem had been that prison, something she had forgotten about when choosing this duty station. But why should she have remembered and thought anything of that past? The moon had been nuked, all of its inhabitants destroyed generations before she had been born.

  “The history you know is the same history I know,” Anise said. “Six hundred years ago, genetic tinkering grew more popular, with people changing everything from the eye colors of their children before they were born, to their resistance to diseases, to their adaptability to the planets in this system. Everyone wanted enhanced athletic ability, intelligence, and longevity. But buying superior children was expensive. Few could afford it, and that created strife between the haves and have-nots. Those of lesser means complained that long, disease-free lives shouldn’t only be available to those with money, and many of them feared for their children’s futures. Would there be jobs and opportunities for those who weren’t enhanced?”

  Tamryn nodded, though she was a touch impatient. She knew this part of the story. She wanted to know where Makkon and his buddies had come from.

  “Around the same time, the government had some private firms tinkering with building super soldiers. There was a lot of rebellion in that century, especially in the rim planets, and they were having trouble policing everything. They thought that by creating powerful soldiers that could drive fear into the hearts of those rebels, it would take fewer men to maintain order. This was before androids and robots were as sophisticated as they are today, mind you. It took humans a long time to get tech standards back up to what they had been when the colonists left Old Earth. We spent that first five hundred years just trying to survive, expecting more ships and resources to come, expecting—”

  “Captain,” Tamryn whispered, fighting a yawn. “I did take history classes in school. It was required.”

  Anise managed a faint smile. “And you remembered what you learned? That’s something of a rarity, at least among some colleagues I’ve had.”

  “Well, I’m not as old as your gray-haired friends.” Tamryn nodded toward the closest group of scientists. “School wasn’t that long ago for me.”

  “All right. You only want what applies to our situation then. As I was saying, the government experimented with all manner of super soldiers, crossing humans with animals and even stealing some genes from plants to get desirable traits. In the end, they found other soldiers were most comfortable interacting with people that looked human and were still mostly human, simply enhanced. That might have been true, but the general populace was another matter. The genetic-engineering debate had been growing more heated, and millions of people across the system felt that sense of unease, that they and their descendants would be doomed to inferior lives if they couldn’t afford enhancements.

  “Around this time, the new Masukra religion was very popular, preaching a back-to-basics philosophy. A fundamentalist, Simon Lev, found out about the super-soldier project and used it as a platform to gain power for himself while incensing the population into action. He played on people’s fears and preached that these super soldiers would use their superior attributes to set themselves up as the masters of humanity. Some texts claim that the engineered humans tried to do just that, but that’s revisionist history that got changed based on what happened later. Oh, there were a few incidents, but mostly the government decided that its special soldiers were too controversial. They shunted them off to live on Glaciem, which wasn’t exactly a paradise even before it was nuked. The soldiers were told they’d be called upon when needed and that they were welcome to establish their own colony in the meantime. But it was more that they were in exile. They weren’t left any ships or any way to communicate with the rest of the system. Basically, the government shut them in a closet, locked the door, and threw away the key.”

  Tamryn pulled out a ration bar to nibble on while she listened. She’d heard what Anise was calling the revisionist history, that the modified humans had risen up and tried to rule the system, that the exile on Glaciem had been their punishment, supposedly a lenient one, given their heinous crimes.

  “It’s rumored they even contemplated killing their ex-soldiers at one point,” Anise went on, “under pressure from Lev, who was by then High Priest Lev. But the government doesn’t give up weapons easily. Speculation among intellectuals of the time suggests that the military always thought their super soldiers could be retrieved for later use. But, as the government changed and generations passed, those soldiers were forgotten. Until one hundred and fifty years ago.”

&
nbsp; Tamryn nodded. She’d heard this part of the story. “While they’d been forgotten, they’d been surviving and eventually they got space travel, right?”

  “Yes. Given the barrenness of Glaciem, the government never thought those people would find the resources to build a civilization, much less start a space program and escape their prison, but humans have a knack for surviving, even in hostile environments. And these men and women weren’t just strong and quick on the battlefield. They’d been designed to be smart and capable commanders too. By this time, it was their distant descendants who were making decisions and launching spacecraft, but they had retained their progenitors’ traits. When they went into space, they were powerful, cunning, and dangerous. And they had the element of surprise. They knocked out the system-wide network and gained control of numerous space stations and planets before the military marshaled enough forces to thwart them. In the end, it was a bloody war with heavy casualties. The Glacians didn’t say much as to what had prompted them to try and rule the system, but one can only surmise that they remembered how they’d been treated and that they were tired of being condemned to their icy rock.”

  “You sound like you sympathize with them.” Tamryn remembered the way Anise had been intrigued—more than intrigued—by Makkon. True, that had been under the influence of the drug, but if that drug merely removed inhibitions, did that mean that underneath it all, Anise might have those feelings? As much as Tamryn hated the idea of monitoring her colleague, she might have to keep an eye on her. If these men had plans similar to what their ancestors had attempted...

  “Empathize, perhaps.” It was hard to tell in the dim lighting, but Anise might have blushed. “It’s easy to do so, to romanticize people across history, when you weren’t there to see the bloodbaths in person. But after witnessing the carnage in engineering...” She gazed toward the doorway, her eyes unfocused. “No, I would not be a sympathizer. I just can perhaps understand why they would be bitter.”

  That was a little reassuring. So long as Anise kept their dead comrades in mind.

  “What I don’t understand is where these people came from,” Tamryn said. “After the war...”

  “Yes, the Glacians were finally defeated, with almost all of their ships destroyed and their forces decimated. But let me tell you that they never would have lost if they hadn’t been so hugely outnumbered. The system had billions of people to their thousands. Some experts think that their original strike force might have even numbered only in the hundreds. But you’re right. After they were defeated, our military returned to this moon—” Anise waved in the direction of the icy sphere outside of their porthole, “—and annihilated it. No form of life should have been capable of surviving, not that there’d been much to start with. And that brings us to the end of recorded history, insofar as the Glacians are concerned.”

  “But you believe some of them did survive. And that these are their descendants.”

  “I do. The tattoos were a hallmark of being born on Glaciem. The people used a special pigment that was able to absorb extra UVB rays from the incredibly weak sun that makes it to the moon’s surface, enough so that their bodies could create the Vitamin D necessary to survive and thrive.”

  Tamryn mulled over the information, comparing it to what she had heard in her dealings with Makkon.

  “I assume these people have been living in their tunnels,” Anise said, “rarely coming up to the surface. Still, it’s surprising that they were able to remain undiscovered for several generations, especially with this station right here. It was originally built after the war, to watch over the moon and make sure nobody had survived.”

  “Actually, I’m thinking these might not be the descendants of those soldiers from a hundred and fifty years ago,” Tamryn said slowly.

  “Oh?”

  “Is it possible they could have developed cryonic facilities for freezing people until their moon recovered? That’s old tech, right? We had that back on the colony ships.”

  “With their limited resources, it wouldn’t have been easy, but if they built space-worthy ships, cryonics would have been feasible, I suppose. Maybe that was their backup plan? In case their bid for galactic power failed?”

  “I don’t know. Oddly, they don’t confide in me.”

  “No?” Anise raised her eyebrows. “The handsome one was looking at you when I was fawning over him.” She added a self-deprecating smile.

  “You remember all of that, eh?” Tamryn asked, trying to sidestep the insinuation.

  “Unfortunately. I especially remember that he made me leave all of my artifacts out on the table where anyone could steal them.” Anise’s gazed flicked toward the porthole, though they couldn’t see much from their seats on the floor.

  “Still think there might be a pirate ship out there?”

  “I don’t know. I’d love more intel.” Anise lowered her voice to the barest whisper again. “We have to get out of here and send a report with everything we know back to headquarters. Especially now that I’ve... blabbed.”

  “Trust me. I’ve been trying. I—”

  The lounge’s only door opened, and Brax and Makkon walked in. Tamryn sank lower against the wall and closed her eyes to slits, hoping they would think her asleep, or that they wouldn’t notice her at all.

  But Makkon’s gaze latched onto her before he’d come more than two steps into the room. Anise was right: he did tend to focus on her.

  “Maybe you can seduce him and try to get more details about their plans,” Anise whispered.

  Tamryn snorted. “Right.”

  If she could seduce him, she would be duty bound to kill him.

  As the pair walked in her direction, she wondered if that might actually be possible. Could he, in the throes of passion, be distracted enough that a normal human being might be able to land a killing blow?

  Makkon had cleaned up since she had seen him last, washing off the blood and changing into another vest that, while still faded and patched, was at least clean. His black hair fell about his shoulders, straight and glossy. Long hair wasn’t that fashionable, and she had never dated a man with such locks, but it looked soft, and she could imagine running her hand through it.

  When we’re seducing him to kill him, right? came a thought from the back of her mind.

  Yes, of course.

  “Any of you ever deal with a Fleet ship called the Felling Axe?” Brax asked, stopping in front of Anise and Tamryn.

  Tamryn met his eyes but did not answer. She hadn’t, but she wouldn’t have told him if she had.

  “Are they here to rescue us?” Anise asked.

  “No,” Brax said.

  “Are you sure?” Anise lifted her bound wrists. “This would be the perfect time for inspiring heroics.”

  Tamryn managed a smile, though she felt anything but pleased, especially now that she knew more about these people. She almost kicked the med kit as she pulled back her legs from Brax. He was standing too close for comfort. Makkon was a couple of steps behind him, his hand in a pocket, a pocket with a faint bulge in it. Was he still carrying her tablet around with him? If that other ship was nearby, she might be able to contact it with the small device.

  “They haven’t responded to us,” Makkon said. “We told them the station is ours and that they can’t come in for repairs. They haven’t been good enough to leave the station’s space, as one might expect.”

  “If they’re damaged, they might not be able to make it anywhere else.” Tamryn found her gaze drifting to the med kit, to the injector next to it. It had nothing but some morphine-based concoction in it—she’d given the wounded men fresh shots before falling asleep—but based on what Makkon had said, she wondered if the painkiller might compete with his truth drug in the body. Didn’t morphine already bind to the receptors for a person’s endorphins? That wouldn’t do anything to stop the release of oxytocin, but perhaps if she knew exactly what was happening, she could fight it, especially if the rest of the drug was only partially effective
.

  “I may have heard of the Felling Axe,” Tamryn said, not because she had, but because she needed a reason for them to try the truth drug on her. “Why don’t you let me talk to them from the station?”

  “And tell them what?” Brax demanded.

  “That Anise is waiting for inspiring heroics?”

  He glared at her. “We don’t need you to talk to them.” He and Makkon walked away to confer softly.

  Tamryn subtly slid her hand down by her calf and grabbed the injector. She checked the dosage out of the corner of her eye, then pushed up her sleeve and gave herself a shot. Doing it with her hands bound made it awkward, but she managed, then set the injector back in the kit. She touched her pocket and felt for the hard outline of the knife she had acquired to make sure it was still there.

  Anise’s eyebrows rose—she hadn’t missed Tamryn giving herself a shot—but she did not say anything. Tamryn leaned closer to her.

  “If I could talk to the captain of the Felling Axe,” she whispered, trusting the men’s superior senses would allow them to overhear, “tell him my secret, then he might take some risks to help us.”

  There. Bait dangled.

  Anise glanced toward the men. Whether she knew what Tamryn was up to or not was up for debate, but Tamryn had already said enough. It should intrigue the men, if they were listening. Brax was talking, and Makkon was pointedly not looking at her, but he definitely had an ear turned in their direction.

  “I don’t think they’re going to let you have a nice chat with him,” Anise whispered back. She didn’t look all that enlightened as to Tamryn’s plan, but she was playing along.

  “Maybe we can find a way to signal them if they’re still in range.”

  “Like what? Holding pictures up to the portholes?”

  Brax and Makkon stopped talking. Tamryn fell silent, as well, looking at up them with her usual expression of loathing, or at least irritation.