Dav decided theyʼd been frozen in shock long enough, himself included.
“Is there anyone on board?” That was almost the only logical reason why the Tecran hadnʼt fired on them yet. Their ship was three times the size of the Barrist, and Dav knew from the information he received from Battle Center that a rare Class 5 like the one in front of him had even more than that in terms of fire power.
“There are at least five hundred heartbeats, sir.” Kila said. She tapped a screen and immediately the view of the battleship on the main screen in front of them lit up with hundreds of lights on clearly defined levels.
Most of them were blue but . . .
“Are those orange lights?” Dav leant forward to get a better look. They were all concentrated in the same area, set apart from the blue, which was the only reason they were noticeable at all.
“Those are bio-signatures our system canʼt identify.” Kila said, and frowned. “This is the first time Iʼve ever come across a genuine orange before.”
“Should I initiate evacuation?” Davʼs aide, Farso Lothric, hovered at his shoulder, his hands clenching and unclenching.
“Where would we go?” Dav didnʼt need to look at his systems screen to know they couldnʼt possibly have recovered enough from the light jump theyʼd just made to go anywhere. Let alone evade a Tecran Class 5 battleship.
And while the moon behind the Tecran ship shone like a blue and green jewel against the red and cream of Virmanaʼs patterned atmosphere, and was assuredly habitable, the problem still remained that they would have to go around the Tecran ship to get to it.
“We have to do something,” Lothric said.
Dav didnʼt disagree. However, heʼd known the moment theyʼd come out of the jump and straight on course toward the Tecran ship that there was only one course of action. They had sent out a comm the moment theyʼd made visual contact, and at least two battle class ships would be light jumping to the Barristʼs aid, but right now, all they could do was defend. “Shields are at full. Guns are all primed. If they attack——”
At that moment, all the lights on the Tecran ship went out.
The blue and orange heartbeats remained, but it was clear the power was down.
“The oranges, sir.” Kila stood up in her excitement, and forgot to use the pointer, using her finger instead.
The orange heartbeats detached from the ship, and Dav zoomed in with the lens, saw two explorer-class craft flying away from their mother ship.
“Is one empty?” Borji, his systems engineer, asked, peering forward.
“No. Thereʼs one orange heartbeat on that one. Six on the other.”
Dav watched their trajectory for a minute longer, but there was nowhere else to go but Virmanaʼs moon——not in those craft——and he turned his attention back to the real threat.
“Could they be on backup power and we canʼt see it?” He waited for Kila to fiddle with her instrumentation.
She shook her head. “I canʼt see any power at all.”
“Which means . . .” Lothric gripped the back of Davʼs chair.
“Which means we have a ship full of dying Tecran in front of us.” Dav stood. Walked toward the screen. He would give a lot to know what was going on in that Tecran ship right now.
It was like someone had just handed them a Class 5 warship on a plate, with no effort on their part to claim it besides a bit of messy clean-up.
He didnʼt trust that at all.
No one in the universe was that kind.
He tapped his communicator. “Commander Appal, ready Squads A to F, and prepare to board the Tecran vessel immediately. Full biohazard kit.”
He paused.
“Iʼm coming with you.”
Chapter 2
“You can move around now.” This time, Sazoʼs voice was much softer in her ear.
Rose depressed the button over her chest, and the safety harness released, letting her up to stand in the tiny cabin.
She walked to the porthole window and looked back, saw the outside of her prison for the first time.
The Tecran ship was a black ball with long protrusions. Like a naval contact mine from the Second World War. She shuddered to see it. “You did what I asked you? You deleted the maps?”
“Iʼve wiped the Tecran system of all navigation points to Earth, and was able to send a system virus to all their other vessels, to search out the information and destroy it wherever else it exists in the Tecran fleet. They wonʼt even know itʼs missing, because I also deleted all reports relating to their find. With the crew that took you gone, only those in the high command office who read the reports will have any idea of what they found, and they wonʼt be able to find the information again.”
“What do you mean, with the crew gone?” Rose stared out at the Tecran ship a moment longer. “The Grih wonʼt return the Tecran to their people as prisoners of war? What will they do with them?” She tried to tamp down on a wish for something truly unpleasant.
Sazo paused. “I am not familiar with the Grihʼs handling of prisoners of war. When we make contact with them and I can infiltrate their system, I can keep watch on the Tecran theyʼre holding. But either way, it wonʼt matter. The Tecran will have to start again from scratch.”
It was the most she could hope for. “But you still have the information, right?” She didnʼt know whether she wanted him to delete it from his memory or not. Having it there meant there was a tiny chance of going home.
“I do. But Iʼve put it somewhere extremely hard to find. If the Tecran ever get me again, it will not be accessible to them.”
She would have to believe that. She decided not to ask him to delete the maps permanently yet. If they were about to be taken back into the Tecran fold, then maybe. But not now.
“Does this craft have a hot shower?” She was half-joking, half-hoping beyond hope as she took her first really good look around the craft. Her skin hadnʼt felt clean since sheʼd been taken. Sazo had engineered a respite for her from half-way through her second month of captivity onward, but sheʼd only had a basin to wash in. She wanted water pouring down on her.
“It does,” Sazo said, and she closed her eyes, suddenly close to tears.
“I had the loading crew pack some things that may be useful to you.” He sounded almost shy as he opened an automatic door at the back of the cabin. It slid completely back on itself, and Rose crouched down and pulled out two bags.
They were the size of small backpacks and after a little fiddling, she worked out she had to push a button at the top and the center seam released, opening up to reveal piles of colorful fabric and bottles of what might be toiletries.
She lifted up a piece of fabric, to find it was a large long-sleeved t-shirt made of a smooth fabric with the texture of silk. It looked much to big, but she could deal with that.
“Itʼs hyr fabric,” Sazon said into her ear. “Made from the silk of the hyr spider. It reacts to heat. Hyr spiders only eat prey with a certain body temperature. If the correct prey gets stuck on their web, the silk contracts around it. You put it on and your body heat causes it to shrink to fit you. You can shape it any way you like.”
“I donʼt recognize it from anything I saw the Tecran wear. This is wonderful.” She brushed her fingers over it, and felt it react to the heat of her fingertips. The Tecran had worn uniforms of a dark purple which had looked similar to thick cotton——practical and hardy. This was soft and beautiful. “Thank you.”
“Hyr fabric is the most expensive fabric in this part of the galaxy. I saw in the inventory that we were carrying these two packs for the daughter of the Tecran military leader, and had them pulled from the cargo hold and packed in this shuttle.”
That meant he had thought of her and what she would need well in advance. He had been honest in his promise that he would help her, and on top of that, beyond the bargain, he had thought of her comfort.
He had also killed the lion.
She needed to remember there were a lot of shades of gray in Sazo.<
br />
And if she ever slowed down his plan, there was a chance, just like the lion, sheʼd become so much collateral damage.
She lifted the crystal off her neck and looked at it. “That was really sweet of you. Thank you again. Now, Iʼm going to find the shower, and when all the hot water is gone, Iʼm going to work out how to dress myself in hyr fabric.” She started to pull the earpiece from her ear.
“Wait.” Sazoʼs call was a squawk.
She put the earpiece back in. “Yes?”
“It would take one hour and thirty minutes for the hot water to be gone. We only have an hour before you need to be back in the harness for landing.”
“Can you send me a signal when forty minutes is up? Like a beep through the comm system?” She had nearly said intercom, but even though she spoke in English, a language she had taught Sazo since heʼd first introduced himself, she stopped herself in time and used the Grih term. She could speak relatively understandable Tecran by now, and almost fluent Grih. They had decided it was better for her to concentrate on Grih, rather than Tecran, given the plan was to escape the Tecran, and never meet up with them again.
Ever.
She pulled the earpiece out and put it and the crystal——she couldnʼt think of that faceted, slim piece of technology as Sazo——on top of the storage unit. It was the first time sheʼd been free of Sazo completely, apart from when she slept, for at least a month and a half. Not since heʼd had someone include the earpiece on the breakfast tray a guard brought her each morning.
She grabbed both of the packs heʼd got her and slung them over her shoulder as she made for the rear cabin door, eager to find out what lay beyond it.
A kitchen galley to the left, a small bathroom to the right, it turned out. This really was a two-person explorer. But she wasnʼt complaining.
She stepped into the bathroom, and then, even though Sazo could hardly get up and walk in, given he was an artificial intelligence lodged in a crystal key, she closed the door. Of course, he would also, by now, be residing in the systems of this craft.
She looked around, but couldnʼt see a camera, and what would she do about it, if she could?
She pulled off her clothes, folding them neatly to one side, because she had learned to take nothing for granted, and she may need them again, and then stepped into the shower.
The Tecran were a little taller than humans and a lot bulkier, so the shower stall was roomy for her. She worked out how to switch it on, and stepped back for a couple of seconds to let it come up to temperature, only to find it came out hot straight away.
As soon as the spray hit her face, she closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and at last, private and under cover of the sound of falling water, let herself cry.
Chapter 3
Dav could hear his own breathing inside the biohazard suit and nothing else, except for the occasional curse from one of his boarding team over his comm as they came across more and more dead Tecran littering the passageways and cabins.
They seemed at first glance to be merely asleep, their thick-set bodies lying up against walls, as if they had sat down to rest and just slid sideways, the feathery protrusions on their heads limp.
He lifted the concentrated beam of his laslight to illuminate the dead littering the area just outside the launch bay, pressed up against the doors as theyʼd tried to get in.
The interior doors had been locked when Dav and his team had arrived at the bay in three gun carriers, and theyʼd had to hook the wiring up to the power system on one of their own ships to get them open.
Dav could only assume the power failure had left the doors in lock mode, with no way for the Tecran crew to make it to the fleet of smaller explorer and fighter craft in the hangar. If they had been able to, a lot more would be alive. All they would have needed to do was start the engines and close the doors, and the on board systems would have provided them with the air they needed to breathe.
There were a few alive, though. Mostly officers with personal breathing apparatus, and one patient who was on a ventilator in the sick bay. Lucky for him, the ventilatorʼs backup power came from a powerful battery built into the machine itself, not the backup system on the ship, or heʼd be dead too. According to one of B Team, he was nearly there, anyway, his chest barely lifting up and down.
Dav turned his laslight back to the one thing on this ship that had no business being here and studied it a little more. It was a dead animal of some kind in a cage, nothing heʼd ever seen before. He would bet quite a large chunk of his pay that if it were breathing, it would show up orange on Kilaʼs little screen.
This one life form, of all the life on this ship, had not died of a lack of breathable air. It had been killed by lethal injection, the syringe still in its shoulder, as if the person whoʼd plunged it in was too scared to pull it out. Looking at the incisors and the claws on the animal, Dav didnʼt blame them.
He played his light over it a little longer, and then tapped his comm. “Final casualties, Commander?”
“Four hundred and eighty-three, sir.” Commander Appal had to clear her throat. “Kilaʼs confirmed from her side. We havenʼt missed anyone.”
They had the captain alive, along with most of his senior officers. And none of the hassle of a large-scale prisoner population. All their would-be prisoners were dead.
Dav wasnʼt sure what he thought of that.
If the Tecran ship hadnʼt been disabled, he knew they would have shot the Barrist out the sky and killed every single person on board. If heʼd had the fire-power available himself, he would have done the same to them.
But this seemed like a waste of life. A tragedy.
And the burning question was, what were the Tecran doing in Grih territory to begin with?
He tapped in to the Barristʼs comm system. “Weʼre secure, Borji. Bring your team over and find out what the hell happened to this ship.”
The place on the Grih planet Dav came from, Calianthra, had a saying: beware of unexpected gifts.
He was wary, all right. Very, very wary.
* * *
She was clean, and she was cried out. Wrung out like a limp rag. Only thirty minutes had past of her hour, because she was worried about working out how to use the hyr fabric, and she didnʼt want to ask Sazoʼs advice.
Her hair hung below shoulder-length, clean but in need of a good brush and a hair tie, smelling of the gel Sazo had provided. A sort of cinnamon and vanilla spicy mix that was amazingly good.
She sorted through the garments, and realized she was humming a tune while she did it. Sheʼd always enjoyed singing, but since sheʼd been taken, sheʼd hummed and sang more than she ever had in her life. There was something so pithy about song lyrics. They got right to the heart of things in a few words.
She didnʼt doubt she was sane because of them.
She lifted out an item that must surely be underwear, although so big she could have got both legs in one leg-hole. She pulled them on, and then bunched them close to her skin. The fabric contracted, and as she pulled and arranged, it obeyed completely, shrinking, molding itself to her, until she had exactly the kind of underwear she preferred.
Flushed with success, as well as the humid air of the shower room, she pulled out a sleeveless tank top which she guessed was a bra equivalent and went to work again. When she worked out she could have any level of lift and separate she wanted, she played for a good five minutes, grinning as she made her breasts do the impossible, giving herself cleavage that would be the envy of any playboy bunny. The beep Sazo said heʼd send at forty minutes sounded, and she toned it down a little, although not totally. She was tired of being grubby and drab.
The pants and long sleeve t-shirt were easy, and the fabric was stretchy enough for her to move freely.
She ran into trouble with the shoes.
The only ones in the pack looked like massive ballet slippers. The Tecran had big feet, and she wondered how the hyr fabric in the shoes would work. Sheʼd prefer trainers, something she could run
in.
Sazo said the Grih were peaceful and had strict rules guiding their encounters with alien life. They would never subject her to what the Tecran had. But call her a cynic. Sheʼd like the option of running, if she could.
Of course, sheʼd been without shoes for three months, so anything was an improvement.
She slipped her foot into one, and then the other, and they started to contract. Ballet slippers, it was, then. They were comfortable, at least. And the soles were probably thick enough to run over rough ground.
She closed up the packs again, still wishing for a brush and a hair tie, but the Tecran had feathery stuff on their heads and if they brushed it, there was no evidence of that in the things Sazo had gotten for her. She combed her fingers through her hair and then braided it in a French braid.
“A hair tie, a hair tie, my kingdom for a hair tie,” she sang under her breath.
“A hair tie?” Sazoʼs voice came through the speaker by the door.
“A stretchy, thin band to wrap around the end of my hair, to keep it in place. Iʼd be happy to see a comb or a brush, too.” She kept her voice neutral, but she didnʼt like that heʼd been listening to her. Although she knew she could be misunderstanding. He was in the craftʼs systems, and if she spoke, he would hear it, whether he was actively listening to her or minding his own business completely.
And what else did he have to do at the moment?
Boredom was a huge problem for Sazo. Idle hands do the devilʼs work had never been more applicable. Although, this time, the devil had been totally in her corner.
Theyʼd needed each other——Sazoʼs access to the shipʼs systems and her mobility and opposable thumbs——and their plan had worked.
She walked back into the small cockpit, still hanging on to the end of her braid, peered out the porthole one last time at the Tecran ship disappearing into the distance, and gave them the middle finger.
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