The lights brightened yet another notch, leaving no shadows in my cell. Full daylight now, I supposed. My stomach growled, hoping for breakfast. To pass the time, I stretched my aching muscles, loosened my joints, did push-ups and sit-ups and lunges and squats until I’d shaken off the chill of the cell and rid my mind of the fog from the drugs. And at last I heard noise in the corridor outside my door.
The door swung open, and a guard stepped inside my room. He was massive—six-five, 270 pounds at least—and he carried a Taser. I backed against the far wall, heart hammering. Behind him, a woman dressed in blue hospital scrubs carried a tray. Despite everything, my mouth watered.
The woman actually smiled at me. “Hungry, hon? Eat up, then we’ll take you down for a shower before you have a visit with Dr. Claussen, okay?”
I said nothing, just stared at the tray. She took that as a “yes” and left the tray on a table that pulled out from the foot of my bed. As soon as she and the Hulk left me alone, I fell on it like a vulture on roadkill. As long as I had one bite of egg or toast or peach yogurt to mop up, I refused to think about what the rest of the morning might bring.
Ethan stared at the woman in the seat beside him, unable to formulate a response, while the skin around her dark brown eyes crinkled with amusement. She offered no further explanation, merely laughed as her partner took the sharp turns in the parking garage at breakneck speed and shot through the exit onto the service road leading away from the airport. As soon as he was well away from any airport buildings, he pulled to the side of the road and turned around to face the backseat with an engaging grin lighting up his face.
Ethan looked from the man in the front seat to the woman in the back seat. “You guys are not really FBI agents, are you?”
“Well, we do work in law enforcement.” The man who’d introduced himself as Frank Martin gave up a dry laugh. “The scope’s a little bigger, though. You want to take those things off him, babe?”
The woman turned him in the seat, used a key to open the cuffs on his wrists and released his arms. Ethan rotated his aching shoulders and rubbed at the raw chafe marks on his wrists. The movement activated the injury to his ribs, and he winced.
“Thanks.”
“My pleasure, sweets.” The woman cocked an eye at his face, a curious finch examining a new feeder. “How’d you get the bruise on your cheek? One of that asshole Varinski’s lugs?” She dug around in a bag on the floor while she waited for the answer.
“I made a move for Asia when Claussen took her. The guards face-planted me.”
The woman produced a chemical icepack from the bag and broke the seal on it with a quick punch. She held it to Ethan’s face until he put a hand up to take over. “I’m sorry.” She looked at him and gave him a tight little smile. “We’ll get her back, don’t you worry. I’m Rayna Murphy. Asia knows me as Dozen. We were together on Gallodon IV.”
Ethan gaped, the icepack and the hand holding it dropping into his lap. “She thought you were dead.”
Rayna’s abundant energy faltered for a second. “I came pretty close. Lucky for both Asia and me the rescue team was practically sitting on us when that tunnel collapsed. Took us both home.”
His mind was suddenly spinning. Gallodon IV—another planet. The tunnel collapse. And Dozen, alive, sitting next to him. Here. And now. Everything Asia had told him was real. He’d believed it. Now he knew it.
“She told me what you did for her,” Ethan said. “She wouldn’t be here—”
“Asia was special—I knew it as soon as I saw her.” Rayna gave his hand a quick squeeze before placing the icepack back on his face. “Within weeks, her eyes were as bright as starshine. She was resistant to the Minertsan mindwipe program. I got to her as soon as I could to try and get her out.”
“Resistant?”
“Uh, yeah, well, lots to talk about, but this isn’t the best place for it.” The man in front stuck out a hand. “I’m Sam, by the way—Solomon Armstrong Murphy, but just Sam works for most people.”
Ethan shook the man’s hand and settled back in his seat as Sam turned out onto the road again. Something clicked in his head, and he glanced between his two companions.
“Murphy? The two of you . . .?”
Rayna’s lips twitched, and she made a show of looking out the window. “Yeah. We tied the knot six months ago.”
Ethan couldn’t help but smile. “Congratulations.”
Sam grinned. “Thanks!”
Questions swirled in Ethan’s mind, so many questions leading in so many different directions that he hesitated, not knowing where to start. But it was the questions he doubted even Sam and Rayna could answer that weighed most on him. He started with those.
“Where is she, Rayna? Do you know where Claussen’s taken her?”
To his surprise, she nodded. “We have an idea. We know Claussen’s been working with an extra-governmental research group for the past two years—something called Daystrom Futurgenics. They have a small facility in Hunt Valley, Maryland. We’re hoping he took her there.”
Ethan vaguely remembered Claussen mentioning a business trip to Maryland once or twice. “That’s where we’re going?”
“You got a better idea?”
“No, I’m all for it. I’m just hoping you’ve got some extraterrestrial backup waiting when we get there.”
Sam glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “I wouldn’t expect a lot of boots on the ground. By our standards, this is a full-scale landing team. But don’t worry. We can handle it.”
There was something evasive about Sam’s answer. “You know it’s not just the old man you’re dealing with here, right? He hired those two you saw in the Security office to try and kidnap us both once before and nearly succeeded. And he hired others to attack Ida Mickens.” He looked at Rayna. “Do you know who she was?”
Rayna met his gaze and didn’t look away, though he could see she knew what was behind his question. “Yes. I’m sorry about Ida, Ethan. We got here too late to help her.”
Ethan felt anger stirring deep inside him like a bear awakening in a dark winter cave. “So you’ve been watching Claussen.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?” The bear growled low in his throat.
Rayna stared him down. “Does it matter, Ethan? We’re going to take care of—”
“How long?”
“From the beginning.” Rayna sighed. “Claussen works for us.”
Ethan fell back in his seat, his lungs collapsing, straining to take in another breath. His eyes darted to the front seat, where Sam was dividing his attention between the back seat and the road.
“We were trying to solve this little mystery quietly.” Rayna went on without emotion. “We usually don’t like to take a direct approach. But when you and Asia turned up missing, we had to send in the troops.”
“This little mystery,” Ethan repeated, biting off the words. A mystery that had led an old woman who should have died peacefully in her sleep to kill herself instead. A mystery that now had a woman who’d overcome a soul-killing tragedy facing yet another round of torture. A mystery that he was beginning to suspect involved him much more deeply than he knew. And for what? That was what he had yet to understand and the rage was threatening to overwhelm him.
His voice shook as he spoke once more. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning. Tell me what the hell is going on. And don’t leave anything out.”
The nurse who’d brought me my breakfast returned a while later, alone this time, to take me down the hall to the shower. Smiling brightly, she gave me some toilet articles and a towel and stood just outside the stall while I “freshened up.” My own clothes were gone when I got out of the shower. I realized with a flare of angry humiliation that I wouldn’t get them back when the nurse handed me a pair of scrubs to put on and some slippers for my feet.
Once she had me “dressed” for the day, the nurse steered me past my cell and into another corridor. This one led to something that looked like a
classroom, with several desks and a monitoring station. She sat me at one of the desks and left me alone. I heard the lock slide solidly into the doorjamb as she left.
Fear began to seep out of my bones and into my stomach, making it churn. My heart started to beat at the speed of a lab rat’s. This was a fear I thought I’d left behind, but now I saw it had only hidden deep in my body, waiting for the right circumstances to re-emerge.
A desk. A test.
This will be the easy part.
Later there would be the lab and the wires. The cold steel. And the probes.
I began to shake.
Then the screaming will start.
Jesus, I couldn’t stop shaking.
The door to the corridor opened and I jumped, my hands fluttering in my lap. Claussen swept into the room and the door locked behind him. I stood, swallowing the bitter taste of terror in my throat. I backed up to give myself the space I needed to maintain some semblance of control.
Claussen simply smiled at me and took a seat at the monitor’s desk.
“Good morning, Asia. How are you feeling this morning?”
“How am I feeling?” My hands clenched into fists. “Angry, resentful, betrayed, trapped. I feel like kicking you in the balls and blowing your pretty facility to hell. Anything else you’d like to know?”
Claussen looked bored. “It was just meant to be a pleasantry. I wasn’t truly asking for a report on your emotional state. We’ll determine that as we go along.”
“That should be easy enough to determine.” I lifted my chin. “You kidnapped me. You’re holding me against my will. You’ve threatened to ruin the life of someone I care about. The emotional state of any rational person under those circumstances would be highly fucking agitated, wouldn’t you say?”
“Why don’t you have a seat, Asia?” Claussen waved mildly at a desk. “We’re going to start with some easy questions today, just to get a baseline.”
“Fuck you. Oh, and fuck your baseline.”
Claussen’s eyes narrowed. “We can do this here, with an oral test. Or we can do it under restraint in the lab, with a brain scan. Your choice. I actually prefer the oral test. Believe it or not, it’s more accurate for my purposes. But if you’d rather have the equipment and the drugs . . .”
He knew what my reaction would be. My body was screaming at me. Heart, lungs, stomach, muscles—NO! NO! NO! NO!
I sat down.
“Good.” He smiled, the smug bastard. “Now. Tell me your full name.”
“Asia Lynne Burdette.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-one.”
“And what did you have for breakfast this morning?”
What?
When I didn’t answer, he repeated the question. “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”
I glared at him. “Eggs, toast, peach yogurt.”
Sam and Rayna exchanged a tight glance as if they knew it might come to this. Rayna shook her head.
“There are rules, Ethan. We couldn’t tell you everything, even if we wanted to.”
Ethan grabbed her forearm. “You’re giving me some kind of fucking no-interference bullshit after all you people have done to screw things up here? Asia deserves an explanation for what happened to her. I worked with Arthur Claussen for years. Goddamn it, I need to know what’s going on.”
He was shouting now, and Rayna had to fight to loosen his grip on her arm. Sam cursed and pulled the Explorer off the road in a squeal of rubber. He turned and had a hand on Ethan’s throat before the SUV had fully come to a stop.
“Hey, I sympathize, buddy, but I will put you in a fucking coma if you lay a hand on my wife again.” His hand tightened. “You get me?”
“Sam!” Rayna touched his shoulder where it hung over the front seat. “I got this. He wasn’t hurting me.”
The big man released his grip and shook his head. “Look, neither one of us is what you might call a stickler for the rules. But in this business we have to be careful. You know, some of that science fiction baraz wasn’t too far from wrong—at least the part where some asshole goes to a less advanced planet and fucks everything up. We’ve seen it happen. So we will keep a low profile, understand?”
“It’s not like I have CNN on speed dial.” Ethan coughed, turning his head to ease the throb in his neck.
Sam snorted. “Wouldn’t matter a whole lot if you did.”
Ethan knew with professional certainty how quickly one man with a wild story of alien abduction would be dismissed. “Just tell me who you are.”
“We work for an organization called the Interstellar Council for Abolition and Rescue.” Sam broke it down. “It’s Rescue’s goal to put an end to the kind of thing that happened to Asia. Some of our people work on the legal end—passing laws and so forth. Others work in enforcement in those parts of the galaxy where governments have abolished trafficking and slave labor.”
Ethan’s mind balked at the scope. “You’re talking about governments all over the galaxy . . .?”
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Rayna said. “But, yes, it’s a busy little galaxy out there. Sometimes a nasty one. Slave trafficking is a profitable business, and not everyone agrees that it should be abolished. Unfortunately, there’s not just one big happy Galactic Senate to regulate things, so we have to fight our battles in every solar system and region of space that has a governing body to negotiate with. Thank God that’s not my job.”
“Yeah, Rayna preferred the easy work—organizing underground resistance and escape networks in the labor camps.” Sam smiled fondly at his wife. “At least until that mountain fell on top of her.”
Rayna made a face at him. “Like your job was a piece of cake—chasing slave ships in a tin can held together with spit and thermoglue.”
Stunned, Ethan followed the banter with only half a mind. The fact that these two obviously sane human beings were confirming a theory he would have said only weeks ago was insane had fully hit him. All the disparate pieces he’d collected since Asia had challenged his view of the universe had at last coalesced into a frightening new model.
“So you’re saying there are other . . . species . . . out there that use humans as slaves?”
Sam and Rayna nodded.
“Their technology is advanced enough that it is economically feasible for them to forcibly remove people from Earth and take them to wherever they need them as labor.”
Sam and Rayna nodded again.
“Humans in particular? Seems like a long way to come for workers.”
“Not really, when you figure that your solar system sits smack on the central jump node—uh, sort of a space/time shortcut—for this quadrant of space,” Sam replied. “And, by some asshole trick of the gods, humans have nearly the same environmental requirements as the biggest slave-trading species out there, a species we’ve nicknamed the Grays. With one big advantage. We’re not susceptible to the mind-altering effects of certain crystal-borne fungi. Add to it that humans are adaptable, smart, and strong, and you’re just asking to be whisked away to the labor camps.”
Ethan shook his head. “They’ve been doing this right under our noses without anyone knowing it?”
“Well, not exactly.” Sam pointed at the sky. “People see UFOs. For years people have been claiming they’ve been kidnapped by aliens, but no one’s believed them. You should know that better than anyone.”
Shame flushed hot through Ethan’s chest. “Most of the people I worked with were—” He was going to say “delusional,” but he stopped, then shook his head. “No. Some of them—from what you say, they must have been telling the truth.” His voice fell to a whisper. “I should have believed them.”
Rayna put a hand on his arm. “You believed Asia. You believed Ida. And from what I know of you, you treated all your patients with respect, whether you believed them or not.”
Ethan sensed something left unsaid, a truth this explanation concealed rather than revealed. He probed for it.
; “You said Claussen worked for you. Doing what?”
“You know, rescuing people from labor camps or slave ships isn’t just a matter of picking them up and dropping them back on their home planets. Early on, Rescue couldn’t return people at all. They started colonies on planets like Terrene, where Rayna comes from.” Sam was avoiding the direct question. “Then we found a way to send them back and, guess what? The people we returned were much happier if they didn’t remember what had happened to them.”
Ethan’s breath tightened, anger beginning a slow burn in his belly again. “You brainwash them.”
Sam corrected him. “The Minertsans—the Grays—brainwash them. To make them more docile. We restore what we can, then we take them home, based on what we find in the implants.”
“The implants,” Ethan repeated, thinking of the scar on Asia’s neck. “But those memories are not complete. You purposely wipe their memories of their time in captivity.”
Rayna returned his challenge with one of her own. “Think about it, Ethan. If you had a choice, would you want to be returned to your old life with your memories of being abducted and living as a slave intact? Or would you rather wake up in the morning just like every other morning, remembering only a good night’s sleep?”
He shook as he answered her. “Asia didn’t just wake up the next morning like every other morning. Somebody fucked up—there was a battle, the ship was late, and she lost everything. Then she started remembering what you had programmed her to forget. That wasn’t in the plan, was it?”
Sam stared at him. “You know about the firefight?”
“Asia remembered it.”
“Jesus.” Sam’s face was ashen.
“I said it before.” Tears welled in Rayna’s eyes. “Asia is special.”
After a moment Sam turned to explain, his voice subdued, almost apologetic. “We have the technology to eliminate short-term memory patterns associated with specific experiences, and it works with all but a few individuals.” He paused, struggling for the right words. “For most people, returning is painless. They have no memory of being gone at all. No nightmares. No scars. And because we can manipulate space-time with the jump, no lost time. The transition is smooth. If people start getting nightmares or flashbacks, it’s an indication the original treatment is breaking down and a brief booster program helps to get them back on track. That’s where Dr. Claussen—and others like him—come in.”
Unchained Memory (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 1) Page 31
