by Roxie Ray
The capacity for violence in him, though... his utter disregard for human life, if it interfered with his own interests or those of the organization he served... the absence of family in his life, of love, of comfort or security or happiness...
Those things didn't seem to conflict with my own brainwaves at all. If anything, they seemed to settle in all too comfortably.
Could it be I had more in common with this obscene outlaw than I'd previously imagined?
“Well, it seems as though we're off to a solid start,” Khim said in a businesslike tone, consulting the screens and scanners that surrounded the examination table. “Your vital signs are stable. The implants are retaining your neural patterns. The genetic materials extracted from Hakkas are supplanting your own. We'll keep you here overnight for observation. In the morning, we'll apply Hakkas' tattoos to your body, and then send you on your way.”
So I stayed in the healers' chambers for hours, alone with my thoughts as I stared at the ceiling and felt myself gradually transform into someone else. I tried to occupy my mind by accessing Hakkas' background information and criminal record on a data pad – as well as the details regarding an inmate named Paige Hudson, who was to be my contact once I was inside. According to Sharon Graves, the human female who'd arrived with the Mana yesterday, this Paige woman could be trusted with my true identity and purpose on Karcerikus.
But even as I meticulously memorized these facts, my mind still wandered.
On the eve of an uncertain or perilous mission, many warriors would seek comfort in their friends, families, or mates.
But I had no “friends” to speak of – only fellow warriors, my relationships with them built on mutual respect and shared experiences on the battlefield. Dhimurs was a trusted comrade, but he was also the leader of the military, so he had too many important demands on his time to come and visit me now. Likewise, Akzun had all the responsibilities of a blood ruler, not to mention a young child to attend to.
I'd never had a family.
And I'd never encountered anyone in the entire galaxy who I'd recognized as my predestined mate. Or perhaps I'd just been too preoccupied with secret missions and silent assassinations to bother looking.
Either way, I was alone that night, with no one to keep me company but the ghost of Hakkas inside me.
2
Paige
“Honestly, I'm surprised you didn't tear your own arm off.”
Suzanne's laughter filled the prison infirmary as I carefully used a tissue regenerator to coax the torn muscles in her deltoids and biceps back together. Most prisoners here in Karcerikus – even the tougher ones – would have grimaced at the unpleasant sensation, but not her.
“Hey, when my fucking terra-pod malfunctions, I'd rather risk self-amputation than loosen my grip on the control stick, even for a second,” she retorted. “At least that way, I've got a fighting chance of making it back to my cell in one piece.”
For maybe the thousandth time since I'd been brought to this floating hellhole, I thanked God that I'd been assigned to the clinic instead of terraforming duty, which almost invariably ended up claiming the lives of the inmates who piloted the terra-pods shift after shift.
Even if I'd had to make a lot of sacrifices for that to happen.
I'd been on a commercial airliner that was beamed out of the sky by alien slave traders several months before, and most of the passengers had been sold to the warden of this facility to be used as expendable laborers. When I'd found myself suddenly surrounded by an insane menagerie of extraterrestrial crooks – half of them looking like they wanted to fuck me, while the other half looked like they wanted to eat me – I figured the only smart thing to do was to find out who everyone else was afraid of the most, and do whatever I could to earn their protection.
I mean, I'd never been in a prison before... but based on everything I'd heard about it, that made sense, right? As much as anything could “make sense,” after I'd been abducted by beings from other planets (which I'd never had any previous reason to believe existed in the first place).
As it turned out, the most powerful gang in Karcerikus was the Sives – a bunch of intergalactic gangsters. And the leader of the Sives was Umel. A Valkredian, although I didn't know what that meant at the time. To me, they were just space vampires, who had a special fondness for human blood.
I thought he'd demand my blood as payment for his protection. Instead, he offered to use his influence to have me posted in the infirmary, since I'd been a nurse on Earth. In exchange, he wanted me to do favors for him – steal drugs from the medicine lock-ups, give his people preferential treatment when they came in with injuries, deliver messages to and from the clinic, and smuggle blood samples out for him to consume.
I did all of those things for him, along with whatever else he asked of me. And in return, the other prisoners left me alone, and I was spared from terraforming duty.
At least it gave me a chance to do what I was good at, which was healing injured people – especially since Healer Lozar, the Valkredian who ran the infirmary, was an incompetent rax addict who carelessly allowed most of the inmates in his “care” to suffer and die.
On Earth, I'd grown up in the lower classes, utterly alone after my father abandoned me when I was ten. The only thing that had given me even the dimmest sense of belonging was pursuing – and eventually, achieving – a career as a medical professional. I tried to think of my coworkers and patients as a kind of family, but it was still hard for me not to feel utterly alone in the world.
Even so, I wasn't proud of the things I'd done for Umel and his gang in order to survive. Especially when I saw other humans in here who managed to get by without doing so. Like Sharon, who'd been my cellmate before she escaped with the help of a Manaean jailer named Tetro.
Or Suzanne Faraday, who'd been assigned as my new cellmate immediately afterward.
Of all the Earthlings who worked in this prison as slaves, Suzanne had the strange distinction of being one of the only ones who was actually here for crimes she'd committed. She, too, had been a member of the lower classes. But unlike me, she'd somehow come to suspect the existence of alien civilizations – and that our own government was hiding the evidence from us.
So she went looking for it.
She broke into covert installations by tunneling into them. She stole files and evidence and pieces of technology from other worlds. In the end, she even managed to commandeer a UFO from a secret base and fly off with it, going on a spree of interstellar piracy and mayhem before she was finally captured and sent here.
Since her arrival, Suzanne had been assigned to terraforming duty almost daily – and every time, she'd beaten the odds by surviving. How? No one knew for sure, except that she was one hell of a daredevil pilot.
She'd taken a liking to me. So had numerous other prisoners whose lives I'd saved. It was nice to have that level of goodwill and acceptance... even if it wasn't enough to quell the loneliness I felt in this awful place.
Or the loneliness I'd felt on Earth, for that matter.
“Okay, that should do it,” I announced, making a final pass over Suzanne's arm with the regenerator and returning it to its proper place on the tool wall. “Try to take it easy for the next couple days.”
“'Take it easy?' In here?” she scoffed good-naturedly, hopping down from the med bed and heading toward the door. “Somehow, I doubt it. See you back at the cell, roomie. Hope the rest of your shift goes well.”
As it happened, my shift was almost over. As usual, Healer Lozar had been passed out in his office for most of it – which was certainly preferable to having him stumble around, slurring insults at me.
Especially since I had a few items to pick up for Umel before heading back to the cell block.
I looked over the blood samples we had stored, and shook my head. No good. There weren't enough for me to take any without Lozar noticing. I checked the artificial plasma, and found that there were plenty of vials of that – I pocketed a ha
ndful of them, peering over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being watched. It was cheap, shitty stuff, and I knew Umel would bitch about it, but it was better than nothing.
Then I went to the medication cupboards and rooted around in them, hating myself for stealing drugs that should have been used to soothe the patients' agony. Still, it wasn't as though I could come back to unit seven empty-handed. Not if I wanted to keep working in the clinic... and not if I wanted the Sives to keep watching my back.
If only I'd had Sharon's toughness, or Suzanne's brazenness. If only there were some way for me to protect myself in here without doing Umel's bidding.
But there didn't seem to be. All I had going for me was my medical expertise. I had to rely on that.
The alarm honked from the mounted speakers on the ceiling, letting all the prisoners know it was time to return to their assigned cell blocks for a handful of hours before lights-out. I poked my head into Lozar's office to make sure he was still asleep in a puddle of his own drool, then walked out into the corridor, keeping my steps careful and measured so the pills in my uniform wouldn't rattle and draw attention.
The hallways of Karcerikus were dark and narrow, with transparent walls that afforded a view of whatever barren rock we were currently in the process of terraforming – in this case, an oblong planetoid near the rim of the Svanteian system. The air was filled with the acrid stink of alien body odor, dust, and machine grease, tinged with vague notes of blood and rax smoke. When I'd first gotten here, the smells had made me gag and choke.
Now I was used to them.
As the prisoners kept their heads down and marched back to their units, several administrators and guard bots stood at various points along the corridor, conducting random inspections. This was a relatively new development – ever since Sharon and Tetro had broken out, Karaak, the warden, had tightened up security. As such, many of the new jailers he'd hired weren't on the Sives' payroll.
Which could be bad news for me, if one of them decided to search me.
As though she'd been reading my mind, a Xehrulian jailer raised a hand, gesturing for me to approach her and submit to a pat-down.
Fuck.
I didn't recognize her. I had no way of knowing whether she was one of the strict new arrivals, or if she was one of the admins Umel bribed to look the other way. Either way, it was too late for me to do anything now except place my palms on the wall, keep my feet apart, and pray for a good outcome.
She slid her large hands over my shoulders, arms, back, chest, and down my hips and legs, nodding and grunting to herself all the while. I held my breath, knowing she'd find the pills and plasma – and promising God that if He'd just get me through this, I'd wrap them up and swallow them next time instead of being careless enough to just tuck them into the folds of my uniform.
But even that might not have done any good. When the admins didn't find anything during a pat-down, they were supposed to follow up with a wave of a special electronic wand that detected foreign substances inside the body. Some of them complied with this regulation. Others – the more bored, sadistic, or perverted among them – preferred to follow up the old-fashioned way: With a full body cavity search, usually conducted in public view.
When I'd first gotten to Karcerikus, having these aliens paw me with impunity used to feel gross and degrading. Now I accepted it as just another part of life in here.
Which didn't make me any less anxious about being caught with contraband.
My stomach tied itself into cold knots as the Xehrulian's hands found the vials and bottles crammed in my pockets and paused over them. I waited for her to snatch them away and drag me down to the seg cells on the lowest level of the station as punishment. I'd never spent any time in those horrible chambers so far, and from everything I'd heard about them from those who had, I prayed I never would.
Instead, though, the jailer just withdrew her hands and said, “All right, move along.”
I exhaled shakily, rejoining the other prisoners who were going back to unit seven. Clearly, this admin was on Umel's payroll... for now, at least. I figured she must have frisked me just to look busy in front of her more honest coworkers.
Still, that had been close. Too damn close.
I stepped through the entry doors and into the familiar chaos of unit seven. Laughter, boasting, threats, curses, all echoed around the cell block in what sounded like an endless cacophonous loop.
The unit was largely populated by the Sives, which included males and females from almost every civilized planet in the galaxy. But there were a handful of others who were assigned to this unit, too – space bikers who'd pledged their loyalty to the Carnage Riders, robots and cyborgs who belonged to the “machine consciousness” cult called the Glitches, and a few random inmates who remained unaffiliated yet somehow managed to survive (for now, at least). The guard bots were arranged around the cell block in a ring like discarded dolls, motionless, waiting to be activated by the jailer administrators who prowled the floors and catwalks like restless tigers in a zoo.
Christ, this place was becoming too fucking familiar to me. When I'd first arrived, there'd been some small part of me that was convinced if I could just find some way to survive and wait it out, I'd make it back to Earth somehow. I hadn't had any plan, any real idea of how that might happen – I just couldn't accept the fact that this was my reality now, that there was no way back to the life I'd once had.
Had I already given up on that entirely?
I felt an aura of dark menace near me, moving through unit seven like a storm cloud. I knew what it was, but I still couldn't help glancing nervously in the direction of the source.
Karaak.
The Lunian warden cut through the throngs of prisoners like a shark through water – his bald head towering above all the others, his skin glowing with dark, malevolent energy as his narrowed eyes surveyed the inmates around him suspiciously. His claw-like hands always seemed to be balled up into fists at his sides, ever since Sharon and Tetro had escaped. Before that incident, he'd spent most of his time in his private office.
These days, though, he'd taken to wandering the cell blocks with a permanent scowl and poking his sharp mental probes into the brains of random convicts – searching for more secret escape plans, no doubt. When Sharon had blown apart the wall of Karaak's office, the Lunian had been sucked out into the cold depths of space by the vacuum. But he'd used his powers to survive, clawing his way back inside to the safety of the station's artificial gravity and oxygen circulators.
Still, many of the inmates whispered among themselves that Karaak had left a rather sizable fragment of his sanity out there among the stars. He'd become quick-tempered, paranoid, unpredictable, and even more malicious than he'd been before.
Would he decide to aim one of his probes at me as I passed by? If he did, would he care that I was smuggling contraband for the Sives, or would he be too focused on detecting prisoners' escape schemes to notice?
I didn't know. Just when I thought I'd figured out how this rotten place worked, everything suddenly seemed to be turned upside down.
I kept my posture and stride as neutral as possible as I walked by Karaak. If he noticed me, he gave no sign – and, to my relief, I didn't feel the terrible stab of his thoughts lancing into my own. He swooped past me, leaving a heavy wake of frigid air and the smell of ozone, and walked out of the cell block.
Thank God for that, at least. Even so, my heart was racing, and my forehead and neck were covered in a thin film of sweat.
I'd endured too many close calls for one day.
3
Paige
I went to Umel's cell, giving a casual nod to the pair of Valkredian Sives who stood guard. They barely noticed me anymore – I was in and out of Umel's cell several times a day. They'd come to trust in the fact that I wouldn't make any attempt to harm or double-cross him.
The thought of this gave me a brief flare of anger and self-hatred. To them, I presented no more of a potential threat t
han a bug skittering across the floor. Christ, was I really that beaten down?
Umel lounged on his bunk, languidly puffing on a crudely made rax pipe. He had the same pale skin, high cheekbones, and feathered wings that the other members of his race had – but as Valkredians went, he was a thoroughly ugly, scrawny, filthy specimen. His beady eyes were red and watery from narcotics abuse, his face was blotchy and covered in blemishes, his fangs were grayish-blue and crooked, and his long hair was limp and greasy.
But his most notable features were the bulky, mismatched, barely functioning bionic legs he tottered around on painfully. From what I'd heard, he'd lost his legs in a shoot-out while he was on the run from the law... needless to say, it was a sensitive topic for him, and many other Sives had been severely punished for bringing the incident up.
When he saw me, Umel bared his ugly teeth in a grin and hauled himself up into a sitting position.
“What have you got for me today?” he drawled, setting the pipe on the floor carefully. “Fresh blood? I could certainly use some. My hands are getting a little shaky, and this rax ain't cutting it.”
I shook my head, emptying my pockets on the blanket next to him. “Sorry. Just some of the fake plasma to tide you over, plus a couple bottles of Xehrulian anesthetics.”
Umel let out a disappointed hiss, the corners of his mouth turning downward sharply as he grabbed a vial of plasma. “Fuck! That thrice-damned glutton Lozar is drinking up too much of the stuff. A couple of weeks ago, I'd have sent some of our guys to the infirmary to work the bastard over. But ever since your little friend Sharon went and executed her big jailbreak, we've had to keep our heads down to stay on Karaak's good side.”
He sucked down the plasma in two loud gulps, then shook a couple of the pills into his palm, popped them in his mouth, and crunched them between his foul teeth.
