Shocked silence reigned on the bridge until Yuskeya broke it. “Two more ships in range,” she said. “Moving fast, heading for the ones we’re watching. But coming from opposite directions.”
“More Chron?” Hirin asked.
“One of them reads as Chron, Captain,” she said, and I didn’t resent her calling him that at all. He was still in the big chair, and as much as it pained me to admit it, he was the best one to be there right now. “From its trajectory, it could have come from the vicinity of that planet we noticed when we arrived in-system.”
“And the other one?”
She pulled a deep breath. “Unless there’s something wrong with the scans—” She turned to him, frowning. “It’s another PrimeCorp ship.”
Hirin sat back in the chair, tapping his lips with steepled fingers. “What the hell is going on here?”
“PrimeCorp and the first Chron ship are moving,” Yuskeya said.
“Running?” I asked.
She turned to me, frowning. “No. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were taking up—battle positions.”
“HOLD US STEADY,” Hirin told Rei. “We don’t want to get caught up in this.”
“I don’t know if we have a choice,” Yuskeya said, glancing up from the nav console, her dark eyes troubled. “Three more ships have entered scan range. All read Chron drive signatures. All coming from the direction of the planet.”
“We should turn around,” Maja said. “We might make it to the wormhole, get to the Corvids—”
“We’d have to navigate the asteroids on the other side,” Hirin reminded her. “We might not get so lucky this time.”
No, we wouldn’t, I thought. I was in far worse shape physically than I’d been short days ago. I didn’t have the coordination to help Rei pilot through another asteroid death trap. Maybe Hirin could—but he was still getting used to his rejuvenated body. If his reflexes were anything but a hundred percent—
“Two of the new ships have broken off and are heading this way,” Yuskeya said. She turned to Hirin. “They must have noticed us.”
Bright flashes of light around the PrimeCorp ship signalled that the first attackers had come within weapons range. The dots on the screen darted and swerved as the ships engaged. I stared at the bright blips of light, wishing I understood the situation better. Whose side were we on? Either one?
“Luta.” Hirin caught my gaze, a question in his eyes. This decision, we had to make together. “How do you want to play this?”
“We don’t have enough information, and we don’t want to get involved.”
“No sense turning back.”
“No. Run for the next wormhole?” I asked. “With the new burst drive, we might make it.”
“Chron ships still coming straight for us,” Yuskeya said.
He nodded once, the time for discussion obviously over. “Rei, engage the burst drive and run for the next wormhole on Fha’s map. Viss, I want weapons online, although I hope we won’t have to use them.”
Rei thrust the ship into a sharp dive down and under the asteroid, then straightened out and hit the burst drive. I was glad I’d been sitting down as the ship leapt under us and the pseudo-gravs fluctuated for a heartbeat. Weightlessness tugged at me, sending my stomach roiling and the blood pounding in my ears. Then the grav stabilized and the skimchair felt solid and reliable underneath me again. My stomach refused to settle, though, and heat rolled over me in waves.
“Merde,” Cerevare swore under her breath, gripping the sides of the console. “What was that?”
“Temporary gravity fluctuation,” Rei assured her. “It won’t happen again.”
“Chron ships are in pursuit,” Yuskeya reported.
“Gaining on us?”
“Not yet.” Her voice sounded grim, as if it were only a matter of time.
“Chron ship is trying to comm us,” Baden said, sounding surprised. He turned in his chair to face Hirin. “I don’t understand the words, but the signal is definitely coming from them.”
“I don’t have to understand them,” Hirin said. “I’m pretty sure they’re telling us stop, or we’ll shoot, or something very similar.”
Jahelia Sord slid her chair closer to Baden’s and held out her datapad. “Here,” she said. “Can you use this to help figure it out?” Cerevare moved to read Sord’s screen, peering over her shoulder at the symbols.
He took it, glancing at the screen. “I don’t know how to match up what I’m hearing with the symbols.”
“Just patch me into the comm channel,” the datapad said in an exasperated voice, and Baden started, almost dropping the thing. “I have a trans-cymatics sound library—”
“What the—”
“Oh,” Jahelia said, “that’s Pita, my AI. She’s right, she can probably help. Do as she says and patch her into the comm.”
“Baden, don’t do that,” I said. I didn’t know what game Jahelia Sord might be playing, but I wasn’t about to let her connect her own datapad to the ship’s system.
Sord turned to me, frowning. Her pridattii wrinkled and crumpled on her face, emphasizing her exasperation. “I’m trying to help. Pita can translate.”
I felt the air on the bridge warming up around me, as if someone had lit a fire. “So you say. You haven’t done a lot to make me trust you, Sord.”
“Don’t be stupid. I don’t want to die out here, any more than you do.”
“Maybe not, but you’d take over this ship in a heartbeat, if you could.” I reached out a hand to Baden. “Here, give it to me, I’ll see what exactly it is.”
He hesitated, eyes fixed on my face, unreadable. “Captain—”
“That’s an order, Baden. Give it here.” My voice was harsh and impatient, far more than I meant it to be.
“Kristos, Captain. Your nose,” said Jahelia Sord.
I felt a warm wetness dribble down over my upper lip and put a hand up, feeling the blood that had betrayed me. Not again.
“Mother! What’s wrong?” Maja pushed up from her skimchair and darted around the corner into First Aid.
“Luta? Are you all right?” Hirin’s voice was thick with worry.
“Never mind me. You deal with the ship.”
Maja hurried back with a clean white cloth and passed it to me. I pressed it to my face, not wanting to meet her eyes and see the worry there.
“Captain—Hirin,” Yuskeya said urgently. “Another Chron ship just appeared on the scan. It’s—it’s ahead of us.”
“Between us and the wormhole?”
“Exactly. And it’s big. Like, as big as a Protectorate Phoenix. I’d say it’s guarding the wormhole.”
“Rock and a hard place,” Hirin said. “Ideas, anyone?”
“Captain,” Cerevare said, excitement evident in her voice, “I think she’s right.” She’d taken out her own datapad and now looked up from the screen. “There’s a file here—”
A brilliant flash lit up the viewscreen. We’d drawn closer to the original firefight since it lay close to our path to the wormhole. The ships continued their deadly dance, and one of them had succumbed. It wasn’t the PrimeCorp ship, but I couldn’t tell which one of the Chron ships, PrimeCorp’s apparent ally or one of the others, had been destroyed.
I held up a hand to the Lobor. “Not now, Cerevare.” Too much was happening, too quickly. I couldn’t focus. The swelling heat of anger blooming in my head seemed ready to burst. Chron chasing us. Chron fighting, against PrimeCorp and more Chron. Chron blocking our way to the wormhole. And Jahelia Sord, claiming she could communicate with them, too? What was going on?
“They’re still comming us,” Baden said. “They sound—I don’t know. Urgent? Angry? Threatening?”
“They’re not going to take the Tane Ikai,” I said suddenly. “Not the Chron, and not PrimeCorp. This is all your fault!” I realized I had shouted it, when I saw Hirin’s shocked face. I’d tossed aside the bloodstained cloth and for some reason grabbed Jahelia Sord by the hair. I stared down at my
fist, daubed with blood, pale-tipped black curls spilling from it. Sord swore, instinctively grabbing my wrist with both hands, trying to break my grasp.
And then Rei said something tense and urgent to Hirin about the activator drive, which didn’t make any sense, because we were nowhere near an artifact moon or a ghosted wormhole. Before anyone could move or answer her, the ship’s engines died, their throbbing heartbeat stilled, and we hurtled forward on momentum only. The bridge lights dimmed and failed, leaving ghost images dancing before my eyes. Everyone started shouting at once. On the front and rear viewscreens, two Chron ships drew in closer, as if closing the Tane Ikai in a pincer grip. And then it did feel like something enormous grabbed us, slowing us down. A hum filled the air, a buzzing like insects. I wondered if I was the only one who could hear it.
Suddenly Jahelia Sord’s hands fell limp, away from my wrist, and I let go of her hair, my hand going suddenly too weak to hold onto it. I clutched my datapad to my chest—no, Sord’s datapad, I thought fuzzily—and I was falling as if in slow motion, drifting toward the hard metal decking. I watched as if in a dream as Hirin slumped forward in the big chair, folding in on himself. As I landed with an impact that didn’t feel slow or dreamlike at all, I saw Cerevare’s softly-furred hands hit the decking to break her own fall. Then her head crashed down on them and her usually-bright eyes were unfocused, closing.
And I knew we were lost, lost to the Chron, and I felt a momentary sorrow that I would never have the chance to explain all of this to Lanar and Mother.
Chapter 29 – Jahelia
Rude Awakening
ONE OF THE many advantages of living with a body full of nanobioscavengers that my father, Berrto Sord, had stolen from PrimeCorp when I was a child, has been an almost total lack of pain. I mean, sure, it hurts if I kick a wall during a zelendu workout, or knock my elbow against the corner of a desk. A punch in the face is a punch in the face. But none of it hurts for long. Even the time I dislocated my shoulder during a fight with Ramesis Smith at the akademio, the pain only lasted for about five minutes before the nanos blocked it. The pain I repaid him lasted a lot longer, I can guarantee.
Waking up after the Chron hit us with—whatever it was that put us all out—I learned what pain really was. I understood, suddenly, even before I opened my eyes, what the term “splitting headache” meant. I was afraid, literally afraid, to open my eyes in case that made it worse.
So I took stock of my surroundings, as much as I could, before I cracked an eyelid. I lay on something soft, but solid underneath, like a thin sleeping pad you might take on a camping trip. I had a sense of open space around me, but not outdoor space—a decent-sized room, I decided. The temperature was comfortable, neither warm nor cold. It smelled a little like the locker rooms at the Protectorate akademio—not exactly sweaty or unpleasant, but definitely inhabited by other humans. In fact, if I strained my ears, I thought I could hear the sounds of someone else—maybe several someones—breathing deep and steady nearby. Weirdly, my left arm, from elbow to wrist, felt as if it were encased in some kind of cast. The sleeve of my jacket bunched uncomfortably around my upper arm, as if it had been pushed up out of the way.
The unexpected touch of something cold and metallic on my forehead startled me and my eyes flew open. And there was the echo of my childhood nightmare.
A tall humanoid bent over me. It hadn’t said anything, must have moved with absolute silence since I hadn’t even been aware of its presence. Pale, chitinous plates covered its face, forming sharp planes and angles, sweeping up to a many-pointed bone crest at the back of the hairless head. Deep-set turquoise eyes with diagonally slitted pupils regarded me from the depths of the eye sockets. It wore a plain dark uniform of close-fitting fabric with strange symbols running down one sleeve.
And just like in a nightmare, an unforgiving paralysis gripped me. I couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, couldn’t knock away the chill weapon the creature held to my forehead. I was about to die and I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it.
The thing it held to my forehead twitched, and between one thudding heartbeat and the next, my headache was gone. So was my paralysis. I threw myself away from the alien, fetching up against a cool metal wall I hadn’t realized was so close behind me. Pain bloomed anew in my right knee as it bashed into the metal plating. Somehow I scrambled to my feet on the cot and put my back against the wall, throwing my hands up in a block. I’d been right—a hard shell of greenish plastic or resin sheathed my left forearm. I stood looking down at the alien, my heart bucking, breaths coming short and fast.
It hadn’t moved, didn’t seem at all alarmed at my reaction. Now it merely shook its head at me. The thing in its hand seemed like a typical med injector. Slowly it backed to the door of the cell—because it was a cell, I realized now, complete with bars and a view across the corridor and through the left-hand wall into other cells. The wall behind me and the one to my right were solid metal; in front of me were bars and a door that led into a corridor perhaps six feet wide. To my left the bars created a divider between my cell and the next one. Beyond that were more. Across the corridor, the cells mirrored those on this side. The corridor stretched off to the left of my cell, and even from inside I could tell that it swung in an inward curve. Space station, my brain immediately suggested, and I imagined a torus shape with rooms laid out around the ring.
The alien touched a hand to a darker grey band about six inches wide on one of the cell door bars. The door swung open silently and the alien slipped out without turning its back on me, then pulled it closed again.
I wiped a shaky hand across my mouth and slid down the wall to sit, cross-legged, on the bed. That was a mistake and I grimaced, straightening my right leg. My knee throbbed painfully, in time with my heartbeat. I still felt rotten, despite the removal of the debilitating headache. Where the hell am I, and what the hell was that thing?
Whatever it was, it bent over a small trolley it had apparently left waiting in the corridor, swapping out the injector it had used on me for another one. It moved to open the door of the cell on the other side of the corridor, where Luta Paixon slept on a cot identical to mine, in an identical cell. A green cast sheathed her left arm as well. In the cell to my left, the engineer, Viss, lay silent and unmoving on his own cot, once again with his left arm encased.
“Captain!” I shouted, practically before I’d even realized that I had the power of speech again. The alien put a hand to a similar grey band on one of the bars, and the door swung open. It entered her cell. My voice echoed eerily, but apparently didn’t penetrate the sleeping woman’s unconsciousness. She didn’t move as the alien crossed to her cot, injector in hand.
I slid off the cot, hissing as my right foot hit the floor and pain lanced my knee again. Come on, bioscavs, get to work. I don’t have time for this. Limping, I reached the cell door and took hold of two of the bars. “Paixon! Captain! Wake up!” Not expecting any success, I touched the grey band with my palm. Predictably, nothing happened. I obviously didn’t have the right chemical composition, palmprint, body heat, implant, or whatever it was that triggered the door lock for the alien.
Paixon didn’t stir, even when the alien pressed the injector to her forehead. The captain slept on. The alien turned to study me, seeming puzzled. It chattered what I assumed must be a question, but I had about as much chance of understanding it as I did of turning into a butterfly and fluttering out of the cell. The alien’s speech sounded like birds chirping and insects clicking and I don’t know what else. It sure as hell wasn’t Esper.
I shook my head. “I don’t understand you.”
The blue eyes fastened on me as the alien left Paixon’s cell and returned to its medical cart. It wheeled the cart along to the cell next to Paixon’s. The fall of blonde hair made it easy for me to identify Maja, out cold like everyone else from the Tane Ikai.
The ship. What had they done with the ship?
And then, Pita. How would I manage without her? I glanced around my
cell, but I wasn’t really expecting that my datapad had come along with me. I hadn’t even had it when they’d knocked us out—Paixon had, and she’d been in the grip of one of her crazy paranoid episodes. If we’d had Pita, at least we might have a chance of communicating with the Chron. They hadn’t killed us outright. That had to be a good thing, didn’t it? In the war, the Chron had never taken prisoners. They simply killed.
Maja yelped from her cell, and I knew she’d been awakened as I had. As I watched, though, she slid off the cot and into a defensive crouch. Much more presence of mind than I’d shown, I thought jealously. There was more to her than I’d thought. Megero.
As it had done with me, the alien backed out of the cell. What would it do, I wondered, if one of us woke up with even more sense, and attacked it?
“Mother?” Maja called through the bars of her cell to Paixon.
“She didn’t wake up,” I told her.
She turned to me, blue eyes appraising. “Maybe it didn’t do—whatever it just did—to her yet.”
“It did. I watched it. But she didn’t come out of it like we did.”
“Mother, wake up!” she tried again, turning her attention from me. No response.
“Maybe it’s her illness—the nanos,” I said.
“What do you know about that?” Maja asked me impatiently. “It’s none of your business, anyway.”
“I know plenty,” I told her. “And it’s my business if it gets us killed or stops us from getting home. Like I keep saying, I’m stuck in the same situation as everybody else.”
“Well, whose fault is that? You—”
Whatever else she might have said was interrupted by a yell from the cell next to mine. The alien had crossed the hall again, and applied the device to Viss. He had the best reaction yet, though. After his initial startle, his right hand shot out to grasp the alien’s arm.
At least, that was his intention. About an inch from the chitinous skin, his fingers stopped as if they’d hit a wall. Yellow light flared from the point where his skin had contacted—what? Some kind of protective force field, I guessed. He hissed and snatched his hand away, shaking it as if he’d been shocked. The alien withdrew fromViss’ cell even more hurriedly than it had left mine or Maja’s.
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