by J. J. Green
“I’m so glad you’re okay!” Oriana exclaimed. Ferne echoed the sentiment, and both the twins also came over to welcome her with a hug.
But when Nahla did the same, Parthenia remained where she was.
“I’ll find you some clothes,” she said stiffly and then walked into a bedroom.
“We were hoping Mezban would take you out of stasis,” said Ferne. “We were worried about you.”
“She was saying she was going to leave everyone else in the capsules until we reach our destination, wherever that is,” Oriana said.
Suddenly, Carina’s last few drops of energy were expended, and she tottered, unable to stand any longer.
“Whoa,” said Ferne as she collapsed in his direction. He caught her and, with help from Oriana, supported her as far as the sofa.
She fell into the seat and lay against the cushions.
Parthenia returned from the bedroom carrying a pair of pants and a shirt.
“Wait a minute,” Oriana said. “I know something better.”
She ran into another room and came out again with a coverlet and a pillow.
“Remember how weak we were when we woke up?” she asked the others generally as she placed the covering over Carina. “Just rest for a bit. You’ll feel better in a few days.” She put the pillow at the end of the sofa. “Lie down if you want to.”
“Thanks.” Carina’s happiness at seeing that her brothers and sisters were okay momentarily overcame her fears about their perilous situation. Then she recalled something she wanted to ask them. “When you all went into stasis, did it seem like you remained awake too long?”
“Yes!” Ferne replied. “It was really scary. I thought I was going to die! But then I must have gone unconscious. We talked about it when we were woken up, right?” he said to the others.
“Yeah, it was horrible,” said Oriana.
“The same thing happened to me,” Carina said. “I think it’s something to do with our genetics. I had a similar experience before, though at the time it was to my advantage. I’m glad you were all okay in the end.”
“The stasis capsules automatically evacuate if the subject begins to suffer a medical emergency,” said Parthenia. “I don’t think we were in any danger.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Carina smiled at her sister, but Parthenia returned her gaze stonily. “You’ll have to fill me in on everything that’s happened. I only woke up about an hour ago. But, before we go into that, where’s Bryce? Have any of you seen him?”
“No,” Parthenia answered gravely. “We don’t know where he is.”
Concern over Bryce reminded Carina of another man, someone none of them would ever see again.
“I have some bad news,” she said. Then, because there was no easier, gentler way of saying it, she added, choking as she spoke, “Lieutenant Colonel Cadwallader is dead.”
“Oh no!” Oriana clasped her cheeks, her eyes filling with tears.
“Lomang gave the order for him to be executed,” she continued. “I heard it as I was coming out of Deep Sleep.” She decided not to mention she’d seen his dead body, especially not in front of Nahla.
“He was a nice man,” Nahla said, sadly.
Carina nodded. She doubted any of his soldiers would have described Cadwallader as ‘nice’, but he’d always been kind to the children. And though he’d been a tough, strict commander, no one could have accused him of being unfair.
She recalled the party in the viewing dome, when he’d tried to give her advice about her relationship with Bryce. She bit her lip as she recalled how she’d rebuffed him. He’d only been trying to help, and he’d been right when he’d said something like that was worth holding onto. Maybe she’d been too hasty in pushing Bryce and her family away. Maybe this time she could help them without screwing up.
She beckoned Nahla closer. As she grasped the little girl’s hand in her own, she said, “How have you been feeling, sweetie? Do you still have nightmares?”
“Sometimes.” Nahla’s gaze turned downward.
“Not so much anymore,” Parthenia said. “I think she’s getting better.”
Carina wasn’t sure her youngest sister would ever get over being trapped with Stevenson’s body in the pilot’s cabin. She felt bad she hadn’t been around to help her during those eight months they’d waited to go into stasis.
Perhaps sensing her feelings, Darius said brightly, “Nahla’s my best friend. Look at the pictures we drew together. Do you like them?”
He was pointing at a wall, and Carina noticed for the first time that several pieces of paper had been stuck to it, each a hand-drawn image. She saw stick figures, starships, castles, and eggs with people inside, which she assumed to be depictions of the time the children had spent in stasis.
“I love them! Did you draw them all by yourselves?”
Darius and Nahla nodded proudly.
Then Carina saw a picture that was not so pleasant. A black, many-legged creature loomed over a group of stick figures of different sizes.
So the kids had met the Regians. She shuddered at the thought. They must have been utterly terrified.
“Nahla’s a chatterbox now,” Ferne said.
The little girl pouted, so he added, “In a nice way.”
“Yes, we love hearing Nahla talk,” said Oriana. “She tells stories.”
“Amazing stories,” Darius said expansively.
“Well,” said Carina, “there’s a particular story I need to hear. What’s been happening while I was in Deep Sleep? How long have you all been out of stasis and what’s happened to you?”
From what Lomang and Mezban had implied, it appeared they’d attempted to impress the Regians with her siblings’ mage powers, but the children had been too upset to Cast, understandably.
“I think that’s a story I should tell you,” Parthenia said solemnly, “and perhaps out of the hearing of little ears.”
“Hmm,” said Ferne, “I think that’s a hint we need to take Darius and Nahla to play a game in our bedroom.”
“I do believe you’re right, brother,” Oriana quipped.
The twins’ cheerfulness despite the circumstances warmed Carina’s heart, but Parthenia’s expression soon cooled it again.
After a little protesting, Darius and Nahla followed their brother and sister into a bedroom.
Parthenia watched until the door closed, then she turned to Carina.
“We were brought out of Deep Sleep three and a half weeks ago. After giving us a day to recover, Lomang told us to make elixir, then he took us one by one to some horrible creatures…” her face twisted with disgust “…and instructed us to Cast. He took me first, and I pretended to be too afraid to do it. I told the others to do the same. I don’t think Darius had to even fake it. Those aliens are terrifying. And, of course, Nahla can’t Cast anyway. Lomang didn’t believe me when I told him but he seems to think she’s also too scared.”
“You were pretending you couldn’t Cast?” Carina was impressed. Her sister’s tactic had been smart. The idea that the Regians were so horrifying the children couldn’t Cast was entirely believable.
If she’d been in her sister’s place, she would have defied Lomang and refused to Cast, no doubt bringing down a world of trouble on her head.
“That was a great idea,” she continued.
“Thanks, but I don’t need your praise,” Parthenia replied acidly.
Carina inwardly winced.
“Anyway,” said Parthenia, “since then he’s tried the same thing again, several times, but our weeping and wailing must be pretty convincing because now he’s woken you up. He probably thinks you’re tougher than us.”
“Maybe. He and Mezban wanted to question me about something, too, but our conversation didn’t get that far in the end. Has Lomang said anything about what’s going on, or have you overheard anything?”
“Nothing. He always speaks his own language when he isn’t talking directly to us, and we spend most of our time in here anyway. T
he soldiers bring us food twice a day. I’ve been trying to keep everyone occupied so they don’t worry too much.”
“You…” Carina hesitated. She didn’t want to upset her already prickly sister. “…I really don’t mean this in a patronizing way, but you’ve done a great job. Ma would be proud.”
Parthenia didn’t reply, but neither did she look angry.
“I’ll tell you what I know, okay?” Carina went on. “Then we can decide together what to do next.”
“Okay,” Parthenia replied, uncertainly.
“I’ve encountered Regians once before, when I was a little girl. They prey on humans, attacking small, remote settlements on insignificant planets and capturing as many of the inhabitants as they can find. No one they captured has ever escaped, so nobody knows exactly what happens to the people who are taken. As I understand it, it’s been going on for centuries. The stories had passed into folklore where I grew up, and I never quite believed them. Until they came to my town.”
Parthenia’s mouth gaped in horror. “Couldn’t the local army fight them off?”
“There was no army where I lived. I guess the Regians deliberately target places where they’ll meet little resistance, but even if we’d had weapons and trained soldiers, they’re difficult to defeat. They have a special capability: they can move forward and backward in time, just by a second or so. It makes them hard to kill. You could have the perfect shot, but by the time your round reached them, the creature wouldn’t exist in that moment anymore. When it did return to the exact present, the round would have passed through the space it was occupying. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“The good news for us is their ability doesn’t make them immune from a Cast. Do you know why?”
Parthenia’s eyes grew thoughtful, then her features brightened. “Because Casts work slower than pulses?”
“You got it. The lag—the thing that’s usually a disadvantage to us—is actually an advantage when it comes to killing Regians. Their time-shift isn’t sufficient to avoid the slower effect of a Cast.”
Her sister’s nose wrinkled. “Do we have to kill them?”
Carina put a hand on her shoulder. “I know it isn’t going to be easy, but it’s them or us.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mezban’s troops came for Carina in the middle of the quiet shift the second day after she’d come out of stasis, when she was sound asleep. Though the guards were weaponless, their numbers and strength made resisting them foolish, and she didn’t want to upset her siblings by putting up a fight.
Instead, she went quietly, rising from the sofa she was using as a bed and allowing one of the five soldiers to lead her away. She felt terrible, even worse than she had during the first hours after she’d come out of stasis. She’d regained some strength in her legs, but an exhaustion had settled on her that sleep didn’t erase, her muscles ached no matter what position she lay in, and just the thought of eating made her gag.
Only Parthenia woke up as she was leaving. Her sister watched from her open bedroom door as Carina left, raising her hand in a silent farewell.
It was clear what lay in store: Lomang and Mezban were going to try to make her Cast in front of the Regians. From what she’d understood, it appeared that this was intended to impress the creatures and prevent them from slaughtering all the humans aboard the Bathsheba.
From Carina’s perspective, the smuggler and his wife were indulging in wishful thinking. Even if she’d been inclined to protect them from the aliens—which she surely was not—the creatures were not dumb. Why would they place any value on the humans who couldn’t Cast? It would make more sense to set aside the ones who could, and then kill the rest.
The thought of the wholesale murder of everyone aboard made her shudder. She might be able to trick the Regians into believing that Nahla could Cast and so should be allowed to live, but what about Bryce, Atoi, and the rest of the mercs? And the soldiers under Mezban had only been following orders—she had no personal gripe against them.
Another thought struck: where was Jace? She hadn’t seen him for months prior to going into stasis. She’d been angry with him for siding with Cadwallader about forming a council. The children hadn’t mentioned him either. Did Lomang and Mezban even know he was a mage? He’d helped in the defense of the Duchess’s airlock during Mezban’s attack, but the woman had been in the viewing dome at the time, and her troops had quickly been put into Deep Sleep, so information about Jace might not have gotten through to her.
Carina recalled a second person she hadn’t had anything to do with for a while: Calvaley. Had the old man been taken out of stasis? And if he had, where were they keeping him?
Mezban’s guards had returned her to the Bathsheba’s gym. When she entered the room for the second time, the lights were half their usual brightness. The place was also cooler than it had been. The soldiers had insisted she went with them immediately and didn’t give her time to change out of her thin pajamas. She was also barefoot, as the closets in the suite held no shoes.
As soon as she stepped over the threshold cold air hit her, and she began to shiver.
Four Regians crouched at the far end of the gym, their black, spindly forms ill-defined in the shadows. Even if Carina hadn’t seen one of the creatures a couple of days previously, she didn’t need a closer look at the four in the gym to know their exact appearance. It had been etched on her mind for the last ten years: they were roughly as tall as a male human, but two-thirds of their height was in their three pairs of legs. Their upper third was as long as a man was tall, and narrow, like an upturned canoe, with a ridge like a keel running from the front to the back. Several shiny black eyes were centered at the thickened front end of the ridge, and two pairs of sharp mouth parts overlapped beneath the eyes.
She’d always had an interest in bugs, from as far back as she could remember, and she liked them all—except these ones.
At the mere sight of the Regians, her pulse sped up. Images from the attack on her settlement when she was a child flashed unbidden into her mind: one of the creatures trying to separate a father from his baby son, then changing its mind and lifting both on the dark carapace of its back; Saul, one of her several bullies, ripped from her grasp by black pincers; Nai Nai, looking up in terror when a Regian discovered her hiding place.
She swallowed and walked forward.
Along with the rest of the population where she’d grown up, she’d never known exactly what the creatures did with the victims they captured during their raids, except that the men, women, and children never came back.
She didn’t want to find out, either, but it was looking inevitable.
Mezban stood with her husband near the door where Carina had entered. They were the only other humans in the room. The soldiers had silently withdrawn.
Lomang beckoned her over.
The man’s demeanor had changed since she’d last seen him. It was clear his and Mezban’s previous haughty attitude had been a show. Now, the man’s eyes were wide with fear and his skin glistened with sweat.
“I know what you’re going to say,” said Carina before the smuggler had a chance to speak.
She could see he was holding a flask, no doubt full of elixir brewed by one of the children.
“You want me to impress our captors with a performance and save your miserable lives,” she went on.
“It would be in your interest to do what we ask,” Mezban said. “We know more about these creatures than you do. Our people have suffered their raids for thousands of years. We have information that could make your family’s experience under their captivity more endurable.”
Carina held out her hand for the elixir. As Lomang handed it over, she said to Mezban, “You would say that, wouldn’t you? Why should I believe you? And even if you are speaking the truth, you’re assuming the Regians are new to me. They aren’t. My home planet borders the galactic desert we crossed to get to your sector, and my settlement was raided once.�
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She didn’t mention that, as a child, she’d single-handedly driven the raiders away. She didn’t want Lomang or Mezban to know any more than she’d just told them.
Mezban frowned. “And why should we believe you?”
“I don’t give a shit whether you believe me. On the other hand, you’d better hope you have something genuine to offer.”
At the corner of the hall, the four Regians stirred, shifting their monstrous, spindly legs, their pincers scraping on the hard floor.
Lomang’s eyes grew wider. “They’re growing impatient. Do something, quickly!”
Carina guessed the pair were down to their final chance with the evil aliens. If she failed to Cast, would Lomang and Mezban become lunch? She smiled, enjoying their torment. Now that she had elixir, she could Transport out of there if the Regians attacked. There was a lot she could do with elixir in her hand. But to get everyone else who deserved saving out of there—not including the two who stood before her—would require planning and time.
“Why are you smiling?” Lomang demanded. “Don’t you have any idea what those creatures can do?”
“To be honest, I don’t have a clear picture,” Carina said, “but I’d be interested to find out.”
“P-please!” Lomang begged. “You must do something!”
To Mezban’s credit, she didn’t debase herself as her husband did. She only stiffened, and her gaze flicked repeatedly to the four creatures in the corner.
“You know,” said Carina bitterly, “I might have been more inclined to help you if you hadn’t murdered Cadwallader. That really was unforgivable.”
“What did you expect us to do?” Mezban spat. “He was your leader. If he’d lived his soldiers would have rallied to him. He would have been a constant thorn in our side.”
“And you think I won’t?” Carina asked. “That is, assuming you survive the next five minutes.”
“Stars, if I could bring him back I would,” said Lomang. “I didn’t know he meant so much to you. As my wife says, it was a logical, strategic decision. You would have done the same yourself. You have done the same.”
