Atrophy (8 page)

The comms pinged. “Attention irritating miscreants, be advised of splice into void-space in five seconds and counting.” Rian’s voice echoed through the ship.

Zahli tugged on his shirt. “You might want to sit down. Splicing takes a few trips to get used to.”

He dropped into the seat across from her and a moment later, everything seemed to take a weird kind of leap, his body and mind feeling like they separated into two different places for a split second. He shook his head, waiting for the slight giddiness to pass.

Zahli rested her chin on her hand. “Feels a bit strange at first, but I barely notice now. We won’t drop out again until we reach Arleta, so you don’t need to worry about being caught unaware.”

Her mention of their destination reminded him of the conversation and message he’d overheard on the bridge. “Who are the Reidar? I know just about every IPC planet from information I gleaned while working in the admin center, but I can’t place that name.”

She looked away from him, apparently finding the scratched surface of the table very interesting. “It’s a long story and not mine to tell. They’re just some people Rian wants to track down.”

He got the sense there was a lot more to the story. However, the topic seemed to make her uncomfortable, and he’d started feeling too drained to push the issue. Right now he just wanted to fall into bed for a few hours solid sleep.

“I’m sorry. I’m sure there’s a lot more you probably need to show me, but I haven’t slept in almost twenty four hours.” He stood and she looked up at him, the now-familiar expression of concern crossing her features. “I’m just going to head back down to the quarters I was assigned.”

“Of course. Do you want me to wake you if you haven’t come up by dinnertime? The crew usually all eat together.”

“I’m pretty sure me turning up for a meal would make most of them lose their appetite, particularly your brother.”

“Well, then I could bring you—”

“Its fine, Zahli.” His hand inched toward hers on the table, but then he thought better of it and closed his fist. “I just need some sleep. You’ve already done more for me than I could have ever hoped for.”

She stood, but before she could offer to do anything else for him, he hurried out into the passage, feeling the weight of her gaze with every step. He didn’t see anyone else as he made his way to the very last cabin on the level, not much larger than a cupboard and far smaller than some of the others he noted. Not that he cared. A room was a room and a bed was a bed. He’d seen and slept on worse.

In the dim, quiet space of the quarters, he toed off his boots and then stripped out of his pants and the shirt Zahli had
borrowed
from Rian. He flipped the blankets back to sink gratefully into the soft bedding. His mind thundered with thoughts and images of Erebus officers coming aboard and finding him here, followed by the resulting punishment. He rubbed a hand over his forehead, willing the pictures away, attempting to replace them, one by one, with Zahli.

He had to tread carefully when it came to her. He couldn’t act on the interest she roused within him, not with her psycho brother and all his weapons around. But a different time and place, he wouldn’t have hesitated. A fitful sleep came, fantasies of the life he might have had with Zahli, if not for Erebus running through his mind.

Z
ahli held the wires apart as Lianna had instructed, trying to remember the last time she’d found helping the ship’s engineer so damn
boring
. Something beneath the control board sparked and Lianna jumped back.

“
Ouch
!” Lianna shook her hand. “Bastard son of a waystation whore.”

“Lianna, how long is this going to take?” Rian asked from his seat.

From where Zahli sat on the floor, all she could see of her brother was his boot tapping.

“I don’t know, Captain. Nirali classers had already been decommissioned by the time someone invented a multi-constellation interstellar navigation program. It’s like trying to splice a Nehru sublight racer to a garbage compactor.”

The tapping foot increased tempo. “For your sake, I’m going to choose to believe you’re equating my ship to a racer and forget the bit about the garbage compactor. I need navs back online. We’re flying blind.”

Lianna ducked back under the control board. “I know we’re flying blind. You think I don’t know navs are offline, while I’m trying to get the old junker’s circuitry to cope with the ciphers?”

Zahli swallowed a laugh at Lianna’s mutterings, which weren’t quite loud enough to reach Rian’s ears. His patience only went so far when people started insulting his ship. Lianna could bitch as much as she wanted, so long as the captain didn’t hear.

The comms double pinged, indicating another ship had made contact with them. She heard Rian’s beads clinking against his crystal display and she shifted sideways to peer around the console as the image of an officer appeared across the main viewport. Zahli placed Lianna’s wires down, setting them well apart, and stood. At the sight of the officer’s uniform, her insides scrunched up, anxiety crushing her stomach.

Stay calm, this had been expected
.

“Attention Nirali class ship registered nine-zero-three-six,
Imojenna
. This is Lieutenant Marshal Gerrod Raleigh, IPC officer stationed out of Erebus.”

“Here we go.” Rian tabbed his screen to open a channel. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant Marshal?”

Zahli crossed her arms, pressing her wrists against her abdomen, as if that might help the churning going on in there. She moved to the back of the bridge, prepared to run down and warn Tannin if this communication went the way she suspected it would.

“I’m requesting that you exit void-space and slow ahead engines. I need to board a team to search your vessel.”

“For what reason?” Rian leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. He looked at ease, relaxed, like he didn’t have a care in the world or a thing to hide. But her brother was a master of deceptions.

“An inmate is unaccounted for on Erebus, and since you left there several hours ago we need to check he didn’t stow away.” The lieutenant paused and cleared his throat. “I would never presume to insinuate that you knowingly helped a fugitive, Major Captain, but law requires me to check.”

“And if I decide not to comply with this request?”

On the screen, the lieutenant marshal fidgeted. If she had to guess, the officer’s unease came down to the fact that there were very few people in the universe who would try and force Rian into something he didn’t want to do. And all of them were almost certainly crazy. No doubt the lieutenant was shaking in his boots over the thought of either having to defy a direct order or take on Rian Sherron.

“We will be compelled to take injunctive action and force you to stop for a mandatory boarding.” The words were tough but the lieutenant’s tone was not.

A chill of foreboding trickled through her. Erebus officers would be coming onboard, whether they agreed to it or not. God, the thought of Tannin returning to that place, it made her sick. Even more ill than she already felt.

“I see. Then we have a problem, Lieutenant Marshal.” Rian stood and moved around his command panel. He indicated to where Lianna had half the ship’s wiring and micro-crystal components hanging out. “My engines and navigational controls aren’t exactly in working order right now, so even if I wanted to stop, I couldn’t.”

The lieutenant marshal turned to have a quiet conversation with someone else and then returned his attention to them a moment later. “When do you think this problem will be fixed?”

Rian crossed his arms. “Fixed? Never. Patched up enough so we can actually plot a course through the goddamn galaxy? Hopefully soon. We’re due on Arleta to pick up some cargo in another rotation and a half. You’re quite welcome to meet us there and board as soon as we hit dirt.”

There was another short on-screen consultation before the lieutenant marshal nodded. “Very well, we’ll make contact on Arleta. Good journey, Major Captain.”

“Yeah, yeah—whatever.” Rian leaned over to cut the transmission. “Lianna, I want navs fixed by the time I come back on duty in a couple of hours.”

“What’s the plan?” Zahli asked as he walked by her and jogged down the few steps. She followed along behind as he headed toward the galley.

“What plan?” He opened the cold storage compartment and pulled out an apple.

“The plan for when the officers come aboard, so they don’t find Tannin?”

“I never said there was a plan. We land, the officers come aboard. If they find the scumrat, then
woo-hoo
for them.”

Frustration and futile anger pressed like a weight against her chest. Sometimes all Rian had to do was speak to her a certain way and it made her feel like a nine year old all over again, with him telling her she couldn’t hang out with him and his friends, and that she was too young to understand.

She nicked the fruit from his hand before he could take a bite. “We can’t let them take Tannin back there. You saw it yourself, he’s innocent.”

Rian sighed, caught her wrist, and then took the apple back. He turned and headed out into the passageway. “He might not have been guilty of the original crime, but he’s been living on that prison planet for the past twelve years. I’m sure by now his hands are far from clean.”

“About as clean as yours?” She pursued him into his office, where he tapped open a compartment holding drinks and grabbed a bottle of violet colored liquor.

He turned to glare at her, getting that cold glint in his eyes that worked well to scare the crap out of other people. “That’s different.”

“Why? Because the IPC sanctioned it? Because you did what you had to in order to survive? Whatever Tannin has or hasn’t done, I’m sure he’d tell you the same thing. He did what he had to so he could get by.”

Rian splashed a measure of the hard drink into one of the glasses and then faced her to knock it back. “And why do you care, Zi-zi? Why are you so adamant about helping him?”

She looked down at the shiny surface of his desk and touched the carved wooden edge. The piece of furniture was the only extravagance Rian had that she knew of.

How could she answer that question? She couldn’t exactly tell her brother Tannin might know something about Rian’s past he wanted to keep hidden.

As for the other reasons, well, she’d been doing a really great job of not thinking about it too closely.

A chill chased over her skin. Even though Tannin had done nothing but hide a body until she was off-planet, the fact that he’d helped her keep the truth from Rian would be enough to piss her brother off. He’d definitely make sure the officers found Tannin, or throw him out the hatch with a knife in his other shoulder.

“It just doesn’t seem right, is all. He deserves a chance at a life.” It sounded lame, even to her own ears and she guessed, by Rian’s expression, he didn’t buy it either.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m off duty. I’m going to drink this Violaine and see if my ship’s deep-space transponder is working well enough for me to watch the latest football game from Yarina.”

He turned his back on her and dropped onto his couch, tapping the small monitor in the arm of the chair for his large screen viewer to lower from the ceiling. The picture came on wavy, filled with interference, and Rian swore while trying to clear the image.

She stepped around the end of the couch, into his line of sight. “I’m not going to let them take him back.”

“Unless you know some way of fixing my frecking viewer, I don’t want to hear anything else coming out of your mouth.”

She made a frustrated noise through her teeth.
Brothers!
She elbowed him out of the way and leaned over the small display, scrolling through the incoming transmission data to see if she could clear it up. “If your ship wasn’t a garbage compactor with engines, half the things onboard might actually work sometimes.”

She rerouted some of the incoming information, and the images on the large screen flickered, then cleared up.

“Thank you.” By the tone of voice he used, she guessed he really wanted to say
screw you
.

“Now, about Tannin?”

“Frecking Christ, Zahli. I’ll think about it, all right? But don’t mention it again until we’re dirt-side on Arleta.” Discarding the glass, he took a swig of Violaine straight from the bottle.

“Thank you. And you’d better not be drunk when you come back on deck later.”

He glared over his shoulder at her. “I’m the damned captain. If I want to fly my ship while I’m plastered, that’s my problem.”

“Yeah, until we crash and burn in a fireball, then it becomes everyone’s problem.”

He took another swig and set the bottle down with a clink on the display, turning his attention to the Inter Worlds League game. Shaking her head, she left his quarters, making sure the door slid shut behind her. Rian wouldn’t come back on duty drunk. He might be rough and seem reckless at times, but he’d never do anything to put his crew in jeopardy.

She returned to the bridge to finish helping Lianna, sitting back against the bulkhead and taking up the wires again with a silent sigh.

What should she tell Tannin? Was it fair to tell him right away or wait until they were about to land? She didn’t want to see the utter desolation in his exquisite green-gray eyes like she’d witnessed when she’d first found him onboard. She’d do just about anything to make sure she never again saw that absolute despair clenched into the angle of his jaw.

They still might be able to get him out of this; she had to believe that. She didn’t want him to spend the next rotation and a half worrying about their arrival on Arleta.

“Zahli, can you pass me the wire in your left hand?” Lianna reached out from her half-reclined position. “You’re going to frown yourself into a headache.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“Thinking hard by the looks of things. About our guest, I suppose?” Lianna took the cable from her and leaned back under the console.

“I’m just wondering what the universe has come to when an innocent man can spend his life on a hell like Erebus for something he didn’t do.”