Dark Beneath the Moon (34 page)

“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.

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.