Dark Beneath the Moon (36 page)

I got to test my theory about the force fields very soon after that. The door to the corridor opened and closed again, and two Chron appeared, pushing a cart. Not the medical one this time, but one that appeared, from the aroma that came with it, to be carrying food. So they didn’t plan to starve us. That was a good thing.

I stayed seated on the cot, legs dangling, trying to appear relaxed as they stopped outside my cell. I couldn’t tell if either of these was the one who’d originally woken me, but I thought not. There wasn’t much to tell them apart at first glance, but now that I was able to study them from a more detached viewpoint, the variations in the shapes and ridges of their bone crests was easier to see. The chitinous plates on their faces revealed similar deviations in form and colour, subtly distinguishing one from another—once you knew what to look for. I wondered if our appearance was as homogeneous to them.

Their uniforms were the same plain dark one-piece suits that the first one had worn, with white symbols spilling down one sleeve. Either all those we had seen were males, or the females were flat-chested, like the Lobors. As I watched them, one unloading a food tray while the other did something to release the door, I noticed something else, too. Each wore a small round pin or button of some kind, attached to the fabric of their sleeve, tucked in the crook of the elbow.

I glanced over at Viss in the next cell. He watched both me and the aliens intently. Surreptitiously, I pointed at the crook of my own elbow. He nodded slightly to indicate that he’d seen, as well.

“
Hola
!” I said to the alien cheerily, as it approached me with the tray. The cell had no table or chair, only the cot for furniture. I wondered if the Chron would come close enough to put it down on the cot, or leave it on the floor. “What’s for supper? It smells delicious.”

The Chron chitter-whistled something at me in response, although I didn’t know if it had understood a word I’d said in Esper. It did come as far as the cot and slid the tray onto the end. Perhaps I’d alleviated its suspicions by speaking to it or not appearing interested in leaving the cot, or maybe it felt more secure with a friend nearby. Whatever the reason, it turned away from me as I’d hoped it would.

Before it took two steps toward the cell door, I launched myself off the cot and tackled the alien. I landed on its back, my arms around its neck.

I’ll admit I screamed when the force field lit up. It felt like I’d grabbed a live charging cable on a docking bay floor and plugged it into me instead of into a ship. Brilliant yellow light blazed and the shock raced up both arms, meeting in my chest with a blast that threatened to stop my heart. Somewhere an alarm bleated out a warning. I knew I hadn’t actually touched the Chron—the field had precluded contact, but not the impact. The Chron fell to its knees.

I slid off the alien, boneless and weak in the wake of the jolt I’d taken. It flipped around to watch me and scuttled crablike to the cell door. Its compatriot helped it to its feet and slammed the door shut once it was outside. They chattered something to me. I ignored it. One of them pressed something on the cart and the alarm stopped. I lay on the floor and panted, waiting for the feeling in my arms to return. I laughed weakly.

“Hey, Engineering, you notice anything?”

“Yeah, I noticed you’re crazy, Sord,” he said. “Completely
freneza
. Another stunt like that and you could get us all killed, not just your own sorry-ass self.”

But I knew he’d seen what I did when the Chron’s arms had flown up in surprise at my tackle. The little round pin had flared with golden light, too, activated by my proximity. It had to be the controller for the force field. And knowing what controlled it was one step closer to knowing how to disable it.

THE TWO CHRON
continued down the corridor, now only opening the cell doors and slipping the trays inside. They didn’t linger at any of the cells, merely completed their job and left. By the time they got to my cell on their way out, I’d managed to sit up again, leaning my back against the solid rear wall of my cell. The one I’d jumped turned an inscrutable stare on me. I gave a little wave. It turned away without blinking.

Maja retrieved her supper tray and uncovered it. “Huh,” she said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this food came from the
Tane Ikai
. We had a good supply of pasta and tomato sauce, and that’s what this is.”

Viss uncovered his and nodded. “It’s a little hard to believe it’s a classic Chron dish as well.”

“Do we trust them?” Baden asked from further down the hallway. “Think it’s safe to eat?”

Hirin said, “I think we can eat it. As Luta said about the Corvids, if they wanted us dead, we’d be dead. I can’t see any point in poisoning us at this point. And I’m starved,” he added. Through the intervening bars I saw him take a bite.

Well, it did smell good. I crawled over to my cot, pulled myself up, and sat on the edge. My hands still felt slightly numb, but it didn’t seem like the shock had done any permanent damage. My knee, where I’d bashed it into the wall, throbbed like a
bastardo
, but there was nothing I could do about that. Like the others, my tray held a plate of spaghetti and a shallow bowl filled with the sauce. The cells were quiet as we all ate. I didn’t know how long we’d been unconscious before the Chron had awakened me, but it must have been a while. Hirin was right about being hungry. I ate in a wholly less than ladylike fashion.

When I was finished, I said, “So, anyone have any theories about where we are?”

Viss said, “Space station, judging by the curve of that corridor.”

“That was my thought, too.”

“Not a ship,” Maja said from across the hall. “There’s no sensation of motion, or engines.”

“Could be a really, really big ship,” I suggested, but I didn’t really mean it.

“How far did they bring us?” Baden said. “We didn’t read any stations in the system, did we?”

Further down the corridor, Yuskeya said, “If it’s on the far side of that planet we saw, we might have missed it.”

“Fha said something about stealth technology—maybe it was blocked from our sensors somehow,” Maja added.

“Well, how can we use our newfound knowledge?” I asked, flexing my fingers to ease out the last of the stiffness from the jolt they’d taken.

“That they don’t seem to be listening to us?” Maja asked.

“Don’t
seem
to be,” Yuskeya echoed. “They could be waiting until we say something
really
interesting.”

“That’s true,” Hirin mused. “Ms. Sord’s declaration of her intent to attack one of them probably wouldn’t worry them overmuch. They’d know their fields would protect them.”

“
Het, Sord, eike tendu si?
” Yuskeya Blue’s voice came to me through the cells between us. Viss turned to me quizzically, then glanced at Blue, frowning. I knew only two people in here would have understood what she said—me and Lieutenant Soto. She’d spoken in what was informally called academy cant, the secret language of the Protectorate. And although I hadn’t finished my Protectorate training, I’d picked up enough to converse at a basic level.

Hey, Sord, can you understand me?

Go slow and I can,
I told her, the words admittedly hesitant and probably poorly pronounced as I dredged them up from the depths of my brain.

Baden’s next to me. We both have our datapads. We’re wondering if there’s any way we could use them to—I don’t know—short out one of the force fields. You and he—you’re both techdogs. You think about it too.

She had to speak slowly, repeating or substituting some words, but eventually I got it. It wasn’t a bad idea. With the cant, we could probably communicate—some of us, anyway—without the Chron understanding if they were listening in. And the datapads . . . we didn’t know much about the tech the Chron were using, but it might be possible . . . if we opened one up and took out the power supply, rerouted the—

Viss stepped close to the bars that joined our cells and whispered, “What was that about?”

I hobbled over to him, wincing at the pain in my knee. I put my face close to his ear, speaking barely above a breath. “Maybe a way out. Jury-rig the datapads to short out the force field controllers.”

He quirked a half-grin. “Good one. Seems like it would depend a lot on things we don’t control, but I guess it’s worth a try.”

“At this point, anything’s worth a try.”

“What’s with the limp?” he asked in a normal voice. “They hurt you?”

“Naw. Went a round with the wall when they first woke me up. The wall won.”

He nodded, then lowered his voice again. “You saw them try to wake the captain?”

“They used the same device on her. It just didn’t take.”

The engineer’s lips pressed down into a tight, thin line. “First priority if we get out of here has to be finding her.”

“I agree.”

He looked surprised at that, so I added with a grin, “She’s got my datapad.”

“Pfft.” He blew out an inarticulate noise of disgust and turned away from me, crossing the cell to talk to Rei, on the other side.

I didn’t mind. I let my thoughts shift to the datapads. I had work to do.

THEY LEFT US
to sleep, not returning to pick up the dirty dishes. I don’t think anyone actually slept very much. Everyone was too keyed up to rest, pacing their cells, holding low-voiced conversations with their neighbours, or openly worrying about Paixon and the Lobor. Baden and I held quiet discussions, filtered slowly and painstakingly—sometimes almost painfully, since my academy cant vocabulary was limited—through Yuskeya, on how to cannibalize the datapads for parts and repurpose them.

After a lot of mental arguing with myself, I’d passed my multi-tool to Viss, who’d sent it on down the line to cells to Baden, to help with the job. I hated like hell to give it up, but if it would help—I sighed. If I was in with these people, I might as well be all in. We needed all the help we could get.

It wouldn’t be easy to make an interruptor work—someone would have to get close enough to a Chron to actually touch the controller with it, since we didn’t know what kind of tech it involved. We could only take our best guess, and hope that the two power sources from the datapads would have enough juice to power the interrupt. I thought, having been close enough to see it in action, that the controller itself wasn’t inside the field—the field radiated out from it, all around the edges. So that meant there was an area about an inch in diameter that we’d have to get inside. And would it even work?

But we couldn’t simply sit around and wait.

Finally Baden declared it finished. What he’d taken out of the two datapads and rigged together was small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.

“Pass it up to me, I’ll do it,” I offered, but Yuskeya disagreed.

“They’re going to be more cautious around you now, since you pulled that last stunt,” she said to me in academy cant. Or something to that effect. My translation was still rusty.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. The crew wouldn’t trust me to be the one to actually get free first, anyway. Not that I’d leave the rest of them here. Unless there was no choice. “In that case, I think it should be Maja.”

She glanced up, frowning, at the sound of her name.

“Why Maja?”

“They won’t be as suspicious of her. Especially if she makes out that she’s really broken up about the captain, like, sick with worry.”

“She
is
sick with worry,” Yuskeya said. It sounded like she was talking through clenched teeth.

“So she’ll be all the more convincing. And I hear she’s trained in warrior chi. Not so helpless as she might appear.”

The Protectorate officer was quiet for a minute, then said grudgingly, “You do have a point. Not that I’d say she looks helpless. One problem, though. The interruptor is on this side of the corridor.”

“The hallway’s not that wide. We could get it across to her.”

“Pfft. Or get it stuck in the middle. Wouldn’t that be not suspicious at all the next time the aliens come in here.”

“
Kristos,
this whole thing’s a gamble, Protectorate,” I told her. “If you’re in, you might as well be all in. If you think Maja’s got the best chance to use it, then figure out a way to get it to her.”

Maja came to the door of her cell. “What are you saying? I keep hearing my name.”

“Explain it to her, Gerazan,” Yuskeya told the Protectorate Lieutenant. He and Maja met at the bars that joined their cells, and he whispered quickly in her ear.

Her face hardened, and then she smiled. It wasn’t the kind of smile I’d associated with her before. “I can do that,” was all she said.

“Get the interruptor to Viss,” I told Yuskeya. “He’s directly across the hall from Maja. It’s not that wide—they might even be able to pass it across.”

“What if there are cameras in here?” Gerazan Soto asked. “Maybe they’re watching us, as well as listening.”