Escape (79 page)

The two newest members of their resistance were striding into the mess hall, both of them looking edgy, their movements jerky, their faces taut. They stopped beside the table and stared at her for an uncomfortably long moment, offering no explanation for their presence.

“Had a craving for a midnight snack?” Kieran nodded stiffly, and she smiled. “Well you won't be craving one for long. There's plenty of food here, but none of it appetizing. Go spacesick.” She gestured to the row of food dispensers behind her, but it took them a painfully long moment to break their soul-searching gaze away from her and follow the gesture.

Wordlessly, they left the table and crossed the room to the food dispensers.

Catchya frowned and shook her head. The man across from her, Witty, as he was called, had an uncharacteristically serious look on his face as he stared after the newcomers. “I don't like the look of them. They're maledicted creepy.”

“Yeah, well, you're pretty creepy, too, Wit.”

He flashed her a quick grin. “Aww, thanks.” He lifted a spoonful of soup to his mouth began slurping it annoyingly.

Catchya grinned wryly at him. “Don't mention
—
”

She was suddenly interrupted by a loud buzzing noise, and then a clash and clatter of breaking dishes. Catchya turned quickly in her seat to see what had happened, and was just in time to watch a bowl wobbling around on the floor in a cloud of hazy gray smoke, meandering around fallen trays, cutlery, and broken plates. “What the Infernal?”

“Where did they go?” Witty asked, his voice curiously soft.

“Probably ran from the mess so they wouldn't have to clean it,” came a comment from further down the table.

Catchya's brow furrowed. “Maybe.” She pushed her chair out from the table and walked over to the mess. “What's the smoke about?” she asked aloud of no one in particular. Even as she studied the cloud, it began to disipate, until finally, it dissapeared completely. With a hearfelt sigh, she turned around. “Did anyone see them leave?”

Witty and a half dozen others began shaking their heads in unison.

“Great!” Catchya threw her hands up in the air. “Well, I'm not cleaning up after them.” She strode back to the table and retook her seat with the others. After a few tasteless mouthfuls of her food, she grimaced and pushed her plate away. “I've lost my appetite. You want what's left, Witty?”

He grinned, and began tucking in. Rations were in full force aboard
Graciala's Rest
, so no one would turn down a hot plate of food, no matter how awful it tasted. Just as he was lifting the first forkful of sliced grasser meat to his lips, the lights in the mess hall snapped off, and darkness descended like a suffocating blanket.

“Oh, kefick, what now?” Catchya asked.

And to her unending surprise, someone answered her. “Not what, but who,” the deep and gravelly voice was not one she recognized, and her head spun toward the sound. “Who said that?” But she needn't have asked. Two pairs of burning red eyes were piercing the darkness and staring at her from the entrance to the mess hall. Catchya's brow furrowed deeply, and she asked in a quavering voice, “Kieran? Jilly?” She hadn't realized that their ocular implants glowed in the dark. That was
truly
creepy.

“Come over here and clean up your keficking mess. And I don't care if you have to do it in the dark.”

Catchya caught a brief glint of teeth in the dim red light pouring through their irises. “With pleasure,” the gravelly voice replied. As those eyes bobbed nearer, Catchya had a moment to realize that something was wrong. First of all, that deep, grating voice was
not
Kieran's. Second, the emergency lights should have come on by now, which either meant that the station hadn't lost power, or the emergency backups had failed as well. Catchya became keenly aware of the silence in the mess hall. Not even a whisper sounded in the darkness.

With a growing sense of unease, Catchya thought to ask the new recruits, somehow fearing that they might know the answer: “What happened to the lights?”Another glint of pearly white. Somehow their teeth seemed too long and too sharp in the darkness.

“Oh, we switched them off,” the gravelly voice replied.

“What? Why would you do that?” Catchya demanded.

“Courtesy.”

“Courtesy?”

“We thought you might not like to see what was coming.”

By now Catchya's heart was pounding in her chest. Her palms were sweating, and her eyes were wide with horror. She tried to push her chair back from the table, away from the advancing threat, but in her rush she tipped her chair back and slammed her head on the deck plates. Her mind grew fuzzy and confused, which only increased her sense of terror. She tried to move, but her limbs were sluggish and unresponsive. Aware that she was seconds from drifting out of consciousness, Catchya tried desperately to sit up, to do anything to jolt herself awake, but when the first, gurgling scream shuddered into her ears, she realized that it would not be such a bad thing to be asleep, and she surrendered to the enveloping darkness.