Hearts of Ishira (Hearts of Ishira Saga) (26 page)

“What a beautiful idea,” Arianna sighed, laying her head on his shoulder. She had missed his scent, his touch, just his very nearness. She had very much missed these moments snuggled in his arms as he toted her from place to place. His heart pounded so strongly beneath her cheek, reminding her of how big and vital he was, how strong and capable. This new world was so much less confusing when he was nearby.

“I missed you, too, little one,” he whispered, stopping at the door to the command center. She blinked up at him in question. “I should be out at the crash site still, but I could not stay away from you that long.”

“Oh, Hunter,” she kissed his chest tenderly, smiled up at him. “I’m just glad you’re back. Now come on. I want to see my surprise!”

He laughed at her eagerness and followed her order.

When Ri and Hunter entered the room, it was lit brightly, with Trey and Bev working tirelessly to transfer the remaining books from Arianna’s SD cards to the main system. Ri saw her Nook, the pile of cards, and her pack, and sucked in a delighted gasp.

“You found our stuff!” she cried happily, hugging Hunter’s neck. “Oh, wow! This is wonderful! I can read while I’m healing now.”

“Wait,” Hunter laughed, setting her into a chair and helping her get situated with a crate beneath her broken leg, the blankets tucked in around her. She rolled her eyes at his fussing, but let him. Every touch was welcome and enjoyed by both, so she was loath to make him stop. He couldn’t resist the kiss he planted on her lips before finding his own chair at the station beside hers. “Patience, little lore-keeper. We are archiving all of your files before you get them back.”

“Oh!” She squeaked, her eyes flying to the pile of cards, her cheeks heating. “You don’t have to save
all
of them, you know.”

“Oh, but we do, Commander,” Trey told her with a saucy wink. Bev giggled, not looking up. “We really, really do.”

“Some of your reading choices looked very intriguing,” Bev added innocently, then snorted with mirth, surprising laughter out of all of them. Trey threw her a helpless, lopsided grin, his gaze simply adoring.

Arianna groaned. She knew some of the books she had in her collection. They were not for the faint of heart or the prudish. Beside her, she felt Hunter’s staunch approval of her choices. Which only made her cheeks burn all the hotter. He laughed, the rat! A mental picture of one of the book covers, with a small, dark-haired woman sandwiched in a passionate embrace between two big, muscular men flitted into her head, but the woman morphed into Ri and the men turned into Hunter and Jace. Her breath left in a whoosh that left her throbbing to the core. Hunter’s eyes were hot, his grin absolutely wicked as he met her gaze. She realized that he’d sent that image, and had to wonder about that. She would be wondering about it well into the night.

“What else did you find?” Ri asked, trying desperately to distract them all. Hunter nodded toward the pile of tote bags, then handed her several by the handles. She quickly rifled through them, finding mostly old snack foods that had long since withered to dust, makeup, and other electronics. As she was digging through someone’s bag, she came across a hardcover book. “Huh. Isaac Asimov? Someone’s a closet geek. I wonder who?”

Opening the book, Ri turned to the first page, only to have it crumble between her fingers. Was this a first edition? The dust jacket was missing and the cover seemed old. Frowning, she very carefully checked the publication date. Last printing 2010. So why were the pages falling apart?

“Hey, guys,” Ri said, frowning and showing the book to Bev. “This is really weird.”

“What is?” Trey asked. Hunter cocked his head in interest, taking the book from her, very delicately turning the pages.

“This book is fairly new,” Ri said. “Or it should be. The last I recall, it was 2012 back home. This book’s only two years old. Why would it be falling apart?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Bev agreed, frowning. “Maybe these things were kept in a cargo hold that wasn’t properly sealed or something?”

“I don’t know,” Ri murmured, bringing a brittle plastic package out of the bag. Both girls stared at it in dawning shock. “I mean, when Twinkies are this far gone?”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“Ri, honey,” Bev breathed, “How long were we on that ship?”

Hunter and Trey frowned at the tone of her voice, their eyes locking on the women. Hunter probed Arianna’s mind, found out just why she was alarmed that the Twinkie had turned to dust, and started asking questions, himself. Finally, he looked at Trey.

“Where are the hard drives for the slaver ship?” Hunter asked quietly. Following Hunter’s line of thought, Trey quickly came up with the storage devices. Bev came to watch, her brow furrowed. Trey inserted the drives into the station beside his commander’s, waited a few minutes for the information to come up, then shook his head.

“Dammit,” Bev murmured, looking at the screen. “I can’t read it.”

“You’ve been on the planet three days,” Trey said wryly. “We don’t expect you to be able to read our language yet. Also, this isn’t Thorsani… it’s Universal, but it is encrypted. We’ll have to deal with that, first, then translate into both our languages. If you can’t read it after that, we’ll have to deal with your eyesight.”

She threw him a frustrated glare. He grinned at her then typed a few commands and sat back to wait. A minute later, the information came up in English. Bev blinked slowly, shaking her head, her face going white as she backed away from the computer screen.

“That’s impossible,” she breathed. Hunter sensed her horror, her grief… and that she was about to pass out. He hopped up, scooped her into his chair, and knelt in front of her. “Hunter… that can’t be right!”

“What’s wrong?” Trey asked quietly, kneeling beside Hunter and taking her hands, warming them between his. Bev’s tears spilled over as she shook her head in denial. Ri looked at the screen and did some quick math, her own eyes widening in shock.

“Too long,” she whispered. “Hunter, we were on the ship for too long. There’s no way a slaver holds onto a cargo for one hundred fifty years. Is there? Why would they do that?”

Hunter’s heart thundered. He turned back to the computer and, after asking Ri a few key questions, he realized that the women were right. According to the slavers’ records, the women had been in stasis aboard that ship for more than a hundred and fifty Earth years. Keeping that many people in stasis for even a year was costly, and while the humans were pretty little things, Hunter knew the major civilization centers in the sector. None would pay that much for them, even a psychic like Arianna.

Keying the com, Hunter summoned Jace to the command center.

“Sir?” Trey asked, waiting for orders, direction. Hunter shook his head, looking at the pile of drives from the ship, his mind churning over the possibilities.

“I want all of these drives translated and analyzed as soon as possible. Wake your team, if you need to, and any other systems specialists you need.”

“Aye, sir,” Trey said. “What are we looking for?”

“We’re looking for any reason in the cosmos a slave ship would be transporting these women for a hundred-fifty years, into this far-flung part of this galaxy.”

“What do you mean ‘this galaxy’?” Bev asked softly, swiping at her tears. Hunter saw that she had more color in her face now.

Jace hurried in at that point and Hunter quickly brought him up to speed. Jace’s countenance showed his concentration as his mind whirled through possible explanations for a moment, then he nodded.

“That actually explains their lack of injuries from the crash,” he said thoughtfully. Ri raised an eyebrow at him. He chuckled and shook his head. “To be honest, you all should probably have died, or at the very least, you should all be in the med center still, mending broken bones, backs, and brains. It’s a miracle that you weren’t. But the gel that is used to sustain a body in stasis tends to keep that body very pliable. The longer you’re in the gel, the more pliable your bones tend to become. The gel is then absorbed and restores rigidity and muscle tone. The effects wear off very shortly after being removed from the gel, as in minutes after, but if you lot were able to get free of the gel before the ship crashed, you would still have been ‘loose’ enough that the impact wouldn’t have hurt nearly as much.” He gazed at Ri for a moment. “I have a feeling that you were one of the first ones released from the gel, and were conscious when the ship crashed, which is why you are the worst hurt.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she murmured, but wanted to know more about a gel that could turn bones to cartilage and back again in moments. “Though I don’t remember being awake.”

“Would you want to remember that crash?” Jace asked quietly. Ri shook her head frantically. Jace sighed, turning to Hunter. “Commander, I’d like permission to take some blood samples from the women, see if I can detect the chemical compound that triggers the phenomenon. I might be able to confirm how long they were in the gel, now that I know what to look for.”

“With their consent, of course,” Hunter said, looking to Ri for permission. She quickly nodded.

“I’ll even go first,” she said, offering her arm to Jace, who chuckled and reached for his med kit.

Bev had calmed down considerably and was working with Trey to get more of the drives into the translating devices as his team members and several other teams arrived, were briefed, and got to work. Jace collected a sample from her, as well, then excused himself to go run the tests in his lab.

“Hunter, you told me we are on a planet called Ishira,” Ri said thoughtfully, “But, where are we, in space?”

Hunter brought up a star map. He showed her Ishira on the map, then panned out until she could see the galaxy they were in.

“It’s not the Milky Way,” she breathed, touching the screen in wonder. She looked at Hunter with some confusion. “So we’re not even in our own galaxy? How fast can those slaver ships travel. And… But… a hundred fifty years? Why in the world would anyone hang onto us for that long? There can’t be any profit at all in that. I mean, they’d have to sell us for… well, a lot more than any of us could possibly be worth.”

“I don’t know,” Hunter sighed, shaking his head wearily at her. “But there are a few things we need to find out, to help us, I think. In the first place, do you have any idea what your galaxy might look like from outside?”

“I have no clue,” Ri shook her head regretfully. “There are artists’ conceptions, and we’ve been able to look at other galaxies, but not our own. Our furthest-reaching probe has… had just left our Solar system when we were abducted.”

“Do you happen to have any pictures of those other galaxies somewhere?” Erik asked from his station, excited at the possibility. “If we can match the galaxies and certain stars, we might be able to get an idea of where you were, in relation to our position now.”

“I had some on my laptop,” Ri said. Hunter handed her the pack she’d been using when she was taken. She dug through the bag, opening a zippered compartment and pulling out her laptop.

“If you can get it to boot up, I should be able to find the pictures.” Hunter grinned at her as he handed the device over to Trey. She cocked her head at him as Trey and Bev worked to get her machine going. “Hunter, when did you find these?”

“Yesterday,” he told her.

“If we could remember what happened that night,” Bev said softly, “Maybe we’d understand more of this. But I can’t.”

“I can’t, either,” Ri admitted. It made her head hurt to try. Hunter’s hand clasped hers on the desk top, silently urging her not to try too hard.

“The most pressing question, though, is… Who shot the abductors?” Hunter said into the silence that followed Ri’s admission.

“If they waited around that long, for the ship to get this far, they’re not going to leave it to chance that they destroyed the slave transport.”

“Commander,” Trey said, his voice excited. Both Hunter and Ri looked up. She rolled her eyes at herself as Hunter reached over to squeeze her hand approvingly. Only a few days and she was already used to the title Hunter had given her. Trey winked at her, but nodded confirmation that he’d been talking to her, as well. “I’ve got the most recent entries coming up now. It looks like these… merchants… were chased off course in this direction. They were attacked several weeks ago, further out, on their intended route. Their attackers let them get away a bit, then chased them in a new direction. Then attacked again. The slave ship was chased in a new and narrower corridor.”

“They were being herded,” Hunter murmured as Trey sent the escape route to Hunter’s screen. “They were being guided… here.”

Ri gasped at that, then met Hunter’s eyes, alarm and confusion vying for supremacy in her mind.

“Hunter…” Jace began from the doorway, having heard the exchange. The commander nodded, tapped in a few commands, and brought up another chart. Ri and Jace leaned forward to see it. Jace’s face paled. He gripped the back of Ri’s chair until his knuckles turned white. “Gods of Ishira!”

“Aye!” Trey breathed. Bev’s breath sucked in as well.

“What in the name of the gods is going on?” Hunter asked, bewildered.

“I don’t know,” Jace said, his eyes wide, “But I’m beginning to think that none of this has been an accident. Not our being chased to this sector, not the women landing here… none of it.”