Supernova (4 page)

“Space?”
she said, her voice small and frightened.

If she
was a spy—and Rian thought that looked like less and less of a possibility—then
she was good at it.

“What
day is it?” she asked.

This
time Shraft spoke. “We don’t have days. We use stardates.”

A very
confused look crossed her face. She looked around at the odd objects in the
cargo hold and the men standing before her. “What year is this?” she asked
warily, her voice a little stronger.

“Give it
up already,” boomed Steg, and her shoulders jumped slightly. “It’s 2867.”

Terror filled
her eyes, and her mouth dropped open. “No,” she breathed. She rose unsteadily
to her feet and swayed. “No, no, no!” She leaned against the coffin for balance
and pointed at a pile of stuff on the floor. “My cell phone. My wallet,” she
said. “Give it to me.” Shraft looked at the captain, and Rian nodded his
permission. He picked up a folded-over pink bundle and handed it to her. She
opened it and struggled with something inside before giving up and handing it
over to him. “My ID,” she croaked. “My credit cards.”

Rian
took the wallet and peeled out a few thin cards from slots inset in the
leather. They were nearly plastered to the material and made a tearing sound as
they were removed. They were made of plastic, with crude holograms inlaid into
them. A few bore her name and picture and detailed the rights associated with
the cards. Lily Stewart, resident of a long-ago city on a planet that now
housed shipyards and its workers. Born on February 10, 1988.

The
faulty coffin seal and fritzy environmental controls. Her total ignorance which
seemed too genuine to be feigned. Her inability to stand on her own using
muscles that hadn’t moved in over eight hundred years, if this woman’s
primitive belongings were any indication. Either she was a hell of an actress, or,
as Rian suspected, she was telling the truth.

He
looked at the woman, leaning unsteadily against the coffin that had held her in
stasis for centuries. She looked bewildered, stunned, and still drugged from
whatever had been administered, and the confusion hadn’t abated from her eyes,
but thank the gods, she wasn’t crying. Rian Marska had never known what to do
with a crying woman, but when the drugs wore off and her fear returned, he knew
he would have to figure it out.

He
pushed that thought from his mind. “Lieutenant, pick up her bag,” he ordered.
Turning to Lily Stewart, he asked, “Can you walk?”

“Maybe,”
she said. She took a few tentative steps, wobbling on her heeled sandals. “My
legs aren’t working right,” she admitted. “And I feel like I’m going to throw
up.”

Steg and
Shraft each took a few steps back. Rian rolled his eyes. “Take a few deep
breaths,” he advised. “I know it’s hot in here and that isn’t helping.” He
tugged on the collar of his Fleet-issued jacket. Sweat was forming at his
temples. He held out a hand to steady her, and she sighed and fell into his
chest, her knees buckling.

Rian
caught her and bent at the knees, hooking his other arm around the back of her
legs and picked her up. He cradled her to his chest and her head fell heavily
against his shoulder. “Lieutenant, notify sick bay about their new patient,” he
ordered.

“Are you
sure you don’t want a security detail, sir?”

“That
won’t be necessary.”

“Wouldn’t
it be easier to transport her to sick bay, sir?” Steg asked. “I can call the team
and have them configure the beam.”

Rian
turned around to leave the cargo hold. Steg and Shraft followed. “If she’s
feeling sick now, it’s going to be a hell of a lot worse after the transport.
She’s not used to it.”

Lily
Stewart lay limp in his arms. “I’m right here,” she said sleepily. “You don’t
have to talk like I can’t hear you.”

“Apologies,”
he said.

They
stepped into the corridor, greeted by a rush of cool air. “If you think you’re
going to be sick, tell me,” Rian said.

“Did you
just get your suit back from the cleaners?” came her muffled reply against his
shoulder. Her breath tickled his neck and his skin prickled involuntarily.

“No,” he
said, and fought back a smile. Steg pressed the button for the lift.

“I feel
better out here,” she said.

“The environmental
controls are a little off in the cargo hold,” explained Rian. The lift doors
opened and they entered. Rian ordered it to deck six, to the ship’s sick bay.
Understaffed, of course, but that was the usual state of things aboard this
rust bucket.

“Controls?
Like a thermostat?” she asked sleepily.

Rian
caught Steg and Shraft’s questioning looks and shrugged a little himself. “Sure,”
he told her, and she lifted her head from his shoulder.

“You can
put me down now,” she said softly. Rian obliged, and she leaned against the
lift’s wall, blinking against its bright light. “I’m really not at home,” she
said, dismay in her voice.

Please
don’t cry
, Rian
silently told her.
All I’ll be able to do is stand here like an idiot
.

She didn’t
cry, just stared up at him, her green eyes large and glassy and lips parted in
uncertainty, then at Steg and Shraft. The ensign couldn’t wipe the look of
incredulity off his face and Rian damned himself for not ordering him to stay
in the hold. Steg raised a menacing eyebrow at her and she sucked in a harsh
breath in response. She turned back to Rian. The look on her face tore at him,
a sensation he wasn’t accustomed to experiencing after sixteen years in the
military. He had seen much worse.

He
looked away. She was simply one more unusual occurrence he had to deal with.
Besides the possibility of her being some sort of spy, however small, there was
still the issue of his captaincy on the
Defiant
. He wanted a permanent
captaincy and hadn’t risen through the Fleet ranks as quickly as he had by
letting damsels in distress distract him.

He
chanced another look at her, at the terrified shock on her face. This was
beyond distress.

The lift
stopped at deck six, where the
Defiant
’s chief medical officer, Ashford,
met them in the sick bay’s foyer. He was a year or two away from retirement,
silver-haired, and infinitely patient. He was also qualified to do his job, a
trait that most of Rian’s crew often lacked, and in the week he had been on
board, he hadn’t complained about his new posting. He watched the woman
trailing between Rian and Steg. She took in her surroundings like a lost child.
“Who’s this?” Ashford asked. “Accident in the cargo hold? I have a bed ready as
the lieutenant asked.”

“An
accident of sorts,” Rian confirmed. “Steg, Shraft—return to your stations.
Shraft, that means the cargo hold.” He could almost hear the ensign swearing at
him in his mind as he walked away.
Bloody Vu’saarns
.  No matter what
Shraft’s personnel file said, Rian was still sure he harbored some kind of telepathic
ability. Steg muttered something unintelligible and held out Lily’s satchel
between two fingers. Rian hooked the strap over his wrist and let it dangle.

“Who are
you?” she asked the doctor.

“Doctor
Orrin Ashford.” As usual, the doctor was unruffled. “Who might you be?”

“Lily
Stewart.”

Dr.
Ashford held out a mediscan unit and held it a few inches from her body. His
eyebrows knitted together and he frowned.

“Captain,
where did you find her?”

“In a
coffin in the hold.”

Ashford
slipped the unit into his lab coat pocket. “Miss Stewart, how are you feeling?”

“Sick
and thirsty.”

“Unsurprising,
but we can do something about both,” he promised her. He gestured to a room off
the foyer. “Bring her in here, Captain.”

“You’ve
been sedated,” Ashford explained to Lily.

She
shrugged clumsily. “I must have been, to be dreaming about this.”

Both
Rian and Ashford tensed at that statement but didn’t contradict her. What was
the point? The doctor ordered the lights on, and the illumination panels on the
ceiling glowed dimly. He turned down the sheets on the bed in the center of the
room and gestured to it. “Come over here, Miss Stewart,” Ashford suggested
gently. She stared at the bed for a moment and stepped out of her shoes,
padding to it on bare feet.

“Captain,
could you bring our patient some water?” Ashford asked. “There’s a dispenser in
my office.”

Rian
obediently went to the doctor’s office, a small room at the back of the
infirmary. He left the satchel on Ashford’s desk and returned to Lily’s room
with a plastic cup of water. She gave a barely audible “Thank you” and took a
few sips. She lay back down on the pillows.

“You
need to sleep,” Ashford said quietly.

“I just
woke up!” she protested half-heartedly. But her eyes were rapidly closing. She
murmured, “This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever been in.” She gazed at Rian,
her eyes taking in his face for a brief, lucid moment. A small smile played
across her lips, and his heart constricted for a second. It had to be caused by
the heat from the cargo hold.

Her eyes
closed peacefully, and within seconds she was asleep.

Ashford
and Rian left the room, the door sliding shut behind them and took seats in his
office. Ashford activated monitors for her room that would keep him informed of
her life signs and movements while Rian fidgeted in his seat. The mediscan
would have told him things about his mysterious new patient. “Doctor?” Rian
said expectantly.

He laid
his mediscan unit on the desktop. “You say you found her with an exhibit for
Rubidge Station?”

“Shraft
did. She woke up in a coffin that was supposed to be from the twenty-first
century.” His curiosity was only getting stronger. “What did your scanner say?”

“Do you
really think she’s from that time?” Ashford countered.

“I think
it’s a possibility worth exploring,” Rian replied carefully.

Ashford
appeared to weigh his words before replying.
“So do I,” he
finally
agreed.
“I’m going to do a full exam when
she wakes up, but the basic scan I took told me a couple of things that may
back up her story. But first, it picked up high tonismi levels, which prevents
me from checking out as much as I like.”

Rian
started. Tonismi was a heavy tranquilizer that caused total paralysis that
mimicked death, outlawed in the Commons and Kurran Empire. It was still favored
by the Nym, a ruthless, cold-blooded people hell-bent on controlling the
galaxy.

The
doctor’s words hit him like a physical blow, and he felt like an idiot. He
deliberately kept his voice low and even, fury coloring his words. “So she’s a
spy for the Nym,” he said tightly, tamping down his temper. “I didn’t know they
resorted to using humanoid women in coffins.” This was a first for the Fleet.
The Nym loathed anyone
who wasn’t one of their own.
“I
can’t believe I have a Nym spy on my ship.”

“I don’t
think you do,” Ashford said patiently. “The tonismi is wearing off, and my
mediscan picked up something else unusual that lends some credibility to her
story.”

Rian
unclenched the fist he didn’t know he had been making and nodded.

“Two
things, actually. First, she’s been immunized.”

“Everyone
gets immunized,” Rian argued. “Coll particles. You don’t have to go to medical
school to know that.”

“Captain,
please. She hasn’t been immunized against Coll particles.”

Okay,
that was a bit of a stretch, but not impossible. It was theoretically possible
to live without that vaccine and not be a hacking, wheezing mess, but only if
one avoided all interstellar travel. In the Commons, that was a necessity. The
air recyclers on ships and stations emitted the miniscule particles, causing a
perpetual mild flu. The symptoms could be averted with the vaccine.

“So she’s
from the Fringes then,” Rian deduced, referring to the sparsely populated and
somewhat reclusive worlds outside the Commons proper. There were those on the
Fringes who never left their home planets.

Ashford
waited, but Rian could tell his patience was thinning. “I’m sorry, Doctor,
continue.”

“She’s
been immunized against diphtheria and pertussis,” Ashford continued. “The
antigens are still in her bloodstream. I studied those diseases in medical
school. They’re extinct Earth diseases; they haven’t existed in over five
hundred years.”

“You
know this for a fact?”

“You’ve
seen my personnel file. I was born on Earth. My father worked in the shipyard
and my mother was a nurse.”

Rian had
never heard of the diseases, but he wasn’t a doctor. “Go on.”

“Her
appendix is gone,” Ashford continued. “It was cut out. She probably has a scar.”

“What?”
The lack of the Coll vaccine was possible. But no one had things cut out of
them anymore.

“It was
surgically removed,” the doctor explained. “Using ancient techniques. It’s
healed of course, but the mediscan picked up the internal scarring from the
instruments the surgeon used. Someone sliced her open the old-fashioned way
with a scalpel and cut out the appendix.”