by Loren Rhoads
If she didn’t have something to occupy her thoughts, she understood, her mind was going to tear itself apart.
The deeper she looked into her log, the more evidence she accrued. Yes, there was a progression in Sloane’s appearance in her dreams. He’d seemed only subtly older in the initial dream, the one with the two Gavins. From then on, his hair had fallen out, his face had grown more wrinkled, and his beard had become more and more unkempt. But if Gavin really was attacking her dreams, placing himself into her past, why wasn’t he controlling how he appeared to her?
She lost track of time until Haoun commed her to say that they were about to land on Tengri. She slipped into the crash webbing and waited for sleep to overpower her, but it chose not to.
Not too much later, Mykah opened the door, but stayed in the hallway where he could slam his fist on the door control and lock her in, if she made any threatening moves. Raena stayed seated at her desk and didn’t even think about all the ways she could overpower him.
“We’re on Tengri,” he said. “I’m going to take Coni out on the town, then we’ll meet up with Kavanaugh. Haoun and Vezali are already gone. I came by to see if you wanted anything before I lock you in.”
“Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” She lifted the still-unopened bottle of cider from her desk.
Mykah lingered there a moment, seeming to have more to say. Raena helped him out. “I’m sorry if I frightened you earlier.”
“It’s all right. It’s just … I located the Doze gas the Thallians had tucked away to use on you, if they’d succeeded in taking you prisoner. They’d even calculated the dosage for you. I want you to check their figures for me. I don’t want to give you too much.”
“Did you send the calculation back to me?”
He nodded.
“I’ll look it over, but I hope we won’t need to go that far.”
“I hope so, too.”
Raena gazed at him. Just a kid, she thought, and I am a lot of responsibility. “Mykah … not that you need it, but you have my permission to do anything you have to, in order to keep the crew safe.”
He nodded. “Have a good evening.”
“You, too.”
Once she was sure they were gone, she retrieved the anesthetic Haoun had left on her desk. It was probably extremely dangerous to use it without any supervision. No doubt she would regret it later, but claustrophobia had crept up on her again. She knew she was trapped in her cabin because she had asked to be—and really, everyone was safer because of it—but she wanted a way to skip ahead in time. The anesthetic wouldn’t do that, but it would blot her out of the here and now.
She retrieved the breather and the nebulizer from the locker where she’d put them. Then she retreated to her bunk, where she arranged herself so that when the drug took effect, the weight of the nebulizer would pull the mask away from her face so she wouldn’t overdose.
If she did overdose, she thought angrily, serves Sloane right.
As she was slipping away, she wondered what memory might come this time.
She noticed the tension in Sloane’s face as his hands flitted over the controls. “What’s wrong with your ship?” she asked.
“One of her old war wounds. The scanners are screwed to hell. We nearly flew through another ship back there because the computer didn’t detect it as soon as it should have.”
Raena sank into the copilot’s chair, her stomach queasy again. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to slow to normal space, so we can see what we’re going to hit while we still have time to avoid it?”
Scowling, Sloane punched the sequence into the navcomputer before Raena could strap herself down. So he was touchy about his flying. Fine. As long as he didn’t kill her trying to prove his skill.
An unfamiliar voice boomed over the ship’s comm system. “B719, stand by for boarding.”
Sloane swore and flipped switches for the rear viewscreen. The haze cleared to reveal an Imperial warship, too close to be in focus, floating behind them.
“Stellar.” He caught her arm and hauled her back toward the hold. Raena let him take her wherever he wanted to go. At this point, the external airlock would have been welcome.
Overhead, the Imperial warship latched onto them with a clank.
Sloane grabbed a sonic drill from the tool nook and played it over a wall in the hallway. The bolts shook loose to reveal a hidden cubbyhole. “Get in,” he ordered. “Don’t break any of those bags of Messiah. One breath of that, and you’ll be a hundred before you can count to five.”
Cautiously, Raena set a high-heeled boot among the plastic bags on the locker floor. She clamped her eyes shut as he replaced the metal panel.
The cloying smell of plastic filled the locker and choked her. She tried to breathe shallowly though the fabric of her cloak. Darkness washed over her as Sloane turned off the hallway lights. Shuddering, she put out a hand to make sure the panel did not close in on her.
Claustrophobia was the worst. She wished she were afraid of water or rodents or fire or thunderstorms, anything other than small places. Space travel was difficult enough for her, without being forced into the lockers or tunnels or prison cells or any number of other tiny places where she kept finding herself. At this moment, she wanted to start screaming and never stop, let the terror out, but she knew it wouldn’t help. The despair was even more painful than the fear.
The overhead noises intensified as the Imperials completed hauling in Sloane’s ship. Then someone banged on the main hatch with the butt of a gun.
“Cool your jets,” Sloane shouted as he pounded the combination into the lock.
When the hatch whooshed open, light trickled in around the panel in front of Raena. She stifled a sigh of relief. The walls remained steadfast in their original places.
“How can I help you, gentlemen?” Sloane offered.
“Surrender your passenger.”
Sloane laughed. “Does this look like a pleasure cruiser?”
“What’s your cargo, then?”
“I’m between shipments now, but I’ve got a bid in on some Yangmai holos. You know the kind.” He chuckled salaciously. “Ought to be an interesting haul, if I get it.”
Something metal trailed across the metal wall of the hallway. Raena twitched as the locker hummed around her. Then the pitch changed. The metal tapped on the wall to make a point.
“What’s in there?”
“Wiring,” Sloane answered.
She heard a gun powering up.
“Put it in a holding pattern,” Sloane protested. “I’d be glad to open it for you.”
He used his sonic drill to open the panel in question. All around Raena, the metal whined and set her teeth on edge. She held herself rigid. She wished she had the power to will herself to die, to vanish, to be completely erased from time and space.
“See?” Sloane asked. “Only wires.”
“Lucky for you.” The metal dragged over a few more panels, stopping in front of Raena.
She knew what was coming. She remembered it. Her muscles quivered with fear. Sloane removed the panel and she couldn’t run. She couldn’t escape. She couldn’t even shift her feet, for fear of piercing one of the pouches of Messiah. The soldiers stunned her point-blank and hauled her back to Thallian and his torture machine …
Rather than watch the memory play out, Raena stomped down hard on a pouch of Messiah. The heel of her boot pierced the pouch, scattering the powdery drug throughout inside of the tiny locker.
Raena gulped in as much as she could. The drug slammed into her system, blotting her out instantly. It felt as if she had been flung bodily against a wall. She forgot how to breathe.
Raena leaned over the handlebars of the jet bike, wringing out all the speed she could from it. Ahead of her, a boy on another bike dodged through the spires of the skyscrapers on Kai, heading toward the spaceport. He nearly impacted one spire, then overcorrected. Raena winced. She hoped he wouldn’t let his fear get the better of him. She needed him to pull it toge
ther enough to get himself safely back to his ship—so she could steal it.
Of course, he was Thallian’s son, so he was used to living with a certain level of terror. The boy got the bike back under control and buzzed off in a straight line. Raena eased off her own throttle, slowing a little so she wouldn’t catch him up yet.
He wove over the maze of docking slips, then recognized the one he was heading for. He sent his jet bike into a dive, braking as he descended. Raena hit the throttle again, closing the gap between them. She loosened her safety straps one-handed as she got closer, then unlimbered the stun stick she’d taken from a security guard when she stole the bike.
Holding the stick in her right hand, she sprang off the bike, spreading out in the air to slow her fall, then tucking into a ball around the stun stick to somersault until she could get her feet under her. She landed in a perfect three-point stance atop the Thallians’ ship. She checked herself, noted that she had the stun stick angled just so, and grinned. Sometimes, she just loved what her body could do.
Her bike plummeted into the roof of the docking bay next door, exploding into a fireball. Debris rained down around her.
She crept to the edge of the Thallian ship in time to see figures coming out of the shadow of the ship’s hatch. A man frogmarched the boy down the ship’s ramp, out where she could see them both. The man’s gun pointed steadily at the boy’s head.
Raena leapt down behind them, between the pair and the open door of the ship. “He’s mine!”
The man wrenched the boy around to face her. “No worries, Raena. I’m ready to get out of here, too.”
The man reminded her of Gavin, but he was older, his face wrinkled like a crumpled piece of paper. What was left of his hair had turned the color of cobwebs.
“Who are you?” Raena said. If he killed the boy, she might never find Thallian. She dropped the stun stick at her feet and stepped over it, leaving her hands raised above her waist.
“Gavin,” he said, as if that should be obvious.
“No. I left Gavin in the market with Ariel.”
“That’s another Gavin.” He grimaced. “A younger one. I’m running out of time, Raena. Let me come with you.”
“Where do you think I’m going?
“Off to Thallian’s homeworld. To finish what he started.”
What kind of trap was this? Who was this old man? How did he know where she was going? How had he found the Thallians’ transport, when she’d had no idea where it was until the kid led her to it?
Someone had betrayed her, but she didn’t have time to allow it to slow her down. She had to get off Kai quickly, before Planetary Security found her, or else she was going back to a jail cell to serve time for defending herself against Thallian’s minions.
She took another step, hands still raised. “Why should I believe you?”
“I thought you’d ask how I knew where to find you,” the stranger said by way of an answer. “After you left me on Kai, Planetary Security threw me an’ Ariel off-world. I snuck back on and was able to figure out which ship you stole. You were long gone by then and I couldn’t figure out how to track you. But now I’ve come back from the future for you. That’s why I knew which docking slip the boy would bring you to. I even know which planet you’re going to take him to.”
How could he know that, when she hadn’t told anyone? Whether he was Gavin or merely some kind of madman who thought he was, she didn’t trust him. She couldn’t. She had to contact Mykah and the crew. She had a message to deliver to Kavanaugh and Ariel. Time was steadily growing shorter before Planetary Security converged on her here.
So she launched herself at the boy, putting him out of the way with one good hard punch to the head. He sagged, dead weight in the old man’s arm, while the gun kept the madman’s other hand busy. He dropped the boy as Raena’s elbow came round at his head. He blocked the blow with his gun, just as she had hoped. She hit it hard enough to put it out of commission.
He got one foot between hers. She let him pull her over, grabbing his jacket with both fists and pulling him down as well. She twisted enough that he took some of her weight in the fall. Once they’d landed, she darted her head forward, planting a good solid kiss on his mouth. That distracted him just enough that she brought her knee up hard and incapacitated him.
Then she scrambled backward off of him and pushed him off the ramp with the toe of her boot. He was lucky she didn’t give him the heel.
She spoke into the comm bracelet on her wrist. “I’m in. I had an unforeseen complication, but it’s been handled. There’s a fire in the next docking bay over, so dodge the fire suppression team on your way here. The smoke will serve as a beacon for you. We haven’t much time.”
She hauled the boy up onto her back and carried him onto the ship. As expected, she found a cell the Thallians had kitted out for her. She locked the unconscious teenager into the restraints, then went back outside to check on things.
The old man had crawled over to his gun and was trying to get it aimed at her. Age or pain made his arm shake.
“I don’t know who you really are,” Raena told him, “but you’d better stop playing with me. Every time a Gavin-figure shows up in one of my dreams, I kill him.”
As the words left her lips, though, the dream came apart. She woke up in her cabin on the Veracity, the very same shuttle that had been in her dream. She spared a fond thought for Jain, the boy who’d led her to it.
Her thoughts circled around to the Gavin-figure in his dream. What had he said? “I’ve come back from the future for you.”
Her blood iced. Was that the proof she was looking for, the proof that Gavin really was using Messiah against her? Were the nightmares really visions from the moments when the time streams split? Maybe that was why they started as things she remembered, then warped. Maybe, if she’d been able to stay in the dream a little longer, she could have gotten a message to Gavin. Told him to leave her the hell alone.
Or, she thought grimly, maybe the insomnia had driven her insane to the point that such a theory would make even passing momentary sense to her.
Still, this was the first dream in which she had been able to talk back as a somewhat self-aware participant. The way all the other dreams had played out so far, she had always been passive, forced to endure her past and the emotions trapped there. Even when the dreams diverged from her memories of the past, the figure that represented her—both observed and inhabited—reacted to everything as the Raena of that era would have reacted, given the new set of circumstances.
The dream-Raena was trapped by the time in which she existed.
Perhaps the only active figure in any of these dreams was Gavin: choosing the moment, directing the change, god and king of the past.
Served him right to be punished repeatedly for his hubris, stupid fucker. Maybe he’d engineered it all so that she couldn’t even speak up in her own defense or ask him to leave her alone. He could rape her memories, her past, and there was no way she could fend him off or tell him no, short of ending him in every timeline where their paths crossed.
Maybe it was time she stopped feeling guilty about killing him and see it as honest self-defense, a kind of unknowing triumph.
Raena no longer had any desire for suicide to stop her torment. The answer was going to have to be murder. Gavin had it coming.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d killed someone who believed he loved her. As if she needed any proof that life had really changed for her, she honestly hoped that this time would be the last.
Kavanaugh picked the bar. He hadn’t been to Tengri in a couple of years, at least, but he knew Ocho’s would still be there. It would be kind to call the place a dive, but it had a trustworthy clientele, in that you could trust everyone there to mind their own business.
He got there early so he could scope the place out and find a good vantage point to wait to meet the crew of the Veracity.
He’d settled over a good amber ale—for old times’ sake�
��when the human boy and the blue-furred girl came in holding hands. He wore some kind of obnoxiously flashing shirt with an advertisement for the casinos on Kai over hand-me-down engineer’s pants, all pockets and loops. She wore a boxy black jacket with nothing under it and a star field-patterned skirt that swirled past her knees.
They went straight to the bar for a drink. They weren’t military at all. Barely looked armed. They could have been a young couple of school kids out for a night on the town, slumming, because they didn’t look like they belonged in a place like this. They may have been the only people in the place who didn’t look at all like a threat.
Kavanaugh suspected he’d made a mistake assuming that anyone traveling with Raena was in her league. He shouldn’t have dragged the kids here. Now that he saw them, he felt responsible for making sure they got home safely.
He moved out of the shadows so they could see him when they turned around, drinks in hand.
He watched the pair of Chameleon girls cross paths with the couple, but neither the boy nor the girl reacted. Kavanaugh knew what to watch for, though. He flicked a coin at one Chameleon girl’s bare arm. Without flinching, she snatched the coin from the air, dropped the wallet she’d stolen, and kept walking.
The boy scooped his wallet up, tucked it back into his trouser pocket, and sealed the flap over it. “Thanks,” he said when they reached Kavanaugh’s table. “I didn’t even know it was gone. They were that smooth.”
“Glad to help,” Kavanaugh said. “Go ahead and sit down.” Once they were settled and introductions made, he asked, “How is she?”
“No more seizures,” Coni said.
“That’s good.”
“Now she’s blaming someone named Gavin Sloane,” Mykah continued.
“Gavin loves her. The crazy-making kind of love,” Kavanaugh explained. “He got himself addicted to the Dart, practically wrecked his health, and set about bankrupting himself, looking for her the last time. I saw how nuts he was when she left him on Kai. I can believe he has had a hard time turning loose of her. What is she blaming him for?”