by K S Augustin
Moon pushed herself back from the table in an abrupt movement and rose to her feet, a cold feeling of dread engulfing her. She thought she was done with such feelings, with the frightening sensation of keeping her balance on a slippery ice floe, always afraid of falling and drowning in the frigid embrace of the Security Force. In fact, she could almost feel the ground sway beneath her feet now. Gritting her teeth, she forced her weight downward, her toes clenching inside her boots as if to clutch at the very floor. She was still scared—Savic could easily come up with a way of drugging her, too. But she was damned if she was going to let anyone else see it. Those days, she fervently hoped, were long gone.
“You’re looking very serious.”
Srin’s calm words arrowed through her unpleasant thoughts, and she met his gaze with wide eyes. She had forgotten he was there.
“I’m just…there’s an equation that’s really bothering me,” she finally said, trying to dismiss her thoughts. Unlike Srin, she wasn’t a general-purpose genius. All she knew was one thing—stellar mechanics. All her work boiled down to one objective. She could not be used in the same way as versatile Srin Flerovs. That alone, she thought, ensured her continued protection from a bastard like Savic.
“In that case—” he popped a small shred of food into his mouth and stood up, “—let’s tackle it together. What exactly is bothering you?”
Moon blinked at him. She knew that it wasn’t an equation that was bothering her, but she didn’t want to tell him what was. She tried thinking of something to distract him with, but her uncooperative brain chose that second to shut down completely. It was a complete blank.
Hen Savic also decided to show his face at that moment, angling into the lab, his posture indicating he was equally comfortable either leaving again or staying. Moon didn’t want him staying.
“How are things going here? Did everyone have a good lunch?”
Moon willed her expression not to change, and stopped herself from darting a suspicious glance at the scattered crumbs of their afternoon meal. Was his an innocent enquiry or something more?
“We’re trying to figure out a difficult coefficient, Hen.” Srin’s voice was testy, his back to his analyst. Only his head was half-turned in Savic’s direction. “It’s quite complex. A little privacy would be appreciated.”
Savic stopped walking and straightened. His gaze bored into the back of Srin’s head for a moment. “Of course,” he said evenly.
Moon had expected the tall, dark man to explode or, at the very least, hit back with a rebuke, but he seemed to take the terse rejection in his stride. Maybe this was how Srin always behaved when he was concentrating, and his analyst was used to it. With a quick, tightlipped smile at the room in general, Savic strode away.
Srin pinned Moon again with a warm, grey gaze. “You weren’t thinking about an equation, were you?”
“N-no.”
“Then what were you thinking about? It wasn’t very pleasant. I gathered that from the expression on your face.”
“No, it wasn’t pleasant,” she agreed, matching his calm with a measure of her own.
He searched her eyes, looking for something, she wasn’t sure what. At every turn, he continued to amaze her. His gaze was sharp and penetrating, certainly not the kind of look she was expecting from someone who lived in two-day cycles. She could see a shadow of the young man he used to be—a person of such powerful intellect that the only way the Republic felt it could control it was through systematically destroying the psyche that surrounded it.
She felt that tug of attraction towards Srin pull again at her insides. Perhaps, at the start, there had been pity. And there still was. Moon defied anybody to comprehend what had been done to Srin year after year and not feel even a twinge of compassion. But there was also an unquenchable strength emanating from him, strong and tangible, that she admired and was drawn to.
Her lips parted unconsciously as they gazed into each other’s eyes. Srin’s eyes narrowed in on the plump flesh like a laser on target. She wasn’t sure what he had planned to say next, but had the feeling the words that left his mouth were not what he was originally thinking.
“Would you care to have dinner with me tonight?” he asked.
Despite herself, Moon smiled.
Chapter Seven
The table was set exactly as it was last time—in the same position, the same orientation, the same settings—but the tremor of heightened excitement that ran up Moon’s spine was new. Srin was even dressed in the same long grey shirt and sarong that he wore during their first dinner. She found it all rather touching. Here was someone who showed constancy through his very actions, a transparency free of deceit, thanks to the punishing drug regime he was under.
A regime that, through her own actions, she was tacitly colluding with.
Moon shook her head as she walked towards him. She wouldn’t think of that. Not now.
“Is something not to your liking?” he asked, misinterpreting her gesture.
She smiled. “No, it’s not that at all. I was thinking of…something else. It wasn’t important.”
Oh, but it is.
“Please,” he indicated as she neared, “have a seat.”
Moon eased herself into a chair while he poured two glasses of light wine.
“Captain Jeen was generous enough to liberate a bottle from the officers’ cellar for me,” he explained as he poured. “He seems a nice man.”
“Yes, he does.” Although he’d probably cringe to be described in such bland terms, she thought to herself.
Srin sat down and pinned her again with one of his characteristically intense gazes. “Do you really think so?”
“P-pardon?”
“Do you really think Captain Jeen is a nice man?”
Where had that question come from? Moon looked across the table at Srin, guarded curiosity on her face, but his expression was one of usual calm and she wondered whether he had deliberately cultivated it as a way of hiding his own thoughts.
“I think….” She paused, and the temptation to give a facile response died in her throat. Srin deserved better, especially from her.
“I like Drue,” she finally said. “And while I don’t doubt he’s done some questionable things in his life on his way to being a captain, I get the feeling there’s a core of humanity in him.” She thought back to the first dinner she and the captain had shared, and his surprising sympathy for her internment. In a subsequent meal, they had even shared almost treasonous thoughts on the government that supported them both. But he was definitely a guarded man, careful of everything he said and did, especially in public. Even a powerful captain with the Space Fleet could make a fatal misstep. It was an occupational hazard.
“I suppose you’re right.” Srin nodded at her explanation and they began eating.
“We’re heading out to the Suzuki Mass to attempt an experiment of your theories, aren’t we?” he finally asked.
She had to remember this was Day-One Srin, still assimilating initial information. “Yes.”
“What do you have to do in order to make the experiment work? What I’ve read so far looks very ambitious.”
“It is,” she laughed. “Well, first I need to make sure that my calculations are correct. That’s why we need the heavy-water tank, so I can test and verify some interim work. When I think I have it right, I’ll need to virtually assemble the fission packet in the lab and send the parameters down to the cargo bay. There’s a huge reactor that was installed just before I came on board. That creates a real-world example of my virtual packet.”
She drank some wine. “Once I’ve calibrated and confirmed the reactor settings, the packet’s structure will get structured and finalised. And then—” she paused, “—and then it will be inserted into the heart of the target star.”
The ensuing silence lasted a long second.
“They call it StellMil One, don’t they?” Srin asked, using the official military designation of the re-ignition payload.
/> “That’s right. StellMil One.” She hated the name. It diminished her intricate work to one blunt military instrument. It was like referring to a scalpel as a weak-field laser.
“What would happen,” he asked, not looking at her, “if the stellar missile was fired into a live star instead of a dead one?”
Moon dropped her cutlery and sat back in her chair, staring at him. Was she on board a ship full of conspiracy theorists?
“Have I upset you?” he asked.
She gave the automatic response at first. “No. I mean, yes.” She took another deep gulp from her glass of wine.
“It hadn’t occurred to you?” he pursued.
She would have been an imbecile if it hadn’t occurred to her. Of course it had occurred to her. She just didn’t want to think about it.
“The purpose of the fission packet,” she started, “is not—”
“I’m asking purely as a hypothetical. Could it destroy a star system?”
Moon’s head moved, reluctantly. “Hypothetically, yes.” Somehow, her imaginings of the dinner didn’t include discussing the lethal applications of her research. Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve done the calculations, haven’t you? Figured out what would happen if a fission packet of that magnitude entered a viable star?” She tried keeping the accusation out of her voice. Failed.
“Yes.”
The food she had consumed was like a lump in her stomach. She had no interest in his calculations. This was outside her line of research. She was being paid to bring stars back to life and refused to think of anything else.
“What did you find?” she heard herself ask.
“The results vary according to the base mass, temperature and magnetic reading of the star. But a sufficiently powered StellMil of the type we’ve been working on leads, in the majority of cases, to a cascading gravitational collapse of the stellar core.”
She didn’t have to ask. She knew the answer even before he spoke it. “A supernova,” she whispered.
“Which, ironically,” he agreed, “could trigger the formation of new stars.” His expression was serene. He could have been discussing the finer points of chess rather than stellar annihilation. She wanted to hate him for what he said, voicing her dark concerns with such ease, but she couldn’t blame him for forcing her to see herself for what she was—a coward.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, her voice bitter.
“I need to tell someone. Before I forget.”
“Before?”
Her gaze flew to his, resentment forgotten, to meet a wall of stolid sadness. He knew! He knew what they were doing to him! From one mental tumult to another, her brain raged between anger and confusion—how much did he remember? Would he hate her for working with his captors? Was she part of what he remembered?
“I only know as much as I can deduce,” he told her softly and quickly. “Faint thoughts occur to me. If I concentrate on them, they seem to become stronger with each cycle.”
“You know,” she whispered back, through bloodless lips, still stuck on his initial bombshell revelation. “You know what they’re doing to you.”
His smile was wry. “Don’t you think I’ve noticed my own face in the mirror each morning? How I’ve aged? How Hen has aged? I have faint memories of waking up in dozens of places, speaking to hundreds of people. It can’t all be fantasy.”
She stared at him, dumbstruck. He knew. Savic was wrong. Savic didn’t have him under control as much as he thought.
“How long is the cycle?” he asked abruptly.
She blinked. “Two days.”
“Two days,” he repeated. He was silent for a long moment, then swallowed convulsively. “The bastards.”
“How long have you known?”
She stopped, suddenly mindful of what a stupid question that was. If he recognised the faint recollections as real, he might have known for almost as long as he was drugged.
“It feels like I’ve always known something was amiss.” He took a sip of wine and Moon marvelled at how steady his hand was. The liquid didn’t even tremble in its fragile, carved glass bowl. Maybe he was calm because this wasn’t the first time he’d broached this subject with someone. Maybe he remembered telling someone else.
“Who else have you confided in?” she asked suddenly.
She couldn’t imagine someone in the kind of mental cage he was locked in not reaching out to someone at the first available opportunity. But how could she reconcile that with Savic’s unshakeable confidence in the treatment?
So she was shocked to hear him say, “No one.”
“But how can you know?” She felt like she was kicking a small animal, but it was only her logic sliding into place.
“I…leave messages for myself. They’re coded and hidden, but they tell me things of significance. I’m sure there have been times when I haven’t had a chance to record anything. I get the impression they’ve moved me around a lot. But—” he lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, as if rubbing against a scrap of fabric, “—there’s a feeling attached to a significant memory. It’s only faint, but it’s there. And that feeling tells me I haven’t told anyone else about my recollections.”
She was the first person in almost twenty years he had confided in? Rather than feeling flattered, Moon felt like the walls of the lab were closing in on her. She drew a panicked breath.
“You’re the first, Moon,” he added, unnecessarily. “Can you help me? Can you stop what they’re doing to me?”
It was like Kad all over again.
No. Worse.
With Kad, all Moon had to do was look perplexed, fail to grasp most of what her research partner was saying and then get hit in the face. What Srin was asking for was beyond such trivialities.
Her expression must have mirrored her thoughts because his shoulders fell as he sank back into his chair. Of course he was disappointed, but he couldn’t have been expecting a reaction other than shocked silence, surely?
“The Republic’s just too damned big, isn’t it?” he asked. “Too big and too powerful.”
“No, it’s…” She sighed. She had become so used to toeing the line, saying and doing the correct thing because that was the only clear way she saw to get back to her research. She didn’t need the Republic to watch over every one of her words anymore. She was doing it to herself.
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” she said firmly. “The truth of the matter is, whether you believe me or not, I’m as much a prisoner here as you are.”
“I don’t understand.”
Would she have to repeat all this to him the day after tomorrow? She didn’t care. She had to tell someone. The enforced secrecy of the past few years was eating away at her. But new habits still died hard.
“How secure do you think this lab is?” she asked, worried. She remembered what Drue had told her regarding the lack of need for security on a ship when there were hundreds of pairs of alert and watching eyes about. But she needed a second opinion, even if it was from someone who seemed as unfamiliar with combat ships as she was.
He barked a short laugh. “Realistically? As secure as a shielded data vault.” He spread his arms, encompassing the space. “Think about it. We’re in the heart of Republic authority, surrounded on all sides by either trained military goons or the quasi-vacuum of hyperspace. Believe me, they’re not worried.”
It was said with more pithy language, but was similar to Drue’s assurances. It seemed that, deep in the heart of the Republic machinery, they were safer than in most other places in the galaxy.
“I had a research partner,” she finally said after a long pause. “I didn’t know it, but he was a rebel, someone who actively worked against the Republic. When the Security Force found out about him, they—they assumed I was also working with him, but that I was just too stupid to escape.” Her lips twisted. “So they ‘detained’ me for three years while they investigated every part of my past.”
“But you were innocent.”
Moon shrugged and a small smile tugged at one edge of her mouth. “Yes, I was innocent, for what it was worth.”
“How long ago were you released?” His voice was gentle.
“I was allowed to return to my lab almost a year ago, but was only formally released from their custody six months ago.”
This time it was Srin’s turn to sit back, mulling over her words. “What happens if this experiment of yours doesn’t work? Do they question you again? Turn your research over to someone else?”
“I don’t know. They might decide to send me back to prison. Nothing’s been stated explicitly but I just get the feeling of a…a threat, hanging over my head.”
She looked into his eyes and knew he understood. She saw the frustration and rising despair in those grey depths, akin to her own. They were two trapped individuals, caught in the Republic’s sticky grasp, unable to move without telegraphing their intentions to their controllers. Hadn’t Moon spent night after night thinking on the injustice of the situation, wondering if there would ever be a time when she would be happy and free again? It was not to be. The situation was hopeless.