“Missing doesn’t mean dead.”
They heard Fran ordering others into their bunks with a reminder to refrain from speaking. “I don’t want to clean up after you if you get caught,” she warned.
Soon she was back between them, stood facing the end of the hall with her hands clasped behind her back.
“What the hell took you guys so long anyway?” she hissed.
“You know how it is, Fran,” Stepper said. Nothing more really needed said. “Why do some of them have that red under their ears, and most don’t?”
Fran laughed without humour. “Those are females. They don’t have a planet anymore, just like us, so their whole population lives in space.”
“Just like us,” Gordon muttered, sarcasm strong.
“What happened to the Renegade?” Stepper asked her.
Fran’s mouth pinched so hard her lips whitened. “We are forced to integrate the ship’s parts with theirs every day. They don’t understand the nano-technology, but their steel is quite advanced, and seems to serve them well enough. Based on what they did to you, they’ve also studied our computer systems. Once I could, I asked what they were trying to accomplish, hoping to stop the mindless brutality. That started a line of questioning I’d rather not remember. They were pretty shocked when they realized I’d figured out their language.”
Gordon frowned. “Did you tell them how to activate the Jump?”
Fran whirled around, her face pale but for two bright spots of red high on her cheeks. Janlin saw a dark shadow in the soul behind the eyes.
“I told them it broke, that’s why we didn’t simply Jump away when they found us.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “I told them that so many times I began to believe it myself.”
Now Janlin saw the fear behind the attitude. Now that they were here with another, working, Jumpship . . .
“It’s near enough to the truth,” Fran continued. “When the Imag came at us with guns firing, we couldn’t Jump. We tried. And we were all still so muddled in the head.”
“They might’ve hit something,” Gordon said. “I’m sure the Hope will still work.” Janlin flinched at the desperation in his voice.
Stepper shook his head. “Couldn’t they try making friends if they want to learn about the Jump technology?”
Fran grunted a laugh. “That’s not the kind of people they are. You’ll see.” She stalked away, hands still clasped behind her back.
Janlin twisted around to watch Fran speak to the alien posted at the entrance. Fran never raised her head as she spoke, keeping her spine bowed before the alien. Janlin had never seen Fran give anyone such deference. Janlin checked the other direction and saw many other heads peering out, Stepper’s included.
They had to get back to the Hope before these idiots started taking it apart.
All around them the ship trembled and rumbled. Even here the smell of hot steel overpowered the stench of sweat and fear. Fans and air pumps and who knew what whirred and hummed all around them, and far off machines clanged and roared.
They were about midway along a rack of bunks. As Fran returned along the hall, she reached out to grasp hands with many along the way. Just as often she shook her head, obviously passing on some message. Soon she approached their bunks again.
“If we could get to the Hope—” Janlin began, her voice too loud by Fran’s flinch.
“Stow it, Janlin.” Fran’s whisper cut across hers. Her mouth barely moved. “We’ve all tried to run, and all we got for it was nerve damage.”
She made to move on, but Stepper spoke. “It must’ve been horrible, and now we’ve been no help at all.”
Fran stopped as if struck. She stared at the far end of the hall, her mouth pulled into a tight line, her knuckles white where her hands clasped. Something in her seemed strung tight like a wire that was about to snap. Janlin noticed Fran’s hands were rimmed with permanent grime, her arms were abraded and scarred, and three fingers on one hand looked curled and twisted.
“They appear to live, work, and breed on this ship. The other areas are closed to us, but I’ve heard talk. This part is built like a manufacturing plant. From what I’ve gathered, they’re upgrading this tub into a warship to take a planet from some opposing race.”
She made to move again, and again Stepper stopped her with only his voice.
“Security?”
Fran gave him her best “don’t be stupid” look. “Like I said, this area is a steel plant. It runs 24-7. There is always someone awake: one crew working, one sleeping, one screwing around. Doesn’t matter who you run into, they all carry weapons, and the guards carry the whips.”
“Will the whips knock us out?” Gordon asked.
“Oh, no. You’re awake for all of it, enjoying the experience of having your entire nervous system screwed so you can’t walk or talk or control your own god-damned shithole, yet you can still feel the pain.”
“Fran,” Stepper said, making her glare at him instead of Gordon. “I’m really sorry all this has happened, but we gotta focus on finding a way out. There’s no one else to come if we don’t return.”
Fran laughed then, the sound hard and bitter, making many of the bunks’ occupants look around with wide eyes. “I’m surprised you came.”
“We have to try something,” Janlin said.
“Do what you have to, but my captain hasn’t been seen since his fourth escape attempt.” Fran walked away from them with a slight limp, still shaking her head.
The former crew of the Renegade stared mute and wild-eyed at the newcomers. What are they thinking, Janlin wondered, how badly we’d failed them, or that there was safety in numbers?
Chapter Eleven
GAZES TURNED AWAY, and people settled in as time passed and nothing more happened. Janlin nudged Gordon, but he shook his head and turned to the wall. She looked across at Stepper. Dark shadows underlined his eyes, and she knew he struggled with the responsibility of letting his ship and crew be captured. Even more, they struggled with the apathy of the people they’d come to help.
Janlin shifted on the steel slab. There were no blankets, no pillows, no comfort offered to the humans. She stared at the bunk above her, occupied by a Renegade crewmate that she didn’t know. These were the first people to ever traverse a new solar system, and now this was all they had to show for it.
With a twist of her tongue, Janlin spit the tiny nano-recorder into her palm. How would she keep this safe now?
Janlin rolled again, scanning up and down the hallway. No one moved, and the doorways stood empty. Where was Fran? What came next? Janlin shut her eyes, the recorder still in her hand, but that left her with nothing but her thoughts. Where had the missing gone? And what of this opposing race Fran spoke of? If she could get to Gordon’s Seraph, slip away somehow, maybe she could go to the planet and warn them, make friends, and get help.
A loud clang reverberated through the hull. Janlin’s eyes popped open, and she looked around for the source. Stepper stared around; Gordon still faced the wall but his back was tense. A few people shifted on their bunks, but otherwise nothing else moved. The noise was apparently something they were used to.
Stepper gave her a desperate look before rolling over, his back to her. Janlin sat up. Her head brushed the bunk above her. The steel flooring would give her away as soon as she set her boots upon it. She reached out, undid the laces, and slipped them off, setting them carefully against the wall. The left boot had a few loose threads in the tongue, and she worked at them until there was a small tear she could slide the device into.
The floor was cool against her sweaty socks, and she welcomed it. She took her first step only to have someone grab her arm.
Stepper pulled her down to his level.
“Not yet, Janlin.”
Janlin wrinkled her nose. “Why not, sir?” she asked in a harsh whisper. She let her frustration at him show in the sarcastic use of the title. “If we don’t move quickly the Hope will end up in pieces just as the Renegade did, and
we will have even less chance than we do now. Let me go look.”
Stepper grimaced. “Willing to have the first go at the nerve whip, are you?”
She pulled her arm free and checked over her shoulder, ignoring Stepper. Many eyes watched her now, but she ignored them too, slipping along the bunks, ready to dive onto one if a guard appeared . . . whether the bunk was occupied or not.
Another clang rang through the ship. Janlin’s whole body twitched, and her hip was already on one of the bunks before she could think. A middle-aged woman lay on the bunk, fast asleep, mouth open and trailing drool. Dark smudges marred her cheek where a dirty hand had brushed away overlong hair. She gave no indication that she heard or felt anything; she was lost in the sleep of the exhausted. Janlin stared, her brain searching for a name, until she realized this poor soul was physicist Linder Brown, an accomplished nano-scientist.
Janlin continued her reconnaissance despite her pounding heart and huge misgivings. The idea of returning to her bunk and just lying there, waiting for the bad news to come, was even less inviting.
At the end of the hall she noticed a panel with markings etched onto the various buttons. Below stood a canister that she hoped was a version of a fire extinguisher. It did boast a nozzle and trigger, but she could count on nothing being what it seemed.
Sweat trickled down her sides beneath her shirt. The heat that seemed a permanent state rose as she neared the doorway. Bootfalls echoed from beyond, and Janlin squeezed her body into the tiny space between the last bunks and the wall where the canister stood. The man in the upper bunk stared at her in horror. White stripped away the former blackness of his greasy hair, but intelligence shone from his eyes.
The footsteps slowed as they passed the doorway, but carried on, leaving Janlin’s heart thumping loud in her ears. The man continued to stare, and he shook his head slowly from side to side. He reached out an arm, pushing up the fabric of his shirt as he stretched, and revealed a withered arm with curled, claw-like fingers. Janlin pressed her body against the wall, willing him silently not to touch her.
He stared at her, his expression demented, before he glanced out beyond their hallway and pulled his arm back to curl it against his chest. He laid his head down and proceeded to ignore her.
Janlin lowered her body to the floor so that she lay mostly under the lower, unoccupied, bunk. Dragging herself, she twisted until her head reached the doorway. With agonizing patience, she moved forward in hopes that her movements would not alert anyone standing guard.
There was no guard.
Panting in relief, Janlin studied the intersecting hallway. In each direction the floor gently curved up out of sight—far in the distance—solving one of Janlin’s curiosities: gravity came from spin, just like the stations at home. Only this place must be huge in comparison.
A slight movement caught her eye, and the sight of what could only be a vidlens made panic pour through her veins. She heaved herself back into the bunk hall. Already she could imagine she heard footsteps of someone coming. She scrambled to her bunk, Stepper watching with questions burning in his eyes.
She was still struggling back into her boots when the alien appeared. He scanned the hall, slowly making his way down to them. Stepper closed his eyes, but Janlin could not bring herself to be blind, instead staring at the bunk where Tyrell appeared to be asleep.
The guard passed, his gnarled and hairless version of a hand—with nerve whip at the ready—going right by Janlin’s face.
She lunged, focusing her whole body on that hand, reaching for just there, the pressure point on the back of the hand that would render it unable to keep its grip on the weapon. Janlin had her other hand ready to take the whip, and so felt the weapon pulse with power.
It was as if the molten steel they’d seen now poured over her, through her, and she opened her mouth to scream. No sound emerged. Her mouth locked open, her eyes bulged in her head, her hands curled into claws like the man she’d seen on the end bunk.
The hum dissipated; the pain remained. The Imag stood over her. He touched the side of his head, gurgled a few words, and walked away.
Stepper and Gordon appeared in her field of vision. “Goddamn it, Janlin!” Stepper said. He whispered the words, but they still carried vehemence. A new smell assaulted her nose, and she knew she’d lost control of her bladder. Luckily there was little else in her. Once more she was glad of an empty stomach.
The pain didn’t ebb, instead soaring through her without respite. She wanted to writhe and cry out, but her muscles were locked beyond her control.
“Get back in your bunk, Stepper. You too, Gordon.” Fran’s voice cut the air after so much silence. Stepper opened his mouth, then shut it and moved out of Janlin’s line-of-sight.
Two uniformed aliens knelt over her. Suddenly she was in the air, only to land on her bunk a second later. Janlin decided it was a good thing she couldn’t feel anything other than the waves of nerve pain, based on how quickly she’d travelled from floor to bunk.
Fran looked at her with obvious disdain. “Somehow I knew you’d be first,” she said with no satisfaction. Janlin barely heard Fran through the buzz in her head. She wished she could close her eyes. She also wished she could pound the look of despair off Fran’s face.
Chapter Twelve
JANLIN COULD WALK by the time they were called for a work shift, but her pants were stained with dried piss and her whole body ached to the bone.
Their team consisted of Stepper, Gordon, Tyrell, herself, and strangely enough, the man from the end bunk. He grinned manically at Janlin and winked. Stepper raised his eyebrows, and all Janlin could do was scowl and look away.
They followed the alien into a factory setting much like the one they’d passed through the day before, Gordon so lost in awe he seemed to forget their situation. Janlin, on the other hand, focused on every passageway, every vidlens, every possible opportunity. She noticed Stepper scanning, too.
They took a lift down, making Janlin think again about the ringed structure of the ship. She’d meant to tell Stepper, but there’d been no chance.
When the lift doors opened, it was to an even hotter stench of fumes that Janlin had no name for. Piles of scrap steel and dark coal reached well above their heads. The Imag pointed at a pile of shovels, then at Janlin and Tyrell. Stepper and Gordon were put to pushing the huge bins and dumping them into the top of the massive furnace that occupied a large portion of the room one level below.
The work was hot, the room was hot, the steel handles of the shovels were hot. Janlin struggled to breathe, uncertain whether it was the sheer temperature of the air or the chemicals that thickened it. She wondered too how the grime could stick with so much sweat running off her.
The shovels were heavy, and it wasn’t long before Janlin’s arms began to ache. Blisters formed on the pads of her palms, but if she stopped to lean on her shovel the alien guarding the pit would snarl, a hand on the nerve whip at his belt. Even Gordon had to stop peering around at everything and bend to the work.
It seemed like days later when their guard motioned them to stop and led them back to the lift. Once they joined the other groups, all equally filthy and exhausted, they were herded into a room that had sealed glass doors and no vidlens that she could see. Nozzle-like pipes protruded from the walls at regular intervals.
Janlin gripped Stepper’s arm. “This looks like a gas chamber,” she said in his ear.
“Couldn’t be,” he said, but he eyed the room. He nudged her and pointed to where trails of water streaked the floor leading to a central drain. “Shower time.”
Sure enough, water began to spray from the nozzles, growing in force until the people on the outer edges of the group were crying out and pushing the rest of them into the centre. Janlin wanted to get clean, so she pressed through to the edge.
The water cut her with its heat and velocity. At first Janlin wondered why they weren’t required to remove their clothing, but then she realized this “shower” was mea
nt to do double duty. There was no soap, however, and before she could even contemplate scooping some water to her face it was over. Those on the edge of the group were left dripping and red-skinned while those in the middle were still relatively dry and very dirty.
“This is ridiculous,” said Gordon. The doors were just opening, the chance to get clean gone.
“I’ll bet Fran has her own private shower,” Janlin said under her breath, and Gordon chuckled. Stepper gave them a warning look, and Janlin wondered just what he planned to do if they didn’t behave as he saw fit. As captain, he needed to take more risks to get them out of there, not be so dammed careful.
It wasn’t until they were back at their bunks that Janlin realized Stepper was gone. At least half a dozen aliens wandered up and down the hall, returning one group and gathering the next, so Janlin lay down as if nothing was wrong.
She caught Gordon staring at Stepper’s empty bunk. She clicked with her tongue to make him look at her, and shook her head. She raised an eyebrow in question, and he just shrugged.
It was a long time before two guards appeared carrying his limp body. They tossed him onto his bunk, and the acrid aroma of urine wafted through the air. It made her glad they hadn’t been fed yet, even if her gut cramped with hunger. With so much demanding physical labour, surely these brutal aliens fed their slaves. Janlin wondered just how long it would be.
She waited, wishing the guards away so she could check on Stepper.
Instead, they came at her.
She crouched, ready to fight, and the brutes both readied their nerve whips. She didn’t relish that joy ride again, at least not so soon. Worse thoughts crowded her mind. She didn’t want to “disappear” like some of the Renegade crew had. Although, what if her father and the others were somewhere else on this tub? Maybe somewhere with lighter security and more opportunity?
She took a deep breath and stood. One grabbed her and bent her arm in such a way she couldn’t move in any direction but the one he pushed her in, and the other led the way.
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