Prisoner

by Gilbert M. Stack

  She knew that in her brain but her heart didn’t want to listen to rational thought. She closed her eyes tight on the tears threatening to well up within them and held him even tighter so that his heart pounded against her. “I love you, Erik Gunnarson,” she whispered.

  “Hey, I love you too,” Erik told her. It was obvious to Jewel from the tone of his voice that he had no idea how truly bad things were. He might realize prison was coming—but Kole, the marriage, the threat to the galactic economy, no, Erik didn’t have any idea how bad things truly were.

  He relaxed his embrace before she did, but Jewel didn’t want to let him go.

  “Hey, let me look at you,” he said as he tried to hold her out at arm’s length.

  Jewel reluctantly conceded, stepping back away from him so he could see the scabs remaining on her face and hands.

  He took her all in as if he just couldn’t believe his eyes. “It’s amazing. Your whole body was covered in blood when we pulled you out of your all-environment suit and now all I can see are a few scabs.

  Jewel self consciously touched the mostly smooth flesh of her face with her hand and shuddered. There might only be a few scabs now, but three days ago her face had been worthy of a starring role in a freak show. “The doctor tells me it’s going to be okay, that I’m going to make a complete recovery.”

  Ana Yang tentatively stepped up beside Erik. Her straight black hair was longer than Jewel remembered and fortunately for once she didn’t look jealous of Jewel and Erik. Ana reached out to touch Jewel’s cheek, an expression of awe on her face. “It’s unbelievable. You honestly look great—comparatively, I mean. First, I thought we lost you when your suit flooded, but when you popped up on the cable you were coughing out blood and water and I really thought you were gone.”

  Jewel shuddered again. “I don’t remember most of that, but what I do remember is bad.”

  Ana shivered in response. “You can say that again. I don’t understand how you survived, even after the doc froze you.”

  Gunther Brüning took that as his cue to enter the conversation. He was an unhealthily overweight man with dark oily hair and an evil disposition. “I see you’re not wearing orange like the rest of us, Jewel.”

  There was nothing to do but face him head on. It wasn’t like he could do anything to her anyway. They weren’t on the Euripides anymore, but on an Armenite warship. Besides, she’d known this subject was going to come up and surrendered any hope of avoiding it when she saw they were dressed in orange and she in gray. “That’s right. I’m not a prisoner yet.”

  “And why might that be?” Brüning asked.

  Jewel could see in the hard expression on his face that he knew he’d been right about her. Much as it pained her to do it, she had to tell them the truth now. “Let’s all sit down around the table. We have a lot to talk about and I don’t know how much time the Empyreals are going to give us.”

  She tried to step past Erik toward the table but he grabbed her arm and held her back. “Empyreals? Did you say there are Empyreals on this ship?”

  “Void,” Meg Falco spit out her breath. “I thought the Armenites were bad enough, but Empyreals?”

  “Yes,” Jewel agreed, “Empyreals. That’s how seriously the Armenites view this situation. They are describing our salvage operation as an act of piracy. And right now, we are completely within their power.”

  “But I’m a citizen of the Confederacy,” Jewel’s old roommate, Vega Costa, protested. “I’m no pirate. They can’t hold me like this.”

  “Like any of that matters to the Armenites,” Dawil Kwon told her. To Jewel’s surprise his hair was still bound up in the long dirty braids he favored. She wondered how long they would last after the Armenites passed sentence on him.

  “Jewel has a good idea,” Erik said. He had been the executive officer on the Euripides, the ship’s second in command, and he strove to take control of the situation now. He stepped past Jewel and pulled out a chair for her next to Jester, who was probably her favorite spacer. The man had a sense of humor, thus the nickname, and a hobbyist’s surprisingly detailed knowledge of antique spacecraft that had proved extremely useful in the Valkyrie System. He smiled as Jewel sat down next to him.

  “Good to see you again, Ms. Aurora,” Jester said.

  “That isn’t her name,” Brüning growled. “She’s a Cartelite I tell you.”

  Jester leaned in disturbingly close to look at her face. “If she is, she’s a bruised Cartelite. That’s a serious shiner developing on your cheek beneath those scabs.”

  Jewel touched her cheek with the tips of her fingers, but it didn’t feel any more sensitive than the other parts of her face.

  Erik had started to sit, but he leapt back up now to examine her face again. “It is bruising,” he agreed. “Did they hit you?” He lightly touched her flesh, his fingers brushing against hers. “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” Jewel assured him. She folded her hand over his and pulled it down to the table. “No to both questions. I’m all right.”

  Erik reluctantly sat back down beside her.

  Jewel tried to direct the conversation because she really didn’t know how much time they might have. “Now we have a lot to talk about. You’re all in very serious trouble. I’m going to do my best to help you, but honestly, I don’t know how much help that will be. I have my own problems here and I don’t know how much—if any—pull I have on this ship.”

  “Why would you have any pull at all?” Vega asked her. “I mean, is Dr. Brüning right? What would a Cartelite be doing on our ship?”

  Jewel shrugged. Anyway she said this it was going to be embarrassing so she figured she should just get it out and over with. “I ran away from home.”

  Dead silence filled the little room.

  “So you’re not wealthy?” Vega finally asked.

  Jewel shrugged. “My family has money, but no, I, personally, do not have that much.”

  “So why did you—”

  “What’s your name?” Brüning demanded. “I want to know who we’re dealing with and why you infiltrated our ship.”

  Erik rose to Jewel’s defense. “She doesn’t have to answer to you.”

  “We’re all going to prison now.” Brüning retorted. “I think we have a right to know why.”

  “You’re going to prison,” Jewel told him, “because the Armenites caught you mining armenium and they don’t want to have any competitors in the field. If you will recall, I tried to warn you off from this, but—”

  “You’re not getting out of your responsibility for this!” Brüning snapped.

  “What responsibility?” Jewel asked him. “I’m the only person who consistently said that mining the ore was a bad idea.”

  “But you didn’t tell us the Armenites were on their way.”

  “That’s because I didn’t know the Armenites were coming.”

  “Wait a minute Dr. Brüning,” Ana had to raise her voice to interrupt the fight. “There is no point in arguing over this. If we do, the Armenites are going to come in here and take us back to our cells and we’re not going to have learned anything.”

  Gunther Brüning was not the sort of man who let others interrupt him. “I’m just trying to—”

  “Can’t you ever just sit and listen,” Jester intervened. It was to Jewel’s mind an uncharacteristic interruption on his part and a clear sign of the stress he and the other crew members were under.

  “You can’t talk to me—”

  Ana raised her voice. “Maybe it would be best, Jewel, if you did tell us your name and how you came to be on the Euripides. I remember it like you do. You were always opposed to harvesting the armenium. But you have to admit that it is a strange coincidence that you were there—and after we just accidentally stumbled onto the abandoned Ymirian colony.”

  Jewel really didn’t want to do that. She hadn’t enjoyed her life as a Cartelite and she didn’t want to reforge her connections to it. But with her parents coming and an arranged marri
age being foisted upon her, she decided that continuing her silence didn’t make any sense either. There was no hope of avoiding her old life any longer. “I was born Luxora Sapphira,” she said.

  Gunther Brüning began to snap his fingers as he struggled to put a meaning to her name, although why a doctor living in the Fringe knew so much about the Cartelites was beyond Jewel. “Luxora Sapphira,” he muttered, “Luxora Sapphira, Luxora—”

  He looked up at her in stunned surprise, unable to believe what he had just remembered. Jewel wasn’t completely surprised that he had made the connection. She was almost the equivalent of the daughter of royalty—an industrial princess who, because of the marriage agreement with the Armenites, had always attracted a great deal of attention on Luxor and the surrounding planets. “Your parents own the Khaba Cartel,” he accused her. “What in the void were you doing out on the Fringe?”

  “The Khaba Cartel?” Jester asked. “Aren’t they armenium distributors? No wonder you knew what raw armenium looked like.”

  Everyone seemed to have something to say about Khaba and armenium. Jewel just let them talk. She knew they were wasting time, but she didn’t feel like standing up and screaming to get them to quiet down again. Beside her, Erik dropped his head in his hands, clearly trying to digest what she had just revealed.

  Jewel slipped a hand beneath the table and patted his thigh reassuringly—not that things were truly going to be all right, but the contact comforted her too.

  Erik looked over at her—really stared at her for a while with those beautiful blue eyes—then slipped his hand beneath the table and covered her fingers with his own.

  Finally, Meg Falco’s voice cut through the din—another crewmember shouting over her officers. “So what’s all this mean, Aurora? You’re like really rich or something? Can you buy us out of this?”

  “Khaba,” Brüning informed them, “is the fastest growing Cartelite cartel. Her family owns it.” His voice held a strange mixture of awe and rage.

  “We don’t own it,” Jewel corrected him, “but we are one of the larger shareholders. So yes, Falco, my parents are really rich.”

  “Filthily, disgustingly rich,” Brüning added with obvious envy.

  “So why were you out with us?” Falco asked. “Why weren’t you out spending your money?”

  Jewel shrugged. “I was dealing with some personal matters and running away to the Fringe seemed like a good way of doing that.”

  “Were you in trouble with the law?” Ana asked her.

  “Only for actually running away and the things I did to make that possible,” Jewel told her.

  “But why run away?” Falco asked again. Jewel could see in her face that she couldn’t fathom why anyone would abandon such wealth. “You must have had everything being born into a family like that.”

  Erik squeezed her hand under the table. “The Khaba are an armenium cartel, right? They’re one of the big ones that have partnerships with the Armenites.”

  Jewel was very aware of the weight and heat of Erik’s fingers where they touched hers. She squeezed him back. “There are really only three cartels that deal directly with the Armenites,” she explained. “All of the others subcontract from us.”

  “So you really do have pull with them,” Jester said. “With the Armenites, I mean.”

  “I don’t know how much actual influence I have, Jester. I don’t want to mislead you. But I am going to try and get them to let you go. Unfortunately, my parents are on their way here and they probably will not want to see you freed. I’m sure they’d like to see this whole scandal swept under the rug, so there are lots of obstacles for us to overcome.”

  “Your parents would like to see us go to jail?” Meg Falco asked. Again, Jewel could see that Falco really couldn’t comprehend why people would act the ways Jewel and her parents did. “Ana and I saved your life.”

  “I am painfully aware of that, Meg,” Jewel assured her. “Please believe me when I say that I will never forget that. But my parents are true Cartelites. They use gratitude but you can’t count on them feeling any.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Erik said. “You belong to one of the Cartel families that has strong commercial ties to the Armenites. They’ve obviously already contacted your family. What happens to you next?”

  Erik had cut right to the core of Jewel’s problems.

  “That depends,” she said. “On the one hand I can probably go to prison with all of you in which case my parents will lose their contract with the Armenites, go bankrupt and die in poverty.” That was an exaggeration. Her parents doubtless had stuck enough money away to live out the rest of their lives in comfort, but from their perspective, living in mere comfort would be like suffering in purgatory.

  “That obviously isn’t your only option,” Erik told her. “What is it the Armenites want?”

  Jewel squeezed his fingers. “They want me to fulfill a contract my parents signed with the Armenites when I was an infant and marry Kole Delling.”

  It should have been comical watching the astonished expressions ripple across the faces around the table.

  “That’s barbaric,” Ana exclaimed.

  Jewel shrugged. She agreed with Ana but she was too Cartelite in her bones to admit it. “Well it’s business, anyway.”

  “And you don’t want to marry this guy?” Meg asked. “I mean, if he’s important enough to marry a Cartelite princess, he must be pretty wealthy too.”

  “Not everything is about money, Meg,” Jewel told her. She glanced at Erik but couldn’t hold his gaze. The anguish in his eyes was too much for her.

  “Spoken like someone who’s always had everything she needs,” Brüning grumbled.

  “So it’s really go to prison or get married?” Ana asked. She truly did look horrified at the situation. Part of Jewel had expected Ana to be happy Jewel was being forced away from Erik, but right now at least, that was not the impression the older woman was giving.

  “Some people would argue that marriage is prison,” Jester quipped.

  Jewel appreciated the joke, but Erik didn’t.

  “It’s not funny,” he snarled. “Jewel you can’t do this.”

  “She has to do it,” Brüning protested. “She owes it to us to get us out of this mess she created.”

  Erik rose menacingly to his feet. “Jewel doesn’t owe you anything, Brüning. She’s not responsible for anything that happened back in Valkyrie.”

  The doctor rose as well, which might have been comical if the situation wasn’t so serious. The out of shape doctor wouldn’t last ten seconds in a fight with the Euripides’ extremely fit executive officer. “She is responsible and stop calling her Jewel. That isn’t her name.”

  Jewel certainly hadn’t needed any more reasons to dislike Gunther Brüning but he certainly seemed determined to give them to her. “Yes, it is. I’m Jewel Aurora now. None of this mess with the Armenites changes that.”

  Erik seemed to take comfort from her words. “That’s right. And we’ll still get out of this. They’ll have to have a trial. We’ll be able to present our side of the story.”

  Jewel wondered how a man who’d lost so much to these people could still be so naïve regarding them. She touched his arm and encouraged him to take his seat again. “You’re not going to get a real trial, Erik. They’re just waiting to see what I decide before passing sentence. My guess is that they don’t know for certain how important you are to me and they’re afraid if they make me too angry right now, I’ll call the wedding off.”

  “So you are going to marry this Armenite?” Ana asked.

  The beseeching look in her eyes added substantially to the pressure Jewel was feeling to do just that, but she only had to glance at Erik to remember the best reason why she didn’t want to. “I don’t know, Ana.”

  “But if you do,” Meg said, “then they won’t send us to prison?”

  Jewel shook her head. “They haven’t said that. It’s one of the things I have to get settled before I give
them my answer.”

  “Jewel, you can’t marry him,” Erik said. “You love me.”

  “Oh, please,” Brüning spat the words across the table. “As if a Cartelite could truly care about anything but money.”

  “You are really stupid,” Dawil Kwon told the doctor. It was the first time the black man had spoken in a long while. “Do you want her to throw the Armenite over for the exec and get us all put in penal? She doesn’t like you. Shut your mouth and let her talk this out with her friends.”

  He turned and gave Jewel a sure look. “I watched you a long time on the Euripides.” He flashed a cocky smile. “I like the way you move, if you know what I mean. But you were too nice for me. I like a nasty woman and you were just too good and pure.”

  He turned back to Brüuning. “So keep your mouth shut. If you let her, I know she’ll do the right thing.”

  Jewel looked at Erik again, taking in with her eyes his strong face, regal nose and beautiful blue eyes. She really hoped Dawil was wrong.

  Chapter Six

  You Have No Choice

  “Luxora, dear, what have these barbarians dressed you in?”

  Jewel’s mother, Alexandra Sapphira, swept into the sparsely furnished briefing room with a swish of silks and the expensive clink of far too much jewelry. Her skin was a shade or two paler than Jewel’s creamy light brown and just as artificial. Her thin nose showed no sign of the laser scalpels that had shaved it to her own vision of perfection, just as her breasts, her stomach, her legs, her collarbone, her rear end, and probably every other part of her body showed no sign of the extensive surgical enhancements that created the woman who almost brushed Jewel’s cheek with her overly full lips.

  Behind Alexandra, Jewel’s father, Amon Sapphira, appeared in the doorway. His skin was a shade or two darker than Jewel’s, which fashion deemed appropriate for men. His suit probably cost him fifty thousand solars, half what her mother was wearing unless Jewel missed her guess. And his wrists, neck, lip, ears and nose were adorned with bejeweled bands and studs that struck Jewel as being even gaudier than her mother’s. Like his wife, he had five apparent diamonds—large and perfect bioware chips—embedded in his temple in a grotesque display of his extraordinary wealth—two more than they had implanted in Jewel herself.