In Ageless Sleep

by Arden Ellis

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  In Ageless Sleep

  About the Author

  IN

  Ageless

  Sleep

  ARDEN ELLIS

  Mal is a spy, a misanthrope, and a coward; growing up in the brutal Reaches has taught her that honor is a quality best left to the dead. Her latest mission: to hijack a cryo-ship carrying the brilliant daughter of the Sovereign King, and deliver her straight into enemy hands.

  But when a vital component of the ship's cryostasis system malfunctions, the only person who can keep the unconscious passengers alive is the woman Mal was sent to kidnap. Alone together on a ship of silent sleepers, Mal must remember that she and Aurora are enemies—or risk them becoming something much more dangerous.

  In Ageless Sleep

  By Arden Ellis

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Michelle McDonough

  Cover designed by Natasha Snow

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition March 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Arden Ellis

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 9781620049921

  In Ageless Sleep

  Everything looked good on the cryo deck. Systems optimal, vitals holding, smooth sailing. Mal could keep every human being on The Royal Arc asleep for as long as it took to fly straight into the nearest sun if she wanted to. Unfortunately, what she wanted was off the table at the moment. It didn't matter what they were going towards, but what was coming towards them.

  She leaned back in the chair and gnawed at the end of her nutristick. The screen to her right displayed the security feed. What it showed made her smile. One hundred-forty-eight slack faces tucked inside their glass prisons, eyes closed, never to wake—unless Mal let them. That was something, she supposed. She may have no control over the forces that were closing in around her little speck on the solar winds, but inside the ship, she was a god.

  Mal clicked through the various security feeds, covering every corner of the four cryo decks. Gloating was a bad look for anyone, but there wasn't much else to do. And Mal certainly had plenty to gloat about: she'd captured the crew of an entire sleeper-ship completely single-handedly. And it had almost been too easy. Perfectly executed, too—well, except for that, blinking at her from the far corner of the computer's module. She pointedly ignored it.

  Her own ship was where she had left it, attached like a lamprey to the Arc's auxiliary airlock. Her stealth field had held true. The larger ship's sensors had not detected her as she slid out of the inky darkness and latched on to its side. She'd known its specs, had them pounded into her head over and over by handlers who thought her incapable of generating a single original thought. She'd done exactly what they'd told her to do; but Mal had made one mistake. Maybe even a fatal one.

  The memory left a sour coating on her tongue—or maybe that was the nutristick. She kept chewing at it anyway, and let her fingers flip to one feed in particular, the one she always saved for last. Seeing it was enough to tease out a smile, her lips curling with self-satisfaction. So much tubing going into another person's flesh had never looked so good.

  But then the blinking light caught Mal's eyes again, and her good mood dissolved like a bitter pill in water.

  She dimmed the monitors and reached for the cane left propped against the module. With its help she stood, the vertebrae in her back cracking as she did. All those years of cheap artificial-g were finally catching up to her. On the Royal Arc they had the good stuff, real planet-grade gravity fields. She didn't know why, when there was only bound to be two crewmembers out of cryo at any given time. Well, alright: she did know why. It was because the people who built it were filthy rich and could afford all the extra fixings. Mal, on the other hand, had been doing two hours a day in the grav-reset chair for most of her life, stretching muscles and putting pressure on joints so they wouldn't forget how to carry her weight. She'd been crunching vitamin tablets to keep herself alive for so long her skin had taken a greenish cast, her eyes the charming color of jaundice. There were only so many planets with the right air and gravity to go around. The rest just had to make do, trust in machines to keep them human when space tried to twist them into something unrecognizable.

  Mal never could get used to the warm, natural light that illuminated the ship's hallways, almost like actual sunlight. When she first boarded, she could have basked under it for hours. After so long aboard, she hardly saw it. She was thinking about the control room, the red light blinking on the module. She'd tried for days to turn the damn thing off. That would only be turning off the indicator, and not what it was indicating; but it would give Mal a chance to forget about it for maybe five minutes at a time. Were it not for that one, tiny detail, her entire mission would have gone off flawlessly. But there it was. Blinking, even in her brain. A light that led to a circuit board that led to a radio, which was currently broadcasting a distress signal. By then it had undoubtedly been received by the exact people whose attention Mal was most desperate to avoid. They knew she was there. And they wouldn't wait around to see what she was going to do next. The Sovereigns valued action—and very powerful guns.

  At the same time, a ship from her people in the Reaches was heading towards a rendezvous point, ready to pull her out of the fire. In the end, it would come down to whichever ship got to her faster.

  Mal ground her teeth as she walked, her cane a constant sharp-edged click against the floor. The plan had been perfect. A ship like this was run on a tight, inflexible schedule. Two crewmembers were awake at all times to keep watch over their sleeping friends, and make sure the ship didn't decide to self-destruct. Through shrewd spy-work, Mal's handlers had discovered exactly when the watchmen would be changed, one pair put to bed as the others woke up to take the helm. There was a window—an incredibly brief window—between the old watch strapping in and the new one waking up. A window of minutes. It had been Mal's job to land, infiltrate the ship (past its incredibly complex automated security systems, by the way), and cancel the wake-up procedure before the next crewmembers could open their eyes. All in a couple of minutes, which was impressive, vanity aside. A bloodless coup. The crewmembers would never even know that an enemy agent was on board.

  That was the idea, at least. How many spies could dance on the head of a pin? As it turned out, one. And not all that gracefully.

  One of the two guards had gone under by the time Mal docked. The other was halfway into the first stages of cryo sleep when Mal triggered a minor failsafe from the computer's control room. One wrong keystroke, and the guard on the cryo deck received a ping. He came to investigate. And she couldn't kill him fast enough.

  Couldn't kill him at all, in fact. That was what really jarred her. Not only had he managed to activate the distress beacon, but he'd slipped away on an escape pod heading back for home sweet home. When the cavalry of Sovereign plasma-slingers and hull-borers showed up, she had no doubt he, Lt. Warren Adams would be leading the charge. A regular hero. Mal hated heroes.

  Her footsteps down the hallway slowed. She knew exactly where she was on the ship, massive as it was. The thing was built like a castle, its base housing the ship's guts and brains and heart, and of course, the engines. Rising out of it like turrets were four narrow decks, and it was down the largest one Mal went limping. She took her time, sidling past the doors, which opened
up to her like a pair of arms. Inside, the air was cool and dry. The walls and ceiling of the hall were dedicated to the bulk of the machinery, cables spilling out like multicolored guts. Cryo wasn't cheap and it sure wasn't compact. Her cane landed with a hollow echo on the gleaming floor. Lying not so far below, sleeping faces watched the bottoms of Mal's boots pass by.

  The crew lay beneath the glass panels of the floor, laid out straight-backed on their cryo beds in a nest of tubes and needles, the apparatus that kept them asleep and alive. In truth, Mal found the sleepers a bit unsettling. They were like ghosts, looking human but empty inside, unless she flipped a switch.

  But it wasn't the crew she cared about. Her footsteps took her to the end of the deck, the hallway opening up to a circular room where the ship's officers were stored. Mal made her way slowly to the center of the floor and stared down at the sleeping figure below. Slowly, her smile crept back onto her face.

  She tapped her cane lightly on the glass. The face beneath it did not stir.

  "Hello, Beautiful," Mal said softly.

  *~*~*

  The worst thing about war was that it never actually ended.

  A sublight missile with enough brains to fly itself from the edges of Sovereign space to the outer Reaches colonies could make the trip in three years. When the battlefield encompassed millions of lightyears between two separate stars, when each faction's headquarters was separated by a vast gulf of time as well as space, when every action had to be planned decades in advance—well, for one, it made fighting a whole lot more complicated. It made stopping almost impossible.

  Hostilities between the Reaches and the Sovereigns had been going on for as long as Mal had been alive. The Reaches had originally come from Sovereign planets, the poor and disenfranchised masses whose leaders had promised a new life, colonizing the edges of the solar system. Well, when they got there, it turned out the nice habitable planets the higher-ups had promised weren't so habitable after all. But once they'd gotten rid of them, the Sovereigns weren't about to let the dissatisfied colonists come flooding back in. They said tough luck. The colonists said they were coming home anyways. That was when the missiles started flying.

  Technically a truce had been called, over two hundred years ago. But that only meant that the war got quiet. Instead of battles, there were assassinations. Instead of destroying planets, they destroyed ships. War turned into a scheming, stealing, conniving little thing. Which suited Mal just fine.

  A few months ago, their spies had slipped word of a Sovereign star-skipper delivering researchers to a special base to study certain kinds of mineral deposits, or something equally exciting. Those details didn't matter. What mattered was that one of the head scientists on the project was the king's only daughter. Having her would be less of a bargaining chip, and more of a hard metal bit in their enemies' mouths.

  So her mission, everything she'd done, was meant to be a kidnapping. With any luck, it still would be. There was nothing to say Mal's people wouldn't arrive first and leave that damned emergency beacon to blink its way to hell before the good Lt. Warren and his reinforcements showed up.

  But until then—

  She was pretty. More than pretty. That was the first thing Mal had noticed—probably the first thing any human being with eyes and a brain would notice. She had the kind of face that made something inside of you come to a stop. On the Sovereign worlds, Mal had heard they grew people to look however their parents wanted. And if you got older and decided your folks had got it wrong, there were plenty of doctors happy to rearrange your face. You couldn't trust beauty when it came from a place like that. But that didn't stop Mal's eyes from sticking to that face like hull-sealing glue.

  Her hair had been intricately plaited, tied away from her face. Once in an officer's chambers, Mal had seen a desk made of real, actual wood. The woman's face reminded Mal of that, polished into a deep rich darkness, making her think of something precious and rare from somewhere far away. The wreaths of thick fleshy tubes that ran from the cryo computer into her veins detracted only slightly.

  Mal wasn't generally the sort of person who enjoyed watching helpless women sleep. Not like there was anything else to do on that sun-forsaken ship, except make sure it followed its new course: a straight line towards the rendezvous point, where in two months' time her people would arrive to collect her. The woman, whose name plate read Aurora—though according to her file she went by "Rory", a pointless fact which stuck in Mal's head all the same—was much more interesting than watching the nav-screens as the ship trawled across a big wide nothing.

  Pulling out her datapad, Mal opened Rory's file. She was smart and beautiful, which really didn't seem fair. Had a lot of lofty qualifications from schools with names Mal had never heard of, which almost guaranteed they were good. On the ship, Rory was stationed as—ironically—an expert in the cryo systems. A good person to have on hand, on a ship where almost every crew member was in stasis.

  Staring at the face below the glass floor, Mal wondered idly who Rory was, beyond what a dry personal file could contain. Mal shuddered to think of the assumptions her own file would conjure about herself. Did Rory have a personality to go with the face, or did she use her looks to drive a wedge through life, not caring about who got crushed in her wake? Mal found that much more likely. It was what she would do, if eking out a life in the Reaches had given her a chance to discover whether she could have been beautiful. But maybe Rory was above all that. Didn't they make them better out there on the real planets?

  Mal forced a laugh. It echoed hollowly in the empty room, undercut with the quiet hum of the cryo machinery. In the end, it didn't matter who Rory was or what she did with her spare time. All Mal had to do was deliver her.

  "You're my ticket out of here," Mal said aloud. Her voice rang unnaturally loud in the glass-floored chamber.

  The shriek that split the air a second later turned Mal's veins into a bloodless vacuum. Mal flung her hands over her ears as the lights began to flash then turned red. There was nothing Mal could do except crouch as low as her bad knees would let her, squeeze her eyes shut, and wait to see if the ship was about to explode.

  It didn't, of course. That would have been too easy.

  *~*~*

  Her first move was to try to turn off the alarm. The metallic screech had almost cracked her head open like a mallet, but as soon as she realized what it was, she could piece together a course of action: Get to the control room. Access the computer. Figure out what the hell was going wrong to make seemingly every alarm howl at the top of its lungs. She managed to disable them for long enough to start digging, looking for the snarl, the gap, the problem. Her fingers flew over the keys and her eyes skimmed thousands of lines of code, but as far as she could tell, the ship was totally fine.

  Before long, the lights went down again. Emergency-red came flaring back up, and with it—Mal braced herself—

  The siren split the air again, even as she typed the commands to silence it. The damn thing kept coming back on, and would continue to do so until she identified the problem. Any of the crewmembers scheduled to be awake and on duty would probably have trained for such a crisis. Mal was fumbling through a computer system she did not fully understand, looking for a single error in a sea of unfamiliar coding. Right. Easy.

  "Come on, come on," she muttered under her breath as she scrolled through lines of code. She'd checked all of the ship's essential systems—air, water, gravity, navigation, even the damn waste-disposal system. Everything optimal. She was starting to believe the ship itself was rebelling against her, reacting to her like she was a germ in its giant body, crawling all over its precious cryo beds—

  —Oh.

  Mal pulled up a new screen.

  Damn it. There it was right in front of her, if she could have been bothered to remember that she was not the only passenger on the blasted ship. It was the life support systems for the hundred-odd crewmembers in stasis that was setting the alarms off.

  According to
the current readings, it was killing them.

  *~*~*

  Obviously, it was Mal's fault.

  The computer's routines for keeping all patients healthy and alive were automatically calibrated. Even the watchmen wouldn't have to mess with them. And since no one else had been tampering around in the system's cryo code but her, well. That did point the finger a bit. It seemed that by interrupting the wake-sleep cycle for the ship's watchmen and turning off the alarm clock, the ship was having trouble determining the difference between "asleep with no set awakening" and "dead."

  It had no reason to keep the life support systems on for a ship full of corpses. So it was preparing to shut them all off.

  Still, not all was lost. It wouldn't be impossible to manually re-route the ship's resources to a single cryo bed. After all, Mal's mission only required her to keep her target alive. The fact that Mal had spared the crew was evidence of her lighter touch. Her handlers, on the other hand, wouldn't particularly care if the whole ship blew up on their heels.

  Mal stared at the computer's spread of life-support patients. She tried to envision those one hundred and forty-eight lights going out, one by one. Then she tried to imagine the weeks of silence that would follow, knowing that she was flying a movable tomb, her feet passing over dead faces with every step.

  Funny, but she'd never thought mass-murder could be so easy. You could practically stumble into it by accident. She didn't know how to save the crew; but it wasn't that she couldn't save them, not quite.

  Mal swore quietly under her breath. And then, she hefted her cane and began the long trip back towards the cryo deck. If the computer's stasis systems were failing, Mal needed an expert in cryo. And she knew just the one.

  *~*~*

  Mal made it back to the familiar cryo chamber in record time. She stared at the face beneath the glass floor and almost hesitated. Her plan was clearly against mission protocol. The ship was utterly under Mal's control; waking up even a single crewmember introduced an element of uncertainty that Mal didn't like at all. But if Mal was going to be honest with herself, it wasn't just potentially saving almost a hundred and fifty lives that had her standing at Rory's cryo bed just then. Mal was terribly curious about the woman beneath the floor. And that more than anything was what made her pull out her handheld datapad and begin to work.