In Ageless Sleep

by Arden Ellis

  The codes to trigger the rise-and-shine sequence for one pod weren't all that complicated. Compared to the elegant lines of the ship's original programing, they looked ugly and out of place, but they'd get the job done. Mal punched them into her handheld, waved it over the computer's activation panel, and waited.

  But not for long.

  It started out as a faint hiss—air rushing back into the chamber itself, rather than pumping directly into the subject's lungs. Then the section of the floor over Rory's face slid away, and the bed itself rose up like a flower, unfolding with a hum of machinery until it was level with Mal's hips. The restraints that had kept Rory's unconscious form secure sprang open. The tubes retracted from her flesh, like creeping vines slithering out of her veins and back into the floor, out of sight. No more life support, and no more cryo sleep. Mal watched it all happen and wondered if it was normal to feel nervous during her first interrogation.

  Mal wasn't quite sure what she was expecting—a flutter of lashes, eyes that slid slowly open to reveal dark limpid pools, yadda yadda—that wasn't at all what she got. Rory woke up like someone tripping down a flight of stairs.

  She gasped, jerking forward as her eyes flew open. She was nearly climbing off the cryo bed before Mal could think to stop her. "Where—what happened?" she gasped. "This isn't the base—Petra, where is Petra—"

  Through all the babbling, Rory's eyes did not once focus on Mal's face. Mal caught her by the shoulders before she could stumble to the floor, but whether the impulse was to soothe her or prevent her from escaping, Mal couldn't be sure. Her skin was surprisingly warm beneath Mal's hands—she'd thought cryo would be cold. And Rory was still babbling. Was that normal for a cryo wake-up? Or had Mal messed up that code, too? If she had accidentally scrambled Rory's brains, she'd doomed the crew and probably herself.

  "Um," Mal said, awkwardly squeezing Rory's shoulders. Her voice was hoarse. Mal realized this was the first time she had spoken to another person since boarding the ship. It was almost disturbing to see a human face not completely still with sleep. "Calm down. You're waking up from cryo. You're—safe." The last word lodged in Mal's mouth. It wasn't strictly a lie.

  At once, Rory's eyes zeroed-in on her. The haze of panic and confusion lifted off her like ice breaking from a ship's hull in the atmosphere. Watching it was almost amazing. One moment Rory was all damsel in distress. In the next, a will of iron had clamped down on that panic until it was nothing more than a raw edge of wariness, eyes that broke down and analyzed everything they saw. They were beautiful eyes, too. It struck Mal, in a distant, floating sort of way, that it was the first time she'd seen them. They were brown, so dark the iris swallowed the pupil whole.

  "Who are you?" Rory demanded. Almost self-consciously, Mal released Rory's shoulders. The heat of them lingered on her palms. Rory's eyes flashed over Mal's form before she could think of phrasing a response. "You're not crew," she said almost immediately, taking in Mal's lack of uniform. "You aren't one of the justice squadron, either." Her eyes turned to the hallway beyond the open door, empty, full of sleepers. "Are we still in transit?"

  Mal took a breath. Rory was connecting the dots faster than she'd anticipated. Through her training as an agent, they always stressed one thing: Always maintain the illusion of control, even when it was furthest from the truth. And Mal was in control. She had the whole crew at her mercy.

  That was sort of the problem.

  "You don't know me, and chances are you never will," she said, in the cool and polished tones she only broke out when trying to make an impression. "What matters is that you're awake because you have something I need."

  As if to punctuate Mal's delivery, the alarm went off once again. Both women flinched, the sudden red light and screeching siren enough to surprise anyone. On impulse, Mal went for her datapad and punched in the code to temporarily disable it. A moment later came blessed silence and normal lighting again. But she met Rory's eyes and saw it—the pieces had all clicked. A stranger on a ship in the middle of an interstellar journey could only mean so many things. None of them good. Well, that made things easier. Explaining that Mal was there to kidnap her could have been a little awkward.

  Except that before Mal had time to open her mouth a second time, Rory had lunged straight off the cryo bed and nearly tackled her to the ground.

  Rory was still weak from cryo, but she could pack a hit—Mal almost went under in the initial barrage, as Rory tried to make a run for it. Mal grabbed at her and caught an armful of waist—Mal was taller, but Rory had the weight advantage, and Mal had dropped her cane. Mal's leg gave out almost instantly, sending both of them tumbling to the floor. The smell of cryo chemicals hit Mal's nose as Rory thrashed at her, teeth bared in a snarl. She was vicious. In the time it took for Mal to fumble for the metal tube on her belt, Rory's hands locked around her throat and would have presumably squeezed the life out of her.

  But Mal was the one with a syringe full of tranquilizers scavenged from the medical bay. She jabbed it into Rory's wrist just as her vision began to go dark. Seconds later, Rory was slumped on top of her, blessedly unconscious again.

  Mal let the syringe fall from her shaking hand. Nothing to worry about. Everything under control.

  Time for a different approach.

  *~*~*

  The next time Rory woke up, she jerked forward on the same startled-awake impulse as before—and was stopped by the cryo harness restraints around her wrists, torso and ankles. Mal had disabled their automatic release mechanisms herself. No early-morning tussles this time.

  As soon as Rory remembered what had happened the last time she woke up, she went as stiff as a metal rod. Jaw tensed, eyes straight ahead—it was a picture of discipline Mal found familiar. Mal half-expected her to start reciting her ID number, rank—all that macho interrogation crap.

  Rory tugged at her restraints, testing to see if they were really as strong as they looked. They were. Silently, Mal waited until she was quite convinced that escape via force was no longer an option. Mal had thought ahead and brought a chair, her cane tucked safely behind it. She didn't want to show any signs of weakness around Rory, physical or otherwise. The skin pallor, abnormal height, and other signs of Mal's life in the Reaches were less easy to disguise. She kept her arms crossed loosely over her chest, legs splayed out before her. A posture that said I am relaxed and at ease and that should probably make you worried. She may or may not have practiced her smile in the mirror.

  "I take it you know who sent me," Mal said at last.

  Rory, predictably, said nothing. What a professional.

  "I'll get the introductions over with," Mal continued. "My name is Malev Doma, and you—well. You're why I'm here." More silence. Mal wasn't about to let it slow her down. "You may have noticed the alarms last time you were awake," she said. "Not exactly a good sign."

  "Alarms rarely are," Rory snapped. Ah. So she'd talk if she was provoked. That was lucky. Mal was awfully good at it.

  "No, they're not," Mal agreed. "And especially for you, seeing as the alarm is going off due to a failure in the cryo units, and you're one of the poor sods relying on it." Mal tilted her head. "Though not currently."

  "I suppose that means you're planning on putting me under again," Rory said.

  Mal shrugged. "Once you've helped me fix the ship, yes."

  "And whose fault is it that it's broken in the first place?"

  "Arguably, whoever built it."

  Rory's jaw clenched. "I'm not going to help you."

  Mal stared at her in vague disbelief. "Did you not hear me right?" she said. "Your ship's cryo is broken, and I don't know how to fix it. If I don't, it will affect every crewmember currently relying on its life support to survive. And they're going to stop surviving."

  "I didn't think caring about innocent loss of life was your people's style."

  "I'm sorry, are you criticizing me for trying to save your crew?"

  "Merely pointing out its abnormality."

 
Mal smiled at her coldly. "Careful, princess. You know big words like that just make us dumb grunts mad."

  "If you're going to call me anything, 'Doctor' will suffice."

  "Alright then, Doctor, how about you use that expensive education to save some lives?"

  Rory stared at Mal blankly. "If the cryo is malfunctioning, the solution is simple," she said. "Wake them up."

  Mal paused. "Can't do that."

  A nasty smile spread over Rory's face. "Then let's not dance around the issue. You don't actually care about saving these people's lives."

  "I care enough to wake you up and suffer through your conversation, don't I?" Mal snapped. "I can still just stand back and let them die."

  "Clearly you won't," Rory argued. "As you pointed out, you're talking to me now."

  "You're my last resort. If you fail, then I've officially tried everything, and my conscience will be clear." Not strictly true—Mal's conscious was murky to begin with, and over a hundred deaths wouldn't exactly settle the silt—but Rory didn't need to know that.

  "So what's it going to be?" Mal raised an eyebrow and let her fingers hover dangerously over the controls on her datapad that would put Rory back to bed. "Are you going to save your crewmates' lives, or are you going to nap through all of their deaths?"

  And oh, Mal could practically savor the distaste fluttering over Rory's face, her principles pulling one direction and her morals in the other. Mal knew then that she had Rory beat.

  At last, Rory hung her head and sighed.

  "Have you checked the code-refreshing routine?" she asked.

  Mal blinked. "That's not a program specifically associated with cryo, is it?"

  "It's a part of the ship's general software. Check the background programs. If anything went wrong, it would start there."

  Mal lifted her datapad, careful to keep an eye on Rory between keystrokes. She was fairly certain the restraints would hold, but where Mal came from, relying on 'fairly certain' was asking for trouble.

  On its infernal and ever-unpredictable timer, the alarm went off once more. Mal ignored it. She scanned the lines of code Rory had mentioned. It all looked perfectly normal to Mal's eyes, except—wait—there. Amid all that unfamiliar coding, a few lines that were just wrong.

  "I found it," Mal said over the alarm. "What do I do now?"

  "Delete it."

  For a moment, Mal hesitated. Tearing up random lines of code, no matter how incorrect they looked, didn't seem entirely safe. But Rory didn't seem the type to sabotage her own ship, throw away her life and her crews' lives just to take an enemy down. That was as much of an assurance as Mal was likely to get. She deleted the code.

  The alarm didn't stop.

  "It isn't working," Mal said, her fingers itching nervously. The blank space where the code had been was beginning to look a lot less friendly.

  "Of course not. You deleted an essential part of the ship's code, and now it needs a replacement. Give me the datapad."

  Mal's fingers tightened on it possessively. "Not going to happen."

  Rory sighed. "I'm the only one who knows how to rewrite that code, and by the time I finished explaining it to you, this ship will have already killed every member of her crew. Your choice."

  Awake for five minutes and already she was strong-arming Mal into handing her the keys to the ship's systems. But how much damage could she possibly do with Mal looking over her shoulder the entire time? A lot, Mal's inner voice chimed helpfully. She's a literal genius, and you're—well—not. The blasting of the alarm drowned it out. Gritting her teeth, Mal typed enough commands into the datapad to release the restraints on Rory's right arm, and then handed it over.

  Rory snatched it up immediately and started to type, shifting it over to her left so she could use both hands. Mal watched the code leaping onto the screen, trying to envision the actions within the ship it was creating. Her knowledge fell painfully short. All she could be reasonably sure of was that none of the lines of code were going to make the ship explode. So that was something.

  All at once, the alarm stopped. Rory flipped the datapad back around and held it out to Mal with a superior smile. "Done."

  Mal took it back, still waiting for the other shoe to drop—she refused to believe that Rory would simply do as Mal had asked. But the alarm was silent, the code looked normal, and Rory hadn't even tried to bludgeon her with the data pad. "I refuse to believe that you couldn't have just told me how to do that."

  "Believe what you want. It's done."

  That much was true. Mal had gotten everything she needed. There was only one more thing left to do.

  As if reading her thoughts, a cold, mocking smile settled on Rory's lips. "So," she said. "What now? Going to gloat a little more, describe all the horrible things you'll do to me in order to get my people to cooperate?"

  "I'm not really the evil monologue type," Mal said. She typed in the cryo sleep activation sequence.

  If Rory woke up with all the violence of an asteroid strike, she went under exactly as Mal might have imagined it. Her eyes grew heavy. Her face took on a softness, a sweetness that turned sharp when she was awake. She relaxed back against the cryo bed. Her eyelashes settled daintily on her cheeks. A sleep like death, just as planned.

  In the aftermath, the silence was deafening.

  That silence lasted about thirty-one hours before the alarm went off again.

  *~*~*

  Mal had practice manually inputting the cryo bed's wake up routines. Rory didn't awaken as violently as she had the past two times. Maybe her body was adjusting to it. Was too many interrupted cryo cycles bad for you? Probably. But if Mal was melting her prisoner's precious brain, she figured Rory would do something a little more drastic than straighten up in her cryo bed's bindings and blink. Mal wasn't quite so calm.

  "What did you do?" Mal demanded. In the background, the alarm was a constant pulse.

  Rory smiled that carefully innocent smile. "Oh, that? Well actually, you did it—when you deleted that line of code I pointed out to you. I guess you didn't realize you were throwing away the computer's automated code-saving functions, but it's a complicated ship. I can't expect everyone to know it as well as I do."

  "Are you trying to murder your crew?"

  "Not at all. They'll be fine—as long as I input the new line of code every twenty-four hours."

  Mal crossed her arms over her chest and stared down the barrel of Rory's smug expression. "Tell me how to fix it. Permanently."

  "Now why would I do that?" Rory mused. "So you can put me back in stasis again, from now until the end of time?" She shook her head. "This suits me better. No matter how many times you put me to sleep, you can wake me up when the alarms go off again."

  "Or maybe I'll just let you all slowly suffocate instead," Mal snapped.

  Rory shrugged. "Fine then. Fail your mission. Hope that your handlers will be forgiving that you got your objective killed. I assure you, my father will not be."

  Mal tapped her fingers on the datapad meaningfully. There was a lot she could do with just a few lines of code, and Rory knew it. "You probably shouldn't threaten me," she said.

  Rory met her gaze without flinching. Mal had never seen steel like that before. "And you should probably let me repair that line of code."

  In the end, Mal had no choice. But what else was new?

  *~*~*

  During the days to come, Mal spent a good amount of time plotting the best way to trick Rory into repairing the ship permanently so Mal would never need to wake her up again. There had to be a way to copy the code that Rory wrote, or to dig through the computer's backup files for the code Mal had accidentally deleted—or maybe she could threaten her somehow? Scratch that. Rory knew Mal needed her alive.

  In the end, Mal had nothing. And so, night after night, when the clock struck 00:00 hours, she made her way down to the cryo deck to wake Rory up again.

  Mal could see the wheels start to turn in Rory's head from the moment her eyes opened. Ever
y moment she spent awake was time spent scheming, weighing her advantages, trying to find a weak point to exploit. Mal watched the code Rory put in like a hawk, occasionally stopping her to demand an explanation for something that didn't look quite right—even then, there were times when she had no idea what Rory was doing. But there was only so much damage Rory could do from the single access point of the datapad, and as long as the alarms went off, the sleepers kept sleeping, and the ship continued sailing to its ultimate destination, Mal decided there was nothing more she could do.

  "My family won't negotiate with you. They never have." Rory's voice almost made Mal jump. She was staring at Mal over the edge of the datapad, her expression neutral as she finished in-putting the final lines of code. After days of terse questions and fraught silences, Mal found herself constantly on edge whenever Rory was awake. But that time, there was no challenge or bait in Rory's tone. Mal couldn't be sure whether Rory was trying to frighten her, or merely frightening herself.

  "Policies tend to change when family is involved," Mal said carefully.

  "You don't know them like I do." Rory looked away. "What will your people do to me if I can't buy them what they want?"

  Mal said nothing. It was the safest answer.

  She tried to avoid conversation whenever she could—fraternizing with the enemy and whatnot. Bad form on a mission as sensitive as hers. Before long they fell into a familiar routine of speaking only about practicalities, or not at all. Silence was a skill Mal was getting very good at.

  Mal sat at the computer's control module, her feet on the desk. The computer was running as it always had—near-death failure of the cryo system aside—and it would do what it was doing for a millennium: soaking up solar energy drifting from billions of lightyears away. It was oblivious to Mal's presence. It didn't care about her. According to the briefing for her mission, Mal's people would reach the rendezvous point two months and a day from the moment Mal set her course. How long the Sovereigns would take to come snapping at Mal's heels was an utter unknown.