In Ageless Sleep

by Arden Ellis

  With an aggravated sigh, she pulled up a new file. Lieutenant Warren Adams's strong-jawed face stared back at her from the computer screen. She'd gotten a fairly good look at him in person, right before he slipped into the escape pod and zipped out of her clutches. If everything came crashing down on her head, he would be the reason. The face of her failure. And possibly, of her executioner.

  As always, the distress signal light blinked and blinked. Sending its emergency message out to whoever cared to read it. And there was nothing Mal could do, except wait for whoever it brought.

  She was tired of being surrounded by things she could not change.

  Inevitably, Mal found herself in front of Rory's cryo bed. She didn't stare like she used to. In the time they'd spent together, Rory had graduated from being nothing more than a pretty face and a mission objective, and watching her sleep seemed more than a little strange. But then again, what about the situation wasn't strange? When she accepted her mission, Mal had expected to have nothing more than some lines of code to take care of, not a hostage with an attitude problem and an intelligence score that made Mal's brain look like a plate of scrambled protein substitute.

  Not that she was intimidated or anything. Mal might not be book-smart, but she was street-smart. She was just as good as any high-ranking Sovereign. Better, even. After all, she was winning.

  Right on schedule, the alarm went off again. With a sigh, Mal booted up the proper cryo bed and waited for Rory to wake up.

  Something was different that time. Maybe Mal's gloomy thoughts were seeping around the edges of her careful mask, because Rory kept shooting her searching looks in between inputting lines of code.

  Mal did her best to ignore them, keeping her eyes on the datapad. Whatever weakness Rory was sensing in her, Mal wouldn't give her the chance to exploit it.

  "So where is the ship now?" Rory said at last, as conversationally as if the two of them were simply meeting up over a cup of solar-sub.

  Mal almost laughed. If this was Rory trying to be sly, then Mal had nothing to worry about. "If you think I'm stupid enough to tell you that—"

  "And why shouldn't you? It's not like I can do anything about it." Rory tugged on her restraints for emphasis. "All you'd be doing is easing my mind."

  "What makes you think I want to do that either?"

  "Human decency?"

  "Oh. That."

  Rory sighed in aggravation. For a while there was only blessed silence and the tapping of keys. It wasn't meant to last. Rory was testing her weaknesses, and she was nothing if not thorough.

  "I notice you walk with a limp," Rory said. Internally, Mal cursed. She must have slipped up, let Rory see her cane—or maybe Rory had noticed from the very beginning and kept it to herself until then. "Looks like a grav compression fracture. Completely fixable, with surgery."

  "Maybe where you come from," Mal said shortly.

  "How did it happen?"

  Mal's silence was as pointed as a knife. At last, Rory sighed. "You could at least talk to me," she said. "I can't imagine you enjoy the silence and isolation any more than I do."

  "I'm not much of a conversationalist," Mal replied without feeling.

  "Luckily for you, I'm a captive audience."

  Mal glanced up at Rory in order to see her brief, wry smile. "That joke was terrible," Mal said.

  "I know. But it got you to look at me, didn't it?"

  As quickly as Rory said it, Mal looked away again.

  It wasn't just stubbornness, or even Mal's poor social skills. She wouldn't have minded talking to Rory; quite the opposite. The aforementioned isolation was beginning to tug at the frayed edges of Mal's mind. But she knew what Rory was doing, and it wasn't making friends.

  It was hostage situations 101. Get your captor to sympathize with you, increase chances of survival exponentially. Maybe she and Mal had learned the same tricks, but from opposite sides. Where Rory had been taught to try to befriend her captor, they'd told Mal time after time not to ever start getting the warm fuzzies for the mark she was meant to be delivering. The fact that she had woken Rory up at all was a mistake. Mal wanted someone to talk to, and she had one. It was only too easy to open her mouth.

  *~*~*

  Without voices, without people, the hallways of the ship seemed to bulge like oxygen-starved veins. Mal found herself wandering them without direction, circling the engine room, the cargo hold, the bridge. She avoided the control room itself. On the ship nothing changed—they were moving towards the same point, at the same speed, and at times the boredom was so terrible Mal considered strapping herself into a cryo bed herself. Instead she stayed awake, the silence and the empty rooms eating away at her mind until there was nowhere for natural sleep to take root.

  And then the clock would count up to 00:00 once again, the numbers rising to a crescendo before the time came to face Rory once again.

  "I think I've figured it out," Rory mused in between writing the lines of code. Since probing at Mal's supposed weaknesses hadn't produced any leads, it seemed Rory was trying a new tactic. She had paused to look at Mal with an expression of carefully manufactured amusement. Posturing. Mal recognized it from practice.

  Mal fixed her with a blank stare. "I dearly hope you're talking about the ship's codes."

  Rory kept talking as if she hadn't heard. "I always thought it was strange that the Reaches had sent you—a single agent, and not a particularly imposing one, if you don't mind me saying so—"

  "I do mind, actually," Mal said.

  "—but no matter how you look at it, they sent you alone." Rory cocked her head, the faint smile still in place. It was a smile that suggested Rory knew more than Mal might have liked. "Didn't you ever find that odd?"

  "They know I'm good at what I do."

  Rory laughed. For everything that was beautiful about her, that laugh was an ugly sound. "I'm sure you'll do exactly what they need you to."

  Mal rubbed at the back of her neck as if something were creeping down it. Don't rise to it, she told herself, but the words were already on her tongue. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means that you're being played. You're on a suicide mission, whether you know it or not."

  "I've completed my mission," Mal snapped. "As is evidenced by the fact that I'm here, and you're strapped to a cryo bed."

  "You've done as you were told, yes. But if they really wanted to capture such a high profile person as myself, then don't you think they would have sent a couple more helping hands?"

  "Are you trying to suggest they sent me all the way out here just to screw me over personally?"

  "Not at all. I'm saying you're just another cog in a bigger machine, and the way I see things, you're one of the disposable ones."

  "Is that how you see it?" Mal said. Her voice was rising and she made no effort to quiet it. "If I'm disposable, what does that make you? You're not even a cog. You're just—just like the crown card in a game of kravash. Just there to get passed from hand to hand, never actually doing anything."

  A small frown dimpled Rory's brow. "What's kravash?"

  Mal stared at her blankly. "It's a card game. Do you really not know—fine. Whatever. Trust me, it was a good metaphor."

  And it had been—Rory wasn't so coolly composed anymore. Mal had learned a long time ago that though Rory might lock her face into that pretty, expressionless mask, it was her body that gave her away. The tension in her muscles, the twitch in her fingers, the way her jaw started ticking like an erratic clock—Mal had got to her, and couldn't help but enjoy it.

  After a moment, she leaned in, ready to seize on Rory's weakness the way Rory had snapped at her own. "I could help you if you'd let me, you know."

  Rory pointedly stared down at the restraints still clamped around her wrists before fixing Mal with a baleful expression. "Somehow, I don't believe you."

  Mal smiled coolly. "You're smart. That much is obvious. But brains won't get you out of this one, and I think you know that. If your family won't neg
otiate on principle, you'll have to figure out a way to change that—and you know better than anyone how to change their minds. You're strong enough not to break. But if you want to live, you'll help us break your people first."

  "I'm not a traitor."

  "It's not treachery, it's self-preservation."

  "Ah, so you're that type."

  "I'm a survivor. Can you say the same?"

  Rory said nothing. Her silence lasted until Mal reactivated the cryo sleep and sent her into a deeper sort of stillness. Even in sleep, Rory's face looked troubled. Mal tried not to look at it for long.

  *~*~*

  It wasn't that Mal felt bad. She didn't. She was just doing what she had to do, breaking Rory down a little bit at a time. It wasn't nice, but it was the job. So if Mal had cut Rory a little too close to the bone, it wasn't as if she cared.

  She brought a pack of kravash cards next time she woke Rory up.

  Rory stared at the deck blankly. "You can't be serious."

  "The fact that you've never played is frankly upsetting," Mal said, beginning to shuffle the deck. "This pack of cards almost single-handedly won me enough money to buy a ticket to the outer moons. Also, it's a two-player game, and I'm a bit short of partners at the moment."

  "My God, you are serious," Rory said as Mal finished dealing. "Unbelievable. You do realize that you're essentially my jailer, right? And that you're escorting me to the hands of enemies that in all likelihood could kill me—but you want me to play a card game with you?"

  "Well, it didn't look like you were busy," Mal said with a gesture to the cryo bed.

  Rory opened her mouth as if to argue, then shut it almost immediately. She was remembering her survival strategy. If she stayed awake, she could keep trying to chip away at Mal's defenses, gather intel, plot her escape. Sleeping, she would be totally helpless. And Mal could see already that 'helpless' was not a label Rory accepted lightly.

  At long last, Rory sighed. "How exactly do you play?"

  *~*~*

  It took a good part of Mal's wake-cycle to teach Rory the rules—she was hopeless, really, and Mal destroyed her without even having to cheat. Which in itself was remarkable, because Mal had always been terrible at kravash without a few extra cards up her sleeve.

  "Seriously," Mal said as she re-shuffled the cards. "You went to school. Didn't you smart kids figure out how to gamble? Or was talking about money too vulgar?"

  "There wasn't much time for games," Rory said, staring down at the hand laid out in front of her with a frown. "It's my turn, isn't it? I'm going to rotate the blue star ninety degrees."

  "You don't have to narrate your own actions, you know," Mal said with a grin. "And now, I think I'll just reverse two of my red dwarfs, and take a couple of those nice planet cards I see you've been saving."

  Rory watched as Mal completely decimated her hand. "That's bad, I take it?"

  Mal sighed. "Winning every time isn't as fun as I imagined it would be."

  "Must be a stark change."

  "Only one of us is a habitual loser at present." Still, Mal dealt a new hand.

  "You know," Rory said. "You could always let me out of here. And then we could play something else."

  "If you're planning on trying to seduce me, I should warn you it might work."

  The comment had slipped out before Mal could think the better of it, and suddenly she wished nothing more than that she'd kept her mouth shut. Rory was looking at her, the gears turning in a new direction. Wondering if Mal had been serious, perhaps. To Mal's horror, she actually felt the heat rising in her face. More likely Rory was taking in her discolored skin, her lank dark hair, her unnatural height, and wondering how Mal could even joke about such a thing.

  "It's your move, by the way," Rory said softly. With a jolt, Mal realized she was right. She rearranged her cards just a little too hastily, grateful for an excuse to look down and compose herself.

  "Correct," Mal said, keeping her voice level. "I see you remember the rules. You might even have a chance at beating me someday."

  "And what do I get if I do?"

  Mal glanced back up at Rory's face. A faint smile was set on her lips, but her eyes weighed Mal's every move. There was no disgust in them, no pity. Only… interest? No. A challenge.

  Mal held Rory's gaze as long as she could, but she was still the first to look away. As she quickly finished their card game and restarted the cryo sleep drive, Mal couldn't help but feel she'd failed a test. But whatever the dare she'd seen in Rory's eyes, Mal couldn't chase it. She wasn't that stupid.

  Just stupid enough to start getting attached to her own prisoner, and then let slip that fact to her face.

  It was the isolation that did it. There was nothing to distract her—nothing and no one but Rory. The ship felt like an empty haunting, full of ghosts without the courtesy of knocking things around to keep her company. All they did was lie still, while in her bunk Mal tossed and turned and tried to stop the silence from draining into her ears. Whatever was shifting between her and Rory, Mal couldn't let it happen. She couldn't afford to mess the mission up.

  The last time Mal had botched a mission, she'd been demoted to scrubbing the plaque buildup inside a gravity drive. The unshielded forces inside had almost killed her. She could still feel the ache in her bones, the feeling that her flesh hung off of her like a sagging canvas. She was sure that was what did her leg in. The Reaches did not punish. The machinery that made life possible needed constant care, and if you didn't want to oil it with your blood, you did your best not to fail in the first place. Only failures got fed into the grinder. If she failed, she wouldn't be punished. They'd simply send her back to the gravity drive, and she'd know it was her duty to go.

  Mal wouldn't fail again.

  The familiar ache chewed at her knee as she set her cane down and settled into the chair near Rory's cryo bed. She stopped to wipe the faint sheen of sweat from her brow and catch her breath. Her legs shook slightly as she took her weight off of them. All that time on planet-grade gravity was beginning to take its toll. How appropriate that the one thing that might have saved Mal in the first place should hurt her so deeply. The irony may have been delicious, but Mal wasn't hungry.

  *~*~*

  Something was wrong. Even half-asleep, Mal could feel it.

  She started awake at the desk of the central computer console, rubbing her cheek where it had been stuck to the metal. She stared at the screen, uncomprehending—had she been dreaming? What had woken her? The screens in front of her had changed from the normal security feeds and distance to travel readouts—instead, the navigation field display had open and inky void across all the screens, with the tiny white blip of the ship itself hanging suspended in the center.

  And in the upper corner—

  "Proximity alert," the computer repeated, and then Mal was very awake.

  Immediately she dove for the controls and began to type with shaking hands. She scanned through her communications channels, searching for a hail, a message, anything that might have come from someone that didn't want to kill her. Nothing but dead air.

  "Shit," she whispered. If Rory's people had found her, Mal was already dead. If she tried to escape on her own ship, they'd just shoot her down. If she hid somewhere in the Arc, they'd just evacuate all the breathable air. If she surrendered—well. She was starting to know how Rory felt.

  She pulled up the ship's log of data, searching for the ID that had pinged as an incoming ship. She found it quickly enough. The size and power the readings suggested made a cold sweat break out over Mal's palms. A ship like that could blast hers out of existence with scarcely any effort. Yet the date the ship's ID had recorded couldn't be right—the ship should be ancient, hundreds of years old, and far too beaten-down to travel. And the life-count was non-existent. Automated, then? How did that make sense? Unless—

  Unless—

  Slowly, Mal let a breath out. Then she closed the ship's log and leaned her forehead against the metal of the desk. Ab
andoned. The ship showed no life signs because nothing on it was alive, and hadn't been for two centuries.

  Mal closed out of the navigational window and activated the ship's outer viewing cameras instead. All of the screens before her suddenly displayed parts of the same image, a fractured picture of sand spilled on the surface of an oil slick. Mal felt a swell of vertigo and nausea to accompany it, but she forced her eyes to focus on the tiny shape growing silently larger by the moment.

  It was dull grey. As it drifted closer, she saw it had originally been white. The hull had been darkened by blast marks, some gone clean through to the other side so the black of space peeked out of them. Ionizer canons tended to have that effect—Mal had seen them in action. She imagined that the first blast, if it had hit precisely, would have de-pressurized a good part of the ship before the blast doors could seal the air in. All atmo, cargo, and crew jettisoned into space. Instant popsiclification. And then whatever had killed the ship had just kept firing and firing, until there was scarcely enough of it left to wear to the beach. Excessive force was only the beginning. It was pure brutality. But that was how things had been back then, when the war still looked like a war.

  The last real battle had been fought in that empty star-field, the Sovereigns and the Reaches duking it out with the thunder of canons and the screams of dying men, all that rah-rah bullshit. Mal couldn't imagine what it would be like to live in a world where all the fighting was done by soldiers in a designated place far away. These days, a well-placed sneaker missile traveling for years at sub-light speeds could happen anywhere. Public docking stations. Medical centers. Personal homes. All good and fair. Everyone had their equal chance to die.

  As Mal's ship passed by the old wreckage, she recognized the ship's distinctive features. That was a Sovereign vessel, blasted to hell and back again. Mal's people had done that, hundreds of years before she'd even been born. And in the star-studded nothing in front of her, there were plenty of dead Reaches vessels spinning in the dark beside their enemies. Mal didn't know who had lost more in the battle. She couldn't even remember who had won. That whole sector of space was a tomb, and she was flying right into it.