In Ageless Sleep

by Arden Ellis

  All according to plan. If she did everything right, by the time she reached the center of the dead battlefield, her people would be waiting for her there. She was so close.

  Though her hands had stopped shaking from the stress of thinking the wrath of the Sovereign's ruling family was coming down on her head, a different gnawing sensation had started chewing at her gut. Once her people came for her—if that was how it shook out—that would be the end of it. She'd never seen Rory again. Mal wasn't sure how she felt about that because she was too busy trying not to feel at all. Rory was just a package to be delivered. Mal hadn't formed any attachment. That would be unprofessional. That would be dangerous.

  There was nothing to be done about it either way. When her people arrived, Mal would hand Rory over with no questions asked. End of story. No alternatives.

  Mal headed back for the cryo dock, fiddling with the pack of cards in her pocket. The least she could do before their final goodbye was make sure Rory won a game.

  *~*~*

  "I don't know much about the Reaches," Rory said one day. It had been a while since she had finished updating the ship's codes, and Mal had yet to put her back to sleep. They'd abandoned their game some time ago in favor of chewing a couple of nutristicks and building a card pyramid. If only her handlers could see her now, Mal thought ruefully. Or more accurately, she tried not to think about it at all.

  Mal lay another card on the second level of their card-house. "Why should you care about the Reaches?"

  "I've heard stories about life there."

  Mal snorted. "I doubt they live up to the real thing."

  Rory stared at her, fiddling with the cards still in her hand. "Tell me about it, then."

  "Why should I?"

  "No reason other than I asked you to. I can tell you about my life, in exchange."

  Mal laughed humorlessly. "Great. You get to hear my sob-stories while you drone on about the lap of luxury."

  "I doubt you'll find it as glamorous as you expect."

  "Really? I'm pretty confident you'd find my circumstances as bleak as you imagine."

  Rory was quiet for a long time. "When I was ten years old, my father took me to see my first execution," she said at last. With the edge of her nail she nudged the card pyramid, sent it tumbling down. "It was a pilot, one of yours, captured over the edge of our borders. They found enough weaponry on his ship to detonate a small moon. There was no question as to the sentence." Her eyes had gone unfocused, staring into the past, or maybe in the opposite direction. "We may be more technologically advanced, but the old brand of justice is said to be more effective. They hanged him, broadcast it publically. That was the first time I can remember seeing someone die, but by now, I might have forgotten the others."

  Mal toyed with flicking a card in and out of her sleeve, unable to meet Rory's gaze. "They train 'em up early in the Sovereign space too, huh?"

  "I wouldn't call it training," Rory said. "More like… shaping. I was carefully formed, like molten metal into a mold. I didn't get any say in what I did or who I spent time with. It was already decided for me. No one ever trusted me to take care of myself."

  "That's all people ever trusted me to do," Mal said quietly. "No one ever thought to take care of me." Mal sighed, rubbed her hands over her face. "I was recruited as an agent earlier than I can remember, trained up to be sure I was worth the air and water it cost to keep me alive. I made sure that I was. You can imagine what happened to those that weren't." Mal's mouth twisted bitterly. She patted her bad knee. "This was a souvenir of their tender care. I was lucky. It wasn't my spine."

  The silence boomed. If Rory had apologized, had offered any sympathy at all, Mal would have snapped. But Rory only sat there in quiet, companionable silence as they nursed their respective wounds. At once, Mal wished she had said nothing at all. "I shouldn't be telling you this," she muttered. "I told myself I wouldn't talk about it. With anyone."

  Rory smiled a little sadly. "You sound like one of the old veterans. The ones that made it back."

  Mal looked away. "I'm not a soldier. Just a spy, a sneak, no honor or glory about it."

  "There's little enough honor and glory to be had in soldiering either."

  "Did you read that in a textbook?"

  "Firsthand experience."

  "You? No," Mal said with a laugh. "That's too much."

  "You really know nothing about me." Mal was surprised by the vehemence in Rory's voice. When she glanced at her askance, Rory was staring at something far away. "This war is ugly, and no one is going to win," she said. "I spent most of my political career trying to push for an actual ceasefire, not the 'looks good on paper while we keep blowing each other up' agreement we have now."

  "And how'd that work out for you?" Mal said, her tone flippant to disguise the genuine curiosity beneath.

  Rory gave her a rueful smile. "I got pressured out. Turned my energies to science, since it didn't seem they were going to do any good elsewhere. I figured I could wait, bide my time. I didn't figure on you."

  "Surprise," Mal said with false cheer. "But I guess you saw your fair share of danger long before I showed up. I'm amazed they even let the king's daughter try a hand at soldiering."

  "Military service is required for all able-bodied people when they come of age," Rory said. "I did my two years just like everyone else."

  "Let me guess, you refused to accept special treatment."

  "Yes, actually."

  "See, that's what really bothers me about you," Mal said sharply. "You know what I would do if I had a chance, even the most unfair and biased chance, to live a happy, cushy life? I'd grab onto it with both hands and all my teeth, and damn anyone who calls me weak for doing so."

  "Isn't it better to at least try to keep things fair?"

  "Fair?" Mal laughed. "Fairness is a luxury to people like you. You can give it up whenever you want, and leave the rest of us to play dirty and get hurt in your place." She stared down at her hands, the thin, greenish skin, the scars and burn marks and chewed-up nails. Mal's mouth twisted bitterly. "If life was fair, I wouldn't have ended up like this."

  She could feel Rory's eyes on her. Always watching. "Like what?"

  "Don't." Mal closed her fists. With a sigh, Mal reached for her cane—she had stopped hiding it from Rory some time ago—and made to stand up, head for the door, send Rory back to sleep. It was better that way.

  "Mal, wait." It was the first time Rory had said her name. It sounded good from Rory's mouth. That more than anything was what made Mal stop, what made her turn back around when she wanted nothing more than to keep her traitorous expressions hidden safely away. She didn't know what Rory saw in her face. But then Rory's gaze shifted, moved down her body and back up again, taking in her height, her limp, her underfed frame, looking without flinching away. Mal was frozen in place. By the time Rory's eyes made it back to her own, Mal felt as if she'd never been truly seen by another person before.

  "I like the way you ended up," Rory said. If she was lying, Mal couldn't tell. She was flying blind. All she saw were Rory's eyes, the beautiful soft darkness of them. They swallowed up all the words Mal might have said in return. When Mal finally tore her eyes away, it was all she could do to boot up the cryo sleep sequence and take the coward's way out of Rory's unspoken question.

  After Rory went under, Mal found herself lingering in the cryo chamber. She looked down at Rory's sleeping face and felt a strange pang of envy. It must have been nice to be dead to the world, to know there was nothing you could do but sleep. She and Mal weren't so different in the end. They were both in stasis, hanging between one state and another, with no way of knowing what the world would look like when they woke up.

  It was easier not to think of Rory as a person. Just a bargaining chip, an object capable only of being acted upon. Oh, it was easier. But god, it didn't feel right. She tried to remind herself that Rory was the enemy. She tried to make herself forget every plane of her face.

  That much was frui
tless. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Rory's face, but in her mind, Rory's eyes were always open, staring right back.

  *~*~*

  Three days later, they arrived at the right coordinates. Mal's people were not there.

  She hadn't told Rory they were getting close, but Mal suspected some part of her knew. When the ship came to a halt, the constant thrum of its engines cutting out at last, the air turned flat and dead in the sudden booming silence. Rory didn't comment on it. But Mal could see the way her eyes darted around the room, the way she studied Mal with a little more wariness than before. It wasn't just the ship. Something had shifted between them, had skidded out from under Mal's control. They were both circling around each other, waiting for the tension to burst. The ship's atmosphere felt as thick as reactor sludge, and night after night, Mal woke up in an icy sweat dreaming of one hundred and forty-eight pairs of eyes watching her from a conscious darkness. Whatever was going to happen would happen very soon. Mal could feel it drawing nearer, like the static before a plasma discharge.

  It was pure chance that Mal happened to boot up the ship's code and scan through it idly. She hadn't done so in weeks; she'd been too busy teaching Rory the rules to a new card game that Mal herself had invented. Maybe she hadn't been paying as close attention to Rory's coding as she should have been either. Mal found herself staring at Rory's face instead, studying the lines of worry that were never there in cryo. Mal liked them better. They meant that Rory was awake, and that eased something in Mal's chest.

  So she should have been paying closer attention. It still came as a surprise to look through the elegant lines of Rory's codes and see the killing thing buried deep inside of them.

  Mal almost didn't believe it—that was how far gone she was. She stared at the insidious little section of code and tried to convince herself she was reading it wrong. But there was no getting around it. Tucked between the lines of code to keep the cryo sleep up and running was a new routine for the ship's breathable atmosphere regulators. Once activated, the air scrubbers would be reversed—turning that breathable atmosphere into invisible, undetectable poison. All it took was the kill command.

  Mal wasted no time. From the moment Rory opened her eyes again and saw the look on Mal's face, the beginnings of a smile disappeared from her face.

  "Is something wrong?" Rory asked carefully.

  Tight-lipped and wordless, Mal rotated the datapad for Rory to see. The lines of Rory's own code flashed back at her, an accusation.

  Mal waited until she saw the look of recognition on Rory's face before she turned away. She'd seen what she needed to see. For a long moment, neither of them said anything—what was there to say? That code was just a reminder of the way things really were. They were enemies. Mal had almost forgotten.

  "One question," Mal said, the words sitting sourly on her tongue. "Why not activate the code? From the looks of things, it's been ready for weeks now. You could have vacuumed all the air out of my lungs whenever you wanted to."

  "Are you asking me rhetorically?" Rory asked. "Or do you really want to know?"

  "Yes, I want to know!" Mal slammed her hand down on the arm of her chair with a clang. "I'm very curious as to why you didn't murder me when you had the chance! So start talking, before I change my mind and spare us both the embarrassment of talking at all."

  "There was no point in killing you," Rory said after a moment. "Your people still might have gotten here first, and I'd still be helpless."

  "Bullshit," Mal said coldly. "I know you, Rory, and I know your type even better. You grab for every advantage, no matter how trivial, always pushing, seeing what options open up—if there was the smallest possibility my death might have benefited you, I'd be dead. So tell me," Mal said, leaning forward, "why didn't you kill me when you had the chance?"

  Rory stared back at her. Her face was a blank mask, impossible for Mal to read. It was a long time before Mal realized Rory wasn't going to answer her at all.

  "Well, what do you know," Mal said with a cold smile. "Looks like we're both cowards. No spine for killing, even when we don't have to get our own hands dirty."

  Before Rory could respond, Mal turned and limped her way out of the room. She heard Rory calling after her as she went and ignored it. If she wanted to stay awake so badly, let her. Mal couldn't even make herself care whether she might find a way to escape.

  Mal left the cryo deck, walking as fast as her leg would allow her. Not fast enough. Her anger and betrayal weren't sporting any handicaps. It was foolish, idiotic—Rory had always been the enemy, was only doing what she was supposed to do. Mal was the one who had stepped outside of the script, had gone and gotten sympathetic towards the other side. Maybe more than sympathetic. Maybe—

  Mal couldn't think about that. She let her mind cling to a single question, repeating with each jolting footstep: Why hadn't Rory simply activated the code and killed her?

  She had no answer. The pain in her leg flared with every step, but she didn't slow down, didn't stop until she had paced the decks for hours and could walk and think no more.

  *~*~*

  Even Mal had to sleep sometime.

  Cryo only resembled sleep to someone looking in from the outside. In stasis, you didn't dream. But Mal wasn't in cryo. And her dreams were impossible to control.

  In those dreams, there was no ship. No impending sense of doom. No mission. What was still the same was Rory, her face smooth in a sleep as deep as cryo, yet no wires entered her veins and no machines hummed a lullaby around her. She lay on a bed, still as death, her plaited hair arranged on the pillow around her. Even in the dream, as Mal approached the bed, she knew it was real gravity beneath her feet. She walked across the room, a place she'd never seen before, and felt as if she were stepping through a thick sheen of time, like cobwebs strung invisibly in the air and breaking across her face. In the dream, she stepped up to the side of the bed and, with the same gesture every time, brushed a braid to the side of Rory's face. Then she leaned in. And then she woke up.

  She never wanted the dream to end, but she could never make it last longer than that. If she tried to hold on, it turned into dreams of a thicket of thorns that rose around her, impossible to escape.

  *~*~*

  When everything came crashing down in the next few hours, it started in the quietest way possible.

  Mal was awakened from sleep by the faint beeping of a computer—a notification, not an alarm.

  Blearily, Mal stared at the screen. She'd gotten similar pings before, minor things requiring a few quick lines of code to fix. She could take care of it without getting out of bed.

  She opened the notification panel.

  "Proximity alert," the computer said, and that time there was no mistake.

  Mal's heart dropped through the bottom of her ribs.

  The Sovereigns had arrived.

  *~*~*

  Mal sat at the control station's deck and read the scanner's readouts. The new ship was almost on top of her. It was a sword-class vehicle, known for its speed and agility in a fight. Top of the line. The Sovereigns had spared no expense where family was concerned.

  "Transmission received," the computer informed her.

  Mal sat back in her seat. After the initial panic, a strange sense of calm had stolen over her. As if everything were happening to someone else, far away. That was probably some kind of survival mechanism. She'd take what she could get. "Play it," she said.

  At once, the screen went dark. A new image replaced it—a man with a haircut that looked like it wouldn't budge if you stuck it in a wind tunnel. Perfect teeth and skin, of course. A regular knight in shining armor. Mal's fists clenched on her knees. In the background, silent and steely, were two figures Mal recognized from almost every propaganda video the Reaches ever produced. The king and queen themselves were both on that ship.

  "This is Lieutenant Warren Adams, originally of the Royal Arc," the recording said. Mal's mouth twisted unpleasantly at the sound of the name. She'd k
nown immediately who he was. "By order of the king, you will lay down your arms and surrender the ship to our authority. We are equipped with deadly force. We will use it if necessary." From the sounds of it, he was going to make sure it would be. "Prepare to be boarded."

  The transmission went blank. And in its place—

  "Shit!" Mal cried, her fingers leaping over the keys. It was too late. From the Sovereign ship, the damage was done: a single pulse of energy that had disabled all of her ship's engine activity. No propulsion. No maneuverability. She was officially a sitting duck.

  In a few seconds, the Sovereigns would board.

  Her syringe of knock-out juice was on her belt. It was the only weapon she had on hand. She might as well jab it into her own leg and save them the trouble, for all the good it would do. There was no time to run, no time to hide.

  No time even to make it down to Rory and consider saying—what? Everything Mal wanted to say grew too large to fit into the span of moments the two of them had left, too unwieldy to even make it past Mal's throat. She was a coward to the end, it seemed. And that was how Rory would remember her. If she remembered Mal at all.

  Mal covered her face with her hands.

  That was about the exact moment when the second ship jumped into range.

  Mal sat straight up in her chair and stared at the screen in disbelief. She couldn't believe it. Right there, blinking on her sensors, was the ship she'd been waiting for all along. The Black Dragon was one of the most powerful ships in the Reaches' fleet, and it was there, right in the nick of time. It was too perfect. A cheer tugged on the end of her throat as she stared at the screen's readouts, waiting for her people to come swooping in to her rescue.

  "Open transmission," she said, ignoring the way her voice shook. "This is Agent Malev Doma of Castle Base, ID 16790, awaiting assigned pickup at the designated coordinates. You sure are a sight for sore eyes." The transmission sent. Mal waited, grinning and nervous, for a reply.