In Ageless Sleep

by Arden Ellis

  The first thing the Dragon did was lock weapons on the Sovereigns.

  Mal blinked. Weren't they going to send someone to dock with her ship, to come get her? So far she hadn't even received a message in response.

  "Second transmission to the Black Dragon," she said, and that time her voice was steadier. "Are you receiving me out there? Again, this is Malev Doma, 16790, awaiting pickup with the designated mark. Do you copy?"

  The Dragon fired. Mal watched its missiles arc over the field of her computer's sensors, heading straight for the Sovereigns. The Sovereign ship didn't even try to avoid them. The charges slammed into their shields, and the shields fanned out in a green wave to burn up the Dragon's weaponry harmlessly away from the hull. Mal's people were no match for a ship like that, Mal realized. Their firepower just wasn't good enough.

  Evidently, her people realized that too.

  The next thing the Black Dragon's weapons locked onto was Mal's ship.

  Mal watched the screen. All at once, her triumph evaporated, leaving something very cold in its place.

  No.

  They wouldn't.

  "Enemy weapons charging," the computer stated in cool tones.

  "No," Mal whispered. "No. No, no, no—" But then again, of course. It was too perfect. As if they would arrive at the exact moment the Sovereigns did on pure coincidence. The mission had always been an ambush, and Rory wasn't the target—she was the bait. They knew her family would come out to save her. But if they couldn't take down the king's ship, they'd settle for his daughter's.

  She fumbled for the controls, pulling up something, anything. The Sovereign engine suppressor blocked her at every turn. She couldn't run. Couldn't even try to get out of the way.

  She knew exactly what the Black Dragon's weapons systems would do to a carrier ship like hers. She'd seen it with her own eyes.

  "Weapons fired," the computer said. "Estimated impact in: Fifty-five. Fifty-four. Fifty-three…" All she had left was—was—

  Mal stumbled through the halls of the ship as quickly as her leg would carry her. Her knee was a dull agony that threatened to swallow her conscious mind whole. Thirty-two. Thirty-one. The march of time was relentless. Mal raced it with every step, felt it pounding in her leg, in her head, in her chest. She couldn't think about it. She didn't have a plan. She didn't even know what she was doing—only that she had to get to Rory, to be there when it happened.

  She lurched onto the cryo deck with twenty seconds to spare. Rory was awake—the strangeness of that almost made Mal falter before she remembered that was how she had left her the night before. Rory was yanking at her bindings with a ferocity that Mal recognized, the terror born from someone who wanted to live and could see no way of accomplishing that goal. Only when Rory saw Mal limp onto the deck did she freeze. Her eyes grew wide with shock.

  "Mal?" she cried. "What are you doing here? You can't be here. You need to get to your own ship—"

  Mal shook her head stubbornly. She was already dropping to her knees by the cryo bed's receptors and pulling out her datapad. "Not without you."

  "Mal, there's no time—"

  Mal ignored her. She had to do this, had to get her free. If it was the last thing she did, that would be enough. Time was ticking down, and there was nothing but the count, Mal's fingers shaking as she tried to figure out the right code, the sound of Rory's shaky breathing.

  "Listen," Rory said, a new note of urgency in her voice. "The kill code—I want you to know why I didn't activate it."

  "Shut up, Rory," Mal said through gritted teeth, her eyes fixed on the datapad before her. She reached into the cryo bed's matrix itself and started yanking at the wires, any wires, but the bone-deep jolt of electricity made her yank her hand back with a cry.

  "Please, Mal, I just need to say it—"

  "I can't!" Mal cried. "Not now, not like this—" Her fingers fumbled on the datapad. She couldn't look up and meet Rory's gaze, not when she had no idea what might be waiting for her there. Mal had never been so terrified.

  Ten.

  Nine.

  "Mal."

  Mal stopped, let her head hang. The datapad might as well have been a useless scrap of metal in her hands. She couldn't get Rory free. She couldn't save either of them. Again, and for the last time, she had failed. But it wasn't failure that ate away at her, wasn't failure that stopped her from raising her eyes.

  "Mal. Look at me."

  Five.

  Four.

  "Please."

  Mal looked up. Rory's hand was open within her restraint, fingers splayed as if reaching for a lifeline. There was fear in her eyes. God, Mal wanted to tell her that she didn't have to be afraid. But all Mal could do was let the datapad clatter to the floor and grab Rory's hand like it was the only thing in the world worth holding on to.

  Three.

  Mal leaned in to press her forehead to Rory's, their eyes locking one more time. Rory's hand was warm in her own, gripping her fingers so tightly they ached.

  Two.

  Mal closed her eyes. She felt the brush of Rory's lips on her own, feather-light and trembling. It wasn't enough. It would have to be. If this was the end, it would have to be everything.

  One.

  "Collision alert."

  The entire world shook like the surface of a drum. Everything went dark. Mal was thrown forward, backward, flying out of control—there was pain—

  Then there was nothing.

  *~*~*

  Mal woke up spinning in an empty void. For a moment of sheer terror, she thought there was no spaceship around her. But then, her head bumped into something solid and painful, and her hands reached out to find the smooth surface of the ship's ceiling. Then she was drifting away from it again, fingers scrabbling for purchase and finding none. A light in the corner of her eyes drifted past, and she reached for it. Her fingers found the tubing that ran along one of the walls. She gripped it for dear life.

  Rory, where's Rory—the terror was so sudden and powerful it threatened to overwhelm her. Mal fought it down. Rory had still been strapped to the cryo bed during the impact, and that was where she would be. If Mal wanted to help her, she needed to stay focused. Mal took one breath, two breaths, forced herself into a state of calm. She'd lived a good part of her life on ships, and ships without good gravity containment to boot. She could handle zero-g. Before anything else, she had to see how much of the ship was left. The light she had seen hovered before her eyes—her datapad, gently spinning in place. Mal reached out to snag it out of the air before it could drift out of her reach. The ship had a little power, a little air, and it seemed no one else was shooting at them. That was something.

  She squinted against the brightness of the screen even as it illuminated the hallway. She had drifted from where she'd been in the initial crash. She was still somewhere on the cryo deck, but Rory's chamber was nowhere to be seen.

  It took Mal a moment to realize that all of the cryo beds beneath the glass floor were utterly, awfully dark.

  Mal's mouth went dry. She pulled up the computer's cryo system check with fingers that she could barely keep steady. Inside the cryo pods, each person's vitals ticked away as smoothly as ever. Mal almost breathed a sigh of relief, until she saw the next lines of code. The life-support had not been damaged by the weapons' blast.

  The wake protocols, on the other hand, had been totally destroyed.

  The people in their cryo beds were not dead, but only because their hearts were still beating. Mal had no way of waking them up again. And with every passing second, the minds, which the computer kept so carefully maintained in sleep, were going to slip away, one by one, into the blank nothingness of cryo sleep. Never to return.

  *~*~*

  There was no time to call for help. The Sovereign ship would undoubtedly be waiting outside, perhaps taking the time to thoroughly destroy the remains of the Black Dragon's hull. Even if they were already putting a boarding party together, even if they were on the way, how much time did the
Arc's crew really have before the computer hemorrhaged their minds into the void?

  Mal was done waiting for someone else to come for her.

  She floated her way back to the final room at the end of the cryo deck. She'd managed to activate a handful of the ship's lights on the way—the sight of Rory's cryo bed in the center of the floor almost flooded Mal with relief. Part of her believed Rory would be sitting there, awake, ready for another game of kravash. But when Mal pulled herself into the room and saw Rory's face, she knew that much was a lie. When the systems overloaded with Rory still hooked in, they had dragged her back down into unconsciousness. Her expression was as smooth and peaceful as it ever was in cryo. Only this time, Mal couldn't wake her up.

  Rory's hair drifted around her face, zero-gravity making her float like someone drowning. Mal held herself steady on either side of the bed and stared at Rory's face. Without the layer of glass between them, she could see the mole on the side of her neck, the places where her eyelashes were stuck together, the chapped texture of her lips.

  Everything was happening too quickly for Mal to comprehend. She'd kissed Rory thinking it would be the last thing she could ever do, the one thing in life she could maybe do right. Instead it was becoming only one more wound for Mal to carry, the memory of Rory's lips an agony she doubted she could survive, knowing it had been the last time.

  Something was howling in Mal's chest, but she couldn't give it a voice. Rory was the only person on the entire ship who could fix the wake-up cycle. If she'd only open her eyes, they could figure it out together. The terrible irony.

  Rory was as still as stone. If life was ever planning on giving Mal a miracle, she needed it right then. She didn't care at what price.

  Wasn't there some old story, about a magical kiss that woke the sleeping princess up? Mal tucked a braid behind Rory's ear, trying to ignore the lump in her throat. Of course, there had also been something in the story about true love. And what the hell did Mal know about love? She'd rather know more about coding. Maybe then she'd actually be able to make things right.

  And then it hit her. She didn't know the codes to fix the wake protocols, but maybe she didn't need to. The ship's computer was one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the galaxy, loaded with failsafes and backup plans. If she could rewire the hardware to work around the damage and then reset the computer, it would adapt to the new pathways and get the cryo functioning as good as new. Once the automated systems took over, Mal wouldn't have to do a thing.

  Of course, just turning it off and on again wasn't enough. After it had been repaired and restarted, it would simply reset to zero: no longer registering the remaining one hundred forty-eight crewmembers at all. That meant no life support, and that meant death. Life systems would only activate if it detected a new patient entering stasis. There was only one person left to be that trigger. And if Mal put herself under, she would just as likely wake up to a Sovereign execution squad.

  But she would wake up. And so would Rory.

  Mal worked fast. She yanked the guts out of an unoccupied cryo pod, and floated them into Rory's chamber. She wired them directly in—half to what was left of the computer, and the other half to the empty bed. Mal was trying very hard not to think about the possible dangers associated with plugging her brain into a computer that had essentially been lobotomized. She thought of Rory instead. If her plan worked, it would save everyone. As for Mal, what happened would happen.

  And if it didn't work—well. Worst case scenario, Mal would simply go into stasis and never wake up. But she'd be at Rory's side. That would be enough.

  She fitted the device she'd scavenged from the pod over her head, and took a shaky breath. It was probably a terrible idea. In fact, she was sure it was.

  But she looked at Rory's face, so still and blank. She was going where Rory was.

  All she needed was something to help her get to sleep. She pulled the syringe off her belt. There was enough juice left in it to knock out a horse. Not too much, then. Just enough to put her under, and the cryo would do the rest. She raised her syringe, and held out a finger. She prickled the tip, saw blood bead as red as a rose. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Everything went grey.

  Sleep rushed in like sand into an hourglass, the deepest sleep she had ever known.

  *~*~*

  One month later

  It was a nice cell, really. Four walls and a roof was always a good start, but this one had a bed that didn't make you long for the good old-fashioned comforts of sleeping on a wooden board, and gravity that didn't fail every other day. It even had its own bathroom. Hot water was a magical thing. Mal lay with her hands behind her head and tried to convince herself that she was getting better at waiting for other people to decide what would happen to her.

  In some ways, Mal was sort of a hero. That was what she'd told the people who arrested her, at least. They'd assured her that jerry-rigging a new cryo pod had been a real stroke of genius as they escorted her, handcuffed, into a fancy Sovereign prison. They'd thanked her for what she'd risked to save the crew, and then they'd charged her with commandeering a Sovereign ship, reckless endangerment of one hundred and forty-eight lives, and attempted kidnapping. It was the 'attempted' that really jarred. After all, she had succeeded.

  In the end, Mal couldn't blame them. She was the enemy, after all. Even if she wasn't very good at it.

  But if Mal was a hero as well as a criminal, it was only by coincidence. She hadn't set out to save everyone. All her thoughts had been of one person, and she hadn't seen Rory since she woke up in Sovereign police custody.

  Mal was trying not to think about that. She was also trying not to think about the fact that her own people had betrayed her. That much was a little easier to swallow. Mal supposed she could respect their decision, given enough time and distance and the fact that they had actually failed to kill her. It didn't change the fact that she was left adrift, nowhere to belong to, nowhere to go, nothing to do except pace the four walls of her cell and think about trying not to think about Rory. About Rory's laugh. About the look in her eyes when the missiles were about to land. About the way her lips had curved into Mal's like they wanted to swallow everything they found.

  Yeah. Mal was having a hard time not thinking about any of that.

  It wasn't like there was much to distract her, after all. Just a lot of people she had to talk to, tell them who she was and why she'd done what she did. She was sick of talking. She just wanted peace. She just wanted—well. Historically, what she wanted didn't matter. Why should things be different now?

  Footsteps moving down the corridor outside her cell caught Mal's attention. Hers was the last cell on the hallway—whoever was coming, was coming to see her. Mal sat up in bed, rested an elbow on her good knee, and tried to look at ease. Probably just another government official who wanted to hear the exact same story in a slightly different way. Honestly, it was like they didn't have any other source of entertainment than listening to the same old boring prisoner—

  The visitor stepped into view. And everything inside of Mal's head went very, very quiet.

  Rory smiled in that half-and-sideways way. "Hey, Mal," she said.

  For a long time, Mal could only stare. "Funny the places you run into people," she said at last. Her voice sounded strange. Like she hadn't really talked to anyone in a long time.

  Rory lingered outside the bars of the cell, still smiling in that way Mal had thought about so much these past weeks. "I've been trying to get clearance to visit ever since I could figure out where they'd taken you," she said. "Father was less than happy about me visiting the person who almost got me killed, but—well, I pulled some strings."

  "I'm thrilled to be a source of family discord," Mal said. Rory laughed. Hearing it eased something in Mal's chest, a pain she hadn't recognized until it was gone.

  "You look good," Mal said quietly. Actually, Rory looked tired—getting significantly less beauty sleep these days, no doubt—but she loo
ked focused, alert, alive.

  "So do you," Rory said.

  "Well of course I do. Do you know what kind of food they're giving me? I think they're fattening me up for the slaughter."

  "Probably. Human flesh is a delicacy out here."

  Mal grinned down at her hands. "It's ironic," she said after a moment, gesturing around her prison. "Most of our conversations took place the other way around."

  Rory settled a hand on the bars. "This doesn't feel too different."

  "Now, what does that say about us?"

  "Nothing good, I'm sure."

  The silence between them reminded Mal unpleasantly of those weeks spent waiting on the ship. Like something was waiting to happen, only for once it was all up to Mal. At last she sighed and limped forward, leaning against the bars of her cell with a wry smile on her lips. "Why are you here, Rory?"

  Rory looked away, eyes down as if rehearsing the lines in her head. Then she looked up to meet Mal's gaze again—and pulled out a pack of kravash cards.

  For a moment, Mal could only stare. And then she laughed, loud and sudden and without reservation. "See, now I'm just thinking that you actually like to lose."

  Rory shifted the cards from hand to hand, a small smile on her lips. "You never did finish teaching me the rules."

  "There's always more to learn." Mal folded her long limbs onto the floor, moving her old injuries carefully. "If you're committed to becoming an expert, you'd best plan on being here for a while."

  "I suppose I can live with that." Rory settled down on the floor on the other side of the bars and began to deal. "But not too long. The clearance to get you released on the grounds of an act of heroism should come through within the next couple months."

  Mal felt her heart jump into her throat and then freeze. It was a while before she could find the words to speak. "That must have taken a lot more string-pulling."

  "You have no idea. I've used up every favor I've ever been owed. Not to mention that any influence I had is now basically nil. People don't take kindly to sympathizing with enemy agents these days. In fact, I'd say my political career is just about finished. I'm free."