Lily could see herself reflected in his big black eyes. She stole another look at Pitro, who looked bored by the situation.
She took a step back into the hallway. “What did you do?” she wailed.
“He fought back,” said Pitro lazily. “This should not have happened.”
Zadbac barked an order at him in his language, and Pitro sulkily replied in kind. Lily saw her chance. She whipped around and tore through the hallway and into reception. She heard the doctors yelling after her and Claybourne’s pleas for help. She ran down the stairs and burst through the front door of the industrial park. The nearly empty industrial park, still waiting for more tenants. Not another soul was around.
She took off in the direction of the lunch cart and coffee shop. Someone there could help. She cursed her medium-heeled sandals as she ran, too terrified to look over her shoulder.
Her toe hit a crack in the sidewalk and she went flying to the pavement. She immediately saw a shadow fall over the sidewalk and tears sprang to her eyes. She dared herself to look over her shoulder.
Zadbac loomed over her, holding a thin black rectangle that looked like a cellphone. She screamed again and looked desperately at the few cars whizzing past them in the street. Why didn’t they stop?
“Don’t bother,” Zadbac said, his face twisted in fury. He didn’t seem winded from running after her. “I have a force field activated. No one can hear or see us, and you cannot escape.”
What was he talking about? Lily got up and charged forward. Zadbac didn’t make a move to stop her. She took a step and something slammed into her chest, knocking the wind from her.
“I told you,” Zadbac said smugly.
Lily looked around her, faint orange stripes coming into focus through the bright afternoon sunlight. She threw her fist at them and yelled as pain shot up her arm from the contact. It was like punching a cement wall.
Zadbac gripped her shoulder. “You cannot escape,” he repeated. He whipped her around and she stumbled, the strange orange bars breaking her fall. He held out what looked like the asthma inhaler she had as a kid, and twisted her head to the side. Lily struggled, but he had an iron grip.
She would not end up like Claybourne.
Zadbac held the inhaler over her pulse and she felt something icy cold penetrate her skin. Almost immediately she felt her body’s temperature drop and her muscles loosen and become heavy. She slid against the orange stripes to the pavement and unsuccessfully tried to hold up her head.
As her eyes closed, the last thing she heard was Zadbac quietly scolding her.
“You should not have entered the lab.”
Chapter 2
Ensign Taz Shraft was being punished. That was the only way to describe being assigned to cleanup duty with an hour to go until he was off shift, sorting through museum crap that had come unstrapped from their containers in the Defiant’s cargo hold. He would be here until midnight to get all of this done.
Of course, he did have a little too much to drink during the twenty-eight hour stayover on Golfell Station a few days ago and made a clumsy pass at a woman who turned out to be his commanding officer’s sister. Drunkenly hitting on Lieutenant Steg’s sister could never bode well, especially when the lieutenant in question loathed Taz. Even though Ena Steg was just as bombed as Taz had been. He still couldn’t believe a woman who looked like that could be related to the lieutenant, a former prizefighter back on his home station.
There was no sense of organization to the crates shoved in the cargo hold, bound for a new museum on Rubidge Station, nearly a week’s journey from the Defiant’s current point. When he tried to argue that point to Lieutenant Steg, his superior had growled at him to take it to the captain.
So Taz had foolishly tracked down Captain Rian Marska to explain his plight. Acting Captain Rian Marska, he corrected himself, the former commander recently tasked with temporarily patrolling Commons space in between deliveries of science teams and spare parts and...museum artifacts. This was the worst delivery so far.
Captain Marska told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to get to the cargo hold and put the museum pieces back in some kind of order, any order, as long as they stopped breaking free of their bonds and crashing around in the belly of the ship. Taz was going to point out that maybe the artificial gravity in the hold needed to repaired, but thought better of it. Knowing Steg, he might wheedle Marska to put Taz in the brig for a night or two.
There were definitely some problems with the environmental programs in the cargo hold. A few statues and crates had lost their gravitational pull and drifted towards the ceiling. And it was hot in here. Taz unzipped his uniform jacket and draped it on a huge figure of a Mulaskan wildcat, clipping his comm badge to his T-shirt.
He made the few adjustments he could from the utilities panel on the wall, cursing at his lack of access to the programs. He could fix the whole gravity problem in the cargo hold if given access to the systems, but Marska would never give him that chance. He grinned mischievously and deliberately adjusted it so a few artifacts crashed to the floor.
He couldn’t find a fix for the heat though, so he sighed and set to work. He remotely controlled an antigravity jack to stack the largest of the crates. A third of the hold cleared, he came across a long sealed plastiglas case and shuddered. Taz hated the corpse displays in museums.
A label was affixed to this one: EARTH HUMANOID, 21st CENTURY. Inside he saw the perfectly preserved body of a woman who would have been pretty in a wholesome kind of way in life. Not like Ena Steg, who was exotic and darkly sensual. This one had long dark hair and a healthy glow to her fair skin that spoke of living on a planet with natural sunlight. She had been attired in a blue dress and short-sleeved black sweater when she died and was preserved.
Taz looked at the floor. He was the first person to admit he had few morals, but parading a dead body around to be gawked at crossed a line for him. It was downright creepy and certainly disrespectful. It wasn’t as though anyone in the Commons hadn’t seen a humanoid before. He would be careful with this one.
He directed the jack to the plastiglas coffin, intending to put it in the most secure corner of the hold where the artificial gravity always worked. Sweat poured down his back and seeped through his T-shirt. He considered taking off his pants, but that guaranteed a visit from the captain to check up on him, and would open the door to all kinds of questions he didn’t want to think about.
The jack raised the coffin to his eye level and its lid lifted slightly with a small pop. With a sinking feeling Taz realized the preserving seal around it had pulled off, likely disintegrating because of the heat and being bounced around.
A dead body and near-tropical conditions made for a working environment even Taz wouldn’t tolerate. He lowered the jack to the floor and looked around frantically for something that could act as a makeshift seal. He tried to press the lid back into place, but only succeeded in dislodging it further.
Oh, shit.
He looked at the body, at the face serene in eternal sleep, and wondered for a few seconds if she had voluntarily signed up for this.
Then her eyes opened.
“Fucking gods!” Taz sputtered. He instinctively backed away and crashed into a clothes rack displaying twenty-second-century Ragma monks’ robes.
Zombies, he thought at first, as his panic rose. As a green recruit, he had ended up assigned to a mission on Corlon where a biochemical weapons plant had exploded. While the workers affected by toxic spores were technically still alive, they had lurched around and tried to bite each other’s faces off. He had been ordered to aim for the head.
He also had an overactive imagination and a penchant for the cheesy zombie vids they showed at Rubidge Station’s cinemas. This was more like a scene out of one of them rather than the Corlon disaster.
With shaking hands, he aimed his regulation laser pistol at the coffin, where muffled thumps pounded from the interior, followed by a weak, bewildered “Hello?”
T
az had never heard of a talking zombie. He lowered his weapon slightly, but didn’t move towards the coffin.
The lid lifted, and the exhibit’s—the woman’s—head peeked out, her dark hair disheveled. She saw Taz, and her eyes took in the laser pistol. She looked at him with a beseeching plea in her eyes, which Taz now saw were green and more than a little dazed. Her mouth moved, as though struggling to find words. Finally, she croaked, “Please don’t kill me.”
Taz lowered the weapon to his hip but didn’t holster it. He cautiously approached the coffin. “Who are you?”
She coughed, a dry, hacking sound, and spoke again. “Where am I?”
“Tell me your name.” Taz thought about which sectors were pissed off with the Commons Fleet this year. At least three, he figured. What a brilliant way to infiltrate a ship: Make the spies appear like dead museum exhibits.
“Lily Stewart,” the woman replied. “Can you help me up? My legs are numb.”
Taz brought up the weapon again and aimed it at her heart. “Who do you work for?”
She managed to lift her knees and she wiggled her feet to get the circulation going. “I was working for Lazarus Cryonics,” she said. “Please help me up. I need some water.” Her eyes focused, and she saw the weapon trained on her, and held up her hands in surrender. “I’m not a threat, I promise,” she said. “I don’t even know where I am.”
Taz peered in the coffin. Beside her was a small black satchel made of an unfamiliar fabric. It was large enough to conceal a weapon. “Give me your bag,” he said. “Lift it out and drop it on the floor.”
She looked surprised. “My purse? You can have it, just please don’t hurt me.”
Taz had to give her credit for acting the part of a ditzy stowaway. Her eyes kept drooping and he saw the fine tremors in her hands as she lifted the bag and let it fall to the floor. Taz poked it with his foot, then bent down to turn it over with the barrel of the laser pistol. The bag’s contents spilled across the floor.
“Hey!” she protested. “That’s a new phone!”
A palm-sized device with a flat screen was on top of the debris that fell out of the bag. There was also a collection of old-fashioned metal keys, a paperback book, some tubes that looked like cosmetics, slips of paper, and a pink wallet.
There was something very wrong with this picture. Not just because a supposedly dead exhibit had resurrected itself, but because the charade was so well done. Whoever was employing her had done his homework. A bound book, for the gods’ sakes!
She had hoisted herself up and pulled herself out of the coffin, gracelessly crawling to the floor. “Where am I?” she repeated.
Taz didn’t reply. Instead, he tapped his comm badge. “Shraft to Lieutenant Steg,” he said. “We have a live one in the cargo hold.”
* * *
Lieutenant Steg was not happy. But then, he was always a little pissed off about something. Acting Captain Rian Marska gave up trying to get an intelligible explanation for the security chief’s blustering through his comm badge and merely waited for him to finish. The lieutenant shouted into Rian’s comm set, interrupting his mediation between a pair of ensigns from engineering with demands for a private conversation. Rian heard the words “Shraft” and “idiocy” in the same sentence and immediately dismissed the ensigns. At least Steg’s latest diatribe would be more interesting than settling a fight over who got the prime tables in the mess.
“I don’t know how the stupid shit managed to get through the academy,” the lieutenant sputtered. “Is this his idea of a joke?”
“If it is, I’ll handle it,” Rian replied smoothly. “What does he mean, ‘a live one’?”
“He said something’s still alive in the cargo bay he’s supposed to be sorting through. The stupid shit—”
“Language, Lieutenant. I’ll be right there.”
The captain rose from his seat. He knew about Ensign Shraft’s regrettable romantic entanglement with Steg’s younger sister, although the gods only knew why he did. He did his best to remain professional and out of the Defiant crew’s personal lives, often to no avail. He never expected a patrol ship captaincy would mean solving more human resources issues than anything else.
Ensign Shraft had the bare minimum of common sense to make a go of it as a Fleet officer. While he had graduated from the academy with a concentration in engineering, he had instead been assigned to communications on his first posting to keep him out of trouble. Rian had discovered the hard way after two days on board that Shraft’s favorite things to do involved reprogramming bots for his own amusement and hitting on as many women as he could. He wasn’t a practical joker though; Fleet wouldn’t have tolerated that.
The captain was aware of the gravity issues in the Defiant’s cargo hold, which was why he had protested hauling the artifacts to Rubidge Station’s new museum. Half of them were bound to be damaged by the time they were to be delivered, but Fleet said his ship was the only one with an empty hold passing through the station’s sector in time for the opening.
He left his office off the bridge and took the lift to the cargo hold, meeting Lieutenant Steg as the security chief stepped off another. The lieutenant was scowling, of course, made more menacing by the faded scar across his forehead. The officer’s uniform strained at the shoulders, a testament to his size and strength.
“If he’s fucking around—” Steg began, but Rian cut him off.
“Brig,” Rian replied curtly. “And what did I say about your language?” They stepped through the automatic door to the cargo hold and were immediately assaulted by the heat.
Ensign Shraft was standing at the other end of the hold, but crates blocked the view of the lower half of his body. His laser pistol aimed at something, and his gaze barely flickered from his target as his commanding officers entered. They stepped around the crates and Rian felt a little dizzy in the spots where the gravity wasn’t holding tight.
A young woman sat on the floor on the receiving end of Shraft’s weapon. Her back was supported by an open plastiglas coffin, and her bare legs were set straight out in front of her, covered to her knees by a light blue dress. Her feet were tilted to either side, as if weighted down by the flimsy heeled sandals she wore. She looked queasy and confused, and more than a little terrified of the ensign’s laser pistol; her eyes were glassy and unfocused.
“I’ll be damned,” Steg said.
“I think she’s a spy, sir,” Shraft intoned.
The woman shook her head, and raised a hand to it as if the movement hurt. “No, I’m not,” she said softly. Her voice sounded scratchy and hoarse, like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
“Who are you?” Rian demanded crisply.
“Lily Stewart,” she said. “I can’t get any answers from him—” she pointed at a shaking finger at Shraft—”and he won’t give me back my purse or tell me who he is or where we are.”
Rian was going to hold off on the introductions until he was sure of this woman’s identity. She didn’t seem to be a threat yet and was obviously under the influence of something so he didn’t call for a full security team. “Ensign, lower your weapon.”
Shraft reluctantly complied.
“Where are you from?” Rian asked.
“Toronto,” she said, and gave a wheezing cough. “Well, I was born and raised in Courtice, but I moved to Toronto about six weeks ago.”
The places were unfamiliar to Rian. “Where is this Toronto?” he asked suspiciously.
“Canada,” she said, and even through her glassy-eyed haze, he caught her disbelieving undertone, as though he should have heard of that place.
“Canada?” said Steg. Sarcasm laced his words. Rian shot him a look.
“North America,” the woman said. A shaking hand smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt.
Rian’s eyebrow shot up. He had only a passing knowledge of the Commons’ oldest settlements, but North America sounded familiar. One of the former geographic areas on Earth. He turned to Shraft.
�
��Ensign, what exhibit is this?” he asked quietly.
“Earth humanoid, twenty-first century,” he replied.
He remembered reading the cargo manifest before it was loaded into the hold back on the planet of Repub-1. One of the natural history artifacts listed had been discovered a couple of years prior on a forgotten, uninhabited planet in Earth’s solar system. The only example of what was then a novel means of preservation in a pile of discarded remains.
Trepidation, then shock, left a sour taste in his mouth. It was too horrible and impossible to be true.
He didn’t let his face betray his thoughts as he regarded the woman sitting on the floor. “What day is this?” he asked gently.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Captain,” said Steg, disgust in his voice. “I should call a security team.” One meaty hand poised over the comm badge clipped to his collar, but Rian shook his head.
“What was the last day you remember?” he prodded.
She thought a moment, and her head lolled to the side and her eyes closed. She forced it back up, as though fighting to keep conscious. “August third, 2017,” she said finally.
Rian took a deep breath of the humid air and forced himself to stay calm. He crouched down until he was almost level with her face. A pair of wide glazed-over green eyes stared back at him. He was either going to be delivering to her the worst news of her life, or he was about to make a huge security breach. “You’re on the Commons Fleet ship Defiant,” he said finally.
“A ship? We’re on the water, then.”
“No, not exactly.” Rian was unsure how to deliver this kind of news. His training had never prepared him for this.
“Then where are we?”
Might as well be honest. “Right now, the Keros Quadrant, a Commons-controlled area of space. We’re on our way to Rubidge Station.” He ignored Steg’s snort at revealing that information to a stranger and focused on Lily Stewart in front of him.
“Space?” she said, her voice small and frightened.
If she was a spy—and Rian thought that looked like less and less of a possibility—then she was good at it.
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