Supernova

by Jessica Marting

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  This time Shraft spoke. “We don’t have days. We use stardates.”

  A very confused look crossed her face. She looked around at the odd objects in the cargo hold and the men standing before her. “What year is this?” she asked warily, her voice a little stronger.

  “Give it up already,” boomed Steg, and her shoulders jumped slightly. “It’s 2867.”

  Terror filled her eyes, and her mouth dropped open. “No,” she breathed. She rose unsteadily to her feet and swayed. “No, no, no!” She leaned against the coffin for balance and pointed at a pile of stuff on the floor. “My cell phone. My wallet,” she said. “Give it to me.” Shraft looked at the captain, and Rian nodded his permission. He picked up a folded-over pink bundle and handed it to her. She opened it and struggled with something inside before giving up and handing it over to him. “My ID,” she croaked. “My credit cards.”

  Rian took the wallet and peeled out a few thin cards from slots inset in the leather. They were nearly plastered to the material and made a tearing sound as they were removed. They were made of plastic, with crude holograms inlaid into them. A few bore her name and picture and detailed the rights associated with the cards. Lily Stewart, resident of a long-ago city on a planet that now housed shipyards and its workers. Born on February 10, 1988.

  The faulty coffin seal and fritzy environmental controls. Her total ignorance which seemed too genuine to be feigned. Her inability to stand on her own using muscles that hadn’t moved in over eight hundred years, if this woman’s primitive belongings were any indication. Either she was a hell of an actress, or, as Rian suspected, she was telling the truth.

  He looked at the woman, leaning unsteadily against the coffin that had held her in stasis for centuries. She looked bewildered, stunned, and still drugged from whatever had been administered, and the confusion hadn’t abated from her eyes, but thank the gods, she wasn’t crying. Rian Marska had never known what to do with a crying woman, but when the drugs wore off and her fear returned, he knew he would have to figure it out.

  He pushed that thought from his mind. “Lieutenant, pick up her bag,” he ordered. Turning to Lily Stewart, he asked, “Can you walk?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She took a few tentative steps, wobbling on her heeled sandals. “My legs aren’t working right,” she admitted. “And I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

  Steg and Shraft each took a few steps back. Rian rolled his eyes. “Take a few deep breaths,” he advised. “I know it’s hot in here and that isn’t helping.” He tugged on the collar of his Fleet-issued jacket. Sweat was forming at his temples. He held out a hand to steady her, and she sighed and fell into his chest, her knees buckling.

  Rian caught her and bent at the knees, hooking his other arm around the back of her legs and picked her up. He cradled her to his chest and her head fell heavily against his shoulder. “Lieutenant, notify sick bay about their new patient,” he ordered.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a security detail, sir?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to transport her to sick bay, sir?” Steg asked. “I can call the team and have them configure the beam.”

  Rian turned around to leave the cargo hold. Steg and Shraft followed. “If she’s feeling sick now, it’s going to be a hell of a lot worse after the transport. She’s not used to it.”

  Lily Stewart lay limp in his arms. “I’m right here,” she said sleepily. “You don’t have to talk like I can’t hear you.”

  “Apologies,” he said.

  They stepped into the corridor, greeted by a rush of cool air. “If you think you’re going to be sick, tell me,” Rian said.

  “Did you just get your suit back from the cleaners?” came her muffled reply against his shoulder. Her breath tickled his neck and his skin prickled involuntarily.

  “No,” he said, and fought back a smile. Steg pressed the button for the lift.

  “I feel better out here,” she said.

  “The environmental controls are a little off in the cargo hold,” explained Rian. The lift doors opened and they entered. Rian ordered it to deck six, to the ship’s sick bay. Understaffed, of course, but that was the usual state of things aboard this rust bucket.

  “Controls? Like a thermostat?” she asked sleepily.

  Rian caught Steg and Shraft’s questioning looks and shrugged a little himself. “Sure,” he told her, and she lifted her head from his shoulder.

  “You can put me down now,” she said softly. Rian obliged, and she leaned against the lift’s wall, blinking against its bright light. “I’m really not at home,” she said, dismay in her voice.

  Please don’t cry, Rian silently told her. All I’ll be able to do is stand here like an idiot.

  She didn’t cry, just stared up at him, her green eyes large and glassy and lips parted in uncertainty, then at Steg and Shraft. The ensign couldn’t wipe the look of incredulity off his face and Rian damned himself for not ordering him to stay in the hold. Steg raised a menacing eyebrow at her and she sucked in a harsh breath in response. She turned back to Rian. The look on her face tore at him, a sensation he wasn’t accustomed to experiencing after sixteen years in the military. He had seen much worse.

  He looked away. She was simply one more unusual occurrence he had to deal with. Besides the possibility of her being some sort of spy, however small, there was still the issue of his captaincy on the Defiant. He wanted a permanent captaincy and hadn’t risen through the Fleet ranks as quickly as he had by letting damsels in distress distract him.

  He chanced another look at her, at the terrified shock on her face. This was beyond distress.

  The lift stopped at deck six, where the Defiant’s chief medical officer, Ashford, met them in the sick bay’s foyer. He was a year or two away from retirement, silver-haired, and infinitely patient. He was also qualified to do his job, a trait that most of Rian’s crew often lacked, and in the week he had been on board, he hadn’t complained about his new posting. He watched the woman trailing between Rian and Steg. She took in her surroundings like a lost child. “Who’s this?” Ashford asked. “Accident in the cargo hold? I have a bed ready as the lieutenant asked.”

  “An accident of sorts,” Rian confirmed. “Steg, Shraft—return to your stations. Shraft, that means the cargo hold.” He could almost hear the ensign swearing at him in his mind as he walked away. Bloody Vu’saarns. No matter what Shraft’s personnel file said, Rian was still sure he harbored some kind of telepathic ability. Steg muttered something unintelligible and held out Lily’s satchel between two fingers. Rian hooked the strap over his wrist and let it dangle.

  “Who are you?” she asked the doctor.

  “Doctor Orrin Ashford.” As usual, the doctor was unruffled. “Who might you be?”

  “Lily Stewart.”

  Dr. Ashford held out a mediscan unit and held it a few inches from her body. His eyebrows knitted together and he frowned.

  “Captain, where did you find her?”

  “In a coffin in the hold.”

  Ashford slipped the unit into his lab coat pocket. “Miss Stewart, how are you feeling?”

  “Sick and thirsty.”

  “Unsurprising, but we can do something about both,” he promised her. He gestured to a room off the foyer. “Bring her in here, Captain.”

  “You’ve been sedated,” Ashford explained to Lily.

  She shrugged clumsily. “I must have been, to be dreaming about this.”

  Both Rian and Ashford tensed at that statement but didn’t contradict her. What was the point? The doctor ordered the lights on, and the illumination panels on the ceiling glowed dimly. He turned down the sheets on the bed in the center of the room and gestured to it. “Come over here, Miss Stewart,” Ashford suggested gently. She stared at the bed for a moment and stepped out of her shoes, padding to it on bare feet.

  “Captain, could you bring our patient some water?” Ashford ask
ed. “There’s a dispenser in my office.”

  Rian obediently went to the doctor’s office, a small room at the back of the infirmary. He left the satchel on Ashford’s desk and returned to Lily’s room with a plastic cup of water. She gave a barely audible “Thank you” and took a few sips. She lay back down on the pillows.

  “You need to sleep,” Ashford said quietly.

  “I just woke up!” she protested half-heartedly. But her eyes were rapidly closing. She murmured, “This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever been in.” She gazed at Rian, her eyes taking in his face for a brief, lucid moment. A small smile played across her lips, and his heart constricted for a second. It had to be caused by the heat from the cargo hold.

  Her eyes closed peacefully, and within seconds she was asleep.

  Ashford and Rian left the room, the door sliding shut behind them and took seats in his office. Ashford activated monitors for her room that would keep him informed of her life signs and movements while Rian fidgeted in his seat. The mediscan would have told him things about his mysterious new patient. “Doctor?” Rian said expectantly.

  He laid his mediscan unit on the desktop. “You say you found her with an exhibit for Rubidge Station?”

  “Shraft did. She woke up in a coffin that was supposed to be from the twenty-first century.” His curiosity was only getting stronger. “What did your scanner say?”

  “Do you really think she’s from that time?” Ashford countered.

  “I think it’s a possibility worth exploring,” Rian replied carefully.

  Ashford appeared to weigh his words before replying. “So do I,” he finally agreed. “I’m going to do a full exam when she wakes up, but the basic scan I took told me a couple of things that may back up her story. But first, it picked up high tonismi levels, which prevents me from checking out as much as I like.”

  Rian started. Tonismi was a heavy tranquilizer that caused total paralysis that mimicked death, outlawed in the Commons and Kurran Empire. It was still favored by the Nym, a ruthless, cold-blooded people hell-bent on controlling the galaxy.

  The doctor’s words hit him like a physical blow, and he felt like an idiot. He deliberately kept his voice low and even, fury coloring his words. “So she’s a spy for the Nym,” he said tightly, tamping down his temper. “I didn’t know they resorted to using humanoid women in coffins.” This was a first for the Fleet. The Nym loathed anyone who wasn’t one of their own. “I can’t believe I have a Nym spy on my ship.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Ashford said patiently. “The tonismi is wearing off, and my mediscan picked up something else unusual that lends some credibility to her story.”

  Rian unclenched the fist he didn’t know he had been making and nodded.

  “Two things, actually. First, she’s been immunized.”

  “Everyone gets immunized,” Rian argued. “Coll particles. You don’t have to go to medical school to know that.”

  “Captain, please. She hasn’t been immunized against Coll particles.”

  Okay, that was a bit of a stretch, but not impossible. It was theoretically possible to live without that vaccine and not be a hacking, wheezing mess, but only if one avoided all interstellar travel. In the Commons, that was a necessity. The air recyclers on ships and stations emitted the miniscule particles, causing a perpetual mild flu. The symptoms could be averted with the vaccine.

  “So she’s from the Fringes then,” Rian deduced, referring to the sparsely populated and somewhat reclusive worlds outside the Commons proper. There were those on the Fringes who never left their home planets.

  Ashford waited, but Rian could tell his patience was thinning. “I’m sorry, Doctor, continue.”

  “She’s been immunized against diphtheria and pertussis,” Ashford continued. “The antigens are still in her bloodstream. I studied those diseases in medical school. They’re extinct Earth diseases; they haven’t existed in over five hundred years.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “You’ve seen my personnel file. I was born on Earth. My father worked in the shipyard and my mother was a nurse.”

  Rian had never heard of the diseases, but he wasn’t a doctor. “Go on.”

  “Her appendix is gone,” Ashford continued. “It was cut out. She probably has a scar.”

  “What?” The lack of the Coll vaccine was possible. But no one had things cut out of them anymore.

  “It was surgically removed,” the doctor explained. “Using ancient techniques. It’s healed of course, but the mediscan picked up the internal scarring from the instruments the surgeon used. Someone sliced her open the old-fashioned way with a scalpel and cut out the appendix.”

  Rian’s stomach turned over, and he blanched. The only kind of surgery he knew of involved simple, nearly painless laser procedures. Ashford leaned back in his chair and regarded him thoughtfully across the desk.

  “Gods,” Rian finally managed.

  “Presumably, she was sedated for the surgery,” Ashford returned dryly. “Two of her ribs have been broken in the past, and healed naturally. None of the bone tissue was regenerated. If she’s a spy, whoever she works for made her suffer first.” He regarded the captain thoughtfully across his desk. “Have you ever broken anything?”

  “Yes, it’s part of my job description. I broke my collarbone when I was an ensign. It was during the civil war on Naa’natcha.” Rian still had a scar, but some quick field medicine had tranquilized the pain so he could keep fighting, and the bone was regenerated in a few hours.

  “Imagine living with that until it healed on its own.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He gestured to the bag on his desk. “Now, on to this.” He held the mediscan unit over it, and it emitted a small beep. “It’s detected tonismi residue in this, and the chemicals used for her preservation. Be careful.”

  Again, Rian damned himself for not thinking straight. He felt fine, so he wouldn’t worry about any lingering effects of the drug, but he had no idea what was used to preserve remains in her time.

  “I’ll take a look at this, and put it in a decon locker,” Ashford assured him. There was a bank of individual decontamination units for medical waste at the back of infirmary. “It’s safe to handle for short periods of time.” He poked around the bag and took out the crude ID cards, opened the pink wallet and spread some printed paper credits across the desk, along with her other belongings.

  “Keys,” Ashford said, jangling a ring of metal tags in his hand.

  Rian sighed. “I’m not completely ignorant, Doctor. My sister uses keys in her home. Her daughter has figured out how to use the palm locks to get out of the house.”

  Ashford picked up the old-fashioned communicator that Lily called a cellphone. The unit was shut off, its screen dark. Rian doubted the thing would work, that whatever technology had supported it was long gone. He shook his head, trying to remain neutral until the doctor finished. The cosmetics in the slim tubes would have gone rancid, as well. He picked up a small slip of paper. It took him a moment to read it—the written language had changed over the last eight hundred-odd years—but was able to make out that it was a store receipt, issued for the purchases of tampons and Diet Coke, whatever they were.

  “I’m still going to do a complete exam,” Ashford said, and Rian set down the receipt. The doctor gathered up her belongings and stuffed them back in the satchel. “But based on my scan and the things we have here, I’m inclined to believe this woman really is from the twenty-first century.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Rian asked.

  “My mediscan doesn’t lie,” Ashford said.

  “What about the tonismi?”

  “When it wears off, we’ll ask her,” Ashford replied. “It should be out of her system within the next twenty-four hours, if not sooner. Tonismi is a fussy drug, and I don’t want to risk anything by giving her something to counteract it.”

  “What about negative reactions? Allergies?”

  Ashford s
hook his head. “If someone wakes up after receiving a dose, they’ll live.”

  Rian tried to formulate a hypothesis for how a Nym sedative ended up drugging someone born 850 years ago, and came up with nothing besides her being a spy. He would have to wait until she woke, and notify Fleet in the meantime.

  “I’m going to check on her,” Rian said, and rose from his seat. “I’ll send a transmit to the admirals—”

  “The first of many,” Ashford wryly interrupted.

  “Likely. I also want to be informed as soon as she wakes up.”

  Ashford demurred and Rian went back to her room. The door opened when he pressed his palm into the lock and quietly stepped into the darkened room.

  She was deeply asleep. Rian drew the blanket folded at the end of the bed over her out of an instinct he didn’t know he had, wanting her to be comfortable. She stirred a little at the movement but didn’t wake. He doubted she would be so docile when the drugs wore off.

  “Captain,” Ashford whispered from the doorway. “I’ll notify you when she wakes up.”

  Embarrassed at being caught being kind to a possible spy, he left the room. But not without a last look at the bed.

  Chapter 3

  Lily woke in a darkened room, the narrow bed unfamiliar. Her new Dufferin Grove apartment had lots of windows; it was one of the reasons she had rented the place. Where was the sun? For that matter, where were the windows?

  Her head throbbed when she forced herself to sit up. She threw off the blanket and found she was fully dressed save for her shoes, and she sat up, her bare feet dangling over the edge of the bed. She had ended up here somehow, and the events were slowly and hazily reconstructing themselves in her mind.

  Lazarus Cryonics. Andrew Claybourne, his hand half torn off and his face smashed in. Zadbac and Pitro standing over him, about as irritated as if he were nothing but a housefly, then Zadbac chasing her into the street.

  The orange bars caging her in on Wilson Avenue’s sidewalk.

  What the hell had happened after that?

  She remembered nothing but terror giving way to heavy numbness as her body lost control of itself. Then she woke up in a plastic box, feeling like she had slept off a night of four-dollar tequila. Feeling a strange mixture of calm and panic when she broke out of the box, as though her body couldn’t process what her brain was telling it, to the sight of a sweating man pointing a gun at her. She remembered feeling cold and heavy despite the cloying heat of the crowded room she found herself in, as though her body was protecting itself from the temperature.