Then she remembered being picked up and held by someone with startling blue eyes, who felt safe and spoke quietly, soothingly, and the feeling of safety being wrenched away when she heard the year 2867.
This couldn’t be. It had to be a dream. She must have met up with a couple of friends from her university days, friends she had been playing phone-tag with since she moved, and had a little too much to drink, and ended up in a hospital somewhere. It didn’t look like any hospital room she’d ever seen, but stranger things had happened when tequila was involved.
There was some light offered by ceiling panels, and she found her sandals at the foot of the bed. She looked around for a light switch to brighten the windowless room a little but found nothing. Remembering Zadbac and Pitro, but not recalling the name of the bar or who she could have met up with the night before, she looked around the room in vain for something to use as a makeshift weapon.
If either of them were on the other side of the door, she would just have to pray and make a run for it. She didn’t want a repeat of what happened last time she tried that, so she carried her shoes by the straps in one hand.
The door slid open sideways when she stepped in front of it, surprising her. It revealed what looked like a waiting room, shaped like an octagon, with doors and short hallways branching off the sides. She resisted closing her eyes against the bright light and the accompanying headache, and took stock of her surroundings. Through one glass-walled hallway she could see what looked to be an office, with a computer screen mounted on a desk.
She tiptoed into the waiting room and the door closed behind her. Lily hadn’t been in a hospital with automatic doors to private rooms, but there was a first for everything. She looked to either side for a way out.
Before she could decide which direction to take, another door opened and a vaguely familiar man in a white lab coat strode into the waiting room. He looked to be past sixty, his thinning hair silver in the bright light overhead. He smiled warmly when he saw her. “Good afternoon, Miss Stewart,” he said. “I came by to check on you. Your monitor said you woke up.”
Monitor? What was more troubling to Lily was that she recalled hearing the friendly, reassuring timbre of his voice very recently in the context of her dream. “Hi,” she said awkwardly. “You know my name, and I’m sure I was introduced to you before, but I’ve forgotten.”
“I’m Dr. Ashford,” he said. He spied the sandals in her hand.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” There was no harm in asking.
“No. I think we should sit down and have a talk, though. My office is just through there.” He gestured to one of the hallways off the octagon. “How are you feeling today?”
Lily slid her feet into her shoes and followed him. There was something about him that was very reassuring and told her she could trust him. She still wasn’t going to let herself do so; despite Zadbac and Pitro’s creepiness she hadn’t expected them to do what they did.
If nothing else, maybe there was something she could use as a weapon in his office.
In response to his question, she said, “I have a headache.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
He led to her to the office she saw through the glass walls. He sat behind the desk, and motioned for her to sit. There were a few chairs in front of it, and she took the one closest to the door, just in case. She sat on the edge of it and looked around his office, and was disappointed. There wasn’t even a pencil on the desktop if she needed a weapon.
“You’ve been asleep for twenty-one hours,” Dr. Ashford said. “You were brought to sick bay at eighteen hundred hours last night. You woke up earlier than I expected.”
Lily counted the hours in her head. So it was around three in the afternoon. “What happened?” she asked.
“You were brought in by Captain Marska and two of his crew,” he said gently. “Do you remember?”
Lily remembered the blue eyes and inexplicable feeling of calm coming from him, as though he were an antidote to the numbing terror she felt when she woke up. She nodded. “A little.”
“You were under the influence of a heavy sedative,” he continued. He laid a small, flat instrument not unlike her cell phone—where the hell was her purse, anyway?— on the desktop. “I did a basic medical scan when you were brought in and it read the presence of tonismi in your bloodstream.”
Aside from smoking pot in the woods with her friends a few times as a teenager, Lily had never used drugs. “I don’t know what that is,” she replied.
“It’s utilized by the Nym, a race living outside the Fringes in its own quadrant.”
Quadrant? Nym?
Sick bay?
That word had been tossed around when she was held by the man with the striking blue eyes. She pinched the skin on the back of her hand and if that was any indication, she was definitely awake.
Realization dawned on her.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “This is real.”
A wave of panic crested over her and she thought she might faint. Black spots appeared in her field of vision, and she put her head between her knees and forced herself to breathe. A few tears slowly coursed down her cheeks.
‘There’s more, Miss Stewart,” Ashford said. Sadness tinged his voice.
Lily hazily remembered a big, burly, and very angry man, furiously telling her what year it was, as if she should know. She thought she’d known, and had been wrong. She sat up slowly and wiped her eyes.
“Oh, no,” she said softly. “I’m not where I’m supposed to be, am I? What year is this?” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not,” the doctor said. “It’s 2867, in solar years.” He set a box of tissues on the desk. Lily took one and dabbed her eyes, but it was futile. She couldn’t stop crying.
“You know,” she said, “I almost believe this after what happened to me at work yesterday. It’s one of two explanations, the other being that I’ve completely snapped and I’m hallucinating this in a padded room somewhere.” Either possibility was terrifying.
She sobbed in silence for a few moments, until the doctor quietly cleared his throat. “I have to notify the captain, Miss Stewart,” he said.
“In a minute,” she said. “He’s the captain of what?”
“The Defiant, a patrol ship in the Commonwealth Space Fleet.”
Space Fleet. Well, this was getting better and better. She nodded and sniffled into a handful of tissues.
“He’ll need you to tell us everything you remember, when you’re able to.”
She nodded again.
Ashford tapped a small circular badge affixed to his shirt collar. “Ashford to the captain,” he said.
“Marska here.” The voice sounded through the disc, and it was familiar.
“Our guest has woken up and would like to speak to you.”
Actually, Lily didn’t, but she didn’t think she had a choice in the matter.
The disembodied voice said, “I’ll be there in five.”
Ashford stood up, the device he called a mediscan in his hand. He held it out in front of her. “I’m going to give you a check-up, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Here?” There wasn’t an exam table or stethoscope in sight. And the walls were windows.
“Yes, you’ll find it less invasive than at home.” He flicked a switch on the mediscan and held it out in front of her for a few minutes. Lily watched him as he scanned her.
“Done,” he said, and smiled.
“That’s it? You’re not going to take my blood pressure?”
“I did,” he answered. “It looks fine, and the tonismi is out of your system. You’ve had some medical work done that’s obsolete now, but otherwise you’re very healthy.” She must have looked at him with a question in her eyes, because he clarified. “You’ve had your appendix removed in a way that hasn’t been performed in centuries, and today I picked up some dental work.”
“My te
eth are all mine,” she protested.
“You’ve had a cavity that was filled in,” he corrected her. “I can also see that your wisdom teeth were extracted fairly recently.”
Lily’s sniffled, but her curiosity was piqued. “Three years ago. How else do you get them out?”
“Painlessly.” Any other explanation he could have offered was cut short by the arrival of the angry man from the night before. He stormed into the office, ignoring Ashford and focusing on Lily.
“You’re awake,” he said, his voice a feral growl.
Fear snaked down Lily’s spine. “Yes,” she squeaked.
“Not now, Lieutenant,” said an exasperated voice from behind him. The big man stepped aside to let him through.
Lily immediately recognized his azure eyes, as striking now as they had been the previous night.
He was almost as tall as the angry one, but still lean and muscled where the other was starting to go to fat. His hair was so dark it was nearly black, and touched his collar as though he had forgotten to get a haircut, and a day’s worth of beard graced his jaw. His uniform was impeccable in contrast, a dark blue ensemble with insignia pinned to it: four small silver stars. A small disc like Ashford’s was clipped to the collar.
His blue gaze fixed on hers and stared at her with an intensity that made her fidget.
She had managed to force herself to stop crying, but at some point soon the tears would come again and not let up until her body decided it was ready. She pushed her overgrown bangs out of her eyes and straightened her shoulders, determined to show these spacemen that twenty-first century women were made of sterner stuff than she looked. And felt.
Under the angry man’s glare, she stood up. “Sirs,” she said, glancing between them. “Lily Stewart.”
The blue-eyed man held out his hand and Lily accepted it. So that little piece of etiquette hadn’t changed in that last 850 years. “Rian Marska, acting captain of the Defiant,” he said, in that same quiet, commanding tone she recalled from the night before. He had the firm grip she would have expected.
Releasing her fingers, he introduced his companion. “This is Lieutenant Grigha Steg, security chief.” The man called Steg grunted an acknowledgment and kept his hands fisted at his sides.
Captain Marska and Lieutenant Steg took seats around the doctor’s desk, a detail the security chief objected to. “It would be better to interrogate her on deck four,” he protested.
Whatever deck four was, Lily didn’t want to find out.
“No one’s being interrogated,” the captain said. “Not yet. Sit down.”
“But, sir...”
“Lieutenant, I appreciate your caution, but no.” He turned to Lily. “I need you to be completely honest with me. We’ve never had an incident like this in Fleet, and my commanding officers and Steg here think you may be a spy. Are you?”
“No,” said Lily automatically. Suspicion bloomed across the security chief’s face and the captain raised an eyebrow. “I’m a receptionist and administrative assistant at Lazarus Cryonics. Or I was,” she clarified.
“What else?” Steg demanded.
Lily thought about what else she was. Downtown apartment-dweller. Regular voter in elections. Driver of a 2009 Toyota that had seen better days. Former director of operations at Stewart Tree Farms. Would-be high school history teacher, when she had the grief from her father’s death purged from her system enough to return to school. “I have a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Ontario,” she said finally. “And before moving to Toronto and taking the job at the cryonics lab, I worked for my father’s company.”
“What kind of business?”
“Christmas tree farm.” Catching Rian’s questioning look in the corner of her eye, she explained, “A holiday. We grew trees to sell for it. Mostly Douglas and Balsam firs.” She sighed. “I guess Christmas isn’t observed anymore.”
“Earth still has an annual winter festival,” Ashford assured her. “Not with what you’ve just described, but I’ve heard of Christmas.” She looked at him, surprised. “I grew up there,” he added.
She brightened. “Where are you from?”
“Earth’s demographics and geographic borders have changed a great deal,” he said. “I’m from the Northlands, which was previously unpopulated. Most of Earth’s population lives there now.”
Lily tried to guess where the Northlands might be. “You’re from the North Pole?” she guessed. Maybe the hippies had been right about climate change. She caught Steg’s irritated look and tamped down her nervousness. The man looked like he could comfortably arm-wrestle a grizzly bear and have enough energy left over to rip a door off her car. He sighed in frustration, and the captain shot him a warning look.
“Earth has been home to shipyards for over four hundred years,” Marska explained.
“No one actually wants to live there,” Steg added.
“Another word out of you and you’re going right back to security,” the captain threatened. Steg shut up. “Go on, Miss Stewart.”
“Lily,” she said automatically.
Their eyes locked and for another brief second she felt something melt in her. Then it was gone, and his next words were all business. “Please continue.”
But something else nagged at her, and she wanted it out in the open. “You’re speaking English,” she said to them.
The captain replied. “We’re speaking one of the dialects of the original Republic colonies. There are fifteen official languages in Commons space and a number of dialects in each. This one is the most widely spoken in the Fleet, but most other officers are fluent in at least two or three. In fact, if you include the dialects as individual languages, there are more than sixty...” Ashford cleared his throat, and Marska quieted and looked at his hands.
“Y a til quelque’un qui parle français?” Lily asked experimentally. At their blank looks, she exhaled noisily. “I spent all that time failing French for nothing.” She soldiered on, and continued her story. “I moved to Toronto in June. A lot of things in my life—” She fumbled for words. “Unraveled. I was hired by Lazarus Cryonics about six weeks later, to book appointments for consultations, answer the phone, reconcile their accounts. I did a lot of that at the tree farm.” In reality, she ended up playing zombie games on the computer, the phone rarely rang, and she never had the chance to go over the books in her short time there. “There were two doctors at the lab, and me. That’s it. Their names were Zadbac and Pitro.”
At that pronouncement, Marska’s and Ashford’s eyes widened and Steg hissed, “Spy!”
“Final warning, Lieutenant,” said Marska.
Lily ignored Steg and asked the captain, “You know them?”
“We know of Zadbac,” Marska said. “Go on.”
“I’d been working there about two weeks when a client named Andrew Claybourne made an appointment to look into having his head frozen,” she continued. Ashford hid a smile. Marska tried to. Steg scowled.
“Cryonics was never successful,” Ashford said. “One of the greatest scams ever perpetuated in history.”
“Except me,” Lily said.
“You were never dead.”
Lily soldiered on, forcing herself to relive that final afternoon in horrifying detail. “I heard Mr. Claybourne yelling in the lab,” she said. “In the doctor’s office. I went in and he’d been attacked. It looked like someone had smashed his face in and bitten his hand. Dr. Pitro did it, I think, and he was...licking blood off his fingers.” She shuddered. “Andrew Claybourne had a big needle sticking out the side of his neck.” She gasped, remembering the news that morning. “There were two bodies that washed up in the river right before...they were found with syringes sticking out of their necks, too.” Captain Marska nodded.
“I ran out of the lab to the street, but I tripped and Dr. Zadbac caught me.” She took a deep breath and willed the tears away. “He did something to the air. I remember these orange stripes, bars, whatever they were, all around us, and
he said no one could hear or see us. Then he sprayed me here.” She pointed to the pulse point on the side of her neck. “The next thing I remember, I woke up in that room with that other guy pointing a ray gun at me.”
She watched the looks being exchanged between the doctor and officers.
“Nym,” growled Steg.
Marska cut him off. “Can you describe these doctors, Miss Stewart?”
She didn’t question why, although they clearly knew about Zadbac already. “Creepy vampire-like psychotics” probably wouldn’t cut it, but Lily was unsure how to describe them more succinctly. Her father had been the writer, not her. “Very tall,” she said. “Thin, with heads that didn’t really fit their bodies. They looked like bobbleheads.” Ashford and Marska looked at her questioningly but she didn’t explain. “Bulgy eyes. Zadbac’s were all black and Pitro’s lime-green. They both had really jagged teeth, too, but Zadbac’s looked worse.”
“So you’ve dealt with the Nym,” Steg snapped.
“I’m not a spy!”
“She’s not a spy,” Ashford echoed. “Captain, remember what I told you last night?” Marska nodded.
Lieutenant Steg sputtered, “What? I have a right to know details about prisoners on this ship!”
“What details?” Lily asked, worried.
Addressing everyone, Ashford tapped the mediscan unit on the desk. “I took a quick reading last night when she was brought in,” he began. “It showed the presence of tonismi and other details that corroborate her story of being from the twenty-first century.
“It detected antigens for diphtheria and pertussis. Diphtheria hasn’t infected humans in hundreds of years and while some of the Fringes worlds have their own unique strains of disease, they’re nowhere near as close to something like pertussis,” he finished.
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