I’d swear this AI had the personality of Jahelia Sord herself.
My Chron companion engaged in a quick, animated discussion with the other two, who seemed agitated and a little angry. They gesticulated to the cells and each other, and pointed to the pile of torn yellow fabric on the floor. At the end of the discussion, they brushed past us and ran off.
“Ask if Hirin and the others have been taken away,” I urged Pita.
She displayed some symbols and I held it out to the Chron, who shook its head and answered.
“Escape. Must find. Danger follows and we are not ready.”
As if to underscore the words, the corridor suddenly shook and the open doors trembled. One swung shut with a clang. I stumbled a little and steadied myself with a hand on the wall. My knees felt incredibly weak and wobbly, and the Chron turned to appraise me with slightly puzzled eyes.
“We have remove the bad machines,” Pita translated again when it spoke.
I could only nod at it—I didn’t want to explain, even through Pita, my fears that perhaps that had been a dangerous thing to do and that it might have made my condition worse. It was quite obvious that the Chron had been trying to help—its characterization of the bioscavs as “bad” made that much clear.
Pushing away from the wall, I forced my legs to carry me a little further into the corridor. From this vantage point I could see the length of the corridor and the way it curved to the right. “Ask it if we’re on a space station,” I suggested to Pita.
She arranged the correct symbols on the screen, and I showed it to the Chron. It nodded and spoke.
“But not complete, and not all the fighters,” Pita said. She was quick now to translate what the Chron said before I even asked, and bring up on the screen whatever I said. The communication had been clunky at first but was smoothing out, despite the insufficiencies of Pita’s database.
Well, that explained why I hadn’t seen anyone other than this one Chron, I thought. They were short-staffed and under attack. Not good.
“Were they all together here?”
“Except for the—sorry, I don’t know that word at all,” Pita said.
Except for which one of them? I wondered. Cerevare, perhaps? She was the only one who was noticeably different.
I put up two fingers behind my head and waggled them to suggest ears. The Chron actually did smile at that, an interesting shifting of plates accompanying the expression, and nodded. It turned over an arm and with one long finger traced a symbol on the inside of its wrist. Cerevare’s Chron tattoo I’d noticed when we first met, at the station on Anar.
“Is she safe?”
“Yes. With our leader. Suspicious of spying.”
Damne. Whatever the Chron symbol meant—or perhaps the mere fact of the tattoo—had made them think Cerevare might be allied with their enemies. So now I had to find the others and find her before we could think about getting out of here.
I pointed down the corridor that passed between the barred cells. “They must have gone that way—we didn’t see them at this end.”
The Chron nodded, and together we started down the hallway. Another hit shook the station and I broke into a jog—if the situation was escalating I needed to reunite everyone fast. The Chron hurried to keep up.
After only a few feet, however, I had to stop, clinging to a cell bar for support. My heart bounced around in my chest like a ship skipping through a wormhole, and sharp pain lanced under my ribs. Cold sweat traced runnels down my spine and arms. Stars like dark fireworks exploded in my vision. Still clutching Pita with one hand, I slid down to my knees.
The Chron was there in an instant, putting a hand on my shoulder, kneeling beside me and speaking in an urgent voice. “Must return to the medical,” Pita translated.
“I have to find my companions,” I managed. “What did you mean when you said, Fear you are the danger here?”
When Pita had translated, the Chron seemed to frown—at least, the plates above its eyes drew downward, suggesting it. After a moment, it put a finger to the smooth floor and roughly sketched the shape of the PrimeCorp logo again. Looked up at me. I nodded.
“PrimeCorp,” I said. “They side with your enemies.” How could I make it clear? “Like you, only—the other side.”
The Chron nodded at the translation on the screen. It said something, and Pita said, “The broken ones.”
Then it tapped the floor where it had “drawn” the symbol, and pointed at me. “The secret to protect,” Pita said when it had finished talking. “You must not allow to tell.”
The pounding in my head made it difficult to concentrate, let alone puzzle out what the Chron was trying to tell me. A flash of heat replaced my chill, and even my t-shirt felt unbearably warm and claustrophobic. Sweat beaded on my skin, sticky and warm. I felt far worse than I had on the Tane Ikai. I gulped air, trying to quell the sensations, trying to focus on the Chron’s words. This was important, dammit. I had to understand.
The schism in Chron society, that Fha had mentioned. These Chron, and the broken ones. Those were the ones allied with PrimeCorp—however that had happened. And how long had the alliance existed? Pita’s dictionary suggested a long time . . . but I forced my thoughts to return to the present. No answers to those questions at the moment.
Fear you are the danger here. Fear you are in danger here. The secret to protect. You must not allow to tell. You must not be allowed to tell.
Yes. If we—if anyone from the Tane Ikai—returned to Nearspace with evidence that PrimeCorp was and had been complicit with the Chron . . . they’d be finished. As Yuskeya had said, the Protectorate would bury them, and to hell with Nearspace’s reliance on PrimeCorp. They’d no longer be too big to fail. They’d fail all the more spectacularly. They’d be ruined.
And the evidence? I clutched the datapad closer to my chest. Pita. It was all there, in the files. The century-old translation dictionary, and who knew what else? If we could make it home with that—
But getting home would be a challenge, with both PrimeCorp and the “broken” Chron trying to stop us. Attacking the station—the understaffed, unprepared, barely completed station—hunting for us . . . and where was my ship?
“I have to find them—we have to find them,” I said. “My crew. Where’s my ship?” I grasped the bar tighter, pulling myself upright. Weakness, nausea, pain . . . whatever was happening to my body in the absence of my bioscavs, I had to push past it somehow. I couldn’t let it stop me. “If you’re not one of the broken ones, you have to help me get to my ship!”
But the moment I was upright the world spun out from under me again, harder and faster than it had before. My last thought as I fell was to twist around so that Pita, in her flimsy datapad casing, carrying all her PrimeCorp secrets, would be safe.
Chapter 35 – Jahelia
Friends and Frenemies
HIRIN AND MAJA were out the door of the medical bay almost as soon as Viss had finished speaking. They ran down the hall in the direction we’d just come from, so I stepped—cautiously—outside the door myself. The scene wasn’t anything I’d expected.
A single Chron had turned into the corridor from the direction of the cells—and stopped in its tracks. Cradled in its arms was an unconscious Captain Luta Paixon. Her auburn hair hung like a curtain across part of her face, but it was easy to see that her eyes were closed and her skin very pale. One arm, still encased in one of the green resin sheaths, dangled limply. Nestled on Paixon’s chest, held there by her other hand, was my datapad. Pita.
The Chron said something, and Pita spoke up through the datapad speaker. “The Captain needs to get to the medical bay, and the Chron is trying to get her there. It’s okay—this one seems to be a friend. Jahelia, are you there? I only heard Feron’s voice.”
“I’m here,” I said, although I have to admit it sounded a little bit squeaky. “Better let them through, folks.”
Hirin hesitated only a moment, glancing from his wife to me and back again. “I can
trust her—I mean, your AI?”
I smiled. “She’s told me she doesn’t want to die, and I think she’s smart enough to know that at the moment, we’re all in this together.”
The station took another hit, and the alarm ratcheted up a notch in pitch and volume. A second tone added to the general claxon, and the muffled thump of torps launching vibrated through the floor again. The Chron carrying the captain pushed past me into the medical bay, muttering.
“Pita, got a translation on that?” I asked.
“You won’t like it,” she said. “PrimeCorp and the other Chron—they’re trying to board the station.”
“What do they want?” Hirin asked.
The Chron settled Paixon on the gurney and turned to one of the cabinets, rummaging through one of the few open boxes. It pulled out a med injector and examined it. I put out a hand to try and ease Pita out of Paixon’s grasp, but her fingers tightened around the datapad almost instinctively.
“I think I know,” she said in a weak voice. Her eyes fluttered open, and she struggled to sit up. Her husband brushed past me to the side of the gurney, and slipped his arm under her head.
“Stay still,” he said. “Don’t try to get up.”
“They’re after us,” she said, ignoring his instructions and still struggling to rise. “PrimeCorp can’t risk the rest of Nearspace finding out that they’re allied with the Chron—well, some of the Chron—”
The one who had brought her in crossed to the gurney, injector in hand. Paixon put a hand on its arm. “Pita, find out what it’s giving me.”
The datapad screen flashed a series of Chron symbols, and the Chron craned its head to see. It gave an answer.
“For the pain and weak,” Pita said. “Strong to fight.”
“Perfect,” the captain said, and took her restraining hand away from its arm. It placed the injector at the base of her neck and pressed a slightly raised pad on the side of the barrel. The injector hissed as the medication released. Paixon hissed too, blowing a slow breath out between clenched teeth.
“Luta, is this a good idea? If it’s the bioscavs—”
Luta Paixon grimaced. “It’s definitely not bioscavs, Hirin. They’re gone. Whatever’s going wrong now, it’s all me.”
“Gone?” His voice went thick with shock, his eyes intent on her face. The rest of us might not have even been in the room. I wondered briefly what it felt like to have someone look at you that way.
“We have remove the bad machines, is the way I heard it,” she told him. “Communication is—as you might have noticed—still not perfect, even with all the help from our friend here.” She held up the datapad as she managed to sit up, wobbling slightly. “But as I understand it, this Chron—I don’t have a name for it yet—realized that the bioscavs were malfunctioning, and somehow managed to filter them—or at least most of them—out of my body.”
Kristos. I tried to school my face into neutrality. If Luta Paixon didn’t know what the loss of her bioscavs could do, I wasn’t going to tell her.
“So what’s wrong? Why were you unconscious?” Maja demanded. “What’s with the injection?”
Paixon slid off the gurney and leaned against it. “Strong to fight,” she said, twisting her lips into a not-quite-smile. “Like I said, we’re the prime target. PrimeCorp can’t risk our returning to Nearspace to tell what we know. So we have to find our ship and get the hell out of here.”
“But if your malfunctioning bioscavs are gone—”
“My body doesn’t seem to like that fact,” Paixon said simply. “I still have all the symptoms I had before—and more. And they’re worse.” She pushed away from the gurney and stood on her own. “I’m okay for now. We have to get out of here.”
The Chron chattered something, moving toward the door.
“It will show us where our ship is,” Pita said.
“Wait, what about Cerevare?” Paixon asked. She caught the Chron’s attention and put a hand behind her head, wiggling her fingers, miming ears. I should have known she’d be a no-one-left-behind kind of captain. The ones who always seem to get someone else killed.
The Chron answered in its clicking whistle, pointed upwards.
“The—I don’t know, the Chron word for Lobor, I guess—is on the bridge, it says,” Pita translated.
The deafening sound of glass shattering somewhere nearby startled all of us, even with the alarm whining its insistent call all around. I thought of the long glass walls of the hydroponics bay we’d passed, and the lone Chron on duty there. With a gesture to follow, the Chron left the room and ran into what Viss had said was a larger ward.
“We’d better go,” Paixon said, moving after the retreating Chron.
I was the last to leave the room. I took a glance around, wondering if I was missing any opportunities, and hurried to catch up.
“Here.” Yuskeya offered Paixon the wavy key, which she’d dug out of a pocket. “Might as well get that thing off, at least.”
Paixon released the arm sheath and cast it aside as we hurried through the med bay. The station was in a state of almost constant vibration now, either shuddering under impacts or firing off its replies. The Chron didn’t stop in the medical ward, but continued through a door on the far side. It opened into another common area for crew.
“Too bad there’s no actual crew in these rooms,” I muttered, but no-one answered.
The Chron crossed to a large cabinet that formed part of the rear wall of the room, and threw open the doors. Racks and shelves lay empty.
All I heard from the Chron was a low whistle, but Pita said, “Um, I think that was a swear word. It doesn’t really translate.”
The Chron ran to another similar cabinet in the other corner. Same result. It turned and said something.
“Should find the defenses,” Pita said. “Not in the here yet.”
“Defenses? Weapons?” Viss said. “There are plenty of weapons on our ship, if we could get to it.”
“If we could get to the ship, we wouldn’t need the weapons,” Paixon said.
The sound of booted feet running in a hallway reached us. If I hadn’t completely lost my bearings, and I didn’t think I had, they came from the area where we’d passed the airlock and turned inward towards hydroponics and the elevators. The Chron turned and bolted the way we’d come, chirp-whistling at us. No-one waited for Pita’s translation this time—we simply ran after it. When we’d crossed into the medical ward, Maja put her hand on the door between the two rooms and it slid closed.
She caught my eye and shrugged. “Might help.”
I nodded.
The Chron had disappeared into a smaller side room and returned with a handful of things: a few med injectors and another of the round field-generating buttons like Maja wore. Paixon already had one, too. The alien looked questioningly at the rest of us.
Viss held out an arm. “If anyone’s going to take one of these guys down by simply running into him, it’s probably going to be me,” he said with a lopsided grin.
“I’m guessing these generate a force field?” Paixon asked.
“And control the doors,” Maja confirmed with a nod.
Yuskeya and Gerazan each took one of the med injectors, and I pulled out the fork I’d kept. Paixon gave me a disbelieving stare. “Hey, I’m working with what I’ve got,” I told her, and she flashed me a distracted smile.
“Can we secure this door?” she asked the Chron, pointing to the one that led in the direction of the cells. And damne if Pita didn’t immediately translate the words into symbols on the datapad screen. Paixon held it up to the Chron, who read it and nodded. It crossed to the door, shut it, and keyed something into a touchpad next to it. I felt a flash of something like jealousy. When had Pita been that accommodating with me?
Something banged against the other door, the one Maja had closed. Seemed like whoever was after us didn’t have any of those handy little field and control enablers. Viss Feron, Yuskeya, and I ran toward the door. If we were about t
o go hand-to-hand, we had to be right there and ready when the door opened.
We’d barely reached it when it did.
Chapter 36 – Luta
Bonds Forged and Broken
I WASN’T EXACTLY sure when or how Jahelia Sord had transformed from prisoner to one of the crew, but she certainly seemed to have slotted herself in there somehow. When the attackers pounded on the med ward door, she was not even a step behind Viss and Yuskeya as they ran to flank it. Maja and Baden ducked to one side of the door, further along the wall than Viss, while Gerazan and Rei went the other way, behind the women. Hirin and I, along with our Chron benefactor, hunkered down behind one of the beds for cover, but I had a clear view of the door and what happened there.
The others obviously didn’t have access privileges on the station, because the door didn’t slide open as smoothly as it had closed—they had to force it. Viss, Yuskeya, and Jahelia waited until the lead attacker had pushed it halfway open, then in one smooth movement Viss leaned around and punched him square in the face. The force field flashed, and the combined impact of it and Viss’s punch sent the other man reeling backwards. As he fell, Jahelia was on him in a heartbeat, and stabbed her fork deeply into the back of his hand—he’d been holding a weapon but let it fall with a shriek of pain. She yanked the utensil out and bright red blood welled up from the punctures. Instantly, Yuskeya jabbed the med injector against his thigh and pressed the pad. He struggled briefly and then fell limp.
As soon as he’d let his punch fly, Viss had touched the door, making it open fully. Maja and Baden, Rei and Gerazan leapt through, over Jahelia and the fallen attacker, and were on the others in the hallway before they had a chance to react. It seemed to work out well, since there were two more attackers, one for each pair. I saw both Rei and Maja take one down, while Baden and Gerazan made sure they stayed down. Efficient.
So by the time—and it wasn’t long—the skirmish ended, we’d gained three actual plasma rifles. I knelt to examine the three intruders—one female, two male, all human. One, the female, wore a jacket with the red and black PrimeCorp logo on the chest pocket.
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