by Elle E. Ire
Before I can respond, the tiny screen on Alex’s diagnostic device flashes once, twice, then words scroll across it.
IF I DIVERT MY FOCUS, SHE WILL REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS.
No need to explain who “she” is. “If you don’t, we’re all going to be buried alive,” I say to the air.
No more words appear, but several indicator lights within the elevator control panel light up, then flash in random sequence. The metal surrounding us creaks. A grinding sound echoes through the compartment along with the rattle of a shower of pebbles and rocks striking the roof of the car. Then we’re moving, crawling really, but making our way up the shaft toward the surface.
Vick groans, then lets out a sharp gasp and struggles against the hands holding her. “Down. Put me down,” she manages.
The guys comply, propping her to sit upright against the side of the car. I’m moving to her when another jolt rocks us, throwing me against the elevator’s wall. Robert staggers into me. Lyle and Alex steady each other; Vick slides into the corner, giving a yelp when she hits. From above us, there’s a loud crack and a metal twang and the whole car tilts sideways at a terrifying angle. The grinding sound increases in volume. We’re still rising but moving even more slowly than before.
“We’ve lost one of the cables,” Alex shouts over the din. “Just need the last one to hold a little longer. I think we’re close.”
A creak is the only warning we have before the overhead lighting comes loose from its fastenings, swinging down on a single set of hinges. Lyle shifts to brace himself like a human tent over Vick’s huddled figure, his arms rigid against the corner walls above her. The light bar breaks free and crashes to the floor in a shower of sparks.
Darkness. Noise and darkness. No way to tell how far we have left to go.
“Kel?” Vick calls into the empty air. “My eye lamps aren’t working.”
“It’s okay. Don’t worry.” And then we stop.
For a second, I think this is it. The lift has failed. We’re stuck, and soon the collapsing shaft will send us plummeting to our deaths with an immediate burial beneath all the rock and stone.
A bell chimes, its high-pitched tone far too cheerful for the circumstances. The doors slide halfway apart, then halt, revealing the hangar bay sideways to our view since we’re hanging at a sharp angle.
“Out. Out now. Move! Move!” Lyle shouts. He scoops up Vick in his powerful arms, getting through the breach first, with the rest of us not far behind them. We take maybe ten steps from the lift before the tearing of metal has us all turning back.
A snap like a firecracker going off in our ears. Then the entire thing breaks free and drops away. We catch a fleeting glimpse of the ragged cable trailing after it and disappearing into the darkness. The shaft is too long for us to hear the impact below.
“Oh… fuck…,” Vick whispers.
At first I think she’s referring to our narrow escape, but when I turn toward her, I see her with her hand to her cheek, or rather, her missing cheek, her good eye wide with horror, her remaining skin so pale it’s practically transparent, showing the veins beneath.
Most of the time, Vick keeps her nails blunt. Long, pretty nails, though they can be effective weapons, interfere with practical things like handling knives and pulling triggers. They catch in delicate gear and tear off in painful jagged edges. However, for this assignment, as part of her Valeria Court persona, Vick had grown them out. Now, as she moves her fingertips across the exposed metal of her skull, they send up an earsplitting screech.
I’ve never heard Vick scream before.
I’m hearing it now.
Chapter 25: Vick—Unwanted Influence
I am a monster.
I KNOW I’m screaming. I know I’m upsetting Kelly beyond all imagination. She’s never seen me like this, even at my worst.
Guess I’ve hit a new worst.
I know I’m attracting attention. Anyone in the hangar who wasn’t already running toward us after the lift broke free and fell is definitely heading our way now that I’m shrieking at the top of my lungs, though I’m growing hoarser by the moment.
Some remaining logical part of me notes that my vocal cords will give out well before my terror does.
I scrunch my eyes shut, or try to. The left closes. The right turns off. My eyelid is missing. Oh God, my eyelid is fucking missing. Somehow I manage to scream louder.
Lyle is shushing me, making soothing noises and holding me closer to his chest. I feel Kelly take my hand and pull it away from my head. “Shh, Vick. It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay,” she says, but her voice wavers. She’s not sure. Her uncertainty carries through our bond.
“We need to hide you,” Alex says. Something warm and heavy drops over my face. A jacket, maybe.
Right. Hide me. So I don’t frighten everyone. So they don’t shoot me on sight like the monster I am.
No. Because they don’t understand and because your components are classified.
VC1! I’m relieved to hear her. It means I’m not overloading, though I’m sure I’m redlining everything.
You are, she admits.
Can you make me stop freaking out? I can’t control it. It kills me to admit that, even if it’s only to the AI, but I’m imagining what I look like right now, and it’s every nightmare I’ve ever had rolled into one.
I am maintaining your other systems. You will need to regain control yourself.
Fat chance.
I’m being carried across the tarmac, my screams reducing to whimpers, then occasional moans. Kelly’s walking beside Lyle, with a death grip on my arm to keep me from being stupid again. The other arm is tucked between me and Lyle’s muscular chest. Even with his strength, he’s panting with the effort by the time the sound of his footfalls changes and we clang up a metal ramp into what I’m assuming is the shuttle that brought us here. Was that only last night?
“Gotta get her in a stasis box,” Alex says. His steps pick up speed as he pushes past us in the ship’s narrow corridor.
A hatch whooshes open and shut. Antiseptic smells and equipment humming—the shuttle’s tiny medbay. I’m placed on a table, Kelly still holding down my arm. “You can let go,” I tell her, throat raw and voice cracking. “I won’t do it again.” No way in hell am I touching my metal skull again. A shiver runs the length of my body.
She eases up on the pressure but doesn’t release me. Not sure if she doesn’t trust me to keep my word or if she needs the physical contact. That’s fine. I need it too.
Someone lifts the jacket off me, replacing it a moment later with a heated blanket—a stopgap to ease my constant chills while they prepare what I’ll need. Off to my left, there’s lots of movement, containers opening and closing, hydraulics hissing as a stasis pod is opened.
The sound ignites a new round of panic. Stasis pods resemble coffins—tight, narrow spaces they lie a damaged body in, pump it full of hibernation drugs, then close the lid and transport it to a more advanced medical facility. I’ve woken up in a few of them, lids open. I’ve never been conscious when I was put inside one.
The moment two sets of hands prepare to lift me again, I fight back, kicking and twisting, muscles shrieking in pain while I attempt and fail to get free. “No. Nonononono.” I’m not being rational. I know this is what has to happen. I can’t stop myself.
The door to the medbay opens again. “What the hell is going on in here?” A new voice, angry, and one I recognize—Carl, my boss in Undercover Ops. His steps bring him to the side of my table. “Shit, what happened to her?” No anger now. In fact, it’s almost gentle. A new set of hands, probably Carl’s, join the others in grabbing hold of me. “Drug her first, then move her,” he orders. He leans down to my ear. “VC1, you are not to interfere with the preliminary narcotics or the stasis drugs.”
“Acknowledged,” my mouth says, though it isn’t me speaking. My eyes widen; then I remember. Carl is my superior officer. My loyalty programming forces compliance with a direct order fro
m my commander, unless it would place me in harm’s way, and no matter how claustrophobic I am, the logical part of my brain knows they’re trying to help, not harm me. Carl doesn’t even need to use a code. I glare up at my boss.
He returns it with a sympathetic look of his own. “You know I don’t like doing that,” he says. “But you need medical care you aren’t allowing us to give you.”
They set me back down on the table, then hold me in place. There’s a pinprick on the inside of my elbow, the squirm-inducing sensation of a needle sliding into a vein, then soothing warmth rushes up my arm, down into my chest, up into my head. Things get fuzzier from there. A lethargy like I’ve never known settles over me. Muscles I didn’t realize were taut slacken. My body seems to sink into the table, solid though it might be. I open/activate my eyes. Blurred figures move with purpose around me. A familiar feminine outline hovers to my right—Kelly. Even drugged, I’d know her anywhere.
“Hey,” she says, not looking directly into my face. Of course she’s not. A tiny chill invades my warmth, quickly chased away by the narcotics. “Better?”
“A little,” I say, the words coming out slurred, my tongue too thick for my mouth.
She smiles, amused by my impaired speech. “Sounds like it. Give it a minute more.”
Kelly’s right. She usually is. After about another minute, I’m floating on clouds, the pain and fear still there but smothered under pillows of euphoria and calm. She studies me, then nods at what she sees or senses.
“Ready to go into stasis now?” she asks, squeezing my shoulder.
“Sure…,” I murmur. “Whatever you want.” What I want is to sleep for days, maybe weeks. I want to forget what I did to Jacks, what the dragon-lizards and the lake did to me. I want all this horror to be a nightmare I’ll wake up from. In my current state, it feels like a dream. “Am I dreaming?” I ask, fighting unconsciousness.
She shakes her head, frowning. “Not yet. Soon.”
“Damn,” I whisper and let them lift me into the padded box. It’s soft and comfortable in there, not at all scary like before. I can’t remember why I fought this.
Confident I won’t struggle, my teammates release me and move around, making final adjustments to the stasis controls before they will close the lid. I miss Kelly’s touch, the imprinted memory of her hand on my shoulder still warm and tingly, but she can’t come with me where I’m going.
We have a problem, VC1 says, intruding on my haze.
“Mmm, no, we don’t,” I mutter out loud.
“Vick, you okay?” Kelly asks, leaning over me.
“Fine. Just chatting with the AI.”
“Shhh,” she whispers, placing a finger on my lips and glancing over her shoulder where Robert is talking with Carl and Lyle. “She’s a secret, remember?”
“Right… secret.” One that neither Robert nor Carl knows. I’m supposed to keep it that way. Can’t remember why, but it’s important. I stop babbling. My eyes drift shut/shut down. I’m going under.
Wake. Up. VC1 again.
You are being a real pain in the ass, I tell her. The hydraulics on the stasis box activate. Kelly steps away. The lid locks into place over me. I don’t mind at all.
There is an anomaly. I need your human input as to the possible cause.
I sigh, noting on my next intake of breath the sweet scent of the hibernation gases flooding my enclosed space. Better explain fast. I’m high and getting higher. Any input I give will be highly suspect. Hah. “Highly” suspect. I chuckle to myself, drawing in more of the gas.
I am monitoring the shuttle’s security systems. There is a discrepancy in the weight of the craft between when we arrived here and our current mass.
Mmm. I purposely take in a huge lungful of gas. It tingles in my nostrils, tickling as it goes down my airway into my chest. So good. Everything feels so good. I don’t recall ever feeling this good before, and I want more of it. My breaths come deep and even. That’s just Carl, I tell the AI, trying to hold scattered thoughts together long enough to appease her. I wonder if she can nag me even while I’m in stasis. That would suck.
I have taken Carl’s mass into account. This is something more. Not the refueling. Not additional cargo. It is moving.
Something prickles at the back of my neck, and it’s not the effect of the gas. Moving? I should be concerned. Part of me is, but it’s so far detached from the rest that I can’t latch on to the feeling or act upon it.
I cannot identify the source, nor am I able to access external means of communication. I cannot inform any other member of Alpha Team. It is as if I am being blocked in some way. When I attempt to focus security cameras on its location, those cameras momentarily cease to function. When I trace the records of the weight shift, those records have been wiped from the ship’s memory, and… something is attempting to erase them from my own….
Wait. What? She’s telling me there’s a computer intelligent enough to tamper with her memory. But that’s impossible. The only thing that would be capable of something like that would be… another AI. Or something very near equivalent.
My primary directive programming made a grave error in keeping information from you. Your confidence was misplaced. I am unworthy as a teammate. You are in danger. I must tell you … that … I must …
I stop sucking in the gas, holding my breath for as long as I’m able while my drugged-out mind attempts to make sense of what she’s said. Panic fights with the soothing narcotics, but I’m too far gone, too high to come back down. My enhanced hearing picks up muted alarms, the medsensors’ response to my sudden emotional upheaval and internal struggle. Outside the stasis box, they must be blaring, startling my team into frantic action. I try to raise my hands to beat against the glass casing, but at some point soft wrist and ankle cuffs locked me into place.
I activate/open my eyes to see Kelly with both her palms pressed to the transparent casing, her face twisted with worry, mouthing to me to calm down, that it’s okay. I shake my head, no, but she doesn’t understand.
Relax, VC1 says, monotone. Everything is fine.
No. It’s not. You just said you were being infiltrated, tampered with, that I’m in danger. What were you trying to tell me?
Everything is fine, she says again with no inflection. I am fine. There is nothing wrong. Sleep.
They’ve gotten to her. That’s it, isn’t it? Whatever she was worried about, it’s erased her memory of ever having been concerned, except the remnants of my organic brain remember it. Whatever it is, it can’t tamper with that.
You are very tired, and you are damaged. Sleep.
I’m not the only one, I think back at her, but she isn’t listening.
The hiss of the stasis gas increases in volume. I wonder who turned it up, my team or VC1. Regardless, I can’t hold my breath any longer, and I let it out with a rasping gasp, taking in another full breath of the sleep inducers almost immediately.
My vision blurs, then goes dark. My last thought is to wonder whether I’ll recall any of this when I wake up. Assuming that whatever has boarded our shuttle doesn’t kill me in my helpless state of stasis sleep.
Chapter 26: Kelly—Is Anybody There?
Vick is in stasis.
WHEN VICK finally lets go and drops into unconsciousness, I sag into Lyle’s arms. The medbay alarms die down, then cease their wailing. The rest of us stare at one another in the sudden silence.
“What happened? I thought she was completely out of it. Then she’s fighting off the drugs like they’re poison.” Alex looks to me for answers. I don’t have them.
“That… shouldn’t have been possible. I gave her a direct order.” Carl never takes his gaze off the stasis box, Vick’s face now relaxed through the view window.
Robert scoffs. “Hard to obey an order when you’re drugged and confused.”
Right. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t realize that VC1 should not have allowed Vick to fight breathing in the gas, that Carl’s order would have triggered her loyalty
programming unless… I swallow a surge of panic of my own. “Alex,” I say, getting everyone’s attention with the fear in my voice, “double-check her readings. Is she stable? Is everything all right? She has other chemicals in her system, that pleasure drug of Jacks’s. Could there be a bad combination? Could what we gave her be harming her in some way?”
Alex steps to the side of the stasis box, examining the readings that mean nothing to me, but there are a lot of green blinking and steady lights. “No, she seems fine. I mean, as fine as she can be with her injuries, but nothing life-threatening. Jacks’s crap wore off almost an hour ago.” He sounds unsure, though. Like the rest of us, he knows she shouldn’t have fought the way she did.
“Hmm,” Carl says, rubbing the stubble on his chin, then covering a yawn. We’ve all been awake and on duty for too many hours. “Well, comm me if there are any further problems. I’ll be on the main passenger transport, overseeing the return of the slaves to Earth and from there to wherever their homeworlds might be. I want Alpha Team to report back to Girard Base immediately and start Vick’s medical team on making her repairs.”
“You mean healing her injuries,” I correct him.
He waves me off. “Right. Whatever. Just do it. I need her functional and on duty as soon as possible.” So much for the almost compassion he showed her earlier. Without looking back, he exits the medbay. A few moments later, a chime sounds over the shipwide PA, letting us know he’s used the exterior hatch.
“Sometimes our boss is a class-A asshole,” Lyle says. He glances down at me. I’m still leaning against him. “You good? Or do you need me to walk you to your cabin?”
“I can manage. Thanks.” I push away from his chest, give Vick one final once-over, and head out. He and Alex follow me down the corridor, arguing over who’s going to fly us home. With all of us exhausted, normally we’d let VC1 take over, but I don’t want to attempt to distract her from monitoring Vick, if she’s even functional while Vick is in stasis.