“My brain just turned inside out,” Sauli said, staring at the human corpse between us. “They’re…us?” It was a man in the suit, his face bloody, his sightless eyes a pale brown and very normal. He even had a scruff of a beard growing in. His skin was dark, but no darker than the range of skin colors I’d ever seen.
“Door, people!” Marlow hissed. “We can’t stay here.”
“They’re not us,” Jai said decisively, staring at the body. “Their technology, their ships…they could not have developed a completely different form of technology with no one in the Empire noticing.”
“Why couldn’t they?” Marlow demanded. “We did exactly that in Sarov.”
“That was one tiny piece of tech,” Jai argued. “This is a whole culture built around technology we’ve never seen before. I don’t know who these people are, but they are not from any world or location known to us. For now, we have to treat them as the aliens we thought them to be. Up, up, everyone. Marlow is right. We can’t linger here.”
I got to my feet. “We find a shuttle, or an exit that Lyssa can connect to, and we get the fuck off this ship.”
“There might be others,” Dalton pointed out, as Fiori opened her mouth to protest.
I didn’t have time to argue with him. “Juliyana, you have the weapon. You’re on point.”
She nodded and moved out of the room, the weapon lifted and her fingers resting on a plate mounted on the side of it. I presumed that was the trigger device.
I followed her out and glanced at the double layers of doors, my worm brain tapping at me once more. But I didn’t have time to deep-think my way to whatever I was trying to tell myself.
The corridor outside the room we’d been in was nearly as wide across as the room itself, and just as white and bright as the room was now the lights had been turned on.
There was a stub of corridor to the left, and a solid wall at the end of it. Ours was apparently the last room along this corridor.
Juliyana was facing to the right, watching down the length of the corridor and waiting for us to step out and form up behind her before moving off. Whatever her problems were these days, she remained an excellent soldier. All the adventuring had sharpened her instincts for the work.
I moved up behind her and peered down the corridor. It was lined with doors just like the one I had stepped through. There were dozens of them, until the corridor turned a corner and disappeared. My heart sank.
“More holding cells?” Marlow breathed, right behind me.
“Seems so,” I murmured back. I looked over my shoulder to check that everyone was bunched up behind us. Sauli stood examining the door controls on this side of the door.
“Sauli!” I hissed.
He held up a hand, not looking at me. Then he reached out and hesitantly touched the panel. Then a second touch, elsewhere on the pad.
The doors slid shut, the inner ones beating the layer on this side by a fraction of a second.
Sauli grinned, looking pleased. “A closed door won’t raise any alarms,” he murmured, joining us.
“What did you do?” Jai asked, his tone still curious. He didn’t seem to be stressed at all about our current situation.
“When I touched the panel, colored squares lit up. The red one closed the door.” Sauli shrugged.
“Maybe it will work on the other doors?” Dalton said to me, coming up to my other side.
I knew why he’d said it. He wanted to look for Mace.
I tapped Juliyana on the shoulder and she moved forward silently. Then I tapped when we reached the next door because I knew that Dalton would not let us pass it by.
He stepped over to the panel and touched it, while glancing at Sauli.
“Touch the green one,” Sauli murmured.
Dalton pressed the green square and the doors clicked and slid open. Lights flickered on.
Juliyana had already pivoted to cover the door. Now she moved forward to fan the gun over the interior of the room, before nodding and moving aside. Dalton and Fiori and Jai all pressed forward, anxious to examine the room.
It was a replica of the one we had just busted out of, only this one was at capacity. Every single box had a human in it, and none of them were moving. They all had their eyes closed and as far as I could see, they weren’t breathing.
Fiori and Dalton rushed down the length of the room, examining each face in each of the pods, until they reached the end.
Then they turned and trudged back to us. Dalton looked grim. Fiori, though, had shifted into medic mode. She examined the people more closely and when she reached us, she tapped the column of lights next to the shell. “These are all showing green and holding steady. The empty ones in our room flashed through the colors. And I don’t know what they were doing when we were in the shells ourselves. I couldn’t see them.”
“These people are in cryogenic sleep?” Jai asked.
“Or something like it,” Fiori replied.
“These aren’t our people,” Kristiana said firmly. She pointed at the nearest one, a woman who looked like she was long past time for her next regenerative therapy course. She had grey hair and fine wrinkles, especially around the throat. But Kristiana was pointing to the garment she was wearing, which was…odd. “This isn’t any fabric I’ve ever seen,” Kristiana said. “I can’t tell if this is a dress or pants, either,” she added. “It’s…weird.”
“And she would know about garments,” Sauli added. “She owns all of them.”
Kristiana rolled her eyes at him. “I think these are more of the blue people.”
“Can we wake them?” I asked Fiori.
She chewed her bottom lip. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “I could prod the buttons like Sauli did for the door, but that might injure them. Maybe there’s a whole medical procedure for waking them that requires secondary equipment. Or a full surgery. I just don’t know. I can’t even say for sure that this is cryogenic sleep, as I’ve never seen cryogenic sleep before.”
“We can’t save them, Danny,” Jai said softly.
“Mace might be in any of the other rooms, too,” Dalton added.
I nodded reluctantly. There was no way I was going to tell Dalton he couldn’t look for his son, even though the idea of stopping at every single room to check made me feel sweaty and prickling with worry for the delay it would cause. We couldn’t go for much longer without running into one of the armored slavers, even though they clearly didn’t bother checking on their slaves once they had them in the chambers. Why bother? They had better things to do, like finding their next batch of slaves.
I felt even sicker at that thought. These people were far too practiced and efficient at herding humans.
My gaze fell on the domed dash at the end of the room. It was a replica of the one in ours that had puzzled me, only at the opposite end of the room. The wall there did look transparent, only there was another white layer behind it. Why make a wall transparent on one side and opaque on the other? That didn’t make sense…but there was little about these people that did make sense. Yet something still nagged away at the back of my brain.
I turned away. “Next room. As fast as we can.” I slapped Yoan’s shoulder, for he crouched in front of one of the shells, frowning as he peered at the panel next to it. “Come on,” I urged him.
We moved onto the next room, which was empty, and the next, which was full of more sleeping people. We quickly developed a fast routine for checking each room and moved down the corridor swiftly after that, moving as silently as we could.
“Why are all these people asleep but we woke up?” Lyth asked in a barely audible voice.
“Just lucky?” Sauli replied.
“Everyone we’ve seen, so far, are blue people,” Kristiana pointed out. “I think…maybe…there must be a difference between them and us, after all. Whatever the difference is, it makes the cryogenics work for them.”
“That headache I woke up with was like nothing I’d ever felt before,” Marlow added.
Fiori was still frowning. “It could be residue from the snake thing. Or the cryogenic process. There’s no way to tell.”
We checked the next room. More sleeping people.
“Is anyone keeping count?” I wondered aloud.
“Twenty-four in each room,” Lyth said. “Seven rooms fully occupied, and two empty, so far.”
“They’re not at full capacity yet,” Jai said, his tone disgusted.
“Keep going,” I urged everyone.
Three rooms later, when Sauli opened the door, we all staggered back a pace or two, for the smell that wafted into our faces was putrid and unmistakable. Rotting flesh, human waste and decay.
Calpurnia moaned, her face draining of color. She swallowed. “I can’t go in there,” she whispered and moved along the passage, away from the door and put her back to the wall. “Give me the gun,” she told Juliyana. “I’ll keep guard.”
Juliyana silently handed her the gun and gave her shoulder a squeeze, then turned back to join us. She raised her brow at me. “Cal isn’t good with gross stuff.”
Fiori, who had probably seen worse than this in her career, hurried into the room. Dalton was right on her heel. I reluctantly followed them, because this was something new and needed to be checked out. But I gagged more than once.
These were our people in here. I could tell immediately, because many of them were dead, slumped in their shells. That explained the rich smell of decomposition. Others stirred weakly as the lights came on. They were in pitiful condition. As Jai had pointed out dryly only a while ago, there was no plumbing in these shells. And no food dispensers. And no way out of the shells for mere non-enhanced humans.
The stench was eye-watering, but all I felt was horror and abject pity for the poor souls. They were wretched indeed. How long had they been here? Days at least. Those who had survived were dehydrated, skinny and weak. Their fingers made weak waving motions. Their eyes fluttered, the light too bright for them.
“Mace! Mace!” Fiori ran for the end. Dalton, too. They stopped in front of one of the shells.
I held everyone else back. “Marlow, we need to get those who are still alive out of the shells. Can you and Lyth manage?”
He nodded, his jaw flexing. “With my teeth, if I have to.”
Yoan pushed him aside. “Wait…let me try something.” He got the flashlight out of his jacket pocket and brought it over to the nearest shell. He glanced at the occupant, a man who could barely open his eyes. “Just hold on, friend,” he murmured and crouched down by the side of the shell and examined what looked like a dataport or a power conduit opening at the bottom of it. He turned the flashlight in his hand and slotted it into the port. It dropped in with a quiet snicking sound.
“Twist it,” Sauli suggested, over Yoan’s shoulder.
Yoan turned the flashlight.
The whole shell gave a solid thunk, and the two bars wavered open, one end coming free.
Sauli patted Yoan’s shoulder, as Marlow reached over them to catch the man, who sagged now the bars were gone, and lifted him out.
“The others,” Sauli said, his tone urgent. “Mace, first,” he added, before I could.
Yoan moved down to the end of the room. I bent over Marlow, where he had laid the man out on the floor. The man was trying to speak but had no strength to do more than whisper. He looked as though he was trying to raise his arms, but they wouldn’t lift. He didn’t have the muscles left to move them. His body had cannibalized itself in order to survive.
Marlow looked up at me, his expression reflecting my own horror.
“I know,” I said in agreement. I looked around the room. “Twenty-four here. There were forty-three on the Ige Ibas. There has to be another room of them.”
“And the three other ships that disappeared…their crew might be on this ship, too.”
I shook my head. “Too long ago,” I said. “Even if they are here, they won’t have lasted this long. But these people, we can help.” I glanced at Jai, who didn’t dispute me. He looked as ill was everyone else, but he turned to help them lift out the survivors without a murmur.
I stepped carefully over the bodies and moved down to where Fiori and Dalton were crouched over Mace. I touched Fiori’s shoulder. She looked up at me. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
“Is there anything you can do for any of the rest, right now?”
“Not here,” she said softly. “Not without a full hospital suite and a ton of gear. The best thing we can do for them now is get them off this ship.”
I nodded. She returned her attention to Mace. He was an emaciated sliver of the energetic red-headed man I remembered, and his blue eyes passed over my face without recognition.
I stepped out of the way. There was nothing I could do for any of them, and someone had to start thinking. We’d spent far too long moving from room to room. Surely one of the slavers would come into the corridor soon, and then the alarm would go up and we would have a running battle on our hands.
Or an entrenched battle, most likely, because I wasn’t sure what we could do to get off the ship. I didn’t know what laid beyond the corner of the corridor. I didn’t know how many slavers were on it. There could be thousands of them, which meant we were badly outnumbered.
We needed to find a shuttle. Even a handful of their one-man fighters would do, if they didn’t run to shuttles. But they had to get their slaves off the ship somehow.
I was close to the transparent wall and I moved even closer to it, trying to think of what to do next.
Yoan had freed the last of the survivors—only six of them.
I leaned against the wall, next to the domed dashboard and hung my head. Humans had done this to fellow humans. While I had thought they were aliens, I could sort of understand the ruthless aggression. But this just made me sick and sad.
I found myself staring at the depression on this side of the dome. I had tried pressing my fingers against the two depressions, in the room we’d woken in, and nothing had happened.
I switched my gaze to the lock on the nearest shell, avoiding looking at the human remains in the shell. The shape of the hole was the same as the depression on the dome.
“Yoan!” I called softly and waved him to me.
He worked his way down the narrow lane, carefully stepping over and around the survivors.
I pointed to the lock on this side of the dome. “Try that one.”
Yoan pulled out the flashlight key and fitted it into the lock. It didn’t surprise me when the key seated itself without protest. Yoan turned it, and the dome made a clicking sound.
“The other side,” I urged him.
He unlocked the other side, too.
I stepped around to face the dome and put my hands on either side and lifted it. It pulled away with a slight resistance, but it was light and easy to move. I put it on the ground by my feet and we both stared at what lay underneath.
“It’s a control panel,” Yoan said. “To control the cryogenic shells?” he guessed, glancing over his shoulder.
I shook my head. The silent voice at the back of my mind was screaming at me, now. I looked up at the transparent layer of the wall in front of me. “Why do I keep thinking of their one-man fighters?” I breathed.
Then I gasped as everything dropped into place, with the same ease with which the key had seated itself in the lock.
At the same time, Calpurnia shouted, out in the corridor. “Incoming!” And the gun she had gave a soft cough. And another.
We were under fire.