Captivate (Alien Cadets Book 2) Page 15

  Akemi had been in a tiny cell with her sister when four Rik scientists tried to take Nat’s body. Akemi had been sedated at first, when they’d started to drain their horrible nanotechs into Nat’s spinal fluid, but she’d woken up halfway through. They’d expected the transfer to go quickly and smoothly.

  It hadn’t.

  The Spo had protected their cadets with an inoculation that prevented just such an attempt. Akemi had woken to the sound of Nat’s screams, as the nanotechs attacked her brain and the remapping of the Spo inoculation confused and thwarted their electronic mission. Nat’s mind had been a battleground, and it had nearly killed her. Nat had clawed at her own arms, as if trying to tear her own skin off. She’d convulsed so violently she fell off onto the floor, and Akemi, in her weakened state, couldn’t even hold Nat’s head in her lap.

  Akemi’s own body had been in the midst of rejecting a new lung transplant. Those few hours in that cell were the worst memories of Akemi’s life. They were a nightmare that she’d only awoken from after the Rik took her brain and installed her in a ship.

  Akemi didn’t know these Rik who were taking Claire with them, but there were decent odds they were as selfish and cruel as any other Rik. And yet Claire stumbled after them, as if they were the ones she should trust.

  When Claire stumbled again, she fell to her knees. She pressed a hand to her forehead, and one of the Rik hoisted her up.

  “Athlete, can you carry her? The train station is less than a mile away.”

  “Probably, yes.”

  Someone grabbed Claire’s glasses and folded them up, effectively blinding Akemi from the rest of their journey. But now at least she knew they weren’t trying to leave the planet. If they were going to ‘the train station’ they were headed to Lower Selta.

  ***

  When they left the blackness of the embassy halls, the light stabbed at Claire’s eyes. The door led out onto an observation deck, (was that what the guard called it?) and it was the largest space she’d been in since she’d escaped from Faal. The ceiling had to be ten stories above her head. On her right was a huge mining shaft in which a spinner turned. There was a railing to keep people from falling in, but it was dwarfed by the colossal size of the spinner machine.

  She’d seen pictures of Seltan spinners on the ship, they were mining machines that had become famous and were now something of a tourist attraction on Selta. In Claire’s fevered eyes the spinner looked ancient and almost evil. The double helix shape, easily fifty yards across, turned slowly, like a gigantic screw twisting into the heart of the planet. Each metal strand was at least three feet thick.

  Claire tripped over her own feet and barely caught herself. “Are we allowed here?”

  “Lots of tourists come here during the day, and obviously a few at night,” Sage said. “But it’s usually fairly quiet...” He looked around tensely. “We’re just going to walk calmly away from here. Selta is a cosmopolitan city, so unknown aliens won’t necessarily be questioned, but people who look like they’re running will be remembered.”

  It felt like an age before they were past the huge spinner. Claire couldn’t seem to rip her eyes away. Probably that was why she stumbled again and fell to her knees. Her vision narrowed and she felt too light-headed to stand.

  “Athlete, can you carry her? The train station is less than a mile away.”

  “Probably, yes.”

  Claire felt herself lifted and Athlete hauled her over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold. His shoulder dug into her stomach and Claire moaned. “My ribs - I’m sorry, I can’t take that.”

  Athlete shifted her forward, holding her more conventionally. “This is harder,” he said, not unkindly.

  “Wait, my glasses,” Claire whispered after a moment. “Where are they?”

  “They’re in my pocket,” Sage said. “Don’t worry.”

  She didn’t know why she felt so attached to those glasses, but somehow she couldn’t bear to think of losing them. She’d chosen to cast in her lot with aliens, and now those glasses represented her only link to Earth. She had to have them. Claire’s eyes tried to focus on Sage, but that brought her gaze back to the drilling shaft.

  “What if you fall over the edge?” Claire asked. The narrow railing didn’t look sufficiently safe to keep people out of the cavernous space.

  “You’d fall and die,” Old Twin said. “This isn’t a playground.”

  “No, I think there’s an energy field at the bottom to catch people,” Diva said quietly.

  “That’s just a port legend,” Old Twin said. “If there is an energy field, it probably just turns everything off to save the equipment.”

  Claire barely heard the argument. She was entering a haze. She knew where she was and where she was going, but she didn’t seem to care. Her temperature must be very high, she thought idly, because she didn’t feel hot or cold anymore, just sleepy.

  “If humans lived here,” Claire told them, “someone would try to slide down that spinner. On a dare, or just for fun. My uncle was like that.”

  Sage was looking around nervously. “Please be quiet, Claire. There may be workers coming through on their way home.”

  Claire’s neck didn’t seem capable of holding her head upright. She leaned against Athlete and her vision blurred for a moment. “I feel weird,” she said. “I might throw up.”

  Athlete walked faster.

  Why were they bothering to walk anyway? This was as good a place as any to stop. Claire went limp. Her legs slid right out of Athlete’s grip and she slumped to the ground. “I’m going to stay here. It’s warm.” She curled up on her side on the gritty black surface.

  She pillowed her head on one arm and closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep so badly, but the others wouldn’t shut up.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Pick her up, quickly,” Sage said. “We need to keep going.”

  “Why bother?” Old Twin said.

  “She could help us later, think of the doors a real human could open. We don’t have time to discuss it now!”

  Claire felt herself lifted, and realized Athlete was carrying her again.

  “Okay, whatever.” She closed her eyes.

  Later, she didn’t know if it was five minutes or an hour, she heard them discussing how to move her down the spinner. Not the big one, but the little spinners used to move between levels. They looked like playground accessories to Claire.

  Claire’s pleasant sleep haze had faded. She felt very ill.

  “I’m awake," she said through numb lips, "Just tell me what to do."

  She eyed the spinner to where it went into a hole in the floor. It was clearly an homage to the big, mining spinners, but she hadn’t realized before.

  Diva stepped onto one strand which put another strand at shoulder level. She grasped it as her feet began to slide and she twirled easily down the hole. Young Twin and Old Twin did the same.

  “I can do that,” Claire said.

  Sage grabbed her arm as she moved to step on. “I don’t think so, that's the fever talking. You ride backward, like this.” He got on like he was mounting a horse and showed her how to wrap her arms around the strand and slide down backward. Like a toddler on a slide, Claire thought.

  But she felt horrible and not like arguing so she swung a leg over and slid down on her tummy. The metal was so smooth at first, it offered almost no friction. For a dizzy moment she was afraid she’d fly off or slam into the ground. But just as she was getting afraid, the pole got rougher, almost sticky, rubbing against her pants and arms and naturally slowing her just before her feet hit the ground at the next level.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Claire said, putting a hand to her aching eyes.

  “Good. You’ve got seven more,” Sage said.

  After the spinners Claire was so dizzy she collapsed. Her knees buckled when she tried to stand after the last slide, and she didn’t protest when Athlete picked her up off the floor.

  “We’re at the train junction,�
� she heard Diva say.

  Someone held her over a trash bin when she threw up.

  Sometime later, when her stomach cramped again, she was strapped into a seat. She felt herself pressed back into the chair and saw the lights flicker as the train entered a tunnel. It felt like the train was going forward, though she knew it was really going down. Weird.

  Someone held a bag for her to throw up in, but she blacked out before any more details sunk in.

  Sage helped her stumble off the train when they got to Lower Selta. The station was bustling with aliens and smelled like rich sea food.

  Sage seemed to know his way around Lower Selta and led them unerringly through a maze of tiny, curving thoroughfares. Claire felt a drop of water on her face and looked up to see a low, slanted ceiling. It reminded her of being under the bleachers at a football game. If Upper Selta was full of interstate highways, this was an alley.

  Sage finally stopped and knocked on a door and Claire let herself be guided through a room that looked remarkably like an English pub.

  “That was - where are we?”

  “Don’t worry,” Sage said. He led her to a back room with an actual bed.

  “This is amazing.” She sighed as her body relaxed into the mattress.

  “Are we crazy, Sage?” one of the twins whispered. “We brought a real human. A sick one. What have we done?”

  “Ask me tomorrow,” he said, and sank down on the bed next to her.

  CHAPTER 18

  When Basher found the empty cell, he was momentarily speechless. The door was left open, the tools they used to break open the lock were left on the floor. Hardly thinking, he entered and ran a hand over the closest bunk. They were gone.

  He stooped and looked under that bunk, then the next, more frantically. Because surely –!

  He stood and ran his hands through his hair. Because surely she was here. He’d not slept well last night, picturing Claire tossing and turning, perhaps becoming feverish, all alone with the Rik. He’d left his room twice to check on her, only to change his mind and stomp back, dreading to see her sleeping soundly.

  Not until he’d seen the empty room did he realize which vision had won. He realized now that he’d fully expected to find Claire with a soaring fever. He’d expected to carry... er, escort her to a guest room, and then to get her everything he could to make the last half of her sickness more bearable.

  She’d be angry with him, sure, but she would understand that he had to know. Legally and personally, he could never trust her if he didn’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was human. She would have understood and then she would have forgiven him. He would have introduced her to Sam and Nat, and privately requested Nat to let Claire share her room. If Claire’s story was true, the poor girl must be starved for human interaction, particularly with other women.

  Basher had three younger sisters to base his guesses on, and he had been engaged, years ago. His fiancé had died in a car wreck, just weeks before the Large Hadron Collider exploded and the Spo invaded. In retrospect it seemed such a ridiculously mundane death. They’d already planned the wedding and bought the honeymoon tickets for a cruise up the east coast to Labrador.

  But in the years since then, he’d almost been glad she hadn’t lived to see the rest of it. Would she have had a horror story to rival Claire’s if she had lived?

  Certainly, if she hadn't died, he wouldn't have ended up here. He’d been angry and alone during the time after the invasion, even more than the average guy, and he'd accepted this Spo job offer cynically, half expecting that it was a suicide mission. What did he know of the galaxy or its dangers? It had seemed a worthwhile way to distance himself from a life he didn’t care to pursue.

  His mother had begged him not to go, practically ordered, but he’d not listened. She had her daughters and grandchildren. She would recover from his loss.

  But even as fey as he'd felt, he'd missed people that first year. He'd missed his fiancé, of course, still grieving for her despite being light years away. But he'd also missed going to a bar and watching a football game or going to a grocery store and chatting with the teller. He'd just missed people.

  He'd spent the last few hours wondering how Claire had made it without people. He cursed silently. Clearly she was only a fake. A good one.

  Why had she worked so hard to convince him? If she’d known they were going to escape that night, there was no point in her desperate, please-believe-me, please-protect-me act.

  Basher turned and punched the wall. The pain made him grunt. The skin over his middle knuckle split and left a tiny patch of blood on the wall.

  “Idiot," he told himself.

  He swiped the blood off the wall with his other hand and rubbed it into his pants. They’d escaped, but he would find them before they got off Selta. They would stand trial like the criminals they were.

  Basher searched the room methodically, making note of what they’d taken and what they’d left. Then he examined the door and the tools on the floor.

  Basher had called his partner and apprised him of the situation. The Spo arrived as Basher was gingerly using a towel to move the tools.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want to put my fingerprints –” Basher stopped. He’d forgotten what kind of scene he was dealing with. On Earth fingerprints might be significant, and as a detective, he’d learned to protect the evidence for forensic analysis.

  But Spo didn’t have fingerprints. The only fingerprints he’d find on these would be the ones of the people in the room, and he already knew who they were.

  “Never mind,” Basher said, tossing the towel away and picking up the magnetic chisel to examine it more closely. He felt stupid. “Who brought this stuff? You’ve got the video of last night.”

  “I already checked, it was wiped.”

  “The night guards?”

  “They’re under temporary suspension, being questioned now. But it seems they were all in sight at the time the recording is gone.”

  “Are they protecting each other? All in it together?”

  The Spo looked briefly offended, but quickly turned it off. “I do not believe so.”

  “That would be stupid," Basher agreed. "The night guards to help the Rik escape during the night shift? They seem more intelligent that.”

  “The lower door to the spinner observation deck was also compromised. The logs show a token used that was marked missing two months ago.”

  Basher shrugged. “One of the guards could have stolen the token then, saved it for this.”

  His partner flushed vaguely orange with disgust at the idea. “I know all the guards personally, as do you. Do you not think them more honorable than this?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re too inclined to think that the Spo, only the Spo, and all the Spo are honorable.”

  His partner didn’t say anything, but Basher could tell he was offended.

  “Hey, I respect you as much as I respect anyone, but only a few weeks ago they verified that your emperor’s son is a traitor. Not all Spo are above reproach, my friend.”

  His partner still preserved a reproachful silence.

  Basher sighed. He found it fairly easy to believe that one of the guards was at fault, but he would have expected them to devise a more intricate plan than this.

  Basher was still arguing it with his partner when Sam and Nat appeared in the door of the empty cell.

  “We know what happened,” Nat said. “Akemi is with them.”

  “She’s what?” They had explained to him about the biocomputer that contained Nat’s sister Akemi, and how she was communicating with them through the glasses, but he had no idea what Nat meant.

  “You must have left your glasses out last night,” Sam said, “Claire found them and put them on.”

  “I - I did. I think I set them on the desk at the end of the hall. I was distracted...”

  “That was providential then, because she took them. Nat and I had our glasses o
ff, so Akemi couldn’t notify us until just now.”

  “Well - where is she? I mean, where are they?”

  Nat handed him her glasses. “Here, she might as well talk to you.”

  Basher put the glasses on, they were rather tight on his head, and the words began to scroll right away.

  They’re in Lower Selta, but I don’t know exactly where. I’m sorry. They went into some kind of restaurant... it took them about forty-five minutes to walk there from the train station.

  Basher blinked, he wasn’t used to reading with the words disappearing as quickly as he looked, but he got the gist of it.

  “She was sick the whole way?” he felt a deep surge of relief, followed by anger. “Then why on Earth did she go with them! What was she thinking? She knew she was human, even if I didn’t.”

  Claire is talking about that right now. If you let me access your computer I can display the video.

  “What do you mean, right now?”

  She put the glasses back on when she woke up. I can see and hear through her glasses, though I can’t triangulate her position.

  Basher walked briskly to his office, letting Sam and Nat trail behind him.

  This should be easy. Your computer is Spo technology, which works out perfectly since I am too. :)

  Akemi started streaming the video to Basher’s computer, from the time Claire put on the glasses. She skipped through the dark hours.

  “I can’t believe I let this happen.” Basher sat down heavily in his chair and handed the glasses back to Nat. “Perhaps I should have realized she was human, but her story sounded so dramatic. I tried to convince myself it was just for manipulation.”

  Nat laughed bleakly. “Sometimes terrible stories are true.”

  Basher shook his head. “But why would she go with the Rik?"

  "That was dumb," Sam agreed. "We may not have known for certain that she was human, but she certainly did.”

  Basher squeezed the bridge of his nose and groaned. "I told her Faal might legally claim her if she truly stole from him. She's terrified of him. I was trying to distract her from my own mistake, but I must have convinced her she wasn’t safe.”