The Empress Capsule (Audacity Saga Book 1), page 27
“Isa appears to be… talking to the wall? This is very atypical behavior.”
He raised his eyebrows as he scarfed down the baklava and climbed the ladder one-handed back up to the main floor. Amazing how familiar the ship felt after such a short time.
He palmed open the hatch, and sure enough, there she was, sitting on the floor.
“Isa—what the frag are you doing? You can’t—” Girl was going to get herself killed.
“You won’t kill me. Not yet. And I’m not interfering, I’m helping.” Her expression was flat and serious.
“What?”
“She’s lonely. Loneliness isn’t good for a baby.”
Eyes wide, Kael slammed the hatch control shut. He didn’t care how it looked, he couldn’t have people overhearing that. “What are you talking about? And Xi, have you informed her mother this time?”
“Of course, Kael. But she is occupied in a serious maintenance procedure that won’t be complete for approximately thirteen minutes, forty-five seconds.”
He sighed.
“There’s no need to worry. I’m simply entertaining her.” Isa gazed blankly at him, no expression readable in her eyes.
“Talk some sense, Isa. Now.”
“There was a voice. A man’s voice?” Isa looked up, like she was remembering something. Or maybe talking to the capsule? “She misses the voice. The swaying, the rocking is less now too. It’s too quiet, too peaceful. Like the dead. But she’s not dead. Not yet.”
He simply stared at her. Was she referring to Li’s voice? His pulse was pounding, and he braced himself for the oath program to kick in.
Nothing happened. Huh. Maybe the program agreed she wasn’t interfering.
Isa shrugged. “She has no mother. How would you—”
Oh, he knew what that was like. All too well. He winced as the girl stopped short. Right. Listening to everything.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize you had grown up without parents. But you were still birthed traditionally, most likely. Babies are meant to be carried, rocked, spoken to.”
“It’s not a baby yet.”
She rolled her eyes. “Semantics.”
He stared. What the hell was he supposed to do with this?
“You don’t want my help?”
“I don’t want to end up having to kill you!”
“I wouldn’t like that either.” She looked back at the wall, not seeming terribly afraid of the notion. “Oh, I have ways of defending myself.”
He sighed again. He didn’t doubt that.
“Is it… really lonely?” He joined her on the floor, sitting cross-legged. He opened the cabinet and took the canister out gingerly. She obviously already knew where it was anyway.
“She,” Isa corrected. “And yes. In a manner of speaking. It is a new to me to experience human consciousness at such an early stage.”
He tried not to think too deeply on that. Where were his thoughts of Commander Ryu when he needed them?
Isa blushed. But then he remembered Ellen’s suggestion that that might be exactly what Isa was curious about. Perhaps that would not help him gain any privacy.
“Listen,” she said quickly. “I’m not trying to interfere. You don’t need to feel threatened. Like the commander said, I keep my secrets.”
He scowled. “And I should just take your word for that?”
“She just needs a little company. You could try speaking to her too.”
His first reaction was no way, but then again, if it kept Isa to herself, perhaps it was his duty. “Will she know what I’m saying?”
“No. It’s not words she wants. Just sounds. Company.”
“All right, all right. I’ll try it. And you can keep her company for a few minutes. But tomorrow—enough for today. Okay? And no probing my mind for details about it. Got it?”
She nodded. She stood, gave an odd little curtsy, and went out.
Strange girl. Would the kid in the capsule end up stranger for hanging out with her? Was such a thing possible?
Did this mean this empress had telepathic abilities? He didn’t recall her predecessor having them. Had they finally found some way to instill them, some genes to splice just so?
He didn’t want to know. He just needed to get this canister to Desori and forget about it. He put it back in the cabinet but hesitated as he shut the door.
Loneliness isn’t good for a baby.
For a moment, he could see Asha again, wind blowing through her black hair as the water of the Bleak Sea lapped around her feet, the sun hot on them both… As quickly as it’d come, the image faded. He shoved his grief back into the corner once again.
Grumbling to himself and gritting his teeth, he retrieved the capsule and sat it on his bunk. Then he pulled up his messages. Good. A bunch of bureaucratic announcements and assorted nonsense.
He sighed and, instead of reading them to himself, he read them aloud. And felt like an idiot.
Ellen gazed out from her cabin at the lifeless hulk of steel and wire and petroglic and sighed.
There should be another Enhancer lab here for them, the last of their run before resupply in Desori. It should have been the largest they’d planned to target, and the most dangerous without the wild outsystem forests to vanish into. There should be hundreds of people here on Upsilon station, coming or going or living out their lives, making the mission all the harder. Adan should be hailing the station any minute now.
But it didn’t take a genius to have a feeling that no one was going to answer.
The station should normally have glowed with the quiet, reassuring light of civilization. Instead, it hung there like a derelict, black and still. A few ships remained docked, their forms also suspiciously dark. If it weren’t for the two suns, she might have had a hard time picking them out at all.
Upsilon Station. It was thus named for its odd Y-like shape, and it took up a vast portion of the nearby Dremeta System. The system had no habitable or terraformable planets—a rarity in the galaxy—and thus humans had decided to construct a large station on its fringes, both because of the energy they could harvest from its dual rotating suns and to process the minerals and gases mined from Dremeta’s six unwelcoming worlds.
That had been the original reason for settlement at least. And for a while they’d made good, honest money that way. But at some point, the tide had changed. Maybe it was galactic expansion, maybe resources had run low. No one knew for sure.
It’d grown into a den of pirates, outlaws, and smugglers operating on the edge of Puritan territory and the outsystem. That only added to the complexity of the mission. A civilian mining station might underestimate the need for biosecurity—or regular security for that matter. Pirates tended to not make the same mistake.
And yet the massive station hung there in space, inert. Almost as though it had been abandoned.
“Not getting a response,” Adan said over the comm. “Shocking.”
She pursed her lips, then made sure the channel was open to everyone. “Prepare for docking. Forced docking. Any nonmission personnel are confined to their cabins. See everybody who’s going down in the hold.”
“Yes, ma’am,” came Adan’s reply.
She shut the channel. “Xi, I want a double medical barrier today, okay?”
“I will strengthen the standard quarantine force field with additional energy output and create a secondary backup layer. Will that be sufficient?”
“Yes. And… be prepared for more than the usual number to run through decontamination.”
“Of course, Commander. We have raw materials remaining to decontaminate everyone on the ship from the highest level of exposure at least three times.”
“Thanks.”
She sighed and eyed the station for one moment longer. She’d worried about this place from the beginning, but she hadn’t expected this.
Upsilon’s airlock hatch ground to life, clanking down into the station with a puff of air and revealing an unlit corridor. Well, at least the locks still responded. That didn’t suggest mechanical failure was the problem. There was still no sign of anyone, no angry comms demanding what they were doing.
Just silence.
Zhia flicked her suit lights to high, the helmet lamp shining down an empty, nondescript corridor. Zhia entered first, slowly, multi carefully poised at the ready. Dr. Dremer followed, flanked by Nova and Jenny, and Ellen stepped onto the station last, Kael quiet at her side.
“Nothing out of the ordinary yet,” Nova reported back, mostly for Adan’s benefit.
“I’m seeing a few life-form readings. But only a few,” chimed in Dremer. “That’s certainly out of the ordinary on a station this size.”
“Shouldn’t there be some kind of gate or customs check here?” said Kael, glancing around.
Ellen nodded. “Maybe at the end of the corridor. Let’s move up.”
“We still have atmo,” said Dremer, studying the readout. Ellen’s suit was telling her the same, but the scan was still running. “But… there’s some kind of sedative in the air.”
Her jaw tightened just as her armor finished its scan and chirped a warning. The same kind of sedative floated in the air that had been on the Teredark moon.
“That sounds… uncomfortably familiar,” Kael said slowly.
“Agreed,” said Nova.
“It doesn’t just sound like it,” Ellen said coldly. “It’s the same exact thing.” And that had worked out so well last time.
They kept their steps quiet and careful. Their lights would announce their presence long before any sound would, though, with the whole place dark. Ellen forced herself to take a deep breath, relax her shoulders. A small set of booths like a customs entry came into view of the helmet lamps, just ahead. No signs of life, though.
“Maybe the station was just abandoned,” Jenny mused, sounding hopeful. “And we hadn’t gotten word of it yet.”
“Sure,” said Dremer smoothly. “Or it could have been sold to an owner who’d powered it down temporarily, run on hard luck. The minerals don’t come off those planets cheaply, you know. It could be nothing—"
“Oh God,” came Zhia’s whisper. Ellen knew it must be bad when the woman launched into a spurt of Russian. Expletives? A prayer? Zhia rarely seemed like the religious type, but Ellen could have sworn there’d been an “Amen” at the end in there.
“They’re all dead,” said Dremer, her voice darkening. “All of them.”
Ellen stopped. They all stopped.
The customs gate Kael had predicted was here all right, the seats empty, but behind it lay a terminal lined with seats for humans and other species, all presumably waiting for a ship. A way off Upsilon.
A way out? Everywhere her headlamp shone, it lit up a corpse.
“This whole place is uninhabitable,” said Dremer quickly. “There’s not just sedative in the air here. Something else too. Several viral strains. Taking a sample.”
Ellen cleared her throat. “Make sure you quarantine the shit out of that.”
“Obviously. The tablet is going to make a digital copy. We aren’t taking anything with us—at least not intentionally as one of my samples anyway.”
“That’s a cheery thought,” croaked Zhia, voice hoarse now.
“We can handle this. Anything other than the viruses?” Ellen said slowly. “Is that what killed these people?”
“Something else could have done it and then dissipated with time. But I’m willing to bet that it was a rogue virus. Or viruses.”
Nova swore. “Maybe one of these pirates screwed the wrong guy this time.”
“Or the wrong gal.” Ellen scowled out into the darkness.
Arakovic.
Had she been here? Was this her handy work? Why was she showing up at every Enhancer lab in Ellen’s path? Was Simmons hot on her trail—or was it the other way around?
“There’s a heat sig that way. More than one person, I’d guess.” Dremer pointed a suited hand, and Zhia nodded. The sight of the suit made Ellen think yet again they needed to order her some armor. Even if she didn’t like it and hardly ever wore it, those space suits were just not as safe. This situation certainly drove that home.
Zhia took a step to the left. “I see it too. Should we check it out?” She looked back to Ellen, waiting for confirmation.
“Yes. And stick together this time.”
They moved quicker now. Bodies lined the hallway, clearly dead but not in an excessive state of decay. No bloating. Most features were horrifically intact. Dead, blank eyes stared out into the heavens.
“Was this recent?” she asked.
“The temperature has dropped to nearly that of open space.” Dremer moved her scanner from side to side, not taking her eyes off it. Good thing she had two escorts watching so she didn’t trip and fall flat on her fancy scanner.
“Meaning?”
“At this distance from the suns, they’re frozen,” Jenny chimed in quietly.
The corridor opened onto another that curved away from them to the left. One of the curving arms of the Y? The bodies were fewer here, but some remained, looking like they’d fallen literally in place while walking down the hallway.
“Must have been sudden. So we don’t know how long ago this happened?” Ellen asked.
“Yes. But I’d guess it was in the last few weeks or months,” said Dremer. “It’s been more than a few days. Almost no heat from the station’s systems are left, and unless they were sabotaged, presumably it took a while for them to completely shut down or break without human intervention.”
“Maybe a polite AI turned out the lights for them,” said Kael.
Ellen pursed her lips. “Another cheery thought. How much farther?”
“Looks like they are…” Dremer hesitated.
“. . . behind this door.” Zhia turned, and her lamp lit up a heavy security door.
Ellen scanned the area one last time, then sighed. “Jenny, Zhia, and Dremer—get the door open. Nova and Kael, let’s watch their backs.”
“Adan,” said Jenny into the comm, stepping up. “We got a door over here. Can you work your magic?”
“Tapping into your cam,” he said slowly. “Can you shine your light down a little? Yeah, there. Hit that black, round button for me.”
She reached out and hit it. Nothing happened.
“Yeah, you don’t need me,” said Adan.
“Aw, don’t say that,” Jenny said, voice oddly sweet. “We always need you, Adan.”
“No, I mean, there’s no power. What you need is a blowtorch.”
“That can be arranged!” Nova jumped into action. Without needing orders, Nova and Jenny switched places, and Nova went to work unloading her torch.
“Wait—if there’s life on the other side of this door, will opening it kill them?” Zhia asked.
“Let me get a reading on the door,” said Dremer. “And see if you can get sensors on the layout within.”
Zhia pulled out her tablet.
As the two of them studied the displays, the station creaked around them. Ellen swallowed. That was of course just the totally normal groaning and moaning of space. Nothing ominous. Nothing to worry about. The station hadn’t shown any structural damage in any of their scans. They still had atmo. Imagining herself getting violently blown out into the vacuum was entirely unnecessary.
“I’ve got clear readings that the hall continues with more seals beyond,” Dremer said finally. “Some electronic sigs there. Maybe even an airlock. So I think opening this door should be fine.”
Ellen frowned. “Considering this is inside the building, I’d call that a staging area. For decontamination. Like in a lab. Have we found our target?”
Dremer grunted. “You know… I think you’re right. We didn’t have clear intel on this, but yes. This is the lab we’ve been looking for.”
“Well, that’s all good news,” said Jenny, brightening up. “Sooner we get in, sooner we get out of this place. If there are people alive in there.”
“Even if they’re alive, how do we get them out?” Kael leaned against the far wall, settling in for a wait.
Ellen shrugged. “Let’s see if anyone’s really alive before we worry about that. I don’t suppose anyone’s going to answer to a knock?”
Jenny’s knock echoed loudly, no other noise from the station remotely issuing in reply. They waited a minute, then another. Nothing.
“Nothing like a station full of corpses and groaning metal to remind you that you’re just a bit of dust in the expanse of space.” Zhia’s tone was uneven, shaky.
“Thanks for the reminder.” Ellen pursed her lips, trying to think if they were missing anything. Something just wasn’t right. But nothing came to her. “All right—get on with it, Nova.”
The rest of them stood around tensely while light from the lasertorch cast a blue sheen over everything while Nova worked. Finally, the door fell in, the huge clank echoing metallic thunder down the corridor. Ellen couldn’t help but wince. Then again, given they were the only life other than these blips on the station, and their lights were lighting the place up, they weren’t going to be surprising anyone.
Zhia went through first, followed by Jenny, and Ellen went after her. She started to get out of the way so the others could follow but stopped short.
Light poured from a single window on one side of the hallway, about thirty meters down. Everything else was dark.
“Kael…” she said softly, finally remember to scoot out of the way. “Look familiar to you?”
He stepped through—and caught his breath as he straightened. Then he started forward at a jog.
She matched his pace and even shot forward a bit to beat him to the window. He was obviously letting her, because even with her suit he ought to be able to out run her. But it was probably good he didn’t his enhancements against allies.
If that was what they really were. Of course, Levereaux was doing her best right now to get a look at his capsule, which he’d left in his cabin for once. So perhaps ‘allies’ was pushing it a little.
She stepped up and peered through the window as the others approached more carefully behind them. Kael skidded to a stop at her side and swore.
