Dark Beneath the Moon (40 page)

We saw no-one in the hallway, Chron or otherwise. The alarm continued to bleat. “Does it seem weird that we haven’t seen anyone yet?” Rei asked.

“I’m starting to think that alarm is nothing to do with us,” Baden said.

Maja quirked a half-smile. “That’s a less comforting thought than I would have expected.”

But it seemed Baden might be right. As we reached the next door—also on the left, we’d seen none at all on the right—the corridor shook suddenly under our feet as if the entire structure had been hit by something big. Maja lurched into the wall, and her force field flared. Baden put out a hand to help her but she warded him off. “Careful, I’m a live wire, remember? And I didn’t even touch the wall—the field stopped me.”

“I have to get one of those things,” Baden said.

“Yeah, maybe they sell them at the gift shop,” Rei told him. “We’ll check before we leave.”

“Let’s not get distracted, folks,” Hirin chided them. “Here’s another door. Maja, do the honours.”

This room seemed to be a common area—chairs and tables, as well as a run of counters and some devices that I assumed were for food preparation. One of the chairs had been knocked backwards, and I wondered if someone had gotten up from here in a hurry. The room was empty of inhabitants. That might explain the footsteps we’d heard running away from us.

“Is anyone else starting to feel like the Chron on this station have bigger worries than us?” Rei asked.

The next door wouldn’t open, even to Maja’s touch.

“Leave it,” Hirin said. “We don’t have the time or the tools to start breaking into places.”

“What if Mother’s in there?” Maja asked.

Hirin blew out a sigh. “Then we’ll come back when we’ve eliminated all the other possibilities.”

As if to underscore his words, the walls and floor shuddered again.

“I get the feeling we are on a station, and it’s getting pounded,” Viss muttered.

One more door and we came to a junction in the hallway—we could go straight or turn right, finally. This door was windowed, and Rei peered through the opening. “Airlock,” she said, “So this is definitely a station. But I can’t see out the second window, so I don’t know if anything’s docked there or not.”

“It could be the ship,” Baden said.

“Here, let’s see if I can open it,” Maja said, and Baden moved out of her way. She put a hand on the door, but nothing changed.

“This one’s keyed,” Rei said, gesturing to a touchpad set into the wall near the door. “Safety precaution, I guess. Dangerous to have an airlock door you can open merely by falling against it.”

“
Damne
,” Hirin said. “We must have come halfway around the station by now. Maybe we should have gone out the other door. I really thought Luta and Cerevare would be nearby.”

“Still think we shouldn’t split up?” Maja asked. “This place is bigger than I expected.”

Hirin chewed his lip, obviously considering. “No, we stay together,” he said finally. “If it’s big, that’s one more reason we should stay close. We can’t communicate with each other if we separate.” He gestured with his resin-sheathed arm.

“Let’s take the side corridor, then,” Yuskeya suggested. “It might go straight across, we’ll find ourselves near the other door, and we can check that area.”

Hirin agreed, so we moved cautiously to the right-hand corridor. After only ten feet or so it opened to another, smaller ring corridor that went left and right. Glass-walled, brightly-lit banks on either side swept the inside of the ring, and the bright, many-hued greens of newly sprouted plants made it obvious that this was a hydroponics garden. Directly ahead of us, ringing what must be the central axis of the station, lay a bank of elevators.

The control station for the hydroponics lab was to the left, and a startled-looking Chron began to rise from a chair inside. Even at that distance, and through the glass wall, it seemed—afraid. Its mouth moved, but it couldn’t be talking to us. More likely telling someone else about us. It was impossible to tell if it had a weapon.

Well, neither did we, not counting the forks.

“Run!” Hirin barked, and darted toward the elevators. The corridor curved around them to each side, and we sped past. A series of reverberations beat through the walls and floor at that moment. Not enough to knock anyone off-balance, but enough to feel.

“Station’s firing at something,” Viss said. “Those were some kind of torps launching.”

“So the station’s under attack, and that last Chron seemed afraid of us,” Baden said. So he’d noticed the facial expression, too. “I don’t like this scenario.”

“At least if most of them are busy, they’re not looking for us,” Gerazan said.

No corridor opened directly across from us when we passed the other side of the hydroponics wing, but there was one about ten feet to the left. We ran in and found ourselves at a dead end; a door in front of us and another corridor to the left. Maja put a hand to the door and it opened to reveal the brig’s anteroom. The first cell—the one I’d been in—lay around the corner through an open door.

“
Okej,
here’s where we started,” Hirin said. “Maybe down this left-hand corridor—”

“Hang on,” Viss said. “I’m pretty sick of this thing.” He gestured to the greenish sheath on his arm. “Maybe there’s something in here that will release them.”

“Good thinking,” Yuskeya said, and she and Viss moved as one to open the cupboards and drawers stacked against the rear wall.

I kept watching over my shoulder, waiting for Chron soldiers to descend and take us into custody—if we were lucky, and they didn’t do worse. But another minute ticked by without incident, and then Yuskeya said, “Got it!”

She turned from one of the lower cupboards holding a sort of hex key, but with a wavy shape on the bottom. In the open cupboard behind her, a pile of what looked like the sheaths was stacked. These were soft and formless, though, not rigid like those we wore.

“These guys take a lot of prisoners from Nearspace?” I asked.

“Maybe they have different uses,” Hirin said. “I think there’s a lot more going on here than we understand.”

“Gee, ya think?” I muttered, but it didn’t seem like a good time to get anyone pissed off at me.

Yuskeya slotted the key into her sheath and turned. With a soft pop, the two halves pulled away from each other, and she slipped it off. Remarkably, once unlocked, it collapsed into a soft, malleable material, pliant as thin silicone. Viss held his arm out wordlessly, and she did the same for his.

“What is this stuff?” Baden wondered, as his softened and released.

Something worth hanging on to,
I thought, and surreptitiously tucked mine inside my bandolier once it was unlocked. I pulled the sleeve of my jacket down into place with a sigh of relief.

In less than a minute we’d all removed them. Hirin pressed his implant. “Luta, are you there? Cerevare?”

He couldn’t really have been hoping to get an answer, but he still seemed dejected when none came.

“The captain had one on, too, and probably the Lobor as well,” I reminded him. “So unless someone else took it off for them . . .”

He nodded. “I know. Figured it was worth a try, though.”

“They’re routed through the
Tane Ikai’s
comm system,” Baden said gently. “If that’s shut down, they won’t work until the ship is live again.”

Hirin nodded and turned to the other hallway. “Right, let’s check this way.”

The doors on either side of this hallway stood open, and the rooms seemed to be medical bays. Each held a gurney, cupboards, a counter, and some unidentifiable machines and electronics. Again things seemed unfinished, haphazard—boxes and crates, things shoved onto shelves with no apparent organization.

The third bay might have been recently vacated. A pale yellow sheet had slipped off a gurney in the center of the room, and lay pooled on the floor beside it. A cart on wheels sat at the head of the gurney. Translucent tubing hung from it, connected to a soft-looking sleeve of some sort. Reddish streaks and drips marred the inside surfaces of the tubing, as if blood had run through it. Curious, I examined the sleeve part. The inside held a row of some kind of sucker-like things that would probably hurt like hell attached to your skin. A tray similar to the ones used to bring us our food sat on the counter, holding a plate with a half-eaten slice of cinnamon bread. A shallow bowl of water, still beaded with condensation, stood beside it.

Maja crossed to it and gently laid her hand against the side of the bowl. “Still cold,” she said. “If Mother was here, she’s not long gone.”

From out in the hallway, Viss said, “End of the corridor opens up into a big ward. Empty, though.”

I’d turned to look at him and saw his eyes widen as he glanced in the other direction, from where we’d just come.

“Captain!” he said, but he didn’t sound at all happy to see her.

WHEN I TURNED
the corner to follow the Chron, I damn near ran into it. It had gone only a few feet, into a small anteroom, and stood before an open door, staring.

It turned and saw me, and shook its head. Said something, but it didn’t seem angry that I’d left the medical bay and followed it.

I joined it and peered through the door. A curving corridor stretched away from us, lined on both sides with barred cells. All the doors stood open. Outside one, on the floor, lay a mound of torn pale yellow cloth. Two Chron stood over it, looking startled at our arrival.

“Companions are no longer in the here,
”
Pita translated.

“You don’t have to give me word for word if it doesn’t make sense,” I told her, exasperated. “I’m pretty sure, advanced as you seem to be, that you can paraphrase what it’s trying to say.”

The voice coming from the datapad held a note of humour. “Sure I could. But that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”

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.