“That’s right,” Quercer Janath said absently. “And we’ve just taken over this ship.”
“Except we can’t get out of this damn room.”
“Cabin. We can’t get out of this damn cabin.”
“Whatever the.”
“Most annoying. Purely—”
“ — Mechanical. You said.”
“Ah. Here we go.” The travelcaptain struck a smart blow at a patch of wall. Then another. The door appeared and irised open, revealing a short corridor and another door.
Quercer Janath turned to look at the Dweller and the human in his arrowhead esuit. “Gentlemen. We must leave you for a while.”
“Fuck that, action hero,” Y’sul said. “You go, we go.” Y’sul paused. “Well, unless there’s an ambush out there. Obviously.”
Quercer Janath bobbed in the gas, laughing. “There’s a vacuum out there, Y’sul.”
“And lots of angry, confused Voehn.”
The injured Dweller was silent for a moment. “I forgot,” he admitted. He shrugged. “Okay. Hurry back.”
* * *
Saluus Kehar woke to a feeling of confusion and dread. There was a nagging feeling that what he’d just experienced had not been an ordinary sleep, that there was something more to it. It had been somehow messier, even dirtier, than he might have expected. He had a sore head, but he didn’t think he’d been over-indulging the day or evening before. He’d had a slightly boring, slightly depressing dinner with some of the Dweller Embassy people, a perplexing talk with Guard-General Thovin, then a more pleasant interlude with Liss. Then sleep. That had been all, hadn’t it? No terrible amount of drink or anything else to give him a headache and make it so hard to open his eyes.
He really couldn’t open his eyes. He tried very hard indeed but he couldn’t do it. They wouldn’t open. No light through his eyelids, either. And his breathing didn’t feel right. He wasn’t breathing! He tried to fill his lungs with air, but he couldn’t breathe. He started to panic. He tried to move his body, bring his hands up to his face, to his eyes, to see if there was something over his head, but nothing moved — he was paralysed.
Saluus felt his heart thud in his chest. There was a terrible, squirming, moving feeling in his guts, as though he was about to void his bowels or throw up or both.
— Mr Kehar?
The voice didn’t come through his ears. It was a virtual voice, a thought-voice. He was in some sort of artificial environment. That at least started to make sense of what was going on. He must have been booked for some rejuvenation treatment. He was deep under, safe and fine in a clinic, probably one he owned. They’d just got the wake-up sequence wrong somehow, failing to monitor his signs properly. A whisper of painkiller, some feel-good, de-panic… a simple-enough cocktail for a Life Clinic to get together, you’d have thought. And a fairly trivial mistake, but they’d still got it wrong. He’d have words.
Except he’d had nothing booked. He’d even cancelled a regular check-up appointment until after the Emergency. He hadn’t been due to have anything done at all.
An attack. They must have been attacked in the ship, maybe while they were asleep. He was in a hospital somewhere, in a tank. Oh fuck, maybe he’d been really badly injured. Maybe he was just a head or something.
— Hello? he sent. It was easy enough to think-speak rather than really speak, just like being in a deep game or — again — like having serious hospital treatment.
— You are Saluus Kehar?
They didn’t know his name?
Could he have been drugged, zapped in some way? Oh fuck, had he been kidnapped?
· Who is this? he asked.
· Confirm your identity.
· Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I asked who you are.
A wave of pain passed up his body, starting at his toes and ending at his skull. It had a startling purity about it, a sort of ghastly, dissociative quality. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving a dull ache in his balls and teeth.
— If you do not cooperate, the voice said, — more pain will be used.
He gagged, trying to speak with his mouth, and failing.
· What the fuck was that for? he sent, eventually. — What have I… ? Okay, look, I’m Saluus Kehar. Where am I?
· You are an industrialist?
· Yes. I own Kehar Heavy Industries. What is the problem here? Where am I?
· What is your last memory before waking up?
· What? His last memory? He tried to think. Well, what he had just been thinking about. Liss. Being on the ship, on Hull 8770 and feeling like he was about to fall asleep. Then he wondered what had happened to Liss. Where could she be? Was she here, wherever “here’ was? Was she dead? Should he mention her or not?
· Answer.
· I was falling asleep.
· Where?
· On a ship. A spacecraft, the Hull 8770.
· Which was where?
· In orbit around Nasq. Look, could you tell me where I am? I’m perfectly willing to cooperate, tell you all you need to know, but I need some context here. I need to know where I am.
· Were you with anybody?
· I was with a friend, a colleague.
· Name?
· Her name is Liss Alentiore. Is she here? Where is she? Where am I?
· What is her post?
— Her? She’s my assistant, my private secretary.
Silence. After a while he sent, — Hello?
Silence.
A click, and the darkness was replaced by light. Saluus was returned to something like the real world, with a real body. The ceiling was shiny silver, lined with hundreds of glowing lines. Wherever he was, it was very bright.
He was in a bed, in about half gravity or less, held down by… he couldn’t move. He might not be held down physically by anything, but he still couldn’t move anything major like hands or legs. Somebody dressed like a doctor or a nurse had just taken a kind of helmet-thing off him. He blinked, licked his lips, feeling some sort of capacity for movement in his face and neck but nothing beyond. He thought he could still feel the other bits of his body, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was still just a head.
A tall, thin, weird-looking man with violently red eyes was looking down at him. Robes like something out of an opera. He smiled and he had no teeth. Oh, he did have teeth; they were just made of glass or something even more transparent.
Saluus took a breath or two. Just breathing normally felt good. He was still terrified, though. He cleared his throat. “Anybody going to tell me what’s going on?”
Movement to one side. He was able to turn his head — neck grating against some sort of collar — and see another bed. Liss was being helped up out of the bed, swinging her long legs over the edge. She looked at him, flexing her neck and shoulders and letting her black hair hang down. She was dressed in a thin esuit. When they’d gone to bed, she’d been naked.
“Hi, Sal,” she said. “Welcome aboard the Starveling invasion fleet.”
The weird guy with the bad eyes turned, put out his gloved, jewelled hand, and helped her stand by the bed. “Well, then. It would appear this is indeed a great prize you have delivered to us, young woman,” he said. His voice was weird too; very heavily accented, and deep but somehow abrasive at the same time. “You have our gratitude.”
Liss smiled thinly, drawing herself upright and running a hand through her hair, shaking it out. “Entirely my pleasure.”