I was on a spaceship! Or was I? Could I be on a base? Or a station? Did it matter? I’d left my planet, something I’d never dreamed would be possible, much less likely. I had to fight to keep a giddy grin from my face.
We paused at a junction where several corridors met at what looked like a central elevator shaft. I felt his gaze on me.
“If I were going to hide a spaceship, which I assume you’re doing, since I haven’t heard about UFOs outside of the regular conspiracy theory circles, I’d put myself in orbit inside the asteroid belt. Just another space rock,” I noted, slanting him what I hoped was an innocent look.
A shadow passed over his perfect face. It looked like uneasiness.
Score one for me. If his expression was any indicator, I’d nailed that.
“To stay hidden, you’d have to dodge the craft that get lobbed out past lunar orbit,” I went on.
The uneasiness drained out of him. He waved a hand. The elevator door opened and Carrollus gestured me inside.
Either he’d gained control of his poker face or I’d gotten that last bit wrong. I entered the compartment and propped one hip against the wall.
He said something. It wasn’t English. Again. Native language? A non-Earth language?
The elevator started up.
If they weren’t avoiding spacecraft, they’d have to find another way to conceal their presence, which suggested tampering with the signals in some way.
“You’re tapping the data streams of everything that could see you, and scrubbing your ship’s image?” I marveled, forming the hypothesis as I spoke it. Of course. It made sense. With the technology I’d seen so far – like the fact that I wasn’t floating through the corridors – it might be a trivial matter to splice in
. . .
Carrollus crossed the tiny space in a single stride, slapped his hands against the wall on either side of my head. An odd combination of anger and regret sparked in his eyes. “Stop. No more synthesizing observations. Your hope of returning home diminishes the more that you know.”
My fleeting sense of satisfaction at having hit so close to home evaporated. I clenched my fists. “I’m a scientist. I can’t stop.”
He spun away from me.
The rigid set of his shoulders warned me to watch my mouth. I took the caution to heart. Studying him, it hit me.
He looked human. I’d naturally assumed he was human. At first. How far had they come? From which star system? Why? Was it a quirk of genetics that allowed them to pass as human? Or had they modified . . . The elevator stopped and the door opened.
He led me through another short maze of corridors to a set of double doors. He muttered another incomprehensible command.
The doors opened. Bright lights blinded me. I squinted against the glare.
Either the place was huge, or it had been soundproofed. Our footfalls disappeared into the quiet. I smelled . . . Did expectation have a scent? I drew in a breath and knew that other people filled the room.
As my eyes adjusted, I caught several things at once. Uniformed, young men stood at attention in front of instrument panels. The oval room was terraced, personnel and equipment arranged in descending concentric horseshoes down to a central floor. An enormous table of what looked like black glass dominated the lowest point.
Definitely not an office. A command center? Or a coliseum?
Carrollus and I paused on the top tier where the horseshoes opened into a broad aisle up the steps.
A thin, brittle-looking man with white hair, a hawk nose and rheumy, pale-blue eyes watched us. A blue uniform hung on his frame. No visible rank insignia. On any of them. Including Commander Trygg Carrollus.
“Ms Finlay Selkirk,” Carrollus said, “may I present Orlan Grisham? Sir, Ms Selkirk.”
“Captain,” he didn’t say. But it was obvious.
We sized one another up.
In the deep frown lines around his mouth and eyes, I believed I saw a despot.
“Ms Selkirk.” His tone dripped with misgiving.
“Captain Grisham.”
Frozen silence.
Crap. First words out of my mouth, I’d messed up. As if Carrollus hadn’t warned me to guard my tongue. I attempted an innocent smile. I don’t think any of us bought it.
“Did I guess the rank system incorrectly?” I inquired. “Commodore? Admiral? Or is it that I pegged the military thing?”
“Finlay . . .” Carrollus growled.
I quelled and slid my gaze away from the older man.
“Perhaps we should refrain from interviewing academics,” the old man said to Carrollus, his tone flat.
“You’ll want to broaden that to anyone with an IQ over fifty,” I muttered. How should a captive address her kidnappers? Bravado? Caution? Diffidence? Did I know how to pretend that last one?
“My apologies if I’ve offended protocol in some fashion,” I offered. “Am I to understand that I might be permitted to ask a few questions of you pursuant to my presence here?”
He narrowed his eyes at me, then glared over my shoulder at Carrollus. “Definitely no more academics.”
The asperity in his voice made me bite back a grin.
“We require your assistance, Ms Selkirk.” Grisham said. He’d thrown his shoulders back and straightened as if trying to assume a more commanding presence.
He had the act down pat. I pasted a neutral expression on my face and nodded.
“We have need of men and women with good hearts and quick minds,” he said.
Irritation flashed through me. Quick minds, my foot. “You’re capable of interstellar travel. Yet you’ve come to a world that hasn’t managed to land manned craft on its nearest planetary neighbor, and you’ve shanghaied a high-school physics teacher. You’re blowing sunshine up my ass, not telling me the truth.”
The at-attention onlookers gasped.
I swallowed a curse. Mistake number two, Finlay.
The old man blinked. His upraised palms fell.
“Interstellar?” he repeated.
I shrugged. “It’s plain you aren’t from around here.”
Grisham tipped his head and eyed me as if sizing me up for a vivisection table. “What makes you say that?”
Throwing my arms wide, I snapped, “The fact that I’m standing a couple thousand miles above the surface of my planet was a real tip-off.”
The old man spun on Carrollus and jabbed a finger at him. “You let her—”
“There was no ‘let’ to it!” I yelled.
“Ms Selkirk discovered our orbital position on her own,” Carrollus said. He looked troubled when I tossed him a glance. “Sir, I think we’d be best served—”
“I know what you think,” the captain snapped. “You’ve been overruled. As you were, Commander.”
Fury leaked past Carrollus’s glacial mask. It made my blood run cold.
Grisham turned his rheumy gaze upon me and attempted a paternal smile. “May we first beg a single boon of you?”
Alarms rang in my head at the captain’s antiquated phrasing, painfully polite though it was.
Wary, I said, “You want to trade for information? What coin?”
“No coin, Ms Selkirk. We aren’t mercenaries. Choose a man,” he directed, waving a hand in a wide sweep to indicate the soldiers lining the tiers, “or as many as you want to sample, from amongst those assembled.”
“Not mercenaries”? “Sample”? My mind twisted in on itself. I winced. “You did not just tell me you kidnapped me for sex.”
“That is precisely what we did.”
“Wow. We are all going to be so disappointed.”
The old man blinked. “Excuse me?”