Page 3 of Escape from Nova Nine
A piercing, shrill voice assaulted his ears. “Gossie! Tell the medics that 547 is finally awake.”
Zade turned his head to the right. The long, narrow room held three more tables like his that turned out to be medical-style anti-gravity tables, otherwise known as corpse carts. They were all grounded and empty. A large, pale-skinned man holding a tablet and wearing a filthy hospital-yellow tunic stood in the doorway, yelling his conversation with someone inaudible outside the room.
“Tell ’em to punch their jets. The warden wants a personal ping after we test him.” The man turned to look at Zade, then his tablet. “You’re Lunaso, right?”
It took Zade two tries to get his throat working. “Yeah.” Thirst moved to the top of his body’s complaints. “Where am I?”
The man’s face twisted with a half sneering, half sympathetic smile. “Nova Nine. Your new forever home.”
Zade activated a bit of his talent. Pain lanced through his head, making his eyes water. It felt like he’d just come down from a ten-day glide on experimental chems. He powered through the pain, only to discover the black wall of a shielder. Releasing his talent eased the headache, but didn’t banish it completely.
“Who is the warden?”
The pale-skinned man shook his head. “You’ll know soon enough.” He turned and exited.
Zade hadn’t missed the fear that flashed across the pale man’s face.
With nothing better to do, he inventoried his external body parts, relieved to discover they were all still there. Except his hair. From his reflection in the shiny trim around the floating light, he appeared to be completely bald. Not his favorite look, but he’d made worse fashion choices.
The contents of the room didn’t tell him much more than he already knew, except the wall at the far end of the room looked like laser-sliced rock. Dust was everywhere. A ventilation system operated somewhere, because in the harsh overhead light, remnant swirls of dust still danced in a lazy downward spiral. Greens, reds, purples, and gold, like the colors that stained the pale man’s tunic.
They landed on his skin, too. He firmly put aside thoughts of luxury cleansing spas, his favorite indulgence when he had funds and time off to spare. Freedom first; long, hot baths later.
The wall comp looked old, but the lights, including the floating orb above him, looked new. A square-shaped charred hole high up on one wall looked like it might once have held a clock display. It’s where he’d have put one, at any rate.
Nova Nine could be a starship or space station, but dust shortened the lives of engines and enviro systems and would have been ruthlessly scrubbed and filtered. In his checkered career, he’d visited a few asteroid mines. They’d all had ubiquitous dust. Thank the universe that gravity generators and plates were built to be impervious to almost anything. Long-term zero-G was hard on human bodies.
His eyelids felt heavy, but he fought the temptation to drift off again. If he hoped to get out of his current predicament, he needed information, not sleep. He summoned up the tune of a rousing march to keep himself awake.
The only sounds in the room came from his heartbeats and breathing. Maybe his hearing protection implants were blocking other noises? If so, he hoped the medics had external diagnostics to check them. The implants worked by themselves. Better that than having a cybernetic controller installed and integrated with his brain.
He didn’t like the ear implants, either, but he liked being deafened by starship engines even less. It was a pain in the ass to shuttle down to a civilized planet to visit the medical body shops for treatment. Only top-tier autodocs could fix natural hearing damage, and none of the outfits he’d worked for in the last twenty years had them. Traders couldn’t afford the maintenance and supplies. Smugglers couldn’t afford the space. Jackers didn’t keep anything valuable, they sold it to the highest bidder. Like his last crew had planned to do with him.
The sound of multiple footsteps drew his attention to the doorway.
A woman and a man entered first, pulling a cart in with them. Their spotless medic tunics looked professional. The multiple instruments and scanners looked intimidating. He especially didn’t like the large selection of chem jets, primed and ready to inject unknown chems into him.
A gaunt woman wearing a greenish-gray tunic and dusty brown pants slipped in through the doorway behind the medics but stayed just inside, leaning against the wall.
The big-shouldered woman with purplish skin tint and a loose halo of brilliant red and orange-streaked hair turned to look at the man with the cart. “Allergies?”
The man poked a tablet, making a holo display briefly. “Pharma tests say none.”
“Good.” She focused an assessing gaze on Zade’s torso, then selected a jet from the rack and punched his left hip with it.
Stepping back, she crossed her arms and caught his gaze. “I’m Medic Peshek. Tell me your name.”
They already had his name and quals, so it was hardly a secret. “Zade Lunaso.” His hip felt numb. What was in that jet?
“He’s telling the truth,” said the gaunt woman near the door, with a bit of wheeze in her voice. Her accent was Standard English.
A sifter, then. He ordered himself to pay attention to his words.
“Ship specialty?” asked Peshek.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Whatever needs doing.”
“Truth,” said the sifter.
