Page 6 of Escape from Nova Nine
The sophisticated distortion veil’s constantly shifting shadows hid all but the vague shape of Kanogan’s face. He turned toward Bolerdi. “Well?”
“Truth.” She hesitated, then added, “He’s telepath immune.”
“Interesting.” One of Kanogan’s shoulders twitched as he turned back to Zade. “Turn around slowly.” His confident tone suggested he was used to being obeyed. “Raise your arms. Let me see all of you.”
Zade turned a slow full circle, wishing he was wearing the clothes instead of carrying them in one hand. Decades of ship living made him indifferent to his own nudity or anyone else’s, but this was meant to make him feel vulnerable. It worked.
Kanogan shook his head. “As much as I’d love to chat, I’m on a tight schedule today.”
Without warning, Kanogan raised a slender tube and punched Zade in the chest.
Agony took over as he collapsed. His limbs each tried to run in a different direction to get away from the pain. No shockstick ever felt like that.
When he finally stopped twisting like a tree snake, he realized he’d peed himself and his new clothes.
Kanogan lifted his hem and stepped back from the small yellow puddle. “Medic. Show me the front of his neck.” One of Kanogan’s boots had metal struts, suggesting he wore a partial exoframe under the cloak.
Peshek crouched next to Zade and pushed Zade’s chin up and back, then shined a hand light. Now all Zade could see was Bolerdi’s dusty ankle boots and the equally dusty calf-height black military boots of the enforcer who stood near her. After a long moment, Peshek released him and went back to her place near the cart.
Zade stayed still on the floor. He had no doubt anyone in the room would kill him instantly if the warden ordered it.
“He’s of no use to me. Send him to the general population.” Kanogan turned and headed through the door, followed by his silent entourage.
The others in the room stayed where they were until Bolerdi collapsed onto a bench, relief etched on her face.
Peshek and her technician used scanners on Zade, then helped him stand. “We’ll clean you up before we turn you over to orientation.”
In his youth, back when he’d lived on a planet, he’d once watched a winter eagle swoop down for a kill in the middle of a flock of wild geese huddled on a frozen lake. The eagle stayed and leisurely ate its midday meal of goose. The others on the ice slowly sidled away, averting their gaze, pretending they hadn’t seen anything. Peshek, Bolerdi, and the others all had that same look.
Zade made himself look on the positive side. At least he wasn’t someone’s lunch.
3
NOVA NINE FACILITY • GDAT 3243.106
Julke had a bad feeling about the seam of ore that she and the other two prisoners were assigned to excavate. She’d learned to listen to her instincts, honed by nearly five hundred days of captivity in the asteroid mine that wasn’t on anyone’s star charts. Instinct, however, wasn’t something she could believably explain to anyone else. She’d given up trying.
The working area was like many others. The unmanned mining bots created and stabilized gravity-plated tunnels to follow the meandering deposit of the target ore. In this seam, chofirium, a friable rock that looked like a sponge. But because drilling chofi created thick, billowing clouds of choking reddish purple dust, it took humans with hot rock cutters to do the actual extraction. The work area had to be water-saturated like a steam room, or even the cutter would clog.
Maybe her uneasiness had to do with the injured griffin she’d smuggled in with her. The little thing now rested in a nest of rags under a broken lens cover to keep the dust away. The hopper’s engine housing kept it warm. She’d glued a tiny cast to the broken wing to give it time to heal. The griffin, which she’d named Moonlet, seemed more antsy than yesterday.
She neatened up the nest around the domestic kitten-sized body and tucked in its long, tufted tail under the cover. In the civilized galaxy, griffins were a venerable and perennially popular pet-trade species, designed to look like miniature griffins from pre-Flight mythology. The dozens of officially registered breeds all had bird heads, lion bodies, and wings, but the variations were endless. All the ones in Nova Nine were bird-light, with flat, downy feathers designed to mimic the look of fur. Little Moonlet had a gray, moon-shaped cloud pattern on its side. This breed of griffin charmed her with their tufted ears, bold topknots of springy feathers, and large, brilliant gold eyes.
Julke tried to project soothing care. She’d been told the griffins were like empaths, sensitive to human emotions. She believed it.
The guards regarded the feral populations of griffins as pests to be killed whenever possible. Prisoners who learned to respect and care for the lively, sneaky, and occasionally hilarious griffins knew better. Miraculously, four breeds of griffins had not only survived, but thrived in an unpredictable and dangerous asteroid. Humans who paid attention when griffins alerted to trouble tended to live longer.
She checked the hopper and adjusted the intake tube. Purple-red dust billowed out, then got sucked back into the collector bin. Only one more hour to go on their shift.
Professional mine operations had specially engineered protective gear for human workers. Nova Nine issued deep-space exosuits intended for spacewalks. The mine’s supply buyer seemed to have cornered the market on antique suits, regardless of design, then grafted on modern tactile gloves and oxygen concentrators with atmosphere readouts. The suits kept the dust out of the prisoners’ lungs and grit off their skin. As a bonus, the built-in plumbing also enabled the mine operators to keep the prisoners working for a full twelve-hour shift, rather than having to allow bathroom or water breaks.
Some prisoners hated the invasive tubes and pads, not to mention drinking recycled water. To Julke, who’d grown up in the Volksstam city ships, exosuits were a fact of life.
She’d give anything to be back in the arms of her people. The information she’d uncovered was vital to their survival, and they didn’t even know she had it. But each day in the mine drained her reservoir of hope of escape or rescue a little more. As it was, she was one of the longest-surviving prisoners. The work was risky and the environment unforgiving. Moreover, those were easy-glide rides compared to the warden’s twisted whims and the live-subject experiments conducted by his pharma company partner.
And whirlpools of despair weren’t improving her personal chances of survival, either. She ruthlessly jettisoned that spiral of thought and focused on the here and now.
She fished the fat cockroach corpse out of her suit’s outer chest pocket and fed it to the recuperating griffin. They’d eat almost anything, but she figured the concentrated protein would help the healing process.
