Release (9 page)

Since she had nothing to do, she contemplated what she was going to do with her life. She couldn’t go back to the sector. She thought, instead, that maybe she’d go out to one of the colony planets. She remembered a story about the Viscountess of Adalon, who’d left the sector after the death of her husband for a planet out in the far reaches of space. The Viscountess hadn’t had any children, and so the viscountship was passing to her husband’s nephew. She’d known she would be in the way. Anyway, the Viscountess had erected a school on the colony planet and lived out her days doing good for the children there.

Ariana didn’t see herself as a charity worker, not really, but certainly there must be some useful activity out here for her. Of course, her one brush with a colony planet hadn’t made her feel at home there, exactly.

She wondered if Keirth was right. Perhaps her only option was to go back to her family and spend the rest of her life dealing with the aftermath of this particularly misguided attempt to save Risciter.

The truth was that she hadn’t realized until now how rigid the sector was. She’d spent her whole life thinking that if she followed all the rules, everything would end up fine. But she was beginning to see now that the sector wasn’t so cut and dry. Sure, she shouldn’t have gone out unchaperoned. But to be ruined because she was kidnapped? That wasn’t her fault. More and more, she didn’t want anything to do with a society that could treat her so poorly simply because bad things had happened to her. She thought of the sector with darker and darker thoughts. She wanted something else for herself, something better.

When the day was over, Ariana did her best to sleep, but she tossed and turned thinking about her future. When she finally did drift off, she dreamed of Risciter’s sneering face over her as he fondled her breast. Only, in the dream, she was frozen, and she couldn’t do anything to stop him. She simply had to lie there as he sneered at her, laughing in her face, and telling her how much he was going to enjoy killing her.

She woke up screaming.

Keirth appeared in the doorway to her bedroom. He was out of breath, like he’d run there. “Are you all right?”

Ariana sat up in bed, pulling her covers tight around her body. “Just a dream,” she said. “Risciter.”

“Oh,” said Keirth. He hovered in the doorway, seeming unsure if he should leave or not.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your sleep and make things even worse for you.”

Keirth hung his head. “It’s not like that.” He shifted on his feet. “Look, I’m sorry I said you were messing everything up. I know you didn’t mean to strand us here.”

He was sincere, and Ariana felt a pang of guilt for her actions. “I shouldn’t have messed with the hyperdrive.”

Keirth took a step into the room. “You really don’t want to go back, do you?”

She loosened her grip on the covers. “Everything’s different now.”

“Because of what Risciter did to you? Because he...forced himself on you?”

Ariana was glad it was dark. It somehow made it less horrible to be talking about things like this. “He didn’t.”

“You said you’d never get an offer of marriage. I thought...”

“No,” she said. She laughed bitterly. “I’m still intact.” She flopped back on the bed. “Not that it matters. It’s the way things seem amongst the nobility in the sector, not the way things actually are.”

“Even so,” said Keirth, “I’m glad he didn’t actually... You didn’t deserve that. I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

“
You
dragged
me
? I don’t think so. This is all my own fault.” She smiled in the darkness. “But I am glad, you know. If this hadn’t happened, I might have married him. And I wouldn’t have wanted that. So thank you for showing me what he really was.”

Keirth didn’t say anything. He took another step forward. She thought he was about to speak, but then a warning beep blared throughout the ship. It repeated over and over at a loud volume.

She climbed out of bed and followed Keirth to the bridge.

Once there, he sat down in the chair and hit a few buttons on the console. The beeping stopped.

“Well, what do you know?” Keirth said.

He switched on the visual, and the view outside of the ship leapt to life in front of them. Outside the ship, there was an old ship floating in front of them. Ariana hadn’t seen a style like that since she was a little girl. It was at least ten years old.

“We were about to run into that,” said Keirth.

“Is it abandoned?” she asked. It looked like it had been floating around in space aimlessly for quite some time.

“I’m scanning it for life forms right now,” said Keirth. He paused. “Definitely nothing human on board. It
is
abandoned.”

Ariana sat down next to him. “Who leaves their ship floating around in space?”

“I don’t know,” said Keirth. “But this is good. The scan I just ran says the ship has a working hyperdrive. We can use it to repair our ship.”

“We don’t have to go to Trioth?”

Keirth grinned. “Nope. Which is a relief, let me tell you.” He sat back in his chair. “I am going to need your help, however. How are you with a screwdriver?”

* * *

The hyperdrive was too big for one person to get out on his own, Keirth explained. Two people needed to detach it at the same time or it would become unbalanced and unusable. The weight of the thing wouldn’t be that big of a deal, however, because as far as Keirth could tell the synthgrav on the ship wasn’t working. They’d be able to float it right back onto Ariana’s ship.

They had to dock against the other ship and attach the Ariana’s ship so that they could board it. Then they had to dig out the space suits so that they could breathe inside the other ship, since its life support systems weren’t working. The suits were bulky and awkward, and once they had them on, it was pretty hot inside. They had big helmets that fastened over their heads and oxygen tanks attached to their backs so that they could breathe. There was a comm system hooked up inside the suits so that they could communicate. Once they were suited up, Keirth tested it.

“Can you hear me?”

His voice echoed inside the suit. It was loud. “Very well. Is there a volume control?”

“Afraid not, sweetheart.”

They exited Ariana’s ship through her docking bay, which was connected to the other ship’s docking bay. Keirth went first, opening the door so that they could get inside.

The docking bay of the other ship was dark and cold. Even through her suit, Ariana could tell the life support systems weren’t up and running. There wasn’t any gravity, so there were pieces of luggage floating around inside the bay. Keirth switched on his headlamp on his space suit and Ariana did the same.

“What do you think happened to this ship?” she asked.

“No idea,” said Keirth, pushing aside floating debris to move through the docking bay.

“It’s not damaged? Did they run out of fuel? If their hyperdrive works, why didn’t they leave?”

“Does it matter?” Keirth asked. “We just need to get the drive and get off.”

Okay. She guessed he was right. She followed the small ball of light that emanated from Keirth through the docking bay. The door out was open, so they floated through into a hallway.

“On this model ship,” said Keirth, “the hyperdrive is above the bridge, so we’ll need to go up a level.” He swung his headlamp up so that she could see an opening to the upper decks of the ship. There was a ladder that could be climbed when the gravity was on. Keirth grabbed a rung and pulled himself up.

Ariana shivered, looking around. Everything was so dark and creepy in here. She followed Keirth, pushing off the ladder so that she floated up to the next level.

When she got up to the next deck, she collided with something floating in the air. She pushed it away. She floated backwards and the thing floated in the opposite direction. As it drifted away, she realized what it was.

It was a person. A man in a uniform of some kind. His face was cold and frozen. His eyes were deep black sockets in his head. She yelped.

“What?” said Keirth, who was ahead of her. He spun around to see. “Oh. Crap. Dead guy.”

“You said there wasn’t anything human on the ship,” said Ariana. She closed her eyes, trying to rid herself of the image of the dead man.

“Well,” said Keirth, “the scan doesn’t pick up on dead bodies, you know. It only looks for heat signals and stuff.”

“What happened to his eyes?” If the rest of him had frozen, why were his eyes missing?

“I don’t know,” said Keirth. He floated over to the body, halting it in the air.

“What are you doing?”

Keirth held something up. “He’s got a blaster. I’m taking it.”

Oh. Gross. On the other hand, Ariana guessed the man wasn’t using it.

“You see anyone else floating around, feel free to take one for yourself,” said Keirth. “You did say you wanted a blaster.”

She couldn’t see his face, but she could tell he was grinning. If they hadn’t been in null grav, she would have shoved him. “Let’s just get the hyperdrive,” she said.

“Sure,” said Keirth, attaching the blaster to his waist.

To distract herself from the cold creepiness of this floating tomb, Ariana decided to change the subject. “So, why don’t you want to go to Trioth, anyway?”

Keirth laughed. “Oh, that. That’s a mess.” He pulled himself along the wall of the ship, heading in the direction of the bridge, Ariana guessed. “See, on Trioth, they have this custom. I didn’t know about it, and I got myself in a heap of trouble.”

“Custom?” She pulled herself along the wall as well, focusing on Keirth. She didn’t want to see any other dead people.

“Yeah, the chief of the planet seemed like a really nice guy. I showed up, looking for Risciter, like I said, but he wasn’t there. I was greeted by this entourage of people wearing loincloths and carrying spears, and they took me back to their chief. He was so hospitable, he threw a banquet in my honor, and in the middle of it, his daughter came up to me and served me some wine or something in this fancy glass. She took a drink of it, and then she handed it to me. And, since I was an idiot, I drank out of it too.”

“Doesn’t sound very sanitary.” Something else floated into Ariana. She cringed away from it, but she could tell from the way it glanced into her shoulder that it wasn’t a body, so she looked it at.

“Well, it’s a backwoods planet. I was trying to be polite,” said Keirth. “I didn’t know what was going on.”

“Hey,” said Ariana, picking up what had bumped into her. “A blaster! A blaster just floated into me.” Ha! She didn’t have to pick one off of a dead guy after all.

“Score,” said Keirth. He turned back to look at her. Through his helmet, she could see he was smiling. He had a nice smile, didn’t he? Keirth was a little rough around the edges, but he was a good guy, wasn’t he?

Triumphantly, she attached it to her suit. “So, what happened? Why was it bad to drink the wine?”

Keirth had reached the end of a passageway. He pulled himself around a corner. “Well, it turned out that I had inadvertently agreed to marry her, which I found out when she appeared in my bedchamber later that night.”

“Oh,” said Ariana. She giggled. “How embarrassing.”

“Yeah,” said Keirth. “I tore out of there right away. Ran to my ship and took off with a bunch of men with spears chasing me and swearing at me. I’m really glad we don’t have to go back there.” He halted for a second. “Watch out. Another guy with no eyes is coming at you.”

Ariana flattened herself against the wall of the ship. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t help herself. The man floated right in front of her, giving her a perfect view of his face. He, too, was missing his eyes. The rest of his skin was frozen, and she could see where chunks of it were broken away at his eye sockets, revealing bone that gleamed in her headlamp. The skin looked jagged, almost as if it had been chewed away... Ugh. She didn’t want to think about this. “Why didn’t you want to marry her? Was she ugly or something?”

“She was very pretty,” Keirth said. “But, you know, I’ve been consumed with this revenge gig. I’m not really into settling down.”

Ariana pulled herself around the corner and collided with Keirth, who hadn’t moved yet.

“There are a lot of them here,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to their eyes.”

She saw at least seven bodies floating in the air. She grimaced. And then she saw something strange. A flash of orange. It was crawling over the face of one of the dead men. “Keirth?” she whispered. “I just saw—”

“Back up!” Keirth yelled. “Go back, Ariana.”

She scrambled to turn around, but it was tough to move fast in the null gravity, and she ended up spinning around uselessly. She grabbed for the wall to pull herself back the way they’d come.

Keirth was pushing her from behind. “Gellococcus!” he screamed.

What? Ariana yanked herself around the corner as quickly as she could. Gellococcus was a sort of bacteria that could survive in deep space. Swarms of it could infest a space ship and kill everyone on it. The thing about it that made it different from regular bacteria was that it was a lot bigger. Why, when she’d seen the hollow eyes, hadn’t she thought...?

She used her feet to push off the wall and went hurtling back down the corridor they’d just come through. Bodies and debris were in her path, but she pushed past it all. Frenzied, she went as fast as she could. She reached the opening down to the docking bay and shot a look over her shoulder for Keirth. “Keirth?”

She couldn’t see him.

“It’s trying to chew through the suit,” echoed Keirth’s voice over the comm. “I can’t get to my blaster.”

If the gellococcus got through Keirth’s suit, he was done for. He wouldn’t be able to breathe. And the little beasts would be free to feast on Keirth, sucking him dry.

* * *

The Duke of Risciter scanned the newsfeeds from the bridge of his spaceship. Who knew what that little bitch, Ariana Gilit, was saying about him? Had she accused him of trying to kill her? If she had, he didn’t know if his reputation would recover.

He couldn’t believe the minx had hit him on the head so hard. He gingerly felt the bump on his forehead. He might even have a concussion, that whore.