Prisoner Read online

  The Unity

  Book II

  Prisoner

  By Gilbert M. Stack

  Amazon Edition

  Copyright 2021 by Gilbert M. Stack

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Prisoner

  Chapter One: Where Am I?

  Chapter Two: We Know Exactly Who You Are

  Chapter Three: Can’t You Do Anything About This Itching?

  Chapter Four: Am I a Guest or a Prisoner?

  Chapter Five: I Know She’ll Do the Right Thing

  Chapter Six: You Have No Choice

  Chapter Seven: It’s Like Keeping Score

  Chapter Eight: It’s a Good Cartelite Story

  Chapter Nine: It’s Built on Blood

  Chapter Ten: She Had to Tell Him the Truth

  Chapter Eleven: It Sends a Totally Wrong Message

  Chapter Twelve: I’m Asking You to Be More Than You Are

  About the Author

  Other Works by Gilbert M. Stack

  Contact Gilbert M. Stack

  Prisoner

  Chapter One

  Where Am I?

  Sound slowly penetrated the fog suffocating Jewel’s consciousness—a quiet, distinct, barely audible occurrence like the drip of water from a faulty faucet.

  Ping…ping…ping…ping.

  Next, her skin began to itch. The irritation started at a spot just beneath her nose on her upper lip—annoying but bearable. Then a second spot beneath her left shoulder blade began to bother her enough that she squirmed in her bed to try and scratch it without coming up from beneath her cover. The spot on her thigh was in easy reach of her sleepy fingers and she clawed liberally at it until dry powdery flakes began to break off against her fingertips.

  “I advise you against exerting yourself,” a cold impersonal voice instructed her. “Your body has been harshly used. As a result, you are weak—even for your people. Over exertion at this point will only impede your recovery. Exercise your self-control.”

  Jewel tried to stop scratching, her body instinctively obeying the voice of authority, but her effort only lasted a few moments. In that time the horrific sensation spread from her thigh to her right breast, left hip and the bottoms of both feet. She tried to sit up but a strap across her chest prevented her.

  A question came to her sleepy brain and she asked it while she continued to dig her fingernails into her suffering body. “Where am I?”

  Her voice croaked the words so badly that she, herself, could barely recognize them.

  “I told you to exercise some self-control,” the woman reminded her, irritation, or maybe even anger, appearing in her voice.

  Spy? Jewel silently called out to the hated bioware package implanted in her temple. Where am I? What’s going on?

  The bioware remained silent and with a jagged flash of imperfect memory, Jewel recalled that it had been acting out this way for several days. The program had figured out she’d run away from home and was hindering her quest for continued freedom through a campaign of passive resistance, just as it had been instructed to do by Jewel’s parents.

  “You must stop scratching. You will only further damage your skin.”

  Jewel had no doubt now that the woman giving her commands had a temper. There was also a slightly odd cadence to the woman’s speech which sounded vaguely familiar even if Jewel’s sleep-fogged brain could not immediately place it. She didn’t like the memory lapse anymore than she enjoyed the intense feeling of disorientation which permeated her other senses. She didn’t know where she was and she had no idea how she had gotten here. She wracked her brain for answers. She had been in the Valkyrie system serving as crew onboard the Euripides, a rundown tramp freighter plying the space lanes in the Fringe, but this woman didn’t sound like any one she’d met there.

  Frightened, Jewel attempted to open her eyes but found something obstructing her vision. She tried to reach for whatever it was, but the strap across her chest and upper arms hindered her. She started to squirm, trying to work her way free, but a strong hand caught her wrist frustrating her efforts. “You must not move around yet.”

  “My eyes,” Jewel forced out the words. Pain erupted in her throat as her larynx struggled to from the words. “I can’t see anything.”

  “That is because I have bandaged them,” the woman said. If there was any hint of compassion or sympathy in that voice, Jewel couldn’t detect it.

  “B-bandages?” she stuttered. She tried to sit up again even as her body screamed in protest but the strap once again defeated her. It might not have mattered. Her muscles screeched at her efforts as if it had been years since she’d called on them to do anything and they weren’t ready to go back to work.

  Someone shoved hard on her shoulder, pushing her flat on her back. “I just finished warning you about the dangers of exertion. I do not enjoy repeating myself to criminal simpletons who do not deserve my care or the honors bestowed upon them.”

  Criminal? Jewel wondered. Spy, for Stars sake, stop playing games and tell me what’s happening!

  The bioware remained silent, but a cascade of images flashed past Jewel’s blind eyes. First blond-haired, blue-eyed, Erik Gunnarson leaning over her shoulder as she read the navigation data on the bridge of the Euripides; then she was finding the skeletal remains of a mother and child who had committed suicide together on Brynhild Station; now she was opening a cargo container full of the thick green grainy jelly that composed unrefined armenium ore; next a horrible all-encompassing black void pressed in all around her with the taste of dirty sea water; finally the last vid image she had seen of her fiancé, Kole Delling hovered before her accusingly.

  The image of Kole formed a strange connection to the present and Jewel suddenly recognized the strange cadence of the speaker’s speech patterns. With sudden perspicacity, she feared she knew all too well where she was, or at least whose hands she had fallen into. “Wh-wh-where…?”

  Her throat crackled agonizingly as she tried to force out the words.

  “Hmmm,” the woman said. “Give her hydration.”

  The tip of a thin straw was placed between Jewel’s lips and a pleasantly warm, lemony liquid dribbled onto her tongue. Where the warmth touched her, the horrible arid feeling in her mouth gave way to a far more moist and comfortable sensation. The dry cotton texture remained inside of her, but lessened somewhat in its severity. The delightfully wet liquid also jumpstarted her senses and caused the world to start spinning but that wasn’t as important as the lovely moisture the straw had brought to her mouth. When it touched her again, Jewel tried to lift her head to get a firmer grip on it, swishing her tongue beneath the stream of lemony fluid to help revive it. As the liquid rolled down her throat, it too began to revive as the feeling of swallowed razor blades substantially diminished.

  The third time she was able to roll her cracked lips inward so they could partake in the delightful moisture as well. When the straw was withdrawn, Jewel lay breathing heavily for a few moments trying to gather her wits about her while she waited for her head to clear and the world to stop spinning. “Thank you,” she finally said.

  “Gratitude from a Cartelite?” the woman with the unhappily familiar accent said. “What is the universe coming to?”

  If that selfsame universe weren’t still dancing dizzily around her, Jewel might have smiled at the woman’s statement.
It was dead on with the stereotype of her people. Instead, she chose from among the many questions she wanted to ask, finally settling on the one that frightened her most. “Am I correct in identifying your accent as Armenite?”

  “Indeed you are, little criminal simpleton. I am Physician Lieutenant Eva Bree of the heavy cruiser, Righteous Lightning.”

  Whatever slight amount of humor Jewel had been feeling slipped away from her, replaced by irritation and a touch of fear. She remembered what she and the crew of the Euripides had been doing in the Valkyrie system, harvesting abandoned ore that the Armenites would doubtless like to claim for themselves. She was in terrible trouble and she had to pull her wits together and start defending herself. “I am aware of no crimes that I have committed,” Jewel stated. That wasn’t precisely true. Running away from her parents had technically been a crime, but she’d been morally right on that one. The problem here was that while the abandoned armenium was clearly legitimate salvage, the Armenites would never admit it. Their entire economy was built upon their centuries-long monopoly over the armenium trade—complete control of the harvesting of the fuel that made faster-than-light travel possible. If they lost that monopoly, they lost their stranglehold over the rest of the galaxy.

  As Jewel considered the severity of her situation, the physician lieutenant responded to her statement with bitter laughter. “Oh, of course not, you would have us all believe you’re a poor kidnapping victim.”

  That was a bizarre idea that took Jewel completely by surprise. Without considering her answer she barked out a protest. “I am not! Who said I’d been kidnapped?”

  The woman continued to laugh, a harsh nasally sound which made her seem even less attractive. “Why you did, of course.”

  Jewel had no idea what the doctor was talking about, but the bioware wired into her head might. She reached out to it again, hoping the severity of her situation would force it to overcome the computer snit that had led it to stop communicating with her. Spy, I need information. What in the galaxy is this woman talking about?

  The bioware maintained its silence.

  Spy, Jewel thought again. Answer me! Where am I? What’s going on here?

  “If you are trying to access the bioware you pampered Cartelite babies have wired into your minds, we deactivated it when it attempted to breach the security of our shipboard computer systems.”

  Jewel’s eyes widened beneath the bandages that covered them. If Spy really had attempted to break into the Armenite computers, that certainly would be construed as a crime. She decided she probably should stay silent, but her fear of spending the next couple of decades in an Armenite prison forced her to defend herself. “I have no recollection of that. My bioware unit went rogue several days ago and I didn’t have the facilities to safely shut it off on the Euripides. I have no way to tell what it may or may not have been doing.”

  The woman was not impressed with Jewel’s disclaimer. “How typical of a Cartelite to think that she can absolve herself of responsibility for her actions by blaming the tools she employs for the deed.”

  “I am not—”

  “Do not dare interrupt me!” the physician lieutenant snapped. “I don’t care who you are engaged to or how important you believe he might be. I am an Armenite naval officer and you are a spoiled Cartelite child-adult who has sacrilegiously meddled in things your base sub-human flesh should never have experienced. If the captain would listen to me, we would atomize your offensive body in the same way we destroyed your ship.”

  “What?” Jewel tried to sit up again only to be held down by the stupid restraint strap. What had they done to the Euripides? What had they done to Erik? “You destroyed the Euripides? What about—”

  She started to ask what had happened to the crew on the surface of the moon, but she stopped herself because she wasn’t sure if the Armenites had found them all yet. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten here—or even precisely where here was. Her memories jumbled confusingly in her brain. They’d been trying to harvest armenium beneath the Northern Sea on the surface of a planet-sized moon in the abandoned Valkyrie System. The star system had been partially colonized once by the Ymirians—a people on the Fringe who’d been conquered by the Armenites about twenty years ago. The colonists were all dead now, victims of some sort of disaster that had struck their mining operations. The Euripides had tried to pick up where the Ymirians had left off by scavenging the spilled-remains of the armenium the colonists had lost when their mining platform had collapsed and sunk to the seabed. The same sort of disaster that killed the Ymirians had hit the planet-side crew of the Euripides just before Armenite warships had entered and claimed the system. They’d lost contact with the miners working on the ocean floor and Jewel had had to dive into the lightless depths to try and discover what had happened to them. There she’d suffered one of the myriad system failures that had plagued all of their efforts on the moon. Her all-environment suit had been compromised and at unspeakable depths below the ocean…the sea water had rushed in and...

  The memory shocked Jewel. She remembered the stark terror, the suffocating force of the water, and strangely through the intense cold a horrific burning both outside and inside her body.

  Why wasn’t she dead?

  The physician lieutenant continued speaking as if she had no idea of the thousand thoughts spiraling around in Jewel’s brain. Satisfaction rang in the woman’s voice. “Certainly we destroyed your ship. Pirates taken in the act deserve death. There was no need to risk their escape by attempting to capture them.”

  The woman’s insufferable arrogance shoved aside Jewel’s questions about her own survival and goaded her to defend her apparently dead crewmates. “You sanctimonious bitch! The Euripides wasn’t a pirate vessel. It wasn’t even armed. And the Valkryie System had been abandoned for close to twenty years. If anyone was acting like pirates there it was you Armenites who destroyed a merchant vessel to prevent its crew from profiting from a legitimate salvage operation.”

  Anger once again flared in the physician lieutenant’s speech. “Ymir and all of its colonies belong to the Armenite Hegemony. Theft from—”

  Jewel had truly had enough. The Armenites were the bastards who had conquered Erik’s home planet more than twenty years ago. For this woman to use that crime to justify the murder of her crewmates—of Erik—was insufferable. “That was just another act of piracy,” she shouted as she struggled again against the restraining strap. She wanted to rip the bandage off her head so she could stare this bitch in the eye while she yelled at her. “If the Euripides deserves to die as a result of peaceful salvage operations, what do you Armenite’s deserve for the violent conquest of an entire planet? Talk about theft. You Armenites make pirates look like petty thieves.”

  Hot rage finished cracking the physician lieutenant’s demeanor. She must have leaned close to Jewel, because spittle accompanied her words as she shouted in Jewel’s face. “I will never understand what possible value our elders could find in this distasteful relationship with you Cartelites. You are shallow venal creatures lacking in even the most modest sense of decorum and civility. And as for honor—”

  “Oh, that’s rich,” Jewel shouted back. Whatever good the lemony liquid had done her throat was gone now. Forcing the words out felt akin to swallowing razor blades, but Jewel was too angry to care about her personal pain. “An Armenite talking about decorum and civility? Your people don’t even begin to understand the meaning of the words polite society.”

  “You will not speak to me this way!” the physician lieutenant screamed as she pounded something on her control panel so hard Jewel could hear the reverberating thump echo across the room.

  Jewel didn’t care how angry the woman was. She couldn’t stop herself from yelling. Shouting was the only outlet she had for her raging emotions. The Armenites had her and they’d killed Captain Kiara, Lara Everson and all the other people on the Euripides. And they’d probably killed Erik too—Erik and Ana and all the others. They were m
onsters and she hated them. She couldn’t believe her parents wanted her to marry one.

  “And as for why you work with us, that should be obvious even to a thick-skulled Armenite hag like you. Your people like money just like everyone else in the galaxy. And no one—absolutely no one—is better…” Jewel broke off her tirade to yawn. “Better,” she tried again, not understanding why it was suddenly so difficult to form words. “No one is better…than a Cartelite…” She yawned once more. “At turning a…profit…”

  The last thing she heard as she slipped into unconsciousness was the physician lieutenant saying, “There! That finally shut her up.”

  Chapter Two

  We Know Exactly Who You Are

  “Why is the Cartelite woman unconscious again?” a cold male voice penetrated Jewel’s sleep. “You reported that she was awake. I came down here because I wish to communicate with her. Is this a setback in her recovery?”

  Jewel tried to look around but found she couldn’t lift her head. What was happening to her? What in the void was going on?

  The nasty doctor who’d fought with Jewel earlier answered the newcomer’s question. There was no hint of the rage she’d directed at Jewel in the hollow respectful tones of her voice. “It is not a serious setback, Captain. The patient overexerted herself against my medical instructions. You know the Cartelites are venal creatures given almost completely to self-indulgence. They do not have the wit or the self-discipline to follow sound medical advice. I was forced to sedate her.”

  Sedate me? The drug induced lethargy weighed Jewel down like a wet blanket, but she struggled against it, trying unsuccessfully to finish waking up. It was terribly frustrating. She could listen as if she was half asleep but didn’t appear able to voluntarily move any of her muscles.

  “Hmmm,” the male voice considered. “It is true they are defective, and yet, they have their uses.”