Prisoner Read online

  “I fail to understand what those are,” the doctor told him in what Jewel thought bordered on insubordination.

  The captain did not appear to be angered by the doctor’s blunt questions. Instead, he took on a lecturing tone. “Then you should apply yourself to studying economics on both a Hegemonic and galactic scale. The Cartelites are distastefully immoral creatures, but their mercantile network is the fourth leg on which the Hegemony stands. And now this one has bound herself to us—first through her parents’ promise to marry her to the Dellings and now on a wholly unexpected spiritual level.”

  Void! The marriage!

  Jewel groaned with horror as thoughts of the undesired union flooded her head. She wanted to run away with Erik, not marry some man her parents had bound her to when she was less than a year old. She had fallen in love. There was no way she could marry Kole now. Not that her family or the laws of the Cartel Worlds would give her a choice. She was the final element sealing a contract that supplied the Armenites’ raw armenium to the refineries of the Khaba Cartel. It was a business relationship literally worth trillions of solars in the long term and while Jewel might want nothing to do with it her greedy parents and the equally avaricious Cartel government certainly would. Unfortunately, it sounded as if the Armenites still supported the union as well.

  Above Jewel the physician lieutenant did a poor job of restraining her temper as she answered the captain. “The Armenite Hegemony stands on three legs, sir—honor, the military and the holy armenium. And it is repulsive that this unprepared outsider should dare to embrace the holy ascension.”

  Most of those words made no sense to Jewel. The Armenites were a culturally rude and backward people with some strange ideas about religion which frankly weren’t well understood by outsiders. But even considering that, Jewel thought that the drugs must be messing with her mind, because it sounded like the doctor was saying they worshipped the armenium and that would be crazy, wouldn’t it? It was just a fuel source—a critical commodity in the galactic trade network—not some sort of holy artifact or being.

  The captain maintained his cool dispassionate tone, apparently unaffected by his subordinate’s temper. “Ascension, Physician Lieutenant, is in the provenance of the Unity. We may prepare ourselves, yet only the Unity determines who is worthy of embrace. As for the three legs, the armenium is refined and distributed to the galaxy by the Cartelites, a service which raises the revenue we need to support our military expenditures. Only in our honor are we Armenites truly independent.”

  The outrage in the Armenite doctor’s voice could not be more apparent. “You’re suggesting that the Hegemony is weak—dependent on these vile creatures.”

  “No, I am suggesting that the Hegemony has weaknesses. And if we do not understand our weaknesses…”

  All hostility abruptly left the physician lieutenant’s tone as if she had remembered a truism so basic that it could not be argued with. “..we cannot address them,” she completed the older man’s sentence. “I apologize for nearly losing my temper, sir. I will undertake the study of the economic issues that you recommend.”

  The captain’s tone did not change, showing no evident pleasure at his victory in this little debate. “Very good, now how long will it be until I can speak with the prisoner?”

  There was a slight pause, presumably so that the doctor could view her monitors. “I have counteracted the sedative so that she will return to full consciousness more quickly. She should be able to answer your questions shortly.”

  “Very good,” the captain repeated. “Then you may leave now. I wish to talk to the prisoner alone.”

  Foreboding surged through Jewel’s body. Surely not even the Armenites would leave a female prisoner alone and unchaperoned with a man.

  The physician lieutenant quickly disabused Jewel of her naïve notions. “Of course, sir, I will be on call if you have any requirements.”

  The sound of a door opening and closing followed.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then hands touched the sides of Jewel’s blind face. She tried to push them away, but her muscles moved with glacial slowness.

  Surprisingly the captain appeared sensitive to her concerns. “Let me remove this for you,” he muttered. “Your eyes should be in no danger now. The light in this room is not bright.”

  Even as he spoke the man began to unravel a cloth bandage from about Jewel’s head. Immediately the punishing blackness began to fade and spots of painful luminosity began to blink before her eyes.

  Jewel tried to touch her eyes, but the same restraint that had hindered her efforts the first time she had awakened, frustrated her again now.

  “Let me help you with that too,” the captain said.

  The strap across her chest and upper arms disappeared allowing Jewel to finally get her hands to her face. She used them to try and blot out the overhead light source while her lids blinked furiously and water welled up from her tear ducts.

  The man, she could only see him as a blurry shape, stepped back away from her and waited patiently while her eyes slowly adjusted to the illumination. Jewel rubbed her orbs, trying to figure out why the flesh around them felt so rough and dry and why she was suddenly itching so furiously all over her body.

  Despite the fact that she still couldn’t see properly, her fingers left her eyes to scratch her forehead, but she stopped when she realized it was dry scabs and not flesh that she felt upon her skin.

  Jewel sat bolt upright while her fingers splayed outward feeling the same scabs on the flesh of her cheeks, chin and neck. “Wh-what happened to me?”

  “That is a question we’re still trying to find a satisfactory answer to,” the captain told her.

  Jewel couldn’t stop running her fingers over her face. Her watery eyes were starting to make sense of the room around her, slowly bringing the furniture into focus. She was in a medical chamber of some sort—a cross between a hospital room and an examination chamber. Unfortunately, there was no mirror to help her assess the damage she had sustained but her fingers could find no smooth skin left to discover. Her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, her chin and her lips all appeared to be covered in scabs and scars like some nightmarish creature in a horror vid. Her hands dipped lower. Her neck and chest felt the same as her face, as did, she realized, her hands, themselves…

  The captain continued speaking as she examined herself. “You appear to have survived some highly unusual circumstances. The results are frankly…miraculous.”

  Still blinking back tears, Jewel held her hands up before her eyes as the captain talked. Scabs covered every inch of their surface with the exception of a narrow swathe of skin to either side of the cuts she’d received keeping a sliding cargo unit from crushing her crewmate, Alfonse Arico, back in the Valkyrie System.

  Arico? He’d been knocked into the freezing waters of the Northern Sea during that final storm just as everything started to go to hell. They hadn’t been able to find him. A fresh tear welled up in her eye. He must be dead now. Nobody could survive for long in that water without an all-environment suit.

  Suddenly the horrifying scabs on her face and hands didn’t feel quite so important anymore.

  The captain continued speaking to her. “We interrogated your crewmates, but thus far they demonstrated no knowledge of any import concerning your survival.”

  Jewel lowered her disfigured hands, almost absently noting that her fingernails were an inch and a half longer than they should be. “Did you just say you rescued some of my shipmates?”

  “Interesting,” the captain said.

  Jewel appraised him for the first time, squinting through her still slightly blurry vision. He was an almost stereotypical image of an Armenite—tall with a well-developed physique in what Jewel guessed to be his upper forties. His black hair was trimmed short enough that she could see the pale flesh of his scalp through the stubble. His eyes were black pupils set in dark gray irises. And he wore a uniform of coarse black with silver brocade in the rank of a
naval captain—not the lesser marine rank that her fogged mind had originally presumed was addressing her.

  She tried not to show any sign of her distress that the captain of this vessel had felt her significant enough to take the time for a private interview. Her parents as Cartelite industrialists would take such attention as their due, but Jewel was realistic enough to recognize that it could not bode well for any of her personal long term hopes for the Armenites to show such interest in her. Rather than show her concern, she blundered forward, picking up on his comment. “I don’t understand. What’s interesting?” She was too flustered to add the word sir to her question and then didn’t want to draw attention to her lapse by sticking it on awkwardly after the fact.

  The man stood at military ease, feet slightly apart, hands behind his back, face essentially lacking in all expression. His voice held the same lecturer’s tone she had heard in it when he had gently chastised the physician lieutenant a few minutes before. “You are not responding to your circumstances as I would have expected. You are a Cartelite. You have just discovered that you are disfigured and yet you ask not about yourself but about your crew.”

  Jewel noted the captain still hadn’t told her how many people had survived. Was it possible any of them had actually escaped? Her memory was slowly growing clearer. When the Euripides had abandoned them, she, Erik, Ana and the others had decided to try and flee the Valkyrie System in the Genesis—an old-style, pre-slide drive colonizer starship they had found parked in orbit over the planet-sized moon the Ymirians had colonized. It was centuries old but still functioning. They’d hoped that even though it lacked faster-than-light capability, they could use it to escape the Armenite warship that had entered the system. Obviously, that hadn’t worked for her, but could any of the others have used it to escape? If the Armenites had captured her did that necessarily mean they’d caught all the others on the moon’s surface as well? And come to think of it, how had they gotten her? She’d been drowning in the depths of the Northern Sea. Forget about the Armenites for a moment, how had she even survived to get back to the surface?

  Spy? You want to help me out with any of this? How did I survive Valkyrie? Then she remembered that she’d been told her bioware had been deactivated.

  “Interesting,” the captain noted. “You also have an almost Armenite level of patience. I expected a Cartelite of your apparent age to be less disciplined—to ask lots of questions one after another, never quite waiting for me to answer the first before blurting out a second.”

  Jewel twisted herself around on the medical bed, careful to keep the thin sheet modestly covering her chest and groin. “I do have many questions, sir,” she admitted.

  For the first time the captain gave a faint smile, as if he found humor in her statement. “Of course, you do, and I may even be able to answer some of them. I have a superior traveling here to take custody of you—a member of the House of Delling who will be more familiar with your case than I am. But since you are technically a guest at this time, unlike your fellows, I am willing to consider your questions. Ask whatever you like.”

  “Delling?” The word slipped out. She didn’t want to go to the House of Delling. She wanted to find Erik—to be with Erik—to runaway again with him.

  The captain’s smile broadened ever so slightly, but contrary to Jewel’s expectations, it was not an unkind look. “Who better to take responsibility for you?” He paused a moment eying her speculatively before continuing. “You do realize that we know exactly who you are, don’t you?”

  “Y-yes,” Jewel stuttered. She wondered if Kole would be coming with his relative. Was the long-dreaded wedding about to take place after all? She needed more information and she thought she was more likely to get it if she could forge a better rapport with this captain. “May I ask your name, sir?”

  The Armenite officer politely inclined his head. “I am Naval Captain Sten Krell, in command of the heavy cruiser, Righteous Lightning.”

  Jewel offered a self-conscious smile in response. She felt a desperate desire to know what she looked like with these scabs all over her flesh. Just thinking about them set her whole body itching furiously again. But she somehow suppressed the nearly overpowering need to scratch just as she squelched the painfully strong compulsion to ask for a mirror so she could examine herself. Instead, she tried to build on her nascent relationship with the captain by formally introducing herself. “I was born with the name Luxora Sapphira, although I have since adopted the appellation, Jewel Aurora.”

  The slight degree of warmth Jewel had been feeling from the captain disappeared immediately. “So you admit to the nom de guerre you used during your criminal activities?”

  Jewel felt her temper shoot skyward and she forgot all about trying to impress this jerk. “There are two things wrong with that statement,” she announced. Her tone was hot, but she wasn’t quite shouting. The first is that the term nom de guerre implies a false identity—a cover identity—so to speak. That is not what Jewel Aurora is. It is a new identity. One that I adopted when I left home and, had I avoided the circumstances I am currently in, it is one that I intended to use for the rest of my life. As for the supposed criminal nature of my activities in the Valkyrie System I can only repeat that while I found the work unnecessarily risky, it is not a crime under international law to conduct salvage operations in an abandoned settlement.”

  Unlike the physician lieutenant, Captain Krell did not lose his temper when Jewel contested the declared illegality of her actions. Quite the opposite, in fact, he actually appeared to relax slightly. It was difficult to tell for certain because he remained standing in his all too rigid at rest military stance, but his tone sounded more reasonable when he responded to her. “Let us put off the matter of crimes for a later discussion. Considering the special circumstances here, it will ultimately be resolved by far higher authority than mine anyway. But I find your comments regarding your identity both intriguing and perplexing. Would you please expand upon them?”

  Jewel was all too happy to avoid the issue of criminality. Although she was certain she was technically correct on the issue, she was equally certain that the Armenites would never agree to see things her way. There was no way that they would establish a precedent that legitimized any power, other than their own, mining raw armenium. But as the captain hadn’t shut her down, she belatedly decided to try and build on the budding communication between them. She started to smile but froze before completing the gesture, remembering her scabs and scars and worrying over how grotesque she must appear right now.

  The captain noticed both her smile and the following cringe. “I admire your courage,” he confided. “I would have expected a Cartelite with your infamous obsessions with fashion and vanities to be screaming over the physical damage your body has incurred. Your outward stoicism is almost Armenite in character. Would it relieve your unspoken concerns if I told you that we have a lot of experience in treating this kind of injury and that I am assured you are healing well?”

  Jewel touched her face again. The damage felt horrible. She just couldn’t resist asking her question any longer. “Could I, would it be okay, could I have a mirror?”

  Concern creased the captain’s brow. “Are you certain you want to? If you wait even a day or two, your face will look much better.”

  With every word he uttered, the captain increased Jewel’s fear. “Please…”

  “Yes, of course,” he agreed. Stepping past her bed he touched a panel and the wall beside Jewel disappeared, replaced by a full length mirror.

  Jewel gasped in horror.

  Most of her face was covered in a revolting mass of scabrous tissue so thick she could barely see the diamonds that comprised her bioware chips sticking out of her right temple. There was no truly smooth flesh left to see on her face. The overlapping layers of scabs extended down her neck and disappeared beneath the sheet she was holding against her breasts.

  Forgetting the captain for a moment, Jewel pulled the cloth away fro
m her so that she could look beneath at the rest of her body. Dried crusty scabs horrifically covered everything her eyes could see—the once soft flesh of her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, even her nipples. She clasped the sheet back against her and twisted about to examine her back, finding it too was covered in the unsightly mass of dried out tissues.

  “Oh, Stars,” she whispered. “This can’t be—”

  Captain Krell grabbed Jewel’s wrist and forced her to turn around and look at him. “Focus on my words, Ms. Sapphira,” he demanded. “You are healing well. Three days from now ninety-percent of the scabs will have fallen away to make room for new soft perfect skin. We’ve been mining armenium for two hundred years. Our doctors know how to treat your condition. You are going to make a full recovery.”

  Despite the captain’s reassurance, the panic in Jewel’s heart didn’t abate. She twisted her hand free of his grip and turned to look at her face again. Insanely she noted that the hair framing the scabrous flesh was several inches longer than it should be, as if that mattered with her skin disfigured in this hideous fashion.

  Captain Krell turned off the mirror so that the plain white wall was all that Jewel could see again.

  “Bring it back,” she pleaded.

  “No.” That single word required no other explanation. He was captain of this ship and he would have his way. End of discussion.

  “But—”

  “You’re healing,” he told her again, not unkindly. “Do you feel any pain at all?”

  Jewel thought about that for a moment and was shocked when she realized that she did not. “No, only this horrible itching sensation.”

  “That’s what I thought. Your case is well advanced. I don’t want to further frighten you, but you have scarring such as this internally as well, which we also started treating while you were still unconscious. The internal scabs are healing much faster due to the natural humidity inside your body. In a few days, you will be completely healed.”