Fortunes of the Imperium (23 page)

CHAPTER 20

M’Kenna had only her thoughts for company. The children hadn’t wanted to be knocked out again, and who could blame them? But Rafe had let the physician put the mask on his face. When he was lying down and breathing softly, she attached the drip bags to each arm.

“One replacement nanites,” she had explained, to four pairs of wide, dark brown eyes. “One antihistamines, suppressants, additional minerals.”

Rafe’s face relaxed. He remained peaceful and pain-free, so the kids allowed themselves to be hooked up. They’d all settled in so well that M’Kenna realized she didn’t have to run from one to another every half hour to make sure they were still breathing.

She had plenty of time over the following four days to go through her mail, and precious little to show for it. It seemed like there was a form letter everyone sent out to supplicants that the officials could not or did not want to handle. She got tired of reading the same excuses and evasions. In her mind, she composed angry retorts, but if there was any hope that a caring human being ever read her letters, she didn’t want to be turned down because she was obnoxious. But she was getting close to giving up hope of any outside help.

Then, on the very last day, when the kids were starting to stir on their bunks and Rafe’s eyelids were fluttering, she clicked on one of the replies, this one from the Imperium Navy. Black hole only knew how they had gotten involved, M’Kenna wondered, but maybe it was because all ships were subject to their authority.

“Dear Ms. Copper,” it began,

“We have reviewed your request for assistance. This is a most serious matter. We wish to receive more detail regarding your case.”

M’Kenna had begun to nod over the tablet, but that line shocked her awake. She read it two or three more times to make sure. More detail? They wanted to know more? She sat up in excitement. Was there someone out there who actually cared?

“Honey, read this!” she exclaimed, holding out the pad. But Rafe was still asleep. M’Kenna looked at the line of print again as though she could hardly believe it. Yes! Hope lifted her heart. What did they want to know?

At that moment, a noise from the children’s room attracted her attention. One of the kids must be waking up. She was torn between reading the rest of the message and checking on the sound, but the letter could wait. She put the tablet aside and went in to see which one of them was stirring.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Get away from her!”

An Uctu in a baggy beige coverall was bending over Nona’s bunk. M’Kenna couldn’t see what he was doing, but it didn’t matter. He had no right to touch her. She charged at him, pushing him away from her daughter.

“Back off! Who are you?”

“All right,” he said, his jaws slightly apart in an affable smile. “Medical staff.”

“If you’re medical staff,” M’Kenna said, staying at arm’s length from him, “show me your badge.”

Something in his demeanor told her that he knew she didn’t believe him. He reached into a pocket. M’Kenna went instantly on guard. She had no weapons, of course, but she had been trained in basic hand-to-hand combat. You never knew when someone was going to try and board your ship, or mug you in the corridors of a space station, or jump you way out somewhere on an atmosphered world. The Uctu brought out a flat orange disk and held it up.

It wasn’t credentials or a badge. M’Kenna didn’t know what it was, except that it had to be bad news. As she feared, he lunged for her, trying to tap her with it. She dodged to one side. He moved faster than she realized he could.

“How did you get in here?” she asked, circling around, hoping she didn’t run into a wall. “What do you want?”

He didn’t answer. She had always thought Geckos were kind of silly-looking. She had never met one that looked absolutely mean.

The intruder feinted with the orange disk, trying to hit her in the face. M’Kenna backed away.

“Help!” she yelled, hoping the guards were listening. “Someone help me!”

“What’s wrong?” Nuro, down the hall, shouted back.

“There’s an Uctu in here! He’s trying to hurt me!”

“Guards!” Nuro bellowed. She heard the door of the Wichus’ cell rattle. “Guards! Let us out of here! We need help!”

The intruder suddenly darted away from M’Kenna, and made for the children again. She took a running start and leaped at him. She landed on the Uctu’s back. He tripped and fell. The orange disk tumbled out of his grasp. It bounced on the floor, seeping liquid as it went. M’Kenna was horrified. She put all her weight on the Gecko, trying to bear him down to the floor. He lashed at her with his tail, half the length of his body. Ow! That damned thing hurt! She worked a forearm underneath his throat and yanked upward. He thrashed and kicked. M’Kenna squeezed his neck between her arms. Its scaly skin rasped her own, but she didn’t dare let go. He batted at her, scratching her arm with needle-sharp claws.

She knew if she let him up he would hurt her children. But she couldn’t hold onto him forever.

“Is anyone coming?” she yelled.

“Not yet!” Nuro shouted back. “Hey, guards! Help!”

“Help!” M’Kenna added her voice.

“What’s going on here?”

Rafe appeared, holding onto the door frame with an unsteady hand. He was still disoriented because of the treatment. M’Kenna smacked the intruder’s face on the floor and shouted at her husband.

“He tried to do something to the kids!”

“What?”

His dark face a thundercloud, Rafe stumbled toward them. The Uctu growled low in his chest. His tail lashed at Rafe’s legs, knocking him sideways. Still unsteady after the habilitation therapy, Rafe tottered and fell over. He just caught himself before he fell on top of Lerin. M’Kenna scrambled to wind a leg over the offending appendage. To her horror, the tail wound back. It grabbed her leg and squeezed. M’Kenna was shocked. She didn’t know they were prehensile. She kicked at him with her free leg.

“Let me go!”

The intruder heaved up to his hands and knees. With a sinuous twist, he flipped her off his back. M’Kenna rolled underneath Dorna’s bunk. She crawled out, hitting her head on the low platform.

The Uctu made for the barred door. M’Kenna bared her teeth in a fierce smile. Now they had him! He couldn’t get out that way. She sprang up and edged toward him, knees bent in a wrestler’s crouch. Rafe made it to his feet about the same time. The two of them homed in on the intruder from both sides. It was only a pace ahead of them, trapped against the doorway.

But to her amazement, the door slid open half a meter. The Uctu slipped through. M’Kenna and Rafe dived for him. The cell slammed shut. M’Kenna and Rafe crashed into the bars. M’Kenna shot her arm through, grabbing for the baggy coverall. She got a few fingers tangled in the cloth, grabbing for a better hold. The Uctu tugged and writhed until her fingers slipped, letting him free. She screamed her frustration.

“Stop him! He’s getting away!” she yelled.

The intruder ran toward the far wall at the end of the corridor. That should have been another dead end, but it wasn’t. A panel moved aside, revealing a dark recess. The Uctu dove through it, and it closed behind him.

“What’s happening there?” the Wichus shouted.

“He got away!” M’Kenna said. “He went through the wall.”

Then, and only then, did the guards appear. Somewhere a klaxon went off, howling official outrage. A squad of eight Uctus in prison uniforms charged into the corridor, weapons leveled. They searched the corridor up and down, then assembled in front of the Coppers’ cell.

“What happened?” the officer at their head demanded.

“Someone just tried to hurt us,” M’Kenna said. “A Gecko—I mean, an Uctu in a plain worksuit.”

“Where did go?”

“Through there,” she said, pointing with her whole arm through the bars. “He just went that way!”

The guard captain spun on his boot heel, then turned back slowly to frown at her.

“No passage through the wall that place. Secure facility.”

“Are you kidding me?” M’Kenna demanded. “He just went that way! My husband and I saw him.”

Rafe stumbled forward, yawning hard. The anaesthetic must not be wearing off fast enough, but he blinked indignantly at the guards.

“My wife and I tried to catch him, captain.”

“No one there!”

“Wait a minute,” M’Kenna said, reaching in vain for the Uctu. He backed away. “Aren’t there security recordings? You can look at them. You’ll see what happened!”

The captain gave a curt sign with his left hand. Immediately two Geckos raised their long weapons and aimed them at the cell door.

“Hands up,” the captain said. “View recordings.”

M’Kenna felt a rush of relief. She put her hands in the air. So did Rafe. The cell door slid open. Two of the other guards entered and secured their hands to a second loop that fastened around their waists.

“What about our children?”

“Sleeping. Safe,” the captain said. He beckoned to them. “Come.”

M’Kenna scanned the corridor as she was marched toward a door at the far end. The dozen or so cells were arranged so the prisoners could not see one another’s doors. She looked hard at each as she went by. The Wichus from
Sword Snacks
looked thinner than before. Their fur was patchy, and their big, dark eyes seemed to have lost their light.

I’d hate to think I look that bad
, she thought.

“You all right, M’Kenna?” Nuro asked.

“We’re fine,” she said. “We’ll get out of here, all of us.”

Apart from the backless seats that accommodated the Gecko tails, the industrial-style office into which they were shown was exactly the same as every one they had been in anywhere in the galaxy. The walls were battered at the edge of the desktop, showing that it or the previous table had been moved numerous times, revealing layered colors of paint. That was one clue that assured M’Kenna that they were planetside: no one used paint in spaceships because the particles tended to flake off and get into the ventilation system and the food recycler. How she missed the scraped and dented enamel walls of the
Entertainer
!

The guards made them sit down on a bench on the far side of the desk. They took up sentry positions beside them.

The Gecko chief ran a narrow, scaly hand over the control pad. Part of the wall shimmered and seemed to bulge out toward them, creating a three-dimensional image. M’Kenna realized that she was looking at the corridor in front of her cell. Eerily, she was watching herself inside the cell reading from the tablet. Another gesture, and the view changed to a video pickup somewhere inside the chamber. She could see herself from the side. Automatically, her hand flew to her hair. It was a mess! How could she not have seen that in the little mirror above their hygiene unit?

The captain pointed a skinny finger at the bottom left corner of the image.

“Time coding. Thirty minutes.” He touched the controls. The digitavid sped up, until M’Kenna’s past self was panting and tapping at the screen like Lerin playing one of his action games. “Ten.”

The woman in the recording sprang to her feet and ran out of the frame. The captain switched to another camera. It showed her and Rafe standing at the cell door, their arms through the bars. Their cries were muted but still audible.

M’Kenna strained toward the image.

“Wait a minute, where did he go?”

“Nowhere!” said the chief.

“Show me the corridor, ten minutes back. Now!”

The captain changed to the outer reference and slid the video back and forth. But at no point was the Gecko in the jumpsuit visible. M’Kenna could see the images of her and Rafe bang into the door and reach through the bars again and again, but there was no one on the other side.

“I can’t see him,” Rafe said. “How is that possible?”

“I grabbed his sleeve,” M’Kenna said. “Can’t you hear me telling my friends there was someone in the cell with us?”

The captain switched back and forth between the recordings.

“No voices here. Listen.”

M’Kenna could have torn out her untidy hair in clumps. She pleaded with the captain.

“But he was there, at that time. Something must be wrong. Something got cut out!”

The Uctu shook his head. His dark eyes seemed sympathetic.