Chapter 10
Ethan woke with a sudden, adrenalin-fueled start.
He’d been shot. Again.
He didn’t feel the worse for it, though. Not this time.
There were no sounds of movement around him, no hint of anyone else being nearby, so he opened his eyes slowly, found himself in a med bay.
No wonder he was fine. He was hooked up to a standard Verdant String medbed, and as he sat up, various needles and tubes retracted.
Velda lay on a medbed beside him, still and pale.
He slid off his bed and leaned over her, fingers brushing her forehead. “Velda. Wake up, beautiful.”
He kept his voice low, but she must have been close to waking anyway, because she blinked her eyes open and stared up at him, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, her lips curving into a smile at the sight of him.
Then he saw her face change as she remembered what had happened, because her gaze suddenly snapped into focus and he stepped back to let her sit up.
“We’re on the ship?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Must be. That’s where it sounded like we were going to be taken. I don’t know that the mine had anything as sophisticated as this medbay.”
She slid off the bed on the same side he was standing, and slid her arms around his waist. They stood for a moment as he looped his own arm around her shoulder, just quietly being together before they faced whatever it was beyond the door.
“Do you think Brink was just messing with Ridgeman about what she was planning to do to us, or do you think we have reason to be worried?” she said at last.
“You mean more worried?” Although he knew what she was getting at. “If we’re on a ship, I’m assuming we’re at least in nearspace, which means there’s no easy way to escape. That alone worries me—whether or not Brink has nefarious plans for us.”
The door opened, something he had been expecting since they’d gotten off the beds, so he simply turned his head to see who was coming through.
“You look like you’re doing well.” A med tech stood in the doorway, eyeing the two of them together. He looked like every med tech Ethan had ever seen, except in this case, there were two armed guards standing behind him, weapons trained on Velda and himself.
“What’s going on?” Ethan asked.
“I gather you’re hikers who had the misfortune of stumbling across the mine, is that right?
” The med tech waited for them to acknowledge his words, and when neither of them did, he sent them a bright smile.
“Well, unfortunately for you, we’ve run out of volunteers, and it was either end the experiments, or force one of the crew to cooperate.
As forcing people tends to lead to great unhappiness onboard, your appearance is serendipitous to say the least.”
“Cooperate in what?” Velda asked.
“Nothing bad,” the med tech said with a smile. “But I didn’t know we had you available until a few hours ago, so I need to set things up. These two guards will take you for a meal while I get busy.”
Ethan had been studying the guards while the tech had been talking, and he had to admit there was no way around cooperating with them for the moment. He didn’t want to take a third laz hit in less than a day. That was not going to help.
And if he was out, he couldn’t protect Velda.
He said nothing when the guards came forward, weapons raised, and the med tech secured their wrists.
The march to the mess was interesting.
The ship looked like standard Verdant String construction, but he wasn’t familiar with the layout, and couldn’t guess what type of ship it was.
He assumed he and Velda were guests of the criminal enterprise that had once run Garmen and Lassa, the breakaway planets that had recently been forcibly wrenched back into the Verdant String’s fold.
They called themselves the Core Companies, and they had lost their grip on the planets they’d once seen as their own fiefdom.
Mainly because of the crazy antics of the Core Companies themselves.
They had done deals with the Caruso when they’d run the breakaway planets, but that hadn’t gone so well, for either themselves or the Caruso. That they were persisting with the plan here on Aponi made no sense, unless someone had managed to explain away the problems they’d had before.
Some people just couldn’t let a bad idea go, if they were the ones who’d come up with it.
Ethan wouldn’t care, except he and Velda were caught up in it, now.
They reached the mess, and it turned out to be a relatively large room set close to the staff quarters. There were a few people eating together at a table to the right, but it was otherwise empty.
Given what he’d observed on the journey from the medbay to here, and the size of the room, Ethan guessed this was a mid-sized transport, rather than a big ship.
“Sit.” One of the guards pointed to a table.
When they were seated, a guard pointed to one of the people sitting at the occupied table.
“Melli, go get two meals.”
The others were watching, wide-eyed, and Melli stood up will ill grace. “Who are these two?”
“Hikers that stumbled across the mine. So Ritter’s got new people to experiment on, other than us. He wants them to eat first.”
Melli stared at them.
Ethan understood from what the med tech had said before that he’d tried his experiments on the crew first. At least they were all alive and looked none the worse for wear. But there was something in all their eyes, a pitying look, that worried him.
He wanted to get himself and Velda out of here.
Melli walked out of the room, through a door he’d noticed at the back, and when she returned, it was with two plates.
“Thank you,” Velda murmured as the plates were put in front of them.
Melli started at the sound of her voice, and stepped back quickly, and with a quick nod, left the mess.
At her exit, the others at the table she’d been sitting at cleared up, and shuffled out themselves.
It looked as if their arrival had brought down the mood.
“So, what are these experiments?” Ethan asked as he picked up his fork. Having his wrists tied together made eating difficult.
The guards didn’t answer.
“Please tell us.” Velda lifted her head, and tilted up to look at them. “It’s better to know, don’t you think? It’s hardly going to matter if we don’t like it, I’m getting the picture that we don’t have a choice.”
The female guard looked at them, glanced at her partner, and then lifted her shoulders. “No one knows what the experiments are. They blindfold you.”
Ethan could see how uncomfortable it made both guards. “Whatever it is, it’s too top secret for the crew to know?” he asked.
The guards shrugged.
“And you’ve all been through it?” Velda asked.
“Not all.”
But something in the way the guard answered made Ethan think the guards both had.
“Not the senior officers?” Ethan asked.
The female guard gave a slight sneer, which made Ethan think he’d hit the nail on the head.
“Do you feel all right?” Velda was watching them carefully. “No side effects?”
The question must have taken them deeper than they wanted to go, because the one guard’s expression tightened. “Just eat your food.”
They stepped back a little way, putting some distance between them.
Velda turned her gaze to his, and Ethan didn’t like the fear he could see on her face.
“Let’s eat,” he told her. “Better to have energy.”
She nodded, focused on her food, but he could feel the tension coming off her and he slid his foot to touch hers.
She looked up at him, sighed, and went back to her food, but she pressed her foot even closer to his in response.
“This is totally mad,” she murmured. “Experiments? Have you ever heard of the Cores involved in anything like this?”
He hadn’t, and that worried him. Either their intelligence was totally useless, or this was a relatively new endeavor for the Cores.
Neither option filled him with confidence.