Honour's Knight (17 page)

Suit or not, though, I wasn’t done yet. If I could just get to the ship’s cannon, maybe Mabel could get me enough power to use it. I couldn’t aim with the cameras out, but with the tentacle wrapped all the way around us, it wasn’t like I could miss. I just had to get there, which meant I needed to get away from the cook.

He might not be able to see the monster, but he’d certainly heard the crunching as it began to squeeze the ship, because his grip was growing slacker, giving me the opening I needed. I hurled my weight forward, slipping out of his arms. But as I was starting my charge down the stairs, light blossomed over the ship.

For a moment, I thought someone had conjured a miracle and gotten the hyperdrive back on line, but then I realized the light was the wrong color. Jump flashes are pure, harsh white. This light was softer, like moonlight, and it rose up from the center of the ship like water from a welling spring. When it passed over me, my skin tingled, but when it reached the monster wrapped around our hull, a scream hit my mind like a switchblade.

I fell to my knees on the stairs, hands clapped over my ears. It did no good; there was no blocking this sound. Behind me, the cook was on his knees too, but I didn’t have time for him. All I could do was sit and try to keep myself together as the scream ripped through me. Then, just as it started to get really unbearable, the tentacle outside the window began to dissolve.

Everywhere the soft light touched, the tentacle vanished. It was like the light was melting it, evaporating the translucent, glowing flesh as I watched. As the glowing mass dissolved, I could see the monster behind it again. It was thrashing wildly, flinging its countless arms through the floating rocks that were supposed to be a thriving aeon colony world. But though other tentacles were flying by, the tentacle around us was nearly gone. In a few seconds, it had faded altogether, and the
Fool
’s engine sputtered back to life.

The hyperdrive came on a moment later, spinning up so fast I could almost see Basil mashing the button. By the time I realized what we were about to do—an ungated jump with no prep in the middle of a debris field—the flash was already washing over the ship. I had one final glimpse of the thrashing monster as it started to edge away from us before the universe vanished, replaced again by the dull gray-purple bleakness of hyperspace.

I flopped over as the sudden stillness landed, collapsing on the stairs in a heap. But my relief was short-lived. Almost as soon as I relaxed, a pair of merciless hands grabbed me under the shoulders and yanked me up again.

Before I could even think about fighting, the cook had tossed me over his shoulder. I yelped in surprise and pain, but it was too late. He had me pinned, carrying me down the stairs toward the cargo bay like a sack of flour. I wasn’t about to let this pass, though. My arms were trapped beneath me, but I could still kick my legs, and I did, slamming my bare feet into his chest as hard as I could.

I might as well have been kicking a cement wall. The cook was freakishly strong and seemingly impervious to pain. I think my kicking hurt my foot more than his ribs, but I didn’t stop, especially since he was now walking me through the door to engineering.

Mabel was there, elbow deep in some critical system. She looked up when the door opened, and I took my chance.

“Mabel!” I shrieked. “Help me!”

The captain’s sister-in-law glanced at the cook, then at me, and then went back to work without a word, her face grim. The cook hadn’t even stopped. He marched straight through engineering, but it was only when we passed the base of the spiral stair that I realized where he was taking me.

“Caldswell?” I shouted, kicking harder than ever. “You did this to get me to
Caldswell
?”

The cook didn’t answer, just tightened his hold and walked into the captain’s rooms without knocking. Caldswell’s sitting area was in disarray from the earlier spinning, the table knocked over and the couch upside down. The captain himself was nowhere to be seen, and I realized he must be on the bridge. I was about to tell the cook that his little stunt was all for nothing when he turned us around and I spotted the captain at last.

Caldswell was in his daughter’s room, standing over the bed where Ren was lying curled on her side with her face hidden in her hands. Caldswell’s head snapped up when the cook entered, eyes flicking to me. I opened my mouth to yell at him to help me, but the cook beat me to it.

“Sleep her,” he said.

Caldswell didn’t even blink, he just looked from me to the cook, and then he was on the move, striding past us into the little sitting room. “Can’t,” he said. “Ren just gave everything she had to get us out. Hold her down; we’ll do this the old-fashioned way.”

I should have tried to reason with them then, should have told them I’d be good and the old-fashioned way was definitely not necessary, but I couldn’t. The moment the captain had spoken, I was back in the bunker under the mountain on Io5, watching my body fall, the hole still smoking in my head. The vision lasted only a moment, but the horror of it was like a claw in my stomach, and before I could recover, the cook had slid me off his shoulder onto the couch. I’d barely landed before Caldswell’s hand grabbed my neck, turning my head away.

“Sorry, Morris.”

That was the last thing I heard before something hard, sharp, and metal slammed into the back of my skull.

CHAPTER 6

I
woke up to the feeling of someone gently slapping my cheek. I made a frustrated noise in my throat and turned away, but the slapping didn’t stop. Eventually I opened my eyes out of self-defense to see Caldswell standing over me.

“Sorry about that, Morris,” he said, dropping his hand from my cheek. Unfortunately, his next move was to pry my cracked eyes wide open to check my pupils. He checked the back of my head too, and I winced as his fingers brushed the painfully tender spot right below my crown.

“What happened?” I muttered when he finally stopped tormenting me.

“I knocked you out.”

My eyes went wide. As he said the words, the memory of how I’d ended up here came back in a flash, and I lurched forward. “You hit me!”

Caldswell dodged easily. “Didn’t I just say that?”

I tried to go after him again, but I couldn’t move any further. I was tied to a heavy chair with my arms behind my back. I must have been out for some time, because my hands were both asleep. I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers. I could yell, though, so that was what I did. “What the hell is this about?”

“You,” Caldswell answered. “And what you claim to have seen in hyperspace.”

“I’m not
claiming
I saw it,” I shouted. “I
did
see it!”

“Like you’ve been seeing other things?” Caldswell said.

The question was so quick, I almost slipped up and said yes. Caldswell hadn’t knocked all the sense out of my head, though, and I caught myself just in time.

“No point being tight-lipped, Morris,” Caldswell chided. “Hyrek tells me everything.”

I looked him straight in the eyes and said nothing, but my bravado was all bluff, and Caldswell wasn’t buying it.

“I’ve known you were having problems for a while now,” he said, giving me a flat look. “I was trying to give you a chance to come forward on your own. Now, though, I think it’s time you told us exactly what you’ve been seeing.”

“You’ll think I’m crazy,” I warned.

Caldswell shrugged. “I have a pretty high threshold for crazy. Just try me.”

I took a deep breath. Considering how I’d come to be sitting here, I didn’t want to tell this man a thing, but like it or not, Caldswell was still my captain. This was his ship, and as Mabel had proven earlier, my opinion meant exactly zip compared to the captain’s business. If I wanted to get out of this at all, I was going to have to give him what he wanted. I just hoped the truth was it.

So, with a deep breath, I told him. I told him everything I could remember about the first time I’d seen the glowing bugs, both the one out on the hull and the one in the medbay. I didn’t tell him about the one Ren and I had both seen, mostly because I didn’t want to get any more involved with the captain’s creepy daughter than I had to. I didn’t tell him about the dream on Io5 for the same reason, though the fact that omitting this also meant I wouldn’t have to explain what I’d seen in the bunker didn’t hurt. I did tell him about the bugs I’d seen filling the cargo bay when I’d woken up, though, and the bugs I’d seen almost constantly since then, excepting the one I’d seen Ren squash earlier today.

By the time I was finished, I felt like a complete lunatic. To his credit, though, Caldswell had listened to everything with a straight face. He didn’t even look concerned until I got to the part about the monster that had attacked the ship.

“You’re sure about the size?” he said, cutting me off before I could get to the part where his cook had scooped me up like an unruly toddler.

“As sure as I can be,” I said. “There wasn’t much outside I could use for reference, but as I said, the end tip of each of those tentacles was still twice as thick as the
Fool
. I’d say the creature’s body must have been several thousand times that.”
Or larger
, I thought with a swallow.

Caldswell leaned back on the couch with a sigh. “All right, Morris,” he said. “Thank you for being honest.”

I smiled before I could stop myself. “So you don’t think I’m insane?”

“No,” Caldswell said. “Unfortunately for you, I believe every word.”

I did not like the way he said that at all. “How is my being sane unfortunate?”

“Because if you were crazy, we could let you go,” Caldswell said. “But since you’re not, this situation is now officially too large for me to ignore anymore. We need to know what you’ve forgotten.”

My blood ran cold. “My memories,” I whispered. “I didn’t lose them from a bump to the head, did I?”

“No,” Caldswell said. “They were taken to protect you.”

I glared at him hard. “Protect me from what?”

“Us,” said an accented voice behind me.

I jumped. I hadn’t even realized the cook was here until he spoke. I turned as far as I could to see him leaning against the door to Ren’s room, just as he had been yesterday. Behind him, Ren was no longer curled in a ball. Instead, she was lying on top of her bed staring wide-eyed and vacant at the ceiling, which was almost worse.

Looking at him brought the revulsion back strong as ever, but I didn’t drop my eyes as the cook walked over to the bed. Ren stirred when he touched her hand, and then sat up slowly, her movement clunky and stiff, like an old, old woman’s. The cook waited patiently for her to stand before leading her over to take Caldswell’s place in front of me.

“Undo it, Charkov,” Caldswell ordered, moving to guard the door. “All of it.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but the cook’s scowl deepened. “We talked about this, sir,” he said. “A full return is dangerous. If I give it all back—”

“All of it,” Caldswell repeated, his voice cold and sharp as a hard winter. “That’s an order, Eye Charkov.”

My eyes went wide in horror. It was the title from my dream. The cook flinched too, but it was over so quickly I almost missed it, and he didn’t try to argue with the captain again. Instead, he reached down and gently grabbed the top of my head. The position of his fingers was just as they’d been last night in the kitchen, but there was no tender gentleness now. He grabbed my head hard, forcing me to look up until I couldn’t see anything but him. But though his grip was as harsh as the revulsion curdling my stomach, the cook’s face was set in an expression of regret so deep it took my breath away.

“I tried, Devi,” he whispered, fingers pressing harder into my hair. “I tried.”

“Tried what?” I whispered back, my voice trembling.

He gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “To save you.”

Before I could demand to know what he meant by that, Ren’s hand shot out, grabbing my shoulder in a vise, and as she touched me, her voice spoke in my head.

Remember.

The word had barely formed before everything I’d lost came roaring back.

Memories are unruly things by nature. Some come when called, but most do exactly as they please, vanishing when you need them and popping up when you’d much rather they didn’t. Mine had always had a bad habit of surfacing at the worst moments, but even the biggest fit of unwanted nostalgia couldn’t have prepared me for what Ren did to my head.

I hadn’t even realized how much I’d lost until it was all back. The past flooded into my brain like a storm surge, and every single memory was clamoring for me to relive it, thrusting itself to the front of my mind to tease me with a flash before being pushed away by the next one. I was still conscious, still aware, I could even hear Caldswell talking, but I couldn’t make sense of anything. My memories took up every bit of me, leaving no room for anything else. But then, just before the flood of memories could pull me under, Ren’s touch on my mind gave way to a new hand. A strong, familiar, masculine one.

To this day, I could not tell you what Rupert did, but he did it well. Everywhere his touch landed, the chaos retreated. The jumbled memories rearranged themselves into an orderly timeline, connecting as they fell into place until I could no longer tell which ones were new and which had always been there.

Naturally, the first thing I looked for was what had happened on Falcon 34. Every time I’d reached for it before I’d gotten nothing. Now, though, the memories came as soon as I called them, and the whole bloody night—the symbionts, Cotter’s defeat, my capture, Brenton, my own near death—unrolled in my mind. Every event was as fresh and vivid as though it had just happened. I could feel the pain in my stomach where I’d been stabbed, the shock of Cotter’s death. He
had
died bravely, I knew it.

Mostly though, I remembered Rupert. I remembered the haunted look in his eyes when he’d changed from human to symbiont. I remembered his fury as he’d tried to kill Brenton on the lounge floor and his speed as he’d thrown the symbiont off me, abandoning his enemy to save my life.