Summerhill (24 page)

“What was what?”

Before Summerhill could clarify, the walls of the room seemed to expand, and he and Katherine appeared to shrink together with the bed. The dog’s stomach felt queasy, and then reality itself snapped back to its proper proportions with a tangible, audible twang.

Katherine lurched, and she reached out to grab Summerhill, who was reeling even harder. She managed to snatch him by the wrist to keep him from falling off of the bed. “Ah, that. That was the FTL transition. I’m guessing that was your first time?”

“No,” Summerhill said. “I mean, yes, it was, but not that. Before that.”

“Before what?”

“Everything went blue, and you seemed to stop,” Summerhill explained. “I thought I heard someone talking.”

Katherine chuckled. “I was talking to you, silly. The relativity shift can be really disorienting. It plays tricks on the mind sometimes. Some species deal with it in different ways. Maybe yours doesn’t handle it so well.”

Whatever had happened before the transition had only happened to Summerhill, then. Maybe it was simply a natural bit of disorientation, like Katherine said, but he doubted that. This had felt too real, too coherent somehow to just be a trick of the mind.

Not that the state of his mind was a great thing to go by. He had to be allowed to trust his gut sometimes, though.

When it came to arguing points like this, Katherine tended to be hard to convince. And after five years of relative normalcy, their past experience together might not even do all that much to help Summerhill’s case. Even if she had called him her guardian angel. Should that have been a more comforting thought?

“I know what I felt,” he said, willing himself to believe it. “And it—”

He was interrupted as the cabin’s intercom chimed in again.
“Bridge to Warrant Officer Tinsley. Can you report your current status?”
The voice was different from the one that had spoken the FTL warning. This one was male and terse, and reminded Summerhill of Katherine when she got into a bad mood.

Katherine leaned over to her nightstand and depressed a small button built onto the top of it. “This is Tinsley,” she spoke aloud. “I’m just in my rack. Duty shift ended at seventeen-thirty.”

The response from the bridge was delayed several seconds; when it finally came, the terse voice had lost a lot of its authoritativeness.
“Tinsley, Hermann says that his project started going haywire a few minutes ago, and he asked us to contact you.”

Summerhill shot Katherine a questioning look, but she appeared just as confused. She pressed the button again and replied, “Bridge, I’m not on Hermann’s team. What does he want me for?”

“No, I know that, Katherine,”
the voice said, now much more personable, if also resigned. A sigh came through the intercom before the followup.
“Hermann just asked if you could provide a status update as to your current situation.”

“What situation?” Katherine asked. “If Hermann wants to talk to me, why doesn’t he just contact me directly?”

There was another pause in the conversation before the intercom came on again.
“I’m just relaying the message as ordered, Tinsley. Can you provide a status update?”

Katherine stared at Summerhill for several seconds, eyeing him, assessing him. A lump formed in the dog’s throat, and he tried to beg her with his eyes not to turn him in again. Not after all this time. Not after all they’d been through together.

Closing her eyes and hanging her head, Katherine pressed the intercom button. “No ‘status’ to report, bridge. I’m just enjoying off-time in my rack. Tell Hermann if he has something important to ask me that he can—”

“Tinsley, this is Hermann,”
a new male voice said. This one was sharp, cutting, and it carried a distinct note of panic—well-disguised panic, but panic nevertheless.
“What’s going on right now?”

Summerhill’s pulse started to race. Somebody, somewhere on the ship, was convinced that something unusual was going on, and he and Katherine were right in the middle of it.

“There’s nothing ‘going on,’ Hermann,” Katherine replied. “I’m just in my rack.”

“Are you alone?”

Katherine made eye contact with Summerhill. “Yes. Why?”

Hermann muttered a curse under his breath without cutting his end of the line.
“Tinsley, something punched a hole in the resonance field, and that hole is right in your quarters. We may have an intruder, and if you’re alone, that means it’s something we can’t see.”

Summerhill choked down that lump in his throat. Katherine was still staring at him. The game was up, then: someone knew that he was there, and they were going to come looking, and Katherine was going to get pulled into it one way or another.

“Hermann, if there’s a security risk to the fleet, then someone needs to inform the Admiral,” Katherine said.

“Already done, Tinsley,”
Hermann replied.
“He’s issued a fleet-wide alert. I expect we’ll be dropping out of FTL very soon.”

Sure enough, before Katherine even had a chance to respond, Summerhill felt the very space inside the cabin shift, a sort of pressure that made it feel like he was being squished in upon himself like a sponge being wrung out. Then, once again, there was the twanging sensation of everything snapping back to normal.

Katherine looked aghast, and her finger came away from the nightstand intercom. With one hand, she did up the front of her uniform, and with the other, she reclaimed her pistol. “This doesn’t look good, Mr. Summerhill.”

“What do you mean?” Summerhill asked. “Should we not be stopping?”

“I don’t think we should have been jumping in the first place. But that’s not even the biggest red flag.” Katherine stood up and breathed deeply as if recomposing herself. “A fleet-wide security alert has been issued.”

“That does sound bad.”

“Worse,” Katherine pointed out. “I
am
Security, remember?”

“Right.”

“And I didn’t get his alert.”

It took Summerhill a moment, but then the thought registered, and his eyes widened. “Oh. This doesn’t bode well for either of us, does it?”

Katherine looked over her firearm, making sure it was loaded before holstering it at her hip. “No, it very much does not.” Turning away from Summerhill, she rummaged through one of her drawers, sifting through personal effects that the dog couldn’t see. He wondered if her orange-and-blue necklace was in there, or if she was allowed to wear it under her uniform.

Resisting the urge to angle his head to sneak a look, Summerhill wrung his hands together. “So, what do we do?” he asked. “Do we run again, like back on the
Nusquam
?”

“I don’t think it’s that simple this time,” Katherine said. She paced back and forth in her cabin, her own fingernails digging into her hands, looking like they might draw blood. “I’m part of a military outfit. These are my people, not some bizarre law enforcement agency that I pissed off. We can’t just shoot our way out.”

“So we don’t shoot,” Summerhill said. “We just run, you and me. Get off the ship before they can find us.”

Katherine shook her head, her exhaled breath coming out as a growl of frustration. “You don’t get it, Summerhill,” she snapped. “I don’t have anywhere to run to anymore. I’ve lost too many homes already, and I’m tired of always having to...” Her words drifted off, and her pacing ceased, and she just looked at Summerhill, her expression blank.

She was thinking about turning him in, Summerhill knew. Worse, he couldn’t blame her for wanting to do it. Whatever was going on here, whatever had caused this fleet to distrust Katherine, it all came down to him. Somehow. Not on purpose, but still somehow.

He’d come here to help her. He’d ended up doing the exact opposite. Way to go.

No, Summerhill wouldn’t let Katherine come to harm because of him. He’d abandoned her once before, and through no help of his, she’d found some way of getting back to her feet. He couldn’t let himself ruin that.

“Katherine, I—”

The room went blue again, the cessation of movement and sound even more awkward and jarring than the first time it had happened. Katherine froze, as before, the look in her eyes somehow even more accusing in the enduring stillness and silence.

“Summerhill?”
The voice echoed inside of his head.
“Summerhill, lah, I thought that was you!”

Despite time being slowed to a near halt, Summerhill’s mind seemed to be working normally. He tried to place the voice, lilting and musical, but like so many other things, he couldn’t be sure if it was supposed to be familiar or not. Moving his muzzle was impossible, and so he tried to respond by forming his thoughts into words.
“Yes, that’s me. Who is this?”

There was the brief impression of laughter, followed by,
“Oh, curious, curious! Lonely little Summerhill finally managed to escape.”
A series of clicks bounced around inside Summerhill’s head.
“Naughty dog, let out without a leash.”

Summerhill’s mind scrambled, trying not to sacrifice the clarity of his words in his rush to reply.
“You know who I am? You know where I’m from?”

“Oh, no love, lah? Curious indeed. But oh, looks like there are other things in store for you right now. Will have to talk more later, naughty dog.”

The blue tinge over the cabin lifted as Summerhill’s mind cried out for the other consciousness to wait. Instead, an actual cry escaped his open muzzle as time shifted back to normal.

Katherine flinched at the sound, and her hand shot to the holster at her hip. She then bit her lip and breathed in and out through her nostrils. If she’d been wary of Summerhill before, she was even more so now after what must have looked to her like a random outburst.

He started to mouth an apology—started to, because before any words came out, there was a bright, painful flash. It blinded him, his vision going solid white, and then the sound of machinery, the floor underneath his feet, and the air against his fur all vanished.

Twenty-Three

Interrogatives

There had been bright light when Summerhill lost consciousness, and now there was bright light again as he was returning to it. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, but he could tell that they stung worse than they’d ever felt—no, the Plain of Ice had been worse, but this was a close second. His stomach churned with nausea, and his head hurt even more than the time he woke up in...

...in where? Where had that been?

Wildflowers. An orange sun. Dirt and grass beneath him. Where?

As he drifted closer to full wakefulness, Summerhill was quite aware of the hole in his memory. He could feel the edges of it, as if a hole had been cut out—no, not cut out, but
torn
out, ripped and frayed, uneven, with tiny bits of the picture still left behind. Those sharp edges hurt, as if they were cutting into other memories adjacent to them.

At the near end of that memory gap was a chasm of emptiness and a giant wooden door, and on the far end was Katherine and the
Nusquam
, but in the middle, there was—

Katherine! There was no time to try to sort out this quandary with his missing memories. Katherine was in danger, and he’d been trying to think of a way to help her. If only he could sort out the buzzing in his ears and the light blinding his vision, he’d figure things out from there.

“His eyes appear to be focusing.”

“Can he hear us?”

“I think so. He’s—look, I just saw his ear twitch!”

“Careful, now. We’re not sure what he might—”

Voices, all overlapping, analytical and overexcited, echoed in Summerhill’s ears. As his hearing returned, so too did his eyesight. Both were still oversensitive. A halo of hazy color throbbed at the edges of his vision as the bizarre picture before him slowly took shape.

A man, human like Katherine, but with darker skin and less delicate features, stood with his face inches from Summerhill’s. He lacked hair at the very top of his head, and what hair he had on either side was peppered with gray. His eyes were intense, his gaze calculating and emotionless as he stared at the dog, looking him over in calm silence.

The man wore a uniform, only vaguely reminiscent of Katherine’s. It was dark blue, with trim of vermillion and silver, and his chest and collar both bore elaborate insignia. Behind him, standing in diagonal rows like a flock of birds, other uniformed humans anxiously waited for Summerhill to do something.

Summerhill was standing upright, somehow. He wasn’t sure how he’d been unconscious without falling over, but his feet were firmly planted on the floor, and his sense of balance was fine despite the disorientation he’d been experiencing. Standing unconscious? How long had he been here?

As the spots of light faded from Summerhill’s vision, the canine saw that some of the optic distortion remained. He was behind a layer of glass or some other translucent material that kept him separated from the humans. Turning around, he discovered that he was encased in some kind of cylindrical tube that ran between the floor and ceiling. Behind him was a baffling jumble of computers and display monitors and other high-tech gadgetry the likes of which he’d never seen, even aboard the
Nusquam
. Off to either side of the chamber there were rows of consoles, manned by uniformed technicians, some of whom were focused on their monitors, and others who were instead staring at Summerhill.

He was naked, he realized. Either these people had taken his clothes off before sealing him in this tube, or whatever had zapped him out of Katherine’s cabin brought him and him alone. Regardless, being on display to a room full of people as he already was, the nudity didn’t help his self-consciousness.