Supernova (28 page)

They
turned around to head for the corridor to wait for the ship’s chief doctor to
arrive in the infirmary, but froze. Dr. Ashford blocked the doorway, holding a
very large, very lethal-looking laser pistol in his hands.

Lily
screamed. Rian automatically drew his own weapon.

“Put it
down, Commander,” Ashford said softly. “This is a Rikto-Four.”

The name
meant nothing to Lily, but Rian’s glare told her it was significant. His voice
was low and cold with fury when he spoke. “That’s a Nym weapon.”

“It is,”
Ashford confirmed calmly. He kept it trained on Rian while he pulled something
out of his pocket: Lily’s phone, turned on, the screen glowing brightly. “You’re
smarter than I gave you credit for,” he told her. To Rian, he said, “You’re a
lot dumber.”

“The
satellites,” Lily squeaked.

Ashford
nodded. “They’re everywhere, and this lazy galaxy never thought to take them
down. Your Global Positioning System was one of the smartest inventions your
people ever came up with.”

Lily
couldn’t believe Ashford’s utter calm, as though he were telling her about the
latest in mediscan units. “Why?” she said.

“Nothing
you ever needed to worry about.”

Red
alert sirens blared around sick bay. “That’s a Nym ship in orbit,” Ashford said
over the din. He tossed the phone on the floor, and Lily heard a faint snapping
sound as its pink case cracked. He closed the small distance between them and
grabbed her arm roughly. She struggled and shrieked as Rian raised his weapon
to fire at Ashford. But the doctor held his gun to Lily. “If you move, I’ll
kill her,” he shouted over the noise. Rian didn’t lower his weapon. The doctor
took a small, unfamiliar comm badge from his pocket. “Say goodbye to the
commander,” he ordered.

“No!”
Lily screamed and tried to wrench away. “Rian, shoot him!”

She saw
a streak of laser fire hit Ashford, whose grip loosened. But she felt herself
being lifted away and the air sucked from her lungs, then everything went
black.

Chapter 16

Bright
light flooded Lily’s eyes, and she greedily sucked in mouthfuls of air. Nausea
slammed into her, and she doubled over on an unfamiliar floor and gagged, sure
she was going to be sick. She gasped for a couple of minutes, but nothing came
up. Pain ratcheted around her skull like a ping-pong ball, and she tried to
stand up.

She
looked around and saw the metal gridwork that made up the floor, and the
smooth, sterile metal walls of the room she was in. It looked like a cleaner
version of the
Defiant
’s cargo hold. A bulgy-headed Nym guard stood
sentry at a large set of closed doors. But that wasn’t what made a scream rise
to her throat.

Dr.
Zadbac stood before her, his bulbous face wearing a triumphant expression.

“
Minsa
Stewart,” he said and held out a hand, as though he made to help her off the
floor. She ignored the gesture and unsteadily climbed to her feet.

“You are
not used to transport unit, no?” he asked. “Lots of people get sick the first
few times. Especially one like ours. It’s much stronger and faster than the
Commonwealth Fleet’s.”

“What
the
fuck
is going on?” she demanded, hoping he didn’t detect the fear in
her voice.

“We’re
not going to hurt you,” Zadbac assured her.

Lily
didn’t believe that for a second.

“We have
to kill you, but it won’t hurt,” he continued.

Lily
would have given the bastard points for honesty if she believed him. She felt
her gorge rise again and forced it back. Going into hysterics wouldn’t help at
all, and she had no doubt Zadbac had painful ways of shutting her up if she
started screaming.

“Where’s
Captain Marska?” she asked.

“On his
ship, I presume.”

“Dr.
Ashford?”

“Still
on the patrol ship.”

The
nausea was fading, and she thought quickly. There was no way she could take
down three people, especially without a weapon. She and Taz had covered only
the basics in hand-to-hand combat, and she had never anticipated having to take
on a Nym. At the very least, she could try to get something out of Zadbac about
what they were doing. They owed her that much.

“Why?”
she asked. “Why were you on Earth in 2017?”

Zadbac’s
mouth compressed into a thin line. “If you had stayed where you should have,
you wouldn’t be here today.”

“Why did
you kill Andrew Claybourne?”

“He
fought back. My colleague was merely attempting to defend himself.”

“From
what?” Shit, the hysteria was creeping back. She tamped down her fear and
stared him straight in his black eyes.

“He
attempted to leave our office. My colleague tried to stop him. They fought.”
Zadbac’s face twisted in disgust. “He did not return with me.”

Andrew
Claybourne hadn’t died in vain. Lily would dwell on that later, when she got
out of here.

At least
Zadbac wasn’t reaching for a weapon. The guard looked straight ahead, as though
she and the doctor didn’t exist.

“Why was
your ship orbiting around Earth’s satellites?”

The
guard called out something in the Nym language. Zadbac snorted. “I do not like
humans either,” he replied in English, keeping his gaze pinned on Lily. “They
talk too much. Earth was a mistake.”

“What do
you mean, ‘Earth was a mistake’?”

“If you
are not quiet,
Minsa
Stewart, I will have to quiet you myself.”

“You’re
going to do that anyway.” Her voice rose to a shout. “At least have the fucking
courtesy to tell me what you’re up to!”

Zadbac
sighed and removed a transdermal unit from the pocket of his black coat. He
wore a utility belt full of medical apparatus around his waist. She recognized
some of them from her pharmacy text files and the
Defiant
’s sick bay.

Sick
bay.
God
. Dr. Ashford. Whatever Rian did to Ashford, it wasn’t brutal
enough. For the first time, Lily saw the logic behind Fleet’s mind-wipe policy,
but a mind-wipe was still too merciful for that bastard. She could only pray
Rian was okay.

Zadbac
held out the transdermal spray but didn’t move to apply it. “We don’t like the
Commons,” he said simply.

“No
shit.” She deliberately kept her eyes away from the unit and on his oversized
head.

“The Nym
are dying. We need more space and a new planet, and we have nowhere to go. If
we start over, we can rebuild our empire from the ground up. From the beginning
of interstellar travel. Prevent Earthlings from ever expanding in their galaxy
and the one beyond.”

It was
ridiculous, and far too simplistic for Lily’s imagination. “That’s it? You
wanted a new empire?”

“So did
Earth. That’s why they migrated.”

“The
Kurrans wouldn’t have allowed you to do that,” she spat.

“We
would have dealt with the Kurrans, I assure you.”

“I don’t
believe you,” Lily shot back. “Your ships can move through Commons space
undetected. It happened twice, with the
Defiant
and
Bishop’s Pride
.
What’s to keep you from taking over space that way?” She had to keep him
talking until she figured a way out of the room.

“We don’t
have enough ships to do that. That’s part of what we were doing on your planet
in your time. We were, as you say, evaluating resources. We miscalculated the
time travel equation. We should have landed in 2217, three solar years before
the Commonwealth formed. Our ship left us on Earth and didn’t return for us for
four of your solar months. We tried out a new cloaking device in your space,
and your ships destroyed both of ours.”

“One,”
she corrected. “The
Pride
fired, but your ship disappeared.”

“It was
hit,” Zadbac said darkly. “It disintegrated on the other side of our wormhole.”

Wormhole?
She knew that a wormhole could
be detected and tried to make sense of what Zadbac was telling her. She filed
the information away to tell Rian and Fleet later, and she would. She
had
to get off this ship, if that’s where she was.

“Enough,”
Zadbac said and held up the transdermal spray. With his other hand, he grabbed
Lily around her throat, leaving her pulse point exposed. She struggled and
tried to breathe, her hands uselessly tugging at Zadbac’s grip. She covered her
bare skin with her hand, trying to prevent contact. Zadbac cursed in his native
tongue but didn’t give up.

She
thought back to Taz’s instruction. Without the time to give it any more
thought, she kicked Zadbac as hard as she could, her booted foot meeting
squarely with his upper thigh. It was a little off the mark, but the impact had
startled him enough to let go of his grip on her throat. She kicked him again,
but he didn’t go down, merely doubling over. He dropped the transderm spray,
and she snatched it before it could hit the floor and held it to the first
patch of exposed skin she could find, on top of his bald head. She pressed the
plunger as hard as she could and prayed that whatever was in there adversely
affected the Nym.

He
looked up at her, shock in his face, unable to stand upright. An angry red welt
was forming on his scalp where she had sprayed him, and his features were
slackened. She kicked him again and he went down on the floor, gasping.

Laser
fire streaked through the cargo bay. Lily screamed and threw herself to the
floor next to Zadbac, who was now seizing and uttering wordless, guttural
cries. She grabbed the oversized laser pistol clipped to his belt and fumbled
with the only switch on it, hoping it was the safety. A charge from the guard’s
weapon seared the floor a couple of inches from where she lay, and she held up
hers and fired. A scream of shock and fury echoed through the room, and the
guard was slammed against the wall, his scorched hand dropping his weapon to
the deck with a clatter. That had been a lucky shot. She didn’t expect to get
another.

Zadbac
lay prone on the floor, curled in a fetal position. She kept her belly to the
ground and slithered behind him, using his body as a makeshift shield. He made
no move to relinquish the gun, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish out
of water. Across the room the guard dropped to his knees and groped for his
weapon with his uninjured hand. Lily angled up on her elbows and aimed her own
weapon at him, resting it on Zadbac’s waist. He ducked out of the way and with
a shaking hand picked up his gun and trained it on her. Lily took a deep breath
and fired one last time.

The
charge hit him squarely in the chest, exiting through his back and spraying
black blood along the back wall. The guard’s eyes rolled back and he dropped to
the floor with a heavy, sickening thump.

Lily
took a few deep, shaky breaths, forcing herself not to panic. The nausea had
returned, and she leaned over and threw up on the floor next to Zadbac’s body.
He had stopped clawing the air and was laying perfectly still, his eyes wide
open in disbelief.

She had
just killed two people and wasn’t going to kid herself. That had been due to
sheer dumb luck, and she doubted that when the bodies were found any remaining
Nym would underestimate her. She had to get out of here. She took a few deep
breaths, and the nausea faded.

Adrenaline
surged through her. She reached for the comm badge clipped to her collar and
paused. If the Nym could track her down through an ancient cell phone, they
could certainly track and hear her words to the
Defiant
, if she could
even get through to the crew.

She was
on her own.

She
stepped to the door, pressed her ear against it, and heard nothing. She didn’t
bother trying to open it with her palm; the pad wasn’t even shaped for a human
hand. Too large, and designed for clubbed, webbed fingers. She inspected the
gun in her hand. Its status light was still green, and miracle of miracles, it
had an indicator on the side. She had hardly used any juice.

Still,
she wasn’t going to waltz out of here with just one weapon. She looked down at
the guard’s body in disgust. He and Zadbac were soaked in black blood that gave
off a horrible stench. She held her breath and reached for the body, taking the
weapon that had fallen to the floor next to him. She shoved it awkwardly into
the waistband of her pants. The movies made it look so much easier.

She
stepped back and fired on the doors, praying the charge would penetrate through
them. Charred indentations appeared, and she cut out a square large enough for
her to crawl through and kicked out the metal after a couple of tries. Pain
reverberated through her body, and she gave the door a mighty smack with the
barrel of the gun. The metal gave, and she forced it out the other side. She
stuck out her head first and looked down an empty hallway on either side.

Good.
She crawled through, the jagged edges of the hole slashing at her clothes. She
ignored the sting of a few cuts on her arms and tried to pick a direction.