Supernova (3 page)

A label
was affixed to this one:
EARTH HUMANOID, 21
^st
CENTURY
. Inside
he saw the perfectly preserved body of a woman who would have been pretty in a
wholesome kind of way in life. Not like Ena Steg, who was exotic and darkly
sensual. This one had long dark hair and a healthy glow to her fair skin that
spoke of living on a planet with natural sunlight. She had been attired in a
blue dress and short-sleeved black sweater when she died and was preserved.

Taz
looked at the floor. He was the first person to admit he had few morals, but
parading a dead body around to be gawked at crossed a line for him. It was
downright creepy and certainly disrespectful. It wasn’t as though anyone in the
Commons hadn’t seen a humanoid before. He would be careful with this one.

He
directed the jack to the plastiglas coffin, intending to put it in the most
secure corner of the hold where the artificial gravity always worked. Sweat
poured down his back and seeped through his T-shirt. He considered taking off
his pants, but that guaranteed a visit from the captain to check up on him, and
would open the door to all kinds of questions he didn’t want to think about.

The jack
raised the coffin to his eye level and its lid lifted slightly with a small
pop. With a sinking feeling Taz realized the preserving seal around it had
pulled off, likely disintegrating because of the heat and being bounced around.

A dead
body and near-tropical conditions made for a working environment even Taz
wouldn’t tolerate. He lowered the jack to the floor and looked around
frantically for something that could act as a makeshift seal. He tried to press
the lid back into place, but only succeeded in dislodging it further.

Oh,
shit.

He
looked at the body, at the face serene in eternal sleep, and wondered for a few
seconds if she had voluntarily signed up for this.

Then her
eyes opened.

“Fucking
gods!” Taz sputtered. He instinctively backed away and crashed into a clothes
rack displaying twenty-second-century Ragma monks’ robes.

Zombies,
he thought at first, as his
panic rose. As a green recruit, he had ended up assigned to a mission on Corlon
where a biochemical weapons plant had exploded. While the workers affected by
toxic spores were technically still alive, they had lurched around and tried to
bite each other’s faces off. He had been ordered to aim for the head.

He also
had an overactive imagination and a penchant for the cheesy zombie vids they
showed at Rubidge Station’s cinemas. This was more like a scene out of one of
them rather than the Corlon disaster.

With
shaking hands, he aimed his regulation laser pistol at the coffin, where
muffled thumps pounded from the interior, followed by a weak, bewildered “Hello?”

Taz had
never heard of a talking zombie. He lowered his weapon slightly, but didn’t
move towards the coffin.

The lid
lifted, and the exhibit’s—the woman’s—head peeked out, her dark hair
disheveled. She saw Taz, and her eyes took in the laser pistol. She looked at
him with a beseeching plea in her eyes, which Taz now saw were green and more
than a little dazed. Her mouth moved, as though struggling to find words.
Finally, she croaked, “Please don’t kill me.”

Taz
lowered the weapon to his hip but didn’t holster it. He cautiously approached
the coffin. “Who are you?”

She
coughed, a dry, hacking sound, and spoke again. “Where am I?”

“Tell me
your name.” Taz thought about which sectors were pissed off with the Commons
Fleet this year. At least three, he figured. What a brilliant way to infiltrate
a ship: Make the spies appear like dead museum exhibits.

“Lily
Stewart,” the woman replied. “Can you help me up? My legs are numb.”

Taz
brought up the weapon again and aimed it at her heart. “Who do you work for?”

She
managed to lift her knees and she wiggled her feet to get the circulation
going. “I was working for Lazarus Cryonics,” she said. “Please help me up. I
need some water.” Her eyes focused, and she saw the weapon trained on her, and
held up her hands in surrender. “I’m not a threat, I promise,” she said. “I don’t
even know where I am.”

Taz
peered in the coffin. Beside her was a small black satchel made of an
unfamiliar fabric. It was large enough to conceal a weapon. “Give me your bag,”
he said. “Lift it out and drop it on the floor.”

She
looked surprised. “My purse? You can have it, just please don’t hurt me.”

Taz had
to give her credit for acting the part of a ditzy stowaway. Her eyes kept
drooping and he saw the fine tremors in her hands as she lifted the bag and let
it fall to the floor. Taz poked it with his foot, then bent down to turn it
over with the barrel of the laser pistol. The bag’s contents spilled across the
floor.

“Hey!”
she protested. “That’s a new phone!”

A
palm-sized device with a flat screen was on top of the debris that fell out of
the bag. There was also a collection of old-fashioned metal keys, a paperback
book, some tubes that looked like cosmetics, slips of paper, and a pink wallet.

There
was something very wrong with this picture. Not just because a supposedly dead
exhibit had resurrected itself, but because the charade was so well done.
Whoever was employing her had done his homework. A bound
book
, for the
gods’ sakes!

She had
hoisted herself up and pulled herself out of the coffin, gracelessly crawling
to the floor. “Where am I?” she repeated.

Taz didn’t
reply. Instead, he tapped his comm badge. “Shraft to Lieutenant Steg,” he said.
“We have a live one in the cargo hold.”

* * *

Lieutenant
Steg was not happy. But then, he was always a little pissed off about
something. Acting Captain Rian Marska gave up trying to get an intelligible
explanation for the security chief’s blustering through his comm badge and
merely waited for him to finish.  The lieutenant shouted into Rian’s comm set,
interrupting his mediation between a pair of ensigns from engineering with
demands for a private conversation.  Rian heard the words “Shraft” and “idiocy”
in the same sentence and immediately dismissed the ensigns. At least Steg’s
latest diatribe would be more interesting than settling a fight over who got
the prime tables in the mess.

“I don’t
know how the stupid shit managed to get through the academy,” the lieutenant
sputtered. “Is this his idea of a joke?”

“If it
is, I’ll handle it,” Rian replied smoothly. “What does he mean, ‘a live one’?”

“He said
something’s still alive in the cargo bay he’s supposed to be sorting through.
The stupid shit—”

“
Language
,
Lieutenant. I’ll be right there.”

The
captain rose from his seat. He knew about Ensign Shraft’s regrettable romantic
entanglement with Steg’s younger sister, although the gods only knew why he
did. He did his best to remain professional and out of the
Defiant
crew’s
personal lives, often to no avail.  He never expected a patrol ship captaincy
would mean solving more human resources issues than anything else.

Ensign
Shraft had the bare minimum of common sense to make a go of it as a Fleet
officer. While he had graduated from the academy with a concentration in
engineering, he had instead been assigned to communications on his first
posting to keep him out of trouble. Rian had discovered the hard way after two
days on board that Shraft’s favorite things to do involved reprogramming bots
for his own amusement and hitting on as many women as he could. He wasn’t a
practical joker though; Fleet wouldn’t have tolerated that.

The
captain was aware of the gravity issues in the
Defiant
’s cargo hold,
which was why he had protested hauling the artifacts to Rubidge Station’s new
museum. Half of them were bound to be damaged by the time they were to be
delivered, but Fleet said his ship was the only one with an empty hold passing
through the station’s sector in time for the opening.

He left
his office off the bridge and took the lift to the cargo hold, meeting
Lieutenant Steg as the security chief stepped off another. The lieutenant was
scowling, of course, made more menacing by the faded scar across his forehead.
The officer’s uniform strained at the shoulders, a testament to his size and
strength.

“If he’s
fucking around—” Steg began, but Rian cut him off.

“Brig,”
Rian replied curtly. “And what did I say about your language?” They stepped
through the automatic door to the cargo hold and were immediately assaulted by
the heat.

Ensign
Shraft was standing at the other end of the hold, but crates blocked the view
of the lower half of his body. His laser pistol aimed at something, and his
gaze barely flickered from his target as his commanding officers entered. They
stepped around the crates and Rian felt a little dizzy in the spots where the
gravity wasn’t holding tight.

A young
woman sat on the floor on the receiving end of Shraft’s weapon. Her back was
supported by an open plastiglas coffin, and her bare legs were set straight out
in front of her, covered to her knees by a light blue dress. Her feet were
tilted to either side, as if weighted down by the flimsy heeled sandals she
wore. She looked queasy and confused, and more than a little terrified of the
ensign’s laser pistol; her eyes were glassy and unfocused.

“I’ll be
damned,” Steg said.

“I think
she’s a spy, sir,” Shraft intoned.

The
woman shook her head, and raised a hand to it as if the movement hurt. “No, I’m
not,” she said softly. Her voice sounded scratchy and hoarse, like it hadn’t
been used in a long time.

“Who are
you?” Rian demanded crisply.

“Lily
Stewart,” she said. “I can’t get any answers from him—” she pointed at a
shaking finger at Shraft—”and he won’t give me back my purse or tell me who he
is or where we are.”

Rian was
going to hold off on the introductions until he was sure of this woman’s
identity. She didn’t seem to be a threat yet and was obviously under the
influence of something so he didn’t call for a full security team. “Ensign,
lower your weapon.”

Shraft
reluctantly complied.

“Where
are you from?” Rian asked.

“Toronto,”
she said, and gave a wheezing cough. “Well, I was born and raised in Courtice,
but I moved to Toronto about six weeks ago.”

The
places were unfamiliar to Rian. “Where is this Toronto?” he asked suspiciously.

“Canada,”
she said, and even through her glassy-eyed haze, he caught her disbelieving
undertone, as though he should have heard of that place.

“Canada?”
said Steg. Sarcasm laced his words. Rian shot him a look.

“North
America,” the woman said. A shaking hand smoothed out the wrinkles in her
skirt.

Rian’s
eyebrow shot up. He had only a passing knowledge of the Commons’ oldest
settlements, but North America sounded familiar. One of the former geographic
areas on Earth. He turned to Shraft.

“Ensign,
what exhibit is this?” he asked quietly.

“Earth
humanoid, twenty-first century,” he replied.

He
remembered reading the cargo manifest before it was loaded into the hold back
on the planet of Repub-1. One of the natural history artifacts listed had been
discovered a couple of years prior on a forgotten, uninhabited planet in Earth’s
solar system. The only example of what was then a novel means of preservation
in a pile of discarded remains.

Trepidation,
then shock, left a sour taste in his mouth. It was too horrible and impossible
to be true.

He didn’t
let his face betray his thoughts as he regarded the woman sitting on the floor.
“What day is this?” he asked gently.

“I don’t
know,” she said.

“Captain,”
said Steg, disgust in his voice. “I should call a security team.” One meaty
hand poised over the comm badge clipped to his collar, but Rian shook his head.

“What
was the last day you remember?” he prodded.

She
thought a moment, and her head lolled to the side and her eyes closed. She
forced it back up, as though fighting to keep conscious. “August third, 2017,”
she said finally.

Rian
took a deep breath of the humid air and forced himself to stay calm. He
crouched down until he was almost level with her face. A pair of wide
glazed-over green eyes stared back at him. He was either going to be delivering
to her the worst news of her life, or he was about to make a huge security
breach. “You’re on the Commons Fleet ship
Defiant
,” he said finally.

“A ship?
We’re on the water, then.”

“No, not
exactly.” Rian was unsure how to deliver this kind of news. His training had
never prepared him for this.

“Then
where are we?”

Might as
well be honest. “Right now, the Keros Quadrant, a Commons-controlled area of
space. We’re on our way to Rubidge Station.” He ignored Steg’s snort at
revealing that information to a stranger and focused on Lily Stewart in front
of him.