Supernova (6 page)

“Marska
here.” The voice sounded through the disc, and it was familiar.

“Our
guest has woken up and would like to speak to you.”

Actually,
Lily didn’t, but she didn’t think she had a choice in the matter.

The
disembodied voice said, “I’ll be there in five.”

Ashford
stood up, the device he called a mediscan in his hand. He held it out in front
of her. “I’m going to give you a check-up, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Here?”
There wasn’t an exam table or stethoscope in sight. And the walls were windows.

“Yes,
you’ll find it less invasive than at home.” He flicked a switch on the mediscan
and held it out in front of her for a few minutes. Lily watched him as he
scanned her.

“Done,”
he said, and smiled.

“That’s
it? You’re not going to take my blood pressure?”

“I did,”
he answered. “It looks fine, and the tonismi is out of your system. You’ve had
some medical work done that’s obsolete now, but otherwise you’re very healthy.”
She must have looked at him with a question in her eyes, because he clarified. “You’ve
had your appendix removed in a way that hasn’t been performed in centuries, and
today I picked up some dental work.”

“My
teeth are all mine,” she protested.

“You’ve
had a cavity that was filled in,” he corrected her. “I can also see that your
wisdom teeth were extracted fairly recently.”

Lily’s
sniffled, but her curiosity was piqued. “Three years ago. How else do you get
them out?”

“Painlessly.”
Any other explanation he could have offered was cut short by the arrival of the
angry man from the night before. He stormed into the office, ignoring Ashford
and focusing on Lily.

“You’re
awake,” he said, his voice a feral growl.

Fear
snaked down Lily’s spine. “Yes,” she squeaked.

“Not
now, Lieutenant,” said an exasperated voice from behind him. The big man
stepped aside to let him through.

Lily
immediately recognized his azure eyes, as striking now as they had been the
previous night.

He was
almost as tall as the angry one, but still lean and muscled where the other was
starting to go to fat. His hair was so dark it was nearly black, and touched
his collar as though he had forgotten to get a haircut, and a day’s worth of
beard graced his jaw. His uniform was impeccable in contrast, a dark blue
ensemble with insignia pinned to it: four small silver stars. A small disc like
Ashford’s was clipped to the collar.

His blue
gaze fixed on hers and stared at her with an intensity that made her fidget.

She had managed
to force herself to stop crying, but at some point soon the tears would come
again and not let up until her body decided it was ready. She pushed her
overgrown bangs out of her eyes and straightened her shoulders, determined to
show these spacemen that twenty-first century women were made of sterner stuff
than she looked. And felt.

Under
the angry man’s glare, she stood up. “Sirs,” she said, glancing between them. “Lily
Stewart.”

The
blue-eyed man held out his hand and Lily accepted it. So that little piece of
etiquette hadn’t changed in that last 850 years. “Rian Marska, acting captain
of the
Defiant
,” he said, in that same quiet, commanding tone she
recalled from the night before. He had the firm grip she would have expected.

Releasing
her fingers, he introduced his companion. “This is Lieutenant Grigha Steg,
security chief.” The man called Steg grunted an acknowledgment and kept his
hands fisted at his sides.

Captain
Marska and Lieutenant Steg took seats around the doctor’s desk, a detail the
security chief objected to. “It would be better to interrogate her on deck
four,” he protested.

Whatever
deck four was, Lily didn’t want to find out.

“No one’s
being interrogated,” the captain said. “Not yet. Sit down.”

“But,
sir...”

“Lieutenant,
I appreciate your caution, but no.” He turned to Lily. “I need you to be
completely honest with me. We’ve never had an incident like this in Fleet, and
my commanding officers and Steg here think you may be a spy. Are you?”

“No,”
said Lily automatically. Suspicion bloomed across the security chief’s face and
the captain raised an eyebrow. “I’m a receptionist and administrative assistant
at Lazarus Cryonics. Or I was,” she clarified.

“What
else?” Steg demanded.

Lily
thought about what else she was. Downtown apartment-dweller. Regular voter in
elections. Driver of a 2009 Toyota that had seen better days. Former director
of operations at Stewart Tree Farms. Would-be high school history teacher, when
she had the grief from her father’s death purged from her system enough to return
to school. “I have a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of
Ontario,” she said finally. “And before moving to Toronto and taking the job at
the cryonics lab, I worked for my father’s company.”

“What
kind of business?”

“Christmas
tree farm.” Catching Rian’s questioning look in the corner of her eye, she
explained, “A holiday. We grew trees to sell for it. Mostly Douglas and Balsam
firs.” She sighed. “I guess Christmas isn’t observed anymore.”

“Earth
still has an annual winter festival,” Ashford assured her. “Not with what you’ve
just described, but I’ve heard of Christmas.” She looked at him, surprised. “I
grew up there,” he added.

She
brightened. “Where are you from?”

“Earth’s
demographics and geographic borders have changed a great deal,” he said. “I’m
from the Northlands, which was previously unpopulated. Most of Earth’s
population lives there now.”

Lily
tried to guess where the Northlands might be. “You’re from the North Pole?” she
guessed. Maybe the hippies
had
been right about climate change. She
caught Steg’s irritated look and tamped down her nervousness. The man looked
like he could comfortably arm-wrestle a grizzly bear and have enough energy
left over to rip a door off her car. He sighed in frustration, and the captain
shot him a warning look.

“Earth
has been home to shipyards for over four hundred years,” Marska explained.

“No one
actually wants to live there,” Steg added.

“Another
word out of you and you’re going right back to security,” the captain
threatened. Steg shut up. “Go on, Miss Stewart.”

“Lily,”
she said automatically.

Their
eyes locked and for another brief second she felt something melt in her. Then
it was gone, and his next words were all business. “Please continue.”

But
something else nagged at her, and she wanted it out in the open. “You’re
speaking English,” she said to them.

The
captain replied. “We’re speaking one of the dialects of the original Republic
colonies. There are fifteen official languages in Commons space and a number of
dialects in each. This one is the most widely spoken in the Fleet, but most
other officers are fluent in at least two or three. In fact, if you include the
dialects as individual languages, there are more than sixty...” Ashford cleared
his throat, and Marska quieted and looked at his hands.

“
Y a
til quelque’un qui parle français
?” Lily asked experimentally. At their
blank looks, she exhaled noisily. “I spent all that time failing French for
nothing.” She soldiered on, and continued her story. “I moved to Toronto in
June. A lot of things in my life—” She fumbled for words. “Unraveled. I was
hired by Lazarus Cryonics about six weeks later, to book appointments for
consultations, answer the phone, reconcile their accounts. I did a lot of that
at the tree farm.” In reality, she ended up playing zombie games on the
computer, the phone rarely rang, and she never had the chance to go over the
books in her short time there. “There were two doctors at the lab, and me. That’s
it. Their names were Zadbac and Pitro.”

At that
pronouncement, Marska’s and Ashford’s eyes widened and Steg hissed, “Spy!”

“Final
warning, Lieutenant,” said Marska.

Lily
ignored Steg and asked the captain, “You know them?”

“We know
of Zadbac,” Marska said. “Go on.”

“I’d
been working there about two weeks when a client named Andrew Claybourne made
an appointment to look into having his head frozen,” she continued. Ashford hid
a smile. Marska tried to. Steg scowled.

“Cryonics
was never successful,” Ashford said. “One of the greatest scams ever
perpetuated in history.”

“Except
me,” Lily said.

“You
were never dead.”

Lily
soldiered on, forcing herself to relive that final afternoon in horrifying
detail. “I heard Mr. Claybourne yelling in the lab,” she said. “In the doctor’s
office. I went in and he’d been attacked. It looked like someone had smashed
his face in and bitten his hand. Dr. Pitro did it, I think, and he
was...licking blood off his fingers.” She shuddered. “Andrew Claybourne had a
big needle sticking out the side of his neck.” She gasped, remembering the news
that morning. “There were two bodies that washed up in the river right
before...they were found with syringes sticking out of their necks, too.”
Captain Marska nodded.

“I ran
out of the lab to the street, but I tripped and Dr. Zadbac caught me.” She took
a deep breath and willed the tears away. “He did something to the air. I
remember these orange stripes, bars, whatever they were, all around us, and he
said no one could hear or see us. Then he sprayed me here.” She pointed to the
pulse point on the side of her neck. “The next thing I remember, I woke up in
that room with that other guy pointing a ray gun at me.”

She
watched the looks being exchanged between the doctor and officers.

“Nym,”
growled Steg.

Marska
cut him off. “Can you describe these doctors, Miss Stewart?”

She didn’t
question why, although they clearly knew about Zadbac already. “Creepy
vampire-like psychotics” probably wouldn’t cut it, but Lily was unsure how to
describe them more succinctly. Her father had been the writer, not her. “Very
tall,” she said. “Thin, with heads that didn’t really fit their bodies. They
looked like bobbleheads.” Ashford and Marska looked at her questioningly but
she didn’t explain. “Bulgy eyes. Zadbac’s were all black and Pitro’s
lime-green. They both had really jagged teeth, too, but Zadbac’s looked worse.”

“So you’ve
dealt with the Nym,” Steg snapped.

“I’m not
a spy!”

“She’s
not a spy,” Ashford echoed. “Captain, remember what I told you last night?”
Marska nodded.

Lieutenant
Steg sputtered, “What? I have a right to know details about prisoners on this
ship!”

“What
details?” Lily asked, worried.

Addressing
everyone, Ashford tapped the mediscan unit on the desk. “I took a quick reading
last night when she was brought in,” he began. “It showed the presence of tonismi
and other details that corroborate her story of being from the twenty-first
century.

“It
detected antigens for diphtheria and pertussis. Diphtheria hasn’t infected
humans in hundreds of years and while some of the Fringes worlds have their own
unique strains of disease, they’re nowhere near as close to something like
pertussis,” he finished.

“Whooping
cough,” said Lily, more to herself. “I had those shots when I was five and
fifteen.” The doctor had given her lollipops both times because she cried.

“You
also had your appendix removed. The unit picked that up.” He caught her glare
and held up his hands in mock surrender. “I can’t control what shows up in a
general scan, Miss Stewart.”

“What
else?” she asked.

“You’re
a female humanoid, late twenties to early thirties, no chronic diseases, but it
detected early-life respiratory issues. No one touched you, I promise.”

Ordinarily,
Lily would be pissed that someone had conducted a medical exam without her
consent, while she was barely coherent, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances.
Besides, the scanner was pretty cool and she couldn’t help but ask about it. “I
had asthma when I was little and an emergency appendectomy when I was
twenty-two,” she said. “My appendix ruptured.” She caught the collective wince
of the men around her and added with a touch of pride, “Hurt like hell. How do
you deal with them?”

“Laser
surgery,” Ashford said. “No sutures or pain, the wound healed with a tissue
regenerator patch.” More cringing from Marska and Steg. “The entire procedure
would take about twenty minutes.” Then he added, “And there are the dental
extractions I told you I picked up.”

“Yeah,
my wisdom teeth. You probably don’t even evolve with them anymore.”

“Only
humanoids with Milky Way ancestry do, but when they show up, they’re removed as
soon as they start forming,” Ashford replied smoothly. “The gum tissue is
regenerated in a matter of hours.”

“I had
holes in my gums for a few weeks. I spit out a lot of blood the first couple of
days, too.” Lily said this to gauge their reactions, and was pleased to see
Steg blanch. “Oh, come on. It wasn’t a big deal.”