Riley's Paradox, page 18
part #9 of Hearts of ICARUS Series
“Another internal explosion, Sir, location and cause unknown.” The captain looked to his left, where the ship’s main status display was located. “We’ve just lost all external comms, both short and long range. We’ve pulled up the data from the transport disrupter—it stopped working four minutes and eleven seconds ago. That was just after the first explosion. We haven’t had time to determine the cause of the failure.”
The ship shuddered, after which the hum of the engines faded away and the lights dimmed by half. “We just lost main engine power…correction, all engine power, Commander.”
“Transmit a priority one distress signal immediately,” Wilder ordered.
The captain gritted his teeth with frustration. “Unable to comply, Sir. We lost all comms when we lost engine power. Getting reports from main engineering now—the engines are totally wrecked and all the comms circuits are completely fused—some strange kind of overload that seems to have burned out everything on the ship capable of sending a signal more than a few miles.”
“Was there a collision? Are we being fired upon, Captain?” Wilder asked, looking up as the already dimmed lights flickered.
“Negative, Sir. As far as we can tell, the damage is purely from internal sources,” Marnet said, his tone making it sound like a question more than an answer. Wilder opened his mouth to speak just before Marnet began swearing.
“Sorry, Sir,” he said a moment later after receiving reports from a few bridge officers. “It’s confirmed that all damage is the result of internal explosions. We’ve found some of the sites, and these are not components that are capable of exploding on their own—someone would have to plant some kind of explosive device. And that last blast was actually several separate but simultaneous detonations scattered throughout the ship. The emergency power systems engaged, but all but one of the fifty-six energy cells have been sabotaged. We’ve got life support and lights for ten minutes at most. After that, things get real bad, real fast. Excuse me a moment, Sir.”
Wilder, Win and West stared at each other as they attempted to absorb the shock of sabotage on top of Riley’s sudden disappearance.
“West, run to your room and get the drug darts taken from the Nomen.”
West didn’t ask questions. He just turned and ran.
“Commander, one of the damage control teams has just informed me that there’s an explosive device in the engine room, this one much larger than the others, probably powerful enough to crack the hull wide open. The timer on it indicates we have only six minutes before it detonates.”
“Understood. Abandon ship, Captain. Repeat. Abandon ship.”
Wilder watched as Marnet flipped open the cover on a big red button on his console, then slammed his fist against it. The alarm changed so that everyone knew to head to the life pod stations immediately. He waited until he saw Marnet stand up, then closed the connection and started to follow Win out of the bathroom. He paused when he realized Percy was still crouched on the floor, staring at the scorch marks.
“Let’s go, Percy,” he said. “We need to get out of here before that bomb goes off.”
“What about Riley?”
“We can’t help her if we’re dead.” Seeing the desolation in Percy’s eyes, he softened his voice. “Come on, Percy. I’ll share my life pod with you. When we get picked up we’ll return to Jasan for our ship, and then we’ll hunt for those who took her from us.”
Percy looked up. “Yes. We will hunt, and when we find them, we will destroy them.”
“That’s exactly what we’ll do,” Wilder agreed.
Chapter 9
Eight weeks later…
Riley opened her eyes, startled to find that she was lying on the floor. A hard gray floor that was entirely unfamiliar. Confused, she raised her head and looked around.
The walls and ceiling of the room were the same shade of gray as the floor, but that barely registered. What caught her attention were six narrow beds; three on one side of the room, and three on the other, with a narrow aisle down the middle of the room between them. The beds were much higher than ordinary beds, each standing on four long metal legs, each with a black rubber wheel at the bottom.
The beds were too tall for her to see whether there was anyone in them from her position on the floor. There was no other furniture, no windows, not even a door that she could discern.
She searched her memory for some clue to tell her where she was and why, but came up with a complete blank. Was this a med-clinic? Or a hospital? If so, where was it? And why was she here? Why was she on the floor? Had she fallen off one of the beds in her sleep? If so, why didn’t she feel any pain?
Frustrated by her inability to come up with a single answer, she started to push herself up, then froze when she looked down and saw paws instead of hands. Tiny paws covered in white fur. She turned her head, already knowing what she’d find before her eyes settled on the long white tail swishing back and forth against the floor behind her.
She wasn’t too freaked out by the form she always took when she used astral projection. The little white cat with a blue teardrop on her forehead was as familiar to her as her katrenca alter form. It took too much mental energy to recreate her true physical self while using astral projection, so she used the image of a small cat instead. She’d even named her Bastet when she was a little girl, just as she’d named her katrenca and all of her toys.
What did freak her out was that she hadn’t been aware that she was in Bastet’s form. Nor could she remember taking the form, or even using astral projection. In fact, she couldn’t remember anything at all about where she was, how she’d gotten there, or why she was there, and that was distinctly not normal.
Riley closed her eyes and thought back, searching for her most recent memory. After a few moments she opened her eyes and frowned, which caused her ears to flatten slightly. The last thing she remembered was trying to get Percy out of bed in time to catch the transport back to school. That was a clear memory, she was certain.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember anything after that even though she knew there was more. Maybe figuring out where she was would jog her memory. She rose to her feet, which seemed to take a lot more effort than it should have. Once she was upright, she was surprised to find she was feeling a little dizzy.
Projecting herself always required a lot of physical and psychic energy. The longer she projected the weaker she got until she either returned to her physical body by choice, or was pulled back automatically.
But she’d just awakened and had barely moved. Surely she couldn’t be out of energy already. And she’d never felt dizzy while projecting before.
A quick glance around confirmed her initial conclusion that there was nothing in the room other than the six beds. Even standing she couldn’t tell if anyone was on them, so she approached the foot of the bed closest to her and jumped up onto it. The moment her paws landed on the mattress another wave of dizziness washed over her.
This time it passed very quickly, which was distinctly odd. She got weaker the longer she projected Bastet’s form. Not stronger. She set that question aside with the others, and looked around.
Each bed held a sleeping woman dressed in a white med gown. They were all lying flat on their backs, arms at their sides, legs straight and unmoving, feet bare. There were no sheets on the thin mattresses, no blankets covering the women, and no pillows beneath their heads.
A cold chill ran through her as she looked at them. These women weren’t sleeping. They were unconscious. And there wasn’t anything natural about it.
She walked along the edge of the narrow mattress until she was close enough to the occupant to see her face. Young, late teens, and completely unfamiliar. Riley looked her over carefully, but there was nothing to indicate that the young woman had been injured. She seemed unusually pale, but there were no obvious signs of illness. So why was she lying unconscious in what looked like a hospital bed?
Frustrated, Riley decided to move to the next bed. Maybe looking at a few of the other women would help her to figure out why they were here.
Turning around, she prepared to jump to the second bed, then paused when she noticed a bundle of tubes and wires running from the bed to a panel set into the wall above the woman’s head. From Riley’s position, she couldn’t see where the lines went since they vanished from sight somewhere on the other side of the woman’s head. She walked down the edge of the mattress, around the woman’s feet, then back up the other side, looking closely for any wires or tubes peeking out as she went.
It wasn’t until she reached the other side of the woman’s head that she could see the tubes and wires disappearing beneath the shoulder of the medical gown. The sight of them sickened her, though she wasn’t sure why.
Riley shifted her position a little and took a closer look at the panel above the bed. In addition to the tubes and wires coming out of it, there were several switches and buttons, each lit up in either red, green, or amber. Each one was marked with an unfamiliar symbol which, try as she might, she could make no sense of. There was an eight by ten view screen above the switches. Unfortunately it was currently dark, so it was no help.
She assumed that the purpose of the panel was to regulate and monitor the status of the woman on the bed. That much seemed obvious. She didn’t like it, though. She didn’t like it even more than she didn’t like the tubes and wires that ran from it to the unconscious woman. She just had no idea why she didn’t like it. After all, she’d spent enough time in the med-clinic on Dracon’s Ranch to be somewhat familiar with the setup.
She looked around the room, unsurprised to find that there was an identical set of tubes, wires, switches, and darkened view screens over each of the other five beds. Since all of the setups appeared to be the same, and all of the women were unconscious, it didn’t take much of a leap to deduce that the tubes and wires were not only monitoring the women, but also keeping them unconscious. A drug induced coma? she wondered. She was no doctor or med-tech, but for some reason, that felt right.
But why? If these women were, in fact, deliberately being kept unconscious, there had to be a reason. While she could come up with a few reasons…accident, injury, illness…that would fit one, or even two women, she couldn’t imagine why six women would be in the exact same condition.
There was something ominous about the way they were all lying in the same position on the bare mattresses, wearing ugly med gowns and nothing more. Not even so much as a sheet to cover them. It was as if they weren’t even people but, instead, something less.
And then there were the biggest questions of all. Why was she there? Why was she in Bastet’s form? And why couldn’t she remember anything?
She’d used astral projection most of her life, and she hadn’t done it accidentally since she was four years old. Controlling it required a combination of physical relaxation and intense concentration. Not once had she ever lost awareness of her true self. She’d always known where she was, why she was there, and what she was doing. Now that she thought about it, she realized that she couldn’t sense her physical self at all. That had never happened before either.
Riley felt threads of panic reaching for her mind and clamped down on them. She didn’t have the time or energy to waste on that. Several minutes had passed already and all she had was a growing pile of questions and no answers. Panicking wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
She took a moment to sift through her growing list of questions, and focused on just one. Why was she there? There had to be a reason. She just needed to find it.
She noticed a set of buttons on the right side of the view screen, and identified one that she was fairly sure would turn it on simply because it was the only green one. Unfortunately, she couldn’t touch it. Bastet was a mental projection and, as such, not real. No one could hear or see her save herself, and she was transparent to her own eyes. Since she didn’t have a physical body, she couldn’t manipulate anything.
Or could she?
She’d never actually tried to use both of her psychic abilities at the same time before. She’d never had a reason to. When she was using astral projection she was an observer. Not a participant.
It’s worth a try, anyway, she decided. Turning slightly, she faced the screen directly and tried to relax. She focused hard on the square green button, imagining that she was pressing it down. Nothing happened, so she focused harder.
A few seconds later she was fighting back another wave of dizziness. She’d definitely used energy, of that she had no doubt. But it hadn’t worked. The button hadn’t moved, and the screen remained dark.
Once the dizziness faded she leapt to the next bed and found that the occupant was another young woman who appeared to be a couple of years older than the first. Nineteen or twenty, maybe. Everything else was the same. The pale face, the white med gown, the incomprehensible panel above her head, and the various tubes and wires connected to the woman’s body.
After checking the third woman and finding nothing new, she jumped down to the floor, trotted back to the first bed on the other side of the little room and jumped up onto it. The fourth woman was no different than the first three. Young, early twenties she guessed, and completely unfamiliar to her.
She jumped to the fifth bed and froze in horror when she saw that the occupant looked exactly like herself. She immediately leapt to the last bed, relieved to find that the sixth woman had black curly hair, and bore no resemblance to her whatsoever.
Only one of her sisters, then. This had to be the reason she was here. Wherever here was. But which sister?
She returned to the fifth bed, but this time she was on the left side of the bed, not the right, so the first thing her eyes fell on was a pale blue section of hair at the woman’s temple. Stunned, all she could do for many moments was stare.
The young woman on the bed wasn’t one of her sisters. It was her. The blue braid proved it. But how?
How had she used astral projection when she was obviously unconscious? Why couldn’t she remember doing it? Why was she here? How did she get here?
She reached out with one tiny paw to touch the back of her hand, needing to feel the warmth of her own body, even though she knew it wouldn’t work. Bastet wasn’t real. She was like spirit, but not.
Riley tried anyway, unsurprised when her paw appeared to sink into her own flesh. She sighed, then started to turn around when she saw something strange on her wrist. Something red.
She crouched down and looked at it more closely. It was a scar, she realized. A thin one that ran in a circle around her wrist. A scar she didn’t remember. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten it, or when, or where. There were a few smaller, thinner red scars beside it, as if whatever had caused the first one had just touched her skin in a few other places. Burns. That’s what they were. Newly healed burns. But how had she gotten them?
She cast back in her mind yet again, searching for some scrap of memory, anything at all that could help her understand what the hell was happening to her. Once again she came up empty.
Frustrated, she turned around and leapt to the floor. Since there were no answers inside this room, maybe she could find some outside of it. She paused and studied the walls more carefully than she had before, knowing there had to be a door somewhere.
It took two tries before she spotted faint rectangular lines in the gray wall near the corner, right next to the first bed she’d checked. There was a pocket door there. It was tightly fitted, and the faint lines giving it away were so close in color to the walls themselves that she’d missed them before. Even after spotting them her eyes kept sliding past them.
Since she had no physical body, she didn’t need a door to leave the room. She could go through the thickest and most heavily armored walls just as easily as she could cross the floor. But she’d discovered long ago that it was generally wisest to use doors when trying to navigate an unfamiliar environment. Otherwise, she could find herself floating in space, or in a room with people doing things she didn’t want to witness, or even in a roaring fireplace. While none of those things would cause her physical harm, they did tend to be shocking enough to send her immediately back to her body. And she wasn’t ready for that just yet.
She was two small steps from the door when her nose bumped up against…nothing? Puzzled, she reached out with one paw, startled when she felt something solid. A wall. An invisible wall.
There was nothing physically solid about her current form, so how in kólasi did she bump up against anything? Visible or not, walls of any sort shouldn’t stop her. Hissing with annoyance, she backed up a step and tried to figure out this new puzzle.
Nothing made any sense. She was using astral projection while unconscious, she couldn’t remember anything, she was stuck in a room full of unconscious women who, aside from herself, she didn’t recognize, and every single minute she came up with more questions for which she had no answers.
Ignoring the fact that she had no true body, lungs, or nose, she took in a long, slow breath in an effort to calm herself. The mental exercise of breathing deeply actually calmed her enough for her temper to settle, and her mind to focus.
After walking all the way around the perimeter of the room she discovered that while she had no trouble walking right through the metal legs of the beds, she bumped up against an invisible barrier a few inches before she reached the walls. It made no sense. She should be able to walk through anything solid. She always had before. So why not these walls?
A sense of familiarity suddenly struck her. This had happened before. She was sure of it. A long time ago. When she was a little girl? Yes, that felt right. She couldn’t remember why, though. She sat down and closed her eyes, calming herself once again before attempting to reach for the memory.
Muffled voices from beyond the door shattered her focus and sent her heart racing. She spun around and hurried back to the spot she’d awakened in, frantically looking for a place to hide even though she knew there wasn’t one. Then she went completely still for a long moment before mentally rolling her eyes at herself. She was a projection of her own mind. Nobody could see her.
