Kira put her hands on her head and dropped to her knees, never taking her eyes off the soldiers. Around her, the crew did the same, the Entropists too.
A half-dozen troopers rushed forward, boots clanging in a metallic cacophony. The weight of their suits made the deck shake; Kira felt the vibrations through her shins.
The troopers moved behind them and began securing the crew’s wrists with restraints. The Entropists’ also. Hwa-jung snarled when one of the troopers grabbed her arms. For a second she resisted, and Kira could hear the soldier’s armor whine as it struggled against her strength. Then Hwa-jung relaxed and muttered an expletive in Korean.
The troopers dragged Falconi and the others to their feet and marched them off to the side, toward a pressure door that slid open at their approach.
“Don’t let them hurt you!” Falconi shouted back at her. “They touch you, rip off their hands. You hear me?!” One of the troopers shoved him in the back. “Gah! We have a pardon! Let us go or I’ll get a lawyer who’ll tear this whole place down for breach of contract. You’ve got nothing on us. We’re—”
His voice faded away as they passed through the doorway and out of sight. Within seconds, the rest of the crew and the Entropists were gone.
A chill crept into Kira’s fingers, despite the best efforts of the Soft Blade. Once again, she was alone.
“This is a waste of time,” she said. “I need to speak with whoever is in command. We have time-sensitive intel about the Jellies. Trust me, the Premier is going to want to hear what we have to say.”
The troopers moved aside, clearing a path forward, and for a moment, Kira thought her words had had the desired effect. Then the thunderous voice again sounded: “Take out your contacts and drop them on the floor.”
Dammit. They must have detected the contacts when she boarded Orsted.
“Weren’t you listening?” she half shouted. The skin of the Soft Blade tightened in response. “While you’re jerking me around, the Jellies are out there killing humans. Who’s in charge? I won’t do a damn thing until—”
The volume of the voice was enough to make her ears hurt: “You WILL comply, or you WILL be shot! You have ten seconds to obey. Nine. Eight. Seven—”
For just a moment, Kira imagined pulling the Soft Blade over herself and letting the troopers shoot her. She was pretty sure the xeno could protect her against all but the largest of their weaponry. But if the fighting on Nidus was anything to go by, the largest would be more than enough to hurt her, and then there would be the consequences for Falconi and the rest of his crew.…
“Fine! Fine!” she said, tamping down her anger. She wasn’t going to lose control. Not now, not ever again. At her urging, the Soft Blade returned to its normal relaxed state.
She reached for her eyes, hating that she was once again going to lose access to a computer.
Once the contacts were on the floor, the voice returned: “Hands back on your head. Good. Now, when I tell you, you’re going to stand up and walk to the other side of the terminal. You will see an open door. Go through that door. If you turn to the side, you will be shot. If you try to go back, you will be shot. If you lower your hands, you will be shot. If you do anything unexpected, you will be shot. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Walk now.”
It was awkward, but Kira got to her feet without using her arms for balance. Then she started forward.
“Faster!” said the voice.
She quickened her pace, but not by much. She’d be damned if she was going to run for them like a server bot programmed to obey their every word.
The battle drones followed her as she walked, their incessant buzzing as maddening as a headache. As she passed the troopers, they closed in behind her, forming a wall of iron, blank and impassive.
At the far end of the terminal was the open door the voice had promised. Another group of troopers waited for her on the other side—a double row of them standing with their weapons trained on her.
Keeping to the same measured pace, Kira left the terminal behind and walked out into the concourse beyond. It was a large chamber (decadent almost with its extravagant use of space), lit by bright panels embedded in the ceiling, which made the whole chamber appear to be bathed in Earth-norm sunlight. The light was needed too, for the walls and floor were dark, and that darkness gave the room an oppressive feel, despite the brightness of the illumination.
As elsewhere, all the doors and passageways leading out of the room had been sealed off, some with freshly welded plates. Benches, terminals, and a few potted trees were distributed in a grid throughout the area, but what really caught her attention was the structure in the very center of the concourse.
It was a polyhedron of some sort, perhaps three meters tall and painted army green. Surrounding it and separated from it by the width of a hand was a wire framework that exactly matched the polyhedron’s shape. A host of thick metal disks (each about the diameter of a dinner plate) were attached to the framework, arranged so the empty space between them was minimized. Every disk had a panel on the back with buttons and a tiny glowing display.
Within the facing side of the polyhedron was a door, and the door stood open. The polyhedron was hollow. Inside was a single chamber so dim and shadowy she couldn’t make out the details.
Kira stopped.
Behind and above her, she heard the troopers and the drones stop as well.
“Inside. Now!” said the voice.
Kira knew she was testing their patience, but she paused a little longer, savoring her last moment of freedom. Then she steeled herself and walked forward and entered the polyhedron.
A second later, the door slammed shut behind her, and the dark confines rang with what felt and sounded like her death knell.
2.
Several minutes passed, during which Kira listened to the troopers thudding about as they shifted equipment into place next to her prison.
Then a new voice sounded outside the door: a man with a rough, burred accent so thick she wished she still had her overlays to provide subtitles.
“Ms. Navárez, can you hear me?”
His words were muffled by the walls, but she could hear well enough. “Yes.”
“My name is Colonel Stahl. I’ll be debriefing you.”
Colonel. That wasn’t a navy rank. “What are you? Army?”
A brief hesitation on his part. “No, ma’am. UMCI. Intelligence.”
Of course. Same as Tschetter. Kira nearly laughed. She should have guessed. “Am I under arrest, Colonel Stahl?”
“No, ma’am, not as such. You are being held in accordance with article thirty-four of the Stellar Security Act, which states—”
“Yes, I’m familiar with it,” she said.
Another pause, this time as if Stahl was surprised. “I see. I realize your accommodations aren’t what you were expecting, Ms. Navárez, but you have to appreciate our position. We’ve seen all sorts of crazy stuff from the nightmares over the past few months. We can’t afford to trust the xeno you’re carrying.”
She bit back a sarcastic response. “Yes, alright. I get it. Now, can we please—”
“Not quite yet, ma’am. Let me be explicitly clear, lest there be any, ah, unwarranted accidents down the road. The disks you saw on the outside of your cell, do you know what they are?”
“No.”
“Shaped charges. Self-forging penetrators. The walls of your cell are electrified. If you break the current, the charges will detonate and crush you and everything around you into a molten-hot ball less than half a meter across. Not even your xeno can survive that. Do you understand?”