CHAPTER 5
Kagen
ALONE, KAGEN WORKED his way through the stacks on Level Ten. The place made his skin crawl. It wasn’t as bad when Melie had done the first two rounds with him, though those rounds hadn’t been pleasant.
She’d spoken to him only when she absolutely had to as she showed him the process of keeping each Condemned core connected into the system and fully charged.
She made sure he understood that any disconnect or unit failure would mean his job—that every active core unit was valuable to the owner and the crew responsible for the few units that had ever failed had been dropped off at the Needle of whatever world was next on the circuit and left to fend for themselves.
Core integrity was the number one priority of every member of Two. Everything else came second.
But while she did her job well, that was all she did. She didn’t hear him if he offered a personal remark or tried to apologize. She gave him the two days of training he needed, and then she was gone to her own duties as Crew Two Green.
And he was left with Mash, who went through after he had made his rounds and claimed to have found errors Kagen had made, even though Kagen knew he had not made them. Three weeks into his stint as Two Green, Mash still treated him like a complete waste of skin.
Kagen worked his way alone through the dimly lit stacks, feeling the ghosts of his past and the ghosts of his future crowding in on him, and he tried to focus on the work he was doing.
The still bodies in the stacks made it hard for him to maintain his romantic notion of the owner as some escaped Class B prisoner made good and determined to save his fellow Class B prisoners. The endless rows of the officially dead stored in cold, hard storage units spoke of some horrific purpose that he could not begin to comprehend. He did his best not to look at their faces through the transparent inspection covers. The people inside did not breathe. They did not move.
They were not dead, but they were the same as dead. They had been reported dead back on their home worlds, with the terms of their executions fulfilled.
Officially dead, but not entirely dead—stored, with large amounts of energy expended in storing them.
All of the cores—the storage units with their locking seals stamped Death Sentence Carried Out and their heavy-duty power cables and complex end-caps that performed functions no one could guess at—were full in Level Ten. All of them were red-lighted. All of them would always be red-lighted. Level Ten was designated permanent storage.
Each person in each core had been passed over for purchase, had been categorized as unsaleable, and had been sentenced to eternity within the chamber that held him. Or her.
Men and women, young and old, lay motionless, eyes closed, lungs forever stilled, captive forever, with enormous amounts of power running through their units, not alive but not dead either.
Kagen’s imagination ran wild. To store the not-entirely-dead in such a fashion, the owner had to be doing something with them. Had he discovered a way to use them as filters to process vast quantities of designer nanoviruses? Had he discovered that souls were real, and found a way to sell theirs? No one would spend the vast fortune it had taken to store the bodies of countless nearly dead for as close to eternity as technology could reach unless there was some tremendous payoff for him. It was entirely too cheap and easy to simply kill people and dump their bodies into space.
So why did this place with its red lights exist?
He rounded the corner in the narrow aisle, asking himself that question, and this one time, his head was up and he was looking directly at the ident screen on the core directly in front of him as he came around the corner.
It said We-T74G.
He froze.
He stared at the screen, frowning, trying to look at the letters and numbers and see a different combination, to make it clear to himself that his mind was playing tricks on him.
But below the identity designator, he read, “Origin: The People’s Home of Truth and Fairness 14-B.”
The date was right around the time he’d been exiled to the Needle, sentenced to work alone until he was ready to starve to death or throw himself into space to rejoin the We. She might have come aboard in a transport unit the same day he’d been taken in as a passenger by the Longview. He had worked his way past her and checked her unit half a dozen times without seeing her.
But this time, he found himself frozen, staring at a face he could not believe he was seeing. She was the girl of his memory—unchanged—though he could no longer see the little grin she’d aimed at him when the two of them were doing Weeding Duty, separated by the wire mesh that kept We First apart from We Second.
Her dark hair curled up around her face as if gravity meant nothing to it, as it had always done.
Her lips were full and perfect. Her brow arched. Her jaw was smooth and firm. She would never have been sentenced with the crime of Property of Beauty.
She was the girl he’d kissed and called “Love” during the morning recitation of the Truth of We.
She’d been Condemned when he’d been exiled.
He had never before considered that she might be sentenced to death for what he had done. But she would have been. There was no justice on a People’s Home of Truth and Fairness.
Her crime would have been Property of Love. He looked lower on the ident screen.
“Murder Grand, four counts.”
That was impossible. They’d lied about her to make an example of her. To make sure she would never kiss another boy—and to make sure, as well, that anyone who saw what happened to her wouldn’t either.
So they’d sentenced her for murder, which meant she could not be offered Return to Citizenship in the lake of fire.
Then they’d sent her away so some rich ship owner could flip a switch and turn her off forever.
On another world, the two of them could have been together. On some sane Pact world, they could have been friends. Could have been lovers. Could have been together their whole lives.
He rested his fingertips on her core. He whispered, “If you had known it would end like this, would you still have done it? Would you still have kissed me back? Locked away in a storage unit in the bottom of a spaceship for the rest of forever, never knowing what you were being used for, what precious commodity was being drained from your body and sold...”
Her still, frozen face haunted him. “No,” she seemed to say. “Of course I wouldn’t have kissed you. Look what they did to me because I did.”
He looked at the future that lay before him. He had sold his future among the stars because he’d been unwilling to stand firm against Mash—just as he had sold the girl whose smile he had loved to Death for the price of a kiss.
He had failed, and failed again. His dreams were dead. His future was ruined
Only one path remained to him.
Melie
WHEN THE EMERGENCY panel went off on Level Ten, Melie was asleep.
But she was Green, so she dragged herself upright, threw on her shipsuit, and gravdropped to Ten with the suit accelerating her passage.
The units on Ten were usually stable. She’d seen Mash’s reports about Two Green making mistakes, but as Level One crew, she had access to the process flows from Level Ten, and Kagen hadn’t made any mistakes.
Someone had come along after him, had tampered with what he’d done, had played with the public time-set to make it look like the mistake had been made when the unit was checked, and had then signed himself into the unit as himself and had corrected the error and sent notification to the captain.
She suspected this time Mash had set one unit low enough to drop to alarm status before Kagen did his next rounds—which would put Kagen before the captain, the first mate, and the owner’s representative, unless the owner himself decided to weigh in.
She hit Ten fast and followed the overhead running lights and the directional signal on her wristcom through the stacks.
And there she found Kagen. With him s
tood a girl who was touching his face with a mixture of joy and dismay—and beside the two of them was the shattered Sentence Seal that had once secured the core unit of We-T74G.
“I do remember you,” the girl was saying, running her fingers across Kagen’s cheeks and lips and jaw.
“Oh, hell,” Melie whispered.
Kagen turned to stare at her. He stepped in front of the girl. “Before you say anything, I’m taking her place in the box. She did nothing to deserve a death sentence, and I’m the reason she was sentenced. If I can’t be the captain of my own ship, if I can’t fix what I’ve done wrong here, I can at least fix what I did to her. Just help me get into the core, lock it back, figure out a way to reseal it...”
And the girl looked from Kagen to Melie and said, “He didn’t know, and he doesn’t understand. But I have to go back in. As much as I want to be with him, I can’t stay here.”
Melie said, “Kagen, you idiot. You screwed up everything. You— We... whatever your number is. I’ll help you into the box. Maybe we can still fix all of this.”
The girl said, “Just call me Lithra.”
And then, behind Melie, the owner's representative, Shay, said, “Unfortunately, We-T74G’s unit has already reported re-activation."
Melie cringed and turned to face her.
Shay continued, "No one can go into that core now. We're going to have to file an incident report with the Death Circus administration about one of our official executions appearing to return to life... and all three of you are going to have to stand before the captain and the first mate. You will probably have to face the owner, too, instead of me. He was furious when the alarm went off in his quarters.”
The security detail came around the corner, and snapped restraints on Kagen and Melie. Lithra walked between them, unrestrained but cooperative.