The sound of Chorus’ last note was punctuated by loud cheering as she beamed a smile to the audience. The lights on the stage dimmed, and she cast one last look at Reece before disappearing into the curtains behind her. The cheering continued as Reece stood up abruptly to go after her.
“Mate!” Eddie grabbed his arm. “Where you going? Who’s the girl?”
Reece broke free from his grip and raced away toward the stage. He pushed and maneuvered his way through the wall of people, feeling as if he were dodging asteroids in his Z-40. The stage remained dark and empty, so he jumped onto it and dashed through the curtains into the back. On the other side, Chorus was gone, and he could only see a couple of stagehands moving equipment around. They all looked at him.
“Where’s the girl?” Reece asked the closest one. “The singer.”
The man gestured toward an adjacent hallway. Reece ran through the empty corridor and made it to the end. He was about to continue his chase down another junction before the sound of female giggling made him stop. He followed the sound back to an open door where he caught sight of her. She was sitting inside a makeup room laughing at herself in the mirror. He peeked in and saw that she was alone in the room. So he walked in and closed the door behind him.
She looked at the reflection of him in the mirror, still smiling.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” she said, beaming. “It was so different than what I expected.”
Reece looked at her, trying to catch his own breath from the chase. “What… why… how?” is all he could manage.
She stood up, her long black hair swaying behind her as she turned to look at him. Her green eyes still seemed to glow unnaturally, hiding the thing that he knew she was. Even knowing she wasn’t a real woman, he could not help but to be bewitched by the intoxicating aroma she let off.
“I will answer your questions in order,” she said. “The what-- is the stage performance. The why-- I was fascinated by the performing arts of that period as I studied it, but always wondered if the actual act of doing it was different than the act of imagining it. I discovered that the reality was in fact different from what I imagined, and it was quite fun. As to the how, I assume you mean this body. It is a nanoform—a construction created at the molecular level by my nanobots. I have a small cache supply of them that were originally hidden in my conduit; enough to construct this nanoform.”
“I thought you were just a dream,” he said. “But you’re real.”
“I lived in a dream for far too long,” Chorus said.
“How did you get off the ship?” Reece said. “Why are you here?”
Chorus motioned to a chair. “Sit, Reece, you look tired.” She sat herself back down on the stool.
Reece looked at the chair adjacent to her and reluctantly sat as well.
“Getting off the ship was just a matter of following the shuttles to the station with my nanobots,” she said. “Once we landed, I snuck out invisibly and studied your movements and that of the rest of the crew. I needed to make contact with you and Laina privately. You must understand that I am not a threat to you and you must help me. Powerful factions are after me, and they will let nothing stand in their way. They are out to destroy me, but they do not know that by doing so it will only ensure their own demise, and more importantly, that of the humanity.”
“Who is after you? The UEP? The Confed?”
“All of them. They want to capture me and somehow harness my power, or destroy me to keep anyone from obtaining it. Either of these events would put the future of humanity into peril. But I have only recently learned that an even more powerful force hunts me, Reece. And if that force succeeds, it will unleash a series of events that will be the end of all as you know it.”
Her gaze moved off and stared into space silently and then she stood up.
“You must return to your crewmates, Reece. There is danger here.”
“Wait,” Reece said, standing. “I’m not leaving till you tell me more.”
“You have to go,” she said. “If you don’t go, you will be captured and it will put—”
At that moment, the door swung open. Reece whirled around and instinctively reached into his jacket for his flicker pistol, but three armed Venusian Peacekeepers already had their rifles trained on him.
“Don’t!” one of them commanded. “Drop to your knees! Now! Hands on your head!”
Reece’s heart sank and as he realized they were caught by the forces that Chorus had just warned him about.
“I’m sorry, Chorus,” he said.
“Shut up!” one of the Peacekeepers said as he stuck a neuralizer on his neck. Reece’s hands dropped to his side and he began to tip over, but two of the men grabbed him by the shoulders and propped him up.
“Be easy on the girl. She doesn’t need a neuralizer,” Reece said.
“What girl?” one of them asked.
Reece moved his eyes to find her, but Chorus was gone. At least she got away, he thought.
“Target apprehended,” he heard one of them speak into his helmet’s ear-link.
There was a pause as the Peacekeeper listened to the other end of the conversation.
“Affirmative and out.” He turned to the other two. “We only needed the principal targets, and we’re to let the others go.”
“Let them go? Why?” one of the others questioned, disappointment evident in his tone.
“They can’t go anywhere; the station is blockaded,” the Peacekeeper responded. “Those are our orders. Put this one into local confinement with the other prisoners.”
“Affirmative, sir,” the other said.
Reece felt his legs again as one of the Peacekeepers adjusted his neuralizer to allow him control from the waist down.
“Come on, fringe scum,” he heard his captor say.
They stood him up and walked him out of the room and into the hall. His thoughts went out to his comrades in the bar. If only he had moved sooner, maybe he could have warned them.
Again, I failed my pilots, he thought, his memory of Tash surfacing again. He would get out of this, and he would redeem himself. Somehow.