Supernova (5 page)

Rian’s
stomach turned over, and he blanched. The only kind of surgery he knew of
involved simple, nearly painless laser procedures. Ashford leaned back in his
chair and regarded him thoughtfully across the desk.

“Gods,”
Rian finally managed.

“Presumably,
she was sedated for the surgery,” Ashford returned dryly. “Two of her ribs have
been broken in the past, and healed naturally. None of the bone tissue was
regenerated. If she’s a spy, whoever she works for made her suffer first.” He
regarded the captain thoughtfully across his desk. “Have you ever broken
anything?”

“Yes, it’s
part of my job description. I broke my collarbone when I was an ensign. It was
during the civil war on Naa’natcha.” Rian still had a scar, but some quick
field medicine had tranquilized the pain so he could keep fighting, and the
bone was regenerated in a few hours.

“Imagine
living with that until it healed on its own.”

“I don’t
want to.”

He
gestured to the bag on his desk. “Now, on to this.” He held the mediscan unit
over it, and it emitted a small beep. “It’s detected tonismi residue in this,
and the chemicals used for her preservation. Be careful.”

Again,
Rian damned himself for not thinking straight. He felt fine, so he wouldn’t
worry about any lingering effects of the drug, but he had no idea what was used
to preserve remains in her time.

“I’ll
take a look at this, and put it in a decon locker,” Ashford assured him. There
was a bank of individual decontamination units for medical waste at the back of
infirmary. “It’s safe to handle for short periods of time.” He poked around the
bag and took out the crude ID cards, opened the pink wallet and spread some
printed paper credits across the desk, along with her other belongings.

“Keys,”
Ashford said, jangling a ring of metal tags in his hand.

Rian
sighed. “I’m not completely ignorant, Doctor. My sister uses keys in her home.
Her daughter has figured out how to use the palm locks to get out of the house.”

Ashford
picked up the old-fashioned communicator that Lily called a cellphone. The unit
was shut off, its screen dark. Rian doubted the thing would work, that whatever
technology had supported it was long gone. He shook his head, trying to remain
neutral until the doctor finished. The cosmetics in the slim tubes would have
gone rancid, as well. He picked up a small slip of paper. It took him a moment
to read it—the written language had changed over the last eight hundred-odd
years—but was able to make out that it was a store receipt, issued for the
purchases of tampons and Diet Coke, whatever they were.

“I’m
still going to do a complete exam,” Ashford said, and Rian set down the
receipt. The doctor gathered up her belongings and stuffed them back in the
satchel. “But based on my scan and the things we have here, I’m inclined to
believe this woman really is from the twenty-first century.”

“You’re
sure about this?” Rian asked.

“My
mediscan doesn’t lie,” Ashford said.

“What
about the tonismi?”

“When it
wears off, we’ll ask her,” Ashford replied. “It should be out of her system
within the next twenty-four hours, if not sooner. Tonismi is a fussy drug, and
I don’t want to risk anything by giving her something to counteract it.”

“What
about negative reactions? Allergies?”

Ashford
shook his head. “If someone wakes up after receiving a dose, they’ll live.”

Rian
tried to formulate a hypothesis for how a Nym sedative ended up drugging
someone born 850 years ago, and came up with nothing besides her being a spy.
He would have to wait until she woke, and notify Fleet in the meantime.

“I’m
going to check on her,” Rian said, and rose from his seat. “I’ll send a
transmit to the admirals—”

“The
first of many,” Ashford wryly interrupted.

“Likely.
I also want to be informed as soon as she wakes up.”

Ashford
demurred and Rian went back to her room. The door opened when he pressed his
palm into the lock and quietly stepped into the darkened room.

She was
deeply asleep. Rian drew the blanket folded at the end of the bed over her out
of an instinct he didn’t know he had, wanting her to be comfortable. She
stirred a little at the movement but didn’t wake. He doubted she would be so
docile when the drugs wore off.

“Captain,”
Ashford whispered from the doorway. “I’ll notify you when she wakes up.”

Embarrassed
at being caught being kind to a possible spy, he left the room. But not without
a last look at the bed.

Chapter 3

Lily
woke in a darkened room, the narrow bed unfamiliar. Her new Dufferin Grove
apartment had lots of windows; it was one of the reasons she had rented the
place. Where was the sun? For that matter, where were the windows?

Her head
throbbed when she forced herself to sit up. She threw off the blanket and found
she was fully dressed save for her shoes, and she sat up, her bare feet
dangling over the edge of the bed. She had ended up here somehow, and the
events were slowly and hazily reconstructing themselves in her mind.

Lazarus
Cryonics. Andrew Claybourne, his hand half torn off and his face smashed in.
Zadbac and Pitro standing over him, about as irritated as if he were nothing
but a housefly, then Zadbac chasing her into the street.

The
orange bars caging her in on Wilson Avenue’s sidewalk.

What
the hell had happened after that?

She
remembered nothing but terror giving way to heavy numbness as her body lost
control of itself. Then she woke up in a plastic box, feeling like she had
slept off a night of four-dollar tequila. Feeling a strange mixture of calm and
panic when she broke out of the box, as though her body couldn’t process what
her brain was telling it, to the sight of a sweating man pointing a gun at her.
She remembered feeling cold and heavy despite the cloying heat of the crowded
room she found herself in, as though her body was protecting itself from the
temperature.

Then she
remembered being picked up and held by someone with startling blue eyes, who
felt safe and spoke quietly, soothingly, and the feeling of safety being
wrenched away when she heard the year
2867
.

This
couldn’t be. It had to be a dream. She must have met up with a couple of
friends from her university days, friends she had been playing phone-tag with
since she moved, and had a little too much to drink, and ended up in a hospital
somewhere. It didn’t look like any hospital room she’d ever seen, but stranger
things had happened when tequila was involved.

There
was some light offered by ceiling panels, and she found her sandals at the foot
of the bed. She looked around for a light switch to brighten the windowless
room a little but found nothing. Remembering Zadbac and Pitro, but not
recalling the name of the bar or who she could have met up with the night
before, she looked around the room in vain for something to use as a makeshift
weapon.

If
either of them were on the other side of the door, she would just have to pray
and make a run for it. She didn’t want a repeat of what happened last time she
tried that, so she carried her shoes by the straps in one hand.

The door
slid open sideways when she stepped in front of it, surprising her. It revealed
what looked like a waiting room, shaped like an octagon, with doors and short
hallways branching off the sides. She resisted closing her eyes against the
bright light and the accompanying headache, and took stock of her surroundings.
Through one glass-walled hallway she could see what looked to be an office,
with a computer screen mounted on a desk.

She
tiptoed into the waiting room and the door closed behind her. Lily hadn’t been
in a hospital with automatic doors to private rooms, but there was a first for
everything. She looked to either side for a way out.

Before
she could decide which direction to take, another door opened and a vaguely
familiar man in a white lab coat strode into the waiting room. He looked to be
past sixty, his thinning hair silver in the bright light overhead. He smiled
warmly when he saw her. “Good afternoon, Miss Stewart,” he said. “I came by to
check on you. Your monitor said you woke up.”

Monitor?
What was more troubling to Lily
was that she recalled hearing the friendly, reassuring timbre of his voice very
recently in the context of her dream. “Hi,” she said awkwardly. “You know my
name, and I’m sure I was introduced to you before, but I’ve forgotten.”

“I’m Dr.
Ashford,” he said. He spied the sandals in her hand.

“You’re
not going to kill me, are you?” There was no harm in asking.

“No. I
think we should sit down and have a talk, though. My office is just through
there.” He gestured to one of the hallways off the octagon. “How are you
feeling today?”

Lily
slid her feet into her shoes and followed him. There was something about him that
was very reassuring and told her she could trust him. She still wasn’t going to
let herself do so; despite Zadbac and Pitro’s creepiness she hadn’t expected
them to do what they did.

If
nothing else, maybe there was something she could use as a weapon in his
office.

In
response to his question, she said, “I have a headache.”

“Are you
hungry?”

“No.”

He led
to her to the office she saw through the glass walls. He sat behind the desk,
and motioned for her to sit. There were a few chairs in front of it, and she
took the one closest to the door, just in case. She sat on the edge of it and
looked around his office, and was disappointed. There wasn’t even a pencil on
the desktop if she needed a weapon.

“You’ve
been asleep for twenty-one hours,” Dr. Ashford said. “You were brought to sick
bay at eighteen hundred hours last night. You woke up earlier than I expected.”

Lily
counted the hours in her head. So it was around three in the afternoon. “What
happened?” she asked.

“You
were brought in by Captain Marska and two of his crew,” he said gently. “Do you
remember?”

Lily
remembered the blue eyes and inexplicable feeling of calm coming from him, as
though he were an antidote to the numbing terror she felt when she woke up. She
nodded. “A little.”

“You
were under the influence of a heavy sedative,” he continued. He laid a small,
flat instrument not unlike her cell phone—where the hell was her purse,
anyway?— on the desktop. “I did a basic medical scan when you were brought in
and it read the presence of tonismi in your bloodstream.”

Aside
from smoking pot in the woods with her friends a few times as a teenager, Lily
had never used drugs. “I don’t know what that is,” she replied.

“It’s
utilized by the Nym, a race living outside the Fringes in its own quadrant.”

Quadrant?
Nym?

Sick
bay?

That
word had been tossed around when she was held by the man with the striking blue
eyes. She pinched the skin on the back of her hand and if that was any
indication, she was definitely awake.

Realization
dawned on her.

“Oh, my
God,” she breathed. “This is real.”

A wave
of panic crested over her and she thought she might faint. Black spots appeared
in her field of vision, and she put her head between her knees and forced
herself to breathe. A few tears slowly coursed down her cheeks.

‘There’s
more, Miss Stewart,” Ashford said. Sadness tinged his voice.

Lily
hazily remembered a big, burly, and very angry man, furiously telling her what
year it was, as if she should know. She thought she’d known, and had been
wrong. She sat up slowly and wiped her eyes.

“Oh, no,”
she said softly. “I’m not where I’m supposed to be, am I? What year is this?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re
not,” the doctor said. “It’s 2867, in solar years.” He set a box of tissues on
the desk. Lily took one and dabbed her eyes, but it was futile. She couldn’t
stop crying.

“You
know,” she said, “I almost believe this after what happened to me at work
yesterday. It’s one of two explanations, the other being that I’ve completely
snapped and I’m hallucinating this in a padded room somewhere.” Either
possibility was terrifying.

She
sobbed in silence for a few moments, until the doctor quietly cleared his
throat. “I have to notify the captain, Miss Stewart,” he said.

“In a
minute,” she said. “He’s the captain of what?”

“The
Defiant
,
a patrol ship in the Commonwealth Space Fleet.”

Space
Fleet. Well, this was getting better and better. She nodded and sniffled into a
handful of tissues.

“He’ll
need you to tell us everything you remember, when you’re able to.”

She
nodded again.

Ashford
tapped a small circular badge affixed to his shirt collar. “Ashford to the
captain,” he said.