Category: Strangers in Flight

As thoughts like this raced through her mind, heavy footsteps sounded outside on the grated floor. A man entered her cell, this one different from all the others. He was tall and balding, with sunken eyes and a hooked nose. The fabric of his second skin was crisp and white, and his expression was cold and impassive, his mouth downturned in a frown that seemed like a permanent fixture.

The strong men stood by the hatch, clearly deferring to him as some sort of leader or administrator. He ducked through the hatchway as he entered, but once he was in, he regarded her coolly with eyes that seemed to penetrate right through her.

“Hello?” she said, struggling to sound confident. “My name is Reva. Who are you, and what do you want with me?”

He said nothing, but walked around her, taking in everything from her toes to the top of her head. At first, she thought he was admiring her tattoos, but from the glint in his eyes she wasn’t quite so sure.

“I asked, what do you want with me? Why are you treating me like this?”

He spoke a single word, calling for silence. Even though she didn’t understand the language he spoke in, the meaning was clear from his tone. She took a deep breath and stood awkwardly as he finished circling her.

Without warning, he reached out and pinched her breast. She gasped in surprise and knocked his hand away.

“Hey! What the hell are you—”

Stars flashed across her vision as he slapped her cheek with the back of his hand. The force of the blow nearly sent her to the floor, and the pain stretched across the whole side of her face. She rubbed her cheek as her shock turned to fear.

The man reached out and felt her again. She tensed and tried weakly to push him away, but he took her firmly by the wrist, squeezing just hard enough to make it clear that struggling against him was a very bad idea.

Stop! Please, stop!

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Who are these people? Reva wondered as the strong men marched her down the narrow corridor. With her cheek still stinging and the two men gripping both her arms, she felt less like she’d been rescued and more like she’d been taken prisoner.

The corridor opened up to a wider hallway, with portholes on one side. The stars were dim, and Reva saw no sign of any planet or space station. At twenty meter intervals along the wall, three circular emergency chutes took the place of the portholes. From her father’s engineering work, she knew that they led to the escape pods, which meant that she was on a starship. But judging from the length of the hallway, the ship must be huge—almost the size of Anuva Station, if not larger.

They passed a handful of people along the way, all of them wearing second-skins. Most of them were men, and all of them stopped to stare at her. She thought it was the tattoos at first, but then she noticed that some of them were snickering. What was their problem? Had they never seen tattoos before? Or was it something else?

They entered a cylindrical elevator chamber with grated floors that clawed at her bare feet. The air was much cooler than she was accustomed to, making her shiver. Even in the elevator, the strong men refused to release her.

Where are they taking me?

They marched her into an empty chamber with a desk and a computer terminal. The strong man on her right pulled out a keycard and held it against an access panel next to another set of doors, which opened to reveal a short, narrow corridor. Holding cells for prisoners lined either side. Reva could tell what they were from the heavy deadbolts built into each one. The doors were actually more like hatches, since they sat on hinges and were raised about half a meter above the floor. They each had a small porthole with bars over the front of them. An ozone scent in the air told her that they were electrified.

So I am a prisoner.

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At that moment, two other men entered the room. They were both tall and muscular, much more so than either the doctor or his apprentice. Like the doctor, they also wore second-skins that covered almost their entire bodies. These ones were thicker, though—hard and black like beetle shells. They looked so silly that Reva couldn’t help but laugh. When the men looked at her, though, it was clear they didn’t find it funny.

“Sorry,” she said, covering her mouth. “It’s just, you don’t …”

The strong men ignored her, focusing instead on the doctor. As her voice trailed off, Reva noticed a frown of concern on the doctor’s face. The apprentice stood behind him and glanced from her to the strong men and back. Reva tensed—something was clearly wrong here.

The apprentice took out the covering again and held it out to her, this time all but pleading for her to put it on. For a second, she considered doing it just to set him at ease, but that would mean covering her henna tattoos. She smiled and waved him away as politely as she could, ignoring the almost frantic look of concern on his face.

The strong men finished with the doctor and walked over to her. One of them took her by the arm and pulled her forcibly to her feet.

“Ow!” she said, trying in vain to free herself from his grip. “What are you doing?”

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Who are these people? she wondered. Clearly, the older man was a doctor, which meant that the younger was probably his apprentice. The room itself seemed like a bathroom in a medical facility, though not at all like the one at home. But that was what her father had told her, wasn’t it? That when she awoke, she’d be far away from everything she knew?

“Hello,” she said again. “My name is Reva. Can you understand me?”

From the stupid way the young apprentice smiled at her, it was clear that the answer was “no.” As if to confirm this, the doctor spoke to him in a language she’d never heard before. His words sounded so foreign that she couldn’t make any sense of them.

So I am far from home.

The doctor took her by the arm and gently led her through a tall doorway. They walked down a short corridor to a boxy, windowless room with a screen on one wall and a series of modular compartments in the other. He pulled out a retractable table and motioned for her to sit. As she did, a spiderlike medical bot descended from the ceiling and unfolded its spindly arms. She flinched, but the doctor snapped his fingers and it retreated into the far corner.

The apprentice came in and pulled a piece of folded fabric from one of the wall compartments. He unfolded it and held it out to her, and she saw that it was a body covering like the ones they wore. She shook her head and waved it away, but he held it out insistently.

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want it, thank you.”

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The shower door opened and she stepped out, holding weakly onto the wall for support. The room outside was narrow and windowless, with walls and floors that were immaculately white. There were a number of gray stalls lining the wall to her right, with a wide sink facility in the far corner.

Two men stood by the entrance to the shower. Their bodies were covered in blankets, leaving only their hands and faces bare. It puzzled her, since the air in the room was not particularly cool.

“Uh, hello,” she said. She wasn’t sure what else to say, so she smiled and waited for them to respond.

Neither of them spoke to her, but the younger one handed her a towel. She took it gratefully and wrapped it around her hair. From the puzzled looks on the young man’s face, she gathered that wasn’t what he had expected of her. She looked at him closer and realized that he wasn’t covered in blankets at all, but some sort of skin covering that was fitted to his body. The same was true of the older man. His second skin was long and white, a bit like one of her father’s aprons.

Back home, no one had covered their bodies unless an unusual circumstance required it. Her father would sometimes wear protective gear while at work, but when he was home in the apartment, he went bare just like everyone else. She’d always been taught that the body was sacred, the highest pinnacle of creation. Just as children were born pure and shameless, so too were they to honor their bodies and not be ashamed of them. But these men—with their blanket-like skin coverings that served no obvious purpose—seemed to believe otherwise.

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It was all coming back to her now—the events that had brought her to this place. The famine at Anuva Station, the long fearful months as the crisis became a catastrophe, and her father’s secret project to save her.

“You are my youngest child,” he’d told her. “You have a greater chance of surviving the cryofreeze than any of your siblings.” As usual, his obsession with efficiency as the station’s chief engineer came before his emotions. But when she’d looked into his eyes and saw the sadness there, she had known that he did this because he loved her.

“What will it feel like?” she asked. Even if going into cryostasis was the only way to survive, the thought of it terrified her.

“The thawing and freezing process will put quite a strain on your body, but while you’re in cryofreeze, you won’t feel a thing. Years could pass—centuries even—and you wouldn’t know it until you wake up.”

She stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Centuries?”

“Yes. There’s no telling when the next ship will come, or what they’ll find when they get here. But there is an upper limit to the timeframe for revival. In eight hundred standard years, Anuva Station’s correctional jets will fail. Orbital decay will crash it into the surface anywhere from one to three hundred years later.”

His brutally efficient analysis had never given her much comfort, but at least she knew that he wasn’t hiding anything from her. He’d never hidden anything from her, not even the hardest truths.

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At first, Reva had no perception other than a vague sense of falling. It was neither dark nor light, neither cold nor hot, and she couldn’t tell whether she was the one falling or the world all around her—if you could call it a world. Time, space, and consciousness were all beyond her immediate awareness. And yet, the void filled her with a strange restlessness, as if something important were about to happen—as if she were about to experience rebirth.

Short streaks of multicolored light flashed past her as she fell, stirring her to awareness. She had a very distinct and powerful feeling that she was going somewhere. In a few moments, she would find herself in a strange place far from home, and she had to be prepared for anything. The thought seemed so important that she held onto it like a lifeline as the flashes grew in length and intensity. Her mind began to stir, her consciousness to awaken; time and space unfolded before her mind, and the void gave way to darkness.

Cold darkness.

She gasped, and the air felt like knives. Her whole body burned like fire and ice, as if her heart were pumping poison through her veins instead of blood. She arched her back and fell into wild convulsions.

Hot steam bathed her body, seeping through her skin like a healing balm. There wasn’t enough of it, though—not nearly enough. She gasped desperately for breath, filling her lungs with the blessed warmth. The convulsions stopped, and her muscles turned to water. She slid to her ankles just as her stomach began to heave.

The next few moments passed in a blur. A sharp hiss filled her ears, followed by voices speaking an unfamiliar language. Hands reached out to her, touching her all over. She gasped again, tears streaming from her eyes as she vomited cold bile from her empty stomach. It was more than she could bear. All she could do was surrender to the pain and hope it didn’t kill her.

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Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III) is now available as a $2.99 ebook! You can pick it up from the following sites, or if you haven’t read the other two books yet, you can find links to those in the sidebar. I’ll post about ten or twelve short excerpts from Strangers in Flight over the next few days just to give you a taste of it. Enjoy!

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