Diffraction (Atrophy) Read online

  “Get him back to the brig and leave him to come around. I want those questions answered before I decide what to do with him,” someone said above him.

  Oh hell. Was he meant to be escorting a prisoner to detention level? “Yeah, let’s get right on that.” He forced his heavy limbs to roll his dead weight back over and pushed up into a sitting position. “Where’s the captive? And why in the hell is it so hot in here?”

  Varean got himself upright, staggering into a bulkhead and then using it to push straighter. Had to keep his shite together. If his CO caught him totally wasted on duty, there’d be hell to pay.

  “Right this way, Commando,” a voice instructed.

  Varean nodded and blanked his features, trying to pretend like the action hadn’t sent his brain hammering about in his skull. Jezus, whatever he’d drunk must have been pure high-gravity toxin.

  A slight figure had moved to walk in front of him, so he focused on a spot in the middle of her shoulder blades and set his uncoordinated legs into a march.

  “That’s far enough, Command Donnelly.”

  He forced his head up and saw nothing but bulkheads on all sides. Christ, it was even hotter here…wherever here was.

  “Take a beat, Donnelly. We’ll come back for you later,” a different voice said.

  Yeah, that sounded like an idea. Need somewhere to sit. There was a utilitarian cot shoved into one corner of the…wait. This place looked familiar. A brig. One he’d been in before. But that didn’t make sense. Why the hell would he be in a brig?

  “Hang on—” He spun around, way too fast for his floundering brain, and his heavy, clumsy movement unbalanced him, sending him over. Except maybe being down wasn’t such a bad thing. The flooring was cool against his—huh. Hadn’t he already thought this before? Well, whatever the case, he’d just lie here for a minute until someone fixed the damn environs, and then he’d get back to whatever the hell he’d been doing.

  Fight until there is no fight left. That was the commando motto. He repeated the mantra as everything shifted, leaving him in that place that seemed like reality, but had to be a dream, where faces were misshapen and the words all garbled. But then the mantra that had defined his life these past years distorted into an abomination.

  Fight until they are all dead.

  Chapter Three

  Kira examined the dosing gun before slipping it into her pocket. She’d definitely hit the commando with a full dose of the sedative, but maybe she’d miscalculated his size. That shot should have put him out for a solid six hours. Instead, it’d only made him confused and somewhat unsteady. Unbelievable, but he’d even managed to walk himself back to the brig. Which maybe was a better result, because if Rian and Tannin had ended up carrying him, she’d never have heard the end of it. Considering how tall and broad he was—and she now had the extreme up-close-and-personal experience to go on—she had to imagine he weighed a ton.

  Rian pushed the cell door closed and palmed the controls to lock it, then turned to pin her with a glare. She made sure her returning stare was as doctorly as possible to cover the very non-doctor direction her thoughts had been skipping.

  “Why was he out of the brig, Kira?”

  She glanced at the prone commando lying facedown on the floor and muttering something about the environs. “Because he threatened to break my arm?”

  Rian’s brow lowered at her question. “Was that your answer or a query as to whether or not I’d accept that as an excuse?”

  “Both?”

  Rian crossed his arms, stance intimidating. “Should I bother asking why you were standing within grabbing distance of an AF-one commando?”

  “His vitals were low last night—”

  “I said I didn’t want anyone interacting with him until I had a chance to talk with him myself. Now it’s going to be another few hours before I can do that.”

  “I understand, Captain, but I have my doubts about him being Reidar—”

  “Possibly being a Reidar isn’t the only reason I gave the order to keep clear of him.” Rian headed back toward the main cargo bay where they’d left Tannin and Zahli.

  “Then why?”

  “Because he’s a commando, and if they don’t want to do something, like stay on a ship, there’s not much that’ll keep them there.” He walked to the far bulkhead where he lifted open the lid of a crate, then grabbed something and made for the stairs.

  “You have a theory, though, don’t you?”

  Rian was a hard person to read, but in the three years she’d been on the Imojenna, she’d come to learn he never did anything without a good reason.

  For a second she thought he wasn’t going to answer, but he finally passed a glance over them all.

  “We know the Reidar have experimented on people, a frecking lot of people. But we don’t know what most of those experiments were for, or how they might affect people. I can’t be the only one who’s ever escaped them.”

  “You think the commando was the victim of these experiments?” The hypothesis made a horrific kind of sense. “Except, he claims he didn’t know anything about the Reidar before we outed the ones on the Swift Brion.”

  Rian shrugged one shoulder. “So he doesn’t remember, or he doesn’t want to admit the truth to a bunch of strangers. If he’s not Reidar himself, it’s the only other likely explanation for why the stunner affects him. Either way, I want to know. Once I’ve got my answers, we’ll cut him loose. But for now, I need him to stay put. Don’t go near him again. He’d kill you to escape.”

  Kira crossed her arms, aiming an aggravated glare at Rian’s back as he disappeared into the upper levels. Surely Rian was exaggerating. If the commando was willing to kill her to escape, he’d already had the chance and hadn’t taken it.

  She turned around to find Zahli watching her with an exasperated expression.

  “No.” Zahli’s voice was hard, her tone scarily similar to the one her brother had just employed.

  “No what?” Kira schooled her features into bland innocence. Might as well play dumb while she could.

  “You are not going to check on the prisoner five seconds after Rian told you not to.”

  “I won’t get within reaching distance of the bars, okay?” She shoved her hand into her pocket and pulled out a small bottle. “Besides, if he gives me any trouble, I’ll just dose him again.”

  Zahli rolled her eyes. “Because drugging the man against his will isn’t as bad as Qaelan shooting him with the Reidar stunner over and over.”

  “A sedative was better than the alternative,” she answered, then headed toward the back of the cargo hold.

  A small surge of contrition shot through her. Okay, Zahli might have a point. It wasn’t like she’d wanted to sedate Command Donnelly, which was why she’d waited for the last possible second to use the dosing gun hidden up her sleeve. Until Rian had turned up, she’d been hoping she could reason with the commando, which was why she’d gone along with his escape attempt even though she could have knocked him out as soon as he’d grabbed her through the bars.

  Honestly, the scientist in her wanted to know why the weapon affected Command Donnelly, especially now, considering Rian’s theory that he’d been a victim of Reidar experiments. But it didn’t seem fair to keep him locked up. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t their enemy. Even though it went beyond the usual bounds of a doctor’s role, she couldn’t help but feel for the situation he’d landed in.

  When he woke up, she’d try again to convince him to answer Rian’s questions. The sooner the captain got his answers, the better it would be for all of them. The stunner had obviously been painful for the commando, and she couldn’t stand by and see him hit with it again.

  In the brig, the temperature had risen now that the engines had been running for a while. She’d been telling the truth earlier when she’d said she didn’t know how hot it would get in here. No one had ever spent any great length of time in Rian’s brig, especially while they were traveling. Likely the hea
t wouldn’t rise to dangerous levels, but it would certainly be uncomfortable.

  The commando was still lying on his stomach in the middle of the cell where she’d left him. Even down on the floor, his body mass was intimidating. He was easily one of the tallest men she’d ever seen, topping out both Rian and Callan, who weren’t exactly short in stature or muscle.

  When he’d pulled her back against his chest earlier, using her body as a shield with his hand on her neck and fingers splayed against her abdomen, she probably should have been terrified, not just a little nervous—no doubt he could have snapped her neck with one hand. But despite his threats, he hadn’t been rough with her. His hold had been light, and the longer she’d stood there, the sensation of his muscles pressed against her had started interfering with her ability to breathe.

  She stared at him for a long moment before reaching over to unlock the door. And then she stood there for another few seconds, making sure he wasn’t about to rush her for another escape attempt. He didn’t move a muscle, and she couldn’t see his face from this angle.

  With a short breath, she pulled open the door and stepped into the cell. Maybe the sedative had at last knocked him out like it was meant to. Perhaps his body had taken longer to react to the medication, which was why he hadn’t immediately gone down like she’d expected.

  As she approached him, she pulled the med scanner out of her pocket. Sweat glistened along the line of his short light brown hair, but the commando’s blue eyes were closed and she let out a low exhale of relief that he was still unconscious.

  Kira knelt down and held the instrument a few inches above the middle of his back. Scanning the chest was more ideal, but the device would work either way; it would just take a little longer to pick up readings from different positions. While she waited, she reached down and trailed two fingers along the masculine line of his stubbled jaw. The man was handsome, but it was his startling light blue eyes that really made his looks. They were the purest, clearest blue she’d even seen, almost the color of silver ice, so easily distraction-worthy. She pressed two fingers into the crook of his neck, because no matter what her scanner or any other medical device could tell her, she’d always believed touch could impart information about a patient’s condition a soulless machine couldn’t.

  The commando’s skin felt clammy and, right away, the pulse lagging under her fingertips told her his heart rate was low. A rush of unease expanded within her, pushing upward, but she focused on the scanner screen, waiting for the results before she let the burgeoning alarm send her into action.

  The device beeped at last, readings scrolling onto the screen.

  Damn it. The apprehension she’d been holding back burst into a surge of adrenaline as she shoved to her feet and ran into the cargo hold, to the bulkhead where the emergency hover stretcher was clamped near the hatchway.

  “Kira, what’s going on?” Zahli came up behind her as she got the stretcher down.

  “The commando’s having a reaction to the sedative.” She didn’t wait for her friend’s reply, but pushed the slim cot at a run through the cargo hold and into the short hallway.

  Back in the brig, Command Donnelly hadn’t moved, probably lucky, considering she’d left the door wide open in her haste. As she positioned the hover stretcher next to him, Zahli and Tannin appeared in the doorway.

  “Help me get him onto the stretcher. If I don’t get him up to the medbay, he’s either going to stroke out or go into full cardiac arrest.”

  Tannin shared a quick look with Zahli then came forward to crouch down and help her roll the commando onto the stretcher. “Rian’s not going to like this. Sure you can’t treat him down here?”

  Kira tabbed the controls on the stretcher to bring it up off the floor. “Since all my medical equipment is two levels above us, and he’ll be dead before I can get up there and back down here, I’d say that’s a no.”

  She brushed by Tannin as she pushed the hover stretcher into action, running the patient back out into the cargo bay and over to the freight elevator. As she loaded him on and then had to wait the few moments it took to go up two levels, she took a second to press her hand against his neck again while watching the too-slow rise and fall of his chest. The only other time she’d seen someone react this badly to a sedative had been back in medical school, and then she’d only observed other doctors treating the woman.

  The elevator stopped, and she maneuvered the hover stretcher out into the passageway and toward the medbay. Zahli arrived, breath a bit short since she’d no doubt run up the stairs to get here so fast.

  “What can I do?”

  Kira stepped sideways toward the screen inset into the bulkhead at the head of the cot, touching the crystal display to bring it online. “Kick down the legs on the stretcher.”

  “On it.”

  Opening a recess below the diag-screen, she pulled out a conduit-cuff. Once Zahli had the legs down and turned off the hover mechanism, she snapped the device around the commando’s wrist.

  The cuff took a moment to scan and then insert a cannula needle into the patient’s vein while the ship’s med system performed a more in-depth scan, presenting readouts on the crystal display.

  She ordered a shot of adrenaline and then stepped back while the drug was administered through the cuff.

  “What’s going on?” The rumble of warning in Rian’s voice stiffened her shoulders.

  “The prisoner had a bad reaction to a sedative,” Zahli explained, her words short with tension.

  No telling what their captain’s reaction to this would be. They all knew he hated people defying his orders, and considering he’d given her one only a few minutes ago… She cut off the line of thinking, concentrating on the fluctuating readings on the screen.

  “And?”

  At the clipped word, Kira glanced over her shoulder. Rian stood just inside the medbay door, posture relaxed but palms resting on his weapons. Callan, the ship’s security specialist, stood to one side with a stunner in hand, while Tannin was out in the passageway.

  “And…” Zahli repeated, her tone a little unsure. “Kira brought him up here to treat him.”

  “Obviously,” Rian muttered. “Except I seem to remember giving orders less than ten minutes ago that no one was to interact with the prisoner, let alone take him out of the brig.”

  Kira turned her attention back to the shallow rise and fall of the commando’s chest, annoyance streaking through her. “He would have died, Captain.”

  “So?” The careless shrug came through loud and clear in Rian’s tone. “Didn’t he just threaten to take you on a spacewalk without a suit?”

  “He was rightly insulted about being locked up and forcibly removed from his post. You want to be responsible for killing an innocent man? Because I sure don’t.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first dead innocent I’m accountable for.” Rian’s low words cut through the otherwise quiet medbay. “And since he threatened a member of my crew, if he dies, it’s not going to ruin my day.”

  A spike of aggravation slashed through her, and she turned to glare at their captain. “Damn it, I’m going to treat him—”

  An alarm sounded from the screen a split second before the patient started seizing. The commando arched up from the narrow stretcher, and Kira threw herself into his side to stop him from pitching off the cot. His eyes were open but unfocused, his expression twisting into confused rage.

  An arm lashed out, and Kira ducked, narrowly avoiding a fist in the face. Damn, the adrenaline had been too much. The man seemed to have a hypersensitivity to any kind of medicine.

  “Frecking jezus christ.” Rian appeared on the opposite side of the stretcher and shoved both hands against the commando’s shoulders, struggling to push him back down to the bed.

  Tannin elbowed his way in, and Kira stepped aside as the two men fought to keep the flailing patient under control.

  “If you’re so set on doctoring him, Kira, do something before I tell Callan to treat him with
a nucleon blast to the face.” Rian huffed over the words, muttering a curse as the commando tried to rear up against him.

  “The last sedative almost killed him.” But, maybe a different one, at half dose—?

  “Do something. Now!”

  She lurched the single step to the crystal display in the bulkhead and brought up a list of stored meds in the Imojenna’s system. The mildest sedative she had was in low supply; usually for kids, it often did nothing for adults, and they’d never had a reason to use it before. She ordered up a dose and then held her breath as she pushed the “administer” icon.

  For a long moment, the commando continued fighting Tannin’s and Rian’s holds. But then he dropped like a stone, sending Tannin stumbling and Rian half sprawling across the patient at the sudden absence of resistance.

  Heart tripping, Kira pushed her way in and pressed a hand to the commando’s neck. A strong, steady pulse registered, and she blew out a short breath of relief. A quick glance at the display showed the patient’s vitals returning to normal ranges.

  She straightened and looked up at Rian, standing across from her.

  “I’ll save you the trouble of ordering me to send him back to the brig, because he’s not going anywhere until I’m sure he’s stable.”

  Rian’s brow lowered over an unimpressed glare, and her heart skipped a beat. The captain hated ultimatums; maybe she should have worded that a little more reasonably.

  “Then you better find a way to wake him up and make him cooperate, because I will have those answers one way or another, even if it’s from dissecting his dead body.”

  Sharp indignation sliced through her, but she kept her expression blank. She’d gotten used to his callous regard for life and lethal threats in the years since she’d signed on with the Imojenna’s crew, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Rian was a good guy, but this war with the Reidar that the wider universe didn’t even know about meant he often walked a questionably moral line in his pursuit of the shape-shifting aliens. However, she’d never personally witnessed him kill someone who hadn’t tried to kill him first. Whatever he’d done before she’d known him, well, it was all said and done. She wasn’t in a position to be judging people on their history.