“Sworn prey must be defeated in combat,” he said, grinning down at the xith’cal as he tightened his finger on the trigger. “I already have your pledge to leave Montblanc alone in exchange for Deviana Morris, but if you refuse to swear safe passage for my people and my ship, I’ll end this farce right here, and Reaper’s disgrace will go unanswered forever. Are you willing to risk that, Highest Guide?”
The female gave Caldswell a scathing look, and then she turned to the male beside her. They talked for a long while. The male was clearly enraged, but the female just kept shaking her head. Eventually, they seemed to come to an agreement, and the female spoke to her slave, who repeated the words to us.
“We will swear safe passage for your crew and ship,” the woman said. “But only after your death. You have been sworn prey for many years, Brian Caldswell, and great Reaper whose flesh we are demands your blood.”
“I die and they go free without harassment,” Caldswell verified. “This is your pledge?”
The female xith’cal nodded, and Caldswell lowered his gun. “Done.”
I stared at the captain in amazement as he holstered his pistol.
“What?” he whispered. “I got the idea from you. And stop gaping, Morris. You’ll give people the wrong impression.”
“Didn’t know it was wrong,” I whispered back, folding my arms over my chest. “Didn’t think you were the hero type, offering to die for your crew.”
Caldswell grinned. “Don’t give me too much credit. I knew I was dead the moment that towline hit, but if I couldn’t double sell a sure thing to guarantee the safety of my crew, what kind of trader captain would I be?”
I couldn’t even begin to answer that. Behind us, Nova was tearing up. Basil looked stricken, Mabel looked impressed, and Hyrek just looked overwhelmed. I was sure he would have said something, but Caldswell silenced everyone with a glare before turning back to me. “Better put your helmet back on.”
My eyes widened, and I snapped my helmet into place just in time to see the xith’cal coming up the ramp through my side camera. But though they had us grossly outnumbered, the xith’cal stopped at the edge of the cargo bay, looking at me like they were afraid to come any closer. For a moment, I almost took that as a compliment to my reputation as a badass lizard killer before I remembered my new name among the xith’cal, “plague bearer.” Too bad I couldn’t just throw the stuff at them and run.
Our mini standoff lasted almost a full minute before the female made her way up the ramp. She must have left her human slave behind, because when she appeared, all she had in her hands was a thing that looked like a large white ball. She said something and pointed at me, then at the corner of the cargo bay. Such a simple command didn’t require translation, but I still waited for Hyrek to tell me to move before I obeyed.
I fully expected her to order me to strip next, because what kind of idiot keeps a Paradoxian prisoner in her armor? But the female didn’t say anything else. She just waited until I was in the corner, and then she lobbed the white ball at my face.
Despite the thousands of guns pointed at me, I very nearly shot the thing down on instinct. I caught myself at the last second, forcing my hands off Sasha as the white ball hit me in the chest. The moment it struck, it expanded, flowing over me until I was standing in the middle of what looked like a white gum bubble. Once it reached its full size, the bubble hardened instantly, much like Mabel’s patches. Unlike a patch, though, this stuff wasn’t brittle. It didn’t crack when I pushed it, or even when I punched it. I would have tried shooting, but that didn’t seem like a smart idea when the female was walking toward me with ten warriors.
She reached up to touch the bubble, tapping the white surface with her claws as she said something in her twisting-metal voice. Behind her, I could see Hyrek typing, and then a message appeared at the bottom of my camera feed.
She says it’s completely shatterproof and airtight, Hyrek’s message read. She also hopes you have an air supply that can last you until you reach the lab.
My eyes went wide as I sealed my suit. The female xith’cal laughed at the sound of my air lock and began commanding the warriors to pick up my makeshift prison. Outside, I saw Caldswell surrender his pistol before being hauled off by two very large xith’cal. The rest of the crew went without protest, including Mabel, and though they were clearly terrified, especially Basil, who was going on about how he was an old bird and couldn’t be very tasty, the xith’cal didn’t seem to be treating them roughly.
As the crew was escorted out, I felt a deep rumble under my feet. It was so huge, it took me a few seconds to realize that the tiny earthquake was actually the roar of the tribe ship’s thrusters. We were leaving Montblanc. The xith’cal were keeping their word, apparently.
Once Caldswell and the crew had been led away, the warriors lifted my bubble and started down the ramp. I cannot begin to describe how bizarre it was to have xith’cal warriors bearing me on their shoulders like a noble in an old-fashioned palanquin. If they hadn’t been carrying me to near-certain doom, I probably would have enjoyed it.
The crew had been marched out ahead of me, and by the time the slow-moving warriors carrying my bubble made it down the Fool’s ramp, Caldswell and the rest were gone. I kept my eyes open anyway, keeping all my cameras busy marking doors and vents, anything that might be useful later for an escape. I also kept watch for Rupert, but I didn’t see so much as a flash of black. I refused to let it bother me, though. Rupert hadn’t been taken with the crew, which meant he was undoubtedly already working on whatever plan he and the captain had made. He’d find me for sure, and together we’d bust this place wide open, get the crew, and get the hell out.
I was taking comfort in that thought when the jump flash washed over me.
In the movies, the inside of a xith’cal tribe ship was always a shadowy, terrible place filled with human skeletons. As it turned out, the truth wasn’t too far off. There were no bones, but it was uncomfortably dark, and the hallways went on forever. Since I wasn’t walking, my suit was having trouble drawing a map as the xith’cal warriors carrying my bubble turned again and again, and by the time we reached our destination, a large, well-lit room lined with what appeared to be medical sterile storage, I was utterly lost.
Wherever this place was, it was clearly a female room. The ceiling was so low the males carrying me had to duck to fit. There were dozens of females standing clustered around clean metal tables with projected diagrams hovering over them like ghosts. They hissed when the warriors entered. The warriors hissed back, causing the female who’d met us in the dock, the Highest Guide, to roar. Everyone shut up after that, and the males kept their heads down as they carried my bubble to an air lock at the far side of the room.
The Highest Guide opened the air lock and stepped back, motioning for the warriors to place me inside. The lock itself was pretty large, but it opened into a small room with glass walls roughly half the size of the bunk I’d shared with Nova. There was barely enough room to fit the bubble, and I got rattled like a nut in its shell as the males wedged me inside.
When I was finally in, the Highest Guide closed the air lock. The moment the seal clicked, my bubble began to dissolve, leaving me standing inside the glass cell. One prison to another wasn’t much of an improvement, but at least I wasn’t being carted around anymore. I tried to feel happy about that as I examined my new cage.
It didn’t take long. The prison beyond the air lock was basically a clear glass box at the end of a larger room that looked like an observation area. The setup made me feel like I was on exhibit at a zoo, though I didn’t think they’d be bringing classes of baby lizards down to see me.
There were two doors I could see, the air lock I’d come in through and a second, larger door on the far side of the observation room. The only furniture was a large box set into the wall across from me. The low light and the thick, smudgy glass of my prison were messing with my cameras, so I couldn’t make out details, but the box seemed to be made of metal, and I could pick up a faint heat signal inside it.
That was a little creepy, because on my scanner, it almost looked like there was a person in there. The box was about the right size, too, like a coffin. But these morbid thoughts weren’t helping, and there was absolutely no reason I could think of for the xith’cal to keep me in a room with a coffin, so I forced my eyes away.
The observation room had been built to accommodate male xith’cal, but my prison was human scale, which meant my ceiling stopped well before the room’s did. Unlike the walls, though, the ceiling of my cell wasn’t clear, so I could only guess that the vents up there led into some kind of closed air recirculating system meant to keep in contagion. That made sense, but what I couldn’t figure out was why a clearly dangerous bioweapon like myself was being kept in a glass box like some kind of exotic pet.
There was no window in the air lock behind me, but I could hear the lizards moving in the other room. I leaned against the glass on the opposite side of my cell, waiting for them to come in and start the interrogation, but no one came. Minutes turned into hours, and still I was left alone. I’d fully expected to have been subdued, stripped out of my armor, and cut into alphabetically arranged pieces by this point, but I hadn’t seen so much as a lizard snout since they’d shoved me in here. It was almost like they’d locked me up and forgotten I existed.
You would think I’d be ecstatic at this turn of events. I wasn’t being vivisected or put in jars or any of the other horrors my brain had imagined. The worst things I’d had to endure so far were boredom and the fact that I was getting hungry, but as the hours built up, so did my anger.
I hate, hate, hate being helpless, and helpless was what I felt at the moment. I’d steeled myself to face anything, to fight to the death, and instead I was locked up with nothing to do. The xith’cal must have taken the crew’s coms, because I couldn’t raise anyone. Not surprising, but it pissed me off to no end to know they considered Nova and Basil a greater threat than me. They weren’t even taking me seriously enough to bother removing my guns, which I took as a personal insult.
By the time we exited hyperspace somewhere around the beginning of the third hour, I’d gotten mad enough to fire half of Sasha’s clip into the glass walls, which was how I’d learned they were exceptionally bulletproof. Not that it mattered. Even if I’d shattered them, I had nowhere to escape to. I was alone and lost in a tribe ship the size of a major city. I couldn’t even play hero because I had no idea where Caldswell and the crew were being held, assuming Caldswell hadn’t been eaten already. I was trapped, useless, and helpless, and it was driving me crazy. It was even worse than when I’d been lost in the mine. At least there I’d been able to walk. Here I couldn’t do anything except pace and brood. I was doing just that, and working myself into a rare fury in the process, when I felt the telltale prick of pins and needles.
Anger turned to fear in a flash. I knelt in the corner of my clear cage and yanked off my gloves. Sure enough, my fingers were solid black, like I’d dipped them in coal dust, and the stain was still growing. It blossomed before my eyes, sweeping down my hand and up my arm under my suit. But even though I couldn’t see it moving anymore, I could feel the pins and needles crawling up my arm nearly to my elbows before finally slowing down.
“Shit,” I whispered, shoving my hands back into my gloves so the xith’cal, who were almost certainly watching, wouldn’t see. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Why was this happening now? Had the xith’cal pumped something into my cage to trigger the virus? It was possible, but up until I’d taken off my gloves, I’d been sealed into my suit, which ruled out anything airborne. A plasmex attack then?
Since my seal had already been broken, I shoved up my visor. The bitter taste of the arsenic-heavy air made me feel queasy, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. My cameras couldn’t pick up plasmex, but my eyes could, and if I was under attack, I wanted to see it. As my visor went up, though, the black stuff on my hands shrank to a minor concern.