Prophets

She was stuck here for twelve hours?

Kugara shook her head. She stood in the corner of the room opposite the wall where she had secured Nickolai. If their situation hadn’t been so dire, it might have been comical. Kugara’s restraints on Nickolai looked almost like a DPS academy hazing.

But not really.

Nickolai hadn’t been beaten, dragged through the slush, or taped to a freezing metal pole. She briefly remembered participating, dousing vodka on the skin of shivering plebes and igniting it, watching the blue flames ripple across naked skin before burning themselves out. The alcohol content was never quite enough to do permanent physical damage, but the poor bastards training to be part of the DPS didn’t know that, and with their heads taped to the pole, they couldn’t see the vodka burning, allowing them to imagine the worst.

Kugara remembered laughing at the screams when the victims lost the ability to tell cold from heat, and felt the sting of ice on their arms as if it was a branding iron.

She stared at Nickolai and thought, And you called me an Angel?

Kugara didn’t like the universe’s sense of humor.

The room was silent for a long time before Nickolai finally spoke. “Why haven’t you asked me?”

Why didn’t I gag you? “Ask you what?”

“Why?”

Kugara shook her head. “I don’t care. I’m a hired gun, and I’m not paid to care about your motives. Not unless Mosasa orders me to do an interrogation. I don’t think you want that.”

There was another long silence, and then Nickolai said, “I apologize for what happened on the observation deck.”

“What?” For a moment Kugara was confused. Things had happened too quickly for her to fit Nickolai’s confession—the little Mosasa had passed along—into her memory of events on the Eclipse.

It struck her much harder than it should have when she realized what his apology meant. “That’s when you rigged the tach-comm!”

It was all crap, from their first meeting onward, a way to distract the one member of the crew that had any training to deal with him. He probably knew enough about her history with the DPS to know exactly how she was going to react when he brought up his damn furry theology.

“I—” Nickolai started to say.

“Shut up. Don’t say another word, or I ignore the fact Mosasa wants you in shape for questioning.” She could easily picture herself slowly tearing bits of flesh away from him, not even for the sake of gaining information, just to teach the tiger a lesson. She was no stranger to that kind of procedure; she had broken people with little more than a pocketknife.

And she hated him for making her remember that.

Over the next couple of hours, the PA broadcast updates; no communication from the planet; drive continuing to cool down; other ship’s systems nominal. About three hours into the silent ordeal, Tsoravitch, who’d taken over the role of bridge communications officer, announced, “We have a transmission from the planet. They’re giving us communications and landing protocols.”

“About time,” Kugara whispered. “We’ve been calling them for three hours.”

“Maybe they don’t want us here.” Nickolai said.

“What?”

“They came out here for a reason. Maybe they don’t welcome visitors from their past.”

Kugara opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped herself. It was a possibility that should have been patently obvious to any native of the Fifteen Worlds. Dakota certainly wouldn’t welcome an unannounced visitor from anywhere, Grimalkin wasn’t much better.

We may be lucky no one is shooting at us.