Imbra smiled. “I doubt he’d see himself as a friend.”
“Associate, then. But you’re sure you wouldn’t rather a proper stasis crew?”
“He’ll pick it up quickly. He’s young, but he’s already seen action—and he knows what stasis is like, too.”
“That’s a benefit, is it?”
“In this case, absolutely.”
General Asarus didn’t press, so after finalizing other details, Imbra went to confer with his fellow northerner in the docking bay. Paloma looked older, somehow, after weeks of being lauded as a system-wide hero for a set of actions prescribed for him by his mother’s killer. He certainly made no attempt to hide his displeasure at seeing Imbra again.
“I could murder you, you know,” said the kid. “I could put you under in a way that guarantees you never wake up again.”
“I know,” said Imbra. “And I’ll take that risk. I’ve owed you that much all along. But if you don’t, you’re the only one I can count on, to do what I need someone to do.”
Paloma’s expression remained hostile as Imbra went on, but at least the kid listened, which was all Imbra could hope for. On their way to the lifepods, Imbra was tempted to ask something else—how Ren was; whether Paloma had been back to Nov and visited his mother’s grave—but every note of affected camaraderie felt flat and wrong in the back of his throat. Before prepping for immersion, Imbra held out a keypass instead.
“I don’t know if you’ll ever get back,” he said. “But if you do, take this to Biggs. It’s a copy, with a holo-note from me. The garage, Bullet, every-thing—It’s yours.”
Paloma clicked his teeth, setting the keypass beside the controls. “You can’t bribe me that easily.” But he paused before adding. “Are you scared yet? Not gonna beg, are you?”
Imbra, lying in the dark womb of the lifepod, shook his head as Paloma started the process, and then the seal came up all around him, and Paloma’s last words couldn’t be heard through the tiny front window. But Imbra’s body, in the end, could not be so easily tricked into calmness. Even with the declaw, he shivered violently as the stasis fluid rose, and his lungs resisted breathing to the bitter end even when fully submerged, and so Imbra went to sleep screaming—and stayed screaming—for what felt like a hundred years.
Ninety-seven years, give or take. His skin felt like twisted bark when the freight crew pulled him from the battered lifepod. At first Imbra could not register his arms and legs, let alone speak, but after days in the infirmary, realizing from the steady beep of machines that his tinnitus had passed, he started to notice larger details outside of himself. The Allegiance insignia, for instance, on the medical officer who so painstakingly coaxed him to health.
“Quite the journey you’ve been on,” said the slender, faintly luminescent being who called itself Yarun. “I guess there’s no one we can call?”
Imbra shook his head—a painful, sluggish maneuver. “Where … ?”
“On the Ambara. We’re a small operation, running supplies to various outposts the cruise ships use for debarks along the way.”
Imbra still struggled for basic control over his facial expressions, but his confusion came naturally enough. Yarun hummed understanding, even sympathy.
“Cruise ships,” Yarun explained, “for tourists from the Allegiance’s central worlds. Those are some wildly rich families, I tell you. Kept in luxury stasis—nothing like your little nightmare, sorry to say—while their ships wander the galaxy, visiting all sorts of attractions. There’s one system, I hear, with the most fantastic athletes. Something to do with the density of the world, and its land features, but really—they’re a sight to behold. And another world’s one big library, an archive of all the galaxy’s knowledge. Beautiful promenades.”
Imbra swallowed heavily before attempting to speak again. “And—Nov— Novun Prime?”
Creases at the corners of Yarun’s eyes suggested incomprehension, but the medical officer pulled up a system file and cried out in triumph. “Ah! Yes, the mausoleum. A solemn little system, that—museums and graveyards almost everywhere, paying tribute to the heroism of those lost in the last Great Allegiance War. Gets a pretty good run of cruise ships passing through. Lots of Allegiance members like to go and wring their hands over that sort of thing. Can’t remember what started the whole war—some monstrous affair involving despotic trade agents, I believe. But all so very sad. Never again, you know?” Yarun nodded while scrolling through the file. “Whole fleets wiped out in brutal double-crosses, as well as some of the lunar bases, civilians and all, over ninety years ago. Say, that’s not where you’re—?”
But when Yarun looked up, Imbra was already touching with amazement the sudden flood of dampness on his cheeks. Yarun offered a gentle smile with its lipless mouth.
“When we scanned you, we saw that you had some sort of neural block. Fascinating monstrosity, stopping the signal for some fairly important hormonal reactions. I know some of the worlds still use these things, but not many. Barbaric, really. So—I know we didn’t ask, but we took it out while repairing the rest of the stasis damage. If, if you want it back … ?”
“No,” said Imbra, choking on the outpouring of his grief. He’d had his suspicions, which was why he had asked Paloma to plot the course for his lifepod differently—to aim it farther than those for the rest of the team, who’d been given flight paths on limited thrusters that would have found their occupants waking maybe ten years later, still in the system and ready to infiltrate any dominant Allegiance force in operation around Novun Prime. A long-term assassination plot, granted, but the Novuni’s only real hope of living to fight again.
But the truth of the matter, the cause for the war in the first place, proved even worse than General Asarus had suggested it might be. What sun was theirs, that neither loved nor hated her people, but rather operated with cool indifference towards the Novuni, having
