The freight ramp was down.
“Not again,” I sighed.
—36—
Lyssa had been busy while we were on the mothership. Actually, she had busted out into action the moment the slavers had fired their snake-things. But we didn’t get to hear about her side of the story until we had dealt with the survivors from the Ige Ibas.
Lyssa made that much simpler than it might have been by turning most of the interior of the ship into a hospital. She put herself into medical mode and nominated everyone who could stand on their feet as medical aides.
Fiori got to work, directing us as we cleaned up the survivors and treated them. Mostly, her treatment of choice was to put them to sleep and pump them full of nutrients and liquids while they slept.
“A full therapy center will be able to do better than I can,” Fiori admitted. “Even with Lyssa’s ability to print nearly everything I need, these poor people will need rehabilitation and expertise to help them through it that I can’t provide. I’m just a medic.”
“You do okay,” I assured her, and peered over her shoulder at Mace, where he lay on the narrow cot. Dalton sat beside him, his head back, snoring softly. Already Mace looked far more human than he had, coming out of the shell. His face had filled out a bit and the skin looked like flesh once more. “But it might be a few days before we can take them to a therapy center.”
She nodded. “They’ll last that long, now they have the essentials they need.”
The delay was because we had not jumped away the moment Lyssa could fire up the crescent arms.
“The mothership is still there,” she pointed out. “It hasn’t jumped away.”
We all trooped onto the bridge to look at the far-away speck of metal, glinting red in the sun’s light.
“Is it drifting?” Lyth asked, rubbing his chin.
“It is locked in orbit around the gas planet,” Lyssa said.
“Is the orbit degrading?” I asked.
“It…might be. I need longer to know for sure.”
I sighed. That put us in a dilemma.
“They might all be dead, and there’s no one to correct the orbit,” Jai said, rubbing his chin.
“They had a fire onboard. That’s usually fatal,” Sauli pointed out. “Especially if they couldn’t all get into their suits fast enough.”
“And if the slavers all died of asphyxiation,” I added, “the prisoners in the galleys might still be alive. The shuttles are airtight and they don’t need oxygen in their current state. We can’t leave them to go down with the ship…if it is going down.”
“We can’t just pin a beacon on the ship and go home, either,” Marlow said. “We might end up having to tow the thing away from the gravity well.”
“Maybe do that now and get it over with. Then we can go home,” Juliyana said.
“If we get too close and they’re still alive, they’ll fire on us, and we’re not in a position to fight back,” I pointed out. “We have casualties aboard. We’re as wounded as they are at the moment.”
“Ah, let the damn thing fall and burn,” Yoan muttered.
“I understand why you might feel that way,” Jai told him, “but we are curious humans, on this ship. That mothership holds knowledge, information about the slaves, where they’re from and why they are here. And it holds at least a hundred of their prisoners, who don’t deserve to die because we don’t like what the slavers did to us.”
Yoan grimaced. “Yeah, sorry.”
So we waited, and watched the disabled mothership’s orbit.
While we did that, Lyssa told us what had happened when the slavers had lashed out with their snake-things. Tethers, we decided to call them.
“The charge delivered by the tethers doesn’t just knock out humans,” Lyssa explained. “It stuns my nanobots, too. The ordinary ones, at least. The heavy duty nanobots recover after a couple of seconds, but they don’t like the charge, either. And the parawolves really didn’t like them. They weren’t knocked out, but they couldn’t do much more than lie there and howl.” Lyssa wrinkled her nose. “It was very noisy.”
Crippling the parawolves may have saved their lives, for the slavers had failed to see them as a threat. They had left them on the ship, picked us up with their tethers, and fired their weapons at the exit hatch until Lyssa was forced to open it and let them out. “Those weapons of theirs are thermic. I couldn’t let them melt through the hatch,” she told me.
Then they had pulled us through their tunnel to their shuttle.
I studied the shuttle on the footage Lyssa had faithfully recorded. It was the same sort of slave galley we had escaped upon. It was probably the same galley we had woken to find ourselves upon.
“They used it to come over to the Lythion,” Sauli said, looking over my shoulder. He shook his head. “It’s…calculating, isn’t it?”
“Efficient,” I added, feeling sick. “They’re practiced at this.”
“They just left the three ships behind?” Jai added, sounding appalled. “They weren’t even interested in what they might find here?”
“Not everyone is curious about everything, like you,” I chided him.
Jai shook his head. “These people can’t be human. Curiosity is natural.”
“They plundered four ships and took their crew,” Dalton said. “They would have learned a lot from those ships. Maybe they figured they’d seen it all.”
“And they had cargo spoiling back on the mothership,” Sauli added, his tone dry.
The slavers didn’t even bother to blow the ships up. Like the Ige Ibas, they left the three of them floating behind, apparently empty.
Lyssa had considered her options for a moment or two after the slavers’ shuttle detached from her side. A few moments is a small lifetime for an AI. Then she spoke to the remaining crew on the Penthos and Captain Truda on the Omia and they had detached and jumped away while Lyssa stood guard.
“They are going for help, and to raise the alarm,” Lyssa told us. “I stayed to watch
