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Dramatis Personae

Athena

When the smoke bomb went off further down the corridor Hector pushed her back and into the last office on the right hand side of the hall. She bristled at his presumptuous attitude but it was the right move to make given the circumstances. She hadn’t expected to find herself in a live firefight. Honestly she hadn’t really been thinking when she hared off after Hector and Lucy, she’d simply seen some kind of disaster coming where Hector got the family business more intimately entangled with University politics than they’d originally planned.

At a base level her situation was really his fault. What was he thinking, sticking his nose into the family business like that? Daddy wanted him as a secretary, which was his call to make, but being secretary meant handling detail work. Not walking into some kind of battle over an archaeological discovery.

Her eyes kept flicking from the disruptor in his hands to the increasingly noisy hallway and back again. Hopefully he wouldn’t get them any deeper into this mess they already were. As long as Lucy’s opponents ignored them then Athena was happy to return the favor. That proved more difficult than she’d expected.

As the quiet fwp sound of fletchettes hummed down the hallway and the crackling of an etheric lash echoed from the walls she started to wonder if they were far enough from the fighting to keep out of the way. When a man with a neatly trimmed and waxed mustache and beard, wearing a tailored suit and sweater vest trotted casually down the hall she tensed. Then he stopped outside their doorway. With a casual swipe of a card he unlocked the room on the opposite side of the hall and stepped in. When he turned and closed the door behind him he was smiling.

“Who was that?”

“Hector.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t.”

He slowly rose to his feet, staring through the glass pane at the far door. “What room is that?”

“It’s an office, Hector, every room up here is an office besides the bathrooms and that lounge.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I read the nameplates as we walked by, it’s not hard if you’re paying attention. Leave him alone.”

He was quiet for another five count. “Do you remember who’s office it is?”

“What does it matter?” She snapped. “It doesn’t have anything to do with us, Hector. Daddy didn’t bring us out here so we could run through a BTL building with the Univeristy professor’s curvy secretary! We should just leave but we watched her wetman kill the staff. If we bail out on this she can finger us as accessories to the crime so we’re out of luck if she gets caught!”

“Then we better not let that guy screw Lucy over, right?” With that Hector got to his feet, checked the hallway in both directions and slipped across the hallway, his disruptor held low.

“Hector! Come back!” Athena hissed. “We’re not-” With a growl of frustration she followed after him, catching up as he fried the door lock with his disruptor. Reluctantly she drew her own identical sidearm out of her purse, making sure it was set to stun. By all accounts betting stunned was unpleasant but at least it wouldn’t leave anyone like the receptionists Tarn had killed on the first floor.

That proved the least of her concerns. With the door unlocked Hector kicked it open, stepping into the office as his weapon barrel swept the room. Before he could complete the motion a trash can came down over his head and arms.

With almost comical grace the man they’d seen earlier stepped down off of a chair to one side of the door, following the container down, and flipped it upright, kicking Hector’s feet out from under him so he wound up tumbling deeper into the waist high can in a mess of arms and legs. The trash can did not have wheels so it just slid a few inches to one side before coming to a stop. Hector groaned. The well dressed man just kept moving, disappearing on the other side of the doorway.

“Hector!” Athena took another two long steps, getting just enough of herself through the doorway to look for the stranger. With Hector in the way she kept her disruptor aimed low. Once again what she discovered defied expectations. This was the office of a fairly well heeled member of BTL’s management and he or she kept a small case with several small containers of alcohol in the corner just to the right of the door. The stranger was in the process of emptying one into a very tall glass. He looked up as the last of the liquid glugged out of the bottle. “Hello, Miss Hutchinson. My name is Malaki Skorkowski. Can I offer you a drink?”

She was so gobsmacked Skorkowski had enough time to inhale the scent of the alcohol before she started to raise her weapon. He casually smacked the knuckles of her hand with his bottle. The disruptor clattered on the floor. As Athena recoiled to cradle her stinging knuckles he casually slipped the tumbler – which smelled like a very good brandy – into her hand with a smile. “For the pain.”

The trash can clattered on the floor as Hector kicked himself back upright, free of the bin but wrapped up in his jacket. When Skorkowski turned to look at the noise Athena threw the glass at him, alcohol and all. It hit him on the shoulder, only distracting him for a second, but it was enough for Hector to recover. Hector started to lift his disruptor again, realized Athena was just behind his target, and abandoned that idea. Instead he lowered a shoulder and charged at Skorkowski.

Who stretched out a foot, hooked the trash can with it and kicked the bin back under Hector’s feet, sending him down for the second time in as many minutes. Skorkowski straightened his jacket lapels as he asked, “Is this really necessary?”

“Sorry,” Athena replied, angling to step around Hector and retrieve her disruptor. “I’m afraid it is for us, we’ve gotten ourselves mixed up in some kind of University politics.”

“Ah.” He made a face like he’d eaten something bitter. “That is the source of so many terrible conundrums in the galaxy, isn’t it?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“There are better ways to deal with those kinds of problems, I assure you, my dear.” Skorkowski had hidden a disruptor under his vest somewhere that suddenly appeared in his hands. “However I don’t have any office hours available to advise you right now. I’d just suggest you treat Faculty with caution. By which I mean more caution than you are now.”

She froze, staring at the disruptor with wide eyes. “I assure you, I’m being as careful as I can.”

“But it wasn’t enough, was it?” He hopped over Hector, who had made a sliding tackle for Skorkowski’s legs, then landed again and shot Athena.

Turned out getting stunned was just as unpleasant as they said. Not for the reasons she was expecting, though. When she was away at University herself she’d met several other students who had been stunned by security or investigative officers. They all agreed they never wanted to experience it again. Athena had always assumed that was because it was a very painful thing. The opposite was true.

She quite literally could not feel anything. Even the omnipresent sensation of gravity pulling her down towards the ground vanished leaving her feeling weightless yet unable to move. Her limbs ignored her orders. The world spun around her and she found herself looking at the office’s carpeted floor. She must have fallen over but she hadn’t felt the motion or the stop. It felt like she was floating somewhere far away from her body.

Panic set in immediately. It started to spiral out of control when she realized the only thing she could do to show her panic was breath faster. There was another quiet sizzling sound off to one side. At a guess she assumed Skorkowski had stunned Hector as well but since he was already on the ground and couldn’t make any noise by falling over she couldn’t be sure. A moment later Skorkowski stooped down into view to collect her disruptor. “I do apologize for this but I promised…”

He trailed off when he looked over and saw her hyperventilating. “Oh. Well, I don’t suppose telling you to calm down and count to three between each breath is going to help you at this juncture, Miss Hutchinson?”

At some point in the future she was going to strangle him for that. First she had to escape the vise that was tightening around her lungs before it made her chest burst open.

“I have no intention of hurting you. Hard to believe, I’m sure, but true none the less. An etheric stun is harmless to humans unless they have very specific neurological conditions and if you had one of them you wouldn’t be breathing still.” He gently straightened her body out and elevated her feet. “Just do your best to stay calm and keep breathing.”

He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. The problem was her lungs didn’t believe what she knew any more than they believed what he was saying and they continued to pump away, trying to get hold of air. She could barely make out anything he was saying now. There was a vague impression of speech but it didn’t feel like it was aimed at her. Then the world spun away and she caught a glimpse of the sidereal.

She’d always found the realm of stars beautiful. Although her father viewed the sidereal as a way to move wealth from one place to another she had always found it mysterious and enticing. Perhaps that’s why she’d developed her etheric sense so much more than her father. However under the influence of the disruptor everything looked much different. The clear, dark expanse of the sidereal, normally lit only by the glow of ether as it pumped out from stars and planets, was now full of strange, dangling tentacles and eerie, writhing lights that raced all around them.

A deeper, more primal terror gripped her and her senses were dragged away from her paralysis to the bigger picture. Skorkowski was carrying her in his arms. He must have turned them sidereal, which meant the building’s interdiction was down for some reason. Perhaps he had a remote control for it. He also looked a bit surprised to see the mass of wires overhead but quickly recovered. A moment later he surged with etheric power and they jumped.

Another pivot and he was carrying Athena through the cramped confines of some kind of ship. She couldn’t recognize the model but she got the general idea. This was how he’d gotten to the planet and likely how he intended to leave. “Lavvy,” he called. “You have a guest!”

“What?” A distant female voice called. “Why?”

“Stun induced panic. I’m using your medbed.” Athena realized she was being laid flat on something, although she couldn’t feel what it was she assumed it was the medbed in question. Skorkowski’s face appeared overhead and he frowned down at her for a moment. “Your color’s a little bit better but breathing is still quite labored. Odd. I’d think seeing L-93 in all his glory would make the panic worse, not better.”

He peeled one eye all the way open and looked in it then attached the bed’s diagnostic electrodes to her right wrist. “Now, I’m going to attach you to the bed and activate the quarantine field. The field will make sure you don’t get out to bother the rest of us while we’re dealing with your University problem, understand? But once you’re safely locked in I’ll use the neural stabilizer to settle your etheric pathways. You’ll be able to move and speak again. Hopefully that’s not a problem for you, under normal medical ethics rules I need your consent for this procedure but right now you physically cannot so I have to go with my best judgment. Don’t hold it against me.”

His face disappeared and a strange sensation started working its way down her spine and into her limbs. It was the first thing she’d been able to feel in them for a good bit and, although it was very alien and unpleasant, she’d take it over the disruptor’s imposed nothingness any day of the week. After about fifteen seconds of that she was able to twitch her fingers again. Another twenty and she stirred and sat halfway up on the bunk where she lay. As promised there was a quarantine field around it, keeping her from getting up and going anywhere, but at least she could move and feel again. She looked over at Skorkowski, who was still watching the bed’s readouts. “Thank you. You could have left me there to hyperventilate.”

“I could have,” he agreed without looking up. “But I prefer to avoid that level of cruelty if I can. How do you feel?”

“A little sore from the fall but otherwise fine.” She rubbed at a sore spot on her arm that was likely going to be a bruise very soon.

“Is there a history of that kind of reaction to etheric shock in your family?”

She gave him a curious look. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

He looked up from the readouts, nonplussed. “Just wondering if I should go back for your brother.”