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  Arco nodded. “Word is that the Hajim came across a CC alone out on the Fringe and took most of the crew alive.”

  Doc eyed Arco suspiciously. “What would a Conquest Class ship be doing that far out? Alone?”

  “The crew’s reporting it as a simple FUBAR navigational malfunction to their debriefers.”

  “Bad luck. For all of us,” Doc added.

  “The Asi and Denthera aren’t going to like this,” Arco agreed. “We’ll outnumber the alien prisoners now. Remember the snorting and snapping from the Asi when they brought in those two new humans a couple of days ago?”

  “The rise in population isn’t good for any body,” Matthias repeated. “You don’t think the rations are going to increase just because we have more people, do you?”

  Arco clearly hadn’t considered this. Until now, he’d seemed rather pleased that there were more human prisoners being processed into the camp.

  “Are you homesick, Corporal Arco? Or just forgetting why we’re here?”

  Arco gave a bitter laugh. “Come on, Doc—sir. You know I was put into Five with the very first batch of human prisoners. And yeah,” he added, “I’m damned homesick.”

  “Me, too. You did say eighty newbies?” Matthias asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Matthias shook his head. “I wonder what sort of fight the CC crew put up before they became prisoners.” Some were bound to need medical attention. “I’d better get the infirmary set up for them.”

  His medical staff consisted of himself, one nurse, a couple of volunteers, and a very old biobot. They didn’t have much to work with to keep the human inmates healthy; now they had more people to call on their already-stretched-thin resources.

  “Prison commandant will want to see you first, Doc. They’ll want you to give your speech, too.”

  Bureaucracy before compassion. It wasn’t necessarily the Kril way, but the Hajim had forced the Kril to work for them, running all of their prison camps. Doc sighed. Before Arco’s news, he’d been planning on finding a quiet spot to enjoy a smoke of recently smuggled in arja tobacco, but he’d have to forgo that pleasure until later.

  “Go get word to the medical team about the new prisoners. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  2

  The processing center was bleak—just a few low, ramshackle buildings huddled on a windy plain around a badly maintained landing field. A small translucent dome rose from the center of the flat roof of the largest building, looking like a pearl embedded in a dull metallic setting. It was a long, dusty walk from the transport to the domed building.

  Zoe’s heart sank further with every step. There was nothing here. Nothing. How was she supposed to find a way to escape when there were no habitations? After the transport lifted, there also would be no other ships resting on the buckled blastcrete. A feeling of hopelessness tried to well inside her, and what she heard next didn’t help.

  “Take a look at the sky,” one of the Kril guards told her group when they formed a ragged, tired line outside the transport ship. “It will be the last time you see daylight for a long time.”

  Zoe exchanged puzzled looks with the people around her, then glanced up at the alien sky. It was orange, streaked with thin gray clouds. It might be nothing like the pale blue sky of her own world, but she was delighted to have its wide expanse above her. There was a stink like boiled cabbage in the air, but at least it was natural atmosphere and not recycled ship air. She wondered if the aroma was a by-product of nearby agriculture, but any inquiry to the guards would bring attention to herself, not to mention bring suspicion of her plans for escape.

  Plans? What plans? She’d spent all the long days en route here trying to think of a way out, probing her fellow POWs for any strategy or support she could get. She didn’t get much help or any bright ideas, as the circumstances of their imprisonment had been very demoralizing.

  Zoe laughed silently at herself for her understated definitions.

  Being in the black vacuum of space was her least favorite part of traveling. Not knowing what fate awaited made it even worse, so much so that she’d been using the neutral language of diplomacy to shield herself from how scared she really was.

  She admitted that she was overjoyed to be standing on solid ground of the prison world after days surrounded by uncompromising dark. Even if she hadn’t been able to see outside the escape pods and the prison ship, space had weighed on her.

  While inside the Hajim prison ship she’d been scanned and questioned and made to feel threatened at all times. But her treatment had been no different than any other prisoner’s. The alien enemy had required instant obedience and had not provided enough food. Their very appearance had been menacing, but they had not been cruel. Now, being handed over to the Krils who operated this facility, she was certain she was merely an anonymous body and bit of data in the POW system. There was safety in being one of the human herd.

  After she took her look at the sky, she shuffled along in the long line of captives into one of the buildings. It was only after being crowded into a huge open elevator, which proceeded to go down and down into a hole in the earth, that she realized the place where she was to be a prisoner was deep underground. All natural light soon faded, replaced by growing dimness. Every sense screamed with fear, telling her she was being swallowed whole.

  It wasn’t that she was afraid of the dark, but …

  She was.

  She was being buried alive.

  A shove from the sailor behind her brought Zoe to her senses when the doors opened at the bottom of the shaft. As she stumbled out of the car, she noted that there were no controls; the elevator could only be operated by the guards up top. When everyone was out, the doors closed with a heavy clang, letting her know that any explosive charge that could break into the shaft would also bring down tons of rock from overhead.

  “The elevator is not a way out,” she muttered.

  A nod from a grim-faced engineer in the crowd confirmed her words.

  A human waited for them in the corridor outside the elevator. Scruffy and skinny, there was very little of the disciplined military man in his bearing—until he barked, “’Tenhun!”

  Everyone in the dispirited group reacted instantly to that tone. Spines straightened, shoulders squared, chins lifted, and eyes looked straight ahead. Zoe was almost relieved to have someone tell her what to do.

  “This way,” the man ordered, and he marched them off in quick time down a hallway until it widened into a huge circular cavern.

  When she looked up, Zoe realized that the white dome arched several stories overhead. It let in diffuse light while it blocked out any sight of the sky.

  Bastards!

  She couldn’t stop her anger, even though a reasonable part of her knew that the opaque covering was a filter to shield all the species in the prison from any harmful radiation. But the cringing, terrified part of her wanted to see daylight and didn’t give a damn about possible consequences to multiple types of life-forms.

  She took a deep breath and firmly turned her attention to the situation as they were given an order to form a double line. She put herself in the rear and worked on keeping her gaze straight ahead, but her military discipline was instantly abandoned when she got a look at the person standing in the center of a shaft of filtered light.

  Very dramatic. Very effective.

  A hot shiver ran through her.

  I’ve never seen anyone like him before.

  Though the big, heavily muscled man wasn’t wearing much of a uniform, he was obviously in charge. The air around him almost crackled with his commanding presence. The expression on his rough-hewn face seemed an odd combination of exasperation and compassion, and there was no way she would have called him handsome. Yet there was a compelling sensuality to his lips, and he certainly had the body of a bulked-up god. Even at a distance, the intelligence in his eyes drew her.

  The only way to tell his rank was because it was tattooed on his bare right bicep. Th
e insignia of a marine brigadier general didn’t surprise Zoe, but the caduceus emblem on his left arm did. A man of fascinating contradictions stood before them, and he was in charge of all the humans in this depressing, dreadful place.

  “Welcome to purgatory,” he said.

  The deep bass tone of his voice complemented everything else about him.

  Quite a few of the long-term prisoners had gathered to watch the newbies’ arrival, and most of them laughed in response to the general’s words. Like him, many of these prisoners had shaved heads and had stripped their clothing choices down to bare minimum. It was understandable, considering the sweltering, humid atmosphere. Many had the large eyes and sunken cheeks that told her food wasn’t plentiful. But there was also a lean wiry strength about them that reminded her more of a pack of predators than a contingent of soldiers and sailors.

  The darkness, the heat, the odors of sweat and dirt lent an organic claustrophobia to the place that was far more intimidating to her than the prison ship had been. Everything here was in shadow. The only person fully illuminated was the marine general, and that was because he deliberately stood in the center of the shaft of diffuse light falling the long distance through the milky dome shield so far above.

  Maybe he wasn’t really all that interesting, maybe she was simply reacting to the intended effect as everyone was supposed to. Good. She was thinking like the group—did the group find him captivating? Not exactly, but …

  Under the circumstances, captivating wasn’t a good way to describe anyone.

  She deliberately took her attention off the bald general and ran a hand through her own thick hair. It was shorter than she normally wore it. Instead of her dark brown curls, she’d let her stylist talk her into a gene-fixed straight style with dark navy blue coloring before leaving on her diplomatic misson. It had been done more as a fashion statement than as a disguise, but she was grateful now for any concealing change in her appearance.

  It hadn’t prevented Alynn from recognizing her, had it? She wondered what had happened to that young man. She hoped that Jazoan hadn’t chosen to do anything drastic to him, but she wouldn’t put murder to cover her tracks past her security chief. She also wondered and worried about Jazoan’s fate, but—

  “Listen up,” announced the deep, rumbling voice of the general.

  Zoe immediately turned her attention back to the big man in the center of the circular plaza.

  “I’m General Raven,” he told them. “Call me Doc.” He folded burly arms over his wide chest and passed a sneering glare over the ragged line of newcomers. “There are two things you need to know. One, you are now prisoners of the Hajim. Two, and far more important, your asses are mine. You’ve all been taught that a prisoner of war’s duty is to try to escape. Forget that rule. Until such time as a superior officer replaces me, you live by Raven’s Rules. Raven’s first rule is: nobody tries to escape. Is this understood?”

  Zoe wasn’t the only one of the new prisoners who reacted with surprise and outrage, but she wasn’t among those who muttered and complained. She watched the ones who did.

  Then she looked back at Raven and saw that he was doing the same thing: observing, marking out potential troublemakers. She didn’t like the implications and protectively brought the general’s attention elsewhere.

  “Why?” she spoke up, and took a few steps forward from the anonymous center of the group. “You’re asking us to abandon the fight, and our duty to the Empire. Why not try to escape?”

  General Raven’s sharp gaze met hers, his eyes so brown they seemed black. They looked at each other for a long moment of mutual assessment. His regard was the most intense she’d ever encountered, which said a lot for the man’s forceful personality. Zoe recognized in him a leader who did what must be done, who used who he had to.

  And oddly, she got the strong impression that he marked her down as a useful commodity as well as a troublemaker.

  3

  Doc knew immediately that the slender blue-haired woman who’d stepped to the front of the group wasn’t strongly psychic, but her mind was strongly shielded. Artificial, he thought, and wondered why her Hajim interrogators hadn’t noticed. He doubted there was anything guarding her mind that could hold out against a natural telepath as strong as him, but he didn’t interfere with personal privacy unless he needed to.

  He hoped he wouldn’t have to, but he got the strong sense that she was playing at more than simple righteous protest and stupid insubordination.

  “Why no escape, Lieutenant?” he replied to the question new prisoners always asked.

  He took in the stubborn set of her chin and the stance that showed she feared no man, nor the rank inked on his arm. He could have pointed out that an order was an order, but chose to explain his reasons to her instead. He bet that happened around her a lot.

  “Because, gentlemen, ladies, and the pretty blue-haired one up front …” He paused as the warmth of her physical and psychic blush reached him. The girl gave him a sudden toothache. “We’re stuck in a situation that is far too politically and ethically complicated for poor little soldiers like us to grasp,” Doc said, his deep voice pitched so that newbies and old-timers alike could all hear. The reminder never hurt. “This camp is run by noncombatants at the behest of the Hajim. We are housed with prisoners from other sides in this war. Alliances change so swiftly on the outside that none of us knows who’s fighting who at the moment. Don’t you agree, Lieutenant?”

  Zoe didn’t like his sarcastic tone, but when a superior officer asked a direct question, an answer was called for.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I see from your expression that you don’t agree at all.”

  Did she answer this or meekly put up with the dressing-down? She settled on, “Permission to crawl away and whimper, sir?”

  “Do you want to spoil my fun, Lieutenant?”

  “I would never want to do that, sir.”

  Laughter erupted around them, and Zoe realized she’d been so focused on Raven that for a few seconds she’d forgotten where she was.

  General Raven put his hands behind his back. “Is there anything else you’d like to add, Lieutenant?”

  Zoe supposed she could fill him in on the current political and military alignments, but this wasn’t the time or place to challenge the camp’s senior officer’s authority any further. She’d already made the stupid mistake of not keeping her head down and her mouth shut. She had to respect the chain of command. Plus, he was right. What she knew now would be irrelevant within a short time. She kept silent and at attention with her eyes facing front.

  Doc was aware of the lieutenant’s mental withdrawal. She was itching to talk, had plenty to say, but kept it to herself. Good decision. At least she hadn’t taken offense to his singling her out, or calling her pretty. Despite what she’d said about crawling and whimpering, she hadn’t really been embarrassed. She was an exotic blue bird all right.

  He probed deeper through her shielding, and caught the surface thought: I can best help him and our people by keeping my mouth shut.

  She thought he was going to be mean to them? Doc smiled. So she’d put herself in his way to shield the others—which he found cute, if kind of bossy. She obviously hadn’t been in the service for very long.

  Zoe saw him smile, and realized to her astonishment that the general was smiling at her. She’d never been smiled at by a brigadier general before.

  His expression quickly grew serious again and he addressed everyone. “We’re stuck here. In a hole in the ground on a desert planet, where the only ships in and out are transports from orbiting Hajim ships. Understood?” This last was bellowed with the expertise of a marine drill sergeant.

  “Yes, sir!” most of the prisoners, new and old, answered, Zoe among them.

  General Raven nodded and turned his attention to the newbies. “Time for your checkups. Then you’ll be assigned quarters.” He pointed. “Infirmary’s that way. Since I’m the only doctor on the premises, we’ll
no doubt be seeing each other again very soon.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “What?” Zoe looked up. “Sorry, sir.”

  She’d been staring at the smooth stone floor and hadn’t heard the big man enter the tiny examining room. She’d been dreading facing him again and must have been too deep in her own thoughts, because no one as big as the general could move silently.

  He moved closer, filling the space before her. “You’re shivering and rubbing your arms. Those are signs of being cold. But you’re not cold, are you?”

  Though his tone was gentle, his compelling voice had a deep effect on her. This was a man you answered, and it had nothing to do with his rank, or his size. He dominated the little room with more than the bulk of his muscled body.

  “It’s the darkness,” she told him.

  It was dim even here in the medical section, but not as much as out in the corridors. She dreaded going out there.

  Along the way across the plaza to the medical section she’d caught glimpses of the corridors that wound like giant snakes into the bowels of the place. There were lights strung in those hallways, but not very bright ones, and at far too distant intervals.

  “I’m not afraid of the dark—but I am intimidated.”

  “It’s understandable to be intimidated, and pretty common,” he reassured her. “But don’t lie to yourself about the fear.”

  “I’m not lying to myself,” she answered. At his coaxing smile, she added, “I don’t suppose I should try to lie to you, either.”

  “That’s right.”

  She forced herself to put her hands down flat on the table on either side of her. The goose bumps didn’t go away, even though she willed them to. “How can anyone stand this place? How can you?” she asked. He had a reassuring bedside manner and he caught her attention like no one she’d ever met before.

  He shrugged. “I’ve got better night vision than most, so I don’t find the dark all that oppressive. But I know it’s not good for humans to spend too much time in the dark. Or underground.”