Dragon Pearl(51)
“Jang,” I whispered into the air, “can you come with me and keep a lookout? We might learn something from the prisoners in the brig.”
He didn’t materialize or speak, but a cold breeze touched my cheek, as if in agreement.
Emboldened, I walked quickly toward the brig. I only slowed when I felt the chill of Jang’s presence again, cutting bone-deep this time. That was all the warning I needed.
I emerged into the corridor just as two soldiers marched by—a man and a woman. They scarcely gave me a glance. I was going to need their help to get into the brig. I focused my Charm on them and flashed a smile at the man.
“Yes?” he said, grinning goofily at me as if I was his new best friend. Which, in a sense, I was.
“I’m supposed to do some toilet-scrubbing in the brig,” I said in a woeful voice, “but I can’t remember the codes to get in there.”
Might as well put all my latrine-duty experience to good use, I thought.
My magic was more wobbly than I’d reckoned on, though, because I still wasn’t feeling well. “Why would they schedule someone to do chores in the middle of an interrogation?” the other soldier demanded.
Yikes. I invented an emergency and directed more magic at her, even though my head ached. “There was a problem with the plumbing,” I said, “and the interrogators were pretty upset about it.” I lifted my hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, I’m just a cadet. They don’t tell me everything.”
The nice thing about Charm was that I didn’t need to come up with a great excuse, just one good enough to give the magic something to fix on. A small voice in my head suggested that I stop relying on my magic to solve problems for me, because at some point all of this was going to catch up to me in a bad way. But I didn’t see any alternative right then.
The two soldiers exchanged glances. I held my breath and tried to act unhappy about the mythical chore, rather than anxious that they would catch me lying. Then the woman said, “It’s four-four-one-two. Better you than me, Cadet.”
“Thank you,” I said, and continued to the elevator. Since no one was in there with me, I sagged in relief. Jun, I reminded myself. You’re doing this for Jun, and Jang.
But I hadn’t seen Jun in nearly two years, and Jang was already dead, and in the meantime I was becoming less and less certain of what I was doing.
The elevator chimed, prompting me to exit on the appropriate deck. I squared my shoulders and walked to the door, then punched in the code. The world swam before me as the door opened. I heard voices yelling: the interrogators.
Jang’s ghost-wind swirled against me, a warning to be cautious.
In the holos I’d watched, starship brigs were full of dramatic shadows where the villains crouched with their eyes gleaming threateningly. Sometimes on the cell walls you could catch a glimpse of scratched graffiti, which offered clues to what would happen next. Often patches of fungus grew on the deck.
Here, however, bright light sliced out of the doorway. I slipped through, drawn to the voices. Their words sounded muffled at first. As I tiptoed closer, I heard them more clearly, and I froze.
“Pox spirits.”
Sweat trickled down my back, and my palms felt unpleasantly clammy. Were the prisoners sick? I hoped there was a medic down here, preferably one who was also a shaman, in case our guests had brought any vengeful disease spirits with them.
I had entered an observation chamber, where a pair of crew members with data-slates was looking through an immense window into a well-lit interrogation room just beyond. I cloaked myself with Charm so I would blend into the back wall. Through the window, which I assumed was a one-way mirror so prisoners couldn’t see out, I saw an interrogator and a stooped man sitting across from each other at a table. Two other people, a man and a woman, slouched behind the bars of separate cells on the left side of the interrogation room. The man at the table and the other two captives wore matching plain dun shirts and trousers. I wasn’t sure whether those were their uniforms or our prisoner outfits. And without rank tabs to go by, I didn’t know which one of them was the most important.
The person being questioned, weasel-faced and of stringy build, met the interrogator’s gaze squarely. He didn’t look frightened, just resigned. His words came through a speaker in the observation room. “You don’t want to go down there,” he was saying. “No one has magic powerful enough to deal with that many ghosts. And even if you did somehow manage to get past them, there’s a chance the pox spirits still hold a grudge.”
Something about his manner of speaking bothered me. I mulled it over while eavesdropping, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“That’s not your concern,” the interrogator said. While her voice didn’t waver, I caught a faint whiff of fear from her, even through the window. She had to be really worried.
“What killed all those colonists generations ago was no ordinary plague,” the man said. “The Fourth Colony was one of the flowers of the Thousand Worlds. They had doctors and magicians and shamans as skilled as anyone you’d find in the core worlds today, but none of them could save the colonists after they neglected to appease the spirits.”
Now I knew what troubled me about his voice. Watching the holos had led me to believe that all pirates were ruffians who solved their problems by shooting them, and my experience on the Red Azalea had borne that out. But this prisoner spoke with the measured accents of a scholar. He sounded like the narrator of some of the recorded history lectures my mother had forced me to listen to as part of my schooling.