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She jerked violently, throwing herself a couple of foot-tangling steps forward, trying desperately to get away from whatever it was that had sneaked up behind her. She spun around, nearly falling down in the process—

  She’d thought it might be another centaur like Fievj. She’d feared it might be something even more horrible.

  It was only a Wisp.

  Nicole staggered to her right, putting a hand against the wall to steady her rubbery knees. “Damn it,” she breathed. “Don’t do that.”

  The Wisp didn’t answer. But then, they never did.

  Nicole frowned. On the other hand, they never seemed to stand still, either. They were always on the move somewhere, with no apparent interest in the activities of the repair crews they were passing.

  In fact, now that Nicole thought about it, the only time she’d ever seen any of them standing still was when they’d grabbed her, Bungie, and Sam.

  Yet here this one was. Just standing there.

  Staring at her.

  With an effort, Nicole found her voice. “What do you want?” she asked.

  For a moment the Wisp held its position. Then, still without a word or gesture, it glided past Nicole and headed down the hallway. It reached the arena door and turned down the same cross-corridor Fievj had taken.

  Was it doing some sort of leisurely pursuit? Or was it on night duty, here to keep track of anyone roaming the Fyrantha’s hallways when they were supposed to be sleeping?

  Nicole took another deep breath. Her lungs, she reflected sourly, were certainly getting the full workout tonight. To say nothing of her heart.

  Or all the rest of her, for that matter. This evening had definitely been one giant meat grinder.

  Pushing herself away from the wall, she headed wearily toward the pump room where she’d left Bungie. She would pick up a few food bars from one of supply closets, make sure he was settled down for the night, and then head back to the hive.

  It had been one hell of a day. She could hardly wait to see what tomorrow would be like.

  seven

  Back in Philadelphia, Trake’s activities had often kept him out into the early hours of the morning. It was the schedule most of his friends also preferred, and when she was lucky Nicole had been allowed to tag along.

  Still, most of those late nights had been followed by equally late mornings, so she’d usually been able to get the necessary hours of sleep.

  Here on the Fyrantha, the standard routine was just the opposite: relatively early evenings, followed by relatively early mornings.

  The two schedules, Nicole discovered to her bleary-eyed regret, did not work together at all.

  She was slogging her way through breakfast, fighting to keep her eyelids open and noting how much harder it was to follow Jeff’s and Kahkitah’s morning chatter when she was half-asleep, when Sam arrived. He got his tray, but instead of going off to eat by himself as he usually did, he headed straight for Nicole’s table. He stopped at her side and nodded toward one of the unoccupied tables. “Over there,” he said curtly. “We need to talk.”

  “About what?” Jeff asked.

  “Something that’s not your business,” Sam said. “Nicole? Move it.”

  “Stay put,” Jeff told her, glowering up at Sam. “If he’s got something to say, he can say it to all of us.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Nicole said, hastily getting to her feet. Her fogged mind had finally figured out that the doctor wanted to talk about Bungie, and that was definitely a conversation she wanted to have in private. She scooped up her tray, followed Sam to his new table, and sat down beside him. “You want to make it a little more obvious?” she growled.

  “Make what obvious?” he growled back.

  “That we’ve got a secret,” she said. “Next time you want to draw attention, wave a flag or wear a sign or something.”

  “Yeah, I’ll try to remember that,” Sam said. “Your big stupid pal Bungie’s gone.”

  Nicole stared at him, her breakfast suddenly forgotten. “What are you talking about? Gone where?”

  “If I knew that, he wouldn’t be gone, would he?” Sam said with strained patience. “I went to check on him this morning, and he wasn’t there. Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know,” Nicole said, thinking hard. Bungie had been all right when she’d delivered the food bars to his hiding place, right after her run-in with—

  Her stomach tightened. “The centaur,” she said.

  “The what?”

  “The centaur,” Nicole repeated. “Fievj. One of the—I forget the name of his people. Lilly something. He found me while I was cleaning up the blood trail and wanted to know what we were doing in the arena.” She frowned. “Or maybe it was the Wisp—they both headed off the same direction. Maybe they’re working together.”

  Sam shook his head. “You’ve lost me. Start at the beginning.”

  Nicole gave him a quick summary of her back-to-back confrontations outside the testing arena. “I’d already cleaned up the blood, so I don’t know how they could have found him,” she said. “Maybe they’ve got some special gadgets that can tell where the blood was.”

  “Or else Bungie was swearing loud enough to be heard two corridors away,” Sam said, his voice suddenly thoughtful. “You say the Wisp showed up out of nowhere?”

  “Well, it must have showed up out of somewhere,” Nicole said. “I just don’t know where. I didn’t see any doors down that corridor. Though now that I think about it, there was another Wisp who disappeared down that way the first time Bungie and I went into the arena. So there must be a door somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said slowly. “Or maybe the teleport room is down that way.”

  Nicole frowned. “You don’t know where it is?” she asked. “Weren’t you watching when they took us from there to the medical center?”

  “No, because I wasn’t awake,” Sam said bitterly. “They knocked out all three of us. I was just thinking that if the Wisps can go from here to Earth, why can’t they also pop in and out of places around the ship?”

  Nicole turned that one over in her brain a couple of times. “Then why do we see them walking around at all?” she asked. “And why would they have to go down that one hallway to pop into the teleport room?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Sam demanded. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “Okay,” Nicole said, easing back from him a little. “Take it easy.”

  “I am taking it easy,” he snarled. “It’s your boyfriend who’s missing. Don’t you even care?”

  “Of course I care,” Nicole said. “And he’s not my boyfriend.”

  “He seems to think he is.”

  “I’m not responsible for what he thinks,” Nicole ground out. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him. As soon as I’ve got my team working, I’ll go look at the pump room and see if he left me a message. Was the spear-axe still there?”

  “It’s called a halberd,” Sam said with more strained patience. “A halberd. And no, it wasn’t. Wherever he went, he took it with him.”

  “Or whoever took him took it, too.”

  “Let’s hope the hell not,” Sam said darkly. “If they did—” He broke off. “Fine. Just make sure you let me know—immediately—if you come up with anything.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the door, then abruptly stood and picked up his tray. “See you later,” he added, and headed toward one of the other tables.

  Nicole frowned. What in the world—?

  “Nicole!” Plato’s voice boomed from the door. “Where are—? Oh, there you are. Grab your crew and head out to lefnizo sector.”

  Nicole turned. Plato was standing just inside the doorway, glowering in her direction. “Sure,” she said. “As soon as we’re done eating.”

  “As soon as we’re done, or as soon as you’re done?” Plato countered. “Looks to me like everyone else is finished.”

  Nicole glanced around the room. The rest of her crew were indeed just sitting and waiting. “I’ll be ready in a minut
e,” she promised, scooping up a spoonful of her breakfast and shoveling it into her mouth.

  “You’ll be ready now,” Plato said tartly. “Come on—everyone up. You’ve been falling behind schedule the last few days.”

  “That’s not Nicole’s fault,” Jeff said as he and the others stood up.

  “It’s not ours, either,” Carp seconded. “It’s that idiot Bungie. I warned you up front that he was going to screw up our fix rate.”

  “Maybe you’d rather I just lock him in his room?” Plato shot back.

  “I could live with that,” Carp said.

  “I’ll bet you could.” Plato looked around the room. “Where is he, anyway? Nicole?”

  “I haven’t seen him since last night,” she said, more or less truthfully.

  Plato snorted. “Idiot. Anyone see him, tell him the clock’s ticking and that he’d better get his butt out to lefnizo.” Turning, he strode out of the room.

  Jeff walked over to Nicole and picked up her tray. “Come on,” he said, starting for the door. “I’ll hold the tray—you can eat as we walk. We can bring the dishes back after work.”

  “Are we in that much of a hurry?” Nicole asked, scrambling to her feet to follow him. The rest of the team, she saw, were already filing out the door.

  “Probably,” Jeff said over his shoulder as he picked up his pace to catch up with them. “Every so often one of the Shipmasters suddenly shows up and tells Plato we’re falling behind and need to get hustling.”

  “But how are we supposed to go any faster?” Nicole objected. “I tell you everything the Fyrantha tells me. Once we finish, we’re done. Right?”

  “Plato obviously thinks we can do more,” Jeff said. “Maybe if we started working faster you’d get more instructions. I don’t know—it doesn’t make sense to me, either. But when they lean on Plato, he leans on us. That’s how it works.”

  “Sounds like back home,” Nicole muttered as she fell into step beside him and scooped up another spoonful. “Who are these Shipmasters, anyway? What do they look like?”

  “No idea,” Jeff said. “Far as I know, Plato’s the only one still here who’s ever seen them.”

  “What do you mean, still here?”

  Jeff shrugged. “The story is that the Shipmasters have been snatching people from Earth for a long time. Maybe as long as a few decades. Don’t know if I buy that myself, but that’s the story.”

  “You’d think the people would have been missed,” Nicole murmured. A few decades? How bad a shape was the Fyrantha in that it needed that much maintenance?

  And why her and Carp and Jeff, of all people? She’d already seen at least four types of aliens aboard the ship. Five, if you counted the Wisps. There must be hundreds of different types out there in the universe—surely someone would be better at this job than people from a primitive world like Earth.

  For that matter, why didn’t the Shipmasters do it themselves? They’d built the damn thing, hadn’t they? How come they couldn’t fix it?

  “Oh, and that other thing Plato said, about the clock ticking down?” Jeff continued. “That means Bungie’s running on what we call down time. Those are the days when you can’t do any work. Kind of like sick days and R and R lumped together. Each of us gets two days of that every month, plus our usual break days.”

  “Plato never said anything about that.”

  “That’s because he’d rather no one ever used down days unless they were sick,” Jeff explained. “You haven’t been, so I guess he didn’t bother to mention it.”

  “Ah,” Nicole said. “Plato does that a lot, doesn’t he? Forget to mention things, I mean. Or is it just me he doesn’t like?”

  “It’s not just you,” Jeff said. He sighed. “Look. You see what this place is like. We’re slaves here. The Shipmasters say they’ll take us home when the ship is all fixed, but no one believes that. There’s nothing to do except watch those nature shows or play whatever games we can cobble together. Plato has to keep us in line, because the Shipmasters keep him in line. There are no carrots here, just sticks.”

  “What?”

  “Carrots and sticks,” Jeff said. “Rewards and punishments. You hadn’t heard that term before?”

  Nicole winced. She never liked having to show her ignorance of things. “Probably. I just forgot. So all we’ve got is each other?”

  “Yeah, for whatever that’s worth,” Jeff said. “There are some friendships here. Not many. You try to get along with the rest of your crew and everybody else, but you’re more acquaintances than friends. That’s just the way it is.”

  “What about us?”

  He looked sideways at her. “What about us? I like you fine, but … this place really isn’t conducive to … anything more.”

  Nicole stared down the corridor at the backs of her teammates, a piece of her soul crumbling inside her. The Fyrantha was so much easier and safer than her old life that she’d managed to completely miss the real core of what things here were like.

  But now she saw. And as she thought back over the past few weeks, all her more or less fond memories of the crew’s time together began to crumble to ash. Everyone made an effort, but she could see now how hollow it all was. “Yeah,” she murmured. “That sucks.”

  “It sucks big-time,” Jeff agreed. “It’s a drab existence. But it is existence. And we were mostly used to it.” He paused. “But then you came along. You, Sam, and especially Bungie.”

  “And Bungie’s the one Plato doesn’t like?”

  “Bungie’s the one who scares him spitless,” Jeff said grimly. “I don’t know what the Shipmasters have over him—he doesn’t talk about it with any of us grunt workers—but he seems deathly afraid that Bungie’s going to do something to ruin things for everyone.”

  Nicole snorted out a curse. “You mean for all us slaves?”

  “Yeah, I get what you’re saying,” Jeff said. “But be careful what you wish for. Things are never so bad they can’t get worse. And to be honest, you’re not helping things poking around that arena.”

  “You telling me I shouldn’t go back?”

  “I think Plato’s made that pretty clear.”

  “I suppose,” Nicole said. “So what happens to Bungie if he runs down the clock?”

  Jeff made a face. “If he runs out of down time before he runs out of AWOL, he stops eating.”

  Nicole winced. Even with Sam’s magic healing cream there was no way Bungie was going to be up and working in less than a week. “I thought the Fyrantha had plenty of food,” she murmured.

  “It does,” Jeff confirmed. “That’s Plato’s way of keeping people from loafing or taking a day off just for the hell of it.”

  “No exceptions?” Nicole asked.

  “Sure, but they’re mostly if you’re injured on the job,” Jeff said. “If that happens you get to stay on full rations until the docs say you’re well enough to go back to work. But somehow, I doubt that’s what happened to Bungie.” He looked sideways at her again. “And don’t tell him that part, okay? He strikes me as the type who might whack his leg with a hammer just to get a few days off. No offense.”

  “No offense,” Nicole assured him. “Actually, that does sound like him.”

  “So if you see him you might want to tell him that he’s looking at a forced diet if he doesn’t come back soon,” Jeff said. “You finished?”

  Nicole scraped one last bite from the bowl. “Yes,” she said, laying the spoon on the tray. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He paused long enough to set the tray down at the side of the hallway, then continued on after Carp and the others. “We’ll pick it up on the way back.”

  The past two days had been spent working on pump rooms and electrical switching areas in the lefnizo sector, not too far from the arena door and the pump room where Nicole had left Bungie.

  Her main concern earlier that morning had been that he might accidentally make enough noise that one of the team would hear him. Now, her main fear as they all gathere
d by the sector’s equipment closet was that he’d taken it into his head to move to more spacious or comfortable living quarters even closer to the day’s work area. Or worse, that he’d managed to pick the exact room they were about to work on.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Carp said sarcastically.

  Nicole blinked, silently cursing herself. Still half-asleep, and with Bungie’s vanishing act weighing on her mind, she was having serious trouble slipping into her normal routine. “Sorry,” she said. She pulled out her inhaler and gave herself a good jolt.

  The electrical locus in lefnizo-two-six-six-nine has short circuits in the two-nine junction, the three-one junction, and the one-one-nine-seven rectifier simplex …

  Listening with half her attention, Nicole relayed the Fyrantha’s instructions. It looked like another of what Jeff called twofers: two entirely separate jobs the team would have to split up to deal with. Still, though Carp was clearly the best mechanic of the group, Levi ran a decent enough second, and Jeff and Duncan were better than either of the other two on straight electronics repair jobs. Today’s twofer looked like one mechanical and one mostly electrical job, which should let the crew split along its usual lines.

  And with the two groups out of sight of each other, Nicole should have a chance to slip off to the pump room and see if she could figure out what had happened to Bungie. Idly, she wondered how Carp would handle things if the Fyrantha started giving them three jobs per day instead of two.

  —and you are needed in Arena Four. Proceed to the lefnizo-four Door Three immediately.

  Nicole’s musings vanished in a violent twitch. What in the world—?

  And then, suddenly, her fogged brain caught up with her.

  It was Bungie. It had to be. He must have watched her punch in the reset code yesterday and then sneaked back into the arena last night after she left him. Possibly looking for a more secure hiding place; more likely still hoping to get hold of one of those greenfire guns they’d seen their first time inside. The Fyrantha had spotted him, realized he wasn’t supposed to be there, and was calling on Nicole to get him out.

  Or else he’d gone in there and gotten himself killed, and the ship wanted her to dispose of the body.