The ship looked like standard Verdant String construction, but he wasn’t familiar with the layout, and couldn’t guess what type of ship it was.
He assumed he and Velda were guests of the criminal enterprise that had once run Garmen and Lassa, the breakaway planets that had recently been forcibly wrenched back into the Verdant String’s fold. They called themselves the Core Companies, and they had lost their grip on the planets they’d once seen as their own fiefdom.
Mainly because of the crazy antics of the Core Companies themselves.
They had done deals with the Caruso when they’d run the breakaway planets, but that hadn’t gone so well, for either themselves or the Caruso. That they were persisting with the plan here on Aponi made no sense, unless someone had managed to explain away the problems they’d had before.
Some people just couldn’t let a bad idea go, if they were the ones who’d come up with it.
Ethan wouldn’t care, except he and Velda were caught up in it, now.
They reached the mess, and it turned out to be a relatively large room set close to the staff quarters. There were a few people eating together at a table to the right, but it was otherwise empty.
Given what he’d observed on the journey from the medbay to here, and the size of the room, Ethan guessed this was a mid-sized transport, rather than a big ship.
“Sit.” One of the guards pointed to a table.
When they were seated, a guard pointed to one of the people sitting at the occupied table.
“Melli, go get two meals.”
The others were watching, wide-eyed, and Melli stood up will ill grace. “Who are these two?”
“Hikers that stumbled across the mine. So Ritter’s got new people to experiment on, other than us. He wants them to eat first.”
Melli stared at them.
Ethan understood from what the med tech had said before that he’d tried his experiments on the crew first. At least they were all alive and looked none the worse for wear. But there was something in all their eyes, a pitying look, that worried him.
He wanted to get himself and Velda out of here.
Melli walked out of the room, through a door he’d noticed at the back, and when she returned, it was with two plates.
“Thank you,” Velda murmured as the plates were put in front of them.
Melli started at the sound of her voice, and stepped back quickly, and with a quick nod, left the mess.
At her exit, the others at the table she’d been sitting at cleared up, and shuffled out themselves.
It looked as if their arrival had brought down the mood.
“So, what are these experiments?” Ethan asked as he picked up his fork. Having his wrists tied together made eating difficult.
The guards didn’t answer.
“Please tell us.” Velda lifted her head, and tilted up to look at them. “It’s better to know, don’t you think? It’s hardly going to matter if we don’t like it, I’m getting the picture that we don’t have a choice.”
The female guard looked at them, glanced at her partner, and then lifted her shoulders. “No one knows what the experiments are. They blindfold you.”
Ethan could see how uncomfortable it made both guards. “Whatever it is, it’s too top secret for the crew to know?” he asked.
The guards shrugged.
“And you’ve all been through it?” Velda asked.
“Not all.”
But something in the way the guard answered made Ethan think the guards both had.
