She closed her eyes and tried to summon all of her willpower to focus on what she had learned of the ship, but her thoughts inevitably returned to the promises of a Galleon mate, of being disciplined by him, of submitting to his needs in exchange for his protection... maybe it wasn’t so bad...
She was just beginning to drift off, when she heard the first of many terrible noises.
A metal clang, accompanied by an abrupt shift of everything in the room to the side of her quarters with the door to the bathroom. Her body slid, not very rapidly, to the side of her bed, and it felt almost as if the centrifugal gravity had suddenly started to come from her left side, and not from the floor.
She was pressed to the side by the force, which started to feel like she was in a vehicle moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Her room was bare, but a blanket from her bed had slipped down to the floor and was now being gently tugged to the left, where it seemed to behave like an animal and curl up against the wall.
Another loud crash, and high-pitched sounds like something moving at high speed and cutting through air sounded around her. The light around her window turned red and began to pulse, and above her—on what was the ceiling, once—a bright, flashing light began to wink.
Then all light disappeared, except for the starlight outside her window. It was black inside her room, terrifyingly so, and she could see nothing.
The pressure on her side had eased, and staring at the only light she could see she felt suddenly, instantly disoriented. The stars seemed to be moving, and at the same time her position next to the window appeared to be changing, but it was hard to tell which was which.
Her mind was just getting to the idea that she was floating, and that the gravity was gone, when the stars whipped across the window and began to roll enough to make her stomach feel queasy. Just as she got her head around what that could mean, she was slammed against the wall again, this time harder.
And then, as the stars began to spin faster and faster, the pull to the side became stronger and stronger. Outside her door, she heard banging and yelling, even though it was nearly soundproof.
She had a terrifying thought: they were caught in the orbit of an enormous planet. She’d heard of these accidents before. Ships in unexplored regions of the system, underestimating the mass of an unknown planet, were pulled into orbit and could not escape the pull, plunging into what was usually a very dense, molten core of metal.
She closed her eyes, certain that she was about to die. The pressure increased, and she felt that she was going to be crushed against the wall. The slamming and crashing outside her door continued, but the yelling died away slowly.
She held her breath, though she couldn’t say why, as if it would stop her from dying or seeing her death. Perhaps that was why she was still conscious when the forces pressing her to the wall began to abate, and she was only drifting off, out of consciousness, when the gravity shifted abruptly back to the floor, where it should have been.
The shift startled her into taking a breath, and her vision promptly narrowed, closed in by blackness and colorful stars. She decided she was going to die but didn’t have time to have a feeling about it one way or the other. And then everything was black.
* * *
But she wasn’t dead.
Her eyelids felt heavy, and she was as sleepy as she had felt in a long time, but it was cold, and her shoulder felt uncomfortable, so she was forced to muster the strength to open her eyes.
The red light had returned, as well as the bright flash. Sounds came to her as though through water at first: a high-pitched alarm, the pounding of footsteps. Smells reached her next: she couldn’t recognize them, but they were scorched and portended bad things.
Emergency.
The voice accompanying the alarms was not speaking Anglais, but it didn’t have to: humanoids might be different in some respects all over the galaxy, but they had somehow all evolved to express emergencies in the same tone of voice.
Emergency.
Lana was jolted awake by a rush of adrenaline. She sat up, even though her body was sore and her head felt as though it had been stuffed with foam.Stop and think, she told herself.
She quickly replayed the events that had taken place just before she had blacked out. The shifts in gravity, the loss of power... maybe they were having a malfunction.
Her heart began to beat rapidly, and a cool thrill traveled through her chest. This was it. This was her chance. Some kind of terrible malfunction had occurred, and she would be able to take advantage of the chaos to escape.
Shivering, she got to her feet. She was momentarily surprised that she felt lighter when she rose, and she quickly ascertained that, whatever was happening, the centrifugal gravity had been affected. Maybe thatwasthe malfunction, and it would be fixed momentarily.
She considered sitting back down, resigning herself to the inevitable.
But no, she had totry.
This was the only chance she was ever going to get.
She walked to the door, trying to adjust her gait to the changed pull of gravity, which let her bound like a gazelle rather than walking. She placed a hand against the exit key, fully expecting nothing to happen except for perhaps an alarm to reach the commander. She certainly wasn’t expecting the door to open immediately, or the corridor to be filled with a red light.
She leaned her head out cautiously.
A Pratean guard was stumbling along the corridor, hands against the wall as though he had been blinded. He turned toward her door, his big, animal eyes blinking and staring in her direction, at a slightly off angle. It was as though he were staring into darkness... until the flashing light winked, and his eyes jerked in her direction. A growl escaped him, and he lunged toward her, hands in front of him, eyes evidently unseeing.
