Read Online The Mind Field by Blaze Ward - Free Book Online

“Orders?”

Part Six
    Javier stood outside the hatch and took a deep breath. Ilan and the male gun bunny had been left in engineering to clean things up. He had the three women with him, four with Suvi, as he contemplated the little brass plaque hung at eyeball level.
    Cryonics Lab.
    To Sykora and Hajna and Sascha, just words. They weren’t trained in this sort of thing. Hell, almost nobody was, these days. The technology was used so much less today than it used to be. Mostly for medical purposes, in a total catastrophe. Ships didn’t need it, as life support systems were so much better now and Jumpdrives could hop so much farther in one go.
    He took a second deep breath.
    “Why are you nervous, Aritza?” the amazon asked, her voice almost blowing warm air in his ear.
    He did not, quite, jump out of his skin. He did turn and look her in the eye, from a distance of about eight centimeters. Biting her seemed rude. Kissing her, more so. Both would be equal amounts of surprise as payback. Maybe tomorrow.
    “What’s on the other side of this door,” he said, just loud enough for the three to hear him.
    Safeties clicked off in the ominous silence.
    “Oh, put them away,” he half–snarled. “There’s nothing in there to worry you. You’re the bogeyman, remember?”
    That nearly got him punched. By more than just Sykora.
    They did holster the weapons, though, so Javier could relax.
    Suvi took up watch above and behind, where she could see down the long hallway and over any of the bodies in the way. She was prepared, in case she needed to rescue him. Again.
    Javier turned back to the door and placed his palm flat on the access plate. Given the circumstances, he could see someone actually locking it, but that would be an oversight, not a design feature.
    The hatch clicked back a centimeter into the room and slid out of the way on powerful pneumatic sledges.
    Javier reached out a hand and caught Sykora before she could complete her step forward.
    “Not yet,” he whispered, almost intimately as she rounded on him. “Let it breathe.”
    “Breathe?” she asked, almost as quiet.
    “It has been closed up for a very long time. The air is likely to be a little foul with volatile trace elements.”
    “What’s in there, Javier?” she asked, turning her head to scan the room beyond.
    Javier? We’re back to Javier, are we?
    “Not what,” he said, a little louder, of the other two to hear as well. “Who.”
    “Who?” That got her head spun all the way back around to face him. A hand was on the pommel of the pistol, ready to draw and fire.
    Javier leaned forward and sniffed carefully at the breeze blowing softly into his face. A little rank. Extremely dry. Cold, where the rest of the ship had been merely cool. Right about what he had expected, from the things he had read, once upon a time.
    Some days, he hated being right.
    Javier walked forward instead of answering, one hand still on Sykora’s arm, but more as a guide than a restraint. As if he could actually stop a woman like that if she set her mind to something.
    She trailed along anyway, half a step behind him, probably prepared to throw him into the dragon’s maw to give her the half–second she would need to draw and kill it. It was how she thought.
    The room was larger than he had expected. Or rather, the walls were where they should be, but less space was taken up.
    Based on the size of the ship, he had expected two, or possibly three big boxes in here. Sarcophagi. Coffins.
    There was only one, tucked back into the corner, although he could see the power couplings for two more coming out of the walls.
    One was enough.
    Javier walked to it quietly, hearing the slight hum of the device in the still air, feeling it in his feet when he got close and stood over it.
    Ancient kings on the Homeworld had been buried like this. Big black box, three meters or so long, two wide, one tall. This was metal instead of stone, and the inscriptions on the sides were medical