Out of This World

Chapter Eighteen

By the time they were two days out from Psi Cassiopeia Two, Pel understood why the original complement aboard the Princess had wanted to land there in the first place.

Space travel was boring.

It was very nearly as boring as, though far more comfortable than, sitting out in the desert waiting for the aircar to come back.

Obviously, anything that broke the monotony would be welcome, even if it was just a stopover somewhere like Town-which Pel, angrily remembering Ted’s words, had to admit probably did resemble the Pittsburgh bus station more than it did anything else.

So much for the romance and adventure of being in another universe.

The fact that none of them had so much as a toothbrush in the way of supplies didn’t help any. Having to either wear the same clothes constantly or borrow ill-fitting substitutes from condescending strangers was a constant irritation for them all; Amy and Susan had wound up with spare stewardess uniforms, but there hadn’t been enough of those to go around even for the women, so the crew and the original passengers had made donations to the poor, pitiful refugees.

“Condescending” was the politest word Pel could apply to their attitude. He would have paid his entire fortune for a well-packed suitcase-preferably one with a couple of paperbacks in it. A nice trashy novel would have been just right for passing the time.

Pel had initially assumed that the ship would have some sort of library, or a theater of some sort-just a VCR hooked to a TV would have been wonderful. This assumption had not panned out; some of the paying passengers had brought their own books, but there was no library, and none of the people native to this universe seemed to understand what he was talking about when he mentioned “TV,” or “video,” or “VCR.”

Movies they understood, films, motion pictures-though Pel had the impression that they only knew silents, that the Empire hadn’t yet developed talkies. In any case, there weren’t any films on board.

And books were too bulky. Keeping a good selection would have been, a steward told him, completely impractical; far better to let the passengers bring their own and swap.

None of the passengers seemed interested in simply loaning books to the refugees, and of course, the refugees had nothing to offer in trade.

This was not to say that there was nothing at all on board for entertainment; on the contrary, the Princess was, the stewards assured him, fully equipped in that regard. They carried a plentiful supply of playing cards, poker chips, backgammon boards, dice, and other gaming devices.

Pel was not quite ready to resort to such mundane pastimes-for one thing, he had no money with him, which really made poker and other gambling games rather pointless. He had never much liked backgammon, never even learned craps.

There were other card games, and he knew he would probably resort to them shortly, but for now he was still hoping to find something more exotic. He didn’t want to be like those people who go to Europe and eat at McDonald’s; he wanted to sample the local culture.

Unfortunately, the local culture was not cooperating. The native passengers, after the incident in the aft salon, avoided him even more than they avoided the other refugees. The crew spoke to him, but kept relations strictly businesslike and formal.

Nancy and Rachel had found something to occupy their time-caring for the two little people, who were growing weaker and weaker with no visible cause for their illness. The two of them were in constant pain now, and unable to move, and Nancy had taken it upon herself to stay with them and tend them as best she could, feeding them thin soup and aspirin, sponging off the heavy perspiration that bathed them, and talking to them soothingly. Rachel was acting as her mother’s messenger, running whatever errands needed to be run.

That was all very well, and in fact Pel was proud to see it, but there wasn’t room or need for another person in the storage compartment the little people occupied. That left him unable to help out, and without the company of his wife and daughter.

The others all seemed to have found ways to stay busy, as well-except for Ted, and Pel was avoiding him.

There wasn’t even anything to see out the ports; to the stern the stars had red-shifted into invisibility, while ahead they had blue-shifted into areas of the spectrum hazardous enough that the ports were kept closed.

This left him sufficiently desperate for entertainment to stand around asking stupid questions of the crew.

“How does anti-gravity work, anyway?” he said casually.

The navigator looked up from the periscope, annoyed. “What?” he asked.

Pel repeated his question.

“How the hell should I know?” the navigator snarled.

“Well, I just thought…” Pel began. “I mean, I don’t know anything about it, not even schoolboy stuff, we don’t have it where I come from.”

The navigator returned to the eyepiece, but said, “It’s simple enough. Matter absorbs gravitons, so that particles are drawn toward each other by the streams of gravitons flowing into them-that’s gravity, right?”

Pel made a noise of agreement, but was in fact bewildered; that was not at all the explanation he remembered from high school physics.

But then, why should it be? This was another universe, with its own laws.

“Well, anti-gravity makes solid matter spit the gravitons back out again, that’s all,” the navigator explained patiently, never moving his eyes from the periscope. “So it counteracts gravity. And if we make it spit the gravitons out all in one direction, we can use it like a rocket, only of course it’s far more powerful.”

“Oh,” Pel said.

It would appear, he thought, that gravity did not work here in anything like the way it did back home. No wonder Ruthless had dropped like a rock.

“How do you get matter to emit gravitons?” he asked.

The navigator let out an exasperated sigh and looked up from the lens. “You compress it until the space it occupies collapses, of course,” he said. “You take a lump of uranium, or something else really massive, and run a vibratory current through it to destabilize it, and then you apply pressure.”

Pel started to ask another question, then saw the navigator’s expression and thought better of it. “Thanks,” he said.

He started to turn away, and then something else occurred to him. “If we’re traveling faster than light,” he asked, “how can you see to navigate?”

“I’m not seeing anything,” the navigator said. “I’m reading the gravity fields.”

“Oh,” Pel said.

The whole thing sounded crazy. That bit about making the space an object occupied collapse sounded a little like black hole theory, but the rest of the explanation didn’t, and how would creating a miniature black hole result in anti- gravity? That didn’t make any sense.

It was clear that he had come upon this other universe’s version of quantum physics, and that he wasn’t going to make sense of it any time soon. He wandered off, baffled.

The navigator had at least answered him with more than monosyllables, however, so he drifted back an hour or two later and hovered nearby, trying to think of something intelligent to ask.

He was still working on the phrasing of a question about telling one star from another when the spectra had shifted when the navigator said, “Shit.”

This was almost the first time Pel had heard any citizen of the Galactic Empire use foul language. He blinked in surprise.

The navigator adjusted something and stared into the eyepiece, then repeated, somewhat louder, “Shit!”

“What is it?” Pel asked.

The navigator didn’t answer; instead he turned and pushed Pel aside as he reached for a button and pushed it hard. A bell chimed somewhere.

That done, the crewman looked at Pel as if only now discovering his presence.

“You’d better get to your cabin,” he said. “And lock the door. And if you have any weapons, get them.”

“Why?” Pel asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” the navigator said, “not for sure, but we’re slowing down. It looks like something’s got a gravity beam on us.”

“A gravity beam?” Pel was getting tired of feeling stupid and lost and asking dumb questions, but he couldn’t help himself. “What’s that mean?”

“It means someone’s slowing us down and pulling us in.”

Pel blinked. “It does?”

The navigator made a disgusted noise and pushed the button again. “Yes, it does,” he said.

“How does that work, though?”

“Where the hell are they?” the navigator asked, not speaking to Pel.

“Who?”

“The captain. It works… well, I told you we spit out a stream of gravitons from our main drive, right?”

Pel nodded.

“Well, you can spot that beam pretty easily, and track where it came from, and then if you fire a faster, more powerful beam back along the same line, it cancels out our main drive-and in fact…”

A buzzer sounded, and a distant, dull thump reverberated through the flooring beneath Pel’s feet. He felt suddenly lighter; his gorge rose in his throat, and his ears hurt.

“Damn!” the crewman said. “In fact, it can blow out the drive completely, which it just did, and then we’re just coasting until we can get it running again, and that gravity beam can reel us in like a fish on a line.”

Pel started to say something, and almost choked; the crewman glanced up and asked, “Feeling light-headed?”

Pel nodded.

“With the drive blown we don’t even have the full on-board gravity,” the man explained. “We’re on emergency power. Most ships don’t even have this sort of back-up, but the Princess is top of the line-on an ordinary ship you’d be drifting a foot off the floor right about now. And those bastards would probably like that just fine; we’d be even more helpless.”

“But why?” Pel asked, with his composure back but still utterly baffled, more confused than worried. “Who would want to do that?”

“Pirates,” the navigator said.

And then the alarms went off, and an officer chased Pel out of the room.

* * * *

Prossie had been asleep, afloat in the pleasant current of dreams, both her own and others she soaked up from her surroundings. She had picked up some wonderful imagery from somewhere nearby, from one of the non-telepaths aboard Emerald Princess, and had tangled it into the warm, comforting network of her own family. A faint touch of the pain and hurt and heat and worry from the forward storage locker had wormed its way into her sleeping thoughts, but so far it was just a little background noise, and had not turned the dreams into nightmares.

Then the alarm bell sounded, and she snapped awake, as much from the psychic shock of a score of other minds being startled as from the actual physical sound.

She felt the disciplined worry of the crew, the confusion of passengers, but the rule was “Don’t snoop,” so she didn’t snoop. She called Captain Cahn for orders.

He didn’t know what was going on, and latched onto her light contact.

“Find out,” he told her.

She thought a question.

“Just find out,” he replied. “No rules to get in the way until we know.”

She dropped the contact and reached out elsewhere. She found Captain Gifford, found the navigator-

And woke up Carrie, back at Base One, with her mental shout. Captain Cahn heard it, too.

Then she stopped worrying about anybody else for the next few minutes, as she found her uniform and began carefully searching for anything else that would mark her for what she was, an Imperial telepath. She had to hide it all, or better still, destroy it; had to remove all the evidence.

Because everybody knew what rebels and pirates and anyone else who feared the Empire did to telepaths. No outlaw could risk, even for a moment, having someone around who could relay their very thoughts to the Imperial military.

If the pirates reached Emerald Princess and spotted her for a telepath, killing her would be the first thing they did.

They wouldn’t even take the time to rape her first.

* * * *

Pel stood in the passageway, dazed, for several minutes, watching crewmen hurrying back and forth, most of them looking worried and determined and purposeful. A few looked angry, or frightened, or as dazed as Pel, instead. He kept himself pressed flat against one wall, out of the way.

After a time it occurred to him that there were probably better places to be. The navigator had told him to go to his cabin; that sounded like a good idea.

Pirates-had the man been serious?

Something was obviously wrong, and the navigator certainly hadn’t sounded as if he were joking, but pirates?

Space pirates?

That sounded so silly, like something out of a low-budget, straight-to-video movie, that Pel found it hard to believe it could be serious. Pirates?

Pirates were a childhood game, something out of kids’ adventure stories or old films. They were an absurd anachronism, a word that brought an image of peglegs and parrots and that ridiculous accent. Captain Hook and Errol Flynn and “Arr, me buckos”-those were pirates.

Pel smiled uneasily as he began inching toward his cabin, still keeping his back to the wall and staying out of the way of oncoming traffic in either direction. Pirates?

Ted wouldn’t believe in any pirates- but then, he didn’t believe in any of this. Raven and the rest from that world probably wouldn’t have any trouble with the concept, though, and Rachel might think it was exciting-or scary.

And he didn’t know about the other Earth people, Nancy and Amy and Susan…

Susan.

Susan Nguyen.

Pel grimaced. She probably wouldn’t think there was anything funny or unbelievable about pirates at all. Pel had no idea how she had gotten to the U.S.-she might even be native-born, really-but she was obviously Vietnamese by ancestry, and plenty of Vietnamese refugees knew first-hand that pirates weren’t just something out of old adventure stories.

And Pel and his family were refugees now, like those boat people…

Suddenly Pel didn’t see anything particularly amusing about the idea of space pirates any more. He picked up his pace.

The cabin was empty, and he remembered belatedly that Nancy would still be tending to Grummetty and Alella. He turned back and headed that way.

At the door of the storage locker he found Rachel sitting against the bulkhead to one side, arms wrapped around her knees and her head down. She didn’t stir when he approached.

That wasn’t how she would react to the alarms, or to talk about pirates; Pel knew his daughter better than that.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her.

She shook her head and didn’t answer, didn’t look up.

“Rachel?”

She refused to speak, refused to move.

The locker door opened and Nancy peered out. “Oh, Pel,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Yeah,” Pel said. “What’s wrong?” He belatedly remembered why Nancy was there in the first place. “Are they worse?” he asked.

Nancy nodded. “Grummetty’s dead,” she said. “About ten minutes ago.” Her voice was unsteady.

Pel felt his own throat drying and tightening at the news.

“Oh,” he said helplessly. “I’m sorry.” He paused for a second or two, out of respect for the little man, and then said, “Listen, the ship’s in trouble.” He couldn’t bring himself to mention pirates, not yet; it still sounded stupid.

“I heard the bells,” Nancy said. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Pel said, “but the navigator said we’re under some kind of attack-something that shuts down the anti-gravity.”

“Is it Shadow?” Nancy asked. “Is it sending more of those creatures?”

Pel had not even thought of that; what if it was Shadow that was responsible, and not pirates?

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think it could be the creatures, because they can’t live in this universe any more than Grummetty could, but it could be people working for Shadow, I guess.”

“Are they shooting at us? At the ship, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Pel repeated. “Listen, I really don’t know much of anything, but we are under some kind of attack, and the navigator said we should get to our cabins and lock the doors and wait there.”

Nancy shook her head. “I can’t leave Alella,” she said. “You take Rachel, and I’ll stay here.”

Pel chewed on his lower lip, considering, and then nodded. “Come on, Rae,” he said. “Let’s get back to our room.”

Rachel looked up unhappily. “I want Harvey,” she said.

“I know you do,” Pel said, “but he’s not here. Now, come on, and we can cuddle up together, if you like.”

“Is Grummetty really dead?”

“If your mother says so,” Pel said, “then I’m afraid he is. Your mom’s pretty reliable about these things.”

“I don’t want him to be dead.”

An officer trotted past, almost running. Something was buzzing loudly somewhere forward.

A storybook hero would find some way to make himself useful, some way to save the ship, but Pel was no storybook hero, he knew that more certainly than ever. Right now, dealing with Rachel seemed much more important than saving the ship. He knelt down and spoke softly to his daughter.

“I don’t either, Rae, but we have to go. Right now. Come on!” He reached over and took her hand, and then stood up again. She allowed herself to be pulled upright, and followed him, unresisting, as he led her by the hand back to their cabin.

There, they sat on the bed and waited.

* * * *

Amy had decided to make one more attempt to convince Ted that he was awake, and that everything that had happened was real.

For one thing, she wanted to be sure that she was convinced herself; for another, she thought Ted might be useful somehow if he once started taking things seriously.

She had been leading the conversation gently in that direction, listening to Ted ramble on about how everyone misunderstood what lawyers really did, when the alarm bells sounded. She looked up, startled.

“I wonder what that is?” she asked.

Ted shrugged, looked around, and saw nothing different about the aft salon. “I guess I haven’t decided yet,” he said.

Amy frowned.

A crewman ran through, without so much as glancing at them. The two Earthpeople watched him go.

“Or maybe we should go see,” Ted said, getting to his feet, “just what I’ve come up with this time.”

* * * *

The tocsin roused Raven from a doze. He frowned; he had slept far too much and too easily, of late. Perhaps the strain of these strange adventures in fantastic lands was telling upon him, and were it so it would be sorry news indeed; he would need all his powers when he led attacks against Shadow.

“A bell?” he asked no one in specific. “Wherefore does it ring?”

“I know not,” Stoddard replied. “Perchance the lieutenant can say?”

“An he be here,” Raven agreed.

“It’s an alarm,” Drummond said, hurriedly pulling on a boot. “I don’t know why.”

“An alarm?” Raven said, swinging his feet to the floor and sitting upright. “Be the ship endangered?”

“I said I don’t know,” Drummond snarled. “I’ll go find out.” He stood, boots on.

“Shall we accompany?”

Drummond hesitated, thinking.

“No,” he said at last. “No, you two stay here. And don’t cause any trouble. You’re valuable; if there’s some kind of fight we don’t want you getting yourselves killed.”

“I’ve no fear to give my life in a good cause,” Raven said. “Better to die waging war ‘gainst evil than to live in an evil world.”

“This isn’t any war against evil,” Drummond said. “It’s probably some stupid mix-up. You just stay out of trouble.”

“I reserve, sir, the right to judge my best role myself,” Raven retorted. “I am no child.”

“Fine,” Drummond said. “Fine. Just stay out of it this time, though, okay?”

Then he was gone, the door closing behind him.

“’Tis not our fight,” Stoddard said. “’Tis not our world, so how could be?”

Raven looked at his sword, leaning against the nightstand, but did not reach for it. “Shadow has its agents in this realm, as in ours,” he said, settling back. “But ‘til we know more, best to bide.”

* * * *

Somehow Pel had assumed, from what the navigator had said, that the pirates, whoever they were, would be arriving, however they would arrive, within a few minutes, but instead he and Rachel sat on the bed, hugging each other and whispering quietly, for what seemed like hours. Nothing happened; no one burst in, or even knocked; there were no loud noises, no screams, no explosions, no sign that anything out of the ordinary was going on. A few times they heard footsteps passing the door, sometimes running, sometimes not.

Rachel fell asleep after perhaps a quarter of an hour, and Pel tucked her into bed. Then he sat, alone, waiting.

And still nothing happened.

He wished fervently for a book to read, or a TV to watch, or something to pass the time. A deck of cards to play solitaire would have been a taste of heaven, and he wished he had taken one when he had the chance.

His watch still wasn’t working; after some thought he had concluded that as near as he could figure, liquid crystals didn’t exist in Imperial space, and probably couldn’t exist. He wasn’t sure about chip technology in general, whether it was impossible or just hadn’t yet been developed.

Whatever the exact reasons, he had no way to tell how long he sat there, watching Rachel sleep and waiting for the pirates. It was very inconsiderate, he decided, to not provide every cabin with a working clock.

He lay back on the bed, trying to think of what he should be doing and reaching no conclusions at all. Nothing that he came up with seemed very important, and they all involved leaving the room, and that meant leaving Rachel alone, which seemed like a very bad idea.

* * * *

Amy had reluctantly followed Ted to the forward lounge, where they watched the confusion and worry. Three times, crewmen ordered them to leave, to go back to their cabins, but Ted simply ignored them-he didn’t need to obey orders from figments of his imagination. Amy followed his lead; she wanted to see what was happening, not be cooped up in the suite with Susan and Elani and Prossie.

Nobody had time to argue with them, or force them, and they stayed in the lounge.

They stayed there right up until the pirates boarded the Princess and burst in through the airlock.

Ted looked at the grey-uniformed men, at the heavy blasters they held, and shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I don’t like this part. It’s nasty, and I don’t want any more of that. The monsters were bad enough.”

“On the floor,” a man in a grey coverall ordered.

Ted ignored the order; instead he stepped up and reached out for the man’s blaster. “Give me that,” he said.

“He’s crazy,” someone called.

Ted’s hand started to close on the barrel of the blaster, and the man holding it said, “I’ll give it to you, all right.”

* * * *

A dream it’s all a dream it’s a fucking dream it can’t be real.

The pain blazed through the side of his head, screaming agony that ripped at his consciousness.

It’s a dream.

It has to be a dream.

But a dream can’t hurt like this.

I must have fallen out of bed, that’s what happened, I fell out of bed and hit my head on the floor, and it hurts like hell, why can’t I wake up? God, is it a concussion or something?

Why can’t I wake up?

As he fell, as he struggled to remain conscious, Ted remembered an old story called “The Knight’s Tale,” from a book of puzzles, a book called Mazes and Labyrinths, a story about a mysterious death. The man in the story had dreamed his own death, and had died in his sleep as a result.

Could that happen? Could he really die from this stupid interminable dream?

No, the knight had lied. And he couldn’t possibly sleep through pain like this. He would wake up any second now, he knew he would wake up, and the dream would be over.

Please, God, it would be over!

* * * *

“Get away from there,” someone ordered.

Nancy looked up, startled.

“What is that, anyway?” the man in the grey coverall demanded. He was standing in the doorway of the storage area with a blaster in his hand.

“Alella,” Nancy said. “She’s dead, too.”

The man looked at the little corpse.

“What is that, some kind of freak? Or just a doll?”

“She’s… she was a little person,” Nancy said.

“You sure it’s dead?”

Nancy just stared at him; the inside of her chest seemed hollow and aching.

“Whatever, just leave it and come out of there.”

Nancy didn’t move.

“Damn it, bitch! Get out here!”

In some part of her mind Nancy knew that she should do what the man in grey wanted; he had that gun, and he was getting angry, and it wouldn’t do Alella or Grummetty any good to linger here.

That logical, sensible part of her was overwhelmed, though, by the grief and emptiness she felt, and she still didn’t move.

With a wordless growl, the man reached in and grabbed her by the hair, one-handed, the other hand keeping the blaster at ready. He tightened his grip until, even through her grief, she felt the pain; a small gasp escaped her.

Then he dragged her out into the corridor.

Exhausted from her long hours tending the little people and from all the cumulative strain of being swept out of her own world, awash in despair, she never did find the strength to scream.

* * * *

When the door opened, Raven expected to see Lieutenant Drummond enter. By the time he saw the stranger’s face it was too late.

“Touch that sword and I’ll blow your fucking head off,” the man in gray told him.

Stoddard glanced at Raven, who gave a quick negative jerk of the head. The weapon in the stranger’s hand would not have worked back in the real world, nor in Pel Brown’s Earth, but this ship sailed in the Empire’s skies, where such devices were effective indeed.

“Surely, sir,” Raven answered. “Whatever please you.”

Stoddard accepted this hint, and made no move for his weapons.

“Get out here.” The man gestured with his blaster.

“Certes. Might I ask, though, whether Lieutenant Drummond…”

“No questions.”

Raven shrugged and obeyed.

He had no fear of any fight, but unarmed men against one of the Empire’s fire-weapons was a senseless waste. He would heed, for the present, Lieutenant Drummond’s advice. Perhaps this was some jurisdictional squabble between Imperial factions, or a disagreement over the succession to the throne, but in any case, this gray-clad fellow with the rude speech gave no impression of being one of Shadow’s monsters. Surely, in time, all would be made clear, and when matters were settled Raven and his companions would be free.

And perhaps whatever faction this person represented would be more eager to fight Shadow than had been Captain Cahn and his crew.

* * * *

Pel was awakened by a pounding on the door; it was only when he started up that he realized he had dozed off.

He turned the knob, struck once again by the incongruity of ordinary wooden doors, with knobs and hinges, aboard a spaceship.

The door was shoved open, the knob yanking out of his hand before he could react, and he found himself facing three unfamiliar men in grey uniforms. Two of them held drawn blasters; one needed a shave.

“Out,” one of them ordered.

“What…” Pel began.

“Out,” the man repeated, gesturing with his weapon.

Pel reluctantly stepped out into the passageway, then turned and said, “My daughter…”

“That her?” One of the men pointed at Rachel, still asleep.

“Yes,” Pel said.

“Get her.”

Pel obeyed. He crossed quickly to the cot and stooped over her, then stood again, lifting the girl to his shoulder. She protested sleepily, then flopped against him, her arms around his neck.

“Out,” came the order.

Nervously, Pel returned to the corridor.

“That way,” he was told, and one of the men herded him forward, toward the lounge, while the others vanished into the cabin.

Farther aft, down the passage, Pel could see armed men at other cabin doors, and ahead he could see a knot of people.

In the lounge he found the ship’s doctor bent over Ted Deranian, who lay on the floor, arms flung out to either side. One side of Ted’s head was…

Pel couldn’t see it clearly. He couldn’t bring himself to look at it, but he couldn’t look away, either. There was black, and red, wet and shining, and the hair was gone. He was glad Rachel was asleep, and not able to see it.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” someone said.

“He tried to play hero,” Amy answered. “When they came charging in here Ted tried to take away one of their guns, and the man with the gun shot him. He didn’t have time to aim, though, so he’s still alive.” She made a choked little noise, apparently suppressing a hysterical giggle, and said, “I mean, the man didn’t have time to aim, so Ted’s still alive.”

Pel realized that the doctor was feeling Ted’s chest, rather than his head, but before he could ask anything, Amy added, “They kicked him after he fell; we think a couple of ribs are broken.”

“Was anyone else hurt?” Pel looked around, checking who was present.

There was Susan, standing quietly, and Prossie Thorpe, and Soorn, and Valadrakul. There were three, four, five of the Princess’s original passengers, and three of her crew, in addition to the doctor.

“Where’s Nancy?” Pel asked.

Amy turned and glanced about, worried. “I don’t know,” she said. “Wasn’t she with you?”

“No,” Pel said. “She stayed with Alella.”

Raven and Stoddard emerged from the corridor behind Pel, their swords gone, a blaster leveled at their backs. Beyond them Pel could see more of the original passengers, and farther back Captain Cahn and two of his crewmen.

“All right,” one of the grey-clad men ordered, “through there. Let’s go.” He pointed toward the airlock.

“What about my wife?” Pel called.

“Don’t worry about it,” another man ordered him. “Just move.”

Pel started to say something, and the man shoved a blaster under his nose with one hand, pointing to the airlock with the other. “Move,” he said.

Pel moved.