The flight was uneventful. The soldiers remained helmeted; she saw no faces. Strapped into the small space of the shuttle there was very little to see at all.
Katja had never been in a ship of this sort. On her homeworld, of course, planet-to-orbit ships were launched by long, high-speed rail; on Metsenia, the only other world she had visited before her recent adventures, they launched like planes. Neither of these methods, however, were designed to maximize the speed of launch. This ship, however, was clearly designed to land and launch as swiftly as possible. There was the turbulent pressure of intense acceleration, liking sliding down a rocky hill in a barrel, then, suddenly it was like the barrel slid off the hill into the air, and suddenly all was weightless.
Katja had never been weightless, either; Sylven ships, adapted from basic Ylfae technology, reduced the feel of transition into space. The difference could be felt; one often had a sense of lightness. But you never stopped feeling down and up, and the transition from the natural vertical to the artificial was smooth. To start feeling weightlessness and drift was a new sensation, almost like a change of bodies. It was not a sensation she liked, and it make her nauseous. Later she was glad it did not go beyond the feeling of nausea; but at the time, the nausea was bad enough. Fortunately, some machine hummed and the sanity of the world was slowly restored.
Under her breath she said part of the sanalassa of Sickness:
Sickness I know, a malevolent wind,
daughter of death and seeping ill.
Death itself was splashed upon a stone,
re-formed like quicksilver, whole again,
but drops remained, like mist on cold steel...
The sick feeling in the stomach remained, but it was no longer at the front of her mind. The greatest part of her discomfort consisted in nothing more than being crammed into a small box with a significant number of tightly packed armored men, one on each side of her and men directly across the way.
There were several jolts as the ship either changed its course or pushed itself up into a higher orbit, and by this point Katja was singularly unimpressed by the quality of Samthyrian technology; she felt like she was strapped to a leaf in gusting winds. Then there was a long period that seemed like nothing happened, and she was beginning to feel like her legs would atrophy if she did not stand up and walk around when there was a voice from an intercom: "Prepare for quarantine docking," it said in Samthyrian.
After the bumpy flight, Katja expected the docking to be equally crude, but it went quite smoothly; there was no sensation at all before an announcement indicated that it had finished.
She was unceremoniously raised to her feet and pushed through the ship, through a hatchway, and then down a short corridor snugly fitting the hatchway. Down the short corridor, white-walled and blank, she went, through another hatchway, into a small decontamination room.
"Stand still," said the soldier who was doing all the guiding. So she stood still, at gunpoint, while the machines in the room did unspecified things.
A small box came out of a wall near her; it had a slot in it. "Put your hand in the slot," the soldier said.
Katja did not feel like putting her hand in a mystery slot, but she did not feel like being shot, either. She put her hand in the slot. Something grabbed her hand, and while she struggled against, she felt a sharp, quick prick in her finger; it continued to hold her hand, and then there was another pain, not quite like a prick, and it let it go. Katja stared at her hand for a moment; there was no blood, but by the slowly ebbing heartbeat-rhythmed pain she knew a blood sample had been taken.
A green light flashed, and she was moved down another short corridor into a room, dimly lit but as white-walled and blank as the corridors had been. A door was closed behind her. She was alone.
The trip from ship to cell had raised her heartrate and left her breathless. It took a moment for her nerves to settle down, and when she did, she leaned back against one of the blank, white walls, and with a very large sigh, sank down the wall to the floor.
She sat there, she knew not how long, until a slight cramping in the legs motivated her to stand and look around. At first glance, with nothing but white meeting the eye, the room had seemed just a smooth white box, but now that her wits were more about her, she found it to have much more texture. There were handholds in various places on the wall, no doubt for low-gravity situations, as with any properly designed spaceship. There were also small recesses that could be pressed. Pressing one led to a bed slowly folding outward from the wall; pressing another did the same with a vacuum toilet; pressing a third revealed what she at first thought was a drawer but which in fact turned out to be a shallow sink with a transparent top and an optional vacuum function, also for low-gravity situations. The sink sprayed a fine mist, pure water if one button was pressed and something water-like but soapy-smelling if another button was pressed.
On one side of the room, opposite that through which she had entered, she found a door, almost but not quite seamlessly flush with the wall, nearly invisible. There was, of course, no way to open it from this side. A small square on the door turned out to have the texture of glass. It was white and opaque, but Katja suspected electrically so; pressing a button or flipping a switch somewhere would likely make it transparent.
After all the exploration of the small space, Katja knew no more about the intentions of her captors, about the fate in store for her, about how she might fulfill her missions given that her first step in doing so had resulted her being locked in a room. Perhaps she had already failed. Perhaps she would be locked in this room for the rest of her life. Perhaps the rest of her life would be quite short. There was no way at that point to know for sure. But all the time exploring had been time that she had spent not worrying about such things, and as such she regarded it as time well spent. With nothing else to do, she lay down on the bed and tried, not altogether successfully, to take up some more time with sleep.
She lay there, staring at the ceiling, for a very long time.
At some point, while she was half-dozing, not quite asleep and yet without a waking presence of mind, she heard a noise. It took some time for it to register, but when she opened her eyes and looked for the source, she found a slot had opened in the door, like a drawer, and in the little drawer was a tray of food. More exploration: a nasty-tasting meaty bar that was also unfortunately spicy-hot, a stick of string cheese, and a cylinder that turned out to be a sort of spray for water, once she had spent several minutes figuring out how it worked and squirting herself in the face in the process. It was the worst meal she had had in a very long time.
She hummed a song from the Venahana. She recited to herself long sections of Sylevid. She ran through all the suuvo she could remember. She had not had her daily suvo since she had left the Island, and decided that this needed to change. So she settled on one:
Wise answers only patience can give;
for true answers one must first learn all.
It seemed as good a fit for her situation as any.
She slept and was fed again, then slept again. In all this time she had seen no one, spoken to no one. Somehow it seemed almost worse than having a gun pointed at her, and she wondered for a while if the Tanaver and Samar had somehow made a mistake. The doubt and worry were perhaps more dangerous than anything else she had experienced in this universe.
[1405]
