Chapter One The Lugging Nut

Close to death, Jara Mackenzie is found by two brothers, Racer and Bayli. She and her brother, Davud are taken aboard their spaceship, the Lugging Nut

Update: Feb. 2013

This is the second book in the Mackenzie's Rock series.  The first book is Julee and the First Officer and the third book is Captain Mackenzie and the Last Chance Spaceship.  A book that is located in the Mackenzie universe is available at Amazon and other fine booksites.  The story in that book, Sarah's Spaceship Adventure, occurs some years after this story.

Copyright 2011

Jara Mackenzie Versus the Planet Marl

 

By Stan Morris

 

Chapter One

 

The Lugging Nut

 

I’m going to die, Jara said to herself.  She was resigned to her death, but she was still frightened by the process.  Worse, she would not be alive to take care of Davud.  Her only hope was that by dying, Davud might have a chance to stay alive long enough for Wendy or Julee to return.  She should not have stayed in the panic room, she thought, even though Julee had insisted.

Then fate intervened.

* * * * *

“Racer, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it,” Captain Tyre said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“This must be the near formation of a super rock,” was his excited brother’s response.

“How many rocks are in this clump?” Captain Tyre asked.

“It’s impossible to say for sure, Bayli,” Racer replied.  “Hundreds at least.  I can’t get a good scan beyond the outer layer.  The spectrum for rare dirt is positive though.  Somewhere in this clump is a valuable rock.”

“We have a launch window of opportunity,” Bayuspli Tyre noted.  “Shall we take a shuttle and have a look inside?”

“I’m not sure about that,” Racer replied uneasily.  “I’m getting a strange feeling here.”

Surprised, Racer’s brother turned to look at Racer.  His brother’s intuition was annoying but often correct.  Bayli had learned to not discount that intuition.

“Pirates?  Slavers?  Something else?” he asked his brother.

“Something else, I think, Bayli,” Racer answered.  “But I’m not sure.”

“When are you ever?” his brother muttered as he turned to look at the visual screen.

“Instead of the shuttle, can we take the Lugging Nut in closer?” Racer asked.

Bayli grimaced.  “That will take a lot of our thruster gas,” he pointed out.

“I think that we should.”

Bayli sighed.  “All right, we’ll go in for a short way.”

Slowly the Lugging Nut maneuvered through the clump of asteroids, keeping well away from any of the icy rocks.  Racer kept the scanners humming and inputting data into the ship’s rom.  After a few hours, Bayli informed his brother that it was time to leave.

“Can you take us up a little so that I can see over that big rock ahead?” Racer asked.

“All right, but this is it,” Bayli replied.  “We’re leaving.  We’ll study the data and return later when we have more time and energy to explore longer.”

The thrusters on the big freighter gently fired, and the huge vessel began to move toward north of the elliptic plane.  Racer continued to scan the data.  Then he frowned.

“Wait a click.  Let’s see the visual of that big rock,” he stated.

Bayli touched a pad and an image of the large rock appeared on their imaging screen.  For a second, both young men stared in silence at the picture.  But it was not the big asteroid on which they were focusing.  It was the curve of something much bigger behind the rock.  Without waiting for his brother’s request, Bayli altered slightly the direction of the ship’s movement.

“That’s impossible,” Racer whispered, “Anything that big should have cleared out the surrounding area of space long ago.  There are not even any huge craters that indicate where it was hit by other major rocks.”

What they were seeing was a globe.  Until now it had been hidden by other rocks all of which were the irregular shape of normal asteroids.   This was not normal.

“I’ll bring us in a little closer.”

“I’m getting a homing signal,” said Racer.  “Someone’s been here before us and not that long ago.”

“Is there a broadcasting claim?”

“No, there’s not,” Racer answered.

Puzzled, the brothers looked at each other.

“Why, by the Spirit, wouldn’t a broadcasting claim be initiated by whoever found this place?” Bayli asked.

“I take it back,” Racer exclaimed as he watched the incoming data on his rom.  “There is a claim, but it’s not being broadcast by the persons who set up the homing array.  It’s not recent.”

“Could it be a pirate port or a slaver base?” Bayli asked.

“I don’t know,” Racer replied.  “I’m not getting a bad feeling about this.  Wait a click.”  He watched his rom intently.

“Bayli, that sphere is loaded with ore.  Not just loaded, Bayli, heavily veined.  That has to be a mining claim.”

The brothers smiled at one another now.  The Lugging Nut was a huge freighter specially designed to carry ore to Marl.  And the globe with the rich lode did not appear to have been visited yet by more than one freighter.  If they could enter into a delivery contract with the owners of the globe, they might become some of the richest ore haulers in the Saif system.

“I want to swim in filthy Marl dollars,” laughed Racer as Bayli changed direction again and headed straight for the globe.

When they were in orbit around the asteroid, they began to search for the access route.  They found a borehole at the north pole of the huge rock, but it looked as if the hole was only an export route for the ore.  Bayli moved the ship lower in the elliptic and closer to the rock, until they spotted a large concrete protrusion sticking out into space.

“What’s that?” Racer asked.

“It looks like a block of concrete.”

“I’ll bet it’s a port, Bayli.  I’ll bet it’s designed to match with a shuttle’s tube.”

Bayli was undecided about what to do next.

“Are you getting anything in the scans, which suggests the presence of another ship?” he asked.

“No.  Just cold space and a lot of rocks.”

Bayli thought for a minute more, and then he decided. 

“I’ll match with the rock, close to that port, and then we’ll drop in the shuttle.”

Thirty minutes later, their shuttle tube connected easily with the concrete port.  They entered the rock and began to explore, making sure as they advanced, that they called out, so that anyone in the rock would know that they were approaching.  They kept their mic guns in their holsters, but kept the holster flaps unsnapped.  It soon became apparent that only a small portion of the rock had been excavated.

They saw no one as they made their way past large cave-like areas that had been mined, and then they rounded a curved section of a tunnel, and they found themselves staring at small scared boy who was holding a very deadly, trembling mic gun which was pointed at them.  The three males stared at each other in silence for a long moment, and then Bayli slowly sat down on the hard rock and crossed his legs.  The sandy haired boy moved his mic to cover Bayli while anxiously watching Racer.

“Ho,” the captain of the Lugging Nut said.  “I’m Bayli.”

“Ho,” replied the boy in a voice so low that it was barely audible.  “I’m Davud.  I’m not supposed to tell you my name.  I can’t talk to strangers.”  The boy spoke with a lisp because of a missing tooth.

Bayli nodded.  “Okay, that’s a good rule,” he said.  “Is there anyone else here that I can talk to?”

The boy looked around.  “I can’t tell you,” he answered.  “You might be a pirate or a slaver.”

Bayli paused and considered what to say next.

“Racer, are you carrying candy bars in your tool belt?” Bayli asked.

“No,” Racer replied too quickly.  Bayli waited.

“Oh, all right,” Racer grumbled and he reached into a pouch on his tool belt and pulled out two sweet bars.

Bayli tore off the wrapper from one of the bars and broke it in half.  He took a bite from one half.  The boy’s auburn eyes widened, and he licked his lips.  Silently Bayli held out the other half of the sweet bar.  Hesitantly, the boy took it and cautiously nibbled at a corner.  He swallowed, and then took a big bite.  To Racer’s dismay, his brother and the boy quickly consumed the sweet bar.  Then Bayli held up the other bar.

“Is anyone else hungry?” he asked.

The boy bobbed his small head up and down.

“We’re not supposed to teach kids to take candy from strangers,” Racer complained.

“We’ll have to make an exception in this case,” Bayli replied.  He repeated his question.

“Jara might be,” Davud answered.

“If you take us to Jara, I’ll give her this candy bar,” Bayli said.

Davud laid the mic gun on the floor and turned around. Bayli quickly retrieved the weapon and watched as the boy toddled to the rock wall behind him.  By holding his arms wide and standing on his toes, the child managed to insert two of his small fingers into small crevices in the rock.  There was a groaning sound, and then to the young spacers’ astonishment, a portion of the wall swung forward into a cavity behind the wall.  The brothers followed Davud into the cavity.  They were in a small room, and the first thing that caught their attention was a girl wearing a skinsuit and lying on a gas mattress.

“Jara’s sleeping,” Davud’s quivering voice informed them.  The boy went to the girl and shook her head.  “Jara, wake up.  Someone’s here.”  Davud’s voice was full of tears.  “Don’t go to Earth, Jara,” he pleaded.

“Do they have a medidoc listed in their rom?” Bayli asked, his voice rising as he studied the girl’s limp form.

Racer was already seated on a rock stool and studying a terminal embedded in the rock wall.  He began pounding furiously on the keyboard.

“It wouldn’t matter if they did,” Racer reported a few minutes later.  “There is not enough electricity to run anything outside of this room.  The nitrooxy is circulating and the scrubber is working and that’s about it.”

“We need to get her to our ship,” said Bayli.  He turned to Davud.  “Jara’s sick.”

Davud burst into tears.  Bayli picked him up in one arm and turned toward the entrance to the small room.

“I’ll get the shuttle ready,” Bayli called over his shoulder as he loped down the corridor while holding Davud.  “Bring the girl.  Hurry.”

“Huh?” Racer replied as he stared after his vanishing brother.

Racer stood and went to look at the girl’s limp form.  Then he put an arm under her shoulders and an arm under her knees and lifted her.  Feeling awkward because he was holding a young female, he carried the girl through the globe until they entered the shuttle.

Bayli was at the controls, and he blasted away from the rock as soon as Racer had secured himself and the girl with seat belts.  Racer watched in horrified fascination as his brother blasted the shuttle to the ship and into the shuttle bay as quickly as possible, with just a bare margin of safety.  He had seen his brother do this during practice runs but never in a real emergency.

“Take her to the medidoc,” Bayli ordered using his captain’s voice.  “I’m going back to the rock.  I’ll access their rom to see if I can find any medical records.”  Bayli did not bother to undo Davud’s seatbelt.  He took the boy with him.

Racer carried the girl to the medidoc which was in his room, and stripped off her skinsuit.  He gently laid the girl in the unit and covered her body with the medical cloth which was similar to the material used to make the skinsuits.  After closing and sealing the glass case, the young spacer pressed ‘start.’  The sensors on the medical cloth began to take readings, and the scanner began to scan the girl’s internal organs.  Within a few seconds, the holographic lights in the glass displayed, MALNOURISHMENT.  When the medidoc’s rom had finished analyzing the girl’s condition, the medical cloth tightened around her wrist, and a microneedle pushed into a vein on the girl.  Moments later, a nutriment solution began to drip into her body.

Racer studied the girl.  She was young, but her body showed that she was past puberty.  Her skin was lighter than his medium brown skin, and her hair was the shade of dark sienna. She was a little shorter than him.  As he watched her, Racer’s rom dinged.  It was his brother calling.

“I found the medical data and uploaded them to the ship’s rom,” Bayli reported.  “That should help the medidoc determine the precise amount of solution to give her.  How is she doing?”

“No report except for the diagnosis,” Racer replied.  “She’s suffering from malnourishment.  The doc poked her and started a drip, but it hasn’t reported anything else.”

“The med data indicated that there were at least three others on the rock at one time,” said Bayli.  “I’m uploading it now through my rom.  Davud showed me something else.”

“Yeah, what?”

“He showed me a room with an ore lifter and a humongous lode all ready to be pumped out of the rock,”

Racer whistled loudly.

“What in the name of the Spirit is going on here?” he asked, knowing that his brother knew as little as he.

“I don’t know, and we may never know the answer if that girl doesn’t live,”

“Doc’s not giving off any warnings, but it’s not giving out a moving time either.”

“I’ll be back in a bit.”

While Racer waited for Bayli and Davud to return, the holographic display on the glass abruptly changed.  Now it read, PATIENT STABILIZED.  INDUCING HEALING COMA.  Bayli and Davud entered the room shortly after the change.  When Davud saw his sister in the glass enclosure, he let out a cry of dismay.

“Jara!  What are you doing to Jara?” he demanded fiercely, and he ran to the case and stared at his unconscious sister.

“That’s a fixit machine,” Bayli explained.  “It fixes sick people.  They sleep while it’s fixing them.”

“Oh,” Davud replied.  He studied the spacers.  “Are you pirates?”

“No,” Bayli replied before his annoyed brother could respond.

Davud thought for a moment more.  “Are you slavers?” he asked.

Bayli held up a hand to ward off his brother who was steaming mad now.

“No, we’re not slavers.  We carry stuff.  We carry rocks in our spaceship,”

“Oh!”  Davud’s eyes lit up wisely.  “Like Wendy.  She carries rocks, too.”

“Where is Wendy, Davud?” Bayli asked.

The boy shrugged his shoulders.  “I don’t know.  She’s not home.  Julee’s not home, too.”

“Are you and Jara here alone?” Bayli asked.

“I’m not supposed to tell.”

Bayli nodded.  “When Jara wakes up, she can tell us.”

Davud’s frown suggested that he thought this to be a dubious possibility.  “She’s not supposed to.  Julee said so.  She’s bigger than Jara.”

“Is Julee older than Wendy?” Bayli asked.

Davud shook his head emphatically from side to side.

“No, Wendy is old, old, old,” he said.  “She’s a hundred.”

“Ah,” said Bayli.  “Wendy is the oldest.”  David nodded his agreement.

Bayli turned to Racer.  “Go back to the rock and see what you can get out of its rom.  I need to know what happened here.”

“We’re using a lot of gas,” Racer objected.

Bayli nodded.  “I know, and we can’t keep doing that.  See if they have a supply.  If they do, we’ll borrow some.”

While Racer returned to the rock. Bayli took Davud to the engine room and nuked him a bowl of hydroponic grain mixed with sugar grass and sweetened liquid protein.  The boy wolfed the meal down and looked around.  When Bayli suggested that Davud might like another bowl, the boy nodded eagerly.  Bayli nuked another bowl and set it before the little boy.  When the boy finished that bowl he sat back rubbed his tummy and sighed.

“Let’s go check on Jara,” Bayli suggested as he lifted the boy from the stool and lowered him to the grabbit.

Davud nodded.  To Bayli’s surprise, the boy lifted his small hand and took Bayli’s fingers.  Together they walked back to Racer’s room.  The girl had not moved, but the medidoc was displaying, ESTIMATE SEVEN STANDARD DAY CYCLES BEFORE COMPLETE RECOVERY in the glass display.  Davud was happy to see his sister, but Bayli’s mood sank.  He knew that there was no way the Lugging Nut could remain in orbit around this rock for seven days.  They had a schedule to meet and a launch window to make.  But there was no use telling that to Davud.

Racer returned soon after that.

“I started an upload, encrypted it, and linked it to the discovery broadcast, Captain,” he informed his brother.  “We don’t have to return to the rock anymore.  All their rom’s data will be fed to our ship’s rom.”

“Excellent work, crew.”

“Thanks, Captain,” his brother replied.  “What’s the word on the girl?”

“Not as excellent,” Bayli admitted.  “The Doc says she won’t be up for seven work cycles.”

“Seven work cycles?” Racer exclaimed.  “We can’t stay here that long.”

“No, we can’t,” his brother agreed.  “But we can’t leave these two behind either.  Did you get anything on Julee or Wendy?”

“Their last name is Mackenzie, and they are Jara’s sisters,” Racer reported.  “Wendra Mackenzie took their only spaceship, a really small freighter called ‘The Saving Graze’, and left for First Rock a few months ago.  She sent a gnote that the ship cracked a nozzle and is in drydock at First Rock, and that she was searching for a ship that would bring her back here.  There is a log entry that Jara left.  It says that the rock was boarded, and that Julee Mackenzie left with, or was taken by whoever boarded the rock.  That was a month ago.  It sounds like pirates because the boarders took their food supply also.  Jara and Davud have been surviving on what was left.”

“Maybe Jara has been giving Davud her share,” Bayli speculated.

Racer nodded.  “Trying to keep her brother alive.  And hoping that one of her sisters, probably Wendra would return.”

“That sounds about right.”

“So what are we going to do, Captain?”

Bayli grimaced.  Racer often chaffed at the reality that Bayli was the captain because he was the older brother, but that did not stop Racer from tossing the hard decisions over to Bayli whenever they arose.

“I’m thinking that we should load their ore and take it with us,” Bayli said.

Racer looked alarmed.  “We can’t do that,” he exclaimed.  “That’s pirating.”

“I don’t mean to keep it for ourselves, you twitch,” Bayli replied giving Racer an irritated glare.  “We take the girl and the boy to Marl, and we let them sell the ore.  That way, they’ll have some assets in case we can’t find their sisters.”

“Oh,” Racer nodded apologetically, understanding what his brother meant.  “I see.  That’s a good idea, Bayli.  Sorry.”

“Never mind,” Bayli muttered still annoyed that Racer would think for one moment that he would pirate someone else’s ore.  “Make this your last shuttle trip.  Figure out how to lift the ore out of the storage hole.  I’ll bring the Lugging Nut up to the pole. ”

While Racer studied the system that moved the ore through the tunnel that led to the north pole of the rock, Bayli moved the Lugging Nut until it was over the bore hole at the pole, and then he waited until Racer dinged the ship’s rom.

“They use magnetic electric canisters to move their ore,” Racer reported.  “A boring screw tears out the ore from the vein.  Most of the ore falls onto a magnetic mover belt that has fixed magnets beneath the section of the belt that’s closest to the screw.  The belt travels back through the tunnel and dumps the ore into canisters that are clamped to a lifter.  The platinum and other non-magnetic ores are vacuumed into the canisters through a couple of tubes that run along the side of the borer screw. Then they manually roll the lifter down to the tube leading to the surface and put the canister into an airlock at the bottom of the tube.  They seal and vacuum the lock, and then open the upper hatch.”

“How do they lift it?  With a gas charge?  Do they have the gas available?”

“Give me a click,” Racer replied impatiently.  “You should see an automatic electric cable coiler at the top but off to one side.  It has a gas thruster behind the head.  The thruster releases a puff of gas sending the iron cable head down to the canister.    A current is sent through the wire and that magnetizes the head, so the cable head attaches to the canister.  Then they start reeling it up.  Once the moving canister reaches the proper speed, they shut off the current and reel in the head.  The canister continues to lift until it passes out of the rock and into their ship where a hydraulic spring halts its progress, so the canister can be moved onto a rack.”

“Okay, I see the cable coiler,” said Bayli.  “Spirit!  Do they use spacesuits to operate it?”

“No, it can be operated from here.  But the Lugging Nut doesn’t have the same size racks.  You’re going to need strapping cable to secure the canisters.  Use the mech dummies to stop the canister movement, and then have them position the canisters around the locker until it’s about full, and then close and gas up the locker with nitrooxy.”

“I know how to load our lockers, crew,” Bayli said, irritated at his brother’s unnecessary instructions.

He took a moment to check on Davud who was playing with his safely discharged mic gun.  Bayli had Davud in the control room where he could be watched. He had strapped grabbit to the knees of Davud’s pants so the boy would not suddenly float into some important section of the room.

“Sorry, Captain,” Racer replied meekly, though Bayli suspected that his brother had a big grin on his face.

They were used to ribbing each other.  The brothers worked together in an easy, familiar fashion, carefully loading the canisters into the Lugging Nut.  When sleep cycle approached they stopped and secured their equipment.  They began again the following wake cycle, and by the mid meal of that cycle they had finished their work.

“I’m returning now,” Racer said as he headed toward the concrete port.

“Look for some toy’s,” Bayli instructed him.  “Davud is getting bored watching the videos from the CE.  He wants his toys.  There is a stuffed Marlen cuda somewhere.”

Sighing, Racer reversed his direction.  As he was gathering Davud’s toys, he remembered that the sister might need some feminine hygiene items, so he retrieved those items from the viver.  The Lugging Nut was an ore hauler not a consumer goods carrier, so he was fairly sure that they were not carrying any of those products.  When he was finished, he entered the shuttle and thrust away from the concrete port.  A short time later, he matched with the Lugging Nut and carefully connected to the shuttle dock.

“All secured and ready to leave,” he reported.

Bayli maneuvered away from the globe, and then he guided the ship through the myriad of smaller rocks.  Once they were clear of the rocks, Bayli took a solar placement reading and then directed the ship’s rom to fire the plasma drive.  Soon the ship was headed toward their next port of call.

The next stop would not be an unusual rock like the previous rock had been, but he was not looking forward to it.  Hell’s Auger was one of the last stops that Bayli cared to make, but the Lugging Nut was an ore hauler, and Hell’s Auger had ore.  His objection was that the owner used slaves to mine the ore, even though it was obvious that the newer boring systems could do the job just as cheaply as a slave force.

Like most Hoopers, Bayli hated slavery and detested slavers.  But his attitudes would not change the historical and economic realities that he was forced to live with.  Most of the older, large scale mining operations still used slaves as their work force, and if he wanted to haul ore, he often had to haul ore that had been mined by slaves.

He dinged Racer.  “How’s the girl?”

“She’s still asleep,” Racer reported.  “But the Doc shows her condition to be improving.  She should wake up in a few day cycles.”

“Can she be moved yet?”

“Not yet,” was his brother’s response.  “The doc wants to continue feeding her intravenously until she’s able to eat on her own without feeling like overeating.”

Bayli nodded to himself.  It was difficult explaining to Davud why his sister did not wake up, but at least the boy seemed to accept Bayli’s explanations.  Davud was still worried, but when he was with Bayli he often became distracted by his toys and by the comic graphics on the Common Entertainment System.

Since bringing Davud and Jara aboard the Lugging Nut, Bayli had made a point of searching the graph for the most popular children’s shows and downloading them.  It took a long time if the shows were downloaded from Marl, but many of the shows were cached on servers in the Hoop.  The downloads were an added expense, but so far Bayli had been unwilling to debit their cost against the ore the spacers had removed from the rock.  It just did not seem right.

Racer was in his room two days later when Jara Mackenzie woke.  The young man did not notice that the girl had awoken, because his attention was on the graph game he was playing.  The time lag, caused by the huge distances between players, made it difficult to become involved in multiplayer games, but the game had been cleverly designed to force individual actions during the time lags that occurred between the interactions of the widely separated players.  This was not always satisfactory when the time lag between players was great, but if the distance grew smaller, the game’s algorithm would gradually change the playing scheme to increase the interaction element of the game.  If the Lugging Nut passed a rock, the interaction between Racer and the players on that rock became faster and more exciting.

Jara became conscious but just barely.  Her eyes cracked open enough that she could see a little light.  She closed them again when the strain became too much.  She was aware enough to wonder where she was and to wonder what had happened to her.  She opened her eyes once more and saw the glass above her, but she did not understand the meaning of the glass.  Then she closed her eyes and slept again.

The next time she opened her eyes, the lights were dim.  She felt well enough to turn her head.  On one side was a metal wall that appeared to be a part of the enclosure in which she was laying.  On her other side, the wall was glass and she could see through it to the room beyond.  Jara saw a desk with a terminal and a chair.  There was something else in the room, but Jara was too high to see it clearly from her position in this contraption.

Jara slept again.  When she woke, it was still dark in the room.  She was able to lift her head this time.  She saw a bed and a lump in the bed hidden by a bed cover.  The lump moved a little, and she realized that the lump was a person.  That was alarming, but she wasn’t sure why.

“Davud,” she managed to whisper, and then she fell asleep again.

Racer had just awoken when there was a soft ping from the medidoc.  He got out of his bed and went to look at the girl beneath the glass enclosure.  She was sleeping easily.  When he reported this to his brother, he was told to remove her from the medidoc.

“Why?” he asked.  “She’s sleeping.”

“She might panic if she wakes in the doc,” Bayli explained.  “I don’t want her breaking anything while trying to get out.  Besides, she’s using energy unnecessarily now.  Put her in your bed.”

Racer frowned.  “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said into his rom, but once he disconnected he added, “Cheapflyer.”

Racer raised the glass lid on the medidoc and removed the medical cloth, after first making sure that the microneedles had properly retracted.  Then he slid one arm under the girl’s shoulders and one arm under her knees and lifted her.  When he went to lay the girl on his bed, he realized that he should have removed his covering first.  Awkwardly he braced the girl against a raised thigh and flipped over his bed covering with one hand.  Then he laid her down and flipped the bed covering over her.  Before he began his work cycle, he used the viver, radiated his body in the radiant cleaner, and dressed.  With a last glance at the sleeping girl, he headed to the control room to begin his work.

The next time Jara woke, it did not take long for her to become alert.  She was in a bed, and by the hum that she could hear through the walls, she knew that she was in a spaceship.  She also knew that this was not her sister’s spaceship.  She thought of her brother and fear and anxiety threatened for a moment to overwhelm her.  Where is Davud, she wondered.  Where am I?  She was not particularly alarmed to find herself unclothed, for nudity was relatively common in Hoop cultures, unlike the culture of the Marl, the only planet in the life zone of Saif.  Still, her lack of clothing did not make her feel any securer.

Jara heard a noise on the other side of the access panel. She quickly closed her eyes as someone entered the room.  She heard some noises she could not identify, and then she heard the distinct sound of someone removing a skinsuit.  The person lifted the bed covering on the side of the bed away from her and began to crawl into it.

She could not remain quiet.  She emitted a cry of alarm and jerked away from the person while holding the bed covering to her bare body.  She opened her eyes, and she stared at a young nude man who appeared to be a few years older than her.  His hair was cut short almost to his dark scalp.  The young man stared back at her, and then he spoke.

“You’re awake,” he said unnecessarily.

“Who are you?” Jara demanded.  “Where’s Davud.”  Tears threatened to spill down her cheeks.