INCINERATOR

Location: Unknown

"Holy—! Sarge... it's alive!"

The exclamation pierced through the fog that cocooned Micah's mind. Distantly, it registered that he was lying on his back, somewhere cool and dark. With effort, Micah pushed against the mental haze that clung to him like a sticky web. His limbs felt leaden, his eyes refused to open.

A second voice joined the first.

"Of course it's alive," the sergeant responded. "It's biomatter. Living tissues and shit."

The sergeant's gruff tone reminded Micah of his drill instructor back at OCS—the kind of person who didn't suffer fools or idiot officer candidates.

The sergeant wasn't done. "Just do what the eggheads in research ordered and burn it." He barked the order, his voice growing louder as he neared Micah's location. "Or do I need to shove my boot up your ass to get you to do your job?"

"But I have neural activity on scan," the first man protested. "That's a person in there, Sarge, not biomatter. Already sent a ping to let Doc Janus know." Agitation was replaced by urgency as his voice drew near. "Hey, grab the emergency kit by the door, willya? I've got to get him out of there."

The sergeant sighed. "Dammit, corpsman. Why'd you have to go and run a scan?" His tone was a mixture of annoyed and tired. "Couldn't you have just done as Janus ordered? Now I gotta do as he ordered."

Those words stirred a vague sense of unease in Micah. It turned to alarm when he heard a firearm being unholstered. He fought to throw off his stupor, to reach out, call a warning.

"Sarge? What… wait—" The corpsman's words cut off at the sound of a directed energy weapon being discharged. Micah's gut clenched; he knew what that meant.

"Sorry about that," the sergeant muttered. Footfalls closed the distance as he stopped in front of the dead corpsman. "You were a good kid, too."

There was a grunt, followed by a soft scraping noise, and annoyance returned to the sergeant's voice.

"Well, hell. Now I have two bodies to deal with. You damn well better be good for the credits, Janus," the man muttered, "or I might have to pay your pogue ass a visit, too."

Janus. Micah forced his mind to latch onto the name. Not that he was in any position to share—

In a moment of clarity, he recalled the evanescent wave nanocircuitry wired into his neural net. It was something every Alliance citizen received when they came of age.

Micah's wire had been upgraded when he joined the Geminate Navy. The implant was military-issued and encrypted, allowing him to connect to any secured network. He reached mentally for it, cursing his drug-induced fog. His thoughts were clumsy, his implant a slippery and elusive thing.

A thundering scrape of metal above his head interrupted his attempt to connect with the dormant unit. His brain nudged at him, the sound vaguely familiar. Something landed with a dull thump overhead.

The corpsman's body.

A spike of adrenaline cleared his thoughts, and he realized what his subconscious mind had been trying to tell him. He knew now where he was being held: inside an incinerator.

His limbs twitched as he strained to overthrow his paralysis. He had to get out before the thing fired up.

Easy there. You'll be fine.

The thought startled him, seeming to come from nowhere, but he'd run out of time to analyze.

With a deafening roar, the incinerator fired up. All around him, the inferno raged, heat building in the darkness until he knew no more.

* * *

"Shit. He's not dead."

Micah jolted back to awareness as the words brought memory flooding back. He was still supine, still in complete darkness. He was as surprised as the voice sounded to find himself alive.

From what he could tell, his situation hadn't changed, although he seemed to have a clearer head this time around. He had no idea how long he'd been out, but he remained unable to move, to speak, or even to open his eyes.

The voice sounded again. It was the sergeant from before.

"Now what do we do? Janus said we need to scuttle all the evidence before fifteen hundred hours."

His query was met with a curt response.

"Then kill him again, soldier. And this time, check your work."

The new voice was female, her words chilling. They galvanized Micah; he fought for mobility, to no avail.

The sound of soft footsteps heralded her departure, followed by the sergeant's softly muttered, "Damned Akkadian. I didn't sign up for this shit."

The man began to move toward Micah's location, but was brought up short when a resounding clang sounded in the distance. The noise elicited a string of curses from the man, the words fading with distance as he ran to investigate.

In the next instant, Micah felt a slight breeze caress his skin. Within seconds, his mind was much more alert than it had been mere minutes before, when he'd clawed his way to consciousness. His arm bumped against a smooth surface and he froze, arrested by the knowledge that he could now move.

This was a significant improvement.

He turned his attention to his surroundings—to finding a way out of his confinement. The cushion of chill air around his face suggested close quarters. He reached a cautious hand up and met resistance, ten centimeters above him. The cold leaching from it into his palm suggested some type of metal.

He pressed his other hand beside the first, then slid both apart, using the movement to measure the space that held him. Another twenty centimeters and both hands stopped, having found the sides of his prison.

It suddenly registered that he was cold.

Where the hell am I? he thought.

There was the briefest of pauses, and then an answer sounded inside his head.

Base Morgue. Level -10. deGrasse Torus. Luyten's Star.

The words jolted him. These weren't his thoughts. He knew this with certainty, but how he knew escaped him, since they hadn't come across his wire. After almost two decades living with the unit embedded in his skull, he'd become used to feeling the presence of the neural implant. It was always there in the back of his mind, like subliminal white noise.

Until now. Its silence was glaring, and yet a voice was unmistakably there.

Deal with it later, Case, he told himself. Survival first.

He ran his hands blindly along the seam of his prison walls, seeking a way out. His fingers stilled momentarily as it came to him that his wire wasn't his only nonfunctioning implant. His optical augments weren't working properly, either.

He should have been able to scan the area on all EM bands, the coolness of the metal above him registering in muted blues and purples. Instead, he was enveloped in an unrelenting blackness.

Now would be a good time to leave.

With this newly transmitted thought came movement. The darkness split above his head, broken by a shaft of light. His eyes slitted shut in response to the sudden brightness. The light played down his torso as the platform on which he lay slid out of the wall—a wall of identical drawers, each the exact dimension of the space that confined him.

And then it hit him. He wasn't just in the base's morgue, as the voice had indicated. He was on a freaking slab in the morgue. In one of its self-contained storage units, each of which could be individually incinerated.

Which explains why I'm still alive, he realized. Somehow my unit must have malfunctioned.

He turned his head, eyes darting about the room. He was alone, the sergeant nowhere to be seen. Expelling a breath, Micah sat up. The chill air hit his naked flesh as he assessed his condition.

Get dressed.

The mental words were punctuated by the sound of a locker opening against the far wall. Micah gripped the side of the platform, the sharpness of its metal edge grounding him as he considered what to do.

Shaking his head, he hopped down from the cold, steel surface. As he strode toward the locker that sat invitingly open, thanks to his mysterious benefactor, he reviewed what he could recall of deGrasse. He knew the morgue was on the military side of the torus. He'd been here once before, to…

His mind hit a blank wall.

Frustrated, he grabbed the boots that sat atop a folded flight suit, dropping them to the deck beside his bare feet. He reached for the clothing but then froze, fingers wrapped around the fabric, when he saw the weapons the suit had hidden. A pulsed energy sidearm lay beside a sheathed tanto knife. The first was a civilized weapon; the second held a lethal edge.

Micah's eyes narrowed as he studied the blade. The tanto's carbyne edge could likely cut into bulkhead, though he'd never had occasion to test its capabilities. In the skilled hands of an operator, the weapon would be swift, efficient, and brutal.

An unspoken mental nudge spurred him back into movement. He shrugged into the standard issue flight suit, stripped of both rank and nametag.

He left the tanto for now. Grabbing the sidearm, he clipped it and the spare batteries to his belt, then shoved his feet into the boots, tucking his pant legs into the tops and sealing them.

He stood—then froze, attention arrested by his reflection in a nearby mirror. His face…

It looked wrong, somehow. He raised a hand, running it through his dark, short-cropped hair in confusion, stiffening as realization came to him.

Micah was left-handed, and yet he'd reached with his right. His hair, which stubbornly grew in one direction, now fell to the wrong side. He leaned closer, noting other subtle irregularities in the face that had stared back at him for the past thirty-five years.

What the—?

They're coming. Leave now if you want to live.

The words were followed by a panel sliding open in a nearby bulkhead. Across the room, Micah heard the pounding of feet in the passageway leading to the morgue. The sergeant was returning, and he wasn't alone.

Leave. Now.

There was a sense of urgency to the words that propelled him forward. He spun, lunged for the tanto blade. Palming it, he slammed the locker door closed and turned to face the yawning blackness.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded, slipping though the panel. It slid shut behind him, darkness enveloping him once more.

An image appeared in his head, a mental construct of a lab he knew he'd never seen and yet somehow recognized. Abruptly, he realized the feeling of familiarity wasn't coming from him. It emanated from the same place as the foreign thoughts that he now understood were being pushed to him from… someone else.

Your destination. Hurry.

"Who are you?" he repeated as he followed the mental nudge that urged him forward.

There was a pause. The response, when it came, had him reaching for the bulkhead to support himself, his mind spinning in confusion.

I am you.