Worlds Away Read Online Free Page A

used the glass wall as support and pulled herself to her
feet. Reaching up as high as she could, even standing on the tips of her toes,
she could not feel a ceiling.
    Keeping her hand firmly on the wall, she moved to her left
until she came to a corner. The adjoining wall was made of the same glass-like
material.
    Soon, Justine made a complete circuit of her cell. The room
she was in was a cube, each wall at least three meters. She assumed the ceiling
was at least a similar height. Although she couldn’t reach it, when she was
near one corner, she could feel a hiss of oxygen coming from above her.
    Was she a prisoner of the Kulsat? Was she on their ship? The
hull had been made of Kinemet. She’d sensed that before they abducted her.
There had to be some dampening around her, however, because she could not sense
any radiation.
    Alex, Michael, Kenny, Yaxche! Had they been abducted
as well? Killed?
    Her military training told her that there was a possibility
she would be tortured for information. She remembered the story Alex had told
them moments before the alien ship had appeared before them.
    The Kulsat wanted to find the legacy left behind by the
Grace, which they believed was in a pre-Emerged system. The Sentinel who had
left the message for Alex had told them the Kulsat would not hesitate to destroy
anything that got in their way.
    Justine knew they would question her about her home world:
where it was, what level of technology they had, and any other information that
would provide them with a tactical advantage. Now that they’d become aware of
humanity, it would only be a matter of time before the Kulsat investigated the
system.
    Earth would not stand a chance against a species who had the
level of technology the Kulsat possessed—and for all Justine knew, what she’d
seen might only be a small portion of their capabilities.
    During her four-year journey to the Centauri system, Justine
had been fully conscious in her quantized state. Something during the Kinemetic
conversion had altered her body’s chemistry in a permanent way.
    One of the other major side effects was that she retained
information. She could recall the text of every book she’d ever read. Her mind
was a storehouse of knowledge that an enemy would be eager to pillage.
    Again, she felt her heart rate increase. It wasn’t the
thought of torture that frightened her; it was the thought that she wouldn’t be
able to withstand their interrogation techniques. If they broke her, she would
essentially be giving up her entire world to the enemy. She didn’t know if she
could live with that … if she survived.
    She couldn’t let her imagination get the better of her. Her
isolation and the fear of the future were playing with her emotions. Willing
herself to be calm, she took a deep breath, and then another. With her back
against one of the walls, she sat down and waited.
    Although she’d been conscious for only a few minutes, she
had no idea how long it had been since she’d been abducted from the Ultio .
Hours? Days? For all she knew, they could have kept her in the quantized state
for years, and there would be no physical evidence to prove otherwise.
    She also did not know how long they planned to keep her in
the cell. Certainly, it was not set up for long-term confinement. Though she
was not looking forward to it, she knew whatever the Kulsat planned to do her,
she had to keep all the information stored in her mind from them.
    ∞
    She didn’t have to wait very long.
    Twelve minutes after she’d regained consciousness, she
became aware of another Kinemetic presence nearby.
    With her sight, she realized that the damping field
was not around her cell, which was in a very large room. There was a barrier
dividing the room itself from the rest of the ship.
    Alex? was her first thought. Had they captured him as
well? He was the only other human who had been through the Kinemetic process—though
his transformation had not been complete.
    When she’d