Page 4 of Mutant Mine

The creature in the cell is like nothing I have ever seen.

He’s tall. So tall, closer to seven feet than six — tall enough that I have to crane backwards to look at him. He’s broad, too, and bulging with muscle. But that’s not what’s made my blood run hot then cold.

His skin is marked all over with swirls and stripes of iridescent blue, like a peacock’s breast. Those blue markings look a little like pictures I’ve seen of Maori tattoos; intricate patterns that go up and over his skull, down his forehead, striping his cheeks, framing his mouth, winding down his chin, down his neck… disappearing under his jumpsuit. But these are no tattoos. They shift and shimmer under the dim artificial light, and look as if they’ve ripped their way through his normal human skin.

And for a less subtle indication that those markings aren’tjust really clever ink: two midnight blue horns curl backwards from his forehead.

This is Roth.

Oh god. This isRoth.The terrifying, murderous, genetically mutilated psychopath.

His hair is dark, long and loose. There’s stubble on his jaw. His eyes are a piercing, glowing blue, and they’re looking right at me. Roth is studying me, unblinking. As I stare up at him, his head tilts to one side like a curious bird.

The force field is an invisible barrier, so it seems like he’s standing just in front of me, with nothing but air between us. He’s close enough to touch.

“You’re welcome,” I mumble, and hustle back up the corridor behind my cart. The prisoners’ laughter rings in my ears all the way.

3

Rory

AT DINNERTIME, we sit down to eat our own gray mush in the crew canteen. Ours, at least, is sprinkled with a little powdered strawberry, for flavor and color.

“So?” asks Tommy, around a mouthful. “How was max security?”

“It was fine,” I say. “Honestly, not that different from the lower security decks.”

I don’t want to mention that the prisoners were poking fun at me. That would only end with Ellis calling me ‘Lunchlady’ too. He’d get a real kick out of that.

“Did you see Roth?” Tommy asks. “Is he in your section?”

“Yep.”

“No way! So what does he look like? Is he reallyblue?”

“Sort of. Not all over. He’s got, like, stripes?”

“Huh,” says Tommy.

I’m not sure Tommy thinks that stripes are as cool as being blue all over. To cheer him up, I say:

“He does have horns, though.”

“Wow!”

“Sometimes I feel bad for the prisoners,” says Carl. “I wouldn’t wish a lifetime spent digging luminum on anyone. But that’s one man I don’t feel guilty for… If I can even call him a man.”

“You wouldn’t feel bad for many of the others if you knewwhat they’d done,” says Ellis. “These are real lowlifes, y’know. You don’t get sentenced to Chronus for nothing.”

“Some of the guys in my section were bragging about what they were sentenced for the other day,” says Tommy, sounding queasy. “It made my skin crawl just listening to it.”

“If you’re going to feel bad for anyone, it should beus,” says Ellis. “We’re going to have to spend six freaking months surrounded by luminum ourselves.” He shudders. “Not fun.”

Luminum is the element that changed the world. Almost a century ago, an unfamiliar ore was recovered from a meteorite. Scientists discovered that you could refine this ore into pure luminum, a metal with very unusual properties. It produces an effect similar to magnetism, but which acts on space-time instead of matter.

From the ore alone, this effect is minimal — causing only minor distortions of time. But once the ore has been refined, wound into coils, and amplified with an electric charge, it’s a whole other story.

That’s how they make the superluminal core of interstellar ships. The effect on time becomes so intense that it creates a temporal field, which encompasses the ship. Time seems to pass normally inside the field, but dilates around it, allowing you to travel at multiple times the speed of light.

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