by E M Gale
‘Sigh. No more fun duels and, heh, scientific research, back to being attacked by pirates instead.’
“Hey, Clarke,” called someone after me. I turned round and saw Emma chasing me down the hall. I ought to have picked up her scent, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to what was around me. She was grinning and jogging to catch up. “You look more like I thought you would,” she declared when she stopped.
‘Oh? Because I’m in my shit-kicking outfit, not my pretty dress?’
“Not like a pirate, right?” I asked with a smile.
She smiled at that. “Exactly like a pirate, actually,” she confessed.
‘Oh. Well, given she’s wearing a flouncy shirt, a waistcoat of all things, brown trousers, two swords on her back and a pistol on her hip, I don’t think she’s one to talk. Still, she probably doesn’t mind if people say she looks like a pirate, since she’s an independent trader, which I strongly suspect is only a few small steps away.’
I picked up the scent of my friends nearby and ignored them. “Huh, well, you’re just missing the hat,” I said to Emma.
She grinned flirtatiously. “Maybe I should get one, if–”
“Hey, Clarke,” interrupted Rob. He looked sheepish and was accompanied by the others and all their stuff. Emma paused what she was saying and looked at Rob and then looked at me sympathetically.
‘Why? What is that look for?’
“Running around with his great-great-great-grandson isn’t going to bring him back, Clarke,” she said, sotto voce, so only I could hear.
‘What? She recognises Rob? What?’
I just stared at her, confused.
“Perhaps you could find a happy medium between hero-worshipping me and presuming to give me advice,” I muttered sotto voce. I didn’t mean to be quite so cold, but I didn’t want to talk about Rob’s death with someone I barely knew. In fact, I didn’t even want to talk about it with someone I knew well.
“Forget I said anything, Clarke,” she said, looking rather unhappy at my comment. “I’ll see you soon if you enter the competition.”
“Yeah, bye, Emma.”
“Ja ne,” she said, and then she walked off.
‘What was that about? Does she think I’m still upset about the Great Engineer’s death, still, one hundred and fifty years later, and went to find one of his descendants to drag around the galaxy with me? I guess, as I’m her hero or something dumb like that, she’s seen the same B-movie as I did. Except she recognises Rob, so she must have seen his face somewhere. But surely Rob’s face is famous, given what he achieved in his lifetime. Or maybe she just looked him up because she wanted to find out more about me?’
I sighed to myself.
‘This is the problem with heroes, especially long-lived ones like vampires–they don’t die, leaving you with romantic myths, they hang on long enough to fuck it all up. Still, I’m only her hero for sword-fighting ability. Which surely isn’t all that hard to live up to. Well, if that’s the case, why would she recognise Rob?’
“Clarke, Clarke, you still with us?” asked Jane, clicking her fingers under my chin rather rudely.
‘Oops, have I been ignoring them?’
“Yes, hi, guys,” I said.
“Was she one of the pirates you’ve been duelling with?” Anna asked, nodding at Emma’s retreating back.
‘Well…’
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Emma, right?”
‘How’d she know that?’
“See, now, she looks like a pirate,” said Anna, smiling.
“Yeah, but I don’t.”
She eyed me sidelong. “Yes, you do.”
I sighed. “Oh, don’t start that again. I do not look like a pirate. I don’t have a flouncy shirt. Or a waistcoat. Or even a gun,” I said.
“You look more like a soldier actually,” said Mark.
‘Oh? Do I?’
“Why?” I asked him.
“Well, combats, vest top, weapons.”
‘Oh, whatever.’
“That is if they wear black,” he added.
“The UESF do–black, grey and white.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
‘Ah, well, the stashed uniforms on the ship.’
“I saw it in one of Cliff’s silly B-movies,” I said.
‘It would be rather strange to wear green or blue uniforms when onboard ship. The grunt uniforms for going planetside come in different colour camouflage. But on a ship where space is black, the spaceship is painted battleship grey and the stars are white-ish, I guess you’d want monochrome uniforms.’
“Anyway, let’s stop discussing how I have no fashion sense, as the subject bores me, and mosey back to the Egg,” I said.
They nodded and we entered the lift and the strains of Bon Jovi’s You Give Love a Bad Name started up. Not the original, the acoustic cover. I liked the original. This cover I didn’t. I’d heard funeral dirges more upbeat. It played over and over on the fifteen-minute journey down to my docking bay.
“Why’s the lift playing Bon Jovi?” asked Mark when we were on the third run-through of the song.
“Gargh, it’s always playing that at me,” I remarked, “it’s the lift music.”
“It doesn’t play it for me,” said Mark.
“Maybe it just doesn’t like you, Clarke,” said Jane.
“How can a lift not like me? A lift is not intelligent.”
‘Huh, recalcitrant robots, lugubrious lifts, maybe that’s why vampires don’t like robots–the robots don’t give them much choice.’
“And surely you haven’t been here long enough to piss it off.” She sniggered.
“How do you piss off a lift?” asked Anna.
“I dunno, press all the buttons at once,” suggested Rob. I chuckled.
We arrived at my docking bay and I astonished my friends by turning away from the Egg and striding towards my now-under-repair wedge-shaped spacecraft. It still looked pretty beaten up. Half a dozen robots were working on it, replacing the outer plates in a balletic manner.
‘Cool, robots that fix spaceships.’
They seemed to be replacing all the shields. Well, I guessed that it was cheaper than repair–they had been pretty beaten up. There was some program for it though. The movements were precisely choreographed, the robots were efficient and didn’t get in each other’s way. It was kind of hypnotic to watch, beautiful like a dance.
“Cool!” said Rob.
I turned to look at him in horror.
‘How exactly did he sneak up on me? I must not have been paying attention.’
“It looks trashed, though. I wonder how it got that way?” he asked.
“Bounty hunters in the asteroid field,” I commented woodenly.
“Well, could be anything, I guess.” He started to walk around the ship. Whether he was admiring it or the robots, I couldn’t tell.
The docking bay attendant I’d spoken to before came over.
‘Oh, well, this is it. Rob is going to find out that I own this ship. He’s a scientist, he won’t fail to ask pertinent questions when presented with something that doesn’t make sense.’
“’Lo,” said the attendant. “Come to check on the robots then?”
‘Is he aiming that question at me, Rob or both of us?’
“I like to see something doing its job efficiently,” I said.
‘There, that doesn’t immediately give me away.’
The attendant chuckled.
“Same every time–”
‘I take it that me crashing happens a lot, then.’
“–but I guess you like to check the details, Clarke.”
‘Ah, well, that’s given me away. It’s also similar to what they said on the UESF flagship. Maybe I do like to check details.’
Rob said nothing and wandered around the ship, looking at the robots in fascination. The attendant didn’t tell him off. Perhaps he knew better than to tell off one of my guests.
“It was ea
siest to just do a full outer-body replacement,” said the attendant. I nodded.
‘Well, I’m not paying for it. Yet.’
“Is there anything else you want to know?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said with a smile, and he went off to do whatever docking bay attendants did when no-one was crashing spaceships into their docking bay wall. I eyed Rob uneasily. He was walking around, almost getting in the robots’ way, to see how the ship was put together.
‘OK, Clarke, this is it. He has totally made you, you know, no more hiding now. Well, this is going to be fun.’
“Hey, Clarke,” said Rob, looking at me. I gritted my teeth. “Do you think they’ll let us look inside?”
‘Uh, is he asking because he’s figured out I’m the owner and instead of asking how or why, he wants to play with my pretty, yet injured, spaceship?’
“Um, well, we might get in the robots’ way,” I said, eyeing him warily.
‘I wonder if there is a robot to clean up my smashed coffee cups? I’m sure they were supposed to be clipped in somewhere, that’s what they do with twenty-first-century spaceships.’
“Yeah, I guess,” he said regretfully and then smiled.
‘Uh-oh, here it comes: ‘So, Clarke, why do you own a spaceship?’’
He looked at his watch. “We’ve got a little while before we need to be back on the Silvered Cloud.”
I nodded, dry-mouthed.
We turned and started to walk around the crashed ship. He looked a little awkward. “And, er, Clarke…” He trailed off.
“Yes?” I said in a small voice, staring at him in fear; he didn’t meet my eyes.
“Um, I’m sorry about yelling at you about Dr. Cleckley.”
‘Eh?’
I stopped and put my hands on my hips and frowned at him.
‘So… he’s completely failed to ask why the docking bay attendant spoke to me as if it was my ship! The guy just doesn’t listen!’
I shook my head. “Whatever. You don’t have any right to tell me off about things like that.”
He nodded. “I know, I’m very sorry.”
I looked at him expectantly.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
‘Nope, he really hasn’t noticed. Oh, well.’
“Let’s go back to the Egg,” I said with a shake of my head.
He grinned and met my eyes, presumably taking that as an accepted apology. But he briefly put his hand on my arm as I turned towards the Egg. “And there is something else.”
“What?”
“Um… I don’t quite know how to say this…”
‘Oh, God, he didn’t remark on the ship as he already knows who I am!’
I waited. He waited. He eyed me unsurely. I chewed on my lip.
“It’s about Anna.”
“What? Anna? What?”
“Yeah.”
If my mind was usually a tidily filed office, I spent those moments running around, pulling open drawers and throwing files everywhere, trying to guess what he could be talking about.
“It’s a little awkward to say…” He trailed off and looked at the floor.
I had found a file in the drawer labelled ‘irrelevant gossip’.
“Ah, I understand!” I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me and I smiled. “And I can tell you that she likes you too. Price said so. I don’t know how he knew, but it turns out that she wasn’t hypnotised that time that I thought she was.”
“What?” said Rob. He was frowning.
I took my hand off his shoulder. “Not that then?”
‘What else could he want to talk about?’ I picked another file off the floor.
“Is this about the money?” I asked, pointing at him.
“What? What money?”
“Anna wanted to borrow some money.”
Rob shook his head. “Oh, that. She asked you for a loan as well?”
“Yeah, but then she wouldn’t take it.”
“Huh, you’re nicer than me. I said no. Why should I help her out the way she’s been behaving?”
I stared at him. “What has she done?” I paused. “And you don’t fancy her, do you?”
Rob shook his head. “She’s…”
‘Poor Anna.’
“Look, she told everyone about your one-night stand.”
I frowned. “Yeah, that was weird. She knows I don’t like to discuss that shit. I know I let her go on about the morals of it, but in the abstract. I don’t like people knowing the details of my private life.”
“I know. She told me,” he said significantly.
I shrugged. “Well, I think everyone knows that about me.”
“Just… I wouldn’t trust her with anything you want kept secret, that’s all.”
I frowned at him.
“Perhaps you could find another confidante for your girly chats. Someone a little more… discreet. Jane maybe?”
“Bloody hell, Rob, where do you get off on saying that? Anna’s my friend, OK? And she’s always been trustworthy. I tell her all sorts of shit and I know she gossips, but she’s not told anyone anything I told her not to.”
Rob shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything…”
“No, I don’t think you should’ve! Who I’m friends with is my business. And I can’t trust your judgement if you haven’t realised that Jane hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” said Rob, shaking his head. “What if Anna told me all your dirty secrets?”
I stared at him.
‘Would she?’
“Why would she do that?”
Rob shrugged. “I don’t know why she did that.” He was looking at me intently.
I sighed. “And anyway, I don’t have any secrets,” I lied.
Rob sighed. “Look, just forget I said anything.”
I was frowning at him.
“Please, just forget it.”
“OK. Forgotten.”
“Shall we head back?”
I eyed him oddly. “Sure.”
‘Has Anna told him stuff that I asked her to keep secret? Why would Rob want to know about my sex life? And why would Anna tell him? She’s not told anyone else…’
‘I’ve told Anna a lot of things. Who is he to think she’s not trustworthy, just ’cos she’s told him about last night? That’s nothing compared to the rest.’
* * *
I headed down to the sims rooms and noticed that Jane was in one of them. Looking through the door, I saw her running through some Tae Kwon Do moves. I strolled in. She was obviously very skilled, flexible and athletic. I didn’t mind pausing to watch, but eventually decided to cough politely.
She looked over, her eyes narrowed.
“You’re good at that. Which belt are you?” I said.
“Black.” Her tone of voice implied an ‘obviously’ at the end of the sentence.
“It’s Korean, right?”
She sighed. “Yup. Far better than that Japanese crap you do.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Well, perhaps we could test that out.” I went into a neutral guard position from aikido.
She kicked towards my face. I dodged and grinned.
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“No, I am not going to spar with you.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“Too tempting.”
“Too tempting?” I grinned again. “Why?”
“I might kick you in the face and break your nose.”
“I doubt it. Why not go a few rounds, eh?” I put my fingers up in a Scout salute. “I promise I won’t hold it against you if I end up in Cleckley’s office.”
“No, Clarke. And stop grinning at me like that. Don’t sneak in here to eye me up. I did see you, you know.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“So… would you be up for teaching me a little of the style? It would be cool to be able to kick above my head.”
She sighed. “What? You think I’m going to train you up? No way. Not my job.
You want to learn Tae Kwon Do, go find yourself a dojang and a white belt.”
“Huh. Come on, what about the cigarettes I got you?”
“I paid for them.”
“What about the favour?”
“And you didn’t make a profit out of me? You’d be crap at it, you know. You gotta think with your feet, your style’s all about thinking with your sword. You’re not much cop with guns either, are you?”
‘How’d she know that?’
“Who the fuck you been talking to, Jane? You been gossiping with the marines?”
“They said you were a crap shot when you started.”
“I’ve been practising.”
“Maybe you’d be better off practising shooting rather than dicking around here.”
“What, you reckon you know how to shoot?”
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
She sighed. “’Cos I do, OK? I gotta give you my entire life story just ’cos you have a passing curiosity?”
“Jeez, you really are a spiky person.”
“Spiky? I’m not spiky. I just know you’ve got Anna teaching you orcish and Mark’s been running around the ship on your orders. Who the hell do you think you are getting your friends to do your bidding? And what’s Rob doing for you, or does he only have to serve you in bed?”
“Oh, come on, Jane, chill. Anna’s a great linguist and she’s helping me out. I even tried to pay her, but she wouldn’t take it.”
“What about Mark, huh? You ever think that it wasn’t a good idea for him to be poking around everything?”
“He’d already started investigating before I suggested anything. And it’s not like I’m telling him to continue. Hell, I don’t even know if he is.”
She frowned at me. “He is.”
I held my hands up. “And how is that my fault? He likes playing at being a detective, I think.”
“Tell me about it,” she muttered.
I lifted my index finger in the air. “Ah, that’s it, isn’t it?” I grinned. “He’s been investigating you and your secret past.”
“Who says I have a secret past?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I’m not saying you do, but is it my fault that your boyfriend likes playing stupid games?”
She slumped. “You know?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t tell you, did he?”
“Jane, it was obvious, you’re always disappearing together and he’s stopped talking to me other than to tell me what you think and what you’ve been saying.”