She winced at the realization he hadn’t left after all and squinted one eye in the direction of the stairwell. He stood with one foot on the landing, the other hovering above the first step. “You don’t understand what?”
“You said ‘it is now,’ as if it wasn’t before. And earlier you seemed to imply leaving was somehow my choice.”
She groaned and sat up enough to glare at him. “Do not try to play mind games with me, Caleb. I am not in the mood, and I will not let you pin this on me, vrubilsya? You want to leave, I get it—so just go, but don’t try to turn it into something else to ease your guilty conscience.”
The expression of pained patience flitted across his face, but it was as if he hadn’t the strength to maintain it. His gaze roved around the cabin, and when it again found her his eyes had gone harsh. Sapphire chiseled into brittle edges. His jaw could have been carved of stone, and his formerly deadened voice now bled bitterness.
“No. I won’t let you turn this into something else. If you can’t take what I am so be it, but the simple truth is my actions saved your life. I am not the enemy and I won’t allow you to paint me as one.”
God, she wished he would end this torture and leave her alone to curl up in a ball…. Now he was deliberately taking advantage of her less than optimal state to confuse her and render her unable to fight back. It was dirty fighting and it wasn’t fair.
“I’m perfectly well aware you saved my life, so thank you for doing that at least before you discarded me to run off on your next adventure. I’m so sorry it will take a few hours until you can rid yourself of me. But I don’t intend to spend those hours propping up your ego, so you—”
His mouth twitched furiously. “My ego? What the bloody hell are you talking about? Alex, what do you think is happening here?”
“What do I think? I think you’re a selfish narcissist who only goes along for the ride until it begins to interfere with your good time. I think you’re an even better liar than I gave you credit for and I fell for it even though I goddamn knew better! I think you should—”
“Stop, please, for one second.” He dragged a hand raggedly through his hair. “No. After the attack you were distant and wary and shell-shocked. I killed those men and I know it was brutal and violent and ruthless—”
“Is killing people ever not those things?”
“Well it isn’t always so bloody, but….” His voice trailed off as he stared at her for the first time since right after she had awoken, and she swore beneath the surface anger she saw raw pain tarnishing his beautiful eyes. Damn he’s good at this. Even now, he makes me want to believe him.
He frowned…no, it wasn’t a frown. It was something else. “Are you….” He stopped, drew in a deep breath, let it out and began again. “Are you telling me you aren’t horrified by what I did back there? By the violence of it, the brutality? You’re not…you’re not afraid I might hurt you, or simply appalled I’m a killer?”
“What? Why would I be?”
“Because it’s happened before. Because good people often are. Because I am a killer. And the way you looked at me, the way you—”
“I had been shot. I was a little distracted. Then a little weak, then a little dizzy, then, well….”
He blinked and shook his head as if trying to clear cobwebs from it. “Which you neglected to tell me.”
In the recesses of her mind, her memories had been gradually solidifying and assembling themselves into a proper order. She tried to focus in on them. “I admit I wasn’t thinking overly clearly, but…I thought I’d be okay. I didn’t want to slow you down.”
“Oh, Alex, I would do anything….” He swallowed and met her gaze once more, an odd glint in his countenance. Like a dying man catching sight of an oasis yet afraid it was a mirage. He spoke slowly. Deliberately. “You weren’t planning to kick me out of your life as soon as we landed?”
“Planning when? When I woke up after being shot, of course not. As of a few minutes ago? Hell yes.”
He looked confused, hopeful, terrified, all at once; he really did. At this point she was feeling rather confused herself…she checked to make sure her eVi had executed her instructions, though she recognized it commanded diminished resources.
He started pacing again, this time in considerable agitation. His movements were uncontrolled in a manner she had never seen.
Then words began tumbling over one another as they spilled forth. “I thought—I thought you were. I thought you wanted nothing else to do with me upon seeing the bloody reality of what I can be, and do, when I need to. I thought you were in horrified shock—and you were, only maybe it was from being shot and not because of what you saw and—”
The blur of the evening’s events raced around in her head again, this time with greater clarity and colored by his perspective. She recalled things he had hinted at over the past days, topics he had been reluctant to talk about. What else Mia had said about him—
—and in a rush it all made sense, in a crazy way that wasn’t.
Silly, hardened, sensitive man. Her head swam from a deluge of relief and whiplashing emotions. Dammit, he was always doing that to her. But she felt the strangest desire to…protect him.
“You are such a dumb ass.”
His face scrunched up in greater confusion, but the pacing screeched to a halt. “Excuse me?”
“You’re a dumb ass. You honestly believe such an incredible display of badass heroics would scare away someone like me? Frankly, I’m offended. Did you take me for some delicate flower who faints at the sight of a drop of blood?”
He laughed; it had a wild, reckless timbre. “No, I would never—”
“Come here.” She didn’t quite trust her body to stand just yet. He was going to have to come to her. Perhaps in more ways than one.
He blinked. She watched his throat working. Finally he crossed the cabin to the space in front of the couch and crouched on the balls of his feet. He seemed to search her face but didn’t stop to meet her gaze directly. Hesitant. Cautious. Guarded.
She reached up with her good arm and wound her hand tenderly into his hair, letting it curl softly around her fingers. He sucked in a breath as his eyes closed and his lips fought to tug upward.
“Caleb.” His eyes reopened at the sound of her voice. The ocean within them roiled like a hurricane, and her heart decided to go careening off the walls which held it in place.
“I’ve always known what you are. Who you are may have been in question….” She struggled to find the right words. “I come from a family of soldiers. I understand the necessity for violence. If you hadn’t acted as you did, we would probably both be dead. And I, for one, prefer being alive.”
She smiled weakly. “I won’t deny it was a bit jarring for a second or two, seeing you like that. But….”
Her hand drew down along his jaw to his chin, and she urged it up so he was unable to turn aside. “I knew what I was getting into. And I am not afraid of you.” At least, not in that way. “Now if this routine is something you concocted as cover for you wanting to leave—”
“No.” He fell to his knees before her; his hands grasped her shoulders and his forehead dropped to rest against hers. “I don’t want to go.”
Her breath lodged in her throat. The emotion bleeding out of his words crashed through her with more intensity than she could possibly absorb. Her chest burned hot as it nonetheless insisted on trying.
Her throat eked out a trembling whisper. “Then stay.”
He nodded silently against her. They didn’t move for untold seconds, struggling to pick up the pieces and put themselves back together, to regain some control over the inner tumult.
Finally he pulled away a sliver. His eyes rose to meet hers as a hand rose to cup her cheek.
“You are a most remarkable woman, Alex Solovy.”
64
ROMANE
INDEPENDENT COLONY
* * *
“ARE YOU READY TO get to work, Meno?”
&nbs
p; I am looking forward to this endeavor, Mia. I expect to learn new things.
“I’m not sure we’ll learn anything more worthwhile than the name of Miss Solovy’s first pet or her favorite author.”
Yet that will nevertheless be something new.
“Ha. Fair enough.”
Mia stood at the top of the ramp in the hangar bay, the fingertips of her right hand pressed to the embedded panel of the Siyane’s external hatch. The contact pad of the remote interface rested snugly against the base of her neck. Her eyes were closed—but she was not blind.
Instead she saw what Meno ‘saw’: a seemingly infinite three-dimensional grid of pulsing, spinning translucent orbs. The orbs grouped together in formations ranging from tiny to massive and complex. Threadlike filaments connected the groupings, and always there existed structure and order, sharp lines and hard right angles.
The grid overflowed with color. The entire spectrum was represented in the spinning orbs, every and each color all at once. When viewed in the corner of her eye, an orb appeared a prismatic swirl. If she turned her focus to one, however, it transformed to pure white light.
The orbs, of course, signified the qubits composing the Siyane’s security control system. Much as Schrödinger’s cat, until observed a qubit held all possible quantum superpositions of 0 and 1. When she observed one, the prism resolved to white; when Meno ‘observed’ one, he measured its true state.
As such, her presence here was largely superfluous other than to guide Meno to the appropriate access points—and to make certain it didn’t rewrite the Siyane’s weapons, propulsion and life-support systems to be more efficient while he was in there.
Besides, she liked the view.
“Begin recording.” She needed to image the security controls because when she finished it had to be put back as she found it, leaving no trace she had been there. She didn’t want to cause trouble for Caleb, even if she was a little worried about him. The odds of this new relationship of his working out well in the end were only slightly north of nil…but he never had been the cautious sort.
Recording initiated.
“Excellent. Overlay Alexis Solovy’s fingerprints.”
Overlay successful. Security is requesting secondary encryption key. Analyzing.
Meno had named ‘himself’ at her suggestion. At the time it was devouring ancient philosophical texts and had taken the name from the Plato Socratic dialogue on virtue, knowledge and belief. It continued to burn spare cycles contemplating the notion of inborn knowledge and whether, lacking a soul, it nonetheless possessed such knowledge.
Secondary encryption key: Д085401Н129914С. Would you like to know my hypothesis on the meaning of this key?
She smiled to herself. Artificials were tightly regulated, monitored, circumscribed, feared and often reviled, and with good reason. Perhaps excepting the last one, anyway. They possessed incredible processing ability—but computers ran many facets of society. Those CUs were also powerful, capable of zettaFLOP calculations and zeptosecond accuracy. Yet no one feared them, because they were dumb. They did not think; they simply calculated. Oh, a well-designed VI could create a convincing impression of thought and even personality, but it was still executing defined programming.
Synthetic neural nets, on the other hand, were designed for that exact purpose: to think. To learn. To adapt. To improve.
Their greatest feature was also their most dangerous one: curiosity. Mia delighted in Meno’s childlike inquisitiveness and thirst for knowledge. But though it wasn’t registered, she otherwise obeyed all the prescribed safety precautions. Because it was like a child—a hyper-savant child wielding unfathomable power and no perspective, no wisdom born of hard lessons and experience and no sense of boundaries which might keep it in check.
So while she supplied Meno with endless zettabytes of information—history, art, literature, science, data on the very universe itself—she provided it no connections to the exanet or the local Romane infrastructure network. In fact, its hardware did not include any external networking capability, save for the single point-to-point node which allowed her to remotely interface with it. While interfacing, the only outside information it received came through her personal cybernetics. Hence the fingertips on the panel.
“Maybe later. Are there any other authorized entrants?”
Kennedy Rossi and Charles Blalock.
“Is the secondary encryption key the same for them as well?”
It is.
“Terrific. Register Caleb Marano as an authorized entrant and input his fingerprints. I’ll let him know the key when he returns. Then mask the authorization.”
Caleb hadn’t specified precisely why he needed access to Alex’s ship. Most likely there wasn’t any precise reason at all; he would merely be preparing for multiple possibilities. She did have a good idea why he didn’t simply ask for access. The possessiveness—and protectiveness—Alex exhibited regarding her ship had been blindingly obvious within thirty seconds of meeting her.
Mr. Marano now enjoys authorized access, should he provide the ship his fingerprints and the key.
“Thank you, Meno. Open the hatch, would you? We’re going to need to get him usage of the flight systems, too.”
PANDORA
INDEPENDENT COLONY
“What? Dude, I can’t hear you.”
Noah leaned in closer to Dylan, to no avail. Between the strobing prism beams dancing across the sky and the synchronous musical and visual performance, he could hardly hear himself think, much less hear anyone else speak. Then again, the point of the circus wasn’t to think, but rather to experience. To feel. To get wasted.
I said do you want another drink? I’m heading to the bar.
A beer, man—but a good one.
He leaned against the railing and drew in a deep breath, enjoying the warm night air and the smoothness of the sensory deluge.
Yet his thoughts inevitably drifted. He had caught the news of the destruction of the Surno facility on Aquila. His father must be so pissed. It wasn’t his sole interest by far; Surno accounted for maybe ten percent of his holdings at most. But it would definitely sting.
When he realized what he was doing he groaned and dropped his head back to stare at the art painting the night sky. Don’t even think about getting involved, Noah. Not your problem—not the business, not the war. Just keep the party going.
He accepted the beer from Dylan with a wry smile and greedily turned it up.
At that moment Ella lurched out of the crowd and fell into him. He held the bottle out to the side with one hand to avoid sloshing it all over him and grasped onto her with the other. “Hey baby, careful there.”
She gazed up at him, eyes unfocused and blurry. “Noah, hi…. Whatcha doin?”
He chuckled. “Not what you are, apparently.” He steadied her and tried to position her on the railing next to him, but she draped her arms clumsily around his shoulders. “You’re hot, you know that righ…?”
Ella was pretty enough. But she was unstable when sober, which was an increasingly rare occurrence, and nuts when she was high. And if there was one rule he lived by on this mad planet, it was never stick your dick in crazy.
He eased her off him. “Yeah, baby, I know that.”
“You wanna—” She reached for him again, missed and tumbled to the floor.
He squeezed his eyes shut, muttered a curse under his breath and crouched to pick her up. Sometimes having a conscience goddamn sucked. “Come on, Ella, I’m taking you home.”
“Don’t wanna—”
“Yes, you do.” He rolled his eyes at Dylan and began guiding her through the reveling crowd to the lift. It wasn’t terribly late; if he got her tucked into bed reasonably quickly, perhaps he’d return.
The lift circled the building as it descended, and she swayed unsteadily against him. He willed patience. She didn’t…‘live’ was a strong word. She wasn’t staying far from the club.
The lift settled to the street level and
he maneuvered her in the proper direction. They walked slowly down the street, then veered onto a narrower thruway. The entrance to the residences where she stayed was located about a hundred meters farther on the left.
“Oops!” Ella tripped and stumbled forward.
Noah leaned over to try to save her from sprawling upon the ground—
—the brilliant white stream of a laser pulse sliced centimeters above his head.
“Ella, get down!”
“Wha—?”
He grabbed her arm and dragged her along the thruway, trying to stay low and near the wall. They came to a door, and he shoved her into the alcove. He slammed on the door but it appeared hard-locked. “Dammit! Okay, I need you to stay here, stay hidden. I’m going to—”
“But I wan—” She pulled away from him and staggered into the thruway.
“Ella, get back here!” He reached for her at the same instant the laser sliced through her neck and she crumbled lifelessly to the ground.
“Motherfu—” The shot had come from close range. He yanked the small kinetic blade he carried from the narrow pocket in his pants and lunged toward the shadow he saw moving against darker shadows.
He plowed into a body and they both crashed to the ground, each grappling for an advantage. He swung blindly in the dark and connected with bone, at least if the loud crack was any indication. Before he could do further damage a knee came up and rammed him in the nuts, sending a wave of nausea up his chest into his throat. He fought it back and stabbed wildly while struggling to hold the flailing gun away from his body.
Abruptly his knife met pliant, sluggish resistance. When the man’s grip on him fell away, he decided the knife had found the man’s gut. He wrenched the gun out of the attacker’s hand, climbed to his feet and pointed it at the attacker’s head.
“Who do you work for?”
The man writhed on the ground, clutching at his stomach in the darkness. “Fuck you. They’ll send more. You won’t last the day.”
“I’ll take that bet.” He pulled the trigger.
Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection Page 45