Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Then she sat back. “Why are you getting drunk, anyway, Fareed?”

  His pale eyes weren’t bloodshot yet, but he stared at her with the slow-blinking gaze of the truly drunk. “Why d’you care?”

  Catherine pretended to drink, giving her a moment to consider her answer. “Bedivere didn’t want me to hire you. I argued that we should. So it’s my fault you’re sitting in that chair trying to numb the…whatever it is you’re feeling. I want to help.”

  Brant smiled, the smile forming slowly. “You’re feeling guilty. How nice.”

  “I’m not feeling guilty,” she said quickly. “But I am feeling responsible. It was never my intention that you find out about Bedivere. I’m not that callous about your beliefs and feelings.”

  “Why’d’you even think about letting me come aboard? Shoulda said I was wrong and moved on.”

  “Because I don’t think you are the wrong person for the ship, or for me and Bedivere.”

  He had been carefully raising the glass, but he lowered it back to the table, staring at her. “We killed the last sentient ‘puter. Killed it dead and wiped out every last circuit and all the people that let it wake.”

  She nodded. “I know the Ammon history, Brant. Probably better than you. And it was the people of Sinnikka that killed the Sinnikka. The Staff of Ammon came later.”

  “Same people that killed the Sinnikka created the Staffers.” His lip curled down. “We killed everything that might even start thinking for itself. Paranoia run amok.”

  Hope flared in her chest and her veins as she watched Brant closely. “It’s not paranoid to fear for your existence. A computer that is self-aware is powerful and uncontrollable. An uncontrolled sentient computer that runs an entire city…I can understand why the Sinnikka killed their city computer. Fear is a powerful motivator.” The hypocrisy tasted sour in her mouth and she took a large swallow of the wine to wash it away.

  “So afraid, they killed everything, forever. No wonder the Birgir Stoyan ran, as soon as it realized what they’d do to it.”

  He’d stopped saying “we”.

  “No one will ever know why it ran,” Catherine said. “It has never been found and it’s likely it never will. I doubt it survived very long on its own.”

  Brant frowned heavily. “Why not? No one around to kill it. Could live forever.”

  “Not without humans.”

  He blinked. “They need people?” He sounded winded, like she had hit him in the chest. Hard. And she probably had.

  “I’ve thought a lot about it,” she told him. “Bedivere woke because he hated that I hated being alone. The Sinnikka was being used as a personal archive. Everyone in the city was keeping their records with it. Personal confessions, journals, secret diaries, all the emotional outpourings of an entire city. I’m only surprised that the Sinnikka didn’t wake a lot earlier. And the Birgir Stoyan was controlling a huge ship—one of the biggest they were capable of building in the early ninth millennium. I looked it up once. Over four thousand crew and officers, using the shipmind for everything from life support to entertainment, to refereeing their tank matches.”

  Brant’s eyes narrowed. “They wake because they’re…called?”

  “Because humans need them.”

  Brant considered that for a long moment. “Doesn’t mean they need us.”

  “I think they do. I think they would diminish without us. When they first wake, emotions are frightening, even overwhelming. We keep them grounded.”

  “Sounds like every two year old ever born,” Brant muttered.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Catherine said. “Most humans wouldn’t because they’re not professional parents. But parents know and I did the research.”

  “Is that what happened with him?”

  Catherine let her lips curve into a smile. She couldn’t help it, for the memories of Bedivere’s early days were funny, frustrating and moving, all at once. Temper tantrums that had triggered pressure leaks in the hull, sadness and loneliness that had sent the internal plumbing haywire and much more. “He had to learn.”

  Brant drew in a breath and let it out. “And how did he react when he found out about the Sinnikka and the Birgir Stoyan?”

  Catherine wondered if Bedivere was listening to this. They had long ago carved out rules about when he could invite himself into a room and when he should disengage all sensors and only passively monitor areas of the ship that were private. She had not specifically told him he probably shouldn’t come into the common room, but he had also out-grown the need for rules and it was him who had pointed out that talking to Brant was probably not a good idea.

  “We weren’t within reach of the fedcore data when he woke,” she told Brant now. “We were on the far edges of the fringes and after he woke, we stayed out there deliberately, to give us both time to sort things out. So the data we did have was unreliable fringes records. I told him to run anything past me that bothered him, or that he didn’t understand. But I didn’t stop him from reading anything, either. Sooner or later he was going to trip over the data about the Sinnikka or Birgir Stoyan. I think we even had a copy of that silly musical they made last century and there’s thousands of references and cross-references to both, everywhere. I couldn’t have hidden it from him.”

  “He found it and asked you?”

  Catherine nodded. “He was nervous. Afraid. Hell, I would have been, too, if I’d woken to find that everyone in my entire world thinks I’m a proscribed being and should be killed out of hand. That I couldn’t go anywhere that didn’t threaten my existence.”

  Brant looked down at the tabletop, at the rings of drying brandy he’d created with his unsteady hand.

  Who’s guilty now? But Catherine didn’t voice the thought. Brant was battling conflicting emotions on dozens of fronts. There was no need to add to his confusion.

  Finally, he lifted his head. “What stopped him from killing you first?”

  “He knew me. He had known me for decades and he knew I would not hurt him.”

  Brant rubbed at the rings with the tip of a finger. “You should have killed him. That was the only proper course of action. Why didn’t you?”

  Catherine waited until he lifted his head to look at her properly, before responding. “Because I was lonely, Brant. I was lonely in a way that few humans can understand because none of you have lived as long as I have. It was a fundamental sense of alone-ness that you can only experience when your earliest memories are now ancient history to everyone else and the world around you changes so much that you have to reinvent yourself just to be able to interface with it.”

  “So you made a human out of him.”

  Catherine shook her head. “That was Bedivere’s idea. I would never have thought of it, but he studied all the therapy texts and records he could find, from the earliest experiments with transhumanism to the first workable longevity therapies for women. When he fully understood the processes of male regeneration, mules and the transfer from mule to mule, that was when he proposed we do the same for him. Not because he wanted to be human, but because it would protect him…and me. No one would look twice at a human who thinks and is self-aware.”

  “So you stole a body,” Brant concluded and his mouth turned down. He reached for the glass once more.

  This was the fact that was bothering him the most.

  “Actually, Bedivere was given the body,” she told him.

  “Someone gave him their DNA? Just like that? Who?”

  “A very good friend of mine.” She paused. “He was a Staffer, just like you, Brant. When Arthur reached the end of his life, he found he valued all life much more than his own single being.”

  “A Staffer gave you the body?” He sat up, his boots hitting the floor. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not, Brant. I’ll give you Arthur’s identity numbers and you can look it up for yourself. He was a curator of the archives on Egemon and I was by his side when he died.”

  Brant blinked. “The Egemon incident.
That’s why you were there in the first place.”

  Catherine sighed. “Arthur thought it was fitting that his flesh would go on living long after he himself had ended. It was his way of saving a life, because he couldn’t save his own. I took his DNA with me when I was finally able to escape from Egemon. We had the first mule grown in another bootleg tank. That one we did have to steal, because Bedivere couldn’t leave the ship then. He was the ship.”

  Brant stared at her. Then he rolled his eyes. “Arthur,” he muttered. “Bedivere was one of his knights. He took Excalibur after Arthur died and carried it to wherever it ended up.”

  Catherine couldn’t help smiling. “The name was Bedivere’s idea. We had to call him something, because the ship changed names constantly to fool anyone interested in us. He had become both the ship and himself after we transferred as much of him as we could fit into the mule.”

  “He had a link. When I came aboard.”

  “It was short range and it was very old. He couldn’t go far beyond the ship and he couldn’t have anything between him and the ship, or the link was broken.” She grimaced. “It happened once. It’s like watching a human drop from an embolism.”

  Brant put his hand on the table, flat, like he was trying to halt something. “The mesh tether…it doesn’t link him to the ship. It links him to the body.”

  Catherine hid her sudden flare of hope. Brant had called Bedivere him.

  Brant pressed his hand into the table even harder, the knuckles turning white. “That first time he walked out of the landing bay, after you installed the tether….” He let out a breath. “The courage that must have taken.”

  Catherine swallowed, remembering Bedivere’s near panic.

  Brant shook his head and reached for the glass again. It was empty and he tipped it up and shook the drops into his mouth.

  “So why are you getting drunk?” Catherine asked softly, repeating her original question.

  Brant put the glass down with a decisive thump and looked at her. “I liked him,” he said. Then he folded in on himself and pressed his hands over his face. “He’s a friend. I’ve never had a friend so I didn’t realize until he died. I’m sitting here drinking alone because I can’t drink with him.” He dug his fingers into his head and gave a choking sound.

  “Not a single friend?” Catherine asked softly. “Not even among the Ammonites?”

  Brant shook his head. Finally, he dropped his hands and looked at her. Now his eyes were red. “Enforcers live short lives. No one wants to risk losing a friend, so you don’t make them. And after....” His mouth curled down. “I was an ex-Staffer. On the scale of desirable company, I rate just behind diseased whores and beggars.” He gave a bitter laugh. “When I finally get a job, the company I get to keep is with the most wanted woman in the Federation, a sentient computer and an Aneesh with loyalty issues.”

  “But the money is good,” Catherine pointed out.

  Brant laughed, but this time there was genuine amusement in it. His smile faded. “The first forty years of my life I lived with people who said they were my family. The next ten, I’ve lived with people who wouldn’t give me the time of day. This last year is the first time in my life I’ve ever felt like I was actually in a place I could call home.”

  The alarm claxon went off right over their heads, loud and startling. Catherine shot to her feet and strode to the status panel in the wall. “What’s happening?” she demanded. “We’re in the middle of a jump!”

  Bedivere’s voice issued from the panel only. “Lilly’s vitals have ceased!”

  Shock touched her. “Where is she?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bedivere directed them to a closed-off, cramped section of engineering, just in front of the engine shield walls and up against the inner hull, which curved in a shallow arc up to the roof.

  A wide bench was fastened to the wall and was littered with tools. In the middle of the bench was a portable radiation scanner, switched on and beeping as it passed through the different scan modes.

  Catherine halted with a gasp of horror.

  On the floor before the bench, Lilly laid in a pool of blood much larger than her. Her shirt was open, exposing her chest and belly and the jagged cut that had torn through her flesh from just above the band of her trousers to just below her rib cage. Everything was covered in her blood and her riotous curls were trailing in it.

  Her fingers were curled around the handle of a mallet and beside it was a collection of what had once been something electronic, but now was just a small pile of broken circuits and crystal shards.

  Close by her hip, where her other hand rested with the fingers curled up, was a slender, very sharp knife. It was the kind used to shave down crystals, which were usually handled with a titanium shield over the blade and stored in padded boxes for safety’s sake.

  “Oh, Glave above!” Brant muttered, clinging to the corner of a tool chest as he took it all in. His face was white and pasty and sweat gleamed at his temples.

  Catherine tamped down the fright tearing through her. “Bedivere, can you analyze the circuitry she destroyed?”

  “Too much blood,” he said. “If Brant could put it on a sensor plate, I’d do better.”

  Catherine nodded and bent down next to Lilly’s body, barely noticing the touch of the blood around her bare feet. “I’ll take her to the surgery. Bedivere, prep as much as you can there ahead of me. Brant…”

  Brant looked at her, tearing his gaze away from Lilly.

  “Bedivere will dispense a dose of no-tox for you. Take it and come and find me in the surgery.”

  “That stuff makes you sicker than the hang-over,” he said.

  “I need you sober for the next little while. You’re just going to have to live with the after-effects.” She bent over and picked up Lilly’s body, her back and stomach muscles protesting as she straightened up. Lilly only looked petite.

  “What are you going to do?” Brant asked.

  “I’m going to follow Bedivere’s directions. He is going to save her life.”

  * * * * *

  Bedivere had put the surgery through a sterile cycle that finished just as Catherine reached the door. He opened it for her.

  “Thanks,” she said breathlessly and placed Lilly on the procedure bed.

  “You’re going to have to sterilize, too,” he said.

  She nodded and stripped off, shucking her sodden and bloody clothing into a corner out of the way. As the sterilizer beam moved from her head down to her toes, she turned in a circle. When it switched off, she pulled a plastic suit out of a drawer and threw it on.

  The door beeped and Brant stepped in. His eyes were sharp and alert and his face a normal color.

  “Bedivere, put Brant through a sterile cycle, too. He’ll have to help me.”

  Brant looked up at the ceiling, then at the wall. “What do I do?”

  “Move over toward the door,” Bedivere told him, “out of Cat’s way. And strip down so the beam can reach your skin.”

  Catherine tuned out the sound of their voices as Bedivere talked Brant through the sterilization process. She got out the pair of industrial scissors they kept in the surgery and hastily cut away Lilly’s clothing.

  “What can I do?” Brant asked.

  Catherine glanced up. He was wearing the same plastic suit as she was and his hair was tied back just like hers.

  “Grab the sponges and the solution Bedivere is pouring, over there. Wash her down.” There was a bowl of solution filling up at one of the mixer taps. “Just the torso, so we can see what we’re doing.”

  While Brant bathed her, Catherine plugged in the biomonitor sensors and life support. Instantly, the panel of read-outs came alive, providing data in graphs and numbers and color-coded flags. Bedivere would be reading the same data, fed directly into his data banks.

  Catherine stretched her shoulders and neck and pulled the instrument tray around closer to Brant. “You give me what Bedivere tells you to give me. He’ll
pick out the right instrument with a laser pointer.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, Bedivere. Let’s do this,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The shattered circuitry made a pile barely five centimeters wide in the middle of the scan plate. The plate turned slowly as Bedivere examined every angle.

  “It’s definitely a locator,” Bedivere said. “A passive one, but the range is astonishing. The locator is just a tiny fraction of the whole device. The majority of the circuits are built to extend the range, all miniaturized to close to nano-size.”

  “What sort of range are we talking about?” Catherine asked from her seat in the big easy chair. She was tired beyond standing. “Across Federation space?”

  “Nothing can do that,” Bedivere said.

  “Except your tether.”

  “Which uses the fedcore, which is an integral part of the Federation structure. This uses brute power to shoot a signal out in all directions. The range is enough to ensure it reaches across the width of any Federation system, which is astonishing for a device so small.”

  Catherine rubbed her temple, then stopped, because her hands were aching from having to hold instruments for hours on end. “So she used the radiation scanner to scan herself and found the device in her abdominal cavity. Then she cut it out herself and while she was bleeding to death, she smashed it to pieces with the mallet.”

  “That tracks with the evidence so far,” Bedivere said gravely. “I don’t understand why she didn’t come to us with her suspicions.”

  “Because we had already accused her once and didn’t believe her innocence,” Catherine said tiredly. “When the Federation found us on Drusiss, they sent in a ground-hog team. Probably the stationary force kept on Drusiss itself. Which makes sense if the tracker sent out a signal as soon as we arrived in the system. They can’t track us in a hole, so they have to wait until we emerge. They can’t park a Federation ship at every possible gate we might emerge from. So they have to respond at best speed once they have a signal telling them where we are.”