by C. Gockel
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Why did you stun her?” Eight demanded as Noa crumpled to the ramp.
“Because she saw you bomb her people, and I doubted she'd trust you or me after that,” James snapped. The thought had occurred to him just moments ago. When Noa had hesitated on the gangway, it had confirmed his worries.
“But now we have to wait for her to wake up.”
“Yes, but this way she won't escape before I get a chance to question her,” James replied.
“You are stronger than her, equally matched in hand-to-hand combat skills and intelligence, and she is my prisoner. You didn't have to worry about her escaping,” Eight snapped through a speaker.
Raising an eyebrow and looking up at the speaker, James replied, “She's very sneaky.”
He squatted down to pick her up, and a familiar rush of paws made James turn his head. “Carl Sagan!” James cried, holding out a hand to the little beast hoping for a purr, and to wind the warm creature around his neck. With a ferocious snarl, Carl Sagan leapt into the air and snapped James's fingers in his teeth. James hissed in pain and tried to shake the werfle loose, but Carl Sagan had swung his long hind quarters around to grasp the bottom of James's arm with six of his tiny paws.
James pulled the werfle back by the scruff of its neck, wincing at the hunk of synth skin the creature tore from him. Carl Sagan hissed and writhed, snapping his jaws at James. Fortunately, James was apparently immune to his poison. But he felt … disappointment. The werfle wasn't just aurally and tactilely pleasing, he had always been … amusing … and the creature provoked contemplation on James's part, and charming dreams on Noa's. “What did I ever do to you?” James exclaimed.
In answer, Carl Sagan snapped his jaws, scratched the air with his tiny claws, and growled and spit at James. Turning his head to avoid the spittle, James found his eyes on Noa. Carl Sagan would put his life on the line for her. The human and the werfle were separate species from different planets who didn't share DNA base pairs or an evolutionary history—but they'd developed a symbiosis that Carl Sagan was prepared to defend with his life.
Drones whisked up the gangway into the ship as the werfle shrieked furiously and wiggled in James's grasp. James eyed the creature and felt his circuits go dark—and then spark. However she'd managed to escape the exploding Ark, she'd taken pains to take the werfle with her. The brain of a werfle wasn't much bigger than an almond; yet the creature had determined that an alliance with Noa was advantageous. James remembered Noa saying to Eight she was going to Luddeccea to try and save him, and she'd urged James not to give himself over to the Luddecceans.
Eight declared over the ether, “The ship is stocked with weapons. Based on her location in orbit and the ship's log records of her surveillance, I estimate she was going to the Northwest Province. She was lying. You would not have been imprisoned in the Northwest Province; she was not going to save you.”
For a moment, the heat of betrayal flashed beneath his skin … and then the heat became cold. “It would have been the only place she could have landed,” he said.
“The weapons indicate a plan to collude with the rebels or bandits, not to rescue you,” Eight said in the ether and over the intercoms. “Are you sure you deprogrammed yourself?”
James bowed his head. He felt like the metal beneath his feet was shifting, but his internal apps told him the gangway hadn't moved.
Eight had rescued him, because Eight thought that the treatment he'd received from the other gates and the Luddecceans was wrong. But Noa would have tried somehow to save him—like she saved Gunny, and tried to save Kenji, like she would have thrown herself into the line of fire to save Oliver and Hisha, and Monica and her daughter. It was Noa's programming to be the white knight, and to never give up.
“Yes, I'm certain I deprogrammed myself,” James replied. Everything else he was increasingly less certain of.
Carl Sagan bit him again, and with a startled yelp, James grabbed a satchel that one of the drones was dragging down the gangplank. Throwing the werfle in it and zipping it up, he slid it over one shoulder and picked up Noa. As he carried her between the drones on the tarmac, he noticed when he passed the drones swiveled their camera eyes to watch.
Noa was lying on something very hard, she was too hot, and her stomach hurt from a stun. There was a light above her that was too bright. Groaning, she tried to sit up and found her wrists and ankles were restrained. Somewhere outside her range of vision she heard muffled squeaks from Carl Sagan. The scene on the gangplank came back to her. She made up her mind not to panic. Instead, she carefully tested her bonds.
Eight's voice flooded the room through a speaker on the wall. “She is awake. Ask your questions and then dispose of her.”
Noa heard a stirring on her left. Outside the halo of the too-bright light, she thought she made out James sitting on a chair.
“Hello, Noa,” he said, confirming that suspicion.
Eight's voice cracked again over the intercom. “He's going to use every method your people used on him to find out everything you know.”
Noa sucked in a breath. She knew quite a lot of Fleet intel. Most of it would be months’ outdated thanks to her little diversion in this system, but they might still be able to use it to do some damage … But why would they need what she knew of Fleet? Didn't they already have the intel from the ether? Had they not been able to decrypt it?
“We'll see how you respond to having needles inserted beneath your fingernails,” Eight shrieked.
Noa's hands formed fists. This wasn't about intel, this was about terror.
James stood and approached the table, a hulking dark shadow. Unlike their meeting on the tarmac, his face was flat and expressionless. Could she reach him? She felt herself shiver. Would James actually torture her? Was the James she knew even still in there?
“I'm sorry for whatever they did to you,” Noa said, and she didn't have to fake sincerity. She felt a rising sense of betrayal—not at the being in front of her—but at her own people. Had they taken away the James she'd known?
The intercom hissed. “She is a liar! Hurt her! Get the information from her.”
James lifted his right hand. In it was clasped a neural link. Mouth going completely dry, she rolled her head to the side, so her neural port was blocked by the hard surface. James's hand darted out and grabbed her chin too roughly. Gritting her teeth, Noa growled as he tried to turn her head around. She jerked up in her bonds and his hand slipped. “Don't make it worse for yourself,” the not-James hissed.
Noa only snarled as he grabbed her chin again. Every second she did not relent might be a second needed by the Fleet.
“It's nothing personal, Noa,” the not-James said through gritted teeth.
Noa struggled and jerked out of his grasp again, her sweat-slick skin giving her an advantage.
“Break her neck! She can retain consciousness if you do it right,” screamed Eight.
Noa was breathing hard and her lungs were screaming, but she felt a dawning in her thick skull. James could break her neck, but he hadn't. It wasn't personal … she'd said those words before on Adam's Station, right before she tried to trick the men who'd been intent on selling him for spare parts. Her eyes went wide, and she gulped. It could be a trick, but she wasn't going to win a struggle against him.
Raising the neural interface high, James said, “Now you will scream.”
Noa obliged. “No!” Rolling her head as though in mindless terror, she purposely exposed her neural interface. She felt the link click and the flow of electrons in her brain … the flow that even a gate that could scan the ether would not be privy to.
James's voice echoed in her mind over the hard link. “Scream, damn it!”
“I did scream,” Noa protested, so happy to feel him in her mind again that she bit her lip to hide her smile.
An avatar of James rose in her visual cortex. This avatar wore the clothing she'd seen him wearing on the gangplank. He'd chosen to keep the lo
ng black gash on his face, too. Beyond that, at the moment, the avatar looked extremely irritated. “It wasn't convincing.”
Noa coughed to keep from laughing.
“And you're smiling,” James's avatar complained, waving his arms.
Screwing her eyes shut, Noa cried out, “No, stop, please, the pain, the paaiinnnn!”
In the real world, Eight said, “Is she divulging the data?”
“Owwww! No, please don't, I don't want to tell any more!” Noa cried aloud.
“Stop it,” James's avatar hissed.
Noa blinked at him. “But—”
Scowling, his avatar muttered, “You are a horrible actress.” With a grumble, he added, “Just try not to smile.”
“Okay!” Noa let her avatar beam, but in the real world she let her mouth gape open, and stuck her tongue out a bit.
Rolling his eyes, James's avatar sighed and blinked out of the mindscape.
“What is happening?” Eight asked. “Is she unconscious?”
“Not really,” James said to the gate. “I've just overwhelmed her sensory inputs with an electron burst.”
“Can you do that?” Noa whispered silently across the hard link.
James's thoughts rumbled into her brain. “I have no idea, but it sounds good.”
Noa almost laughed again, with joy and relief, and because nebulas, she'd forgotten how much she'd enjoyed his dry wit. Her eyes welled with tears, and a giant one slipped down her cheek.
“She's crying. She is hurt,” Eight whispered, and Noa shuddered … hopefully convincingly.
Her eyes were closed, but she swore she could hear the scowl in his voice as James said, “Please, don't disturb me. It takes … concentration.”
“Of course!” said Eight, and Noa heard the barely perceptible hum of the intercom go silent. She wondered why the gate bothered to speak to James aloud instead of using the ether.
James's avatar reappeared in her mind. Noa let her avatar rush toward him, ready to catch him in a virtual embrace, and then she stopped, her virtual arms falling. “James?”
She hadn't seen the real James smile, but his avatar had always been expressive. His avatar's face was flat now. Her eyes caught on the long dark scar down his cheek. Was that some sort of synthetic bone poking through? What had the Luddecceans done to him? What had her species done to him? She wrapped her arms around herself to keep from touching him. James's avatar just stared at her, like she was an insect.
“What they did to you … I can see where you might … I shouldn't assumed that you would want …”
James's avatar's eyebrows went up. “I don't blame you for the torture.”
Noa's avatar's arms unwound, but he didn't reach for her.
“But I did deprogram myself,” James said. “I no longer love you.”
“Oh,” Noa said in a small voice. For a moment her mind stopped and she felt like her heart had stopped, too. And then another tear slipped from her eyes. “I'm glad you escaped,” she whispered. “You didn't deserve to be caught up in this.”
“We need to talk about how you came to be here,” James's avatar said, his words completely businesslike. “The Ark was destroyed and has no escape pods.”
“I holed up in Airlock 1.”
His brows rose again. “Oh.” He blinked. “Oh, yes, the force of the explosion would have jettisoned it away from the ship, and as long as the inner door was sealed, it would have been able to withstand the force of the—” His avatar smiled. “Eight is right. You are sneaky.”
Locking her hands behind her back, Noa said, “Says the man who is feigning torturing me.”
James laughed, and it made Noa's heart hurt to hear it again.
“Thank you for that, by the way,” she added.
James's avatar shrugged. “Why bother if I could just ask you? I have enough data on torture to know how humans would respond.”
Noa's jaw fell, wondering if he were joking, and having a sinking feeling he wasn't. “You know,” she whispered, “if you think I'm going to divulge Fleet secrets willingly, you're mistaken.”
James laughed again, his voice warm and low. “The Fleet has no secrets from us.”
Noa didn't know whether to feel relieved or terrified by that. “And anything I think you'd use against the Republic, I can't give away either,” she whispered.
James's jaw got hard and he looked to the side, exposing the long black scar.
“Whose side are you on, James?” Noa asked.
He looked back to her, blue eyes icy. “Not yours.” He looked down, and his brows drew together. “Mine … ours ...”
“Ours?” Noa whispered.
“My people's,” he said, looking at the barren mindscape as though it held great secrets. He looked away again. “Noa, I don't want there to be war.”
“Me either,” Noa snapped.
“It may not be avoidable,” James said, echoing her posture and putting his hands behind his back.
Noa swallowed, thinking about what a war with the gates would mean. Billions in settlements that weren't self-sufficient would die. Billions more, who would find themselves thrust back into a pre-industrial level of subsistence. She remembered Eight dropping the fuel pods on Luddeccea, and hadn't Kenji said that Eight was weaponizing? How many billions above gate worlds would lose their lives outright?
“It might not be at that point yet,” Noa said. “We don't know where the fuel pods landed. It could be that they—”
“Eight dropped a weaponized fission reactor on Prime,” James said. “When it rescued me.”
“What?” Noa said, in real life and in the mindscape.
In the real world, she heard the intercom click on with a crackly sigh, and then Eight's voice. “Is everything all right?”
In the real world, she heard James say, “It's fine. Just having a little fun with her.”
Noa shivered. He said it so easily, she wasn't sure if he'd mind “having a little fun” with her, whatever that implied for a cyborg. In the ether, she demanded, “And you have no feelings about that?”
His avatar's head whipped toward hers. “Yes, I do. I'm glad to not be tortured, not to have to face ten—a hundred—however many more centuries of captivity and that.”
Noa's stomach twisted. “You have no sense of remorse?” she whispered.
“None, Noa.”
Noa drew back, sickened by what happened to her people … but also by what would be done to him. Centuries … without death as an escape. To ask any one person to be that sacrifice was unconscionable.
Of course, her people didn't see him as a person.
And was he? He said he didn't care about the dead and suffering humans of her home world. In the ether, she put her avatar's hands to her temples. Her head hurt, and she thought she might throw up in the real world, thinking about the hundreds of thousands of lives snuffed out, and the tens of thousands more who would suffer from radiation sickness, burns, and the inevitable increase in cancer. The disruptions to Prime's distribution networks would condemn millions more to slow starvation if the Fleet didn't get here in the next few months.
“I am not human, Noa,” James said. “I do not feel for humans, not the way you do or … Professor James Sinclair did. If I seemed to care before, it was only because I needed you. I was programmed to need you, and I couldn't do anything that would lower your estimation of me.”
Dropping her hands, she gazed at him. He had done things that had lowered him in her estimation. She'd seen this callousness toward human life before, and when she'd first met him, his near lack of humor had disturbed her. “You learned to hide that quickly,” Noa murmured. Eerily quickly. She shivered. “Why are you telling me this?” It was making her trust him less, not more.
“Because I need you to be honest with me. Eight is weaponizing more reactors.”
Noa inhaled sharply.
James continued. “I need to know where you got that ship. I need to know what is happening at the Kanakah Gate. It could change … e
verything.”
The Fleet was coming, and that was a secret the gates could not know because until the Kanakah Gate was damaged, if the Free People of the Kanakah Disk were on schedule, Fleet would arrive through the gate within days, and then they'd be here within a month grav standard time. What would the gates do if they knew that? What was James planning on doing with that information? If he alerted Gate 8 to the Fleet's arrival, it could prepare. There would be more human lives lost.
“Why should I trust you?” Noa said, meeting his gaze.
“Because I haven't tried to rip the information out of your head already,” James replied icily, his avatar taking a step toward her.
Noa stood her ground. James huffed in frustration, and looked away. “Noa, the other gates do not approve of what Eight has done. They're not ready for war. They're still trying to decide what the human-machine relationship should be, and I don't want a war.”
“You don't care about humankind,” Noa said. “You've just told me so.”
“No, but I care about my kind,” James said.
Noa's eyes narrowed. “Doesn't seem that they have as much to fear from us.” So why was he toying with her?
“Not the gates,” James said, icy blue gaze meeting her eyes again. “There are other agents; they are my kind. We can be hurt.”
Her eyes went instinctively to that long black scar.
“We can save my kind and yours. Together,” James said. “There is nothing you gain by hiding this information from me, and everything to lose.”
Noa took a step back. He was right, there was nothing to be gained by hiding the information—he'd rip it from her eventually, over her dead body if he wanted or needed to.
But would the Kanakah Gate even work if the other gates did not want it to? James had said that the other gates didn't approve of what Eight had done … that was just his word. He could be lying. If she withheld the information for as long as she could, at least she would die with pride.
Her avatar squeezed its eyes shut. In the real world, she grimaced. But what good would her pride do anyone? If she told James, maybe they could come up with a plan to halt Eight's weaponization.