by Calinda B
“I’ll show her around and set her up in a bunk,” he said, even as his mind ticked through his grim history and even uglier future.
Benedetta eyed him for a moment, and he wondered what she saw. Although the l’auraly had been designed simply to be perfect lovers, their empathic skills would have made them excellent artists or therapists. Or interrogators.
But she merely said, “Put her across from the twins. And, Shaxi, when was the last time you had a real meal?”
Shaxi shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s been…some time.”
“Get something to eat while you take your tour,” Benedetta said. “You’re less useful to us if you die of hunger.”
Shaxi ducked her head, the almost bashful motion at odds with her warrior physique. “I think you must be a good older sister.”
“If you can convince Torash and Alolis of that, I’ll add a bonus in danger pay.” Benedetta jerked her chin at Eril. “Hit the mess hall first, Mr. Morav.”
He indicated the way to Shaxi. “Shall we?”
But she glanced back at Benedetta. “Thank you for giving me a place.” She bowed with stiff formality. “In return, I will give my life to protect your sisters and this ship. That is what I was made to do.”
Benedetta nodded, a certain brutal set to her mouth, as if she expected nothing less, although her eyes shone with a suspicious glitter.
Not ruthlessness, but tears. She might pity the poor programmed killer now, but he had no doubt she would be the first to fire when he hijacked Shaxi’s empty code and unleashed her on the twins. But it would be too late, for all of them.
He was silent as he led the next of his many victims to one of her last meals.
The motion sensor lights flicked on at their entry, and he turned with resignation to face her. “What do you like to eat?”
“I have no idea.”
He cocked his head. “Hermitaj programming doesn’t override your personality. At least when you aren’t on a specific mission. You must have some preferences.”
She was scanning the mess hall as if there might be some peril concealed in the tidy food prep area or between the banquette seating where the crew gathered for meals. Mostly, he suspected she was avoiding his gaze. “I do have preferences. In…some things. But not food.”
He wondered what preferences she did have, that she’d hesitated to mention. But he didn’t want to push her. Yet. “I suppose your employers kept you on battle rations, and you were taken young enough that you hadn’t developed an adult palate.”
“I wasn’t taken—” She let out a sharp breath. “I like pixberries. Fresh off the vine.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, you don’t want much on a spaceship, do you?”
She jerked her chin in. “I’ll eat anything, but you asked—”
He raised his hand to quiet her. “So I did. Let me see what we have in stores. Won’t be quite the same as fresh, but better than nutri-bars.”
He kept one eye on her as she prowled through the mess hall while he found a dessert package with the ubiquitous purple sphere on the label. Pixberries were always one of the first terraforming plants introduced to a new planet since they could be engineered to thrive in almost any soil and atmosphere to produce fat, sweet-tart berries that made the early days of planet-busting less dreary. He broke the seal on the package and set it in the wave-oven then dug around for a spoon while the dessert heated.
When he straightened, Shaxi was standing on the other side of the counter, just beyond arm’s reach.
For all his covert training, his pulse skittered. He hadn’t heard her approach. The gold ring around her irises widened, shrinking the blackness; she was scanning him.
He handed her the spoon. “Do you want ice cream with that?”
“I…don’t remember.”
“I always recommend berry cobbler be served a la mode.”
“If that means with ice cream, then yes.”
Even when he opened the freezer compartment and let out a blast of super-chilled air, the deep burn of her gaze still prickled between his shoulder blades. He took a steadying breath before he turned back. When he plucked a laser cutter out of a drawer, she stiffened.
He kept his movements slow and easy, making sure his hands stayed where she could see them. Other ex-Hermitaj commandos had gone rogue, and he didn’t want to trigger a shoot-out with this one; he’d seen what she was capable of. “We can cryo-preserve long-range sheership passengers, but science still hasn’t found an easy way to spoon up ice cream.” He adjusted the depth of the cutter and sliced out a generous portion of the frozen treat. The sound of the cutter sizzling around the softening edges was lost in the ding of the wave-oven. He pulled out the cobbler package and neatly centered the ice cream on top. “There are certain benefits to traveling with two young women, three if you count Benedetta.” He handed Shaxi the dessert.
She looked down at the faint twist of steam and inhaled. The unnatural gold ring constricted to near invisibility as her pupils dilated in pleasure. “This I remember,” she said softly.
He waited until she’d taken the first bite, her eyes closing in delight, before asking, “When did Hermitaj conscript you?”
Her eyes still closed, she savored the bite, and he found himself mesmerized by the slow grind of her jaw. By all the threads of the sheerways, he could almost feel the melting sweetness on his own tongue.
He cleared his throat and she opened her eyes.
She took another bite, savoring again and swallowing, before answering him. “I was younger than the twins. What can you tell me about them?”
He wondered why she avoided saying more. Her base programming should have made her amenable to any questioning from authority, which he was—as far as she knew—by virtue of his seniority on the Asphodel’s crew. He needed to know how deep that encoding went: the younger she’d been, the more intrinsic the coding was to her core psyche, the more vulnerable to codejacking she’d be.
Had her reticence been part of her character before Hermitaj, or after?
He gestured for the door. “Shall we tour while you snack?” With both her hands occupied with bowl and spoon, and her mind and body awash in sugary endorphins, maybe she’d be less on guard. He led the way, asking, “Did the captain give you access to the ship’s history, schematics, and manifest?”
“He did. And I found it to be pointedly incomplete.” She took another bite of cobbler as they headed out into the main corridor. “Is this a pirate ship?”
Eril coughed. “No. Would that be a problem if it was?”
She considered. “No. There’s a saying about beggars, and I am less than a beggar.”
He didn’t bother to contradict her. Her vulnerability was exactly what made her such an expedient tool. “This ship has enemies, so the captain keeps a low profile.” He stopped to show her the club room where crew members could stave off the boredom of long flights with gaming and exercise. She asked about the sim firing range; he gave her the specs. As they moved on, he weighed his options, then decided to be semi honest since she was obviously attuned to lies, even of omission. “I don’t know all of what they’ve faced. But the girls—as you’ve seen—need extra eyes.”
“And guns.” She took another bite with great relish before looking down at her empty bowl with a sigh.
He glanced down at her hazer pistol. “Fortunately, you have both.”
“A gun and an eye.” She stopped abruptly to face him.
He jerked his gaze up from where it had lingered on her thigh where the gun was strapped. The flower-nose pistol looked almost delicate against the strong curve of her hips, but he’d already seen its slaughtering potential. He didn’t doubt her body could just as simply lay waste to a man.
The gold rings were back in her eyes, measuring him in incremental pulses as the rings spun through their analytical spectrum. “The pattern of your tattoo. It’s not finished. You are incomplete as well.”
She said it with such accusat
ion he couldn’t help but give her a twisted smile, not much different probably from the grimace he’d had to summon up while the inker marked his skin. Except as she’d noted, the motif was fragmented. The pain would never be over. “Like the Asphodel, I too prefer to keep myself to myself.”
Gold widened, almost eclipsing the black, but she said nothing.
After he showed her past the engine room, he gave her a rundown on her evacuation route and battle stations in case of an emergency. When they stopped at navigation—quiet since the ship was in port—she investigated the 3D rendering of the sheerways which was the only light in the otherwise blacked-out room. All the universe’s connected threads were traced out in a woven rainbow, from the long red wavelength routes to the shortest violet paths. If he had the genetic mods of a sheerways pilot, the infrared and ultraviolet threads would show too. The tangle was confusing enough to his merely human eyes; no wonder sheerways pilots always ended up insane.
He wondered how much Shaxi saw of the chaos. But when she glanced at him, her eyes were still bright gold—not a color of the sheerways. “In Old Earth mythology,” she said, “asphodels are associated with the afterlife.”
She’d been doing her own research while he took her on his tour, he realized. “If by afterlife, you mean death. Asphodels bloomed in the meadows of the dead. That shouldn’t be a problem for you though. I’m sure you’ve faced worse threats than ghostly white flowers.”
To his surprise, the gold rings thinned to almost nothing, leaving only her dark, disturbed gaze. “That is something else I don’t remember. Or not much.”
In the light of the sheerways map, her full lips thinned in concentration, as if she was struggling to remember more. He wanted to warn her not to fight the forgetfulness. Remembering would only renew the agony. But then she’d be curious why he knew so much about the torture of the lost. And then she might wonder how far he’d go to stop the pain…
To distract her from that irretrievable past—his own and hers—he directed her attention forward. “How did you survive when the Hermitaj base was destroyed?”
She drifted to the edge of the darkened room, until the lighted threads of the map barely glimmered on the edge of her hazer and the worn on’Taj patch above her breast when she turned to face him.
“I killed most of my unit,” she said.
So much for diverting her from old pain. She’d only traded up. He didn’t doubt she saw everything despite the gloom, so he kept his expression utterly still. “That must have been hard for you.”
She tilted her head, the white spikes of her hair catching a glint of the rainbow. “Not particularly. The failure of their programming made them undemanding targets.”
“I meant,” he said softly, “it must have been emotionally difficult.”
After a moment, she shrugged. “They did not give me the opportunity to consult my…feelings on the matter.”
“They went rogue?”
The faint rainbows in her hair warped and reformed at her sharp nod. “My strike force was en route back to base. Our completed mission had been wiped, and no replacement coding had been sent yet when the asteroid was attacked. In the confusion, the others defaulted to combat mode. Except to them, everyone in reach was the enemy.”
Despite her sparse telling, he guessed enough to fill in the blanks. The strike force would have been only a handful of savage commandos, traveling light on a small, fast ship. When they went rogue… His gut tightened, but he couldn’t stop himself from picturing her facing the blank black armor of the uncontrolled killers in the tight confines of a sheership.
His voice sounded rough in his ears when he said, “You’re lucky you were able to keep control.”
“Lucky.” She breathed out the word, the sound almost lost in the thud of her boots as she resumed her circuit around the room. “I don’t know that I did keep control. But when the shooting was over, I and one other still stood and there was a breach in the bulkhead. Maybe the vacuum of space cleared our heads. We had to work together to repressurize the ship and by then it seemed stupid to keep shooting. When base went out, we lost our autopilot so we were adrift. Our only choice was to retrace our path.”
Eril choked out an appalled oath. “Back to the war zone you’d just left?”
“The fires were still burning,” she said in a thin voice. “Our memories of the battle had already been wiped, but the inhabitants had not forgotten. They hunted the two of us relentlessly. I escaped on a delivery drone, but I don’t know what happened to the other. I took a job as hired security for intraplanetary shipments in that system, thinking I might be able to get information, but I found nothing. Everything I knew was destroyed, everyone I knew was dead, and I was alone.”
Falling silent when she returned to the sheerways map where she’d started, she lifted her hand into the projected threads. Around her skin, black as space itself, the lights wrapped like bright gemstone chains.
The threads that connected the universe were always shifting, which was why sheerships needed living pilots to unravel the tangle for all but the least important ships with the least valued cargo and passengers. Shaxi was not one of the rare few who’d survived navigator indoctrination, so why did he feel like her touch on the virtual lights like a caress on his own skin? He couldn’t let her terrible story change his course.
But he heard himself tell her, “It wasn’t your fault, what happened.”
“I know that,” she said. “It wasn’t their fault either, though they would have killed me without hesitation. As we’d been programmed to do.”
Her tone was utterly flat and matter-of-fact, but she kept her focus on the threads, as if she could find a way out of the tangle.
He should tell her there was no way out, but the words stuck in his throat.
She let her hand drop out of the light. “We should finish this.”
For a moment, he just stared at her, the tingle of his flesh sinking to a bone-deep chill. She couldn’t know how often he thought that to himself.
“Finish the tour,” she prodded expectantly when he still didn’t speak.
With more effort than he’d ever needed in his life of lies, he shook off his frozen silence and led her back to steerage.
The corridors in the crew section were tighter than in the main compartments. The blue-gray walls glowed gently from behind with lighted panels, and he found himself breathing more deeply, taking in the scent of dust and something else as earthy, but warmer and sweeter, like the pixberries: the fragrance of her skin.
He exhaled hard. It was just the l’auraly influence making him so perversely aware of the half-woman beside him. Benedetta kept the qva’avaq key hidden somewhere on the ship, he’d guessed, but the crystal coursing through the twins’ blood was potent enough even without the resonating key. He just had to ignore the sudden impulse to shove Shaxi against the bulkhead and thread his fingers through that white hair while he tasted the last of the berries on her tongue until they both forgot what they were doing, where they were, and who they’d become.
If he tried it, of course, she’d pull that flower-nose pistol and take his head off.
The possibility wasn’t as much of a deterrent as it should’ve been. Maybe she’d even forgive him as she’d forgiven the rogues who’d tried to kill her.
That fleeting wish—as if he had any right to even hope for absolution—extinguished his unacceptable desire, and he halted in front of the next doorway.
“The Asphodel took on extra crew, me included, for this most recent trading run,” he told her, “so quarters are tighter than usual, but the twins share a suite right across the hall. At least you get your own bunk.”
“I’m not hard to please,” she said.
How could she know what pleased her? She’d mentioned the enforced celibacy of Hermitaj soldiers, and he’d seen for himself her delight in one rewarmed dessert. He could show her—
He stifled the rest of the thought. He had even less right to her pleasure than
he did to her forgiveness.
“Let’s set you up, then,” he said. At least his voice was steady. “Hold your hand to the lock pad.”
She did so, and the door slid silently aside. “Who else will it open for?”
“The captain, of course. Security, at captain’s orders. And supplies.”
“Who is that?”
“Me.”
He couldn’t decipher her low grunt, but she made no move to block him when he followed her into the room.
She circled, taking in the small but efficient room with one sweep.
“Basic lav behind the mirror.” He pointed out the glass panel. “Full water shower—a luxury on a ship this size—is at the end of the hall. The light here on the mirror and above the shower door will tell you when it’s available or occupied. But it’s big enough for two.”
When she glanced over her shoulder at him, he kept his expression neutral though his pulse pounded in his ears. That thrice-tangled crystal! He needed a shower himself—an ice-cold one—to wash away the impossible craving.
She lifted one eyebrow. “I do not require real water to clean, nor do I need a back-scrubber.”
He managed to shrug. “Then I guess you’ve gotten most of the tour.”
“You were telling me about the twins,” she reminded him. “They are my assignment, and there is something about them I don’t understand.”
Had his comment about the shower revived in her the unnerving sexual reaction triggered by the qva’avaq crystal? He had caught that hot spark in her black eyes during the cantina fight. Apparently there was enough woman left in the cyborg to feel the lure too.
A dart of anticipation stiffened his spine. If he could subvert that impulse for himself…
Uncertain of the best way to proceed, he answered her question. “The twins are young women of a particular age, living on a very small ship, with an unsuitable number of companions. Of course they get into trouble. But you’ll take care of that.”
“I should get to it then.” She looked at him pointedly.