In the Company of Others

by Julie E. Czerneda

Pardell had heard Gail’s orders, all right. He hadn’t believed them for an instant. Maybe, he thought, it was time to test them for himself. “So I could go to the bridge,” he ventured.

  “Get dressed, first,” Grant suggested, with a distinctly challenging smile.

  Orders. Requests. Messages. Instructions. As Pardell pulled on his clothes—still his clothes, not Seeker “hand-me-news”—he realized those had been the sum of his communications with Gail Smith since they’d touched in the lab. His fault or hers?

  His, if he were honest.

  “You almost ready, Aaron?” Grant called from the corridor.

  “Coming,” Pardell replied, pulling on his boots and trying to dismiss the memory. He’d deserved what he’d felt.

  They’d not spoken a word to one another beyond the needs of her experiments since. He’d been too humiliated and angry at first, at everything, not just her.

  Later?

  Pardell had found himself studying Gail Smith even as she studied him, hour after hour, day after day. He’d seen the way her eyes clouded when she concentrated, then snapped into brightness with each new idea or approach. He’d seen—did the others?—how she drove herself harder than anyone around her, her seemingly boundless energy fueled by passion for her work. It couldn’t have been sleep. Her face had grown thinner since he’d learned it, tired around the eyes, though it still possessed dimples.

  He’d seen them in her smiles at Malley.

  At some mysterious, otherwise unremarkable instant—had it been when he’d noticed how Gail stood close to ask him questions, unafraid, though she knew firsthand the pain of his touch? or maybe when she’d stopped an experiment because a tech had forgotten to strap him in for his own safety—his heart had started to pound and he’d lost himself in the way her hair caught light and transmuted it into gold.

  So now, he still couldn’t talk to her. But it wasn’t anger.

  “You fall asleep?” Grant rapped on the door impatiently. “We do have be on duty at some point today.”

  Pardell shook away any thought but anticipation. He’d never seen a working starship bridge. Grant was right—it was time he started enjoying his freedom.

  No point daydreaming about anything, or anyone, else.

  Chapter 54

  IT might have been a dream, except for its importance. Gail ran her fingers over her forearm again, fearing the impulse was on its way to becoming a habit, but using it to try and extract everything possible from the memory. Her arm had touched the edge of his thumb. There’d been pain, a burning that shot from that contact to her fingers and upward, to wrap from shoulder to throat.

  Pardell had confessed to pain, less localized than hers, likely more intense. He’d been ill. That was all.

  It couldn’t have been all. Her every instinct insisted he’d lied, even though she had no idea why he would. Proof? Nothing Gail could take to her colleagues. But until that moment, there had been something growing between them. Gail might want it otherwise—could there be a worse time to be attracted to someone, or a worse someone to choose?—but she wasn’t blind to her own feelings. She didn’t think she’d misinterpreted his. Beyond reason, beyond sense, time they’d spent together had passed like nothing at all. Time apart . . . had become merely waiting.

  Pardell’s avoidance of her, his careful distancing and oh-so-businesslike conversation—yes, Dr. Smith . . . of course, Dr. Smith—when they had to work together, weren’t helping. Unless she buried herself in her work, Gail found herself distracted. Sometimes, even then. Irony come to roost, she thought, in those moments of mental clarity when she could step away from herself and take a good look. What had put her in charge of this ship and its search for the Quill—her intensity, her judgment—conspired against her now. She was consumed by longings and judged herself a fool.

  “Cooper?” Gail called to the tech. “I need corroboration on these results. Get something worked out with Dr. Temujin and don’t let him go off on a tangent again. Remember, we’ve a great deal to accomplish in the next couple of days.”

  “Two days? What then?” Malley, never far, pulled over a stool.

  Gail could look him in the eye once he’d sat and she did, treading with sudden care to say only: “We’ll reach our destination.” Malley had taken to being on the ship a little too well, according to the preliminary psych reports she had on her desk. He might be young, smart, and adaptable. Or he might simply be dumping the entire concept into someplace dark and scared that could ultimately explode from the strain.

  No sign this bothered him at all. “What happens there?”

  “We orbit,” Dr. Temujin offered gleefully, stopping short of bouncing as he walked over to them. He’d learned very few of his colleagues were impressed by physical enthusiasm before their third coffee. “We orbit, we examine, and if all is as we hope, we begin implementation of Trial Number One! Two days, Dr. Smith. You must be so excited. The culmination of your work is at hand.”

  “And Trial Number One might be?” Malley raised his eyebrows quizzically, with no sign of any other reaction but curiosity. Gail was impressed.

  She raised an eyebrow back. “What precedes Trials Two through Fifty, Malley. You’re welcome to check the list of approved experiments.” She pointed to the scrolling display board near the main exit, on one of the lab’s two permanent walls. The D-board itself was becoming a crucial tool as the various research leaders posted last-minute requests and changes. “This isn’t only about my mission to retrieve Quill tissue, you realize, although that’s our central purpose. What made it easy to fill the Seeker with the brightest and best was the chance to do some deep-space science—”

  “And put Titan University back where it should be, at the forefront of human exploration and understanding of the universe.”

  “Good morning, Dr. Reinsez,” Gail said politely to the man arriving with a trio of FDs. “You’re up early.” Another one who always knew when she didn’t want him around.

  Dr. Reinsez smiled benevolently. “The closer we get to your mystery planet, Dr. Smith, the less anyone seems to be sleeping on this ship. Why should I be any different? It’s the air of discovery. The lure of the unknown—”

  “The certainty that no matter the outcome,” Gail said cut-tingly, “you’ll earn that Chair of Extrasolar Studies you’ve been after for fifteen years.” They’d come to an understanding of sorts. If she failed, he had enough evidence to end her career and make his own. If she succeeded? Gail had willingly volunteered to share any fame and glory, going so far as to give Reinsez her written guarantee.

  Such things were irrelevant now.

  Reinsez, to whom such things were still everything, looked insufferably smug. “There’s that. So what’s up today? And where’s your test subject?” The latter was said with an uneasy glance around, as if Reinsez feared Pardell might be sneaking up on him from behind.

  Where indeed? Without being obvious about it, Gail looked around as well. Pardell typically came in with, or shortly after, his friend, waiting until the stationer rapped on his door before making an appearance. Grant had confirmed Pardell rarely slept more than three hours a ship night, so she assumed this practice was another deliberate attempt to avoid being alone with her.

  What had he felt from her touch?

  Cornell, one of the FDs who “happened” to arrive with Reinsez—Gail’s orders being very specific in how little autonomy the man was to be allowed—spoke up, “Mr. Pardell is on the bridge, Dr. Smith.”

  Gail had overruled Tobo in granting her guests shipwide access. It had seemed only reasonable at the time, considering it could well be argued she’d kidnapped all three. With Grant’s people assuming responsibility for monitoring their movements, she hadn’t given it further thought. Until now.

  “Where’s Rosalind Fournier?” she asked. The two ’siders took their evening meals together, but as far as she’d been told or observed, Pardell didn’t seek Rosalind out otherwise. The older ’ider spent most of her time, understanda
bly, in the Seeker’s engineering section.

  FD Sensun answered. “In her assigned quarters, Dr. Smith.”

  Aaron was on the bridge. She wondered what Tobo was going to say about that.

  Her heart gave a sickening lurch. Without a word, Gail almost flew out of the lab, dodging past sleepy incoming techs without apology, running flat out down the corridor to the waist connecting the science sphere to the rest of the ship.

  She’d shown Tobo and Grant the recording uploaded from the returning shuttle and buried under layers of code all these years within the ’Mate. She’d had to—it was too much to ask their blind cooperation in ignoring Titan’s orders, when their heads would roll with hers. But only those two, besides herself and Aaron. And, as far as she knew, the ’sider hadn’t shown Malley.

  Perhaps Aaron wouldn’t care that Tobo and Grant had seen his past.

  Unfortunately, he was very likely to care about something Tobo and Grant knew that she hadn’t found a way to tell him yet. That in two days they’d be in orbit around no mystery planet, but the world where he’d been bom. And his parents had died.

  Gail could only hope Tobo knew when not to tell stories to a guest on his bridge.

  Chapter 55

  PARDELL leaned forward in the first officer’s chair. He hadn’t felt so at home since leaving the ’Mate. “And no one saw the ship again, Captain?” he prompted Tobo. Spacer tales were the folklore of his youth—he’d grown up sitting at the feet of those who’d either lived them, or embellished with gusto. Or both. The Seeker’s round-faced Captain was a master storyteller of the same ilk.

  “Never again, Mr. Pardell. You can be sure the families of the lost crew searched, but to this day, not a trace, not a whisper of a signal or translight trail, has ever been found.” Tobo’s voice was suitably low and grim.

  Pardell grinned with delight. Tobo took one look at him, tried to keep a straight, somber face, then burst into laughter, his dark eyes twinkling. “Well, if that didn’t scare you, young man, have you heard the one about the star barge Misery’s Company and her blackhearted captain?”

  “No, and I’d love to, Captain,” Pardell said sincerely, “but I can tell from Commander Grant’s monotonous twitching I’m late for my duties in the science sphere. But thank you.” He hesitated, then asked: “May I come again?”

  Pardell had thought the Seeker’s bridge would make him homesick, but there’d been no points of comparison to draw him into memories of the Merry Mate II. This was a place of wonders, wonders he could comprehend, as opposed to those in the lab which Malley had to explain to him, usually more than once, or which involved being wired up like a console himself. When they’d arrived, Grant had introduced him to First Officer Szpindel, whose night shift boredom was patent in the speed with which he’d offered a tour. Afterward, Grant had suggested breakfast, but Pardell couldn’t bear to leave. Not for something as ordinary as food. The commander had promised to be back to collect him.

  Pardell was used to becoming unremarkable. It hadn’t taken long before the bridge crew forgot about him, to all intents and purposes. He’d sat, drinking in the view of a passing nebula on the towering screen, for once content to let his surroundings expand and grow strange around him as his perceptions deepened and wandered, relaxed enough to permit his mind its hunt for connections, seeing the past in the curve of a man’s spine and the curl of a nebula, the future in tones of language and tamed light, letting his thoughts expand and roam as they would.

  He could well have sat there forever, but Captain Tobo had arrived, complete with tea service, and offered to tell him the real truths of space travel.

  And now Commander Grant stood, ready to provide another official twitch if he didn’t get moving, all trace of the cheerful Ping-Pong partner occluded by a uniform and a tough, professional bearing. Well, not all. Pardell had seen Grant holding in a smile of his own at the incredible finale to Tobo’s story.

  Maybe, Pardell admitted to himself, just maybe, this wasn’t such a bad place to be.

  At the same instant, the door to the bridge whooshed open and in ran, not walked, Gail Smith, followed by two of Grant’s FDs. Grant straightened with a subvocal oath and Tobo surged to his feet.

  Pardell stayed in his seat, hoping whatever sent Gail Smith chasing all the way to her ship’s bridge had nothing to do with his being here.

  Even if part of him hoped it did.

  Chapter 56

  THERE really wasn’t going to be a graceful, easy way out of this, Gail told herself, coming to a breathless halt steps from Tobo and Pardell, Grant already in “full alert” mode and looking to her shadows for clues to the emergency.

  She clawed loose hair from her eyes and couldn’t tear her gaze away from Pardell’s face. He looked normal, if a little wary. Not the look of someone who’d just learned how soon, and how directly, he was going to meet the dark truths of his past.

  There wasn’t an easy way, Gail knew suddenly. There was only one way.

  “I came—” Her voice was still too shaky. Gail took two more deep breaths and smoothed down her lab coat by jamming her hands in the pockets. “I came to ask you to have breakfast with me, Aaron.” She then took another breath and added reasonably: “If you have had breakfast, we could have coffee—or tea.”

  Now the hazel eyes were puzzled, but oddly off guard, as if she’d caught him relaxing at home. “I’ve had tea with your entertaining Captain, Dr. Smith.” Then, perhaps because her face wasn’t under any type of control and must have shown something of her desperation, Pardell clarified: “But I haven’t had breakfast.”

  “Good. That’s good. Someone call the steward’s office and have breakfast for two sent to my office. You’ve had breakfast,” she informed Grant, staving off any thoughts he might have of joining them.

  This was going to be hard enough without an audience.

  Gail had fully expected to have to order Grant to allow her to be alone with the ’sider. After all, to the FD commander, Pardell was still an unknown quantity and proved lethal—a security risk by any definition. But Grant hadn’t argued. In fact, the flash of sympathy in the look he sent after Pardell was almost unnerving.

  Grant knew what she planned to do.

  Gail fervently wished she did as the door closed, leaving her alone with Aaron Pardell. “This is my office,” she heard herself announce.

  Aaron looked at her out the corner of one eye. He was prowling, something he seemed to do automatically in a new room, as though checking the exits. Probably a ’sider habit—Gail had seen Rosalind do it, too. “Not in the science sphere?” he sounded surprised.

  “It’s a compromise. I’m close to the bridge if Captain Tobo needs me. And I’ve meetings with representatives from the university here. That sort of thing.”

  “And breakfast.”

  “And breakfast,” she agreed. Gail shoved her hands in her pockets again, then realized that might appear defensive and shrugged off her lab coat, tossing it over the back of her chair. A rain of stylos, clips, and forceps hit the floor. She hurriedly bent down to retrieve them, holding her hair out of her eyes with one hand and wishing she’d remembered to tie it back.

  “Here,” a quiet voice said. She tilted her head and saw Aaron balanced on his heels in front of her, with most of the escapees from her lab coat in his glove. “Hold out your hands.”

  “Thank you,” Gail said softly, in case her voice might startle him back behind the wall he’d kept between them. She cupped her hands and held them out, studying his face rather than looking down as the small objects dropped into her palms.

  His face. She’d mapped it, surface and underlying tissue both, and tested its skin’s sensitivity with remotes and volunteers. If she were an artist, she could have drawn its clean, sharp lines from memory. It haunted her dreams.

  She’d never seen it, not like this, with his eyes traveling over her face as if finding something lost, his lower lip slowly drawn into his mouth and held between his teeth, then released
with a sigh that feathered warm against her skin. His eyes traced their way across her mouth, then her neck, then lower—not assessing, but memorizing. They stopped where she hadn’t bothered fastening the top of her shirt this morning and she watched the blood rise along his cheekbones.

  Her own were flaming. Gail felt an almost visceral shock as Pardell brought his eyes to hers at last and she saw the naked wanting in them.

  She couldn’t remember how to move.

  “Your breakfast, Dr. Smith?”

  Aaron leaped to his feet and Gail heard him talking to the steward. She took advantage of the distraction to fasten her shirt all the way to her throat, then collect the escaped contents of her pockets from the floor. She’d dropped them again. When? By the time she stood, Aaron and the steward had two places set at the meeting table in the corner.

  Keep the steward here, part of her mind babbled, even as she nodded her thanks and realized the man had taken it for dismissal.

  They were alone again.

  “This was why you asked me here, Dr. Smith, wasn’t it?” Pardell asked, his voice deliberately curious, nothing more.

  “What?” Gail blinked, realizing she was still standing behind her desk while Aaron had taken a seat at the table.

  “Breakfast?” his mouth deepened at the corners, as if he tried not to smile.

  “Yes. Of course.” Gail hurried to the other chair and tried to compose herself.

  Aaron glanced up at her, his face oddly unreadable, then took two glasses and poured water into both. He put one glass in front of her, took the other in his hand, and waited.

  No blame; no apologies. Gail’s hand almost slipped from the glass as she recognized the ritual and suddenly realized what Aaron must be assuming. He had to believe she’d brought him here for this, to put aside whatever conflict lingered from that night. Since he accepted the gesture, she knew beyond doubt he’d abide by it. She lifted her glass and sipped once, when he did, then again. They put their glasses down in unison.