She turned her head to hide the frustration that must be visible in her eyes. Not to acquiesce, never to acquiesce. “It was a good decision. Almost all of your choices are good. But decisions made in the dark aren’t always fair. You and I—we can be a symbol. We can be the mother and father of our people, united. We can stand side by side and represent the balance of work and command, the joining of man and woman, the beauty of song and the strength of a ready warrior.”
He laughed and she realized how exaggerated her words were—something meant for lyrics instead of to heal an argument. But they were true. She didn’t try to take them back.
He pushed the drawer shut and continued stripping, standing there long and lean, marked with old scars from years spent training and fighting, but nonetheless whole and vibrant. Even when she was angry with him, he drew her. Maybe even more then. She opened an arm toward him.
He came to lie beside her.
She let her fingers play through his short, graying hair. He had not acknowledged what she asked for. “I love you,” she said. “Remember before? The first time we met? I told you that I needed to matter, that I needed to be more than a lover.”
“You do. You are.”
She ran her hands over his shoulders, her touch light.
“The best lover,” he murmured. “So strong, so perfect.”
For a few moments touch was the only conversation between them. Then he whispered, “You have more power than you know. But there are places others are not ready for me to allow you to go.”
“But they will be. You can help them to be ready for me.”
He reached a hand up and caressed her cheek. “In the meantime, I am happy to listen to you.”
“I’m valuable for more than bedroom advice.” She took his hand in two of hers and began massaging his palm, using her thumb to draw strong circles in it. Perhaps she had pushed far enough for this moment. He would think about it. He was like that often, listening to her with no reaction and then evaluating what she said. “Ask me a question.”
He smiled, his blue-green eyes bright in a face paled with exhaustion and slightly reddened by arousal. Such a hard life he led, so much pressure. She wasn’t sure he was going to answer, but he finally asked, “What do you think it means that the only greeting from home so far is an attempt to steal from us?”
“That we must be very, very careful.”
He sighed. “Yes. There may be no need for any of us at all now that the ship is back. Perhaps we were always slaves.”
She drew in a sharp little breath, and then let it out slowly. “It cannot be like that. We are too brilliant, too creative, too strong to waste.”
“But we were wasting you, even inside this small ship.”
She put a finger over his lips. “At least you know that now.”
Yet he had wasted the people who followed Ellis and Sylva. She slid to her knees and straddled him, her naked body touching his in as many places as she could manage without dropping all of her weight onto him. “Perhaps we should make sure not to waste this night. Tomorrow is getting even more uncertain.”
In answer he pulled her down, kissing her so hard that she felt her lips bruise. It felt good.
Onor finally found Ruby in the cargo bar, chatting with Allen. Colin’s fight leader had become one of a handful of heirs-apparent after Colin and Par’s deaths, but in the three days between then and now, no decisions had been made. Ruby smiled up at the man, her head cocked, her face fully attentive.
Onor hesitated: Ruby twirled a glass of wine in her hand and a hint of red flush stained her cheeks. She turned her head as Onor approached, and it became too late to back away.
Besides, he didn’t want to.
Clearly she was able to read his mood. She stood up, her face instantly gone from soft and teasing to tense. “What happened?”
“I need to talk to you in private.”
She looked torn, but this wasn’t a conversation he was willing to share with Allen. “This won’t take long,” he added.
Ruby whispered something to Allen, kept her glass, and followed Onor as he turned and led her out of the room, and into the same private space where he and Haric had told Colin and Allen about the approaching ship. Unsurprisingly, Ruby ignored the table and sat on the worn blue couch. She gestured for him to sit beside her.
“I prefer to stand.” Now that he had her in a private place, he didn’t know how to begin. Angry sentences piled up behind his lips, unwilling to emerge.
She waited him out, twisting her hands in her hair and pulling out clips, letting it fall.
He turned away. He tried to modulate his voice, but failed. “I know what happened to Ellis and Sylva. And the others.”
She didn’t say anything.
The silence dragged on until he couldn’t help himself, and he turned to look at her. Her pale blue eyes showed no remorse at all. Her muscles had tensed, and her lips thinned. Some of the other sentences he’d been holding back came out, sounding disjointed. “It was murder. Turning off life support. How could you? Do you know how horribly they died?”
She nodded, controlled calm to his storm. Her words came out slow, as if she were on stage talking to a group of children. “They were trying to take over the ship’s command. Right when we were being attacked by an enemy.”
“That doesn’t make it honorable.”
“They would have killed us.”
“Maybe. But you could have locked them up. They could have been killed in a fair fight. Most of their followers were just blind; we could have saved them. KJ and his people could have taken them. I doubt they could have gotten in to command.” He realized he had moved to stand over her.
She smelled of wine and spices, and her face stayed cool and collected. She took another sip of wine, holding the glass to her lips for a second too long. When she finished, she said, “They were your enemies, too.”
“I wouldn’t have done that to them.”
“Even to protect me?” She stood up, her gaze meeting his evenly. “Joel did it to protect me, so he didn’t need to worry about me and the ship all at once.”
Her words felt like punches in his chest. Not because they were wrong. Because they were wrong for her. She lived for fairness, fought for fairness, and now she was defending cold-blooded murder. He stepped back, and the wall stopped his movement too fast, the room too small to contain them both. “We did this—we fought this fight—for justice. For everybody. You can’t just become like Garth, and kill people because they . . . they inconvenience you.”
Ruby took another sip of wine. She had become so much better at controlling herself than she used to be, so much more . . . theatrical.
He slammed his fist backward into the wall, the sharp thud and the pain both good. “You’re not the same anymore. You would have hated yourself.”
She closed the distance between them and her hand came up and slapped his left cheek hard enough to shift his balance so that he fell against the wall and had to shuffle his feet to keep them under him.
Her cool had gone completely, her voice high and tight. “You cannot know what we have to deal with, what it’s like to be responsible. Every day Joel and his people have to make decisions they hate. I do fight them, some of them. I fight more than you can possibly know.”
“So tell me how you fought this one?”
She met his gaze for a moment, and he finally saw guilt and confusion on her face before she turned away. “I didn’t. I didn’t know about it. Not until after it was done.”
He stood behind her, close enough to smell her again, and he put his hands on her shoulders. Her shirt was so thin that he felt her bone and muscle beneath his hands, even felt the warmth of her body. A single multi-colored strand of beads hung around her neck, visible from behind only because she’d tugged her hair all to one side. Her muscles tensed under his hands. He tried to shift his weight and turn her, but she shook her head, refusing to meet his eyes. “Why do you protect Joel?” he asked her.
>
“He’s smart enough to keep us all safe, and he’s willing to care.” She turned, breaking his grip so his hands fell by his sides. Her eyes were damp. They’d lost the guilt, and instead she looked resolute. “You can’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I can’t be everything, Onor. I must maintain my position or I will lose my ability to keep the fairness we have won. Choices have to be made.” She paused, took a deep breath, and when she started again her voice was firmer but softer. “If we—if I—If I fight every fight, I will lose one day. And if I lose, then we—all of us from gray—will lose our voice.”
Her look melted the anger out from under him, so he felt a bit loose in his moorings, a bit empty. “We can also lose if you—or we—give up our principles.”
“Don’t you think I know that? After all we’ve been through, I’m clear on what matters. But we have gained so much that we cannot afford to lose, and power contains compromise.” She paused. “You’re the one who is always talking about power, thinking about power. We used to be the ones who didn’t have it. Now we do.”
She did.
As if she were reading his reaction, she said, “You, too. Joel trusts you. The Jackman and Conroy trust you. Come on out with me and help me work on Allen. Once you have power, you don’t keep it by fighting.”
He touched her cheek.
She gazed at him for a long time, a universe of feelings in her eyes. Then she turned away.
Ruby hated pressure suits. They stank. The best one she’d been able to find had slightly short legs so she always felt like she should bend her knees, and the right elbow joint was harder to move than the left, so she expected to overcompensate in low-g and jerk herself to the left of where she wanted to go. Everything must have been perfect when the Fire left Adiamo, but she was willing to bet half of the damned ship would fail by the time it got home.
She didn’t like the airlock a whole lot more than the stiff and stinky suit, especially since it felt crowded with two of them. KJ sat closest to the bay door. She had wanted Onor or Marcelle, but the only way Joel had allowed her to visit the robot spider was with KJ right next to her.
She held her breath while pressure equalized, relaxing only when KJ could open the inner door to the cargo bay. They sat side by side on the lip of the lock, looking down. The small amount of gravity that Ix let them impose on the bay—about twenty-five percent—allowed their legs to hang down in a fashion.
Lights illuminated most of the vast space, although there were corners where shadow still ruled.
The traverse lines had all been replaced and strengthened. A crew of KJ’s carefully trained fighters, now nicknamed spider dancers, waited on the far side of the bay by the other airlock. They crouched as still as the metal ribs of the vast bay. They would only move if KJ asked them to, or if they perceived that KJ or Ruby were in life-threatening danger.
Blocky, multicolored cargo containers were strapped and bolted to the walls. The containers the robots had cut loose had been retied with bright yellow straps, so that they stood out from the others.
Two spiders sat unmoving, still trapped in ropes. They looked as dead as she had been assured they were; chains and ropes held their metal limbs in lifelike poses. A third had been reduced by half. Four legs had been taken out of the hold piece by piece to be examined by a bot repair crew.
The last living one sat where it had been captured, still trussed in rope and chain. It flexed its metal appendages against its bonds. “It sees us,” Ruby whispered.
KJ’s answer reminded her of a conversation they’d had getting ready for this. “They have a good sense of their surroundings, and act as if they can see in every direction at once.”
“I want to get closer.”
“Of course you do.” If they were in a world without helmets and radios, she was certain he’d be laughing at her.
She grabbed a traverse line and hooked onto it.
“Be careful,” KJ whispered. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The vertical traverse passed near a horizontal line, and she switched, heading toward the bot she’d saved. When she stood on the outer edge close to the bot, she stared in awe. Its mass reminded her she was small and soft.
Its front appendages ended in the claws that had cut cargo straps as if they were paper, severed traverse lines, and destroyed humans. The claws were as tall as Ruby, and each of the three long metal bones between the joints were also as tall as Ruby, and wide enough that she would fit inside them if they were hollow. Each leg could bend in three places. KJ glided down the traverse and stood beside her, both of them silent in front of the bound enemy.
Ruby took a deep breath through her mouth, doing her best to avoid the suit-smell and the almost unmanageable temptation to rip her helmet off. There was air, but the safety protocols in the cargo bays were strict.
She chewed her lower lip. “It’s not completely different than our bots,” she said. “I can see how the claws move.”
KJ responded in his typical dry tone. “It is bigger than most of ours.”
“There’s transport bots that are a quarter this size.” She tried for humor. “I suppose it’s possible to consider the trains a bot.”
“Whatever works for you. Just don’t leave this anchor line and don’t get too close. Let’s get started.”
As if in answer, the bot flexed all of its appendages at once, straining its bindings.
She wondered if this one had torn Colin in half.
“Ix.” Ruby called the AI up, surely unnecessarily. Protocol, like the helmets. “Ix, tell it we’re here and tell it we want to know why they invaded us.”
“I will translate.”
The conversation should have been fast. Machines talked to each other much more quickly than humans. But it wasn’t. She waited, and waited some more. She listened to her breath, and KJ’s breath through the radio link between them.
There was time to wonder if Ix had—in fact—decoded enough of the speech between the bots to build a communication bridge between itself and the invader. She shifted, trying to get comfortable with the floating feeling of low-g again.
Ix chose a voice she had never heard, tinny and feminine. “What happened to the Thief of a Thousand Stars?”
Ix changed to its most common voice. “That must be the invader’s ship.”
Aptly named. Ruby regarded the huge bot, which did not react directly to her presence in any way. “We damaged it. It has been left far behind. We had no choice.”
This time the answer was fast. “But it is not completely dysfunctional? Does it have life support and engines?”
Ruby managed to bite back a comment about how she hoped not. “We don’t know.”
Silence.
After a while, Ruby asked Ix, “Is it talking to you?”
“No. Nor is it moving.”
“But it’s not dead?”
“I’m not sure that question applies. It remains capable of responding as far as I can tell. There is nothing like this in my history of Adiamo.”
Ruby had prepared questions in her head. “Ask it if Adiamo is full of people or robots or both.”
More time. KJ shifted and moved, stretching. She followed his lead. It helped calm her. The spider dancers remained in the corner, but they too stretched and moved, as if following their leader.
At one point in Ix’s long silence, the bot thrashed and flexed, although the bonds held.
“It is not answering.”
“Very well.”
More standing. She had asked Ix to record this, hoping it would be a good backdrop for a performance. She looked at KJ. “While we wait, can we climb around some? Maybe go look more closely at one of the dead ones?”
KJ didn’t respond immediately.
“Please?”
In answer, he stepped back and pointed up the traverse line she still held in her right glove. He wanted her to go first. Very well.
The leap up worked pretty well, and she clung to t
he line with both legs. Her body remembered a trick she’d been taught, and she pushed out from the line, so her hands and feet were both on it, but not her belly. She walked her hands up, then her feet, then her hands, then her feet, hands, feet, her appendages hard to keep stuck to the line with no gravity. A matter of gripping with her gloves and toes.
KJ hadn’t started up after her. She was a good way past him now, and the robot looked smaller.
She let go and pulled, which felt less awkward, but was slower.
She stopped again, and this time KJ started up after her. He moved with no extra movement, no real pull on the line, nothing. He made small movements to maintain trajectory and add speed, as if null-g made him dance.
She grimaced.
“Ix? Did it say anything yet?”
“No.”
“Are you still trying?”
“What do you suggest?”
“Play it our history. One of the lessons from school. The one that starts when we leave Adiamo.”
KJ spoke up. “You want to give an enemy our history?”
“I don’t see what it can hurt.”
“How do you think it will help?”
“Maybe if it understands us, it will be sympathetic.”
KJ laughed. “Follow me.” They had reached open space near the middle of the bay, all of the closest objects other traverse lines, the robots small again. KJ contorted his body, drawing completely in on himself, and then pushed, sailing for a nearby horizontal traverse line.
She tried to mimic him exactly, but wavered when it came time to let go, stealing her own momentum from herself in a brief flash of fear. She fell away from KJ and the lines.
A hand grabbed her long before she expected to be caught. “Thank you.”
He helped her get both hands onto the new line. Her fall had cost them some distance.
“Thank you again. We should have sent you in with these damned things first. You’d have survived and we’d still have Colin.”
The Diamond Deep Page 10