by Lyn Gala
“Could be that Da’shay is the source of some of that unfriendliness,” Tom said, relieved to have the privacy to finally share what he thought he knew. “I know she’s not the easiest to understand, but as far as I can tell, she knows someone around here, a group of someones, and they’re not very friendly toward her.”
“Shit.” Captain Ramsay pulled his handheld off his wrist and tossed it at the table.
“Captain?” Eli had claimed a spot near the door where he’d been leaning against the wall, but now he stood up straight.
“She give you any information on these enemies of hers?” Ramsay was leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. Tom frowned because the captain was taking his word a little too fast. Normally Tom got paranoid over someone trying to kill them and the captain spent at least a day trying to pretend that Tom was overly paranoid.
“Just that she thinks they’re crazy. I think it goes without saying that if Da’shay thinks they’re nuts, that’s saying something because she isn’t exactly sane,” Tom pointed out. Ramsay rubbed his face without answering.
Eli asked the question Tom was trying hard not to ask. “Is there something we should know, Captain?”
That’s exactly what Tom was wondering, but Da’shay’s fingers were wrapped around his arm and he could feel her body coiled with energy, like a spring about to let loose. She had something rattling around in her head.
“Look, this is classified, but…um…” Ramsay blew out a breath. “Da’shay had a history with slavers, so this might not be her first trip here.”
Tom looked from Ramsay to Da’shay and back, but neither one of them was explaining anything.
“History like what?” Becca asked when the silence had gone on so long it was getting uncomfortable.
Ramsay blew out a breath and then sat up, his eyes going right to Da’shay. “You want to tell the story?”
“Ain’t right looking to her when she don’t have the words to say it,” Tom said. Ramsay looked at Tom in clear surprise.
“You’re standing up for her?” Ramsay frowned at him and Tom could feel his defensiveness rising up. If anyone other than the captain had given him that particular look, Tom would have already been throwing punches.
“I’m saying what’s right. She got me out of a spot in there, and I can’t say I like all the ways she did it, but I’m not dead and I’m not in a slaver’s pen, so I figure I owe her on that.” Tom frowned as Becca gave him about the biggest smile he’d ever seen on her face, and that was saying something because Becca did smile a whole lot. Between her smile and those blonde curls of hers, there were lot of people who had underestimated her ability to fix an engine or swing a beer bottle in a fight, but she’d never looked at him with quite so much joy. Maybe she was thinking of changing teams.
Da’shay reached out and caught his hand, tugging on it. Tom shifted his attention to her as he tried to figure out what she was wanting to say. “After genta girl went to meet genta humans and the totally and completely fucking crazy people sent vultures to pick at scabs, they lost me in the dark.” She reached up and traced a circle over her heart, right where a slave mark would have been if she’d ever been marked as a slave. Tom didn’t know of any genta who ever carried anyone’s mark, but Da’shay did seem to be agreeing with Ramsay.
“How long were you in the dark?” Tom asked.
She closed her eyes and started rocking slowly. “Diamonds, blinding me. Darkness in all the light, swimming blind.”
“You swim good enough now,” Tom reassured her. Whatever she was remembering, Tom guessed it wasn’t a good thing to think on too much. Her face reflected a whole lot of pain. “The past ain’t nothing to worry about once it’s over.” Her eyes came open. She still had a hold on his hand and she tightened her fingers. “If she was marked as a slave, how did she get unmarked?” Tom looked at Ramsay because Da’shay was clearly not in a mood for any sort of clear communication.
For a second, Ramsay looked from him to Da’shay, back and forth like some ball was bouncing between them. “Um…it got cut it out. Genta healing fixed the scar it would have left.”
Tom frowned. “Mighty stupid, slaving a genta out. It’s not like they’re known for following orders.”
“Maybe it’s because she looks so human,” Becca said. “I know that genta—what we call genta—can’t have children because they’re hybrids. It takes full-genta and their genetic manipulators to force human and genta DNA together, but I always wondered if they weren’t playing around with a half-genta’s and a human’s DNA, making something only a quarter genta. It would explain why she’s not big like the others and she doesn’t really look like them.”
Tom could tell from the utterly blank expression on Da’shay’s face that she wasn’t going to answer that. Either they’d hit some bit the doctors had picked out of her brain or she had just mentally wandered away.
“She told me some parts of her life before she came to this part of space,” Tom said slowly. He wasn’t fond of the way the captain was looking at him, but the Kratos was home and they were about the only people he could turn to for help.
“She did?” Eli blurted that out.
Tom shrugged. “Give her sand to do some drawing and let her play with pebbles and she does better acting it out than talking.”
“From before she came to this part of space? From her time in genta space?” Ramsay leaned forward. “Tom, are you really sure?”
“No. It ain’t like she’s real clear, but I think I got some parts figured out. But if she was a slave, how did she end up working for Command?” Tom looked at Ramsay and pressed his lips together. If he was going to put himself out there by sharing what might be a stupid idea, he wanted to know whether Ramsay’s information matched with what Tom thought he knew about Da’shay’s past.
“It’s classified.”
Tom looked down at Da’shay for some sort of help. He didn’t have the words to convince the captain of anything. Hell, he didn’t even know if she wanted him saying any of this, but her hands held his arm tightly while she stared off with no sign she’d even heard.
“Sir,” Becca said, “it seems like we’re pretty much on our own. The ship’s grounded, Tom’s wearing a slave mark and we don’t have any plan for getting off the planet. Maybe now would be a good time to take the regulations and shove them down the recycler. At least the ones we ain’t already recycled. I’m pretty sure that letting Tom get marked as a slave shredded a whole bunch of them.”
“And Da’shay thinks there are people here who are after her if not us. They think we know something,” Tom added. From a threat assessment point of view, knowing they had unidentified enemies was about the worst part of the situation.
“She thinks… Just how much talking have you done?” Ramsay demanded.
“I could answer that better if I knew I was right about what I thought she was saying,” Tom said honestly. He knew captains were told to keep secrets from crew, but he’d thought Ramsay was smart enough to ignore Command and their rules about keeping crew in the dark.
Ramsay sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m getting busted back to lieutenant for this, but here’s what I know. A ship intercepted a slaver and Da’shay was part of the shipment. The crew was shocked, but when they tried keeping her with the victims, she ignored them. She seemed functional enough, jimmying their locks and wandering where she wanted, including into the med lab where she took a knife and sliced out a big chunk of her own skin and dumped it in the recycler.”
Becca made a disgusted face, but Tom had to give Da’shay some credit for that. He’d do it to his own body, only he’d never heal clean from that kind of muscle damage. Joint replacements were easier than getting big grafts of muscle or skin to take.
“When the ship put off the other slaves to be rehabilitated, she flat out refused to go. She started acting like crew. When the ship came across a meaiai freighter, she did some translating voodoo and got them some tech in return for a disk
full of fictional vids. Then she started taking turns at piloting.”
Now that made Tom cringe. The woman would say she was piloting, but then she’d wander the ship with a blank look that made him think they were about to fall off the quantum string. Ramsay took one look at Tom’s expression and crossed his arms.
“Tom, she can shave entire days off a trip. She may not follow all the safety protocols, but she’s the best pilot the Kratos has ever had.” Ramsay sounded unhappy on that point and Tom tried to wipe the unease off his face.
Ramsay sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “She never seemed to recover the verbal skills, but she always acted in the best interest of the ship, so Command put her on the payroll. Her last ship, something happened. She refused to follow her captain’s order. I never did find out about what.” Ramsay looked up at Tom. “Anyway, Command asked if I would convince her to come on the Kratos. She doesn’t take getting orders well, but she seems to respond if someone invites her to come to their ship.” Ramsay threw his hands up. “That’s all I know. Command wants her for her piloting, and I have orders to record any transmissions where she speaks meaiai.”
“That ain’t making sense when meaiai are on the other side of human space,” Tom said. The slave worlds were closest to casslit in terms of aliens. This part of the universe had taken a bad beating during the war.
Ramsay shrugged. “There’s been rumors of meaiai around these parts. She seems to be using some version of it we haven’t heard before and the bugs like it more than the dialect our translators have been using.”
“But why make that classified?” Becca asked.
“Enslaving a genta could give the wrong people ideas,” Eli said slowly. “And if the public suspected we were having communication problems with meaiai and the only woman who seemed to know a better way to talk to them was clearly insane…” He let his voice trail off. “About the only thing that scares people more than casslit ships are meaiai.” Eli was right about that, even if it didn’t make one bit of sense considering the meaiai didn’t have a word for war or death.
“She’s not insane,” Tom said, but the minute the words were out his mouth he realized they were a little stupid. “Not without cause, anyway,” he added. “According to her, she left full-genta space and went somewhere else first, somewhere that she met people who were crazier than she was. When she didn’t like them, she came to meet half-genta in our space, only those people she’d seen before thought she was a threat, so they followed and had some doctor stir around in her brain to pull out memories of what she’s seen, and that meant they pulled out certain words.” Tom said all that while studying Da’shay, waiting for some sign that he was getting some part wrong. She stared at the far wall. Slowly her fingers tightened against his arm so that he cringed.
“Well, shit. Any idea who might be after her?” Ramsay asked. Tom wasn’t sure if the captain really believed, but from a security point of view, it was always best to assume you had someone after you.
Tom shrugged. “She calls them the totally and completely fucking crazy people.”
A rough laugh slipped out of Ramsay. “That’s a mouthful.”
“Might be she was using my suggestions for what to call people,” Tom admitted. “They sent vultures to pick her brain apart, so that’s why I’m assuming doctors did some rearranging. And according to her, at least four of them are here now. One was in that prison where we were,” Tom said, looking at Ramsay. The man’s expression turned grim.
Tom frowned and turned to Becca since she knew tech better than anyone. “Do you know of any sort of brain scan that works without some big machine? Maybe something handheld?”
Becca frowned and slowly shook her head. “Brain’s too complicated for that. It takes a big machine with huge computing power to do even the crudest of brain scans accurately. You might be able to do something handheld that could judge if someone was lying or telling the truth, but even then, I wouldn’t think it would be completely accurate. If you had someone just off the street, you could probably get a good read, but pupil dilation and heart rate can be faked if someone has the right training. And the evidence on gray matter and white matter use during lying is shaky. A liar uses more white matter, sure, but that changes if the liar has told the story a lot or if they’re mentally unbalanced, and a truth-teller could use more white matter if he was just the kind to get easily confused. At least, I think. I’m not exactly up on medical tech. Why?”
“I think I met one of her crazy people.”
“Totally and completely fucking crazy people,” Da’shay corrected him softly, but now her fingers were threatening to crush his arm. Tom used his free hand to pull at her fingers and she looked at him with wild despair.
“Just ain’t looking for you to break something,” Tom explained. Immediately her fingers loosened, but then her arm struck out like a snake and she grabbed his collar, pulling on it so that his neck popped. “Fuck! I ain’t no genta who heals up fast. Take it easy,” he told her, resting a hand on her back.
When Tom looked up, Ramsay was staring as if he’d spotted a casslit wandering around in the ship. “What?” Tom demanded.
“Are you going to let her grope at you like that?”
“Are you going to try to tell her to stop? It ain’t like she’s going to listen.” Tom’s glare dared the captain to make something out of this.
“Sparkles and refractions, light in every direction. Lets the corners come creeping out.” Da’shay’s whispers were distant.
Tom sighed. “Now you set her off on sparkles again. You ain’t helping.”
“This is getting more disquieting by the second,” Ramsay muttered, but before Tom could ask what that meant, Ramsay moved on to another topic. “Why do you think you met one? Why ask about brain scans?”
“In the cell, she said that they could taste my hate and that would make them think I was nothing more than a mercenary, but if they tasted your thoughts, our cover would be blown. She said that’s why I had to stay and get caught. Now unless we want to assume there’s some group out there randomly licking people, and that’s a mighty disgusting thought, then I just thought she was talking about scanning.”
“So you stayed behind? On her word?” Ramsay sounded almost angry now.
“Fuck no. I would have run for the hills whether she said or no. I stayed behind because she blocked the door. It was only after I’d pretty much figured out that I couldn’t fight my way past her that she tried explaining things.”
“Oh gods and saints.” Becca breathed the words so softly Tom wasn’t even sure he’d heard them, but he couldn’t understand what had her panties in such a tight wad.
“Before marking me, someone came to see me, and she insisted on blindfolding me because if I saw this guy, he’d rip out parts of my brain.” Tom ignored Becca’s loud gasp.
“You’re sure on that part?” Ramsay asked. His voice had a deadly quiet to it and Tom figured the captain would go shoot someone right now if he knew whom to shoot.
“Yep. I heard the guy. He wasn’t talking right, and I ain’t exactly the most educated seeing as how Beauteous didn’t have three schools on the whole planet, so when I start taking note of people’s poor grammar, it means they’re worse than most.”
“So, a non-English speaker,” Eli concluded. “There are a number of other languages out here. The Chinese languages, Russian, Spanish and Hindi are still popular, and if Command is right, there may be several meaiai languages.”
Tom frowned. “You think it was meaiai?” He couldn’t control a shiver as he thought of those multi-jointed stick legs on creatures that looked like leathery jellyfish. If it was one of those spiderish things that had touched his face, he was feeling a need to go scrub it until the skin came off.
“No,” Eli said, “I’m simply saying there are many reasons why a speaker might be unfamiliar with English. I learned Cantonese in school, but if I tried to speak it, anyone who knew the language would think I was some sort of idiot.
”
“So, we’re talking about someone who didn’t grow up speaking English,” Ramsay said quickly. “What did he say to you, Tom?”
“Not much,” Tom admitted. “He thought it was interesting that I cared about Captain Smyth’s death. After that, he babbled about rivers and drowning. Then he said that I had a simple mind full of hate and either threatened to break my neck or predicted that Da’shay would—I wasn’t real clear on that part. But when he wanted to kill me out of mercy, Da’shay said he couldn’t—said I belonged to her and that as long as I hadn’t seen him, she had a right to keep me. After that, he left. I suppose she saved my life.” Considering Tom had put a bug on her, he wasn’t real sure why she was willing to do that, but she had.
“Clearer diamonds reflecting new light, light I missed,” Da’shay said wistfully.
“You think he scanned you?” Ramsay asked.
“Seems like,” Tom answered the captain. “He knew I had a whole lot of nothing but hate in me.” Both of them looked at Becca for some sort of answer on the tech end. She made a funny face and shrugged.
“I’m starting to get the feeling there’s a whole lot more going on than a terrorist trying to target a few Corps ships,” Ramsay said with a sigh. “And I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it.”
“Sir,” Eli said, “we should take off without clearance. We should get this information back to Command.”
Ramsay folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling again. “That’d be a good trick if you could figure out how to do it. Tell you what, you get some ropes hooked up to the nose to pull the Kratos, and I’ll push her, and we’ll get her over to the launching deck.”
Eli opened his mouth, but Da’shay just about exploded off her seat. She caught Tom’s hand and tugged him toward the door, catching Becca’s arm on the way, pulling her with them. Becca gave a startled little yelp, but came along anyway. “Going shopping!” she said with the sort of careless joy Tom might expect if they were in the middle of government space on a safe planet.