by Rick Partlow
“You are so beautiful,” he blurted. He knew it sounded clumsy and inane, something a schoolboy would say.
“It’s distracting,” she stated.
He thought at first she was complaining, saying her physical appearance distracted people from her authority and intelligence, but then he frowned and reconsidered. The words had been more along the lines of an…explanation?
“It was designed to be distracting,” she elaborated. “The same as the pheromone dispensers I used on Mars.” She made an almost imperceptible motion with her head and left shoulder that could have been a shrug. “I…we thought it might provide an advantage when dealing with the Consensus, as they tend to be a bit parochial, and patriarchal as well.”
“So you had Restruct surgery?” he asked.
It didn’t really bother him. It was discouraged, of course, except in cases when accidental injury necessitated it. The Resolution wasn’t against it for religious or ethical reasons, like the Consensus; it was just a social norm for people to embrace who they were rather than trying to constantly change themselves to meet some external standards. Everyone was born genetically perfect, of course, with no defects or flaws for which you could control, but there was still a lot of variation between people. If not, his skin wouldn’t have been almond colored against her pale white.
But it wasn’t unheard of, either, and if she’d done it on orders for a mission… He wondered if she’d go back to the way she’d been before once the assignment was over.
“No, not exactly.” She closed her eyes and laid her head back on the pillow. “Sam, there’s something you should know about me.”
“You’re married?” He cursed himself the moment he said it. “I’m sorry,” he babbled immediately, sitting up in bed. “I know you wouldn’t do that, not without telling me.”
“I’m not married,” she said, scooting up in the bed. His eyes wandered across that white skin and he nearly lost the thread of the conversation again. “But I’m not who you think I am.” She winced, clenching her fingers. “I’m not what you think I am.”
Now he was well and truly lost. He almost blurted “did you used to be a man?” but stopped himself, barely. That, too, was not totally unheard of, particularly out in the wild and wooly Belt, but the Consensus banned it outright and the Resolution discouraged it for the same reason they discouraged Restruct surgery.
“The person I am,” Priscilla told him carefully, capturing his gaze in the azure bonds of his eyes, “didn’t exist until shortly before you met me.”
“What do you mean?” He didn’t want to sound impatient; he could tell this wasn’t easy for her. But she’d started this and now he was very, very worried.
“I can’t say exactly.”
If he’d had to fight impatience before, now Sam virtually had to pull a gun and shoot it in the chest. He wanted to say “What do you mean?” again, but didn’t want to sound like a damned parrot.
“You have to understand,” Priscilla implored, hands shaping a pleading gesture, “I hold a very sensitive position in the Resolution government. There are things I’m not allowed to say…”
“How high would my clearance have to be?” he wondered.
“You don’t get it!” Priscilla made a sound of frustration and slammed a fist against the bed, startling him. “It’s not that telling you would be breaking regulations, it’s that I physically can’t tell you! I’ve been programmed not to be able to say the words!”
“Programmed?” Sam repeated, eyes wide, face slack with confusion.
“Psychologically,” she clarified.
Now confusion turned to a vague sense of horror and outrage.
“They can do that?” he demanded, leaning forward, one leg sliding off the bed to give him leverage, as if he were about to lunge toward whoever had done this to her.
“All I can tell you,” she began, then stopped herself and tried again, frustration on her face. “All I can get away with revealing is that the way I look now, the person I am now didn’t exist until shortly after we received word of your discovery. There’s a reason I don’t have a title or a last name.”
Sam tried to wrap his mind around what she was saying, but he didn’t know if he could have done it at his best; and at the moment, he was totally exhausted.
“Are you telling me you’re some sort of special operative who changes your looks and identity between every assignment?” He thought the idea sounded ludicrous, like something he might have seen in a bad spy movie, but it was all he could come up with.
“I couldn’t tell you if you were guessing right.” She sighed and balled her fist like she wanted to hit the bed again. “I know this is really hard to understand, but I had to tell you because when all this is over…”
“They’ll do it again,” he finished the thought for her, finally figuring out where it all was leading. He reached out and clutched her upper arm as if he could stop it somehow. “They’ll change you into someone else.”
“The person I am now won’t exist.”
She was crying now, the tears trailing down her cheeks cautiously, treading on unfamiliar ground. Her knees came up and she clutched them to herself, burying her head against her legs. Her shoulders were shaking with sobs and he scooted across the bed to slip a comforting arm around her.
“Is there any way you can, I don’t know, get a transfer? Be allowed to stay who you are?” He said the words softly into her hair.
“It’s never happened.” Her voice was muffled, but she wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t let him see her crying. “This isn’t fair to you. I wasn’t thinking about how hard it would be for you…I didn’t understand.”
“Take it easy.” He rubbed at her back, kissing her shoulder. “It’s okay.”
The words came automatically, but he sure as hell didn’t know how it was going to be okay.
“We have some time,” he finally reasoned, trying to sound positive, hopeful, for her and for himself, because he needed it just as badly. “We have nearly three years before the ramship arrives insystem, right? They won’t recall you before then, will they?”
“I don’t think so.” She scrubbed at her face with the heels of her hand and finally looked up at him, her eyes red. “I think I could make a case for staying until the Gate is successful. But still, at the end…”
“No one knows how much time they have,” he insisted. “Today should have proven that to us.” He sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm his thoughts down. “Let’s enjoy the time we have here together and when everything gets closer…” He shook his head. “Maybe you’ll decide you want to do something different. Maybe we can run, go live in the Belt, or on Mars, if that’s what you want.”
“You’d give up your career?” she asked him, seemingly surprised.
He’d said it almost off-handedly, but to his shock, he discovered he would.
“If you’d asked me a few months ago,” he admitted, “I’d’ve told you there was nothing more important to me than being the Captain of a Patrol ship. Now…” He shook his head. “I guess I’ve had my priorities adjusted.”
She traced a line down his cheek with her palm, looking as if she might start sobbing again.
“Thank you. But I’m not even sure I can run.”
“You mean the psychological programming,” he presumed. At her nod, he tried to think of something clever, some way out he was sure would work. All he could think of were the walls of the small cabin closing in around them.
“We’ll just have to see,” he decided. “When the time comes, we’ll find out.”
She didn’t seem convinced, but she sagged against him anyway, as if surrendering to the inevitable. She didn’t even suggest they break things off, maybe because she wouldn’t give up on him, or more likely because she knew he was too stubborn to give up on her.
“You know what my longest relationship has been so far?” he said, trying to lighten his tone. At her curious glance, he went on. “Six months. While I was
in the Academy.” He grinned lopsidedly. “If we make it to three years without you wanting to kill me, you’ll have broken quite a few records.”
“No promises,” she warned him, a smile fighting to emerge on her tear-stained face. She was getting control, getting back to herself, he thought. “But if we hang around long enough, perhaps the Naturalists will take care of it for us.”
“Third time’s the charm,” he reminded her.
She leaned in to kiss him, then smiled seductively and pushed him back on the bed.
“What?” She cocked an eyebrow, her hands moving down his body. “You think you’ve got a third time in you?”
“I think I’ve definitely been a bad influence on you,” he reflected as she climbed atop him.
“Don’t stop now,” she whispered in his ear, following the words with her tongue. “Let’s enjoy the time we have.”
They’d have to talk more about this, he decided.
But not tonight.
Chapter Fourteen
Captain Avalon.
The voice in his head woke him from a sound sleep, and it took a moment for him to realize it wasn’t the remnants of a dream. But no, he wouldn’t be dreaming about Lt. Englehart. He blinked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and squinting at the glow of the chemical lightstrips. Why, he wondered, had he never remembered to rip those damned things out?
“Yeah?” he said the words aloud, then remembered the call had come in over his neurolink and tried again. Yeah, Englehart? What’s up?
Sir, you told me to wake you when the antimatter was scheduled to arrive. It’s nearly finished decelerating and is less than an hour from achieving stable transfer position with the Gate, sir.
“Shit,” he mumbled, sitting up in bed, scratching at his beard. Need to shave this thing. Itches all the time. He shrugged. But Pris likes it, so…
Excuse me, sir? I didn’t catch that.
Sam shook his head. The dangers of communicating via neurolink. He never thought he’d be nostalgic for the days when nothing on the station worked.
Nothing, Englehart. We’ll be right up.
“What is it?” Pris asked groggily, stretching her back catlike as she tried to wake up.
Sam grinned, suddenly forgetting about the lost sleep. Even after nearly three years together, watching her do that always drove him nuts.
“The antimatter is here,” he informed her, brushing the wild, blond hair out of her face and kissing her before he rolled out of the bed.
“It’s about damned time,” she enthused, snapping awake instantly and scooting across to his side of the bed, jumping up and grabbing for her utility fatigues where she’d thrown them over a chair. “We have less than six months before our scheduled intercept and we haven’t even been able to run a full-scale test on the Gate!”
“You still want to shuttle over and supervise personally?” he wondered, pulling on a T-shirt. He thought about indulging in a shower before he headed to the control room, but there really wasn’t time for it. “Dr. Kovalev said she could handle the transfer.”
“I need to be there,” she insisted, running a brush through her hair, not even bothering to look in the mirror. Electrical fields working from internal memory arranged her hair the way she liked and left it clean as well, and Sam wondered idly if they couldn’t come up with a full body version of that. “I need to be seen, to appear essential if we don’t want Peterman or someone above him to suddenly decide they can afford to pull me out of here.”
“Right,” he grunted, frowning. He’d managed not to think about that possibility for months now, but maybe it was time to start thinking about it again. “If the tests go well, maybe we should talk to one of the Belter crews about arranging a getaway.”
She glanced at him sharply.
“You do it,” she said, nearly whispering, as if she thought the compartment was bugged, despite their incessant, paranoid precautions. “We still don’t know if I might unintentionally give something away. It’s better I not be in the loop.”
He didn’t argue the point. He’d been with her long enough to read her moods, and he could tell she wasn’t holding out much hope; he also knew battling it out here and now wouldn’t accomplish anything other than getting them both spun up, and there was work to be done. He fastened the front of his utility fatigue top and smoothed it down, then stepped into his ship-boots and tightened the straps, using the time to decide if he should try to cheer her up or just let it ride.
“How long do you think it’ll take them to transfer the fuel?” he asked.
She’d been reaching for the latch and she paused, some of the dolorous concern gone from her face as she considered the question.
“It’s a hundred kilograms of antimatter, so we’re talking five storage modules, each with about thirty tons of shielding, isotope reactor and electromagnetic coils. That’s a shitload of mass and you don’t want to be reckless with antimatter. I imagine it’s going to take the better part of fifteen or sixteen hours, and that’s after they maneuver the freighter into position.”
He slipped an arm around her and pulled her into a brief embrace.
“Sure you don’t want me to come along?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be, but feeling he had to offer anyway.
“Someone has to be in charge here,” she reminded him, but she relaxed against his chest, returning the hug. “Unless you want to leave Danabri on his own and see if he tries to stage another coup.”
He snorted a laugh at that. Danabri had somehow managed to get himself assigned to the Gateway Project long-term, pulling all the strings and calling in all the favors he’d collected over his many years in the Diplomatic Corps just to stay close to Telia. Since most of their negotiation had been completed over two years ago, the Sensitive didn’t have many real duties and had begun volunteering for watches in the Control Center out of sheer boredom. Sam had allowed it at first, but one of the junior watch officers had managed to piss Danabri off and he’d locked the man out of the compartment and taken over traffic control for the better part of a shift.
“It’s just a few hours,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek and yanking the hatch open. It still stuck, despite the best efforts of the station’s repair techs. “Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
They said it so casually now, he thought. Not nearly as momentous as the first time, not nearly the catharsis it had been, more like the way his parents had said it to each other every day he’d lived with them. Which, he supposed, was exactly how these things were meant to go.
She’d headed one way down the corridor, to the lift bank closest to the north polar docking bays, while he headed the other, toward the Control Center. He wasn’t alone in the halls of the station, either. The place would never be crowded; it was far too outsized for its task and there were always crews out working on the Gateway framework. But now you could at least tell this was a working station with around-the-clock shifts, even if he could still recognize and name every single officer in every one of the shifts.
“Sir,” a technician in a Resolution Patrol uniform said, nodding to him as she passed.
“Benitez.” He returned the nod. “You heading off-shift?”
“Finally,” she sighed and he chuckled in sympathy.
“I feel ya’. I’m heading on up for the antimatter delivery.”
“Better you than me, sir.” She rolled her eyes. “There’s been a damned Belter ore shipment on the sensors for days now and I’m getting tired of staring at it.” She grinned with a bit of the innate malice of someone coming off a long shift for their replacement. “But I think it’s due to arrive around the same time as the antimatter, so you won’t have that problem.”
“Go get some sleep, Benitez,” he warned her, “before I decide you’re awake enough to spend another eight hours on watch.”
“Yes, sir.” She threw him an off-hand salute and kept moving towards her cabin.
Great. He felt the missed hours of sleep weighi
ng him down as he stepped into the lift car. Something else to worry about.
***
“Good morning, ma’am. Great day to be flying, isn’t it?”
Pris eyed the pilot sidelong as she strapped into the shuttle’s right-hand seat, stifling a smile at their little ritual.
“I’m sure it’s morning for you, Lt. Sullivan,” she returned briskly, “but for me it’s the middle of the night. And according to you, any day is a great day to be flying.”
The young man grinned broadly beneath his helmet.
“You got that right, ma’am!” He pushed at the controls of the shuttle and loud bangs guided them away from the station’s docking umbilical.
It had been Sam’s idea to borrow Sully from the Consensus, and she’d been against it at first. The Earther was talented, but he lacked the wetware technology of a Resolution pilot. Sam had told her there was more to being a great pilot than implants, and she had to take his word for it. She was many things, but a pilot wasn’t one of them.
“A little loop for good luck,” Sully said in a sing-song voice, nudging the controls as they drifted away from the polar docking hub.
Maneuvering jets pushed sharply at the shuttle’s aft portside and the bird swung around, the exterior cameras panning across the polished silver bulk of the station. It was another habit he’d developed out here, and one she’d stopped trying to break. It was useful to have a first-hand look at the outside of Gateway Station once in a while, or at least that was what she told herself to justify the waste of time and fuel.
Spending most of her time stuck in the Control Center or their cabin, it was easy to forget how massive the place was. It spun below them, a mountain of nickel-iron sparkling in the glow of the Sun; and if it wasn’t the vast orbital cities circling the central Resolution worlds, it was the largest deep-space installation she’d ever seen, impressive if only for the fact it had been dragged out here physically from the Belt.