Medusa's Touch

by Emily L Byrne

  That TiCara had accepted that the restriction applied to her crew as well as to port personnel was different, new. It burned a little in Erol’s mind, like a small betrayal that might be a symptom of something larger. The Pilot-Captain disliked rules, finding it more fun to bend them to the breaking point and see what she could get from the challenge than to follow them unthinkingly. It had been one of the reasons that he had signed on with her. So the corp diplomat or rep, whoever or whatever he really was, must have something that made it worthwhile for her to obey his rules.

  Credits went without saying. She had never told him how much she still owed on the ship, but he could guess from the jobs they took and the risks she encouraged. That alone might be enough to get her to promise the galaxy, if the price Vahn paid was high enough, as long as the job didn’t seem too dangerous. Or involve working for the Ears. That was a line that she would never cross.

  Then his thoughts turned to the old man’s assistant and paused there. She was nova beautiful, like a distant star. But TiCara was too smart to gamble her relationship with her crew on a lovely face and body.

  Wasn’t she?

  Until now, he’d been sure that he knew the answer to that. Especially when the lovely woman in question had been seen speaking with an Ear right before leaving port. He wondered what secrets she had, what tru tell she possessed that would make an Ear want to listen to her. Or what lies she had told in her past that would make her open to betrayals of her own in her present.

  He remembered when he, too, had spoken at length with the Ears, and gave them whatever tell they wanted. He also remembered the consequences for the people he betrayed. Those memories were like an unexpected trip out the airlock in a suit with a faulty seal. They remembered his earlier betrayals and they knew how to compel new ones.

  The difference was that now they were offering to pay for it with credits in one hand, threats in the other. He

  worried more about the latter. If they had the information they said they had about his past, he might never pilot again, not even for the shadow trade. No one liked a traitor. TiCara, Ji-min, Vijay, his primary, all the friendships he had made in this new life of his, would vanish into the vacuum between systems if they knew him for what he had been. Was.

  He knew it the same way that he knew that he could pilot his way through four of the populated corps systems by memory alone. The woman who called him before they left port hadn’t even needed to spell out her threat. She had enough details on a few of his past crimes that he didn’t question what else she knew. The consequences of discovery he could list for himself.

  He raised long fingers to his face and closed his eyes, then rubbed them hard, frustration making him press down until small flashes of light danced inside his lids. There had to be a way out of this, but he couldn’t see it, not yet. Maybe not ever. But there had to be something.

  Erol stared out over the comm boards, letting the nav computer pilot the ship while he vanished into his own thoughts.

  Chapter 8

  TiCara couldn’t see where Sherin went after she scrambled back into her suit and rocketed out into the corridor. Probably back to her quarters, but there were always other possibilities. And they were out of time. She needed to get into a sling of her own.

  The pilot swore quietly to herself, catching her hand before she inadvertently yanked on her medusas. It wasn’t their fault that everything that the rep did seemed to leave her a jumbled mess of conflicting emotions. Plus a good hard yank hurt wouldn’t make her feel any better.

  It wasn’t as if Sherin’s behavior instilled trust, even if she’d thoroughly enjoyed their encounter up until the rep’s abrupt departure. TiCara grimaced, weighing her options on what to do next. Almost of their own accord, her fingers skimmed along the Astra’s wall, looking for a catch invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. A panel clicked open with a nearly inaudible whirr of gears.

  Telling herself that she just wanted to make sure that Sherin was safe before she strapped in, she reached in and touched a button. The medusa sockets in the enclosed opening clicked open an instant later. They were powered by a hidden set of actual gears, not like the wireless linkups in the comm booths.

  Older tech was slower, but more reliable. Even the best of Ears would have trouble locating and using this particular back door into the ship’s security system. Even if they did find it, if they weren’t wired, they couldn’t use the ship’s computer and its electronic senses to augment their own the way she could.

  Now to plug in and hope she wasn’t dealing with the best of Ears, if that’s what Sherin really was. For an instant, she closed her eyes, picturing Sherin’s expression just before she fled. She looked terrified, confused, anything except calculating. TiCara clenched her fists in frustration. Scaring Sherin off had never been her intention. She just wanted the other woman where she could keep an eye on her, as well as both hands, her mouth and anything else that the rep might enjoy.

  And if she was honest with herself, she wanted this entire trip to be nothing more than a foolish chase after an impossible dream that would end with them safely back at dock, Sherin in her bed, Vahn’s credits on her chip and the old man looking for a real solution. It was so little to ask, and yet it seemed so unlikely right now.

  Her medusas ignored her doubts, snaking down from her head to insert themselves into the waiting sockets. The tiny ship schematic screen rose up without any conscious prompting on her part, which was good since her mind was not on threats to the ship, internal or external. That was the point of this particular back door: if the main cameras didn’t work or she couldn’t use them, this backup would tell her most of what she needed to know about the state of the Astra.

  It would be more useful if she paid attention to it, though. With an effort, she forced herself to focus, to let the computer feed her mind from its own sensors. At first, she received a blur of images that triggered all sorts of sensations in her. Making sense of them took longer than she liked. If Sherin was working for the Ears, she could be up to anything while TiCara wrestled with the computer. It wasn’t as if sabotaging a jump was that difficult.

  She shuddered at that particular thought and kept searching. After a few moments of showing her circuit schematics and a minor issue with the food processors, the ship complied with her desire to see the key life support sensors. That alone wouldn’t tell her where Sherin was, but it would tell her where the ship’s oxygen was being used, as well as how much was being consumed. She could figure out who was doing all that breathing on her own.

  Sherin’s quarters were empty. The last threads of the lingering clouds of desire in TiCara’s mind vanished, replaced with a rush of adrenaline and anger. It felt alien and unpleasant, but then so did fear and uncertainty and she knew those emotions quite well, especially when it came to the Ears. Even the meditation techniques she’d learned on Aliandra weren’t enough to help her master her fears.

  She caressed her medusas for comfort, for grounding, and felt the tide of emotions subside. Anger could be useful, if she used it right, or so they told her on Aliandra. She frowned at the console, then maneuvered her way further into the feed: Engineering, the Bridge, all the places where a rogue rep could do significant harm to the ship. Still nothing. Vijay was likely in his quarters, Ji-min was at their station and Erol was on the Bridge, or so it appeared. Vahn’s quarters only showed signs of two people.

  Then she tried the storage bays, as well as the hidden compartments where smuggled goods could rest beneath floor panels or in walls, insulated from port customs scanners. She didn’t deceive herself into thinking that

  she was the first to use such things. If Sherin were more than she appeared to be, she could find the more obvious hiding places easily enough if she searched hard enough.

  Though why she thought the rep might be looking for either a place to hide or smuggled goods, she couldn’t say. Perhaps because it was something she herself might do, if she found herself on a strange ship
in a similar situation. Go to ground somewhere that felt safe, figure out what to do next. Just like she had done when she was a child, after her crèche was destroyed.

  She took a deep breath, centering herself, reining in the urge to the direction that her thoughts were going and forcing them to return to the present. Guessing was futile. Wanting to know where the rep was, that was rational. Guessing why the rep was doing whatever she was doing without more information was just that: guessing.

  Other than a blip in one of the aft bay cameras, where an anomaly of some sort caught her attention briefly, she saw nothing she didn’t expect to see. Making a note to check that bay soon, she looked back at Vahn’s quarters again. The rep was there now, based on the sensor information that showed three people in the room.

  TiCara almost disconnected the link with a sigh of relief. She didn’t need to spy on Vahn, after all. But she found herself turning on the security camera in her quarters with a thought and watching it anyway. There was nothing wrong with certainty. Or something like it.

  Sherin was giving Vahn something in a cup. She bent forward, long black hair hanging loose and hiding her face from the camera. TiCara would have given anything to see her expression. Anything. She rolled the feeling around for a moment then grimaced as she let go of it and the edge of obsession it carried with it. She was just curious, that was all. Nothing more, nothing deeper than that.

  Vahn gave his employee a skeptical look and waved the cup away. There was something sly in his expression, as if he knew how she was spending her off duty hours.

  Or as if he didn’t trust her. TiCara rubbed her chin and frowned. What if he had brought the rep on this trip so that he could keep an eye on her? In that case, TiCara wondered if he’d had her tracked. A guttural phrase in port common lingua danced past her lips. If she hadn’t been wired in, she might have moved her head, tilting it in a nod of admiration. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  As it was, her lips curled in a small smile. If that was what he had done, then the old man had had his fun tonight. Next time, if there was a next time, she’d make sure to remove everything the rep was wearing and toss it out in the corridor. They didn’t need an audience to make it any hotter between them. Unless, of course, that Vahn’s interests were less prurient than that.

  Even with all that uncertainty, a flush ran up her thighs at the thought of continuing what they had started. She watched Sherin and Vahn for a few more seconds. If she had more time in port, she’d have set up her security system for sound as well as viewing, but cargo didn’t talk, as a rule, so she’d never gotten around to it. She wondered if Vahn’s creds would stretch to that kind of upgrade for the next trip.

  Then she wondered if she should go and wait for Sherin to leave Vahn’s room. Given how the rep had left her, it was hard to tell whether she’d be welcomed or spurned. She hovered over the controls, hated uncertainty filling her once again.

  Her eyelids drooped a little and the ship sent her the tiny chiming alarm that told her that the stimulants were wearing off. She gave the timekeeper on the screen a startled glance before realizing that the ship’s sensors were right. She would need to sleep just like a groundy and do it soon. With any luck, she could sleep right through the jump. TiCara sighed with frustration. If the corps could create an interstellar drive, why not a substitute for sleep? She shouldn’t need it any more.

  But then, madness was not an appealing option, and she’d heard all the horror stories when she was in training about the medusa pilots who gave up sleep and food for more time linked in. Her fingers flickered over the controls of the security panel, triggering the secur cameras along the route that she thought Sherin would probably take from Vahn’s quarters. There were already alarms on Engineering and the Bridge; she would have to hope that they were enough.

  With a thought, her medusas disconnected with an audible click. The panel closed smoothly as she withdrew from it and turned toward her temporary quarters, obedient to her body’s needs once more. It seemed like only seconds later that she was lying in her sleeping cube, letting its sensors read her from head to foot. A gentle heat spread from her shoulders down her back as the memfoam sensors responded to what they thought she needed most. They vibrated slowly, loosening her muscles

  She played gently with a medusa that coiled down past her shoulder. It wrapped itself around her fingertip in a caressing motion, the touch soothing her even more than the mattress. That was one of the quieter pleasures that came with being wired. After the first group of test medusa pilots crashed into the nearest planets, the next thing the engineers had done was to program the medusas to sooth and calm until the pilots could unwind, eventually fall asleep.

  They said it was the shock of being wired in directly to their ships that drove them to it, but TiCara suspected that wasn’t really the reason. It was the exhilaration, not the unexpectedness of that connection. Who could bear to sleep when the universe was theirs? When they could keep flying and forget all about their slowly failing human bodies?

  She remembered the first time she had plugged her medusas into a training computer as the jump sling automatically wrapped itself over the bed in response to the ship’s alarm. There had been a flash of heat, of light, followed by a flood of information. Her body had convulsed as her brain tried to process all of it at once. She barely remembered flailing and babbling until Elia’s second had injected her with something that made her limp and relaxed.

  After that, it had been all about riding the waves of input, like learning through a sleep module. She remembered thinking that she never wanted to sleep again, not when there was something so much better that she could be doing. But the implants and the ships were programmed to stop that from happening. Begrudgingly, she found herself agreeing with the updated design.

  TiCara felt her medusas plug themselves into the Astra’s sleep settings on the console near her head. They could be overridden if there was an emergency but otherwise, she was going to be asleep for the next six cycles.

  Her last waking thought was to ask the computer to search its archives for more information on Sherin Khan. They were too far out for live Net access but the computer would have backed up and stored station data while they were still in port. Maybe she could learn a little more about where the rep had been before and what she’d done, maybe even why she had responded the way that she had.

  If nothing else, she would have sweet dreams about the other woman so it would be jump time well spent. Sleep took over with that thought.

  Chapter 9

  TiCara woke up to the insistent chime of an alarm. She reached out and smacked her clock hard. It was voice-controlled, so her gesture was unnecessary but the noise had worked its disturbing way into her last dream, the one about being hooked into a VR module with Sherin, just as the machine suddenly began to malfunction.

  TiCara grimaced with annoyance. That dream had been getting interesting, right up until the time that the machine broke down in a sparking, beeping mess. Then she realized that the noise had been coming from the comm connection on her handheld, not the clock on the shelf. She reached over and picked it up, squinting at it as the room got gradually brighter around her, its sensors responding to her movement.

  Her handheld’s screen displayed the code for Vahn’s comm, and she frowned at it before flipping on the audio with a sigh. Yes, Ser? She sat up, leaving the video turned off. He could live without seeing her newly woken and naked. Is anything wrong?

  At the sound of her voice, the Astra’s wall niche opened to display her blacksuit, cleaned and ready. A new set of undergarments, synthesized from organic proteins by the ship’s computers, appeared next to it. She stood up and hit the button for the portable sonic shower.

  Pilot-Captain, I would like to see you in my quarters, when you have a moment.

  TiCara grimaced. Didn’t he ever sleep? No wonder he looked so ancient and tired. That thought wasn’t reflected in her voice when she answered him, though. Yes Ser. I will be there
soon. She wondered what the old man wanted. Then she wondered if Sherin would be with him when she got there as she showered and dressed. She wondered which alternative she should be hoping for as she stepped into the corridor, letting the door slide shut behind her with a quiet beep.

  A quick tap on the nearest nutrient console dispensed a container of a beverage that smelled like a warm spiced tea from Earth, with a full meal’s protein and vitamin content added to it. She gulped half of it down, then paused to savor the spicy sweet taste as it lingered on her tongue. Then she drank the rest of it slowly, enjoying the flavor. Vijay had outdone himself this trip. This tasted even better than the previous mixes. She smiled and keyed in a quick complimentary message to him on her handheld.

  She disposed of the container in the recycler and started for Vahn’s quarters, Sherin filling her thoughts once again. Maybe she should have overridden her medusas, taken another stim, gone after the other woman to talk instead of sleeping. Her failure to do that might have ruined everything. Frustration filled her again and with it, a sharp sense of annoyance.

  What did the rep really want from her? Or she from Sherin? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about the sex enough, but it was always less complicated in her fantasies, and, if she were being tru, she hadn’t thought past it. What was she supposed to do now? Sherin had begun to touch a place inside her, a place that she thought was numb. And she wasn’t sure that she liked that feeling.

  She clenched her fist and punched one of the walls as she passed it, turning her hand sideways so that the blow didn’t catch her knuckles. The impact was still enough to make her pause outside Vahn’s room and shake out her fingers, frowning at her own foolishness. The last thing she should be doing was hurting herself; frustrated or not, she’d need her hands for whatever came next. She shook her medusas out, letting them soothe the crankiness of her mood, and composed herself before she hit the entry request button.