Now Panatakis found a reason to be somewhat upset. His senses were working again, but they functioned like those of a normal person. He saw with his eyes and heard with his ears. After spending so much time in his version of the world, to be thrust into the same one experienced by everyone else was a less than pleasant experience.
He kept his eyes, at least what passed for eyes in his machine-infused skull, focused on Helena while he turned his attention inward. The implants did not have menus or anything that would make them easy to navigate. Perhaps if Helena could turn them off with a touch, Panatakis might get her to design an easier to use interface for him at some point. For the time being, however, he slowly pushed against their default settings with his mind.
“Is everything alright?” Helena asked. Her expression had morphed into a look of concern which she took no pains to conceal.
Panatakis realized he was squinting and leaning forward to force just a little more detail into his damaged, human eyes. He sat back, frowned. “My implants reset.”
“I apologize. Do you require time to adjust them?”
“Yes.”
As it happened, it took somewhat longer than a minute. While he worked, the Third Lord who took their order brought their drinks. Panatakis gave an offhand order for some sort of appetizing food taken at random from the day's specials. He would figure out what he ordered when it came to the table. Fortunately, Three Peaks did not make bad food.
Slowly, colors and lights bled around him, detail and information trickling in like cool air in the Kokkinian heat. As the world came back into proper focus again, Panatakis felt the tension in his neck start to dissipate.
When the world was back the way he wanted it, Panatakis turned his attention back across the table to Helena. Now that he thought about it, other than the occasional drink and the moment when she ordered her food, he did not remember her moving at all while he readjusted his implants.
“Alright, what did you do?”
Panatakis jumped in his seat. Her voice came from inside his head, bypassing every single one of his senses. Despite that, the sound was clearly her voice. The intonation might have been a little flatter, lacking the timbre that human vocal cords imparted, but the sounds were all there.
A moment passed and he became aware of her presence in his mind as well. It felt much like the sensation of someone sitting down in a chair next to him, close enough to feel and hear the subtle signs of life like body heat or breath.
Only the feeling was completely different, because she was somehow in his mind.
“How?”
“How do I...?”
He closed off his eyes and ears for a moment, relying on nothing but the information coming into his implants from Helena. She was colder than he was, somehow, but having only ever touched her mind like this, he had no one else to compare to. Perhaps everyone was like that and one's own mind was always warmer.
Maybe, he thought, that was how he stayed “him.” The warm parts were “Panatakis,” and the cool parts were “Helena.”
“Like,” he said, then,
She radiated a feeling that hit every one of his senses. Sight, sound, even smell combined to create the sensation of a smile without either of them moving a muscle.
Panatakis returned the feeling, surprised at how easy it was. All he had to do was imagine the feeling of smiling and their shared connection translated that automatically to her.
She radiated a sense of caution.
She waited a moment before replying.
She stopped a moment, awash in caution, then finished that thought.
He smiled, both physically and mentally. With a jab of amusement he said,
Helena replied.
Panatakis laughed with his physical body. Their connection automatically translated it as a flare of color.
She felt his amusement and sent him a burst of curiosity.
She laughed, a rare verbal sound from her.
She replied with the mental sensation of a shrug.
She nodded mentally.
Another mental shrug, touched with caution and pride in equal measure.
Panatakis grinned with his physical face and inside their connection.
Helena hesitated less than a second.
He radiated a general feeling of pleasantry between them.
He felt a rush of surprise and that same glow of curiosity coming from Helena's mind before she asked,
Blue-green amusement bubbled up from his mind, filling the space between their thoughts.
Chapter 14
After hiding Myrto's body where the soldiers said the mastigas should not find it, they packed up their camp and left that area quickly. Privately, Victoria had her doubts about whether their attempts to keep the body hidden ha
d any chance of being effective. If the mastigas were incapable of finding corpses in out of the way places, she reasoned she would have stumbled across some of her predecessors. Until the soldiers, she never found another human, and the mastigas even disappeared their own corpses with alarming speed.
Victoria herself walked at the rear of the group. During the few minutes she was able to speak with Myrto before the attack, Victoria felt a general lessening of tension in the room. A lot of it could have been attributed to the simple fact that most of the soldiers were asleep. Victoria was certain, at least for those few minutes of peace, that at at least some of it came from her talk with Pallasophia. Perhaps she helped smooth things over while Victoria slept.
Since the fight, however, that tension returned. Photeos walked at the front of the group, as far from Victoria as he could. Eleni and Stavros moved with nervous energy, not exactly avoiding her but not coming near either. Only Pallasophia walked close by Victoria, but even she had nothing to say.
“Damn it, where are they?” Eleni cursed, physically smacking the device in her hands. It remained passively unaware of her attempted violence.
Victoria sped up, doublestepping twice. “Where are who?”
Eleni jumped. That she was suddenly on edge was obvious enough from the tension in her shoulders. Her masked face turned toward Victoria for a moment before she replied. “The mastigas.”
Victoria nodded. The same thoughts had been eating at her as well. “It's unusual for them to make a small attack like that and then not follow up with anything.”
From the front, Photeos scoffed, but said nothing. Victoria might not have noticed if the noise not been pitched to carry.
“Is there something you wanted to add, Lochias?” Victoria asked, hoping she remembered the correct rank for the green-sleeved soldier.
“Killing a few of them is impressive, One Hundred, but it doesn't make you qualified to opine on their tactics.”
Victoria bristled. “There's a dead sophont and a dead elite down here. I did more than kill a few of them, I lived with them.”
Photeos started to snap some sort of fiery retort. In fact, he got as far as cursing before visibly stopping himself and falling silent for a moment. “I apologize. In the interest of open communication, I feel personally responsible for what happened earlier.”
“And you think I don't?” Victoria still did not have the control over her emotions that the soldiers displayed, and it came out much harsher than she might have wanted.
“What do you...”
She interrupted. “Do you know how many fonias I've killed?”
“No.”
“Me neither, but you can be sure it's more than four. I should have been able to handle that myself with no one getting hurt. Instead, Stavros is hobbling along while a chemical cocktail puts his chest back together and Myrto's body has gone cold under a pile of rocks!”
“The mastigas surprised us,” Pallasophia said, physically interjecting herself between Victoria and Photeos. Her voice was calm, level, and seemed to do wonders for both of their emotional states.
“The Lochagos is right,” Photeos said after a moment. “When I fought them on Kipos, we would have considered losing two people a fair trade for five dead mastigas.”
“Anything so long as someone walks out of there alive, right?” Victoria asked. Her question might have been directed at Photeos, but her face—helmet and all—was turned directly toward Pallasophia.
“There were days that, yes, those were our orders.” Photeos was silent for a full minute as they walked. Finally, he added another thought. “Without you, One H—Victoria, we would probably have all died in that ambush. Thank you.”
“You're welcome,” she replied automatically. His words did nothing to assuage the frustration and anger seething inside her, but they did calm her surface thoughts.
Adding to it, Pallasophia said, “apology accepted, Lochias.”
“Eleni's right,” Victoria persisted. “It's not normal for them to ignore a fight like that. They always came running after the sounds of fighting. I either had to kill them quietly or run and hide until they lost interest. Otherwise, I would often have to fight several in a row.”
Photeos nodded. His back was still to her, but the tension in his shoulders had lessened some. “Without a sophont, they just go after whatever seems the most interesting.”
“And by 'interesting,' you mean 'violent,'” Victoria said.
“Or most likely to result in food.”
Victoria shuddered. That was a dream she did not want to have again. Pallasophia's masked face turned to regard her for a moment, but she remained silent. Victoria suspected she knew exactly what memories had been passed on to Victoria and how graphic they were.
“I've got something on the floor above us!” Eleni announced.
At one, the group stopped at a hand signal from Pallasophia. “Play it,” she ordered.
Eleni did, producing a scratching sound from the device in her hands.
“Mikros,” Victoria and Photeos announced at nearly the same moment. She added, “only one of them.”
Photeos nodded agreement. “You learned well.”
“I didn't have much choice.” Victoria heard the soldiers laugh off negative things while they talked to one another. Watching them, it seemed to be a way to relieve stress. She did her best to make her voice sound like that, hoping for the same effect. The slight relaxation in Photeos's shoulders told her it worked, at least a little bit.
“It's probably watching the stairs,” Photeos said.
“That matches what I saw them do around the sophont,” Victoria said. “They didn't do it anywhere else, though.”
“I thought you killed the sophont.”
His tone might not have been accusatory, but that was how it came across to Victoria and she growled in automatic displeasure. “I did.”
“Lochagos,” he said, addressing Pallasophia. “You're sure there was only one sophont down here?”
She nodded firmly, once. “Absolutely.”
“If I may,” Stavros said, speaking for for the first time in a while. His voice was quiet and slow, and he stopped frequently. The quick heal was doing its job on his ribs, but even it could only work so quickly. Victoria also knew from experience that using the stuff, much like a smear of mastigas blood, also made the wound burn.
“Go ahead.” Pallasophia gestured for him to continue.
“Morphologically, the elite and the mikros aren't the only ones similar ones. The sophont shares a great many characteristics with them.”
“So, we could conceivably be dealing with mastigas led by a new sophont?” The surprise in Eleni's voice was clear.
Photeos nodded. “Their behavior would indicate that, yes.”
Something creaked down the hallway and the soldiers instantly assumed defensive postures. Only Victoria remained where she was, watching as the others raised their weapons to their shoulders and disabled the safeties.
Pallasophia was the first to rise out of the half-crouch into which she sank. “Victoria?”
She closed her eyes as the creak turned into a rhythmic knocking. “That's a water pipe. Specifically, it connects to the only place I found clean water.”
Now, it was Photeos's turn to be surprised. “You mapped out the pipes?”
“Only the ones that made mysterious noises while I was trying to sleep, but yes.”
“So what makes that noise?”
Victoria shrugged. “I don't know. I only know where that pipe leads.”
“It's an air hammer,” Stavros ventured.
“I don't like the sound of that.”
He laughed. The sound was a little thin, but still mostly amused. “It just means some air got caught in the pipe.”
Victoria nodded. “It leads to an open trough where I got water before.”
“That's one mystery solved, then,” Photeos said with relief.
“Victoria,” Pallasophia said, “where do you thi
nk they mastigas are, if they're not attacking us?”
“If there's a new sophont,” she started, emphasizing 'if' both times, “and if the remaining mastigas are following it, then they're probably below us. The sophont, the one I killed, made me come to it. I had to find it to confront it, and when I did, it tried to ambush me.”
“After this morning, why don't they just attack and kill us?” Stavros said. “Why don't...”
Stavros's knees wobbled. Victoria, nearest him, put a firm hand on his shoulder while he struggled to keep his legs and feet underneath himself. A trained reflex made him relax his hold on his rifle, allowing Victoria to take it and hand the weapon off to Eleni, who accepted it without question.
Victoria, still holding Stavros by the shoulder, came around in front of him. She felt the same rush of emotions she felt during the fight: the instinct to protect, to analyze. That close, she could see through the tint of his visor to his wide eyes and sweaty forehead.
“Are you alright?”
Stavros took several deep breaths. When he finally replied, most of the fear and uncertainty remained, but he seemed much more in control of things. He also seemed to have found control over his feet again and Victoria relaxed her grip on his shoulder.
“I will be,” he said. “Just still a little shaken.”
Victoria stepped away and nodded as Photeos approached. He slapped Stavros lightly on the back, but it was enough for him to lurch forward a step. Victoria reached out a hand to steady him again, but he brushed it off with a muttered, “thanks.”
“Congratulations, Dekaneas,” Photeos said. “You've survived two engagements with the mastigas now.”
“Thanks,” he replied. “I'd be sure to mention that at the ball next week if it wasn't classified.”
Photeos laughed. “Give it time. In a few weeks, I'm sure you'll be able to talk about some of it.”
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