Cai winked out as a section of corridor wall dilated open to reveal the entrance to the escape pod. I urged Preita to enter before me, and as I climbed inside a third impact shook the ship, this one much stronger than the other two, and I slipped and cracked my head on the plasteel of the pod"s curved inner surface. My vision grayed, and I felt sudden nausea grip my gut. Preita helped me to sit beside her, buckled me in, and then the pod door sealed shut and its systems activated.
A fourth impact rocked the Dragonwing, and for a moment I thought the Ng had managed to destroy the ship before our pod could launch. But then I experienced a moment of vertigo, and I realized our pod was away. The pod was strictly a no-frills craft-dim lighting, basic artificial gravity, minimal inertial dampeners-but it had full life support, as well as simple protective shielding, and it was already transmitting a distress signal on all Tieran frequencies. I imagined hundreds of identical pods filled with pa.s.sengers streaking away from the Dragonwing, and I wondered how the ship was faring against the Ng. There were no windows and no monitor screen, and when I asked the computer to give us a status report, there was no reply. It seemed the on-board computer wasn"t very sophisticated either.
I thought of the captain we"d dined with earlier that evening, and I wondered if right now the man was wishing he hadn"t been quite so eager to relive his military adventures.Though not without its defenses, the Dragonwing was only a barque, a commercial transport ship. It didn"t carry the heavy armaments that a destrier or sun-runner did, and against the Ng it could do little more than put up a token fight. I wondered if the battle was already over, Ng nan.o.bots flooding the ship, the crew dead or dying as the malleable machines flowed swiftly through the corridors of the Dragonwing like rivers of liquid metal, killing with ruthless efficiency as they went, the artificial intelligences driving them utterly pitiless and without remorse.
"How"s your head?" Preita asked. She tried to get a closer look, but I turned away.
"It"s fine. Just a b.u.mp."
She ignored me, unbuckled herself, and ordered the computer to show us the pod"s supplies. The computer made no verbal reply, but a floor panel slid open to reveal a stash of nutrition bars and water tabs, along with a small medical kit. Preita grabbed the latter and began rummaging through it, and it was only when I saw the first drops of blood spatter onto my leg that I realized my head wound was bleeding. But I didn"t care about that right then. My attention was focused on the plasteel hand weapon lying in the supply hold. I unbuckled and reached down to pick up the weapon, while Preita fussed over me, cleaning my wound with a disinfectant and then applying a patch of Nu-Skin.
"What"s that?" she said, nodding toward the weapon I was now holding.
"I think it"s a separator." I"d never seen one up close before, let alone held one, and I wasn"t sure. They"re devastating weapons, emitting short-range energy bursts that loosen the molecular bonds in objects. Organic, inorganic . . . a separator will turn them both into gray sludge.
Preita finished playing nurse, closed the medical kit, and replaced it in the supply hold. "It is," she said, and I wondered if she"d ever had occasion to use one in her long life. It wouldn"t have surprised me. Even after fifteen years of marriage, there were still things I didn"t know about her. "The question is, why would they put a weapon in here?" she added.
"As a precaution, I imagine. In case a pod has to make planetfall, and the occupants need to defend themselves." I gazed down at the gun in my hand. I felt a little sick holding that much destructive power. A separator is powerful enough to even affect the Ng. Too bad the scientists have never been able to get the weapons to work on a large scale.
"You can put that down," Preita said. "I doubt the Ng will try to board our pod. They"re only interested in the weapon the Dragonwing is carrying."
I hadn"t thought about the Ng trying to get into our pod, not consciously at least, but now that Preita had put the notion into my mind, I was reluctant to let go of the separator.
"I think I"ll hold onto it a little while. Just in case."
Preita looked at me for a moment and then nodded. "If it makes you feel better."
We sat in silence for several moments as our pod drifted in s.p.a.ce. The trauma of the evacuation was beginning to hit me and I found myself having trouble focusing my thoughts. Preita had said something . . . something that bothered me, but I couldn"t quite put my finger on what it was.
After a time, Preita starting speaking again, her voice soft. So much so I could barely hear her at first. "They have a right to defend themselves, you know. That"s all they"re doing. A weapon that powerful . . . they had no choice but to attack the Dragonwing."
It took me another moment to register what was bothering me about Preita"s words. I turned to look at her, and without meaning to, I gripped the separator more tightly.
"You sound as if you know what the Ng are thinking."
"No, but I can guess, Darach. I can empathize." She reached up to stroke the silvarium bracelet wrapped around her left arm. She looked at me then and gave me a weak smile. "That"s what actors do, right? We need a high degree of empathy in order to portray different characters."
I looked more closely at her bracelet. I"d gotten so used to seeing her wear the thing that I never paid much attention to it. She"d told me it was made of silvarium, and it looked like silvarium, but in the pod"s dim interior lighting, the metal seemed to take on a darker cast. Silver tinged with blue. Just like the Ng in the holos I"d seen.
I looked into Preita"s eyes, and I thought she would lie to me, but she said, "They just wanted some of us to be their eyes and ears, that"s all. They chose people who were sympathetic to their situation, people who understood that they were more than just machines, that they have just as much right to exist as we do."
I wasn"t sure of all the details, but I understood the gist of it. The bracelet was made of Ng nan.o.bots, and Preita had worn it to dinner where they"d heard the captain bragging about the new weapon he was transporting to Amontillado. They"d sent a signal to the rest of the Ng, and several hours later, a fleet of needlers arrived to attack the Dragonwing.
I couldn"t believe what I was hearing. I"d known she was pa.s.sionate about the Ng, but this . . .
"How many people were aboard the barque when the Ng attacked?" I asked her. "Five hundred? More? How many of them are dead, do you think? All because of your G.o.dd.a.m.ned empathy?"
And that"s when the bracelet uncoiled from around Preita"s forearm and flowed toward me, quick as a striking serpent.
"What happened after that?" Preita said softly.
"I aimed the separator at the Ng and pulled the trigger. The safety sensors detected the presence of the Ng, activated the gun, locked on to the target, and fired. The Ng was destroyed."
"But the bracelet hadn"t unwrapped completely from my arm, so the separator"s energy affected me too."
I nodded, trying desperately not to picture the image of my wife"s body collapsing into a pile of grayish muck, and failing. I"d sat there watching the viscous mess slowly disintegrate for nineteen hours until a rescue ship finally arrived, and by then no trace of the Ng or my wife remained.
"You lied about my death," Preita said. "You told the authorities that I"d died on the ship. Why?"
"Because I loved you and didn"t want to soil your memory. Not just for our friends and relatives, but for all the people you"d entertained during your career. And because I didn"t want your new self to get in trouble."
"You needn"t have worried about that. By Cascadian law, a reviver can"t be held liable for actions a previous incarnation undertook if the personality back-up was made before any wrongdoing was committed. As is the case with me."
"I knew that. But I also knew the military would question your new self to learn when and how you"d been contacted by the Ng, and to force you to name any other "eyes and ears" you might know. And they"d be very interested to see if your new self had picked up where your previous self had left off." I nodded to the bracelet this version of Preita wore. "I suppose I should"ve told the truth to the authorities. h.e.l.l, I probably committed an act of treason by keeping my mouth shut, but..."
"You loved me," Preita finished.
"Yes."
"Past tense," she added sadly.
My voice was thick with emotion as I answered. "Given what you did... Three hundred and thirty-six people died in the attack on the Dragonwing. And as bad as that is, do you know what"s worse? Once I returned to Amontillado I started asking questions. It took me a while to find the right people to talk to, and I had to raid my retirement fund to bribe them in order to get them to talk, but guess what I learned? There was no super weapon on board the Dragonwing. I"d been right. The captain had made the story up just to impress a beautiful actress who was a pa.s.senger on his ship. The men and women who died during the Ng attack died for no reason other than you wore a certain piece of jewelry to dinner one night."
Preita looked stunned, but she quickly recovered. We actors are good at rolling with punches. "I understand how you feel, Darach, but I didn"t do that. My previous incarnation did."
"Maybe. But can you tell me that"s a real silvarium bracelet this time?"
Preita opened her mouth to reply, but she said nothing, and after a moment she closed it again.
"Now that you know I know-and more importantly, they do-" I nodded toward her bracelet, "-I guess I"m officially a threat to the Ng. I know they won"t try anything here. Too many witnesses. But I imagine it won"t take them long to get around to doing something about me. You may serve as their eyes and ears, but I"m sure they have other agents willing to serve as their hands as well." I wondered how long it would be before I received a visit from one.
I drank the last of my bitterroot before getting out of the booth. "Time for me to leave. I need to get ready for tonight"s show." I managed a smile. "Who knows? It may turn out to be my farewell performance."
I left then, and I didn"t look back. I was tired, in so many ways, and I wasn"t looking forward to stepping onto the stage tonight, but you know the old adage: the show must go on.
Even when you no longer have the heart for it.
DRINKING GAMES.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Hands fumbling, fingers shaking, head aching, Rikki leaned one shoulder against the wall, blocking the view of the airlock controls from the corridor. Elio Testrail leaned against the wall at her feet. She hoped he looked drunk.
Things hadn"t gone as planned. Things never went as planned-she should have learned that a long time ago. But she kept thinking she"d get better with each job.
She completed each job. That was a victory, or at least, that felt like one right now.
Her heart pounded, her breath came in short gasps. If she couldn"t get a deep lungful of air, her fingers would keep shaking, not that it made any difference.
Why weren"t s.p.a.ceships built to a universal standard? Why couldn"t she just follow the same moves with every piece of equipment that had the same name? Instead, she had to study old specs, which were always wrong, and then she had to improvise, which was always dicey, and then she had to worry that somehow, with one little flick of a fingernail, she"d touch the wrong piece, which would set off an alarm, which would bring the security guards running.
High-end ships like this one always had security guards, and the d.a.m.n guards always thought they were some kind of cop which, she supposed, in the vast emptiness that was s.p.a.ce, they were.
Someone had fused the alarm to the computer control for the airlock doors, which meant that unless she could figure out a way to unfuse, this stupid airlock was useless to her. Which meant she had to haul Testrail to yet another airlock on a different deck, one that wouldn"t be as private as this one, and it would be just her luck that the airlock controls one deck up (or one deck down) would be just as screwy as the controls on this deck.
She cursed. Next s.p.a.ceport-the big kind with every d.a.m.n thing in the universe plus a dozen other d.a.m.n things she hadn"t even thought of-she would sign up for some kind of maintenance course, one that specialized in s.p.a.ce cruisers, since she found herself on so many of them, or maybe even some university course in mechanics or design or systems a.n.a.lysis, so that she wouldn"t waste precious minutes trying to pry open something that didn"t want to get pried.
She cursed again, and then a third time for good measure, but the words weren"t helping. She poked at that little fused bit inside the control, and felt her fingernail rip, which caused her to suck in a breath-no curse words for that kind of pain, sharp and tiny, the kind that could cause her (if she were a little less cautious) to pull back and stick the offending nail inside her mouth.
She"d done that once, set off a timer for an explosive device she"d been working on, just managed to dive behind the blast shield (she estimated) fifteen seconds before the d.a.m.n thing blew.
So she had her little reflexes under control.
It was the big reflexes that worried her.
"Need help?" Male voice. Deep. Authoritative.
She didn"t jump. She didn"t even flinch. But she did freeze in place for a half second, which she knew was a give-away, one of those moments like little kids had when they got caught doing something wrong.
"I"m fine, thanks," she said without turning around. No sense in letting him see her face.
"Your friend doesn"t look fine." He had just a bit of an accent, something that told her Standard wasn"t his native language.
"He"s drunk," she said.
"Looks dead to me," he said.
She turned, a.s.sessing her options as she did. One knife. (People were afraid of knives, but knives were messy; hard to clean up the blood.) Two laser pistols. (One tiny, against her ankle, hard to reach. The other on her hip, obvious, but lasers in a corridor-dangerous. They"d bounce off the walls, might hit her.) Fists. (Might break something, hands already shaking. Didn"t need the additional risk.) Then stopped a.s.sessing when she saw him.
He wasn"t what she expected. Tall, white blond hair, the kind that got noticed (funny, she hadn"t noticed him, but then there were 2,000 pa.s.sengers on this d.a.m.n ship). Broad shoulders, strong bones-not a s.p.a.cer then. Blue eyes with long lashes, like a girl"s almost, but he didn"t look girly, not with that aquiline nose and those high cheekbones. Thin lips twisted into a slight smile, a knowing smile, as if he knew what she was doing.
He wore gray pants and an ivory shirt without a single stain on it. No rings, no tattoos, no visible scars-and no uniform.
Not security, then. Or at least, not security that happened to be on duty.
"He"s drunk," she said again, hoping Testrail"s face was turned slightly. She"d managed to close his eyes, but he had that pallor the newly dead sometimes acquired. Blood wasn"t flowing; it was pooling, and that leached all the color from his skin.
"So he"s drunk, and you"re messing with the airlock controls, because you want to get him, what? Some fresh air?" The man"s eyes twinkled.
He was disgustingly handsome, and he knew it. She hated men like that, and thought longingly of her knife. One slash across the cheek. That would teach him.
"Guess I"ve had a little too much to drink myself," she said.
"Oh, for G.o.dssake," the man said as he approached her.
She reached for the knife, but he caught her wrist with one hand. He smelled faintly of sandalwood, and that, for some reason, made her breath catch.
He slammed the airlock controls with his free fist, and that made the d.a.m.n alarm go off and the first of the double doors open.
"What the h.e.l.l?" she snapped.
He sighed, as if she were the dumbest person he had ever met, then let her go. She did reach for the knife as he bent at the waist and picked up Testrail with one easy move.
She knew that move wasn"t easy. She"d used an over-the-shoulder carry to get the b.a.s.t.a.r.d down here, after having rigged the corridor cameras to show footage from two hours before. Not that that did any good now, now that this a.s.shole had set off the alarm.
He tossed Testrail into the airlock itself, then reached inside, and triggered the outer door. He barely got his hand back into the corridor before the inner door closed, protecting them from the vacuum of s.p.a.ce.
"What the h.e.l.l?" she asked again.
The man gave her a withering glance. "He was dead, you were going to toss him out, and then you were going to go about your business as is nothing happened. I just helped you along a little."
"And now every security agent on the ship will come down here," she snapped.
"Yeah," he said. "But it won"t be a problem."
"It won"t be a problem?" she asked.
But he already had his arm tightly around her shoulder, and he pulled her along. "C"mon," he said. "Stagger a little."
"What?" she asked, letting him pull her along. Her hand was still on her knife, but she didn"t close her fist around the hilt. Not yet.
"Do you know any drinking songs?" he asked.
"Know any . . . what?"
"Stagger," he said, and she did without much effort, since he was pulling her alongside him, not allowing her feet to find a rhythm.
They stepped onto the between-decks platform, which she loathed because it was open, not a true elevator at all, and he said, "Down," and the stupid thing jerked before it went down, and suddenly she was on corridor cameras.
"Do you know any drinking songs?" he asked again.
"No," she said, ready with an answer this time. "I don"t drink."
"No wonder you lack creativity," he said, and added, "Stop," as they pa.s.sed their third deck. He dragged her down the corridor to the airlock, and slammed it with his fist.
Another alarm went off as the inner door opened, and he reached inside, triggering the outer door.
"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" she asked again.
"Is that the only question you know?" he asked.
"Just answer me," she said as he turned her around and headed back toward the between-decks platform.
"Weren"t you ever a teenager?" he asked.