The whisper of a sensor-sweep across the landscape—like the brush of silk across Tia's skin, when she'd had skin. Like something not-quite-heard in the distance.
Tia stayed quiet and concentrated on keeping all of her outputs as low as possible. We aren't here. You can't find us. Why don't you just fill your holds and go away?
What had been a good hiding place was now a trap. Tia had shut down every system she could; Alex moved as little as possible. She had no way of knowing how sophisticated the pirates' systems were, so they were both operating on the assumption that anything out of the ordinary would alert the enemy to their presence, if not their location.
Whether or not the looters' initial carelessness had been because of the storm or because of greed—or whether they had been alerted by something she or Alex had done—now they were displaying all the caution Tia had expected of them. Telltales and alarms were in place; irregular sensor sweeps made it impossible for Alex to make a second trip to the ruins without being caught.
And now there were two more ships in orbit that had arrived while the blizzard still raged. One of those two ships had checked the satellite. Had they found Alex's handiwork, or were they simply following a procedure they had always followed? She had no way of knowing.
Whatever the case, those two ships kept her from taking off—and she wasn't going to transmit anything to the satellite. It was still broadcasting, and they only hoped it was because the pirates hadn't checked that closely. But it could have been because the pirates wanted them lulled into thinking they were safe.
So Tia had shut off all nonessential systems, and they used no active sensors, relying entirely on passive receptors. Knowing that sound could carry even past her blanket of snow, especially percussive sounds, Alex padded about in stocking feet when he walked at all. Three days of this now—and no sign that the looters were ready to leave yet.
Mostly he and Tia studied holos and the few artifacts that he had brought out of the cache area—once Tia had vacuum-purged them and sterilized them to a fare-thee-well.
After all, she kept telling herself, the pirates couldn't stay up there forever. Could they?
Unless they had some idea that Tia was already here. Someone had leaked what they knew about Hank and his cargo when they were on Presley Station. The leak could have gone beyond the station.
She was frightened and could not tell him; strung as tightly as piano strings with anxiety, with no way to work off the tension.
She knew that the same thoughts troubled Alex, although he never voiced them. Instead, he concentrated his attention completely on the enigmatic book of metal plates he had brought out of the cache.
There were glyphs of some kind etched into it, along the right edge of each plate, and a peculiarly matte-finished strip along the left edge of each. But most importantly, the middle of each page was covered with the pinprick patterns of what could only be stellar configurations. Having spent so much time studying stellar maps, both of them had recognized that they were nav-guides immediately. But to what—and far more importantly, what was the reference point? There was no way of knowing that she could see.
And who had made the book in the first place? The glyphs had an odd sort of familiarity about them, but nothing she was able to put a figurative finger on.
It was enough of a puzzle to keep Alex busy, but not enough to occupy her. It was very easy to spend a lot of time brooding over her brawn. Slumped in his chair, peculiarly handsome face intent, with a single light shining down on his head and the artifact, with the rest of the room in darkness—or staring into a screen full of data—
Like a scene out of a thriller-holo. The hero, biding his time, ready to crack under the strain but not going to show his vulnerability; the enemies waiting above. Priceless data in their hands, data that they dared not allow the enemy to have. The hero, thinking about the lover he had left behind, wondering if he will ever see her again—
Shellcrack. This was getting her nowhere.
She couldn't pace, she couldn't bite her nails, she couldn't even read to distract herself. Finally she activated a single servo and sent it discretely into his cabin to clean it. It hadn't been cleaned since they'd left the base; mostly Alex had just shoved things into drawers and closets and locked the doors down. She couldn't clean his clothing now—but as soon as they shook the hounds off their trail—
If they shook the hounds off their trail—if the second avalanche and the blizzard hadn't piled too much snow on top of them to clear away. There were eight meters of snow up there now, not four. Much more, and she might not be able to blast free.
Stop that. We'll get out of this.
Carefully she cleaned each drawer and closet, replacing what wasn't dirty and having the servo kidnap what was. Carefully, because there were lots of loose objects shoved in with the clothing.
But she never expected the one she found tumbled in among the bedcoverings.
A holocube—of her.
She turned the cube over and over in the servo's pinchers, changing the pictures, finding all of them familiar. Scenes of her from before her illness; the birthday party, posing with Theodore Bear—
Standing in her brand new pressure-suit in front of a fragment of wall covered with EsKay glyphs—that was a funny one; Mum had teased Dad about it because he'd focused on the glyphs out of habit. She'd come out half out of the picture, but the glyphs had been nice and sharp.
It hit her like a jolt of current. The glyphs. That was where she had seen them before! Oh, these were carved rather than inscribed, and time and sandstorms had worn them down to mere suggestions. They were formed in a kind of cursive style, where the ones on the book were angular—but—
She ran a quick comparison and got another jolt, this time of elation. "Alex!" she whispered excitedly. "Look!"
She popped the glyphs from the old holo up on her screen as he looked up, took the graphic of the third page of the book, and superimposed the one over the other. Aside from the differences in style, they were a perfect match.
"EsKays," he murmured, his tone awestruck. "Spirits of space—this book was made by the EsKays!"
"I think these caches and buildings must have been made by some race that knew the EsKays," she replied. "But even if they weren't—Alex, how much will you wager that this little set of charts shows the EsKay homeworld, once you figure out how to decipher it?"
"It would make sense," he said, after a moment. "Look at this smooth area on every page—always in the same place along the edge. I bet this is some kind of recording medium, like a datahedron—maybe optical—"
"Let me look at it," she demanded. "Put it in the lab." Now she had something to keep her attention. And something to keep her mind off him.
Alex had nothing more to do but read and brood. While Tia bent all the resources at her disposal on the artifact, he was left staring at screens and hoping the pirates didn't think to scan for large masses of metal under the snow.
Reading palled after too long; music was out because it could be detected, even if he were wearing headphones, and he hated headphones. He'd never been much of a one for entertainment holos, and they made at least as much noise as music.
That left him alone in the dark with his thoughts, which kept turning back towards Tia. He knew her childhood very well now—accessing the data available publicly and then doing the unthinkable, at least for anyone in the BB program: contacting Doctor Kennet and Doctor Anna and pumping them for information. Not with any great subtlety, he feared, but they hadn't taken it amiss. Of course, if anyone in CS found out what he'd been doing, he would be in major trouble. There was an ugly name for his feeling about Tia.
Fixation.
After that single attempt at finding a temporary companion in port, Alex had left the women alone—because he kept picking ones who looked like Tia. He had thought it would all wear off after a while; that sooner or later, since nothing could be done about it, the fascination would fade away.
And meanwhile, or so he'd told himself, it only made sense to learn as much about Tia as he could. She was unique; the oldest child ever to have been put into a shell. He had to be very careful with someone like that; the normal parameters of a brain-brawn relationship simply would not apply.
So now he knew what she had looked like—and, thanks to computer-projection, what she would have looked like if she had never caught that hideous disease and had grown up normally. Why, she might even have wound up at the Academy, if she hadn't chosen to follow in her famous parents' footsteps. He knew most of the details, not only of her pre-shell life, but of her life at Lab Schools. He knew as much about her as he would have if she had been his own sibling—except that his feelings about her had been anything but brotherly.
But he had told himself that they were brotherly, that he was not falling in love with a kind of ghost, that everything would be fine. He'd believed it, too.
That is, up until he ran into Chria Chance and her gunner.
There was no doubt in his mind from the moment the screen lit up that Chria and Neil were an item. The signs were there for anyone who knew how to read body language, especially for someone who knew Chria as well as Alex did. And his initial reaction to the relationship caught him completely by surprise.
Envy. Sheer, raw, uncomplicated envy. Not jealousy, for he wasn't at all interested in Chria and never had been. In some ways, he was very happy for her; she had been truly the poor little rich girl—High Family with four very proper brothers and sisters who were making the Family even more prestige and money. She alone had been the rebel; she of all of them had wanted something more than a proper position, a place on a board of directors, and a bloodless, loveless, high-status spouse. After she threatened to bring disgrace on all of them, blackmailing them by swearing she would join a shatter-rock synthocom band under her real name, they had permitted her the Academy under an assumed one.
No, he was happy for Chria; she had found exactly the life and partners that she had longed for.
But he wanted what she had—only he wanted it to be Tia sitting back there in the second seat. Or Tia in the front and himself in the back; it didn't much matter who was the one in command, if he could have had her there.
The strength of his feelings had been so unexpected that he had not known what to do with them—so he had attempted, clumsily, to cover them. Fortunately, everyone involved seemed to put his surliness down to a combination of pain from his injuries and wooziness due to the pain-pills he'd gulped.
If only it had been . . .
I'm in love with someone I can't touch, can't hold, can't even tell that I love her, he thought with despair, clenching his hand tightly on the armrest of his chair. I—
"Alex?" Tia whispered, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silence of the ship, for she had turned even the ventilation system down to a minimum. "Alex, I've decoded the storage-mode. It's old-fashioned hard-etched binary storage and I think that it's nav directions that relate to the stellar map on the page. Once I find a reference point I recognize, I'm pretty sure I can decode it all eventually. I got some ideas, though, since I was able to match some place-name glyphs—and we were right—I'm positive that these are directions to all the EsKay bases from the homeworld! So if we could just find a base—"
"And trace it back!" This was what she'd been looking for from the beginning, and excitement for her shoved aside all other feelings for the moment. "What's the deal—why the primitive navcharts? Not that it isn't a break for us, but if they were space-going, why limit yourself to a crawl?"
"Well, the storage medium is pretty hard to damage; you wouldn't believe how strong it is. So I can see why they chose it over something like a datahedron that a strong magnetic field can wipe. As for why the charts themselves are so primitive, near as I can make out, they didn't have Singularity Drive and they could or would only warp between stars, using them as navigational stepping-stones. I don't know why; there may be something there that would give the reason, but I can't decode it." There was something odd and subdued about her voice—
"What, hopping like a Survey ship?" he asked incredulously. "You could spend years getting across space that way!"
"Maybe they didn't care. Maybe hyper made them sick." Now he recognized what the odd tone in her voice was; she didn't seem terribly excited, now that she had what she was looking for.
"Well, we don't have to do that," he pointed out. "Once we get out of here, we can backtrack to the EsKay homeworld, make a couple of jumps, and we'll be stellar celebs! All we have to do is—"
"Is forget about our responsibilities," she said, sharply. "Or else 'forget' to turn in this book with the rest of the loot until we get a long leave. Or turn it in and hope no one else beats us to the punch."
Keeping the book was out of the question, and he dismissed it out of hand. "They won't," he replied positively. "No one else has spent as much time staring at star-charts as we have. You've said as much yourself; the archeologists at the Institute get very specialized and see things in a very narrow way. I don't think that there's the slightest chance that anyone will figure out what this book means within the next four or five years. But you're right about having responsibilities; we are under a hard contract to the Institute. We'll have to wait until we can buy or earn a long leave—"
"That's not what's bothering me," she interrupted, in a very soft voice. "It's—the ethics of it. If we hold back this information, how are we any better than those pirates out there?"
"How do you mean?" he asked, startled.
"Withholding information—that's like data piracy, in a way. We're holding back, not only the data, but the career of whoever is the EsKay specialist right now—Doctor Lana Courtney-Rai, I think. In fact, if we keep this to ourselves, we'll be stealing her career advancement. I mean, we aren't even real archeologists!" There was no mistaking the distress in her voice.
"I think I see what you mean." And he did; he could understand it all too well. He'd seen both his parents passed over for promotions in favor of someone who hadn't earned the advancement but who "knew the right people." He'd seen the same thing happen at the Academy. It wasn't fair or right. "We can't do everything, can we?" he said slowly. "Not like in the holos, where the heroes can fight off pirates while performing brain surgery."
Tia made a sad little chuckle. "I'm beginning to think it's all we can do just to get our real job done right."
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. "Funny. When this quest of ours was all theoretical, it was one thing—but we really can't go shooting off by ourselves and still do our duty, the duty that people are expecting us to do."
She didn't sigh, but her voice was heavy with regret. "It's not only a question of ethics, but of priorities. We can simply go on doing what we do best—and Chria Chance really put her finger on it, when she pointed out that she and Neil and Pol wouldn't know how to recognize our plague spot, and we would. She knows when she should let the experts take over. I hate to give up on the dream—but in this case, that dream was the kind of thing a kid could have, but—"
"But it's time to grow up—and let someone else play," Alex said firmly.
"Maybe we could go pretend to be archeologists," Tia added, "but we'd steal someone else's career in the process. Become second-rate—but very, very lucky amateur pot-hunters."
He sighed for both of them. "They'd hate us, you know. Everyone we respected would hate us. And we'd be celebrities, but we wouldn't be real archeologists."
"Alex?" she said, after a long silence. "I think we should just seal that book up with our findings and what we've deduced about it. Then we should lock it up with the rest of the loot and go on being a stellar CS team. Even if it does get awfully boring running mail and supplies, sometimes."
"It's not boring now," he said ruefully, without thinking. "I kind of wish it was."
Silence for a long time, then she made a tiny sound that he would have identified as a whimper in a softperson. "I wish you hadn't reminded me," she said.
"Why?"
"Because—because it seems as if we're never going to get out of here—that they're going to find us eventually."
"Stop that," he replied sharply, reacting to the note of panic in her voice. "They can't hover up there forever. They'll run out of supplies, for one thing."
"So will we," she countered.
"And they'll run out of patience! Tia, think—these are pirates, and they don't even know there's anyone else here, not for certain, anyway! When they don't find anything, they'll give up and take their loot off to sell!" He wanted, badly, to pace—but that would make noise. "We can leave when they're gone!"
"If—we can get out."
"What?" he said, startled.
"I didn't want you to worry—but there's been two avalanches since you got back, and all the snow the blizzard dropped."
He stared at her column in numbed shock, but she wasn't finished.
"There's about eleven meters of snow above us. I don't know if I can get out. And even if CenSec shows up, I don't know if they'll hear a hail under all this ice. I lost the signals from the surface right after that last avalanche, and the satellite signals are getting too faint to read clearly."
He said the first thing that came into his head, trying to lighten the mood, but without running it past his internal censor first. "Well, at least if I'm going to be frozen into a glacier for all eternity, I've got my love to keep me warm."
He stopped himself, but not in time. Oh, brilliant. Now she thinks she's locked in an iceberg with a fixated madman!
"Do—" Her voice sounded choked, probably with shock. "Do you mean that?"
He could have shot himself. "Tia," he began babbling, "it's all right, really, I mean I'm not going to go crazy and try to crack your column or anything, I really am all right, I—"
"Did you mean that?" she persisted.
"I—" Oh well. It's on the record. You can't make it worse. "Yes. I don't know, it just sort of—happened." He shrugged helplessly. "It's not anything crazy, like a fixation. But, well—I just don't want any partner of any kind but you. If that's love, then I guess I love you. And I really, really love you a lot." He sighed and rubbed his temples. "So there it is, out in the open at last. I hope I don't offend or frighten you, but you're the best thing that ever happened to me, and that's a fact. I'd rather be with you than anyone else I know, or know of." He managed a faint grin. "Holostars and stellar celebs included."
The plexy cover to Ted Bear's little "shrine" popped open, and he jumped.
"I can't touch you, and you can't touch me, but—would you like to hug Theodore?" she replied softly. "I love you, too, Alex. I think I have ever since you went out to face the Zombie Bug. You're the bravest, cleverest, most wonderful brawn I could ever imagine, and I wouldn't want to be anyone's partner but yours."
The offer of her childhood friend was the closest she could come to intimacy—and he knew it.
He got up, carefully, and took the little fellow down out of his wall-home, hugging the soft little bear once, hard, before he restored him again and closed the door.
"You have a magnificent lady, Theodore Bear," he told the solemn-faced little toy. "And I'm going to do my best to make her happy."
He turned back to her column and cleared his throat, carefully. Time, and more than time, to change the subject. "Right," he said. "Now that we've both established why we've been touchy—let's see if we can figure out what our options are."
"Options?" she replied, confused.
"Certainly." He raised his chin defiantly. "I intend to spend the rest of my life with you—and I don't intend that to be restricted to how long it takes before the pirates find us or we freeze to death! So let's figure out some options, hang it all!"
To his great joy and relief, she actually laughed. And if there was an edge of hysteria in it, he chose to ignore that little nuance.
"Right," she said. "Options. Well, we can start with the servos, I guess. . . ."
"Tia snuggled down into his arms, and turned into a big blue toy bear. The bear looked at him reproachfully.
He started to get up, but the bedcoverings had turned to snowdrifts, and he was frozen in place. The bear tried to chip him out, but its blunt arms were too soft to make an impression on the ice-covered drifts.
Then he heard rumbling—and looked up, to see an avalanche poised to crash down on him like some kind of slow-motion wave—
The avalanche rumbled, and Tia-the-bear growled back, interposing herself between him and the tumbling snow—
"Alex, wake up!"
He floundered awake, flailing at the bedclothes, hitting the light button more by accident than anything else. He blinked as the light came up full, blinding him, his legs trapped in a tangle of sheets and blankets. "What?" he said, his tongue too thick for his mouth. "Who? Where?"
"Alex," Tia said, her voice strained, but excited. "Alex, I have been trying to get you to wake up for fifteen minutes! There's a CenSec ship Upstairs, and it's beating the tail off those two pirates!"
CenSec? Spirits of space—
"What happened?" he asked, grabbing for clothing and pulling it on. "From the beginning—"
"The first I knew of it was when one of the pirates sent a warning down to the ship here to stay under cover and quiet. I got the impression that they thought it was just an ordinary Survey ship, until it locked onto one of them and started blasting." Tia had brought up all of her systems again; fresher air was moving briskly through the ventilator, all the lights and boards were up and active in the main cabin. "That was when all the scans stopped—and I started breaking loose. I ran that freeze-thaw cycle you suggested, and a couple of minutes ago, I fired the engines. I can definitely move, and I'm pretty sure I can pull out of here without too much trouble. I might lose some paint and some bits of things on my surface, but nothing that can't be repaired."
"What about Upstairs?" he asked, running for his chair without stopping for shoes or even socks, and strapping himself down.
"Good news and bad news. The CenSec ship looks like its going to take both the pirates," she replied. "The bad news is that while I can receive, I can't seem to broadcast. The ice might have jammed something, I can't tell."
"All right; we can move, and the ambush Upstairs is being taken care of." Alex clipped the last of his restraint belts in place; when Tia moved, it could be abruptly, and with little warning. "But if we can't broadcast, we can't warn CenSec that there's another ship down here—we can't even identify ourselves as a friend. And we'll be a sitting duck for the pirates if we try to rise. They can just hide in their blinds and ambush the CenSec ship, then wait to see if we come out of hiding—as soon as we clear their horizon they can pot us."
Alex considered the problem as dispassionately as he could. "Can we stay below their horizon until we're out of range?"
Tia threw up a map as an answer. If the pirate chose to pursue them, there was no way that she could stay out of range of medium guns, and they had to assume that was what the pirate had.
"There has to be a way to keep them on the ground, somehow," Alex muttered, chewing a hangnail, aware that with every second that passed their window of opportunity was closing. "What's going on Upstairs?"
"The first ship is heavily damaged. If I'm reading the tactics right, the CenSec ship is going to move in for the kill—provided the other pirate gives him a chance."
Alex turned his attention back to their own problem. "If we could just cripple them—throw enough rocks down on them or—wait a minute. Bring up the views of the building they're hiding in—the ones you got from my camera."
Tia obeyed, and Alex studied the situation carefully, matching pictures with memory. "Interesting thing about those hills—see how some of them look broken-off, as if those tips get too heavy to support after a while? I bet that's because the winds come in from different directions and scour out under the crests once in a while. Can you give me a better shot of the hills overhanging those buildings?"
"No problem." The viewpoint pulled back, displaying one of those wave-crest hills overshadowing the building with the partial roof. "Alex!" she exclaimed.
"You see it too," he said with satisfaction. "All right girl, think we can pull this off?"
For answer, she revved her engines. "Be a nice change to hit back, for once!"
"Then let's lift!"
The engines built from a quiet purr to a bone-deep, bass rumble, more felt than heard. Tia pulled in her landing gear, then began rocking herself by engaging null-grav, first on the starboard, then on the port side, each time rolling a little more. Alex did what he could, playing with the attitude jets, trying to undercut some of the ice.
Her nose rose, until Alex tilted back in his chair at about a forty-five degree angle. That was when Tia cut loose with the full power of her rear thrusters.
"We're moving!" she shouted over the roar of her own engines, engines normally reserved only for in-atmosphere flight. There was no sensation of movement, but Alex clearly heard the scrape of ice along her hull, and winced, knowing that without a long stint in dry dock, Tia would look worse than Hank's old tramp-freighter. . . .
Suddenly, they were free—
Tia killed the engines and engaged full null-gee drive, hovering just above the surface of the snow in eerie silence.
"CenSec got the first ship; the other one jumped them. It looks pretty even," Tia said shortly, as Alex heard the whine of the landing gear being dropped again. "So far, no one has noticed us. Are you braced?"
"Go for it," he replied. "Is there anything I can do?"
"Hold on," she said shortly.
She shot skyward, going for altitude. She knew the capabilities of her hull better than Alex did; he was going to leave this in her hands. The hill they wanted was less than a kilometer away—when they'd gotten high enough, Tia nosed over and dove for it. She aimed straight for the crest, as if it were a target and she a projectile.
Sudden fear clutched at his throat, his heart going a million beats per second. She can't mean to ram—
Alex froze, his hands clutching the armrests.
At the last minute, Tia rolled her nose up, hitting the crest of the hill with her landing gear instead of her nose.
The shriek and crunch of agonized metal told Alex that they were not going to make port anywhere but a space station now. The impact rammed him back into his chair, the lights flickered and went out, and crash-systems deployed, cushioning him from worse shock. Even so, he blacked out for a moment.
When he came to again, the lights were back on, and Tia hovered, tilted slightly askew, above the alien city.
Below and to their right was what was left of the roofless building—now buried beneath a pile of ice, earth, and rock.
"Are you all right?" he managed, though it hurt to move his jaw.
"Space-worthy," she said, and there was no mistaking the shakiness in her voice. "Barely. I'll be as leaky as a sieve in anything but the main cabin and the passenger section, though. And I don't know about my drives—hang on, we're being hailed."
The screen flickered and filled with the image of Neil, with Chria Chance in the background. "AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, is that you? I assume you had a good reason for playing 'chicken' with a mountain?"
"It's us," Alex replied, feeling all of his energy drain out as his adrenaline level dropped. "There's another one of your playmates under that rockpile."
"Ah." Neil said nothing more, simply nodded. "All right, then. Can you come up to us?"
"We aren't going to be making any landings," Tia pointed out. "But I don't know about the state of our drives."
Chria leaned over her partner's shoulder. "I wouldn't trust them if I were you," she said. "But if you can get up here, we can take you in tow and hold you in orbit until one of the transports shows up. Then you can ride home in their bay."
"It's a deal," Alex told her—then, with a lift of an eyebrow, "I didn't know you could do that."
"There's a lot you don't know," she told him. "Is that all right with you, Tia?"
"At this point, just about anything would be all right with me," she replied. "We're on the way."
Tia was still a little dizzy from the call she'd gotten from the Institute. When you're refitted, we'd like you to take the first Team into what we think is the EsKay homeworld. You and Alexander have the most experience in situations where plague is a possibility of any other courier on contract to us. It had only made sense; to this day no one knew what had paralyzed her. She had a vested interest in making sure the team stayed healthy, and an even bigger one in helping to find the bug.
Of course, they knew that. And they knew she would never buy out her contract until this assignment was over. Blackmail? Assuredly. But it was a form of blackmail she could live with.
Besides, if her plan worked, she would soon be digging with the Prime Team, not just watching them. It might take a while, but sooner or later, she'd have enough money made from her investments—
Once she paid for the repairs, that is. From the remarks of the techs working on her hull, they would not be cheap.
Then Stirling stunned her again, presenting her with the figures in her account.
"So, my dear lady," said Stirling, "between an unspecified reward from the Drug Enforcement Arm, the bonus for decoding the purpose of the EsKay navbook, the fine return from your last investment, and the finders' fee for that impressive treasure trove, you are quite a wealthy shellperson."
"So I see," Tia replied, more than a little dazed. "But what about the bill for repairs—"
"Covered by CenSec." Stirling wasn't precisely gloating, but he was certainly enjoying himself. "And if you don't mind my saying so, that was my work. I merely repeated what you had told me about the situation—pointed out that your damages were due entirely to a civilian aiding in the apprehension of dangerous criminals—and CenSec seemed positively eager to have the bills transferred over. When I mentioned how you had kept their ship from ambush from the ground, they decided you needed that Singularity Drive you've always wanted."
She suspected he had done more than merely mention it . . . perhaps she ought to see if she could get Lee Stirling as her Advocate, instead of the softperson she had, who had done nothing about the repairs or the drive! So, she would not have to spend a single penny of all those bonuses on her own repairs! "What about my investments in the prosthetics firm? And what if I take my bonus money and plow it back into Moto-Prosthetics?"
"Doing brilliantly. And if you do that—hmm—do you realize you'll have a controlling interest?" Stirling sounded quite amazed. "Is this something you wanted? You could buy out your contract with all this. Or get yourself an entire new refit internally and externally."
"Yes," she replied firmly. She was glad that Alex wasn't aboard at the moment, even though she felt achingly lonely without the sounds of his footsteps or his tuneless whistling. This was something she needed absolute privacy for. "In fact, I am going to need a softperson proxy to go to the Board of Directors for me."
"Now?" Stirling asked.
"As soon as I have controlling interest," she replied. "The sooner the better."
And it can't be soon enough to suit me.
Alex looked deeply into the bottom of his glass and decided that this one was going to be his last. He had achieved the state of floating that passed for euphoria; any more and he would pass it, and become disgustingly drunk. Probably a weepy drunk, too, all things considered. That would be a bad thing; despite his civilian clothing, someone might recognize him as a CS brawn, and that would be trouble. Besides, this was a high-class bar as spaceport bars went; human bartender, subdued, restful lighting, comfortable booths and stools, good music that was not too loud. They didn't need a maudlin drunk; they really didn't need any drunk. No point in ruining other people's evening just because his life was a mess. . . .
He felt the lump in his throat and knew one more drink would make it spill over into an outpouring of emotion. The bartender leaned over and said, confidingly, "Buddy, if I were you, I'd cut off about now."
Alex nodded, a little surprised, and swallowed back the lump. Had liability laws gotten to the point where bartenders were watching their customers for risky behavior? "Yeah. What I figured." He sniffed a bit and told himself to straighten up before he became an annoyance.
The bartender—a human, which was why Alex had chosen to drink away his troubles here, if such a thing was possible—did not leave. Instead, he polished the slick pseudo-wooden bar beside Alex with a spotless cloth, and said, casually, "If you don't mind my saying so, buddy, you look like a man with a problem or two."
Alex laughed, mirthlessly. The man had no idea. "Yeah. Guess so."
"You want to talk about it?" the bartender persisted. "That's what they hire me for. That's why you're paying so much for the drinks."
Alex squinted up at the man, who was perfectly ordinary in a way that seemed very familiar. Conservative haircut, conservative, casual clothing. Nothing about the face or the expression to mark him except a certain air of friendly concern. It was that "air" that tipped him off—it was very polished, very professional. "Counselor?" he asked, finally.
The bartender nodded to a framed certificate over the three shelves of antique and exotic bottles behind the bar. "Licensed. Confidential. Freelance. Been in the business for five years. You probably can't tell me anything I haven't heard a hundred times before."
Freelance and confidential meant that whatever Alex told him would stay with him, and would not be reported back to his superiors. Alex was both surprised and unsurprised—the Counselor-attended bars had been gaining in popularity when he had graduated. He just hadn't known they'd gotten that popular. He certainly hadn't expected to find one out here, at a refit station. People tended to pour out their problems when they'd been drinking; someone back on old Terra had figured out that it might be a good idea to give them someone to talk to who might be able to tender some reasonable advice. Now, so he'd heard, there were more Counselors behind bars than there were in offices, and a large number of bartenders were going back to school to get Counselor's licenses.
Suddenly the need to unburden himself to someone was too much to withstand. "Ever been in love?" he asked, staring back down at the empty glass and shoving it back and forth a little between his index fingers.
The bartender took the glass away and replaced it with a cup of coffee. "Not personally, but I've seen a lot of people who are—or think they are."
"Ah." Alex transferred his gaze to the cup, which steamed very nicely. "I wouldn't advise it."
"Yeah. A lot of them say that. Personal troubles with your significant?" the bartender-cum-Counselor prompted. "Maybe it's something I can help out with."
Alex sighed. "Only that I'm in love with someone that—isn't exactly reachable." He scratched his head for a moment, trying to think of a way to phrase it without giving too much away. "Our—uh—professions are going to keep us apart, no matter what, and there's some physical problems, too."
The habit of caution was ingrained too deeply. Freelance Counselor or no, he couldn't bring himself to tell the whole truth to this man. Not when telling it could lose him access to Tia altogether, if the wrong people heard all this.
"Can't you change jobs?" the Counselor asked, reasonably. "Surely a job isn't worth putting yourself through misery. From everything I've ever seen or heard, it's better to have a low-paying job that makes you happy than a high-paying one that's driving you into bars."
Alex shook his head, sorrowfully. "That won't help," he sighed hopelessly. "It's not just the job, and changing it will only make things worse. Think of us as—as a Delphin and an Avithran. She can't swim, I can't fly. Completely incompatible lives."
And that puts it mildly.
The Counselor shook his head. "That doesn't sound promising, my friend. Romeo and Juliet romances are all very well for the holos, but they're hell on your insides. I'd see if I couldn't shake my emotional attachment, if I was you. No matter how much you think you love someone, you can always turn the heat down if you decide that's what you want to do about it."
"I'm trying," Alex told him, moving the focus of his concentration from the coffee cup to the bartender's face. "Believe me, I'm trying. I've got a couple of weeks extended leave coming, and I'm going to use every minute of it in trying. I've got dates lined up; I've got parties I'm hitting—and a friend from CenSec is planning on taking me on an extended shore leave crawl."
The bartender nodded, slowly. "I understand, and seeing a lot of attractive new people is one way to try and shake an emotional attachment. But friend—you are not going to find your answer in the bottom of a bottle."
"Maybe not," Alex replied sadly. "But at least I can find a little forgetfulness there."
And as the bartender shook his head, he pushed away from his seat, turned, took a tight grip on his dubious equilibrium, and walked out the door, looking for a little more of that forgetfulness.
Angelica Guon-Stirling bint Chad slid into her leather-upholstered seat and smiled politely at the man seated next to her at the foot of the huge, black marble table. He nodded back and returned his attention to the stock market report he was reading on the screen of his datalink. Other men and women, dressed in conservative suits and the subdued hues of management, filed in and took the remaining places around the table. She refrained from chuckling. In a few more moments, he might well be more interested in her than in anything that datalink could supply. She'd gotten entry to the meeting on the pretext of representing her uncle's firm on some unspecified business—they represented enough fluid wealth that the secretary had added her to the agenda and granted her entry to the sacred boardroom. It was a very well-appointed sacred boardroom; rich with the scent of expensive leather and hushed as only a room ringed with high-priced anti-surveillance equipment could be. The lights were set at exactly the perfect psychological hue and intensity for the maximum amount of alertness, the chair cradled her with unobtrusive comfort. The colors of warm white, cool black, and gray created an air of efficiency and importance, without being sterile.
None of this intimidated Angelica in the least. She had seen a hundred such board rooms in the past, and would probably see a thousand more before her career had advanced to the point that she was too busy to be sent out on such missions. Her uncle had not only chosen her to be Ms. Cade's proxy because they were related; he had chosen her because she was the best proxy in the firm. And this particular venture was going to need a very delicate touch, for what Ms. Cade wanted was not anything the board of directors of Moto-Prosthetics was going to be ready for. They thought in terms of hostile takeovers, poison pills, golden parachutes. Ms. Cade had an entirely different agenda. If this were not handled well and professionally, the board might well fight, and that would waste precious time.
Though it might seem archaic, board meetings still took place in person. It was too easy to fake holos, to create a computer-generated simulacrum of someone who was dead or in cold sleep. That was why she was here now, with proxy papers in order and properly filed with all the appropriate authorities. Not that she minded. This was exciting work, and every once in a while there was a client like Hypatia Cade, who wanted something so different that it made everything else she had done up to now seem like a training exercise.
The meeting was called to order—and Angelica stood up before the chairman of the board could bring up normal business. Now was the time. If she waited until her scheduled turn, she could be lost or buried in nonsense—and as of this moment, the board's business was no longer what had been scheduled anyway. It was hers, Angelica's, to dictate. It was a heady brew, power, and Angelica drank it to the dregs as all eyes centered on her, most affronted that she had "barged in" on their business.
"Gentlemen," she said smoothly, catching all their attentions. "Ladies. I believe you should all check your datalinks. If you do, you will see that my client, a Miz Hypatia Cade, has just this moment purchased a controlling interest in your preferred stock. As of this moment, Hypatia Cade is Moto-Prosthetics. As her proxy, she directs me to put the normal business before the board on hold for a moment."
There was a sudden, shocked moment of silence—then a rustle as cuffs were pushed back—followed by another moment of silence as the members of the board took in the reality of her statement, verified that it was true, wondered how it had happened without them noticing, then waited for the axe to fall. All eyes were on Angelica; some of them desperate. Most of the desperate were those who backed risky ventures within the company, and were wondering if their risk-taking had made them into liabilities for the new majority owner.
Ah, power. I could disband the entire board and bring in my own people, and you all know it. These were the moments that she lived for; the feeling of having the steel hand within the velvet glove—knowing that she held immense power, and choosing not to exercise it.
Angelica slid back down into her seat and smiled—smoothly, coolly, but encouragingly. "Be at ease, ladies and gentlemen. The very first thing that my client wishes to assure you of is that she intends no shakeups. She is satisfied with the way this company is performing, and she does not intend to interfere in the way you are running it."
Once again, the faces around the table changed. Disbelief in some eyes, calculation in others. Then understanding. It would be business as usual. Nothing would change. These men and women still had their lives, their power, undisturbed.
She waited for the relief to set in, then pounced, leaning forward, putting her elbows down in the table, and steepling her hands before her. "But I must tell you that this will be the case only so long as Miz Cade is satisfied. And Miz Cade does have a private agenda for this company."
Another pause, to let the words sink in. She saw the questions behind the eyes—what kind of private agenda? Was it something that this Cade person wanted them to do—or to make? Or was it something else altogether?
"It's something that she wants you to construct; nothing you are not already capable of carrying off," Angelica continued, relishing every moment. "In fact, I would venture to say that it is something you could be doing now, if you had the inclination. It's just a little personal project, shall we say. . . ."
Alex's mouth tasted like an old rug; his eyes were scratchy and puffed, and his head pounded. Every joint ached, his stomach churned unhappily, and he was not at all enjoying the way the room had a tendency to roll whenever he moved.
The wages of sin were counted out in hangovers, and this one was one of monumental proportions.
Well, that's what happens when you go on a two-week drunk.
He closed his eyes, but that didn't help. It hadn't exactly been a two-week drunk, but he had never once in the entire span been precisely sober. He had chosen, quite successfully, to glaze his problems over with the fuzz and blurring of alcohol.
It was all that had happened. He had not shaken his fixation with Tia. He was just as hopelessly in love with her as he had been before he started his binge. And he had tried everything short of brain-wipe to get rid of the emotion; he'd made contact with some of his old classmates, he'd gone along with Neil and Chria on a celebratory spree, he'd talked to more bartender-Counselors, he'd picked up girl after girl. . . .
To no avail whatsoever.
Tia Cade it was who was lodged so completely in his mind and heart, and Tia Cade it would remain.
So, besides being hung over, he was still torn up inside. And without that blur of alcohol to take the edge off it, his pain was just as bad as before.
There was only one thing for it: he and Tia would have to work it all out, somehow. One way or another.
He opened his eyes again; his tiny rented cubicle spun slowly around, and he groaned as his stomach protested.
First things first; deal with the hangover. . . .
It was just past the end of the second shift when he made his way down the docks to the refit berth where CenSec had installed Tia for her repair work. It had taken that long before he felt like a human being again. One thing was certain; that was not something he intended to indulge in ever again. One long binge in his life was enough.
I just hope I haven't fried too many brain cells with stupidity. I don't have any to spare.
He found the lock closed, but there were no more workers swarming about, either inside the bay or out. That was a good sign, since it probably meant all the repairs were over. He'd used the day-and-night noise as an excuse to get away, assuming Tia would contact him if she needed to.
As he hit the lock controls and gave them his palm to read, it suddenly occurred to him that she hadn't made any attempt at all to contact him in all the time he'd been gone.
Had he frightened her?
Had she reported him?
The lock cycled quickly, and he stepped onto a ship that was uncannily silent.
The lights had been dimmed down; the only sounds were of the ventilation system. Tia did not greet him; nothing did. He might as well have been on an empty, untenanted ship, without even an AI.
Something was wrong.
His heart pounding, his mouth dry with apprehension, he went to the main cabin. The boards were all dark, with no signs of activity.
Tia wasn't sulking; Tia didn't sulk. There was nothing functioning that could not be handled by the stand-alone redundant micros.
He dropped his bag on the deck, from fingers that had gone suddenly nerveless.
There could be only one cause for this silence, this absence of activity. Tia was gone.
Either the BB authorities had found out about how he felt, or Tia herself had complained. They had come and taken her away, and he would never see or talk to her again.
As if to confirm his worst fears, a glint of light on an open plexy window caught his eye. Theodore Edward Bear was gone, his tiny shrine empty.
No—
But the evidence was inescapable.
Numb with shock, he found himself walking towards his own cabin. Perhaps there would be a note there, in his personal database. Perhaps there would be a message waiting from CS, ordering him to report for official Counseling.
Perhaps both. It didn't matter. Tia was gone, and very little mattered anymore.
Black despair washed into him, a despair so deep that not even tears would relieve it. Tia was gone. . . .
He opened the door to his cabin, and the light from the corridor shone inside, making the person sitting on his bunk blink.
Person sitting on my—
Female. It was definitely female. And she wasn't wearing anything like a CS uniform, Counselor, Advocate, or anything else. In fact, she wasn't wearing very much at all—a little neon-red Skandex unitard that left nothing to imagine.
He turned on the light, an automatic reflex. His visitor stared up at him, lips creasing in a shy smile. She was tiny, smaller than he had first thought; dark and elfin, with big blue eyes, the image of a Victorian fairy—and oddly familiar.
In her hands, she gently cradled the missing Ted Bear. It was the bear that suddenly shook his brain out of inactive and into overdrive.
He stared; he gripped the side of the door. "T-T-Tia?" he stammered.
She smiled again, with less shyness. "Hi," she said—and it was Tia's voice, sounding a bit—odd—coming from a mouth and not a speaker. "I'm sorry I had to shut so much down, I can't run this and the ship, too."
It was Tia—Tia!—sitting there in a body, a human body, like the realization of his dream!
"This?" he replied cleverly.
"I hope you don't mind if I don't get up," she continued, a little ruefully. "I'm not very good at walking yet. They just delivered this today, and I haven't had much practice in it yet."
"It?" he said, sitting heavily down on his bunk and staring at her. "How—what—"
"Do you like it?" she asked, pathetically eager for his approval. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to approve of—the body?
"How could I not like it—you—" His head was spinning as badly as it had a few hours ago. "Tia, what on earth is this?"
She blinked, and giggled. "I keep forgetting. You know all that bonus money we've been getting? I kept investing it, then reinvesting the profits in Moto-Prosthetics. But when we got back here, I was thinking about something Doctor Kenny told me, that they had the capability to make a body like this, but that there was no way to put a naked brain in it, and there was so much data-transfer needed to run it that the link could only be done at very short distances."
"Oh." He couldn't help but stare at her; this was his dream, his daydream—his—
Never mind.
"Anyway," she continued, blithely unaware that she had stunned him into complete silence, "it seemed to me that the body would be perfect for a brainship, I mean, we've got all the links already, and it wouldn't be any harder to control a body from inside than a servo. But he was already an investor, and he told me it wasn't likely they'd ever build a body like that, since there was no market for it, because it would cost as much as a brainship contract buy-out."
"But how—"
She laughed aloud. "That was why I took all my share of the bonuses and bought more stock! I bought a controlling interest, then I told them to build me a body! I don't need a buy-out—I don't really want a buy-out—not since the Institute decided to give us the EsKay homeworld assignment."
He shook his head. "That simple? It hardly seems possible . . . didn't they argue?"
"They were too happy that I was letting them keep their old jobs," she told him cynically. "After all, as controlling stockholder, I had the right to fire them all and set up my own Board of Directors. But I have to tell you the funniest thing!"
"What's that?" he asked.
Her hands caressed Theodore's soft fur. "Word of what I was doing leaked out, and now there is a market! Did you have any idea how many shellpersons there are who've earned a buy-out, but didn't have any place to go with it, because they were happy with their current jobs?"
He shook his head, dumbly.
"Not too many ships," she told him, "but a lot of shellpersons running installations. Lots of them. And there were a lot of inquiries from brainships, too—some of them saying that they'd be willing to skip a buy-out to have a body! Moto-Prosthetics even got a letter of protest from some of the Advocates!"
"Why?" he asked, bewildered. "Why on earth would they care?"
"They said that we were the tools of the BB program, that we had purposely put this 'mechanical monster' together to tempt brainships out of their buy-out money." She tilted her head to one side, charmingly, and frowned. "I must admit that angle had never occurred to me. I hope that really isn't a problem. Maybe I should have Lars and Lee Stirling look into it for me."
"Tia," he managed, around the daze surrounding his thoughts, "what is this 'mechanical monster' of yours?"
"It's a cybernetic body, with a wide-band comlink in the extreme shortwave area up here." She tapped her forehead. "What's different about it is that it's using shellperson tech to give me full sensory input from the skin as well as output to the rest. My range isn't much outside the ship, but my techs at Moto are working on that. After all, when we take the Prime Team out to the EsKay homeworld, I'm going to want to join the dig, if they'll let me. What with alloys and silicates and carbon-fibers and all, it's not much heavier than you are, even though it outmasses a softperson female of this type by a few kilos. Everything works, though, full sensory and well—everything. Like a softperson again, except that I don't get muscle fatigue and I can shut off the pain-sensors if I'm damaged. That was why I took Ted out; I wanted to feel him, to hug him again."
She just sat there and beamed at him, and he shook his head. "But why?" he asked, finally.
She blinked, and then dropped her eyes to the bear. "I—probably would have gone for a buy-out, if it hadn't been for you," she said shyly. "Or maybe a Singularity Drive, except that CenSec decided that maybe they'd better give me one and threw it in with the repairs. But—I told you, Alex. You're the most special person in my life. How could I know this was possible, and not do it for—for both of us?"
He dared to touch her then, just one finger along her cheek, then under her chin, raising her eyes to meet his. There was nothing about those lucent eyes that looked mechanical or cold; nothing about the warmth and resiliency of the skin under his hand that said "cybernetic."
"You gave up your chance of a buy-out for me—for us?" he asked.
She shrugged. "Someone very wise once said that the chance for happiness was worth giving up a little freedom for. And really, between the Advocates and everybody, they really can't make us do anything we don't want to."
"I guess not." He smiled, and she smiled back. "You do realize that you've actually done the BB program two favors, don't you?"
"I have?" She blinked again, clearly bewildered.
"You've given shellpersons something else to do with their buy-out money. If they don't have Singularity Drives, they'll want those first—and then they'll want one of these." He let go of her chin and tapped her cheek playfully. "Maybe more than one. Maybe one of each sex, or in different body types. Some brainships may never buy out. But the other problem—you've solved fixation, my clever lady."
She nodded after a moment. "I never thought of that. But you're right! If you have a body, someone to be with and—ah—everything—you won't endanger the shellperson. And if it's just an infatuation based on the dream instead of the reality—well—"
"Well, after a few rounds with the body, it will cool off to something manageable." He chuckled. "Watch out, or they'll give you a bonus for that one, too!"
She laughed. "Well, I won't take it as a buy-out! Maybe I'll just build myself a second body! After all, if we aren't going to be exploring the universe like a couple of holo-heroes, we have the time to explore things a little—closer to hand. Right?"
She posed, coyly, looking at him flirtatiously over her shoulder. He wondered how many of her entertainment holos she'd watched to find that pose. "So, what would you like, Alex? A big, blond Valkyrie? An Egyptian queen? A Nubian warrior-maid? How about a Chinese princess or—"
"Let's learn about what we have at hand, shall we?" he interrupted, sliding closer to her and taking her in his arms. Her head tilted up towards his, her eyes shining with anticipation. Carefully, gently, he took the bear out of her hands and placed him on the shelf above the foot of the bed, as her arms slid around his waist, cautiously, but eagerly.
"Now," he breathed, "about that exploration . . ."
—END—