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When Skull awoke the door was shut. Suspicious, he grabbed his weapon and banged it open, to see Raphaela sitting on the floor, stretching her hands to her toes. She smiled at him wanly, a halfhearted thing, but he counted it a good sign, a better alternative to being flayed with her tongue. Stalking over as she watched, he threw himself into his chair. “What is there to do?” he asked, vaguely irritated.
“You can start insulting me again.” Her tone was bantering.
“Tempting. But really.”
“Waah. ‘Mommy, I’m bored. Are we there yet?’ Well, space travel is boring,” she said, matter-of-fact. “We can tap in to a lot of Earth broadcasts. I have thousands of books in the memory stores.”
Deliberately suppressing a retort, trying to keep the peace, he asked, “What about food? I’m hungry and thirsty. You must be too.” And he realized he was; the nano must have been holding the sensations at bay. He had eaten a combat ration, his only one, shortly after they came on board. He cursed himself for not thinking to have ordered Section Three to steal cases of some kind of preserved stuff, which might also have given them an excuse to rejoin the team and saved their lives.
Or maybe not. Skull sighed grimly. What’s done is done.
Raphaela softened. “I made this. It’s not very good but it’s nutritious.” She handed him a lump of something brownish the consistency of cookie dough, along with a clear misshapen plasticky bottle of water.
The lump smelled like meat gone faintly old, and he took a nibble. “Not too bad. I’ve had much worse. There was this time in Ecuador that we lost all our food and we ate raw snake, and the insides of some kind of beetle, and some grubs. Now that was awful.” He laughed, drank. Maybe if we keep talking normally it will all be normal. Whatever normal is.
“Well I’m glad you like my cooking. More like my programming.”
“What’s it made out of?” Skull asked.
“Ship.”
“What?”
“It’s made out of ship, just like everything here. It’s basically one big biomachine.” She waved a hand at the surroundings.
“Huh. So as we eat the ship gets smaller?”
She shrugged. “Slightly, but there’s a lot of mass that’s just there to provide materials. You should be much more worried about the amount of fuel we’re using.”
“Okay, how much fuel are we using?”
“A lot. Constant one G burns a lot of mass even with the highly efficient fusion reactor that powers this thing. Though it’s less efficient than it used to be.”
“How efficient is it?”
“It’s down below ninety-three percent now. That’s horrible. Almost failing.”
“Since when is ‘used to be’?”
“Since Raphael came to consciousness. Four thousand years, give or take.”
“Pretty well built.” He ate some more of the meat-dough. “So why are you being so amenable now?”
Her dark eyes were liquid, clear and open. “How else would I be, in the long run? I’m an Eden, remember?” She tapped her skull. “Mentally well-adjusted. I can’t help it. I can’t hate you, and anger isn’t sustainable.”
Skull slumped down in the seat, stunned, mind revving. Of course she was an Eden, because Captain Sophia Ilona had been. Somehow he’d forgotten about the Eden Plague, or figured the Blending had bypassed it, made it irrelevant, cured it. Then he’d just made it with an Eden...and maybe that explained something.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Think hard. Think carefully. Try to compare it to how you felt before, when we were, umm, emotional. Before, during and after.”
She cocked her head, stared at him while thinking.
He found that mannerism endearing, but it was a thin emotion, well-bound, in no danger of breaking loose. He closed his eyes to do some thinking of his own. They stayed that way for some minutes.
“I suppose,” she eventually ventured, “that before you kidnapped me I felt very rational. Sophia Ilona was a cerebral woman and before the Eden Plague she was a chubby teenager and she probably carried her attitude forward with her. She didn’t think herself attractive even after she got infected. So she based her self-worth on her mind and her skills. Raphael was much the same but more so. He’d interacted with humans from afar, using biorobots and, uh, I guess you’d say special effects tricks to play god to more primitive cultures.”
He nodded. “So you are the combination of two very rational beings and you probably didn’t think about what it would feel like. Suddenly Raphael was human with all the drives common to woman, and Ilona was made into a goddess. But you immediately went to work in a laboratory and you were focused on science and you shut everything out. Right?”
“Yes,” she agreed, “for sure, you’re right. The time you and I spent together in the first day was the longest stretch I’ve just sat down and been near someone without being totally consumed with a task. So you think my biology just took over?”
“I think that’s part of it.” He told her about JT Tyler’s behavior, and Huff’s, and McCarthy’s violent reaction to the nano. “I think the nano and the Eden Plague create some unpredictable effects together. I don’t even know whether they are the same from instance to instance. Obviously when I touched you, when I grabbed you and then whatever is floating in the air – I know the virus isn’t supposed to be airborne but there must be some in the air, in the droplets of your breath, even at sub-infection levels – well, they did something. Maybe fending each other off at the microscopic level unsettled our emotions. I don’t know; I’m no scientist.”
“No, but I am. Or at least, Raphael was, of a sort, and Ilona was a very smart woman, and this shuttle has basic bio-analytical equipment, so I should get working on finding out.”
His hooded eyes gazed at her, brooding. “Sounds good. But...I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ve been asleep twice, and you’ve done nothing. You know this ship, but I’m clueless about it. The only thing I can do is threaten you. I bet you could have done a hundred things to take control of the situation. You could have drugged the food or the water or put gas into the bedroom...hell, you didn’t even take my rifle away.”
An impish smile broke through her serious mien. “Actually I kind of did.” She pointed at the ceiling at a small fitting, at a device of metal a few inches long embedded there.
“That’s...that’s the bolt from my weapon.” He laughed, rueful.
“Yes, and if you need it I’ll let it go, or if you tried really hard you could probably pry it out in a few minutes. And you’re still a lot stronger and faster than I am, but this makes me feel a little less vulnerable.”
Skull shrugged. “Fair enough. It can stay there. But the question still stands. Why haven’t you done something and turned us around?”
“If I’m going to answer your questions, you have to answer mine.”
He shrugged. “All right. Shoot.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You mean why did I do it, or what’s our goal?”
“Our goal first.”
Skull answered immediately. “I want to see what you have out here, for several reasons. I want to see whether Raphael was completely truthful, and I want to see whether there is something that could be used to fight this Meme scout ship, to buy us some time. They don’t think humans have any significant space capability, and they have no reason to think that one of their own has defected. Maybe we can sucker them somehow.”
She nodded. “But you don’t expect to live through it.”
His gaze was steady, and then he shook his head. “I didn’t expect to live through it when I started, and I’m not suicidal, but I am willing to die for a good cause.”
“That’s a relief. I wasn’t sure. Someone like you...”
“Someone like me what?” he asked sharply.
Her nostrils flared below narrowed eyes. “A born killer. It has to take its toll.”
“I wasn’t born this way, I was made.” His tone was harsh. “I hope that’s not pity I see.”
She lowered and shook her head. He could see tears fly from under her hair. “No...just sympathy. There’s a difference. But you’re not as tough as you think you are.”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I am. But that’s because I’m always careful not to overestimate myself. A man has got to know his limits.”
Raphaela laughed, looking up. “Dirty Harry.”
“What? Oh, yeah.” he laughed with her, easing the tension. “But he said ‘limitations.’ Close enough. So...answer my question.”
“About why I haven’t tried to regain control? I don’t want to kill or imprison you unless I have to. I don’t want that responsibility. And I’ve been thinking that maybe what you’re doing is worth doing. It might be the best strategy.”
“No, the best strategy would have been to take us all to Australia and turn this ship and its technology over to them, and try to make more of them, something like that. But I’m not that selfless, and I don’t trust the Aussies. Something funny is going on there. So I compromised. I sent the other nanocommandos. If I know Spooky, and if my suspicions are correct, that will be enough help for him.”
Raphaela ran her hands through her hair, stretching, mildly distracting him. “That segues nicely into the other question – why did you do all this the way you did?”
“Well,” he shrugged, “it seemed like a good idea at the time. Making the best of a bad situation. I told you about JT Tyler. I couldn’t know who in the US government was compromised, whether he was a rogue or part of a wider plot, whom to trust. Our mission at Carletonville was to destroy as much of the Free Communities research program as we could, kill as many leaders and scientists as we could, kidnap or kill you, and try to get your ship back to the US for exploitation.”
She let out a long breath through pressed lips, a sound of disdain and derision. “Stupid.”
“Yes, really stupid on so many levels. The research program is the only thing that will stop the Plagues. And while I would have liked to have the US get ahold of your technology, I wasn’t at all sure who I would be turning it over to. No, we can always do that later, if we make it through this.”
“But how did you convince your comrades to go along?”
“I’d already decided to do something, but this assignment made it clear that things were screwy, even to the gang of yahoos they stuck me with. All I had to do was explain it in two-syllable words and they followed my lead. I told them they should all defect to Australia and I was going to take you and the ship back to the US. I told them the Aussies would welcome them like heroes, and I played up the risk to them back home. They were all drunk on nano-power anyway. It was an easy sell.”
“And now,” her grin was thin, “you have the biggest bargaining chips in the world. Me and this ship.”
“Yes, something no one among the Free Communities leadership realized right then. Edens are too trusting. They have difficulty thinking like their opponents. I suppose I should thank the pressure of the Demon Plagues, otherwise you’d have been helping them understand your spaceship technology and how to convert it for human use, rather than working around the clock on countering the coming epidemics.”
“You know, Alan – can I call you Alan? I like that better. You’re sounding more reasonable all the time. More human.”
“Now there’s some irony, coming from you.”
Raphaela sighed. “Now you’re doing it.”
“What?”
“Stabbing me.”
Sorry. He kept his mouth shut with difficulty, afraid of opening to her and what it might mean. This isn’t me. It can’t be me. I can’t go soft and weak. Skull stared at the view screen for a minute, avoiding her eyes. “I’m going to bed.” He could feel her gaze following him as he left the control room, but he ignored it, throwing himself down on the bed-platform and falling quickly asleep.
His dreams were troubled, unusually so. He’d seldom had any problem sleeping, yet tonight his demons, shut tightly behind bars of steel certainty and locks of black iron control, rattled their chains and moaned.
