In the evening, there was repeated tapping on Maricia’s door. She touched her screen and activated the door, which slid open. Lucinda stepped inside.
“I am still angry, Lucinda. Are you sure you want to come in here?”
“There isn’t a place I’d like to be much less, honestly. But I need your help.”
“I’m not in a helping mood.”
“It is a medical kind of question. You are the best suited to address it.”
“Can it wait for a day or two?”
“It could wait a long time, but there may be consequences.”
“Then let it wait. I’m too angry and drunk. Go talk to one of the bots.”
“Yeah.” Lucinda stepped back to the door, which reopened, and was stepping out.
“Lucinda,” Maricia called out. Lucinda turned. “Aren’t you going to apologize to me?”
“Yes, I will apologize when I understand why this happened, just not right now. You are too angry to accept a simple ‘I’m sorry.’ I know you. You will want more. I want more. There is a lot more to know.” Lucinda stood still, looking at her close friend, who, in turn, looked away. Stepping back again, the door hissed quietly closed.
One floor up, she found Jekyll. Together they went up another floor to Science. Jekyll accessed the work log. For two hours, they searched. Finally finding a bevy of small vials, Jekyll went to work analyzing. He was taciturn as usual; his chatter algorithm was apparently not activated. Lucinda left when he indicated the process was going to take much more time.
She went up two flights to CAC where it was more dark than dim in the room. The place was always well lit to encourage alertness and raise mood. It seemed deathly quiet. She looked around and initially thought the room was abandoned. She entered the storage rooms to her right and found no one. An array of spare parts and seldom-used equipment were lashed securely to the walls. An access panel to the utility shaft that the boys used for climbing had been left open. She latched it closed, thinking they were a lax bunch. On her way out, she spotted dark hair barely visible over the back of a swivel chair. She cleared her throat. “Where’s Savanna?”
Cyrus turned. “You’ve made a lot of trouble today. Maybe you should just go to bed, your bed, and pray that your punishment will be brief.”
She instantly regretted not looking at a computer to find her locator.
“Are you thinking about punishing me? The arrogance!”
“There was a day when you would have been stoned.”
“And Raul?”
“He behaved as any man.”
“You’ve slid off the rail, buster. Where’s Savanna?”
“She is in quarters, asleep I hope.”
“Thanks.” She turned toward the stairwell to leave.
“Lucinda,” Cyrus said angrily, “let her sleep.”
It was five flights down to Recreation. Her footsteps echoed in the emptiness; not only vacant but also lonely. It seemed a long time to cover a short distance. She pondered Cyrus’s choice of words, “Pray that your punishment will be brief.” Strange, she thought but realized her thoughts and emotions were unsteady as well.
Recreation was dimly lit. She moved past a resistance machine and an aerobic trainer. Her clothing lay untouched, flung over the room. Her shirt was on the trainer; a bra dangled from the handle of a bicycle. Her underpants had been flung to a corner under a bench. From her rear pocket, she removed a plastic bag and carefully placed each article in it. When everything was inside, she sealed it. She looked around and remembered the morning, not with the glow from a passionate ecstasy but with sudden nausea. It began at the top of her nasal cavity and shot to her stomach. She looked for a sink but realized this feeling was fading.
She had never felt desire for Raul. He was good looking and refined but insensitive and emotionally clumsy. He was a beta male, not her type. But she had sky-high libido in the morning the last few weeks, especially today.
Suresh had been trying in his never subtle and insanely confident way to convince her to “get together.” Perhaps he had tired of sex with Einstein, or she was making it difficult or less enjoyable. Lucinda didn’t like to analyze it because it brought up disgusting visuals, enough to increase the nausea momentarily.
Most mornings for the last week or so, she woke up aroused to find a scented, suggestive note on her bedside stand. She had checked the locator log and found nothing. It was no secret that positions were logged about every four minutes. Whoever did the delivery did so quickly.
She disliked the months of celibacy, but until recently, it had not been so bad. The recent morning urges has been greater than she had ever experienced. The reason for this change evaded her. Psychologically, things had changed. She was widowed. Her mate had been killed in flagrante delicto with her friend. All of them were hurtling through space for a rendezvous with sleep that could last an eternity, trapped in a high-tech though luxurious prison without parole. There was stress piled upon conflict wrapped in uncertainty. She and everyone else no longer knew what was normal.
Lucinda’s sister’s husband had a dalliance years before. Her sister told her in one of those intimate moments that when she learned of the infidelity, she went mad with desire. The reason was unclear, perhaps fearing that she would lose her mate; possibly in competition. She tried to have sex with him often and in every conceivable way and place. Maybe Lucinda’s exaggerated lust was a confluence of factors she did not understand. Being widowed was not usually considered stimulating. With her behavior today, the cause of these urges suddenly went from curious to bizarre. She focused on the details of the last two days.
Yesterday, she talked to Cyrus. “I need your help. I think Suresh is sneaking into my room at night.”
“Why would you think something like that? Have you seen him?”
“Someone comes in and leaves a note on my table.”
“A threat?”
“No. The messages were always short, pedantic, and invariably a turnoff but with an obvious double meaning or overt sexual innuendo.”
“Have you addressed him about this?”
“Not yet. I’d like you to come with me.”
“Why me? He’s my friend.”
It’s interesting that Cyrus would refer to Suresh as his friend. Weren’t they all friends? It seemed at the time a quirky thing to say, and it still felt off. “You’re the commander and less threatening than a med-bot.”
“I take that as an insult.”
There it was. Another statement that showed his emotional state was off in some way. Fear began rising in her throat in the lift as she and Cyrus went without speaking to Science. When they entered, Suresh had his hands in gloves inside a hood, mixing chemicals. They exchanged greetings for a minute. “Lucinda is concerned that someone is delivering notes to her room while she sleeps. Do you know anything about that?”
“Of course not.”
“You haven’t been inside her room, then?”
“No. Does the locator log indicate otherwise?”
“No.”
“There you are. It must be someone else.”
Outside Science, Cyrus said, “Are you satisfied?”
“Not really, but thanks for your time.” She was irritated that he had spent as little effort as possible to address what she viewed as a threat.
This morning, there was no note and, thankfully, no arousal. That was nice. Instead, a few minutes after she awoke and was about to bathe, there was a knock at her door. She pulled a towel around her and answered. Suresh was dressed in his silk robe, polite and pleasant.
“Good morning, Lucinda,” he said. He pulled a little tea light candle from his pocket.
“Is there a problem?”
“I should apologize.”
“You know you’re not welcome at my room anytime.”
“So sorry.”
“Bye.”
He lit the candle. “Take this as my peace offering.” He gave it to her and left. She put it on the dresser and showered. When she came back in to dress, her arousal started and grew with a vengeance. She decided to go work out, hoping that a heavy sweat would flush it off.
She hurried to Recreation and laid her sweater on the resistance machine next to the trainer she used. She put the resistance up to 180 watts and was cranking hard without deafening the siren’s song. Raul came in, and the compulsion went up a notch. Handsome, muscular guy, flexing his pecs and starting to glow after starting his work out. Nice butt. Big bulge. She looked away, turning the watts to 225. He stepped over to talk to her. Within seconds, his pupils became dilated. Then he came too close. His pheromones went up her hypersensitive nose, and somewhere in her primal lobes, a flood of neurotransmitters took control. She was literally compelled to stop running and hold him. They embraced without speaking. She ground like an animal hard against his thigh. They each tried to stop, but every time they separated, they fell together again. She lost all control when he slipped his hand beneath her bra. She ripped off her pants, her shirt, her bra, and purred as she launched her underpants. Never had sex been so intense as Raul banged away. It was not making love, not tender, not romantic. It was vicious, predatory, animals in heat.
Then Parambi entered unseen and unheard until he said, “May I play? I was so hoping to find you alone, Luc, but I could tell you had company.”
She was struck with fear. Raul was still grunting and growling in torrid passion, eyes screwed shut seemingly unaware of the visitor. Suresh lifted her off of him by the armpits and threw her several feet away. Raul’s eyes flew open in surprise. In a second, the much larger Parambi had him rolled over facedown and immobilized.
Lucinda saw blood over his Suresh’s chest and followed it to an ugly laceration under his clavicle where the locator should have been, a blood trail trickling to his waist and below. Suresh looked up at her. “You look lovely in heat, dear Lucinda. How about using up your drive on me? I’m ready.”
Her arms pulled across her chest. “You bastard! What are you doing?”
“I am wooing you, sweetheart. I am turning you on like you’ve never been turned on before. Did you enjoy my candle? It made me the man you’ve been looking for.”
“I have not been looking for a man.”
“Well, well, then what is this if it is not a man?” Suresh lifted Raul’s head by his hair and twisted his face toward Lucinda. She had no answer. His eyes moved from her pubis to her chest. She backed up to the wall. His nostrils flared, and a smile spread across his face. He shoved Raul’s face hard into the floor, dazing him. Suresh then lifted him up and threw him like a rag doll against the wall a few feet from Lucinda, blocking any hope of exit. He held him with one hand around his neck and jaw, pinning Raul’s legs with his hip. “Make love to me, or I’ll cut off his little organ,” he demanded as he produced a laser scalpel from his robe pocket. He flicked his robe open and gestured for her to approach. “Come,” he said.
A woman’s voice echoed into the room, “Raul, Lucinda, where are you?”
Parambi’s face clouded, and the grip on Raul’s throat tightened as he apparently swore in Hindi.
“We are in Rec,” Lucinda answered slowly, thinking about how to resolve this without disaster, “having a discussion with Suresh.” She then saw Ivanna enter and knew that she would not suffer the indignity and humiliation of rape.
Now in this room, the memory of what they had done here oppressed her. She had been debased and wanted an explanation. Both she and Raul had been violated. Was it rape? The key to the start of the search grew out of her recall.