Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance (20 page)

“We weren’t within reach of the fedcore
data when he woke,” she told Brant now. “We were on the far edges
of the fringes and after he woke, we stayed out there deliberately,
to give us both time to sort things out. So the data we did have
was unreliable fringes records. I told him to run anything past me
that bothered him, or that he didn’t understand. But I didn’t stop
him from reading anything, either. Sooner or later he was going to
trip over the data about the Sinnikka or Birgir Stoyan. I think we
even had a copy of that silly musical they made last century and
there’s thousands of references and cross-references to both,
everywhere. I couldn’t have hidden it from him.”

“He found it and asked you?”

Catherine nodded. “He was nervous.
Afraid. Hell, I would have been, too, if I’d woken to find that
everyone in my entire world thinks I’m a proscribed being and
should be killed out of hand. That I couldn’t go
anywhere
that didn’t threaten my existence.”

Brant looked down at the tabletop, at
the rings of drying brandy he’d created with his unsteady hand.

Who’s guilty now
? But Catherine
didn’t voice the thought. Brant was battling conflicting emotions
on dozens of fronts. There was no need to add to his confusion.

Finally, he lifted his head. “What
stopped him from killing you first?”

“He knew me. He had known me for
decades and he knew I would not hurt him.”

Brant rubbed at the rings with the tip
of a finger. “You should have killed him. That was the only proper
course of action. Why didn’t you?”

Catherine waited until he lifted his
head to look at her properly, before responding. “Because I
was
lonely, Brant. I was lonely in a way that few humans can
understand because none of you have lived as long as I have. It was
a fundamental sense of alone-ness that you can only experience when
your earliest memories are now ancient history to everyone else and
the world around you changes so much that you have to reinvent
yourself just to be able to interface with it.”

“So you made a human out of him.”

Catherine shook her head. “That was
Bedivere’s idea. I would never have thought of it, but he studied
all the therapy texts and records he could find, from the earliest
experiments with transhumanism to the first workable longevity
therapies for women. When he fully understood the processes of male
regeneration, mules and the transfer from mule to mule, that was
when he proposed we do the same for him. Not because he wanted to
be human, but because it would protect him…and me. No one would
look twice at a human who thinks and is self-aware.”

“So you stole a body,” Brant concluded
and his mouth turned down. He reached for the glass once more.

This was the fact that was bothering
him the most.

“Actually, Bedivere was given the
body,” she told him.

“Someone
gave
him their DNA?
Just like that? Who?”

“A very good friend of mine.” She
paused. “He was a Staffer, just like you, Brant. When Arthur
reached the end of his life, he found he valued
all
life
much more than his own single being.”

“A
Staffer
gave you the body?”
He sat up, his boots hitting the floor. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not, Brant. I’ll give you Arthur’s
identity numbers and you can look it up for yourself. He was a
curator of the archives on Egemon and I was by his side when he
died.”

Brant blinked. “The Egemon incident.
That’s
why you were there in the first place.”

Catherine sighed. “Arthur thought it
was fitting that his flesh would go on living long after he himself
had ended. It was his way of saving a life, because he couldn’t
save his own. I took his DNA with me when I was finally able to
escape from Egemon. We had the first mule grown in another bootleg
tank. That one we
did
have to steal, because Bedivere
couldn’t leave the ship then. He
was
the ship.”

Brant stared at her. Then he rolled his
eyes. “Arthur,” he muttered. “Bedivere was one of his knights. He
took Excalibur after Arthur died and carried it to wherever it
ended up.”

Catherine couldn’t help smiling. “The
name was Bedivere’s idea. We had to call him something, because the
ship changed names constantly to fool anyone interested in us. He
had become both the ship and himself after we transferred as much
of him as we could fit into the mule.”

“He had a link. When I came
aboard.”

“It was short range and it was very
old. He couldn’t go far beyond the ship and he couldn’t have
anything between him and the ship, or the link was broken.” She
grimaced. “It happened once. It’s like watching a human drop from
an embolism.”

Brant put his hand on the table, flat,
like he was trying to halt something. “The mesh tether…it doesn’t
link him to the ship. It links him to the
body
.”

Catherine hid her sudden flare of hope.
Brant had called Bedivere
him
.

Brant pressed his hand into the table
even harder, the knuckles turning white. “That first time he walked
out of the landing bay, after you installed the tether….” He let
out a breath. “The courage that must have taken.”

Catherine swallowed, remembering
Bedivere’s near panic.

Brant shook his head and reached for
the glass again. It was empty and he tipped it up and shook the
drops into his mouth.

“So why
are
you getting drunk?”
Catherine asked softly, repeating her original question.

Brant put the glass down with a
decisive thump and looked at her. “I
liked
him,” he said.
Then he folded in on himself and pressed his hands over his face.
“He’s a friend. I’ve never had a friend so I didn’t realize until
he died. I’m sitting here drinking alone because I can’t drink with
him.” He dug his fingers into his head and gave a choking
sound.

“Not a single friend?” Catherine asked
softly. “Not even among the Ammonites?”

Brant shook his head. Finally, he
dropped his hands and looked at her. Now his eyes were red.
“Enforcers live short lives. No one wants to risk losing a friend,
so you don’t make them. And after....” His mouth curled down. “I
was an ex-Staffer. On the scale of desirable company, I rate just
behind diseased whores and beggars.” He gave a bitter laugh. “When
I
finally
get a job, the company I get to keep is with the
most wanted woman in the Federation, a sentient computer and an
Aneesh with loyalty issues.”

“But the money is good,” Catherine
pointed out.

Brant laughed, but this time there was
genuine amusement in it. His smile faded. “The first forty years of
my life I lived with people who said they were my family. The next
ten, I’ve lived with people who wouldn’t give me the time of day.
This last year is the first time in my life I’ve ever felt like I
was actually in a place I could call home.”

The alarm claxon went off right over
their heads, loud and startling. Catherine shot to her feet and
strode to the status panel in the wall. “What’s happening?” she
demanded. “We’re in the middle of a jump!”

Bedivere’s voice issued from the panel
only. “Lilly’s vitals have ceased!”

Shock touched her. “Where is she?”

Bedivere directed them to a closed-off,
cramped section of engineering, just in front of the engine shield
walls and up against the inner hull, which curved in a shallow arc
up to the roof.

A wide bench was fastened to the wall
and was littered with tools. In the middle of the bench was a
portable radiation scanner, switched on and beeping as it passed
through the different scan modes.

Catherine halted with a gasp of
horror.

On the floor before the bench, Lilly
laid in a pool of blood much larger than her. Her shirt was open,
exposing her chest and belly and the jagged cut that had torn
through her flesh from just above the band of her trousers to just
below her rib cage. Everything was covered in her blood and her
riotous curls were trailing in it.

Her fingers were curled around the
handle of a mallet and beside it was a collection of what had once
been something electronic, but now was just a small pile of broken
circuits and crystal shards.

Close by her hip, where her other hand
rested with the fingers curled up, was a slender, very sharp knife.
It was the kind used to shave down crystals, which were usually
handled with a titanium shield over the blade and stored in padded
boxes for safety’s sake.

“Oh, Glave above!” Brant muttered,
clinging to the corner of a tool chest as he took it all in. His
face was white and pasty and sweat gleamed at his temples.

Catherine tamped down the fright
tearing through her. “Bedivere, can you analyze the circuitry she
destroyed?”

“Too much blood,” he said. “If Brant
could put it on a sensor plate, I’d do better.”

Catherine nodded and bent down next to
Lilly’s body, barely noticing the touch of the blood around her
bare feet. “I’ll take her to the surgery. Bedivere, prep as much as
you can there ahead of me. Brant…”

Brant looked at her, tearing his gaze
away from Lilly.

“Bedivere will dispense a dose of
no-tox for you. Take it and come and find me in the surgery.”

“That stuff makes you sicker than the
hang-over,” he said.

“I need you sober for the next little
while. You’re just going to have to live with the after-effects.”
She bent over and picked up Lilly’s body, her back and stomach
muscles protesting as she straightened up. Lilly only
looked
petite.

“What are you going to do?” Brant
asked.

“I’m going to follow Bedivere’s
directions.
He
is going to save her life.”

Bedivere had put the surgery through a
sterile cycle that finished just as Catherine reached the door. He
opened it for her.

“Thanks,” she said breathlessly and
placed Lilly on the procedure bed.

“You’re going to have to sterilize,
too,” he said.

She nodded and stripped off, shucking
her sodden and bloody clothing into a corner out of the way. As the
sterilizer beam moved from her head down to her toes, she turned in
a circle. When it switched off, she pulled a plastic suit out of a
drawer and threw it on.

The door beeped and Brant stepped in.
His eyes were sharp and alert and his face a normal color.

“Bedivere, put Brant through a sterile
cycle, too. He’ll have to help me.”

Brant looked up at the ceiling, then at
the wall. “What do I do?”

“Move over toward the door,” Bedivere
told him, “out of Cat’s way. And strip down so the beam can reach
your skin.”

Catherine tuned out the sound of their
voices as Bedivere talked Brant through the sterilization process.
She got out the pair of industrial scissors they kept in the
surgery and hastily cut away Lilly’s clothing.

“What can I do?” Brant asked.

Catherine glanced up. He was wearing
the same plastic suit as she was and his hair was tied back just
like hers.

“Grab the sponges and the solution
Bedivere is pouring, over there. Wash her down.” There was a bowl
of solution filling up at one of the mixer taps. “Just the torso,
so we can see what we’re doing.”

While Brant bathed her, Catherine
plugged in the biomonitor sensors and life support. Instantly, the
panel of read-outs came alive, providing data in graphs and numbers
and color-coded flags. Bedivere would be reading the same data, fed
directly into his data banks.

Catherine stretched her shoulders and
neck and pulled the instrument tray around closer to Brant. “You
give me what Bedivere tells you to give me. He’ll pick out the
right instrument with a laser pointer.”

He nodded.

“Okay, Bedivere. Let’s do this,” she
said.

The shattered circuitry made a pile
barely five centimeters wide in the middle of the scan plate. The
plate turned slowly as Bedivere examined every angle.

“It’s definitely a locator,” Bedivere
said. “A passive one, but the range is astonishing. The locator is
just a tiny fraction of the whole device. The majority of the
circuits are built to extend the range, all miniaturized to close
to nano-size.”

“What sort of range are we talking
about?” Catherine asked from her seat in the big easy chair. She
was tired beyond standing. “Across Federation space?”

“Nothing can do that,” Bedivere
said.

“Except your tether.”

“Which uses the fedcore, which is an
integral part of the Federation structure. This uses brute power to
shoot a signal out in all directions. The range is enough to ensure
it reaches across the width of any Federation system, which is
astonishing for a device so small.”

Catherine rubbed her temple, then
stopped, because her hands were aching from having to hold
instruments for hours on end. “So she used the radiation scanner to
scan herself and found the device in her abdominal cavity. Then she
cut it out herself and while she was bleeding to death, she smashed
it to pieces with the mallet.”

“That tracks with the evidence so far,”
Bedivere said gravely. “I don’t understand why she didn’t come to
us with her suspicions.”

“Because we had already accused her
once and didn’t believe her innocence,” Catherine said tiredly.
“When the Federation found us on Drusiss, they sent in a ground-hog
team. Probably the stationary force kept on Drusiss itself. Which
makes sense if the tracker sent out a signal as soon as we arrived
in the system. They can’t track us in a hole, so they have to wait
until we emerge. They can’t park a Federation ship at every
possible gate we might emerge from. So they have to respond at best
speed once they have a signal telling them where we are.”