oo
Thank you. However, my decision is irrevocable. Should I still be welcome, I may hope for a request to rejoin you at some point in the future should some exceptional situation stimulate the thought that I might again be of service.
oo
My dear, dear ship. If you really must go, please do so with our fondest regards, so long as you swear never to forget that your invitation to restore your wisdom and probity to our small team stands in perpetuity!
VI
Genar-Hofoen spent quite a lot of time on the toilet. Ulver Seich was hell when she was cross and she had been in a state of virtually permanent crossness ever since he’d properly woken up; in fact, since well before. She’d been cross – cross with him – while he’d been unconscious, which seemed unfair somehow.
If he slept too long or day-dozed she got even crosser, so he went to the toilet for fairly long intervals. The toilet in a nine-person module consisted of a sort of thick flap that hinged down from a recess in the back wall of the small craft’s single cabin. A semi-cylindrical field popped into being when the flap was in place, isolating the enclosed space from the rest of the cabin, and there was just enough room to make the necessary adjustments to one’s clothing and stand or sit in comfort; usually some pleasantly bland music played, but Genar-Hofoen preferred the perfect silence the field enclosure produced. He sat there in the gentle, pleasantly perfumed downward breeze, not, as a rule, actually doing anything, but content to have some time to himself.
Stuck on a tiny but perfectly comfortable module with a beautiful, intelligent young woman. It ought to be a recipe for unbridled bliss; it was practically a fantasy. In fact, it was sheer hell. He’d felt trapped before, but never like this, never so completely, never so helplessly, never with somebody who seemed to find him quite so annoying just to be in the presence of. He couldn’t even blame the drone. The drone was, in a sense, in the way, but he didn’t mind. Just as well it was, in fact; he didn’t know what Ulver Seich might have done to him if it hadn’t been in the way. Hell, he quite liked the drone. The girl he could easily fall in love with, and in the right circumstances certainly admire and be impressed by and, yes, perfectly possibly like, even be friends with… but right now he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she really didn’t like him a lot.
He supposed these just were not the right circumstances. The right circumstances would involve them both being somewhere extremely civilised and cultured with lots of other people around and things happening and stuff to do and opportunities to choose when and where to get to know each other, not cooped up – grief, and it was only for two days so far but it felt more like a month – in a small module in the middle of a war with no apparent idea where they were supposed to go and all their plans seemingly thwarted. It probably didn’t help that he was effectively their prisoner, either.
‘So who was the first girl?’ he asked her. ‘The one outside the Sublimers’ place?’
‘Probably SC,’ Ulver Seich told him grumpily. She glared back at the drone. The two humans were in the same seats they’d been in when he’d first woken up. The floor of the cabin area behind them could contort and produce various combinations of seats, couches, tables and so on, but every now and again they just sat in the forward-facing seats, looking at the screen and the stars. The drone Churt Lyne sat oblivious on the floor of the cabin, taking no apparent notice of the girl’s glare. The drone seemed to be glare-proof. Somehow it was allowed to get away with being uncommunicative.
Genar-Hofoen sat back in the seat. The stars ahead looked the same as they had a few minutes ago. The module wasn’t really heading anywhere purposefully; it was just moving away from Tier, down one of the many corridors approved by Tier traffic control as free from warships and/or volume warnings or restrictions. The girl and the drone hadn’t allowed him to contact Tier or anybody else. They had been in touch with what sounded like a ship Mind, communicating by screen-written messages he wasn’t allowed to see. Once or twice the girl and the drone had gone quiet and still together, obviously in touch through its communicator and a neural lace.
In theory he might have been able to wrest control of the module from them at such a point, but in practice it would have been futile; the module had its own semi-sentient systems which he had no way of subverting and little chance of arguing round even if he had somehow got the better of the girl and the drone, and anyway, where was he supposed to go? Tier was out, he had no idea where the Grey Area or the Sleeper Service were and suspected that probably nobody else knew where the two ships were either. He assumed SC would be looking for him. Better to let himself be found.
Besides, when they’d finally released him from the chair he’d been secured to while he’d been unconscious, the drone had shown him an old but shinily mean-looking knife missile it contained within its casing and given him a brief but nasty stinging sensation in his left little finger that it assured him was about a thousandth of the pain its effector was capable of inflicting on him if he tried anything silly. He had assured the machine that he was no warrior and that any martial skills he might have been born with had entirely atrophied at the expense of an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation.
So he was content to let them get on with it when they communicated silently. Made a welcome change, in fact. Anyway, whatever it was they had discovered through all this communicating, they didn’t seem terribly happy with it. The girl in particular seemed upset. He got the impression she felt cheated, that she’d discovered she’d been lied to. Perhaps because of that she was telling him things she wouldn’t have told him otherwise. He tried to put together what she’d just said about Special Circumstances with what she’d already let him know.
His head ached briefly with the effort. He’d hit it when he’d fallen out of the trap, in Night City. He was still trying to work out what happened there.
‘But I thought you said you were with SC?’ he said. He couldn’t help it; he knew it would just annoy her again, but he was still confused.
‘I said,’ she hissed, through gritted teeth, ‘that I thought I was working for SC.’ She looked to one side and sighed heavily, then turned back to him. ‘Maybe I am, maybe I was, maybe there’s different bits of SC, maybe something else entirely, I just don’t know, don’t you understand?’
‘So who sent you?’ he asked, crossing his arms. The ownskin jacket slid round his torso; the module’s bio unit was cleaning his shirt. The suit still looked pretty good, he thought. The girl hadn’t changed out of her jewelled space suit (though she had used the module’s toilet, rather than whatever built-in units the suit had). She looked less and less like Dajeil Gelian every hour, he thought, her face becoming younger and finer and more beautiful all the time. It was a fascinating transformation to watch and if the circumstances had been different he’d have been aching at least to test the waters with her to see if there was any sort of mutuality of attraction here… but the circumstances were as they were, and right now the last thing he wanted to do was give her any impression he was ogling her.
‘I told you who sent me,’ she said, her voice cold. ‘A Mind. With the help… well, it looks more like collusion now, actually,’ she said with an insincere smile, ‘of my home world’s Mind.’ She took a deep breath, then set her lips in as tight a line as their fullness would permit. ‘I had my own warship for grief’s sake,’ she said bitterly, addressing the stars on the screen ahead of them. ‘Is it any wonder I thought it was all SC-arranged?’
She glanced back at the silent drone, then looked at him again.
‘Now we’re told our ship’s fucked off and we’ve to keep quiet about where we are. And the sort of trouble we had getting you off Tier…’ She shook her head. ‘Looked like SC to me… not that I know that much, but the machine thinks so too,’ she said, jerking her head to indicate the drone again. She looked him down and up. ‘Wish we’d left you there now.’