Escape (22 page)

* * *

Kieran entered the cockpit with Dimmi still holding onto his arm. Her grip had progressively tightened all the way back from medbay, until Kieran feared that she was going to break his skin with her stubby nails. She was probably scared to death by her suddenly unfamiliar surroundings.

Kieran cleared his throat noisily from the entrance to the cockpit, and eyed the back of Ferrel’s head, waiting for the boy to stir.

Nothing.

Kieran spoke: “Hey!”

Ferrel sighed and turned to look over his shoulder. “Man, I told you
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Ferrel’s expression went from annoyed, to quizzical, to incredulous in all of a second. His eyes skipped from Kieran, to Dimmi, and back again. “What the Infernal man! Are you
—
”

“She doesn’t remember,” Kieran interrupted.

Ferrel shook his head and rubbed his red, bloodshot eyes. “What
—
so? Man, what difference does that make?”

Kieran took a step toward the pilot’s chair and gestured Dimmi into the tech station directly behind. She gratefully sank into the chair and sat quietly, staring hard at the controls in front of her.

After just a moment, she looked up at Kieran, her eyes adorably wide and confused. “What should I do? Am I
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Her gaze skipped back to the dizzying array of blinking lights, dials, switches, and glowing standby screens. “
Should
I know what to do?”

Kieran shook his head. “Just sit there and relax.” He turned back to Ferrel
—
who was literally gaping at him. “I thought that under the circumstances we could let her
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran trailed off, not sure how to say
out of her cell
without actually saying it.

Ferrel shook his head, squinted his eyes shut, and pressed a hand to his forehead. After a long moment he opened his eyes again.

His expression was back to incredulous. “Seriously?” His eyes found Dimmi. She gazed innocently back at him. Ferrel looked away. “Are you keficking
CRAZY?
”

“What’s wrong?” Dimmi asked, sounding suddenly alarmed.

Kieran replied in a neutral voice: “Nothing. Don’t worry.” To Ferrel he said, “Look, kid
—
it’ll be okay. You can keep an eye on her
—
in case she needs some
 
.
 
.
 
.
help. And it’s already the stellar night cycle. We’ll be going to our quarters soon
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
”
Which we can lock her into from the outside,
Kieran thought, hoping Ferrel could figure that out for himself.

Ferrel shrugged and turned back to the fore. “Whatever, man.”

Dimmi whispered to Kieran: “He doesn’t like me very much, does he?”

Kieran shook his head and whispered back: “He’s just grumpy because I’ve kept him up past his bedtime.”

Dimmi giggled, and Kieran smiled. He went to the pilot’s chair and sat down. Ferrel was deliberately looking the other way.

Kieran busied himself with the navicomp. He checked their flightpath and set the ship’s autopilot to automatically follow it until they reached Da Shon. ETA: seven stellar hours and a few minutes. He set an alarm to blare across the ship’s intercom ten minutes before arrival. Orbital patrollers would expect a live pilot to answer when they queried the corvette and did their scans.

Finally, Kieran checked the inertial dampeners
—
they were at 95%. He dialed them up to 100%. Otherwise they would be jolted awake by every transition from TLS to normal space and back again
—
and there would be a lot of those.

Kieran stood up from the pilot’s chair and turned to Dimmi. “Shall we get some sleep?”

She looked innocently up at him, opened her mouth to say something, then hesitated
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

“Together?”

Kieran was momentarily shocked into silence. Ferrel turned to look up at him with a knowing grin. “So that’s why you took her off her leash.”

Kieran shot Ferrel an angry look.

Dimmi was staring at Ferrel, her eyebrows tightly knitted. “What do you mean by that?”

Kieran shook his head. “Nothing. And no, we’re not going together. You’ll have your own room. We’re just friends.”

Ferrel snorted. “Friends!” He let out a little snigger. “That’s a good one, man.”

“Shut up, Ferrel.” Kieran started toward Dimmi and held out a hand for her to get up. She took it
—
yet another sign of her strange new personality. Kieran decided he liked her better with amnesia.

Ferrel followed them out of the cockpit, through the mess hall/briefing room, and down the corridor which appeared to the right. Kieran stopped at the first of the numbered doors which appeared and waved his hand across the door controls. The door slid open in a rush, and Kieran gestured to Dimmi to go inside. The room was dark, but a viewport in the far wall (likely just a screen showing data from an external camera) was showing a mesmerizing view of trilinear space streaking by
—
casting shifting rainbows of light into the room. Oddly, that only made the shadows inside look deeper and more sinister.

Dimmi hesitated and Kieran gave her a nudge at the small of her back. She took half a halting step forward and then turned to him with an uncertain look on her face. “It’s dark in there.”

“The lights will come on as soon as you step inside.”

“I’m scared,” she whispered.

Kieran smiled. “You can lock your door.”

She cast a worried glance over her shoulder, into the dark room
—
shadows gamboling around whirling pools of colorful light. “I’m worried about what I could be locking in with me.”

Kieran heard Ferrel snort behind him. “Man, I’m too tired for this! You can stick around to tell her a bedtime story if you want to. I’m taking the next room down. Laterz.”

Kieran ignored Ferrel and gazed into Dimmi’s scared brown eyes. He reached out to clasp her hands between his, and felt a brief thrill go shooting through his fingertips. Suppressing a sigh, he thought:
If she could only be this vulnerable all the time, she’d be irresistible
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

He shook himself and smiled reassuringly. “We're the only ones on the ship. Just us three
—
okay? There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Dimmi bit her lower lip, and her eyes dipped to the floor. “Would you stay with me?”

Kieran let go of her hands, and grimaced. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”

She looked up at him then
—
her face suddenly smiling, suddenly seductive. Her hands began roaming up his chest. He just stood there, wondering at her sudden transformation. He had to admit: it was more like the old Dimmi, but definitely still out of character
—
considering she’d been trying to kill him the last time he’d checked.

“We wouldn’t have to do anything,” she whispered, her voice and adorable face suddenly close beside his ear. “We could just help each other fall asleep. Don’t you want some company?”

“Actually, I’m a bit of a bed hog,” Kieran said, shattering the moment with a laugh.

Dimmi wasn’t deterred. She grabbed his hand and began leading him toward the open door. “I don’t mind,” she said.

The door slid closed behind them, and the lights came on in the room. There were two single beds.

Dimmi turned to him with a broad grin: “Let’s push them together.”

Kieran’s eyebrows shot up and he regarded Dimmi with a hesitant frown.
Is it immoral to sleep with an amnesiac?

Chapter 10

I
mmoral, unethical, unwise, very tempting
 
.
 
.
 
.

Yes to all of the above.

Dimmi was still regarding Kieran with a broad grin
—
but now it had turned sultry. Her lips pouted enticingly, and she batted her eyelashes at him. “Come on, Kieran
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
” She took a step toward him, and her lips drifted mesmerizingly close to his. He could smell her skin
—
not the grimy smell of sweat he expected from a long day without a shower, but a soft, floral fragrance that made him think of cool running water and the sun beating warmly down on his neck
—
things he mostly knew from the simulacrum available in the parks and gardens aboard space stations.

Kieran felt himself swaying on his feet, and frowned.

You know you want to.

The words crept unbidden into his head, taking him by surprise.

“Dimmi
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran whispered. She ran her fingers along the side of his face to the nape of his neck and pulled his head down to hers. Her tongue pressed past his lips and tangled dizzyingly with his.

Something was wrong.

Something had to be wrong.

All of Kieran’s instincts were raging at him to
run!
But he couldn’t move a muscle. She tasted faintly metallic
—
bitter
—
as though she’d been smoking a stimstick. Amidst the heady rush of other sensations, it wasn’t much of a turn off, but he used it to give him the strength to step away from her.

He put his hands up, warding her off. “Let’s slow down for a minute, okay?”

She grinned, but made no move toward him.

Kieran’s tongue felt strangely numb. The feeling was spreading to his throat. He worked his tongue around his mouth a few times, trying to figure out what was happening
—
and realized he couldn’t feel his cheeks. Dimmi just went on grinning.

“What
—
what have you
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran trailed off with a strangled whisper. His vocal cords had suddenly stopped working.

“What have I done to you?” Dimmi asked. Her grin widened. “Nothing you won’t recover from.” Kieran felt the numbness spreading through his abdomen, and flowing down his legs. They suddenly buckled, unable to hold his weight, and he fell in a daze to the floor, his back falling with a
thud
against the door.

“Don’t worry. When you wake up, you’ll feel much better.”

Kieran’s eyelids drooped. He knew he was already dreaming, because what he saw next was Dimmi dissolving in front of his eyes, fading into a dusty gray cloud. She reappeared a brief second later, but it wasn’t her.

Instead, standing before him was a nightmarish creature, with long, white teeth, gleaming from a lipless mouth; leathery, gray skin from its face up to its high, sloping brow and bald head
—
and deep, glowing red eyes. The creature was wearing some form of exoskeleton which was black and shiny, but that was the last detail Kieran perceived before his brain fell into a fuzzy, horrified coma.

* * *

Ferrel emerged from his room’s cleansing station, using a clean blue face cloth to wipe away stray droplets of water that were trickling down his neck. Without any clean clothes to wear, he’d wrapped a matching blue towel around his waist. He turned to the nearest of the two sleeping pallets in his room and was just about to flop down onto it when it occurred to him to lock his door. With Dimmi at large, he wasn't going to get a good night's sleep otherwise. Ferrel snorted disgustedly to himself, wondering what Kieran had been thinking to let her loose.

He walked up to the door's control panel and selected “lock” from the menu. A satisfying
clunk
sounded as bolts slid from the door into its frame, and with that Ferrel turned back to the sleeping pallet he’d been eyeing a second ago. He walked over to it and peeled back the shiny thermal blanket and the clean, white sheets underneath. He dropped his towel and face cloth to the floor and climbed naked into the bed.