Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance (8 page)

The jump executed without issue and
when Catherine stood and stretched and turned, she saw Brant with a
touch of surprise. She had forgotten he was there.

Lilita was chatting to him as he
listened gravely and Catherine hid her smile. Lilita had found her
next victim. If he would cooperate with her was open to question.
Catherine had a feeling she would have to spend far more time
getting to know Brant before she could begin to make a guess about
what he might do in any particular situation.

Catherine rested her hand on Bedivere’s
shoulder. She could feel the tension there. It would take him a
while to relax after the stress of the jump and get back to normal.
“I have some Soward chardonnay. I thought I’d serve it with dinner.
Sort of a welcome-home gesture for Kemp. Come and join us.”

Bedivere looked up from the console,
his eyes narrowed. She could see his thoughts were far away, but he
made himself focus on her, then shook his head. “Not until I’ve
checked everything.”

“You could do that from the table,” she
pointed out. That was the explanation they gave the inquisitive to
explain the sync link. Just two of them running a mid-sized cruiser
would be impossible if one of them had to stay on duty on the
bridge at all times. The sync link was a way to let Bedivere
monitor the arrays and let both of them move freely around the
ship.

“There’s an hour or so yet.” He tried
to smile. “I won’t promise, but I’ll see.”

“It won’t be anything too grand,” she
assured him. “I can already feel my bed calling. I think I’m going
to sleep for twelve hours. I’m not up to a big formal sit-down,
either.”

It ended up being one of the shortest
first-night meals Catherine could ever remember. Bedivere didn’t
show, which meant he was sleeping or still worrying over the
flight. Kemp was unsettled and anxious and when he asked for a
second time what the projected arrival date was, Catherine cocked
her brow at him. “Bad news from home?” she asked.

“It’s…worsening,” he said. His dark
eyes were troubled.

“We’re going as fast as we can,”
Catherine promised him. “You should find a way to work off all that
stress, Kemp, or this ship will start to feel claustrophobic inside
a week. We have a well-equipped gym room, for instance.”

Kemp drew in a breath. “My apologies.”
He tried to smile, his teeth looking very white next to his
chocolate brown skin. For the rest of the meal he was polite and
answered Brant’s questions gravely. Lilita preened in front of them
and laughed loudly and often.

By the time Kemp stood and excused
himself, Catherine was just as ready to call the day done.

“May I roam the ship?” Kemp asked her.
“I’m tired, but I won’t sleep until I’ve used up some of the
calories from this excellent meal.”

“Your biometrics have been registered,”
Catherine told him. “Nothing you touch will work if it’s something
you shouldn’t be touching. There are one or two doors that won’t
open for you, either. That’s because it would be dangerous for you
beyond the doors.”

“I understand and I appreciate the
freedom you can extend.” He nodded at her, then bid Lilita and
Brant a warm goodnight.

As Catherine headed back to her room,
she wondered who of the three would end up with whom. She would
have to monitor that. A jealous triangle wouldn’t make for a happy
ship.

Three days later, she almost knocked
Kemp over as he emerged from Bedivere’s suite and realized Kemp
hadn’t picked either Brant or Lilita. He’d chosen someone else with
whom to work off his stress.

“I understood that cancer inoculations
were considered unnecessary these days,” Brant said, as Catherine
set the dispenser for the right dose.

“The Federation thinks they are a waste
of money, but their ships rarely deviate from the high traffic
routes. The shielding on the Fed ships has been developed to the
point where they’re impervious to any radiation you might find out
here. You could detonate a dirty bomb right on top of their shields
and the shields would barely warm up. Put your arm through there,
please. Thank you.” She activated the dispenser and waited.

Brant nodded. “I have noticed that this
ship is of a more classic era.”

“Is that your way of saying it’s
old?”

He smiled. “I have only ever used
Federation transport until now. My travelling was all quite
legitimate. But I am not a rich man and my time on Gry ensured I
never would be, so I am forced to use the slowest and oldest
vessels, but even those do not have the air of history that this
one does. I don’t think I have ever seen fixed walls and permanent
rooms before.”

Catherine nodded. “I’ve sometimes
thought about renovating the guts out of the old darling and
installing a holo-kit, so we could lay things out the way we want
and change it up when we get bored. But every time I think about
it, I come back to the same conclusion. I like it this way. So does
Bedivere. So it stays and for the fussy passengers, we explain that
we
have
renovated. It’s called antiquarian style.”

Brant smiled.

“You can remove your arm now,” she told
him, as the dispenser beeped.

He pulled it out and rubbed the flesh
below his elbow, looking around. “In fact, this ship is
very
old, isn’t it? Much older than anyone suspects.” He spoke
off-handedly, but even so, Catherine felt something jump inside
her.

“What makes you say that?”

“You’ve renovated, but not the inside,
except for recoating surfaces. It’s the outside that has had all
the cosmetic work. I was reading the ship’s blueprints. There is a
real hull underneath the hull that shows to the rest of the
world.”

Catherine made herself shrug casually.
“Everyone needs a new look every now and then. Especially in the
fringes.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never ventured
there.” Then he smiled. “Although I suspect that I will end up
there. They say no one has a past there. Is that true?”

Catherine relaxed. This was harmless
stuff. “Lie down, please, so the scanner can get a full
reading.”

He stretched out on the medical bed and
Catherine started the diagnostic program. “There’s a lot of
romantic nonsense Federation citizens believe about the fringes.
Having no past is a good example, although it’s true in a way.
People in the fringes aren’t throwbacks, or in-bred. They’re all
just normal people and depending on how settled and advanced their
world is, they’re busy surviving just like everyone else, so
mostly, who you were once doesn’t mean a damn thing. What you can
do to help the settlement or the city thrive…that’s how you’re
measured.”

“Usefulness. That could be a deceptive
gauge.”

“Oh, there’s plenty of con artists,
crooks and thieves out there. If you’re dumb enough to get suckered
in by one, everyone else figures that’s your look-out.”

“That isn’t a good recipe for
trust.”

Catherine smiled. “No, trust doesn’t
come easy out there. But once you have someone’s trust, you value
it and you do your best not to destroy it.”

The bed pinged.

“You’re clear,” Catherine announced,
“and free to go.”

Brant sat up and bent his arm
experimentally and prodded at the location of the injection.

“You shouldn’t be able to feel
anything,” Catherine said.

“I don’t,” he confirmed. “That’s why I
was prodding. There are some nasty virals on Gry and the
immunization process was much more invasive.”

“On Earth, in antiquity, they use to
slice the flesh open, insert a pellet of the inoculation material,
then sew the patient back up and wrap a bandage around the wound.
You might die of infection to the wound, or the disease the pellet
was supposed to protect you against.”

“Barbaric.”

“It helped humans survive. Shouldn’t
you be spiritually uplifted by that?”

Brant slid off the table. “I never said
I was perfect.” He paused at the door. “We’re a week out from
Soward. No one has said anything about how we are to slide Kemp
down to the surface undetected. All traffic has to go through
Soward’s Forward Station to get dirtside.”

“Is there a question in there
somewhere?” she asked.

“It’s the lack of questions I’m
questioning. You’re planning to take the whole ship down to the
surface, aren’t you?”

“Jump ships can’t land,” she said
automatically.

“Except for this very old one,” Brant
said, patting the doorframe and looking up and around. “I do wonder
what else the ship is capable of, that might have been very
carefully hidden behind facades like the false hull.” He gave her a
smile. “See you at the dinner table.”

Brant had never stepped inside the
engine workrooms before, although Catherine had opened one of the
doors and let him peek inside when she had been showing him the
ship, his first day aboard. Ball-bound freshie he might be, but he
knew enough to stay out of the engineering areas and let Lilita do
her work.

So he moved through the crowded room
carefully. There were too many consoles and readouts. If he brushed
against one and reset something accidentally, there was a good
chance he wouldn’t know what he had touched and he certainly
wouldn’t know what to correct.

The hum of electronics and the deep
background throb of the massive engines behind the shield wall made
him uncomfortable. Anywhere that was not Gry still made him uneasy.
Gry did not have computers, except for the minimum necessary for
communications off-world and for interstellar transports to find
them, but the cadre had no need to use them. He had gone thirty
years without touching a screen and now they were all around him
everywhere he went.

Shipboard life was even more reliant
upon electronic processing. Even drawing water from a faucet
involved computers, to monitor the purity, to adjust the
temperature to something drinkable and to draw the water through
plumbing that was subject to gravitational surges and sometimes no
gravity at all.

After five years away from Gry, he had
become inured to daily life driven by digital enhancements, but he
was still adjusting to the level of computer assistance
onboard.

That was another reason he had stayed
away from the engineering areas. Computers and AIs had no heart to
speak of, but their guts and entrails lived in engineering.

He sidled past the banks of servers and
tried to pretend the structures were simply mounds of mechanical
equipment and kept looking. He could hear something beneath the
engines and the electronic humming, just ahead.

He glanced to his right as he moved
beyond the edge of a bank of servers and spotted Lilita. She was
sitting on the floor, her legs sprawled any way, her abundant curls
spilling over her shoulder and covering most of her face, as she
looked down at her lap. She had this side of the servers open and
was working on a fragile-looking sheet of crystals with a finely
made tool. There was a box filled with more tools next to her
hip.

She looked up, her dark eyes narrowed.
Then she smiled. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch something, down
here?”

“I admit my comfort level is not what
I’d prefer. But you are not easy to find in the common areas.”

She looked up and around at the
equipment surrounding her on three sides. “This stuff takes a lot
of maintenance. It’s so old, something falls apart every time
Catherine kicks in the Machs.” She hefted the board in her hands.
“Like these. They were fine three days ago, but now two of the
crystals are cracked right through their centers.” She curled her
feet under her hips and lifted up onto her knees, to slide the
board back into the proper slot. “I spend a lot of time down here
because if I didn’t, the ship would start flaking apart.”

“You can fix it even though it’s so
old? You know this stuff?”

“It’s old, but the principles are still
the same. Well, sort of the same. It’s just a lot
bigger
than I’m used to. But I can print any parts I need and there’s a
stock of crystals so big it could generate its own gravity well, so
nothing is ever going to be unfixable.”

“Sort-of the same?”

Lilita frowned, marring the perfection
of her flesh. “To look at things at first glance, I could see this
stuff is old. But then, when I started digging in, getting to know
the structure and the circuitry and how it was all laid out….” She
pressed her lips together, looking inward, possibly recalling her
exploration of the systems. “It’s far more complex than anything
I’ve ever seen.”

“But the AIs are all shackled, right?
“

She almost rolled her eyes. “Of course
they are. They’ll all itty baby things, only enough smarts to fix
themselves and call for help if they can’t. No, it’s the other
systems. The support and sub-routines. It’s like someone has been
adding capacity and storage any which way, a bit here and a bit
there…” She grinned. “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “It’s probably
just that the ship is so damn old it’s got redundant circuits and
routines all over the place.”

“Most likely,” Brant said politely,
although the idea of systems being so old and so out of control
there were areas even a good engineer couldn’t map…that didn’t make
him any more comfortable. “But that’s probably why they hired an
engineer before they hired the muscle.”

She gave him a small smile. “I’m still
trying to figure why you’re onboard. Cat could take you down and
three others like you before you blink. Come to that, I could
probably do the deed myself, long time before you got around to
reacting with that old body of yours.”

Brant didn’t take offense. He’d found
that most people couldn’t help but comment one way or another on
his signs of aging. “On occasion, a second pair of hands is
helpful. Catherine believes some of those occasions might be coming
up. I’m just glad to have the job.”