Fatal Boarding (6 page)

"Guess I'm not much of a psychologist."

She smiled knowingly. She spoke softly.
"Something happened out there between us, Adrian. We were trading
each other's breath. I can think of a lot better ways to trade
breath with someone, can't you? Something got started out there. It
must be finished. I'm here to finish it."

"But you’re on medication. You're probably
under the influence...”

"I'm under more influence than medication,
darling."

"But, the laceration. You should be
resting..."

Her voice became low and hypnotically
mellow. "I've been glued back together, dear. Guaranteed for life.
But if your really so worried about my little boo-boo, why don't I
show it to you."

I expected her to pull up one sleeve.
Instead, she stood and very deliberately unzipped her flight suit
to the navel. She reached up, still staring me in the eye, and
pulled the thin fabric free from her shoulders. It fell in a heap
at her feet. A wide bandage covered one wrist.

I had always imagined Nira's body to be
muscled and compact. It was soft and voluptuous. I could not help
but stare. That part of my mind which is responsible for rational,
sensible behavior gave me a little four fingered wave, a meek
"bye-bye", and dropped out of sight completely. She hooked one knee
up and over me, exposing herself completely, and sat down in a
straddle across my legs. Smooth, white, even breasts bounced gently
as she adjusted herself. Fine, burgundy nipples became tight and
erect. I looked back up into her eyes. She smiled down at me
knowingly. I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I knew nothing
to say. She leaned forward and clamped her soft, wet mouth over my
mine.

Shock and sensuality seem to go well
together. There are those times when you have been so severely
frightened, so unthinkably traumatized, that a residual shock
effect stays with you for years, sometimes forever. You can see
this lingering shadow of fear in the eyes of people who have
sky-dived and should not have, or in the soldiers of war who have
been forced into hand to hand combat when they where not expecting
it. It is as though some childish part of the soul is still crying
out for help, as though it has not yet received word that all is
well. No amount of therapy usually cures this condition. Very few
things do. Confronting the same level of danger for a second time
occasionally will, but the real, best, time tested antidote is hard
sex with love mixed in. It has a way of resetting the necessary
circuit breaker.

The world became a sensuous pool of color
and warmth. We slipped and slid our way into each other, over and
over, finding the places that had not yet been touched, and testing
each other's vulnerability. The visual became a strobe of sexual
light accented by the sounds of passion and effort. Endurance gave
out before desire. We reluctantly ground down into a tangle on the
bed and held to each other in exhausted satisfaction. The day had
taken its toll, but it had saved the best for last.

Love making has its own set of rules for
time. Or, maybe time has no control over love. When it is good, two
hours can seem like ten minutes. And when it is good, you hardly
care. Her slight movement brought me half awake. She was lying on
her side against me; her right leg sprawled across my thighs, her
right arm draped over my chest. She made an annoyed purring sound
as I felt her ooze away from me and out of bed. Through a glassy
eye'd stare I could see her looking down at me as she pulled the
wrinkled coveralls back on. She bent over, dragging her hair across
my face, and gently bit my earlobe. She kissed me on the cheek and
in a mocking, haughty voice whispered, "Oh I'm so ashamed."

I heard her short, throaty laugh above the
swish of the doors as she left. Clearly I had lost all credibility
as a debater of idealism. She had left me limp and beaten. I lay
with one arm draped over the side of the bed, floating in the
sensuous corona of half sleep, and decided that winning wasn't
everything.

Chapter 6

Tuesday morning began late. I had neglected
to set a wake-up call on my terminal. I had been distracted. I
rubbed at the bristle on my face, as thoughts of the day past
flooded my mind. Oddly, no matter how I added it all up, I came out
feeling pretty good, with just a little bit of guilt on the side.
It had been a day to mark time by, a day of premier exploration,
disaster averted, and unexpected encounters.

I pushed myself out of bed, went to the
terminal and called up my personal duty roster. My shift was
supposed to begin at 08:00. It was 08:15. I had informal security
audits of several engineering areas scheduled for 09:00, but that
had been on the calendar from before our encounter with the alien
ship. We were probably well underway by now, and those inspection
areas would be bustling with activity from the jump to light.
Besides, I had an appointment with Doctor Pacell, a medical
appointment that for once needed to be kept. A continental
breakfast would have first priority. I stuffed my blanket away, hit
the button to put the bed up, grabbed a clean gray-black flight
suit and headed for the shower.

On my way to the mess hall, I stepped into
the corridor and crashed into someone traveling at a high rate of
speed in the opposite direction. Clayton Pell, the ship's internet
loner, was wearing a pair of music-video optics, the wire-frame
type with tiny, button-sized, tinted lenses. You can see through
the image projected into your eyes by MVOs, but charging down a
hallway while using them is not recommended. He had to grab onto me
to keep from falling down and then began profusely apologizing.

Pell is an odd character who is more a
ship's ghost than a real crew member. He haunts many of the seldom
used access corridors within the habitat module in a never-ending
quest to keep the internet working. When you try to log on to your
personal computer terminal and the ship's icon cursor freezes
solid, you call Pell. Although everyone inevitably gets to know
him, he has never been close to anyone that I know of, which may be
part of the reason everyone calls him ‘Pell’ as though it were his
first name. He is unusually tall and lanky with stilty legs that
end in size twelve shoes. He has short-cropped, sandy-bond hair
except for the bald spot in the middle, and a sandy-tan face that
reflects a quiet personality. He has an unusually long, narrow neck
partly covered by sandpaper skin, and big hands that he keeps well
manicured. Pell seems to have a blind spot for rank. He inevitably
fails to notice or acknowledge it, and because even the highest of
ranks so fear not having the network, no one ever challenges him
about it. It takes an event such as crashing into someone in the
hallway to get him talking. His only real weakness for social
intercourse comes on occasions when he unfolds his electric guitar
to join in impromptu blues/jazz sessions that sometime take place
in the cafeteria.

"I'm really sorry, Adrian. I wasn't paying
attention. I've been chasing the net for the entire third shift.
It's acting up like I've never seen it."

"Funny, I haven't noticed anything."

"Yeah, well staff terminals are logging on
all by themselves, files are disappearing and reappearing, and
people are getting cut off in the middle of E-Mail. Every time I
get there the damned thing has cleared. We've got some kind of
noise getting in the system somewhere. I've seen it before, but
never this bad. I sure hope its not bleeding in from the engine
sensors. I sure don't want to go crawling around way back in the
damn tail tunnels. They woke me up around 01:00. I'm gonna give up
and try to get some sleep. If it's still going on when I wake up,
I'll just have to start all over again."

"Better you than me, Pell. I've had my share
of adventure."

"Yeah, so I heard. Hey, take a look at this
music. It's really something." Pell peeled off the light weight
optics he was straining to see me through, and handed them over. It
was not my thing, but you must remain on good terms with Pell. I
looked them over and carefully put them on. The music instantly cut
in slightly too loud, giving me a tingling sensation behind the
ears where the transducers touch skin. It was an ancient-styled
blues band. An unshaven man with bifocal-style glasses was bending
strings on an old-fashioned electric guitar that had a cord and
tuning keys. He wore baggy-looking brown work pants, and big,
brown, heavy work shoes. He kept lifting his left foot slightly off
the floor as he wrapped himself around his instrument. His voice
was raspy and pitch-perfect. I could see Pell nodding
enthusiastically at me through the image.

"It's Clapton, can you believe it?"

I took off the optics and handed them back.
"Sorry, never heard of him, Pell."

"Clapton, ...you know. He brought the blues
into the twenty-first century. Studied under the best blues players
in the world. They're taking all these old videos and converting
them to surround-sight. You get to see the real masters as though
they're right in front of you. It's incredible. It just kills
me."

"Well, if you keep speeding down the hall
wearing those things, it just might."

"Yeah, sorry about that. I'm half asleep.
Well, I'd better get where I'm going. See you later." He hooked the
optics frames back over his ears and headed off, clanking along the
grated section of corridor floor that led to his stateroom. I
smiled to myself, shook my head and headed for the mess hall.

The Commissary is one of those cartoon-like
places that are designed in fine detail by architectural engineers
who were born to care about cost and efficiency and nothing else.
They lie in bed at night entertaining fantasies about ground
breaking designs in food dispensation. They design plastic rooms,
with no detail, and no sharp edges as though the room was intended
to prevent five-year olds from harming themselves. They generally
top it off with a picture of a boat on the wall to show the depth
of their symbolism, which it does.

Unbeknownst to them, as soon as the mess
hall is activated, it is completely taken over by a strange group
of space bound eccentrics who use it for a dozen different things
for which it was never intended. They are the people who become
walking outhouses on Halloween, Santas at Christmas, gigantic
bunnies on Easter, off-key karaoke singers and flat comedians
backed by too frequent, synthetic rim-shots during thinly-populated
talent nights.

Understandably, Halloween is the favorite.
On that particular evening, if you come to the mess hall, you are
likely to be served brain salad by someone dressed in a big black
helmet with the sound of heavy breathing.

There are no seasons in deep space, but
there are seasons in the mess hall. It snows there in winter,
flowers bloom in the spring lasting through the summer, and pines
needles and corn stalks are gathered in the fall. R.J. does not
really need to slay his invisible windmills in the cause of
preserving humanity. The atypical people, who stalk designated
human prey relentlessly, dragging their captured victims to the
galley under false pretense only to bellow choruses of happy
birthday to them while forcing them to blow out tiny, flaming
sticks stuck into oversized pastries bearing their names, will do
that for him.

Feeling lazy, I took an elevator up one deck
and stepped out into the wide corridor that leads to the mess hall.
A little alarm of awareness suddenly went off in my head. I stopped
and listened. The faint echoes of dishes and trays could be heard
clamoring in the distance, but other than that there was nothing.
No sound at all. The plan had been for us to back away from the
alien craft at 03:00, bring her around, and make the jump to light
thirty minutes later. But there were no waves of superstructure
vibration coming off the walls and no subsonic resonant drone from
the Tachyon drives.

We weren't moving. I hastened my pace.

To my surprise the place was packed and
noisy. It should have been nearly empty with the first shift people
all at their stations. Instead, they were here celebrating another
unexpected break in routine. Even more surprising, they were not
dressed in regulation duty wear. That meant they knew they would
not be called to their positions any time soon. They sat around the
hall drinking coffee, eating late breakfast snacks, and talking
cheerfully around the colorful plastic tables, looking like a bunch
of tourists on holiday. I searched over the heads for a sign of
R.J. until an arm suddenly jutted up over the crowd. To my dismay
he stood partly up and called, "Hey, Buck, over here!"

There was sporadic laughter from points
around the room, as though too many understood the reference. It
was impossible to judge just how red my face became, though I am
certain it conveyed an adequate betrayal of guilt. I weaved my way
through the masses, nodding sarcastically, and joined him at his
table.

"R.J."

"Yes, oh grand marshal of this fortuitous
gathering?"

"Later, I will kill you."

He blurted out a laugh and pushed an empty
mug and coffee dispenser at me. I poured and eye'd him
threateningly.

"Nira was in here earlier. She looked very
refreshed."

"R.J., keep your voice down. So what about
Nira?"

"Oh, just thought you'd like to know she was
doing well, that's all."

"Is there no damn privacy on this ship at
all? How do you know about Nira?"

"Apparently she bumped into a nurse's aid
while sneaking back into sick bay last night. When asked where she
had been, she laughed and claimed to have paid a little visit to a
Mr. Buck Rogers. Of course we all have no idea who that could
be."

"Oh my god."

"I'm sure it was heavenly, my amorous
friend."