The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (26 page)

“If you suspect her of a heinous crime,” Leona says, “why did you let her back on ship?”

“She has the captain’s protection,” the woman says.

I wince.
I didn’t ask for that. He shouldn’t be involved.

“The captain can’t protect her,” Leona says.
“He should know that.
If she’s done something wrong, she gets punished—planetside.”

“We’re at war,” the woman says.
“We couldn’t keep our people planetside.”

“Then we leave her and bring the innocents back,” Leona says.

I close my eyes.
She’s right. That’s what the regulations say.
I shouldn’t be here.

“The captain can’t change the regulations,” Leona says.
She’s clearly pushing something, but what I don’t know.

“Actually,” the woman says, “that’s a gray area. We have two policies, the modern and the ancient. Both apply in this case.”

Leona frowns.
She doesn’t agree.
Isn’t it her business to know the regulations?
Isn’t she the expert in them, like I’m the expert in languages?

“No one gets left behind,” the woman says.
“That’s the ancient regulation.
No matter how criminal, how perverted, how sick, no one gets left behind.”

She looks at me as she says those things and she has that look in her eyes again.
What I had initially taken for sympathy is something else.
Fear? Disgust?

“The captain chose to follow that regulation,” the woman says.

“Is that why he didn’t run the announcement?” I ask.

“I don’t presume to know why the captain does what he does,” the woman says.
“He should have left you behind.”

“I know,” I say.

Leona frowns at me and even though I don’t know her, I can read her expression.
Shut up. Let me talk. I’m your advocate. Let me advocate
.

“You want to tell me why he didn’t?” the woman asks.

I shrug one shoulder.
I don’t honestly know.
I haven’t talked to him. Since I got back, the entire Fleet’s been attacked.
We’ve moved, been hit, then moved to foldspace.
I suspect the captain’s been busy.

“Are you sure it was him who ordered me back?” I ask.

“Enough,” Leona says.
“We can talk all night, but until we have facts, I can’t help you. And I need to know what you want.
I know what they want.
They want to test you.”

She’s looking at me, and her eyes hold no emotion at all.
Only a few people can effectively do that.
She’s clearly learned it over the course of her career.
She doesn’t know what to think of me, and she doesn’t want me to know that.

She wants me to think she’s on my side.

As if I know what my side is.

“I can block the tests,” she says.

My heart leaps as she says this, but I dry swallow yet again.
I am afraid of the tests.
I am afraid of what they will reveal.
I am afraid of what they won’t reveal.

“Why don’t you study my case,” I say, sounding calm and logical, which I am not, “and then we’ll decide what to do.”

“We need to take her out of the residential wing,” the woman says.
“She’s dangerous.”

“We don’t know that,” Leona says.

“We can assume,” the woman says.

Leona turns back to her.
Leona’s expression changes, from that flat look she gives me to something akin to anger.
Only I’m not sure that emotion is real either.

“From my understanding,” Leona says, “she’s been here for days.
If she was going to snap, she would have already.
Lock the doors, post a guard, put some kind of monitor on her.
But leave her here.
You know as well as I do that familiarity provides comfort.”

But the apartment isn’t familiar.

Well, part of it is. The furniture, the mementos that I have brought from previous trips, my bedding, my clothing.

But the view from the portal—it’s unfamiliar, and bound to become more so.

If I don’t have to look outside the ship, I might feel better.

“Do you have portals in the evaluation ward?” I ask the woman.

“Yes,” she says.

So outside lurks here, there, in any place they’d take me.

I let out a shaky sigh.
“Then I’ll stay here.”

As if the decision is sane.

As if I am.

As if I would know the difference.

5

THEY ALL LEAVE ME, Leona who is off to do research, the three medical personnel.
They’ve posted guards, just like Leona told them to, and they made a point of letting me know. The guards—both big, muscular men—displayed the laser pistols attached to their hips and gave me a stern look.

The warning was clear.
If I tried to leave, they’d shoot.

If I tried to leave.

Which I’m not going to do.

Maybe they’re the ones who aren’t thinking.
I’m the one who locked myself in my apartment. I’m the one who has hidden from everyone I love.

My twin sister Deirdre has left me increasingly urgent messages, using her technical skills to override the protections I’ve put on my private communications.
She is worried, she says. She has heard horrible things, she says.
She wants to see me, she says.

Too bad.
I don’t want to see her.

I don’t want to see anyone.

Not even Coop.

Jonathon Cooper, our captain.
My former husband.
He looks like a captain of the Fleet should. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark haired, handsome, and oh, so intelligent.

We married young and I was going to have a thousand babies, or maybe the acceptable two.
But the babies never happened.
Every time I got pregnant, I had to go planetside on some mission or another, and every time, I lost them.

The prenatal unit offered to harbor the fetuses for me, so that my risky job wouldn’t have an impact on my children, but Coop didn’t like the idea. For a man who has attached himself to a machine—loving the
Ivoire
more than anyone, anything else—he has very old-fashioned views about children.
He believes that a child housed in a fetal unit will not have the warmth and compassion, the ability to bond with others, that regular humans do.

He might be right; Lord knows, he’s shown me a lot of studies, all from the Fleet, all from various points in our history, all very scientific.

I know this, but I also know that gestating a child in the woman is no guarantee either.
The fetus gets exposed to whatever the woman gets exposed to, and sometimes that exposure is toxic or strange or just plain terrifying.

Dry, dry sand. Heat so extreme that my skin aches. The blood has dried on my skin and it stinks, rotting, even as it’s attached to me. But I cannot get it off. I don’t have the water to drink, let alone any to clean myself. I don’t have
—

I stand up.
My face feels flushed, my skin tight with dried blood.

I don’t want to remember.

I put my hands on my cheeks.
I was thinking about Coop. Coop and the babies that never were, and our perennial argument, and the way that he looks at me, even now, as if I have broken his heart.

We still love each other.
But we are no longer
in love
with each other.
If we ever were in love with each other.

I think we were in love with the idea of each other.
Coop is a bona fide hero, a man who rushes in when he should hang back, who has saved countless lives, who always puts others first and rarely thinks of himself.

I’m the intellectual, the collected one, the one who thinks before she acts—who thinks in many languages before she acts.
Coop has always been intrigued by my skills, my ability to make myself understood, to put myself in the place of another culture, another person, to become someone I’m not, even if only for a few minutes.

There is too much Coop to subsume into another human being, even for a moment.
I’m beginning to understand that there is not enough me, and perhaps that’s why I can completely vanish into another perspective, because mine is so fragile, so very frail.

Or is it? Coop always says I have a firm core.
He may be right. That may be why I am still here—alive, one of three survivors.
But that might also be why I can’t remember, why I feel my brains leaking out of my skull, why my memory skips as if it were a rock skimming a clear mountain lake.

I am standing in the middle of my apartment, back to the portal, in foldspace, guards outside my door, my memory gone.
I am here because my former husband still loves me too much to sacrifice me for the good of the ship, even though he makes up other reasons.
Ancient regulations versus new regulations.
Silly, that.
He just can’t abide sending me to the middle of that planet, as the war has heated up, a war we started.

Twenty-four died.

I survived.

Along with two others.

Whom I can’t remember.

Just like I can’t remember what happened to everybody else.

6

“SOMETHING ODD IS HAPPENING HERE,” I say to Leona.
I’m looking out my portal at foldspace. At least I think it’s foldspace.

I recognize nothing out there, and neither does my computer. When I catch a moment, a moment when I can concentrate, I use my apartment computer, trying to figure out where we are.
I have to use the information stored on the computer itself; the ship has cut me off.
I can’t get into any systems, even informational ones.

The message system doesn’t even work properly.
If I want to send a message to anyone other than the medical evaluation unit or Leona, I have to send it through the approval system.
Someone else will listen to my complaints, read my notes, see my anxious face.

Rather than let that happen, I don’t send messages.

Not that I feel like communicating anyway.

“Yes, something odd is happening,” Leona says.
“You’re essentially imprisoned in your own apartment.”

She sounds offended by this, which strikes me as strange.
I’m not offended.
I turn.

She’s sitting at my table, her own portable notebook on her lap.
Her dark hair is up, and she’s wearing a formal tunic with matching pants.

“I’m not talking about me,” I say, sweeping a hand toward the portal.
“Something odd is happening on the ship. To the ship.
I don’t know where we are.”

Her expression freezes as if I’ve said something wrong.

“Is this something you’re not supposed to tell me?” I ask.

She shakes her head.
“I forgot, that’s all.
You can’t access the news.”

Shipboard news is an outside system.
I’ve never really paid attention anyway, except when I need to for my work, and even then, I’m not really watching.
I’m listening—not to what’s going on, but to how it’s expressed.

I am the ship’s senior linguist, a position as important as the captain’s in its own way. Strange that I haven’t thought of that since I’ve come back.
I haven’t identified myself as a linguist at all.
I haven’t missed the interplay of languages, the way that the same sentence in one language can mean something completely different when translated word-for-word into another.

Context, subtext, word origins, emotions, all contained in one little phrase, one little word.
The difference between “an” and “the” can alter meaning dramatically.

And it’s my job to know these subtleties in every language I specialize in.
It’s my job to understand them in the new languages I encounter.
It’s my job to make sure we can all communicate clearly, because the basis of diplomacy isn’t action, it’s words.

Words, words, words.

“You’ve gone pale,” Leona says.
“Do you need to sit down?”

“No.” I walk back to the portal.
It’s space-black out there—not quite total darkness.
The universe has its own light, and it’s lovely, most of the time.
But usually you can see the source—the star in the distance, the reflection off clouds protecting a planet’s atmosphere.