Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (12 page)

The rendezvous must not happen.

Roger opened his eyes, still tangled in Leeja’s nakedness, warm and satisfied and drowsy. So much tension was gone that his muscles felt too soft to allow him to stand. He had no desire to shift, save for the bladder-pressure that forced the matter.

‘Sorry, Hei— Leeja.’

‘Mm?’

‘I’ve got to get up.’

He had been going to call her Heithrún, which made no sense: the name belonged to no one he knew. Pulling on his trousers, he looked around for the bathroom facilities, saw nothing obvious, and called up his tu-ring menu with its quickglass commands.

‘You want the bathroom?’ said Leeja. ‘Look.’

She pointed and the wall puckered and opened back. Smiling, Roger went inside, and waited for her to command it shut. When he came back out, his skin was tingling and smelling of pine – he had used full cleansing facilities – but some of his warmth was gone.

‘My tu-ring can’t ping external services,’ he said.

‘That’s the privacy shield.’ Leeja smiled as she pulled back the covers. ‘We don’t want to shock the neighbours, do we?’

Her entire body was an invitation, soft and glorious.

‘Yeah, but … Sorry. My … friend’s in the med-hall and I was waiting for news.’

Leeja blinked, then pulled the cover up around herself.

‘If you need me to drop the shield, then— There you are.’

The message cache glowed scarlet: a single message, priority-one urgent.

Alisha?

But the sender ID was Jed Goran, and the message playing out in Roger’s smartlenses, accompanied by collimated audio, said nothing about the fate of one traumatized refugee among so many.

‘
We’re holding off in mu-space
,’ Jed said. ‘
Me and the seven ships that have turned up, none of which have offloaded their refugees. Investigations are ongoing, so I’ve been told. At twenty-seven hundred your local, I’ll perform a realspace insertion. Meaning, I’ll be available to take your call, my friend
.’

Not promising to come back to Molsin and take him away.

‘Shit.’

‘What is it, lover?’

There were no addenda to the message, no smart-query facilities to allow follow-up questions with best-heuristic generated answers. Two-and-a-bit standard hours before he could talk to Jed again.

‘I’ve got stuff … happening.’

What ongoing investigations could Jed have meant? If the ships were waiting in mu-space, then who was doing the investigating? On Fulgor, a dispersed army of roving in-Skein netAgents would have been ideal; but Molsin was clearly a different world.

‘Privacy is important here, isn’t it?’ he added.

‘I’ll share everything about my life with you,’ said Leeja. ‘Any detail at all you want to ask about, I’ll tell you.’

There was a wondering note in her voice, as if surprised by her own offer. Older than he was, with years of additional experience, still she seemed lost in something new, just as he was.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

It was a unilateral response – implying no obligation on his part to divulge his innermost thoughts, for example about Alisha – but Leeja smiled, accepting his answer.

He kissed her bare shoulder.

‘I … I get lost in you,’ he said. ‘You know?’

‘My world has been simplifying,’ said Leeja, ‘since I met you.’

This was not helping him do what he needed to do.

‘I’m going to have to go back to the med-hall,’ he said. ‘To check on my friend. All right?’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Girl and friend, who might have become my girlfriend. But it didn’t happen, and now everything has changed.’

Leeja smiled, though she was not the only change he had been thinking of.

‘You’ll come right back to me, then?’

Roger pulled back the cover, leaned over and kissed one cherry nipple, then the other.

‘Of course I will.’

Her stomach was smooth-skinned, so kissable; and so he did. Then his lips were murmuring and kissing and travelling lower. Her inner thighs were ultimately soft; and her core was sensitive and wonderful.

Some time later, entangled and spent, they smiled and kissed each other.

‘You’re really going now?’ said Leeja.

‘Only if you’ll wait for me to return.’

‘Do you have any doubts?’

‘Not about that.’

He dressed, then blew her a kiss as she commanded an opening in the wall. She made it a double affair, with inner and outer doors. He stepped into the airlock-like passage, blew her another kiss, then waited for the inner door to flow back into place and the outer to melt.

Then he was out in a main corridor and the wall was sealing up. Complex patterns whirled inside the quickglass: art-forms he did not know how to read, not yet.

A new world
.

Despite all previous trauma, he was smiling as he queried his tu-ring for directions to the med-hall and Alisha Spalding.

Roger and Dr Keele sat in a small consulting-room. One wall was either a one-way transparent window or a full-function holo displaying a private ward. Beyond, Alisha was sitting up in a green quickglass chair next to her bed, while a male physician talked to her.

‘Your eyes are different.’ Dr Keele placed a fingertip on her own cheekbone. ‘It changes your appearance rather a lot.’

‘I’ll take the lenses out, if you like.’

‘Not at all. I wouldn’t dream of violating your privacy by suggesting it.’

‘Oh.’ Roger glanced out at Alisha. ‘But we’re spying on her, aren’t we?’

Dr Keele smiled and nodded. ‘Very good.’

As if he had passed a test.

‘Because medical ethics change behavioural standards,’ he said. ‘For her own good, sort of thing.’

‘Something like that.’ Her voice was neutral. ‘And I think that’s enough.’

The wall blanked to opacity.

That was a test
.

His emotional reaction to seeing Alisha – that was what Dr Keele had wanted to observe.

And I’ve failed it
.

The faint rose-hip fragrance of Leeja was on his skin.

‘So what’s going on?’ he asked.

‘One moment.’ Dr Keele glanced into the air – a her-eyes-only display lased on to her retinas from the walls – then her lips moved, mouthing: ‘
Go ahead. Protocol confirmed
.’

Anti-sound prevented him hearing, but she had not bothered with optical distortion to prevent lip-reading.

‘You haven’t treated her?’ he asked.

‘The final phase just started. Can I assume that Meta Ed was part of your schooling?’

‘Er …’

‘I mean learning about learning.’

‘Of course.’

He could speak of Fulgidus education – as was – rather than what happened in Labyrinth; but that was good enough.

‘I thought so,’ said Dr Keele. ‘I understand you grew up on Fulgor.’

How could she know that?

From Alisha’s memories
.

That was disturbing.

‘So,’ added Dr Keele, ‘you’ll know about potentiation, including long-term memory formation.’

‘Yes, I— Why?’

But after discussions about Dad’s induced amnesia, he had a premonition before Dr Keele confirmed the nature of Alisha’s treatment.

‘We’re using full cognitive rollback,’ she said. ‘The process was largely complete, which was why she looked so calm just now. I wanted confirmation that we could proceed to the optimum potentiation boundary. Taking out entire waking days is always best.’

He should not have gone with Leeja. He should not even have talked to her.

‘Could you explain that, please?’ he said.

‘The boundary is before her first meeting with someone called Helsen. From her neuroassociative mapping results, this Helsen was tied up causally with the Stargonier woman who carried out the neural assault.’

Dr Keele swallowed, no longer professionally calm.

‘Law enforcement officials have already scanned everything,’ she went on. ‘I’m sure you can appreciate why.’

Given what had happened on Fulgor, Roger would have been surprised if they had done anything else, regardless of privacy laws.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘The day Alisha met Helsen was my first day on—’

He remembered sitting on the circular balcony that overlooked the campus. Seeing Alisha for the first time – and, across the plaza, Helsen and the bearded man with her: both darkness-haunted.

Helsen, the bitch who had killed his world.

‘Exactly why I needed to gauge your degree of emotional attachment,’ said Dr Keele. ‘If you wish to get to know Alisha Spalding again, you will have to begin all over as a stranger.’

He forced his attention back to the moment. ‘You don’t sound like someone who’s negotiating, Doctor.’

‘The treatment is already complete, save for final integrity checks.’

Like a finishing glaze or varnish on archaic craftwork, the main creation complete.

‘So if I walk in now’ – he gestured to the blank wall – ‘she’ll not recognize me.’

Dr Keele just looked at him.

I get it. You already told me that much
.

On holodramas, medics were good-looking and empathic. But this, now, was not the severest lesson in reality to have hit him lately.

‘You think I let her down,’ he added. ‘Is that it?’

Her nostrils flared, as if picking up the scent of recent sex.

‘Your moral standards are up to you.’

‘But I don’t know if she had any feelings for me at all. All I really know—’

Dr Keele’s head-shake was tiny, a micro-expression.

Shit
.

But coming from someone adept at reading the stuff of thought from scans, it formed a clear and authoritative signal.

Alisha was in love with me
.

Past tense, and now something further removed: Alisha’s emotions belonged to an alternate subjective reality cut off and discarded, just as old-time surgeons might have snipped out an appendix and tossed the organ aside.

And if he walked in to see Alisha now, what would he say?

Hi, I’m the guy who pulled you out of the brothel where you’d been servicing that fat old guy with the dripping dick. Remember him? No, I guess you don’t
.

Arcs of tension bracketed his mouth.

‘I’m sure you think you’ve done the right thing,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we leave it at—’

Scarlet holo icons streamed at eye-level between them.

‘That’s a security alarm,’ said Dr Keele.

‘You get security emergencies in the med-halls? How often does—?’

Her face was stony.

‘I’ve never known it to happen.’

Dr Keele rushed out, Roger striding after. She ran to a large therapy room and stopped, breathing hard in the doorway. Inside, the room was largely empty. As a group of junior medics trotted up, Dr Keele turned on them.

‘Where the hell is my autodoc? My new autodoc!’

‘I can’t—’ The nearest medic had paled. ‘No one came past us.’

But scarlet alarm-icons continued to flare.

‘Look.’ Dr Keele opened a holovolume. ‘See?’

In the holo, a narrow-bodied woman with dirty-blond hair came into this room, tu-rings blazing on her fists, and commanded the autodoc to open. She stopped, stared into whatever area of wall had recorded this, and pulled a rictus expression, a corpse’s smile.

Bitch
.

Her eyes were colder than a reptile’s. Or perhaps it was simply this: he knew what she had done, what she had caused with her manipulation.

You fucking bitch
.

Inside the image, Helsen climbed into the autodoc, and crouched as it sealed up. Roger could not help his grasping gesture; but it was too late to catch her, at least like that.

I will kill you
.

Beneath the autodoc, the quickglass floor began to spiral, creating a viscous vortex into which, seconds later, the autodoc sank. Then it was completely under. Movement showed as a rippling shadow, then nothing, as if a pond-fish had flicked its muscles to swim from sight.

‘She walked right in,’ said Dr Keele.

‘That’s not possible.’ Another medic was shaking his head. ‘Not without light-bending tech to create invisibility … but even so, we were right outside.’

‘Not light-bending,’ said Roger.

It was the darkness that was the enemy, not just a single, manipulative, psychotic woman.

‘Not—?’

‘Mind-bending,’ said Roger. ‘She’s very good at it.’

‘You
know
her?’ Dr Keele, unsympathetic before, used her voice like a flail. ‘What is this about, Pilot Blackstone?’