“I am beginning to reconsider my reckless youth,” she said. “I won’t deny that life with Maauro is lively, but I would like to live through it. Right now, though, I am worried for you. You two will be going down first. If this op blows up it will catch you both on the surface. We, at least, will have a chance to abort.”
“I have my worries too,” I kissed Jaelle on the lips. “I’m still not comfortable with you relying on Dusko.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the Dua-Denlenn at the back of the office, who was arguing with the port inspector over something on a com screen. “He’ll be all right. If I have to pass as a Guild agent, I’m going to need him whispering in my head to get me through. I can’t say I’m all that happy about Kit-sister putting these coms directly into our brains. She knows too much of what goes on with us as it is.”
“She says they’ll dissolve in about five months.”
“And do you always believe everything she tells you?” Jaelle said, pulling on my ear. I couldn’t quite tell if the exasperation was all fake, all real or a mix. “You do recall she was created to annihilate the universe fifty millennia ago.”
I sighed. “She was created to protect her makers. And other than staring possessively at the stars, she has shown no signs of embarking on a mission of galactic domination.”
“Hmmnn. I think she has made some conquests closer to home.”
“Jaelle.”
“Mostly kidding, Honey. I like Kit-sister too and I am glad she is on our side. I’m also glad,” she flicked her tail around my upper thigh, “that there are some things I do that she doesn’t, yet anyway.”
“What would those be?” I asked playfully.
I had my arms full of warm catgirl for a few moments as she demonstrated.
“Well,” she said finally. “I will see you later. Love you, male-of-mine.”
“Love you too. Watch Dusko.”
She grinned at me. “Have to say good bye to Kit-sister first.”
“That’s never going to work.”
“I could get lucky.”
Before I could say anything else, Jaelle bounded away, she could run faster over a short distance and jump higher than anyone else I’d ever met. She leapt atop some nearby packing crates and then plunged down the other side.
A moment later Maauro emerged from the other side with Jaelle tucked under one arm, her tail swishing in frustration.
I could not help but laugh, and smothered it as best I could. Maauro gently put her down. Jaelle spoke to her briefly, then exchanged hugs with the android and walked off toward Dusko and the waiting ship.
Maauro came over.
“Not even close?” I asked.
“Please Wrik, in addition to the noise generated by her running, leaping and breathing; she was in the air for a full .3234 seconds. I was able to catch her easily, minimize the impact to avoid any injury to her and secure her under my arm. It did take some effort not to pull her tail in revenge however.”
“Easy on the tail,” I said, “that’s sensitive and mildly kinky in her culture.”
“And you know this why?” she said as we started walking toward our own ship.
“You’re too young. Come back in a few years.”
“I am over 50,000 years old.”
“The five in artifact space don’t count and all but the first seven and last four years were spent contemplating your navel on an asteroid.”
“Wrik, I do not have a navel, even now, and certainly not then.”
“I think you still have growing up to do.”
“I will not increase in size. In fact I am 40% smaller than I was when first activated.”
I stopped. “What?”
“I was blown up in the original asteroid attack. Two legs and an arm severed off. I reconstituted myself from spare material I contained inside my chassis.”
“How come you didn’t do that when your arm was blown off on Kandalor?”
“I had used up most of my spare material in the initial repairs. I have enough for minor impacts but not for a full arm.” She flexed the arm she‘d salvaged from the Infester machine found at the bottom of the Tar Sea on Kandalor. “This has served well with the improvements I have made in it. In raw strength, it’s nearly equal to my right arm, but it will never have the feedback sensitivity or malleability of my original equipment.”
“No chance of making more of your chassis material?”
“I continue to work toward it but the ceramo-alloy of my true body was the supreme accomplishment of my Creators. I have not as yet come close to the flexibility and strength of my OEM. I must avoid major material loss until I do. “
“That would be good. I think I’ll follow the same plan.”
“As fragile as you are, you should avoid even minor material loss.”
“True enough.”
“In fact if I were as fragile as you, I would seldom go outside.”
“Thanks, Maauro. I got it.”
We spent the next day scrambling about our tasks, readying for the mission. Candace called me to the spaceport in the afternoon. I thought an in-person meeting with the spymaster unnecessary, but she insisted. Maauro declined to come along. “If she has some ulterior motive in approaching you,” she reasoned, “better to obtain the intelligence quickly. I suspect however that she is still trying to get a sense of you.”
“A sense of me? What for?”
“You are the closest of our unit to her, a male of the same species. Jaelle is a Nekoan and daughter of a Guild agent, Dusko is a professional liar, and I am the most mysterious to her. If she hopes to gain a greater insight and control of us, it will be through you. We should encourage this information pipeline. It will bring in more than it drains out I think.”
So I ventured out alone to the military section of the spaceport, albeit in a little-used corner for storage and salvage. The guards expected me and after a cursory review of my ID, let me in, directing me to Bay 17.
That bay held a Confed scoutship, towering a hundred meters into the sky and painted a dark grey with a red flash insignia on the tail. The ground around the ship was puddled from the recent rainstorm. Clouds scudded behind the needle shape of the four-being ship. It was an older model, a Constellation but well maintained. Under her hull number was the name, Pisces.
“Congratulations,” Candace said from behind me. “Lost Planet Expeditions is now the proud owners of the CSS Pisces, surplused yesterday and sold to you for 10,000 credits.”
“Which I assume you will add to the money you are paying us,” I said automatically, “and that there is a warranty.”
“You’re kind of tight with the credits aren’t you?”
“Habits of an uncertain lifetime,” I replied. A sudden gust of wet, cool wind made me seal my jacket. “Poverty marks you for life.”
“Yes,” she said, a rare note of sympathy in her voice. “I suppose it does.”
“That sale of course allows you to say should we be caught or killed—”
“That we knew nothing about it and you were a bunch of scammers up to something with a surplus ship and some fake uniforms. Did you expect something else?”
“I try to keep my expectations of the universe modest. It limits my disappointments.”
“So can you fly her?” Candace asked.
I didn’t turn but merely continued leaning on a railing looking up at the ship. “Flight characteristics are similar to Stardust’s, just a lot more discretionary power. Room for fifteen in a pinch, that’s nice. Maauro and I have been working on a simulator she set up right after she picked the model.”
“She picked the model,” Candace came up and joined me against the railing. “How much does she run you?”
“Divide and conquer, Candace? You wanted to see me on my own. What’s next: bribes, threats, and appeals to my loyalty t
o the Confederacy? I’d expect more out of a granddaughter of Avery Deveraux.”
“No offense,” she said. “It’s an honest question. I see three living beings, yet clearly the AI is in charge.”
“If it pleases you to think of it that way.”
“Is there another way to view it?”
“Maauro is smarter than I am, certainly. She’s already survived over 50,000 years despite a lot of people’s efforts to make sure she didn’t. So in some things she leads. But she doesn’t force anyone to follow her, not even Dusko anymore. For other things, well, I’ve taken her by the hand on quite a few.”
“Taken her by the hand?” Candace’s eyebrow’s rose. “That’s a lot of anthropomorphizing going on there. It’s a machine, an incredibly complicated, undoubtedly dangerous machine.”
I looked up at the clouds. “I don’t really understand what Maauro is, but she’s much more than a machine or even an AI. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, the divine spark started racing over her circuits. Maybe it did for others of her kind. Maybe not, or why haven’t we run into more like her?”
Candace shrugged. “Maybe they fled this area of space? Maybe they slaughtered their masters and don’t want to serve any others? You can’t know about her.”
“No I can’t,” I said. “No more than I can know about you, maybe even less as you’re so adept at deceptions. In the end, the one thing I know about Maauro is that she is the first true friend I found in my life as Wrik Trigardt.”
“So sure?” she murmured as if surprised.
“I’ll bet my life, which I still have only because of her: any day, any place, on any odds you care to wager.”
“I hope for all your sakes I never have to take you up on that offer,” she said.
“The offer stands as long I do,” I said straightening. “Now if you’ll excuse me I’d like to spend some time on the ship. Maauro wants to pick out some new curtains.”
Candace laughed. “Ok, Wrik. You and your little android go play house.”
Chapter Seven
We rose from Star Central with the sun. Our ships launched simultaneously but from different locations. I took Starfire up from our launch pad near the office, accompanied by Dusko and Jaelle. Maauro lifted off in the Pisces, although what the launch commander of the military base thought of an apparent teenager taking off in a scoutship, I had no idea. Still, that had been Candace’s problem and she’d evidently handled it as Maauro joined us in orbit. We synced up with boarding tubes and the grapples Pisces came equipped with.
From there, we refueled with a military tanker Candace arranged for, then shaped a course for the accelerator, where she’d also arranged a free transit. The accelerator would boost us to .75C without the need to burn fuel.
We quickly settled down to the regularity of shipboard life. Dusko had his hydroponic gardens both on Starfire and on Pisces. Jaelle, ever mindful of the possibilities of trade, took up her jewel crafting. For me, I had started a model of Fenaday’s famous starship, the Sidhe. Finding out that we were “being run” by the daughter of Avery Deveraux, the Confederacy’s wartime spymaster had piqued my interest in the grim Irishman who searched the stars for his lost wife, and in Shasti Rainhell, the genetically engineered warrior who’d been his lover and later commanded the Sidhe. The model was nearly a meter long. With Maauro’s help, I’d progressed well. She made whatever parts or paints I needed inside her body and even created a tiny reactor to power the model’s lights, which was the only actual construction that I left for her. It was, after all, a reactor. Jaelle admired the work, even as she wrinkled her delicate nose at the solvents and cements I used.
We came upon the accelerator on the third day out and decoupled the ships to pass though its rings. The maw of the giant accelerator was large enough for a battleship, but it wasn’t safe to fly our ships through while connected. Once the massive accelerator spat us out, we reconnected for the trip to the outer solar system where the hyperdrive, unencumbered by the gravity well of the star, would function. When next we separated, it would be for the star jump and we would proceed on our differing missions.
Jaelle and I spent all our time together, as if to make up for the impending separation. Maauro discretely made herself scarce. Dusko, ever solitary, we saw only occasionally.
On the last night before jump, we lay on Jaelle’s custom-made bed, a luxury we’d had installed for us and vastly more comfortable than a bunk. Jaelle lay on her stomach, face to one side as I kneaded the long, strong muscles of her back, feeling the inhumanly flexible spine below them. She purred, an affectation she’d picked up after I told her about Terran cats. I looked down at her, the small, sharp, alien features that suggested a woman’s face, but really didn’t look that much like one. “Jaelle?”
“Yes,” she said, a drowsy tone in her voice.
“When we get back, let’s have a proper consortship ceremony and register it.”
She rolled over. “Truly? This will make you happy as well?”
“I won’t pretend that your having children with someone else won’t take some getting used to, or that at times it won’t be hard being from two different species, but I do love you. I know that you won’t be happy without children of your own, so this is how that has to be. I want the things that are best for you.”
She gazed up at me with big golden eyes. “You know that if you ever wish the same, I will accept it too.”
“I won’t, but thanks. No, from my side all you’ll have to live with is Maauro. It will be a complicated road for us, but we will travel it together.”
She laughed and patted my chest. I could feel the sheathed claws in them. “Yes, you, me, Kit-sister and actual kits, a complicated orbit to be sure, even if you continue to foreswear human females, something I do not expect—”
“Jaelle.”
“No matter,” she shrugged. “I do not care about occasional females unless you should want a child with one. There I must be consulted.”
“As I said, it’s not going to come up.”
“And Kit-sister, do you think she will always travel this road with us?”
I nodded “I’m pretty sure, at least as far as I can see the future. You’re alright with that?”
“I care for Maauro,” she said, “but not as you do. Sometimes I am jealous of your closeness with her, and do not try to reassure me that she is merely a machine.”
“I’d never say that about her in any event. She’s not just a machine, but as for gender, she assumed that only after I found her. Her original appearance was humanoid, but frighteningly corpse-like.”
“Maauro,” Jaelle said archly, “is thoroughly and completely female now and I suspect always was.”
I laughed. “Maybe so.”
Jaelle laughed too. “Well, we will not resolve every issue at the start of our journey. It is enough that we will travel together and that you want this too.”
Our lips came together, followed by our bodies.
Afterwards, I turned to her. “So when do we tell people?”
“That depends a little on how you think Maauro will take the news?”
“Huh? She’ll be happy for us, of course.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, “as sure as I am about anything.”
She shifted, rolling up on one shoulder to look at me. “You really feel you know her well enough to say?” There was no edge to her voice; the question seemed an honest one.
“Yes. But even after all we have been through, you still have doubts.”
Jaelle considered. “Yes, small ones, but still doubts. I’m fond of her, as you know, but I can’t forget the times when her M-7 programming ruled her and she dragged us all into hell. Even you, Wrik, who she loves as much as her synthetic little heart is capable of, how much did she miss you by when she reverted to being M-7 aboard the Infester Artifact?”
“But she did miss,” I replied, “and she never does. In the end, Maauro was the stronger personality and it was our friendship that made the difference.”
“Then M-7 was gone and we have Kit-sister, a good trade no doubt. I certainly don’t miss M-7. Maybe it’s just hard for me to believe it’s entirely gone and she can’t turn on us again.”
I fought back a surge of bitter memory. Being born into the universe, instead of made, was no guarantee against betrayal and failure. I was living proof of that myself. I pushed the thoughts back into their locked box.
“But back to your question,” Jaelle said, a drowsy note creeping into her voice. “I want to hold off until we are safely back on Star Central. That is assuming we can keep this a secret from Kit-sister. She is linked to us mentally.”
“It’s not telepathy. Maauro said that she only hears us when we push thoughts at her. It’s like speaking but without a voice. That’s one reason it’s so fatiguing and uses so much energy when we practice.”
“No wonder we’re both so hungry lately. Anyway, I’ll be very cross if she learns of this and ruins the surprise.”
I put a hand on my bare chest. “Trust me, if there is anything I can do, it’s keep secrets.”
“Good, then when we get back, we’ll take Maauro, Dusko—”
Dusko?”
“He’s part of the Lost Planet Expeditions now for all that he started as our prisoner, part of our team. He’s content to leave the past—”
“When he was trying to kill us!”
“And we were trying to kill him, too. And we came closer. Besides, didn’t Maauro ask you to put all the past in the past?”
“He doesn’t think of us as friends.”
He’s Dua-Denlenn. The word means something else to him but we are probably the closest things he has to such. Friendship is a learned response for his kind.”
I sighed. It seemed I was alone in being a prisoner of the past and now both Maauro and Jaelle had chided me for it. “OK so we take Maauro and Dusko…”
“And Bizel, Rana and Latome from my trading company, to a fancy dinner at the best restaurant in Star Central, maybe the Terra Nova or the Ether?”
Against That Time Page 7
