by Morgan Hawke
Fallon walked over to Khan’s wardrobe to hang the robe.
“She has absolutely no cultural skills whatsoever.”
She caught the shake of Sobehk’s head in the mirror just before she opened the wardrobe door. Fate and damnation, he made her sound like a total barbarian. She struggled briefly with the heavy robe and the hanger, making damned sure to hang it with all the other robes like it. Order, precision, and grace. Bleck. She closed the door.
Khan chuckled. “Good thing she’s upuaht.”
“That’s my opinion.”
Fallon turned in time to catch Sobehk’s smile.
Khan nodded. “The midday supper should be arriving shortly.” He turned to face Fallon. “I guess we’ll see if she can manage a table or will have to eat from a bowl on the floor.”
Sobehk snorted. “Well, she knows how to sit and stand properly. I don’t hold high hopes for anything else.”
Fallon decided right then and there that she really, really wanted to bite Sobehk, and not in a good way.
* * * * *
The midday supper arrived on an anti-grav levitating tray escorted by two youthful, slender Skeldhi. They wore knee-length gray robes with white smocks cross-tied over them. The smell of something juicy, meaty, and delicious wafted from the tray.
Fallon knelt on the carpet by the edge of the table, while Sobehk on her left and Khan on her right got to sit on nice cushy pillows.
The attending Skeldhi set a large smoked-glass bowl holding a good-sized chunk of meat in a golden broth in the center of the table, followed by two smaller bowls with other meats in broth. Square plates of exceedingly expensive black Shido porcelain edged in gold were set before Khan and Sobehk. Matching cup-sized bowls were set on the plates, with snowy-white rolled cloth napkins bound in gold paper twists above them, and utensils above that. Crystal goblets and matching tumblers were set beside the plates, and a carved crystal decanter filled with a deep-gold liquid was set between Sobehk and Khan.
The arrangement was done in complete silence with swift efficiency and a formal elegance that Fallon found surprising. Watching their reflections in the mirrors rather than staring openly, Fallon found the whole thing fascinating.
One of the attendants bowed to Sobehk and presented him with a rolled mat, a shallow bowl of red glass with some kind of lettering around the bowl’s rim, and a broad spoon.
Sobehk nodded in thanks and then raised a brow at Fallon as he set them on the far left. “In case eating at the table proves too difficult for you.”
Fallon’s cheeks flushed with heat, but she didn’t growl. She dropped her gaze to the bare table before her.
At the last second, a square plate of plain clear glass was set before Fallon with a matching clear bowl. A napkin and utensils were added and a simple plain glass tumbler was set beside her plate. A clear pitcher filled with what looked like water was set by the crystal decanter.
Fallon took a deep breath. Obviously she did not rate the good porcelain, but it wasn’t a bowl on the floor, though that was still a distinct possibility. She eyed the rolled mat and the red bowl by Sobehk’s elbow.
The attendants bowed and left, directing their floating tray between them.
Khan leaned forward and gestured for Sobehk’s cup and plate. He scooped meat from all three bowls onto the plate and broth from the largest bowl into the cup, then served himself.
Sobehk reached for the crystal decanter and filled both Khan’s goblet and his, then filled his tumbler from the clear glass pitcher. He turned and filled her tumbler from the pitcher, as well.
Fallon sniffed as discreetly as she could as he poured. It smelled like water.
Khan finally collected her plate and bowl and put food in them, then set them before her. It smelled incredible. Her mouth watered, and her stomach decided to protest its emptiness with a hard kick. She winced. She was hungrier than she thought, but she wasn’t about to touch a damned thing until she saw how Khan and Sobehk did it first. She was not going to eat off the floor if she could help it.
Fallon watched as Sobehk reached for his napkin first, noting the way he placed it in his lap, then how Khan held the utensils. On instinct alone, she waited.
They began to eat.
Still, she waited. Something told her it was the right thing to do.
Khan smiled at Sobehk before nodding at Fallon. “You may begin.”
She blinked in surprise but reached for her napkin. She stopped before she touched it. Something was not right. What had she forgotten? She glanced at Khan. “Thank you, ‘Syr.”
Khan grinned. “Very well done!” He nodded at Sobehk. “Definitely an improvement.”
Sobehk grinned openly. “She figured that one out all by herself. We’ll have her civilized yet.”
Fallon flushed and collected her napkin. She’d pleased them both. Warmth wrapped around her heart.
It was the most nerve-wracking meal she’d ever attended in her life. Handling the utensils alone was an exercise in patience, but she did it. She speared a sliver of meat and sucked it into her mouth. It took two tries before she remembered that chewing was not an option. She finally noticed what was missing. There wasn’t a single vegetable, just meat and broth.
Khan sipped at his goblet. “Something wrong, Isabeau?” Humor curved his lush mouth.
Fallon looked over at him. “No vegetables?”
Khan’s lip curled. “Only food eats plant life.”
Fallon froze. Humans ate plants. She stared at the unidentified meat on her plate. Great Maker, what was she eating?
Khan’s brow rose, and he snorted. “Before you go into a panic, no, we don’t eat humans.”
Sobehk sipped water from his tumbler. “We don’t eat plants because they are poisonous.”
Fallon frowned at Sobehk. “For me, too?”
Sobehk raised his brow at her.
Fallon flinched. “Sorry, ‘Syr.”
Khan chuckled and shook his head. “Yes, for you, too. If it grew in the ground, you don’t put it in your mouth.”
Fallon stared at her reflection in the mirror across the table. No deep-fried potatoes? No bread, or noodles, which were made from wheat? Blood and Fate, there went every last one of her favorite foods. Great Maker, kaffa was brewed from a bean. She curled her hands in her lap. Chocolate came from a bean, too. She groaned. No chocolate?
Khan glanced at Sobehk and set his elbow on the table. “Something you’re going to miss?” He smiled.
Fallon looked up at him in total misery. “No more kaffa or chocolate? ” She sniffed. “‘Syr”
Sobehk rolled his eyes.
Khan laughed out loud. “You can still have both.”
“I can?” Fallon sat up straight. “‘Syr?”
Khan nodded, grinning, and held up a finger. “But only in small amounts; they are still fairly toxic. Too much will make you very ill.”
Fallon sighed in complete relief. “For a moment I thought my life was over.” She clapped her hands over her mouth. “‘Syr.” Her voice was muffled behind her hands.
Sobehk groaned. “We genetically alter her, and she does just fine. We threaten her with the loss of chocolate, and now it’s the end of the world?” He looked away, pressing his hand against his brow while closing his eyes.
Khan shook his head. “Do not underestimate the importance of chocolate to a female.” He nodded at Fallon “Sobehk had brothers; I had sisters. I discovered quite early that chocolate makes an excellent bribe.”
Fallon frowned at one then the other. She couldn’t imagine either one being part of a ... family.
Khan tilted his head. “Didn’t you have a family?”
Fallon looked at her half-eaten dinner. “No, ‘Syr.” She had Peter and the lostlings, but that wasn’t the same as having people that you actually belonged with.
Sobehk turned to face her. “Then who raised you?”
Fallon lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “There was the institution ...”
Khan tugged
his napkin from his lap and tossed it over his plate. “You did not learn to write code in an Imperial institution.”
Fallon shook her head. No, she hadn’t. Well, she wasn’t on the station anymore, and it didn’t look like she was going back. She glanced at Khan. Ever going back. Peter’s secret would still be safe. She hunched, just a little. “Peter taught me to write code.”
Both Sobehk and Khan sat up. They traded glances.
Khan leaned on his elbow, cupping his chin in his palm. “Peter?”
Fallon nodded. “He’s the station master.”
Sobehk tossed his napkin on his plate. “You were raised by the station master? The Dyson’s Ring station’s artificial intelligence?”
“Peter isn’t artificial.” Fallon shot him a quick glare, then looked back at her plate. “‘Syr. He’s a normal ... well, mostly normal, person. He has a body. It’s hardwired into the station, but he has one.”
Khan pursed his lips and glanced at Sobehk. “It was a very old practice that the humans used in their early days of jump-space travel. They originally hardwired a living body into the ship’s computational to achieve quantum consciousness.” He shook his head. “Your Peter must be quite old.”
Fallon nodded. “He is, ‘Syr.” Ages and ages old.
Khan’s brows rose. “How did you meet him?”
Fallon sat up. She’d never told her story before. She’d prepared one, but she’d never actually said it out loud before. She looked over at Khan. “Can I tell it in story form, ‘Syr?”
“Story form?” Khan blinked, glanced at Sobehk then nodded. “Certainly.”
Fallon tilted her head and nibbled carefully on her bottom lip. “I have to change the way I sit.”
Khan sat back and waved his hand. “By all means.”
Fallon rose to her feet, remembering at the last second how she was supposed to stand. She bowed to both Sobehk and Khan, stalked two paces away, grinned, then twirled and dropped into the traditional folded seat of the storyteller. She loved storytelling.
She raised her hands in a sweeping gesture. “Once upon a time, in the heart of Dyson’s Ring, there lived a boy who would never grow old, and his name was Peter.”
Fallon recited the story she had rehearsed in her head but had never said out loud. It began with being strapped in an institution couch, looking for anything but what they wanted to shove into her brain.
Peter had come as a welcome voice in the deep darkness. He told fascinating stories about far-away worlds and showed her wonderful images from all over the universe. One day, he asked if she wanted to join him in Neverland and become a lostling.
Thrilled to find a way to escape her drab world of shouting voices, she had eagerly accepted. A map was dropped into her mind with fantastical instructions that marked an adventurous journey into the station’s deeps. Her travels culminated in an open elevator shaft marked with a star.
Fallon pointed at the distant wall, caught up in her story. “First star on the left and straight on ’til morning!”
A leap into the darkness and she flew, buoyant on a cushion of wind, to Neverland.
Neverland consisted of a tiny maze of rooms crammed wall to wall with servers and couches where kids of all ages were wired in to play in the most incredible virtual reality fantasyland she had ever seen. It was there that she learned to build her personal fantasies with code and talent.
Eventually she joined the hunting parties of older kids that made forays above ground to collect food. Armed with door codes, internal maps, and Peter within easy reach through any communications line, they slipped unseen through the station’s maze of disused tunnels. Snatching and grabbing, the hunting parties provided the basic necessities for the rather motley group that lived deep in the station’s heart.
Then kids started disappearing all over the station. Eventually, some of the lostlings started to go missing, too.
Fallon, with her talent for code splitting, and a small collection of the savvier older kids went above to discover what happened to them. Armed with breaker codes for entry into doors and moving through hidden passages known only to the station master, they hunted through the station’s bowels. Eventually, they found a small group of kids with a few of their missing companions locked in a warehouse. They had been collected to be farmed.
Sobehk shook his head. “Farmed?”
Fallon nodded. “Station kids are considered a crop of unskilled labor. This particular outfit collects them -- ‘harvesting,’ they call it -- then ships them off-world to sell.”
Sobehk winced. “Oh ... farmed.”
Khan tilted his head. “Any idea who runs that operation?”
Fallon bared her teeth. “The Moribund Company. The nastiest bunch of filthy pirates in the known universe.”
Khan sat back. “You don’t like the Moribund Company?”
Fallon let loose a string of foul curses that should have peeled the paint. She took a breath and smiled. “No, ‘Syr.”
Khan’s brows rose. “But you code-cracked for them, yes?”
“No, I did not! ” Fallon barely held back her snarl. She had to look away to get her temper back under control. “‘Syr. The boss sold some of my stuff to them, I’m sure, but I didn’t work for them. I broke into every ship of theirs I could find.”
Khan smiled. “How very interesting. Please, continue with your story.”
Fallon took a deep breath, closed her eyes briefly to get back into place and continued.
It became a regular mission to go out and find kids. It took time before she was able to get into ship holds as well as warehouses. Then one day, she ran into a trap code that knocked her out cold. She woke up lashed to a chair, facing the boss for the first time.
The boss was very curious as to how she had gotten into ships. He was not interested in the released kids, he assured her, but there were things he was definitely interested in getting out of the occasional ship. He’d be willing to ignore her forays to rescue the kids if she wouldn’t mind picking up a few things for him along the way.
And so began her extremely lucrative job of breaking into ships for secrets. Every credit she earned went into her physical and mental augmentations to make it faster to get into ships and easier to avoid capture. With every upgrade, Peter taught her as much as her brain could hold. Peter wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but he had access to every drop of information that went through the station’s inter-star communications.
Rather than continue with how she had been caught by Sobehk, Fallon twirled up onto her feet and delivered a sweeping bow. “And so ends my adventures, gentlemen, of Peter, Neverland, and the Pirates.”
Khan looked over at Sobehk. “A most remarkable story.”
Sobehk smiled. “I was impressed.”
Fallon grinned. She’d pleased them. A small touch of sadness brushed her heart and tightened her smile. She hadn’t been the only one that had gone on hunting forays for Peter, merely the most successful. With luck, another lostling would take her place and continue her mission, because ... she wasn’t going back.
Khan poured some of the golden liquid from the cut crystal carafe into his goblet. “What pleases me the most is your profound dislike of the Moribund Company.” He set the carafe down. “Because after a long and detailed look at your internal programs, it seems that the trapdoor program in your head is theirs.”
Fallon gasped. “What?”
Chapter Nineteen
The Moribund Company had planted something in her head.
The rage closed around Fallon’s heart into a fist of hate so tight she had to gasp for breath. How dare they? She folded onto her knees and dug her nails into the carpet, shaking with violent rage. How dare they presume to put their filthy programs in her?
“Isabeau?”
Fallon looked up, not caring if Sobehk saw her rage.
Sobehk tilted his head. “Would you like some water?” He patted the floor beside him. “Come.”
Fallon took a deep breath and eas
ed back onto her heels with exquisite slowness. She rose and stalked toward the table. She folded her knees and dropped beside the table in proper form. The amount of control it took to sit properly actually helped to disperse the shaking rage trembling in her limbs.
Only then did she notice Khan’s perfect and dangerous stillness. His copper gaze was ice cold, but a smile curved his lips. “Isabeau, what do you want right now?”
Fallon could barely think past the hate boiling in her. It took her two tries before she could get her desire into words. She looked straight into Khan’s eyes. How she kept back the scream, she didn’t know, but her words came out even and fairly quiet. “I want to make them bleed.”
“Good.” Khan nodded. “So do I.”
Sobehk pressed her water glass into her hand. “Don’t squeeze; you’ll shatter it.” He pushed the glass toward her lips. “Drink.”
Fallon took a swallow, pretty sure she wouldn’t need more than that, but drained the glass. She looked at the empty glass in surprise.
Sobehk smiled. “Better?”
Fallon nodded. The rage was still there, but it was far deeper. It took two tries before she could speak. “Thank you, ‘Syr.”
Sobehk looked over at Khan. “Can the program be removed?”
“It can, though not easily.” Khan tapped the rim of his goblet with a finger. “Interestingly enough, I don’t believe that whoever decided to put that program in Isabeau understood our Isabeau’s actual capabilities, as it does not take advantage of them.”
Fallon turned to look over at Khan. Her teeth clenched so hard her jaw began to ache. “What did they put in my head?” Screw manners.
Khan lifted his goblet. “It seems that whoever broke into your head made the same assumptions that Sobehk did.” He sipped at the golden liquid.
Sobehk frowned. “What assumptions?”
Khan set the goblet down and focused on Fallon. “They assumed that you were a clever acrobatic thief, because that is all the program accesses, your physical abilities.”
Accessed her physical abilities? Fallon frowned. “For what? Am I supposed to do something, ‘Syr?”
