by Robin Smith
But wait…
“Can I upload things?” she asked.
“What ‘things’, precisely?”
“A game? There’s this game I play. It’s pretty big—well, it’s big on my computer at home,” she corrected herself, looking dubiously at the surrounding alien consoles. “For that matter, I don’t know if it’ll even be compatible enough to play here.”
“If the program originated on Earth, it can be attuned to this computer,” Vala replied, giving his tureen a casual swirl. “When you are ready to upload the data, tell me and I will see your game installed properly to your terminal.”
Skye chugged the second half of her tasteless slime, stood impatiently through its thirty-second self-cleaning cycle, and threw her tureen back in the cupboard while Vala sat smiling and pretending not to pay attention to her. The computer station was all of five feet from the table; she rushed over anyway, dropped into the uncomfortable seat, and touched the screen. She’d seen him do this often enough, so she wasn’t as terrifically impressed when light sprang out and took a keyboard’s form as maybe she should have been, she just started typing.
There was no resistance beneath her fingers, of course, but the ‘keys’ were very sensitive. She checked her email first—even the spam was a welcome sight—but the only messages were some weekly comic strips she subscribed to and an e-coupon from her favorite pizza place. She reveled in a few daily puzzles from the websites she frequented, and then got down to the serious business of Battlehammer.
She’d have to buy a new game and another set of expansions to get it working up here, she was resigned to that, but it was easy enough to download the e-version of the game on Earth, so it ought to be do-able up here. All she had to do was go to their home site, punch up her account, and—
Her account had been suspended. Surely that had to be a mistake. Even though Skye hadn’t been at home, the Battlehammer people should have been receiving automatic payments from her credit card, which also should have been paid automatically by her bank. Skye was a big believer in setting things up so that she had to think about them as little as possible.
Confused, she carefully pecked through the light-keyboard until she could call up her account summary, and sure enough: Account Overdue.
But she was so positive…she knew the last thing she’d done before leaving the house in the company of those nice young soldiers had been to make sure all her debts were paid off, all her mail was on hold, and all her future bills were set up for automatic payment. By God, did this mean her rent wasn’t being paid either? What was going to happen to all her stuff?
Now fighting off a useless throb of panic (what could she really do about any of this up here?), Skye left Battlehammer and went to her credit card’s site instead.
It wouldn’t let her in.
Account frozen, it said after she’d tried three times. Access denied.
Numbly, Skye went to her bank’s site and keyed herself in to what was essentially the same message. The accounts were still there, as far as she could tell, and as far as she could tell she was still considered the account-holder, but none of her passwords were working. The accounts were frozen pending reauthorization. By whom, she had no idea.
Wait, she did have an idea. A very bad idea. And she could see his face all over again, that man who had never even bothered to give her his name when he’d told her that she had a choice: either she could launch herself into space for an exciting career in interspecies prostitution, or she could be locked up indefinitely on grounds of National Security.
What was she supposed to go home to? Her apartment would be long gone, and all her things…Honestly, she didn’t care so much about the furniture (well, okay, a part of her cared, all right, a part of her cared a lot, but she knew the sofa wasn’t exactly leaving a void), but what about her photographs? The baby book her mom had kept so faithfully until she was five? Her dad’s journals from when he traveled around Europe and Africa? What about the home movies she had saved on her computer? She knew how things worked; eventually, all her saleable stuff would just be packed up and auctioned off by her landlord, and all the things that mattered, that really mattered, would end up in some dumpster.
“Skye?”
Vala rarely called her by her name. Hearing it was enough to shock her back into the present, where she realized she’d been sitting open-mouthed and wet-eyed in front of the alien monitor for several minutes. She didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t even want to look at him. He’d done such a nice thing for her, and all she wanted to do was crawl into a dark hole somewhere and bawl like a baby.
Her life was gone. She’d done everything they’d wanted her to do, and the sons of bitches had taken her life away anyway.
A blur of black at the corner of her vision; Vala had crept up behind her and was looking at the monitor over her head. She shut it off clumsily, mashing through a dozen error messages because her hands were shaking so badly that she kept blurring into the other holographic keys.
“Thank you,” she said, made herself say. It didn’t even sound like her voice. She got up from the chair, kept her face turned away, and escaped to the privacy of her room where tears, useless tears, offered up her only refuge.
How long she lay on the muffling bed and cried, she didn’t know, but it couldn’t have been too long. She’d had a lot of crying jags since coming here, and even if she didn’t have a clock, she thought she was pretty good at gauging the seriousness of her fits. On a scale of one to ten, this last couldn’t have been more than a five. Really, what was the point of going hardcore hysterical? It would be over and done by a year or more before she could ever do anything about it.
That pushed out a few more tears, but they were silent ones. Skye didn’t have much to pride herself on, but she’d always been a pragmatic girl; when all was said and done, it really was no good crying over stolen goods, even if they were the only pieces of her past she had left.
But not crying had another effect. As she sat up and pushed her hair listlessly back over her shoulder, she realized she could hear, beyond the endless droning hum of the ship’s systems, Vala’s voice.
It confused her, in the easy, fuzzy way confusion can come on after a good crying spell. Vala barely even spoke to her and she knew there was no one else around. If he was supposed to be dictating a “captain’s log”, like they did on TV, he was really behind in them, because he’d never done it before.
Furthermore, she realized that the thinness of the walls was such that if she held her breath and really focused, she could make out what he was saying fairly well. Sure, she could…but should she? Eavesdropping was rude, and Vala had some definite ideas on how to discourage rudeness. She didn’t want to get in trouble with him, not when he’d gone out of his way to do something nice for her, and certainly not when she already felt so crummy about everything else.
On the other hand, no one knew the acoustics of this place better than Vala, so was it really eavesdropping if he knew he could be overheard? And besides, she lived here now. She had as much a right to know what was going on as he did.
He wouldn’t see it that way and she knew it. Nevertheless, Skye held her breath and listened.
“—am not interested in listening to anymore of your excuses,” he was saying, and if he’d ever used an icier tone, Skye had never heard it. That alone was more than a little arresting. “The next human who addresses me will be he who selected my assistant.”
Those words, delivered in that tone, faceless behind this wall, gripped her bruised heart with something like fear. He couldn’t be sending her home, could he? If he wouldn’t do that when she hit him, why over this? But what other reason could he possibly have to make a phone call to Earth and ask for that particular man if it wasn’t to make a complaint?
The lengthy silence in the room beyond was broken at last by a new voice, one that sounded even more rattled than when she’d heard it last. “Emissary,” it began, and for a moment, Skye could almost see
him as he’d been sitting behind that desk with his tie unknotted and his shirt all sweaty, smoking his cigarette and looking like he’d almost rather be sucking on a live grenade. “What an unexpected pleasure. My name is—”
“Entirely irrelevant,” Vala interrupted. “It suffices that you stand responsible for the procurement of my assistant.”
A very long pause. Skye wasn’t even aware of holding her breath now. Then, cautiously: “Is there a problem with the girl?”
“Is there indeed?” Vala countered.
Another pause. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Emissary.”
“The very next time you silence this channel to confer, I will fire on your planet. You are speaking to me, not amongst yourselves.”
“I-I’m sorry, Em—”
“Why have you seized my assistant’s financial resources?”
Skye’s heart seemed to skip a beat and then slam back into rhythm extra hard: ba-THUD! He wasn’t mad at her. He was…He was fighting for her.
“W-Well there was a…a question of s-secur—How did you even find ou—”
“Was it meant to be secret from me?” Vala asked, and his voice was like a sword cut right out of the night, all gleaming edges and shadowed steel.
“No!” the poor bastard down on Earth shrilled out. “Look, look, this is a security matter! We were promised that the assimilation was going to be discreet, that we could avoid a global panic!”
“I fail to see the connection.”
“W-We need to make sure that Ms. Westlocke doesn’t use her resources—”
“You admit then that you have knowingly sent me a duplicitous and dishonest human.”
“No!” gasped Skye, actually clutching at the wall as if she could reach right through it and grab his arm, show him her honest eyes.
“No!” the man on Earth shrieked, and she could hear a frightened babble of other voices behind him in what was no doubt a very tense, sweaty, smoky room. “No, we trust her completely! She’s the most trustworthy—”
“Then it is you who are the liar!” Vala roared.
It sounded like a twelve-year old boy shrieking, “What? No! I swear to God—”
“One of the conditions of the woman’s contract for the services she provides me is a promise of her silence when she returns to Earth. Is that not true?”
“That is! That is absolutely true!”
“And yet you have seized her monetary resources, claiming security risk. Therefore, either you do not expect her to hold to that condition, meaning that you have sent me a duplicitous and dishonest human to earn my intimate trust, or her character is entirely irrelevant because you never had any intention of keeping your promises to her in the first place. Which is it?” Vala thundered.
“It’s neither, I swear to God, it’s neither! It wasn’t even my decision. There’s just things we have to do!”
“Then they are things which can be undone.”
“If it’s her house, I mean, if she’s worried about her house, for God’s sake, tell her it’s all packed up, I swear. It’s being stored, it’s totally safe! We-We wouldn’t—” He interrupted himself with a hysterical shave of laughter. “We wouldn’t just throw it all out!”
“Do not presume to know my mind again,” Vala said in that midnight swordfighting voice. “We are not addressing the woman’s concerns, but my own.”
“I-I—”
“While she is here, she is dually in my service and your employ, and I expect her to draw a wage. There are no slaves in the Empire!”
“No, sir! Yes, sir!”
“Then you will remove the hold you have placed on her resources.”
“I…I can talk to—”
“Have you been wasting my time?” Vala cut in frostily. “I asked to speak to the man responsible for her arrangements. Now I hear that you must talk to someone else. Again, you have misled me, human.”
“Why does she need money?!” the man shrilled out. “For Christ’s sake, she’s in space!”
“It amuses her to purchase games.”
“What, Battlehammer?” The man laughed again, just as hysterically and now a little meanly as well. “She’s complaining about losing her Battlehammer account? We can’t let her play that! Try to understand, she could be talking to anyone, saying anything—”
“Then you admit—”
“I’m not admitting anything!”
Now it was Vala’s turn to pause. For perhaps ten seconds, Skye heard nothing but her own pulse drumming in her ears and the shaky rooba-rooba of the voices in that sweaty, smoky, Earthbound room. Then, without emotion, Vala said, “I have just annihilated one of your island countries.”
Explosive babble. Skye recoiled and stared at the wall in disbelief.
“Silence,” Vala said evenly, speaking right over the top of the panic on the speakers. “I have not. But remember how easily I might. Do not interrupt me, human. And do not raise your voice again. I am done with hearing that.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, so hoarsely that she wasn’t even sure it was the same guy. “I didn’t mean it. I—You’re shaking things up down here, you just—”
“I? I am merely voicing concerns which demand redress, and as demands go,” he went on, beginning to sound just the faintest bit on edge, “these are ridiculously simple. You have suspended my assistant’s finances without cause, which in addition to being a gross infringement of her rights, also places the burden of keeping her entertained fully on me. I am not here to entertain her.”
Skye stepped back from the wall and stared at it. Of all the numbing, unpleasant, and frightening things she’d heard tonight, that was somehow the worst, the most wounding. Even hearing him say he’d blown up an island wasn’t that bad, because she’d known even as he’d said it that he wouldn’t actually do it, not just because someone cut him off mid-sentence. But this…this sounded like something he meant.
Skye backed up to the bed and sat. She could still hear him, no longer clearly enough to make out more than a word here or an answer there, and no longer caring what conclusion he reached. She sat and stared at her hands where they rested on her knees and just let time pass, until she heard his footsteps out in the hall.
He never knocked and he didn’t knock now. He just paced, being loud and obvious, wanting her to come out the way she usually did because going in to talk to her was so far beneath him, but everything he did was supposed to be the center of her whole world.
It had almost felt like that this morning, when she’d thought he’d cleared a console for her so that she had a place of her own, and not just so she’d stop bugging him with conversation.
Skye stayed where she was.
Pacing, pacing. Finally, he went to the exercise room and worked out for a few hours, pausing every so often to peek out into the hall. Then he showered, recycled the water, sterilized the shower-stall…came out to stand in front of her door again.
She lay down on her bed and didn’t speak.
He went back to the main room, and maybe he started to work, but in just a few minutes, he was up again and stalking down the hall, this time to his own room.
Skye glanced at the light above her bed just in time to watch it come on.
He never played fair. Never.
She got up, because she had to. She didn’t dress in her slinky nightgown for him. He didn’t really want her ‘services’. She walked the dozen or so paces to his door and opened it.
He was right on the other side—waiting, glaring, fully dressed. “I am never going to understand you,” he snapped.
“I’m sorry,” she said tonelessly, her face carefully composed. “What can I explain?”
“Stop that!” He stalked away from her as far as the bed, then spun around and said, “What the hell is the matter with you? Weren’t you listening?”
“Yes, I was.” She raised her chin slightly, but kept her calm. She was a mask, she told herself. A porcelain mask. “I heard you call me duplicitous and dishonest.”
His alien face smoothed out in shock, then furrowed in exasperation. “That wasn’t about you, that was about him! That wasn’t even about him, that was just gaining leverage. I was trying to help you.”
“Were you? Or were you just making sure I amuse myself from now on?”
His mouth dropped open, then snapped shut. He raised one hand and smacked it down over the point of his pointed head and stayed that way for a while, his eyes squeezed shut and sharp teeth bared. “I have to say things a certain way,” he said finally, barely moving his jaw. “It is purely political. The Empire must never be seen as bowing to the will of a weaker planet.”
Her mask cracked. “That makes it okay for you to call me a liar? And a...And a pest! You made me happy this morning! Really, really happy! But I wish you’d never done it if all it was for was just to…to shut me up!”
“You misunderstood!”
“Well that’s never going to happen again,” she said, pushing at her eyes, the dry eyes in the face of her porcelain mask. “Because I’m all done trying to make the best of this. I’m just…here to serve you.” She looked at him, her heart numb in her chest and her arms limp at her sides. “Where do you want me?”
“You’re acting like a fool!” he exploded. “Do you want to know why I gave you that terminal? I did it so you would sit with me during my work-shift instead of sitting in your room!”
“Bull!” The audacity of the lie even provoked a shaky, unhappy species of laughter out of her. “Bullshit, even! You only did it so you wouldn’t have to listen to me talk anymore!”
“I listen!”
“You never talk back!”
“Men don’t talk to women!” he roared. He wrestled visibly with his self-control when she flinched back, paced shortly beside the bed, and then stopped facing away from her. He gave her nothing but his broad back and the barest thread of a growl running through his words when he said, “When a woman of the Empire is called to serve, it is a point of pride to anticipate her man’s desires and provide for them intuitively. When such a woman talks about her day, she is asking her man what he wants her to do with it. When she asks what he thinks, she is really asking what she’s supposed to think.”
