This Alien Shore (32 page)

She was a strange one, all right.

At last he had to almost physically drag her off the bridge, so intent was she upon studying everything within it. She seemed almost angry with him for forcing her to go ... and then, as soon as they exited the control chamber, that mood was gone. As if anger, too, was a mask she simply put aside, her whole mood banished in an instant.

“Where did you study tech?” he asked. He didn't necessarily expect a straight answer—no one who worked the ship had credentials they'd discuss with a stranger—but he figured she'd at least reveal something of her background in how she chose to answer him.

But what he got wasn't helpful at all. She turned to look at him with those strange blue eyes—they
had
to be artificial—and seemed almost puzzled herself.

“I read a lot,” she said at last. And it was clear from her tone that this the closest thing to an answer he was going to get.

Their tour completed, he led her back to her own room. It was little more than a closet with a bed, in size, but he supposed that when you were running from someone you didn't much care how big your bedroom was. Calia flashed him a message that she had copied the security transmissions from Reijik Station into the ship's own database, and was struggling even now to decode them. Soon enough they'd know what the situation was with this girl ... and how it might benefit them to exploit it. Sumi had worked with Allo for over twenty E-years now, and knew how the Castilian's mind worked. Everything that came on this ship paid for itself ... and that included passengers.

A pity, with this one. He rather liked her, for all her strangeness. She intrigued him.

At the door of her room he muttered a polite leavetaking, and began to move back toward the bridge, where he had work of his own to do—but she put a hand on his arm, gently, tentatively, to stop him.

“Yes?”

She seemed about to speak, then shut her mouth without making a sound.

“Raven?”

Strange, how she looked at him when he said that name. Almost as if she didn't recognize it.

She drew up a hand to his shoulder, curved gently, like the hand of a dancer. After a few seconds, one of his questing tentrils brushed against her. The taste of her skin was a not unpleasing mixture of tension and female essence; he wasn't all that sure of his ability to interpret the exudate of Earthies, but there seemed to be a hint of sexual interest, too, barely discernible on her skin. Was that really possible? He should have been repelled—a Terran was hardly a desirable sexual partner in his circle—but something about her manner made the thought more arousing than repellent. He could feel his tendrils stiffening in response and flashed a quick, somewhat embarrassed instruction to his wellseeker, which drained enough blood from the offending appendages that their appearance returned quickly to normal.

Gotta be careful there,
he thought.
Don't want to scare the poor little Earthie too much.

A cryptic, minimal smile curved the comers of the girl's mouth, hinting that perhaps she had guessed at his train of thought and no, it was not repellent to her. Then she drew back her hand from his arm, but slowly; slender fingers stroking the fabric of his jumpsuit with just enough pressure to be felt. Such a simple motion, not suggestive in any obvious way, but his heart started to pound nonetheless. So he told his wellseeker to deal with that as well, and felt the sharp bite of mechanical activity in his arm as the autopharmacy embedded in his flesh released a drop of the proper medication into his bloodstream. Thank God for modem medicine. He'd have to make sure he had enough sedative compounds for future use; he had a feeling he'd need them.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. Almost a whisper. “For the tour.”

There was nothing more to say. He mumbled something that might have amounted to “you're welcome,” then nodded a stiff leavetaking and backed out of the room.

W
orms. That's what they reminded her of: moist, repellent worms, like the ones they had studied in Earthbio 101. She remembered her tutor encouraging her to reach out and touch one, to experience its nature through all of her senses, not just the computer-enhanced visuals she usually relied upon. It was cold and clammy and soft in a squishy, nauseating way. Later he had shown her pictures of worms mating, wrapped in some gelatinous gook, and she had pictured touching
that,
and the sickness had welled up inside her. Only the prompt action of her wellseeker had kept her from throwing up right in the classroom. Could it help her now? She wasn't so sure.

How can you even think about him that way?
she asked Katlyn. Scrubbing her hand as she did so, trying to scour away the memory of contact with Sumi's moist, repellent appendages. The thought of having any kind of sexual contact with the Variant, damp and snakelike tendrils against her naked skin ... she leaned over the side of the bed suddenly and did throw up, her whole body heaving as if trying to force out the image. And no bottie was going to clean it up for her, either. She was going to have to deal with the mess herself.

You've got a lot of growing up to do, kid,
Katlyn told her.

God, if only the Others would go away. Just for an hour. Just one blessed hour of being a normal human being, one human being in all her parts—not trapped in a body that did things which repelled her, or endangered her, or ... or anything.

“I want to be normal,” she whispered. “Oh, please, I just want to know what that's like again....”

This is normal now,
Verina thought gently.
There's no going back.

To which Derik added,
So fucking get used to it.

Hands shaking, senses reeling, she dialed up a towel from the commissary outlet and slowly, shakily, began to clean up the evidence of her sickness.

“G
ot it,” Tam announced.

Allo and Sumi both looked up from the work they were doing as soon as the Belial spoke. They'd been waiting for such an announcement.

“And?” Allo asked.

“Take a look.”

An inloading query flashed in Sumi's field of vision. He answered with a go-ahead, and the ship's innernet began to feed text into his brainware. He shut his eyes so as to see it more clearly.

There was a picture, first of all. It was clearly the same girl they had on board, though taken when she was younger, and she looked every bit as prosperous as Allo had guessed her to be. Sumi quickly assessed her lo-G formalwear and matching jewelry to be in the neighborhood of a thousand corporates in value, and that was if there wasn't a designer label inside to boost the price. He was willing to bet there was.

He scrolled past the encrypted text of the message itself—Tam always included a copy of the original in his reports, he was a little bit anal in that respect—until he got to the translation. It was short and sweet, and all that Allo had hoped it would be.

“So,” Allo mused, “our little passenger's a terrorist. Any thoughts on that, Sumi?”

For a moment the Medusan did not respond. “Hard to believe,” he said at last. “But not impossible.”

“She fits the bill,” Tam pointed out. “If terrorists were recruiting, they'd look for someone with an air of innocence, who wouldn't draw suspicion. Someone just like her. Don't you think?”

“I think,” Allo said slowly, “that someone wants her very badly. I think there's one hell of a crime involved, if an Earth Habitat was destroyed. I think there's someone out there willing to transmit any lie it takes, to get hold of her.” He looked up at Sumi. “How about you?”

Sumi didn't answer right away; he was trying not to think about his own memories of the girl, for they were ill suited to the current conversation. The touch of her fingers, the taste of her skin ... he forced those images out of his mind and struggled to recover his objectivity. “I doubt she's a station terrorist,” he said at last. “That being the one unforgivable crime in outspace ... who would give her refuge, once the truth was known? She doesn't seem the kind to risk that. She isn't ...” he struggled to find the right word.

“Focused enough?” Allo suggested.

“Gutsy enough?” Tam offered.

“Polished enough,” Sumi said. He was thinking of her vulnerability, then how it gave way to a strange intensity on the bridge, and that in turn to a more seductive aspect. “A terrorist would have her act down better than this girl does. A real one wouldn't have run through the docking ring like that, no matter what the cause. She'd have had a better story prepared to cover her ass than what she gave us, and she'd know how to access funds ... or how to do without them.”

“True.” Allo nodded thoughtfully. “If so, then the contact data given here is a fake. And whoever sent this out is pretty damn confident ... because someone who saw her might lose track of this eddress and contact the real ECC. So they'd have to have their bases covered there, too, just in case that happened.”

“That's one hell of a high-level contact,” Tam mused.

“Which means ...” Allo drew in a deep breath. “Whoever wants her is probably powerful, and probably rich, and willing to do just about anything to get her.”

He let that sit for a minute, then asked, “Any comments?”

There were none.

“Any questions?”

None.

“All right. Sumi, you keep an eye on her. Win her trust if you can, see if you can get her to disclose something useful. We still have to track down just who it is that's looking for her, and do it very carefully. You keep her out of the way while we finish off our current business, then we can focus on her.”

“Allo, I—”

Silence.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Sumi said quietly. His tendrils were held rigid in a submissive posture, communicating nothing. “It doesn't matter.”

“Tam, try to trace this transmission back to its source. In the meantime I'm going to get that shit in the hold unloaded, and if we have to cut price to do that fast, so be it. We've got more valuable cargo now.”

“You think she's worth that much?” Sumi asked.

For a moment there was silence. The pilot's eyes shut halfway as he scanned through the message again, letters bright against the darkness of his inner lids.

“No question about it,” he finally assessed. “The only question is, to whom?”