Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 2 / Chapter 4 –>

He wakes from dreams of sand with the taste of cordite in his mouth. He dodges a last couple of Russoturk tracers fired at his head as he peeks over the ragged lip of a wind-carved canyon, rolls to his right and plummets off the side of his bed. His head strikes the corner or the end table as he goes down, there is a burst of stars like detonating howitzer shells, and from the chiaroscuro glare of the eruption inside his skull, he’s pinpointed by a red-glimmering pair of infrared enhanced sniper’s goggles that turn out to be Nomar watching his antics from across the room. Chittering apologies, Nomar bounces down from the top of Ray’s desk and lashes his sensor whip none too gently across the gash with which Ray has impressed his forehead.

Ray remains where he is for some time, canoodling, pressing his palms flat against his temples as if that will contain the throbbing. His blood streams backward into his hair, runs into his ears. It drips off his earlobes and strikes the deck with a fearsomely regular pfft, pfft, pfft that suggests he should probably seek some sort of medical attention.

“Medic!” he mutters with much less intensity than he should. It doesn’t matter. Whisper or roar, the medics never come. Medics are for men in the regular infantry, for salving wounds inflicted during the charges of heroic light brigades. In his case, medics come only to collect dog tags and incriminating papers and highly classified field weapons that the government doesn’t want to let fall into the hands of the enemy. This is completely beside the fact that any man who screams for a medic on the battlefield runs a 2:1 chance of attracting a coup de grace opening of the third eye from a Russoturk crawler rather than the expected course of triage, air evac to Wadi E’lukar, pretty and dark eyed Israeli nurses for two months, then the long, slow flight home to a hero’s welcome and celebratory rural American barbecue.

Ray has seen Tac Sergeant McCoy, his gut wounds spurting an eye-popping geyser of blood, advise a field of corpses: Just rub some sand on it, it’ll be fine. Just rub some sand on it. The same way Ray’s coach in pony league baseball might have extolled the medicinal value of infield dirt. On a muggy Indiana summer night, infield dirt was a panacea for dings on the wrist, bruises on cheeks and lips swollen from the impact of a baseball’s bad bounce–all of which came frequently off the rain-cratered community ball diamond. Rub some dirt on it, Ray! Heart of their lineup’s due, boy! Quit whining and get back to third base before your momma sees you crying!

McCoy would’ve been a great baseball coach. If he hadn’t been dead, of course. McCoy and Lance Corporal Lilly and Lieutenant (Hoo-ah!) Wendell Cain and–

Screw it. He’s not going to go there today.

It’s just after six Greenwich. Ray figures that’s as good a time to get up as any. Lying here certainly isn’t doing him any good. He locates some disinfectant cream and a tube of flesh toned dermaplast bandage paste in his night stand, then wanders into the head. He scrubs the wound on his forehead with cold water.

The rills and crimson contrails generated by his seeping blood look uncannily like the flowing, graceful Arabic script he used to see on posters in Tehran and Baghdad, or the exquisite handwriting of lower level Kurd functionaries on border documents. This had always impressed him mightily, this overt attention to the written word. Long after the Western world had replaced it’s blocky and obtuse written characters with blocky and obtuse typographical characters (and ultimately, blocky and obtuse pixel patterns on terminal screens), the Arabs held fast to sentences that flowed like sweet water across a cream colored page. Every document was a work of art, every writer an Irish monk laboring over a perfect folio of sacred text. Because he had never bothered to learn Arabic, Ray had wondered if it was beautiful to him because he could not read it, or in spite of it. Words outside the context of meaning, like a Tibetan Buddhist’s mandala. Words as objects rather than memes, where content was determined by the eye of the beholder rather than the intent of the artist, the communicator.

In February, what, four years ago, he and Corporal Isaac Rabin, a Brooklyn Jew–and a fellow Red Sox fan, who by his very loyalty proved he knew something about Diasporic existential isolation–spent a weekender pass in Djubruk, Chechnya. The Las Vegas of the Steppes as it was styled, despite the fact that it was ringed by mountains and hundreds of kilometers from any actual steppe-like geography but marketed as such because Westerners, particularly Americans, controlled all the money and bore only a passing familiarity with world geography. (And because Asians and to a lesser extent Eastern Europeans still considered the steppe cultures of Attila and the grand Khans to be vaguely, mythically romantic, and assumed the nuances would be universal rather than merely region specific. By their reckoning, it was a set of legends that was at least as compelling as those of the American Old West. This estimation turned out to be so accurate and to hold so much worldwide appeal that it took nothing less than the eruption of the New Mesopotamian Conflict to save Djubruk and its heavily Chinese investors from an inevitable and squalid decline into disaster.)

But in those days, Ray and Isaac had stumbled into what was still a thriving frontier metropolis of neon casinos, front-window strip joints, sickly sweet opium dens and Third World slave brothels. The type of place where fourteen year old sino-afghani whores unzipped your trousers without asking, began sucking your tool right in the middle of the street, then demanded reasonable compensation by way of the universal language–that is, a rusty spike pressed against the tender lump of your scrotum. All the fun and feckless abandon a soldier could ask for, all priced under a dollar…which happened to be Djubruk’s unofficial civic motto.

Anyway, the bright eyed kid sister of one of those miserable street whores had sold Ray a crayon and chalk family rendering for the exorbitant price of sixty-three cents American. Wonderful blues and greens and ubiquitous camel-browns. In the forefront was cock-sucking older sister fellating a stick figure with a prodigious bulge of manhood–sans tetanus inducing spike to generate the illusion of libidinous consent. Smaller, to the left, Ahkira herself in idealized yellow satin pinafore, dark haired and grinning with her one working eye wide in cyclopean wonder and contentment. (Ray is able to recognize all the family members because Ahkira had subtly identified them with names and slender, accusatory arrows pointing. The fellated individual was anonymous, but Ray supposed it was meant to be him, kind of like the memento photographs you could buy from the camera-wielding barbarians manning steel-reinforced bunker kiosks in U.S. amusement parks). Elevated, but clearly behind Ahkira’s sister is the blackened gorgon lump of B’hutuc, resplendent with jagged silver knives, a menacing shadow cast across the domestic tableau. Much less threatening presented here than it would have been having his actual flesh and blood present to oversee the sexual activity with the toothy smile of a midnight horror and the self-interest of a Djubruk pimp.

Ray has kept this picture. It’s in a locker in a lease-by-the-month storage depot outside Indianapolis currently, sealed in vacuum plastic to keep the mice out of it. It is one of his few prized possessions, because when he thinks of it, what he envisions isn’t Ahkira’s turgid world, but the clean and spidery track of her script, the names and arrows. Things of beauty in a world utterly and pathetically wrong, words outside the context of meaning.

This, of course, makes him think of things that are not nearly so pleasant as slave whores and their handicapped siblings, so he finishes up quickly, trying not to examine his features in the mirror as he does so lest darker revelations be found lurking in the bruised pillows beneath his eyes or sprouting like poppies amongst his nose hairs or peeping like prairie dogs from the cavernous pores on the tip of his nose. A man’s body should not become a personal metaphor system for a catalog of bad memories.

Since he has almost six hours before he goes on duty and a starship traveling through the vacuum of space has no regular business hours, Ray decides that it is not insanely early to think about breakfast. He stops in his room to change into khaki cargo pants and a button up civvy style shirt, then whistles for Nomar to follow. By this time, Nomar has lapped up his spilled blood, added the matrix of Ray’s DNA to a cross-referenced internal database, subjected the proteins to a shocking number of enzymes and stored the residual matter in his internal tank (since Ray’s room, unlike waste bins and storage vaults, doesn’t have a standard sewage flume). Nomar streaks past him into the corridor, then prances impatiently, his iridium-alloy paws ticking against the deckplate like hailstones, while Ray secures the door.

After a fairly heated discussion, they manage to more or less agree that they’re both in the mood for something Thai. Thai trash is always a rat favorite, for reasons Ray has never been able to fathom, especially given that Ng Uk-Thong, the Thai franchisee on Paraclete, steadfastly refuses to strike a food-for-labor deal with the system vets. Uk-Thong is probably aware of his favored-nation status among the rat leadership and sees no reason to make compromises with mere carbon-form emissaries. That, or the fact that it is a staple of Thai culture and subsequently its cuisine to believe that anything worth using once is worth recycling for someone else, which is both an example of cost-controlling efficiency and striking cosmopolitanism. As most inexperienced cooks know, a good food processor covers a multitude of culinary sins. The “chefs” at Uk-Thong’s Bangkok House knew it, and they generated very little raw waste as a result.

Ray and Nomar skitter up to the Garden Level, taking advantage of the early hour and the light pedestrian traffic to grab one of the public lifts. Six months out of the hub-city dock at Stratiskaya Daransk, the business travelers have finally accepted the cold fact that regardless of what the financial markets might be doing, Commander Sorensen isn’t going to let them use the broadcast array to triple or quintuple their fortunes until late in the evening. After some initial whining, they’ve adjusted their internal clocks. Now they rise late, plotting their fiscal strategies in the languid hours between noon and six, laying about in their bedclothes until it’s time to assemble in the queue outside the Network Control hub just off the auxiliary communications bridge. They send their wives to theatres and delicately powdered trysts; shoo their kids out to find mischief or personal drugs of choice on the main concourse; drink themselves into a toxic stupor and pass out at their desks, and in the end, it isn’t so much unlike the life they had planetside, just skeltered a few hours.

So at this hour, they encounter mostly children on the prowl for entertainment and crewmen bustling about in the course of their duties. The children range from barely toddling to grim teenagers. They wander the decks in cliques like street gangs transplanted from Buenos Aires’ urban sprawl–angry, bored, chasing after mischief that will most likely end in violence. The fact that they are mostly effete, lily-skinned poshes doesn’t seem to occur to them. At the lowest passenger level, Ray picks up a boisterous tailing of eight year olds, boys and girls, who had been occupied in attempting to disassemble one of the public data kiosks. They are as incorrigible as a tumble of puppies and won’t leave him alone until Nomar has been poked and examined to their satisfaction and subjected to the sort of invasive curiosity that is second nature to a rat, and would probably have done Nomar proud if he hadn’t been its unwilling recipient. When he neither fetches nor jiggers about chasing his tail, the children lose interest and let them pass without further molestation.

Bangkok House is nearly deserted when they arrive. Ng Uk-Thong’s dowdy Brazilian wife, Maria Concita, mans the service counter alone, wrapped in roughly half a kilometer’s worth of floral print sarong and still displaying a length of cleavage that could probably be detected with satellite reconnaissance photography. Business is slow enough that she doesn’t bother to heave her considerable bulk up from the stool behind the cash register, even in order to engage in her legendary hostile and howling management style at the assorted pot clanging/dish dropping /carefully orchestrated chaos that pours forth from the depths of the kitchen area.

Ray blurts out an order for a bland pad kee mao with tofu and a side of plain jasmine rice in between her outbursts of neo-Mexicali pidgin obscenity. (“What was that you wanted?” I have a customer! Hold your tongue, you goat molesting son of pig! “That is the pad kee mao, you say, sir?” Dent another pot, you discharge of an infected mule’s penis, and Gucho will cut your throat with his box knife! I swear it will be so! “Oh, the chicken is so much nicer! Fresh from the flash freeze unit this morning, mister!” You talk of my large ass! I will show you my lesion encrusted, puss-filled diarrheal ass when I stick your head in it! And so on.) Because it is early in the morning, and Ray is both a member of the crew and known to Maria Concita as a customer, she is making a quite an impressive show of restraint. The fact that Ng has learned to keep her away from the knives also helps.

The stir fried noodles and rice arrive in wide crockery bowls decorated with Thai characters but manufactured in an old Irish factory in Queens. Ray retreats with Nomar to the far corner of the Bangkok House’s open air food court, which is separated from the main concourse by a low wall topped with plastic ferns. A few moments later, Maria Concita abandons her station with a frightening leap and thunderous landing that Ray is certain must have shoved Paraclete three degrees off course. She vanishes into the galley, from which a fresh gale of curses and some indiscriminate screaming noises emerge. Then a clatter. Then silence.

This is why Ray always gets the tofu. Never the chicken. Definitely not ever the beef. Never ever, not with what he knows about the latest advances in industrial food processing technology.

Ray stares intensely at his bowl, then out over the nearly empty concourse, determined to notice nothing. Nomar claws his way onto the tabletop and displays a passing interest in the jasmine rice, but mostly picks the cubes of tofu out from among Ray’s forest of noodles.

They eat for several minutes in this disturbing silence while Ray internally debates the wisdom of slinking away before Ng’s wife can return.

He becomes aware of a shadow hanging over him and glances up sharply, anticipating Maria Concita Uk-Thong wielding a frying pan or a stainless steel wok the diameter of Mount Fuji, determined to leave no witnesses. But it is not Frau Uk-Thong, and the dissonance leaves him dazed, his jaw hanging.

Emma Whiston peers down at him, her eyes squeezed into slits, her hands clasped behind her back. She burrows into him with the intensity of a woodland sprite attacking a man who has inadvertently violated a fairy ring.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she says, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were stalking me. I may very well have to report you to your captain for my own protection.”

Ray swallows an asphyxiation inducing lump of noodles and undercooked vegetables. He remembers to close his mouth after a suitably embarrassing pause. Recognizing Emma’s chemical signature, Nomar climbs onto his hind legs and does his best to attract her attention with a frantic forepaw wave–eager, no doubt, for another taste of her. This happens to be something he and Ray have in common, but only because Ray has a documented a weakness for young women in tight cream blouses and short plaid skirts. It’s an old parochial school hang-up.

“I believe I was actually here first, Miss…”

“As if you’ve forgotten my name already!” She makes a delightful show of foot tapping impatience.

“Emma.”

He surprises himself by winking as he says her name.

“I suppose that’s better than nothing. Not exactly proper, mind you, but it shows you have at least half a brain in your head.”

“Do you always insult acquaintances in public restaurants, Miss Whiston?”

“Most always, when it doesn’t suit me to approach them in more direct ways.”

“And that would be how? With a sharp piece of glass jammed into their ribs?”

This tickles her, and she presses a delicate hand over her mouth as she giggles. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, Ray? Oh, except you’ve probably got to go on duty soon. Or you’re already on duty because you’re such a conscientious Systems Hardware Technician.”

It was close enough. At least she’d been paying that much attention. She was very pretty, but exhausting. So much unfocused, exuberant energy. Much more exhausting than pretty, really.

“You’re a very odd girl, you know that?”

“I’m eccentric. My entire family is eccentric. We can be that way because we’re wealthy. Unbearably, fabulously wealthy.”

“Because you get paid by the word? Or by the offense?”

Like slamming a door, all the play goes out of her. “You’re not very nice after all, are you?”

Ray returns to his noodles. He doesn’t watch her anymore, though it normally wouldn’t have bothered him to watch her for quite some time–hours and hours, in fact–if she had a volume control. Eventually, when she doesn’t give up and go away, he says, “I’m actually quite nice, when I’m not being verbally assaulted by pretentious little snits, especially when I’m eating breakfast.”

She is silent for a few moments, and Ray congratulates himself smugly. Then sighs. Then feels the imminent psychic slap his mother would have doled out to him had she been standing close enough to hear.

Ugh.

“Would you like to join me?” Ray asks, smiling thinly in defeat.

See, mom? Mom, you know I love you, okay? You know I think you’re the greatest woman to ever walk the face of the earth. You’re the bees knees and all of that. But I’ve got to tell you, really. I’ve killed maybe a hundred men in the last ten years, and I don’t mean shooting at them across three or four hundred meters of sand or picking them off fortifications from behind a sniper’s scope. I mean, I’ve killed them. Face to face, looking into their eyes, sticking sharp things into places they never wanted pointed objects stuck, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t hate any of them, mom. I wasn’t rude to them or inappropriately angry with them or behaving crassly like those filthy Heatherman kids that frisked around at the end of our street. If such a thing can be said, I killed them in a dignified way I thought wouldn’t make you completely ashamed of me. Most of the time, at least.

I’ve been a good son. Really.

So couldn’t you have just backed off for a second and let me be rude to this annoying girl? I would really have liked you to give me a break on this one.

Emma grins back at him, slowly and warily. In a small voice, she says, “I like Thai.”

The lights come on, her stunning blue eyes spring wide, and she’s off again, electric and vibrant and chillingly incandescent. “I adore it, actually.” Ray pushes the chair across the table from him out with his foot and she drops into it, the tide of her words rolling on. “I would have thought you’d be eating American, Ray, a big, strapping farm boy like yourself. You do like to eat American don’t you? Or has your head been turned by foreign…tastes.”

Oh, she was wicked. Delightfully so in some ways, when she didn’t generate in him the urge to strangle her. “What makes you think I’m American.”

“Your accent gives you away. Like mine, I suppose. I’m American, too. Originally, I mean. I was born there.” The smile, the eyes, a wink. “So do you? Do you like American?”

“American food makes me homesick,” he says, which was pretty much true.

Click. Click. Click. Pieces of a puzzle he wasn’t aware he had been assembling drop into place, revealing a landscape that was hauntingly familiar. That Whiston. Those Whistons. Not a disinherited, starfaring branch living off the name and the notoriety, but the actual root of the family tree. It was as if she’d said the magical words Rockefeller or Gates or Primus to a latter day, goggle eyed Horatio Alger protagonist. The air seeps out of Ray’s lungs and doesn’t return for several seconds.

“Please don’t look at me like that, Ray,” Emma says.

A shake of the head. “Like what?”

“Like I’ve tipped my hand and shown you all of my cards.” She knew that he knew, and the plaint in her eyes was suddenly there, as real and naked as tears.

In that instant, he understands much. “How about I just go back to leering when you’re not watching?”

“I’d like that.”

“I’d like that, too, but it isn’t exactly polite, so I won’t. Would you like me to order something for you instead?”

She eyes his bowl without any self-consciousness. “I’ll just take yours, if you’re done.”

This strikes him as odd, given that she could have probably bought Uk-Thong about a billion times over. But he lets it pass without comment and says, “The rat’s been in it.”

It doesn’t appear to bother her. Emma snatches away the noodles, even the fork from his hand. Nomar whistles at them both as if he doesn’t understand the transaction that has just taken place, except for the fact that proper etiquette has relegated him to a rice diet for the rest of the meal.

Ray waits until she is finished. Emma sucks up the last noodle, bending over the bowl just like a kid experiencing spaghetti for the first time, then leans back into the chair. She slumps down with her arms wound over her stomach, her lips curled in contentment. She heaves an impressively satisfied sigh.

She must be all of twenty years old, Ray realizes, if that. He resists the urge to feel like an old man, thinking about what he was doing when he was twenty. Russoturk bullets and all that.

“So, no escort this morning?” He hopes this does not sound like a proposition. Or is it that he thinks he should hope it doesn’t sound this way, rather than actually feeling it?

She is young, yes, but striking. Her legs, long and athletically sculpted, splay out from the side of the table at an attractively obtuse angle. It’s difficult not to stare at them, and at the shortness of her skirt, and on up her lithe torso at the silk blouse with just the right number of buttons unfastened to be provocative on her terms.

Ray isn’t precisely certain what he’s thinking, and he can’t stop to sort it out. She keeps looking at him, her eyes vast and innocent, her expression so open and trusting, it’s completely disarming. Even before New Mes, he’s never seen anything like it, like her.

“Your brother, I mean,” Ray prompts her.

“He sleeps late. It’s a family curse, you know. We have nocturnal habits. Mostly bad ones.”

“Except you.”

“I’ve been forced to cultivate new skills lately. I was in school.”

“On Stratiskaya Daransk?”

Emma nods, but it’s clear the topic is not of particular interest to her. “At the university. And despite my father’s considerable contributions, the esteemed administration couldn’t be persuaded to make even the basic accommodations to my preferred schedule.” She laughs, a clean and pleasant sound, without undertones. “I’m just being silly, of course.”

“And now you’re done with school?”

Her gaze flickers away uncertainly. “My brother was sent to fetch me, to bring me home. My mother is ill. The family needs–oh, you know. Family responsibilities. Frederick still bears the brunt of it, of course, because he is the scion of such a great and noble house, but he can’t care for mother and the charitable trust and the businesses and everything else, even with Amah–” She stops herself abruptly. “It’s boring, Ray. A long and boring story.”

Ray nods. He understands something about exigencies, long and boring, but which remain exigencies nonetheless.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t worry. I’m certain Frederick has already provided the necessary tutors to complete my education. He can’t very well let his little sister be practically a cultural illiterate! That would be so mundane, so crass.”

Ray had actually been thinking about the ailing family matriarch, but he thinks it’s probably best not to clarify the point. Instead, he says, “Well, maybe getting home won’t be so bad. I’m sure there have been some exciting changes in your absence. Outlier colonies tend to ebb and flow rapidly.”

“You’ve been to New Holyoke?”

“No, but I’ve seen other colonies.”

Emma sits up sharply, her features instantly animated. “Then you should let me show you about when we arrive, yes? At least Blackheath Grange. We could discover it together.”

Paraclete will take at least two weeks to take on new stock and fuel, process outgoing passengers and perform the million other numbing tasks required to hurtle her safely back to Alamai Plantation. “If there’s time,” Ray concedes. “There’ll be a ton of things for me to do during docking protocol.”

“But the captain always lets the crew shuttle down to the city for a little while. Always!”

“I’m sure he will, but who knows when that will be? You might be otherwise occupied by the time I’m free.”

She makes snorting noise, as though he’s the one who has insulted her this time. “I’ll lock myself in my tower until you send me word. That way we can discover the Grange together.”

“Now you’re being facetious.”

“I’m not!”

“You won’t lock yourself in a tower.”

She points an accusatory finger at him. “You don’t think I have a tower, do you?”

“I’m sure you do.”

“You filthy, little liar!” Emma explodes into laughter. “Now you must come down. It’s a point of honor that I show you both my city and my tower–and the fact that my word is beyond reproach.”

Ray tries to think of something witty to say, something unembarrassing that will keep up his end of the bargaining, but he can’t help but think that she’s had much more practice at this sort of thing than he has.

This is all well and good, this casual sexual repartee, punctuated by Emma’s aggressive pursuit and frequent surge of pretty laughter. It has an underlying tone of intensity that Ray finds unsettling, but not in an unpleasant way. He is reminded that it has been a number of years since he engaged with a woman on this level, that is to say, on a level in which he wasn’t mentally thumbing through the bills in his wallet or crunching the digits available on his cred account to determine if he could afford actual intercourse or would have to settle for a blow job–a transaction ultimately made that much more dicey by the fact those women generally spoke a brand of broken, transaction-oriented English that was all but unintelligible.

On the other hand, if this is normal, it is a wonder people ever manage to get together.

The unfortunate part about being a soldier, or having been a soldier, is the tendency of the martial life to strip everything of glamour. World travel becomes hurried jaunts in the bellies of a series of noisy and flopping aircraft which transport you to destinations no man in his right mind would choose. Mano-a-mano battlefield glory turns out to be a sweaty, grunting, exhausting affair after which the only thing you feel is either a growing sense of weariness as your guts collect in a pile on the sand, or a numbing, insistent stab of guilt. Seduction is a financial transaction with girls young enough to be your kid sister, except they’re your kid sister thirty pounds too light, two weeks unbathed and beneficiaries of a dental system whose technology has not yet evolved to include the introduction of the toothbrush.

Suddenly, Emma says, “Oh, crap.”

Because he’s offended her by not saying anything in too long, no doubt. He’s exposed the uneven field upon which they’ve been playing.

“I’m working it out,” Ray says. “Give me a minute.”

But she isn’t looking at him. She’s not actually looking much of anywhere so much as she’s making a concerted effort to fold herself under the table. Ray has had extensive experience with the art of public fellation, so this doesn’t throw him completely off. He’s instantly well on his way to becoming erect, in fact, a reptilian-brain response to a recognized set of visual cues; but he’s also a bit disappointed, given that he’s spent the last half an hour negotiating traditional sexual terrain and was just starting to remember the rules well enough to participate. She could have saved a lot of time and aggravation if she’d gone straight for his trousers in the first place.

Emma doesn’t go all the way under the table, though, just sinks below the level of the privacy wall separating their table from the concourse.

“My brother,” she whispers fiercely.

“Your brother,” Ray says, nodding. Of course. This is another of those traditional sexual terrain bits that he’d forgotten about.

“He’s looking for me.”

And why wouldn’t he be? That is the way brothers act in the normal world, as surrogate guardians of their kid sisters’ virtue. Ray should probably spend a few moments deciding among expressions and body language that suggest abashment, outrage, guilt or just a generalized confusion.

Since he hadn’t registered anything about Frederick Whiston the night before other than an archetypal sense of agitation, Ray peers after Frederick Whiston through the leaves of the ferns. He’s thin and dark, the negative image of Emma’s glowing vibrancy. Sallow complexion, hair slicked back from his forehead, eyes hooded as if the lights are too bright or the lids have been trained to provide an air of condescending superiority. This morning, Frederick has been hastily put together. He’s wearing last night’s dinner jacket and slacks, both of which have the rumpled appearance that comes from having been slept in. He has missed a button on his white shirt, and the collar stabs up toward his chin. Unshaven, glassy-eyed, would probably have been unsteady on his feet if he wasn’t bowling down the concourse like a steamroller without brakes, Ray suspects that Mr. Frederick Whiston carries about him a reek of sour alcohol and liquor sweat in a three foot diameter halo.

Ray sees Frederick coming; Frederick sees Ray watching. The scion of the Whiston fortune switches tracks and banks into the Bangkok House’s food court without slowing down.

“I think he’s spotted us,” Ray says apologetically. “Sorry.”

Emma pushes herself up in her seat, frowning. “I’m the one who is going to be sorry. You can count on it.”

Whiston wheels to a halt beside the table. He’s breathing hard, almost panting. “You should have left word that you were going out,” he says to Emma. “I’ve been looking all over the ship for you.”

Ray was right. He smells like the victim of a liquor store explosion.

“I was hungry,” Emma responds. The corners of her mouth crease in a frown. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”

“Obviously.” Ray gets the impression that Freddy rolls his eyes, but he can’t actually see it because he’s facing Emma as if she’s the only one at the table. “Amah sent me to collect you. You need to return to your quarters.”

“I will.” A pause, like defiance. “In a few minutes.”

“That’s unacceptable.”

“Leave me alone, Frederick. I said I’ll be home shortly.”

Like an asp, Whiston’s pale hand darts out and he grips Emma by the arm. He squeezes until his knuckles are white. “Come along, Emma. Let’s not create a fuss, okay?”

For an instant, her gaze dashes from Whiston to Ray, a mute appeal in her eyes, then she gasps. “You’re hurting me.”

“You’re making me.”

Ray figures he’s got old Freddy by three inches, probably thirty pounds and a skill set that includes the ability to kill trained military personnel who possess a strong desire not to end up dead. And he’s tired of glowering at this idiot’s back as though he was invisible. Ray hauls himself to his feet, screeching the chair along the tiled deckplate as he rises, and extends a hand which happens to be roughly the size of the circumference Whiston’s neck in greeting.

“Hey, sorry to intrude on this scene of domestic tranquility,” he says, growling. He jabs his fingers into Whiston’s ribs, in case he’s tempted to ignore something as genial as a handshake. “Ray Marlowe, with an ‘e’. I had the pleasure of making your sister’s acquaintance last evening, and the extra pleasure of renewing it this morning. We were just about to take a stroll with Nomar here.” Nomar, taking his cue, lifts his head and bares a jagged row of titanium alloy canines. “Get some exercise, you know? I could have her back at your place in about an hour.”

To his credit, Whiston does not flinch. He also doesn’t release his hold on Emma’s arm. Turning his head slightly, so he gives Ray a solid profile headshot, he transfers his glare from Emma to Ray. “I can’t say I’m particularly interested in your acquaintance with my sister, Mr. Marlowe. I’ll have to ask you to excuse us.”

“That’s okay, because I’m not feeling much in the mood to excuse you. She’s already told you that you’re hurting her.”

It doesn’t take much, just a focused punch with his index finger to the kidney Whiston has left exposed. Whiston grunts, more in surprise than in pain as the left side of his body–unaccountably and without having been granted the proper permissions–collapses. A pronounced starboard list turns into full on roll, and he spills across the tabletop, arms flailing for something to catch him.

Nomar just has time to skitter out of way by diving from this table to the next. The bowl of rice is not so agile and totters over the edge, where it shatters against the floor, fanning white grains like maggots at Ray’s feet.

Ray doesn’t want to hit him again. Assaulting passengers in public is bad for his cover.

Emma leaps up, gets the chair and a buffering couple of paces between them.

“Your sister is a nice young woman,” Ray growls, fixing Whiston with a cool expression reminiscent of a whetted knife. “I’d appreciate it if you treated her that way in my presence. No, I think I’d appreciate it if you treated her that way in general. Are we clear?”

Frederick Whiston rises, wincing. Bits of tofu Nomar had left undigested cling to the lapels of his jacket. “This is none of your business, Mr. Marlowe.”

He says Ray’s name as if he’s committing it to memory. Probably to file some sort of complaint with the Watch Officer.

But Frederick does nothing more threatening than turn away, back to Emma so that Ray can’t read his face. “Do what you want, but the children are expecting you.”

Children?

Emma cowers for a moment, but her brother, having delivered his message, is apparently done. Still listing, he stalks past her and out onto the concourse. In seconds, he’s disappeared from view. Back to whatever pit it was that spawned him, Ray thinks.

He presses his hand toward Emma, open palmed. “Are you okay?”

She’s shaking, hugging her shoulders as if to keep from sobbing. “I should go.”

“What did he mean about the children?”

But she shakes her head. “Thank you for breakfast, Ray. I had a good time.”

“Emma–”

Does he hit you? This is what he means to ask, what he should be asking, but even the bare thought of it makes him feel violent. But in the space between words, she slips close to him. Her small hands pull his face to hers and she kisses his lips, cool and dry and hungry.

Without another word, she’s gone.

***

The rest of his day is spent the way most of days pass on Paraclete. Ziggy rides him for duty failures that may or may not be legitimate or even vaguely associated with his own personal fault, then tells him Nina has packed along some lasagna from last night’s dinner that he can have as long as he promises to remember to get the dish back to her. He makes two retrievals of malfunctioning drones. He performs some perfunctory upgrades to the drone system control frame. Around this, he codes new search parameters into the drones’ surveillance routines, uploads a dozen petaflops of gathered surveillance data for pattern searches and anomalous chemical traces from the rat network’s latest security sweep, trying to skew all his available resources in a clever and anonymous enough way that the other systems vets won’t notice that he’s been tinkering with the rats, and on the chance that they do notice, won’t suspect it’s anything but a buggy command sequence and definitely won’t trace it back to him.

This extended deception is arguably the most difficult and entertaining portion of his job. He should also be refitting Nomar for another survey of the reactor vent, but for some reason can’t seem to muster the energy to get it done, though he does find the strength to run a separate pattern analysis on the series of rat vocal sequences to see if he could develop a shorthand method of understanding the assorted chirps and whistles and whirs. He doesn’t have a good reason for doing this.

Somewhere in that time, he checks his text messenger and finds the massively encrypted, viciously terse note from Sorensen which says simply Would you like to explain to me why you have decided it is a good idea to start assaulting my passengers? Ray does not feel like fabricating excuses, so he deletes the message unanswered. He spends several minutes plotting ways in which he might plant some explosives of his own in Frederick Whiston’s sleeping compartment while at the same time evading suspicion. The conundrum has all the makings of a logistical disaster, so he abandons it, though unhappily.

He wastes whole hours at a stretch thinking about Emma Whiston. Not proper thoughts like how he can protect her from an abusive older sibling who is about to lock her up on the family’s frontier estate where he can put his hands on her unhindered–those were covered in his Frederick death musings–but highly distracting mental exercises that leave him with wide, goofy grins and a damp ball of queasiness in his stomach.

He also considers that it is way past time that he prepare an official case update for transmission back to his CIU handler, but as he suspects his handler is not a real person, but a computer generated facsimile of an actual CIU agent, he claims investigative latitude or dearth of significant developments or any number of other plausible excuses, and doesn’t do anything. More than likely, when he does generate status reports, they’re deleted unread so as not to compromise his cover anyway. Then the hard disk to which the messages have been saved is removed and incinerated; the assorted satellites and relay beacons which carried his message are remotely detonated to preserve the anonymity of his signal; teams of sweepers are dispatched to eliminate the crew of the ship he happens to be on, plus anyone with whom he might have had contact, plus anyone who might have witnessed him having contact with one those people, and eventually anyone related to any of those witnesses who might be tempted to complain about the sudden disappearance of their family member. That constitutes an entirely too egregious waste of human and material resources to justify sending any sort of message, at least in Ray’s estimation.

About the time he’s finally ready to knock off for the night, Ray receives an encrypted internal comm call from Chief Becker. This immediately strikes him as a bad development. It might really piss him off just hearing the preliminary chime that indicated an incoming encrypted call, except it’s from Becker (which he knows because the comm unit’s LCD screen scrolls Becker’s shipsys ID as the call’s originator), and Becker has not shown himself in the past to be some sort of chronically inflicted idiot who would do something so stupid as to place an encrypted communication to a service level hardware geek–something foreign agents of the Lilaiken separatist movement would be certain to notice, and even if they didn’t, Ziggy certainly wouldn’t let pass without comment.

People in jobs like Ray’s do not appreciate having their cover potentially shot to hell by anyone other than themselves. Becker has been in the security business long enough to appreciate that, even if he did spend three quarters of that time dead drunk.

So it’s only because he trusts Becker that he plugs a privacy headset into the comm unit and punches in his code key. The comm unit is a square, black box like an intercom attached to the terminal on his desk. Most of the time it functions exactly like an intercom, broadcasting personal and ship’s information messages on an open channel. When an encrypted message is beamed to a particular unit, an angry, red indicator begins to flash, the LCD screen tumbles shipsys ID verification codes for everyone patched into the transmission and the unit pings the terminal’s encryption software to challenge the user with his pass key to unlock the message scrambling. An unscrambled voice comm sounds something like a pair of tomcats wailing the tar out of one another, one of those grating noises that have been scientifically proven to cause normal and otherwise sane human beings to grind their teeth down to mere nubbins.

Ray gets to listen to the cats whooping it up for the several seconds it takes him to punch in the text equivalent of a 512-bit encryption key. The comm unit hums for a moment, chugging merrily along, and eventually the cats work out their business, and are replaced by a sultry, southern-tinted woman’s voice informing him in a monotonously looped message that he has an encrypted call from Security Chief Andres Richard Becker! Please input your 512-bit encryption key now.

It is a very sexy voice which says these things, which does not in any way mitigate Ray’s desire to track her down and punch her in the mouth.

He clears the system to patch the message through. The connection opens with an audible click, and Ray says, “I can’t even begin to explain to you how much trouble you are in at this moment, Becker. You’ll be lucky–no, you’ll be officially smiled down upon by God and Jesus and the entire freaking host of heaven–if foreign agents don’t blow this ship up in the next three minutes. Or at the very least send a death squad down here to make a bloody mess of my work area.”

He’s mostly kidding, and laughs to make that point clear. But he still whirls around in his chair so he can watch the shop’s door, in case roaming death squads happen to stumble by looking for directions.

Becker does not return his humor. “We have a problem.”

“I gathered that.”

“I want you to meet me on Sub-Deck Omicron, Section 944. Right now.” Becker’s voice carries an edge as sharp and jagged as broken glass. “Bring a drone with you.”

“What’s going on?”

A hesitation, as though he didn’t trust the encryption. “There’s been a murder.”

Is that all? Ray thinks, but he’s had enough sensitivity training to keep from actually saying it. “I don’t see why you’re involving me in this.”

“You will if you shut up and get down here.”

In the background, Ray can hear a flurry of voices. Then the distinct, guttural burst of someone vomiting, their effluent making a wet slap against the deckplate. Off microphone, obviously to someone else, Becker barks, “Get him out of here, Anderson! This is a crime scene, gentlemen. Let’s try to give it the proper respect.”

Ray stiffens, instantly alert. “Who’s there with you, Becker?” Was the Chief determined to expose him? Because it sounded to Ray’s straining ears as if he had an entire team in place already. A complete klatch of security personnel who theoretically had no need to know they had their very own pet spook on board Paraclete. And Becker, beckerbeckerbecker, understood this! Ray could hear it when he spoke, his consummate understanding of all the things he was jeopardizing. And still he went forward. A surge of adrenaline like an electrical current ripples through Ray’s body.

“Just get here, Marlowe. Nobody is touching a thing until you arrive. I’m out.”

The line goes dead. Sexy little southern belle informs him that the transmission has been terminated and reminds him to log out of the encryption software.

<– Chapter 2 / Chapter 4 –>

Filed under: A Vessel for Offering