4. Karnac
4
KARNAC
A dvancing on the human male as he scrambled unsteadily to his feet, I tried to work out what to do with him. Every instinct in my body shouted for his blood, for his heart.
He hurt my khara, he threatened her, and he would pay.
“You get back,” he shouted as I stalked forward, baring my teeth in a killer snarl. The bravado he’d displayed when his foe was a woman half his size vanished like ice in a drive-flame. “I didn’t hurt her, I wouldn’t, just scared her a little. That’s all. Get away!”
Cowardice didn’t endear him to me. The color drained from his face and his eyes darted in every direction, looking for salvation. He wouldn’t find it. Nothing would save him now.
From behind me came the soft breath of Molly’s whispered “no.”
More a sound of pain and horror than a word, it chilled me. I spun to see what was wrong, and Harmon took that moment to turn and flee. I ignored him for now — Molly came first.
“What is wrong?” I looked over her shoulder at the shattered parts of her comm bracelet and understood. Molly was still drawing breath to answer me when I scooped up the parts in one hand, slung her over my shoulder with the other, and ran.
“What are you doing?” she protested. I ignored her — taking time to explain would waste precious seconds.
As it was, it took too long to reach the workshop. Putting Molly down on the sofa at the back of the room, I spread the parts of Glitch’s projector bracelet on my workbench. Peeling open the remains, separating the broken parts, trying to make sense of the primitive construction.
Stopping the datastore’s degeneration was the priority — repair could come later. Throwing parts out of the way, I grabbed up the salvaged shipbrain of a Prytheen fighter and tore the outer casing off.
It was long dead. No power since the Crash, nothing to stop the computer from degenerating into inert gel. But, hopefully, that would still be of use.
The lid of the gel tank came off easily, and I dropped the datastore parts into the amber gunk inside, followed by anything else that might contain part of Glitch. That done, I let myself slow down. Sorting through the power connectors, I found one that delivered about the right charge. It would have to do — I plunged the end of the wire into the gel, watching it thicken around the datastore.
Molly stepped up next to me, her hand resting on the small of my back. Even through the leather of my coat, her touch brought peace, calm, rightness with the world.
“What, and I can’t stress this enough, the fuck are you doing?” Her harsh words meant less than the tone she presented them in — hushed, concerned for her friend, almost as though I wasn’t really there. All her attention was on the broken comm, and on Glitch.
I knew that level of distraction all too well. Sliding an arm around her shoulders, I gave her a gentle squeeze. Offering comfort and hoping that she’d accept it.
Molly stiffened for a moment, then relaxed and rested against me.
“The computational gel should stabilize the broken datastore as long as it hasn’t degraded too far,” I explained. “It won’t last forever, but it gives us time to work on a way of rescuing Glitch.”
Molly looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, this is stupid of me. I can just get another comm, another AI. You don’t have to, to do this.”
I gave a small growl, and she fell silent. Hugging her again, I answered.
“I do not have to. I wish to. Glitch is your friend, your companion — if there was nothing else, that would be reason enough. But I like him too, and I’d save him on my own account, even without you.”
“He’s not,” Molly paused, sniffled, carried on. “He’s not a person, not really, he’s just a complex simulation of one.”
She didn’t believe that. Her voice made it clear, as did the fact that she couldn’t meet my eyes. I frowned, stroked her cheek.
“You know better than that, Molly,” I told her gently. “Or rather, you know it doesn’t matter. You see him as a person, you will mourn him, you want to keep him safe. That’s enough.”
Suddenly, her arms were around me, squeezing tight. I held her as she shuddered, letting go of the pent-up stress that had filled her. Stroking her flame-colored hair, I held her and let her get it all out. There was more here than just that one attack, and the longer I thought about it, the angrier I was. Not just with Harmon, but all the humans who let her suffer.
My khara wasn’t well treated here. That, I swore to myself, would change. Even if changing it meant slitting a few throats.
Before taking lives, we worked together to save one. It was a tricky thing, working on the small computer I barely understood, but Molly had all the knowledge we needed. Carefully and slowly, I pulled the pieces of datastore back together. Molly constructed a splint to hold it together once we lifted it out of the gel, keeping a fraction of an inch between the two parts.
“Why?” She didn’t stop working to ask, and I admired her quick improvisation. It would have taken me longer to find the parts than it took her to construct the whole thing.
“The edges are warped,” I told her. “If we just press them together, they won’t line up right and we’ll be lucky if we don’t burn the datastore up when we power it on. Instead, we’ll leave a layer of shipbrain goo between the parts, and train it to make the right connections.”
“Huh.” Molly said no more until she’d finished welding the tiny cage. “So that stuff is computer magic in liquid form?”
I chuckled. “Not magic, just… very useful. It won’t be perfect, mind you. If the gel loses power, it’ll stop working.”
She looked up at me, eyes shining. “That’s a problem I can work with.”
And work on it we did, side-by-side. A wonderful experience, a chance to see more of her mind at work. While we’d shared a workspace, we’d never worked on one project — despite that, we quickly fell into a routine, making allowances for each other’s habits.
“It’ll never fit,” Molly said once her structure was ready. An epoxy shell hardened around it, adding protection but also bulk. She set it down under a UV lamp to harden the epoxy and laid the popped-open bracelet beside it. I saw what she meant: the datastore assembly was too big, too long, too bulky. I frowned.
“It doesn’t have to have the same form, does it?”
“Well, no,” she conceded, setting a timer for the epoxy. Nothing more could be done until it had set. “That’s just what I’ve got with a holoprojector attached. Do you have another idea?”
“Let me see.” Without thinking, I took her arm in my hands, measuring with my fingers. Or at least that was the intention. As soon as I touched her skin, every other thought vanished from my mind.
Her warm skin, smooth and soft, made me inhale sharply, her scent filling my senses. She let out a little gasp too, freezing in place. Her teeth caught her lower lip and I felt her pulse speed up under my fingers.
We stood still for a moment, her arm gripped in both my hands. For the first time since we’d started working on Glitch’s projector, I really saw her.
Saw the low cut of her dress, the pink blush spreading down her throat. The passion in her eyes, so many emotions there. Both of us breathed quickly, heavily, and my heartbeat sped up to match hers.
I leaned over her, our faces inches apart, and a little whimper escaped her throat. Her head bobbed in the tiniest of nods, her lips moved to say ‘yes’ and that was all the permission I needed. With a hungry growl I released her arm and lifted her, pulled her to me, kissed her passionately on the lips.
Two steps took me to the wall, and I pressed her back against it, our faces level. Molly grabbed me, her hands sliding under my coat, her legs wrapping around my hips.
I growled as we kissed, felt her shiver at the sound, her kiss more urgent. I felt her heartbeat against my chest, her hands dragged down my back, fingernails digging in.
“Careful,” I growled, breaking the kiss long enough to warn her. “Or I’ll tear your pretty little dress right off you.”
Her breath caught, eyes widened, fingers tightened on my back. Our eyes met, her glare almost a challenge now…
The timer behind me dinged. With a frustrated snarl, I stepped back and let Molly down. I ached for her, my inner animal clawing at its confines, wanting her , the khara it sensed was right there. To ravish and claim her and let the rest fall into a black hole.
“So. Uh. We need that wristband? Or something,” Molly said, swallowing and refusing to look at me as she straightened her clothes.
“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice steady with an effort. “Yes, I can make that if you?—”
“I’ll sort out the power supply,” she said, already going to work. “Just tell me what the output needs to be.”
I called the numbers out to her as I rooted through the parts bin. Humans had gathered this selection of Prytheen gear: mostly full of spare parts, it also had some random bits and pieces thrown in.
Pushing aside a devotional circuit—so someone in the Silver Band was a tech-worshipper then? The Council of Alphas outlawed that heresy before I’d been born—I found what I was looking for. A vambrace for a vacuum suit, intended to protect a worker’s forearm while they did dangerous work in space. Why anyone thought it should be here I’d never know, but whichever human had made such a strange mistake, I was glad of their error.
While I worked on it, Molly bent over a circuit board, soldering iron moving quickly and expertly as she modified it by hand. By hand. That the human technology even allowed that was ridiculous, with Prytheen circuitry it would be impossible. We printed our circuits directly into crystal or gel: they might be self-modifying, but to alter them with hand tools and a magnifier?
In that moment, I gained a new appreciation for my mate. Molly had already shown me she was skilled at her work, even if the other humans somehow missed what a treasure she was for them. Tonight, though, she’d shown me she could function under pressure, that she had the skill to put together a circuit out of nothing.
And that she looked amazing bent across the workstation in a short dress while she focused on her task. I made a note to explore that discovery later, when we weren’t fighting to save the life of one of her friends.
“There, done,” she said, looking back and showing me the datastore, its new epoxy-wrapped frame, and now a modified power supply attached to the side. Before, it took a moment to see that it wouldn’t fit in a bracelet. Now, the idea was ludicrous.
I joined her, the vambrace open, and she nodded. Quick on the uptake, she padded the inside, keeping a cutout space running down the metal lengthways. A space just big enough that the datastore and holoprojector fitted. And when she snapped the vambrace around her left forearm, it fit perfectly. I’d ground it down, warped it, until it fit her human arm, and while it was an odd look along with the human party dress, it suited her.
Molly bit her lip, and I nodded.
“It’s time.” I didn’t say the rest out loud. Time to see what’s left of Glitch.