Chapter 8 #2
“So what? You can see transmissions? Is this an Icthian thing I’m unfamiliar with, or do you have some sort of aug I’ve never heard of?”
“Part of it is training, and part of it is breeding. All Icthians are sensitive to frequencies in some form. It is how we ‘hear’ each other in the Chorus. I am simply bred to be more sensitive to these waves, specifically.”
“Whoa,” he breathed, his words low and reverent. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. You really are a mystery, Fia.”
“I can understand if you have never met one exactly like me. But you have met others who can touch, feel, or read frequencies, no?”
He furrowed his eyebrows thoughtfully, leaning back against the wall behind them and sliding his hands behind his head.
“No. Every Icthian I’ve worked with, which is a small sample size admittedly, hasn’t deigned to dazzle me with their ability to taste radiation or anything fun like that.
Though they all were bound, so maybe that factors in? ”
“I had hoped the bind was just a sedative. Not a … silencing.” She swept her fingers back over the thick, scaled tendrils that fell from her crown, moving them to the side so she could palm the back of her neck. “That explains why the kin I have met here are so quiet.”
“Ah, the uh,” he said as he mimicked her gesture, patting the back of his neck. “That hivemind thing, yeah?”
She bristled immediately, clutching her now-empty mug hard enough that her claws creaked on the ceramic. Her tone was flat and cool, but her tendrils flared with a speckling of irritated, flickering electricity.
“It is the Chorus. It is a beautiful and misunderstood thing.”
“Okay, yes, but in groups where there’s a bunch of unbound Icthians, that thing — that Chorus — can get people bit rowdy. No?”
She could hear the hesitancy in his voice. It was as if he were waiting for her to lash out at him in the same expected anger. The fury he feared rose in her throat, and instead of meeting it with a proud and honorable defense of her people, she deflated.
Her tendrils drooped, and she set the mug aside to rest her hands in her lap.
She herself was a vessel of risk, too loud in the resonance to be trusted to let her emotions echo openly, lest it overwhelm those around her.
But she understood that it was her responsibility.
She always managed. Keeping herself in check, centering herself.
It had never become a problem because she refused to let it.
“Maybe…?” she whispered. “It is, or was, just how we lived. How we communicated. It may be hard to understand, but it never seemed much different from humans. If one of you laughs, it cascades to your neighbor. If one of you screams, the fear echoes even to the one who did not see what was frightful.”
She held out both her hands, palms up, clenching and unclenching them slowly.
Perhaps I should have let it consume me. For all the good it has done us to stay quiet. They all look at this and think we are just a fearsome thing, needing to be subdued regardless. We should have given a proper reason to fear.
The tears fell before she could temper her welling sorrow. Defending her people’s capacity for restraint broke her own self-control. The irony did not escape her.
Wordlessly, he slid an arm around her back and pulled her to his side. She felt a hitch in her chest that fluttered into a proper sob, and she sank the full weight of her head onto his waiting shoulder.
“This world is just so wrong, so empty. Everyone I knew, lost,” she whispered, her voice lilting and weak. “Even the strangers here, my kin. They wear that cursed thing, and I cannot hear them. The world is so distant, so quiet…”
He didn’t push her. He let her be. Let her lament.
The warmth from his touch kept bringing her back into her body when she felt like she was spiraling.
But hopelessness sang a seductive call, tempting her to admit that there was nothing left for her.
To admit she had failed to protect them all, that nothing awaited her people but subjugation and slow death.
The weight of his arm around her disappeared, and the absence centered her back into her senses.
Grounded in the cool metal beneath her, with the scent of coffee in the air.
She breathed out one last unsteady breath and nodded appreciatively at him.
She was grateful, but didn’t have the energy to express that with the gravity it needed.
When he spoke, his voice was low and gentle, but tinged with a tone that made her think he understood her ache profoundly.
“Last time you were topside, you were in the Rim. From what I hear, that’s basically a damn war zone.
Then, you woke up here, stasis-sore and immediately set to working.
You finally have a moment to breathe. That’s when everything you’ve been putting off likes to sneak up and sucker punch you. ”
Well, I was in a literal war zone. Just not the Rim. The Kuiper belt must have grown far beyond the sparse frontier it was when I slept if it has garnered such a reputation.
He squeezed her shoulder before returning his hands to his own lap, picking idly at the hem of his shirt.
“There’s got to be people out there that you feel at home with, and you’ll find them.
So long as you can put up with sharing cramped quarters with me and my charismatic pilot, we’ll give you the time to find that. ”
“You have already helped me so much.” A hint of a smile curled the corner of her lips. “You are a rare soul, Davik,” she murmured, her eyes briefly catching his before she turned back forward.
The comfort lingered, but she couldn’t let herself fall down into self-indulgent musing. There was too much to be done. Too many wrongs to right.
She pulled the datapad back into her grasp and made a few motions.
“I have been trying to find my crew, or at least find who had placed me in the cryo-prison station. There is just no starting point for me to dig my claws into. The logs show my pod as having been delivered twenty years ago. Labeled as an unidentified dead body. No further information.”
“Your party trick can see all the way across the system?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Not in the slightest. I just find the beginning of the thread and pull. Without all my equipment, my reach is very limited.” She made a brisk flicking motion above the datapad, pulling up a diagram of the cryo-prison facility.
“You don’t know how you got there, and we don’t know how we got you. This whole situation. God. It’s just … Wait. Dead body? So my med scanner wasn’t lying, you were dead?!”
“Not entirely. Deep torpor. It is hard to discern between that and death. Likely not something a routine scan of a cryopod accounts for, as they would need to perform an entire warming cycle to verify. It is why my pod was in the mortuary wing.”
“Mortuary wing?!” Davik bolted upright, peering down at the datapad. “Wait, but Carissa said he was alive! On ice, but alive, and—”
Fia reached out to touch his shoulder and disrupt his sudden cascade of worry.
“He is, look.” She moved her focus to draw up the diagram of the prison station, shifting the screen to a separate wing. “Over here. Deck 8, pod 7291. See?” she said, tapping at a readout for one Marius Yerevan.
He shook his head and sighed, rolling his neck as he spoke. “Bad, bad intel. How did we end up in the mortuary wing? Too many goddamn mysteries.”
“Speaking of mysteries,” she said, watching the light glinting off his augmented titanium throat.
Her tendrils crackled with energy as she focused her eyes on the electrical impulses. The rest of him was a blur, but she could see the fascinating semi-mechanic physiology in stark detail.
It was so intricate, so enmeshed with his body.
The way it moved when he spoke, the way she could see his jaw tense, the way she could watch his heart race if she just peered at the electrical waves for a moment.
The way it tapered to the broad expanse of his shoulders was fascinating, and it drew a line from nape to chest that she often caught herself observing intently.
Purely academic intrigue. Nothing more.
“You owe me one secret, yes? What is the story behind this?” she asked, gesturing towards his throat and touching her own as she stared with rapt attention.
“Oh, uh … yeah, that’s a long story. I had a nasty accident. Had to get all the fleshy bits swapped out for good, old-fashioned, bottom-shelf titanium bio-alloys.”
“May I?” she asked, reaching her hand out closer to him. She could see his pulse quicken as the bio-mechanical interface scrambled to keep up with the rush of blood rising to his face.
There had been many humans on the Fleet, some more augmented than others. She had kept her curiosity at bay to abide by the Fleet rules about respecting humans’ personal space. But she was deeply interested in this human. And there was no Human Relations officer here to reprimand her.
“I can’t feel much in it, but sure. It isn’t cold, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
She traced her fingers across the silver surface with fascination, pulling her focus back to observe with her standard visuals rather than signal-sight. His lips were pressed together tightly, and he was keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead.
What intriguing reactions.
From the underside of his chin towards his clavicle, she traced the tip of her claw until she found where the augment met flesh.
“You cannot feel any of this?” she asked, and he made an ambiguous noise from his tightly shut mouth. “Or, do you feel very little?” She flexed her fingers, resting the tips of her claws against the sleek line that traveled from his ear down to his shoulder.
“I feel, uh. A little. Not much, though. It’s … a-a cheap aug. Not a lot of neural interfacing.”
He swallowed hard, his chest rising with a sharp inhale. She licked her own lips as she watched the motion.
Am I making him nervous?
“So there is an electrical interfacing issue?” she asked, leaning closer so she could study the mechanics.
The mechanics, and also the prickling of his skin as he squirmed ever so slightly.
Her eyes followed the lines that mimicked tendon and muscle with rapt attention as he tensed and tried to keep his breathing steady.
“Mmm, yep. Yeah, something like that. I can kind of feel it. It’s just muted. Like when your arm falls asleep because you slept on it. The pathways are there. They just aren’t responsive enough to mimic the real thing.”
A faint sheen of sweat was barely visible on his arms. She drew a breath and could just barely taste a hint of him in the air. A mix of citrusy soap, the bitter cut of coffee, blended with the heat radiating from his skin.
“Hmm. So, are you able to feel this?”
It was just a light charge, a small current of bioelectricity that she directed into her fingertips. She let it dance on his skin where she touched him. He gasped, and she felt her heart roar with frenzied excitement.
“I will take that as a yes,” she said, tracing another slow, charged path from the very edge of his jaw down to the nape of his neck. A purely exploratory, academic, research-based touch that made her tendrils gleam with an excited flicker.
“Dav, is the bay ready for the first shipment?”
Fia grimaced as the sound of Carissa’s voice echoed out over the speakers in the cargo bay. She reluctantly pulled back as he fumbled to cue up his comms.
“Yeah, yeah, she’s … uh, yeah. All set. Starting early?”
“Nope, we’re right on time. Let’s go, sunshine.”
“Oh, shit,” Davik breathed, smiling as he looked down at his datapad. “I stole your quiet spot ‘til dawn. Well, there’s no dawn here, but…”
“Time to get to work?” Fia asked, doing her best not to stare fixedly at his lips as he spoke.
“Yep! The crime won’t do itself.”