20. Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Kieron waited longer to do it than he thought he would.
Longer than he should have, probably. He meant to do it right when he was finished talking to Xilinn, but then he got to the hangar, and Elenus was rolling through a series of holograms so rapid-fire that Kieron couldn’t even make most of them out.
And with each one he got either a high-pitched “Yeeees!” or a low, rumbly “Noooo!”
There were a lot more “nooooo”s than the other way around, and Elenus finally pushed the holograms away and said, “Honestly, if you’re going to be so picky, why don’t you just design your new skin yourself?”
“Because I want youuu to dooo iiiit!”
“Well, I want to do it, too, but you’re not giving me much to work with, Catie!”
Kieron stifled a smirk as he heard Elenus refer to Catalina as “Catie.” He’d been adamantly against nicknaming her, claiming childhood trauma.
“Do you have any idea what kids do with a name like mine? They don’t shorten it to ‘El,’ that’s for damn sure.
” But he’d finally broken. Or maybe he didn’t even realize he was doing it.
Either way, it made Kieron happy to hear.
It was one small way he’d continue to have a presence in their lives even once they’d gone their separate ways.
“What’s wrong with this one?” Elenus asked, pulling up another hologram. This was a maze of swirling lights, sometimes blossoming into flower-like shapes, other times sinking into deep pools of solid color.
“It’s too briiiiight.”
“Since when do you not like bright? Since when do you not like to color yourself like a dozen rainbows were vomited all over a canvas?”
“Since foreeeever! I’m a biiiig girl nowww!”
“Too big for rainbows? Can you even get too big for rainbows?”
“Daddeee! Do a different ooone!”
“Fine, fine.” He swiped through some more images until he came up with something pebbly and fine-grained. “How about dinosaur skin? You could even have it in just one regular, boring color if you want to.”
“Mageeeenta.”
Elenus made a startled sound. “You want me to fly around in a magenta ship? Do you want me to lose all the respect of my peers? Do you want them to laugh at me every time we land? Is that what you want?”
“Mageeenta, Daddee! And feathers!”
“Feath … why would I put feathers on a—how would we even do feathers on you? How is that supposed to work?”
“Dinosaurs did have feathers, you know,” Kieron offered from the doorway.
Elenus spun around to look at him, his face momentarily brightening before he put a stern expression back on it.
Catalina burst into a song of greeting, finishing up with a trilling, “Eeeee,” that tapered off into a register Kieron couldn’t even hear.
“Yes, of course, I know dinosaurs had feathers, Doctor Obvious, everyone with the slightest knowledge of ancient Earth paleontology knows that dinosaurs had feathers. I’m just not sure how they’re supposed to be incorporated into a new skin for my ever-so-picky child here.”
“Maybe a different pattern along the thrusters and up at her nose,” Kieron suggested, walking over to Catalina and shaping the idea of it with his hands. “Something arcing back like this … in a complementary color to magenta, which—I have no clue what that would be, that’s entirely up to you.”
“Oh gee, thanks. I think—”
“I liiiike iit!” Catalina hummed gleefully. “Pretty feathers for my front and baaack! And top!”
“Why not just cover you in feathers while we’re at it?” Elenus asked with an exaggerated sigh. “Why not just make you look like a bird instead of a dinosaur?”
“Okaaaay. I’ll look for pretty biiiirds and piiick one!”
“Catie, I—” But her lights had already dimmed, a sign that she’d turned her attention to other things.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t split her focus—her brain was designed to perform hundreds of complex functions at once.
But, and Kieron knew she’d gotten this from her father, she tended to home in intensely on one thing at a time when it came to external interactions.
It made her a little moody at times, but Kieron appreciated her thoughtfulness.
“A bird.” Elenus looked at Kieron and raised one eyebrow. “She wants to look like a bird now. Probably a magenta one, given my luck. I’m going to be laughed out of conferences for showing up in a ship that looks like it should be flocking ahead of the storm.”
Kieron didn’t understand the idiom, but he let it pass. “Would you really?”
Elenus scoffed. “No, of course not. Are you kidding me? I could refuse every conference for the next ten years, and people would still be begging me to attend on year eleven, asking for a closer look at my baby. When I say she’s advanced, that’s me doing my best to be modest.”
“And you don’t really do modest in the first place.”
“Not in the slightest.” Elenus paused. “So … how did the big reveal go?”
Kieron sighed. “There were tears. It was uncomfortable.”
“You’re doing a very good thing for your friend’s wife; of course, there were tears.”
For more reasons than you know. But Kieron didn’t want to get into a conversation about fundamentalism on Trakta right then. He had something else to talk about. He cleared his throat. “I need to speak to you about something.”
Elenus’s hand froze over his projector. “Sounds serious,” he said, his voice casual but his posture already screaming discomfort.
“It is. This doesn’t have to be a bad conversation, though.”
“Why would it be bad?”
“Because I want to know what you’re planning to do with Deysan Moritz.”
Elenus’s nostrils flared slightly, like he’d just smelled something off. “I already told you—I’m going to turn him over to the authorities on Gania as soon as—”
“No.” Kieron watched Elenus’s facile mouth flatten into a hard line. “Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth.”
“It isn’t. Not the complete truth, at least. I haven’t looked down in the containment room where you’re keeping him,” Kieron said, feeling tired.
He didn’t want to ruin the happy, comfortable thing they had together, but he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t figure out the truth.
Cloverleaf Station, for now, was under his command despite his “boss” being there.
“But I will if you don’t tell me what you’re doing to him. ”
There was a long pause, and then— “Nothing. Yet. He’s in cryo for the moment.”
That made sense. The cryo containers in the storage areas were capable of holding everything from complex living beings to deadly viral strains if necessary. “And after the cryo?”
Elenus smiled. It wasn’t a beautiful smile.
It certainly wasn’t a happy one. “After the cryo? Well, when he finally wakes up, I plan on having relocated his brain and spinal column into a rudimentary, bio-compatible bot. Probably one shaped like a box that I can shove into a corner and sit on. I’ll give him rudimentary senses and particularly good vision, but I’ll take away all of his physical autonomy, and then I’ll use him like the good-for-nothing piece of shit he is, so he can see how he likes being at someone else’s mercy.
“And when I’m done playing with his emotions and have done my level best to drive him insane, I’ll jettison his box into space and let him float in agony for as long as his batteries keep his brain alive. That’s my plan.” He spread his hands. “What are you going to do about it?”
***
Oh. That was … quite the plan. Even as Kieron’s brain cringed from contemplating the absolute cruelty of it, he automatically took in Elenus’s body language—aggressive verging on attack—and adjusted his own into something non-provoking.
He let his shoulders fall forward, ducked his chin down, lowered his eyes, and turned his body slightly away—all things that indicated he had no interest in confrontation.
“It’s okay,” he said softly, some of the earliest lessons that had ever been beaten into him coming effortlessly to the fore. “It’s going to be okay. I’m not going to stop you from doing what you’ve got to do, I promise.”
“Really?” Elenus’s voice stayed angry, but at least he dropped his hands. “Then you’re going to let me get away with something that any Alliance planet would throw me into prison over?”
“No.”
Elenus scoffed. “Then you need to explain this to me, babe, because where I come from, two plus two equals four. I’m not about to let Gania throw Deysan into a comfy prison house for the rest of his life or, even worse, let him out on good behavior in ten years because ‘he only stole a ship.’” Elenus’s face twisted with anger.
“Even if they recognize Catalina as a living entity, the law hasn’t advanced enough yet to get the same sort of justice for mistreatment of an AI as it has for flesh and blood.
It doesn’t matter that he took a toddler into danger and abused her for weeks and would have made her into a slave, all they’ll see is intellectual property violations and theft.
It’s not enough. I won’t have it. I won’t. ”
“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Kieron said.
“Oh no? Fine.” Elenus sat back on the edge of the table, leaning his weight on his hands.
Like this, he and Kieron were almost the same height.
“Then tell me what you’ve got in mind, and you should know in advance that if it doesn’t end in death, I don’t want to hear it, and you can fuck right off. ”
Kieron took a deep breath. “Catie is your child, isn’t she?”
Elenus rolled his eyes. “Have you not been listening? Has nothing I’ve been saying penetrated your—yes, she’s my child!”
“Then you need to set a good example for her.”
“I am. Self-defense is—”
“You’re not talking about self-defense,” Kieron interjected firmly. “You’re not talking about justice. You’re talking about torture.”
Elenus slapped the tabletop with one hand. “So what if I am? He tortured her!”
“And what are you teaching her, if you show her that the best justice is an eye for an eye?” Kieron shook his head.
“I grew up with teachings like that, and all it did was take away all the love and trust and faith in each other that everyone on Hadrian’s Colony once had and replace it with suspicion, anger, and ruthlessness.
“Catie is smart, so smart, but she’s still young. She’s relying on you to help her figure out her moral compass. Is that the direction you really want to push her? To make it okay to justify any atrocity as long as someone else did something terrible first?”
Elenus, to his credit, didn’t immediately start speaking. He perched there, dark eyes fixed on Kieron’s face for a long time, before he finally said, “I can’t let him go. I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to,” Kieron assured him. “There’s another way.”
“There isn’t.” Elenus shook his head once then again as he continued, “No, there isn’t!
I’ve already been in touch with Ganian authorities, and they’re adamant about taking him in alive and ensuring his welfare, and I’m going to have to give them video footage documenting his fucking ‘well-being’ in another week, and I just …
I’m not going to do it. If I have to lie to them and say he died in an accident, then so be it, because I won’t let him keep breathing after what he did to my baby. ”
“I didn’t say he had to keep breathing.”
Elenus paused, his ire settling as his gaze turned questioning. “What? I thought you … you said …”
“I said I didn’t want you teaching your daughter that torture is a good answer to being wronged,” Kieron interjected, a little exasperated.
He stepped forward, not quite close enough to touch but far enough that Elenus could see how earnest he was.
“I never said he gets to live. But you don’t have to be the one to kill him. ”
“Oh, but … no.” Now Elenus was the one to reach out, grabbing Kieron’s hand and pulling him closer as Kieron stepped into the V of his legs.
“No, I’m not going to ask you to do that.
If it’s not all right for me to do it, then it isn’t okay for you to do it.
I’m sure you’ve killed people before, and I do think it’s sweet you would offer, which come to think of it is pretty sick of me, but I can’t let you do that. ”
Kieron sighed. “I didn’t say I would be the one to kill him either.”
“Ohhhh … kay, you’ve lost me.”
Clearly. Kieron wasn’t used to being this many steps ahead when it came to Elenus, but he supposed a certain amount of fixation was to be expected. “You said you won’t let him go to prison. I agree.”
“And you said that we can’t kill him, so …”
“So.” Kieron let a smile appear on his lips. “We get him to kill himself.”
Elenus stared at his mouth for a moment, transfixed, before he shook his head again. “No, but—he wouldn’t. Won’t. He’s not the type to commit suicide, trust me. He can’t be shamed, the man is unshameable. Trust me, I would know. He’s not going to kill himself.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Oh? Ohhh …” Elenus let go of Kieron’s hands and gripped him around his middle, pulling him in closer. His handspan was almost wide enough to encompass Kieron’s entire waist. “You want to set him up to kill himself.”
“I want to give him the option to kill himself, yes.”
“And you think he’ll take it?”
Kieron nodded. “I think it’s going to look like such a good deal that he has no reason not to take it.
You said it yourself, he’s unshameable. He has no interest in paying for his crimes, no interest in spending any time in prison.
He’s probably cast himself as the victim in his own mind.
I think we can make it so that he thinks he’s getting the better of us and escapes, and then …
well.” Kieron shrugged. “It’s still radiation season out there. ”
“And he knows that,” Elenus added pensively. “So he probably wouldn’t try to fly out there.”
“He would if he thought he was in a ship that could take it.”
“Oh. Oh, babe.” Elenus tilted Kieron’s head up and kissed him passionately, bending him back so far that Kieron had to grab Elenus’s shoulders to stay upright. “Fuck, you’re such a clever thing,” he purred when they parted. “How do you want to do it?”
Kieron told him. Elenus laughed through most of it.