Good God, a complete sentence. Miles blinked. "Admiral Miles Naismith." He arranged himself cross-legged.
She looked up, transfixed. "A soldier? A real officer?" And then more doubtfully, as if seeing him in detail for the first time, "You?"
Miles cleared his throat firmly. "Quite real. A bit down on my luck just at the moment," he admitted.
"Me too," she said glumly, and sniffled. "I don't know how long I've been in this basement, but that was my first drink."
"Three days, I think," said Miles. "Have they not, ah, given you any food, either?"
"No." She frowned; the effect, with the fangs, was quite overpowering. "This is worse than anything they did to me in the lab, and I thought that was bad."
It's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, the old saying went. It's what you do know that isn't so. Miles thought of his map cube; Miles looked at Nine. Miles pictured himself taking this entire mission's carefully-worked-out strategy plan delicately between thumb and forefinger and flushing it down a waste-disposal unit. The ductwork in the ceiling niggled at his imagination. Nine would never fit through it. …
She clawed her wild hair away from her face and stared at him with renewed fierceness. Her eyes were a strange light hazel, adding to the wolfish effect. "What are you really doing here? Is this another test?"
"No, this is real life." Miles's lips twitched. "I, ah, made a mistake."
"Guess I did too," she said, lowering her head.
Miles pulled at his lip and studied her through narrowed eyes. "What sort of life have you had, I wonder?" he mused, half to himself.
She answered literally. "I lived with hired fosterers till I was eight. Like the clones do. Then I started to get big and clumsy and break things—they brought me to live at the lab after that. It was all right, I was warm and had plenty to eat."
"They can't have simplified you too much if they seriously intended you to be a soldier. I wonder what your IQ is?" he speculated.
"A hundred and thirty-five."
Miles fought off stunned paralysis. "I … see. Did you ever get . . . any training?"
She shrugged. "I took a lot of tests. They were . . . OK. Except for the aggression experiments. I don't like electric shocks." She brooded a moment. "I don't like experimental psychologists, either. They lie a lot." Her shoulders slumped. "Anyway, I failed. We all failed."
"How can they know if you failed if you never had any proper training?" Miles said scornfully. "Soldiering entails some of the most complex, cooperative learned behavior ever invented—I've been studying strategy and tactics for years, and I don't know half yet. It's all up here." He pressed his hands urgently to his head.
She looked across at him sharply. "If that's so," she turned her huge clawed hands over, staring at them, "then why did they do this to me?"
Miles stopped short. His throat was strangely dry. So, admirals lie too. Sometimes, even to themselves. After an unsettled pause he asked, "Did you never think of breaking open a water pipe?"
"You're punished, for breaking things. Or I was. Maybe not you, you're human."
"Did you ever think of escaping, breaking out? It's a soldier's duty, when captured by the enemy, to escape. Survive, escape, sabotage, in that order."
"Enemy?" She looked upward at the whole weight of House Ryoval pressing overhead. "Who are my friends?"
"Ah. Yes. There is that . . . point." And where would an eight-foot-tall genetic cocktail with fangs run to? He took a deep breath. No question what his next move must be. Duty, expediency, survival, all compelled it. "Your friends are closer than you think. Why do you think I came here?" Why, indeed?
She shot him a silent, puzzled frown.
"I came for you. I'd heard of you. I'm . . . recruiting. Or I was. Things went wrong, and now I'm escaping. But if you came with me, you could join the Dendarii Mercenaries. A top outfit—always looking for a few good men, or whatever. I have this master-sergeant who . . . who needs a recruit like you." Too true. Sergeant Dyeb was infamous for his sour attitude about women soldiers, insisting that they were too soft. Any female recruit who survived his course came out with her aggression highly developed. Miles pictured Dyeb being dangled by his toes from a height of about eight feet. … He controlled his runaway imagination in favor of concentration on the present crisis. Nine was looking . . . unimpressed.
"Very funny," she said coldly, making Miles wonder for a wild moment if she'd been equipped with the telepathy gene complex—no, she pre-dated that—"but I'm not even human. Or hadn't you heard?"
Miles shrugged carefully. "Human is as human does." He forced himself to reach out and touch her damp cheek. "Animals don't weep, Nine."
She jerked, as from an electric shock. "Animals don't lie. Humans do. All the time."
"Not all the time." He hoped the light was too dim for her to see the flush in his face. She was watching his face intently.
"Prove it." She tilted her head as she sat cross-legged. Her pale gold eyes were suddenly burning, speculative.
"Uh . . . sure. How?"
"Take off your clothes."
". . . what?"
"Take off your clothes, and lie down with me as humans do. Men and women." Her hand reached out to touch his throat.
The pressing claws made little wells in his flesh. "Blrp?" choked Miles. His eyes felt wide as saucers. A little more pressure, and those wells would spring forth red fountains. I am about to die. . . .
She stared into his face with a strange, frightening, bottomless hunger. Then abruptly, she released him. He sprang up and cracked his head on the low ceiling, and dropped back down, the stars in his eyes unrelated to love at first sight.
Her lips wrinkled back on a fanged groan of despair. "Ugly," she wailed. Her clawed nails raked across her cheeks leaving red furrows. "Too ugly . . . animal . . . you don't think I'm human—" She seemed to swell with some destructive resolve.
"No, no, no!" gibbered Miles, lurching to his knees and grabbing her hands and pulling them down. "It's not that. It's just, uh—how old are you, anyway?"
"Sixteen."
Sixteen. God. He remembered sixteen. Sex-obsessed and dying inside every minute. A horrible age to be trapped in a twisted, fragile, abnormal body. God only knew how he had survived his own self-hatred then. No—he remembered how. He'd been saved by one who loved him. "Aren't you a little young for this?" he tried hopefully.
"How old were you?"
"Fifteen," he admitted, before thinking to lie. "But … it was traumatic. Didn't work out at all in the long run."
Her claws turned toward her face again.
"Don't do that!" he cried, hanging on. It reminded him entirely too much of the episode of Sergeant Bothari and the knife. The Sergeant had taken Miles's knife away from him by superior force. Not an option open to Miles here. "Will you calm down?" he yelled at her.
She hesitated.
"It's just that, uh, an officer and gentleman doesn't just fling himself onto his lady on the bare ground. One . . . one sits down. Gets comfortable. Has a little conversation, drinks a little wine, plays a little music . . . slows down. You're hardly warm yet. Here, sit over here where it's warmest." He positioned her nearer the broken duct, got up on his knees behind her, tried rubbing her neck and shoulders. Her muscles were tense, they felt like rocks under his thumbs. Any attempt on his part to strangle her would clearly be futile.