So I wasn’t in the mood to get lovey-dovey. It surprised me she was so keen for it: I mean, a lot of women like how I look, and Prope might have been thinking, "His father’s an admiral," but even so, the captain was acting awfully loose and loopy. As if she was drunk or something… except I couldn’t smell any alcohol on her. The way she was clinging right on my arm, I could smell a lot of other things — shampoo in her hair, soap behind her ears, chocolate mousse on her breath, sweat where her shoulder and hip pressed against me — but not a drop of booze.
Maybe she was just the sort of person who could make herself passionate whenever she wanted: turn it on, turn it off, like the diplomats I’d known on Troyen. Heaven knows, Sam was a master of whipping up whatever emotions she wanted… the same as a hive-queen could pump out pheromones at will, whether she wanted to scare people, or get them to listen, or even to make them love her.
I wondered what kind of pheromones could make the captain not love me.
When we reached my room, Prope didn’t even slow down: right through the door and on into the cabin, never letting me go. I think she intended to drag me straight to the bed… and she might have, if I hadn’t caught a strong whiff of something that reminded me of buttered toast. The smell was more than a smell — it had the feel of toast too, steamy hot, with a gritty, crumbly texture. Don’t ask me how an odor can have a texture; but the sensation was so strong, I drew back sharply in surprise.
My stopping caught Prope off guard. She was kind of jerked back by her grip on my arm — her momentum wasn’t nearly as strong as my inertia when I wanted to stand still. I stopped… listened… sniffed. Prope kept tugging on my elbow, not really hard but persistent, like a kid who wants to pull Dad into the candy store; but I kept smelling that buttered toast and wondering what it was.
"Edward," Prope said in a not-very-patient voice, "what’s wrong?"
"Do you smell it?"
"Smell what?"
"Buttered toast."
Prope gave a polite sniff, but she was just humoring me. "I don’t smell a thing," she said. Then she gave a coy flick of her eyelids. "Do you want to know what I’d like to smell?"
"Um." I thought, What the heck has gotten into her? But I didn’t say it out loud; I was still looking around the room, trying to figure out where the smell came from. The closet? No. The desk? The bed?
Suddenly, something clicked inside my half-asleep brain. "Ship-soul," I said, "lights ninety-five percent dim."
"That’s more like it," Prope murmured, as the room fell darker than candlelight. She leaned in and laid her hand lightly on my chest. "Now let’s just find out…"
Her voice broke off. I’d pulled away from her and stepped toward the bed. That was definitely where the smell came from. With a quick yank, I whipped the top blankets and sheets all the way off the mattress.
On the bottom sheet, low down where your feet would go, where you’d never look before you got into bed, the white linen was dusted with a sprinkle of glowing red specks.
"Ooo," Prope whispered, "very nice. But if I were you, I would have put that up where people could see it. Splash some on the pillow. On the walls. Dribble it up and down our bodies, then lick it off. How much of it do you have?"
I stared at her in disbelief. Was she drunk or something, that she didn’t recognize the Balrog? But then, she’d only seen it as a big mossy clump on Kaisho’s legs, not as single spores; and her mind was definitely distracted, focused on other things.
She reached toward the glimmering spores, like a little kid trying to touch the pretties. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her away. "You’d be sorry if you did that," I told her. I kept hold of her arm as I backed out of the room into the bright lights of the corridor.
"What’s wrong?" she asked. "Aren’t we going to—"
"No," I said. "Not in there."
"My room then? I’m captain. I’ve got a great big room. And a great big bed." She was still talking like a drunk with a one-track mind; I wondered if she’d popped some aphrodisiac drug when I wasn’t looking.
"Not tonight," I told her. "There’s something I have to report to the admiral."
"To Festina?" the captain asked, her voice turning shrill. "You’re dumping me and going to that freak-faced bitch?"
Then Prope screamed. It was the most amazing noise: just a shriek of pure outrage. It scarcely even sounded real — more like some eight-year-old who’d been challenged to a dare by her friends, and was wailing out this ear-piercing screech to prove she had the nerve. But there was nothing childish about the look on Prope’s face; it was fierce and furious, not aimed at me or anyone, just exploding out at the universe along with the scream. A primal venting of absolute rage, neither long nor short.
It happened, it shattered the silence of the empty corridor, and then it was over. Prope closed her mouth with a little clopping sound as her lips came together. She shuffled off without even looking at me, like a sleepwalker moving onto some new part of her dream.
Above my head, the ship-soul spoke through one of its speakers. "Is there a problem? Do you need help? Is there a problem? Do you need help?"
"Ship-soul," I said, "get a robot to take all the linen off my bed. I don’t care if it’s a cleaning robot or one of those that handle toxic substances — whatever you have handy. Take the sheets and leave them in Kaisho’s room; break down her door if you have to."
"I am afraid that is not—"
"Just do it," I snapped. "My father is Admiral of the Gold, Alexander York, and he doesn’t appreciate lippy AIs who don’t follow orders. Give me results, not excuses."
I wheeled around and stormed off down the corridor… as if the ship-soul was somebody I could stomp away from. Every two seconds I walked under another of the computer’s speakers, but I didn’t hear any more protests. Apparently, whoever programmed the ship’s system must have anticipated getting bullied by an admiral’s retard son.
Festina wasn’t in her room… even though it was almost midnight, Jacaranda time. I found her alone in the gym, already sopping with sweat from pounding the heavy bag. And I mean pounding it hard. Not one of those controlled sessions where you try the same combination twenty times, or see how many roundhouse kicks you can do in two minutes. She was throwing elbows and knees and head-high jump kicks, plus all kinds of palm heels, knife-hands, snake-strikes, that thing where you clap your opponent’s eardrums… even some plain old body checks, whomping into the bag with her shoulder and yelling something bloodthirsty. That didn’t look like a real martial-arts move to me, but maybe it was okay if you just wanted to smash something with all the strength you had.
I didn’t say anything — just waited for her to notice me. Festina was moving around the bag, hitting it from lots of different angles; eventually she got to the far side, facing the bag, facing my direction. When she saw me, she stiffened a little and stopped, panting lightly.
She looked good, puffing and sweating. For the workout, she’d put on a plain old T-shirt and loose cotton pants… both colored admiral’s gray, but very simple. You don’t see simple clothes very much in navy gyms — people are always wearing smart fibers that keep the body at perfect temperature, or chemical paints that make fat burn faster. Not Festina; but then, she made a point of being different from regular navy folks.