“What am I doing wrong?” she asked herself aloud. While she was at the top of her field in several esoteric areas of psychological research, her bedside manner left much to be desired, not that she particularly cared. She was more at home dealing with drugged criminal patients strapped into deep-core machines than she was with a highly intelligent and alert individual. Mentally, she went over every step and action she had taken with him, looking for some clue as to why he was holding out against her, but she could come up with nothing. Except spite, perhaps.
She finished her business in the bathroom and returned to the bedroom, this time sitting behind the desk monitor. It showed Dr. Juanita Feron, one of her team, sitting with Reza and giving him what Deliha recognized as one of the simplified versions of the Baumgartner-Rollmann intelligence tests that didn’t depend on language.
“Good luck, you idiot,” Deliha sneered as she called up a cup of hot tea from the food processor, recalling her own miserable luck while attempting to administer a similar test, several times. When she had laid out all the test pieces, of which there were nearly two hundred, each of which had to be arranged precisely within a defined work area, he had simply turned his attention to the room’s viewport and ignored her. She had done everything short of physically touching him (she had wanted to throttle him, she thought angrily) to get him to pay attention, all to no avail. Now, she decided she was going to sit back and watch Feron’s humiliation at the hands of this beast. “Go ahead, Juanita, lay it all out for him so he can spit in your eye.” It occurred to her that this was Feron’s first chance at him. She was not one of Deliha’s protégés, and had been near the bottom of the access list. So much the better, Deliha thought savagely. This should be a good introduction for her to Kreelan manners.
Deliha leaned forward, watching Feron’s lips move as she explained what she wanted Reza to do in a way she hoped he could grasp with his limited – albeit rapidly expanding – understanding of Standard. Rabat had turned down the sound during her little interlude with the awkward petty officer, and she had no interest to hear the test explained again. She had already heard it a thousand times. And so had Reza.
She took another sip of her tea, closing her eyes and pondering why Fate had cast her such a difficult nut to crack. Things would have been a lot smoother and more effective if the Council had just authorized a deep-core scan. Such a pity.
When she looked at the screen again, she was so surprised at what she saw that she spilled the tea in her lap.
“Dammit!” she snarled as the hot liquid burned her upper thighs. “You bastard!” The puzzle, which normally took someone with a genius-level IQ almost five minutes to complete, was half done in little over sixty seconds. Deliha wanted to vomit at the sight of Feron’s overjoyed expression, completely overlooking the enormous significance of what Reza was doing.
Cursing every god and person that came to mind – Reza most of all – Rabat threw on some clothes and headed for the conference center, leaving the mute screen and Reza’s contemplative face behind.
Twenty-One
Jodi was never so glad to get off of a ship as she was to leave the Aboukir’s cutter. While the crew was a good one and the ship was fast, the voyage to Ekaterina III had taken what had seemed like forever. The fact that Jodi had not been allowed by the cutter’s captain to get any cockpit time had not helped.
But thoughts of the cutter – indeed of the last few months – faded with every step she took toward Berth 12A, where Hood was tied up for repairs in Ekaterina’s huge orbital shipyards. While Jodi had been sorely tempted to take one of the shuttles, she decided to stretch her legs after being so cramped in the cutter. It was worth the hour-long walk to get back to the ship.
At long last, there she was: C.S.S. Hood. The shipwrights of Trivandrum had built more than legendary striking power into their metal leviathan. The Hood, among humanity’s most powerful warships, was also a beauty to the eye. Unlike many of her sister ships-of-the-line, she was not a collection of angular plates and protrusions that gave so many vessels an insectile appearance. Hood was a collection of finely modeled curves, streamlined and sleek, as if her destiny was to navigate through some terrestrial ocean as had her namesake centuries before. But in that beauty also lay strength, both in the armor that made up her thick protective hide and the weapons that bristled from her hull like the thorns of a rose.
But her last battle had severely tried her strength, as the carbonized craters and streaks, the breached hangar deck and ruptured gangway hatch attested. Most of her damage had already been patched, but there would be some ugly scars that would endure with the ship until her retirement by age or by fire.
You’re still a tough old bitch, Jodi thought admiringly.
Pausing on the ramp just before reaching the new gangway hatch, Jodi snapped a salute to the Confederation flag suspended nearly a kilometer away on Hood’s stern, before stepping up to the ensign who was the officer of the watch and rendering the same courtesy. “Lieutenant Mackenzie, reporting aboard.”
The young woman’s eyes lit up as she returned the salute. “Yes, ma’am,” she said cordially. “Welcome back. The captain pays his respects, and will see you when he returns from shore leave.”
“Thanks, ensign.” As Jodi made her way over the decks she had come to know so well, greeting the few members of the crew who were not on rotation down to the planet surface, her excitement began to build. The sounds and smells of the great ship, the thrum that she knew was there but could not quite hear: all the many things that made the ship a living thing. It was her home.
There was a moment, just a tiny fraction of a second, as she was approaching her destination that she was afraid, terrified, that one tiny thing might have changed. Holding her breath, she approached the door and read the names on the assignment placard. There were two. One was hers. The other was…
Jodi burst through the door, knowing that her roommate and commander would be there. She always was.
“I’m back!” she shouted like a giddy teenage girl who had just been asked to the prom by the most sought-after male – or female, as the case might be – in school.
The woman inside, dressed in her duty fatigues, practically fell out of the chair where she had been writing performance evaluations of her pilots.
“Jodi!” her commander cried as she fell into Jodi’s embrace. “Mon Dieu, I was so worried about you! Are you all right?”
“Yes, Nikki,” Jodi said, “I’m okay. Oh, God, am I glad to be back.”
Later, there would be many stories exchanged for the time they had been away from one another. But for now, Nicole Carré was content to hold her only real friend tightly, both of them crying tears of relief that the other was still alive and, for the moment, out of harm’s way.
Ekaterina III boasted one of the strongest military forces in the human sphere, both in terms of its ground forces and the naval squadrons patrolling her system, guarding the enormous orbital shipyards. If there was a safe place in the known human galaxy, with the possible exception of Earth itself, it was here.
And that was how Jodi felt now. Safe, content. She was still riding an emotional roller coaster that alternated between the exhausted depression of the furious fighting she had seen on Rutan and the hyperventilated feeling of knowing she was back with the woman she loved. The fact that her love was unrequited, that Nicole Carré had long ago made it clear that she could never be more than a close friend, did not – and never had – been an obstacle for Jodi’s tacit affection. It was enough to know that Nicole cared, loving Jodi as a friend. That they had never shared a passionate moment together was something Jodi had decided she could live with. The physical expressions of her love for Nicole were discretely diverted toward others who were more than happy to receive them, and who willingly did their best to satisfy Jodi’s needs in return.