‘How are you progressing?’ Mika asked.
Cormac paused, about to ask what she meant. But a certain honesty, integrity, made him close the impulse down. The conversation was about to progress away from the business at hand, and he repressed the urge to abandon it. He sat down on the sofa next to her.
‘Physically I am in good shape but bad condition,’ he said.
‘Curious description.’
Cormac smiled. ‘Everything is healed, everything is there, but my bone and muscle mass is low. Presently I’m on regrowth factors, steroids, and induction stressing of my bones while I sleep.’ He gestured vaguely to the door leading into his sleeping area. ‘It will be weeks before I’m back in condition.’
‘And your mind?’ Mika asked, leaning closer.
‘Fragile, Jerusalem tells me. Apparently, the last time I asked, I have a tendency to over-focus on the task in hand, with an exclusivity that is borderline autistic’
‘But isn’t that how you have always been? I’ve worked with you intermittently, for some years now, yet I know very little about you. How do you relax—do you socialize, do you have family? With you it has always been the job and nothing else. But I know there’s more… Chaline for example?’
Cormac felt he wanted to get up, draw this encounter to a close… run away. He repressed that urge too.
‘We had a brief liaison at Samarkand, that was all. I was damaged goods then as well—too long gridlinked and apparently losing my humanity.’
‘No inclination to continue where you left off?’
‘The Celedon survivors are heading back to Solsystem.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘None.’
‘What about your family?’
‘Are you trying to psychoanalyse me, Mika?’
‘No, this is what is called social intercourse. You might have encountered it before on those occasions when you weren’t shooting someone.’
Cormac could feel something twisted up inside his chest. Exercising rigid control, he chuckled. ‘My family… my father was a soldier who did not come back from the Prador War, my mother is an archaeologist, on Earth. I have not seen her in forty years. I have two brothers who work in the ECS medical service. I have not seen them in forty years either.’ He waved a hand towards the window. ‘They might even be here, I don’t know. Perhaps we all possess the same narrow focus on our own interests which is why our ways parted. There’s a network family site that I check occasionally, and last time I looked I learned I now also have a sister-in-law, two nieces and a nephew, a grand niece. Also, thirty years back I acquired a stepfather, then a half brother and half sister… shall I go on?’
‘No contact at all?’
‘None. Isn’t it the case now that even when a nuclear family is formed, which is not often, its members tend to drift away. We move about a lot more now, and we’re long-lived so there is less desperation to cling to that centre. Yourself?’
‘I am an orphan and have never been able to trace my family. I don’t even know if they are alive. It’s why I take such an interest in other people’s families, and don’t quite understand the lack of interest I often encounter.’
Cormac shrugged and stood.
‘Should I leave now?’ she asked.
He walked over to the drinks cabinet, reflecting that he still could not quite get used to the luxury this vessel provided. Fashioned of something as near to old oak as made no difference, the cabinet was supplied with all types of glasses, a selection of drinks in glass and ceramic bottles, and even contained an ice machine plumbed into the wall. It also possessed a programmable drinks maker concealed behind the lower wooden doors, which was operable by a touch-console inset in the glass top. Via chrome spigots this could provide anything from hot coffee to yak-buttered tea.
‘I would like you to stay,’ he said, picking up two brandy glasses cut from manufactured emerald—probably made aboard this ship. ‘Brandy?’
‘Please.’
He uncapped a bottle, poured, turned with the two glasses to find her standing facing him. She took her glass, sipped, stepped in close to grip the front of his shirt in one hand and pulled his face down into a kiss. With her pressed up against him, he suddenly became much more aware of her as something more than Mika in Medical, Mika explaining Jain tech, cell-welding wounds, and dissecting alien flesh. She stepped back, looking almost angry. He sipped his drink.
‘Don’t you pull away now,’ she warned.
He pursed his lips, turned and deposited his glass back on the cabinet. ‘It seems I have to take you out of that neat little box in my mind now and reassess you.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ she said, stepping past him to place her glass down beside his. ‘Let’s just cut all the cerebral crap and get physical. You can do a reassessment afterwards, maybe build some programs to analyse the Mika pheno…’
He slid the back of his hand down her stomach, pushed his fingers into the top of the loose slacks she wore, pulled her close and kissed her hard to shut her up, then towed her behind him towards the sofa. By the sofa she broke away from him, slid a thumb into the stick-seam of her slacks, slid them down, kicked her way out of them.
‘Get undressed and lie down,’ she ordered.
Cormac found no problem in obeying this authority figure. She wore no underwear and was quickly astride him, though still wearing her loose oriental top. Grabbing his penis she slid her hand up and down—now I’m in charge. After a moment she shuffled forwards and, easing herself down with a hissing exhalation, began gently to revolve her hips. He closed his eyes, tried to remember the last time he’d let anyone get this close—so many hurried sexual encounters organized when they could be fitted into his schedule, last time on Elysium while he awaited the end of the quarantine imposed there; the rest of the time using drugs to repress the need, control it, like he controlled every other aspect of himself.
‘Don’t you dare come,’ she ordered, stripping off her top, ‘not yet.’
‘Would you like to tie me down to this sofa?’ he joked.
‘Not right now,’ she replied, ‘I hardly know you well enough for that.’
Cormac laughed, then felt shocked—wondering when was the last time that had happened too.
Thorn brought the AG platform down opposite a burnt-out shopping centre and eased it in over a tangle of ceramal beams flaked and distorted by the heat. Twelve dracomen occupied this platform with him, while Scar and eight others occupied the platform immediately behind. He looked around him. The chainglass windows of the shops remained intact, but were blackened from the inside. Burnt bodies lay on quartz paving, black and curled foetal. A low-walled garden, running down the centre of the shopping mall, still smouldered—all the smaller plants incinerated, though jagged cores of cycads still stood. He swung his platform over to the right of this garden, while Scar took his to the other side.
‘Okay,’ Thorn spoke into his comlink, ‘we’ll land up at the end here and see what we can find. Scar, have your people spread out and cover the landing area—not too far mind, we might have to get out of here fast.’
At the end of the mall stood a row of drop-shaft entrances, with a corridor leading away on either side. Thorn swung the platform over near a bar beside the entrance to one corridor. Most of its furniture was scattered but a table and three chairs still stood upright. Grotesquely, one chair still supported a charred corpse slumped over the table.