“Sorry,” Heris said. “I was sent on pickup—we didn’t bring anything.” The guard glowered at her.
“Dammit! It’s been twice as long as government mail, and it’s supposed to be quicker.”
“The guy at the office said maybe Sal had a drive out and had to go to refitting,” Heris said. Offering gossip would at least make her seem knowledgeable about it. “We weren’t told—but if that’s true, another ship will have picked up that load and be bringing it.” She only hoped Sal himself wouldn’t show up in the next day or so.
“Well, enjoy yourself,” said the guard, in a tone that implied no one could do that on this station. “Shop your little heart out.”
Heris wandered around, picking up an entertainment cube and a box of sweets, for which she paid an outrageous price. Having heard this complaint often from civilians while she was still in the Fleet, she grumbled at the guard on her way out. “Dammit, the prices go up every trip—you expect us to maintain you in luxury, while hardworking taxpayers go short—” The guard gave her the same bored look she had given others, and she almost giggled.
Naverrn Station, according to its listings, had no housing for transient civilians, and no recreational facilities—not even a gym, and only one place to eat, a vast and gloomy cafeteria clearly meant to feed hordes of troops in a hurry. Heris glanced into it and realized that her crew would much rather eat off of Oblo’s stolen supplies aboard than the sort of mush they’d get here. She wondered why anyone would come up to the Station on liberty; Naverrn itself was a pleasant planet, and the training base (she’d seen the holograms) looked far more attractive than this empty, boring station.
When the shuttle arrived, Naverrn Station took on a spurious gaiety. Heris cast a critical eye on the young officers, and almost immediately thought better of Ronnie and George at their worst. The Royal Aerospace Service (known to those in the Regular Space Service as the Royal ASS) attracted the wealthy and highborn into its officer corps; its enlisted personnel were recruited mostly from those just below the Regular Space Service cutoffs. The young officers sported a foppish uniform with an abundance of braid and shiny metaclass="underline" sky-blue tunics with cream facings over dark-blue trousers, cream and scarlet piping on every seam, tall shiny boots. No wonder they seemed as businesslike and military as a gaggle of debutantes. Most of them quickly shed their colorful uniforms for even more outlandish and expensive civilian clothes. Whatever sense they might have shown at their duties onplanet, they shed as quickly, and Heris saw little sign of supervision or discipline. She was glad she had no responsibility for them.
Naverrn stationers wouldn’t put themselves out for a small tramp freighter, which could be assumed to have no spending power, but fifty familiar Royal junior officers were another matter. Heris could hardly believe it was the same service area she’d seen before. Suddenly there were dozens of attractive young men and women (far more than one per officer, she suspected) strolling the corridors, bait for even more colorful fish. A door that had presented only a blank gray metal face before now opened on a cozy bar with a live band playing in one corner. The smell of real food wafted out another door that Heris hadn’t seen. Two sleek, dripping, naked figures chased each other out a door just in front of her; she heard splashes and yells from inside that argued for the existence of a swimming pool.
But where was the prince? He should have had a message—they had sent one in the code given them—and he was supposed to make the contact. She would have no excuse to hang about once she’d collected the Outworld Parcels cargo. She needed to find him—or have him find her—now. She strolled back toward the OP office, to check the status of the cargo.
“Another shift, at least, even with no more problems,” the clerk told her. He looked harried; a line of impatient young officers had hand-carried mail and packages to check through. “Tarash is out with something she ate, and Jivi sprained an ankle, but the clinic is packed. It always is, with this bunch.”
“Fine. Let me know.”
That still didn’t find the prince, she thought, as she walked on back to the docking area. Where could he be lurking? Why hadn’t he contacted her? Back aboard Better Luck, she checked on the progress of the cockroach egg hunt. They had cleared the bridge, and the galleys, and were working on the owner’s quarters. If the prince found cockroaches aboard, Heris knew the news would spread. She took a look at what had been an elegant guest suite, in which the prince had travelled from Sirialis. Bare decking and bulkheads, just as in crew quarters, with the bed platform’s framing all too visible. Oblo had installed a bare-bones communications node, nothing like the handsome system Cecelia had had, with its touchscreens and voice-response. Plenty of bedding, though, and towels, and those colorful pillows. Worst, though, the suite still held a faint odor of cockroach. Heris realized she was wrinkling her nose. That would never do; she’d send someone to buy an olfactory screen.
Gradually, Cecelia began to regain a sense of structure in her existence. Brun and the other attendants spoke to her often, telling her what time it was, what watch, who was in the room, what they had done, and were about to do. She could not see the light level change, or the colors they described on the walls, but she could imagine it all. She began to know, when she woke, what shift to expect, who would be in the room. So she knew it was morning—ship’s morning, early in the main dayshift—when the doctors both arrived to explain her situation as they then understood it.
“Lady Cecelia, I’m now sure that you are able to hear—and, I hope, understand—what we’re saying. I’m going to explain what tests we’ve done, what more we can do aboard the yacht, and what we’ll be trying to do later. You may know more about what happened to you than we do, although we’re ready to make an educated guess. The drugs we found in the venous access reservoirs consisted of a perfectly ordinary array of cardiac drugs—which would have been dispensed automatically at signals from the cardiac monitor—and some very unusual neuroactive drugs, one of them not in the data banks at all. I suspect that these drugs were merely for maintenance, not the ones that caused the initial damage. We cannot tell yet how much function will return just because you no longer have the maintenance drugs in your system, or how long it will take. It depends on how the damage was done, and whether the maintenance drugs were considered essential or just a safeguard against spontaneous recovery.
“I can tell you that the maintenance drugs targeted voluntary muscle innervation, motor and sensory both. Thus I expect you to regain some sensation of touch, and some ability to move. How much is impossible to say. It is unusual for someone with your level of deficit to be able to breathe spontaneously—they did a fine job of sparing respiratory function. It’s amazing that you can hear, and yet the few medical records we were able to get indicate that you couldn’t—that your auditory cortex was inactive in the presence of both speech and sound. Either someone fiddled with the scans, or . . . I can’t imagine what.”
Cecelia struggled to remember the early days, what everyone had said. She knew the lawyer had been told she could not hear; she had heard that. She remembered hearing about the scans that were supposed to prove it. That suggested intentional deception. But she had no way to let Dr. Czerda know what she had heard.
Over the next few days, sensation returned slowly, in odd patches. One time Cecelia woke, she felt the side of her face as if it were a patch of harsh cloth laid on her skull. She felt the slight pressure of air against it from the ventilator. The nurse’s gentle facewashing felt like being scrubbed with a broom. Still she could not move, could not flinch away. Later that day, she had an uncanny sensation in her left arm, as if something were crawling down it from shoulder to elbow, and from there along the outside of her forearm to her little finger. The feeling grew to a tingle, then an itch, then a painful throbbing that subsided gradually over far too long a time. Each time Czerda came in, she touched Cecelia everywhere, explaining the process over and over. The monitors they had, crude as they were compared to those in a major neuro ward, showed Cecelia’s response . . . and Czerda was mapping the return of sensation. The nurses and Brun massaged her, too . . . and gradually, fitfully, she remapped the feeling of her own body.