“What do you think?” I asked. “Can you use any of it?”
“Use it for what?” she asked.
“It’s makeup,” I said.
“Honey, back home we called this ‘queer gear,’ ” she said.
“Queer gear?” I asked.
“These are cosmetics for men,” she said, picking up the stockings. “I could use these for a hammock, but I wouldn’t want to wear them. Harris, stockings are not one size fits all.”
Feeling deflated, I went to the mess to get us our first meal. While I was gone, Ava removed the makeup from my rack. She played coy, but I noticed the faint smear of red on her cheeks and the enhanced shadow above her eyes when I returned.
It looked good.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A week passed between the day I boarded the Kamehameha and the time we would start the mission. I spent some of my time on the Washington, welcoming shuttles as Captain Pershing’s cruiser ferried Marines in and natural-borns out at the snail’s pace of four hundred men per trip. Walking the upper corridors of the ship, I heard officers complaining about the slow pace of the transfers.
In my off-hours, I stockpiled MREs in my quarters so that Ava would have food to eat while I was on Terraneau. If everything went well, the mission might only take a day. If things went wrong, I might not return for weeks, if I returned at all. Preparing for the worst, I hid a month’s worth of meals around my billet.
I had Ava sample each of the meals to see which ones she liked. She didn’t like any of them, but she did not complain. After sampling the spaghetti, she groaned, and said, “Can’t we just use room service?”
When I said, “They’d probably just bring you more of the same stuff,” she said, “Honey, that’s fine with me as long as the waiter looks good.”
“Charming,” I said. “He’d probably look a lot like me since they’re all clones.”
We could have smuggled a spare rack into the billet; we had the floor space. Instead, Ava and I slept in the same bed. I liked the warmth of her body under the sheets, though she showed little interest in me. She generally came to bed dressed in her bra and panties, both of which were made of a satiny white material that had been stained and dulled by the heat and sweat of Clonetown.
Ava slept with her back toward me. If I reached out and touched her, she did not pull away so long as my hands stayed around her back or her waist. When I reached too high, she wrapped her arms across her breasts and curled into a ball.
She probably would have allowed me to grope her if I forced the issue, but I never did. Instead, I would lie there, smelling her scent and feeling her warmth, entirely unable to sleep.
We talked a lot. Ava told me all about her life. She treated conversations like an autobiography. I didn’t mind, though; her life was interesting.
Ava had known that she was a clone from an early age. When she was young, the man who claimed to be her father employed a series of lab technicians to help raise her. Although they treated her well, they were not especially careful about what they said around her or about keeping her safely away from the truth of her birth. As an eight-year-old, she sneaked into the lab where she was cloned and saw the equipment that reproduced her. She wanted to believe she was real, but seeing that equipment, she had her doubts.
She lost her virginity and decided she was a clone all on the same night. She had her first period at the age of fifteen. Exactly one week later, her “father” came to visit her after she’d gone to bed. By the time he left, her virginity was gone along with any illusions that the man was really her father.
She related this tale in a matter-of-fact style without shedding a single useless tear. After telling me this story, she stared at me for several seconds, then asked, “What’s wrong with you?”
Her question caught me off guard. I did not know anything was wrong with me. “Wrong with me?”
“Don’t you feel sorry for me?” she asked.
“Why the speck would I feel sorry for you?” I asked.
“He raped me and took away my dreams.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” I grew up with thousands of clones who never knew any parents other than instructors at military orphanages. Our instructors lied to us and sent us to war. The closest thing we had to a dream was the goal that we might one day reach the rank of sergeant. Sex and reality at the age of fifteen sounded pretty good to me.
That night and the next, Ava and I slept in the same rack but a million miles apart. I call them nights, but they were just sleep periods. Life on a starship …the halls are constantly bright as day, and the world around you is generally dark as night. I had work shifts, shifts in which I was off duty, and shifts in which I slept.
Ava’s attitude thawed the day before I left for Terraneau. From the moment I entered my quarters, she wanted to talk.
I came in sweating from a day spent working out, sparring, and drilling my men. Ava, pretending as if she had not given me ice for the last forty-eight hours, followed me into the bathroom and asked about my day as I stripped off my clothes. I grunted that I had worked hard and that my crew looked ready.
“That’s good,” she said. “Are you excited to get to the planet?”
I turned to look at her. Dressed in the smallest sailor suit I could find, she looked clean and childlike. The tunic looked stylish and loose on her, but the trousers were baggy around her waist. She had rolled the cuffs back on the denim sleeves to prevent them from covering her hands. There was something vulnerable and oddly erotic about seeing this petite woman wearing a sailor’s suit.
She had also applied the makeup I brought her. Her eyes looked wide and the blue of the eye shadow played well against the green of her eyes. The makeup looked a lot better on her than it had on Fahey.
“Are you excited or scared?” she repeated in a soft voice.
I stood there naked and sweaty, considered her question, and said, “I’m both,” no longer thinking about the mission. I was excited and scared by the beautiful woman standing in the doorway. For a sliver of a second, I thought of Pavlov and his dog. He rang a bell, and his dog salivated. Ava dressed right, and I did the same.
“Excited to fight?” she asked. The other half of her question hung in the air entirely tangible but unasked. Was I anxious to get away from her?
“I was designed to fight,” I said.
I stepped into the shower. Ava had once said the difference between women and Marines was that women did not only shower when they wanted to have sex. She was wrong, of course, the Corps demands hygiene. That said, she had certainly pegged the motivation behind this particular shower.
Ava stepped into the bathroom so we could hear each other over the water. She didn’t mind the fact that I was naked. Ava was many things, but she was not shy. Rather than sit on the toilet, she stood just outside the shower and half sat on the washbasin. She kept her arms folded across her chest.
“Do you think it’s going to be dangerous?”
“Any time the Avatari are involved, things are going to get dangerous,” I said. The term “Avatari” was highly classified, but I had shared a lot of classified information with Ava. I was an outcast now; what did I care about Unified Authority security?
“Is Thomer ready?” she asked. She knew all about Thomer and his drug problems.
“He’s as ready as he’s going to get,” I said.
“Can you count on him?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said. He did a good job drilling the men today—not perfect, but good enough. “He still moves slowly; but once he gets a little adrenaline running through him, I think he’ll do okay.”
“What about Warshaw? Are you worried about him?” she asked.
“There’s not much I can do there,” I said.
“What if he doesn’t let you off the planet?” she asked. “Would he try to shoot your transport?”