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3
EVE
“You two realize I’m an engineer, right? Do either of you have any idea what that means?”
“You operate the airlocks,” Thuliak said, grinning in a way that made me unsure whether he was trying to piss me off, or if he was really so ignorant. Both would piss me off.
“Engineer,” Tschenkar said, eyes narrowing. He was clearly looking at the Lexikon, but he was better at hiding it than Thuliak. “You are an expert with machines. You build, design, and maintain them…without a Hivemind, I can imagine that such skills must be critical in human society.”
“You see that, Thuliak?” I asked. “Tschenkar can change the words from the Lexikon entries around enough that it’s not so painfully obvious he’s doing it.”
“It’s still obvious. At least I don’t attempt to deceive.” Thuliak said, crossing his arms and staring down the other scion.
“My point is,” I said, “I am used to, um, actually doing things? Being a productive member of society. That kind of thing.”
“You will be extremely productive,” Thuliak said, putting a calloused hand on my belly.
“That’s not all I want to be. I want to be that for you two—and for me too—but I need more than that. I’m not just a uterus with a woman attached to it.”
“What do you want us to do?” Thuliak asked, sounding even more clueless than usual.
“I’m going to be on the surface with Tschenkar. I’m sure there’s a lot of chaos on the surface right now. At a minimum there are going to be machines that need maintained and repaired.”
They both stared at me like I was an idiot.
“The Hivemind is broken. Remember? You might actually need to rely on our human machinery.”
“We simply have lost access to the Hivemind,” Tschenkar said, “there’s no real possibility that it is…down. It must still be fully functioning, but it simply cannot get a signal off the surface for whatever reason.”
“It might be down,” I said.
Thuliak shook his head. “Human machinery might go ‘down,’ which is why you need engineers. Our machinery is billions of years old. It has never failed in many eons. You’ll see that your fears are completely unfounded, Airlock.”
“Do you agree with him?” I asked, glaring at Tschenkar.
That caught Tschenkar off guard, because he clearly did agree with Thuliak, but the man hated admitting when he agreed with Thuliak. “I…I do think it’s very unlikely that the Hivemind is down.”
“Let’s make a deal then,” I said. “If the Hivemind is actually operating the way it should, then I’ll just keep my head down and do whatever Tschenkar tells me.”
Tschenkar grinned wide at that, and Thuliak frowned when Tschenkar ran his tongue across his gleaming white teeth.
“But!” I said, holding up a finger. “If the Hivemindisdown—”
“It’s not,” Thuliak said.
“If you’re both so sure it’s not down, then agree to the deal. If it’s not down, then I get to be Engineer Eve again.”
“Fine,” Tschenkar said.
Thuliak bristled, and I caught them looking at each other the way they did when they communicated through the Hivemind. Probably they were reassuring each other that their precious Hivemind could never go down, and that they just needed to humor me because I’d never really have need to be an engineer again.
“You do both realize that it’s important for humans to be productive. The Lexikon mentions that, right?”
“Yes,” Thuliak said, speaking cautiously as if he were navigating a minefield rather than a few sentences, “we also value productivity.”
“Not just popping out babies,” I said.
“We understand how you feel,” Tschenkar said.
I laughed. “Okay, so you’re both hopeless. Got it. You agree to the deal though?”
They both nodded in unison. Yeah, they’d talked to each other through the Hivemind and agreed to humor me.
“Strap in, Love,” Tschenkar said, gesturing toward a swirl of mist which was forming into the shape of an acceleration couch. “We’ll be docking onHarbingerin just a few minutes.”
