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Kolt speaks up. He’s a big blond beast of a man with hair shaved at the sides and cut into a flat plane about an inch above his skull. His augmentations are nearly external in several places, wires trammeling his body between muscle and skin in a network of cybernetic veins. He has a blocky head with an intensely square mandible. Kolt is a beast.
“Maybe she hasn’t in the usual way, but I’ve heard of drones being tracked before, I’ve also heard of them being turned into spying devices. You know this, Shah.”
“If she was a spy device, then why did she help me escape three years ago?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that Zeki might die and there are a lot of wounded, not to mention the hit our reputation and ship took. The repairs alone are going to wipe out the last several scores. She needs to be examined, Shah.”
“Yes,” I agree. “You’re right. I’ll have the doc examine her.”
“And if she is the rat? We kill her. Publicly.” Rath chimes in. He is not as bulky as the rest of us, but he is taller than any of us, with a wiry, dancerly, generally dangerous demeanor. His hair is pale white, not far off the near silver hue of his skin. It’s not an augmentation. His mother fucked an alien, and what resulted was Rath. He’s harder to read than any human when he chooses to be subtle. He’s not choosing to be subtle now.
“The crew is going to want blood,” Kolt agrees. “We lost people today. We haven’t lost anybody in three years. Remember what we did when Kris was killed? We laid waste to the entire base where his killers were given sanctuary. Blood demands blood.”
“Indeed.”
* * *
Dreamy is waiting for me where I left her. She looks afraid when I enter, but then again, she always looks afraid when I enter. I am her captor, and she is my hostage. That dynamic underpins every interaction we will ever have.
“What’s happening?” She almost whispers the question, as though she doesn’t want to know the answer.
“Good question,” I say, sitting down in front of her. I want her attention fully on me, those sweet doe eyes locked on mine. What the others suspect her of would make her little more than a walking meat robot, incapable of true independent thought or action. I hope for her sake their suspicions are not true. “Do you remember the night I took you?”
She nods her head. “Vividly.”
“Good,” I smile, taking her hands in mine. I don’t want to scare her. I want her to be as relaxed as possible, so she has some chance of being able to answer me.
“I want to know what brought you to the club that night, Dreamy.” I’m not romantic enough to believe that fate brought us together. Not the way everything has gone wrong from the moment she set foot on this vessel.
She looks confused. “I just… I wanted…”
“Yes, you’ve told me you were taken with a sudden urge to break every rule you’ve ever followed and come to Omega for the first time ever, at the same time as me?”
“I didn’t know it was the same time as you. Other than that, yes.”
“Had you done anything else deviant before that? Any other departures from your daily routine?”
“I don’t think so.”
Something doesn’t make sense. It’s not that I think she’s lying. Dreamy, as far as I know, doesn’t really lie. But that doesn’t mean she’s not being used. The others are right. Her arrival here coincided with the worst losses we’ve ever experienced. She needs to be investigated and cleared.
“I need you to think. What were you doing before you decided to go to the club?”
“I was folding my clothes. I was getting ready for bed.”
“Okay. And had you had a normal day before that?”
“I’d worked the standard sixteen-hour shift with three fifteen-minute breaks for food and water. I was due to start another in a matter of hours.”
“So nothing was out of the ordinary. You weren’t taken from your work to talk to anyone, nobody took you for any procedures?”
She frowns slightly. “Shah, what are you trying not to accuse me of?”
That sentence tells me she’s not a remote drone relaying information back to the authorities. There’s too much creativity in the way she expresses herself. She’s repressed and timid, but she’s not a robot.
Dreamy
I don’t need him to answer the question. It is obvious that he thinks this was my fault somehow. I’m not surprised. I am the newest variable aboard his ship. It would make sense that fingers would be pointed at me.
