Aiden opened his mouth, struggling for something to say. But the weight of over five years of never saying what needed to be said suddenly piled down on him, and his mind went blank. So he nodded dumbly. “Of course, crewman. Get to it.”
The gunner turned on one heel and strode off, leaving Aiden alone at the window.
He stared at the unconscious young woman lying on a medical cot inside. Even though Ali had put her under so she wouldn't be a threat, he hadn't been willing to take any chances and had also insisted on restraints. Not just wrist and ankle restraints, either, but fully strapping her down.
The precaution seemed overblown, even absurd, when he looked at her sleeping face. Her beautiful features were soft and peaceful, and the only sign of the vicious fight she'd put them through was the bandages swathing her right hand, which had been horrifically burned when the gunner disarmed her.
Even after seeing the damage she'd wreaked after being triggered, it seemed impossible that she could be anything but harmless. But appearances could be deceiving.
The irony wasn't lost on him, that he'd originally “rescued” this girl by leaving an atomic in Fleetfoot's path, floating innocently like any random bit of space debris. It looked as if the Deeks had come up with the same idea for his ship, tricking him into bringing a figurative nuke aboard.
And all this time she'd just sat there, waiting to be set off. Befriending them all, struggling to become one of the crew. Falling in love and beginning a relationship with the gunner.
Aiden snorted bitterly. After he'd gotten over his anger at discovering the two were together, he'd acknowledged that they had a lot of similarities: the girl with no memories and the boy with no childhood. And now, discovering that Lana had been brainwashed similarly to the young man's conditioning, it looked as if they were even more alike than he'd realized.
He jumped slightly when a familiar and at the same time unfamiliar form slipped up to the window beside him. He'd already had a few chances to get used to the sight of Ali after her exposure to vacuum, and she'd taken hasty steps to repair herself between working on everything else that needed to be done.
Even so, the damage done to her was shocking, almost horrifying.
Whatever synthetic flesh her creators had used to make her seem human to all the senses, vacuum hadn't been much better for it than if she'd actually been a real woman; fissures and blisters covered it, most of the visible ones hastily sealed over and cauterized so she looked like the survivor of some terrible battle. The smallest and most unobtrusive “wounds” still gaped open, although whatever she used for blood was either depleted or no longer circulating in those areas, so the injuries looked as if they were on a corpse.
Her face was the most damaged, with mouth and nose and eyes containing moisture that could be flash-boiled by vacuum. She'd taken more care to repair them, but her once impossibly beautiful features were now painful to look at.
And to top it all off, the hand Lana had blown off was unsalvageable, so she'd replaced it with one of the crude models from a destroyed Fix; it was huge and ungainly on her slender arm, although she used it with just as much grace. Still, it all served to remind Aiden of what she was.
Not that he needed a reminder. He wasn't sure which was more painful to look at, her or Lana, so he focused his eyes on the wall above the Blank-the Dormant's head, saying nothing.
“Her hand will require extensive work,” the Caretaker finally said. “I've begun already, a process that would be quite uncomfortable for her if she wasn't unconscious.”
“Good thing you'll be keeping her that way until I decide what to do with her,” he ordered more than said. “A solution that'll involve booting her out at the nearest habitable world, ideally.”
He didn't look to see whether or not Ali approved with that callous decision, and whatever she felt, she said nothing. The tense silence settled again, the Caretaker waiting patiently for him to sort out his inner turmoil. Or failing that, to tell her to go away so he could suffer on his own.
Well, he certainly wasn't about to go to Ali for comfort, all things considered. But he didn't want to be alone, either. “She really wanted to stay behind on Callous, didn't she?” he finally said, almost under his breath.
The Caretaker hesitated, obviously startled by the direction his thoughts had taken. “If the part of her that was a Blank Slate was separate from the Dormant, with no knowledge of it, that seems very likely. Her brainwashing would've forced her to follow her mission.”
So it hadn't been loyalty to him or his cause, or even to the gunner, that had made Lana stay. She'd been ready to ditch him and his insane war with the Movement, like any rational person would, and would've if she'd been free to choose.
Even understanding that, even though he himself had done everything he could to get the young woman to stay on the colony world, the realization still stung. “Who was she?” he asked harshly. “And more importantly, why didn't you identify her as a threat with your vaunted Caretaker upgrades? Don't you have all the knowledge in the universe at your fingertips?”
Ali didn't sound offended by his hostility. “Logic hiccups, ones AIs tend to be susceptible to. Firstly, Dormant brainwashing on Blank Slates is considered impossible, so I did not include the potential threat in any but my most peripheral analyses of her. At the same priority ranking that checked the likelihood of, say, her actually being an alien in disguise, or a mythical creature from Homeworld.”
Well, hard to fault her for that, since it had caught the rest of them completely by surprise, too. Although
