The confines behind that door were both smaller and much larger than I had imagined they’d be. I rested my forearm along the doorframe and hung my head.
“Give me a minute.”
And Abby stayed as quiet as a mouse. As far as I could tell, I was the only person on the ship—except I knew that was impossible. Abby was hardwired in. She was all around me, was the ship itself. Abby was the airlock.
Abby was the airlock.
I could do this—and I stepped across the threshold and into the lock, itself.
The door stayed open. Waiting. Letting me just stand there, while my heart raced, and every muscle got ready to run. Abby’s voice made me jump.
“You need to close the door, Cutter.”
I nodded.
Right. The door. Needed closing. Because the outer door wouldn’t open until the inner door was shut.
I stayed facing the outer door, and Abby stayed perfectly quiet. If she’d been human, she’d have been standing statue-still, on the other side of the airlock, letting me work it out for myself. Without taking my eyes off the door in front of me, I stretched back, and touched the control panel.
I so didn’t want to do what came next.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could. I kept my fingers on the panel, and took a deep breath, reminding myself this was Abby and she needed me, so she’d keep me safe. Abby. Safe. Well, she always had been, in the past.
Before I could get past that thought, I tapped the button that would close the inner door.
Oh, Stars, Abby. Don’t betray me, now.
And, if she heard that, she didn’t say a word. I spread my fingers so my hand was straddling the controls, rather than poised above them, couldn’t quite bring myself to let go.
“Five minutes, right, Abs?” I said, more to remind myself than the ship. “Five minutes.”
And I let go of the control panel and made myself stand on my own.
Five minutes is a very long time.
Abby opened the door at the end of it.
“You’ll do better next time, Cutter.”
“But…”
“Are you going to tell me you weren’t freaking out?”
I sighed. Damn ship could read my vitals. I might have looked okay standing there and staring at the floor, but my body had been freaking out, big time. I figured it was best to change the subject.
“Since I’m up, what’s for breakfast.”
To be honest, I was wondering what she had in store for me for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure just how much of this desensitization I could take. Doc could go suck it—and when I got back to the Marie I was going to tell him so.
“I’m sure he’ll find that very entertaining.”
For a computer, Abby had the art of sarcasm down pat.
“I wasn’t always a computer,” she said, and I wondered who she’d sassed enough to feel like killing her. “Very funny.”
But she didn’t sound amused.
I dug through the records for the rest of the day—except for two hard rounds on the exercise equipment stored behind another bulkhead.
“Can’t have you getting fat,” Abby quipped.
“What about sloppy and out of practice?”
“Good point. You’ll just have to do kata until Mack turns up.”
“How long?”
“My guess? Two more days.”
Her guess? Wasn’t she keeping an eye on him?
“No. He got very defensive when you were taken. The man has a temper that’s even worse than yours.”
I smiled at the thought.
“Now, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Tens is not happy.”
“When is Tens ever happy?”
“He has his moments.”
He did? And now I wanted to know more.
“A lady doesn’t kiss and tell.”
Tens and the AI? I tried to figure out how that might work and Abby hit me with a short, sharp blast of sound that all but jolted me out of the chair—an AI’s idea of a slap upside the head, I guess.
“Get your head back in the game.”
Right. Sure. Like I had anything else to do.
3—The Hunt Begins
I pulled all the files to do with Septu, and then I pulled all the files to do with all the worlds he’d ever worked on, and linked them with all the jobs Dasojin had ever done on any of them. There were links and overlaps, but nothing that made the kind of pattern I was looking for. I ran the files of the potential enemies Dasojin had dealt with in their own hunt for Septu’s kidnappers.
Man, I really hoped he hadn’t been mistaken for a normal hull and broken down for parts.
“He’d have let them know, before they destroyed his shell.”
Let them know what?
“Let them know he was a Human-Mind Transfer. We are highly valued. Whoever took him will either have known what he was, or they’ll be looking to upscale their market.”
“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
“I know the market, dear. They’ll take steps to contain him, and then they’ll use him for whatever purpose pays the best.”
“Right.”
I started a search on markets for slightly-used HMTs, and then I isolated a part of my implant so I could access the dark side of the intergalactic net.
“Anything breaks out of here, you need to hit me hard with something to wipe it,” I told Abby.
“But that might wipe your implant.”
“Better the implant than letting anything into your systems.”
“I’ll make a back-up.”
Now, why hadn’t I thought of that?
“You’re good, dear, but you’re only human.”
Yeah, thanks Abs. Thanks a lot.
She didn’t reply to that, but she made the back-up and then she settled back to keep an eye on what I was doing. I figured it was better doing what I was doing with an over watch than without one, and moved in to see what I could see. It was an education on the darker side of the sentient psyche—and no surprise to discover the arach mingling with the foolish and unsuspecting.
I did my best to ignore them, and chased down black-market ship dealers, traffickers in sentients
