Conversations On The Utopian Ideal: Thirty

Sergeant Helmi Alpassi submitted to the security scan at the entrance to Captain Night’s hangar stoically.

It’d be pretty fucking hypocritical of me to complain about getting checked for chips and jacks, after all.

She was less resigned to leaving her sidearm in the security locker there, but that was procedure they insisted on back at Pilot Roth’s hangars too and she had no reasonable justification to refuse.

And it wasn’t as if she was appreciably less deadly without her weapon as with it.

Still, options are nice things to have.

Pilot Roth, of course, had no weapon to turn over. She passed through the checkpoint with a polite, if slightly absent-minded, smile for the marines, accepted back the small parcel she had brought with her, and headed for the docking umbilical. An ensign was waiting at the top to escort them through the Utopian Ideal’s corridors, and not, this time, to the officer’s mess or the office of either Captain Night or Commander Invelen, but into an unfamiliar part of the ship where the occasional open door revealed scientific equipment and terminals that looked as if they’d be at home in the most up-to-date research facilities in the Cluster.

The ensign stopped. “Dr Toin’s lab is just along here, sir,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Pilot said warmly. “Helmi, why don’t you wait here while I – ”

“No,” Helmi said.

“I’m quite sure,” Pilot said, in the dry tone she used when she thought she was being a woman of the world, “that I’m not in any danger from one research scientist, Helmi.”

One research scientist with spirits’ know what going on in her head after two years collared like a dog in a kennel. Helmi considered giving Pilot a brief explanation of what a person could do in the mindless panic of post-traumatic anxiety, illustrated with a couple of colorful examples from her own personal barracks-room experience, then looked at Pilot’s soft blue eyes and settled for: “No.”

Pilot sighed. “Fine. Just don’t scare her, Helmi. I don’t think she’s had a very good time of it.”

Helmi nodded. I won’t scare her.

If she doesn’t scare me.

That seemed, to Helmi, to be about fair.

She expected the door to lead to another sterile grey laboratory with banks of monitors and machines, but her first impression of the room beyond it was color. Reds and pinks, golden tones shading into orange, spilling around the room in shapes that seemed vaguely familiar from long-ago classes, strings of numbers and symbols that swooped and spun and had Helmi’s heart-rate ticking up a little in the half-second before she identified holoprojection and cut in the optical filters that damped it down to a pastel blur.

At the center of that blur was the object of Pilot’s visit, clear and sharp now in contrast to the haze in her dark blue insignia-less uniform. ID confirmation spooled across Helmi’s retinas as her internal neocom made a facial recognition match, Dr Nolikka Toin, Corporation: Ishukone, Rank: Restricted, Posting: Restricted, Age: 37, Hair: Brown, Eyes: N/A, Height: 178 cm, Weight: 50 kg.

That last Helmi assessed as being out of date, as Nolikka turned at the sound of footfalls and the holoprojection stilled. Incarceration will do that to a person.

Do other things, too.

Still, the woman didn’t seem about to fly off the handle, tense though she was, and so Helmi moved aside and let Pilot through the door after her.

“Hello,” Pilot said, her soft Gallente accent softer than usual. “Dr Toin? My name’s Cia, Cia Roth. I’m, well. Ami’s sister, among other things. I brought you – I brought you some things.”

“Ms Roth. Sir,” Nolikka said, her voice clear but without any weight to it, a voice, Helmi thought, neither used to giving orders nor having to raise itself to be heard. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to ‘sir’, me,” Pilot said. “I’m not – in your chain of command, is that the term?”

“Yes, Ms Roth.” The scientist didn’t relax from her at ease posture, not as straight-backed as Helmi would have liked to see from anyone under her command but not bad. For a techie.

Pilot set the bag down on the nearest bench. “I’ll put them – I’ll just put them here, shall I? It’s just some – some things I’d want, if I were …” She paused. “Um. Just some things.”

Nolikka looked a little baffled, as well, Helmi thought, she might. Perhaps it was the done thing in the Federation to give scented soaps and handcream to people recently escaped from slave labor factories. I’m sorry about your illegal imprisonment and abuse. Have some lavender water!

Helmi wouldn’t know.

“And this is, um. My friend Helmi,” Pilot said.

“Hello,” Helmi said neutrally.

“Sir,” Nolikka said.

“Do you have everything you need?” Pilot asked.

“Yes, Ms Roth. Thank you.”

“Do you mind if I … ” Pilot pulled a stool out from under the nearest bench, and perched herself upon it, even as she went on, “Do you mind if I sit down? It’s a long walk from the lock to back here.”

“No, Ms Roth, I don’t mind.”

Which was, Helmi judged, a lie. A good one, told with a straight face, and no betraying flicker to the voice, but a lie nonetheless, polite courtesy from a woman who wanted nothing more than for them to leave her in peace.

But Pilot hears what she wants to hear.

“How are you holding up?” Pilot asked.

“I’m well, thank you, Ms Roth.” Nolikka’s voice was inflexionless.

Pilot toyed a little with the bag on the bench. “I remember, for me … it was such a relief that it was over. I couldn’t feel anything else through the relief for a while. And when I did, it seemed so … inappropriate.” She smiled, as if Nolikka could see her. “It was over, it was past, I’d been fine. So why … ?”

There was a small silence, and then the scientist asked softly, “For you?”

Pilot shrugged. “It was different, for me. Not so long. Not for … the same reasons. I’m not pretending to know how you feel. But …” She toyed with the bag again. “After, the first thing I wanted, well, after I slept for about twenty hours, was to be clean. A bath with bubbles, and nice soap, and all the things that … just weren’t part of what had happened. I thought you might …”

“Thank you,” Nolikka said, and this time Helmi thought she meant it.

“But not,” Pilot said with a little wry twist to her lips, “Not what you were wanting?”

“I don’t want for anything, here,” Nolikka said. “But thank you.”

Pilot looked around. “Silver said you’ve been doing some exceptional research.” Nolikka looked slightly baffled, and Pilot went on, “Captain Night. He said your work is extraordinary.”

A faint hint of color in the scientist’s cheeks, then. “He’s too generous. I am quite out of the loop on latest developments.”

“I’m sure you’ll catch up,” Pilot said, studying her. “Have you thought about what you’ll do? When this is over?”

“When this is over,” Nolikka said blankly.

“Will you go back to Ishukone? Do you have family there?”

“I have a sister,” Nolikka said, and paused. “Go back to Ishukone? Of course.”

“Of course,” Pilot said gently. “Besides your sister?” At the other woman’s expression of incomprehension, she prompted, “Someone special? You’d like to see again?”

The answer came with the speed of pre-prepared fiction. “No. No-one like that.”

“I see,” Pilot said softly.

From the expression on that pretty Gallente face, Helmi thought that Pilot did see, even if what she saw was not what she'd been looking for.

And for once, heard what she didn’t want to hear, too.

Conversations On The Utopian Ideal: Twenty Nine

((co-written with Silver Night))

The room was full of colours. Pouring out of the holoprojector in a cascade of swirling equation which danced around each other and merged and reformed, following the gestures of the slender scientist who stood at their heart as a squadron of fighters follows their target, they stained the utilitarian grey of the Utopian Ideal’s laboratory a thousand bright and changing hues. Dr Nolikka Toin flicked her fingers at one number and beckoned to another and the images spun and changed and rained rainbow sparks on the floor and then hovered on the palm of her hand. Colours flared and faded: blue and indigo, blurring into purple and then flushing deep red a little further on; orange and gold always rotating around each other, each shading towards sunset pink at one end of their orbit before recovering their original hue as they looped back towards the centre of the room.

The ship’s sensors picked up the splash of the projections against the walls and ceiling of the laboratory. Because the ship was not simply a ship at that moment at time, but a ship with pilot in pod, the sensors filtered their input, focused it, translated it from data to a faint tickling and fed it to the human intelligence controlling the carrier. Instructions came back, seeking more detail, more input, and the ship responded, activating monitors and isolating feeds. The ship’s computers were capable of testing the equations that swirled around the laboratory.

The ship’s pilot was capable of appreciating them.

Incomplete, the computers judged, reached a dead-end in the line and stopped.

The ship’s pilot followed the leap past that gap to the numbers spinning on the other side.

New instructions reached the ship, and obediently, it withdrew the neural links connecting it to the pilot and subsided into somnolence as the pilot slid through the decanting chamber and into the briskly efficient embrace of what the crew called the de-gooing room. Moments later, he was dressed and walking the corridors of the ship that was now, once more, simply a ship, just as he was now once more, merely a man.

At least, as much as any pilot who had killed millions and spent billions could be merely anything.

This pilot, Captain Silver Night, paused in the corridor a few meters short of the door of the laboratory, and sent a polite comm inquiry to the scientist within. Captain Night wishes to know if a visit would inconvenience Dr Toin. Not that the Captain of the Utopian Ideal needed permission to enter the laboratory or any other room on his ship, of course. Some things, however, were done whether strictly required or not – and Silver was quite sure that Dr Nolikka Toin had not been in a position to refuse entry to her workspace for quite some time.

After a moment, an equally polite response came back: Dr Toin would welcome such a visit.

The equations had stilled their dance by the time Silver opened the door, hovering around the head of the woman who stood at their heart, staining the dark blue of her insignia-less uniform and the dull grey of the collar around her neck with splashes of vivid turquoise and green, stippling her spacer’s-tan white face with indigo and violet.

“Dr Toin,” he said. “I noticed you were working late. I hope I am not interrupting.”

“Not at all, sir. I am …” A flick of her fingers sent the symbols around her spinning lazily, and she gave a small smile. “A little stuck.”

Silver studied the rotating figures, f(x14) = a_0 + ∑ - (n=1 ) ^ ∞ µ (aπd) - ∫ cos (f (xϬ)) dx + b/n / sin (4 ﻑ /7θ) floating past his face in bright blue and dusky yellow. A faint electro-magnetic field prickled against his skin. “At the transition between Tahvulen’s paradox and the Mondmuggar equivalencies. Have you considered inverting the Elerouc transform?”

Nolikka’s smile grew wider. “Excellent idea as that is, it turned out to lead me nowhere. Or, to infinity, which in this case is identical.”

“Perhaps your colleagues in Ishukone will have a more useful suggestion, then. When this is over.”

“Yes, sir. And – is there …” A hand crept to the thin circlet of metal at her neck, inactive now but still intact as the nanites ate their way busily through the explosive booby-trap inside, and she stopped.

“Any word on when that will be? It’s my understanding that both S.C.I.D and Republic Justice are both all but ready to move. Lieutenant Etay’s colleagues have taken your deposition, I believe?”

Nolikka’s fingers tightened on the collar and the colours around her dimmed and dipped. “Yes, sir.”

Silver frowned slightly. “Is there something about that I should know, Dr Toin?”

“That you should … I don’t, I – ” She stammered to an anxious halt, the holoprojections fading to the palest transparency and then vanishing completely, leaving her a lonely figure stranded in the middle of a blank grey room. Questions without ‘right’ answers, Dr Akell had warned him, pose intolerable dilemmas.

“Please, take a seat, Dr Toin,” Silver said gently. “There is one just to your left.”

As she located the stool and perched on it, he came a little further into the room, drawing out another seat with a deliberate scrape and sitting down himself. “I noticed you’re using Isida’s convergence operation to bridge the medium and low frequency harmonic interface. I was under the impression Dr Sihorah’s work had superseded that.”

Nolikka’s expression cleared and her grip on the metal collar around her neck loosened. “Sir, I still find Sihorah’s proofs unstable past one-ten of max power.”

“That’s … suboptimal for real-world application,” Silver said, and the corner of Nolikka’s mouth twitched up.

“It’s an elegant theorem,” she said. “But unfortunately a brittle one as well.”

Silver paused, and then with careful precision, said, “You have spoken to a number of representatives from S.C.I.D. and Republic Justice, as well as my own officers, over the past week. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said readily.

“These interviews have taken a considerable amount of your time,” Silver said. “Have you found them fatiguing?”

“Sir, a little, sir. But they need to know as much as I can tell them, sir, I understand that.”

“That is, unfortunately and regrettably, the case, yes,” Silver said. A query to his internal NEOCOM sent a search program burrowing through logs and records: Nolikka Toin, Doctor: interview {with} Saernal Taerild, Colonel {or} Demen Jadat, Sergeant {or} Supreme Court Investigative Division (any) {or} Republic Justice Department (any): time/location/duration/doorlogs/personnel present.

The results returned quickly. The information they contained was also, in Silver’s opinion, suboptimal.

“The personnel from S.C.I.D. here today kept you for quite some time,” he said evenly. “Without breaks, according to the ship’s records.”

“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said.

“If they feel the need to speak to you again, one of my officers will be present,” Silver said. “Sergeant Jadat, perhaps. To prevent a repeat of that – or any other failing in manners.”

“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said, and there was unmistakable relief in her voice. I will, Silver thought, be explaining a few things to Lieutenant Etay’s colleagues.

“Dr Toin,” he said. “You are a guest aboard my ship. As such, I consider a discourtesy to you to be one done to me. And I take … a dim view of bad manners. Rest assured I will be making my opinions known to the officers you have dealt with. And their superiors.”

“Captain Night, sir.” For a moment, head bent, Nolikka could have passed for any officer on the ship, brown hair with threads of early grey tied austerely back, spacer-pale skin in sharp contrast to the dark blue of the Ideal uniform. A Deteis tube-bred crèche-child, one of many, spick-and-span and always on call.

Then she lifted her head and the thin circlet of her collar caught the light that did not reflect at all off the opaque white of her eyes, and she was not one of many, not at all.

“Sir,” she said again, and stopped.

“You may speak freely, Dr Toin,” Silver encouraged.

“Sir. They said, the Fedo officers, they said …” Another pause, and the rest of her words came in a breathless rush. “About the rest of the operation, when I go back there, for cover, with the people going inside, they said.”

“That will not happen,” Silver said mildly. Explaining more than a few things, perhaps. “Dr Toin. You have my word that no operational plan that requires your presence will be approved. You have my word that you will not leave this ship except by your choice.”

Nolikka said quietly, “I don’t want to be the cause of any problems for you, sir.”

“I am not the one who will have problems,” Silver assured her. “Believe me. Remember, I am a capsuleer.”

“Yes,” she said. “That makes things different for you, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen a capsuleer pilot before, I don’t … quite know how things are for you.”

“That’s an – ” Manners stopped him there. Odd choice of words for a blind woman.

Nolikka smiled. “Interesting way to put it? I can see you, Captain. I just don’t see what you see.”

“What do you see?” he asked.

“What do you see?” she said, turning the question back on him.

Silver considered. “You are … thirty-seven years old, one hundred seventy two centimetres tall – ”

“Which you got from my personnel file.”

“Which I got from your personnel file,” he acknowledged. “Deteis, from the Ishukone tube program, brown hair, wearing a uniform with no insignia. Your eyes have been damaged by radiation exposure and there is a scar on your forehead that may or may not be related to that. No jewellery.”

“Except my necklace,” Nolikka said, tapping a finger on the control collar.

“No jewellery,” Silver said again, and there was a small moment of silence between them, not uncomfortable.

Nolikka broke it, her voice soft. “You’re taller than I am. I don’t know what colour your hair is but your voice is the same colour as the fourteenth cosin pi function in the last repeating sequence of Ititeola’s theorem. And younger than you are. A clone?”

“Yes,” Silver said.

“You’re used to talking to people, but not so much with them. You keep secrets as if it’s second nature. You risk your life for strangers and you could have been a serious mathematician if you’d put the time in. Still could be, I think.”

“Not strangers,” Silver corrected. “Ishukone.”

“Ishukone,” Nolikka said, and smiled. “I’m right about the math, though. And you’re in love with your X.O.”

“That,” Silver said, “is not correct.”

“No?” Nolikka said. “Your voice changes when you talk to her, even giving orders.”

“You are hypothesising ahead of your data, Dr Toin,” Silver said.

She laughed a little. “You asked what I saw. Is any of it right?”

“I am,” Silver allowed, “taller than you are.”

Nolikka laughed again and leaned back, reaching up one hand to brush the equations once more circling lazily above her head, dark blue and green in a slow and sinuous orbit. Silver recognised old, old formulae, long ago established as the mathematics that ruled the speed of light and the pull of gravity wells, rotating leisurely around each other as they traced an elliptic loop around the woman at their centre, and realised he was watching the quiet background hum of her thoughts, different from and yet not entirely alien to the steady stream of data that passed beneath the surface of his own mind when the neural interfaces connected him to a ship.

The stately dance slowed further, the equations shedding complexity and reducing down to strings of simple equivalencies.

“You should get some rest, Dr Toin,” Silver said. “I can have an ensign show you to your quarters.”

The symbols coiled themselves around her wrist and curled into the palm of her hand. “Thank you, Captain. That’s kind of you,” she said gravely, and then smiled, closing her hand around the holograph until the light was just glimmer between her fingers, so faint it could have been entirely his imagination. “But I know my way.”

Equal

((co-authored with Silver Night))

The numbers stream past her fingers in a river of light and sound, whispering their secrets to her, dancing at her command. Arranged and rearranged the symbols resting on her left hand equal the ones circling her right. They separate and recombine and make new patterns in the darkness behind her eyes, spin into all the shapes of space. There, Nolikka Toin tells them, and there, and there.

They obey her, beautiful in their asymmetrical perfection, obey her as she must obey –

The treacherous thought slips in and the numbers wobble. Nolikka fights to bring them back into line but she’s lost the balance of it and they spin sideways and away, slipping out of her control like everything else is out of her control, racing towards the vanishing point …

She hits the keys to save what she’s done and takes a deep breath. Don’t think. That’s the key, mad as it is for someone whose very life depends on her ability to think better and faster than others. Don’t think about where you are, about what you’re doing. Just the numbers. There’s nothing but the numbers, after all, in the end.

As she’s about to try again, a voice stops her. “Dr. Toin! Over here.”

Nolikka doesn’t have a name for that voice, doesn’t have a name for most of the Gallente accents in this place she’s in for those hours of the day she can’t find a way back to the numbers. She knows it, though, male, middle-aged, belonging to a man who smells of hair-gel and cheese and too much cologne. The voice is in charge and she can’t afford to hesitate, turns and walks across the laboratory towards it, sidestepping work-tables and colleagues who are, as always, in exactly the same place as they are every day.

“This gentleman,” Too Much Cologne says, “has some questions for you, Dr. Toin.”

People there, she can tell, not just one, not just this gentleman. Their breathing and the small sounds of movement make a slow surf of dark waves behind her eyes, in front and to the right of her. Then a voice, a new voice, male, tall. Expensive, Nolikka thinks, not knowing why, hearing it as a taupe ribbon shot through with silk, slipping tautly though her fingers, the standardized accent of a newsreader that was standard to no-one at all with only the occasional depth of the vowels betraying …

Ishukone.

She loses the thread of his words, scrambles after it, makes sense of his question and finds that his question makes sense. Answers it without thinking, and finds him with her at the end of her explanation with another question pointed directly at the gap in her hypothesis.

For a few moments she forgets even Ishukone in the sheer exhilaration of another mind, a mind whose thoughts she isn’t intimately familiar with after two years of close confinement, a mind that follows hers and understands.

Words are inadequate. “It's easier to show you,” she says. Let me show you what I see. Please. “ I have the simulations – ”

“Of course,” Expensive says.

She hurries back to her workstation, hearing him follow her, other footsteps, she didn’t care who, it didn’t matter. Keystrokes bring up her simulation, the electro-magnetic charge of the projection pricking against her skin. “This is the current mass-manufactured version.”

“I’m very familiar with it,” Expensive tells her. She believes him.

Nolikka reaches up to run her fingers over the field, every number in every line of it as familiar to her as Haraila’s face had been. “You can feel the resilience, but ultimately it’s a go-no-go solution. Go ahead. Go ahead and touch it.”

She feels the shift and give in the projection as he does, and smiles. “Wait a moment now.” The numbers answer her, change their faces and join hands in a new dance of new equals. The tingle of the charge against her skin changes colour and she feels her equations move them both back a little, firmly but politely. There’s no excuse for bad manners, Noli, Hara had always said and she has taught the numbers that, for Hara, to remember.

“Interesting,” Expensive says, and Nolikka hears the hint of Ishukone again and falls hard out of the equations and back into her hungry, collared self.

Stupid, stupid, she chides herself. You planned and waited and prepared and almost lost your chance because someone asked you about your work. Head-in-the-clouds is right.

He has more questions for her. She has answers, some, not all, because his questions are good ones and she knows they’ll make her work for the missing answers tomorrow and the next day until they were there and clear and vivid in her mind.

Not now, though. Not now.

Nolikka clears her throat, makes her voice as casual as she can, and asks, “Is that an Ishukone accent I hear?”

Mistake.

Pain, every nerve in her body firing distress signals at once, crackling red light behind her eyes. Beyond comprehension, beyond bearing except she has no choice but to bear it, crushing even her thought of no, no, no into a white-hot black hole of agony.

Then gone. The edge of the workbench is hard beneath her hands. Sparks crackle and blaze in her head, neurons still firing at random, and she sucks a breath, another, tries to remember who and where she was and then does and tries to forget again.

A rich dark taupe ribbon unfurls in her head, the threads of silk gone to a burnished samite, and says “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. It’s Korama.”

Which makes no sense. Because what is there in Korama but Ishukone?

I’m sorry, you’re mistaken, that’s right.

Or.

Yes. But I don’t want the others here to know.

Hope, then. A small sharp bubble of light in her mind. Not a coincidence, that Expensive is here, with his clever questions and the trace of home in his voice.

He has more questions. Nolikka forces herself to focus against the residual flicks and jerks of the collar, testing him with her answers now, pushing past the concepts into the strings of numbers beyond them. Expensive follows her, and she takes another deep breath and another chance.

“These are the equations I mean,” she says, and touches the keys that will bring up a screen of data she can’t see. Can’t see, but knows, nonetheless, because it’s her numbers there, a string of familiar formula and, seeded in among them, carefully segregated from the strings to prevent automated checking from noticing, numbers and letters that didn’t belong.

Not in shield tech, anyway.

On a docking registry, though, there they’d belong, telling any reader that the Otanuomi Blue was in port.

“I understand,” Expensive says. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.”

Nolikka touches the keys she knows will blank the screen, hope acquiring sharp edges that make it painful to look at. “This is cutting edge work, Mr ... ?”

“Captain,” Expensive says. “Captain Night.” Which is not the right name for that voice, which is not the soft grey of a sleeping station or the cold sable of a sky empty of sun, but perhaps, Nolikka thinks, it’s just exactly as true as Korama is.

“Captain Night. These simulations represent years of research,” Nolikka says. “Years.”

“I know,” Captain Night says. “Of course, the proof will be in the final tests.”

Proof. “I'm not sure how much more proof I can provide you at this stage, in a laboratory, Captain.” I could run for the door and make them cut me down in front of him, that’d be proof. Is that what he needs me to do?

It surprises her, realising how much she doesn’t want to die. But if it would get the others out … She is Ishukone, and so are fully half of them. And she had been Lead Project Scientist, and that should still mean something to her. Is that what you need me to do?

“Of course,” Captain Night says. “We will need plans to go to full scale testing. That's why we're here. To see if we can't get the tech working out in the wild in the near future, as it were.” Wait, that was, Nolikka is almost certain, parsing plans and near future.

Wait.

Captain Night excuses himself, says something about hammering out details, and she hears his footsteps receding.

Nolikka waits, straining to hear the voices at the other end of the room, too far away for anything but a low blur of conversation, until –

Pain.

And gone again, almost immediately, leaving her shaking and gasping and then an instant later pain and then not and then again, and again. Her thoughts scatter and fracture, I did something … they know … what was it …, muscles spasming as nerves fired at random. Her name, Too Much Cologne is calling her name, and she has to go, not to go will mean more punishment, that Nolikka knows even as jagged flares behind her eyes break apart every other chain of thought she tries to put together until there’s red and red and redredred and nothing else in all the world.

“Temporary side effects,” Too Much Cologne is saying as she gets closer. “With no effect on productivity, of course.”

“So I would hope,” Captain Night says, and the silk behind the ribbon of his voice has gone completely.

“Dr Toin, you'll be going with Captain Night,” Too Much Cologne says, “to examine the setup of his manufacturing facilities and make sure there's no impediment to our moving forward with production.”

There is one right answer to that, one answer that won’t get the collar triggered. “Yessir,” Nolikka says.

“His staff will ensure your focus on the task at hand as we do here.” Too Much Cologne’s voice leaks fake bonhomie over Nolikka like a broken sewer and for a moment she thinks fear and nausea combined will have her vomiting on his shoes. “Can't have you scientists day-dreaming the day away, can we?”

“ We also want to ensure that to the degree it is practical,” Captain Night says, “that the production version of the technology is compatible as possible with our setup, so you'll need to make sure and take note of our processes.”

One right answer to that, too. And the answers have to be right. Her muscles are still jumping and twitching and nerves scream with memory. “Of course, Captain.”

“I don't want Captain Night to have any complaints about you, Dr Toin,” Too Much Cologne says. “I’d take a dim view of that.”

"Some of these research types just require a firm hand, I've found.” Nolikka wonders if she imagined it before, the trace of home she heard before, the depth she had been so certain lay behind Captain Night’s smooth announcer’s tones. It’s not there now. “I'm sure she'll do splendidly."

They talk about money. After a few moments Nolikka understands that she’s being bought, that Captain Night is haggling over the price he’ll pay for her, with nobody being so coarse as to say so out loud. Perhaps this is the plan, she thinks.

He’s either lying now, or he was lying to her before, and Nolikka doesn’t know him well enough to tell whether this is his real voice or the other was.

Doesn’t know him at all.

Except he understands her equations.

And she has no choice.

She goes where she is told, until they reach the door that none of them are able to pass and her feet stop without her willing them too. A hard shove in the small of her back sends her forward, off balance, bracing herself again pain that doesn’t come. Her shoulder hits the wall and she is suddenly in a space she doesn’t know, when every step for the past two years has been familiar to the point of monotony. She can’t move with the knowledge of it, can’t breathe. A hand takes her arm and tugs her along and she stumbles forward.

“No trouble out in the station, Doctor,” Captain Night tells her. “Mr Erquilenne is a talented amateur. We are not.”

There is one right answer to that as well. “Yes, Captain.”

Outside, then, strange voices around her, spaces wider and then narrower and then wider again. Smells, noises, the colours behind her eyes are a senseless cacophony but the hand on her arm keeps her moving. Then a quieter place, metal echoing beneath their feet, a cold oily smell that she remembers. It equals hangar. They are moving up an incline that vibrates beneath their combined footsteps. Boarding ramp.

A smaller space. A hiss and click behind her and a change in air pressure.

“Excuse me,” Captain Night says hurriedly, and all the burnished low notes are back in his voice. Fabric rustles, footsteps, a door closing, and Nolikka realises he is gone.

A Gallente voice says neutrally, “Are we secure?”

Nolikka turns her head, trying to tell who she’s there with, how many. Another voice, a woman’s, Ishukone clear in more than the vowels, saying “If we aren't, we're fucked.”

Someone addressed as Colonel is ordered to run a scan.

Nolikka is alone on a ship with an unknown number of strangers and one of them probably has the trigger to her collar and she sees whitewhitewhitewhite as voices talk past her.

No. To her, now. Names that she can’t match to any of the bodies around her, acronyms that mean nothing, something about –

The Federation.

She gives them her name and her rank and her ID number.

It didn’t work last time.

Gives it again, or thinks she does, in the middle of whitewhitewhitewhite, and a door opens and closes and Captain Night says “That isn't necessary, Doctor.”

There’s no reason for her to feel safer, no reason at all, when he’s just bought her like a trained furrier, but he understands her equations and on a certain level that’s everything she needs to know. Whitewhitewhitewhite recedes and she can hear that there’s just four other people near her, none of them too close.

“I want to apologize for activating your collar earlier, too,” Captain Night says, a faint hint of shrip carried to her on his words. No mistaking the Ishukone now, for all the polished non-accent that lies over it. “This is my ship, and you certainly are not a prisoner. We could use your help freeing the others, though.”

“Captain Night, sir,” Nolikka says, because That’s all right is untrue and Thank you is nowhere near enough and neither of them equal the numbers balancing themselves behind her eyes. “Korama, sir?”

“Dr Toin,” Captain Night says with formal courtesy, almost as if it is not his ship but her laboratory. “How would they know? Commander Invelen and I are both Ishukone. Whatever else we might have become since then, always that.”

There’s a name, then, for the woman with the smoker’s rasp. I knew they’d send someone, Nolikka thinks, and realises she’s spoken aloud when they try and tell her that no, they’re not sent by Ishukone.

That the corporation had no intention of coming for her, that’s too much, that’s whitewhitewhitewhite again and voices washing over her in long rolling waves with an undertow to suck her down to darkness. She surfaces enough to ask to send word to her sister and Captain Night tells her that it might be best to wait until they have all the others in hand as well. Which means no, and the waves take her down again.

A question brings her back up to where she can breathe and think and hear. The dynamics of the fluctuations in the lower spectrum under sustained laser exposure, and the numbers dance for her. She follows them to the answer and Captain Night asks another, the strands of his voice no longer drawn tight against her grip but resting gently on the palms of her hands. Another answer, another question, leading her through the well-known steps of long-familiar formulae to the quiet certainty at their heart.

“The flaws in the design that you put there,” Captain Night says to her then “They were subtle, but it was still a dangerous thing to do.”

There had been a time when Nolikka had not even understood that who and what she was might not be equal, when violating the implacable accuracy of her equations and endangering the lives that might one day depend on them was outside all comprehension.

Before.

She is suddenly, deeply ashamed. “Yes, sir. I thought about the crews of the ships, sir, I did.”

He corrects her. “Dangerous for you, Doctor. A brave thing.”

Forgiven.

Absolved.

Strong hands, disorientingly cold and unyielding, help her to a chair. There is food, so rich she spins back and forth between hunger and nausea. There is a new voice, one Commander Invelen says belongs to a medical officer. Hands touch her, impersonally gentle, and then are gone. Captain Night is talking to the Gallente about our course going forward. Between one mouthful of food and the next she is suddenly so tired that the words fuzz apart into meaningless spirals and Nolikka lays her head down on the table and watches them without comprehension.

Time skips and jumps. Captain Night is talking to her, and she is answering, with no idea of what either of them are saying. She is standing, walking, a cool metal hand guiding her, smelling tobacco and machine oil.

She is lying down. A blanket settles over her. A door closes, and then it is quiet, quiet enough for her to hear her own heart beating, its slow and steady pace accommodating the susurration of her breath.

She counts and divides and multiplies and watches the long and simple string of symbols that describe the rhythm in her chest spin out in a slow and gracious orbit, until everything inside her equals their steady tempo and they draw her with them into the gentle velvet dark.

When This Goes Wrong ...

"Of all your fucking appalling ideas, farmboy, this one takes the prize for une assiette pleine de merde."

Lieutenant Charles Etay shrugged a little, having, Capitaine Elienne Desorlay thought sourly, clearly developed an immunity to even my best glare.

Fortune me forniquer.

"What's your better idea, Eli?" Etay asked. "Go back and knock on the front door? Say 'Excusez-moi, s'il vous plaît, je vous ai entendu gardent esclaves ici.' Like that?"

"Better than getting podders mixed into it." Eli shook the last cigarette out of the crumpled pack. "This one especially."

"Because ...?"

"Don't play dumber than you are, Charlie," Eli snapped. "You think he's all post-Sansha and reformed? Really?"

"Now you sound like Proleque."

"And baiser vous with a splintery stick too." She found her lighter and set fire to the cigarette with more vigour than was perhaps necessary. "You think about how our careers are going to look when this gets back home?"

Etay looked down. "I have," he admitted quietly.

"And?"

He paused, and then looked back at her, eyes a little narrowed against the smoke drifting into his face. "I can't just leave them there, Eli."

Merde.

She flicked ash at him for the small, vindictive pleasure of seeing him flinch. "When this goes wrong, farmboy ..."

The corner of his mouth twitched up. "You'll say I told you so?"

Eli snorted. "You'd better believe I will," she said. "If we both live long enough, you'd better believe I will."

Avec grandes cloches sur le dessus.

If I get the fucking chance.