John Adams - Federations

“Let’s see if we can get a closer fix on them, shall we, Niall?”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea on an otherwise dull day, would it?” Though his fingers flashed across the pressure plates of the pilot’s console, it was she who did the actual mechanics of altering their direction. But then, she would have done that anyway. Niall didn’t really need to, but it pleased her to give him tasks to do. He’d often railed at her for finding him the sort of work he didn’t want to do. And she’d snap back that a little hard work never hurt anyone. Of course, as he began to fail physically, this became lip service to that old argument. Niall had been in his mid-forties when he became her brawn and she the NH-834, so he had had a good long life for a soft-shell person.

“Good healthy stock I am,” the hologram said, surprising her.

Was she thinking out loud? She must have been for the program to respond.

“With careful treatment, you’ll last centuries,” she replied, as she often had.

She executed the ninety-degree course change that the control panel had plotted.

“Don’t dawdle, girl,” Niall said, swiveling in the chair to face the panel behind which her titanium shell resided.

She thought about going into his “routine,” but decided she’d better find out a little more about the “invasion.”

“Why do you call it an invasion?” Niall asked.

“That many ships, all heading in one direction? What else could it be? Freighters don’t run in convoys. Not out here, at any rate. And nomads have definite routes they stick to in the more settled sectors. And if I’ve read their KPS rightly…”

“…Which, inevitably, you do, my fine lady friend…”

“Those ships have been juiced up beyond freighter specifications and they’re spreading dirty stuff all over space. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

“Can’t have space mucked up, can we?” The holo’s right eyebrow cocked, imitating an habitual trait of Niall’s. “And juiced-up engines as well. Should we warn anyone?”

Helva had found the Atlas entries for this sector of space. “Only the one habitable planet in the system they seem to be heading straight for. Ravel…” Sudden surprise caught at her heart at that name. “Of all places.”

“Ravel?” A pretty good program to search and find that long-ago reference so quickly. She inwardly winced at the holo’s predictable response. “Ravel was the name of the star that went nova and killed your Jennan brawn, wasn’t it?” Niall said, knowing the fact perfectly well.

“I didn’t need the reminder,” she said sourly.

“Biggest rival I have,” Niall said brightly as he always did, and pushed the command chair around in a circle, grinning at her unrepentantly as he let the chair swing 360 degrees and back to the console.

“Nonsense. He’s been dead nearly a century…”

“Dead but not forgotten…”

Helva paused, knowing Niall was right, as he always was, in spite of being dead, too. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea, having him able to talk back to her. But it was only what he would have said in life anyhow, and had done often enough or it wouldn’t be in the program.

She wished that the diagnostics had shown her one specific cause for his general debilitation so she could have forestalled his death. Some way, somehow.

“I’m wearing out, lover,” he’d told her fatalistically in one of their conversations when he could no longer deny increasing weakness. “What can you expect from a life-form that degenerates? I’m lucky to have lived as long as I have. Thanks to you fussing at me for the last seventy years.”

“Seventy-eight,” she corrected him then.

“I’ll be sorry to leave you alone, dear heart,” he’d said, coming and laying his cheek on the panel behind which she was immured. “Of all the women in my life, you’ve been the best.”

“Only because I was the one you couldn’t have,” she replied.

“Not that I didn’t try,” the hologram responded with a characteristic snort.

Helva echoed it. Reminiscing and talking out loud were not a good idea. Soon she wouldn’t know what was memory and what was programming.

Why hadn’t she used the prosthetic body that Niall had purchased for her—reducing their credit balance perilously close to zero and coming close to causing an irreparable breach between them? He had desperately wanted the physical contact, ersatz as she had argued it would be. The prosthesis would have been her in Niall’s eyes, and arms, since she would have motivated it. And he’d tried so hard to have her. He had supplied Sorg Prosthetics with the hologram statue he’d had made long before he became her brawn, using genetic information from her medical history and holos of her parents and siblings. Until he’d told her, she hadn’t known that there had been other, physically normal children of her parents’ issue. But then, shell-people were not encouraged to be curious about their families: they were shell-people, and ineffably different. He swore blind that he hadn’t maximized her potential appearance—the hologram was of a strikingly good-looking woman—when he’d had a hologram made of her from that genetic information. He’d even produced his research materials for her inspection.

“You may not like it, kid,” he’d said in his usual irreverent tone, “but you are a blond, blue-eyed female and would have grown tall and lissome. Just like I like ’em. Your dad was good-lookin’ and I made you take after him, since daughters so often tend to resemble good ol’ dad. Not that your ma wasn’t a good-looking broad. Your siblings all are, so I didn’t engineer anything but a valid extrapolation.”

“You just prefer blondes, don’t tell me otherwise!”

“I never do, do I?” responded the hologram and Helva brought herself sharply to the present—and the fact she tried to avoid—that the Niall Parollan she had loved was dead. Really truly dead. The husk of what he called his “mortal coil” was in stasis in his quarters. He had died peacefully—not as he had lived, with fuss and fury and fine histrionics. One moment her sensors read his slowly fading life signs—the next second, the thin line of “nothing” as the essence of the personality that had been Niall Parollan departed—to wherever souls or a spiritual essence went.

She who could not weep was shattered. Later she realized that she had hung in space for days, coming to grips with his passing. She had said over and over that they had had a good, long time together: that these circumstances differed from her loss of Jennan after just a few very short years. Jennan had never had a chance to live a full, long, productive life. Niall had. Surely she shouldn’t be greedy for just a little more, especially when for the last decade he had been unable to enjoy the lifestyle that he had followed so vibrantly, so fully, in such a raucous nonconformist spirit. Surely she had learned to cope with grief in her last hundred years. That was when she realized that she couldn’t face the long silent trip back to Regulus Base. He’d insisted that he had a right to be buried with other heroes of the Service since he’d had to put up so much with them and especially her, all these decades. They had been a lot closer to Regulus at the time that subject had come up. But she was determined to grant that request.

There were no other brain ships anywhere in her spatial vicinity to contact and act as escort. She and Niall had been on a primary scouting sweep of unexplored star systems. She might have resented that first escort back from Ravel with Jennan’s body. Not that there was much chance of her suiciding this time. She’d passed that test on the first funereal return to Regulus Base. Which is when the notion to program a facsimile had occurred to her. So it was a way to delay acceptance? Surely she could be allowed this aberration—if aberration it was. She didn’t have to mention the matter to Regulus. They’d be glad enough to have her ready to take another partner. Experienced B&B ships were always in demand for delicate assignments. She was one of their best, her ship-self redesigned and crammed with all the new technology that had been developed for brain ships, and stations. Like that damned spare body Niall had bought and which she had never used. She couldn’t. She simply couldn’t inhabit the Sorg prosthesis. Oh, she knew that Tia did and the girl was glad of the ability to “leave” the shell and ambulate. Lovely word, “ambulate.” She and Niall had had some roaring arguments over the whole notion of prosthesis.