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Chapter Six
"Still so eager to be up and about?"
Alicia inhaled a spray of sweat as she gasped for breath, but she welcomed the teasing malice in Lieutenant de Riebeck's voice. The physical therapist was a fellow Cadreman, without a trace of the semi-awe her drop commando reputation woke in ordinary medics. That was refreshing enough, and his complete indifference to her mental state was even more so. Alicia had agitated so noisily to get out of bed that even Okanami and Major Gateau had finally given in, but de Riebeck had been their revenge. His sole interest lay in getting one Captain Alicia DeVries not merely ambulatory but fully reconditioned, and his was clearly an obsessive personality.
"Looking a little worn to me, Captain," he continued brightly, and cranked the treadmill's speed control up a bit. "Care for another five or six klicks? How about another five percent of grade just to make it interesting?"
Alicia moaned and collapsed over the handrails. The still-moving treadmill carried her feet from under her, and she twitched with a horridly realistic death rattle and belly-flopped onto the belt. It deposited her on the floor with a thump, and she oozed out flat.
Lieutenant de Riebeck gri
"I give that a nine-point-five for dramatic effect and, oh, a three-point-two for coordination." Alicia shook a fist, and the major chuckled. "I see Pablo is being his usual sadistic self."
"We strive to please, Major, ma'am," de Riebeck smirked. Alicia laughed, and Cateau reached down to pull her to her feet.
"You know, I never thought I'd admit it, but this is one part of the Cadre I've missed," she panted, massaging her rebuilt thigh with both hands. The repaired muscles ached, but it was the good ache of exercise, and she straightened with a sigh. Despite her reactivation, she refused to cut her hair, which had escaped its clasp once more. She gathered it back up and refastened it, then scrubbed her face with a towel.
"I think I'm going to live after all, Pablo."
"Aw, shucks. Wen, there's always tomorrow."
"An inspiring thought." Alicia hung the towel around her neck and turned back to Cateau. "May I assume you arrived for some reason other than to rescue me from Lieutenant de Sade?"
"Indeed I have. Uncle Arthur wants to see you."
"Oh." The humor flowed out of Alicia's voice, and her forefingers moved in slow circles, wrapping the towel-ends about them. Her success in so far avoiding Keita made her feel a bit guilty, but she really didn't want to see him. Not now, and perhaps never. He was going to bring back too many painful memories ... and Cadre rumor credited him with telepathy, among other arcane powers. He'd always made her feel as if her skull were made of glass.
"Sorry, Sarge, but he insists. And I think it's a good idea myself."
"Why?" Alicia demanded bluntly, and Cateau shrugged.
"You didn't quit the Cadre just to avoid Uncle Arthur, and you've been hiding from him long enough. It's time you faced up to him. He knows, whether you do or not, that you didn't 'fail' him by resigning, but you're never going to feel comfortable about it till you talk to him in person. Call it absolution."
"I don't need 'absolution'!" Alicia snapped, jade eyes flashing with sudden fire, and Cateau gri
"Then why the sudden heat? Come on, Sarge." She hooked an arm through Alicia's. "I'm surprised he's let your debrief wait this long, so you may as well get it over with." "You can be a real pain in the ass, Ta
"True, too true. Now march, Sarge."
"Can't I even clean up first?"
"Uncle Arthur knows what sweat smells like. March!"
Alicia sighed, but the steel showed under Gateau's humor, and she was right. Alicia couldn't keep pretending Keita wasn't here. But Ta
A heat which was rapidly becoming familiar tingled in her right arm, radiating from its contact with Gateau's left elbow, and she felt her friend's thoughts. Amusement. Pride in the way she was bouncing back from her wounds. Carefully hidden worry over the upcoming interview. A burning curiosity as to the reasons for her dread over meeting Keita and concern over their possible consequences, and under it a deeper, more persistent worry about Alicia's stability—and what to do about her if she was, in fact, unstable.
"Stop that!"
"Why? She is your physician, and we need this information."
"Not from Ta
A mental grumble answered, but the information flow died, and she was grateful. Stealing Ta
Not that it hadn't been useful, she conceded. The first time Ta
Forewarned, Alicia had tapered off and allowed her manufactured dialogues to run down as if she were tiring of the game. Ta
Alicia hated deceiving her, but she was having those conversations. It was always possible she truly was mad— a possibility she would almost prefer, at times—and if she wasn't, she certainly wasn't responsible for Ta
She squared her shoulders, tucked the ends of the towel into the neck of her sweat shirt, and walked down the hallway at her friend's side.
-=0=-***-=0=-
Tisiphone watched through her host's eyes as they marched along the corridor. The past few weeks had been the oddest of her long life, a strange combination of impatient waiting and discovery, and she wasn't certain she had enjoyed them.
She and Alicia had learned much about her own current abilities. She could still pluck thoughts from mortal minds, but only when her host brought those other mortals into physical contact. She could still hasten physical healing, as well, yet what had once been "miracles" were routine to the medical arts man had attained. There was little she could do to speed what the physicians were already accomplishing, and so she had restricted herself to holding pain and discomfort within useful limits and insuring her host's sleep without medication or one of the peculiar somatic units. Tisiphone hated the somatic units. They might sweep Alicia into slumber through her receptors, but sleep was a stranger to Tisiphone. For her, the somatic units' soothing waves were a droning, scarcely endurable static. She and Alicia had also determined to their satisfaction that she still could blur mortals' senses, even without physical contact. Their technology, unfortunately, was something else again, and that experiment had almost ended in disaster. The nurse had known the bed was empty, but her medical sca
Their experiments had combined dismay and excitement in almost equal measure, yet neither Tisiphone's own sense of discovery and rediscovery nor Alicia's amazement at what she still could accomplish had been sufficient to banish her boredom. She was a being of fire and passion, the hunger and destruction of her triumvirate of selves. Alecto had been the methodical one, the inescapable stalker patient as the stones themselves, and Megarea had been the thinker who analyzed and pondered with a mind of ice and steel. Tisiphone was the weapon, unleashed only when her targets had been clearly identified, her objectives precisely defined. Now she could not even know who her targets were, much less where to find them, and she felt ... lost. Ignorance added to her sense of frustration, for if she had no doubt of her ultimate success, she was unused to delays and puzzles. It had turned her surly and snappish (not, she admitted privately, an unusual state for such as she) with her host until a fresh revelation diverted them both.
Tisiphone had discovered computers. More to the point, she had encountered the processors built into Alicia's augmentation, and had she been the sort of being who possessed eyes, they would have opened wide in surprise.
The data storage of Alicia's processors was little more than a few dozen terabytes, for bioimplants simply couldn't rival the memories of full-sized units, yet they were the first computers Tisiphone had ever met, and she had been amazed by how easy they were to access. It had taken no effort at all, for they were designed and programmed for neural linkage; the same technique which slipped into a mortal's thoughts through his nerves and brain worked just as well with them, and the vistas that opened were dazzling.
It was almost like finding the ghost of one of her sister selves. A weak and pallid revenant, without the rich awareness which had textured that forever-lost link, yet one which expanded her own abilities many-fold. Tisiphone had only the vaguest grasp of what Alicia called "programming" or "machine language," but those concepts were immaterial to her. A being crafted to interface with human minds had no use or need for such things; anything structured to link with those same minds became an extension of them and so an instinctive part of herself.