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Chapter Twenty-seven
Delicious smells filled the small galley, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem sat at the table. He wore a highly atypical air of bemusement and sprawled in his chair without his usual neatness, but then he'd earned a little down time— and hadn't expected to live to enjoy it.
He felt a bit like the ancient Alice as he watched Captain DeVries stir tomato-rich sauce with a neurosurgeon's concentration. Her dyed hair was coiled in a thick braid, and she looked absurdly young. It was hard to credit his own memory of icy eyes and lightning muzzle flashes as she sampled the sauce and reached for more basil. The lid rose from a pot beside her, hovering in midair on an invisible tractor beam, and linguine drifted from a storage bin to settle neatly in the boiling water.
"And what do you think you're doing? I told you I'd put that in when I was ready," she said, and this time he barely twitched. He was starting to adjust to her onesided conversations with the ship's AI—even if they were yet another of the "impossible" things she did so casually.
Ben Belkassem had boned up on the alpha synths after DeVries stole this ship. Too much was classified for him to learn as much as he would have liked, but he'd learned enough to know her augmentation didn't include the normal alpha synth com link. Without it, the AI should have been forced to communicate back by voice, not some sort of ... of telepathy!
Yet he was beyond surprise where DeVries was concerned. After all, she'd survived multiple disrupter hits with no more than a few minor burns, killed eleven men saving his own highly- trained self, taken out a few ground-to-space weapon emplacements, escaped through the heart of Wyvern's very respectable fortifications, and polished off a destroyer as an encore. As far as he was concerned, she could do anything she damned well liked.
She murmured something else to the empty air, too softly this time for him to hear, and he sat very still as
Elates and silverware swooped from cupboard to table like strange birds. Yes, he thought, very like Alice, though a bit more of this and he could qualify as the March Hare. Or perhaps DeVries already had that role and he'd be forced to settle for the Mad Hatter.
He smiled at the thought, and she spared him a smile of her own as she set the sauce on the table and produced a bottle of wine. He raised an eyebrow at the Defiant Vineyards label, and she sighed as she filled their glasses.
"He really was an outstanding vintner. Too bad he couldn't have stopped there."
"Um, you are speaking to me, this time, Captain?"
"You might as well call me Alicia," she said by way of answer, dropping into the chair opposite him as the pot of pasta moved to the sink, drained itself, and drifted to the table.
"Di
"Fair's fair. If you're Alicia, I'm Ferhat."
She nodded agreement and heaped linguine on her plate, then reached for the sauce ladle while Ben Belkassem eyed the huge serving of pasta.
"Are you sure your stomach's up to this?" he asked, remembering the tearing violent nausea which had wracked her less than two hours before.
"Well," she ladled sauce with a generous hand and gri
"I see." It was untrue, but if she cared to enlighten him she would. He served his own plate one-handedly, sipped his wine, and regarded her quizzically. "I don't believe I've gotten around to thanking you yet. That was about the most efficiently I've ever been rescued by my intended rescuee."
She shrugged a bit uncomfortably. "Without you I'd've been dead, too. Just how long have you been tailing me, anyway?"
"Only since Dewent, and I had a hard time believing it when I first spotted you. You know about the reward? She nodded, and he chuckled. "Somehow I don't think anyone's going to collect it. How the devil did you get so deep so quickly? It took O Branch seven months to get as far as Jacoby, and we still hadn't fingered Fuchien."
She looked at him oddly, then shrugged again.
"Tisiphone helped. And Megarea, of course."
"Oh. Ah, may I take it Megarea is your AI?"
"What else should I call her?" she asked with a smile.
"From what I've read about alpha synth symbioses," he said carefully, "the AI usually winds up with the same name as the human partner."
"Must get pretty confusing," another voice said, and Ben Belkassem jumped. His head whipped around, and the new voice chuckled as his eye found the intercom speaker. "Since you're talking about me, I thought I might as well speak up, Inspector. Or do I get to call you Ferhat, too?"
He spoke firmly to his pulse. He'd known the AI was there, but that didn't diminish his astonishment. He'd worked with more than his share of AIs, and they were at least as alien as one might have expected. They simply didn't have a human perspective, and most were totally disinterested in anyone other than their cyber synth partners. When they did speak, they sounded quite inhuman, and none of them had been issued a sense of humor.
But this one was an alpha synth AI, he reminded himself, and its voice, not unreasonably, sounded remarkably like Alicia's.
"'Ferhat' will be fine, um, Megarea," he said after a moment.
"Fine. But if you call me 'Maggie' I'll reverse flow in the head the next time you sit down."
"I wouldn't dream of it," he said a bit faintly.
"Alley did ... once."
"A base lie," Alicia put in around a mouthful of food. "She makes things up all the time. Sometimes—" she held Ben Belkassem's eyes across the table "—you might almost think she's shy a brick or two."
"Point taken," the inspector said, begi
"Well," Alicia waved at the bulkheads, "you certainly saw how Megarea—by the way, that's 'Star Ru
"So she did, and most efficiently, too."
"Why, thank you, kind sir," the speaker said. "I see he's a perceptive man, Alley."
"And your modesty underwhelms us all," Alicia returned dryly.
"Oh, yeah? Just remember, I got it from you."
Ben Belkassem choked on pasta. Definitely not your typical AI. But his humor faded as Alicia replied to Megarea.
"I'll remember. And you just remember I'd still've been dead if not for Tisiphone." She looked back at Ben Belkassem. "She was the one who jump-started my augmentation after that bastard knocked it out."
"Really?"
"Don't sound so dubious." He felt himself blush— something he hadn't done in years—and she snorted. "Of course she did. Who do you think put me back on line after Ta
He took another bite to avoid answering, and her eyes glinted.
"Of course, that's not all she does," she continued, leaning across her plate with a conspiratorial air. "She reads minds, too. That's how I know just who to look for as my next target. And she creates a pretty mean illusion, as well—not to mention sticking the occasional idea into someone else's brain." He gawked at her, and she smiled brightly. "Oh, and she and Megarea do a dynamite job of raiding other people's data bases ... or planting data in them, like 'Star Ru
She paused expectantly, and he swallowed. It was too much. Logic said she had to be telling the truth, but sanity said it was all impossible, and he was trapped between them.
"Well, yes," he said weakly, "but—"
"Oh, come on, Ferhat!" she snapped, glaring as if at a none too bright student who'd muffed a pop quiz. "You just talked to Megarea, right?" He nodded. "Well, if you don't have a problem accepting an intelligence—a person—who lives in that computer," she jabbed an index finger in the general direction of Megarea's bridge, "what's the big deal about accepting one who lives in this computer—" the same finger thumped her temple "—with me?"
"Put that way," he said slowly, easing his left arm in its sling, "I don't suppose there should be one. But you have to admit it's a bit hard to accept that a mythological creature's moved in with you."
"I don't have to admit anything of the sort, and I'm getting sick and tired of making allowances for everyone else. Damn it, everybody just assumes I'm crazy! Not a one of you, not even Ta
"That's not quite true," he said, and it was her turn to pause. She made a small gesture, inviting him to continue. "Actually, Sir Arthur never questioned that she was 'real' in the sense of someone—or something—in your own mind." He raised a hand as her eyes fired up. I know that's not what you meant, but he'd gotten as far as worrying that something had activated some sort of psi talent in you and produced a "Tisiphone persona," I suppose you'd call it, and I think he may have gone a bit further, whether he knew it or not. That's the real reason he was so worried about you. For you."
The green fire softened, and he shrugged.
"As for myself, I don't pretend to know what's inside your mind. You might remember that conversation we had just before Soissons. I can accept that another entity, not just a delusion, has moved in with you. I just ... have trouble with the idea of a Greek demigoddess or demon." He smiled a touch sheepishly. "I'm afraid it violates my own preconceptions."
"Your preconceptions! What do you think it did to mine?"
"I hate to think," he admitted. "But even those who accept something exists can be excused for worrying about whether or not it's benign, I think."
"That depends on how you define 'benign,'"Alicia replied slowly. "She's not what you'd call a forgiving sort, and we have ... a bargain."
"To nail the pirates," Ben Belkassem said in a soft voice, and she nodded. "At what price, Alicia?"