Embarkment 2577 Page 9

  “Are you alright? You’re pale. Do you want me to take you home? It’s been a long day.”

  It had been a long day and I was completely exhausted, but that wasn’t it. “No. No, I’m fine. Go on.”

  We had spent a lot of time together, and I didn’t remember it at all. Why did I forget?

  He sounded amused when he spoke again. “Okay. Not to brag, but I seem to be a novelty. I meet women everywhere who want to see if they can make me feel something for them. You can probably guess most of it. It’s a pain.”

  I swallowed an almost hysterical bout of laughter. “Did anyone ever succeed?”

  His voice oozed with sarcasm. “My mother did intend to use me for a spouse. I suppose she programmed me after her preferences, I don’t know.”

  How many surprises would this day carry? I never expected to sit in a corridor discussing sex with an android. “You still haven’t answered the question. What am I to you?”

  It might be unfair to put him on the spot, but I couldn’t bear waiting any longer.

  “You’re everything. You accepted me for what and who I was, even though your world didn’t know anything more advanced than one of those funny little phones. I never felt anything besides friendship for anyone, and I fell in love with you within a day.”

  Did I hear that right?

  “I haven’t wanted to tell you. I just wanted you to know I’d always be there for you, always be your friend.”

  This would be a good time to say something, but I had nothing.

  “Even with my emotions turned off, I will always remember what loving you feels like. I realize I act oddly around you at times, and now you know why.”

  There was more to it, of course, but he didn’t have to say it. I heard it anyway. He was responsible for me being there, for me dying. He’d always do his best for me, no matter what. If I found someone else, or if I wanted to leave the ship, he’d let me go. He couldn’t know I longed for him every moment he wasn’t there.

  “Did I… Did we…?”

  “You’re the first woman I’ve kissed, the first woman I’ve given anything more than a friendly hug, and the first woman I’ve made love to.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I asked for information, and now I had it in abundance.

  “I hope I haven’t offended you. Come, you need some sleep.”

  We had been lovers. I had probably loved him back. I still did, didn’t I? My mind was too tried to assimilate the information, and too overwhelmed to move. The mere thought of walking made my feet and back ache.

  Adam swept me up in his arms and carried me towards home. “I’m sorry. I should have saved all this for another day.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and rested my head against him. We were only steps away from my door, and I expected him to bring me all the way inside, but he put me down in the corridor. “Good night, Alex.”

  “Wait…” Even if I couldn’t formulate a coherent answer, I could at least kiss him. He seemed surprised, and hesitated for a split second before holding me close and kissing me back. “I love you too.”

  For the longest time, I had wondered what kissing him might be like. Maybe androids didn’t do things like that. I’d been afraid to admit it; maybe he only cared for me out of guilt, or as a friend. Now, I clung to him. “Come inside.”

  He held me close, and his face was so near mine it made me weak. When hearing my plea, he ran a hand over my back and pressed his lips against my forehead. “I have to go. I still have a few hours of work to do.”

  I kissed him again. Maybe his sense of duty could be corrupted, just a little. “Are you sure? Please come in.”

  “I can come back when I’m done, if you want me to, but it will be in the middle of the night.”

  My cheeks heated. When did I grow so bold? “It doesn’t matter. Just hurry back.”

  One more tender kiss and he was gone. I went into my room, all fatigue forgotten. If anything, I walked on a cloud.

  Who would be able to sleep after something like this? I checked for monsters in the closet, just to be on the safe side, but it contained nothing but clothes. I expected many hours’ tossing and turning, but my eyes fell shut the moment my head hit the pillow.

  It might have been the combination of excitement, terror, and adventure, or the fact that Adam and I were on the same page again. Either way, my subconscious worked hard as I slept. I relived parts of my life in my dreams, and woke from shouting out his name.

  The computer answered, “Commander Adam is currently in Engineering. Do you want me to call for him?”

  How embarrassing. “No. Thank you.”

  I was at home, on the ship, in no danger, but my mind lingered on the last thing I saw before I died. A shuttle landed behind my lover like a giant bird. It was beautiful and strange. I stood to the side, and in front of him a row of men crouched down with rifles.

  They ordered him to stand down, to surrender, and I saw one man’s finger tighten around the trigger. It must have been incredibly quick in real life, but in my mind, it played in slow motion.

  I threw myself in the line of fire to save him. Most likely, they wouldn’t have been able to hurt him, but even if I knew at the time, I forgot everything when he was threatened.

  Going back to sleep seemed impossible. I took my robe and plodded over to the replicator. “I’d like a cup of tea, please. Jasmine.”

  Just for once, the machine gave me what I asked for. Good thing; I wasn’t up to arguing with it.

  I curled up in the sofa, and woke in the very same spot when the front door opened a couple of hours later.

  Adam stepped into the room and lifted an eyebrow when he saw me peek up. I mumbled, “Hi lover.”

  He hunched down and brushed a lock of my hair away. “Why are you sleeping on the couch, sweetheart?”

  My eyelids were so heavy, and I blinked a couple of times, trying to make them stay open. “It’s a long story. Take me to bed?”

  “Sure.” He swept me up in his arms as if I weighed less than a butterfly. I could remember things like this now. I remembered him carrying me, and me giggling because it was something no one had ever done.

  By the time we reached the bed, I was a little more awake. “I love you.”

  He smiled, put me down, and pulled the sheets up around me. Taking a seat on the edge, he answered in his usual serene manner. “I love you too. But you know that.”

  I patted the bed next to me. “Come to bed. It’s late and I’ve missed you.”

  He didn’t seem surprised, but it was usually difficult to read him. Maybe he was. He took his shoes off and stretched out next to me. I rolled over so I could curl up close. It had been so long, and I wanted to sleep in his arms with my head on his shoulder. “I remember now.”

  He ran his free hand over my hair. “What do you remember, sweetie?”

  “Everything. Did you break into the Smithsonian?” I had a vivid memory of standing outside the Information Center in Washington DC in the middle of the night.

  If he answered I didn’t hear it. I was fast asleep.

  *****

  When morning came, I woke up in the exact same position. Adam had his eyes closed, and I was happy he hadn’t spent all night staring up at the ceiling. He might not need to sleep like a human, but had a stand-by routine for purging his databases. He couldn’t have gotten much of that in lately, hurrying between duties and me. Remembering something like this about him made me bubble with joy.

  I didn’t want to disturb him, but he woke as soon as I started to move. “Good morning, handsome.”

  He seemed amused. “Good morning, beautiful.”

  “I think your uniform is getting wrinkly.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t care. Ensigns can’t be wrinkly, but no one will yell at me for it.”

  I patted his chest. “Stay right here.”

  My teeth and my hair needed brushing, and I bounced off the bed and into the restroom. I didn’t really expect him to stay; h
is sense of duty would most likely call on him to get up and do something, but nothing wrong with hoping.

  When I returned, Adam lay with his hands behind his head. How could I thank him for everything he did? “You’ve been wonderful.”

  What would I have done if roles were reversed? Could I have been as calm and patient? Not likely. “Was it difficult?”

  He entangled his fingers in my hair. “Yes. But you’re worth it.”

  “You don’t want to run off with the pretty blonde ensign?”

  The joke rewarded me with hearty laughter. “Laura? No, I’d rather wait for you. At least for a few years.”

  My hand found its way over his chest and toyed with the buttons on his shirt. He looked good in it, but I still wanted it to disappear. Artificial or not, I wanted to feel his skin against mine. How could I have forgotten something like this?

  We didn’t pay attention to the world outside the door for hours, but it still moved on. When I got dressed, the computer reported that several Confederacy ship travelled to the mines and rescued scores of kidnapped workers from all across the galaxy.

  Eventually, we did leave the rooms. When we stepped into the corridor, holding hands, a young man stared at Adam as if he wondered whether to approach or just sink through the floor. “Sir, we’ve been looking for you for hours. No one knows how to override the Logg encryption of…”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  The young man seemed confused by the answer. “We’ve been trying your communicator, but…”

  “I turned it off.”

  By now, I was sure Adam teased him on purpose. The communicators did not turn off.

  “Oh. Well… Sir, could you come help us now?”

  “No. I’m still busy. Ask Commander Jia’Lyn.”

  Adam squeezed my fingers and walked towards the lifts. The young man made one more valiant effort. Most people would have given up by now, and with persistency like this, he might go far. “Bur Sir, she told me to ask you. If I could find you…”

  I struggled not to laugh. Adam waved one hand in the air and wrapped the other around me. “Well, I guess you’ll have to search a little harder.”

  “But…”

  “I have important things to do. I need to take my girl to lunch.”

  High Gravity

  Chapter One

  “Wow. This is a big empty room.” One of my big talents: stating the obvious.

  Adam gave a slight shrug. “The place comes with the job. I never needed it for anything.”

  I lived in a set of guest quarters, and it was nice, but impersonal. The furniture, lamps, and decorations might not be mine, but they still existed, and reminded me of an upscale hotel. Looking around in my boyfriend’s quarters, the rooms were huge, and contained one large desk filled with tools and gadgets.

  “Why…?” I closed my mouth around the question. He was an android and normal human logic wouldn’t apply.

  He smirked. “You wanted to see it, here it is.”

  “It’s awesome. Let’s go home.”

  No wonder we always stayed at my place. He crossed his arms over his chest and glanced into my eyes. “I have to go to work. You know that.”

  Damn. His sense of duty was admirable, but couldn’t it slip just a little, just once?

  Adam tilted his head to the side. “You’re disappointed.”

  “No… Well, maybe a little. I thought there would be more of you here.”

  He put a hand on my back and pushed me out of the living room, back into what would have been a study in a normal person’s world. “There is something of me here. There’s the desk, and my chair, and your broken iPod I’ve been trying to fix.”

  I couldn’t even recognize the fragmented pieces. The poor thing must have been hit by a bullet. What a shame. It would have contained all sorts of entertainment and memories.

  “C’mon, I’ll walk you home.”

  My rooms were almost right under his, just a couple of floors down. Going there would normally be completely uneventful, but after an alien species called the Logg stole the ship and I played an involuntary part in getting it back, people I didn’t know stopped and stared wherever I went. I hated all the whispering behind my back.

  Some of the junior officers treated me with the same awe they normally reserved for the senior staff, and it freaked me out. It was traumatic enough to arrive dead from another time, I didn’t need any additional attention.

  We didn’t meet anyone on Adam’s floor and the lift was empty. Close to my door, two young men pushed a broken cleaning robot down the corridor. They stopped and stared. “Look, it’s them. Told you she lives here.”

  “She’s shorter than I expected.”

  Adam rolled his eyes and walked over to them. “Is there a problem?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then, move along, will you.”

  I shuffled over to my door. “Will this never end?”

  Adam ran a hand over my back. “Sure. As soon as something more interesting happens.”

  The young men were out of sight, and for all practical purposes, we were alone. I pressed my palms against his chest and gave him my best bedroom look. “Are you sure you can’t come in?”

  “Not unless you’re comfortable with Laura adjusting the starboard radiation shield.”

  The annoyingly perky nineteen year old ensign was probably quite able to do it, but he had a point. When it came to matters like keeping cosmic radiation from frying my brain, I’d be more comfortable with Adam handling it.

  He winked. “I’ll hurry back.”

  The ship rocked. I stood on the tip of my toes, wanting to steal a kiss, completely unprepared for the floor shifting underneath me. My face was about to come in close contact with the carpet when Adam caught me.

  “Well, that’s new.” He didn’t sound bothered, but I was. Anything able to move the ship like that would have to be dangerous.

  The computer’s voice echoed in the corridor. “All senior officers, please report to the bridge.”

  I was barely aware of clinging to him until he took my hands in his and loosened my grip around his neck.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”

  I watched him jog towards the lifts. Would they really be safe to use? What if he got stuck, or the thing fell all the way down to the bottom floor? I should stop fretting and go inside. Unless I was extremely lucky, there would be crushed decorations all over the floor, waiting for me to initiate some serious clean-up.

  My rooms were a bit jumbled, but not as bad as I expected. To be honest, more of it came from my being disorganized than things falling off the shelves. After visiting Adam’s desolate quarters I appreciated the chaos. It might not technically be my stuff, but it was there for me to use, and I was grateful.

  Putting a lamp back up on a table, I muttered, “Someone needs to invent a force field or something to keep things in place.”

  I ventured over to the window. Last time the ship rocked and I peeked out we were in a horrific battle. This time, I saw nothing but darkness. We no longer moved, but I couldn’t see anyone or anything close. Could there be invisible attackers?

  I normally kept my windows covered. Seeing space fly by outside gave me a headache. Each time I tried to imagine hundreds of billions of stars and all the possibilities of planets, alien life, and civilizations my mind wanted to fold in on itself.

  The vacuum of space was one of my biggest fears. Adam reasoned it would soothe me to know a human would have at least ten seconds of clear thinking before brain asphyxiation set in. He also said a human could still be rescued after 90 seconds in space. Knowing these things didn’t help at all; these figures made everything worse. Before he told me, I imagined it painful but quick. Now I saw it as painful and slow.

  “Computer, what’s happening?”

  “There is a problem with the artificial gravity containment field.”

  Say what? I understood the ship wasn’t big enough to create its own gravity, but I never
wondered why down was down and up remained up. “Is that bad? How does it work?”

  “Do you wish to run a learning program for galaxy class starships?”

  “I guess.” I didn’t have anything better to do, and I probably wouldn’t understand a straight answer. Maybe the program could distract me enough not to see the blackness outside.

  The faceless voice pulled up a hologram of the ship and zoomed in on a red dot at the bottom. “This is a singularity with two micron’s width.”

  “It’s a what and a what? English, please.”

  “It is a black hole, 0.002 millimeters wide. It is held in place and controlled by a magnetic containment field. The disturbance in the ship was created by a failure in the containment field, and for a moment, the hole expanded to 0.0022 millimeters.”

  I still struggled to figure out how many millimeters were in an inch. The measurement seemed too small to be significant. “What happens if the field fails?”

  The computer sounded unemotional as always. “The singularity will consume the ship and grow proportionately stronger.”

  Oh goodie, we used a lethal self-destruct mechanism to be able to keep our feet on the deck. Who invented these things? Cartoon villains?

  The computer kept talking, and I ignored it until it said, “…and the black hole also provides our warp drive engines with power.”

  Really? That little thing powered the ship? “I don’t believe you.”

  I expected the machine to tell me it didn’t matter whether I believed it or not since the facts would still be true. I didn’t get to hear its answer; the door slid open and Adam stepped in. He eyed the holograms, but didn’t seem surprised. “I can’t stay. I just need to pick up my Tokamak Alpha particle restrictor.”

  A Toyota Avensis? I had one of those for a few years. Wouldn’t have expected Adam to hide one in the nightstand though…

  He pressed his palm against the wall, and a hatch opened. I didn’t know we had hidden shelves. Truly a day filled with surprises.

  “What else you got in there?”