Federations

“Wanna bet?” He’d whirled away, back to his command chair, sprawling into it, glaring at her panel. “Trouble is, with you, girl, you’re aged in the keg. Set in plascrete. You don’t know what you’re missing!” And he was snarling with bitterness.

Since she considered herself tolerant and forward thinking, that accusation had burned. It still did. Maybe, after all, she was too old in her head to contemplate physical freedom. But she could not make use of that empty body-shell as something she, Helva, could manipulate. Not all the brain ships she had spoken to about the Sorg prosthesis had found it a substitute for immolation in a shell. And some of them had been just commissioned, too. Of course, Tia—Alex/Hypatia AH-1033—had once been a walking, unshelled person as a child. Maybe, as Niall had vociferously bellowed at the top of his lungs at her, Helva needed to have her conditioning altered: a moral update. For a brain ship, she wasn’t that old, after all. Why couldn’t she have accepted the prosthesis when he wanted so desperately for her to use it? She and Niall had been partnered a long time, so how could it have altered their special relationship to have added to it that final surrender of self? She really hadn’t thought of herself as a technological vestal virgin, one of the epithets Niall had flung at her. She wasn’t prudish. She’d just been conditioned to accept herself, as she was, so thoroughly that to be “unshelled” was the worst imaginable fate. Using the prosthetic body was not at all the same thing as being unshelled, he had shouted back at her. While she had been sensorily deprived once, she hadn’t also been out of her shell. Nearly out of her mind, yes, but not out of the shell. But she couldn’t, simply could not, oblige. Oblige? No, she couldn’t oblige Niall in that way. A weak word to define a response to his unreasonable, but oh-so-much masculine request. Well, she had refused. Now she wished she hadn’t. But if Niall were still living, would she have relented? Not likely, since it was his death that had now prompted remorse for that omission.

“Preferably before I became impotent, my girl,” and this was the holo speaking.

“If you knew how sorry I am, Niall . . . ” she murmured.

Information started to chatter in from her sensors. She didn’t quite recall having asked for a spectrographic analysis of the ion trail. Such an action was so much a part of her standard operating procedure that she supposed, in between self-castigation and listening to her Niall program, that she had automatically instigated it.

“Well, well, armed and loaded for bear, huh?”

“Yeah,” Niall in holo replied, “but what sort of bear?”

“Those religious fanatics on Chloe had used fur rugs to keep warm . . . so the analogy is accurate enough,” she replied, amused to have been so accurate. “I remember they went merrily off to . . . ”

“Merrily?” Niall’s voice cracked in dismay. “That lot never heard the word. So what’s hunting bear in this volume of space?” he asked.

“Well, now hear this, dear friend. They’re on that habitable planet which, being the gluttons for punishment they seemed to be when I first met them, they have named Ravel.”

“No doubt a penitential derived gimmick to remind them of their sins,” Niall said in a dour tone.

Helva analyzed the report. “Got an ID on the visitors. Pirates,” she said, for her data files had been able to match the emissions with those of Kolnari raiders. Small—yachts more likely—and some medium-sized spaceships, probably freighters, gutted and refitted for piratical practices and two heavier but older cruiser-sized vessels.

The Niall holo whipped the chair round, staring at her. (Mind you, the program was very good to get this sort of reaction so quickly.) “Kolnari? The bastards that attacked your space-station friend, Simeon?”

“The very same. Not all of those fanatics got captured when Central World’s Navy tried to round all of them up.”

“Wily fiends, those Kolnari.” And the holo’s expression was dead serious. “Last info from Regulus suggested that two groups, possibly four, had escaped completely. Even one group’s more than enough bear-hunters to ravage Ravel with their modus operandi.” The holo slammed both hands on the armrests in frustration.

“I wonder that there are any still alive. After all, the virus that Dr. Chaundra let loose on them was one of the most virulent ever discovered.” She gave a sigh. “The Kolnari were dying in droves.”