Flight of the Outcast (20 page)

   Asteria allowed herself a smile. She felt one step closer to becoming a true pilot. One step closer to being able to avenge her father's death herself.

Aboard the ship, the cadets ate with the junior officers, Aristos and Commoners thrown into the same big cafeteria, but Asteria was still surprised that evening when she saw Dai and Kayser sitting together. She joined them and sat beside Dai. Both of them murmured greetings.

   She began to eat, but Kayser said teasingly, "We're not in the Academy, Cadet Locke. We can talk here."

   "Nothing to talk about," she said.

   Dai told her, "Lord Mastral was saying the Captain is concerned about Tetra ships."

   "Shh," Kayser said, glancing around. "It's nothing specific. But we're supposed to come out of FTL at high alert. Kamedes has sent reports in that three monitoring stations have traced plasma residue like the kind Tetra ships leave behind."

   "Stellar storms can produce the same kind of plasma traces," Asteria said.

   Kayser shrugged. "Well, the captain's taking it seriously, anyway."

   Dai took a long sip of cava. "Let's hope there aren't any Tetras around when we drop into normal space," he said. "That's the way they get you. Before you can organize a defense, they come ripping right through your hull."

   "We're a warship," Kayser said confidently. "We can take care of them."

   Asteria wasn't so sure. She had a really bad feeling about the future. Part of it was worry about going back to Sanctal, even with Dai tagging along. Part of it was her memory of the raid. And now the Tetra threat—

   She felt the belt tingle beneath her tunic. Whenever she got worked up, it seemed to engage. It could send her extra stamina, extra energy. It could make her quicker and stronger.

   Only—

   It couldn't make her less anxious. It couldn't take away her fears about what might lie ahead.

O
ne advantage of space travel was that the crew worked

      watches: ten hours on, fifteen hours off, rotating from day to day. Because Dai and Asteria were both in the aft starboard watch, they had similar schedules. As often as not, Dai wanted to hang out with the AI techies past his watch. Asteria wasn't permitted to do that—there wasn't enough room in Engineering to allow it.

    But there were plenty of diversions: she could watch holos of music, drama, history, or science; the gym was always available for a workout; the ship library was extensive and varied. She could occupy herself and put her worries way in the back of her mind, at least temporarily.

    Kayser had the same schedule that she and Dai had. He seemed to want to be friends—but Asteria could not bring herself to trust him. They talked occasionally, but they never played games together or shared any secrets. She couldn't allow herself to open up to him; she could barely allow herself to open up to Dai.

    Seven days after they had disembarked, the captain warned that the ship was about to jump into FTL drive. It was toward the end of Asteria's watch, and she sat in the observer's seat and saw the switchover to FTL drive occur just before that wrenching sensation of being stretched and turned inside-out made her involuntarily close her eyes for an instant.

   And when she opened them, it was over. The ship had popped back into normal space and was angling in for the approach to Theron. The visor display showed the visuals: there was the familiar daystar of the system, and three pinpricks of bright light that had to be the system's three gas giant planets, icy worlds with moons that were large enough and barely warm enough to provide havens for Raiders. Theron itself was too dim and too distant to show up in the display.

   Asteria studied the readouts. It would be another ten days before the
Pax
could insert into orbit. A few minutes later, her watch ended, and she surrendered the observer's chair to another midshipman. She walked through the corridors stretching and flexing, working off the stiffness of ten long hours in the seat. To her surprise, she saw Dai coming the other way, excitement on his face. "Come into my room," he said, dissolving the door.

   "I don't think that's permitted."

   "No one will find out. Come on. I've got something important."

   Dai was neater than Asteria. His room was spartan, neat, and so tidy that it hardly looked used. "We'll have to sit on the bed," he said, extruding it from the wall. "Listen, what do you know about Cybots?"

   They settled down, side by side. "Cybots?" she asked. "What everyone knows, I guess. They're mechanical, except they're run by neutralized nervous tissue from human donors."

   "Neutralized," echoed Dai. "Exactly. They don't retain any memories of when they were alive. No personality. No emotions, because parts of the limbic system are deadened. So Cybots have a kind of human brain, but it's more like—like—"

   "A meat computer," Asteria said.

   "Uh—yeah. Okay, but sometimes, right, a Cybot has ghost memories. One of the bots on this ship does."

   "It remembers its human life?"

   "Partial memories. You know how I came aboard at the last minute?"

   "Sure."

   "Okay, I have a confession. I was able to get a Cybot to change my orders. It had some memory of its former life, and I found out about it. It acknowledged that it had the ghost memories, and it didn't want to give them up—it would be like dying again, I guess. So it agreed to help me—"

   "Dai!" exclaimed Asteria. "You blackmailed a Cybot?"

   He shook his head. "You make it sound bad! It wasn't like that. When I found out about its memories, it was willing to help. And it did more than get me aboard. It managed to put itself into the rotation too, and it's on the
Pax
now. It's a lifesupport systems monitor. You've got to talk to it."

   Asteria shook her head. "I don't understand. Why?"

   "Because it wants to talk to you. It needs to talk to you."

   "What do you mean?" Asteria was having a hard time wrapping her mind around that. She thought of Cybots as machines… not as, well, people. "Why?" she asked again.

   Dai had been speaking softly; now he dropped his voice to such a soft whisper that Asteria had to lean close to hear his answer. "Because he was on the
Adastra
. Because he knew your father."

   But here Asteria found herself, forward on B deck, in the lifesupport control center of the ship. At first, she did not recognize the device in front of her as a Cybot. It had been…dismembered, stripped of arms and legs. It was essentially a quicksilver-shiny torso and egg-shaped head with no features. She could see her own distorted reflection in its face.

   Dai was speaking softly into his wrist transceiver. "All right, thanks," he said. He nodded to Asteria. "We're all right. Kayser's in the library. Nobody's monitoring sounds here. We're alone."

   The Cybot did not respond, and Asteria licked her lips, which felt dry.

   "Speak to him," Dai said.

   "I—I'm Asteria Locke," she said hesitantly. "My father was Carlson Locke."

   "I served with your father," the Cybot said in its uninflected voice. "I was alive then. Your father was a weapons specialist. I was a weapons engineer. I do not remember my human name."

   "I—I'm sorry," Asteria said, feeling the prickle of goose bumps on her arms.

   "That has no meaning for me." The Cybot waited silently.

   "He can't initiate conversation," Dai said. "You'll have to ask him. Want me to leave?"

   "No—no, that's all right. Uh, what did my father do when the Tetraploid attack hit?"

   "We operated the weapons. Captain Kyseros was caught without a plan. It is my presumption that the captain panicked under the pressure of the attack. His orders were neither clear nor effective, though he was a princeps of the Aristocracy."

   "We've seen how Aristos are always cool under pressure," Dai said sarcastically.

   The Cybot seemed to miss his tone completely. "My experience has not shown that to be invariably true. At that time, however, I did place great confidence in our commanding officer. Captain Kyseros did not perform according to my expectations. Even so, and even though we in the weapons crew had to ignore most of his orders, our people fought well. We destroyed seven of the nine attacking Tetra ships."

   "Only nine?" Asteria asked.

   "Only nine. Very small ships, attacking at extremely close quarters. Nothing like all of our battle simulations. Yet we managed to destroy seven, as I say. The eighth actually impacted the bridge of the
Adastra.
The ninth penetrated the hangar deck where we carried fighters. The enemy ship came apart."

   "So it was destroyed too," Asteria said.

   "Negative. The ship was not destroyed. It came to pieces and then reassembled as thirty-three spider warriors. They breached the air locks and began an internal assault. Carlson organized a defense, and we defeated the spiders, though we took heavy casualties. Deep scans showed more Tetra ships at a great distance but locked onto us and coming toward us fast. We were receiving no orders. Carlson ascertained that the captain, three of the mates, and most of the bridge crew had been killed when the bridge was destroyed. We could raise no surviving officers on the comm. Therefore, Carlson took command, rerouted navigation and control to his own station, and ordered a retreat. His order was countermanded by…I cannot recall his name…the security officer, a lieutenant and the only officer of rank not dead or badly wounded. He had been hiding. He came out just as Carlson engaged the ion propulsion preparatory to FTL insertion. That officer asserted command, but he was too disorganized to be obeyed."

   "What?" Asteria asked, shocked. "I never heard that! I thought my father was the ranking officer when he took command."

   "Negative, Asteria Locke. The security officer had not been engaged in the fighting. When he emerged from hiding, he was irrational. He gave Carlson an order to surrender command to him. He wanted to turn and fight, though from the damage we had already sustained, it was clear that the ship would be lost, and the Tetras would then have a wedge into Empyrean space. It was an impasse until I shot the security officer."

   "You—
shot
him?" Asteria swallowed hard. Even touching a superior officer was a court-martial offense.

   The Cybot's strange, unemotional voice went on: "Affirmative. I shot him with a stunner. He fell, but as he fell, he hit your father with a neural disruptor set at high power. That destroyed the nerve structure in his arm and leg. I tried to apply restraints on the security officer, but a Tetra spider burst into the weapons center. It killed the lieutenant before we could stop it. And it wounded me so severely that Carlson put me in a stasis field to save my life. I remember no more until we reached an Empyrean world and I was removed from the stasis field."

   Asteria felt sick. Her father had been part of a mutiny!

   "He had to do what he did," Dai said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "By ordering the withdrawal, he saved hundreds of crewmen on the dreadnaught, and by reaching friendly space, he alerted Empyrean forces to the Tetra invasion. But now you see why the Fleet didn't allow him to remain on duty."

   Asteria wasn't sure that she did. "Because he didn't surrender command to the lieutenant?"

   "Negative," the Cybot said. "Because he knew how ineffective our captain had been. Because he was a Commoner and in time of crisis led the crew better than the Aristo had done. These are facts."

   "And your injuries were so bad that they made you a Cybot," Dai said.

   "Negative. I was not mortally injured. When I came out of stasis, I told the interrogating officers of what had happened. I mentioned neutralizing the security lieutenant. His family demanded my death. I was killed at their request, and my brain was harvested for Cybot creation. I do not know why all my memories were not purged."

   "That's horrible!" blurted Asteria.

   "That has no meaning to me," the Cybot said.

   Appalled, Asteria thought:
It doesn't even resent the terrible
things that were done to it—to him! It can't feel anger or
resentment. Its humanity has been stolen.

   And the same thing could have happened to her father. She turned and blundered out. Behind her the Cybot hummed softly, probably monitoring air quality. Dai hurried after her. "I thought you should know," he said, sounding upset. "The new Governor we're taking to Theron is in the same branch of the royal family as the captain of the
Adastra was. Of course, there are about a millio
n in the Kyseros branch, so—hey, come on. What's the matter?"

   "I don't—I never thought—I'm sorry. I want to be alone," Asteria stammered.

   
The Cybot wanted to tell me,
she thought.
It has nothing
human left to it—nothing but a few scattered memories. And
if the memories die, the last connection of that mind to its old
life dies. It told me because it wanted to show that it still had
that one shred of humanity left.

   
And because I'm my father's daughter.

   She felt too nauseated even to think of eating. There had been times at the Academy when she had questioned the privileges claimed by Aristos. Now she'd learned the awful truth about an incompetent Aristo captain and an irrational Aristo lieutenant who had tried to prevent Carlson Locke's saving the survivors of the
Adastra
. The Fleet's judgment was that the incompetent and the irrational should have been obeyed—they were Aristos, and Carlson Locke had been a Commoner. Just like his daughter. And like Lieutenant Skarne, she could never hope to make Admiral.