“So you need hands that can be left to get on with unskilled jobs without supervision.” I licked my lips. “But you’re the only officer left, aren’t you? The only person who knows how to run the chapel? Doesn’t that put the vehicle at some risk if anything were to happen to you?”
“No!” he answered slightly too fast. “The priestess . . . as I said, we recovered her soul chips. At Taj Beacon, we purchased all the necessary parts of a new body for her, from structural chassis to techné. She lies in the crypt now, integrating new flesh on her bones while her soul chip unpacks in her new brain. As I said, she is regenerating.”
But didn’t you just say the soul chips were damaged? I kept this thought to myself. Best case, the priestess would wake up in a month or two, and we’d have a responsible adult in charge. The Church wouldn’t trust a planetary mission to an incompetent, or to someone they wanted to get rid of, would they? But the worst case was that what woke up might be a few million mechaneurons short of a full set. It clarified my position: from questionable to foolhardy in one easy step.
I folded my arms defensively. “So, let me summarize? You need spare hands to do the easy stuff while you fly the chapel toward Shin-Tethys, or until the priestess awakens. Once you arrive at Shin-Tethys, you’ll link up with the port and deliver your charges’ remains.” He winced at that last characterization. “And you’ll have no problem with my leaving your employ at that point?” He winced again. “Am I correct? What about pay and working conditions?”
He nodded slightly, then jerked upright, as if he had just caught himself falling asleep. (How long had he been awake anyway, doing everything himself?) “Pay will be ten fast dollars per diurn,” he announced brightly, “payable on arrival! Plus bunk and feedstock, and such medical cover as we can provide. Is that satisfactory?”
“Huh. Normally, it would be, but this chapel has been damaged, hasn’t it? You mentioned a meltdown? And a dead doctor. If I incur medical needs that you can’t handle, then will you commit your Church to pay for my treatment on arrival? Up to and including a new body, if you manage to trash this one? Because it’s the only body I’ve got, and—”
Dennett shuddered. “I think . . . yes, we should be able to cover that.” We? Now he was arguing with his socket-mounted siblings. Just what I needed!
“And I want a guarantee that I will be allowed to leave when we arrive at Shin-Tethys. Shin-Tethys is my final destination. I’m signing in for a working passage, not a permanent berth. Yes?”
I thought for a moment that I’d pushed him too far. The left side of his face puffed out and spiked up, the tips of his chromatophores suddenly burning crimson: “This is a vehicle of worship, not a slave ship, Ms. Alizond!” he snarled. “You impugn the honor of the Mother Church! I offer you the terms of the standard unskilled able spacer’s contract from the Ancient and Technical Guild of Taikonauts, and you have the effrontery to demand—”
“Please!” I raised my hands palm out, trying to ward off the Bad Deacon who’d just risen to the surface: “I’m not trying to make obstacles! I’m just trying to understand the situation. I was told there was meat husbandry involved, not a crippled church with a short crew and a damaged reactor. All I want is an understanding that you’ll cover any repair costs I incur in working for you. Is that too much to ask for?”
He took several deep breaths: As he did so, the spines of his cheek dimmed to pink and began to subside. “My. Apologies.” Another deep breath: “We—I—am still integrating. It’s noisy in here.” He tapped his head with one finger and smiled in a manner that was probably meant to be reassuring. “You were not misinformed about the meat—but we will not be able to carry out the holy insemination until our priestess is with us in body and soul once more. It’s quite likely that the new meat won’t be extruded by the Gravid Mother until after our arrival. So. Do you have any personal effects to retrieve? Because if so, you should do so immediately—we will depart as soon as we receive clearance. Your personal effects should mass no more than eight kilos, by the way. The longer we delay after the conjunction, the more of our maneuvering reserve we will need to expend.”
“I travel light.” I patted my go bag. “I assumed you wouldn’t want to waste reaction mass on fripperies, so I brought everything I thought I’d need in the short term. Do you have a fab I can use for clothes and essentials . . . ?”
“Yes, of course we do. Cook will show you how to use it in due course. Very well then.” He reached a decision. “Let me show you where you’ll be bunking and log you with the maintenance systems. There’s no time to lose.”
Only a couple of thousand seconds had passed when the travel agent received his second customer of the day.
It was an entirely unexpected (but not unwelcome) surprise. Most people knew better than to look for cheap travel after conjunction, so only the desperate and the rich—or those with serious long-term plans—bothered to do so. Most of his competitors had shut up shop for the third of a standard year it would take until business picked up again: His main reason for staying open was that it gave him a competitive edge, and as a sole trader, that was something he needed. (When you’re a struggling sole trader, you need to take every opportunity that happenstance offers you.)
When the fabric awning of his stall rippled to admit his new visitor, the agent was in repose, eyes closed and arms floating free before him, as if he were asleep. He wasn’t asleep but elsewhere, scanning the register of vehicle movements—so it took a few seconds for him to blink and adjust his posture, focusing on the new arrival.
“Back so soon?” he asked, puzzled.
She smiled. It was an insincere smile—quirked lips, bared teeth, widened eyes—a canned reflexive expression triggered by his attempt at social interaction.
“My sib. Krina Alizond-114. Have you seen her?”
The agent blinked, then focused on her. He had good eyes, the best he could afford: She was indeed very similar to the customer he had just assisted, but there were some differences that became apparent as he studied her. Her hair-growth pattern was different, still straight and dark and jagged-short, but sprouting slightly closer behind the ears: her pupils big and dark, the irises of her eyes a slightly different brown. Comparing her to his memory, he saw two gracile, slim, low-adipose females of indeterminate age, clad in similar colorful free-fall one-pieces, close enough to be—yes, sibs from the same lineage.
“She was in here earlier today. Why? Can’t you call her?”
The new woman’s face froze for a fraction of a second. “She’s off-net.”
“Yes, of course she is. Listen, are you traveling with her? Because she’s booked on a short-notice departure, and it may already have left—”
“Where is she?” The woman loomed over him. She was clearly eager to find her sib and not nearly as diffident.
“I arranged a working passage for her aboard an itinerant chapel that put in for repairs a couple of million seconds ago.” He looked up at her face from below, registering her fixed expression, gaze focused almost behind his head. “It’s part of the Church of the Fragile. You can find her at this berth—” He rattled off the node number and directions.
He expected some sort of acknowledgment or thanks for this information. And, indeed, she smiled as she absorbed it. But he didn’t see her smile, because she clamped her legs around his thorax and twisted his head right round, dislocating his neck. As his body began to twitch, she peeled open the slits on the back of his head, pulled out the soul chips nestling therein, and swallowed them. Then, before his spine could build out new connections and regain control of his body, she slid a new chip into one of the sockets and pushed it home: a scrambler, purpose-built to turn the finely weighted neural connectome inside the victim’s cranium into random noise.