"You may not like it, kid," he'd said in his usual irreverent tone, "but you are a blond, blue-eyed female and would have grown tall and lissome. Just like I like 'em. Your dad was good-lookin' and I made you take after him, since daughters so often tend to resemble good ol' dad. Not that your ma wasn't a good-looking broad. Your siblings all are, so I didn't engineer anything but a valid extrapolation."
"You just prefer blondes, don't tell me otherwise!"
"I never do, do I?" responded the hologram and Helva brought herself sharply to the present-and the fact she tried to avoid-that the Niall Parollan she had loved was dead. Really truly dead. The husk of what he called his "mortal coil" was in stasis in his quarters. He had died peacefully-not as he had lived, with fuss and fury and fine histrionics. One moment her sensors read his slowly fading life signs-the next second, the thin line of "nothing" as the essence of the personality that had been Niall Parollan departed-to wherever souls or a spiritual essence went.
She who could not weep was shattered. Later she realized that she had hung in space for days, coming to grips with his passing. She had said over and over that they had had a good, long time together: that these circumstances differed from her loss of Jennan after just a few very short years. Jennan had never had a chance to live a full, long, productive life. Niall had. Surely she shouldn't be greedy for just a little more, especially when for the last decade he had been unable to enjoy the lifestyle that he had followed so vibrantly, so fully, in such a raucous nonconformist spirit. Surely she had learned to cope with grief in her last hundred years. That was when she realized that she couldn't face the long silent trip back to Regulus Base. He'd insisted that he had a right to be buried with other heroes of the Service since he'd had to put up so much with them and especially her, all these decades. They had been a lot closer to Regulus at the time that subject had come up. But she was determined to grant that request.
There were no other brain ships anywhere in her spatial vicinity to contact and act as escort. She and Niall had been on a primary scouting sweep of unexplored star systems. She might have resented that first escort back from Ravel with Jennan's body. Not that there was much chance of her suiciding this time. She'd passed that test on the first funereal return to Regulus Base. Which is when the notion to program a facsimile had occurred to her. So it was a way to delay acceptance? Surely she could be allowed this aberration-if aberration it was. She didn't have to mention the matter to Regulus. They'd be glad enough to have her ready to take another partner. Experienced B amp;B ships were always in demand for delicate assignments. She was one of their best, her ship-self redesigned and crammed with all the new technology that had been developed for brain ships, and stations. Like that damned spare body Niall had bought and which she had never used. She couldn't. She simply couldn't inhabit the Sorg prosthesis. Oh, she knew that Tia did and the girl was glad of the ability to "leave" the shell and ambulate. Lovely word, "ambulate." She and Niall had had some roaring arguments over the whole notion of prosthesis.
"You'd fit me out with a false arm or leg, if I lost one, wouldn't you?" had been one of Niall's rebuttals.
"So you could walk or use the hand, yes, but this is different."
"Because you know what I'd be using on you, don't you?" He was so close to her panel that his face had been an angry blur. He'd been spitting at her intransigence. "And you don't want any part of my short arm, do you?"
"At least they can't replace that in prosthesis," she'd snarled.
"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?"