“Okay.” Dev got up and went to the door, then she turned. “Thanks for letting me help you.” She said. “And thank you for showing me the dining hall.”
Jess settled behind her desk and leaned on it, gazing at Dev thoughtfully. “If nothing else, we’ll learn something.” She said. “You’re interesting.”
Dev paused with her hand on the touch-plate for the door. “I think you’re interesting too.” She replied, with a faint smile, before she triggered the latch and went through it, letting it close behind her.
Jess sat back in her chair and drummed her fingers lightly on the arms. Then she exhaled and pulled the sheets Stephen had given her over, unfolding them and reaching out to touch the console pad. “Ouch.” She grimaced, as she pulled at the newly raw skin on her arm. “Maybe it wasn’t smart to do that when we’re flying tonight.”
She adjusted the light and studied the report, touching a finger on the dotted lines and sweeps, grimacing as she analyzed the information. “Or maybe not.”
**
Dev stood for a minute in her chamber, just listening to her own heartbeat slow and settle. Once it had, she went over and got a bottle of liquid from the dispenser, opening it and drinking it down in a draught.
Then she went and sat in her chair, trying to decide what to do. Jess had told her to get some rest, but Jess had also inferred that they might be going out on a mission tonight so she realized her tech skills would be put to a very real test very real soon.
She’d been in the sims for the carriers, of course. She’d known she would have to pilot them, that was part of the programming and she’d done a whole shift in the lab for that. But sims were sims, and she decided she’d set up a session and review everything just to be sure.
That decided, she went in the sanitary facility and used it, still bemused by the swirling water. Then she came back into the main part of the chamber and went over to the bed, sitting down on it curiously and then laying down on her back.
Very different from the crèche and it’s snug, rotating pods that cradled you and rocked you through the night.
This was cool, though yielding, the surface conforming to her body in a comfortable way, but wide and spacious giving her room to spread out as much as she wanted.
The pillows were also mild and yielding, and they cradled her head, making it easy to relax. She did so for a few minutes, watching the lights adjust themselves as the pressure of the bed was detected an analyzed.
The illumination softened and darkened, and she found herself thinking about everything she’d seen in the long day.
Her leaving from the crèche. The arrival at Interforce. The killing of the director. Being given her things. Being given this space. Lunch.
Jess.
She thought about the design she’d seen cut into Jess’s arm, and how sad it seemed to her that these people, these soldiers seemed to have so hard a life, that they had to carve their accomplishments into their own flesh and get no thanks otherwise.
And what had Jess meant when she said she hadn’t had a choice to be here either? Dev looked at the faint glints of mica in the rough cut ceiling. That she didn’t really understand, nor what she’d meant when she referred to Elaine’s tech as an outsider.
What did that mean, really? And, what had Jason meant by knowing people who were kicked downstairs, as he had said, because of her kind?
Did he mean they’d lost their place here, because of bio alts? Dev frowned. What was downstairs? Could it really be that natural born people had been displaced like that? She’d always thought that bio alts did tasks no natural born would want to, and they would have gone on to do something more interesting or rewarding in its place.
Surely that was true. Surely they didn’t just throw those natural born out. Dev got up and walked around, feeling a burst of nervous energy. That’s how it was in the crèche. The natural born people did the important jobs, and the bio alts did the rest.
She climbed up the steps to the training area, and seated herself at the console.
But. She put her hands on the pads and keyed them. But here she was, doing a natural born person’s job. This had been Joshua’s job.
His job, and his rooms and Jess, his partner.
But she wasn’t to be Jess’s partner. Jess didn’t want that. Joshua had betrayed her. She was just here to help.
She wanted to help. She wanted to do well for these people.
She wanted to do her best, certainly, for Jess who had defended her, and been nice to her, and who apparently wanted her to succeed.
Who found her interesting. Dev studied her reflection in the console.
Interesting.
**
Part 4
Jess took a sip of her kack, her eyes flicking from one screen to the other studying her options. The weather had put a halt on an immediate leave and now it looked like she was going to have to wait for daylight to go.
Sucked. She scanned the metrics again. It really was a fairly simple plan. She’d target the laboratory she knew they had the new growth tech in, aiming for a supply station entrance halfway up the hill the place was built into.
No doubt she’d draw a crowd. They’d cut off trying to communicate with the two teams, hopefully giving the impression they’ considered them destroyed and were no longer interested in them. Wouldn’t b the first time, both sides knew it.
You cut your losses. Made no sense wasting precious resources chasing after a lost cause. Jess knew if she hadn’t made her own way out in her last gig chances were no rescue would have been attempted for her.
She didn’t resent that. It was just the way it was – they were valuable resources, sure, but they were, as she’d told Dev, expendable when there were other things at stake.
Her comm buzzed, and she tapped it. “Drake.”
“We meeting?” Jason asked. “Weather tanked.”
“Yeah. Bring Elaine over.” Jess said. “We’ll be plus eight to go, but might as well go over the outline.”
“Be there.” Jason cut the comm off.
Jess leaned over and tapped another button. “Dev?” She waited. After a pause, she tapped again. “Dev?”
With a soft crackle the circuit opened “Yes.” The bio alt’s voice responded. “My apologies. I was investigating the wet space.”
“The what?” Jess stared in puzzlement at the comm..
“There is a space in the sanitary facility with a pipe over it.”
“Oh. The shower.” Jess said. “You were taking one.” She listened to the faint sound of breathing coming over the comm., as her new next door neighbor considered what she’d said. That was one thing she’d noticed about Dev – she waited to talk until she knew what she wanted to say.
“Yes.” Dev finally concluded. “If you mean, I went under the pipe and got very wet.” She added. “That was unusual.”
“You don’t have showers upside?” Jess found herself weirdly distracted by this odd conversation.
“We do.” Dev said. “But they don’t involve getting wet.”
“Oh.’ Jess said. “Well, dry off and come over. We’re going to run the plan.”
“All right.” The bio alt replied. “Thank you.”
The comm cut off. Jess gazed at it in bemusement for a minute, then she went back to the console screen and started assembling the information she would need to lay out the statistics and the routes to her colleagues.
Two minutes, and a knock on the inner door sounded. Jess pressed the ingress key and the door slid open, revealing Dev’s slim figure. The bio alt’s hair was damp, slicked back off her forehead and giving her finely etched features a slightly tougher cast. “So water’s a novelty for ya, huh?”
Dev sat down in one of the chairs across from Jess’s workspace. “Running water, yes.” She agreed. “They made all the water in the crèche. They told us it was expensive. The natural borns had it, I think, in their quarters but we used flash rad to clean our skins.”