“Concur, one hundred out,” came the clipped reply.
Thorn had been staring down at the curve of Code Nebula’s host planet. The terminator crawled across the surface, day relentlessly replacing night below.
He glanced at Mol. “Is that something new?”
“What?”
“Confirming distances to the Hecate. I’ve never heard you do that before.”
“Just trying to minimize the processing load on Trixie.”
Thorn frowned. Trixie was an AI. She was nothing but a processing load.
“Why the special treatment for her? Nobody tries to minimize my processing load.”
Mol glanced at him, then she looked back at the panel and sighed. “She’s doing it again—says she’s feeling melancholy. Ever since you brought her back, she’s had these spells.”
“Melancholy?”
“That’s the word she uses.”
“Trixie is melancholy. What does that even mean?”
“Damned if I know.”
Trixie cut in. “Melancholy means a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause—”
“No, I know what the word melancholy means. What I’m asking is, what does it mean regarding you? What does it mean for you to be melancholy?” Thorn asked.
In response, soft music began to play, but it suddenly swelled in volume. It wasn’t punk, Trixie’s favorite genre before she’d been savaged by a virus injected into her by a couple of human Nyctus agents called Skins. It was odd. A slower tempo, more orchestral, and downright meditative. But it was the lyrics that caught him, speaking of loneliness and things he felt in his bones.
Mol rolled her eyes. “This one again.” She looked at Thorn. “See what I mean?”
“Yeah, this is . . . kind of downbeat, for such a catchy tune.”
“It’s called Eleanor Rigby. It’s from some old Earth album called Revolver.” She sighed. “I hear it almost every day.”
“Trixie, can you lower the volume, please?” Thorn said.
The music faded to background, just audible over the thrum of the Gyrfalcon’s systems.
He listened to the lyrics a moment longer, then nodded. “Yeah, I’d say this counts as melancholy, alright.”
“Like I said, ever since you brought her back, she’s been like this. She might even be getting worse.” Mol fiddled with her controls, then looked back at Thorn. “Any chance you could look into it, maybe fix her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Thorn replied, settling his head back against the g-couch. The truth was, he wasn’t anxious to have anything more to do with bringing anyone back.
It just didn’t seem to work out very well.
2
Thorn had told Kira that the Danzur were fussy. He’d even used that exact word—fussy. What he hadn’t told her was just what that meant.
Fussy was the utter devotion to an oversized, labyrinthine bureaucracy that seemed to regulate every aspect of Danzur life. It meant keeping important information to themselves, even if it would be in their best interest to release it. It meant engaging in meticulous bargaining over the most inconsequential things.
It meant Kira would soon be bald from tearing her hair out—at least metaphorically, but maybe a little in real life, too.
She sat back in the chair in the quarters the Danzur had assigned her aboard their orbital platform. The accommodations were one of the few bright spots in this miserable assignment, being not just large and comfortable, but in some ways downright luxurious.
Yet another draft of their most recent attempts at a negotiation agreement glowed on the terminal in front of her. Her eyes flicked across a wherefor, passed a heretofore, settled on the second part, then glazed over. She lolled her head back and groaned.
“Kill me now.”
“This system has neither the motivation nor the means to execute violence upon your person,” a clipped voice said.
Kira raised her head and glared at the screen. “You sure about that? Maybe dispense some cyanide into my next meal?”
“This system has neither the motivation nor—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m stuck here.”
She swiveled the chair and looked out the deck-to-ceiling viewport that made up most of one wall of her quarters. She could see a wing of the huge platform, which was lined with docking ports—one of two sprawling constructs that operated as commercial hubs for the voluminous Danzur trade. Ships were plugged into half of them, mostly freighters, but she didn’t recognize a couple of them. Apparently, the Danzur had commercial relations with several other races even further away from Allied Stars space—which itself sprawled on the other side of Nyctus space.
That made Kira a little queasy. She hated having the Nyctus between her and home. Fortunately, the Danzur had a neutral relationship with the squids. They had something the squids wanted, obviously, and the squids were willing to respect their neutrality to get it. She wished she knew just what that was, but the talks she’d been attending, led by Fleet on behalf of the Allied Stars Central Administration, hadn’t even gotten close to that question yet.
She glowered at the screen again. Negotiation agreement my ass, she thought. It was a negotiation agreement only insofar as it documented the things they were going to negotiate—an agreement to work toward an agreement.
“I did not join the ON for this,” she muttered.
Cyanide was starting to sound pretty good.
“Lieutenant Wixcombe,” a voice cut in over a comm circuit. “It’s Specialist Dawson. We’ve got a Danzur named Tadrup here at the ship looking for you.”
Kira groaned again. Dawson was one of six crew who, along with her, made up the human delegation to the Danzur. Their ship, an ON courier sloop named the Venture, was docked nearby. Kira tended to split her time between the ship and the Danzur platform, since the Venture carried their classified gear, like cryptographic equipment and secure databases. The Danzur had insisted on a complete timetable of Kira’s whereabouts, since she was the ON’s delegation head, and she’d marked herself as being aboard the Venture this afternoon.
If there was one thing the Danzur weren’t, it was flexible. Kira had never married her life to a rigid timetable. Who could actually live that way? Sure, key timings and deadlines mattered, but whether she was here, in her quarters, or aboard the Venture, about a hundred meters away, should not be a big deal.
But it was to the Danzur—in an almost pathological way.
“Alright, offer my apologies to Tadrup and tell him I’ll be there in a moment,” Kira said.
“Actually, Lieutenant, he says he’ll come to you.”
Kira’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“He’s on his way right now, in fact.”
Kira stood and fastened her tunic. “Got it, thanks. Wixcombe out.”
A moment passed, then the door chime sounded. Kira gritted her teeth. The stupid chime had a shrill, ear-scraping edge to it. Apparently, the Danzur audio range was higher pitched than that of humans, so they were more attuned to higher frequencies. Kira couldn’t help wondering, though, if it might just be a negotiating ploy, putting her slightly on edge and off-balance.