Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) (10 page)

She thought,
I can collect the
necessary devices as soon as everyone is out of Olympus and I’m the only one on
duty.
As an early explorer in the saucer, she had planted Mori Electronics
listening devices everywhere. If she removed them one at a time, someone might
notice and examine one of the other devices. Rummaging in other peoples’
bedrooms was tricky business. “I’m close to a breakthrough.”

Inside the lab, he had assembled
the first wave of sensors on a gel-pad harness and another set on a headband.
All of them were jacked into a computer with a three-dimensional display tank.

“You’ve started making the arm
already?” Yuki asked.

“This is your practice gear.”

“My what?”

He placed the electrode-laden
headband over her brow. “This headband is just until you get done training.”
When she began another question, he said, “Take your shirt off. It’ll make
attaching the rest of the rig easier.”

She smiled. “If you wanted to see
me naked, all you had to do was ask.”

Stripping off her sweaty clothes,
she watched him affix the sensors to her stump with infinite care and no sign
of revulsion. She had never been with someone this safe or caring before. It
was agonizing.

When everything was strapped into
place, he turned on the display. “This is practice contracting your new bicep.
Try to move the yellow ball through the blue hoop.”

The odd exercise took her an hour
before she mastered it consistently. “We’ll aim for smooth later. The sweat
from your forehead and armpit is interfering with the contacts.”

“This is hard work,” she
complained. “You try it.”

Holding up his hand with the
artificial digits, he said, “Already have, tiger cub. The next exercise is an
elbow bend. Then, we can move to hand grip and advanced maneuvers like twisting
a screwdriver.”

She gasped at the scope. “That’s
weeks of work.”

“If you’re not ready by the time
the chips are done, Pratibha can always find other uses for the fabricator.”

“Screw you. I’ll be ready.”

After a while, the silence bothered
her. Yuki tried to get Sojiro to talk about himself. “Do you have a thing for
Park now?”

“No. He’s dependable and a good
sparring partner. He appreciates architecture, but he’s afraid of color. The man
blends into wallpaper.”

Yuki reached out to a red dot with
her virtual fingers on the screen. She felt like a cat being teased with a
laser pointer. As soon as she touched the spot, it would move. “Solid and loyal
is good. Pretty will dump your ass in a week.”

“So when you’re fifty,” he asked,
“who do you see yourself coming home to?”

“It seems shallow, but I want my
lover to be honest, well-educated, and a respected expert in his field. It’s
not all about the prestige. My father was a carnival barker, and I was ashamed
to stand near him in public. He was always working an angle.”

Sojiro raised an eyebrow. “People
have accused you of the same thing.”

“Yeah. Not proud of that.”

“Dress for the job you want,
girlfriend.”

All she had to do was impress
everyone with an unprecedented linguistics project and hide the evidence of her
past treachery—soon.

The medical team worked
an average of sixty hours a week to make the three-month deadline. They needed
to clear Mercy out of the stasis chamber in case someone became injured on the
fuel run. Synthesizing a talent-suppressing serum proved to be the easy part of
the equation. After Auckland demonstrated that the serum was harmless on the
guinea pigs, Yvette volunteered to be the first human test subject for her
friend’s sake.

Yvette
dreaded returning to the command saucer. The strangeness of the elevator helped
to prevent her from hyperventilating as she approached. Seeing Red on the
patio, she focused on the other woman and gave a weak smile. “I suppose you
think I’m silly.”

“Not
at all,” said Red. “Your physical reactions are very real. Having a kidnapping
attempt at age six changed my behavior for the rest of my life. If it will
help, you can close your eyes, and I’ll take you to the room.”

“Please,”
Yvette said with a quiver in her voice. Concentrating on her friend’s need, she
clenched her jaw, squeezed her eyes shut, and counted her breaths as Red led
her to the medical bay.

After
the door irised shut, Yvette opened her eyes. Five people crowded into the
cramped medical bay: the entire command and medical teams except Toby. Even so,
the room held more equipment by volume than people. The electroshock paddles
and a wide array of medical countermeasures were laid out on the exam table.
“Oh my. Worried much about how the experiment will affect me, doctor?” she
asked.

“You
don’t have to do this,” Auckland whispered.

Lou
jerked his head at this offer.

Yvette
could see the flash of panic followed by pleading in Lou’s face. She and the
other women of the camp had taken turns looking out for the sad puppy for
months. His earnest, pathetic look could make any woman with an ounce of
maternal instinct fold. “Mercy would do it for me. Go ahead.” She sat on the
padded chair while Auckland announced his procedure and the date to the
recorder as he injected her with a low dosage of talent-suppressing solution.
The initial euphoria surprised her but helped her to cope with the tension.

Lou
chewed his thumbnail, waiting for some sign that this could help his wife.
Sweat pasted the fabric of his shirt to the curve of his lower back.

Yvette
announced, “I can feel Doctor Auckland worrying about the dosage and Red
fretting about Yuki’s last workout session with Zeiss.”

Glancing
at her husband, Red said, “I trust him. She’s just aggressive. He has new
bruises, and we’re leaving in a few days. It could impair the mission.”

“With
no sexual outlet, Yuki’s very frustrated,” Yvette explained.

Coughing,
Lou said, “Thank you for that news flash, Dr. Ruth.”

“You’re
making your own sexual tension worse,” Yvette said.

“How
exactly is Mercy being frozen my fault?” asked Lou.

Yvette
replied, “When I went to your room to retrieve another DNA sample from Mercy’s
hairbrush, I caught you smelling Mercy’s pillow. You keep it in a plastic bag
and inhale it like cocaine.”

“Auckland, how long before Captain Blunt here can hold her tongue?” Lou asked.

“The
Ethics effect is hardwired into her brain. We can’t change that. We can only
diminish her Empathy responses. Give it a few minutes. Talk about something
innocuous. How’s the language toolkit coming?”

“Slowly,”
Lou confessed. “We’ve had several hilarious mistakes, though. We’ve been
running newspaper clippings and magazine articles through the AI pidgin
translator. The first was the train wreck in India that left eighty dead people
throwing garbage on the tracks. It meant littering, but we made a lot of
inconsiderate zombie jokes after that.” He regaled them with a few other
examples. “My favorite was the man who ‘felt left behind.’ That phrase somehow
came out ‘groped a little ass on the side.’”

Drowsy,
Yvette said, “That’s strange. I didn’t feel the laugh.”

“You
mean hear?” asked Auckland.

“No,
feel,” Red explained. “Just before someone laughs at a joke, there’s a mental
tickle that lets you know it’s coming. I use that sensation to tell when to
fake a laugh.”

“Not
with my jokes,” Zeiss said.

“No,
of course not,” Red promised.

Lou
chuckled, patting the commander on the back. “You thought you were rocking her
diaphragm. Sorry. She was just being polite. I told you Red was really an
alien.”

Zeiss
elbowed Lou in the solar plexus, but Yvette couldn’t feel the backlash of pain.

“That
sense is gone,” Yvette said. “Numb. It’s quiet in my head for the first time in
years.”

“It’s
going to work,” said Lou. “I’m getting my partner back.”

Auckland
replied, “Call it a miracle if it wears off as
anticipated and there are no other side effects. You’ll only have a few days
together before the six of you and Toby have to crawl up the shaft to the loading
dock.”

“This
is wonderful,” Yvette mused, closing her eyes. “So many times, I longed to just
switch this talent off.”

There
were only two negative effects from the experiment. First, the shot took sixty
hours to wear off instead of twenty-four, causing Auckland to refigure his
dosage charts and examine Yvette’s endocrine levels for another four hours.
While the medical team slept at their groundside homes, Lou complained that he
would only have a day to be reunited with his wife before the grueling mission
began. The second effect was more personal for the nurse. Immediately after she
awoke the next morning, with the serum entirely out of her system, she craved
another injection more than coffee or human contact. She was sure that the
desire would fade with time.

When
the medical team tried to have a peaceful breakfast at Garden Hollow cafeteria,
Lou was there waiting. Auckland and Yvette stopped chatting about new methods
of generating casts with the fabricators, filled their coffee mugs, and walked
the path toward Olympus. Lou thanked them and followed close behind, so close
that he bumped into the doctor when they stopped suddenly to watch a rodent
scurry by with a nut.

At
the base of the elevator, Lou cupped a hand to his earpiece. “I’ll ask her.”
When they were in the lift, he whispered, “Toby was up all night adjusting the
mixture. He wants your permission to stand in the command center in case Mercy
needs him.”

Yvette
swallowed panic. “That means we’ll have to go past him.”

“I’ll
guide you,” said the blind man. “He won’t hurt you.”

“Why
not make him hide in his cell?” she asked.

Lou
looked down. “I’m not saying I like the guy, but he did bond with you. Not
feeling my wife for almost four months has been hell for me. I can sympathize.
He only wants to look at you as you pass by.”

“Do
you realize how hard it’s going to be for me to revisit that chamber?” Yvette
hissed.

“I
climb into Snowflake twice a week, and it still makes me sweat. He strapped me
to that interface and opened the inputs to maximum as we went by that sun. When
we enter the Oblivion system, I’ll be reenacting the scene that left me this
way. I do it for Mercy.”

“It’s
not the same.”

“No.
Would it help if I told you Toby worked eighty hours this week?”

“I’ll
think about letting him see me on the way out, depending on how I feel.”

“Fair
enough,” Lou said. He turned his body away from hers, tapped his throat
microphone, and relayed the response like a ventriloquist, not moving his lips.

He
was the perfect gentleman as he led her into the pit of hell, the place where
she’d been imprisoned. The Zeiss family had draped the walls with sheets to
disguise the chamber, but Yvette could still smell the dampness and shampoo.
She could still hear her cries echoing. When she noticed the syringe on the stainless-steel
tray, she felt a tangible ache to plunge it into her own vein and experience
the quiet.

The
command and medical crews clustered around the stasis chamber. Red said,
“Snowflake, you can wake Mercy now.”

Lou
grabbed her hand the instant the field was off and kissed it. Like Sleeping
Beauty, her eyelids fluttered. Auckland hung an IV bottle beside her. “We’ll
drip this in gradually. If she has any adverse reaction, we can freeze her
again.”

Ten
minutes into the procedure, Mercy was snoring. Lou said, “Is this like a coma?
Should we give her adrenaline?”

Yvette
felt her friend relax. “No. This is good.”

“How
long is she going to be like this? I mean, she’s been asleep for months.”

“Actually,
from her standpoint, she’s been awake for a very stressful eighteen hours. Let
her rest.”

Lou
fretted constantly. When they pulled out the IV a couple hours later, Mercy
stirred. Her first muzzy question was, “Where did all the colors go?”

Auckland
held up a card and asked, “How many shades of
blue do you see?”

“Only
one,” she replied.

“Well,
her extra senses are muted,” Auckland said. “We can move her to her own bedroom
upstairs until after the fuel run. Then, we can move her to the Hollow. Nurse,
you can check her three times a day for symptoms and give her booster
injections twice a week.” He handed her a month’s supply of serum and needles.

As
the men transported Mercy to her room and Red helped the groggy woman into
pajamas, Yvette stared at the temptation in her grasp. One push and she could
become a monster too, endangering a pregnant friend for the sake of a few hours
of release. Several minutes later, she felt a presence lingering in the central
command room above her. From the aura of sadness and anticipation, she assumed
it was Lou. Clearly, he wasn’t getting the amorous reunion he’d been
anticipating.

Yvette
launched herself upward, telling him, “Cheer up. You can escort me to the
elevator.” At the top, she caught the rim of the access tube with her toes and
held out her arm for him to take, until she saw his face. There was no beard.
Toby had been lurking, waiting for her, and the stasis chamber was empty. Her
lungs slammed shut.

Toby
looked at the floor. “I’m sorry, for everything.” He took a shuddering breath.
“I just had to face you and tell you what I did was wrong.”

She
turned away, waiting for the attack. Seconds passed, and the empathic feedback
hit her in the forehead. The man was a black hole of grief and misery, but
under that was a yearning. He needed her approval. This animal wanted her
approval.

“
I
took something sacred that you offered and trampled it,” he continued. “I was
sick, but I swear, I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”

The
only aggression emanated from Red who stood ready to leap across the room and
kill Toby if necessary.

He
didn’t move.

The
nurse forced herself to examine the man. Yvette had always viewed him as a
drunken hit-and-run driver who had staggered away unharmed by a collision. Now through
the link, she could tell that his actions of that insane period had wrecked him
as well. He was trapped in a twisted ruin wrapped around a telephone pole.
Through the smoke and flames, she could just recognize that man she once
respected. “Dr. Baatjies,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Yes?”
He held his breath, bracing himself for the blow and telling himself he
deserved it.

Instead,
Yvette decided to give him fresh air. “You did outstanding work on the first
phase of the treatment. If this works, you’ll have saved millions of lives.”

“It
was a team effort.” He turned a gasp into a nervous half laugh. “Lou kept
hanging around me. I had to do something to get rid of him.” Recalling that
he’d planned murder against this man, justifying himself with the same phrase,
Toby’s face twisted and he let out the strangled exclamation of a man who’d
just smacked his thumb with a hammer.

Red
hovered, her right hand flat and rigid in strike position.

“I
can tell how hard it’s been for you,” Yvette said softly. “Can you imagine how
difficult it has been for me?” She lowered her shields for an instant and
showed him the terror that pierced her standing in Olympus again. She
visualized each room and let herself experience the panic and loathing that
room induced.

Toby
collapsed, wailing at her feet.

Even
at the fringe of the emotional exposure, Red paled and swayed. “Back on suicide
watch for him.”

For
a split second Yvette wondered if she’d been too harsh and wanted to stroke his
back to comfort him. No. She wasn’t ready to feel sorry for Toby yet. She
whispered to Red, “Get me out of here.”