Chains of Redemption (9 page)

Shlerb had clearance.

Jessica could wait till security got lax again, which would happen eventually, but she was suddenly tired of waiting. She was sick to death of screwing Shlerb, and as little company as Right had been, she found that she missed him. She wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps it was simply that she'd gotten used to having him around. Maybe it was because he had known her as well as anyone ever had, and no one else here even knew what she was or why she was here.

As a foreman Shlerb had certain rights, and the ship's crew knew him. If he was smart it would be easy for him to get her on board. Of course he wasn't smart, he was a freaking, perverted moron, but now he'd take her orders, do what she told him, and Jessica was more than smart enough for the both of them.

Shlerb came around the corner of the mineshaft out of breath and red in the face. He was sending guilt in a great huge wave, so Jessica smacked him good and hard in the ribs. He collapsed against the wall, gasping for the wind she'd forced from his lungs.

"Dammit, Jesut, why did you do that?"

"Because you were telegraphing guilt, you idiot," Jessica answered in an angry hiss. "Don't you know how to use a shield?"

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be sorry, just stop being stupid. Did you get them?"

He pulled the bag from inside his shirt, and she smiled as she jerked it out of his hands. She checked to make sure he'd gotten everything and then she started to undress.

"I was very nearly caught," he objected.

"No doubt because you were sending guilt out in a huge radiating wave," she mumbled under her breath.

"Ah . . . What's that chain for?"

"To make you ask stupid questions. You just don't worry about my chain. Did anyone see you?"

"I don't think so . . . It's not going to work, Jesut," he said as he watched her slip the uniform on over the chain. "No one's going to believe that someone with one eye . . ."

"You used to delight in pointing that out to me. I thought we'd gotten past that," Jessica said with a snarl.

"I was just going to say . . . You couldn't keep a top military position with one eye," he said.

"Which is why I needed this." She took off her patch and shoved it down in her pocket, then she tied a piece of gauze over her eye.

"That isn't going to fool anyone," Shlerb said, shaking his head.

For answer she grabbed his hand, cut his finger with a knife and stuck the bleeding end of it on the gauze, which soaked the blood up. He tried to swing a fist into her head with his free hand, but she grabbed his fist and held it. He got excited, and she wanted to kill him right then and there, but she still needed him.

"You're going to take me in. If anyone asks, I was walking through the mines doing a spot check and something blew. Luckily you were there, and . . ." He was grinning like an idiot. She sighed. "Keep your mouth shut; I'll do all the talking."

Everything had worked just as she planned. She was rushed to the infirmary with no real questions being asked. Blood did something to the psychology of every race she had ever encountered. No matter what color that blood happened to be, when people saw blood running out of themselves or someone else they always freaked out. Even seasoned medical personnel couldn't help but get excited.

The body was like a full fuel tank. Everyone knew it only held just so much fuel and when that fuel ran out the motor sputtered and died. If the blood happened to be coming from an eye, that caused an instant panic. She knew all about the horror of losing an eye, and the reaction it caused.

She clung to Shlerb as if he were her lifeline, and as the doctor slid in the door ahead of them she broke the vial she held tightly in her right hand. Before even the nurse could enter the alarm sounded and the doors started to close. The nurse jumped the rest of the way through as all the doors to the room quickly slammed shut.

"Contamination!" the alarm sounded loudly. "Contamination. Examination room Gester Fontacks sealed."

"What have you two been exposed to?" the doctor said with agitation, but his emotions showed fear.

"Nothing that I know of," Shlerb said with real worry as he helped Jessica to sit on the table.

Jessica lay down feigning pain and looked for the surveillance camera she knew would be present. Security cameras might be considered unnecessary for most of the ship, but she had been sure they would monitor the treatment rooms for any number of reasons. Not the least of which was the scenario she was even now playing out. The camera was a problem, but it was also a much-needed prop in her plan.

The "bug" hadn't been hard to get. Half the "colonists" were sick with some crap most of the time. She'd picked up the discarded snotty tissue of one who looked especially ill and had stuck the nasty mess into a small vial, figuring that if the contamination sensors in this infirmary were anywhere near as sensitive as the ones in Reliance ships, even something as relatively harmless as a common cold would be enough to successfully shut them off from the rest of the ship. When a treatment room was shut down because of contamination no one was likely to want to try to break in.

The camera, however, was a problem, because with a contamination scare it was a sure bet that someone would be carefully watching the monitor and listening.

She couldn't just destroy the monitor, because she was going to need it later. She needed it to appear, to anyone who might be watching, as if there were simply a glitch in the system. She waited for Shlerb to make his move, but of course he just stood there like the big idiot that he was as the nurse and doctor started to don protective gear. She glared at him, he looked puzzled, and then the big idiot grinned and nodded wildly as he reached into his pocket, pulled out the device and showed it to her.

Jessica gritted her teeth and hoped she was the only one who noticed the idiot boy's display.

He moved slowly—and it might be added, obviously—towards the camera. When he was under it, out of view, he reached up and stuck the apparatus on the camera. Almost immediately a red light on the side of the scanner started to blink, no doubt signaling that the camera wasn't working. A few seconds later it started to make an irritating little pinging noise. Jessica smiled in satisfaction. There had been no way to actually test her invention, so till now she couldn't be sure whether it would work or not.

"Damn, now what's wrong with that thing?" the doctor asked. "Control, can you see us at all?"

There was no answer.

"Can you hear us?" he asked, though it seemed like a really stupid question to Jessica. There was still no answer. The doctor walked reluctantly over to Jessica to check out her wound. "Herster," he said to the nurse over his shoulder, "see if you can't fix that camera."

"Screw the camera," Jessica said, sitting bolt upright on the examining table before the doctor even had a chance to start to examine her. "You fix my eye."

"You don't understand, Lieutenant. Unless they can see us, unless we can report on what you're carrying, they can't let us out of this room. That means we can't go to a surgical unit if we need to. We can't leave this room till the tests are run and I can assure my commanding officer that I'm not unleashing any form of deadly contaminant onto this ship. Now the computer is currently running a diagnostic on the germ, and when it has determined what it is and how best to disinfect . . ."

"No," Jessica said with a smile as she reached out and easily picked the man up off the floor by his collar. "
You
don't understand. I don't give a shit about any of that."

"Jesut!" Shlerb protested. "You didn't say you were going to do any of this crazy shit. You said you wanted a decent shower and a good meal."

"You shut up, you sniveling, wretched moron," Jessica hissed and suddenly all her power was back. She was in control. Once again she was the force to be reckoned with. She put the doctor down and ripped the gauze off her eye. She walked over to the sink and washed her face, then she turned to look at the three people she shared the room with, but she only addressed the doctor. "You're going to put an eye back in my head, because everyone's going to know exactly who I am if I go back there without an eye. You do exactly what I tell you to do and no one's going to get hurt." She laughed then and walked up to Shlerb. "Except you, you filthy, putrid, maggot festering in a two day old turd. You, I'm going to kill."

"But Jesut, I . . . I love you. I helped you."

"You treated me like total shit until I gave you something you wanted, and now you're about to give me something I want. It's a shame for the irony to be wasted on someone as stupid as you, but I'm going to take one of your eyes so I won't be One-eye anymore." She grabbed his head in her hands and spun it with enough torque to break his neck, then lay him gently on the floor as the nurse and doctor screamed. She turned to look at them, her one eye gleaming with maniacal intent, as Shlerb's body jerked around on the floor like a fish thrown on dry land.

"I could do this myself. It wouldn't be easy, but I could," Jessica said. "So I suggest you shut up and help me before I make you just as dead as old Shlerb here."

"What . . . What do you want me to do?" the doctor asked as he comforted the nurse, though from what she was reading the nurse wasn't as scared as the doctor was.

"You're a doctor. I don't think it should take a genius to figure it out. I want you to take an eye out of this moron and put it into me."

"It . . . it isn't that simple, you need to cross-match and . . ."

"I've already done that. It was just good luck that the guy with the closest match for me was the guy who tormented me for three years. It's Karma really," Jessica said a lilt to her voice that hadn't been there since the day she'd lost her eye. The Argys didn't have a word for Karma, so she knew they hadn't understood her and she didn't care. She was in control. She was the boss.

"It can't be a close match, it has to be perfect. This is an emergency room, we would need an operating room, and . . ."

"And I can't believe you haven't figured out what the hell I am. I'm a genetically superior humanoid. I have my kit right here." She pulled the black wallet from her pocket. "Don't blow smoke up my ass. You can do the surgery here as easily as in an operating room. Look, I'll even do the hard part for you." She pulled the knife from her pouch and leaned beside Shlerb's body.

She carefully harvested the eye and put it into the sterile bowl the nurse brought her without being asked. The nurse wasn't stupid. She no doubt believed Jessica's claim to be just exactly what she said she was.

Jessica took the bowl with the eye in it from the nurse and looked from it to Shlerb's body. "Gee, Shlerb, every time I'm looking at another guy's cock with this eye I'll be thinking of you." She laughed. "Let's get this show on the road shall we? I've only got another four or five thousand years to live. Time's a-wasting."

Doctor Sedro was a nervous wreck. If it had been his specialty, and it wasn't, doing this sort of transplant operation would be nerve-wracking under the best of circumstances. Doing it on a fully awake and fully functional GSH with no actual experience and under these circumstances was unthinkable, but he knew he didn't have any choice. He couldn't afford to make even the slightest mistake. There was no doubt that she would kill both him and Herster if they didn't do exactly as they were told. Of course, he wasn't exactly sure that she wouldn't kill them anyway.

He had no idea where she'd come from, why she'd been built, or how she had wound up on Pete. He was sure that she was completely insane, psychotic. That was dangerous in a normal Argy, but in someone so obviously genetically enhanced . . . it could be cataclysmic.
Who made her? Why did they make her? More important, what is her ultimate plan and what is she going to do to us?

The eye socket was like nothing he had ever seen. The eyelid was still there, even the eyelashes, and when she opened the lid, it was as if the eye socket had just healed. He wondered just exactly how she thought he could fix this.

She seemed to read his mind, making him wonder if she might not also be telepathic.

"It's easy. Make a small incision in the back with the laser and find the optic nerve. Then scrape the socket to expose the tissue. Connect the optic nerve to the eyeball and we're ready to go . . . Oh, and you've only got a few seconds before my tissue starts to heal, so make it quick."

She wasn't lying, either. He had to keep cutting just to keep the opening from healing until he got done. At one point he thought seriously about using the laser scalpel to kill her, but before he could do more than just think it he found her hand around the wrist in which he was holding the aforementioned scalpel. She looked at him and smiled a smile that was anything but pleasant.

"Don't even think it, dick boy," she hissed. "Like I said. I could do this myself if I absolutely had to. Unless you did more damage than I believe you could do with that sucker, all you'd really do is piss me off."

He did the surgery, and then stepped back to see her reaction. He knew he'd successfully restored sight on that side of her body when she started to laugh.