Hard Crash - Christie Golden [17]
She looked a little smug. "I don't need a primitive viewing screen to see, or a console to program, not when I'm joined with the computer. To be able to experience so many things that, as an organic being, I'd never otherwise know is indescribable. And he--yeah, I know it's not alive and it's got no gender, but I think of the ship as a he--is so close to me when we're joined. I've never known anything like it, not even in a relationship with another Omearan. But there are things I want to say so I can look back at them later, and I can't be entirely honest when Friend is so completely joined with me. So, I guess these are secret journals."
She giggled. To his surprise, Duffy felt tears sting his eyes. He had thought they'd be looking at boring but informative impersonal logs, stuff that would reveal the horrors and atrocities committed by this ship and this pilot, not the most intimate confessions of a young girl's private thoughts. He felt like a peeping Tom. But there was nothing for it. This was, so far, the only information they had on the ship and its pilot, and they needed to keep watching, hard as it was.
One thing was becoming rapidly apparent. Their assumption about the pilot had been all wrong. Whatever she was, this giggling, endearing child on the viewscreen was no Borg.
The girl rambled on about how hard it had been for her to say goodbye to her family. "I didn't want to tell Friend about it because it'd upset him. He's really sensitive to my happiness. It's nice to have things like that matter to someone else so much." She smiled, her green eyes soft with affection, and continued.
"We wouldn't normally get tapped for so deep a mission, but after the war, we're really short of pilots," she explained. "So here Friend and I are, alone together in space, searching for an uninhabited but fertile planet so we can get off that toxic rock. Start new lives. I tried to explain to Friend about how great it feels to walk on soft grass in your bare feet, but he didn't quite get it, I think."
Another journal entry described a severe bout of homesickness. A third had the girl, who finally identified herself as Jaldark, describing how she and Friend had navigated a treacherous asteroid belt unscathed.
"It's the most amazing sensation, to be linked with him while we did that!" Jaldark enthused, practically bouncing up and down in her chair. "I just love Friend so much. He's the most wonderful ship. I'm so glad I'm bonded with him for the rest of my life. He seems to be so much easier to get along with temperamentally than the trainer ships, but maybe that's because they are constantly bonding and breaking bond with new pilots. Maybe they never get to settle into being themselves. Poor things."
The grin, the wonderful, wide, endearing grin crossed her face again. "I guess I'm just the luckiest girl in the universe."
But you weren't, Jaldark, Duffy thought, feeling slightly sick. And sure enough, on the next tape, the trouble had already begun. Jaldark looked thinner and paler. There were deep circles under the green eyes, and she wasn't smiling.
"Something's wrong," she told her recorded journal without preamble. "Friend can sense it but I'm not telling him any more than I have to in order to maintain function. He knows we're turning around and heading back toward Omearan space at our top speed, but I don't know that we'll make it in time. I hate lying to him like this."
She swallowed hard, licked dry lips, and continued. "I think it's the implants. I've passed the rejection window, so it can't be that. They'd never have let me go on a deep space recon mission if there was a possibility that they'd be rejected. But they're failing somehow. I can't get sustenance from Friend anymore."
Jaldark pressed long, thin fingers to her unusually deep temples. Twin implants pulsed beneath the skin at her touch.
"I have these terrible headaches. And the