Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [43]
She didn’t fraternize with her fellow EDF crewmembers either, and not just because she outranked them. They did their duties on shift, ate together in the mess hall, but generally treated Tasia with a cool formality due to her Roamer connections.
At least she had EA as a friend, even if she had to recreate their history and friendship. On the evening before their approach to Llaro, the small robot stood inside the commander’s quarters just off the bridge. Tasia dropped heavily onto her bunk and leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “Now, I know you don’t remember any of this next story, so I’ll tell you in as much detail as I can. I won’t embellish it too much.”
“You would not deceive me, Master Tasia. I’m very eager to listen.”
She chuckled. “Your memory might have been fried, but my human brain isn’t completely reliable either. Okay, this is how I remember it, anyway.” Pausing to repaint the picture in her head, Tasia let out a long breath. For weeks now she had spent hours daily with EA, reminiscing, telling the little compy about all the times they’d spent together, recounting the adventures they’d had. Giving her a secondhand past was better than nothing at all.
Despite her reassurances of honesty, Tasia did in fact censor her descriptions. She suspected the Earth Defense Forces might be monitoring her room, eavesdropping on private conversations in hopes that she would let slip some important detail about the clans or their whereabouts. The EDF simply didn’t trust her. Tasia had given them no concrete reason to question her loyalty, but neither had she made any secret of how she felt about their offensive against the clans. Her superiors had stripped her of her Manta command, ostensibly to avoid placing her in an awkward situation “where loyalties might be conflicted.”
And indeed her loyalties were torn. Before the Osquivel offensive, she had secretly dispatched her compy to warn the Roamer shipyards that a military force was on its way. EA had successfully delivered her urgent message, but something must have happened to the compy on the way home, because when she returned, her imprinted memory had been wiped. Tasia sometimes wondered if the Earth military had triggered the fail-safe amnesia programming that all Roamer compies contained...
So now, when she recounted the compy’s life story for EA’s own benefit, Tasia used no names, no coordinates, no clues that might give the Eddies a lead to follow.
“I was nine,” she said, “and it was one of the most important days in my life. In your life too.” The compy’s glowing eyes remained fixed as EA listened with seemingly rapt attention. “My two brothers took us out in a boat onto the cold underground sea. Jess was eighteen, I think, and Ross was twenty-three. Our father wanted them to run the family water mines together, but Ross had dreams of building his own ekti harvester on a gas giant. Since I was so much younger, I didn’t spend a lot of time with them—they had responsibilities, and I was just a kid.
“I could tell that they had something special in mind. Ross guided the boat away from the ice pack, to colder water that wasn’t directly under the artificial suns in the ice ceiling. All four of us on a stable boat—including you, EA.”
“I am glad I could come along.”
She remembered the Listener compy sitting motionless, like a prim lady on one of the seats. Tasia, Ross, and Jess wore warm clothes, their cheeks pink from the chill. She pictured the frigid water—still liquid but barely above the freezing point. Reflections from the high cavernous ceiling and the distant sloping walls of the giant air pocket turned the sea a gunmetal gray.
“Ross took the boat out into the deep water, where we played a game. We ignited lightsticks, then dropped them overboard from different parts of the boat. We’d watch the lights sink deeper and deeper, until something ate them.”
“Ate them?” EA asked.
“Even under the