The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [91]
“I’m okay,” I lied, fighting the dizziness. I could see how much blood there was on the gray floor now, and how much there was on the pale blue sleeves of my dead shirt. My trousers were pale blue too, except where they’d picked up bloodstains from the floor. Everybody’s clothes were pale blue. They had to be uniforms of some kind, although they seemed ridiculously casual as well as inert.
“Better do as she says, Mr. Tamlin,” Solantha Handsel put in, flatly. “I hit you hard. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was. It could have been a hostile.”
“If I wasn’t a hostile before,” I managed to mutter, darkly, “I am now.” She didn’t seem impressed.
“Come on, Mr. Tamlin,” said Mortimer Gray. “I’ll help you.” He lent me an arm so that I could raise myself from a sitting position to a standing one. I felt faint, and I had to fight hard against the impulse to lie back down again. I’d sat up because I wanted to keep better track of the argument, but the argument had been suspended now while everyone put on a collaborative show of sympathy. Michael Lowenthal seemed very anxious indeed, although he might have been overacting — or he might, of course, have been projecting an anxiety he really felt for himself. Emortal or not, he knew how vulnerable he was without IT assistance.
Mortimer Gray continued to hang on to my arm, to make sure that I didn’t keel over again. When he was sure that I wouldn’t he steered me back toward the door from which I’d unwisely emerged on my exploratory mission, obviously intent on seeing me safety back to my bed. I resisted, but I didn’t have the strength to make the resistance stick. In the end, I decided that I could only benefit from a brief interval of rest, and allowed myself to be guided.
Christine Caine followed us into the cell, with the air of one who thought she had a legitimate claim to the territory. I took that to mean that she had been the person in the upper bunk. I wondered briefly whether I ought to put in for a transfer, but it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to volunteer to trade — not only because no one else would want to share with Christine but also because no one else would want to share with me.
I figured that I had the rough end of the deal. If I had been deprived of my IT, I reasoned, so had Christine. Whatever internal censors the sisterhood had put in place to ensure that she didn’t revert to type were presumably gone. She didn’t look dangerous at the moment, but I had seen Bad Karma.
I lay down in the bottom bunk. Mercifully, the dizziness relinquished its hold on my head almost immediately.
“I’m sorry, Madoc,” Mortimer Gray said, moving toward the door, “but we have to get this sorted out, if we can.”
I was tempted to tell him that he shouldn’t leave me out of the discussion, and certainly shouldn’t leave me alone with a crazy mass murderer, but I didn’t have the energy. I needed time to recover my wits.
“Are you okay?” the crazy mass murderer said, looking down at me. “Do you want me to stay?”
I resisted the temptation to laugh. I tried to shake my head, but it wasn’t the ideal gesture to attempt in my condition.
She stayed anyway. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked, paying me a compliment of sorts.
“It looks as if we’ve been kidnapped by space pirates,” I said, weakly. “In fact, one way or another, that’s what it amounts to. Whether the pirates are from Earth, or Titan, or Excelsior, or somewhere else entirely, we’re still kidnapped. I expect we’ll find out soon enough what happens next. Maybe we get held for ransom, auctioned to the highest bidder. There’s only one thing I’m sure of.”
“What’s that?” she wanted to know.
“This isn’t a dream,” I told her. “Everything else might have been a trip in a fancy VE, but not this.” I touched my broken nose, very gently indeed. “No matter how preposterous the situation seems, I’m certain now that we’re awake. I wasn’t before, but I am now. And given that this is real, we’re in real trouble.