Day 41: Intercom, Noon
"Hello, hello," said the Head Doctor in a cheery tone. It sounded as if he'd gotten over his paperwork hangover. "I hope half of you are clean and that the other half of you are hungry! Or that all of you are hungry! Ha-ha... Either way, we'll be serving a down-to-earth lunch of crispy chicken strips and fries; we also have cole slaw, potato salad
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The intercom hissed on for an all-hands alert. It brought in its wake immediate alertness; shipboard duty, especially in a mercenary fleet, was no place for deep sleepers. Taura listened to the message, wide awake. Intuition kept her eyes shut, her muscles relaxed; intuition, and the opportunistic hope of going back to sleep afterwards.
It wasn't the Captain, or the night comm officer, or anyone she recognized at all.
Something was wrong. A lot of somethings were wrong. The air hung still over her face; no recirculation fans humming in the background, no gentle vibration of engines, but there was light on the other side of her eyelids, and there was oxygen. If she was very, very lucky, no-one had noticed she was awake yet. She kept her breathing level and continued to listen.
Patients. She was in a dirt-side hospital. That explained the air, and the cot that was too short for her legs, and injury or painkillers would cover the feeling of forced detachment from her own limbs.
Reconnaissance by stealth complete, she opened her eyes. The room was large, by standards accustomed to quarters on a warship; the colors were strangely washed-out; and the furnishings were a hodgepodge of utilitarian and decadent. The bed was cheap steel, but the desk beyond looked like real wood. Well, she could be on one of the planets where trees grew without significant intervention. It was time to see what she'd done to herself this time. She raised both hands and pushed the blanket off.
The body it revealed wasn't her body. The hands that had just moved weren't her hands. They were fully human, soft skin, long fingers, and flat, thin nails. She brought both hands to her cheeks -- her fangs were gone, her lower jaw fit neatly under her cheeks. She pressed the back of a knuckle against her throat; her pulse was steady but human-slow. The skin of her neck was smooth and unblemished. She ran the pads of her fingers around jaw and cheeks and under the edge of her hair. There was not a single thin ridge or whorl that could suggest cosmetic surgery, tissue regrowth, a full-face transplant. Though, she added to herself, trying to stave off incipient hysteria with deep breaths and biological truths, with enough money, scars were optional.
Changing an entire metabolism, though, that was impossible. It was an impossibility she lived with -- no, just lived on a day to day basis. The Dendarii medics had tweaked and adjusted and tempered it as far as possible, and it had been enough for her. Never for Miles, but he'd never let impossibility stop him. But this could not be his doing. He would never ask this of her. Kill for her, in the heat of battle; die for her, if death could ever catch him, she had no doubts about. But not cold-blooded murder.
Oh. Oh, damn. Unfamiliar muscles moved as her face crumpled. Her new fingers slid back up her cheeks, and then turned inwards. She dragged soft, useless nails down along skin, as if she could somehow dig her way back to the face she had always worn.
She wasn't sure how long she sat there, crying, until her attention was caught again from without.
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Taura froze. The medtech reached out with a small white square; it turned out to be a disposable disinfectant-soaked wipe, which cooled some of the tear-burn in her cheeks at the same time as it stung where even human-soft nails had left marks.
"There you go, dear. Now, wouldn't you like some lunch, Kitty? You heard the Head Doctor; we have a little bit of everything available, and you know you need to eat to get better."
Taura had heard the announcement the first time; she didn't need to be told twice, especially where food was concerned. No, the interesting part was what the tech had only implied. First, that she had been injured, despite no symptoms other than a new body, and a remarkable lack of transplant side effects.
And she'd been booked under a false name. Was this recuperation, or a covert operation? No-one in the Dendarii would agree to a full-body transplant as a disguise, would they? Not even for that, would Miles ask this of me. She was more sure of it than she was sure of her own heartbeat. "I'm afraid," she began, her voice coming out a half-octave above her natural range, though still low and rumbling by any objective scale. She coughed, and tried again. "I'm afraid my memory seems to have some holes in it." That would be normal, after battle trauma, or whatever cover story had been attached -- shuttle accident?
The medtech sighed. "We've been over this, Kitty. There's no physiological reason for you to be experiencing amnesia."
This time, Taura couldn't help but flinch at the pet name. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She'd blow her cover, if cover it was. And the medtech was looking at her curiously. "Most...people don't call me that." The statement had the virtue of being the absolute truth. Misdirection. She was taking control of what she could, fragment by fragment.
"Well, I hope we'll be good friends by the time you're ready to go home, Miss Jackson. Now, you don't want to miss lunch, do you?"
Taura shook her head and ventured a wan smile, which garnered an eager response all out of proportion to the one she had offered, and then meekly followed the woman out the door and into the hallway.
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