Blue Light of Home (6 page)

He did heal, although it took several days and it was a fight each and every time she saw him not to draw attention to it by stupidly asking how he felt. If he caught her staring, she made a point of paying some kind of compliment, half-assed though it may be. He seldom reacted, but once he curled his lip in one of those toothy smiles before he turned away. She was trying; she guessed that counted, too.

Not long after his face returned to normal, Skye came onto the bridge to find one of the computer stations dark. This was unprecedented. Although there were fourteen separate consoles arranged around the circular room, all fourteen were always in use. Skye had only the vaguest notion of what Vala did, but she knew it involved sifting through a lot of junk to get a few nuggets of useful information, which then had to be uploaded to the ship and stored. The translation between systems could take hours, even for a small file, and there were rarely any small files. As soon as he started the process at one station, Vala simply moved his chair down the line and started in on the next. To have one empty, completely unused, while all the others scrolled their endless streams of data, astonished her.

“Did something break?” she asked. It was all she could think of.

Vala grunted. The sound was vaguely disapproving. Too late, she remembered she wasn’t supposed to ask questions. She pulled out the table and a clean tureen, and as it filled, Vala came to sit with her. She gave him the first serving of slime; he waited until she had hers before he started drinking. She only sipped at hers. It had been weeks, and she was in no danger of learning to like this stuff.

“Do you see the terminal there?” Vala asked eventually, addressing his breakfast rather than her.

“Yes.”

“I don’t use it often,” he said, a bold-faced lie if ever she’d heard one. “I have decided to give it to you.”

“Oh!” She blinked, genuinely surprised and touched. “Wow, thank you!”

“It has been configured for human use. The satellite feeds are prohibited, but you may access what you like on Earth’s global network. Touch the screen to connect, and then you may use the keys exactly as you would one of your own systems. Remember, do not touch the console. If you become confused, ask for help.” He drank his slime, looking very mildly pleased with himself.

“Thank you so much!” Her mind was whirling, giddy with possibilities. She could listen to music again. Start a live-journal—She’d never been interested in one before, but a few weeks trapped on a small ship with a stoic alien had created an almost pathological need for human contact in her—or even blog! Blogging was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of, even the stupidest word, but at least she’d be—

Battlehammer! Oh God, she could play Battlehammer again! It had been more than thirty days, so all her in-game mail would have melted, but she didn’t care. Oh, to be once more in the world of Acamaria, fighting off the evil humans and their evil alliance of disgustingly cute cronies, swinging her enchanted Serpentblade for the glory of Warchief Izar and the outcast races of Kalatru!

But wait…

“Can I upload things?” she asked.

“What ‘things’, precisely?”

“A game? There’s this game I play. It’s pretty big—well, it’s big on my computer at home,” she corrected herself, looking dubiously at the surrounding alien consoles. “For that matter, I don’t know if it’ll even be compatible enough to play here.”

“If the program originated on Earth, it can be attuned to this computer,” Vala replied, giving his tureen a casual swirl. “When you are ready to upload the data, tell me and I will see your game installed properly to your terminal.”

Skye chugged the second half of her tasteless slime, stood impatiently through its thirty-second self-cleaning cycle, and threw her tureen back in the cupboard while Vala sat smiling and pretending not to pay attention to her. The computer station was all of five feet from the table; she rushed over anyway, dropped into the uncomfortable seat, and touched the screen. She’d seen him do this often enough, so she wasn’t as terrifically impressed when light sprang out and took a keyboard’s form as maybe she should have been, she just started typing.

There was no resistance beneath her fingers, of course, but the ‘keys’ were very sensitive. She checked her email first—even the spam was a welcome sight—but the only messages were some weekly comic strips she subscribed to and an e-coupon from her favorite pizza place. She reveled in a few daily puzzles from the websites she frequented, and then got down to the serious business of Battlehammer.

She’d have to buy a new game and another set of expansions to get it working up here, she was resigned to that, but it was easy enough to download the e-version of the game on Earth, so it ought to be do-able up here. All she had to do was go to their home site, punch up her account, and—

Her account had been suspended.  Surely that had to be a mistake.  Even though Skye hadn’t been at home, the Battlehammer people should have been receiving automatic payments from her credit card, which also should have been paid automatically by her bank.  Skye was a big believer in setting things up so that she had to think about them as little as possible.

Confused, she carefully pecked through the light-keyboard until she could call up her account summary, and sure enough: Account Overdue.

But she was so positive…she knew the last thing she’d done before leaving the house in the company of those nice young soldiers had been to make sure all her debts were paid off, all her mail was on hold, and all her future bills were set up for automatic payment.  By God, did this mean her rent wasn’t being paid either?  What was going to happen to all her stuff?

Now fighting off a useless throb of panic (what could she really do about any of this up here?), Skye left Battlehammer and went to her credit card’s site instead.

It wouldn’t let her in.

Account frozen, it said after she’d tried three times.  Access denied.

Numbly, Skye went to her bank’s site and keyed herself in to what was essentially the same message.  The accounts were still there, as far as she could tell, and as far as she could tell she was still considered the account-holder, but none of her passwords were working.  The accounts were frozen pending reauthorization.  By whom, she had no idea.

Wait, she did have an idea.  A very bad idea.  And she could see his face all over again, that man who had never even bothered to give her his name when he’d told her that she had a choice: either she could launch herself into space for an exciting career in interspecies prostitution, or she could be locked up indefinitely on grounds of National Security.

What was she supposed to go home to?  Her apartment would be long gone, and all her things…Honestly, she didn’t care so much about the furniture (well, okay, a part of her cared, all right, a part of her cared a lot, but she knew the sofa wasn’t exactly leaving a void), but what about her photographs?  The baby book her mom had kept so faithfully until she was five?  Her dad’s journals from when he traveled around Europe and Africa?  What about the home movies she had saved on her computer?  She knew how things worked; eventually, all her saleable stuff would just be packed up and auctioned off by her landlord, and all the things that mattered, that really mattered, would end up in some dumpster.

“Skye?”

Vala rarely called her by her name.  Hearing it was enough to shock her back into the present, where she realized she’d been sitting open-mouthed and wet-eyed in front of the alien monitor for several minutes.  She didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t even want to look at him.  He’d done such a nice thing for her, and all she wanted to do was crawl into a dark hole somewhere and bawl like a baby.

Her life was gone.  She’d done everything they’d wanted her to do, and the sons of bitches had taken her life away anyway.

A blur of black at the corner of her vision; Vala had crept up behind her and was looking at the monitor over her head.  She shut it off clumsily, mashing through a dozen error messages because her hands were shaking so badly that she kept blurring into the other holographic keys.

“Thank you,” she said, made herself say.  It didn’t even sound like her voice.  She got up from the chair, kept her face turned away, and escaped to the privacy of her room where tears, useless tears, offered up her only refuge.

How long she lay on the muffling bed and cried, she didn’t know, but it couldn’t have been too long.  She’d had a lot of crying jags since coming here, and even if she didn’t have a clock, she thought she was pretty good at gauging the seriousness of her fits.  On a scale of one to ten, this last couldn’t have been more than a five.  Really, what was the point of going hardcore hysterical?  It would be over and done by a year or more before she could ever do anything about it.

That pushed out a few more tears, but they were silent ones.  Skye didn’t have much to pride herself on, but she’d always been a pragmatic girl; when all was said and done, it really was no good crying over stolen goods, even if they were the only pieces of her past she had left.

But not crying had another effect.  As she sat up and pushed her hair listlessly back over her shoulder, she realized she could hear, beyond the endless droning hum of the ship’s systems, Vala’s voice.

It confused her, in the easy, fuzzy way confusion can come on after a good crying spell.  Vala barely even spoke to her and she knew there was no one else around.  If he was supposed to be dictating a “captain’s log”, like they did on TV, he was really behind in them, because he’d never done it before.

Furthermore, she realized that the thinness of the walls was such that if she held her breath and really focused, she could make out what he was saying fairly well.  Sure, she could…but should she?  Eavesdropping was rude, and Vala had some definite ideas on how to discourage rudeness.  She didn’t want to get in trouble with him, not when he’d gone out of his way to do something nice for her, and certainly not when she already felt so crummy about everything else.

On the other hand, no one knew the acoustics of this place better than Vala, so was it really eavesdropping if he knew he could be overheard?  And besides, she lived here now.  She had as much a right to know what was going on as he did.

He wouldn’t see it that way and she knew it.  Nevertheless, Skye held her breath and listened.

“—am not interested in listening to anymore of your excuses,” he was saying, and if he’d ever used an icier tone, Skye had never heard it.  That alone was more than a little arresting.  “The next human who addresses me will be he who selected my assistant.”

Those words, delivered in that tone, faceless behind this wall, gripped her bruised heart with something like fear.  He couldn’t be sending her home, could he?  If he wouldn’t do that when she hit him, why over this?  But what other reason could he possibly have to make a phone call to Earth and ask for that particular man if it wasn’t to make a complaint?

The lengthy silence in the room beyond was broken at last by a new voice, one that sounded even more rattled than when she’d heard it last.  “Emissary,” it began, and for a moment, Skye could almost see him as he’d been sitting behind that desk with his tie unknotted and his shirt all sweaty, smoking his cigarette and looking like he’d almost rather be sucking on a live grenade.  “What an unexpected pleasure.  My name is—”

“Entirely irrelevant,” Vala interrupted.  “It suffices that you stand responsible for the procurement of my assistant.”

A very long pause.  Skye wasn’t even aware of holding her breath now.  Then, cautiously: “Is there a problem with the girl?”

“Is there indeed?” Vala countered.

Another pause.  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Emissary.”

“The very next time you silence this channel to confer, I will fire on your planet.  You are speaking to me, not amongst yourselves.”

“I-I’m sorry, Em—”

“Why have you seized my assistant’s financial resources?”

Skye’s heart seemed to skip a beat and then slam back into rhythm extra hard: ba-THUD!  He wasn’t mad at her.  He was…He was fighting for her.

“W-Well there was a…a question of s-secur—How did you even find ou—”

“Was it meant to be secret from me?” Vala asked, and his voice was like a sword cut right out of the night, all gleaming edges and shadowed steel.

“No!” the poor bastard down on Earth shrilled out.  “Look, look, this is a security matter!  We were promised that the assimilation was going to be discreet, that we could avoid a global panic!”

“I fail to see the connection.”

“W-We need to make sure that Ms. Westlocke doesn’t use her resources—”

“You admit then that you have knowingly sent me a duplicitous and dishonest human.”

“No!” gasped Skye, actually clutching at the wall as if she could reach right through it and grab his arm, show him her honest eyes.

“No!” the man on Earth shrieked, and she could hear a frightened babble of other voices behind him in what was no doubt a very tense, sweaty, smoky room.  “No, we trust her completely!  She’s the most trustworthy—”

“Then it is you who are the liar!” Vala roared.

It sounded like a twelve-year old boy shrieking, “
What
?  No!  I swear to God—”

“One of the conditions of the woman’s contract for the services she provides me is a promise of her silence when she returns to Earth. Is that not true?”

“That is!  That is absolutely true!”

“And yet you have seized her monetary resources, claiming security risk.  Therefore, either you do not expect her to hold to that condition, meaning that you have sent me a duplicitous and dishonest human to earn my intimate trust, or her character is entirely irrelevant because you never had any intention of keeping your promises to her in the first place. 
Which is it
?” Vala thundered.

“It’s neither, I swear to God, it’s neither!  It wasn’t even my decision.  There’s just things we have to do!”

“Then they are things which can be undone.”

“If it’s her house, I mean, if she’s worried about her house, for God’s sake, tell her it’s all packed up, I swear.  It’s being stored, it’s totally safe!  We-We wouldn’t—”  He interrupted himself with a hysterical shave of laughter.  “We wouldn’t just throw it all out!”