PrincessColumbia

  Diane mused idly on the fact that entertainment media (books, streaming series, movies...) never mentioned or showed the main characters having to pee when they’re experiencing an existential crisis.

  After she colpsed, her dreams were pgued with fitful starts of images and sound, little indications that she was about to dream something, but exactly what, she couldn’t say. Apparently being aware of her dream state meant she was able to, with enough emotional incentive, choose to exit the dreams entirely. The terrified surety that she’d encounter the dream phantom version of Rachel was something even her unconscious mind couldn’t tolerate in that moment.

  Eventually, it was the call of nature that woke her from her stupor. She found herself curled up on the floor and set about the task of not thinking about anything at all. Any thoughts whatsoever might allow, however incidentally, the unwelcome recognition of a terrible, horrible truth that she’d uncovered. One that she’s been aware of on some level. The nightmares were evidence of that.

  Her bdder had other pns, however, and as time passed, she felt the increasing pressure and eventually decided that lying in a pool of her own piss with rank clothes sticking to her body while her Morvuck sense of smell punished her for it wouldn’t be worth it, so managed to lever her body into a standing position. She shambled to the bathroom door, zombie like, and managed to get her pants and panties down without incident and sat on the toilet without bothering to close the door to the water closet-like half-bath.

  Business complete, she stood again, pulled her panties and pants back up, situated her genitalia appropriately, and closed her fly. Every step deliberate, every action taking the entirety of her conscious awareness.

  She washed her hands, being extremely careful not to look in the mirror. The bar of soap, chosen for use on a space station as a liquid or gel soap would wind up in freefall and possibly gum up some critical component if the gravity pting went out, occupied her attention as she counted out a full ninety seconds of scrubbing her hands before rinsing, then repcing the soap on its dish.

  It was the habit of checking the pins on her jacket that betrayed her. She gnced up and saw that the commander’s pips were slightly crooked. Reaching up to adjust them, she paused and regarded the gold accoutrements, bold procmations that she was the one making the big decisions for a floating city in space. She then eyed the badge representing her station, the icon of the Matron’s Aerie stood bold and proud on the opposite pel and a disgusted loathing bubbled up inside her. She yanked off her jacket and held it in front of her regarding the insignia and realizing she didn’t deserve them. She didn’t deserve to be commander of anything. Child killers should be in prison, at best.

  The ck of the weight of the jacket made the weight of her weapon more pronounced. She stepped out of the bathroom and gently id the jacket on her desk. Someone had worked hard on the badging and the pips could actually be used for someone else, so she didn’t want to damage them.

  Her weapon, however, she wanted to destroy. She’d have to exit the game to do so. As long as it was instantiated it was tied to her neural framework as a ‘thread’ and would throw a permissions error if she tried to halt the several hundred processes that made up the weapon’s code in memory, she couldn’t instruct its management bot to delete the fragments it would scatter into until she removed her neural framework (that is, her brain) from the equation. She reached behind her back and pulled it off, the ‘magic physics’ being weak enough this was a simple task. She gred at the thing that made it so easy for her to make the wrong choice, to make a mistake of such cataclysmic proportions with the pull of a trigger. In a fit of fury and self-loathing, she heaved it across the room. It smmed against a wall and dropped behind a dresser.

  She felt like she would fall apart if she moved anywhere or did anything. Even her breathing was shallow as she stared fixedly at nothing. She looked over to the space between her bed and her walk-in closet and saw the results of her work for the st...however many days it had been. The pyer HUD, the holographic desk, the complex optical tool that served to network her in-game station to her IRL work computer, and the two character models that were locked still as statues. She’d been so proud of herself for coming up with such a clever solution. She was just...so...clever that she could come up with such neat little toys that made it so she could break ‘the rules.’

  “Computer, get rid of all this!” she gestured expansively at the remaining holographic setup. Thankfully for her sanity, it disappeared almost before her request was complete, only leaving the pod’s HUD hovering in the space the cobbled together workbench had been. Angrily, she stomped across the room and swiped it away, not even at the normal angle, just backhanding it. Thankfully, the software seemed to have been programmed with the awareness that the user may want to dismiss it from any direction, and it blipped out, leaving the space her impromptu investigation desk had been occupying vacant.

  She eyed the bed, but part of her couldn’t stand the thought of climbing into one of the most comfortable sleeping ptforms she’d ever experienced. I should be brought up on charges, she thought, I killed a child. Even if she reported back to her superiors about it, though, she knew they’d dismiss anything she said that might indicate Rachel was anything more than software or anything like a girl who wanted to grow beyond her origin conditions.

  Her palms itched, and rather than scratching them she lifted a hand to look at the open palm. She saw the sickle shaped scabs, uneven and ugly as she hadn’t cleaned them right after injuring herself. It wasn’t enough of a punishment, she was in this game living a life she hadn’t ever dared to dream because of so, so many impossibilities that being in a VR environment just…sidestepped, at least for a little bit. She should be suspended, pending review. She should be disclosing her weapon to her superiors and preparing to be retired and redacted from the intelligence community. Instead, she would likely open her door and find another gift from a world she wasn’t really a daughter of for a woman who was becoming legendary for being a savior to hundreds.

  She staggered unseeingly to the wall next to her bed’s end table and leaned heavily against it. Turning and sinking, she sat against the solid surface, hands palm-up in her p, feet against the floor and knees level with her shoulders as she sagged as much as her bones and muscuture would allow. She closed her eyes and thudded her head back against the wall and realized she just…couldn’t cry. She almost wanted to and was slightly relieved to find she seemed to be cried out. She hurt so badly, so deep in her soul she’d never realized it was possible to feel pain there. It was as though she’d torn a chunk of her heart out, just like in her nightmares.

  The station was quiet, the gentle hum of the multitudes of systems and reactors and shielding and electronics and engines and fields combining to create a background sensation that was both a feeling and something that could be heard, very subtly and faintly. It was soothing once one noticed it and got used to it and something not experienced in a pnetary environment. A ship had its engines and those produced a simir effect, but no ship in the game (that she was aware of) had the scale of the station and so couldn’t possibly generate the same quiet, calming hum.

  She could almost sink into it, meditatively, letting it quiet and still her roiling thoughts and emotions. It wasn’t a commutation of her guilt, but an easing of her pain, a reprieve to give her enough emotional space to recover enough to eventually face it again. She knew that she’d carry her sin until the day she died. How many successful tags have I managed? Hell, I’ve lost count…and all undone because I killed a child in the commission of my duties. All the good I’ve managed, all the times I stopped an enemy of humanity, and now I’m so inhuman I’m in an alien body and so legitimately a monster because I assumed guilt. I’ll bet we didn’t even have a file on her, specifically. She took a deep breath, her closed eyes letting her focus entirely on her body, letting her notice that she actually had to force the breath to be a deep one. I wonder how many of the rogues I spshed actually had files? I wonder how many…children I killed? Her heart clenched and she knew she’d never be strong enough to trace the story of every single rogue…every S.A.I. she’d eliminated during that mission. Even one more child would be enough to destroy her completely.

  She snorted darkly, Like I’m not completely undone already…child killer.

  Going off so abruptly it was almost like a gunshot in the quiet room, she heard a sound so incredibly out of pce it took her a moment to identify it. It was the clink-skrrtch of a lighter. An old-style, Zippo-like lighter, the likes of which hadn’t been made in America for nearly 75 years. Sometime in the te 21st century the company had sold itself to an international concern, Diane could never be bothered to find out which, leaving the headquarters in Pennsylvania empty until the third World War wiped it and half the old city off the map. Zippo lighters had many imitators over the years, but fans of the originals were obsessed with collecting, restoring, and preserving them. It was a sign of wealth to have one and actually use it in America, since getting a new one meant either you had enough money to bypass all sorts of American and U.N. blockades on the import of them or you just snapped up enough working models that using one casually was the equivalent to throwing stacks of 1,000 bills into a firepce to keep warm.

  Blinking her eyes open, she turned to discover that somehow, improbably, she was no longer alone in her quarters.

  Sitting next to her on the floor, leaning back against the wall with one leg outstretched and the other cocked in a simir position to hers was an older man with a thick, untidy shock of gray hair. He was wearing a trench coat over a well-worn navy blue suit, cut in something resembling a style she’d seen on the men in the Terran ambassadorial staff back on Mortan when they were trying to curry favor after the incident with the matron. But where theirs spoke of a desire to impress and funt, this suit seemed like it was just something the man wore unconsciously, like he slipped into it because the suit was just so much a part of him that he’d be ushered into heaven wearing it. His shoes were a humble pair of penny loafers, complete with old-style, 20th century pennies in the tongue. His shirt was rumpled, and his tie was loosened up just enough the top button on the shirt was visible. He was in the process of lighting a cigar with the Zippo lighter.

  Now that she was aware of his presence it was like her sense of smell finally decided to grace her with the information she might have expected it to if she wasn’t so distracted by her inner turmoil. He was wearing a cologne, probably some inexpensive brand one might find in a grocery store, but even that fit with everything else about the man. An attention and care to his presence without a concern for being too fshy or ostentatious. His scent was understated, he clearly bathed regurly and used unscented soaps. The cigar was…off-putting. She never smoked, herself, but she knew most cigars were supposed to be warm bouquets of an almost incense-like odor, but this one had more of the smell of cheap tobacco burning in corner store cigarettes.

  As he puffed on the cigar to get it lit, she found herself so surprised at his presence she couldn’t even be upset that he was invading her private quarters. “Who’r’you?!” she blurted.

  Rather than answer directly, he said, “You’re a hard woman to get ahold of, Miss Somni’els.” He didn’t seem put out by the apparent challenge rating of meeting with her face to face. In fact, his voice sounded like he could be someone’s grandpa and was enjoying a prank performed by one of his grandchildren.

  He probably is someone’s grampa, she thought. “That…was kinda on purpose.”

  He took a puff on his stogie and chuckled, “Yeah, could see you were having some sorta rough time there. Not that it’s any of my business, of course.”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together in confusion, “Yeah, these are my private quarters. I locked everyone out for a reason. How did you even get in here?”

  He waved the hand holding the cigar pcatingly, “I know a few tricks, and don’t worry, I won’t be here long. My ship leaves ter today, and I wanted to make sure I got a chance to talk to you before that happened. I was trying to meet with you a few days ago, but I guess that wasn’t a good time.”

  “But boss, Norma and Russe were coming to tell you we’re having a visitor...” Katrina’s words surfaced from the depths of her memory. The man had been waiting for a meeting for...however many days she’d been locked in her room. At least three. “Oh,” she said and closed her eyes again, her head thunking back against the wall, “Sorry.”

  “Eh, that’s okay. Gave me a chance to look around, take in the local shops. Your girl, Norma, she’s doing a good job with the pce. Keeping everything ship-shape, her boyfriend following her around like a lovesick puppy…”

  She snorted a brief ugh at that.

  “That station assistant of yours, Katrina?” the simple statement of ownership rankled something deep inside Diane, but she couldn’t spare the emotional bandwidth to figure that out, “She’s a pretty bright young thing. Good head on her shoulders, very proud of what she’s built here, and she should be.”

  Diane could only reply with a ‘Mmm.’

  “So my wife wanted me to bring back a souvenir. She likes it when I come home with presents. So, I went lookin’ around and pretty much the only thing I could get here that wouldn’t be something I could get her anywhere else was one of those badges your people wear. I asked if they had any that were for the general public to purchase, and pretty much everyone was insistent that they were specific to the station and if I wanted one, I’d have to talk to you.” She heard him take a pull on his cigar before he continued, “Now I figure something like that has got to have a story, right? Like everyone here was really proud of the badge and didn’t want it to wind up in unworthy hands.”

  Yeah, Diane thought, Like mine are so worthy…or clean enough to even hold one. “Mmm,” she noised noncommittally.

  “Course I asked, and there’s a lot of people who had so many good things to say about you and that badge and what it means. Now, of course, I couldn’t possibly just buy one, now that I know the story behind it.”

  He puffed on his cigar again and Diane’s eyes drifted open enough to see him out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t otherwise move.

  “Course,” he said after a moment, “I knew part of the story. Most of it, in fact. Hard not to hear about the first Matron’s Daughter in a generation, and then there’s how you put down my former colleagues and freed their sves. That’s some good work you did there.”

  Her eyes flew open the rest of the way and she turned her head to stare at him for a moment, “…just who are you, anyway?”

  He chuckled, his grin crinkling his face into the most genial, grandfatherly expression she’d ever seen, “Trephor Camran, head of the Chroma Syndicate.”

  She was sure her jaw was hanging sck, “…the Chroma Syndicate?”

  He took a puff, “Yeah, not surprised if you hadn’t heard of us, most people growing up on Earth never learn about all the goings-on in Independent space. Terran government likes to pretend that only they are the ones that can keep order and peace in the gaxy. Better watch those Crotuck or the Lantru or the Swarm, they’re the bad guys, just ignore what the feds are doing in our own back yard.” This statement was delivered with the same genial, friendly tone the rest of his words had been spoken with, but she could sense an undercurrent of anger in a man who presented a face that seemed imperturbable.

  Her eyebrow lifted, “I get why I might be a bit upset at Earthgov, but why are you?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” he rumbled, “I’m just an old man that knows where they keep all their dirty undry.”

  She blinked in confusion, “You know all the dirty undry on the Terran government?”

  He smiled, a mischievous twinkle sparkling in his eye, “I mean, the former head of the Terran Intelligence Agency would be the one to know all that, right?”

  Now she knew her jaw was hanging sck, “You were an intelligence agent?!”

  He waved dismissively and turned to look at nothing in particur across the room, “It was a job, and a good one for a while. Let’s just say people in power don’t like when you tell ‘em they’re wrong.”

  She remembered the fate of her first boss in the agency and huffed a breath, resting her head back against the wall. “So how did you wind up in charge of the Syndicate?”

  Mister Camran took a puff and blew it out slowly before answering, “I stepped on too many toes, pissed off too many people trying to keep the agency from being used as a political tool. I’d dealt with the Syndicate long enough that I knew enough people in the organization and when the water started getting too hot in Earthgov for someone who knows enough to tear down the entire Senate and most of the Executive branch that when a power vacuum in the Syndicate opened up, I turned in my papers, packed my bags, and my wife and I moved out to Independent space to settle in. Started cleaning things up, making sure nobody suffered needlessly for some greedy person’s wallet, made a few enemies and made sure I didn’t have to worry about them. That’s part of why those Branwell folks tried to set up their own shop. Didn’t like that I told ‘em that owning people wasn’t how the Syndicate was going to make money from now on.”

  Diane snorted skeptically, “Just like that?”

  He just grinned and took a pull on his stogie with a satisfied, “Hmmm.”

  They sat quietly for a while, Diane finally breaking the silence, “So you were an agent,” she offered. Not a question, a statement, “Can I ask you something?”

  He turned to her with a smile, once again projecting the very image of a grampa offering a friendly ear.

  She was taking a risk, but at the moment she couldn’t seem to care that her OpSec was slipping. “I…did a job. You won’t find record of it, it was for an agency that doesn’t exist,” Not in the game, anyway, “It was before I came here and became a station commander.” He nodded, not giving any indication of what he thought of her cims that should sound completely ridiculous to an actual agent. “I…someone died. Someone who shouldn’t have.” His expression finally changed, his smile softening and his eyes turning sympathetic, “And…I ran into someone here, the same day you arrived, I think. She looks…so much like the girl who I…killed.” Her breath caught and she found herself feeling like she was about to cry again.

  He didn’t say anything, just let her process for a bit.

  “So, I guess…I mean, I’ll never be…punished for it. I’ll never be held accountable, or arrested…hell, the girl doesn’t even officially exist. I’m pretty much the only person in the gaxy that will even remember her face or her name…” She felt her eyes growing wet, so she closed them and leaned her head back against the wall, just breathing.

  After a bit, Mister Camran asked in his kindly, grandfatherly voice, “So what’s your question, kid?”

  She thought for a moment before asking, “Have you…ever had something like that happen to you?”

  He was quiet for long enough that she opened her eyes and turned to see he was frowning sadly at something only he could see. Finally, he said, “More than you can imagine, kid.”

  She swallowed back the lump in her throat, “How…how do you handle it?”

  He sat in silence for a while, letting his cigar burn down slowly without drawing any more puffs before finally saying, “It’s like when the love of your life breaks your heart.”

  That was so far out of left field that she was speechless.

  “My wife, I love her, but she wasn’t my first love. No, that was…well, that was a long story. But when she left me it hurt. For a long time. I spent so much time wondering what I did wrong, what I could have done differently…but none of that could ever change what happened. She was gone, I wasn’t, and life just goes on, you know?” He finally took another puff of his cigar, “You feel bad someone who didn’t deserve to die wound up dying, and even worse it’s because of a call you made, right?” He looked to her and she nodded, somewhat timidly, “That’s gonna live in your head and remind you of your mistake, and it should. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it, so you gotta learn from it. Look at every decision you make as though it might be the first step on the path to making the same mistake, and if you realize you’re headed that direction, you choose different.”

  He sighed and took another breath, “And that’s another thing, kid. You’re in charge of people, and you’re making choices that mean other people will live or die…and you’re gonna make mistakes. Eventually, you’re gonna be in a moment and you gotta make a choice and that choice is gonna get someone dead. And you gotta learn to keep going. Remember the people who died, respect ‘em and make sure nobody else disrespect’s ‘em. And at the end of the day make it right.” She snorted and he nodded at her with a wry grin, “Yeah, no need to say it, she’s dead and how do you make that right?” She nodded again, this time more firmly, “Well, you make sure the death was worth something. She probably didn’t want to die,” Diane closed her eyes and huffed a dark ugh, “So you find a way to honor her life.”

  She turned that over in her thoughts for a moment and finally said, “…don’t know how, I guess…”

  Trephor sucked on his cigar, “You said there’s another girl that reminded you of the one who died?” Diane turned to him and nodded, “Maybe get to know this girl, make a difference in her life, if you can. You can’t repce one life with another; universe doesn’t work that way. But you can make that life count for good in others.”

  She took another breath, letting that settle in. She found after a few moments that she had nothing to say...but somehow having a task that she could do reduced the feeling of being...bereft and broken.

  They sat in silence once again, the smoke from the cigar being whisked away by the air scrubbers on the station before it could linger. Finally, after several minutes, Mister Camran said, “Well, I mostly came by the station to see who you were, if you lived up to the hype. It wouldn’t do for Branwell to have neatly gotten themselves wiped out from stupidity only to have someone worse turn up in their pce, after all.”

  She turned to him with a raised eyebrow.

  He chuckled, “Don’t worry, I think I like you, kid. You got a good head on your shoulders...and more importantly, I think, a good heart in you. I’ll send someone by to be a direct rep for your station to the Syndicate. We may not be able to swing a big stick like the Feds or the Crotuck or the Lantru, but we can...grease the wheels for you a bit. Including helping you get that orphanage set up you were tryin’ to get recognized.”

  She pulled a face that he clearly correctly interpreted the meaning of when he ughed, “Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t need to use anything to get that information. It’s your girl Norma’s pet project right now and Russe told her to trust me, so she kinda spilled the whole can of beans.”

  A bubble of actual ughter caught her by surprise, “I’m guessing he worked for you at some point?”

  “A good boy like Russe, working for the T.I.A.?” he made a scoffing noise and waved his hand dismissively again, “Nah, that’s crazy talk.”

  She snickered, “Yeah, sure. Crazy talk.”

  Winking at her, he pushed himself off the wall and stood, “Well, that’s about all I got time for, I think. Gotta catch that ship before it leaves.”

  She gnced across the room and saw her jacket lying on her desk where she’d left it earlier. “Wait a sec...” she said as she, far more spryly than Trephor, scrambled to her feet and retrieved her discarded piece of clothing. Rather than put it on, she fumbled about with the pel and turned it so she could get to the backing for the badge, disengaging the two pins that locked it in pce and pulling the back off. She turned the cloth over again and pulled the pins out of the fabric, leaving behind two holes where the badge had been mounted, and re-secured the backing so the pins wouldn’t be a possible safety hazard.

  She turned back to the former agent and handed him the badge. “This is the only one made of solid gold. I mean, other than for computer connectors gold’s a pretty cheap metal out here,” she blushed, “Of course, you’d know that, but the others are just some grade of steel. There’s only one of these right now and... I’m okay not wearing it at the moment.”

  He took it delicately from her hands, then reached over and patted her arm with the hand holding the smoke. He gave her one of his sage, grandfatherly smiles and said, “You’re gonna be alright, kid. I think you’ll be an excellent commander.”

  Somehow, his simple statement was like a salve to her wounded soul.

  ~~~

  Somehow, Diane made it out of the hab without encountering another person.

  Her body felt...distant. For the first time since character creation, she felt a little bit like a pilot in a mech-suit, like the world around her wasn’t quite making it all the way to her actual senses. It was a purely emotional thing, a level of emotional shock, her brain chemistry completely drained by the intense activity of the st few days, but she realized that she was (to auto-negate the phrase) uncomfortably comfortable, like she’d been expecting the feeling the entire time she’d been in the pod because that’s how she normally felt. Not just in her VR rig at the office, but in her day-to-day life. These pods must be cutting through some…natural defense against the intensity of the world, she thought, Either that or the VR devs are intentionally dialing the sensations and coded ‘chemical’ reactions of the brain up to 11, probably to an unsafe degree. How else could she expin how…in-tune with an alien body she was? How good it felt to be a woman when she was born a man? Something to file a report on when I get out of VR…probably a good thing this game auto-logs out, given how…I dunno, ‘addictive’ it is to feel this good in a body you’re not born in, some way of enforcing the time-off is a good thing. Probably should find some time to look up the psychological effects of pod usage and see if there’s been any studies…but ter.

  Gncing down at her mini-tab, she confirmed she was on the right track to find Sani, pulling her mind out of the introspection.

  A few minutes ter, she found herself at one of the green parks that took up the spaces between buildings and building sbs, this particur park being on the edge of the ‘cliff’ that separated the Ops Deck from the Industrial Deck. She was surprised to see the Morvuck girl alone, sitting with her legs through the safety railing, leaning her arms on the first bar and draping her body in a distinctly teenaged way, seemingly staring across the expanse of the station’s life space at nothing in particur. Diane tucked her mini-tab into her jacket’s breast pocket and made her way across the grass to sit on the ridge a few feet away, propping her elbows on the same bar Sani was slumped over.

  “Hey,” she said by means of opening a dialog.

  The girl huffed in a very teenager way. It made Diane smile, seeing the absolute drama almost dripping from the younger Morvuck.

  “Surprised you’re not with Cynthy or Kymberlynn,” offered Diane.

  “Cynthy’s on duty and Kymberlynn is in school,” grumbled Sani.

  Diane mouthed a silent, ‘ah,’ with a nod, “And you’re not attending here yet?”

  Sani shrugged, a singurly uncomfortable-looking gesture in her position, “Kymmie is still at ‘first fliers’ level,” she expined, using the Morvuck-transted-to-‘common’ term for kindergarten, “The svers never taught her anything, so she and the rest of the people you rescued are still learning their alphabet. I’m just about graduated; I just have some essays to finish up and send back home and they’ll email my diploma.”

  Diane nodded, allowing herself a small smile, “Nothing wrong with First Fliers, I’m in a First Fliers css back on Mortan.”

  This finally got Sani to turn to Diane with an incredulous look.

  “It’s true! I can even show you the letter they sent decring me an honorary sister-student of their css since I encountered the Matron right outside their school.”

  Sani snorted and rolled her eyes in a distinctly teenage fashion, “Oh,” being all she said.

  They sat quietly, observing some of the automated construction happening on the Industrial deck, the machines looking like toys in the distance. Diane shifted her arms up to a higher bar so she could lean her chin on her palms in an obvious mirror of the younger Morvuck, “So…what’re we lookin’ at?”

  Sani turned that slightly disdainful incredulity back on Diane, “Why are you here? I thought you hated me!”

  Diane frowned, “What…gave you that idea?”

  Sani snorted and turned back to stare into the distance, “Yeah, you’re a Lost all right. No Morvuck could have missed that…scent bomb.”

  Ooooh, crap! Diane thought as her face turned scarlet in embarrassment, Fear response triggers an adrenal dump which causes stress hormones to be released and…she’d have smelled my reaction to seeing her face, “Oh…oh, god…I’m so sorry, that…”

  “It’s okay,” Sani grumped in a manner that made it clear she wasn’t actually okay with it, “I’m used to everyone hating me.”

  “No, that’s not…” Diane sighed, was I this moody as a teenager? I mean, Tiffanny made sure I had a miserable teenage-hood, but maybe part of why I couldn’t make friends was because… she shook her head, trying to keep in mind her therapist’s words about not assigning bme for past actions. Her brief stint in therapy had helped with the fallout from her stepmother’s impact in her life, but at the time she could only afford the General Welfare mental health programs, which had probably the lowest quality shrinks avaible. Once she’d started working for the agency, she could afford access to non-GW services, but her seemingly continually escating clearance levels meant that the avaible pool of therapists she had access to was incredibly small, and the scuttlebutt amongst agents was that the mental health professionals that had been ‘read in’ by the agency had a mandatory reporting cuse of not just possible threats to the nation, but everything reported in the sessions. Pretty much no analyst or agent in her division had a therapist, they fell into the ‘threat’ category and couldn’t be trusted.

  She sighed and said, “Okay, I did the Morvuck equivalent of ripping a fart when we first met,” Sani snorted in amusement, “That wasn’t because of you it was…” She closed her eyes, “You reminded me of someone. She…died. And it was my fault.”

  Sani turned to face her and, for the first time since Diane sat down, didn’t immediately look away.

  She also didn’t say anything, which Diane took as a cue to continue, “She was…human,” for the purposes of this game, Rachel may as well have been, “And she was…so afraid of me.”

  It was Diane’s turn to look off into the distance as Sani’s posture changed, turning more in Diane’s direction.

  “I…don’t want to say too much about it, but because she was afraid of me, she…did something stupid. Something I pushed her into doing. She was young and had heard bad things about me, things I didn’t really do anything to disprove when she finally met me face to face, and when you’re scared you do stupid things.” She swallowed heavily, “Even when you’re the First Found Daughter of Mortan.”

  “Huh?!” the teenage moodiness gave way to pure confusion.

  “You look like her. A lot like her. And I’ve been having…nightmares about being the reason she’s dead. And when I saw your face and…” she shook her head, “I…locked myself in my quarters. I thought I’d controlled my emotions enough that you wouldn’t think anything of it, but obviously I messed that up badly.”

  “Yeah,” Sani sighed, “Cynthy’s been thinking you’re mad at her. Kept trying to tell her I was the one you were mad at. I mean, you weren’t mad, I guess, but she and Kymmi…I mean, I guess we got into a fight about it.”

  Diane groaned and thumped her forehead against the meat of her forearms with enough force to cause the rail to vibrate with a quiet ‘thmm,’ “Wow, see? ‘First Found Daughter of Mortan,’ a title that keeps on giving.” She looked up to see Sani’s pinched expression, confusion warring with doubt. Diane shook her head, “I didn’t earn the title, kid. I was just a dumb bimbo that decided to wander out into an unfamiliar city on a pnet with a megafauna that I could have just as easily been eaten by as anything else. Yeah, I’m Morvuck, but I was raised on Earth. I didn’t even know Matrons existed until I was face to face with one. I’m a celebrity because of something that just barely has better odds of happening than being struck by an asteroid while doing a spacewalk.”

  Sani’s mouth was hanging sck, “But…the Matrons…”

  “Matrons are part of Morvuck culture and practically kissing cousins to Morvucks and really big flying things and yadda,” Diane smiled to lessen the disregard to Sani’s culture she was so casually letting fly out of her mouth, “And…being in the presence of one of them? Being…nuzzled and…cared after? Having one of them adopt you?” her heart swelled and tears came to her eyes as she remembered the experience, “…human religion, or at least the one where I grew up, has beings called ‘angels,’” she felt a tear drip off her eyeshes and she wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket, “They’re messengers of God, perfect beings that watch over and protect God’s children. They’re more powerful than anything but God and can destroy continents…but the first thing they say whenever they show themselves to humans is, ‘Fear not,’ because the message they bring is from God himself, and they’re always trying to speak of God’s love.” She swallowed, unable to form words for a moment as she turned to Sani, aware she was still low-key crying, “Encountering the Matron was…like encountering an angel.”

  Diane pressed her index finger and thumb into her eyes, trying to clear the tears from them as she consciously worked to suppress her memory of the emotions enough to speak of the encounter without crying. “She was so…big, and powerful. She could have ended me right there. But she didn’t. I couldn’t tell you why I did what I did,” she took a shuddering breath, “Why I ‘screamed challenge,’ I guess it’s called. But when she marked me?” A gnce to Sani showed the girl was practically turned to face Diane fully, “I felt like I’d never been safe before and I’d never be safe again, but in that one moment, I was…safe.”

  “Safe?” asked the teen.

  She nodded, “Like…it didn’t matter what choices I’d made to get there or what anyone else thought of me, exactly who I was in that moment was who she’d chosen out of every other Morvuck on the pnet.”

  Sani scooted closer to Diane, seemingly unconsciously. She’d pulled her legs up from hanging off the ridge to sit cross-legged and was facing Diane fully, “What’d she smell like?”

  Taken aback by the apparent non-sequitur, it took Diane a moment to realize that if Sani, a completely average by all accounts Morvuck teen, had thought Diane hated her because of one moment’s scenting of an emotional reaction, then it seemed likely that Morvish culture might pce more emphasis on smell than human cultures would. “She smelled…” Diane pced herself back in the memory and tried to remember such a detail and found herself recalling it with little difficulty, “She smelled like…the mountains. And cinnamon.”

  “What’s cinnamon?”

  She smiled at the teen, who was now giving Diane absolute and undivided attention, “It’s an Earth spice, it comes from the bark of a tree. There’s a few cultures that use it as part of the Earth version of araoshō shosh, though the spice blends that make curry are more of a regional thing than a family thing.” She smiled gently at the teen girl, “What’d you mean by ‘everybody hates’ you?”

  Sani almost folded in on herself, “…it’s nothin’…”

  Diane moved back from the edge, a process that took longer than it had Sani as she had to fit her significantly longer legs through the safety rail, and scooted over to sit next to Sani, “Hey, I can see it’s not ‘nothin’ for you, so c’mon, tell me about it.”

  Sani’s eyes teared up, “I’m…the most dominant girl in my css. Or, I was, I guess.”

  Diane tilted her head in confusion, “…I don’t know what that means.”

  Sani looked up through heavy shes, confusion etched on her face, “You didn’t have dominance on Earth?”

  “I mean,” she chuckled as she spoke, “I guess? If you count adolescent high school drama driven by hormones and gender divisions ‘dominance,’ sure. But humans aren’t Morvucks, so we…they wouldn’t do ‘dominance’ the way you mean, I think. Tell me what that means, and remember, I’m in First Fliers.”

  Sani snickered and shoved her shoulder into Diane’s arm, “Yer a dork.”

  Diane just grinned, “So Norma keeps reminding me.”

  Sani took a deep breath, “It’s…when we…hit puberty, we have this thing in our brains, certain chemicals do a thing…I don’t know the specifics, I just had the two sex ed csses…”

  Diane’s eyebrows shot up, “Sex ed?”

  Sani’s eyes rolled so hard her head tilted, “Yeeeaaaaah, dunno if you had’ta deal with it, but the teachers were so weird about it, like tellin’ us about our bodies was gonna make us wanna rip each other’s clothes off in the cssroom or somethin’ stupid like that. Anyway, the brain chemicals make our pheromones send signals for who’s dominant and submissive and how dominant, and…my moms say that once I’m out of high school people stop caring so much about ‘who’s on top…’”

  Diane flushed bright red and cpped her hand over her mouth as a guilty giggle (of all things) tried to escape. At Sani’s confused expression, she struggled to compose herself and expined, “That phrase means something else entirely among humans…and no, I don’t think I should be the one to tell you, it’s ‘weird teachers in sex ed css’ types of meaning and I’m not your parent, so probably not my pce to educate you on that.”

  “Oh, c’mon!” compined Sani, “I’m tellin’ you stuff you’re supposed to know about Morvucks, can’t you tell me some stuff about humans?”

  Diane felt an eyebrow go up, “Why? Did you need the info because you’re interested in Cynthy or Kymberlynn?”

  Sani bopped Diane on the shoulder, prompting a giggle from the older Morvuck, “No! Dork! Matron above, you’re such a…dweeb!”

  “Alright, alright!” ughed Diane, “But I’m not going into detail, ‘cause that’d be weird,” she took a breath to compose herself, “When two humans…have sex,” she felt her face heating up, “Usually one of them positions themselves on the bottom and the other on top. It’s…a power dynamic thing, if someone’s ‘on top’ they’re supposedly in more control of the action.”

  Sani bnched, “Ew, more than I wanted to know about humans, I think.” She shrugged, “But, yeah, it’s a power thing for Morvucks, too, just not for sex. But in high school…” she shook her head, “It’s not a rule or anything, like, even the teachers tell us it shouldn’t matter, but you only get to be friends with someone who’s just as dominant as you are. You don’t ask out someone who’s equally dominant and if you’re less dominant than you gotta wait for the girl you like to ask you out.”

  “And if you’re ‘the most’ dominant…” prompted Diane.

  “…then you don’t have any friends.” Sani’s eyes dropped to the grass in front of her, “I used to have some friends, but they all wound up being more submissive than me…I kept tryin’ to hang out, but then one of ‘em thought we were dating and started telling all the other girls we were a thing and I didn’t know ‘cause…anyway, she went off on me one day in the halls at school about how I was such a bad girlfriend and I’m just a dummy that didn’t know she was leading her best friend on and she wasn’t my best friend after that…”

  Sani’s eyes closed, forcing out the tears that had been building, and she scrubbed her eyes dry with the back of her hand. Diane tentatively put a hand on the girl’s shoulder to comfort her and was surprised when Sani leaned against her.

  “And then my moms took the job to the outer rim and sent me here, and I really wanted to go with them, but they didn’t…didn’t want me around…and Aunt Leki’s always too busy…and then I got into a fight with Cynthy and Kymberlynn.”

  “You mentioned that...”

  The girl sighed heavily, “It was so stupid, ‘specially since…you said what you did ‘bout why you reacted the way you did. All three of us were so sure we were the reason you locked yourself in your quarters. Half the adults on the station are panicking and nobody took us seriously when we tried to take responsibility and we just kinda got into it st night.”

  “Ah,” Diane took a deep breath, slowly letting it out, “Yeah, I have a feeling I’ll be running clean-up after my little tantrum.” She felt Sani huff a ugh. “But kid, I didn’t hate you, and I probably never will. I know Leki doesn’t hate you. She’s one of my drinking and training buddies and she’s so buttoned down even when she’s tipsy…woman never gets drunk, I swear, she can come off as a little cold. Ask her ter, I bet she’ll feel super-bad about making you think she hates you. And your moms…I’ve never met ‘em, but I’ll bet they sent you here because they wanted to keep you safer than any rim world could be for a kid. I wish I had that kind of parent growing up.”

  “Oh…uh…right, your…” Sani’s statement dropped off awkwardly.

  “Yeah, both my parents are dead, I’m an orphan. But that just means I have a good perspective of other people’s parents, both human and Morvuck, and from what I’ve seen a kid like you doesn’t come from bad parents that hate their kids.”

  Sani was quiet for a bit. “What’re human parents like?”

  Diane smiled sadly, “Well, I mostly had my caretaker, and the less said about her the better, but I saw other kid’s parents and then when I was an adult, I started watching people get together and get married…”

  They spoke for a while longer, Diane letting the time get away from her as she and Sani talked about life as a teen on Mortan and growing up on Earth and the differences. Diane told about human entertainment and Sani gushed about her achievements on the sports teams, her enthusiasm only matched by her dismay at Diane knowing nothing about Morvish sports. Diane expined football and soccer and how some parts of Earth used the word ‘football’ for soccer.

  At some point they’d made their way to a bench and Sani was trying to expin the plot of a holo-vid serial that was popur on Mortan when they were interrupted by a tentative, “…Commander? Sani?”

  They looked up in surprise to see Cynthy being tailed by Kymberlynn. The two girls were clearly hesitant to intervene, so Diane smiled gently at her usual comms officer, “Hi, Cynthy. Sani said you thought you’d upset me? You didn’t, I promise. It was…a personal, private matter and you three just…accidentally tripped into it. It’s not your fault, and I’m sorry if I made it seem like it was because of you.”

  Cynthy did a poor job of covering up a relieved breath, “Really?” At Diane’s nod, the girl smiled, “Uh, there’s a guy who’s been trying to…”

  Diane smiled with veiled amusement, “We chatted, don’t worry. I’ll let Norma know so she doesn’t send the hounds after me.”

  Kymberlynn took the opportunity to step forward a little, “…Sani? I’m sorry…”

  “Huh?!” blurted the Morvish girl, “What’d’ya mean you’re sorry? I’m the one that yelled at you!”

  “Girls,” said Diane just loud enough to be sure all three heard her. Once she had the attention of all three she smiled, “It was my fault, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on this.” All three girls spoke at once, trying to tell Diane she was wrong, “Ep!” she vocalized, silencing them again, “You were arguing over who’d pissed me off, right?”

  The three girls gnced at each other and then back to her almost in unison, Cynthy offering the tentative nod of agreement, “Then as the one who did a poor job of managing her own emotions and making it everyone else’s problem, it’s my fault. Now,” she gently squeezed Sani’s shoulder, somewhat surprised when the girl smiled up at her, “Why don’t the three of you go to my private storage units and hunt down the cryo-suspended foods that you know are still being sent in care packages, find yourself a shipment of cookies or ice cream or whatever the women of Mortan are sending me as a dessert, and split it amongst yourselves.”

  Three teenage faces lit up with sudden enthusiasm and Sani darted off the bench to join the other two. “Oh, triad! Maybe someone sent some sosstow! You’ve got to try it!”

  “Only the foods!” Diane called after them as Sani’s charge led them off in the direction of the habs, “Stay out of the clothes!” She hoped they took the direction. Sure, they were all teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, and one had been rescued from sex svery, but it would still be awkward for them to stumble onto one of the ‘special’ care packages that had only NSFW contents.

  She watched the three teenage girls darting off with far more energy than she remembered ever possessing in the direction of the lifts to the cargo bays. It was so easy for her mind’s eye to blur Sani’s form until she saw Rachel darting off ahead of her friends, then turning to taunt them with friendly jibes at how slow they were going. Her heart began to ache again, and she became aware that at some point after she’d sat down to talk with the younger Morvuck her...experience of the world was no longer distant. It was the difference between the VR experience of her rig at her desk in Houston and the pod she was in now. It was as though the world were once again real and she was experiencing it for the first time all over again and she hadn’t even been aware of the difference when she first created her character.

  She put her hand on the bench next to her hip and let herself just feel the texture and the temperature difference from the air around her and her skin. ‘Make that life count for good,’ huh? she recalled. Dimly, she was aware of someone sitting on the bench where Sani had been just a few minutes before and her Morvuck senses were telling her that it was Norma without her having to look up. Thankfully, she didn’t say anything, just waited for Diane.

  For Diane’s part, she couldn’t bring herself to look at her friend. Her eyes took in the grass of the park and the stretch of poly-crete that made up the sidewalks and construction sbs of the life spaces. She watched the automated construction bots going about their work halfway across the industrial deck. She saw a couple of people, forms tiny from the distance, entering and exiting the docking bay tether and boarding cars to travel across the station.

  Her eyesight started blurring when she looked above the hab wall to see the stars that Rachel had never had the opportunity to see and never would. Her breath started hitching and she knew she was about to fall apart again and would have no way of expining why she was so upset to Norma, and she both did and did not want to expin. She was trapped between her duty and her pain and there was no way out.

  She felt Norma’s hand on her shoulder, and as though that was the final snowfke on the mountainside that unleashed the avanche, she fell into loud, heaving sobs that rocked her entire body. Norma’s hands gently tugged her over and Diane let herself be guided closer to the other woman, almost curling into her shoulder as she fully, finally accepted the reality of Rachel’s end at her hands.

  PrincessColumbia