Chapter 15: Suspense!

"Officer Rand Korsun! Did you kill Neb Fishior?"

"No, Sir. I did not." Rand stood straight and still, the bluish light of the truth field a halo around him.

"Do you have any certain knowledge that would indicate to you who the murder, or murderers, might be?"

"No, Sir. I do not."

"Thank you," Captain Jeryth told him formally. "You may step down. Next witness?"

First Officer Tshegh had already been questioned, and now Pilot Homr An Inpi took Rand's place. The same questions were asked of him, and he gave the same answers. Once again, the entire crew was assembled in the meeting hall, but this time each one would be asked individually about his or her knowledge of the crimes.

There was also another change. The truth field, instead of being spread out over the entire hall, was focused in a narrow cone in front of the podium. Each witness had to stand in the center of that cone. Each witness would be questioned by the holographic image of Captain Jeryth, projected from the safety of the bridge. This, too, was an ancient custom, prompted by memories of past mutinies.

The questioning went on for almost two hours. Once or twice, an agitated response by a witness tripped the truth field's indicators, but Captain Jeryth's careful probing soon determined that the guilty secret in each case had nothing to do with the murders.

"That will be all," they were told at last. "You are dismissed. Return to your normal duties. Just remember that, in spite of the failure of the truth field to detect anyone's guilt, there is at least one murderer among you. Any member of this crew with knowledge of these crimes may come to me in secret, and ask for my full protection. You are dismissed."

Rand was one of the last ones to leave the hall. This had been no killing by a madman, no frenzied attack on a helpless victim. Somebody had lured Neb Fishior to a deserted corridor. Once there, somebody had taken hold of the man's neck, and given it a single, brutal twist. There had been the beginnings of a pair of bruises, one on each side of the neck, just below the back of the skull.

The killing had taken skill, determination, and a ruthless cunning. It had also taken extraordinary strength. The strength of madness? Perhaps, but a strength directed by a strong will.

He shuddered to think that he had been almost within sight of the killer. A few seconds earlier, and he would have been a witness to the crime. The murderer would have been caught, or he himself would have been dead. The sound that had caught his attention had been the footsteps of the murderer, hurrying away from the scene of his crime.

If only he'd reacted faster! He had stood frozen for long seconds before giving the alarm, and by that time the killer had gotten away unseen, riding the open platforms of the man hoist to one of the higher levels, there to mingle with other crew members.

Captain Jeryth had called a hearing for early the next day, giving Berniss only enough time to do a hasty autopsy on the murdered man. She'd found nothing, other than the bruises on Neb Fishior's neck, and a snapped vertebra that had severed his spinal column. No other bruises. No drugs that would have allowed him to be led quietly to his doom. Fishior had died quietly, not even given time to react to his danger. There were no traces in his blood stream of the surge of adrenaline that would have resulted from an awareness of his danger...

"Rand?" Berniss spoke his name, and he realized that he had been standing there for minutes, lost in thought.

"What? Oh, sorry. I was thinking."

"You sure were. Come on, and I'll join you in a snack. I know you've got to be hungry again, by now."

The mess hall was as crowded as it ever got, with about a third of the crew coming in for their evening meal. Another third would be coming by in an hour or so for their breakfasts, while the rest were probably asleep. Rand didn't have any idea which meal of the day this was for him, since he'd long since gotten his daily schedule so mixed up that his body didn't have any idea what time of day it was. He would be glad to get back on the surface of a planet when this voyage was over, back to an unvarying routine of sunrise and sunset, of sleeping, waking, and eating. Aboard ship, it was too easy to sleep when he was tired, eat when he was hungry, and pay little or no attention to the time shown by Skryben's clocks.

"You're awfully quiet, today."

He looked up from his food to see Berniss smiling gently.

"Just a lot of things on my mind, I guess. How could Fishior's murderer defeat the truth field? This was no insane frenzy, no burst of emotion that led to a killing that the murderer wouldn't remember afterward. He had to know what he was doing. He, or she. Fishior knew something that made him a threat, and the killer knew it. Knew that Fishior had to die. So, why didn't the truth field react?"

"I don't know, Rand. That isn't all that's bothering you, is it? You've got other things on your mind, I can tell."

"This isn't the place to talk about any of it. Let's go and take a look at our project."

He didn't say any more until they were by themselves, closed within the softly lighted golden sphere that housed Skryben's multiple brains.

"Now," Berniss perched on the corner of a packing case, her feet tucked up under her. Rand thought to himself that she seemed about sixteen, as long as you didn't look too closely at the fine lines around her eyes and mouth. She had recovered, finally, from the stress that had made her look nearer to her real age. "What did you want to talk about, that you didn't want anyone else to hear?"

"Well, it's... it's a lot of things." He had trouble meeting her gaze, trying to think of a subject that wasn't as emotionally loaded as the one he really wanted to talk about. "For instance, how could the killer evade the truth field? Yes, I know, you told me that the killer could be insane, but you and I both know that explanation won't hold vacuum. Think back to the hearing. Captain Jeryth's questions were very specific. They had to be, to keep from pulling in a lot of responses that hadn't anything to do with the murders. What if the killer didn't think of it as murder? What would the response to the truth field be?"

"That would take another kind of insanity," she answered. "Somebody who didn't think of the victims as human, as anything real. It's easy to kill something that you think of in abstract terms, you know. Like we kill the crews of the Vortigen ships we destroy. Could we do that, if we knew them? Could we fire on ships like our own, crewed by people like ourselves? Certainly, most of us couldn't."

"Yeah, like when we were kids." Rand's face was white, as though he looked at ghosts out of his past. "It's so easy. 'Bang, bang, you're dead!' What if Xeren and Fishior weren't real to their killer. They could have been nothing but abstracts. 'The Enemy!' But, what enemy? Whose enemy?"

"It could be almost anything, almost anyone, but that wasn't really what you wanted to talk about, Rand. What's really bothering you?"

"It's you," he blurted out before he could change his mind, could lose his nerve.

"Me?" Her voice held only a slight amusement, and when he looked up, her smile was still gentle. "Why do I bother you?"

"I... I love you." His own voice was little better than a whisper, but he hurried on to keep her from interrupting. "I know that you like me, that we fit together. The way that we can touch each other, through Skryben, tells me that. Yet, you never say anything to me, except things that anyone might say. We're friends, we work together, we laugh and joke, but nothing more. Tasca says... , says that you only turn on to Skryben, that you aren't interested in anything human, but I know that's not true. What's wrong with me? Why can't we... Why can't we be more than just friends?"

"Rand, my dear Rand." She was still smiling, but her eyes were sad. "I know that you love me, that you've loved me ever since you first came on board Skryben. I should know, at my age, when someone is in love. And, I like you. Like you enough so that it could almost be love, in its turn. No, let me finish. You are young. Yes, you are, don't deny it. No, you're not a child, but you've lived how many years, as an adult? Four or five, since you have been old enough to know what love is? Certainly, no more than that. I'll be one hundred and fifty six years old, on my next birthday. Not that I keep track all that closely, any more. One hundred and forty years, more or less, since the first time I fell in love. Yes, I still remember him, though he's far away in time and in space. As I am far away, in time and in space, from that girl who vowed to devote her life to the healing of illness and injuries, like the man I loved had dedicated himself. I've been in love many times, since then. In love, or just liking someone enough to want to spend a few of my years with him. Or, with her. One hundred and fifty years is enough time to try many things, to be many people..."

"But..." Rand started to speak, but her upraised hand stopped him.

"Another time, another place, and I would let myself love you, but not now, not here. I have a job to do, a task that has been given to me, and I cannot allow anything to stand between me and my duty. No, not just my position as Skryben's Medical Officer. There's more to it than that. Skryben is an experiment, one that may have wide ranging repercussions throughout the Imperial Cluster. Skryben is one of the Fleet's most successful warships. Not because of her fire power, and not because of her speed. There are a number of newer, faster, more powerful ships in the Imperial Fleet. No, the one thing that makes Skryben stand out is her captain. Captain Jeryth. It is his skill, his experience, and his rapport with his ship that makes Skryben such a potent weapon. I wasn't assigned to this post by chance. You probably don't know how unusual it is for a Medic of my standing to be aboard an ordinary strike probe ship, but most of Skryben's class have only a junior member of the Medic's Guild assigned to them."

She got down from her seat. Rand watched as she moved gracefully over to a piece of equipment, checking that everything was going the way it was supposed to.

"No, Rand." She resumed her position on the edge of the machine's casing. "I am here by the express orders of the Emperor, himself. That is also why Tran Af'Sword is here. A Marine Officer, in charge of a mere two squads of marines? The Empire needs to know whether or not it can use more officers like Captain Jeryth. Can a human mind survive in a metallo organic body? Captain Jeryth was a fluke, an accident that might not have happened once in a thousand years. Do we dare to send out more ships like Skryben, captained by more men like her captain? Skryben needs to get back to Fleet Base with the knowledge we have gained, but even more, she needs to return with what we have learned, with what I have learned about her captain. My first loyalty is to the Emperor, my second is to my calling as a Medic. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of my duties, not even love."

"And after we have returned to Fleet Base?"

"I don't know. Don't ask me, not yet. Now, we have work that must be done if we are to make it back, so don't push me."

"All right. I won't. I've told you how I feel. I love you. No, I won't tell you again. We can't be lovers, not now, but can we still be friends?" His smile was twisted, forced, but he held onto it.

"Yes, Rand. Yes, we can still be friends."

He had to be satisfied with that, knowing that to press his luck would almost certainly be to lose her. The work on Skryben seemed to crawl. The rebuilding of one sector, on one level, would be done, only to leave them facing near identical problems in the next sector, on the next level.

Gradually, Skryben changed. There was no way of seeing how she looked from the outside, but Rand could see her image in her own mind. From a gently rounded ovoid, she slowly became a thing of gem like facets as the flesh between the struts of her framework shrank. Not all of her flesh could be recovered, to be transformed back into flesh again. There was always something that couldn't be used over, tainted liquids and tons of metallic flecks from flesh that had died, had gone bad.

Rand and Berniss, working alone and in secret, proceeded with the re growth of one of Skryben's brains. Finished, it floated in its own hemisphere, above and to one side of its original. It was connected to Skryben's nervous system by the same network of nerves and veins that served the brain it had been copied from.

"Are you sure that it is all right?" Rand held his voice to a whisper, as though Skryben could overhear.

"I'm certain. Everything has been checked out. The programs, the contents of the memory bank, have all been transferred over. Now, it must be energized, and the old one shut down. Your job will be to stay in rapport with Skryben as this is done, and warn me if anything seems to be going wrong."

Rand breathed in and out, in and out, in the measured cadence that helped him to reach the meditative levels of his mind. He was conscious of his body, as always, but not concerned with it. What was more important was that around him, Skryben existed. He was but a mote within her, as was Berniss, next to him. He was also conscious of men and women going about their tasks throughout Skryben's body, and the itching of re growth processes that were over half completed. The star patterns in all directions were unchanging, as though she'd not even moved from the spot where she'd first been thrown by her wild jump through hyper space. The nearest star cluster was still almost a dozen light years away, and home was more than a dozen times that far.

Skryben's consciousness brightened, somehow. It was as though her thoughts were clearer, her memories sharper, than they had been. There was a sense of doubling, of fuzziness, for an instant, then all was normal once more.

'... there, it's done... ' The thought seemed to come from within his own mind, but it had the flavor of Berniss. '... you can come back, now... '

Reluctantly, he returned to his own body. "How did it go?"

"Couldn't you tell?" Her smile was triumphant. "There were no problems at all, that I could see."

"Yeah, it did seem to go all right. How long do you think it'll take to do the other two?"

"This first one took us two weeks, but we should be able to have the others finished by the time we've braked down to a stop. Say, another ten days or so, now that we know what we're doing. How is Tshegh coming with his jump energy absorber field?"