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Chapter Six

Right watched in disgust as Jessica shoved the shit covered, stinking sack into their shower.

"Jessica, what on Pete are you playing at?" he demanded for the fifth time, though he was sure he knew. Only two short days ago the searches and interrogations had stopped. After having beaten half the population and totally intimidated the other half the Argy had finally admitted defeat and were punishing the entire population of the village by docking the amount paid for buckets of ore until the debt of the stolen computer was paid off. Or until the Argy government felt they had all been duly punished for the theft.

Jessica ignored him and continued cleaning the bag.

"Jessica, if that is what I think it is . . . if you're caught with it . . . if we're caught with it."

"We aren't going to be. They've stopped looking for it. We're all paying for it . . ."

"Some people have died, Jess."

"So . . . people die for lesser causes every day. Don't pretend to care. How many lives did you destroy as Governor General Right? Did you even care? No, you didn't give one good damn, and those were your people. Don't try to force me into some hypocritical moral dilemma, Right. We both know that your only real motivation for doing so is that you've figured out that I am no longer blind to the suffering of others and you hope to sway me to bury this thing before someone finds out I have it and tortures you to death. The damage to the populace has been done, some have died, and many have suffered and will continue to suffer. If I bury this now it will have all been for nothing. I knew of the possible consequences when I stole it and deduced that in fact the end did justify the means, as with this I can start to put things right. So shut the fuck up, stay out of my way, and out of my business."

Right watched as Jessica carefully unwrapped the items in question. Even clean the sack smelled awful, and so for that matter did the shower. Right threw the sack into the trash and then scrubbed the shower out. Even expelling this small amount of energy made him weak. Less money for ore meant less money for protein, and less protein meant the worms would move on up his body. She didn't care. She didn't care about all the others who had suffered for her theft, and she sure as hell didn't care about him.

He walked across the small room and sat down, exhausted. He watched as Jessica went to work tinkering with the electronic equipment like a child with a new toy.

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"Find out what I need to know," she answered vaguely, and shut up and leave me alone was implied.

That was it; whatever her plan was he wasn't to be part of it. She had hidden the fact that she had the equipment in the first place, and now she wasn't going to tell him why she had it. She was leaving him out of the loop, because she didn't trust him to be able to mask his feelings under questioning. Though part of him knew he was safer if he didn't know, it still hurt that she didn't trust him after all this time.

Right had become accustomed to constant pain these last few horrible years as the worms made a meal of his leg. He could feel every move they made as they squirmed their way around his body. It was an indescribable pain, and one he had to deal with alone.

He wasn't allowed to converse with, or even have light contact with, the Argy they shared the planet with, because Jessica felt his Argy wasn't good enough to pass for a local, and his emotions were too easily read. So he had no external outlet. Jessica's answer to his pain was to offer to put him out of his misery on a regular basis. She said she'd changed, and she had. He'd watched, in fact he'd had a front row seat as Jessica Kirk had slowly gone completely and totally insane. There were moments of clarity, but there were no truly sane moments with her any more.

She believed that she had developed a conscience that she didn't formerly have. Truly believed that she had gained enlightenment. Life on Pete had been her personal hell. A way of clearing away the demons of the evil she had committed in the name of the Reliance.

Right certainly felt as if he'd paid, and paid, and paid.

Jessica hadn't been through the crap he'd been through. Her perfect body hadn't been invaded by parasites. But she was still sure she'd done enough time in hell. She'd been punished, and now she wanted . . . what, exactly?

Where could they go? Where besides this hateful planet could they hide? They had come here in the first place because they'd been completely out of options.

He knew then why Jessica had stolen the equipment. Jessica was going to start looking for options.

 

Jessica had all but given up on the pile of electronic crap. At one point she was sure that she would never to be able to boost it enough to get the range she needed, much less hack into Reliance communications. About the time she was ready to throw it back into the shit from whence it had come, she found that one missing piece that had eluded her. Within hours she had managed to hack into just the right Reliance data port.

She smiled triumphantly. The idiots hadn't even bothered to change the codes since she'd defected. Of course, they didn't actually expect people to be able to store streams of code in their heads.

RJ was still missing and the Reliance was still claiming to have killed her and her entire crew. No mention was made of her jump out of hyperspace. She found no data to indicate that any ship had entered Reliance or Argy space from 'the frontier.' Certainly there was no data to indicate that RJ's ship had surfaced anywhere in charted space. No unauthorized landings, no audio contact, nothing. For all intents and purposes RJ was gone.

The New Alliance had apparently absorbed a bunch of Beta 4 humanoids that the Reliance had tried to build into an army to fight the New Alliance. The delightful irony of the news almost made Jessica laugh. The New Alliance had also absorbed the entire planet of Beta 4 and its orbiting satellite Pam Station into their growing empire.

David Grant had apparently stayed on Beta 4, no doubt to act as an ambassador for the New Alliance on the newly acquired planet.

Pam Station had been the last place that RJ had been 'alive'. As such, Jessica badly needed to hack into the system there. It turned out to be harder to breach this system than it had been to get into the Reliance military mainframe because of some New Alliance system code named MARGE—Jessica was still trying to figure out what the letters stood for—which kept putting up blocks. It wasn't until she tried a completely different approach—actually with the help of Argy technology—that she was able to get through at all. When she did, she finally had the information she most needed.

Jessica had expected RJ to be accompanied by Poley, but she'd known very little about the man named Levits and even less about the man they called Topaz. Kirsty, the spy who had infiltrated the new Alliance and handed Alsterase to Jessica on a silver platter, had known very little about them, because RJ had never actually trusted the girl.

Jessica took awhile to digest that thought.

If RJ had given in to her instincts and killed Kirsty on sight, things would have played out in a totally different way. The variables boggled even Kirk's mind. It was, of course, all immaterial. Grant had bought the girl's act, had bargained for her life, and from that point on all their fates were sealed for better or worse.

But RJ hadn't trusted Kirsty, so she'd hidden things from her. Kept her away from the "Inner Circle" as much as possible, and therefore limited her contact with Levits and the mysterious Topaz. She'd been able to pull up Levits' service record, which was one of the reasons Jessica was surprised to learn that he'd gone with RJ into space. She hadn't been able to pull up any record on anyone named Topaz fitting his description in any Reliance system. As far as the Reliance was concerned he didn't exist, which wasn't at all surprising for a resident of Alsterase.

Even Jessica couldn't have guessed at the truth. As she read the log of one Lieutenant Stratton, she learned not only why Levits had put aside his fear to follow RJ, but also just why Topaz had no record. She wasn't sure that she believed all that she read concerning him, but it was obvious that Lieutenant Stratton did. Jessica found Stratton's telling of her brief but mutually beneficial meeting with RJ and her people enlightening on several counts.

When she was done reading it, Jessica knew everything she needed to know about Levits and Topaz, and in fact everything she needed to know for the next stage of her plan.

 

They were all the Reliance coins Jessica had left. She sat in the middle of the floor bending them over the links of the chain she had found in the mines. Right was watching her with a carefully curious expression on his face. Finally when he could stand it no longer he asked, "Jessica . . . What in hell's name are you doing now?"

She looked up at him, pulling a look of doom over her face. "It's the chain I built in my life, link by link, and yard by yard I made it. See how cumbersome and heavy . . ."

"What on earth are you going on about?"

"Illiterate swine," Jessica mumbled and went on working on her task. "Millions of books spanning thousands of generations of humankind at your fingertips, and did you bother to read any of them? No."

"I shouldn't have to remind you, but I don't read as quickly as you do." He sighed. "Surely I would have killed to have even a small portion of such reading material these last long years stuck in this pit with nothing to do but watch my flesh crawl and my worms grow. You have been barely communicative, and now . . . Even now when you are obviously working on something. Some plan. Even now you refuse to talk to me, to tell me what exactly it is that you're doing. It's been years since you've let me touch you, even when I have the strength, and now you're getting ready to do . . . something, and I'm not part of that plan, am I?"

"Of course you're part of the plan, Right. A very important part of the plan," Jessica said with a smile. "I've just been a little preoccupied . . ."

"Why are you building her chain, Jessica?" he asked in that special voice one used to talk to very small children and crazy people, especially when they were doing something particularly disturbing.

"Because she doesn't need it anymore, but they still need her." Jessica finished bending the last coin around a link of chain. She held it up. "Isn't it pretty?"

"Jess . . . That just doesn't make any sense," Right said sadly, no doubt sure that this time she'd gone irretrievably around the bend.

"Sure it does, baby, it just doesn't make any sense to you. But it will. It's all about redemption. Don't you see? It's all about making what's wrong, right, Right. Fixing what I helped to break." She put the chain down, got up off the floor and walked over to him. She took his hand, and he looked up at her, a little chill of excitement going through him that she felt and drank in. "You've been a very good companion to me, Right, a true friend. How do you feel?"

"Ah . . . as well as can be expected . . . Why do you ask?"

She smiled at him in that special way, and he didn't have to ask again. He just followed limpingly as she pulled him toward the bed.

 

Jessica sighed, rose from the bed and picked her clothes up off the floor as she turned to look down on Right. He looked peaceful, as if asleep. Or at least he did after she bent down and closed his eyes.

She didn't feel any guilt about killing him. He had been miserable here, and she couldn't have taken him with her even if she had wanted to. He had died happy, in the way that no few sickly Argy men had died, so no one was likely to ask any questions. They were having sex, she had an orgasm, and she accidentally killed him. Of course the truth was that she just didn't even try to control herself knowing that the end result—being all that she was—would mean that he died.

His death closed one chapter in her life and opened a whole new one.

After a few seconds of preparation, she was ready for the next task at hand. Carefully, she took down the plastic shower curtain and spread it on the floor in the middle of the room. Then she picked up Right's nude body, carried him over and laid him on top of it. Using the sharp knife she had laid to hand, she cut his guts open. Then she removed his stomach, intestines and a few other odds and ends, shoved all the stolen computer parts inside him and then carefully covered them with his organs. Some of the stuff had to be thrown away to make room, so she just chucked it down the waste hole knowing no one would notice it among the other shit. Quickly but carefully she sewed the wound shut, cleaned him from head to toe, and then duct taped his whole midsection—just to be on the safe side. Careful not to re-open the incision, she then moved him back to the bed and dressed him in his favorite shirt, leaving him unclothed from the waist down. Finally she picked up the shower curtain, cleaned it in the shower and hung it back up.

She made herself cry, which wasn't too hard to do seeing as no matter how big a pain in the ass he had been he had still been the only friend she'd had. She had to work at feeling guilty, which wasn't very hard, either, considering all that she had done as a Reliance officer.

Then she ran out onto her porch screaming into the night, "My husband is dead! My gods! I have killed my poor sick husband!"

A group of villagers soon gathered to comfort her. Knowing well what had happened and how, no one further questioned her. Since everyone knew he had the worms, several of the men watched as she put on his pants and stuffed him into one of the bio-waste bags they had brought for that purpose. Then they helpfully gathered up Right's bagged carcass and carried it off towards the incinerator as Jessica followed in a herd of consoling women. One told her how she had killed her aged husband the same way only last spring. It happened sometimes, no one ever blamed anyone, she shouldn't blame herself, and he probably welcomed death anyway having the worms in him and all.

He was loaded into the incinerator, it was set on high, and in mere moments Right, his worms, and the computer components he hid were history. Nothing but dust.

She returned home to "mourn" on her own. When the others were clear of her abode she sat down and smiled. She wondered when would be a proper time to start the next phase of her plan. How long would she be expected to mourn for Right? She wanted off this filthy planet, but she couldn't afford to screw up, not now.

She expected that taking into account the severity of Right's illness and how tiresome life with him obviously was that she wouldn't be expected to mourn more than a couple of weeks.

 

For two weeks she moped around just shooting out vibes of grief and general guilt. It wasn't hard; there were many things in her life that had made her unhappy. Stewart's rejection of her seemed to be her favorite unpleasant memory. There were a multitude of things she felt very real guilt for, and all stemmed from being stupid enough to buy into the Reliance's propaganda. Which she could blame on her father because he hadn't trained her to think for herself the way he had RJ. He had in fact killed himself rather than choose her over her sister, which made her very unhappy, which fed her guilt, etcetera.

Finally, she figured she had displayed all the grief necessary. After all, life was short, and life on Pete was shorter. A general "shit happens" type attitude seemed to prevail where all horrors were concerned on Pete. It was time for her to move forward to the next stage of her plan.

 

He was watching her. She had noticed when she had finally opened her eye that he always watched her, and she could feel his lust. No doubt her flawless body more than made up for the eye she was missing.

"Sorry to hear about your husband, One-eye," he said as he approached her close to the middle of the day. It was obvious that he wasn't in the slightest bit sorry.

"Thanks," Jessica said in an absent tone.

He laughed then. "I hear you bed killed him."

That's what the Argy called it, bed killing. She supposed it was nicer than saying "fucked to death."

She just nodded.

"He was sickly and weak. You couldn't kill a healthy man," he said.

Jessica looked up at him and gave him her very sexiest smile. "Now I wouldn't want to bet on that."

The pig was now fully aroused. She didn't have to use her empathic powers to know it, he was pointing at her—and not with a finger. "I'd take that bet," he said.

She purposely looked down at her feet and tried to feel coy, though she wasn't really sure what that was. "It's been a very long time since I've had a healthy man."

"Take me to your place after work and I'll show you the best night of your life."

She knew that was a boast he wouldn't be able to make good on.

 

He was a filthy pig who wanted her to do disgusting things and who liked to get violent during sex, but if he noticed she didn't bruise or bleed he didn't say anything. He didn't seem to mind when he busted his knuckles on her stomach. She was good at pretending, and he was too stupid to figure out the implications.

He got her so-called "cushy" jobs, as she pretended to enjoy a good beating and screwed his brains out. He was easy to play because he was just so damn stupid, and so sure that he was playing her.

Jessica knew just exactly how to give a man exactly what he most desired. It was how she had controlled every man she'd ever slept with. It wasn't a week before she had this indecent slob jumping through hoops.

He moved to slap her hard across the face and she grabbed his arm and easily twisted it behind his back. She forced him face down onto the bed.

"What the . . ."

"You know this is what you really want, Shlerb," she whispered in his ear. "To have someone who dominates you."

He laughed, "And you think you can do it." He tried to get away and found that he couldn't. "All right, Jesut"—that was the Argy name she'd given herself when she arrived on Pete—"this isn't funny anymore."

"Oh, isn't it?" She slammed the palm of her free hand into the small of his back hard enough to hurt, but not do damage and he struggled. "I'm having a hell of a good time."

He struggled again, and she leaned more on the arm again, making it hurt, but not pulling it off, or even out of the socket as she could do without even breaking a sweat. Beneath her he quit struggling. "Don't . . . Don't hurt me," he pleaded, and she knew immediately what he really wanted. She slapped his ass with her free hand hard enough to leave a print and could see that his tiny little dick was pointing into the bed. "You think you're such a big, bad brute, but you aren't. You're just a nasty, dirty little boy who needs to be punished. Don't you think you deserve to be punished, Shlerb?"

"Yes," he said in a small voice. "Yes, I do."

And so she did.

 

Shlerb was now her trained dog. He would have done anything for her, and so she asked him for just exactly what she wanted.

He lay in blissful pain in the middle of her bed.

"Shlerb, I want you to get me inside the very next ship that lands."

"I . . . I can't do that. I could lose my job."

"They could give you a worse detail than Pete?" Jessica said, dismissing his fear.

"Probably," he said, obviously not knowing. "Hey, let's play some more," he winked at her. "I've been really bad, I should be spanked."

"There will be no more playing till you get me on that ship. I want a real bath and a real meal. I want to see something different, something clean. If you can't even do that for me, then what do I need you for? You told me you had connections."

"All right," he sighed. "I'll see what I can do."

 

Jessica got up and wrapped the chain around herself. Today was the day. Today was the day she got off this gods forsaken planet.

Security had doubled on the ships, which was why she needed Shlerb's help. Ever since she had stolen the computer and power unit the Argys had made sure that particular route onto the ship was always well guarded, and there just weren't any other ways onto the ships without clearance.

Shlerb had clearance.

Jessica could wait till security got lax again, which would happen eventually, but she was suddenly tired of waiting. She was sick to death of screwing Shlerb, and as little company as Right had been, she found that she missed him. She wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps it was simply that she'd gotten used to having him around. Maybe it was because he had known her as well as anyone ever had, and no one else here even knew what she was or why she was here.

As a foreman Shlerb had certain rights, and the ship's crew knew him. If he was smart it would be easy for him to get her on board. Of course he wasn't smart, he was a freaking, perverted moron, but now he'd take her orders, do what she told him, and Jessica was more than smart enough for the both of them.

Shlerb came around the corner of the mineshaft out of breath and red in the face. He was sending guilt in a great huge wave, so Jessica smacked him good and hard in the ribs. He collapsed against the wall, gasping for the wind she'd forced from his lungs.

"Dammit, Jesut, why did you do that?"

"Because you were telegraphing guilt, you idiot," Jessica answered in an angry hiss. "Don't you know how to use a shield?"

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be sorry, just stop being stupid. Did you get them?"

He pulled the bag from inside his shirt, and she smiled as she jerked it out of his hands. She checked to make sure he'd gotten everything and then she started to undress.

"I was very nearly caught," he objected.

"No doubt because you were sending guilt out in a huge radiating wave," she mumbled under her breath.

"Ah . . . What's that chain for?"

"To make you ask stupid questions. You just don't worry about my chain. Did anyone see you?"

"I don't think so . . . It's not going to work, Jesut," he said as he watched her slip the uniform on over the chain. "No one's going to believe that someone with one eye . . ."

"You used to delight in pointing that out to me. I thought we'd gotten past that," Jessica said with a snarl.

"I was just going to say . . . You couldn't keep a top military position with one eye," he said.

"Which is why I needed this." She took off her patch and shoved it down in her pocket, then she tied a piece of gauze over her eye.

"That isn't going to fool anyone," Shlerb said, shaking his head.

For answer she grabbed his hand, cut his finger with a knife and stuck the bleeding end of it on the gauze, which soaked the blood up. He tried to swing a fist into her head with his free hand, but she grabbed his fist and held it. He got excited, and she wanted to kill him right then and there, but she still needed him.

"You're going to take me in. If anyone asks, I was walking through the mines doing a spot check and something blew. Luckily you were there, and . . ." He was grinning like an idiot. She sighed. "Keep your mouth shut; I'll do all the talking."

 

Everything had worked just as she planned. She was rushed to the infirmary with no real questions being asked. Blood did something to the psychology of every race she had ever encountered. No matter what color that blood happened to be, when people saw blood running out of themselves or someone else they always freaked out. Even seasoned medical personnel couldn't help but get excited.

The body was like a full fuel tank. Everyone knew it only held just so much fuel and when that fuel ran out the motor sputtered and died. If the blood happened to be coming from an eye, that caused an instant panic. She knew all about the horror of losing an eye, and the reaction it caused.

She clung to Shlerb as if he were her lifeline, and as the doctor slid in the door ahead of them she broke the vial she held tightly in her right hand. Before even the nurse could enter the alarm sounded and the doors started to close. The nurse jumped the rest of the way through as all the doors to the room quickly slammed shut.

"Contamination!" the alarm sounded loudly. "Contamination. Examination room Gester Fontacks sealed."

"What have you two been exposed to?" the doctor said with agitation, but his emotions showed fear.

"Nothing that I know of," Shlerb said with real worry as he helped Jessica to sit on the table.

Jessica lay down feigning pain and looked for the surveillance camera she knew would be present. Security cameras might be considered unnecessary for most of the ship, but she had been sure they would monitor the treatment rooms for any number of reasons. Not the least of which was the scenario she was even now playing out. The camera was a problem, but it was also a much-needed prop in her plan.

The "bug" hadn't been hard to get. Half the "colonists" were sick with some crap most of the time. She'd picked up the discarded snotty tissue of one who looked especially ill and had stuck the nasty mess into a small vial, figuring that if the contamination sensors in this infirmary were anywhere near as sensitive as the ones in Reliance ships, even something as relatively harmless as a common cold would be enough to successfully shut them off from the rest of the ship. When a treatment room was shut down because of contamination no one was likely to want to try to break in.

The camera, however, was a problem, because with a contamination scare it was a sure bet that someone would be carefully watching the monitor and listening.

She couldn't just destroy the monitor, because she was going to need it later. She needed it to appear, to anyone who might be watching, as if there were simply a glitch in the system. She waited for Shlerb to make his move, but of course he just stood there like the big idiot that he was as the nurse and doctor started to don protective gear. She glared at him, he looked puzzled, and then the big idiot grinned and nodded wildly as he reached into his pocket, pulled out the device and showed it to her.

Jessica gritted her teeth and hoped she was the only one who noticed the idiot boy's display.

He moved slowly—and it might be added, obviously—towards the camera. When he was under it, out of view, he reached up and stuck the apparatus on the camera. Almost immediately a red light on the side of the scanner started to blink, no doubt signaling that the camera wasn't working. A few seconds later it started to make an irritating little pinging noise. Jessica smiled in satisfaction. There had been no way to actually test her invention, so till now she couldn't be sure whether it would work or not.

"Damn, now what's wrong with that thing?" the doctor asked. "Control, can you see us at all?"

There was no answer.

"Can you hear us?" he asked, though it seemed like a really stupid question to Jessica. There was still no answer. The doctor walked reluctantly over to Jessica to check out her wound. "Herster," he said to the nurse over his shoulder, "see if you can't fix that camera."

"Screw the camera," Jessica said, sitting bolt upright on the examining table before the doctor even had a chance to start to examine her. "You fix my eye."

"You don't understand, Lieutenant. Unless they can see us, unless we can report on what you're carrying, they can't let us out of this room. That means we can't go to a surgical unit if we need to. We can't leave this room till the tests are run and I can assure my commanding officer that I'm not unleashing any form of deadly contaminant onto this ship. Now the computer is currently running a diagnostic on the germ, and when it has determined what it is and how best to disinfect . . ."

"No," Jessica said with a smile as she reached out and easily picked the man up off the floor by his collar. "You don't understand. I don't give a shit about any of that."

"Jesut!" Shlerb protested. "You didn't say you were going to do any of this crazy shit. You said you wanted a decent shower and a good meal."

"You shut up, you sniveling, wretched moron," Jessica hissed and suddenly all her power was back. She was in control. Once again she was the force to be reckoned with. She put the doctor down and ripped the gauze off her eye. She walked over to the sink and washed her face, then she turned to look at the three people she shared the room with, but she only addressed the doctor. "You're going to put an eye back in my head, because everyone's going to know exactly who I am if I go back there without an eye. You do exactly what I tell you to do and no one's going to get hurt." She laughed then and walked up to Shlerb. "Except you, you filthy, putrid, maggot festering in a two day old turd. You, I'm going to kill."

"But Jesut, I . . . I love you. I helped you."

"You treated me like total shit until I gave you something you wanted, and now you're about to give me something I want. It's a shame for the irony to be wasted on someone as stupid as you, but I'm going to take one of your eyes so I won't be One-eye anymore." She grabbed his head in her hands and spun it with enough torque to break his neck, then lay him gently on the floor as the nurse and doctor screamed. She turned to look at them, her one eye gleaming with maniacal intent, as Shlerb's body jerked around on the floor like a fish thrown on dry land.

"I could do this myself. It wouldn't be easy, but I could," Jessica said. "So I suggest you shut up and help me before I make you just as dead as old Shlerb here."

"What . . . What do you want me to do?" the doctor asked as he comforted the nurse, though from what she was reading the nurse wasn't as scared as the doctor was.

"You're a doctor. I don't think it should take a genius to figure it out. I want you to take an eye out of this moron and put it into me."

"It . . . it isn't that simple, you need to cross-match and . . ."

"I've already done that. It was just good luck that the guy with the closest match for me was the guy who tormented me for three years. It's Karma really," Jessica said a lilt to her voice that hadn't been there since the day she'd lost her eye. The Argys didn't have a word for Karma, so she knew they hadn't understood her and she didn't care. She was in control. She was the boss.

"It can't be a close match, it has to be perfect. This is an emergency room, we would need an operating room, and . . ."

"And I can't believe you haven't figured out what the hell I am. I'm a genetically superior humanoid. I have my kit right here." She pulled the black wallet from her pocket. "Don't blow smoke up my ass. You can do the surgery here as easily as in an operating room. Look, I'll even do the hard part for you." She pulled the knife from her pouch and leaned beside Shlerb's body.

She carefully harvested the eye and put it into the sterile bowl the nurse brought her without being asked. The nurse wasn't stupid. She no doubt believed Jessica's claim to be just exactly what she said she was.

Jessica took the bowl with the eye in it from the nurse and looked from it to Shlerb's body. "Gee, Shlerb, every time I'm looking at another guy's cock with this eye I'll be thinking of you." She laughed. "Let's get this show on the road shall we? I've only got another four or five thousand years to live. Time's a-wasting."

 

Doctor Sedro was a nervous wreck. If it had been his specialty, and it wasn't, doing this sort of transplant operation would be nerve-wracking under the best of circumstances. Doing it on a fully awake and fully functional GSH with no actual experience and under these circumstances was unthinkable, but he knew he didn't have any choice. He couldn't afford to make even the slightest mistake. There was no doubt that she would kill both him and Herster if they didn't do exactly as they were told. Of course, he wasn't exactly sure that she wouldn't kill them anyway.

He had no idea where she'd come from, why she'd been built, or how she had wound up on Pete. He was sure that she was completely insane, psychotic. That was dangerous in a normal Argy, but in someone so obviously genetically enhanced . . . it could be cataclysmic. Who made her? Why did they make her? More important, what is her ultimate plan and what is she going to do to us?

The eye socket was like nothing he had ever seen. The eyelid was still there, even the eyelashes, and when she opened the lid, it was as if the eye socket had just healed. He wondered just exactly how she thought he could fix this.

She seemed to read his mind, making him wonder if she might not also be telepathic.

"It's easy. Make a small incision in the back with the laser and find the optic nerve. Then scrape the socket to expose the tissue. Connect the optic nerve to the eyeball and we're ready to go . . . Oh, and you've only got a few seconds before my tissue starts to heal, so make it quick."

She wasn't lying, either. He had to keep cutting just to keep the opening from healing until he got done. At one point he thought seriously about using the laser scalpel to kill her, but before he could do more than just think it he found her hand around the wrist in which he was holding the aforementioned scalpel. She looked at him and smiled a smile that was anything but pleasant.

"Don't even think it, dick boy," she hissed. "Like I said. I could do this myself if I absolutely had to. Unless you did more damage than I believe you could do with that sucker, all you'd really do is piss me off."

He did the surgery, and then stepped back to see her reaction. He knew he'd successfully restored sight on that side of her body when she started to laugh.

She stopped suddenly and sat straight up. She looked at him coldly then. "So . . . Now all that remains for me to do is to get off this rock, and you can help me do that, too."

"How so?" he asked cautiously.

She picked the dead man up off the floor and stuck him on the examining table, his empty eye socket purposely turned away from the camera. She found some clean gauze and wrapped it back around her own head before she started talking, "This man died of some unknown virus. Something so bad that he didn't show any symptoms at all till ten minutes before he died. The diagnostic program has failed to identify the virus."

"The planet would be quarantined," the doctor thought out loud. "No ships could land till the virus could be identified and a cure found. The ship would have to recall everyone who'd been in contact with it since it landed, and we'd be forced to go to Vero station to go through testing and decontamination," he finished, showing his understanding of at least part of her plan. "But why would you want to go there? It's just a medical station, one that deals with the most highly contagious diseases in the galaxy at that. No one in their right mind willingly goes to Vero Station." She just smiled, and he suddenly knew. "You can't get sick."

"And because no one would willingly go there, no one will ever guess that anyone would hijack a ship to go there," she said.

"They won't let you leave the station till the whole ship has been decontaminated and we've all gone through quarantine," he said, thinking he'd found the glitch in her plan.

She laughed out loud at him and just shook her head. "I'm not one of those idiot bad guys that find it necessary to tell some unimportant idiot do-gooder my entire plan. All you need to know is that you'd better make damn sure that they believe you when I fix that freaking camera. All you need to worry about is that you and Herster there do the performances of your life, because if you fail . . . I'll kill you and every other Argy on this ship, and I'll do what I want to do anyway. I'm trying to turn over a new leaf, you know, not just kill the innocent and declare them collateral damage, but if you make me . . . Well, I don't have to get vulgar, do I?"

He shook his head no. He had no doubt that she could and would do exactly what she said if they forced her hand. She was . . . Well, the gods only knew what she was, and she was crazy enough to do almost anything if it meant that in the end she had what she wanted. He wondered if she was even sure of what that was.

 

 

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