Sporting Chance

Chapter Twelve

The transfer station at Naverrn had none of the luxury and elegance of Rockhouse Major. It was as large—it had to be, to handle the transfers of entire troopships—but only in the Exchange did any civilians color and brighten the drab corridors and docksides. The Better Luck had come in, with its new identity unchallenged—just another scruffy little tramp freighter and her slipshod crew.

“Recognition’s supposed to be easy,” Heris said, eyeing the material she’d been given. “The prince has seen me; I’ve seen him.”

“But the double,” said Petris. “You might mistake the double for the prince.”

“The double doesn’t know me. He won’t approach. It’s true, both of them will be there . . . but only one will come aboard.”

Like all but the restricted stations, Naverrn Station had no objection to civilian traffic—in moderation—and civilians could shop at the Exchange, paying higher prices. Heris was claiming a subcontract with Outworld Parcel, one of the independent companies transferring small hardcopy documents and packages for individuals who preferred not to use the government mail service. The Crown had provided such documents, and arranged for her to dump any business received at a nearby Outworld Parcel main depot.

Heris checked in at the Outworld Parcel local office, handing the clerk the little strip of platinum-embossed plastic. The clerk glanced at her as he fed the strip into the reader. “You’re new on this run, aren’t you? What happened to Sal?”

Heris shrugged. “Have no idea. I don’t ask questions—they shift me around wherever there’s a gap.”

“Oh. Maybe that port drive pod finally went sour, and he’s in refitting.” The clerk touched a keypad and a sign lighted up: Outgoing Active. “How long are you here for? There’s only a few letters now, but if you’ll be here long enough for a shuttle from below, I can guarantee at least a 50-kilo cargo.”

“How long’s that?” asked Heris, as if she didn’t know the shuttle schedule already.

“Let me check our downside office,” the clerk said, and vanished into a back room. A few minutes later he came out. “You’re in luck. They can add the downside accumulation to the next shuttle, and that’s tomorrow’s. It’ll be up here by 1800, but it won’t unload until 2000, at least.”

“I suppose,” Heris said, feigning reluctance. “They didn’t say I’d have to wait; it was supposed to be a scoop and run . . .”

“Are you time-locked for your next destination?” That would make it a legal requirement to keep the schedule.

“No.” As if she’d just decided, Heris gave a quick nod. “Fine—we can wait. Let me know the mass and cubage when the shuttle lifts. You have the codes.” He would return the identification strip when she signed for the outgoing mail.

The Exchange was next door; Heris glanced in at rows of displayed merchandise. Once such places had been her territory; she had paid the lower, military price; she had felt at home. Now—she made herself enter, with a quick smile at the security guard by the door.

“New onstation?” he asked.

“Right. The Better Luck; we have a subcontract with Outworld Parcel.”

“About time,” the guard said, grinning. “I’m expecting a package from my parents—”

“Sorry,” Heris said. “I was sent on pickup—we didn’t bring anything.” The guard glowered at her.

“Dammit! It’s been twice as long as government mail, and it’s supposed to be quicker.”

“The guy at the office said maybe Sal had a drive out and had to go to refitting,” Heris said. Offering gossip would at least make her seem knowledgeable about it. “We weren’t told—but if that’s true, another ship will have picked up that load and be bringing it.” She only hoped Sal himself wouldn’t show up in the next day or so.

“Well, enjoy yourself,” said the guard, in a tone that implied no one could do that on this station. “Shop your little heart out.”

Heris wandered around, picking up an entertainment cube and a box of sweets, for which she paid an outrageous price. Having heard this complaint often from civilians while she was still in the Fleet, she grumbled at the guard on her way out. “Dammit, the prices go up every trip—you expect us to maintain you in luxury, while hardworking taxpayers go short—” The guard gave her the same bored look she had given others, and she almost giggled.

Naverrn Station, according to its listings, had no housing for transient civilians, and no recreational facilities—not even a gym, and only one place to eat, a vast and gloomy cafeteria clearly meant to feed hordes of troops in a hurry. Heris glanced into it and realized that her crew would much rather eat off of Oblo’s stolen supplies aboard than the sort of mush they’d get here. She wondered why anyone would come up to the Station on liberty; Naverrn itself was a pleasant planet, and the training base (she’d seen the holograms) looked far more attractive than this empty, boring station.

When the shuttle arrived, Naverrn Station took on a spurious gaiety. Heris cast a critical eye on the young officers, and almost immediately thought better of Ronnie and George at their worst. The Royal Aerospace Service (known to those in the Regular Space Service as the Royal ASS) attracted the wealthy and highborn into its officer corps; its enlisted personnel were recruited mostly from those just below the Regular Space Service cutoffs. The young officers sported a foppish uniform with an abundance of braid and shiny metal: sky-blue tunics with cream facings over dark-blue trousers, cream and scarlet piping on every seam, tall shiny boots. No wonder they seemed as businesslike and military as a gaggle of debutantes. Most of them quickly shed their colorful uniforms for even more outlandish and expensive civilian clothes. Whatever sense they might have shown at their duties onplanet, they shed as quickly, and Heris saw little sign of supervision or discipline. She was glad she had no responsibility for them.

Naverrn stationers wouldn’t put themselves out for a small tramp freighter, which could be assumed to have no spending power, but fifty familiar Royal junior officers were another matter. Heris could hardly believe it was the same service area she’d seen before. Suddenly there were dozens of attractive young men and women (far more than one per officer, she suspected) strolling the corridors, bait for even more colorful fish. A door that had presented only a blank gray metal face before now opened on a cozy bar with a live band playing in one corner. The smell of real food wafted out another door that Heris hadn’t seen. Two sleek, dripping, naked figures chased each other out a door just in front of her; she heard splashes and yells from inside that argued for the existence of a swimming pool.

But where was the prince? He should have had a message—they had sent one in the code given them—and he was supposed to make the contact. She would have no excuse to hang about once she’d collected the Outworld Parcels cargo. She needed to find him—or have him find her—now. She strolled back toward the OP office, to check the status of the cargo.

“Another shift, at least, even with no more problems,” the clerk told her. He looked harried; a line of impatient young officers had hand-carried mail and packages to check through. “Tarash is out with something she ate, and Jivi sprained an ankle, but the clinic is packed. It always is, with this bunch.”

“Fine. Let me know.”

That still didn’t find the prince, she thought, as she walked on back to the docking area. Where could he be lurking? Why hadn’t he contacted her? Back aboard Better Luck, she checked on the progress of the cockroach egg hunt. They had cleared the bridge, and the galleys, and were working on the owner’s quarters. If the prince found cockroaches aboard, Heris knew the news would spread. She took a look at what had been an elegant guest suite, in which the prince had travelled from Sirialis. Bare decking and bulkheads, just as in crew quarters, with the bed platform’s framing all too visible. Oblo had installed a bare-bones communications node, nothing like the handsome system Cecelia had had, with its touchscreens and voice-response. Plenty of bedding, though, and towels, and those colorful pillows. Worst, though, the suite still held a faint odor of cockroach. Heris realized she was wrinkling her nose. That would never do; she’d send someone to buy an olfactory screen.

Gradually, Cecelia began to regain a sense of structure in her existence. Brun and the other attendants spoke to her often, telling her what time it was, what watch, who was in the room, what they had done, and were about to do. She could not see the light level change, or the colors they described on the walls, but she could imagine it all. She began to know, when she woke, what shift to expect, who would be in the room. So she knew it was morning—ship’s morning, early in the main dayshift—when the doctors both arrived to explain her situation as they then understood it.

“Lady Cecelia, I’m now sure that you are able to hear—and, I hope, understand—what we’re saying. I’m going to explain what tests we’ve done, what more we can do aboard the yacht, and what we’ll be trying to do later. You may know more about what happened to you than we do, although we’re ready to make an educated guess. The drugs we found in the venous access reservoirs consisted of a perfectly ordinary array of cardiac drugs—which would have been dispensed automatically at signals from the cardiac monitor—and some very unusual neuroactive drugs, one of them not in the data banks at all. I suspect that these drugs were merely for maintenance, not the ones that caused the initial damage. We cannot tell yet how much function will return just because you no longer have the maintenance drugs in your system, or how long it will take. It depends on how the damage was done, and whether the maintenance drugs were considered essential or just a safeguard against spontaneous recovery.

“I can tell you that the maintenance drugs targeted voluntary muscle innervation, motor and sensory both. Thus I expect you to regain some sensation of touch, and some ability to move. How much is impossible to say. It is unusual for someone with your level of deficit to be able to breathe spontaneously—they did a fine job of sparing respiratory function. It’s amazing that you can hear, and yet the few medical records we were able to get indicate that you couldn’t—that your auditory cortex was inactive in the presence of both speech and sound. Either someone fiddled with the scans, or . . . I can’t imagine what.”

Cecelia struggled to remember the early days, what everyone had said. She knew the lawyer had been told she could not hear; she had heard that. She remembered hearing about the scans that were supposed to prove it. That suggested intentional deception. But she had no way to let Dr. Czerda know what she had heard.

Over the next few days, sensation returned slowly, in odd patches. One time Cecelia woke, she felt the side of her face as if it were a patch of harsh cloth laid on her skull. She felt the slight pressure of air against it from the ventilator. The nurse’s gentle facewashing felt like being scrubbed with a broom. Still she could not move, could not flinch away. Later that day, she had an uncanny sensation in her left arm, as if something were crawling down it from shoulder to elbow, and from there along the outside of her forearm to her little finger. The feeling grew to a tingle, then an itch, then a painful throbbing that subsided gradually over far too long a time. Each time Czerda came in, she touched Cecelia everywhere, explaining the process over and over. The monitors they had, crude as they were compared to those in a major neuro ward, showed Cecelia’s response . . . and Czerda was mapping the return of sensation. The nurses and Brun massaged her, too . . . and gradually, fitfully, she remapped the feeling of her own body.

Blank patches remained. Her left upper chest had no sensation: Czerda explained that was where the implanted ports were. They’d probably destroyed the innervation there. That was standard practice. She felt nothing on the insides of both arms . . . where the median nerve should have supplied sensation and controlled movement. One foot regained sensation, in a maddening pins—and-needles form, days before the other. Her nose itched.

The first movement, the first real movement, came when the nurse’s washcloth dripped cold on her shoulder. She flinched . . . and knew she moved even as the nurse exclaimed. She tried again.

“Again!” said Czerda, who had come at the nurse’s call. Cecelia twitched again, as proud as if she’d just taken a big drop jump. “That’s great. Now try the other one.”

Cecelia tried, but couldn’t remember how to move that shoulder. Someone tickled her, just above the collarbone. Ah. Yes. She struggled again, and felt her skin move against the sheet.

“Not as strong, but something. Good progress . . . keep doing that.”

She kept doing that, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere. She tried to imagine what it looked like, the twitch of a shoulder. Not as communicative as a facial expression. And no matter how she struggled, she couldn’t move her hands. Surely she would have to move her hands to use sign language. Then, three days later, when Czerda had pulled her lower jaw down, she snapped it closed so hard her teeth hurt. She couldn’t open it . . . but she could close it when Czerda opened it again. Czerda chuckled.

“Yes—a good response. Now we start your communication training. I know you’re an intelligent adult, and I know there’s lots you want to say, but we’ll start with what we need to know first. We want you to have a yes and a no. Right now your shoulder jerk is your strongest motion: let’s try one jerk for yes, and two for no. Understand?”

Cecelia twitched her shoulder with contemptuous ease. She could have done that three days ago—why hadn’t they told her? Why hadn’t she thought of it?

“Good. Now . . . did you like your breakfast?” Breakfast had been a bland flavor of custard; she had never liked bland anything. She gave two twitches. “Excellent. You may not realize it, but you’ve just demonstrated that your higher language functions are still intact: you understood both directions and a question form. Did you like lunch?” One twitch. Lunch had been the date-caramel-almond custard, her favorite of the flavors she’d had.

“Now I’ve got to ask you a lot of boring questions that are standard on neuro-psych exams. And I’m going to record this, on full video, because it may be used in court to establish your competency.”

Cecelia hadn’t thought of that. Could someone who only twitched one shoulder be considered competent legally? She had thought she couldn’t fight that battle until she was well.

“Is your name Cecelia de Marktos?” One twitch. That wasn’t her full name, but she used the short form oftener than the long. “Do you know where you are?” Now that was a hopeless question. She knew she was on a yacht, but she had no idea where the yacht was. She shrugged both shoulders, the right more strongly. Apparently that got through; Czerda muttered, “Bad question” and changed it to, “Are you in a hospital?” Two twitches. “Are you in a spacecraft?” One twitch. “Are you aware of the nature of your disability?” One twitch. “Was this disability the result of natural causes?” Two twitches. No one was going to believe this, Cecelia thought. It might convince Czerda, or Bunny, but she couldn’t see it working in court. Czerda proceeded to questions of reasoning and general knowledge, most of them ridiculously easy: “Is a circle a geometric solid?” No, of course not. “Is a horse a mammal?” Yes, dummy. “Did you name Heris Serrano a beneficiary in your will?” Yes. Cecelia came alert again. “Did Heris Serrano unduly influence you to make her a beneficiary in your will?” No! She made that twitch as big as she could, and then a muscle in her back cramped. She gasped. Czerda stopped the questions, and patiently massaged the cramp out.

“I wish we could give you muscle relaxants,” she said. “But I don’t want to risk any more dissociation between your nerves and your muscles. Things are bad enough.”

Cecelia wondered what that meant. She had thought things were going well. If she could move a shoulder now, if she could answer questions . . . she pushed aside her own doubts and refused to pay attention to the doctor’s. Whatever the medical agenda, her own would include figuring out a way to ask for specific foods, things with more flavor and more texture.

Now, with even that meagre amount of communication, the days moved more swiftly. Would she like to try something with more texture? Yes . . . and a mouthful of something soft but grainy—still too bland—challenged her ability to move her tongue and swallow it. Would she like music? Yes. This music? No. Trial and error—more error than success, at first—remapped her choices in flavors and music. As she had feared, the dietician could not be persuaded to offer really tasty food, and there was no way to say More garlic, you idiot! with a twitch of the shoulder.

She learned to move her knees, one by one, and wished someone would think of using the twitch of her other shoulder and both knees for other useful signals, but no one did. Yet. In her mind she fashioned her own code: more, less, not yet, hurry up, enough, go away, question. The question signal would have been really helpful; she had more to ask them, she thought, than they had to ask her. But she realized, from their talk, that they were fully engaged already in discovering what had been done to her, and what might be done about it. For the urgency they conveyed, she could forgive a lot.

“Captain—two young . . . gentlemen to see you.” Petris’s voice carried some message, but she wasn’t sure what. This had to be the prince, and presumably some necessary companion. Valet, bodyguard, whatever. Heris made her way quickly to the access tube.

The prince all right, just the same as she’d seen in Sirialis, with that smug little smile on his face. Beside him—she blinked as she focused on the other face. The same face, rather. Side by side, two apparent princes, both with that smug little smile. Both in uniform, for a wonder . . . her mind ran headlong into the logical flaw here.

The prince and his double, of course, but the prince and his double were not to be seen together. Certainly not here, not now. If someone saw them both enter Better Luck and only one of them left . . .

“Welcome aboard,” Heris said, trying to think this out. “Mr. Smith, I believe?” She offered the same bland smile to both of them, no longer sure which was which. It was very good plastic surgery, she told herself.

“Yes,” they said. “Mr. Smith.” Even their voices sounded alike, which might mean vocal training or surgery there, too. Impressive, but still stupid. If they’d both come up on the shuttle with the others, then everyone on the Station knew.

“We don’t have a lot of time for games,” she said, trying for a combination of sweet reason and firmness. “We’ll be departing as soon as the Outworld Parcel cargo comes aboard, and in the meantime we’ll need to ensure that your . . . er . . . double has appropriate cover.”

“I just came to tell you I’m not going,” one of the young men said. “I don’t want to spend more time on this yacht, especially since it’s not even carpeted.” He looked at the bare deck and bulkheads with contempt.

“But your father planned—” Heris began. The other young man interrupted.

“If my father insists, let my double do it.”

“Sir, it’s extremely important—” Heris began, but the first one interrupted this time.

“Besides, I’m perfectly healthy; there’s nothing wrong with me. My own physician checked me out after we arrived at Rockhouse.” His voice was petulant; Heris wondered if it was really higher, more childish, than it had been. His blue eyes were guileless as a child’s; his expression mildly annoyed. Nothing quite fit.

“Your father told us to take you,” Heris said. She softened her voice, speaking as she would to a younger child. This time the prince didn’t interrupt. “He really wanted you to go—he said you would—”

“But I don’t want to,” the second young man said. In exactly the same voice.

“But he’ll be mad at me,” Heris said, in almost the same tone, with the same quaver. She’d seen that work once, with a hysterical Senior Minister. It didn’t work this time.

“So?” They both glanced around, boredom and contempt plain on their features. Heris wanted to smack their heads together.

“We shouldn’t discuss this here,” she said. “Come along to the bridge—you never saw it before, did you?—and we can settle things there.”

“It won’t make any difference,” said one of them languidly. “I’m not going.”

Heris refrained from comment, simply gave them the regulation smile that so often got her way. They shrugged and followed her into the ship, scuffing their boot heels on the deck and commenting on the yacht’s ugliness in this state. At least they didn’t comment on any odd smells—perhaps the last of the cockroach odor had adhered to the powdery scavengers in the air circulation. She stopped by her office, to show the prince and his double the official authorization from the king himself.

“I didn’t doubt you,” the prince said. She hoped this was the prince. “I quite understand that you are who you are, and my father told you to come get me. But I’m not going.” Oh yes you are, you little tick, thought Heris. Aloud, she said nothing then, leading the way to the bridge.

“Pretty,” the prince said, as if she’d given him a toy he didn’t want, and he felt it necessary to be polite. He was looking at Sirkin, she realized after a moment, not the bridge layout at all. Ginese gave him a look and Heris began to hope the other one was the prince. She’d forgotten the prince’s temporary attraction to Raffaele; perhaps he liked dark-haired girls best, and considered Sirkin an adequate substitute.

“If you had more girls like this,” the double said—or was it the prince?—“I might reconsider. But it simply won’t do.”

“Perhaps you should take a look around,” Heris said. “Your suite is a little bare now, but we’ve funds to provide some . . . amenities . . . from the Station sources. Let Mr. Ginese show you around—” She gave Ginese another look; he nodded. The prince and his double shrugged.

“It’s terribly dull on Station this time—might as well.” And they followed Ginese meekly. Heris allowed herself a brief grin.

“Lambs to the slaughter,” she said softly. Meharry grinned, but Sirkin looked shocked.

“What are you going to do?” asked Petris.

“I wish you hadn’t asked,” Heris said. “If we take him by force, that blows the double’s cover—and the king said it was important to have the double to cover for him.”

“If we don’t take him by force, he won’t come,” Petris said. He had a plug in his ear, listening to the conversation with Ginese somewhere else in the ship. “He’s blathering on about the social calendar on the liner where they will have plenty of girls, he says.”

“I knew this was a stupid idea,” Heris said. “His father should have known he wouldn’t want to come. Unless that was the plan. The possibilities for a double cross on this mission are endless.” She drummed her fingers on her console. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to do it, though. The only way to help Lady Cecelia is to lead the trouble away from her . . . and if we’re believed to have kidnapped the prince, everyone in the Familias will be after us.”

“How can we be sure we’ve snatched the right one?”

“Standard ID scan. We’ve got the data from his father.”

“It won’t work,” said one of the princes, when she put it to them.

“Of course it will,” Heris said. “You can’t fool a full-ID scan with plastic surgery.”

“Fine. Go ahead.” He smirked. So did the other prince. Heris wanted to hit both of them, but thought better of it. If she did, she’d be sure to hit the real prince—and that wouldn’t do.

The ID scans of both young men took only a few minutes, but the results made no sense. “Both of them are the prince,” said Heris. She heard the disbelief in her voice. “Or neither, if they’re identical twins—clones—”

“Clone doubles are illegal,” Petris said. “Not that that would stop the Crown.”

Heris felt like pulling her hair. “It’s . . . ridiculous. Why didn’t the king tell us—”

“If he knew.”

“He must have known. This is just like the slowness—he, of all people, cannot not know.” Heris glared at the scan results. “How am I supposed to know which is which? Dammit—it’s like something out of an entertainment cube, a joke or something. And it’s not funny.”

“So—what do we do?”

“We take them both,” Heris said. “And we keep them separate—we’ll have to use the original guest suites—and surely there’ll be something in the real prince’s memories of the affair on Sirialis that will make it clear who is which.”

“Umm. And the . . . er . . . reaction?”

Heris found herself grinning in spite of everything. “Well, you know what they say—when you haven’t any other place to step, it doesn’t matter which foot lands in the shit first.”