Day Sixteen

"You may sit if you'd like. Unfortunately, due to rectifying this minor mishap, the Captain is currently unavailable to attend you. Please accept my sincerest apology."
Her voice was clear, cutting in the dim air and Betaine shook his head. Was it just the lack of sleep making him fuzzy or were there chemicals in this room at work? He stood there dumbly, his shoulders rigid with the strain of staying upright, his neck curved forward like a whipped horse. Surely there was no reason for this. What had he seen that the Captain didn't want him to? Everything, Ober's presence, his familiarity with the Steeress, the Controller, made a clear pattern of smuggling. Weapons? Sentient beings? Noetic drugs? Obviously this Steeress, Bethany, Butterfly, whoever she was, was masquerading as an idiot to cover her involvement...
"Please take a seat, sir. We do not know yet if the engines have fully stabilized yet and the last thing we would wish is for you to risk further injury."
He'd certainly had enough of her.
"Letter of the law, then? What would it matter to your sort one way or the other?"
He watched her, the sleek, blonde hair, the soft, little hands. No. A ridge of calluses along the palm, down the side, across the fingertips. There was a scar on the ring finger of the left.
"Is there any refreshment I can bring you while you wait, sir?"
Not a scar. There was the faint glimmer of wire around the finger that threaded back up the sleeve. Betaine stared openly at it and the brittle smile Bethany wore faded slowly, leaving a heart-breaking sadness in its place.
"Can't you leave well enough alone?" she whispered, "you will cause so much trouble if you talk."
"It will cause a lot more if I don't make it back alive to my employer."
He was halfway through the sentence when he lunged towards the hand. She would think he was going for skin contact, recalling his internalist abilities, and pulled away with a fluid motion that left Betaine stumbling behind her. She stood poised for another attack, deadly purpose on her face, watched the young man right himself ever so slowly, wondered why he smiled that thin, exhausted smile.
"Do you fix all your mistakes by making more?" he asked, turning towards her, "had you left me to go back to my room, all I'd want to know is why the Controller suddenly decided I, and I'm sure there are more internals on board, had anything to do with him. Now I have to deal with your...your saccharine bullshit. Are you going to spit more lies at me about being just a Steeress, asking me politely if perhaps I'd like to choose the poison you'll kill me with? Some rejection training if you have to keep away from contact!"
Betaine pointed at her hand, trying to find the words that would get him out of here. He felt the anger rise but it was a dull thing concealed behind an increasingly cloudy haze and failed to supply any energy.
"If you think I'm going to stand here and stay a part of your idiotic smuggling scheme..."
"Accidents happen," Bethany said, "all I do is make the best of them."
"Failure isn't important," he replied, "it's how you react to failure that creates your situation!"
"Are you so determined to conceal your own mistakes that you'd keep flinging those stupid words at me?"
Betaine paused, profoundly disturbed. The pattern of her speech, the set of her slender shoulders - it was as if facing an entirely new foe, one that could read him with increasing accuracy. The Steeress spoke with an arrogance that illuminated an incredible intelligence. She'd dropped the act, but why? The second he had lunged for her, the recorders tucked discreetly around the small lounge would have all the evidence required for her to remove him. His curiosity had gotten him into a bigger mess than anything she had done and the knowledge stung, but the desire for why hammered in his chest and he slumped on to the divan.
There was a ragged silence in the room that swirled around them and Betaine looked up at Bethany, her mouth thin with the sadness he had seen before and something else, pity? in her sky-deep eyes.
"Whatever you're going to do, I don't need your pity," he said.
"I have no sympathy for those with guts, brains and freedom who waste all three."
She moved to within a meter of where he sat, looking down at the analyst who grimaced under the weight of her reprimand.
"Why are you here, Saul Betaine?"
His elbows on his thighs, through the fabric, it felt as if his bones were grating together. What gave her the right to ask these questions?
"I..."
"...don't care about who sent you or what for. Why are you here now, on my ship, in my lounge, such a brilliant young man but so goddamn dumb?"
"Lack of sleep, I think..."
Betaine's voice, thick and low, trailed off and Bethany's face spun in front of him. He almost felt the microsuede of the divan beneath his head and after a moment, didn't at all feel the small, strong grip that kept him from falling off onto the floor.

This was the dark of the death of stars. There were no markers in this stellar graveyard, no light, no cosmic wind, even the low burn of the greatest of gas giants had faded long ago. Particles smaller than comprehension waited here, spinning themselves sick in the usual way. If there was an underlying fabric to space, it was this, the frenzied bang-bang on the subatomic level that permeated everything in greater or lesser amounts but science had long done away with theories of unity. The cause and effect of these miniscule motions were too far apart to mean anything on a noticeable scale and thus, what happened here happened only here. To any observers, could there have been observers, this was a true void.
Against the omnipresent black appeared an unimpressive hairball of lesser darkness, threads of whatever it was coruscating outward, slowly filling a space no more than three feet to a side. There it stayed, fixed against the blankness and despite what anyone with a basic grasp on the principles of a vacuum had to say about the matter, began to hiss.