"Was it because of his affair with you?"
"There is nothing between Laurent and me," she said. Somehow, it seemed harder to tell the truth than it would have been to lie.
"Laurent?" the adept noted.
Hobbes took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She felt the heat of another blush travel across her exposed body. Hobbes realized that if they were polygraphing her, they had every advantage. She was naked and exhausted, without defenses.
But she was telling the truth, after all.
"Were you and Zai lovers?"
"No."
"Did Laurent Zai choose to live for you, Katherie?"
"No, Adept. It was someone else."
Their faces showed no surprise, but Hobbes's words won her a moment of respite. She felt triumphant to have silenced the dead woman.
"Who, Katherie?" the adept finally asked.
"I don't know."
"Another crew member?"
"No. Captain Zai would never--" She swallowed. "I have no idea who."
"So it could be a crewmate of yours."
"No! It's someone on Home, I think."
The adept leaned closer, peering at her like some troubling specimen under glass.
"He just wanted to live, Honored Mother. For some lover, for some imagined future. Why is that so hard to believe?"
The dead woman blinked, then nodded again, as smoothly as a machine. Hobbes felt she could detect an expression on her face: a ghost of satisfaction. "I believe you, Executive Officer," the dead woman said.
They left Hobbes, and she curled back into bed. The worm silk didn't comfort her. The privacy of the cabin had been utterly violated, her mind stripped of its deepest secret. They had seen what she had wanted, what she had allowed herself to hope for. That old humiliation had returned, amplified by a dead woman's smirk.
And as she calmed herself, curling into a ball and gesturing for the susurrant music of her childhood, Katherie realized that she might have made a terrible mistake. The politicals still wanted Captain Zai's blood, still sought revenge for his rejection of tradition. They would try to turn anything they knew about him to their advantage. And she had told him of his secret lover on Home. Had she betrayed her captain?
Marine Private
Bassiritz watched the transformation.
The prisoner had lain with her head pressed against the cell wall, just as she had for a few minutes of every hour for the last two weeks.
He had checked the interval against his time stamp many times, and it was always just over an hour. In his shifts guarding the Rix-woman, Bassiritz had never seen the ritual disrupted. Her actions were absolutely regular, as if her mind were empty of everything but numbers, counting ten thousand seconds again and again. She seemed more machine than human.
Bassiritz's fascination with her had led to still more reading, and he knew that Rix bodies were half artificial. Brain, muscles, cellular systems--no aspect of their physiology remained untouched, even in the womb. Of course, Imperial knowledge had for centuries been limited to corpses recovered after battle; live specimens had only been observed in firefights, where the Rixwomen seemed more demonic than mechanical.
The woman before him was the Empire's first captive Rixwoman.
For the last two weeks, Bassiritz had keenly observed this event, this moment when the prisoner looked fully human. As she listened, head pressed to the hypercarbon wall, the fierce cast of her features softened, as if she were adrift in some innocent daydream years distant from her empty cell. So he saw when it happened.
Her eyes popped open, and filled with predatory pleasure.
The marine jumped at the Rixwoman's sudden motion, a measure of cold fear trickling into his belly. The hypercarbon between them suddenly seemed no more substantial than glass.
Bassiritz remembered his childhood, when he used to dare himself to face his father's tarantula, trapped in a terrarium above the old man's desk. The arachnid glowered down from the transparent globe, guarding its tiny domain of twigs and sand. The glass sphere never seemed sufficient to ensure its captivity. When, subjective years ago, Bassiritz had returned home to discover that the Time Thief had taken his father, the globe above the desk was empty. The tarantula had died long ago, his aging sisters assured Bassiritz. But in his mind, it had escaped, free to roam now that it was no longer held in check by his father's iron will. Since that disappearance, the marine had never slept comfortably in his family home.
The Rixwoman now seemed to embody the spirit of that missing spider, as if it had come for him at last.
She stared directly at Bassiritz, even though the imaging was oneway.
"Bring your captain to me," she said.
He nodded dumbly, unable to resist her command.
Laurent Zai looked at the command bridge airscreen and sighed.
The colors of the image were false, the terminology metaphorical, the clean-looking shapes wholly a mathematical invention. The illustration was purely hypothetical; merely a representation of a theory about an enigma. Nothing was ever straightforward when one tried to plumb the quantum.
"We think that the pseudoatoms are physically disjunct from the silicon substrate," Tyre continued.
Zai's eyes drifted about the command bridge. He wondered how many of the officers present really understood this. They were all still exhausted by battle and repair work, and perhaps a bit complacent from victory. For the last fifteen minutes, only Hobbes had been questioning the DA ensign.
"The silicon simply gives it mass?" his executive officer asked.
"Gives it mass, ma'am," said Tyre, "and serves as the semiconducting medium. Without a semiconductor, you can't make quantum wells."
Captain Zai winced. There was that term again. He'd always thought of quantum mechanics as safely in the realm of the minuscule--relevant to data processing and communications, but not the hard and "strongly interacting" physics of combat. Whenever the twisted rules of the quantum domain reached up into the macroworld, the results were unnerving.
"Please explain quantum wells again, Ensign."
Tyre took a deep breath, managing to keep frustration from her face.
"In certain semiconducting environments, electrons occupy something called a quantum well. Inside a quantum well, pseudoatom electrons assume the arrangement of a normal atom, but there's no nucleus--no protons or neutrons."
"No real mass, Captain," Hobbes added, "and with infinite half-life: no radiation or decay even in transuranium elements. But like an isotope, quantum-well pseudoatoms have the same physical characteristics as a real atom with the same number of electrons: hardness, reflectivity, chemical properties."