Interphase

Damn good thing Sirtis society's so tolerant about public nudity, isn't it, Merry my love?

With that whimsical, yet also profoundly resentful thought, Lieutenant Commander Yancey settled into a splashy, energy-wasting crawl. By the time he came ashore, he hoped, he'd have spent both of his frustrations. Unsatisfied sexual arousal, and fury at the competitor whose claim on Meredith Carver Canso so irrevocably outweighed his own.

* * *

"He'll be all right," a voice Lieutenant Commander Edek Fallon didn't recognize said in a tone that wasn't at all reassuring. The woman (at least, the person sounded female enough) was running her hands over him as she spoke, doing an old-fashioned "body survey" instead of, or in addition to, a medical scan. "Huh? What's this?"

She'd encountered the raised pattern of flesh that decorated the inside of his right wrist. Not many people now living on Hegemony worlds would know what it was, of course; and he'd grown damned tired of explaining it. But not tired enough (yet, at least!) to ask a colleague to remove it for him.

"Some kind of tribal marking? A ritual scar? That's odd in a man who's creche bred-isn't it?" The second voice sounded familiar, although it didn't belong to a friend. Edek remembered it from yesterday, when he'd toured one of the vast bio-labs that were Bra d'Or's claim to fame. Or at least, that were the main reason for holding a medical convention on this world.

Merry would say that he ought to play possum (whatever that phrase might have meant originally) for awhile longer, in hopes he might find out something useful about these people while they thought him unaware. But what worked for Merry, the born daughter of Warrior Creche, didn't always work for Edek the late arrival...and come to think of it, why was he so sure these people meant him harm? He couldn't remember the event that rendered him unconscious. Maybe he'd simply fainted, and his hosts were now doing their best to render aid.

No. If he'd fainted (which he had no reason to do), he should be waking up in the last location he recalled; and that was a walking trail on the grounds of the hotel where he and most of his colleagues were lodging. This was the first time since he'd finished his medical training and returned to the Guard afterward that he'd attended a function that wasn't military-sponsored, where his uniform stood out in each gathering instead of being just one more in a sea of similar costumes. It was also the first time since med school that he'd been this far away from his sib, for this long.

The woman said sharply, "He's awake! Dr. Fallon, I know you can hear me."

Damn. So much for playing possum. Edek opened his eyes and looked up at her. A familiar face. Why? From where? And why wasn't his comm implant working?

"I'm Ardis Hall," she said, with a slight smile. "Yes, you've seen my face before. But this is the first time you've met me."

"I never was much good at riddles. Suppose you just tell me what the hell's going on." Edek lay still, and let himself take in his surroundings.

Doing so didn't offer him a great deal of enlightenment. This looked like a compartment on board a starship, or a room in a modern building on any world in the Hegemony. Metallic surfaces; muted colors; tasteless, odorless air. He rested on a survival cot, which seemed out of place in this not at all primitive setting.

He looked at the woman again, and then at the man who stood near the other side of his cot. He said, "Administrator Chalfont."

"Yes." The man nodded.