Chapter 13

[Reality Check - Saturday Sep. 15 2009, 1203 hours, Bay 5B] 

Thallin awoke to the sight of Izabelle's face and honey-brown hair looking at him from above. He sighed, closed his eyes, then opened them again as realisation hit. <Honey-brown?> He turned his thoughts back to before he had passed out, trying to remember Izabelle's hair colour. It was no use... all he could remember was that goddamn tiger-stripe pattern. 

"Are you feeling better?" Izabelle enquired. 

Groaning in the process, Thallin slowly sat upon his bed, his head feeling filled with cotton-wool. Luckily, he did not have the terrifying headaches he had heard of from others. "All right. How much of a fool did I make of myself last night?" 

Izabelle looked at him quizzically. "Does referring to yourself as 'dahling' and insisting on being taken back to somewhere called Tomobiki count?" 

"In spades." 

"Then you have made a 'right royal fool' of yourself." 

"Great. Wonderful. Love it. Where're my clothes?!" he suddenly exclaimed as he realised they were not on his person. 

"After you lost consciousness last night, I performed a thorough examination upon your person, thus necessitating the removal of your attire. The results of the examination were not conclusive, some even indicated that you have been dead for over ten years. However, your behaviour prior to your dysfunction seemed to indicate a temporary overload of the working of the cerebral cortex due to a large intake of ethanol-based organic compounds with impurities." 

"In other words, I was drunk." 

"Correct. According to the information databanks, your condition would have lasted up to two days, depending on the amount you had ingested, until your blood chemistry had returned to a more normal state." 

"Until I'd slept it of." 

"I must start to look into these colloquialisms. They are eluding me for the moment." 

"So then what?" 

"A lapse of two days was not an acceptable duration, so I proceeded to purge your system of the infected blood and utilised the laboratory to synthesise a new batch of NG-positive plasma to replace that which was tainted by the ethanol derivative." 

"With impurities." 

"That goes without saying." 

"Does this conversation make sense?" 

"It does to me." 

"Pass me the coffee then, I need to catch up." 

"...realised that continued altercations with people accusing me of being the alleged Christina Leeds would only hamper my movements within the ship. Since human beings place a lot of emphasis on visual stimuli for recognisance, I deemed it necessary to change some aspect of my appearance. Honey-Brown was the only colour available at the store when I perused it." 

"Well, let's hope that it's enough to throw the scent off. The last thing I want to have to do is explain how a dead Veritech Pilot is now walking around the ship in her own uniform, said uniform having supposedly been sent to the next of kin." Thallin saw Izabelle's expression darken and realised he had made a mistake. <Oh shit, I forgot. I never told her about all of this.>"Thallin," Izabelle started sweetly, "I think it is time for you to tell me of my origins." 

<Oh God, no! Not the sweet voice! I'm in trouble now.> "Well... Your thinking capabilities are thanks to a MEMIC-derivative designed by a super-computer back on the Moon, the Bahamoud. Your processor are cross-linked into a n-cube array to allow for multi-phasic computation. Memory retention is done by direct-encryption of virgin neural material by a process which might as well be magic to me, cause I don't understand how it happens. I mean, I built the thing, but I don't know how it manages to do what it does. The only person that does is currently sitting one-and-a-half klicks below ground level in Luna." 

"What about the chassis... the body?" 

<sigh> "The body I stole from the morgue. It belonged to a Veritech Pilot which had been killed early on in the battle on Macross Island. Her name was Christina Leeds. I needed a body and she was the closest at hand. I thought that since nobody had yet claimed her she would have no relatives on the ship. I was wrong. Turns out that her sister is one of the Bridge Bunnies." 

Silence followed. 

"Er... Izabelle?" 

"The thought of this body having died once before is unnerving. It gives me a sense of... discontinuity. Thallin, I have no wish to die." 

"Nobody does - most of the time. Death scares us all. Humanity has always been scared of the darkness of mortality. Some say that's why religions were invented, to allay those fears during our lives." 

"Thallin," asked Izabelle in a shaky voice, "do you believe in a religion?" 

"No... I sometimes hope that somewhere out there is someone who knows what the hell is going on, but most of the time I think that we are just born, we live... and then we die - and that's all there is to our miserable existence." 

"Thallin... I am... afraid..." 

He moved over to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "Welcome to the human race." 

[Reality Check - Friday Nov. 20 2009, 1230 hours, outside Bay 5B] 

The morning had passed uneventfully in repairs for the Valkyrie. Some supplies had been delivered to the bay, but not enough to complete the job. A quick search of the requisition database revealed that a hitherto-undiscovered fracture in one of the engines' casing had taken over the top priority in the ranking. It would be yet longer before the parts requested were made available. At least the repair to the Valkyrie's memory were well under way thanks to Izabelle's find of a spare MEMIC module lying unattended in an office near the Pinpoint Barrier system's control room. Thallin hadn't asked too many questions. 

Both Izabelle and Thallin were waiting for the lift to arrive to take them to the officer's mess hall when someone careened into Thallin's back. Before he could even put a thought together, Thallin turned around and had swung hard to meet his attacker's jaw, connecting with a heaving thud, sending the person flying down the corridor a few feet. Then, reason returned to him. "Shit!" 

Lying on the floor was the figure of Sergeant Tamara Sam'di. 

"Sergeant Sam'di? Sergeant, can you hear me?" He patted her on the cheek a few time to try to bring her around, avoiding the glaring blue bruise that had developed on her jaw. "Look, I'm terribly sorry about this. I didn't expect anyone to run into me and..." 

"Ouch - that hurt!" Tamara finally replied as she came to. "What are you wearing? A full set of armour?" Thallin looked at her with a contrite expression on his face. Hitting women was not his forte. Behind him, Izabelle was busy picking up the parcels Tamara had been carrying and making sure nothing had been broken when they had been flung about. 

"I believe you dropped these." Izabelle said, offering the packages to the prone Tamara. 

"Well, whatever." Tamara replied. She looked Izabelle up and down with a critical eye. "I must say you look a lot better in clothes that fit. I trust you found everything to your liking?" 

"Quite satisfactory." replied Izabelle, smiling. 

Tamara winced slightly as she sat up with her back to the corridor's wall, testing her jaw softly with her left hand. Eventually, she turned her attention back to Thallin. "None of your orders are in yet, and there's been a delay on your MEMIC. I was planning on dropping in on you this afternoon, though. I've got something to tell you." She sighed. "Izabelle, I don't particularly like you, but I also don't wish you any harm. I've done enough unusual things in my time to know when somebody is not playing the game straight, and I can see that there is something going on here." Thallin tried to interrupt to tell her she had it all wrong, but Tamara continued before he could say anything. "I don't really want to know what it is. Thallin has already gotten me out of hot water once, so I'm going to get David Marshall off your back for a while. Call this a pay-back, or if you can't, call it future credit. Shall we go somewhere more private?" Tamara gave a pretty good rendition of Izabelle's signature smile. 

[Reality Check - Friday Nov. 20 2009, 1300 hours, Bay 5B] 

Thallin sat back and mulled over what Sergeant Sam'di had told them. It seemed that now this David Marshall was on to him... <Marshall. Where have I heard that name before?> As if it wasn't bad enough that he already had Kay Landers snooping around his files and the bay. <I need to get the plane and the rest of the equipment out of here. I need a place where deliveries in and out will not be noticed, where there is enough noise to cover the work we'll be doing on the plane and with a storage area large enough to hold the sucker.> Hard as he might, Thallin could not think of such a place. 

[Reality Check - Friday Nov. 20 2009, 1415 hours, Corridor 12C] 

It was now 1415 and, as told by Tamara, Thallin was waiting in one of the many shadows which pocketed corridor 12C. Thallin did not like being so far away of what he unconsciously thought of as his home ground, but curiosity had finally won over. Already there, in one of the pools of light along the corridor, Tamara Sam'di was waiting for David Marshall to arrive. 

At 1420 exactly, Marshall walked in from the other end of the hallway, waving to Tamara as he neared her location. Tamara waved back, stopped leaning against the wall and started walking towards David, a cheerful smile on her face making her look like she was about to meet her lover. <Now there's an interesting thought> 

Then all Hell broke loose. 

An explosion occurred between David and Tamara, throwing her to the ground, ripping a good six meters of the corridor in the process. David heard the scream of tortured metal and looked up in time to see sheets of metal ripping themselves away from the high ceiling, falling toward the ground. Before he could shout a warning, both pieces of metal fell upon Tamara, one shearing her left leg off just above the knee, the other impaling itself in her left chest, planting her solidly to the ground. Tamara's screams of pain were abruptly cut off. 

Thallin stood hidden in the shadows, shocked by the speed at which this disaster had taken place. He must not have been the only one, for he could hear David shouting Tamara's name. He changed the focus of his attention from Tamara's bloodied form to the man on the other side of the chasm. 

David was looking at the ripped ground, possibly wondering if he could make the jump to the other side. Eventually, he shouted at Tamara that he was going for help and ran back the way he came, disappearing around the bend of the corridor. 

Waiting until the sounds of running footsteps had faded, Thallin stood out of the shadow and ran to Tamara's body. He bent to grasp her, to pull her away from the danger of more falling debris... and his hand went right through her shoulder. <What the f...?> Thallin tried again and was rewarded with the sight of his hand sinking into Tamara's upper-arm. <A hologram. The sneaky bitch set up a hologram.> As if on cue, the scene surrounding him faded into nothingness - body, chasm and all. Thallin was now standing in the middle of a perfectly normal - undamaged - corridor. 

Footsteps were becoming louder in the direction David Marshall had disappeared. Thallin could hear his voice shouting at those with him to hurry. Before anyone could come around the bend and see him, Thallin had disappeared down one of the badly-lit side corridors and taken a flight of steps to level 11. 

He stopped a few blocks later, his mind running wild wit the events that had just happened. <She set all this up just to get back at him. And now Marshall is probably trying to convince whoever's with him that he's not battle-happy. We're dealing with somebody who's willing to go this far to get someone who's pissed her off. And she's got enough dirt on me to bury me with.> "Oh boy." 

Forward to Chapter 14.
Back to Chapter 12. 

Return to the Thallin Braywater contents page.