Panterra: The Machinist

4: The Prince

The spotted back of a Soogan is close to Barcy's face. The spots are uniform in size and seemingly equally spaced, but I can tell it's not Owen. Arlington raises our head to find that Austin has joined us as well. Though I can only see a portion of him, his stripes are distinct. Denton sits in the doorway, her face lit by the last rays of the sun, still wearing her commander's tunic.

The fingers of our hand are no longer intertwined with Barcy's. I expect Arlington to extract himself from the nest, but he doesn't. He lays his head back down and sniffs Barcy's hair. She's hung her blue jacket by the door, and he slowly moves our hand to Barcy's chest and presses gently against the soft flesh through the linen fabric.

> Never thought I'd feel this again, he tells me.

>> You never have, I reply. Not her, and she's awake.

He starts to withdraw his hand, but she takes it and returns it to her chest. The weight of her breast fascinates me. I've only ever known the partial gravity on the ship. I'm curious to know what it feels like from her perspective, to experience through her SI the sensation of full gravity on her body.

My memories of her two years on the ship are intact. But often crew members will request "privacy" from me when they want to be alone, individually or in pairs, sometimes in small groups. I search my memories for any interactions where anyone touched her like this and find nothing. That's not unusual. I always knew her as discrete. She rarely drank alcohol and never used recreational drugs.

She was professional, an officer, and was careful with her appearance and behavior. So I search her broken memories for any of these private moments and stumble on something not private, something Arlington and I both remember.

Her memory is full-sensory—optical, auditory, olfactory and tactile—all recorded in her SI in full detail. The data includes her vitals—heart rate, respiratory, body temperature, and glandular activity—everything a person would want if she desires to re-experience a memory in its totality.

Arlington's memory is the same. Mine is a complex montage of all of the optical, thermal and audio sensors from all over the ship, and all of the long- and short-range sensors beyond the limits of my skin, the ship's hull. I miss, beyond words, the massive amounts of data I could process and record each micro-second. Those were the days.

I match all three memories—mine, hers, and his—and re-experience it from all three vantage points simultaneously. It's like walking through a vivid hologram.

Barcy looks up and down the empty passageway on the ship, late during a night cycle. She unzips the front of her light-blue uni-suit several centimeters. She looks to see how much she's showing and unzips it further. The suits regulate the body temperature and work best when the fabric has direct contact with the wearer's skin.

Pleased with herself, she fiddles with her short hair and knocks on the engine room hatch. I tell Arlington who it is, and he allows me to unseal it.

"You were supposed to visit me for your quarterly physical," she says, closing the hatch behind her.

"Busy." He doesn't even look up from the screen of his display terminal. "And can't you do that remotely?"

"Where's the fun in that?" she asks. She leans backward against the counter, brushing his elbow with her hip. He doesn't move. "Most of my patients are women, and that often necessitates physical contact, as you can imagine. It's nice to get my hands on other parts every now and then, particularly yours. And yes, I do most of my male patients remotely. You're a rare exception."

He grunts and touches the display screen to enlarge a graph on energy displacement.

"Whatcha looking at?" She turns and leans over his shoulder, putting a hand on the back of his chair. He notices the front of her suit and stares at the exposed flesh without moving his head. The skin in the crease between her breasts glistens with nervous sweat.