More to the point, they had to secure those areas before Regi's goddess decided to intervene once again. Most of Regi’s shipmates would discount his fear as superstition. However, the goddess had a reason for sending Regi on this quest, and he doubted Dante figured into her plans. The exalteds said that Kowri life was so small that the gods had difficulty even perceiving them as individuals, seeing only the larger movements of the Empire like kitshava pieces on a strategy board. So something on this board, something larger than Regi or Dante or pirates had caught Poque’s attention.
And if Regi didn’t solve the problem his goddess had identified, she would continue to agitate the situation. An aggravated goddess was far more dangerous than a frightened pirate. Unfortunately, Regi suspected he had both on the ship, and he could not arrest the former.
Chapter Ten
Dante’s gaze kept flickeringtoward the door he’d identified, and Regi took several breaths to restrain his own desire to study the damaged door more closely. However, right now stealth was their best weapon. So he leaned against the corridor wall and tried to project a nonchalance he did not feel. “Shouldn’t you call some of your security people?” Dante whispered.
“Until the radiation suits come, we can't go in. And I would rather not advertise our interest in the engineering access areas until we have teams suited up.” Regi shifted so he could better see the damaged door in his peripheral vision. The radiation foam was in place, sealed to the door edges. However, one edge was folded under, as if part had been caught when someone had gone through after the sealant had been applied. Only a Styl would open a door with a damaged radiation seal.
“You're concerned the pirate is going to throw the door open and spread the radiation around,” Dante said.
Regi was impressed that Dante had recognized the danger. Sometimes Regi thought that the hardest part of his job was trying to explain the obvious to crew members who should have already understood it. Dante had the advantage of having seen his fellow huuman die of radiation poisoning. No doubt that improved his understanding of the risk.
The patrol ship was small and in an area of space that was unlikely to be faced with much conflict. Intelligent pirates avoided Empire space because the Empire did have a bad habit of shooting intruders where the Coalition limited itself to talking them to death. And this was very close to Empire space.
“I am sorry about your colleague who sought escape through this part of the ship.”
Dante raised one shoulder. “I'm fairly sure she knew that she wasn't going to find a teleporter back here.”
“Teleporter? I am unfamiliar with that technology.” The translator had offered a strange and scientifically improbable definition based on related words. Just as the translation matrix could never translate the names of animals, it often created false definitions when it came to technology, especially when the technology was unique to one culture.
Dante huffed. “It’s fictional technology that my people like to imagine being possible.”
For a short time, surprise robbed Regi of the ability to form a proper response. His people enjoyed storytelling, and those favored by Oba could inspire debilitating emotion, but his people did not use fictional words to create realities that could not exist. “Do your people often imagine technology beyond the scope of scientists?”
“We love to imagine anything and everything. We imagine fictional technologies, we imagine histories that didn’t happen, we love heroes who aren’t real. We are just a very imaginative people.”
When the huumans joined the rest of the universe, they would no doubt find themselves in great demand. There were many species, such as Ter’s, which had great technical abilities but were not highly skilled in innovation and adaptation. If Dante’s people were as imaginative as he claimed, they could help others advance their technology.
“Maybe that's why the slaves had a bad habit of killing themselves.” Dante considered his feet with far more intensity than was reasonable.
Regi tilted his head. “I do not understand. As I understand your stories, the pirates killed them.” This was the exact topic Regi had sworn to avoid discussing, but he followed Dante’s lead in the conversation.
“Well now, which stories have I told you? I told you how one went and got herself irradiated and another one attacked a slaver got his neck snapped. There was the one who was poisoned and one who died in a decompression accident. But here's the thing, every single one of them started a perfectly logical chain of events, knowing that the last item in the most likely list was going to be their deaths. But I can't blame them. When I imagined day after week after year after month of slavery, of ducking my head before some alien could backhand me into a wall, of skittering away from that electric cattle prod they used, there were days I thought about starting one of those chain of events myself.”
Regi contained his horror. This was much more dire than he had thought. He had never considered how an imaginative species would suffer in slavery. To seek death was an anathema, but Dante presented it in a way that would have pleased the goddess of logic. “I would be very distressed if you started a chain of events with such an end.”
