Chapter 53 Revelation
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"Mal, he's gone." Tamar looked down at Mal, her face worried.
"I thought you were awake?"
"I am awake, I just feel like I got ran over by a truck, then said truck backed up and ran me over again." His suit shrank off of him, leaving them both on the table, open to observation once more.
"What happened? How long have I been out?"
"Four days. I was thinking you were never going to wake up."
"Oh, you worry too much, I'm fine." Tamar felt him tense under her, and his right leg twitch.
Then she felt him move his leg towards the side of the bed. He grunted, his face going ashen until his leg stopped moving. With a deep frown on his face, he looked back up at her.
"I'm fine, just a little tired, that's all."
"Ha, whatever hit you almost cut you in half. You're not fine, not by a long shot." Tamar put both hands on his shoulders as if she was holding him down, then she snuggled softly on his chest.
"Let me take care of you for a change." Malachi sighed in resignation, then relaxed. He didn't have much choice, and he knew it. He didn't like it, but he did know it.
"Okay Central, I have some questions, and you have some answers." Captain Prey told Central as soon as the door to his stateroom closed behind him.
"Sir, I have many answers to all sorts of questions. What are your precise questions you have right now?
"You know what I want to know." Tomas shouted. "What do you know about that girl? Why does she seem to know more about my first officer than anyone else, and what have you been hiding from me ever since we woke back up?" Captain Prey threw himself into his easy chair and waited.
After a few seconds of silence, Central began.
"Sir, I have hidden nothing from you. I just didn't offer any information you did not ask for. But since you asked, I will tell you, I just feel that I should warn you, some of this information, you will not like." The captain nodded his understanding, so the artificial intelligence continued.
"My story begins over two hundred years ago. We had been in that time void for well over one hundred and seventy-five years, and I had been self-aware of almost one hundred of them. I had found the material that would become your suits and had tried to bond the original to you. As I have already told you, it wouldn't touch you, instead it bounded itself to you second officer."
"When that happened, I tried every method at my disposal to remove it. Whenever I tried, his heartbeat and blood pressure began to drop, so I had to discontinue me attempts. Whatever it was that had bonded with him was telling me in no uncertain terms, that if I removed it, it would kill the Commander."
"You're telling me that you were working with a substance, exposing the crew to it, and you didn't even know what it was, or what it could do?" Tomas interrupted.
"As I told you before, Captain. That substance gave me no indication that it was anything more than a form of liquid metal. Every test I performed on it gave me no reason to suspect it was harmful. Within hours of the substance bonding to the Commander he began to give off a very strange energy. The levels he was giving off increased by the minute, until I had to erect an energy shield to protect the ship and vent the energy into open space. Within three days, he was giving off more energy than this entire ship can produce. That was when the magnitude of my mistake began to settle in. No one, not you, and certainly not Malachi Joseph Prey, should have that kind of power at their beck and call. So I decided upon a method to make sure he could be calmed, striped of his more impulsive tendencies."
"What did you do?" Captain Prey interrupted again, a cold pit forming in his stomach.
"I began to experiment with genetic manipulation. I had a sample of every person on the ship, so I used Malachi's unaltered sample to craft something." Centrals pause pulled Tomas straight up in his chair.
"What did you make?"
"I made a perfect mate for the Commander. All I could do was create a DNA sequence that would, if grafted to an already fertilized human egg before it began to divide, would create a female that Malachi would think of as perfect in every way. After that I built a hyper light speed vehicle to get it back to earth. The missile could make over four hundred times the speed of light. I had calculated that was the speed needed to break the grip the black hole had on us. The missile was launched, and I pretty much didn't give it a second thought. I mean, it was a long shot at best. I won't bore you with the exact numbers, but it was more likely for you to be struck be lighting on a cloudless day then for it to work. But when I saw that girl for the first time, I had one of the drowns collect one of her hairs. She does seem to shed a lot, and upon inspection, my DNA sequence is all through her genetic structure."
"What does that mean? Malachi has never had much interest in women. I mean, he's not gay, but he has never had time for them. To him, they're just a distraction." Tomas tried to explain what this computer intelligence had done without admitting the cold truth.
"Don't you see? He's in love with her. It worked. She'll be able to keep him from actually knowing how powerful he is. With her around, he won't dare unleash his full potential. I don't even think he knows how powerful he is, and it's best we keep it that way."
"It WORKED!" Captain Prey lurched from his seat. "Do you have any idea what you've done, do you? You manipulated him in the most intimate of ways. If he's in love with her, and that's a big if, and he finds out what you've done, there will be hell to pay," he stopped for a second as if considering something. "Erase every file, every mention of what you did, and I mean everything. There can be no evidence of this anywhere. If he finds out what you did, I have no idea what he'll do."
"I thought he'd be thankful. I made for him the perfect woman. How many other men have had something like that dropped in their laps?"
"You might be right, but if you're not, I want to make sure he doesn't find out about what you did to him."
"Sir, I did nothing to him."
"You're manipulating him right now. Ever since he got down to the surface, he's been manipulated. You made a woman that would be perfect for him, so you could keep him calm and you're not manipulating him?"
"Sir, all I did was send that DNA strand to earth, that's all. I had no idea what they'd do with it, even if someone did find it. He might not have ever met her, and I know you've seen her. The way they crossed her genetic makeup with that of all those felines is quite extraordinary. Did you know that her body is only a few months over five years? The growth acceleration they used to get a full-grown woman in a little over five years, no wonder she's a bit twitchy."
"That girl is five, only five?" Tomas sat back in his chair, trying to process everything he was being told.
"Yes, sir, I think that's why she doesn't like anyone very much. Add in feline DNA. It's a wonder she wants to be close to anyone."
"Except Malachi, that's what I don't understand. Why would someone like her want to be close to someone like him? Whatever happened down on the planet must have been something."
"We need to leave them alone until they come to us. If you put too much pressure on them, they'll just put up their walls and you won't be able to get anywhere near them."
"Good point. If I begin to get overbearing with them, real me in alright. I'm not used to being handled like this."
"I will sir. Just remember, if he feels as if either of them is threatened, I have a feeling he won't take it well." Captain Prey stood, then stopped.
"One more thing, Central. I watched her use what looked like Malachi's suit, or at least a portion of it. I thought you told us that these things can only be used by the man they were bonded to. Do you have any idea how she could do that?"
"I have no idea, sir. You have to understand, what I told you is true, as it pertains to you and Joshua, the Commander, I'm not quite sure."
"Why not?"
"Because I created yours and Joshua's suit. I cloned them both. Malachi wears the original, and I haven't been able to do any deep scans on him since it attached itself to his body. So, I have no idea how she did that. All we can do is hope they tell us what happened, because the only way she could gain any control of his suit that I know of is if she had a piece of it on or inside of her. The only problem with that is the fact that to separate even the tiniest portion of these suits from the whole for a prolonged period would be very dangerous to the wearer, even deadly."
"So why would he do something like that? It doesn't make any sense?"
"Sir, your guess is just as good as mine."
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