Bridgebuilder

Dinner Conversation

"I cannot understand how so fractured a society managed to reach space." Carbon shook her head and offered up the straw to the bag of food to him again.

"You know it's funny, I had a teacher who said that once." He took a pull of passable chicken soup and swallowed. It had been covered in school, sort of. They - the Tsla'o, Eohm, and tkt - all had apparently homogeneous cultures. The last two there were guesses, more than anything. The Eohm did not brook with any sort of cultural exchange that didn't involve one side being exterminated. The tkt were an entirely different ball of wax - hivemind bugs that just didn't care if you tried to interact with them. The Tsla'o were the only ones who bothered with treaties, even if their only purpose had been to keep Human borders away from theirs. "Not that specifically, but something similar."

She left his bag floating in front of him and took a sip from her own, considering his comment an invitation to continue. "Your dispenser has over a thousand kinds of soup available, even on local backup power. Scrolling through the list gave me the feeling of going mad. It seemed to never end and there were so many languages. I have never imagined I would have to do research about soup."

"Really? I had never looked at the soup before." In the few months he'd known Carbon, this was the most she had said to him outside of ship business. The tone was conversational and it wasn't even directly critical of him! It was probably a good sign, assuming he was reading her correctly.

"I will not accept 'just pick something for me' as an answer from you for your future meals." She shook her head again to reinforce that and took another pull from her bag. The markings on it indicated she was not giving Human cuisine a try tonight.

Despite his best efforts, he smiled at that. The attempt to suppress it just kind of twisted it a bit and made him look very smug.

She did mind that. Her expression darkened, her voice dropped away from the conversational tone she had just been using. "Are you mocking me?"

There went his progress. "No. I was just..." Alex tried to figure out how to say what he meant through the cultural barrier with a bit of grace. He failed at that, instead choosing to simply barge through it with as detailed an explanation as possible. "I thought the situation was humorous for its irony. I had not intended to cause you any trouble when you asked me what I wanted to eat, but offering what I perceived to be an easy option turned out to be the opposite."

Her expression softened, voice chastened. "Irony. Yes." Carbon sighed, set her food aside, and rubbed her eyes. He hadn't noticed how tired she looked until now. "I am not being considerate of you, Alex. I confess that I very easily forget you are in this state. And that not everything is meant to be a slight."

"It's fine. I forget that I'm stuck here every few minutes anyway." He grinned. It was a little bit of an exaggeration, but every time he woke up there was a brief panic about why his body wasn't working. "We've mostly talked over comms anyway, just a little head on a screen."

"It is so." Miraculously, the corners of her mouth curled up just a bit as she held his packet of soup out to him again. "The mediboard indicates you should have your upper body back sometime in the next week. Your legs will take longer yet."

He swallowed another sip of food. "Good. At least I'll be able to do something."

"I do not know that there will be much for you to do. The ship is in good shape with the exception of the bridge and engine room."

"I know you said the engines were fixable - how bad is the bridge?"

"I have not inspected it. The amount of radiation I took when I was recovering you indicates that it was struck with a radiological round, so I assume it is not going to be useful, though some things may be salvaged from it." Humans and Tsla'o have agreements to not use nuclear radiation based weapons against each other. It was pretty well known that the Confederation Navy carried radiological tipped railgun rounds for Eohm. They had a lot of biological systems integrated into their ships, making the effects of the contamination worse. No big surprise that the Eohm would use them as well.

"Are the Eohm still in system?" He already knew the answer. If they had left, everything could be turned back on. They were still running just automated systems: life support, shielding and the kinetic buffers. Those would run for months after a ship's crew was dead.

"Yes. They have moved away to one of the local planets, nearly the other side of the system. We are adrift and they have made no attempts to check the ship yet."

"That's something." The assumption that they were dead was likely enough for the Eohm. They wouldn't attempt to scavenge a ship that was defiled with filthy xeno life. So as long as they kept up the appearance of being dead, that would suffice.

"It is." She fed him another sip of soup and looked away, what he assumed was a bit of guilt in her expression. Probably. "I have been meaning to discuss something with you."

In his experience, good conversations did not start that way. "Go on."

"After the attack, I entered the bridge-" she stopped and her eyebrows knit together, some internal tug-of-war going on. "When I got the crash foam off of you, there was so much blood."

"My Amp wasn't reporting vitals, you had no idea if I was still alive. I can understand why you did what you did."

"Yes, that is exactly..." she trailed off, her eyes briefly meeting his and unusually wide. "What do you mean by that?"

"You performed a neural link with me while I was unconscious." He had plenty of time to suss out possible explanations for why she had done it, and it probably wasn't because she had been bored.

"You should not be able to remember that." She seemed genuinely confused about this turn of events.

"Well, I do. When the crash cage was activated I was injected with a lot of drugs to increase the likelihood of successful escape, that might have had something to do with it." That was the idea, at least. He assumed whoever formulated what they got had never even considered that a Tsla'o would be responding to the crash, let alone ransacking their mind. "Or a brain is a brain."

"No, that..." Carbon glanced away and her jaw tightened under the sleek black fur on her cheek. "There should not have been any recollection while unconcious."

"Well. I do recollect quite a bit. So, why did you do it?" Another question he knew the answer to. But it seemed like letting her talk would be beneficial, and he wouldn't mind knowing her actual reasoning.

She hesitated, and looked like she was about to bolt from the room for a moment. Carbon exhaled, steeling herself. "I had to know if you still lived."

The way she put emphasis on it was telling, according to the diplomatic primer. She had wanted to see if his collection of memories was intact. From learning to read to flying a scoutship, these were what made him alive, as far as the Tsla'o saw things. With his memories gone he would have been a sort of ghoul to them. If the trauma had been bad enough to do that, he would have been useless on the ship anyway. "You would have left me to die if I hadn't?"

"It is likely." She looked at the packet of food in her hands with deadly intensity that indicated she didn't particularly relish the idea of someone dying on her watch, no matter what they were.

"I don't blame you. In the same situation I can't say I would not have done the same thing." It might have been a lie. He also did not have the ability to go picking through someone's brain, but he knew it was the diplomatic thing to say. It let her save face.

She nodded, still looking guilty but more relaxed. "Thank you."