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The sound of the teleporter brought Linksano out of a deep reverie; he’d been pondering the applications of hypertime to quantum shifts in electron orbits. He was not surprised to see his boss. He was surprised at the question his boss nearly roared at him.
“Where are the bedrooms?” Linkara asked, jogging towards Linksano with his collar askew.
Linksano blinked. “You mean on the ship?” he replied, reflexively taking a step back.
“Yes,” Linkara answered. “The bedrooms. On the ship. We couldn’t find any when we were out by Jupiter last summer. We were sleeping on the floor, or in the chairs on the bridge.” He stopped just short of the lab bench and leaned on it. “The only two people who were on the ship before it was mine were you and Mechakara,” he continued, “and I wasn’t about to ask him, and it didn’t occur to me to bounce a message back to ask you. Nimue says there aren’t any rooms with that designation, but surely that’s not right? I mean, at a minimum, Vyce had to sleep, didn’t he? And you?”
“Ah,” Linksano murmured. “No, Nimue’s correct, there are no rooms on the ship specifically designated as bedrooms, at least none that you or I could safely enter. Have you ever looked at Vyce’s old quarters?”
“No, I couldn’t find it in the plans,” Linkara admitted.
Linksano checked his equipment. None of the current experiments was in a state that couldn’t be left unattended for a bit. “It’s the room labeled ‘Parallel Life Support Auxiliary’ on the main map,” he explained. “I’ll take you up there.”
Linkara followed him to the turbolift. “That’s not in part of the ship we use very often,” he observed, tapping his foot as the door closed. “But why would the captain’s quarters be labeled as if it were part of life support?”
Linksano smiled mysteriously. “Because it was, in a sense,” he said as the lift door re-opened with a squeak.
The corridor was long and hummed ominously. Linksano made a mental note to have the cybermats replace the lighting with more efficient elements. “Here we are,” he said, gesturing at the door.
It was made of riveted steel coated with something sleek, black, and rather like latex in texture. The doorframe was painted with the same substance. A small window in the middle of the door had been left open; it was barely larger than a peephole and glinted strangely in the light. It had, Linksano knew, been carved from a single flawless diamond.
Linkara stared at Linksano. “That looks like a biohazard room,” he said doubtfully.
“It’s actually sort of the opposite,” Linksano replied, tapping loosely on the window with a fingernail. “The rest of this whole universe is the biohazard room. That’s the only space where Vyce could take his encounter suit off.”
Horrified realization dawned across Linkara’s face. He brushed past Linksano’s arm and stared into the little room.
Linksano knew what he’d find there; he’d seen it more than once. The lighting was all wrong, harsh and greenish with red overtones. From their perspective, the protective cocoon Vyce had slept in looked more like a sensory deprivation tank than a bed. One did not become a multiversal conqueror by letting one’s guard down; if anything happened to the ship, that cocoon could be used as an escape pod in its own right.
“That doesn’t look comfortable,” Linkara mumbled.
“For us, it wouldn’t be,” Linksano agreed. “Apparently Vyce was made of sterner stuff.”
Linkara nodded. “And the shades didn’t need to sleep,” he said.
“Even when they needed to recharge, they were designed to do so standing up,” Linksano filled in. “Same for Mechakara, not that he needed to do that very often.”
Linkara nodded, then turned to Linksano. “What about you?” he asked. “I know you have a fold-out cot in the lab now, but what did you do before?”
Linksano looked away. “Well, I didn’t sleep very much, for one thing,” he admitted.
Linkara flinched. “Sorry about that.”
“Not in any reasonable sense your fault,” Linksano reassured him. “When I did manage to catch a few winks, it was usually just on the floor in the old storage room off of main engineering, the one we converted to a kitchenette and lounge.”
Wincing, Linkara replied, “That can’t have been comfortable.”
“It wasn’t.” Linksano contemplated whether or not the next thing he was about to say was too silly for words; he decided that it was, after all, Linkara’s ship, and he might as well know. “There was a nicer place to nap,” he admitted, “but Vyce got annoyed after the second time I tried it.”
“Where’s that?” Linkara asked. “The next time we have people on board long enough to need a real sleep cycle, we might need it.”
Linksano led him silently back to the turbolift. On the one hand, he thought of these as his safe space, where he’d gone to get out from under Vyce’s watchfulness; that was what had really annoyed Vyce, that he hadn’t known where Linksano had gone.
On the other hand, some part of him really wanted to share this with someone.
On the third hand, much as it pained him to admit it, he really wanted that someone to be Linkara.
Briskly, he stepped out of the turbolift again, his boss and unwitting object of heavily repressed desire trailing in his wake. This time, they headed to a space just astern of the center of the ship, to a room with the unhelpful label of ‘Impact Mitigation Chamber’.
The door automatically slid open, and Linkara peeked inside. “It just looks like an empty room,” he reported. “Kind of like a racquetball court. Why is the door three feet off the floor?”
“I’ll show you,” Linksano agreed, “but step back out here for a minute.”
Linkara complied, and the door slid shut behind him.
“There’s another one of these on the floor above us,” Linksano explained. “They’re intended for storing fragile objects - including living beings - in case the ship has to ram something. With the temporal shields up, the ship itself would take no damage, but anything not strapped down would take quite a beating.” He opened a panel next to the door and tapped in a series of instructions on the numerical keypad.
Something whirred on the other side of the door, like a vacuum cleaner heard from several floors away. Linkara raised an eyebrow at Linksano, but said nothing.
As soon as the whirring stopped, Linksano walked directly at the door and, as it opened, dove past the doorsill.
“Wait!” Linkara shouted, running towards him. “What are you do . . . ing . . . .” He stopped just short of the still-open door, as what appeared to be several ping-pong balls rolled up to his feet.
“Inertial damping material,” Linksano explained, rolling over on top of the pellets of foam that now filled the room. “Rather like packing peanuts on your world. The individual ones are fairly firm, but in aggregate they’re quite comfortable. In actual use, the room would be full, or nearly so, with the delicate materials in the middle, safe from harm.”
“It’s a giant ball pit,” Linkara murmured, taking off his shoes.
“I suppose you could think of it WHOA!” Linksano didn’t get to finish his sentence; Linkara dove into the pile and proceeded to fling an entire armful of pellets at him.
After that, of course, the only proper choice was retaliation. Linksano fished a rubber glove from his pocket and managed to fashion a makeshift slingshot using it and the fingers of his left hand. The resulting rapid-fire barrage took off Linkara’s hat. Unfortunately, his boss took this as a reason to close from ranged combat to melee and tackled Linksano, sending him backwards into the pellet pile again with Linkara on top.
With Linkara’s face just inches from Linksano’s, flushed from the sudden exertion and a bout of laughter.
Linksano couldn’t have told you why, later. Perhaps it was a buildup of all the affection he’d been repressing since the experiment with Eliza hadn’t elicited the desired response from his boss. Perhaps it was just having been touch-starved for so very long, and the excitement of having what was almost a full-body embrace, from a certain point of view.
Whatever the reason, Linksano leaned forward and, without consciously thinking about what he was doing, gave Linkara a quick peck on the cheek.
Linkara’s eyes went saucer-wide, and he scrambled backwards off of Linksano.
Closing his eyes behind his goggles and silently cursing at himself, Linksano protested, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I don’t know why I did that!”
Linkara pressed a hand to his face. “Did you . . .” he breathed, “Did you just kiss me?”
“Would you believe me if I said ‘no’ at this point?” Linksano groaned, trying to curl up in a ball and mostly just flailing about in the packing material.
“Probably not,” Linkara admitted. “Are you okay?”
“Other than just having unintentionally outed myself as both queer and having a crush on my boss, who has openly threatened to send me into exile on a barren planet in an alien dimension if I step out of line?” Linksano whimpered.
Linkara froze. “I did do that, didn’t I?” he breathed.
“Must be nice, to be able to forget about that for a single second of any given day,” Linksano grumbled.
Linkara retrieved his hat, plopped it back on his head, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Would it help if I pointed out that I did that back when I was starting to turn evil, and I’m better now?” he asked.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Linksano admitted. “I mean, it’s what I might have done in your position, and I was evil at the time.”
Crawling across the foam to sit next to him, Linkara asked, “So are you actually less evil now, or are you just on good behavior because I threatened you?”
“Well,” Linksano considered the question. “I’m still mad, obviously. I brought a foam lizard to life as a gift for you, and while I still maintain that was brilliant and worked out marvelously for everyone concerned, that is definitely the act of a madman, in retrospect.”
“Right,” Linkara agreed. “But it’s not evil. It wasn’t like you made her to enslave her, or anything.”
“So I think from an overly-reductive perspective, I haven’t done anything redemptive enough to claim that I’m good, but I’ve suffered enough for being your ally to at least not be actively evil anymore?” Linksano shrugged. “I mean, I joined the future villain band mostly just to play drums, not to reaffirm my villainy or anything.”
Linkara nodded. “Works for me,” he said, and kissed Linksano square on the lips.
That took Linksano a minute of flailing to recover from. “Wait, really?” he said, once he got his breath back.
“What can I say?” Linkara shrugged. “You’re cute, you deserve a second chance, I’ve always believed in the redemptive power of love, and anyone who says they don’t want to make out with someone in a giant ball pit is lying their ass off.” He grinned and lay back, kicking his feet and sending a fresh spray of pellets into Linksano’s side. “Now, c’mere.”
“Yes, sir!” Linksano dove for him, giggling maniacally and sending another wave of foam flying everywhere.
Fortunately, the foam pellets acted as soundproofing as well.