“Have you not been around bodies before?” Elana asked.
“Well, yeah, I’ve seen plenty of corpses during my police work,” the redhead replied, “but that doesn’t mean I like touching or moving them.”
“They are dead, we are not, it is cause for celebration,” Aasne said.
“Yeah, but I’d be just as fine dancing on their graves if someone else dug the hole. Know what I mean?”
“Adam?” Paula’s voice came through my transponder. “Ummm, I don’t know if now works for you, but I’ll be ready in half an hour. If you are too busy I--”
“I’m fine,” I said. “We just finished. I’m going to try to figure out where to take a shower, and then I’ll come to the galley.”
“Great!” Paula gushed. “I’m so… ahh. I’ll see you soon.”
“The captain’s room is in the area behind the bridge,” Eve said as soon as the transponder beeped. “The room looked very clean, I believe it may have been cleaned before they all died.”
“Perfect,” I said. “I’ll talk with you all later.”
“Have a good night,” Aasne said, and everyone smiled at me.
I took the elevator up to the bridge again, said a quick hello to Kasta and Zea, and then I found the captain’s room. The suite was much larger than my room on Persephone, but that was to be expected since the heavy cruiser was a good eighty meters longer. The furniture in the room was made out of aged oak, and paintings of beautiful Viking women posing with weapons while in various states of undress were on all the walls. One of my wives had set my duffle bag of clothes on the bed, and I removed a fresh set of clothes and my toothbrush before jumping in the marble tiled shower.
“Damn, it’s good to be a Jotnar cruiser captain,” I laughed as I washed myself under the four shower heads and scrubbed myself with luxury soap.
Shortly after I showered, I headed back down to the second floor and made my way to the galley. The cruiser’s kitchen area was about twice the size of Persephone’s, and Paula looked a bit nervous standing behind the massive metal counters. There was a large datapad sitting on the counter next to the stove, and she glanced at it quickly before giving me a wide smile.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi,” I replied as I took a seat at the counter.
“Soooooo,” she started, “I’m not really much of a cook.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I just want to spend the time with you.”
“Okay,” she replied with a bit of relief. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and after my parents… well… I spent more time working on my projects than worrying about food. As soon as I had money I just ordered out all the time. Kasta would sometimes cook stuff, but we started to get busy when Byron’s empire started growing.”
“I get it,” I said. “I haven’t heard you mention Byron in a while.”
“Ahhh,” she sighed as she turned around to attend to one of her heating pots. I smelled chicken stock, celery, and onions on the air, and my stomach began to grumble with anticipation.
“It’s probably a weird subject for our wedding dinner, so we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t--”
“Oh, no, it’s fine,” she said. “Byron was my most advanced creation. I’m proud of him, but I’ve kind of forced him out of my mind.”
“He was your most advanced?” I asked with a bit of surprise. “I thought Kasta would have been.”
“It is somewhat complicated,” Paula said as she reached for a metal spoon and stirred the contents of her pot. “Their bodies and firmware were pretty much the same, but Kasta was programmed with my personality, and then I allowed her to evolve. Byron was a completely different personality, and I made him with Kasta’s input. So I’m saying he was more advanced because his programming wasn’t a derivative of me.”
“Ahh,” I said as I remembered my last moments with the android. At first I had thought him just a low level criminal boss, but then we figured out that he was an android on a mission to end the man who Paula and Kasta had thought was responsible for kidnapping their sister. He’d given up his life to protect Queen’s Hat, and while he’d been much cruder than Kasta, I had ended up really liking the strange man.
“I sometimes wonder what he would think about all this,” she said as she looked over her shoulder at me.
“All this? Or you and me?”
“Haha,” Paula giggled. “I guess I’d be most interested to know what he thought about you and me together.”
“What do you think he would say?” I asked.
“Ahhhhh,” Paula sighed and then turned around to smile at me. “He’d be happy for me and Kasta. He was a perverted miscreant, both bellicose, and selfish, but I had made him that way. He was how he was because he wanted to make me happy. I’m very happy with you, so he would be pleased.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said.
“I think we are a good fit, you, Kasta and me.”
“Oh?”
“Sure,” she replied as she grabbed two bowls from a cabinet and scooped some soup into them with a ladle. “I know some women are not very interested in sharing their men.”
“The Nordar women don’t seem to mind,” I chuckled. “I’m still not sure I’m ever going to be used to it.”
“Their culture is very pragmatic,” Paula said. “They think the strongest person should have multiple mates. I guess I was talking more about Zea.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She changed her mind after the rite.”
“We spent many hours talking to her about her fears,” Paula said. “Kasta and I are used to sharing everything. In some ways, it is wonderful to always have someone there for you. That is why Eve is very happy with this. She’s spent her life alone, and she wants as much love as she can get.”
“True,” I agreed.
“Zea was also alone, but for her, it became scarcity. She feared that you only had so much love to give, and that she would not be able to get her fair share. When Kasta and I talked about being twins and loving each other as well as the way our lives fit together, she seemed to respond positively.”
“That’s interesting,” I said as Paula set down the bowl of soup in front of me. “But, I want to focus on you tonight. Is that okay?”
“Yes!” Paula laughed. “Sorry, I’m just… okay, I’m really nervous, in case you couldn’t tell.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to be nervous.”
“I know I shouldn’t be, but you are the first man that I’ve ever loved, and I don’t want to mess anything up.”
“You won’t,” I said as I reached across the table to take her hand in mine. “We’ll just enjoy our time together tonight. We’ll talk, and laugh, and then I’ll take you into my bedroom and make love to you.”
Paula’s face turned red, and she bit her bottom lip as she stared at me. For half a moment, it almost looked like she was going to turn around and run, but then she looked at the bowls of soup and forced a smile to her face.
“So, this-is-a-potato-soup-with-bacon-and-chives-and-a-bit-of-garlic-and-Ihopeyoulikeit!” Her words poured out of her mouth like a machine gun, and then she threw herself down in the stool across from me, grabbed her spoon, and then started shoveling the soup into her mouth. Her eyes were cast down at the steaming bowl, and she made it about four bites in until she gasped and dashed to the fridge.
“Too hot! I forgot water!” The genius engineer pulled a pitcher of water out of the fridge and then drank from it without even bothering to pour it into a glass. She coughed, wheezed, and then gasped as soon as she was done drinking, and then turned to me with a sheepish grin on her beautiful face.
“Whoops,” she sighed. “I must look like an idiot.”
“Paula, come on,” I chuckled as I gestured for her to sit down. “You know I don’t think that way. You are a genius, and you’ve saved my life too many times to count. Don’t you remember my vows? Don’t you remember yours?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You aren’t nervous about the food,” I said as I took a sip of the soup and nodded toward her datapad. “This is great. I’m guessing you followed the recipe to the letter.”