Cat and Company by Tracy Cooper-Posey Page A

Sector?”
    Bedivere blinked. “Excuse me?”
    “You left here in one seventy-eight. Did you head straight for the Silent Sector, or did it take you while to get there? Where did you go first?”
    Bedivere frowned. “I don’t remember,” he said flatly. “There’s things I can’t recall, still.”
    “You don’t remember where you went, first?”
    Bedivere stared at him, wondering why he was asking. He didn’t voice the question, though. That would lead to explanations and more questions. “Darwin, I think.”
    “Thanks.” Connell stepped out of the room and shut the door.
    The lights stayed on.
    Bedivere scrubbed at his hair and face and felt the scrape of whiskers. He’d missed a depilatory dose. He’d have to deal with regrowth manually until the next dose kicked in.
    He reached down and picked up the board he’d left on the floor before falling asleep and flipped through some pages. None of them grabbed his attention.
    Why did Connell want to know where he had gone?
    He knew that asking would stir up stuff he had tamped down into a silent mass so he stayed sitting on the edge of the bed.
    Yet the need to know grew.
    After an hour of pretending to read, he put the board on one of the shelves and got to his feet. He rested his hand on the door, hesitating. Then he sighed. “Open,” he told the AI.
    The door let him out.
    It was quiet in the big room, but not empty. Lilly was at her desk and Yennifer was sitting in the armchair closest to it, a board in her hands.
    Connell and Brant had a sofa apiece, with a heads-up display between them with a chess board on it.
    “Isn’t playing chess with a Varkan just a fancy form of self-flagellation?” Bedivere asked.
    Brant sat back on the sofa, spreading his arms along the back of it. “I like the challenge.”
    Bedivere stopped in the middle of the floor, halfway between his room and the sofas and a long way from Lilly. There was nothing around him. No man’s land. “So, did I go to Darwin?”
    Connell moved his knight and glanced at Bedivere. “You were there. I don’t know if that was the first place you went. It’s not like you had to check in with anyone when you arrived somewhere. Besides, you ditched your identity between here and there.” He frowned, studying the board. “Mate in three,” he added.
    “Damn,” Brant muttered.
    Neither of them were paying Bedivere much attention and that suited him fine. He took another few steps toward the sofas as Brant moved his pawn. “Mate in two,” he said.
    Brant glared at him.
    “He’s right,” Connell said with a smile.
    Brant swore and dissolved the board. “Shouldn’t play with a goddamn sentient anyway,” he muttered.
    “Why do you want to know where I went?” Bedivere asked. The effort it took to ask it aloud made his skin prickle. He was sweating.
    Brant and Connell both looked at Lilly, sitting at her desk. Brant actually turned himself on the cushion so he was leaning on the back of the sofa.
    Lilly looked up from her desk. “We already have a pretty good idea of some of the places you went to and what you did there. Once we hooked you up to a live stream back-up, the data built a picture we can interpret fairly well.”
    “ Why? Why dig it up? ”
    Lilly looked at him steadily. “Nineteen short-term, high-risk, high-bonus no-ask contracts in the Silent Sector and places that no one goes to voluntarily. New Gaia, Fu-Sang. You were irradiated, dosed and hooked on Darzi to keep you compliant. Then, when you couldn’t keep it together anymore and reneged on your contract they sold you to the savage pits.”
    Bedivere swallowed. “That…sounds familiar.”
    Lilly got to her feet. Everyone else was silent.
    “You could have ditched your ID and gone rogue, found work or business on some Terra world without the risk. Or if that had been what you really wanted, you could have suicided very neatly just by jumping to somewhere the datacore doesn’t reach. Yet you didn’t. You dived into a