A tiny optical camera peaked up out of Dwayne's jacket pocket.<br/><br/>"Greeting Passenger Anjali. And thank you for addressing me directly. Many humans do not. It has created data that I shall analyze later." Bianca offered.<br/><br/>She was silent for just a moment before she said, "Processing."<br/><br/>The camera dipped back into his pocket. Dwayne smiled a little.<br/><br/><i>We need to work on what the word 'later' really means.</i><br/><br/>Dwayne turned his focus back to Anjali. She was an absolute wreck and for good reasons. Her needs seemed much more pressing than Bianca's vocabulary. The answers he'd been looking for since she'd exited her pod were all right there. Dwayne need only remain silent and collect them. Some of what she said only confirmed suspicions he already had. Hearing them aloud was more difficult on some points.<br/><br/>...<i>supposed to bed and breed the elite of the Srinivasan Colony...</i><br/><br/>And then be expected to hand that child over to the wife of the man who'd bedded her, there was little doubt. Mother's were supposed to be with their children. At least that's what he'd gathered from the outside looking in. It made him feel a bit foolish. Dwayne had been engineered to kill a man. He had, many times before. And when he stacked it up against what the Srinivasan's had planned for her, his existence felt tame by comparison. Dwayne nodded every so often to convey understanding. His skin crawled, but he needed to hear more about the Srinivasans.<br/><br/><i>Know your enemy. </i><br/><br/>One rich guy, with a god complex, was just as bad as another regardless of the shade of his skin. If they congregated within a particular ethnicity, it meant they'd have a culture that Dwayne likely wouldn't understand. It'd make knowing his enemy more difficult, but nothing was impossible. Anjali was 283 years out of place. It was a heavy number and not just for her. The med bay computer of the Rath-Yatra had recognized some of his genetic material as well. He didn't know what it meant. If it meant anything other than some of the material use to create Dwayne was from Anjali's time. He made a small promise to himself. The next time someone told him he was an 'old soul', he'd reach up and smack the taste out of their mouth. Dwayne shook his head when she told him he should've left her there. Killing an enemy combatant was one things. Leaving someone to die needlessly, was quite another. It'd have been a scar on his conscience. Life dealt out enough of those for free. Dwayne didn't need to go shopping for one.<br/><br/>His stomach and chest felt lighter when she began to tug at her tank top. A part of him wished she'd have kept going. He pushed that part aside and refocused. She showed him a tiny gray tattoo under her left breast. That was bad. In legal guy speak, it would serve as a property mark. Under Confederate law, one property mark and one authentication document was all that was required to take one's slave into custody. Local law enforcement was sometimes obliged to help. Their only saving grace was the document requirements. It couldn't just be a piece of paper with an 'I own you' scribbled across it. It required mountains of legal jargon that Dwayne didn't understand. But that was good things. It was what prevented bottom feeders from just snatching people off of Free Port street and press ganging them into bondage. Either way, that tattoo had to go. It'd probably leave a scar. The only people that would see were those whose<i>business </i>it was to see. And with enough money, scars could be taken away.<br/><br/>Her description of stasis prep sounded routine medical enough. Except for the submerging part. For cyro-stasis you drenched a poor bastard and stick him in front of a fan or stick him in a freezer or thirty minutes or so. It required the beginning of hypothermia, but not the full blown condition. Stasis couldn't be achieved otherwise. If you stuck somebody in cryo warm, they just froze to death. Dwayne didn't care about being the richest guy in the sector. Money was means for survival. Food, shelter, water, equipment; a retirement payday though. It was probably just crescent-moon pie in a nebula, a nice idea. The true stasis pod in his airlock was only half the equation. The prep and the liquid were the other halves. Any of it that remained in the med bay was probably too degraded for analysis. Bianca couldn't even identify a full sample of it. He remember the white mist and what she'd puked up.<br/><br/>Dwayne watched as she rose and knelt near him. If she wanted to go back to the Rath-Yatra they'd do that. There was valuable metal to be claimed yet. Dwayne had other things he wanted to address first.<br/><br/>"I grew up in the Free Worlds Coalition. I knew this guy. He was, ya know, real Hoo-Yah soldier type. Likable guy. A little loud at times. He grew up in an orphanage. Now, in Coalition space, if you're an orphan, they really push citizenship through military service on ya. And if you're an orphan and you don't join up they draft you outright occasionally. That happened to him. But it turned out he was good at it, so it wasn't all bad. Not at first anyway. Now, Casper thought he was<i>real </i>bad ass and got himself transferred to some black ops unit. He got to see some of the spooky shit and some of the real scary shit. Most everything he did was probably classified under some form of state secrets act. A word here, a comment there. Then somebody walked off and left a terminal unguarded and Casper started digging into own service record. He found out the hard way that he was bio engineered. Now, in Free World space that sort of thing is...frowned upon. The faith doesn't like it. Church and State are separate things, but the church holds a lot of sway. Sanctioned bio-engineering is politically unsexy if not career suicide and the church shuns anybody who's not<i>natural born</i>. Casper was black ops, so he knew how to disappear. Only he decided to make it a permanent and stay gone. He had some skills. He did odd jobs for cash here and there." Dwayne explained.<br/><br/>He stood and offered her his hand, "He made it all the way out to the Confederate Free Ports. Learned how to work as a spacer. Then changed his name to Dwayne. And I've carved out decent life in the frontier. Killing or Childbearing." Dwayne shrugged before he continued, "What<i>they </i>intended doesn't really matter. What matter is something<i>we</i>get to decide. A life is yours if you have the will to reach up and take it. Come on. We'll fab you an EVA suit that actually fits and head over to see what else is in the logs. There's something in the med bay I want to show you anyway. And we need to talk about that tattoo. It's only gonna serve to get you fitted for a slave collar. Damn thing has to go. And it's probably not gonna tickle."<br/><br/>Dwayne lead her to the fabricator and then to the airlock where they suited up. It wasn't trust, but it was something. Kindred spirits maybe. Or just two people born of similar science and thrown into isolation, looking for that positive human contact that was required for sanity's sake. Dwayne often just lived one day at a time. And that sounded like a solid enough plan for his approach to Anjali.