Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 Read Online Free

one was looking. The way she'd heedlessly extended her hand to him, Trevor, as if he could ever fucking reach out and take a human hand again.
    He backed away from the bag, panting. As if the neural implants running through his body didn't turn his skin into a finely honed alarm system that could make him curl away and shake, crying, from an unsubtle touch.
Bad enough to be a fucking autistic,
he thought.
Worse if you didn't start out that way, hypersensitive and hyperaware. Worse if you grew up a normal kid, with a normal kid's need to be held, and you woke up one day and you were different. Faster. Stranger. Feeling the air on your skin like sandpaper.
    Lieutenant Koske could remember precisely every detail of the last time he had made love to somebody. Remember the taste of his wife's mouth, and imagine the flavor of his tears when she left him three years later, unable to live with a man who couldn't bear an arm around his shoulders, a kiss on the cheek.
    It could be worse. I could still be crippled. Or dead.
    Would that be worse?
    The hatchway opened as he slammed the bag again. He heard the footsteps and then the hesitation. “Lieutenant. I beg your pardon. I'll come back later.”
    A young man's voice. He turned. The stocky, close-cropped blond lieutenant who stood just inside the hatchway tossed his towel around his neck and nodded. Koske took in powerful muscles under a crisp white T-shirt, shorts in air force blue, rubber-soled ship shoes.
    “No,” Koske said, lowering trembling fists. Exhaustion rolled over him, the familiar dizzying drop out of adrenaline-fueled combat time. “I'll hold the bag for you if you like—”
    “Ramirez. Chris.”
    “I'm done.”
     
    2200 Hours

Thursday 2 November, 2062

PPCASS
Huang Di
Earth orbit
    It wasn't as bad as it had been.
    Of late, growing habituated to his body's precarious artificial equilibrium, Second Pilot Xie Min-xue found that his tendency to flinch and panic when confronted with casual contact was lessening. Rather than overreacting, he was learning to anticipate and avoid the contact before it could happen.
    Also, the crew was learning techniques to make life easier for the pathologically high-strung pilots: incandescent lighting rather than fluorescent in most public areas of the
Huang Di,
for example. Soundproofed bunks for the pilots, and a private ready room where the lights were dim and the only sound the hum of the
Huang Di
's systems. There had been some talk of removing the colored panels and ideographed plaques—
long life, good harvest, fair sailing
—that bid the
Huang Di
prosperity and success, but the first pilot had convinced the captain that such measures would not be necessary.
    Just privacy, he said. And so Min-xue and the other four fragile, essential, half-mad pilots were granted the luxury of bunks and a ready room of their own.
    A luxury that Min-xue had now abandoned to pass carefully through the weightless corridors of the drifting ship. Midwatch, the passageways were almost deserted. The ideal time for a young man suffering from an induced form of acute hypersensitivity to travel through them.
    Min-xue paused by the hatchway to Pilot's Medical and closed his eyes for a moment. His uniform bound at waist and ankles; he jerked it irritably straight, which of course disarrayed the cloth across his shoulders and at his collar. There was no true comfort, but it could have been worse.
    Min-xue opened his eyes, clutched a grab rail beside the door so reactive pressure wouldn't send him drifting into the corridor, and depressed the call plate beside the hatch. The doorway irised open. He swung himself through. “Master Technician?”
    There was a deep sort of irony in the fact that the title of the man who cared for Min-xue's own tightly engineered systems was
technician
. Or perhaps Min-xue's superiors only meant to acknowledge the truth: he, and every other soldier in the People's PanChinese Liberation Army, was perfectly machined for a