Page 15 of Leviathan

"I still can't see what you were talking about," I said. "Perhaps you can draw a circle around it? With your finger?"

Whatever it took to get her to touch me again.

"I can do that," she said.

Then she touched me with both hands. One of them wrapped around that tendril, closer to the drone, and I let out a subsonic groan at the feeling of the heat of her skin encasing me, gripping me. She looked around, her grip tightening, compressing, and that felt even better.

"What was that?" she asked.

"What?" I said.

"There was a shudder?" she asked, alarm in her voice. "Everything vibrated. Did something hit the ship?"

I could tell her not to worry about it, that it was a normal ship function, but that wasn't right. I was fine holding back information about myself, but I didn't like holding it back when she asked directly, especially when it was about something so intimate.

"I was reacting to your touch," I said. "The reaction is not dangerous to you in any manner."

"Is my touch unpleasant?" she asked.

"No, it is very nice," I said, dramatically understating its impact on me. "Now what about that spot?"

I wasn't ready to explain how it was the best thing I had ever experienced, that the sensation of her touch went straight to my core.

She traced a circle on the tendril, and it took everything in my power to resist another full-body shudder even as I focused on what she might be seeing.

I still couldn't see anything, but there was one, terrible thing it could be, so I had to focus. I quickly ran the solution against her medical data to make sure it was nontoxic to her species, and it was safe, so I had one of my drones bring over a cleaning pad soaked in the solution.

"Will you rub this against the spot and let me know if it goes away?" I asked.

She took the pad from the drone and carefully stroked it over the spot she had outlined. It felt nothing like when I used a drone to do it to myself. Somehow, just having her holding the pad elevated the sensation to an entirely new level. What made having her touch me feel so incredibly different than touching myself?

I wanted to explore this more.

"It's gone," she said. "What was it?"

But even as the craving for her touch grew, the horror at what that meant swelled up to drown it out.

"It is a medical problem of sorts, a minor one, but left untreated, it can cause severe issues. It isn't something that can harm your species at all," I said. "The solution is simple. I just need to go through all of my neurofilaments and remove all of the spots."

Where I had gotten the contamination was another question. I hadn't taken on any imports, and I paid extra for third-party verification whenever I took on new supplies. There was only one place it could have come from, and if it was already on a drone in the garden...

Fuck.

She was a trap.

That was why she had such an easy time stealing a tool, exploring, and escaping, if she was even telling the truth about that.

No, the medical data was clear that she had been tortured. If she had agreed to do this to me, to trick her way on board, then it would have been from a state of duress. A victim helping their abuser out of a state of fear doesn't make them any less of a victim; it just makes them a more tragic one.

I set up a subroutine to go through my regular scans of nearby systems, looking for a hiding place.

"But you can't see it," she said, identifying the real problem at its root without me having to explain. Then she began sorting through the tendrils coming out of my drone, inspecting each one by touching it, lifting it, and stroking it, and I forgot what we were talking about for a moment until she repeated herself. "How are you going to remove the spots if you can't see them?"

It took me a moment to come back to the question, that unsettling horror growing as I realized how easy it was for her to distract me from my thoughts, just with the touch of her skin. She was the perfect trap.

"Without crew, the solution is to just clean every inch of my filaments, but it takes a lot more of the solution than spot removal," I said. "I don't currently have enough of the cleaning solution to do a full ship douse, so it can wait until after I take you to your desired destination. This area is fairly isolated, so it won't cause too much difficulty."

I had moved so many of my neurofilaments around after she came on board that there was a high chance that it would cause a great deal of difficulty. But I didn't want to let her know that, just in case she had agreed to be the trap.