The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker Page A

him, but he is still a pirate, to the deepest core of his consciousness.
    In the infirmary, he guides Mendoza to a diagnostic table, where she reclines. A device swings up from the edge of the table and a metal plate touches her left temple. She closes her eyes, sighing.
    “Running program seventeen-fifty-two ten,” the Captain announces. “Tell me when the little lights turn green, now.”
    After a moment she says faintly, “Green.”
    “Good. Five equations this time. Ready? Begin.”
    A moment passes and she gives no signal, but he nods.
    “That’s it. That’s my girl. Only a little more now: temporospatial calculation from this here grid, aye. You see it? Give me the answer.”
    “Five hours in thirty-five point two kilometers,” says Mendoza without hesitation.
    “Beautiful, ma’am,” he assures her. “Red light now. Watch for it! Let me know when.”
    Seconds pass. Mendoza begins to frown. “Let me know when,” the Captain repeats. More time goes by and Mendoza clenches her fists, saying nothing. The blue flame flickers high and wild.
    “Well, that still weren’t bad,” the Captain tells her soothingly. “Time. Coda and Exit Three.”The device swings back under the table and she sits up, blinking, looking dazed.
    “Yer doing grand, dearie. I’ll wager none of them Company cyborgs could survive a upgrade like you got and still have anything left to think with! But my girl’s smart as paint, ain’t she? Now, bedtime. Alec’s waiting for you.”
    Mendoza smiles and lets him lead her into the adjoining room.
    This formerly housed the ship’s decompression chamber. That area has been transformed into a regeneration tank by filling it with the blue oxygenated medium used for intensive life support. Through its windows can be glimpsed a man, floating motionless in the azure light.
    His body is long and lanky but powerfully made, with a slightly odd articulation in the arms and shoulders, and his head and face look a little odd, too: very high wide cheekbones, wide mouth, long nose with a certain irregularity in its bridge suggesting it has been broken.
    He is, at least as far as birth certificates and fingerprints go, Alec William St. James Thorne Checkerfield, seventh earl of Finsbury. Appearances can be deceiving, however. The mind occupying Alec’s corporeal premises, so to speak, belongs to another gentleman, long disembodied but arguably still alive, who answers to the name of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
    Or would do so, were he not deeply unconscious. This is because he is recovering from a near-fatal accident and being rendered immortal in the process. His severed leg has been reattached, his shattered bones mended and converted, atom by atom, to indestructible ferroceramic. Tiny biomechanicals are working through his body, modifying or replacing organs, transforming, transmuting, perfecting, and the sea change has been under way for some weeks now.
    Mendoza walks to the window of the tank and presses her hands against it, peering in. The flame about her burns steady, a clear jet. Minutes pass. She appears to have forgotten anything but the man in the tank, and the Captain knows if he doesn’t do something she’ll stand there all night.
    “Bedtime, dearie,” he reminds her.
    “What?”
    “Bedtime. Look! There’s yer bed and nightie. And, see? Coxinga’s bringing cocoa. You get undressed now like a good lass.”
    “Okay,” she says, and takes off her clothes. The Captain watches her intently, not because he is a lecherous old Artificial Intelligence, but because in this, as in all things nowadays, she tends to focus on one action so closely she forgets anything else.
    But she manages to put on her nightgown and climb into the white infirmary bed without further prompting tonight; accepts the proffered cup of cocoa from another of the skeletal creatures and drinks it down. The creature reaches out to take back the empty cup and busies itself picking up her clothes from the places she