" "I can do that," David offered." "I can do that," David offered. "You?" "I'm not incompetent, Denni. I know how to fix my own ship." "I didn't mean that. I meant, well, you're the Captain. I thought Terran ship's captains didn't 'lower' themselves to doing repair and maintenance." He frowned at her very Pendorian attitude and said, "This ship's too small for me not to." He walked out of the room and returned with a testbed console. Sitting himself on the floor, he proceeded to type ident numbers from various chips and plug them into the breadboard. "You know what your problem is?" Denni said. "Your creators are still herd animals. You put enough humans in a room together and they'll all alpha-male each other until one's in charge, and then they'll all follow him unquestioningly, no matter how lunatic his ideas are." David looked up at her for a second, trying to decide how to respond to that. She was talking about his creators, his gengineers. "At least," he started, "I wasn't gengineered to be a sex toy." Denni looked up sharply, staring at him. "Hey," she said. "Don't take that attitude with me, David. You Terrans all make those jokes about Shardik, talk about him as if he weren't even a real person, just some thing, and you don't really know what he did for us. |