“Listen,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you cannot trust Dr. Cortázar. I’m almost positive he intends to hurt you. Maybe kill you.” Then, a moment later, “Probably kill you.”
She felt a wave of vertigo, and the autodoc threw up a warning. It was just that she was hungry. That she needed water, that was all. Teresa shook her head. “Why?”
Elvi took a deep breath and spoke softly. “I think to give a well-known subject to the repair drones and see what they do. He has two others, but he didn’t have the kind of scans and prep work that he has with you. That and… he wants what you and your father were going to have. He wants to live forever too.”
Like the frogs, Teresa thought, and fought back cruel, despairing laughter. He wants to treat me just like the frogs. Nature eats babies all the time.
Holden had known too. He’d tried to tell her. That was two different people who’d warned her. Two different people who’d discovered the same thing. Elvi was holding her hand. The one that didn’t have a needle in it.
“I’ve been trying to keep him away from you,” Elvi said. “But Cortázar’s very important. Without him… your father’s recovery gets a lot harder. Everything gets a lot harder.”
“We have to tell Trejo,” Teresa said.
“He knows,” Elvi said, her voice dark. “I told him. We’re doing what we can. But you should know too. You should protect yourself.”
“How?”
Elvi started to say something, stopped, started again. There were tears in her eyes, but her voice was steady. “I don’t know. I’m in over my head here.”
“Yeah,” Teresa said. “Me too.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex
You should rest,” Caspar said. “How many double shifts are you now?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said, leaning his back against the galley bulkhead. “But I can’t see that one more’s going to kill me.”
“Isn’t until it is,” Caspar said. “But that’s not even all of it. As hard as you’ve been working, you’re going to start making mistakes.”
Alex scowled at the boy. He knew Caspar hadn’t meant it as an insult. Knowing was what kept him from being angry. Or from showing it at least.
“When you catch me screwing up, I’ll stop taking doubles,” Alex said. “Until then…”
Caspar raised his hands in surrender, and Alex went back to his meal. Textured yeast paste and a bulb of water. It was his lunch if he was second shift, breakfast if he was third. So, in a sense, it was both.
The Storm had burned hard to get away from Laconian forces, but no one had chased it. No one dared to. To judge from the newsfeeds, most people weren’t sure what they’d done to kill the Tempest, and no one wanted to risk that they’d do it again. Which was just as well, because the more they pushed, the clearer it was how much the victory had compromised them.
Every shift found new, unexpected degradations in the Storm. Vacuum channels that weren’t transmitting power, regenerative plating that had stopped regenerating, atmosphere leaks so subtle that they couldn’t be located except as the slow and steady loss of pressure. Alex was no engineer, but he’d been on the Storm as long as any of them and in space since well before many of them had been born. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was working to keep the ship together. He stopped when exhaustion promised a fast, deep, and dreamless sleep.
It wasn’t the first time he’d used work to keep his emotions at bay. On and off his whole life, there had been times like this when the danger of feeling what he felt was too much to face. Some people got drunk or got in fights or hit the gym until they collapsed. He’d done all those things too, but with the Storm as beat up as it was, and the crew as injured and sick as many still were, this was fine. It kept him busy and it kept the ship alive.
Even so, it was imperfect. He knew he wasn’t healed, and he suspected he wasn’t even healing. The pain came in odd moments. When he was just waking up or going to sleep and his mind wandered. Then, sure. But also when he was crawling through the access spaces looking for a broken line or at the medical bay getting his daily ration of medication to keep the lining of his gut
from sloughing off again. It would sneak up on him, and for a few seconds he’d be lost in his own mind, and the oceanic sorrow there.
It was about Bobbie, of course, but it spilled over. In his worst moments, he also found himself thinking about Kit’s upcoming marriage. About Holden and that terrible last run they’d had together on Medina when he’d been captured. Talissa, his first wife, and Giselle, his second one. Amos, who was the worst loss in this because he’d just vanished into the enemy lines. Alex might never know what had happened to him. All the families he’d had, and all the ways he’d lost them. It felt like too much to bear, but he bore it. And after a few minutes the worst would pass, and he could get back to work.
The passage through the ring gates into Freehold system went as well as they could have hoped. Alex let Caspar do the heavy lifting. It was going to be his job soon enough, and it was better that he get the practice. They came in hot, bent their trajectory hard for the Freehold gate, and shot back out into normal space. In theory, it was possible to hit a gate from the realspace side at the perfect angle and make the transit through the intervening space in a straight line. In practice, there was usually a little flex, but Caspar did a good job. As good as Alex could have managed. They threw a fast torpedo at the only thing that looked like a Laconian sensor array, blowing it to dust before they made their last course correction. It was as close to anonymity as they could ask without the shell game.
Freehold itself was a straightforward little system. The one habitable planet was a little smaller than Mars. Then a slightly larger one farther out with an unwelcoming atmosphere, and a series of three gas giants protecting the inner system. The Storm’s home port was there, in the shadow of the giant they called Big Brother when they were being polite and Big Fucker when they weren’t. It was a fraction larger than Jupiter back in Sol, with a blue-green swirling atmosphere and constant electrical storms that created arcs of lightning longer than the Earth was wide. Alex watched it grow close on the Storm’s scopes, saw the black dot against it that was the rocky moon where they hid. Long-dead volcanism had left lava tubes big enough to land the Storm and a small fleet like her under the lunar surface, and that’s where they were headed. Toward the permanent base of Belter engineers and underground operatives that Bobbie had called the “pit crew.”
The knock at his cabin door was polite. Even tentative. Caspar stayed in the corridor, braced with a handhold.
“Hey,” the boy said. “You coming?”
“Where to?” Alex asked.
“Bridge. You got to take us in, yeah? Tradition. A pilot retires, he takes himself to the last port.”