“Yes, a tuner,” she repeats. “Pass me that bolt, please?”
I break my stare and look where she’s pointing. There are small bolts that I recognize, the ones that hold the control consoles to the main panel. I hand her the bolt, but only after slipping one of the lock washers on it. She narrows her eyes at me like she just watched a monkey perform a trick. “I’m Claire.” She holds out her hand, which is streaked with grease. I shake it. “What d’you go by?”
I laugh. Nerves, I guess. “Lately, I go by That Idiot. In the army, they just called me Soldier. But back in flight school, we were given call signs.”
She laughs. “What was your call sign?”
“It wasn’t a very good one,” I warn.
“Lay it on me. Another bolt, please.”
I prep and hand her another bolt. “My call sign was Digger.”
Claire’s laugh echoes from within the cavity. I shift in place while she works.
“It was supposed to be Tomb Digger,” I explain. “Which is… you know… really badass. But my flight instructor didn’t like me, and he saw me rub my nose one time, and said I was a nose digger, and that from then on I’d just go by Digger. So that was it.” I shrug, even though she’s not looking.
“Tell the truth,” she calls out. “You were picking your nose, right? Not just scratching it. Give me the lock nuts.”
Her hand emerges. I place the three lock nuts in her palm. “I may have been picking it,” I say. “I’m not proud.”
“No, you’re not. I can tell that about you.”
I can’t determine if this is a compliment or not. It definitely doesn’t feel like a compliment.
“So where’d you serve, soldier?”
“All over. Orion. Humbolt. Dakka. Did my first tour on Gturn.”
Claire whistles. “They always had you in the shit, didn’t they?”
“Hip deep.”
She wiggles free from the space, and I move back to give her room. She has on a white NASA tank top. No bra. A trim and muscular physique. Not what I expect in an egghead. She starts working on one of the main consoles, and I watch, following what she’s doing. Looks like a master reboot sequence, but she’s rewriting the config.sys before it goes through, coding faster than I can type.
“Let’s see if this works,” she mutters.
The lights go off around us. Pitch black. There’s a distant thunk from the massive power relays two floors below. Pinpricks of light make themselves known through several of the portholes as my eyes gradually adjust. There’s something sensual about this, exhaling and inhaling in that dark space with someone else. I can feel her presence like I have radar. I can tell that there’s another person in the darkness with me, that I’m not alone. I stand frozen, afraid to move my limbs, afraid of what I might do with them.
The lights come back on. Claire is staring intently at one of the portholes. I look as well. The pulsing, fluttering, palpitating, unsure lights of the shocked and alarmed have returned to that steady metronome, that constant and confident pulse.
Claire smiles at me.
“Much better,” she says.
I agree.
• 4 •
Cricket pounces on me as I enter the lifeboat. She holds me against the deck, massive paws on my chest, and growls and growls. Clamping down on my arm with her mouth, she squeezes like she wants to bite me. But she just holds me there, making threatening noises in her throat.
I let her have it out and scratch her neck. Relenting, she lets go, mews at me, then licks my face through my open visor.
“I know, I know,” I tell her, stroking her head, trying to calm her down. “I’m sorry. Everything’s okay. I’m sorry.”
I exude these thoughts. Cricket lowers her weight against me, as if we’re going to lie just outside the airlock and take a nap.
“Up,” I say. “We gotta go. Can’t abandon our station. Everything’s okay here.”
Better than okay. But I can’t stay. After an hour of watching Claire work, sweating in my walksuit, feeling useless and awkward, I had to beg my leave. Despite every craving in every cell of my body, I had to beg my leave.
Cricket and I head back to our beacon at half-thrust. I leave one of the displays set to the rear camera, and I watch the unblemished and new recede as I crawl across empty space toward my rundown home. Cricket is passed out on the seat beside me, her body sprawled over the armrest so that her head can reach my arm, pinning it to my seat with the weight of her exhaustion. Must’ve worn herself out pacing and fretting while I was gone. When I need to adjust the throttle, I lean across and use my left hand so I don’t disturb her. What the hell am I doing? Aiding and abetting a fugitive, and now harboring an alien. This is what happens when they give you medals for breaking the rules—you forget the rules apply to you.
Opening the airlock to my home, I smell the tiredness of the place. The clean atmo in the other beacon cleared my nostrils, and now I can smell that the air I live in isn’t foul so much as stale. The scrubbers are doing their job more admirably than I thought. Hell, they’re doing their job more admirably than I am.
Shedding the walksuit, I head toward the ladder. Cricket seems to read my mind and leaps for it first. She wraps her paws around a rung halfway up, lunges again, and grabs the lip. Elbows jut down as she scrambles, rear legs wheeling, tail corkscrewing. Every time she goes up a ladder, it looks like she might not make it, but she always does. I’m already climbing up behind her, the air cool on my sweaty skin, just my sleep shorts on. Cricket takes advantage of my hands being occupied at the top of the ladder and gets in a lick on my head and one on my cheek before I can ward her away.
“No lick,” I tell her, wiping my cheek. I’ve tried to train this out of her. “Never lick me again,” I say, shaking a finger at her. She sits and cocks her head to the side. “Last time. Never again. No licking. I mean it.”
Her tail swishes the steel grating. I pat her head. I swear she can read my mind, and yet somehow she doesn’t seem to hear a word I say. I scratch behind her ears and ask, “These are just for decoration, aren’t they?”
She licks my hand. I don’t know why I even try.
Up another ladder, I start the shower pod. I let it steam up inside, the water recycling over and over. When it looks like one of those cig smoking rooms in a spaceport, I crack the door and step through the fog and into the scalding hot. The death and tiredness boils off my skin. I scrub the old cells away, getting at the new me beneath. Soap and lather. I fumble for my razor and run it under the shower head before rolling it across my face. Little patches of hair elude me. I wash my hair, then turn my back to the jet and just let the heat pound into my spine. Water so damn hot. I pee while standing there, remembering Hank from B Company who used to get angry when anyone did this. One whiff of pee in the showers, and Hank’d go ballistic, looking everywhere for the yellow stream. We’d accuse him of using this as an excuse to go around studying our dicks.
Hank was my best friend in the company—for all of the two weeks he was alive with us in the trenches. It was a long two weeks. There aren’t any rules about how long you gotta know someone to know you love them. The army taught me that. You can hate the moment you line up your barrel, and you can love the second you lower it. Back and forth like that. Oscillating grav panels. There’s no up or down to the cosmos, just a whole bunch of fucking sideways. Just people loving and hating. And no rules on how long it takes.
I turn off the shower as the heat starts to die down from boiling to mere scalding. My flesh is red. Steam rises off me as I leave the pod. Cricket is fast asleep on my bed; she wakes long enough to glance at me, make sure she isn’t missing anything, then goes back to sleep.