“I want you to tell me my options,” I say.
“You know your options,” she says. “You destroy that vessel.”
“And the Room?” I ask.
She looks at me for the longest time. “I’d need to see it,” she says.
I swallow hard. I’m not going back there. I’m not going to go inside that Room ever again. I’m not going to look at the habitats or the docking areas or the station, looming out of the darkness.
“You said you mapped it,” she says.
I let out a breath.
“I have a place we can view things. Did you record inside the Room itself?”
“No,” I say. “But Karl did.”
There isn’t much. The cameras on his suit quit about the time he died. Roderick and Mikk tried to recover the information.
I didn’t help at all, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look at the last minutes—the last few days—of Karl’s life.
But I will, with Squishy.
Because she’s right.
I have to.
Her setup is inside her medical practice. There are several rooms set up for holographic projection, some of which re-create patients on surgical tables. Apparently she uses this place to review what she or others have done.
It reminds me of the lounge in the Business, only this setup is more efficient.
Nothing else happens in these rooms except viewing. Viewing and learning and understanding.
It takes a while to make my recordings compatible with her system. I let her worry about all of that. While she does it, I wander the practice, trying to figure out who Squishy is now.
The practice itself is comfortable. Patients enter a waiting area that tailors itself just for them. When I walk inside that room, it becomes a replica of a space ship’s cockpit. The cockpit is generic—it has a fake star map outside its portals and the guidance equipment is out of date—but I’m instantly comfortable.
The room takes information from my various chips and re-creates the environment I’m in the most often.
As I stand there, not taking the pilot’s chair, the room seems to think I’m uncomfortable. A holographic list appears before me. A soft female voice tells me I can reprogram the room to one of these other places.
One of them is a spaceport bar.
Obviously, I’ve spent too much time on Longbow Station.
I leave the waiting area and investigate the examination rooms. They’re as patient-specific as the waiting area. Because I haven’t logged in, the rooms want to know if I’m a visitor, a family member, or a patient.
I don’t answer.
I back out quickly and wander the corridors. The private areas are locked.
No one else is here, except for me and Squishy.
So I go back to the viewing area.
Squishy is still fiddling with the machinery. I lean against the wall and wait.
This woman is different from the one who left the Business years ago. The weight isn’t the only thing that’s changed. The military posture is gone as well.
I understand the medical practice—she has found a new way to expiate all her guilt from those deaths—but I don’t understand the children.
I asked her about them as we walked down to the village.
She shrugged. Then when I pressed her for an answer, she said, “Everyone needs a place to go.”
“That girl, the one who got you,” I said, “she’s clearly family.”
Squishy gave me a sideways look—one I couldn’t read.
“Oh,” she said softly. “They’re all family.”
And she wouldn’t say anything else.
Now she stands, puts a hand on her back like it hurts her, and turns around. “Got it,” she says.
I take a deep breath. I’m not sure I want to see this.
“You can leave, you know,” she says.
But I can’t. She needs me to explain what she’s seeing. She needs context, and only I can provide it.
The station looks small. Nothing we recorded shows the vastness of the place, the sense of emptiness that we all felt when we first examined it.
Not even the Business, locked into one of the docking rings, gives it a real sense of perspective.
At first, Squishy and I discuss size, measurements—both the ones that my team took when it arrived and the ones my father claimed he had.
I explain again that my father’s information isn’t trustworthy, that he has lied to me all along.
But Squishy waves her hand to silence me.
“We can download more information when we need it,” she says. “Others have been to the Room as well.”
We. I’m not sure how I feel about the word “we.” I don’t want us both to investigate anything. I just want her help repairing the damage I’ve already done.
I want to know my options.
Squishy is acting like we have a mission.
For three nights, we examine the footage of the Room. Fortunately, Squishy has turned down the audio. Karl does start to talk about twelve hours in, speculating, wondering if we can find him or if he’s entered another dimension.
Mikk listened to the audio on the way back, hoping to figure out what went wrong. He’s as haunted as I am, only he blames himself. I keep telling him that what happened is my fault. Odette forcefully told him that it’s my father’s fault, but Mikk blames himself.
I do understand that. When you’re part of a mission, you believe that you have to do everything you can to make it go well.
When it doesn’t go well, you review, make certain things will go well the next time. That’s part of our training.
When things go horribly awry—when someone dies—then you review as well. Only you carry the burden of that death, and the what-ifs become even more powerful.
You become more powerful. You imagine what would have happened if you spoke up a moment sooner, or tugged the line earlier, or refused to participate in the mission.
You try to find the one way the mission would have worked, and of course, you can’t. Or worse, you can.
I know what went wrong on the Dignity Vessel. I went wrong. So did Squishy. If I had told my divers it was a Dignity Vessel, they would have acted differently. If Squishy had told them that she worried the probe was stuck in an ancient stealth field, we never would have gotten near it.
Divers died because we did things wrong.
Jypé and Junior died.
But Karl died because my father and Riya Trekov lied to us. Much as I want to review that and change the decision to go with them, I know I would have done nothing different. All of my actions were correct—except, maybe, going in after Karl. That was reckless.
But I’m glad I did it.
Mikk’s actions were right too. We just can’t convince him of it.
And listening to Karl talk to himself in what, to him, was the last few days of his life, made Mikk feel even worse.
Squishy says she doesn’t need to hear it, although I know she’s making herself a copy of the imagery. I have a hunch she will listen when I am not around.
And I am grateful for that bit of sensitivity.
There isn’t much to see. The others told me that Karl claimed he heard music and saw lights, but none of that shows up on the imagery. I do explain the music and lights to Squishy. I give her my theories.
She pauses the imagery as I talk. “You heard sound?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s almost unbearable in the Room. It sounded like a faint hum on the Dignity Vessel. I noticed it when we went to get Junior.”
“Not before?”
I can no longer remember what I heard and when. Junior has woven his way into my dreams. My nightmares, actually. I still see his face behind that clouded helmet. Sometimes he speaks to me. Sometimes I watch him age and can do nothing about it.