“She’s a good dog. She doesn’t bite.”
The excitement on the black-eyed boy’s face was bright. He put out his hands, gray fingers splayed, and chortled with delight. Jim slipped past him, ducked under the floating dog, and pulled himself into the galley proper. Alex and Fayez were already there, Alex held to the floor by magnetic boots and Fayez on the float but steadied on a handhold.
“Looks like they’re having fun,” Jim said as the Rocinante decanted fresh coffee into a bulb. “What exactly are they doing?”
“They’re playing catch,” Alex said, “with the dog.”
Jim sipped the bitter, lovely coffee, feeling the familiar warmth against his palate and down his throat. “Of course they are. I don’t even know why I asked.”
Reconfiguring the Falcon’s lab for a dual dive wasn’t trivial, and it wasn’t fast. Elvi had packed enough supplies in the Falcon for anything and everything to break, so getting her hands on another set of sensors, a second medical couch, and enough backup monitoring units was simply a matter of figuring out which crate in which cargo hold. They couldn’t move the walls of the lab, though, and finding the space for all the equipment and the technical staff was taking time and an apparently endless number of meetings. Added to that were the baseline scans for Amos, integrating the data from the Roci’s medical bay, and a series of long, in-depth interviews with Elvi intended to map the previous explorations of the library to the shifts in consciousness and knowledge that the mechanic had suffered.
As the days moved on, more new faces started appearing on the Roci. First, it was Fayez and Elvi, but as her time became more and more in demand, Fayez started coming over alone. Then bringing Cara and Xan with him, or more often, just Xan. Outside the galley, Muskrat woofed happily as she drifted past the galley’s door heading back toward Teresa.
“Kids are getting along well,” Fayez said.
“You’re just setting Teresa up as a babysitter, aren’t you?” Alex asked. “I mean, she’s old enough.”
“Xan’s twice her age, easy,” Fayez said.
“He’s a kid, though,” Alex said. “It’s just he’s been a kid for a really long time.”
“What do you do when the models fail?” Fayez said, spreading his hands. “Xan and Cara don’t really exist on the kid/not-kid spectrum. They’re just Cara and Xan.”
Teresa’s laughter boiled in from the corridor. Even with the months she’d spent on the Roci, it was an unfamiliar sound, harsh and joyous. Jim didn’t think of Teresa Duarte as the laughing type.
But maybe it was just that she didn’t often have the opportunity for it. There weren’t very many people who could see past her circumstances to the girl she actually was. Jim wasn’t sure he could, even. She was the daughter of the god-emperor, their human shield, the heir to Laconia, and its highest-ranking apostate. All that was true, but it wasn’t complete. There was a kid there too. One who’d lost her mother and her dad, who’d run away from home, who needed things emotionally that Jim could guess at. But he didn’t know. He was probably just as much a cipher to her.
There was something weirdly universal about her laughter, though. And Xan’s. The sound of young humans at play. Jim realized they were being quiet, all three of them, and listening to the kids like it was a piece of music.
Muskrat whined once—a high, nervous sound—and Teresa called for Xan to stop. A moment later, her face appeared at the door, flushed and sweaty. “Hey. Muskrat needs to use the little dogs’ room. Can I take Xan down to the machine shop so he can see how it works?”
Jim’s reflexive Sure, go ahead stumbled over the idea of Xan and Teresa alone in the ship. It wasn’t that he thought they’d do anything malicious—it turned out he trusted Teresa more than that—but in their present moods, something could happen by mistake. The machine shop of an aging Martian gunship wasn’t a great place for oopsies.
“I’ll come too,” Alex said, and tossed the last of his meal into the recycler.
Jim turned to Teresa, pointed his thumb at Alex, and said, “Don’t let him start playing with the tools.”
The girl rolled her eyes, seeing through Jim’s weak joke to the concerns behind it and dismissing them out of hand. Alex clapped his shoulder on the way out, and Jim drank more of his coffee as girl and boy and dog and man muttered and chuckled their way to the lift shaft, and then down.
“Thank you,” Fayez said.
“You’re welcome. For what?”
“Letting Xan come get a little time away from the pressure cooker. He puts a good face on everything we’re doing, but it’s hard for him. Every time Cara goes in, I think he worries about how much of her is coming back.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. We’re not in territory with much precedent. We’ll pretty much know there’s a massive change coming when it’s already happened.”
“I know the feeling,” Jim said. He finished his coffee and tossed the bulb away.
“Thanks for letting me come over here too. The Falcon’s a fine ship, and the company’s generally not the worst, but after a few months on the float, I do start fantasizing about long walks by rivers and university coffee shops.”
Jim laughed politely, but there was a tightness in his chest. He keyed in a simple breakfast of eggs and beans. “I am sorry about that.”
“About what?” Fayez asked.
“Sticking you here. You and Elvi. I mean, I did kind of fuck you two over by getting you the job.”
Fayez tilted his head. Jim had known him since Ilus, and the years lay gently on the man. His hair was still thick and darker than it probably had a right to be. The lines in his face mostly gave evidence of laughter. Now he only looked thoughtful.
“I know why we’re here. If anything, we should thank you for the opportunity.”
“Okay, now you’re bullshitting me.”
Fayez was quiet for a long moment. Then, “You have a minute? I want to show you something.”
Jim shrugged, paused the meal, and followed as the other man led the way to the lift shaft, then to the airlock, and into the Falcon. The weird astringent smell was still there, but it wasn’t as assaulting now as the first time he’d smelled it. Familiarity had numbed him.
Fayez turned down a long hallway, heading down toward the ship’s reactor and drive decks. It was eerie seeing the same Martian design language that had built the Rocinante grown and complicated into the Laconian flesh of the Falcon. It reminded Jim of a documentary he’d seen about parasitic fungi that took over ants. Here was a ship that had been Martian, that became infected by the protomolecule and the ambitions of Winston Duarte, and now it looked similar and acted similar and you could almost mistake it for the kind of ship that the Roci still was. But this was something else.
“You know we keep Xan isolated when Cara goes on her dives, right?”
“I do,” Jim said.
“The idea is that he’d just be an extra variable. Another influence we’d have to correct for. But he’s also the control group. We see how Cara changes and how he doesn’t, and maybe that tells us something we need to know.”
A dark-haired woman with her attention on a hand terminal drifted into the corridor in front of them. When she glanced up and saw Jim, a glimmer of panic came into her eye. He nodded as they passed.
“That makes sense to me,” Jim said.
“And when we’re not doing that, we use the same rig to isolate the catalyst. It’s a lot like Ilus. You had a sample of the protomolecule on your ship, and it was accessing all the artifacts on Ilus. Flipping switches. Seeing what came on.”