It wasn’t chaos, or if it was, it was no more than usual. It was the blossoming of hope where there had been no hope before. It was everything Bobbie had intended it to be, except for one detail.
For himself, the radiation sickness was bad, but the physical distress at least kept his mind busy. When he felt well enough to work, he threw in with the repair crews. He wasn’t surprised when Jillian Houston—Captain Houston—called him into her office. He’d been expecting it.
The cabin was small and spare. Laconian officers didn’t show off. Another thing they’d inherited from Mars. Alex remembered his own commanders embracing the same austerity, back when he’d been a different man and the universe had made sense. The few decorations and belongings that had been Bobbie’s were on the desk. Jillian looked thinner than before, and paler too. The radiation sickness had hit her harder, but it hadn’t stopped her.
“Alex,” she said. Her voice was gentler than usual. Like now that she’d taken power, she didn’t have to be as aggressive. “I wanted you to … I thought she’d have wanted you to take care of her things.”
“Thank you,” Alex said, reaching for them.
“Please sit.”
He did. Jillian leaned forward, her fingers steepled. “We need repairs. We need to regroup. And we need to go to ground before Laconia gets their shit together and sends ships after us.”
“All right,” Alex said. His heart wasn’t in it. Maybe it was because he was sick. Maybe it was grief. Where one started and the other stopped was difficult if not impossible to locate.
“I’ve decided to take us back to Freehold. We have the support there. And the Storm’s home base facility. We can get her back up to trim. Resupply from the colony. Plan our next moves.”
She looked at him like she expected him to say something. He wasn’t sure what that would be. He considered the things on the table. A tunic. A little glass-and-ceramic commendation she’d gotten from the UN, signed by Chrisjen Avasarala. He was surprised there wasn’t more, and he was a little surprised there was even that much.
“I think that’s a good plan,” he said. “The risky part will be getting through the gates, but with no Medina Station, we don’t have to try to sneak out in a supply ship. That makes it easier.”
When Jillian spoke again, there was a thickness in her voice like passion or sorrow. Or rage. “Draper was a good captain. And a better war leader. She made this ship what it is, and no one on the Storm will ever forget her or the sacrifice she made for us.”
“Thank you,” Alex said.
“I need to make this my ship now. In her tradition and her honor, but my command. I wish it wasn’t like that, but it’s where we are. You understand.”
“I do.”
“Good. Because I need you as my XO.”
Alex looked at her. He knew the answer and what he was going to do as clearly as if he’d actually been thinking about it. All his next steps laid out before him.
“Thank you,” he said. “But no. This is your ship, and that’s the way it should be. I’ve got one of my own.”
Chapter Thirty-Four: Elvi
Elvi woke up gasping.
“Hey hey hey,” Fayez said, shifting in the bed beside her. His hand on her back grounded her. It made the dream scatter back a little. She leaned into it. “Nightmare?” he asked.
“Worse,” she said. “You know that dream where you’ve got the big presentation that you forgot about, and now you have to pretend you did eight months of work on something you’ve got no clue on?”
“That is your go-to for bad dreams.”
“That, except that usually when I have it, I just have to wake up and things are better,” she said, smoothing back her hair. “I’d give three fingers and an eye to only have a blown lecture to worry about.”
He shifted, the familiar warmth of his body moving alongside her. “How’s your gut?” he asked. And then, when she didn’t answer, “You need to eat, darling.”
“I do. I will. It’s just …”
“I know.”
She reached for her cane, but when she stood, she put more weight on her hurt leg. The pain felt right. She went to the bathroom first, then started pulling on clothes. It was still dark out, apart from the lights of the State Building, the glow of the city, and the construction platforms glittering against the stars.
“Come back to bed,” Fayez said. “It’s too early.”
“I’m not going to sleep anyway. I’ll go out to the university. Get a jump on the day.”
“You have to get some rest.”
“Rest for me,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek, and then again on the neck. They were still for a moment.
When Fayez spoke, his voice didn’t have its usual lightness. “I will find a way to get us out of this if I can.”
“Out of this?”
“The part where you’re surrounded by psychopaths and politicians. We’ll steal a little ship, head out to some backwater colony world and spend the rest of our lives trying to get cucumbers to grow in poison soil. It’ll be great.”
“It would be heaven,” she said. “Go back to bed. I’ll come back when I can.”
The State Building was almost pleasant at night. Something about the quietness made it seem like she had freedom. There were just as many guards, just as many surveillance drones. Maybe it was just millennia of evolution priming her brain to believe that what happened in the darkness was hidden, private, and peculiar. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and went to the commissary. There would be something there—coffee and sweet rice, if nothing else. She couldn’t keep much more than that down anyway.
The work in Cortázar’s lab was punishing. There were a couple of decent virtual context translators in the lab. They helped enough that when his notes were couched in terms of nanoinformatics—complex imaginary information loss, Deriner functions, implicit multipliers—she could understand it in exo-biological terms like functional regulation site persistence across generations. How either or both of them would ever be able to make the issues clear to Admiral Trejo, she couldn’t imagine. But she’d been able to explain convergent evolution to undergraduates, once upon a time. So maybe she’d come up with something.
The commissary was bright and quiet. An attendant nodded to her as she entered. Or maybe he was a guard. Same thing. Elvi got herself a cup of tea—the coffee smelled too acidic and aggressive when she got close to it—and a bagel with butter and jelly. She didn’t want to go to the pens or Cortázar’s private labs. She didn’t want to spend another day with Cara and Xan. She also didn’t want to stay here. But most of all, she didn’t want to do what she knew she had to do. Tell Trejo about Cortázar.
She’d wanted to find proof. A smoking gun somewhere in his notes. She’d gone over everything she could find about Duarte’s transubstantiation—her term for it, not theirs—hoping to find something that showed Cortázar didn’t intend to let Teresa follow in her father’s footsteps, and that he never had. There was nothing. Either he’d never put it in his written musings or he’d erased it carefully enough that she couldn’t find it.
Her hand terminal had a reminder function. It was meant to alert her when meetings were about to start, and one of the options was to let her know when the other people were already together. She’d made a fake appointment with Cortázar and Teresa with an unfixed time. It meant that anytime the two of them were in close proximity, she was notified, and would be until one of them noticed it on their schedule and wiped it out. She was almost certain that her unexpected appearance at the medical wing was the only thing that had kept Cortázar’s work with Teresa from moving forward already.