“There has to be a way to stop these things,” said Falconi. His voice was low, gravelly, as if he were suppressing an unpleasant emotion.
Kira lifted her head and let it bang back against the wall. In the two-and-a-quarter g’s, the impact was a hard, painful blow that made stars flash before her eyes. “The Soft Blade is capable of so much. More than I really understand. If it’s unbound and unbalanced, I don’t see how it can be stopped.… This situation with the nightmares is the worst sort of grey goo, nanobot catastrophe.” She snorted. “A real nightmare scenario. It’s just going to keep eating and growing and building.… Even if we kill whatever it is that Carr and the Jelly, Qwon, have turned into, there are still the other nightmares with the flesh of the Soft Blade. Any one of them could start the whole thing over. Hell, if a single speck of the Maw survives, it could infect someone else, just like at Sigma Draconis. There’s just no, no way to—”
“Kira.”
“—to contain it. And I can’t fight it, can’t stop it, can’t—”
“Kira.” The note of command in Falconi’s voice cut through the swarm of buzzing thoughts in her head. His ice-blue eyes were fixed on her, steady and—in a way—comforting.
She allowed some of the tension to bleed out of her body. “Yeah. Okay… I think the Jellies might have dealt with something like this before. Or at least, I think they knew it was possible. Itari didn’t seem surprised.”
Falconi cocked his head. “That’s encouraging. Any idea how they contained the nightmares?”
She shrugged. “With a whole lot of death is my guess. I’m not real clear on the details, but I’m pretty sure their whole species was endangered at one point. Not necessarily because of nightmares, but just because of the scale of the conflict. They were even fighting a Seeker at one point, same as us.”
“In that case, it sounds like Hawes is right; you need to talk with the Jelly. Maybe it can give you some answers. There might be ways we don’t know about to stop the nightmares.”
Encouragement wasn’t what Kira was expecting from Falconi, but it was a welcome gift. “I will.” She looked down at the deck and picked at a piece of dried food stuck in the grating. “Still … it’s my fault. All of this is my fault.”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Falconi.
“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m the one who caused this war. Me. No one else.”
Falconi tapped the edge of his cards against the floor in an absentminded fashion, although he was too sharp, too aware, for the motion to be careless. “You can’t think like that. It’ll destroy you.”
“There’s more,” she said, soft and miserable.
He froze. Then he gathered up the rest of the cards and started to shuffle them. “Oh?”
Now that she’d started confessing, Kira couldn’t stop. “I lied to you. The Jellies weren’t the ones who killed my team.…”
“What do you mean?”
“Like with the Numenist. When I’m scared, angry, upset, the Soft Blade acts out. Or it tries to.…” The tears were rolling down her cheeks now, and Kira made no attempt to stop them. “Pretty much everyone on the team was pissed off when I came out of cryo. Not at me, not exactly, but I was still responsible, you know? The colony was getting canceled, we were going to lose our bonuses. It was bad. I ended up getting in an argument with Fizel, our doctor, and when Alan and I went to bed—” She shook her head, the words stuck in her throat. “I was still all messed up, and then … then that night, Neghar was coughing. She must have gotten a bit of the xeno in her, from rescuing me, see? She was coughing and coughing, and there was … there was so much blood. I was scared. C-couldn’t help it. Scared. A-and the Soft Blade came out stabbing. It-it stabbed Alan. Yugo. Seppo. J-Jenan. But it was because of me. I’m responsible. I killed them.”
Kira bent her neck, unable to bear Falconi’s gaze, and allowed the tears to fall freely. On her chest and legs, the suit roiled in response. Revulsion filled her, and she clamped down on the xeno’s reactions, forcing it to subside.
She flinched as Falconi’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. He held her like that, and after a few seconds, Kira allowed her head to rest against his chest while she cried. Not since the Extenuating Circumstances had she mourned so openly. The revelation of the nightmares had stirred up old pains and added to them.
When her tears had begun to dry and her breathing slow, Falconi released her. Embarrassed, Kira dabbed at her eyes. “Sorry,” she said.
He waved a hand and got to his feet. Moving as if he had bone-rot, he shambled across the galley. She watched as he turned on the kettle, made two mugs of chell, and then carried them back to where she sat.
“Careful,” he said, handing her one.
“Thanks.” She wrapped her hands around the warm mug and breathed in the steam, savoring the smell.
Falconi sat and ran his thumb around the rim of his cup, chasing a drop of water. “Before I bought the Wallfish, I worked for Hanzo Tensegrity. It’s a big insurance company out of Sol.”
“You sold insurance?” Somehow Kira found that hard to believe.
“I got hired to vet claims by miners, stakeholders, freelancers, that sort of thing. Only problem was, the company didn’t really want us to vet anything. Our actual job was to, ah, discourage claimants.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t take it after a while, so I quit. Not the point. One claim I had, there was a boy who—”
“A boy?”
“It’s a story. Listen. There was a boy who lived on a hab-ring out by Farrugia’s Landing. His father worked maintenance, and every day, the boy would go with his father, and the boy would clean and check the skinsuits the maintenance crew used.” Falconi flicked the drop of water off the mug. “It wasn’t a real job, of course. Just something to keep him busy while his father was working.”
“Didn’t he have a mother?” Kira asked.
Falconi shook his head. “No other parent. Not mother, not a second paterfamilias, not grandparents, not even a sibling. All the boy had was his father. And every day, the boy cleaned and checked the suits, laid them in a line, ran diagnostics before the maintenance crew went out to tend the hull of the hab.”
“And then?”
Falconi’s eyes seemed to burn into her. “One of the guys—they were almost all guys—one of the guys, he didn’t like anyone touching his suit. Made him antsy, he said. Told the boy to knock it off. Thing is, regs were clear; at least two people had to inspect all safety equipment, skinsuits included. So the boy’s father told him to ignore the jerk and keep doing what he was doing.”
“But the boy didn’t.”
“But he didn’t. He was young, just a kid. The jerk convinced him that it was okay. He—the jerk, that is—would run the diagnostics himself.”
“But he didn’t,” Kira murmured.
“But he didn’t. And one day … poof. The suit ripped, a line tore, and Mr. Jerk died a horrible, agonizing death.” Falconi moved closer. “Now who was to blame?”
“The jerk, of course.”
“Maybe. But the regs were clear, and the boy ignored them. If he hadn’t, the man would still be alive.”
“He was only a child, though,” Kira protested.
“That’s true.”
“So then the father was to blame.”
Falconi shrugged. “Could be.” He blew on his chell and then took a sip. “Actually, it turned out to be bad manufacturing. Defect in the suits; the rest of them would have failed, given time. The whole batch had to be replaced.”