by Anna Gaffey
“Masochist,” Boxhill mumbled.
“Lazy,” Jake corrected him. He pulled his arm out and examined it; the jab had scrawled a raw red V into the skin. He swiped it with alcohol and stuck on a heal patch from the dispenser atop the boost box. “Is Lindy taking care of the new recruits?”
“No, I talked to the pilot, your friend, guy, you know. So-and-so. Such and such.” Mick sat down in the rotating chair, and banged Jake’s console as if to jumpstart his memory. “Connor. He said they did their own boosts before docking. They’re all in the mess now.”
“Ah. Finally.” Apparently pilot duties weren’t that time-consuming after all.
“You should see the place—it’s nuts. Nat did a good job. But don’t you repeat that shit. She’s thrilled enough with herself as it is.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Bet I get a priority-ten memo in a few hours.” Mick pitched his voice higher, and clipped it into Nat’s scholarly old-time phrasing. “‘Attention to all crew. My hum-blest of thanks for your attendance and contribution to my contribution, this amazing psychological synchronization of humankind and nature among the stars…’” He trailed off, his eyes darting like startled fish.
“You sure you’re feeling all right, Mick?” Jake patted his shoulder. “You look bad.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you said that.” Boxhill rubbed at his temples. “All those damn supplies…everything just looks kind of shivery, you know? And the mess hall. It got me thinking. You know Nat wants to have a death picnic or something? Chubaryan and all them. I started thinking about that a little too much. Ghosts, man. Why?”
Yeesh. “Guess you have to believe in ghosts first.” Jake tried to look casual as he flicked the inside of his elbow. The heal patch had already done its work and was beginning to sink wetly into the skin. He still didn’t like the look of Mick’s eyes. “I’m not in any rush for that. I could stay.”
“No, really. I mean, that’d be great, but I’m good. And Mei’s totally feeling better. She might come up later, keep me company. You know how it is, anyway.” Mick motioned at the screen. “Most relaxing time of the day. Headaches aren’t even much of a problem anymore. Although this one time I thought Mei was up here and she wasn’t. Shadows, man. Brrr. Makes you think Nat might be onto something.”
Jake grimaced, and Mick laughed. “But hells, don’t you think better here? It’s so calm. Look at how calm I am.”
“Yeah,” Jake admitted. “Something about being out here in the middle of nowhere in general, I suppose. But it’s just you for now. You need to be on top of things.”
“I am, I’m fine. I’m good.” Mick scuffed his feet, and kicked the canvas sack still lying against the Control console base. He picked it up and dangled it suspiciously. “What’re these?”
“Legacy gems. Knock yourself out.”
Mick dropped it as if it were on fire. The sack clinked reproachfully. “Maybe later.”
“You know, I could comm Carmichael, or I could stay for a while, keep you from dropping us out of orbit or blowing us up—”
For a second, Mick looked almost grateful. But he waved a shooing hand at Jake. “Oh, hells, no. Seriously. Go check out the mess, eat some fresh reconstitution.”
Jake’s belly rumbled. “They bring any fruit?”
“Pineapple. Some other stuff. Oh, yeah, baby. You know you want some.”
Jake didn’t want to go. And yes, he did. And…he was an idiot. He turned toward the lift column and caught a flurry of motion. A tall form in a grey station uniform had just stepped around beyond the curve of the lifts. “Hey. Who—”
“What?” asked Mick.
“Hey.” Jake strode around the column. “This area is restricted. Who is that?”
There was no one there. No telltale crunch of the lifts starting up behind their closed doors, either. According to the lift map, Delta Lift was stalled somewhere down around Level 6. Jake pushed the call button, and the doors to Alpha slid open to reveal the lift box empty and waiting. Jake’s neck prickled. He could have sworn…but there was nothing.
Boxhill’s voice floated out from the other side of the column. “Who you talking at, dude?”
Jake stalked back around to the console. “No one, apparently.” For a moment, Boxhill’s orange head was haloed in a greyish cloud. Jake blinked, and the cloudiness rearranged itself into the normal background of consoles, polymerine, Selas.
“Now, you? You need to take some ease.” With a nerve-grinding squeal, Boxhill swiveled his seat and glared at Jake. “Seriously, man. Shadows. Ghosts. Don’t give Nat any fuel; she will eat that up. Will you get out of here already?” He screeeed back around to stare out at the fluid, shifting atmosphere of Selas as the planet waned slowly into deep green darkness. “You’re making me twitchy, too.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Brief break from cryo sleep this morning. I’ve read about the possibility of dreams in cryo but never experienced them before now. Exceedingly vivid. I was back in the surgery again, waiting for Hel to finish the prep, and I couldn’t find my gloves. So I went into the OR with my bare hands. I went ahead with the procedure, and as I finished my exploratory into the skull, I looked down to see the prep team had left his face uncovered. His face. Jeong’s. Instead of the patient’s, who was, oh, I forget. I can’t get it out of my mind. Horrible. I plan on requesting my dampening cocktail be fed through the cryo berth system for the duration of the trip to limit any further such meditations.”
Excerpt: personal ship’s log
12 July 2242
Dr. Alice Silverman
Clinical pathologist
Personnel Carrier Leah Harmon
United Worlds DS 2150-1
En route Selas Station, Satellite, Eos System
[Data recovered 02 Dec 2242, Gunaji rights per salvage]
31 October 2242 AEC
21:10
Jake skipped the lift and climbed down the emergency access tunnel to Level 4, Astrometrics and crew quarters. The ladder dropped out a few doors down from his own room, but his earlier idea of crawling into bed seemed untenably childish in the dimly lit corridor. At a loss, he stuck his hands in his pockets and meandered around, doing a halfhearted inspection of the halls that ran behind and around the crew quarters’ side of the level. Everything was quiet and deserted. Not a thing was out of place apart from a few ripe-smelling blue refuse sacks which, he was disgusted to see when he dared to look inside one, were filled with globs of pumpkin flesh. Nat, of course. Who else would order dehydrated pumpkins? Jake mentally composed a scathing memo to her as he dumped them into the incinerator chute. Then he again found himself staring down the door to his quarters.
He could send out a general comm begging off, thick with apologies. He could catch up on his reading. He could go through the stack of Science requisitions waiting on his desk for approval. All very appealing options.
On the opposite side of the level from crew quarters, he found the Astrometrics lab equally vacant. Selas dominated the wide observation window, mesmerizing in her proximity. Huge and cold and black, her green swirls of misty forest were blotted out by night, with the barest hint of light from the system’s star Eos showing in a faint corona around the curve. The yellow gaseous bulk of Helias, Selas’s lurker twin planet, loomed off to her left, giant and still half-golden by sunlight. Under the UW Commonwealth’s Space Governance system, they were technically 1H-24HM and 2X-24HM in orbit around G-class star 24HM (informally, Eos), since uninhabited worlds required an official naming appeal from colonial residents be submitted to United Worlds Working Group for Stellar Bodies Nomenclature. Pooh-poohing that, Nat had named them within a week of her arrival, and surprisingly—despite Jake’s reminder that mythological names were very out of fashion, and the crew’s usual reception to most of her impromptu ideas—the handles had stuck.
She was probably introducing the new recruits to her vocabulary at that exact moment. Jake imagined he could hear the muted noise of laughter and music w
afting up from the mess, up through the walls and out into the black: tiny particles, shreds of gaiety, like broken glass.
Glass. Yes, he could still see the slivered, reflective mess of it in his head, a shard of a memory he couldn’t restore. What had shattered, and when?
Now he was making things up. He couldn’t separate nervousness from nerves. And why? He was a reasonably gregarious guy. It was stupid to be nervous about seeing Con, and it was genetically impossible for Jake to be stupid. At worst, he’d be awkward. But he had brief memories of Con from before and after the accident, friendly, comfortable recollections surrounding his mental gap. He wasn’t sure what to make of those memories, nor was he sure he could even trust them. Had they been close friends? Colleagues? Passing acquaintances? Lovers?
They were something, he decided after a moment’s reflection, and not colleagues. Con’s name hadn’t appeared as Icebreaker lab staff listed in the Circuit Court documents. And no one would keep in active touch with a convicted felon unless they were at least friends, which Jake supposed they were now in an epistolary sense, despite his memories or lack of them. Con wasn’t saying anything, either. What that meant, Jake didn’t know. It was easier just to go along with it, especially when the only other communications he received were from the Gov Board, Science, the Bends lab team, or his mother. Or the odd prank-wank commtext dripping with creative gruesome wishes for his speedy demise.
He couldn’t blame the pranksters. When the Court had read out the names of the dead, he hadn’t recognized some of them. A natural oversight for a busy scientist, certainly, but one that still twisted his gut whenever Jake thought of it. Why should he remember every detail of Con? Stupid.
Yes, it was stupid. By now the entire personnel transport would likely be half in the bag. The new recruits probably wouldn’t even recognize Jake. He wouldn’t have to scorch anyone’s thoughtless curiosity until tomorrow at the earliest.
It’s just a stupid party. The admonishing voice in his head gave way to Santos’ dry she wants to have a séance and Con’s sardonic, familiar genius.
His fledgling courage—no, his interest, interest—dropped from nonexistent to negative.
Rather than dissect his feelings or bear down and go to the party like a sensible person, he took the lift back up to Level 2 and the main Science labs, where it was dark and cool and full of comforting smells like strong disinfectant and char. Pulling his notes on the Selas geologic samples, Jake called up an audio of an old mystery pulp from the Historical Society network memory gems, Dark Passage, and piped it through the lab speakers. After a few minutes of isotopes and Heart’s contralto audio, the sweat under his arms dried and he felt more or less like an adult again.
He was elbow-deep in the containment field, scraping stubborn growths from the edges of a U-shaped chunk of Selas surface stone, when the Science lab doors snicked open. A hulking figure loomed in the doorway. Jake stilled.
“Hello.” Carmichael sauntered in. “Don’t you ever stop working?”
“Sure.” Jake scraped a few more bits, capped the collection plate, and slowly drew his gloved arms out of containment. The field buzzed against his arms and the nodes in the gloves, wavered with a bluish ripple, and calmed again. “When the work’s done. Isn’t that what you always say?”
“Where did those come from?”
Jake pointed to his paperwork. “Remember the foundations?”
“Ah.”
The “foundations” were a strangely regular set of rocks on the surface of Selas, very near the original habitat for scientific exploration. Jake had been to them once, to collect this series, and was anxious to go back for more.
These particular stone samples were fascinating. According to the petrographic scans, they contained more pure mineral ore deposits than any strata Jake had ever seen from any United Worlds planet. They also reacted strangely to oxygen, which was odd because Selas had plenty in the atmosphere, enough for them to breathe safely on surface visits. And just what were the odd little growths on the exposed rock face? Putting up with Kai’s raging ill will was a small price to pay for getting an answer first. Jake had to stay fresh, too, with the arrival of new competition.
Like Silverman. She probably wouldn’t have anything to say to him, anything she hadn’t said on the stand. But she would have known Jake was stationed here at Selas. And still she came. The opportunity to speak to her, to ask questions about the Icebreaker days, thrilled Jake more than he wanted to admit. He would speak to her. Tomorrow.
Behind him, Carmichael coughed politely. “Rachel wanted me to find you.”
Carmichael was startlingly quick for such a crag of a guy. He’d maneuvered between the lab scanners and slouched against the wall across from the containment tray before Jake had even looked round. The close-shorn specks of his graying hair gleamed silver in the blue light from the containment field. Jake tapped the book audio to a low mutter and waited.
“She asked me when you were coming down. Said there was a general demand for ornery scientists.”
“There’s always Kai.” Jake pushed the plate under the console scope and fired it up. “Unless he’s still playing sick.” The screen blinked and focused into a grey chasm: a microscopic crevice on the surface of the tiny sample. The heavy mineral content was one thing. Despite the various tree and insect life on Selas, the ground samples they withdrew were always so clean of accrual. And there was no life below the surface, which made no sense. Yet. Odd, especially if this piece dated back as far as the others did. Stone with a defense mechanism, perhaps? But against what? Where was the supporting ecosystem on such a lush green planet? Were they dealing with a geologic sentience? Now that was an intriguing leap, and a silly one. He had to identify the mineral first, whatever it was, and then compare it with the original samples taken a century ago. Jake still hadn’t worked through that frozen backlog.
“Con Griffin,” Carmichael said. “How well do you know him?”
An unexpected segue. The readout blurred, and Jake fiddled with the control. “Why do you ask?”
“I didn’t recognize his voice today on the comm. Rachel said she’d never met him, either. She said you keep in touch, that you’ve known him a while. I wasn’t aware you had many friends on Earth.”
Supposedly, the art of making aimless genteel conversation while slicing to the bone had been Carmichael’s specialty back in the day. Combined with his penetrating gaze, his quiet voice, and his intimidating size, he had boasted a confession-and-conviction rate far beyond the norm of beefy Defense interrogators. And yet he was one of the few long-term staff aboard Selas Station who had willingly chosen the post.
Still, going from a United Worlds Defense’s quadrant Chief of Security (New States, Northwestern) to Stationmaster aboard a clunker Science space waystation months from the main human action had to require some adjustment, especially since the amount of skullduggery was next to nil. Carmichael didn’t get many chances to exercise the good old grilling muscles these days.
“I talk that way with a lot of pilots,” Jake said. “So does Santos. And she said that you were chatting with that woman from Tacoma Dome for, what, half an hour? That’s just what happens when you see the same rotating freighter crews. We all deal in talk out here.”
There. He’d finally nailed the focus dead-on. Carmichael shifted, and the lab table creaked under his weight.
“True,” he mused. “It’s just somewhat peculiar.”
Jake recalibrated the sensors for dating and zoomed in on one of the intriguing crevasses. Carmichael was still watching, damn him, relentless and silent. It was hard for Jake to keep his hands steady with every adjustment under such neck-prickling scrutiny. He relented. “What’s peculiar?”
“I’m glad you asked. Your comm records show you keep in regular touch with him. Text. Occasional vid. It’s peculiar, then, that he’s never once been to visit.”
“You know how it is.” Jake shrugged. “His route usually takes him to one of the other way
stations. And they’re newer and nicer. Or sometimes the time isn’t right, or a shipment is crucial. Demanding bosses. Right?”
“All good reasons.”
“And I’m busy, too. Lots of stuff to do here. So what’s the problem?”
“I didn’t say problem,” Carmichael corrected. “I said peculiar.”
“Ah. Semantics. They’ll be missing you downstairs.”
“I was curious, so I called in some contacts on Earth. Remarkable how quickly some folks can get back to you over comm relay, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jake said warily.
Carmichael squinted at him. “My contacts sent me a log of your comm exchanges from the years 2225 on. The steady back-and-forth with Connor Griffin didn’t start until 2232.”
The year he’d been sentenced and deposited in The Bends. And nothing much before then. It wasn’t as if Jake hadn’t thought about the coincidence. He twiddled the forceps in his hand. “Damn, Toby. Don’t worry about my privacy, it’s fine.”
“You know you don’t really have any,” Carmichael said, not unkindly. “None of us do. But you most of all. And I need to think about more here than personal confidentiality.”
Station safety first, of course. “Okay, okay. It’s a little weird. But it’s not unheard of. Why don’t you ask him? I’m guessing you just met him down in the mess, is that right?”
Carmichael lifted a hand. “I did.”
“Well, I can guarantee you he’d have a better memory of it than I do.” The thin metal of the forceps bent and dug deeply into his palm. Jake swore. Looking up, he caught Carmichael’s gaze on him: thoughtful, patient, waiting.
“You’re really not going to leave...until I…”
“Nope,” Carmichael said cheerfully.
Jake banged the broken forceps onto the lab counter. “Do you have any damn idea how much there is to do with Selas samples, what they could mean—You know what, fine. All right, okay. My personal relationships are far more important and, may I say, more gripping.” He ticked the points off on one hand. “We were friends back on Earth. We knew each other through the Historical Society. I started in it as a kid, and we’d get some lab credits whenever we found something useful, info we could build on. And it was interesting. I know we’re all supposed to be nose-deep, learning what we can from the golden pinnacles of our species and all that frilly PR dross, but I actually like history.”
