by R. M. Olson
He’d let go of the multitool, and it was floating gently away from him. He grabbed for it, but it took him two attempts before he could close his fingers around it.
He was having a hard time keeping his eyes open now.
There was something he was supposed to do. What was it?
Replace the thruster component.
Not that, he’d done that already.
Get back to the ship. Get back to the airlock, because he was out of oxygen, and his body was shutting down. He was going to die.
It seemed like a problem that was somehow academic, distant and not really important at the moment. More compelling was the sight, all around him, of deep space, the faint, burning lights of the stars in the far, far distance, the black that cloaked everything like a velvet blanket, rich and cold and endless.
His earpiece crackled again, and for one brief moment, it shocked him back into lucidity.
He was out of oxygen, and he was dying, and no one in the ship knew because they thought he had plenty of time left. He couldn’t call in on the com, and he’d be dead long before he could make the painstaking walk back to the airlock, if he was even coherent enough to do it.
He was going to die.
He saw, for a moment, Jez’s tearstained face from the day before, when he’d found her in her cabin.
He couldn’t damn well hurt Jez again.
With the last of his conscious thought, he grabbed the tether and pulled as hard as he could, once, twice, three times.
And then his grip seemed to falter, and he wasn’t sure what he was holding onto and why, and his head ached and he was so dizzy he wasn’t sure if he could take a step even if he wanted to.
There was a click, and something was happening with his boots, and he found he was no longer walking on the ship, he was floating beside it, and then everything went slightly hazy. The last thing he remembered was Jez’s face in his mind, and the thought, for some unaccountable reason, made him smile.
“Lev! Lev, can you hear me?”
He blinked, through the pounding ache in his head, and tried to focus his eyes.
“He’s alive. Lev! Lev, answer me. Can you hear me?”
He squinted and tried to peer around him, but the effort was too much, and he let his eyes fall closed again.
Cool fingers pressed against the side of his throat, and Masha’s dispassionate voice said, “He should be fine in a few minutes. His pulse is good. He’ll need some time to recover.”
“I’ll take him to his cabin.”
The new voice was quiet and dangerous, and it took him a minute to recognize it.
Jez.
What was she doing there? The whole point of … of whatever it was he’d done was to keep her from getting hurt anymore. He was pretty sure.
She sounded somewhere beyond hurt. She sounded like she was about to take the ship apart with her bare hands.
“Come on, you idiot, up,” she whispered, and he felt himself being lifted upright, and there was someone supporting him on either side.
“Let’s get him somewhere quiet. It’ll take him a bit to recover from this. To be honest, I wasn’t sure we’d been in time.” Tae’s voice was unaccountably grim. Lev managed to raise his head.
The headache was pounding through his skull now, making the whole world fuzzy when he tried to open his eyes, but he managed to mumble, “Got the part in. Should be able to run it, I think.”
“You damn idiot,” said Jez from his other side, but her words choked, and he was left to puzzle what he’d done to upset her.
At last they lowered him onto something soft—probably a cot, by the feel of it—and after a whispered conversation, he saw through half-opened eyes Tae slip out the doorway. He glanced around reflexively, and relaxed when he saw Jez, sitting beside the bed.
Her face was drawn with worry, and there was a frantic, desperate look in her eyes. Almost like when she’d lost the ship.
What in the system could have happened? Because he was pretty sure there was nothing as important to Jez as her ship.
He had to do something, because in the state he was in, he didn’t think he could handle seeing Jez sad.
“Jez,” he whispered.
“What is it, you idiot?”
“Jez. I got the thruster piece in. I … didn’t scratch your ship, I promise.”
“You damn bastard,” she hissed. “You think I care about that right now?”
He felt awful. He felt drunk, and like he was well on his way to the worst hangover of his life at the same time. But this was important.
“Jez.” He managed to push himself up on one elbow. “What’s the matter, Jez?”
She glared at him. “What the hell do you think is the matter, you plaguing idiot?”
“I … I’m sorry about the ship. I wish there was something—”
“This isn’t about my damn ship, OK? You almost died. You were almost dead by the time we pulled you in here. I thought—” she paused, and he was horrified to see she was crying. “You damn, plaguing idiot. Why didn’t you come back sooner?”
“I—I was—”
“I told you last night. I don’t have time for this! I don’t have time to be worrying about you all the time, and I don’t have time to deal with this, and I don’t have time to—to—” She broke down completely, dropping her head down on the cot beside him and sobbing. He managed to put his arm around her shoulder, but that only seemed to make things worse.
“And you’re just a damn soft-boy, and this is the stupidest thing in the entire system,” she sobbed. “And I don’t damn well have time for it. And you almost died, and you throw up when I do any sort of flying at all, and—”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, since some response seemed expected. She burst into fresh sobs, and he put his other arm around her as well, and held her.
It felt right, somehow, to have her in his arms, even through the torpor of his thoughts and the pounding, screaming headache. She dropped her head weakly against his chest, still sobbing loudly.
“Jez,” he whispered. “Jez. Listen to me. I’m going to do whatever I have to do to make this better, OK? Listen to me, Jez. I—I need you to be alright. I don’t know how to handle it when you’re not alright. OK, Jez?”
She looked up, sniffling. “You sound drunk.”
He managed a slight grimace. “I feel drunk.”
“You should probably stop talking now.”
“Maybe. But Jez, you—that whole time I was out there. You were the only thing I could think of.”
Somehow it was very important that she hear this.
“Pretty sure when you wake up you’re going to wish you’d stopped talking.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
He was so tired. His eyes were falling closed on their own, and his head glowed with pain. “You have any painkillers?” he mumbled. “My head—”
“Yeah. I’ll get some.” She stood, and he grabbed her arm.
“No. Don’t go. I don’t want you to go.”
She frowned at him, but she didn’t leave.
“Just—just stay here, OK? I like it when you’re here.”
“Yeah.” She sniffled again and settled back down beside his cot, and he gathered her back into his arms. She leaned her head back down on his chest, and he closed his eyes, and even with the pain hammering spikes through his temples, everything felt somehow right with the world as he faded out of consciousness.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hour 17, Lev
The headache woke him. He lay in the dark, squeezing his eyes shut against the pounding in his brain that made it completely impossible to think. He reached out a hand to try to figure out where he was and what he was doing there, and on the floor beside the cot, felt two small tablets under his fingers. He picked them up and, with an effort that felt almost too great, tapped his com for a light. They’d been wrapped in a paper, and he fumbled on the floor until he was able to grab that as well, then he squinted at it in the faint blue ligh
t of his com.
Hey genius, the note read, if you feel anything like you sounded when you passed out, you’re probably going to need these. I’ll be back in a bit to check on you—got to go keep those other idiots from wrecking my ship any more than she already is.
It wasn’t signed, and it didn’t need to be.
He swallowed the tablets with a sigh of relief and lay back on the bed, waiting for the pain to diminish to the point he could think again.
What the hell had happened? Had he gotten drunk? He couldn’t imagine what else would have given him a headache like this. Still, he was pretty sure he hadn’t, because that sounded much more like something that Jez would do.
Jez.
Damn.
The memories began to filter reluctantly back through the throbbing pain.
The space walk, running out of oxygen.
He shuddered involuntarily. He’d almost died. He hadn’t realized it at the time, too incoherent and half-drunk from oxygen deprivation, but he’d almost died.
And then somehow he’d ended up here. He had a faint memory of Jez laying her head on his chest, his arms around her—but as nice as the thought was, he was pretty sure he must have imagined it.
She had been here, though, he was almost certain of that, and she’d been crying, for some reason. And he’d said—what? He couldn’t remember, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that if he did remember, he’d wish he hadn’t. He was pretty sure he remembered Jez telling him he should probably stop talking.
Damn. He probably should have.
What had he said?
He shook his head, and even that slight movement sent waves of pain washing through his skull.
Unfortunately, there were things that were a lot more important to worry about than what he may or may not have inadvertently said to the lunatic pilot who he’d somehow gone completely off his head over.
He groaned and tried to sit up, and almost passed out.
Alright. He’d give it a few minutes.
He lay back on the bed, trying to think of something other than the throbbing pain, or whatever it was he might have said to Jez.
There was something else, niggling in the back of his mind.
A date.
It took him a moment to remember why it was there, and then he frowned.
Why would that particular date have been on the chip under his name? There was no reason it should have importance to a smuggler like Lena.
There was no reason why that date would have importance to anyone but him. Except, of course, for his professor. His mentor. It would have had reams of importance to her, if she was still alive. Which was, admittedly, doubtful.
He’d been working with Evka for almost three years at that point—she’d been the one who had insisted to the committee that he was ready for graduation, a year and a half before his fellow students, and the one who had strong-armed the committee into admitting him into the graduate program despite the fact he was only sixteen at the time. He’d had, of course, perfect scores in every subject, but then, the committee had a tendency to be slightly more regressive on matters of policy.
Evka, however, had threatened to resign if they didn’t accept him, and added that she’d publish his scores to the entire academic system to let them know the kind of student they’d refused to accept into their program because of his age, and his admittedly-humble background. Wasn’t the system built on the idea, she’d argued, that the lowest of the low can rise to staggering heights given the opportunity, and that birth and wealth and even age mattered less than raw talent and intelligence?
And she’d won, because of course she’d won, because she was one of the top research scientists in the entire university, which was, in turn the top research university in the system.
That had been a year and a half ago. But she’d been on edge for the past three months. He’d noticed it, in the way she turned her head when someone entered the classroom, in the tension in her posture, in the faint spark of fear, half-hidden in her eyes. And if anything, whatever was worrying her was building. These days he announced his presence at her office door with a clearing of his throat before he even knocked, because he’d seen her start when other people knocked, and he’d begun to worry about her heart, the way she clutched her chest and had to pause a moment to catch her breath after every shock.
She wouldn’t tell him. He’d asked her straight out, once, but she wouldn’t tell him. Still, he noticed her eyes following one of the other research students she was mentoring, and he could see the fear in her expression. And, because he had no desire for something to happen to the woman who currently seemed committed to bringing him into a professorship, he had decided to look a little more deeply into the student’s background.
And also, although he hated to admit it, because the sight of his favourite professor, the woman who had treated him almost like a son, leaning against the wall clutching her chest, worry twisting her face, made him sick to his stomach, and very, very, angry.
That morning, he’d stopped at her door on the way to the class he was co-teaching—although really, he was doing all the teaching at the moment. He paused and cleared his throat loudly, then tapped lightly on the door.
There was no response.
He frowned. It was early, yes, but he’d never known her not to be in her office at this hour.
He tapped again, a little louder, and when there was no response from inside, he tried the handle.
It opened, easily, and he stepped inside.
Someone else might not have noticed—perhaps they would have thought it was too early, for once, and she hadn’t come in yet. There was really nothing there that spoke overtly of violence. But there was just enough. That shred of torn paper on her desk—she still used paper, one of the few professors who did—the chips spilled carelessly on the floor and caught in the corners. Something someone as fastidious as Evka would never have missed. And there, on the edge of the wall by the door, a tiny spray of something red, as if someone wiping the surface clean had missed a spot.
It was very red.
He knelt beside it, and, heart pounding, touched his fingers to the wall.
Some of the red smeared onto his fingertips and across the wall, and he felt suddenly very, very cold. When he looked up, he noticed an equation on the wall com. It was something she and he had been working on, and it was still projecting dimly. But it was wrong, somehow, different than when he’d last seen it.
He frowned. That number there …
And then he saw it. A message in the numbers and letters.
Lev. If I’m gone, whatever you do, don’t come after me. There’s no point.
He’d stared at it for a long time. Then, deliberately, he’d wiped the red stains from his fingers, gone over to the desk and signed into the com.
He erased the entire equation. They’d spent the last eight months working on it, but it hardly seemed to matter. Then he replaced it with something that looked just as complicated, but was completely useless.
It would take someone else months to figure out that it didn’t calculate what it was supposed to calculate, of course, and further months to realize that the reason was that the whole thing was a bunch of gibberish, but he didn’t actually mind that outcome.
He still felt cold, colder than he’d felt in a very long time.
He stepped out of the office, after one more quick look around. He closed the door behind him, and wiped his fingers again, gingerly on the hem of his coat. She’d bought it for him, when the coat he had was falling apart at the seams, his wrists sticking far out of the cuffs. He’d found it one day in his student dorm without a note attached, but then he hadn’t needed a note. He’d pretended not to know who’d given it to him, and she’d pretended not to know that he knew.
Then he walked slowly down the hallway and taught his class, took the homework from students who were generally several years older than he was. It had been something of a problem on the first day of class. It was
n’t any more.
And then he’d walked back to his tiny student dorm, and sat down on his bed, and pulled up the holoscreen on his ancient com.
He knew the name of the student she’d been afraid of. And everything else, he could figure out.
He was very smart, after all.
Two days later, the news was all over campus that one of the students Evka had been mentoring had been arrested. No one was quite clear on exactly what he’d done, or why the police had found out about it, but for a day or two, that was all anyone talked about.
No one had talked about Evka’s disappearance, so Lev had felt it would only be just.
The headache pills had finally kicked in, and he tried to sit up again, with marginally more success than last time. He blinked hard, leaning against the wall, and then pushed himself to his feet. The room spun slightly, but it was better than he’d thought it might be. Considering how long he’d been oxygen deprived, it was actually a miracle the only thing wrong with him at the moment was a headache.
He tapped his com. “Tae?” he asked.
“Lev? Are you up? How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” he said. Fine, he’d learned, was a relative term. “Where are you?”
“Just finished the thrusters. I’m on the main deck.”
“On my way.”
He took a couple deep breaths, and then made his careful way down the hallway to the main deck. When he reached it, Tae was waiting for him. Lev tried to smile, but the effort made his head ache more, so he gave up and sank into one of the chairs.
Ysbel was there as well, but he knew better than to try to meet her gaze.
“Did you get the thrusters working?”
Tae nodded slightly. “As well as I can. Ysbel’s just going down to check on the reactor, and then we’re going to try to fire her up.” He managed something that almost looked like a smile. “We’re even ahead of schedule. We still have something like thirty hours of oxygen left.” He paused. “I checked your oxygen tank. It was compromised, probably from the explosion. Why didn’t you call when you started running low?”