Annoyed, she hit Accept. Falconi did the same, and everything on Kira’s overlays froze. “Okay,” she said.
Falconi nodded and picked up his cards.
Kira looked at her own cards. A two, an eight, and a jack: twenty-one. How many sevens did that make? Despite the math she’d done during FTL, multiplying and dividing numbers in her head still wasn’t easy. Addition it was. Seven plus seven is fourteen. Plus another seven is twenty-one. She smiled, pleased that she already had a score of three.
Then Falconi reached out and turned over the first of the four communal cards: an ace. “I’ll start the betting,” he said. Behind him, the Entropists deposited their empty meal wrappers in the trash and headed out of the galley.
“You dealt. Shouldn’t I?”
“Captain’s prerogative.” When she didn’t argue, he said, “Same question as before: What’s bothering you?”
Kira already had her own question ready: “How did you get those scars on your arms?” A hard expression settled on Falconi’s face. He hadn’t expected that from her, she could tell. Well, good. It served him right. “Call. Unless you think that’s a raise?” She asked in the same tone of challenge he had used before.
Falconi’s lips flattened into a thin line. “No. I think that counts as a call.” He turned over the next card. A five.
They were both silent as they checked their math. Kira still came up with the same figure: twenty-one. Was that a good hand? She wasn’t sure. If not, her only chance of winning would be to ask another question, one that might make Falconi fold.
Nielsen and Vishal were drying their hands after finishing the dishes. The first officer walked over—her steps painfully slow in the high-g—and touched Falconi on the shoulder. “I’m going back to Control. I’ll keep an eye on things from there.”
He nodded. “Okay. I’ll relieve you in, say, an hour.”
She patted him and moved on. As she left the galley, she turned and said, “Don’t bet anything too valuable, Kira.”
“He’ll steal the tongue right out of your mouth,” Vishal added, following after.
And then it was just the two of them in the galley.
“Well?” said Kira.
Falconi turned over the third card. Nine.
Kira tried to keep her lips from moving as she did the sums. Keeping track of all the numbers wasn’t easy, and a few times she lost her place and had to start over again.
Thirty-five. That was the best she could come up with. Five sevens. A good sight better than what she’d had before. She started to feel as if there was a chance she might win the hand. Time to take some risks.
“I’m going to raise,” she said.
“Oh?” said Falconi.
“Yeah. How did you manage to buy the Wallfish?” The skin under his eyes tightened. She’d struck another nerve. Good. If she was going to tell him about the nightmares, Kira didn’t want to be the only one sharing secrets. When Falconi still hadn’t responded after a few seconds, she said, “What’s it going to be? Fold, call, or raise?”
Falconi rubbed his chin. The stubble rasped against the pad of his thumb. “Call. What happened to your arm? How did you really lose it? And don’t give me that nonsense you told Sparrow about a nightmare grabbing you. It would take a half-dozen exos to give you any trouble.”
“That’s two questions.”
“It’s a restatement. If you want to say it’s two, just say I … upped the stakes.”
Kira bit back a sarcastic reply. He wasn’t making it easy to open up, that was for sure. “Leave it. Keep going.”
“Last card,” Falconi said, seemingly unperturbed, and flipped it over.
A king. Thirteen.
Her mind raced as she tried different combinations. The next multiple of seven was seven times six, or … forty-two. Eleven plus thirteen plus one plus eight plus nine—that did it! Forty-two!
Satisfied, Kira started to relax. Then she saw it: add in the two and the five, and she had another seven. Forty-nine. Seven times seven. Her lips curled. How appropriate.
“Now there’s a dangerous expression,” said Falconi. Then he laid his cards on the deck. Two threes and a seven. “Pity it won’t do you any good. Five sevens.”
She revealed her own cards. “Seven sevens.”
His gaze darted from card to card as he checked her math. A hard line formed between his eyebrows. “Beginner’s luck.”
“Sure, keep telling yourself that. Pay up.” She crossed her mismatched arms, pleased with herself.
Falconi tapped his fingers against the deck. Then he went still and said, “The scars are from a fire. And I managed to buy the Wallfish because I spent almost a decade saving every bit I could. Got a good deal and…” He shrugged.
His job must have been very well-paying for him to afford a ship. “Those aren’t much in the way of answers,” Kira said.
Falconi swept up their cards and shuffled them back into the deck. “So then play another round. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“Maybe I will,” said Kira. “Deal.”
He dealt. Three for her, three for him, and four on the table.
She scanned her cards. No sevens, nor anything that added up to seven or a multiple of seven. Then Falconi turned over the first card on the table: the two of spades. That gave her … one seven.
“Why did you keep the scars?” she asked.
He surprised her with his counter: “Why do you care?”
“Is that … your bet?”
“It is.”
Falconi turned over the next card. Kira still had only one seven. She decided to go for another bet. “What exactly did you do before you got the Wallfish?” she asked.
“Call: What’s bothering you?”
Neither of them wagered again through the rest of the round. With the last of the communal cards, Kira had three sevens. Not too shabby. However, when Falconi showed his hand, he said, “Four sevens.”
Dammit. Kira paused, checking his math, and then she made a sound of disgust. “Three.”
Falconi leaned back and crossed his arms, expectant.
For a few moments, the only sound was the rumble of the ship and the whirring fans of life support. Kira used the time to marshal her thoughts and then said, “I care because I’m curious. We’re way out past the rim, and yet I don’t really know anything about you.”
“Why does it matter?”
“That’s another question.”
“Mmm.… You know I care for the Wallfish. And my crew.”
“Yes,” said Kira, and she felt an unexpected sense of closeness with him. Falconi was protective of his ship and crew; she’d seen it. And his bonsai also. That didn’t mean he was necessarily a good person, but she couldn’t deny his sense of loyalty to the people and things he considered his own. “As for what’s bothering me, the nightmares.”
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Kira and, one-handed, swept up the cards on the floor. “Maybe you can get more out of me if you beat me again.”
“Maybe I will,” said Falconi with a dangerous flash in his eyes.
It was difficult, but Kira managed to shuffle the cards. She plopped them next to her knee, stirred them in a muddled mess, and then dealt by picking up individual cards between thumb and index finger. She felt horribly clumsy throughout the whole process, and it annoyed her nearly enough to use the Soft Blade to facilitate. But she didn’t because, right then, she didn’t want anything to do with the xeno. Not then and not ever.
Since she hadn’t gotten her questions answered the last time, she repeated them. In turn, Falconi asked her: “What about the nightmares is bothering you so much?” And “How did you really lose your arm?”
To Kira’s extreme annoyance, she lost again, one to three. Still, she also felt a measure of relief at no longer having to avoid the truth.
She said, “… I haven’t been drinking enough for this.”
“There’s a bottle of vodka over in t
he locker,” said Falconi.
“No.” She tilted her head back and rested it against the wall. “It wouldn’t fix anything. Not really.”
“Might make you feel better.”
“I doubt it.” Tears suddenly filled her eyes, and she blinked, hard. “Nothing will.”
“Kira,” said Falconi, his voice unexpectedly gentle. “What is it? What’s really going on?”
She let out a shuddering breath. “The nightmares … they’re my fault.”
“How do you mean?” His eyes never left her.
So Kira told him. She told him the whole sorry tale, starting with the creation of the Carr-Jelly–Soft Blade monstrosity and all that had transpired with it since. It was as if a barrier broke inside her, and a tidal wave of words and feelings came rushing out in a tumult of guilt, sorrow, and regret.
When she stopped, Falconi’s expression was unreadable; she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, only that his gaze had grown hooded and the lines about his mouth deepened. He started to speak, but she preempted him: “The thing is, I don’t think I can fight the nightmares. At least, not the ones like the Soft Blade. When we touched, I could feel it absorbing me. If I’d stayed…” She shook her head. “I can’t beat them. We’re too similar, and there are so many more of them. I’d drown in their flesh. If I met this Carr-Jelly-thing, it would eat me. I know it would. Flesh for the Maw.”
“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.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Sometimes,” Falconi said, “everything just turns to crap, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He looked at her. “No one’s to blame. Or maybe everyone’s to blame.”
Kira chewed over the story in her mind, searching for the kernel of truth at the center. She felt Falconi had offered it up in the spirit of understanding, if not absolution, and for that, she was grateful. But it wasn’t enough to soothe her heart.
She said, “Maybe. I bet the boy still felt responsible.”
Falconi inclined his head. “Of course. I think he did. But you can’t let the guilt from something like that consume your life.”
“Sure you can.”
“Kira.”
She pressed her eyes shut again, unable to block out the image of Alan slumped against her. “What happened can’t be changed. I killed the man I loved, Falconi. You’d think that was the worst thing ever, but no, I had to go and start a war—a goddamn interstellar war, and it is my fault. There’s no fixing something like that.”
A long silence came from Falconi. Then he sighed and put his cup down on the deck. “When I was nineteen—”
“Nothing you can say is going to make this any better.”
“Just listen; it’s another story.” He fiddled with the handle of the mug, and as she didn’t interrupt again, continued: “When I was nineteen, my parents left me to watch my sister while they went out for dinner. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck babysitting, especially on a weekend. I got pretty angry, but it didn’t matter. My parents left, and that was that.”
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Page 55