by Amy Lane
If he smiled.
He came down the ramp and looked around hesitantly. “Uh, Kate told me I should ask for Cassidy?”
“That’s me! Cassidy Poulson-Silvering, the resident station counselor. I’m so pleased to meet you.” Cass walked up and extended her hand and smiled, and Anderson blinked slowly and then smiled back, extending his own hand.
“Anderson,” he said formally. “Anderson Rawn.”
“Do you have a nickname?” C.J. asked from his sister’s side, blinking. “I mean, Anderson, it’s awfully formal.”
Anderson’s face went through a complicated set of expressions, as though he was doing hard math in his head. “It was my mother’s maiden name,” he said after a moment. He obviously hadn’t thought about this in a long time. “She… the women in our colony took their husbands’ names. She said she named me after her father so the name would live on.”
C.J. wanted something hard to beat his head against. Oh sweet Hermes, was there any way he could not just totally step in it when he was trying to make conversation with the guy?
As it was, Cassie narrowed her eyes at him while keeping her over-bright smile in place. “And this is my stupid-doofus brother, Cyril John Poulson.”
“Please call me C.J.” C.J. extended his own hand and glared right back at Cassie, while Anderson looked at them both with grave eyes. Suddenly those apple cheeks popped out with, wonder of wonders, a dimple in one of them. Anderson was smiling at the two of them, even as he took C.J.’s hand.
“I’m pleased to meet you, C.J.,” he said, that grave smile still in place. “Your sister has been really nice to my….” The smile disappeared, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in sudden nerves. “People.”
C.J. and Cassie met eyes, and neither of them were willing to have the “people” conversation as of yet. Cassie grimaced at C.J., and C.J. shrugged and thought about the first thing he’d want when he’d just come off of ten years in a shuttle.
“So, are you ready for some real food?” he asked, and Anderson turned to him in sudden excitement.
“Real like….” His face fell. “I bet it’s freeze dried, hah?” He perked up, though. “Well, it’s been a while since those rations ran out. I bet they taste better than I remember!”
C.J. shook his head. “No, Anderson, they probably taste just as vile. But we’ve got real food here. We’re a way station between the farm planets and Hermes-Eight proper. We’ve got everything you’d want—milk, fresh bread, meat.”
“Fruit?” Anderson asked wistfully. “We had Terran import trees in our greenhouses….”
“Peaches?” C.J. offered, hoping he’d nailed it, and that thin face absolutely lit up with happiness.
“Oh yeah! Peaches! That sounds awesome! Wait until I tell Bobby….” He grimaced.
Cass tried not to look embarrassed, and C.J. made a rash decision. “Man, if they’re your friends, talk about them like friends, okay?”
“Thank you. Yes. Thank you. I’ll do that.”
The look of pure shining gratitude that Anderson turned his way did something strange and unwelcome to C.J.’s chest. No. No, no, no, no, no. Not that emotion. Not here. Not now. Not with this person.
He firmly told his chest to behave, but that didn’t seem to keep it from aching over the next ten hours.
BEFORE Anderson could eat, Cass had to give him a basic physical first. Usually Michelle, the station doctor, or her replacement, Josh, would do this, but Josh was planetside and couldn’t be reached, and Michelle had had a family emergency. Cassidy, oh she with the many letters behind her name, had been it. Although she wasn’t officially qualified, she was very competent at dealing with the routine medical needs in a situation like this one, and C.J. and Marshall were hanging out in the little clinic waiting room when she came out with her professional smile on. As soon as the door closed behind her, her hands started shaking so hard she dropped her stylus, and Marshall got there in time to catch her tablet before she put both hands on her knees, bent over, and tried to catch her breath.
“Cass….” C.J. was almost laughing, he was just so surprised. “Geez, big sister, how bad could it be? His thing look like a frog or something?”
Cass stood up and shook her head and then looked around like maybe the rest of the station had suddenly shoved themselves into the clinic doors.
“Look, you two, this doesn’t go beyond us, okay? If Michelle had been able to get topside, she would have had to tell me, and then we could have kept it tight, but right now, it’s you two, and I fucking need to tell somebody, so absolute confidentiality, you hear?”
C.J. looked at Marshall and had a sudden, acute wish that he hadn’t been in the room and that his relationship with his sister hadn’t gotten him front row seats to the thin-faced, grave-eyed young man who had come down the ramp that morning.
If there was something this badly wrong with Anderson Rawn, C.J. didn’t want to know about it.
“Okay, Cass,” he said after a moment of unrepentant cowardice. “Whatever you say. Between the gods’ ears and us, alright?”
Cassie nodded. “Guys, the thing here… it’s like, I mean, I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen a lot of it before. People locked in shuttles, or even locked on the station without leave… you know what happens if a couple is dysfunctional, and sometimes it gets bad, we all know it, right?”
C.J. nodded. Yeah. At least once a year, a two-person shuttle would arrive with a pre-entered destination, a hold full of grain, and a couple of rotting corpses who had died violent and/or self-inflicted deaths in the living quarters. Domestic abuse was exacerbated by space life. It was one of the reasons the original colonists had been so rigorously screened for psychological defects. But even pre-screening couldn’t account for time, circumstance, or just plain old human intensity when things got too close for too long.
“Okay, I know what you’re talking about, but the only people he’s been with are holograms!”
Cassie’s look was thoughtful, her fine analyst’s mind finally breaking through her initial reaction. “Yeah, C.J., they are. But you’re the one who said we needed to treat the holograms as people.”
C.J. blinked, still not following. “So…?”
Cassie straightened and took her stylus back from her husband’s hand like she had dropped it accidentally. “So we’re looking at one of the worst cases of male-male spousal abuse I’ve ever seen,” she said after a moment. “He’s got bruises everywhere, Cyril. Some of them fresh, and a lot of them around his neck. They’re hidden by his coveralls, but they’re absolutely livid. It’s like he’s been throttled, and not just once, either. There’s bruises on top of bruises and even some cracking in the ribs and on his cheekbone.”
“How do you know it’s spousal abuse?” Marshall asked quietly, and Cassie answered him with a grim sort of bitterness.
“Because he had an open, bleeding fissure in his rectum, Marshall, and tears.”
All three of them grimaced. Ouch. Oh fuck. Ouch.
“Did you get him patched up?” C.J. asked, almost desperate to not have Anderson in that sort of pain.
“I used the laser stitches to close up the fissure,” Cassie said sharply, “and to mend the last of the cracks in the bones. The bruises will fade. I took away the worst of it, but what I want to know is how.”
“Well, you said there was a hologram we hadn’t accounted for,” C.J. started reasonably, “and you said everyone hated him. Now we know why.” It sounded very logical, but C.J. thought of that smile, that blinding, generous smile, and felt a clench in his gut. Come on, Anderson. Why wouldn’t you fight back?
Cassie waved her hands ineffectually. “We don’t know why,” she hissed. “I can’t even begin to guess why!”
Marshall’s long, almost attenuated hand started rubbing circles on Cassie’s back. “Sweetheart, whatever is going on, it’s taken ten years for it to happen. Let’s let the poor boy put his clothes back on before we start to head-shrink him, okay?”
Cassie nodd
ed and straightened. “He’s pretty malnourished,” she said, her voice snapping into practicality again. “I think Cyril’s idea about feeding him was probably the best thing he’s said all day.”
For once C.J. didn’t argue with her, just let her go back inside the small exam room to do her job. When the door closed, he looked at Marshall and wrinkled his nose. “She seems pretty upset about this one,” he said quietly, and Marshall shrugged.
“I think it’s that mom thing kicking in again. We were talking about children. She keeps saying that the station is no place for a child.”
C.J. shrugged. “I liked it okay. Mom ’n’ Dad seemed to enjoy it up here. And visits planetside were really appreciated, you know?”
Marshall grunted then, and C.J. said, “What?”
“It just occurred to me. This kid, he’s never seen anything bigger than this station. Can you imagine what he’d make of planetside?”
C.J. thought of that blinding smile at the mention of peaches, and his chest gave that unfamiliar throb. “I’d like to see,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Really, really would.”
Marshall looked at him and shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. This kid is going to need an escort, and you know downside pretty well. We’ll see how it falls out. But first….”
“You’re going to need me to check out the ship.”
“Damned straight.”
“Can I hang out and ask him some questions first?”
Marshall nodded. “Acceptable.” He was about to say something else when the door opened and Anderson walked out, looking embarrassed.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he mumbled, and C.J. grinned at him.
“No worries. But I bet you’re dying for some chow, am I right?”
He smiled, but it wasn’t that blinding, sunshine-bright burst of optimism that it had been before. It didn’t matter—they had a purpose, at least for the moment. C.J. took the lead, showing Anderson around the station, feeling that unexpected thing in his chest again.
The station was laid out in a fairly predictable manner. Like a small ringed planet, circling slowly so the gravity generators could do their work, it had a big pie slice through the rings and part of the sphere to allow ships to dock in the bay.
“The corridors all lead to a spoke in the wheel,” C.J. explained, “and all of the spokes lead to the center of the station. The offices in the outer rings are all for station business, trade, military, interplanetary relations, that sort of thing. The middle rings are all resident quarters and services, and the inner rings are all the businesses inside the station.”
“What’s the center?” Anderson asked, looking around him curiously. They were in the outer ring, following the green arrows to the nearest spoke.
C.J. grinned. “Off-planet entertainment, of course! Well, besides a biosphere—need that! Otherwise, most of it is luxury hotels, gambling, shows, pleasure workers. It’s our main source of revenue. We cater to the rich and the bored and the people who just want to get the hell off the planet’s surface for a while. But watch yourself in there, bucko, that’s a fast crowd. They’d eat a sweet young thing like you alive!”
Anderson gave a faint smile. “I’ll stick as close to the shuttle as I can,” he said quietly. “I have business to do there.”
“What do you need done?” Cassie asked, bustling up officiously. “I can help with whatever you need to do. You know, we’re all very curious about your ship and how you managed to adapt it the way you did. We were going to ask permission to take a closer look.”
Anderson visibly flinched. “I….” Then he closed his eyes and swallowed and made what appeared to be a truly painful decision. C.J. couldn’t help thinking that he looked like a schoolboy in one of those old Terran vids, the kind with the earnest young men who always did the “right thing.”
“I’m going to need your help,” he confessed quietly after a moment. “We… the holodeck was using too much memory. It was going to start dumping all of the colony archives, so we… we saved them by displaying them to the holo-recorders. That way, you know….”
C.J. blinked in admiration. “It’s so simple, it would totally work. You called up the data on a vid screen or a tablet or…?”
“A school tablet,” Anderson confessed, blushing. “And we did it page by page for the journals and manifests and letters and things. But the videos and songs and media, those were playing while we were sleeping. You… I don’t know how you’d transfer that. I… I read as much material as we had on board ship, but it kind of quit at the more advanced stuff, but….”
“We can help you with that,” Cassie said quickly, and then looked at her husband. “Right, Marshall?”
Marshall caught his wife’s significant look and barely refrained from rolling his eyes. Yeah, Marshall could help with the technical stuff, but they all knew what Cassie’s real agenda was.
“Yeah, Cass. We can spare, say, Julio, and C.J. maybe, and they can copy the stuff that hasn’t been deleted from the data banks first and then go into the holo-memory and scan that into the computers.” He looked at Anderson with real praise. “The only step you missed was scanning, and we’ve got a holo-scanner right here at the station. It’s no worries, Anderson. Your colony’s memories are safe with… hey? What’s the matter?”
Anderson shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “It’s nothing,” he said quietly. “It’s… it’s just been a worry for a long time.” He swallowed and looked up at the three of them, his face working painfully as he tried to get his emotions back under control. He risked a smile that looked to C.J. like about the bravest thing anyone had ever done, and said, “I’ll take that real food now, thank you, and then I think I’d better get back to my ship.”
C.J. felt his sister’s sharp elbow digging into his side, and he glared at her, but he tried to do her bidding as well. “Uh, Anderson, maybe you want to sleep somewhere else tonight? Marshall and I have to check your ship for anything hinky you may have picked up during your journey, you know? We need to do some deep scans on the engine and everything underneath the hull. Sometimes there’s mechanical parasites in hyperspace that you never even knew about or radiation that your console didn’t register. That’s actually my specialty, and it’s why Cass called me in. It might be easier for you if you’re not there. We can set you up somewhere with a monitor to make sure you’re settling in all right, okay?”
Anderson swallowed. “The monitor isn’t necessary,” he said with a hint of a sulk. Well, yes, he would feel condescended to, wouldn’t he?
“We’ll set you up in C.J.’s room,” Cassie said smoothly, and C.J. looked at her sharply, and then watched her look away in guilt.
Oh hell no!
“Yeah,” he said with a glare at his sister. “We’ll set you up in my room.”
They turned down the nearby spoke and stopped at the food court that occupied the middle of it. C.J. liked this spot because the proprietor had a long-standing romantic arrangement with one of the freight shuttle captains, and the fruit selection was outstanding. He’d also put in a live-action holo on the ceiling, so it looked like they were looking at the rainbow of planets stretched out beyond the station toward Hermes-Eight-Prime.
“Here, Anderson,” C.J. said smoothly, still glaring at his sister. “You and Marshall stake out a table, Cassidy Jeanette and I will go scare us up some chow.”
Cassie flinched. “Okay, Cyril John,” she muttered, still trying to act like she hadn’t done anything wrong. “That’s a great idea!”
C.J. grabbed her elbow and hauled her barely outside of earshot. “You had my room monitored?” he growled.
She shot back, “It was Mom and Dad’s idea!” before he’d even finished speaking.
“Mom and Dad? Are you shitting me?”
Cassie looked back over her shoulder, where C.J. could see Marshall’s “You got yourself into this, dear” look written plain across his face. “You kn
ow what a horndog you were, C.J.! They… they just didn’t want you to nail anything that was, you know, poisonous, or whose culture said one night meant matrimony or something. We haven’t used it in years, because, you know….”
“I’ve got better sense than that!” C.J. snarled, and Cassie grimaced again.
“Yeah. You had better sense than that back then too. I didn’t… I mean we didn’t see it until after the monitor had been all set up and everything and….”
“When?” he asked, his voice unforgiving.
Cassie had to stop and think. “Uhm… Zalandra, I think. Yeah, I think she was the last date we saw there, but it might have been Clint from that casino downside.”
C.J. frowned. “Zalandra… that was… that was right after I got here!”
Cassie nodded vigorously. “See? I told you, C.J., once I… I mean we figured out that you were, you know, using your head, we didn’t peek, I swear!”
C.J. just looked at her in disgust and shook his head. “I cannot believe you, Cass. You know that? Not everyone meets their husband at a virginal eighteen. You really have to ride herd over my love life from a molecular level?”
Cassie winced but tried to maintain her dignity. “I’ve seen the pictures of Jensen and Molly, C.J., with you in there with them. There is nothing molecular about that couple!”
“Jensen’s a good guy, and Molly’s a damned sight sweeter than you are!” he growled.
“Well, I’m not going down on you in front of my husband, now am I?” she snapped back, and then both of them stopped and grimaced.
“Ewwwwwww!” he muttered, and she agreed.
“Worst. Example. Ever. Sorry about that, C.J. You’re right, okay? You’re right, I… we… I was wrong, and we should have trusted you, but, seriously, it was seven years ago. Until I thought about where to put Anderson up, I didn’t even think about it.”
C.J. shook his head, still disgruntled. “Cass, you keep telling me that I didn’t get this job through nepotism alone. Do me a favor and… just, you know, have a little faith in me, okay?”