by Amy Lane
“God, yes.” C.J. nodded. “Catching them, for the love of little baby asteroids hangin’ on their mama’s belts, it was a fucking nightmare.”
“See, the thing is, they froze too,” Marshall continued. The look in his eyes could only be termed “paternal,” and C.J. was glad. Marshall did the big brother thing for C.J. all the time, and C.J. loved him for it. “Their urine reacts with the oxygen, has some ungodly chemical reaction that only Cassie could tell you about, and then, once it froze the metal underneath the tile floors, their body temperature dropped, and they were these little, spiky, poison-skinned… what did you call them again?”
“Hockey pucks,” C.J. supplied, and Marshall nodded and went on.
“And they would reanimate without notice and go just absolutely berserk. You didn’t want to pick them up without the steel-lined gloves, and the thing is, once you had them, the damned things would wake up and you couldn’t hold on to them.”
“Holy cats!” Anderson exclaimed, the expression so young and so outdated that C.J. blinked. He really must have been living off of old comedy vids for the last ten years. “How did you get them?”
“Oh, man, it was epic!” Julio could tell a good story—and he was all hands. “You should have seen it. Stroke of genius, really. Marshall totally saved our asses.”
“That’s not true!” Marshall said, glaring at C.J., and C.J. shrugged.
“Sure it is. Now let him talk.”
“Okay,” Julio continued, “so suddenly C.J. and Marshall go off and powwow, and then C.J. takes off at a sprint down the one un-frozen spoke toward the hub. We have no fucking idea where he’s going, right? And Marshall starts organizing us, has us all get the emergency blankets from the supplies, plus welding masks, and those gloves, and whatever protective clothing we can find in an all-fired hurry, and the entire dock was there in shit like cooking pots and anti-grav boots and whatever the fuck else we could find. So Marshall puts us at this end of the dock, then C.J. comes back, and he must have ran to the hub and back in like… what was it, C.J., fifteen minutes? And man, that’s like three miles total, maybe even more, so he was just flying, and he comes back, and he’s got… God, I don’t even know what the fuck they were!”
“Skids,” C.J. supplied after a sip of his fruit juice. “There’s this game in the center of the hub, for teens, mostly, but you put these things on your feet, and they glide over just about anything, they’re like carpet skates without wheels, right? And the kids, they’ve got this big room full of stuff that they can just bounce off of, but I figure on the ice, they’ll work like magic, right?”
“They did,” Marshall said simply. “And then C.J. taught me the difference between hockey and curling—”
“What’s curling?” Anderson wanted to know, and C.J. burst out laughing, because he’d forgotten this part.
“It’s this sport where you slide weights across the ice, trying to hit center. The thing is, you’re allowed to ‘brush’ the ice in order to coax the weight the way you want it to go. And Marshall, he didn’t know a lot of Earth games then, so I told him—”
“His exact words were, ‘Hockey—you know, that game on the ice with the skates’, and the only thing I’d ever seen was Terran footage of people with the curling stones, so C.J. and I both grab brooms, the wide flat kind that you can swing, and after a brief lesson on the difference between a curling brush and a hockey stick—”
“I think I said, ‘Whack them, dammit! Don’t do their hair and make-up, jerk-off,’” C.J. said to Anderson, embarrassed and in a sotto vocce voice, and Anderson gave him a shy smile in return.
“So the rest of us didn’t know any of this!” Julio said, picking up the story. “We’re just waiting there with the open shuttle behind us and every protective thing we can think of on our bodies, and then here comes C.J. and Marshall, and they’re whacking this entire herd of ice-piss lizards, that’s an official name by the way, across the corridor, and they’ve gotten good at it by the time they get around to us.”
“God, I was sore for a week!” C.J. confessed. There had been a trick to lifting and scooting the things at the same time, and it had used muscles C.J. hadn’t known he had.
“So was I,” Marshall added, nodding emphatically.
“So they tell us to be ready, and then they start shooting them, like hockey pucks, up over the ice and into the blankets. And we’ve got two people per blanket, and every time one of those things hit a blanket, we would gather up all the corners, run to the open shuttle, and just throw them in.”
“The guy had it, like, minus fifteen kelvins in there by that time, so they hit the back wall and fell asleep,” C.J. explained, but Julio wasn’t done with the story yet.
“So every time either one of these jackasses shoots a lizard at us and hits the blanket, he holds both hands over his head and goes, ‘Goal!’ like they’re hot shit or something, and it isn’t until later that someone realizes—”
“That’s what they do in soccer, not hockey!” Anderson interjected, and Julio laughed so hard he sprayed soda and pounded the table.
“That’s what I’m sayin’. That whole time, we even thought they knew what in the hell they were doing!”
Anderson had a surprisingly deep laugh for such a thin, worried-looking boy, and C.J. grinned as he let it loose over their little corner of the world. Anderson had finished, and was still gasping for breath and going for a drink of his soda, when Julio looked at C.J. sharply.
“You know, I never knew that was your idea. This whole time, we thought that Marshall was the one who came up with that!”
Marshall’s mild gaze caught C.J. with surprising sharpness. “That’s because he didn’t want the blame if it went bad,” he said dryly, and C.J. shrugged.
“No worries. That meant you got to be the hero when it went right,” he said with a warm smile, but Marshall didn’t reciprocate.
“I’ve tried to promote him to assistant station master three times in the last two years. He won’t take it, but when something goes wrong, you can be bloody sure C.J.’s the one with the solution. Not bloody fair.”
Now Julio was looking at him, completely chagrined. “Really? Those other three guys wore their asses for hats, C.J., really?”
Now C.J. was flushing deep to the roots of his ash-blonde curly hair. “Man, I got fired from my last two jobs. I really think this is more Marshall’s fault for relying on nepotism than mine for telling him no!”
He smiled when he said it and was surprised when Marshall’s face flushed to anger. Before the other man could speak up, C.J. pushed up from the table and said, “Julio, could you please tell Anderson what a fuck-up I am so he doesn’t get the wrong impression? I gotta have a word.”
“I take it you didn’t get to the shuttle,” Marshall said dryly, and then he waved C.J. off when he tried to apologize. “Don’t worry about it. I had time to get the analysis from your friend Jensen, and I’ve got to say, that’s what I’m concerned about. Do you think this… this other personality or holo, Alpha, was he the reason your sister got hurt?”
C.J. grimaced. “Hey, he beat the holy hell out of Anderson, apparently for a couple of years. But if it was him, I don’t think hurting Cassie was what he meant to do. I think it was probably just a burst of temper or something. We’ll have to ask Anderson, if he doesn’t….” C.J. swallowed and tried to keep his expression even. “If he doesn’t go stark raving bat guano on us, he might be able to help us figure out what to do with him. With all of them.”
“But for now?” Marshall was asking the question, but he really knew the answer, because he was nodding his head as C.J. finished speaking.
“For now, we leave the holos and work around them. We get our data from watching the histories, probably from day one, because I don’t know if anyone really knows what happened to the mining colony, and then we watch him program them and see how they interact. Anderson was right that those records are important, especially to the next of kin of the colony, so that need
s to be done anyway. The rest of it is really important to the holo-scientists and the head-shrinks, and all of it is important….” He swallowed, because really, this was the part he’d wanted to say first.
“To Anderson,” Marshall said softly. “It’s okay, C.J., you can put his welfare on the roster.”
“The space station is a business, Marshall,” C.J. said reluctantly. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”
“Yeah, but we’re already getting government funding as long as we make the mining colony records public domain.”
“Not Anderson’s stuff, right?” Anderson’s adventures in holo-land seemed unbearably private. He couldn’t stand it if “boy abused by holo-spouse” was splashed on every media screen on the planet.
Marshall grimaced. “Christ, no. Have a little faith in us, Cyril. Anderson’s life will stay private until he makes it not private. But I do think he’s going to want to share a little of it. Julio says that the patents for the holo-improvements he’s done should set him up in style when he’s ready to go out and make himself a living.”
That cheered C.J. up a little. “I do have faith in you,” he said sincerely. “You know me, I land on my feet and hope everyone else lands with me. Now let’s go make sure that data transfer is going well. Tomorrow the real work begins, you know. That holo-shit’s going to punk us out, I’m telling you.”
“Not so fast.”
C.J. stopped at the unaccountably grim set of Marshall’s jaw. “Jesus, Marshall, what did I do now?”
“The Angloran isn’t working out as my second, you know that, right?”
C.J. grimaced. Yeah, he’d figured. Anglorans were sort of a nervous species. Not entirely humanoid, they tended to skitter on an extra set of legs, like a highly intelligent cross between the old Terran spiders and really big cats. X’tl’torp (the crew called him X) was difficult to read emotionally until something freaked him out and his hairy legs had him skittering halfway across the station. Apparently, there were a lot of predators on X’s world, and the whole skittering thing was a good reaction to have. But there were no predators on the space station, and a lot of keeping things sane was keeping your own head. No. X was not working out, and everyone knew he’d started putting out feelers—not his physical ones, thank God—looking for a job on Hermes-Gamma, where even the jungle climate was a little more compatible with his physical needs.
“Uh, no, I hadn’t heard,” he lied blandly, and Marshall glowered.
“Five months, C.J. He’ll be done in five months, and I want you in his spot.”
“Marshall…,” C.J. practically whined, and Marshall growled.
“No. No ‘Marshall, I want to slack! Marshall, I’m not good enough! Marshall, I suck at responsibility!’ You rock at responsibility. Most in-laws would be whining to the skies about what dumb motherfuckers they had to hire in order to please their spouses, but no. Not me. I’ve got one of the most highly qualified space technology engineers with extra units in space psy in the system, and you’re smart, and people like you, and you’re good at your job, and I can’t get you to commit!”
C.J. glared at him, feeling like a little kid. Marshall didn’t do it often, but when he pulled his big brother on, he did it right. “What brought this on?” he asked, uncomfortable.
“I told you your sister was hurt, and you were right there. You sat down with that kid, called in an extra resource, and brought out a game plan. I didn’t have to ask you to do a goddamned thing.”
C.J. blushed. “Well, you know, just looking out for my boy there.”
Marshall smiled a little. “Yeah, you are. But you were looking out for us too. Come on, C.J., you’re so afraid of letting people down, you’re letting them down! Tell me you’ll do it!”
C.J. blushed a little more and looked to where Anderson was quietly finishing his seasoned mammal-bird. The boy had looked at him like he was something, someone important. Someone worth listening to, after over a decade of talking to himself.
“I’ll think about it,” C.J. said, feeling an unaccustomed burst of responsibility sitting on his shoulders. “No promises, but… but I’ll think about it.”
Marshall made a fist-pumping motion at his side and a long, drawn out, “Yessssss!”
C.J. shook his head. “And I’m supposed to be the dumb kid!” C.J. muttered. “Come on, you big doofus. Let’s get to the damned ship.”
ANDERSON took them into the house—not with codes, but with a key that he had to run to C.J.’s room to fetch out of his pocket.
C.J. looked at the key blankly. “That’s a real key,” he said, and Anderson blushed.
“It’s the key to my parents’ house,” he said after a moment, the words hitting the air like stones into a still pond of water—the kind of pond with a monster living underneath.
C.J. blinked. “Really?”
Anderson nodded. “It was something my friends couldn’t replicate, and it just seemed like, you know, if anyone unfriendly wanted to go see them, they couldn’t get there without me.”
It was such an odd mixture of what was tangible and what existed in Anderson’s own mind that C.J. could only nod. “Sounds… logical,” he said after a moment, but when he looked up, Julio was using his fingers as a sort of cause and effect chart, and C.J. was relatively sure that that little talisman in Anderson’s hand was the key to the tangled mess that was Anderson’s own mind.
Still, they followed Anderson inside, and Bobby ran up to greet him. They hugged warmly, and then Bobby said eagerly, “So, what was it like? You saw a new vid. Was it as good as you hoped?”
Anderson looked at C.J. in embarrassment. “I fell asleep,” he apologized. “The gravity is heavier here. I’ll have to program that into the ship. I’m going to be asleep a lot.”
Bobby nodded, still excited. “I can do it. Hey, you brought someone new!”
Anderson turned to Julio, who was regarding what he knew to be a hologram with wide eyes. “Yeah, this is C.J.’s friend Julio.”
Bobby gave C.J. a genuine smile. “Well then, that’s okay. C.J. takes care of you. Any friend of his is a friend of ours.”
I’ll just bet, C.J. thought dryly, but his smile was real as well. “Thanks, Bobby. Uhm, Julio is under strict orders. We’re going to be in and out, and he’s allowed to ask you and Kate and the others questions about your programming, and you can show him how it was done, but he’s not allowed to interfere, right, Julio?”
Julio swallowed. “It would be like dicking with a masterpiece, man. This old man’s just here to take notes, okay?”
Bobby nodded, then grinned irrepressibly. “Hey, wait until I tell Kate that I’m a masterpiece.”
“She’ll say you’re a piece, all right,” Kate muttered, walking in from what looked to be a hallway. The inside of the house was bright and airy. The floors were made of hard wood, and there were big, intricately looped rugs on the floor and a gathering of soft-covered furniture in what looked to be a living room. The sky outside the windows was early morning, coming in from the direction of the kitchen window.
The table itself was a bright, shiny red-colored wood with a bowl of fruit on the top of it, and a narrow kitchen was in a little nook behind it. The ship’s food synthesizer was the main appliance, and a mini hand-water fresher and recycler was the secondary one, but there were cupboards for dishes and decorative towels, and the tile was done in a merry little pattern of Earth farm animals.
“This is nice,” C.J. said to the general company. “Did you do all the decorating, Anderson?”
Kate snorted. “As if. That was me and Risa.”
Julio had pulled out a little electronic pocket tablet, and he was so surprised that he fumbled it. Bobby caught it before it fell to the ground and handed it back smoothly, and Julio took it with a distracted “thank you” and then almost dropped it again when he realized who had caught it.
After that, it took him a minute of stammering before he managed his question. “You guys… you did the decorating?”
Kate nodded, and Julio opened and closed his eyes and said, “It’s really nice. Uhm, was there anything else you guys did independently?”
Bobby shrugged. “Pretty much anything Anderson does, we can do. Pick out vids, choose what we’re going to do today, check the shuttle functions, program the deck….”
Julio had to sit down. “Okay, Bobby, Kate, could you get the others, and maybe we can have a little powwow? I’d like to know what, exactly, the five of you programmed.”
“Four,” Kate corrected absently. “Only four of us programmed stuff.”
“That’s right,” Anderson said quietly. “That’s right. Alpha never programmed anything.”
“He couldn’t,” Kate replied to Anderson. “We didn’t know how to give him that, and….” She blushed. “That’s not what we were worried about when we made him anyway.”
“Wait a second,” C.J. said slowly. His eyes were getting a little glassy—and from the looks of it, so were Julio’s. “When you say ‘we’, you’re talking about…?”
“Bobby and me,” Kate said, her voice so matter-of-fact that it was clear she couldn’t possibly know how huge this was. “We made Henry, and we made Alpha.”
ANDERSON didn’t last long in the shuttle, but for a while, he sat and talked animatedly with his friends (and after watching him do that, C.J. had an even harder time thinking of them as holos.) Julio sat and made furious notations on his tablet. C.J. and Marshall supervised the last of the file transfer and then looked at each other grimly.
The easy stuff was over. The next day, the real work would begin.
C.J. had been thinking about it, and he pulled Marshall aside before he escorted Anderson back to C.J.’s quarters. “He shouldn’t be here,” C.J. said quietly, and Marshall blinked.
“We might need his help!”
“Then we’ll ask for his help when we need it. Think about it, Marshall, what’s the first thing on those recordings going to be?”
Marshall blinked. “The emergency start-up feed on the mining colony.” They both met horrified gazes and shuddered. “Yeah, I get it. Michelle will be back tomorrow, and Cassie wanted to start him on an exercise regimen in the pool to help him get used to the gravity and beef him up a little.” They both looked to where Anderson had started to wilt into the overstuffed chair that he’d been sitting in while telling the others what he’d seen in the space station. “We’ll steer him that way while we get stuff sorted and then have him in for….”