Stellan knew Doug wasn't finished. It was in the way Doug didn't speak and in the way he avoided eye contact. Introspection was abnormal for him. He normally thought with his mouth.
"What about that Council woman?" Doug said. "You trust her?"
Stellan didn't answer because anything he said in response would be a lie. No, he didn't trust her, and he couldn't help but sigh. He hoped Doug wouldn't interpret it as a response, but it was evident from Doug's hardening face that he understood it as irritation.
"Go ahead and start your rounds, Doug," Stellan said, trying not to sound dismissive.
Doug stopped, and the crowd flowed around him like water. Some of the crew bumped into his arms, not even budging the big man. Doug appeared to feel a cocktail of surprise, amazement, and vexation, which Stellan knew he'd process as resentment.
"We'll talk later," Stellan said.
"Sure thing, Chief," Doug said with contempt. As Doug lumbered away, Stellan remembered how much he hated the isolation of authority. He couldn't tell Doug that the abnormality of not knowing their destination set him off, too. He couldn't tell Doug that the presence of a Council agent aboard the Atlas was both irregular and, for reasons not many would understand, alarming.
Turning to face the march to the tram and onward to the bridge, he felt a sense of absorbing into the crowd, but he knew better. He knew the things he carried—his uniform, his weapon, his duty—separated him from them. Because he was their protector, they would never accept him. They would never be comfortable with him in the way they were comfortable with each other. His responsibilities to protect them formed barriers, and even as he passed and met eyes with neighbors, even as he smiled and nodded, he knew they returned those sentiments out of a sense of obligation. Few relationships he had on the ship were legitimate, and most existed because of his badge, not in spite of it.
He hated it, but it was the price he paid for their safety. He often felt it was his penance to feel outcast. He could only hope they trusted him. For some, trust was earned, and he wondered if he'd had such an opportunity on their quiet ship. He hoped one day for that chance. He also hoped he would not let them down.
So he continued on, counting the bobbing heads, watching for signs of danger and harm, because they were his flock, and he was the shepherd, trying desperately to fit in.
Four
The platform at the maglev tram station seethed. The crowd swelled dangerously close to the edge, threatening to spill into the magnetic bed. It was the kind of crowd where someone would bump into you, and it wouldn't even faze you. You'd understand. There was no room for the luxury of personal space, and if you wanted a seat on the tram, you'd give up every bit you had.
The holographic displays on the platform's pillars informed them a twelve-car tram would arrive in three minutes. The station manager, Robert Powell, dozed in a leaned-back chair in his booth as his holoterminal blinked and covered his face in blue light. Stellan knocked on the booth's glass, startling Robert, who looked around in a panic and then smiled at Stellan in embarrassment. Stellan shook his head with a smile of his own and walked away with a friendly wave.
He carefully slithered between each warm body toward the platform edge, trying to be as considerate as possible. Some of the crew turned, angry that someone was squeezing in front of them. Once they saw it was Stellan, their demeanor changed in the way anyone hides scorn in the face of authority.
Standing on the yellow line at the edge of the platform, he turned to face the crowd. Looking at either end, he watched their knees to ensure everyone maintained safe clearance. He watched their shoulders to ensure they kept their balance.
Behind the crowd, a holographic monitor projected New Earth's news from the wall, and Stellan read the headlines scrolling in a ticker at the bottom. Anchorman Shelly Sheltonson's relentless smile and perfect teeth reported that sixteen people resisted arrest and opened fire on a Unity Corps unit in the District of Australia. None survived. In the Canadian Province, a family refused to surrender religious texts, violating the Freedom From Religion Act. The parents were being processed, and the children would be sent to reform school and already were lined up to be adopted by a noble family that was loyal to the New Earth Council. Terrorists staged attacks in the Mediterranean and greater Europe. The Unity Corps was hot on the trail of the leader of the organization that claimed responsibility.
Stellan knew the rebels never actually claimed responsibility because the message was more important to them than ownership. The Council had declared the war over years ago. Somebody had forgotten to inform the rebels. That message was clear to him, even though most of New Earth's citizens ignored it.
A dull pain on his upper arm brought his attention back to the platform.
"Yow!" he yelled, his hand reaching for the hot spot near his shoulder. He looked down and found his friend, Wendy Lin, one of the Atlas' engineers.
A clean canvas now, her blue jumpsuit would later be covered in grease from servicing gravity cranes in the cargo bays, and even now, old stains streaked her chest, shoulders, and legs. They were especially dark at her knees and elbows. Though, with her black hair tied into a ponytail at the base of her skull, her clean face shined with the precious innocence of a younger sibling, even with the shrewd twist across her brow and the swelling of her jaw muscles as she grit her teeth. In her normally narrow eyes, which were now merely slits, he found more fire.
"Where were you last night?" she asked. And then she socked him in the shoulder again. Her fist impacted with all the force of a tennis ball, a quick jolt with little weight behind it.
"Would you stop it?" Stellan said, grabbing both of her arms and moving her away from the platform edge. "Daelen didn't feel well, so I stayed with her. I'm sorry I didn't message you."
"Yeah, I bet you are," Wendy scoffed.
Stellan's attention returned to the crowd. His duty was too important. Still, he was curious. On the outruns, the crew played basketball in the empty cargo bays. Stellan and Wendy were on the same team, but he had missed their game the previous night.
"What did I miss?" Stellan asked.
"What do you care?" Wendy asked. "We might as well consider you an alternate if you're going to keep missing games."
Stellan put his hands in the air. "Hey, don't bench me, coach!"
She shook her head in dismissal.
"Rick Fairchild played," she said with a grumble.
"Rick? Really?"
"Apparently he played a lot in his day. Can't run worth a damn, but he's a pretty good shot. He won it for us at the last second."
"What was the score?"
"Forty-nine to forty-eight."
"Close game."
She glared at him. "Yeah, but we would have destroyed them if our team captain had been there."
"You still won," Stellan said. "Close games are more fun anyway."
"That's not the point."
"Oh?" Stellan said. "I thought having fun was the point."
"No, I mean, that's not why I'm mad at you."
Stellan understood, but he didn't feel much like getting into it then. His curiosity had been satisfied, and had appeased Wendy. He returned his attention to the crowd.
"What are you doing anyway?" she asked.
"Watching."
"Watching what?"
"Everyone."
"That's silly," she laughed, her body loosening. "You can't watch everyone." It was good that they could move past his absence at the game. That was what he liked most about her. While she had attitude and her temper could flare quickly, she didn't dwell on things.
"It's not as hard as you'd think. Most people just have too narrow of a focus. They watch hands or faces, and it's impossible to watch everyone's hands. I look at their shoulders, their hips and knees. Those parts of the body move first. They give away what a person's going to do. It's the same idea we use in self-defense."
Wendy lifted one foot from the floor and shook it, examining her bent knee leading the dir
ection in which her foot moved.
"Speaking of which, you have to show me some moves some time," she said, bouncing.
"Why?"
"In case I ever need to know."
"Do yourself a favor," he said. "If there's ever trouble, run. Fighting will get you hurt, no matter how good you are."
"Don't you think that's a little hypocritical coming from someone who fights for a living?"
"My job is to prevent and resolve conflict," Stellan said. "Fighting only makes things worse."
"I've seen you fight."
"You've seen me defend myself from people who are out of line."
"There's a difference?"
"The difference is I'm supposed to be in that situation, not you."
"What if there's nowhere to run? What if I'm trapped?"
Stellan couldn't imagine a scenario on the Atlas where Wendy would be trapped or would ever need to know how to defend herself. He knew learning self-defense bred overconfidence; he also knew that meeting rising conflict led to terrible places. He wanted to protect her from that. It was more than just his job. As a friend, it was his duty to protect her.
"Don't worry," Stellan said, forgetting the crowd and looking her in the eyes. He put his hand on her shoulder. "You're safe here. No one's going to hurt you."
They shared a moment of silence where Stellan couldn't be sure if Wendy doubted her safety because she doubted him or if something had happened. She looked disappointed, not reassured.
Violence had never brought him anything worth fighting over. Except for the times he was using his skills to defend another, he felt like he could have resolved every conflict he'd ever been involved in if he'd just walked away. At some point, which he felt was late in his life, he'd learned that lesson. When he'd turned his back, it felt to him like his life had turned around with him.
The floor beneath them rumbled and then became stable again as the magnetic bed activated. The whole room tightened. The walls constricted.
The maglev tram hovered into the station silently, emerging from the tunnel like a giant worm. Only the linear motor at the front whispered as it winded down. Stellan held out his hands sideways, flicking his fingers inward to tell the crowd on the platform to back away from the edge.
When the tram stopped, the floor shuddered, and the paddles in the magnetic bed slapped the belly of each car, clamping them securely into place.
Then the doors parted, and people funneled in. Stellan shrugged. There wasn't much more he could do, so he ushered Wendy gently into the tram.
"I hate the tram," she said.
"It's all we've got," Stellan said. "Could you imagine the alternative?"
"Point taken," she said as the doors closed. "I hate walking."
Five
It was early when Daelen walked into the infirmary, a long room lined on one side with examination tables arranged like cemetery plots. On the other side, workstations and laboratories led back to her office. Beyond, another door led to private exam, recovery, and operating rooms. The last room on the medical deck was the morgue.
Daelen's shift wouldn't begin for a while, and she hoped to have some time alone. Instead, Daelen found Margo Tailan, the medical intern, asleep on one of the exam tables, her white lab coat draped over her body, her elbows and hips jutting like sharp peaks in a snowy landscape. Daelen felt slightly disappointed that she wouldn't have the deck to herself, but a warm smile curled her mouth anyway. She pinched her lips to contain her laughter.
Seeing Margo asleep on the exam table reminded Daelen of the time she spent as an intern. Margo looked peaceful, but Daelen knew how her back would ache when she woke. Those exam tables weren't meant for sleeping.
Back then, Daelen focused on her career, granting herself no time to pursue personal pleasures, such as the warmth of a man who might love her, and the time she spent as an intern had rocketed by as if it had its own light drive.
She didn't let time pass her by so quickly anymore. She could feel it with her mind, wanting to slip, and she feared waking one morning and realizing all she had were the lives she'd saved. That wouldn't be terrible; practicing medicine and helping people fulfilled her sense of purpose, but she yearned for something more. At some point in her life, she realized what she wanted was not just to give people back their lives but to also give her own life back to herself. The key to slowing down time, she learned, was creating memories.
Daelen walked through the exam area toward her office and the private rooms beyond. She grabbed her lab coat from behind her office door and swung it over her head, placing her arms in the holes. Wind from her flapping coattail blew several short strands of her black hair out from her neat ponytail, and she absently brushed them behind her ears. Out of her pocket, she drew her reading glasses, small oval lenses attached to thin black rims, and she sat at her desk, staring at her blank holoterminal.
Life is about creating memories, she thought. It's about creating, not just holding onto life and keeping it in this world for as long as you could, but actually creating it.
She lifted her left arm, and her link fanned open several 3D holographic windows. She flipped them sideways and found her personal folder. Every crewmember had a personal folder on the Atlas' servers, retrievable solely on their own links, but Daelen thought that, in this case, she might as well have marked her folder "secret."
The smile fell from her mouth, and her eyebrows pushed together in a sharp furrow, the wrinkles like fine cracks in porcelain.
She pressed on the folder with her palm, and it fanned open several files. She flipped them and found the file marked "results" and threw it to her holoterminal. The terminal lit up and projected a flat screen with text. Reviewing the results, she realized she loved the document. She reached out absently, attempting to touch it. If she could, it might become more real, more memorable. For the first time, she wished it were paper, something she never understood the value of until now.
Her fingertips pierced the holographic image. It was as tangible as the idea it represented. That was to say, the thought of motherhood burned in her mind, not yet in her palms.
But for that, she was almost thankful. It was safer this way, easier to control. She released a deep sigh of relief when she realized she still had time. She wouldn't begin to show for another few weeks, perhaps a month, which was when they were scheduled to return to New Earth and when she'd return to the surface of her home planet for good. Expectant mothers weren't allowed to travel in space, nor were children.
She'd come to love her life on the Atlas. Like everyone aboard, the freedom had drawn her to the ancient halls of that forgotten carrier ship, yet she couldn't wait to see her belly begin to bulge. The yearning to see her child's face flooded her chest with warmth, like a deep yawn that stubbornly would not be released.
While it was quiet in the lab and she had some time to herself, she wanted to revel in the thought of motherhood. She wanted to coddle something, so she held onto the idea that, by focusing on her child, she was creating the memory of its conception, a joyous time in her life she would remember fondly.
She wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes. She imagined looking down and seeing her abdomen expand, and she began to hum. Her voice matched the note of the Atlas' light drive, and it soothed her instead of irritating her. The hum, to her, had always rubbed her temples like sandpaper, but she began to hear it as a song, her mind filling in the gaps of the melody.
The swelling of the hum rose and fell; her chest heaved. The sound of the light drive resembled a mechanical heartbeat, and she thought about her child's heartbeat. She yearned to feel it, and she placed her hand on her stomach and continued to hum with her eyes closed, rogue strands of her hair leaving her ears and falling across her cheek. She didn't brush them back this time.
Over and over, the hum rolled, swaying her body as if it laid hands upon her hips, and her voice matched that note. Her voice hung onto the hum like swinging from the limb of a tree. She heard the song
she would sing to her child. It was a pleasant melody. She thought about maybe writing some words to it, but no, that might spoil it.
"What song is that?" Margo asked wearily from Daelen's office doorway, her eyes little more than a squint. The melody left Daelen, and her eyes opened to find her hand still on her belly, which was flat again.
"I don't know," she said. "Just something I made up, I guess." She grabbed the results document from her terminal and dragged it back to her link, the fan of documents closing back into her wrist. Her eyes darted toward the doorway, a desperate attempt to see Margo without turning, but the intern rubbed her face and yawned, shuffling forward into the room and into her chair at a small desk in the corner.
Daelen doubted Margo had seen her pregnancy results, but she undoubtedly saw her close them and hurriedly pull them from the terminal, the sure sign of someone attempting to hide something. If she asked, Daelen had not prepared a lie.
"Those tables really aren't as comfortable as they look," Margo said, wincing from a pain that shot through her back. "What are you doing anyway?"
A lie. Daelen frantically searched for a lie. She couldn't find one, so she decided to stall.
"What do you mean?" Daelen asked and immediately realized she was asking for trouble because Margo wasn't only observant; she was analytical. Daelen thought Margo would make a great doctor someday, which is why she had chosen Margo for the position from hundreds of applicants.
Margo rolled her head back with her eyes closed, stretching her neck. Her collarbone jutted like a bridge between her shoulders.
"You're in early, poring over a document, which you stash away like you're hiding something."
No. Daelen had to stop her.
"You're humming, and you're holding your hand on your abdomen, and you—oh my God, you're pregnant!" Margo's eyes shot open, wide-awake and instantly alert.
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