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THE RADIO CHATTER WAS a welcome distraction from the tingles that tap danced over Tyce’s skin. It was maddening. The ship sent images of tiny probes sliding through Tyce’s skin like slivers. She also insisted that the process wouldn’t hurt him. Hopefully the ship wouldn’t lie to him. And if this process killed him, he couldn’t do much about it.
The radio went quiet a second before John’s voice came through. “Tyce?”
“I’m right here. I’m not likely to go anywhere in the near future,” Tyce said. The fear of what was happening gnawed at him and his voice came out a little sharp.
“I know.” John sounded so damn sad. He cleared his throat. “I’m right outside the alcove, inches away. Now that it’s closed, it looks like a regular wall. These designs mask the doors pretty effectively.”
“Yeah, I think I know why.” Only one explanation fit all the flashes Tyce kept receiving—and prison ship wasn’t it. The Anla he’d seen had scurried around like creatures with too much work to complete, and no humans could have broken Cy laws. As far as Tyce knew, humans didn’t have contact with Cy, so the humans must have been taken off the various ships lost early in space exploration. Where the hell else would Cy get their hands on human prisoners?
“Oh?”
“She was a slave ship. The owners lived in the nose of the ship,” he said as a schematic of the ship appeared in his mind. “But most of the ship was set aside for other species.” When humans built a ship, they put the engines at the back with up-ship for officers and down-ship for enlisted. Cy had engines at the back, then captives or criminals, then slaves, then... something Tyce didn’t understand.
“So some areas are difficult to access to protect them from rebelling slaves.” John’s disgust came through the radio loud and clear.
“I don’t think a Cy would ever lower itself to acting as a guard, so the ship is designed to help fill that need.” The ship sent an image of Anla carrying weapons. “And they possibly made some slaves the guards over other slaves.”
John made a disgusted noise. No doubt this offended his sense of justice—and John had a fairly overdeveloped one. “So they were assholes.”
“The Cy? Hell yes.” Tyce didn’t doubt that. “But the ship—I don’t know. I think she cares about some things, but I don’t know how she could cooperate with the Cy. The bastards make me feel sorry for Anla, and I pretty much loathe them.” The only reason humans hadn’t nuked the Anla home world was that the rebelling colony planets distracted them.
“Ama would probably lecture you about not being judgmental.”
Tyce laughed. “Yeah, she would.” Either everyone was lying to him, or his old life and new life fit together surprisingly well. Cameras in the up-ship areas would have been nice so he could see for himself, but Cy didn’t run surveillance against Cy. They entertained themselves by enslaving and stalking every other species they could get their slimy hands on.
Tyce got another image. A Rownt—seven or eight feet tall, so a smaller one. It charged a wall of Anla, teeth bared. The Anla stabbed and clung and shot and threw their bodies at the Rownt, but the creature didn’t care about any of the wounds. It punched through a leather wall and ripped at the mechanics. A yellow line broke and the ship screamed in pain as flesh melted off the Rownt arm, and the creature still kept fighting. By the time the Rownt fell, it had killed hundreds of Anla and had nearly torn its way through a fucking wall. Damn. “They didn’t enslave Rownt. They discovered that Rownt go into killing rages that scared the Cy.”
“Good for them. I’ll upvote any species that’s anti-slavery.”
Tyce got one more image—a Rownt child. That was what had driven the adult into a killing rage. “Does Command know that they are physically badass fighters? One unarmed Rownt in a killing rage could rip through our entire crew. If we threatened a Rownt child, they would do exactly that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh hell, yes,” Tyce said with confidence. “I’m getting a Technicolor memory of a Rownt in a frenzy, and it clawed through a wall and left a carpet of dead Anla bodies behind. And tell engineering that if they see any lines with yellow fluid to be careful because that shit is corrosive.”
“Command knows Rownt technology is dangerous, but I’m not sure they know Rownt themselves are.” John had a bit of doubt in his voice, so he wasn’t sold on the danger either. They looked and moved so much like turtles that Tyce understood how easy it was for humans to underestimate them, but he would fight five hundred humans in hand-to-hand before he went up against a Rownt. He’d end up dead in either case, but at least humans weren’t as likely to physically rip him to pieces like a ragdoll. Tyce wondered how much damage the bigger Rownt could do. No wonder the Cy had steered clear of the species.
Of course Command underestimated everyone. Tyce suspected the real problem was they overestimated themselves. He wondered if the other governments with space programs had the same problem. If not, they probably had their own version of stupid.
After a long pause, John spoke. “I’m sorry I treated you like shit, you know, when you surrendered.”
“You had a crew on the verge of mutiny because they thought you were pro-Ribelian. I get it. You played the cards in your hand, and you earned your soldiers’ trust.” If anything, Tyce had expected rougher treatment.
John was silent, and when he spoke again, he sounded angry. “Fuck. You don’t have to be so damn accommodating.”
“What do you want me to say?” Tyce demanded.
“That I was an asshole!”
For a second, Tyce was speechless. “That goes without saying. You were,” he snapped. “You also had a good reason for acting that way. Besides, it seems like I treated you equally badly when we graduated.” Tyce expected anger. During school they had been inseparable—best friends at a level Tyce had never experienced before or since. And the day after he graduated, he moved out of their shared room and never looked back. That had been the first of many decisions on Tyce’s road to being an asshole. Ama had saved him from that fate, and if her religion was right, had saved him from a hundred lifetimes as a dung beetle.
“I got it,” John said softly. “Even back then I understood. You wanted a career.”
“That doesn’t mean I had any right to drop you cold.” Tyce had put John out of his mind for so long, but now the guilt gnawed at him.
“You couldn’t afford to keep in touch. Command always gives the most dangerous positions and the fastest promotions to the single officers.”
The emotional ground under Tyce shifted. John assumed they had been moving toward a relationship. Maybe there’d been some heat there. Maybe they’d shared a bed a few times when they’d gotten in from a training exercise late and they didn’t have the energy to clear their gear off both beds. And maybe he hadn’t minded waking up with a warm body pressed close, but he’d never let himself think about his attraction to John.
“We shouldn’t talk about this now.” A low-level panic gripped Tyce.
“We’re alone. I asked everyone to give us some privacy.” John paused before he added, “It’s not as if the engineers are any closer to figuring out how to access the ship’s systems. Every time they try to pull a line, the line retracts into the wall. So not a lot of engineering is going on.”
Tyce heard a man’s voice with an old-fashioned accent: It usually takes me weeks to get my engineers to stop yanking and pulling at connectors like they’re inanimate objects. Weird. “What’s the point of talking about this?” Tyce asked. Maybe they could have built something together in another time or another place. Maybe if Tyce had been stationed on Earth he would have given in to temptation, or maybe if they had given him a less sadistic team, he would have returned to Earth after the war and looked up his old buddy. But none of that mattered now. The what-ifs and could-have-beens were salt in the wounds.
“I told Ama that as much as I didn’t want your soul getting reborn on Ribelo, I would rather have that than know you are trapped in there.”
Fuck. Ama knew Tyce had shared the tattoo tradition. Maybe he was lucky to be locked in the ship’s console. “She’s Ribelian. You and I don’t have the same beliefs.”
“I’m pretty sure you do share most of her beliefs,” John said. “But why did you tell me about the tattoo?”
“Because you’re my friend. Because I didn’t want you thinking I was a suicide bomber waiting to blow up innocent civilians.” That seemed fairly obvious.
“So have you told Yoss what it means?”
Tyce wanted to point out that Yoss was Ribelian, but most Ribelians didn’t know the details of the tattoo ceremony. They knew it was a commitment to Ribelo and an endorsement from a religious leader, but little else. Every religious leader Tyce met had given him some sort of gentle quiz about the ceremony, about Tyce’s reasons, but the average Ribelian respected it as a taboo subject appropriate only for the wearer and his or her spiritual confidants.
“He doesn’t need to know,” Tyce finally said. “If someone starts talking about being reborn Ribelian and a religious leader feels like it’s appropriate, they’ll tell him.” So far, the only topic Yoss devoted himself to was killing Command soldiers. God only knew what he would do now that the war was over.
“Wait, you talked about wanting to be reborn Ribelian? You brought that up first?”
“I wanted to do something to make up for the harm I allowed to happen when I led that shitty unit,” Tyce said. “I didn’t actually believe in reincarnation, but I wanted to say something that expressed how deeply I felt my own failings. Why do I have to explain myself?”
“You don’t. Fuck.” John whispered the last word. “I didn’t want to start a fight. I get it, okay? I understand why you had to change sides. I even understand this crazy strategy of yours to get Earth to give up on Ribelo. I get it. You don’t have to justify anything.” There was a desperation to John’s voice that scattered Tyce’s anger to the winds.
“Then what are we talking about?”
“Fuck. I don’t know,” John admitted in a defeated tone. “I guess I wanted to say I hope you and Ama are right.”
“About Earth?” Tyce hadn’t realized how much he relied on seeing a person to make sense of what they were talking about. Words weren’t communication whatever John had hoped to get across.
“About souls,” John corrected him. “I hope we do find each other in our next lives and we have a chance to do this all over again. I hope next time, we won’t have the war haunting us. I hope next time I grow the balls to talk to you, and you grow the balls to admit your feelings to yourself. I hope we have a chance to try all this again.”
John’s voice was heavy with tears, and Tyce ached with the need to make empty promises or rest his hand on John’s shoulder. He couldn’t. The ship had taken that from him, and the pain made his chest feel like it was getting crushed. How the hell could feelings hurt so much—physically hurt?
“I’ve never been good at feelings,” Tyce admitted.
John scoffed. “You suck at them. Black holes have less gravitational force than your repression.”
“Maybe,” Tyce admitted. “But maybe it would have screwed up our friendship. Maybe we’re better in theory than in messy, complicated reality.”
John was silent for a long time. “Is that why you weren’t open to trying?”
Tyce didn’t know. The person he’d been back then was so different than who he was now. Maybe he should have chosen a new name when he completed his ceremony because he was a new person. And sometimes Tyce didn’t understand the man he had been. “Maybe in part. We had such a perfect friendship.” The old Tyce would have cut off his left nut before admitting that.
“Yeah... ‘had’.” John had a catch in his voice.
“I wish I would have found the courage.” Tyce admitted. He’d been so afraid of losing something that he hadn’t let himself even look at it. He shoved his feelings into a drawer the way a dieting person hides candy from himself.
“Sometimes I hate you for that. I understand that’s who you are, but I hate that you made this decision for us.” And now John’s voice was right back to sounding brittle. Hard. Angry. “I hate you for being such a good friend, for walking away, for putting ethics ahead of yourself, for that damn emotional control of yours, for your self-sacrificing bullshit. And that doesn’t make sense because some of those are your good qualities, and I still fucking hate you for them.”
“John.” Tyce whispered the word and a wave of desperation swallowed him. More than life, he wanted to hold John and apologize. Low-level panic rolled over him, the sort he got when he hadn’t finished a job and the deadline was approaching. His toes touched the ground and images of ships half-built blasted his brain. That distracted him from the light. Not the light from a camera jacked into his brain, but actual light waves affected his physical eyes.
When Tyce slid backwards, he realized the alcove was pushing him back out.
“Tyce!” John shouted.
Tyce was naked and slimy and shivering with cold when his knees hit the deck. Then John was there, throwing his arms around Tyce and yelling for a medic.