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TYCE WINCED AS THE doctor tightened a medical cuff around his upper arm, but he tried to hide his reaction. John stood on the opposite side, ready to vibrate out of his skin. Tyce wondered if they needed to find a bed for him because he looked a half second away from heart failure. The doctor read the cuff’s display, and his thumb pressed against the sore spot. One of the ship’s probes was misplaced. No, not misplaced, unfinished. It hadn’t absorbed into the bone yet.
Ama stood at the end of the makeshift bed, tilting her head when Tyce reacted. She was in observation mode, which scared him a little. It usually meant she was trying to decide what the universe was telling her to do. “How is he, doctor?” she asked.
John rested his fingers against Tyce’s shoulder as if afraid Tyce might vanish.
The Command doctor stood. “I have almost no experience with alien probes, although that means I have more than any other human I know. I can't make any definitive prognosis, but he looks hale and healthy.”
Tyce felt a niggle of discomfort at that proclamation. Until the changes settled, he was vulnerable. His immune system could overreact, which is why the ship had wanted to protect him during the transition.
“Tyce?” Ama asked.
He blinked at her. “What?”
“Don't what me,” she said with a stern expression. “That’s the look you get on your face when you realize something that the rest of us haven’t. What's wrong?”
“Is there a problem?” John asked, his voice a little higher than normal. He hovered at Tyce’s bedside. He’d even shoved Yoss to one side, and no one did that to Yoss, particularly not when the man was wounded and cranky. But at least Yoss was on his feet. As long as he could stand, Tyce trusted him to heal.
“Nothing is wrong, exactly.” Tyce said. Ama raised her eyebrows. Tyce didn’t have all the words to explain the situation because he got fragments, feelings, images—not complete ideas. “Whatever the ship was doing, she isn't finished. It’s dangerous right now.”
“Finish what? I thought the ship let you go.” John looked ready to grab a gun and go to war against the ship itself. Tyce wasn’t sure if the fond amusement was his own or if the ship liked John’s spunk.
Tyce got an image of himself running down the corridor, leaping from step to oversized step on a staircase. “She never intended for me to be in the alcove for long,” Tyce said, ninety percent sure he was translating her images correctly. “The alcove is a place for forming a connection. It's not a circuit breaker that needs to have a person plugged in all the time. But the probes have to integrate.”
“How?” the doctor immediately asked. He grabbed a hand scanner off a rolling cart.
“No idea. I keep getting an image of probes dissolving into bone, but...” Tyce shrugged. Clearly they did more than dissolve, but the images were not detailed enough to provide more information. “I know she’s worried that she let me out too soon, and if I get sick, she wants me back in the alcove.”
The doctor looked ready to launch into an indignant defense of his ability to care for his patients, but Ama preempted him. “She wants a symbiotic partner.” She frowned. “I respect her desire to have a relationship with another creature, but she cannot take someone against their will.”
“What will you do?” Yoss asked, “lecture the ship to death?” He had a point. As long as they lived inside the ship, she had the upper hand.
“I leapt into the alcove headfirst, which is pretty much the definition of volunteering,” Tyce said.
John muttered something that sounded a lot like “Suicidal idiot.”
Tyce patted John’s hip since that was the only body part he could reach. “I knew at the time the plan was a Hail Mary, but we were getting our asses kicked. The Imshee were about to kill us. So, yes, I volunteered, and I would do it again. That doesn’t mean I wanted to die.”
“You are fond of this lifetime, aren't you?” Ama patted Tyce’s leg, but she watched John. She was as subtle as nuclear ordnance. Tyce rolled his eyes. Maybe he was still confused about his feelings, but he wasn’t stupid enough to deny that he cared for John. The foundations had been built during those years in the academy, but more than that, Tyce respected the man John had become.
“Up to this point, I've been a little iffy on this incarnation, but it's getting interesting,” Tyce admitted. “I don't want to move on yet.” He didn’t look at John—he couldn’t make any promises yet, even silent ones. But he wanted to see what would happen when they weren’t on opposite sides, and they didn’t have supervising officers monitoring student-student relationships.
“Are you saying the past few years with us made you wish for death? Yoss demanded in a voice that made it clear he planned to punch Tyce in the arm as soon as Tyce recovered enough to get out of the hospital bed. Hopefully Yoss’s leg wound would slow him down enough for Tyce to make an escape.
“No,” Tyce said firmly. “It just left me not strenuously avoiding death.”
“You two,” Ama said with a dramatic sigh. “You’re worse than my boys. I suspect all your parents need a remedial course on how to raise productive children. Can we please focus on the important issue here? What does the ship want out of this relationship?”
“A Purpose,” Tyce said immediately. “And what that means...” He shrugged.
“So, do you tell the ship where to go? Are you the pilot?” John asked.
“If I am, I haven’t found those controls yet. It feels more generalized than that. She can make her own decisions about where to go or what to do now that she’s awake, but I don’t have the words to explain.” Tyce closed his eyes and tried to sort the feelings he got from the ship. “Without a Purpose, she sleeps because she doesn’t know what else to do.” Tyce got a clear image then—giant ships drifting toward a sun, asleep as their skin burned. Waking. Screaming in pain and firing engines toward the danger. Skin hulls peeling back from bone. Sisters. Gone. Lost.
Tyce’s stomach churned, and he leaned over the bed a half second before he threw up yellow bile all over the doctor’s shoes. “Fuck. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
Instead of getting angry, the doctor pressed a scanner against Tyce’s chest. “What hurts?”
“The memory of my sisters’ suicides by diving straight into suns as their skin burned away,” Tyce said.
“Oh.” The doctor fell silent.
John tugged on Tyce’s arm. He had gotten a glass of water from somewhere and Tyce gratefully took it. “Thank you.”
“Does she want the rest of us to stay on the ship or leave?” Ama asked.
“Stay,” Tyce immediately said. She liked the noise. She liked the children. Tyce frowned. “Is someone trying to cut through the skin to get into the shuttles?” Tyce asked.
“Yes. We need to get to those people,” Ama said slowly. “We regret hurting the ship, but we won’t abandon our people.”
Tyce nodded as he saw the ship’s final plan. “You’re slowing down the rescue,” Tyce said. “She’s growing doors and absorbing the shuttles so she can make them stronger.” Tyce got an image of empty space. If they were too far away from any habitable planet, they wouldn’t leave her, even if she gave them back their shuttles. She would have children running through her halls, laughter. A fragment of a memory floated to the surface, a little girl with red hair. Then Tyce got a much more X-rated image of two men in an Cy-sized bed. Apparently the ship was a voyeur.
Ama walked around to the side of the bed next to John, but she didn’t move him. “Would she allow you to leave?”
“Never.”
Ama blew out a breath. “Okay. We need to think about this. We still have John’s mutinous crew running around, so let’s focus on that. Can you use sensors to find them?”
Tyce closed his eyes and tried, but any request for sensors yielded images of the lower ship. However, he did feel the controls for water and protein production. She had shut them off in the upper levels because the soldiers were loud and they hurt her. But if Tyce liked them, she could open those access lines. Tyce opened his eyes. “Cy didn’t spy on other Cy, so there are no cameras or sensors up-ship, but I did turn on water and food production lines.” Tyce looked at John. “She didn’t like your people blowing a hole in her side.”
He grimaced. “I can’t blame her, but if we don’t have sensors, we have a problem. This ship is larger than most cities. We don’t have enough people to do a grid search, and I don’t think random hunts through the ship’s hallways will do much good.”
“They’ll have to get food and water. If they don’t have synthesizers that can process the raw nutrients, they’ll need to steal either equipment or food from us,” Tyce said. “That’s when they’ll be vulnerable. We only have to guard our perimeter and they’ll have to come to us.”
John nodded. “Okay, that means keeping our people in a fairly limited area. We need to pull everyone together in one place.”
Ama put a hand on John’s arm. “Tyce is exhausted. Perhaps we can discuss strategy another time,” she said softly. John blushed and gave Tyce an apologetic look. “But before we leave, I want to ask if the ship has a name.”
Images scrolled through Tyce’s brain. A lone wolf howling in grief. Wolves running a snowy trail. A wolf playing with pups. A wolf dying, its foot caught in a trap. The image zoomed into the trap for a moment and then Tyce was alone in his head again—or at least she was quiet.
“Wolf.”
Ama nodded. “Then remind Wolf that you are tired and need your rest.” She touched Tyce’s tattoo and then glanced at John. “Yoss, Doctor, let’s give him some time to sleep.”
“Aren’t you going to make the Command guy leave?” Yoss demanded as she pushed him away from the bed.
“No,” she said. “Doctor, are you coming?”
“He should be monitored,” the doctor protested, but he edged toward the door. He probably wanted to change his shoes, and Tyce hoped the man had packed two pairs when he’d abandoned the Command attack cruiser.
“The ship will do that. If I have any trouble, she’ll let everyone know, loud and clear. So if alarms and lights all go mad, you can come check on me then,” Tyce said.
“Wolf,” Ama corrected him. “The Dragon was appropriately called a ship, but Wolf is her own creature.”
Tyce saw many lectures in his future. The ship sent an image of a Cy. His two large arms worked feverishly over a holographic control panel and she grieved his loss. He’d been her Purpose, and he had listened to her name, although then it had been something different. Tyce got an image of a creature that looked like a giant centipede and a small lion had a baby. The Cy planet favored creatures with multiple limbs. Ama smiled at him and then dragged a complaining Yoss out of the room. The doctor followed, leaving Tyce and John alone.
Tyce wasn’t sure where to start. He’d been honest about everything he’d said, but he probably wouldn’t have said half of it if they’d been face-to-face. They stood in silence. The images in Tyce’s head even went conspicuously quiet. Tyce frowned as he realized the doctor had set up his exam room in an alien version of a closet.
John pulled his hand back . “Take backsies, no judgment.” That had been their deal back when they were roommates. Sometimes they were exhausted and frustrated and they said the shittiest things to each other. Take-backs had let them smooth over some of those early fights.
Tyce grabbed John’s hand. “Absolutely not. Maybe I wouldn’t have said those things if I knew I was going to be...” He gestured at the room. “But I meant every word.” He sighed. “And I was an asshole, a cowardly one. And I didn’t know how to make a relationship work. When we were cadets, I could point to the regulations as the reason for avoiding complications, but when I was faced with the prospect of us....”
John leaned his hip against Tyce’s bed. Evidently he didn’t plan on rescuing Tyce from his own verbal flailing.
Tyce rubbed a hand over his face. “I was terrified I wouldn’t have the self-control to say no. I felt like I was running downhill and I was going faster and faster and I was terrified that if I tried to stop.... Running away from that steep hill was safer.” Tyce shrugged. Sometimes he wished he could track down his younger self and punch him in the throat. He’d thought he could plan everything—schedule his whole life and pencil in a relationship for after his promotion to Commander.
“You’re an idiot,” John said softly, but he squeezed Tyce’s hand. Tyce took that as a good sign. “And I’m an idiot, too. Maybe you didn’t say that stuff, but I knew it. I could tell you were scared. Sometimes when we collapsed in the same bed, I would wake up, and you’d be looking at me.” A soft smile made John look years younger. “I had my own plans to convince you to stop focusing on that career of yours.”
Tyce struggled to sit up. “Yes, but why did I care about it so much? Why was getting a promotion more important than our friendship, even if I didn’t want to take it to the next level? I know what I did, but not why I did it. It’s like I was a different person.” Ama had tried to convince him that he had been a different man, that every time a person made new choices, they became a new person. As much as Tyce wanted to believe that, it felt like refusing to take responsibility for fucking up. “I don’t like who I was.”
“I wasn’t a saint, either,” John said. “The day I finished my paperwork, I planned to come back to the room and seduce the fuck out of you. I knew you didn’t want to register a relationship. We’d talked about how officers got held back when they had official partners. But I wanted more than you were offering.” John shrugged. “You probably suspected.”
He hadn’t. By that point, he’d been trying hard to avoid thinking too much about John. “No take backs,” Tyce said firmly. “I meant what I said. I wish I hadn’t been a coward. You deserved to know where my head was at, and I was a coward for running.”
John huffed and sat on the edge of Tyce’s bed, his butt right up against John’s waist. “We’re a pair. We were both selfish.”
In some ways, Tyce felt like they were right back to that moment right before graduation. “If we start a relationship now, we’re still being selfish because we have to deal with Earth.” Tyce got a flash so strong that he grabbed his head. Earth. Green and blue with abnormally large continents. North America still had that funny finger on the south end of the east coast and the Gulf of Amazon was missing entirely. It was all land. Never. Never. Never. Never.
“Tyce!” John grabbed his shoulder. “Doctor!! We need help!”
Despite the images spinning through his head, Tyce squinted his eyes . “I’m fine. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” John snapped, and then the doctor was there, shining a light in Tyce’s eyes.
“Follow the light,” the doctor ordered. Tyce batted at the light, but John caught his hand.
“Will you two listen to me?” Tyce demanded. “The ship had a strong reaction to the idea of Earth.” That was an understatement. She’d been angry at the idea of Imshee hunting the children from the Dragon—so angry she’d vented her own hull. However, that fury was a pale imitation of the raw fury she’d felt at the memory of Earth. She was a wolf, a furious one who had found a predator at her den. Tyce couldn’t sort the feelings as quickly as she shoved them through their link.
“The ship?” The doctor pulled the light away, and Tyce managed to open his eyes.
“Yes. The ship. Wolf. She had a strong reaction to the idea of Earth and she shoved images and feelings at me a little too fast.” He groaned and rubbed his temple.
“This can’t be good for the integrity of brain structures,” the doctor muttered. “I’d like to give you a full medical exam, but since I only have emergency supplies, and precious few of those, that’s not an option.”
“Good,” Tyce said. “I am fine. However, we might have a problem reaching Earth.” Tyce had never planned to go there himself, but he knew they needed to get John’s crew somewhere Earth-aligned so they could go home. Tyce was not into kidnapping, although he wasn’t sure where Ama would come down on the issue. She might talk about the universe putting them on new paths and accepting or she might lecture about allowing others to choose their paths.
“What problem?” The doctor sounded not just suspicious but angry. He probably assumed the Ribelian terrorists were taking them hostage.
“The ship remembers Earth,” Tyce said. “But she remembers it as it existed hundreds of years ago, back before the seas rose.” The image of the blue ball floating in space returned. It retreated in her memory until she crouched next to Mars.
John shook his head. “That’s impossible. The first aliens Earth had contact with were the Anla.” Tyce gave John a weary look. Their government had a long and storied history of lying, and if Tyce had to trust someone, he would trust the ship before politicians. “The first aliens the government admitted to knowing about were the Anla,” John corrected himself with a sigh.
The doctor glanced from one to the other. “Do you think the government would have lied about something that monumental?”
“Yes,” Tyce and John said at the same time.
“It makes sense,” Tyce said. “Based on the images I got, it was back before humans had figured out space travel. If you were stuck on one planet, would you want to tell your people that aliens with big-ass ships were running around the universe?” Wolf followed that up with sensations—brushes against her skin where she felt others pass too near. Sisters.
“To hell with the rest of the universe,” John said. “These Cy were on Earth. Tyce, they were slavers.”
“I know,” Tyce said softly.
“They were what?” the doctor demanded.
“We hadn’t shared that detail yet,” John said with a grimace. “We didn’t want people to blame Wolf for what her crew did.”
The doctor pressed his lips into a thin line before he took a deep breath. “How certain are you about those facts? Are you sure they were slavers and are you sure they visited pre-space travel Earth?” Tyce nodded, and the doctor continued. “Could they have taken humans off the planet? Could we have humans on other planets, isolated from Earth?”
“All I know is that Wolf has strong feelings when she thinks about Earth. She will never go there again.” He frowned. “But there’s more. All I get are vague feelings, but there is a lot of ‘never’ swirling around when she remembers Earth.”
The doctor frowned, probably wondering how the ranking Command officer planned to deal with this information. John shrugged. “Officer training school did not cover this. In fact, if we found ourselves on an old AI ship, we were supposed to rip the computer out before it could do something illogical. That doesn’t apply here,” he quickly added.
“I know you wouldn’t do that to her,” Tyce said.
“I wouldn’t, but if she refuses to go to Earth...” He frowned, and the doctor took a step backward.
“We’ll figure it out,” Tyce said. “She can’t have a problem with every Earth-held territory, so we’ll figure it out.” It was the best he could offer. The doctor didn’t look happy, and no doubt some of the Command crew would be equally displeased, but Tyce was not Wolf’s pilot. He didn’t control her. He could only suggest and ask, and right now she was making it clear that Earth was not an option.
––––––––
EPILOGUE
“Where are we going?” John asked.
Tyce followed the mental map Wolf had given him. When she was offering concrete information, it was so much easier to interpret. For example, he could easily see that she was taking them deeper into empty space as she slowly woke and all her systems started coming online. She had to heal multiple breaches, and until she felt whole and healthy, she didn’t want to risk the crew. The fragility of human children in particular terrified her. The crew found it sweet and comical the way Wolf had detoured light years to avoid the radioactive afterglow of a super-luminous supernova. Her skin was impervious to cosmic radiation, but she didn’t want the children in the same part of space with the dangerous particles.
“Tyce?”
“Down this hall,” Tyce said. “Wolf wants us to see something.”
“If this is another set of stinky bathrooms, you’re on your own. Your ship reeks, Robinson.” John shivered in horror.
“Asshole. Maybe there is some smell,” Tyce admitted in the universe’s biggest understatement, “but that’s the price you pay to have luxury bathrooms and soaking pools.”
“Ah, the ends justify the means.” John nodded. “The last refuge of every unethical bastard.”
“I can tell Wolf that you’d rather use the chemical recyclers we brought,” Tyce warned.
John narrowed his eyes in mock fury. “You wouldn’t dare.”
With almost three hundred of them on board, he wouldn’t dare, but he didn’t mind winding John up. “You can’t go around insulting a woman’s smell and expect her to forgive you.”
After a long pause, John looked at the ceiling. “Wolf, I apologize that your bathrooms stink.” He raised an eyebrow in challenge. Tyce laughed. Luckily, Wolf didn’t take offense easily. John’s expression turned more serious. “What do you think Wolf’s ends are?”
“Big question.” Tyce blew out a breath. “She doesn’t want to go to Earth, and sometimes I get the feeling she wants to find her sisters, and other times I get this resignation when she thinks about them, like she’s given up on them.”
“Why the anti-Earth sentiment? You said there were humans she cared about, grieved for.”
“If I’d enslaved half the universe, I’d avoid my former slaves, too,” Tyce said as he stepped over a rib growing into the corridor. He got a sense of... embarrassment? Wolf didn’t like that her form had slipped, and he felt her strain as she tried to correct it. But she grew slowly and it would take time for her to move the bone.
“Yeah, but Imshee do trade with Cy, or at least that’s the impression I got from the Rownt briefing materials. And the Rownt sometimes trade with Cy. Maybe.” John sighed. “I wish we could have saved a copy of the official databank because I would like to review the information. Why did she shoot our ships to pieces?”
When John had asked that question before, Tyce hadn’t known. Now he did. “It was an automated defense system,” Tyce said. Wolf sent a new flurry of thoughts through him, and the force of the images made Tyce stumble and nearly fall. John grabbed his outstretched hand and steadied him with a second hand on his shoulder. The brain flurries ended and Tyce closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of John so close. They hadn’t done much more than touch so far, but at least they were moving forward.
“What did she say?” John asked.
Tyce held John’s hand and started down the hall again. John closed the distance between them so their shoulders brushed. “It was a test,” Tyce said. “She left her unconscious mind those directions so she could find a Purpose who was brave enough to take the only logical solution that offered itself. That, by the way, would be me.” Tyce wiggled his eyebrows. “I am the logical and brave individual she was searching for.”
John rolled his eyes before his expression turned more serious. “And how many people did she kill without ever waking up?” John asked.
That took most of the shine off Tyce’s pride. Earth’s early exploratory ships that had come in this general direction had vanished, which had pushed space exploration toward the Anla. “The ends justify the means?” he said softly, but he couldn’t defend her choices on this.
There was a good chance she had killed astronauts who had been brave enough to fly into space in ships that were little more than tinfoil and spit. Humans had developed engines far faster than they’d developed the materials for the hull of the ships. However, as Ama often pointed out to the Command people in the crew, Wolf had her own logic. Ama had even suggested that the ship had chosen the image of a wolf to remind the crew of her untamed nature.
“Hey,” John said softly and he squeezed Tyce’s hand. “That’s not your responsibility. She must have been pretty frustrated that you took the lower decks and we ended up near her Purpose console.”
“You have no idea,” Tyce agreed. “I’m glad she was still half asleep or she might have dealt with you the way she did those Imshee who were trying to get to the shuttles.” Tyce’s skin ached with an echo of the pain she’d felt as she’d blown out the hull. Unlike the faceless humans who had died because of her automated weaponry, Wirki’s death in those voided levels did inspire guilt. As Ama would say, Wolf’s enlightenment was limited.
“I’ll avoid making the ship angry.” John had said as much to the members of his crew who had wanted to force the ship to turn around and head for Earth.
“Here it is,” Tyce said. The corridor dead-ended in a huge spiral design embossed onto the wall. Tyce stood staring at it, waiting....
“This is it?” John demanded indignantly. “You made me climb six sets of stairs to look at a wall?”
Tyce laughed. “You are so easy to wind up.”
John narrowed his eyes. “You’ll pay for that.”
“Doubt it.” Tyce rested his hand on the center of the swirl, and he felt old muscles tremble and strain. The doors in the lower and mid-levels were thinner, but this skin was designed to protect. It was the core of her being. It was the home of her Purpose. If she held anything sacred, it would be this room. If the rest of the ship were destroyed, she could regrow. Engines, corridors, consoles—they were pieces that could be ripped out and replaced. They were often ripped out and moved to other places. But this room was her.
“There’s only one access corridor. We could take the rooms on this level and have this area for the children.” When Wolf broadcast surprise, Tyce got his first indication that she couldn’t read his mind. No matter how much Tyce had considered the tactical advantages of putting the children in a more controlled area, she hadn’t heard him. He would have to speak to her, even if she did sink probes into his brain.
Images flashed—the Imshee she’d liked stretching out in his pool-sized bathtub, his long arms slowly scratching his back and then human children running through the space. Over half the children had the face of that little red-haired girl from her memories, which was Tyce’s first indication that Wolf was imaging a possible future. Then she added Wirki’s little boy with his thumb in his mouth and Ter’s little brother and two of Ama’s grandchildren. As she warmed to the idea, she imagined more and more of the children in her room—Iowee climbing the structures under the viewscreen and Lele building block towers.
“Viewscreen?” She showed him the huge nose of the ship and the fibers that ran from the hull, through skin and bone and muscle down to the room, each carrying a spot of light. And those fibers created the illusion of one huge window looking out at space.
John pressed close. “Are you okay?”
“If Wolf is telling the truth, you’re in for one hell of a surprise,” Tyce said. A sliver of light showed in the middle of the design. “These are the private quarters for the Purpose, but I think they’re a little large for just the two of us.” Tyce glanced over to see how John would react to the assumption they would live together.
His smile was incandescent. “We’ll have to choose something smaller then,” he said.
Tyce couldn’t contain his own grin. “Deal.”
Wolf finally found the right muscle and the door retracted into the wall, revealing a cavernous space. But that was not what captured Tyce’s attention. The far side of the room looked into space. Stars twinkled and the deep red stain of a hydrogen field spread like a distant, wispy cloud to the left. Blue stars, red and orange stars, violet auras around distant points—they all lit up the screen. Enhanced telescopes sometimes showed space like this, but those were still images. Here, space moved sluggishly past with the red cloud vanishing behind the edge of the window as if they were driving by at three or four miles an hour.
But that was an illusion. Wolf was tearing through space at about half-light speed. If she didn’t either fold space or go into a hyperspace dimension soon, relativity would become a major problem as time on the ship slowed relative to Earth. “Holy shit,” Tyce said. “She can fold space.”
“What?” John yelped. “That’s the fucking holy grail of space travel.”
Amusement. Confidence. Wolf not only knew how to fold space, but she could do it as easily as breathing. “How do you fold space?” Tyce asked, expecting to get flooded with technical information. He grabbed for the wall, and John took his arm in preparation for the mental storm. But it never came. Instead she showed him an image of a person sneezing.
“Well?” John asked.
Tyce waited to see if she would add anything to that message, but she was silent. “Either she initiates the process by sneezing or she’s telling me that it’s an instinct thing that she has always known how to do.”
“Like a sneeze,” John finished. He sighed. “At least we know she can get us home, assuming she wants to.”
Tyce didn’t like to talk about Earth. He got such a cacophony of feelings rushing through him that it gave him a headache. “Let’s focus on tactical positioning now. With Acosta and his idiots running around, we need to protect our people first. Second, we play for time while Wolf heals, and hopefully we can slow her down so we don’t have to deal with extreme relativity.” As Tyce said that, the decking shivered and the view out the window slowed until it appeared static until Tyce looked at the edge of the screen.
“Third, we need to find a way to get people home. Not everyone likes the idea of living on this ship for the rest of their lives,” John said firmly. He still felt the weight of leadership and the need to put his people’s needs first. He was a good commander, better than Tyce had been back when he’d been given his first unit.
The fact John hadn’t put himself in the category of those who wanted to go to Earth gave Tyce hope that after all these years, maybe they could finally find more than friendship and more than sharing a bed short-term. In all the years since Tyce had left the academy, he had never envisioned himself with a life partner. Now he had trouble imagining himself without John.
“Yeah,” Tyce said, “but that requires her to finish integrating the shuttles before disengaging. She’s too big to land, although I keep getting images of her crashing into the snow.”
“Huh.” John walked the perimeter of the room. The bed was in an alcove large enough to qualify as another room and everywhere were pipe-like structures that rose higher than a standard chair. The Imshee would straddle them. They might’ve looked front-heavy and awkward, but they had been tree dwellers, and they still preferred heights and chairs that mimicked tree branches. “Maybe she didn’t raid Earth for slaves. Maybe she crashed on it,” John suggested.
Tyce wished that was the case, but he had also seen humans huddled, crying in locked rooms as Anla came and dragged them out. The humans hadn’t served on Wolf, but they had been imprisoned. Tyce felt like that was her secret to keep, though. He had already told the others too much about her past and her culpability in enslaving the Anla.
“Whatever happened, it was a damn long time ago,” Tyce said. “So, what do you think about this as the playroom? It would give the kids a chance to run around.” They had been through a lot during the war. Most had lost family members, and all had lived in constant fear. They would need time to heal from the psychological wounds. “We could set up medical and operations offices in the closest rooms, they’re big enough, then living quarters and logistics, plenty of places to hook up food synthesizers. Finally we could put the fighters nearest the staircase and corridor leading in here.”
John studied him. “That would mean giving up the control room,” he said slowly.
Tyce laughed. “It’s not a control room. It’s a... a transition room. Now that she has a Purpose, she’ll seal it off until I die. Candidates go in the room for her to evaluate them. It would be a pretty shitty deal if she had to partner with anyone who wandered into the ship.”
“So the Imshee...”
“Were terrified of humans getting control of a Cy ship, and they knew the function of that room. They were desperate to get us away from it.”
John sat on a pipe chair and rubbed his face. “Christ. If we had understood that, we could have caught a ride with them back to Earth.”
Tyce thought about how the Imshee had been pulled apart, one hair at a time while the Cy experimented on the neural networking. “Doubt it. I don’t understand how they can even trade with the Cy because the hate is strong.”
“You assume that based off memories that might be centuries old,” John said. “Okay, enough with the depressing shit.” John held a hand out, and Tyce crossed the room to take it. “If you want to move in together, I assume that means you’ve made a choice.”
“A reasonable deduction.”
John shook his head. “You’re not any better with this now than you were back in the academy.”
“I’m not,” Tyce admitted. He rested his hands on John’s shoulders and leaned closer. Maybe he didn’t know how to talk about his feelings, but he was getting better about showing them. John tilted his head back, and their lips met.
Tyce leaned against the chair and John’s arms wrapped around him, pulling him closer. The years vanished, and Tyce sank into the memory of a friendship so deep that he trusted John with his soul. Despite the treason, the abandonment, and the damn war, he still felt that way. John’s kiss was soft at first, a whisper against Tyce’s lips before he retreated to kiss the side of Tyce’s jaw. But then John pressed his lips against Tyce’s again. His arms tightened, and Tyce knotted his hand around John’s uniform shirt as the kiss grew more intense, more demanding.
The world faded and all that mattered was them, this moment. Their tongues met, John threaded his fingers through Tyce’s hair, Tyce jerked John off the chair so their bodies pressed together. Tyce was giddy, hard, and stupidly happy. His heart beat almost painfully fast. Then John turned his head, breaking the electric connection between them.
“A few things have changed.” John sounded breathless and his body trembled.
“A few,” Tyce agreed. “And I will try to talk more.”
John rested his head against Tyce’s shoulder. “Then something tells me that the rest of this will all work out.”
When John said it aloud like that, Tyce believed him. Maybe they had some significant bumps in the road ahead of them, but as long as they were together, it would all work out. He turned toward the field of stars. So many colors twinkled and shone—so much of this part of space was a mystery. When Tyce had been a child, he’d looked up at the stars and wanted to explore. Then the Anla had appeared and the war and the universe had grown so much smaller. It was one more arena of war to train for, to learn tactics and perfect ways to kill others.
But this. This was his heart. John and the ship and all the quiet of space waiting for him to explore. This was the perfection that Ama always told him to find. They stood locked in each other’s arms for long minutes before John finally spoke.
“Do you want to go find Ama and run this past her?”
“Yep,” Tyce said without moving. “And Tuch. He’ll be a bastard about leaving that control room. If he doesn’t have wiring to tinker in, he’s a real monster.”
John huffed. Or maybe he sighed. His breath danced across Tyce’s neck and made all the hairs stand on end. “Let Ama deal with him. That woman could talk a Rownt out of a profit.”
“Nope, she’d stare at him until he felt guilty about wanting profit,” Tyce corrected him. Then he straightened up and slowly reclaimed all his limbs. “Okay, let’s get this crew sorted.” He held his hand out, and John took it before Tyce activated his radio.
“Ama, do you have time to come and look at some potential new quarters?”