Dinner at the Martian apartment of Kaylee and Alan was a late affair. Silverware clattered, echoing into the dim recesses of the otherwise silent kitchen. The meal was cold mush—it had been hot an hour ago, when Alan had promised to be back. Kaylee had prepared the meal as a reward for Alan’s hard work at the beginning of the school year. She hadn’t tried to call him since he’d been engaged with students. She hadn’t worried because the school was in the safest part of Curiosity, and the aftermath of the riot had cooled even in the most questionable corners of the domed colony.
“How was work?” Alan asked without looking up from his plate.
“Same as usual since the shutdown,” Kaylee replied evenly. Her gaze bored holes in Alan’s skull. Her fork hung motionless in a white-knuckled grip.
“That’s nice.”
Kaylee stabbed into the unresisting puddle of what had been chicken Alfredo and stuck a forkful into her mouth. As she chewed the cold, clammy sludge, she never took her eyes off her husband.
Between bites that he swallowed with a wince, Alan attempted reconciliation. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call or text you. I was just…” One stray peek at his wife’s face, and his next words stuck on his tongue.
“What were you doing at the terraforming site?”
“How did you—?”
“The marks around your nose and mouth. The smell on you. Why did you lie to me?”
Alan set down his fork to raise both hands in surrender. “Andy said it was best for operational security. You can’t slip up about what you don’t know. Besides, you have to work with those… those people.”
“What people? Who were you with?”
Alan listed off the names of the Chain Breakers Andy had tasked him with infiltrating, then described the meeting. “And I think they believed me.”
“I don’t believe you!” Kaylee snapped, snatching her plate from the table. She stormed across the kitchen, shoved it into the auto-wash, and slammed the unit shut. “How could you let Andy talk you into going behind my back?”
“Don’t blame Andy,” Alan called after her as Kaylee headed into the bedroom and closed her husband out. He continued, voice muffled through the closed door. “I volunteered. I wanted to do more than just sip tea and talk about how communal and well-meaning we all were.”
Kaylee buried her face in her hands.
What was wrong with this planet? Was there something to those old terrestrial legends about spacers going crazy? Alan had always been the levelheaded one, the grounded one, the one who went along with Kaylee’s crazy ideas, not the one embarking on his own.
“Kaylee…? Sweetie?” Alan’s voice pitched higher.
Kaylee just wanted him to leave her in peace. She needed to think. How could she undo this? The best—the absolute least dangerous—case was that Ned and his cronies believed that Alan was some mouth-breathing Human First fanatic. It was bad enough working for a guy like that.
But to sleep in the same bed as one?
“Kaylee, at least talk to me.”
It was an act. She heard the contrition, the sweetness of the man she’d married. He wasn’t a bitter, burnt-out loser blaming his troubles on forces beyond his control. This was Alan.
Alan Greene had given up a cushy Oxford teaching job to educate Martian brats who couldn’t pass emancipation at age fifteen. He’d come here so that she could breathe life into a dead planet, so that she could see Mars colonists break free of their barnacle existence, clinging to the hull of a barren rock. He was willing to go to these crazy lengths to let her have that dream as it threatened to slip away.
She wasn’t going to let politics come between them, especially not when they were still on the same side.
Slapping the door release, she let Alan into the bedroom. Scooting over, she made room for him at the foot of the bed.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. He’d said it more times than Kaylee had kept count. “I wanted to make a difference. The stuff we’ve seen… it doesn’t matter. It’s just polishing the door handles on the tram coming to run us all down. Andy has a few agents doing more. I wanted to be one of them. He’s got spies in some of the other cells, but he hadn’t managed to crack the Curiosity chapter until tonight.”
Kaylee stared at him.
“Ned and the others… it all makes sense from their point of view,” Alan babbled onward. “They’ve got these hiccups in their lives, places where the path they were on jumped off the tracks, and they connect everything back to robots and Earth-based committees. Their facts aren’t even wrong, per se, but they’re ascribing motives that are completely paranoid. Every last one of them could do with some professional counseling, except that they think the entire psychiatric profession is a brainwashing cabal of Svengali hypnotists with mind-control drugs and selective behavioral upload rigs. Sort of a chicken-and-egg problem where the one thing they need most is something their psychosis prevents them from accepting.”
Kaylee kept up her mute stare.
“And it’s not like they’re murderers. This isn’t an archival movie or television drama. Robots used to disappear once in a while, but they don’t self-terminate at the rates they used to. And humans are all too closely knit to go missing for long. Everyone knows they can’t get away with it. Anything mysterious and the committees call up Charlie7 to sort it out. No one wants to cross paths with him, not even nutters like Ned.”
Kaylee blinked once.
Alan cleared his throat and continued. “We have an extraction plan. I’ve got a little emergency beacon in my shoe. It’s very clever. Won’t show up on any scans unless it’s activated. Andy won’t tell me where he got it, but I think we’ve got someone on Earth—maybe even at Kanto or Cambridge—working on spy gizmos for us. So, you see, it’s not really all that dangerous. Awkward and unsavory, maybe, but the worst that might happen is I get roughed up a little. They wouldn’t dare go any further than that.”
Kaylee crossed her arms.
“Are… you going to say anything? Is this one of those ‘I’m waiting for something specific’ silences?”
She nodded.
“I, uh, I’ll be really careful, stop going behind your back, and I’ll never do it again?” he guessed.
Kaylee threw her arms around him and squeezed. Their heads nestled side by side as she clung on tight enough to crush the air from his lungs. She whispered, “You don’t get to be brave and selfless without me.”
Alan choked for breath. When he managed to speak, it was a croak. “You’re… not going to try to stop me?”
“I want to pack you in a suitcase and drag you back to Earth. I want to lock you up and walk you on a leash to class every day and never let you out of my sight again. I want to grow old with you—old like Grannie Eve. I want us to be two shriveled old raisins sitting on a couch side by side with our creaky old cybernetic brains plugged together by a wire, sharing corny jokes that no one else can hear. But I can’t have a quiet, easy life back on Earth knowing that I abandoned Mars to people like Ned. We will make our home here, and we’ll make it the kind of place where we can raise ten more kids if we decide to.”
Alan gasped. “Ten?”
“Let’s worry about them one at a time,” Kaylee said, pulling Alan down atop her and working at the buttons on his pants.