Of course he was gone. Kalo was always going to be gone at some point, and that was why this shitting quad could never be. He was half man and half precarious quantum state teetering on the edge of collapse. Erased from existence by the barrage of a ground array’s superheater? Or beating a retreat from responsibility and sentiment and grief? Gone was gone.
Triz picked up her wrench. It didn’t matter what Casne would do, or what Kalo would say. She wasn’t either of them. And she knew what she needed to do now. She didn’t know how long it would take Lanniq and Rocan to climb down the length of the Hab, though with a tunnelgun in their possession, she guessed they wouldn’t suffer the indignity of having to traverse the recycling engines.
She had to get a ship working. One boot in front of the other. If there was no one else in position to intercept Rocan’s rescue, then she would have to do it herself. Sure, she’d never flown a ship before, but she’d been in one so many times, hadn’t she? Albeit on this side of the Hab bay doors. How different could it be to take this thing into space? Her stomach pitched queasily. She took a different tack: imagining how satisfying it would be to apply the drill bit to the hull of whatever Ceebee ship dropped out of space to make the pickup.
Her wrench bit down on a bolt. Two dust-clogged filters to replace, and this Scooper would be spaceworthy. Just two. Her wrist turned, her arm strained. It felt good to work. Working, at least at this stage of the process, did not require thinking. Only doing.
A dirty filter hit the floor and coughed up rust-red powder. Triz kicked it aside and hefted a clean one. It clicked neatly into place. Triz liked things in their place. So did Casne. Triz’s pairhome had always been neater than the rooms shared by Casne’s quadparents. It was comfortable to nestle, for a moment, in the warmth of memory. Too comfortable. In memory, Casne was still alive. Triz’s eyes watered, but she fastened the filter back into place and reached for the second one.
It was something, to have been witness to Casne’s final moments. An act of bravery. Never the cowardice they’d accused her of. She’d tell Veling and the other quadparents. Quelian too. She’d scream it into his face if he wouldn’t listen. She thought he would. She’d make him.
The second panel popped into place, and it occurred to Triz none of Casne’s quadparents might’ve survived her. She didn’t know how much of a hole the tunnelgun had created in the Hab. Obviously, support systems were still running, but it was entirely possible Rocan had shot through the part of the Hab where people lived. She closed the open wound in the Scooper’s side and probed the oozing sore of the possibility of an entire quadhome erased in an hour’s bloody work. No. She had to believe they were still alive, that Rocan’s main goal was getting here, to this wrenchworks.
And Nantha. Oh, no. She could imagine telling Casne’s mother what happened, their knees close together and hands twisted into two-tone knots. But her wife, who had made her home in Casne’s heart and occupied so many of the warm hollow spaces in Triz’s too? She didn’t have words for that.
The Scooper was finished. Triz stood up and looked at her hands. She’d raised a blister on the heel of one thumb. It would heal. It would have to. She needed to fill the fuel tanks. She needed to work faster.
The soft patter of falling water reached her ears. The sound stopped her completely.
Her head turned toward the wrenchworks office, and her body followed. She stepped over Kalo’s wadded shirt on the floor, his trousers, his boots. The fading emergency lights lit the office a dull blue; she pushed on the half-closed door to the staff shower, where Kalo sat beneath the spray. He might’ve been here the whole time she worked. It was closed-circuit water, devoted to the works, so there was no ration to use up. But he must have used up the remaining heat without the ambient generators flowing to power the heating elements: his skin was raised in gooseflesh.
So he didn’t leave after all.
“Kalo. Get out of there.”
“I thought of rescuing Casne before you did, you know. Not with a starfighter, just on my own two feet. Shooting my way into Justice like the hero in a bad ‘port drama.” He turned his hands palm upward; one collected water, while droplets cascaded down the slack one. “If I’d had the conviction to act right away . . .”
“You’d probably be in a Justice cell yourself. Or maybe you’d be dead too.” Dead. That word jumped in Triz’s mouth. It made things too real, brought them in from their safe distance. She edged forward, put herself under the icy spray of the shower. The cold cut her to the bone, and the water washed away the things she couldn’t handle yet. One thing at a time. And at this time, she needed a pilot.
At this time, she needed someone who wasn’t gone.
She put her arms around him and shared his shivering. The elbows of her shirt wept dirty water. Triz didn’t cry. She wasn’t ready to open that reservoir yet. It ran deep, and she didn’t want to look at the things lurking below the surface. She’d already mourned once, for the Casne who was unjustly arrested; she couldn’t plumb those depths afresh already. She reached over her head and turned the water shutoff. “Kalo,” she said. She put her hand on his neck; he lifted his head and met her eyes. “We need to move.”
He complied and climbed to his feet. Some vestige of military discipline kicking in. They found spare clothes in the crew lockers. Triz dressed in her own clean tunic and leggings; she rifled through the others’ things to produce something usable for Kalo. He shrugged into one of her old shirts, which stretched too tight across his shoulders, and cinched a pair of Quelian’s sagging pants about his waist. There was nothing for it but to shove his feet back into his own sodden boots. “Are you spaceworthy?” she asked, and his chin jerked in a nod. “Good.”
From the wrenchworks proper, a rhythmic banging echoed its way to them. Triz stiffened; Kalo’s head came up. “Rocan,” he said, and he was already striding toward the door.
Before he left the office, Kalo’s good hand went to an empty pocket where a Fleet sidearm might usually rest. He looked over his shoulder at Triz, and if he was afraid, it didn’t show on his face. “Stay here. I’ll take care of this.”
“What are you going to do, slap him to death?” Triz swallowed irritation with an undercurrent of anxiety and shoved in front of him so she alone occupied the office doorway. She craned her neck for a better view of the wrenchworks. “Besides, I’m not so sure it’s him.” Kalo made an irritated noise and wedged himself between her and the door. The sound repeated itself: the same pattern of knocks she’d heard the first time. “That wasn’t coming from the lift, it was coming from . . .”
“The airlock,” he finished. He slammed her arm aside and crossed the works at a dead run before she knew what was happening.
“Wait!” He was already keying in an order at the terminal at the base of the works. Beneath Triz’s feet, the floor hummed and jumped as mechanical gears ground together. The outer airlock was dilating, and gods only knew what lay on the other side. “What are you doing? If there’s a Ceebee entry team out there, we don’t stand a chance.”
“It’s not an entry team.” The humming beneath Triz’s feet stopped briefly, then began cycling again. Closing the outer doors, pumping air into the sealed chamber. She stepped back from the lock, avoiding the lifttrain that would have hefted whatever wounded ship waited inside. Maybe a canister of spray sealant could function as a makeshift weapon—if she could find a hose she could spray it in an unguarded face—
The inner doors dilated with a hiss of cold, misty air. Kalo dropped to his belly at the widening rim. “Give me your hand,” he said, and thrust one arm, his good one, down into the lock. Five space-dark fingers with frost-spangled stars closed around his wrist.
Triz’s heart leaped sideways in her chest. She ran across the works and left skin on the decking where she threw herself down beside Kalo. Casne clung one-handed to Kalo’s arm: She must have jumped from the bottom of the lock ten feet below. Triz stretched with both arms and Casne flung her free hand up to grab a second hold. Her fingers were so cold they burned, but Triz didn’t care. Casne’s boots paddled the misty air, but she cranked her head back to find Triz. Ice rimed her face. Her frozen features were split into a stupid grin.
Triz’s throat spasmed. “I could’ve gotten a ladder if you’d waited one shitting minute.” Her arms strained, Kalo grunted, and then they were moving back as Casne’s boots found purchase on the lip of the airlock. For a moment, they all stared at each other, sprawled flat-out on the deck. Then Casne lunged forward to tackle them both with arms spread wide.
Her skin still burned where it touched Triz, and when it burned, it drove waves of breathless smoky laughter out of her, all the grief she had shoved down and put aside converted to impossible, ever-expanding joy. They were all laughing, less giddy than hysterical, and when the laughter guttered and ran dry, they only clung to each other. As if making up for lost time, and Triz had lost so much time already. As if letting go would make the image unravel like a ‘port drama gone off the rails.
When Triz had the breath to ask the impossible question, she did. “How did you survive?”
“I’m modded, Triz. And I was lucky to have my Fleet boots on in my cell. They magnetize when they detect depressurization. Never out of uniform, right?” Casne’s half-smile faded. The press of fingers and lips had erased some of the rime from her face, but hazy nebulae still mottled her forehead. She rubbed her forearms with her hands and looked at Kalo, who shrugged and avoided Triz’s eyes. “I know you don’t like the idea, but combat adaptations save lives.”
“I’m coded for conditional production of cold resistance proteins too,” Kalo said, to the deck. “And infected with hypoxia-activated Aerobacter. Only reason I’m still flying.”
Triz rubbed her wet eyes. “I’m not—I’m glad you’re alive, Cas!” She could barely believe it, but she was glad. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. That once you crossed the line between human and Ceebee, you’d just keep crossing lines.” Casne and Kalo flicked a gaze at one another. “But I guess it’s not really that simple.”
“That’s a good way to start thinking about it,” said Casne, at the same time Kalo said, “Well, seeing as I haven’t tried terraforming an alien intelligence out of existence to build myself a castle, yeah.”
They all three laughed.
Before the lift doors exploded.