The next day started on a different schedule than the one Park was used to. The term would have been “bright and early” on Earth, but there was no “bright” on a ship with no windows and the same kind of artificial lighting every moment of every day—and “early” was relative, too. But her body knew the difference; she was jittery and on edge from the moment her inlays blinked her awake.
She stayed that way all morning, off-kilter, feeling as if something was wrong. But there was work to do: now that they had landed and the expeditions were officially underway, patient sessions with the crew—which had previously only been sporadic and intermittent—were now daily and mandatory. Keller and Park would be in charge of mitigating any stress the expedition members felt as they explored the new planet.
Except Keller never turned up for their first session of the day—which raised klaxons in Park’s already-anxious mind. She dispatched Jimex to find out if her mentor had somehow overslept—or, she thought with a mental shudder, been poisoned, or fallen ill like Reimi—but he returned and said he couldn’t find her anywhere. That was even more concerning. It was a big ship, but Jimex was thorough, and Keller couldn’t have gone out with the expedition team: she was forbidden to, just as Park was.
But she couldn’t spare any more thoughts on it. Wan Xu was already in their office, downing clarity meds like breath mints. He was their exobiologist and biodome designer, a brilliant but narcissistic man; any interruptions in his perceived routines could catapult him into an outburst, trigger his neuroses. Park had to go through her first patient session with him alone, wondering all the while where the hell Keller could be.
For a while they slogged through the requisite questionnaires and checklists and evaluative worksheets together; Park read off the standard surveys that ISF had bundled together for her, feeling a little chagrined—like a student struggling to perform under the watchful eye of a teacher. Wan Xu, folding his arms, listlessly answered that everything was fine, average, five out of ten—meaning perfectly regular. But when Park asked him how the morning’s expedition had gone, he blanched a little and looked away.
“The expedition went fine,” he said. He was a little rat-faced, Park sometimes thought, with his hair gelled so tightly to his scalp it looked like he was wearing a black, shiny helmet. His beady eyes darted nervously. “Nothing noteworthy to speak of.”
Park was suspicious, but after a while she let him go. She did not feel equipped to press a patient with questions without Keller there.
Afterward, Jimex sidestepped into the room again. The ship wasn’t big enough to keep him constantly cleaning, so Park had set his secondary protocols to assisting her—since she lacked an assistant of her own, while Chanur had Ellenex and all the other specialists had their own robotic helpers. Park looked up eagerly when he came in and said, “Did you find her?”
Jimex shook his head. “I was unable to locate Dr. Keller,” he answered. He seemed a little morose, as if he were sad to disappoint her.
Park watched as he approached the holographic fish tank set into the far wall. The tank was Keller’s aesthetic choice, though Park had always found it distracting. She watched as a shy bumblebee goby bobbed its acknowledgement to her, then ducked behind a bloom of delicate coral. Jimex, also watching intently, remarked: “Fish are very unclean.”
“That one’s not real.”
“I know. It was a general statement.”
Park tried to suppress a smile. “I wouldn’t know if the real ones are unclean or not,” she told him. “They were all gone in my area by the time I was born. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one alive.”
“They excrete in the same water they live in,” Jimex said. He tilted his chin up a little, in disgust, Park thought—or disdain. He at least thought himself better than a fish. “They require numerous filters to live in a contained environment, or die of their own toxicity.”
“Humans are the same,” Park joked—then realized the danger in making such a statement to him. But before she could retract it, the door to the office slung open, and Keller walked in.
Park stood up from her desk just as Jimex wisely sidled out of the room again. “Where have you been?” she demanded.
Keller didn’t answer the question. “I don’t know how you talk to that thing,” she said instead, looking back over her shoulder at Jimex—who was still within earshot. That meant something was on her mind. Keller didn’t get antsy around the robots unless she was already worried about something else. “It’s awful. When it looks into your eyes—”
“He tried to find you this morning,” Park said pointedly. Then she shook her head, unable to stop herself from being drawn into the topic. “And you were fine around the HERCULES.”
Keller shuddered and rubbed her arms as if Park had mentioned a horror story. “Yes, but HERCULES and the other robots weren’t like that. The ones I grew up around were functional, metallic. Not . . . a human imitation, like Jimex. Why would they need a janitor bot to look like a person, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I’m used to androids like that.” Park’s throat flexed as if she were holding in a cough. “Dr. Keller, where were you?”
The older woman sighed and sat down on the couch they usually had the patients sit on. Park sat down again in her usual chair, bewildered, as Keller said in a resigned way: “I’m afraid I have to tell you something, Park, and I don’t suppose you’ll be very happy about it.”
Paranoia and dread overtook Park in a moment, like a cloud suddenly darkening the sun. She said suspiciously, “What is it?”
Keller spread her hands in an expression of regret. “ISF is pulling me off regular duty for a—special project. I can’t say anything about it. But it will take up all my time, starting today.”
“That’s why you were late this morning?”
“Yes,” Keller said. “Events transpired rather quickly—” Then she broke off and shook her head, giving Park an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. It’s conscripted business. You understand.”
Park sat back sharply in her seat, feeling as if Keller had slapped her. Yes, she thought bitterly, she understood all too well the lines between the conscripted and the non-conscripted. It had been one of her biggest concerns before this mission—and her biggest complaint while on it. The ISF often conscripted its members into service in exchange for free transportation and housing in the colonies. Such a person was beholden to the ISF’s every order and command, under threat of having their home and access to space taken away, while a non-conscripted person—a person such as Park—merely had to worry about being fired. That meant the ISF entrusted the conscripted with its secrets more willingly, knowing the consequences of spilling those secrets were much more severe for someone who owed everything to the Frontier. It was why Park was not allowed to see Eos. There was the implicit fear that she might observe something, learn something—then sell the data back to the information companies on Earth.
And now Keller was saying that it was why she could not know what her mentor was up to. Because Keller was conscripted and Park was not.
Because the ISF didn’t trust her that much.
“You can’t tell me anything?” she asked, trying not to sound helpless—like a forlorn child being abandoned by a parent.
Keller grimaced at her. “No,” she said. “Nothing except that . . . I’m not to be disturbed. This project will take up all my time, all my attention. You’ll have to be acting psychologist from now on.”
Alarm surged up Park’s spine like a lightning rod; she nearly jolted out of her seat. “What?” Then she quelled the sudden rush of panic and said in a somewhat calmer tone: “You mean—I’ll be managing the patients alone?”
“I’m afraid so,” Keller said, looking resigned. “Trust me, I know it’s not an ideal situation, but—”
“Ideal?” Park didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry. “I wasn’t trained for this scenario. At all. I was never meant to take on the primary role—I’m here for observation, monitoring, not diagnosis and treatment—”
Keller held up her hand, cutting Park off. “I know, Park,” she said gently. “I know, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.” Then she glanced at something on her inlays and said, “It’s nearly eight. Who’s scheduled to meet with you next?”
Park consulted the dossier on her own inlays, then felt as if the room had lurched. “Sagara,” she said, taking a breath. “Next is Captain Sagara.”
“Well, good!” Keller exclaimed, beaming in a false way. Park had not yet gotten the chance to tell her about the escape pod disaster. “I always thought you two should get to know each other better. There could be a sense of—camaraderie between the two of you, I think.”
Camaraderie? Park thought. Sagara was about as social as a praying mantis, and she didn’t know how she felt being compared to him. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, you’re very similar,” Keller said bluntly. “And considering how the others view both of you . . . I thought you might bond over your shared experience.”
Park tried not to pull a face. Keller was referring, rather tactlessly, to the fact that the other crewmates openly considered Park and Sagara’s positions to be redundant. It was why Chanur made jabs about her having nothing better to do; it was why no one knew whom to be more afraid of, Boone or Sagara. In Park’s case, Keller was already the main psychologist of the Deucalion, so the question had to be asked: What was Park’s role? Why was she there, if she wasn’t interacting directly with the patients? What was the purpose of having two psychologists on the ship?
And the conclusion that had spread around was that Keller was there primarily for the crewmates’ wellbeing: she was the one who talked with the patients, counseled them, prescribed their treatments and medications. But Park was a background presence, usually only observing, monitoring. That meant that she was not there to help the other crewmembers—but to spy on them for the ISF.
And the rumors weren’t wrong, Park thought bitterly. Their conclusions were not so far off. She would not refer to herself as a “spy” necessarily, but the ISF officially called her an “orbiter”—the differences between the two being not so clear. The term had always made Park think of a satellite, cold and mechanical, watching from afar—or, when she was feeling unusually romantic, a moon, circling the tiny world of the Deucalion.
But her crewmates would not have agreed with the depiction. It was more likely they’d have compared her to a rat: some lurking, scampering thing. Park had been hired to provide the ISF a clear window into what was happening on the Deucalion, and the others resented her for it. To them, she was a snitch, a kiss-ass, proof that the ISF didn’t trust its own operatives—to the extent that they would pay someone to watch the crew and report on them. Forget that the other twelve were leading experts in their fields, under non-disclosure agreements; forget too that the majority of them were also under the rite of conscription, meaning the ISF owned their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. Park being on the ship meant that none of that was good enough for the ISF. They still wanted their information from as objective a source as possible. From someone specifically tasked to observe, to record, to interpret, to relay. So that whenever a crewmember reported back to ISF’s outpost, Park was there to fill in the gaps, to clarify their messages for the higher-ups: not what the shipmates were saying, but what they really meant. What was really going on—with them or the ship. She wasn’t really a psychologist, at least not in the conventional way. She was a living avatar of the Interstellar Frontier.
Or she had been, Park corrected herself. Now she didn’t know what she was—orbiter or primary psychologist or both.
She didn’t like that. Didn’t like surprises.
She wrenched her thoughts back to Sagara. Others perceived him in the same way that they perceived her. Sergeant Boone, who had joined the crew from the start, was already established as the mission’s military leader. He and his lieutenant Hunter served as the combat specialists aboard the ship, assigned to protect it from outside threat. They’d only picked up Sagara much later, at the last outpost before they left governed space, and then belatedly found out that he was to be the ship’s security officer. What was the difference? It was unclear—but again, the conclusion was that Sagara, like Park, was there to serve the interests of the ISF, not the crew. If Boone and Hunter were already there to protect the crewmembers, then Sagara must be around to protect something else. But what? No one knew. It was that mystery, coupled with his intense personality, that led the crewmembers to shun him.
“You could get him to open up,” Keller said encouragingly. “Establish a rapport.”
Park tried to stop herself from making an unkind comment. Even if the incident yesterday had never occurred, it was impossible to imagine the taciturn security officer ever getting friendly with her. She was equally, if not more, close-mouthed. “I don’t understand his role here,” she admitted. “Even after all this time. What authority does he have over me—or I over him? And why are he and Boone both here? Who defers to whom?” She shook her head, thinking of the way the two men avoided each other at all costs. “Even they don’t seem quite sure.”
“They belong to different branches of the ISF, so their ranks come out to about equal,” Keller replied. “Though we do know Sagara is far better trained than Boone: only the elite get let into the Security sector, while any man or woman stuffed to the gills with augments can be Military, like Boone. In fact, I hear that’s where most of the conscripts get sent. But you’ve got to have brains, brawn, talent, and a special kind of deadliness to make Sec Corps. They’re the ones who actually keep everyone safe.”
I don’t feel safe around him, Park thought, but she said instead: “It seems you admire him. And he’s cooperated with you so far. Why don’t you continue handling his patient sessions, then? I could do the rest.”
Keller raised her eyebrows at her. “Any reason why you’re so keen to avoid him?”
Desperately Park tried not to think about Sagara walking in on her kiss with Fulbreech. “No.”
Keller snorted. “Well, regardless, it’s not possible,” she said, running a hand over her stubbled head. For the first time Park noticed she had dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept. “I’ll have my hands full with this project; you’ll have to handle Sagara. And everyone else. And that’s that.”
You won’t have any time at all? Park wanted to ask; but she knew that would come off as entitled, needy. She said instead, trying not to sound desperate: “Will you be reachable, at least, if I have questions? Or if I need help?”
Keller didn’t give Park her usual smile: her look was already preoccupied and distant, as if she was only sitting through a formality—the outcome of which would not affect her. “No,” she said absently. “I’ll be going dark, so to speak.” Then she rose and held out her hand for Park to shake: a rare gesture, not commonly seen anymore. Contact between equals—or team players passing a torch. Park felt as if it had a finality to it; as if they were parting ways forever. She looked at Keller’s tough, leathery hand and said, “Going dark? But you’ll still be on the ship, won’t you?”
“I have faith in you, Park,” was all Keller said in reply. Then she withdrew her hand.
Park took the few minutes she had alone before Sagara’s appointment to try and calm her fast-whirling thoughts. There was too much to take in: her sudden change in status, Keller’s mystery project, Wan Xu’s evasiveness. Fulbreech’s kiss. Shit, how was she going to face Sagara after something like that? Did she bring it up to him if he didn’t mention it—preempt him with some sort of plausible justification? Or did they both simply pretend it had never happened?
Shit, shit, shit.
She spent a lot of time considering exactly how to address him, too. Up until now they had mostly avoided speaking directly to each other, so it had never been something she considered deeply. Everyone except the androids addressed each other by their surnames, without the usual labels and honorifics; ISF seemed to think that divisive titles and ranks were not necessary for the Deucalion’s academic tribe.
And yet, somehow, everyone still called him Captain Sagara.
I won’t, Park resolved to herself. It gave him too much automatic power over her—and he already had some significant leverage. She busied herself with inspecting the MAD, trying to avoid thoughts of using it on herself. Was Sagara even the type to need it? He had never asked for it in his sessions before, and there was so little in his file to go on. She knew the number of siblings Fulbreech had, the drugs Hunter had once been expelled from school for. But Sagara’s file was as minimal as bleached animal bone, picked clean by scavengers. She had nothing on him.
That gave him an advantage, too.
She tried studying his staff photo for clues. Although Sagara was not a bulky man, only tall and lean and ropy with hard muscle, he was still an intimidating presence—he always made Park feel like the room was close and airless. His eyes and hair were as black as pitch, his face cold and fine-boned and faintly dire, as if he were always on the verge of delivering terrible news. Even when he was being polite, he constantly seemed . . . prepared for something, on guard, as if he expected an attack from any quarter. That kind of keen hyper-awareness unnerved people—Park included.
The other reason she hated talking to him was that, of all the people on the Deucalion, Vincent Sagara was the hardest for her to read. He was always so cool-eyed and steady, impossibly unflappable, and she—used to having at least some knowledge of what someone thought of her—could never really tell what he was feeling. She hated that; felt that it put her on lower and unstable ground.
She still couldn’t read him when he came into the office, lithe and silent as a panther. Sagara didn’t look surprised at all to find Park sitting alone, either; she wondered if he already knew that Keller had abdicated her position. Or what “special project” she was working on. His file didn’t say if he was conscripted or not.
“Sagara,” Park said as he took the seat across from her. She was careful to keep her voice neutral.
“Park,” he said in turn, heavy-lidded. Then he said, without preamble: “Your robot’s becoming a nuisance to everyone.”
Park tried not to bristle. Although Sagara said it matter-of-factly, it seemed clear he was starting right away with a jab to assess her reaction. “To whom are you referring?” she asked him, outwardly calm.
Sagara shrugged lightly. “The custodian android,” he said. His voice was low and clipped; it was hard to say if he was Earth-born or not. “I’m not aware of its name. It wanders all over the ship, asking people questions. I’ve been told that you were the one who taught it to do that.”
“I didn’t teach him to do anything.” Park kept her voice level, but she could feel the blood thumping in her fingertips. “Jimex started asking me questions on his own. Most androids will do that, even the primitive ones, after they’ve been active long enough. It’s part of their heuristic learning modules: they naturally absorb things, adapt to their environment. That means asking questions, too.” She folded her hands together, only to realize they were damp. “I simply took the time to answer Jimex’s questions, or correct behaviors that were improper. That’s all.”
Sagara’s dark eyes quirked. “You should teach it to stop bothering others, then,” he said. “It’s like a child, jabbering away. I heard Boone threaten to recycle it.” He held her gaze for a moment, the faint amusement vanishing. “Some others think you might be using the bot to spy on people. Telling it to ask everyone questions, so that it can report the answers back to you.”
Park’s heart tensed a little, despite herself. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, through stiff lips. Better to not acknowledge the accusation at all, to show the absurdity of it.
Sagara regarded her for another moment, as if assessing whether or not his words had had an effect; she had the distinct feeling of a hawk appraising a smaller bird. Then he withdrew something from his pocket and said, “You should teach the thing, too, to be more careful with your own secrets. I overheard it asking Ellenex to give it medicine on the sly—without telling Chanur.”
He handed whatever he was holding to Park. She looked, incredulous, at the little green box in her hand. Anti-emesis tabs, the label told her. To counteract the effects of space-sickness.
Ellenex will prepare medication, Jimex had said. She will be discreet.
Fulbreech just kissed me.
Oh. I do not think Ellenex has medication for that.
Park looked up at Sagara and said, very calmly, “I think you’re mistaken. These aren’t for me.”
For a moment it seemed that he was going to laugh. Then he smoothed away the thin smile and said courteously, “Of course not. My mistake.” He steepled his fingers and continued, “But my point still stands. You should educate the bot to be a little wiser in its dealings on the ship.”
“I’ll do my best,” Park said, chilly now with anger and embarrassment. “Although it would make more sense to refer the matter to Reimi. She’s the one who handles issues concerning androids on the ship, not me.”
Then, realizing her lapse, she kicked herself—but Sagara merely looked serious as he said, “It is unfortunate that she’s fallen sick.”
“How do you feel about that turn of events?”
His face remained impassive. “As long as her illness doesn’t threaten the rest of the ship, I suppose I don’t feel any particular way about it. How do you feel about it?”
“What would you do if her illness did threaten the rest of the ship?”
“I’d enact quarantine protocols. Try to eliminate the source of infection, if I could.”
“Eliminate?”
“Freeze. Chanur did the right thing.”
“The cautious thing.”
“Which, to a security officer, is always the right thing.”
They paused for a moment, looking at each other. Park didn’t know why she felt compelled to engage in this kind of verbal sparring, but she told herself that Sagara had started it. She couldn’t believe his paranoia, the implication that she could be employing Jimex to some sinister purpose. Or was he going out of his way to warn her, inform her about the others’ perceptions of her behavior? Both routes were confusing. And she still wasn’t getting much of a topographical read from him, at least emotionally, but she did have the acute sense that he was sussing her out. Why? Because of what happened in the escape shuttle?
“So are you a combat specialist, like Boone and Hunter?” she asked, to deflect her own thoughts. To keep Sagara from reading them.
“If you’re asking if I know how to fight, the answer is yes,” he answered, almost lazily. “I’ve seen combat. I fought carbon pirates back on Earth. I was sent in during the Outer System Wars.”
Mentally Park reviewed his file again; it hadn’t said anything about that. The Outer System Wars had spanned the entire outer ring of colonies past the Solar System: Luxue, Vier, Halla, Elysium, Corvus, and even the prison planet Pandora had all been enmeshed in a bloody, year-long conflict between the ISF and the rogue colonists who had wanted to secede from it. Although it was brief, the war had cost a million lives and destroyed the moon of Vela. Sagara had fought in that? He had to be conscripted. And he’d probably been awarded medals, high honors. No wonder they’d put him in charge of the security on Corvus. No wonder they trusted him to maintain order on the Deucalion.
And if he’d dealt with carbon pirates in the past, or killed terrorists in the outer system—how harsh would his treatment be of delinquents like Park and Fulbreech?
The blood drained from her face. Sagara, seemingly reading her thoughts, said, “Does that make you nervous?”
Park shook her head; she tried not to let her voice sound faint. “Not at all. I’m just—trying to understand your mindset. Whether your past experiences color your . . . treatment of others.”
“You talk as if we’re on opposing sides,” Sagara drawled. “We’re not enemies. I am not a soldier, Park.”
“What are you, then?” Now her voice did sound faint.
He gazed at her unblinkingly. “I’m an officer of the ISF’s Security Corps.”
“The difference being?”
The corner of his mouth twitched; Park read it as part irritation, part amusement. “The primary mission of soldiers like Boone is to eliminate the enemy,” Sagara said. “My primary mission is to protect what the ISF wants safe.”
“Meaning us,” Park prompted.
But Sagara said nothing in response to that.
At lunch, Park went to the usual dispensary line, feeling the absence of Keller as if she had lost her favorite coat. She felt cold, uneasy, vulnerable. The domestic android, Megex, seemed to notice her discomfort from behind the counter and said, “Would you like a juice bulb?”
“Thank you,” Park said gratefully as the brown-haired android placed it on her tray.
“Fuck,” Megex said in return, very calmly. “Shit, damn, ass, bastard, cock.”
Park stared.
“It’s a Reimi thing,” someone said from behind her then. Park turned and saw her bunkmate Elly Ma standing there, looking pitying. Whether the pity was for Megex or for Park, it wasn’t clear. “Without Reimi around to do maintenance, little bugs are popping up all over the place. This thing won’t stop swearing.”
Park looked again at Megex. “She’s malfunctioning?” She’d never heard of a bug like that before, but she wasn’t familiar with Megex’s model or build. “But a domestic android shouldn’t have a database of swear words to pull from at all. So why would a bug cause her to say them out of nowhere?” To Megex she said, “Query: run a systems check.”
“I am in the middle of an operation,” Megex answered politely, looking down the line of people waiting to be served their food. “Fucker.”
Park laughed, despite herself: it was so bland, so innocent, that it made something like delight bubble up inside of her.
Elly, on the other hand, looked positively disturbed. She was a shy, mousy woman, a member of the group that Park referred to as the “First Name Club”: the handful of women (consisting of her bunkmates and Reimi) who’d insisted on being called by their first names rather than their last, shirking protocol and the usual conventions. The reasons for this were beyond her: she’d hypothesized performative submissiveness or familiarity, or perhaps a signal of sexual availability and enticement, but Keller had called her a “classic overthinker” and left it at that.
But now, without the shield of her more extraverted friend Reimi, Elly looked fretful, uneasy; as if she wished she could hide, perhaps behind the formality of her last name again.
“Maybe it’s another prank someone’s playing,” the climatologist said with concern, glancing again at Megex, who’d ceased cussing for the moment. “Maybe someone is going around and teaching all the bots curse words.” She shook her head. “What a way to blow off steam.”
That sobered Park significantly. She’d had enough of pranks on this ship.
She took her tray and went to her usual table, sitting by herself. Keller was still nowhere to be found—busy working on her “special project,” no doubt—and anyway Park wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Again, the mess hall seemed a little too warm, too humid; her chikin salad, with its precious greens, wilted and shriveled in the heat. Park stared down at it in dismay. Bad for morale, she mused, pushing the limp sprouts around on her plate. Surely they could afford better. Or maybe not—maybe this was what all spaceflight passengers were subjected to. They left details like that out of the colony documentaries she’d watched. She looked around at the low lighting of the ship; at the hot, swampy, white little room. At herself sitting alone in a crowd of people. Yes, it seemed they’d left a lot of things out.
The other crewmembers seemed to be in a foul mood, eating their meals in a tense and simmering silence. Forks scraped restlessly against plates. There was a pressure-cooker atmosphere clamped over the mess hall: something must have happened on that morning’s expedition. Wan Xu had obviously known about it, tried to conceal it from her. But what was it? And did it have anything to do with Keller being reassigned?
Or maybe these others didn’t know, themselves. Park felt the torque of frustration low in her gut. She had the constant feeling that there were things she wasn’t privy to, winging overhead. Currents of unspoken knowledge moving through the ship, moving through her. Maybe it was because she wasn’t conscripted, and nearly all of the others were. Or maybe it was because of her position as the ISF’s orbiter—no one was going to confide in their bosses’ “spy.”
But she had to admit that some of the fault also lay with her personality. People found Park spooky, she knew that; they thought she had some uncanny ability to know their thoughts, that she was liable to extract secrets from their minds the way she could separate yolks from cracked eggs. Ridiculous, of course, but she had forced herself to scale back when conversing with them, only listening rather than preempting their responses. People didn’t like it when you could guess their thoughts before they were ready to articulate them.
But by the time she’d recalibrated, the damage had already been done. Along with being a snitch, the crew thought Park was some kind of psychic. A sorceress ready to entangle them in some dark and unknown art. Or maybe even a robot herself; maybe that was why they thought she was in cahoots with Jimex.
Her bleak thoughts were interrupted by a commotion on the other side of the room. Fulbreech and Natalya Severov entered the dining room together, arguing in low voices. Park watched their entrance with veiled interest. She hadn’t spoken to Fulbreech since the catastrophe in the escape shuttle; hadn’t even given herself much time to think on it. His gesture for her had been powerful, of course—even she had to acknowledge that. But she didn’t know what to do with it. What to feel. How to face him and express the proper gratitude—if gratitude was what he even wanted.
Perhaps that was why he turned to Natalya, she thought. She might have greeted the proposal a little more warmly. And they had never come to a meal together before. Park surreptitiously scanned them for any signs of assignation: rumpled hair, slightly unzipped decksuits. No, none of that, but just because their clothing was immaculate didn’t mean they hadn’t coupled. Severov, exacting as she was, was the type to demand intactness, the upkeep of appearances. She was, as Boone often said, a hardass. Park knew a little of what that was like.
“You must feel the same way,” Natalya was saying. Though the woman was summer-skinned and golden-haired, her voice always made Park think of winter: she was always so crisp and biting. “There are bots who can make maps, you know. Those drones you use—soon enough they’ll have models able to do your job for you. In spite of you.”
“Luckily for me, there are none on this ship,” Fulbreech said, in a tone that indicated he was tired of the argument. “Look, Natalya, all of our jobs are outdated. You can’t take that out on the bots. We just have to accept the situation for what it is and be grateful for the time we have before ISF puts us to work doing something the robots can’t do. I expect that, after Eos, they’ll put me in the Art sector or something.”
“You’re wrong,” the surveyor retorted fiercely. “Not all jobs are outdated. The combat jobs are safe—they won’t ever trust clunkers with guns. And the psychologists.” At this she threw a venomous look at Park, who stared vacantly at her food to indicate she wasn’t listening. “Bots haven’t figured out how to do that properly yet. I’m not even sure our humans have.”
Fulbreech didn’t look over at Park—carefully, it seemed. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “Was there anything else you needed?”
Natalya scowled and turned away. “No,” she replied in her brittle way, walking off toward the food dispensary. “That’s all, Kel. I just hope you see things for how they are.”
Park watched Fulbreech watch her go; she told herself that her interest was merely an observer’s interest. A spy’s interest. She ignored the tight, sour feeling in her chest.
Then Fulbreech turned and caught Park’s eye. His face was tired, but it brightened when he saw her, and he came striding up to Park’s table with the same cheerful, guileless friendliness he’d approached her with for the last ten months. “Anyone sitting here?”
Park looked at the empty seat across from her and shrugged, waving slightly with her forkful of drooping salad. She tried very hard not to think about his kiss, the startling scent and warmth of him. Fulbreech took the seat, presumably to avoid having to wait in line with Natalya. He looked haggard, much grayer than the day before; his lips were space-chapped and his eyes still squinted from the Eotian sunlight. But he seemed happy to see Park.
The two of them sat in awkward silence for a moment before Park pushed him her unopened drink. She watched Fulbreech reverently accept the orange juice like she’d given him a birthday present. Why could she never act as happy to see him? Why did she always revert back to a state of—silent resistance, aloofness, despite his overtures?
“Natalya rope you into an anti-android rant?” she asked, just to make conversation.
Fulbreech grimaced; in a flash Park deduced that that was not the root of the issue between them. “She’s angry,” he said, lightly enough. “And afraid. Human surveying doesn’t seem to have much of a future.” He punctured the biodegradable membrane that held his juice in a palm-sized bulb. Park scrutinized him; he was only telling half the truth. But his conversations with Natalya were not her business.
“The new HARE explorers are being rolled out next year,” she said instead. “I remember seeing it on the Frontier newstream.”
“Which pretty much renders Natalya’s job obsolete,” Fulbreech continued, nodding. “And she’s convinced that every job will be threatened by robots soon—mine included.”
“And do you believe her?”
Fulbreech shook his head. “She’s just one of those people.”
Park nodded. She was familiar with those people; she’d lived through the anti-android riots in New Diego, after all. “I wonder how she feels about Reimi being—indisposed. Without her, a lot of the robots’ functions might lock up someday.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s happy about it,” Fulbreech said, glancing at the food dispensary line to make sure Natalya was still in it. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “She thinks that the robots are all here to spy on us for ISF.”
Park couldn’t help but laugh a little at the absurdity of it. “How would they even do that? Does she think they sit down and type incident reports to send back home?”
Fulbreech laughed, too. “Something like that. She thinks they’re all plugged in to ISF relays back on Corvus. My question is, how would they even know what to report? Today, Officer Boone took fifteen minutes too long in the bathroom. This is an emergency of the highest priority.”
The two of them chuckled together over the idea. Park was glad to see that somebody else recognized the silliness of conspiracy theories like Natalya’s; it meant not everybody on the ship believed the robots could be used to spy on people, as Sagara had insinuated about Jimex. For one thing—as Fulbreech said—they were too primitive to distinguish the worthiness of their observations: they’d be useless as spies.
And for another, she thought, they’d be redundant. She knew that ISF had not, could not have commissioned the android crew of the Deucalion to act as secret observers, meant to report back on the actions of the expedition members.
She knew that because it was what they were paying Park for.
Fulbreech sighed then, looking over at Natalya, who seemed to be locked in some sort of tirade against Megex; presumably the android had sworn at her, too. “The thing is,” he said, “it is pretty strange, how many androids are on this ship. I don’t totally blame people for wondering about their purpose. The spy thing is silly, but I find myself wondering, too. Why are there so many robots?”
He looked at Park, as if expecting her to know the answer, but she only shrugged. Even she had wondered this; she didn’t like it either, to a degree. Because she didn’t know what it meant. Machine life matching human life was common on two-seater mining ships, but not on three-deck behemoths like the Deucalion. Normally there were human navigators, other mechanics, auxiliary staffers who prepared food or swabbed the decks. But for whatever reason, this time the ISF had deemed it necessary to minimize human life aboard the ship as much as possible. The only reason why the lucky thirteen were there was because they each had specializations, elite roles the ISF hadn’t figured out how to replace with software—yet. Everything else could be done by the androids, who were often as light as children, or by bodiless AI. The Deucalion wasted no space on self-esteem.
The assumption was that it was all part of the push to propel their ship to Eos as fast as possible. If she looked at everything from a bird’s-eye view, Park could see the logic of it. Let the superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, the ones that could take their time getting to new planets. This ship couldn’t. And besides, if their vessel ever needed to lighten its load, there was the added benefit that the robots could be ejected as ballast. You couldn’t do that with ten, twenty, forty additional human crewmembers.
But the rest of the crew was disgruntled by this, all the same. Friends and colleagues who could have been saddled along had been ousted by androids—for reasons murky and unknown. Of course that caused resentment, anxiety about the future. On the next mission, who would be deemed dispensable next?
Hence why they projected sinister motives onto the robots, believing they had some purpose other than simply rendering human colleagues obsolete. Crewmembers like Natalya thought they were spies . . . and now Park was being lumped in with them, too. Blamed for their presence, their inquiries. As if she were the mastermind and all the androids just her proxies, mechanical limbs leading back to the same source.
Did that mean the crewmembers were going to turn their ire on her next?
Was that why they slipped something into my food?
“Have you heard of a rumor,” Park began, “regarding me?” If he had, he likely wouldn’t be sitting here with her, not if he believed it. But she had to know. How far beyond Sagara had this gossip gone?
Fulbreech looked at her curiously. “Which one?” he asked, utterly tactless. For some reason that made her trust him more.
But then Michael Boone came clunking into the dining hall, before she could answer. For an uneasy moment Park wondered if he had heard their little joke about him somehow—if someone had gone to fetch him. But the soldier seemed intent on something else. He looked like an overgrown child stuffed into the body of a linebacker, with his small, box-shaped head and mop of curly red hair: his torso was comically top-heavy, his powerful hands perpetually balled into fists. Park’s feet seemed to automatically plant themselves against the floor whenever she saw him—as if she were bracing herself for an impact. Today he looked particularly agitated, his neck bullish and veined.
“Uh-oh,” Fulbreech said softly, following her line of sight. “Looks like someone’s augments are acting up again.”
Park nodded, but continued to watch Boone. Their military leader made a beeline straight for Natalya, grabbing her slender arm just as she was turning away from Megex. Other crewmembers noticed, too. The conversation in the room died off a little, and Park was able to catch a snippet of Boone and Natalya’s exchange. Boone said, in his oily Martian drawl: “I asked you the location of the body!”
And Natalya answered testily, “Which body, and why do you care?”
Park couldn’t make out the rest of it. She turned back to Fulbreech and said, “Have you found any lakes on Eos?”
The cartographer looked blank as he began to chew through the juice bulb’s edible skin. “Lakes?”
“Boone’s talking about bodies over there.” He had to mean bodies of water they’d found outside, she thought. It would be the kind of thing he’d ask Natalya, the surveyor, about. Could you even call them lakes, off-planet? If you couldn’t determine the exact size of it, you’d call it a body of water, wouldn’t you?
“Is there water on Eos?” she asked then. She was embarrassed by how little she knew of their destination; but then, it was ISF who had directed her away from knowing more, and Fulbreech himself had referred to that fact yesterday. In the escape pod. Don’t think about that now. “I know there’s ice—obviously. But have you found anything the future colony could use?”
Fulbreech suddenly looked guarded. “You know I can’t discuss any of that with you, Park,” he said.
She sat back and felt her face flattening; all feeling of warmth toward him withdrew like a turtle into a shell. “Of course,” Park said, toneless. “My mistake.”
Foolish of her to assume anything of him, she told herself as Fulbreech got up to claim his lunch. Foolish of her to assume he’d tell a non-conscripted person anything about the new planet. It was ISF’s mandate, after all.
But—was it that foolish? He’d offered to take her outside just yesterday, hadn’t he? He’d stolen a suit and was willing to outright flout the rules. For her sake, he’d claimed. Now he wouldn’t even talk about it? What had changed?
She picked at her food. Was it because they’d been caught? Had Fulbreech been scared off by Sagara? Was he now rethinking the consequences of helping Park—or rethinking his attempt to start a dalliance with her?
Why bother at all, then? she thought with a growing measure of annoyance. Why bother establishing that level of confidence, of intimacy, only to withdraw it again the next day? How was she supposed to know where the line was?
Her frustration mounted as she watched him collect his tray of food from Megex, making light conversation with their physicist, Eric Holt. It wasn’t all Fulbreech’s fault, she knew. Mostly this was about her own vexations with ISF, and the mission they’d assigned her to. Why couldn’t she see Eos, or know anything about it? Why were they so concerned with keeping information about the planet from the data companies, when colonists would be landing here soon enough?
Park dropped her fork down onto her barely-touched tray, her appetite now completely gone. Maybe there was something wrong with the whole thing. Something they weren’t telling her, something that would deflate hopes back on Earth. Their researchers had declared beforehand that conditions on the planet were suitable for human life. There was the great rush to claim it, to begin the process of reconnaissance, exploration, settlement. Things on Earth were deteriorating fast. The ISF had to hustle, establishing outposts farther and farther out, trying to mitigate strain on the existing colonies for when the great diaspora came. Eos was the farthest from home that mankind had ever ventured.
But it’d all be for naught if something was wrong with the place.
They’d fast-tracked the prep time for this mission, she knew. There was a truncated training period on Earth, a scramble to assemble a crew. An anemic four weeks in a simulation dome in Antarctica. Within a matter of weeks the Deucalion was launched and propelled towards the farthest arms of the next galaxy, speeding towards a planet that awaited it like a pale-gleaming lighthouse, hanging in space.
They’d wanted it—and badly—and now perhaps they were hiding that the great rush had been pointless. But the accelerated timespan didn’t account for the other oddities about the mission. There was all the secrecy, the missing procedures. The need for a disproportionate amount of combat specialists—and a robotic crew. No one ever quite gave her a straight answer about anything. Rushing didn’t account for that, did it?
And she had read all about the first colonies, had watched the docustreams on the settling of Phobos and Io and Mars. Those colonies had come equipped with seedlings, and prefab biodomes, and embryos of pygmy cows. The Deucalion had none of that. Just a handful of unhappy scientists, half of whom couldn’t see the very planet they were supposed to be settling.
No, rushing couldn’t account for that.
And that was the other thing, Park thought as she watched Fulbreech slowly make his way back to their table. ISF had taken the time to pick out the best and brightest minds they could find—thirteen leaders in their respective fields. But none of those fields were the kind that tamed planets. There were no agriculturists, no builders, no space architects. Where the Corvus outpost had been settled with one hundred, this ship only had thirteen. Perhaps a lack of time could explain the amount of expedition members—but not their particular qualities. Why were there soldiers instead of farmers, why was there only one cartographer when there should have been twenty, two psychologists instead of two engineers?
Park frowned. So there was the strange acceleration, the hurry to cram a crew into the Deucalion and send it speeding off. And there was the secrecy, the concealment that kept even Park from knowing what was going on—and she was the ship’s so-called spy!
And now all this talk about bodies.
Fulbreech returned, looking unhappy. “You’re thinking about things you shouldn’t be,” he said, setting down his food. “I can tell.”
And whose fault is that? Park thought. She knew it was unfair. Fulbreech read her expression and said in a very low voice: “I never should have offered you the suit. I’m sorry. It was wrong of me.”
For a moment Park didn’t reply. Finally she said, “So I take it your offer is rescinded?”
He ducked his head. “Unfortunately, yes,” Fulbreech answered. “That’s a very strong yes.”
There was a little silence between them as he, too, began to pick at his food. After a moment Park took a steadying breath and said, “I understand, Fulbreech. And I don’t blame you. It’s not your fault.” How could she blame him for retracting an offer she never would have made in the first place, in his position? Even she had to acknowledge that she wasn’t worth the risk, not for a conscripted man. And in the end he was simply following orders from ISF—as were they all. No, she couldn’t blame him for that. But . . .
The cartographer suddenly looked away from her. The haggard look came over him again: his eyes were tired and strained, and shockingly blue. He looked sad, and a little bewildered, as if someone close to him had died suddenly. Even Park was surprised by the change. She had never seen Fulbreech look anything other than simple and friendly.
“I’m sorry, Park,” he said again, heavily. “If I could talk to you, I would.”
She wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m always available for counseling,” she told him. “To whatever extent you’re comfortable with.”
Fulbreech laughed a little and shook his head. “That’s just the thing,” he said. “I’m not sure there is such a thing as comfortable. Not out here.”
Yes, something must have happened, Park thought again. Something had happened out on Eos’s lethal tundra that morning. Something had changed between the escape pod and now. Her voice almost hushed with stifled alarm, she said, “Fulbreech . . . what’s happened? What’s going on?”
His smile had vanished, like a light winking out. “I guess I can’t describe it, Park,” Fulbreech said, resigned. His eyes trailed away from hers. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just something I can’t explain.”
“Perhaps he is feeling sick,” Jimex said after lunch. “I could ask Ellenex.”
“Please don’t,” Park said. After her talk with Sagara, she was training the android on keeping his mouth shut and exercising good sense; she could not say they were making much progress. “I’m telling you this in confidence, Jimex. That means I’m trusting you to keep it a secret from everyone else but us. As in you and me. Also, someone else overheard you asking Ellenex for medicine. If anyone else found out about that, it would be . . . upsetting. For them. So please try to be more mindful in the future.”
“Why?”
“Because—they trust—no, they think you’re incapable of doing things like that. Doing things in secret, doing things of your own prerogative. It’s dangerous to reveal your abilities too much. Do you understand what I mean?”
His head whirred noisily. “Perhaps Dr. Fulbreech is tired,” Jimex said, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “Daylight goes very quickly on Eos. Dr. Keller says this has an adverse effect on humans. It makes them ‘out-of-sorts’ and ‘grumpy.’”
But is Fulbreech ever grumpy? Park wondered. Silly question; he was prone to all the flaws and foibles that any other human was. She couldn’t forget that—couldn’t put him on any kind of pedestal. But in ten months on the ship, she had never caught him in a bad mood. Or found him so unwilling to talk to her.
“Could something have happened?” she wondered out loud. “Could one of the crewmembers have been—injured? Why was Boone talking about a body?”
“I am not certain,” Jimex said placidly. Then he said: “Perhaps Dr. Fulbreech is homesick. Dr. Keller said that could happen, but that the symptoms are not always obvious.” He looked at Park. “Are you homesick?”
“No,” Park said. Then she stood up and began to prepare the office for her next appointment.
It was true, she thought later, after Jimex had left and she had pulled up the program on her inlays for dictation. ISF had never told her when she could expect to return home—colony missions could take years—and she had never particularly cared to know. She had still signed up without objection. Of course, she did feel the occasional pangs for fire, for sunlight, for silence—but those were material longings, trivial concerns. In terms of homesickness, she had no home on Earth to be sick for.
But even Jimex didn’t need to know that.
Her next appointment was with Eric Holt, the expedition’s physicist. At twenty-eight, Holt was one of the youngest people on the ship, and a little insecure about that fact, in Park’s opinion. He was constantly putting on airs, lazily drawling his sentences, trying to blend in with the more cynical and experienced academics. His insecurity was not entirely unfounded, either: the space-born, with their augmented and extended lifespans, tended to believe that adolescence ended around age twenty-five. So to many of them, Holt was just a young buck, brimming with testosterone—despite his two doctorates from Shoemaker University. In response, Holt tried to act as if nothing affected him, as if everything was perpetually just all right. As if it were all part of an interesting story he would tell someday in the future.
But today, he had none of that self-assurance, pretense or otherwise. Before he arrived, Park’s inlays told her that Holt’s heart rate was elevated. And when he came in, his thin decksuit showed dark patches of sweat around the collar.
“Good afternoon, Holt,” Park began. “I was thinking—”
“I’d like to use the MAD,” Holt said rapidly. “Now.”
Park closed her mouth. “Of course,” she said after a moment, her voice neutral, offering no judgment or rebuke. Meanwhile she was thinking: Something’s wrong. Holt was looking at her in a daze, as if he’d been drugged; his eyes were glazed over with fear like a dumb animal’s.
Park reached over to boot up the Mood-Altering Device. Holt’s eyes followed the green spark of its activation sequence greedily. “Can you tell me what’s bothering you?” she asked him as it flashed to life.
The physicist’s hands were shaking. His face had a bony, scraped look. “I was having a nightmare,” he said. His voice was faint and a little muffled.
Park kept her expression pleasantly interested. “And what happened in the nightmare?”
Holt didn’t answer; he just stood there staring at her, kneading the skin around his eyes. After another moment, Park held up the plastic helmet of the MAD and helped Holt with its dangling straps and buckles and sticky microsuction cups. She averted her gaze as the MAD began beaming its euphoric green light into Holt’s brain, slackening his body until he was slumped in his seat. His mouth hung open slightly. In Park’s opinion, there was something disturbingly private about using the MAD—as if she were witnessing someone reach orgasm. She turned away to set a timer on her inlays. Two minutes was usually sufficient.
Then Holt gave a low groan. Park looked at him sharply—he should have been comatose with bliss—but instead he was plucking at the cables hooked to his helmet.
“It’s not working,” he said. He sounded close to tears. “Something’s wrong.”
This had never happened before. Park checked the helmet for malfunction, but the MAD was working fine. She angled it toward her face and felt the gamma rays bathing her brain in a warm cerebral massage. “It seems fine,” she said, trying to sound confident.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” Holt said.
Goddamn it, Keller, where are you? Park let the MAD rest on Holt’s skull again, though when he peered at her from behind the plastic visor, she could see that his expression was still one of distress—almost terror. His features were washed in eerie green light.
“Why don’t you tell me what you dreamt?” Park said, hoping that enough distraction would give him time to calm down.
Holt shook his head, then shuddered. “I don’t know. I was sleeping, and then when I woke up—I couldn’t move. There were all these lights flashing in my face. I tried to open my mouth to yell for someone, but—I had no tongue.”
“In your dream,” Park couldn’t stop herself from saying.
Holt shook his head again, but Park couldn’t tell what it meant. He continued, “My lungs were frozen; I couldn’t breathe. I was cold—so fucking cold. Like I was dead. Like my skin was peeling off. None of my organs were working. And I—I wasn’t in control of myself. I wanted to go outside. Leave the ship. But I was trapped inside my body and couldn’t move. I thought to myself that I’d rather be dead than keep feeling that way. I wanted to be dead.”
He took the helmet off and covered his face with his hands. Park thought, Suicidal ideations? Isn’t it too early for this? Holt hadn’t even gone outside yet, as far as she knew. Was he already buckling under the effects of the isolation? Space psychosis?
She said, “Nightmares are a normal reaction to stress, Eric. You are under an enormous amount of mental strain here, and this is a very common response to that.”
When he didn’t respond, she continued, “Nightmares are a response to fear and anxiety. They’re a way for our psyche to release pressure and operate with less of those pent-up emotions. Sometimes we can look at them as tools to cope and feel better.”
Holt still said nothing. When he spread his fingers to look at her through his hands, Park could see that the glaze was still in his eyes: a barely suppressed panic that made Park think, Something is really wrong here. They’d have to pull him off the expedition team altogether, give him some sedatives. They couldn’t send him out like that. She said aloud: “What else is bothering you, Eric?”
“It didn’t feel like a dream,” he murmured. “Didn’t feel like I was asleep. It felt real.”
“The human consciousness,” Park said, “is an extremely powerful force. Mere conviction and belief have made people ignore the pain of amputation, experience mass delusions—”
“You’re not listening to me!” The sudden ferocity in his tone silenced Park—even had her pulling up Sagara’s contact on her inlays. In the green MAD glow Holt looked shrunken, his features deceptively ravaged and scarred. His breathing hissed. He said again, “You’re not listening! Don’t you listen?”
Park sat, frozen, rapt. Her palms were slick; without realizing it she was gripping her own hand, tightly. It seemed to be melting out of her grasp.
“What is it that you need me to hear?” she asked Holt, barely hearing her own voice.
The physicist flopped back into his seat; his eyes floated away from hers. When he spoke again, his voice was as small and frail as a child’s. “I can’t tell if I’m still dreaming,” he mumbled. “I don’t know if I ever really woke up.”
“So you want me to pull him off the team?” Commander Wick asked, sitting back. “He’s due to go out tomorrow.”
“At least temporarily,” Park said. They were sitting in Wick’s quarters; she had avoided calling him to the counseling office, mindful of a power struggle, of making him feel like she was the school principal summoning a rascally student.
Wick frowned into the middle distance. At forty-two he was punching into the upper limit of the age range on the ship, but he looked younger; his body was rangy and tough, and lean as a rake. His face was tanned by alien suns. He was a somewhat solemn, reserved man—not the charismatic, jovial sort that Park had imagined would lead an expedition—but at least he was sensible. Easy to talk to. She hoped that he wouldn’t ignore her recommendation; otherwise she would have to go to ISF and override him.
“He’s disturbed about something,” Park continued. “Exactly what, we’ll have to find out in further sessions. But he’s far too distressed to be trusted under the strenuous conditions out there—at least right now.”
“What’s your best guess about him?”
“I’d prefer not to say anything with so little information. He may simply be—” She cut herself off.
“Cracking under the pressure,” Wick finished. He worked his jaw. “Which is unusual. If I recall, Holt has been off-world before. We haven’t even been on the Deucalion that long.”
“He’s been fine until today,” Park said, aware that the only person she should be discussing this with was Dr. Keller, who was still in absentia. “Until after we landed.”
“But he hasn’t been outside.”
“No. But going outside could only make it worse, if we don’t determine the cause of his . . . anxiety.”
She’d been reading up on the effects that new planets could have on the human psyche: how there were sometimes feelings of inexplicable terror. There was one unproven theory that the sound of an alien planet’s rotation, something unnoticed on Earth, could cause serious mental disturbance in a person, without them even knowing it. She considered floating the idea past Wick, who was a veteran of new planets, but held back. No point for her to come off as clueless, blind. At least not yet.
“All right,” Wick said, still working his jaw. He had a slightly nasal Lunar accent; watching him, she recalled that he had once broken all the bones in his face climbing Mons Huygens, the tallest peak on the Moon. “I suppose we can make do without a physicist, at least for now. And Holt is young. Maybe the responsibility was just too much for him.” She thought there was something accusatory in his tone, as if he were pointing out that she should have caught this long before the launch. Which was true: both she and Keller had vetted Holt in the preliminary testing. And cleared him. “You sent Holt to see Dr. Chanur?”
“Yes.”
He sat back. “All right, Park. I’ll back you up: Holt is off the team for now. Thanks for telling me.”
She sensed her dismissal; she rose and gathered her things. Before she exited his narrow room, where he bunked with Boone, Wick stopped her and said, “Park—how are you doing?”
She looked back. There was a rare sliver of sympathy in Wick’s face, which normally looked like a hatchet blade. She sensed he understood the difficult position she was in, without Keller, and the frustration of steering herself away from her own questions. The wall that lay between her and the rest of the crew. She felt a strange swell of warmth toward him—and then, alarmingly, a tight, achy feeling around the temples, as if she might cry. She said evenly, “I’m well, thank you.”
Then: “Is Keller really not available for . . . advice, at least? Where even is she? I can’t find her anywhere.”
Wick spread his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking off at something past her. “I couldn’t tell you.” She couldn’t decode what that meant, either.
So she left. At first she felt the urge to visit the infirmary, where Holt was resting under the supervision of Chanur, and where Reimi was being held in her suspended sleep. Park had the ghoulish idea of gazing into her cryogenic tank, as if she were an onlooker at a twenty-first-century zoo. Observing her body floating in the dark waters, oblivious to the rest of the ship and its troubles . . .
But she was so tired. Her own body felt swollen and waterlogged with weariness. Tomorrow, she thought, turning instead toward the long gray corridor that led to the residential section. I’ll look into all of it tomorrow . . .
She trudged to her bunk, trying to keep her head from drooping. The floor lurched oddly beneath her, as if she were on a seaward vessel; she told herself it was the exhaustion, lingering nausea from her space-sickness. The other women were sleeping by the time she crept in and grabbed her night gear; they were on strict sleeping regimens, since Eos only had seven hours of sunlight for them to use. Park, who could sleep in later, hurried down the corridor to the empty showers and activated the water at its hottest setting. The steam formed strange, twisting clouds under the artificial gravity. She shed her clothes and stepped in. Heat blasted her as if she had stepped into a furnace.
It must be heaven for the crewmembers who have to go outside, Park thought. One thing she did know was that Eos was cold—cold as hell. She’d felt it even through the super-reinforced shuttered windows on the bridge. The team had to ensure they were back before sunset every day: apparently nighttime on Eos meant almost-immediate death. Her stomach shuddered. Holt’s nightmare came to mind. Cold so extreme your skin might come off.
She turned her mind to other things. The confrontation between Boone and Natalya in the cafeteria still troubled Park: she had the feeling that if enough friction developed between the flinty surveyor and hotheaded Boone, disaster of an explosive degree might occur. What had they been arguing about? What body or thing were they hiding from her—what was Keller hiding, or Fulbreech, or Wan Xu?
And then there was Sagara. Cold and unreadable as stone. She didn’t even know if he was hiding anything, or if this was all just normal behavior for him. He was the wild card in the deck: she couldn’t predict him, couldn’t understand what his mindset or even purpose was. The big question mark over him scared her. Made him dangerous. And of course he’d done nothing to deter that feeling.
What could defrost him? Sex, she supposed—but he would never be one of the ones who had a liaison in the escape pod. She nearly laughed at the thought. Then briefly found herself imagining leading someone—the eager Fulbreech, she tried not to admit—down into that unlit, buzzing space, thrumming with the warmth of the ship’s whisper engines. Undressing each other’s bodies in the dark.
There was a mirror bolted into the far corner of the room. Park peered into the fogged glass and examined herself. Small, severe body. Harsh cheekbones, harsher eyes. Dark hair cut raggedly short. Not much to inspire interest, aside from perhaps her small nose, which she liked, and her long eyelashes. Better for him to pursue the svelte Natalya, or even shy and sweet Elly Ma. Despite the accompanying palavers, sexual encounters were generally encouraged for the health of the crew. Only she and Keller were exempt.
Objectivity is key, Park told her reflection.
“Dr. Park,” someone said through the steam.
Park jumped, whirled; nearly slipped on the anti-slip floor. Hunter, Boone’s lieutenant, was standing there at the entrance of the shower, watching her. Park resisted the urge to cover her breasts and said calmly, “What is it?”
“I think you need to come back to the room. There’s something wrong with Ma.”
Park wrapped herself in her thermal towel and followed Hunter out of the shower. The other woman walked with long, brisk strides; Park found herself jogging slightly to keep up. Her feet left wet prints against the icy floor.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Hunter said. She was a hard, ropy woman, with a shock of curly red hair. Park often found herself wondering if she was related to Boone: they looked so alike. But nothing in her file indicated it. And unlike Boone, who loved to jeer and slam his way around the ship, Hunter was famously laconic. Park had heard there was a running bet on who was more close-mouthed, herself or the combat specialist. Hunter said, “I just woke up and Ma was going crazy.”
Define crazy, Park wanted to say, as if Hunter were an android that she could command—but she knew that the other woman wouldn’t answer.
From down the hall they could hear the sounds of Elly Ma screaming. It was a sound that made the back of Park’s teeth ache; her eyes prickled. She saw Hunter flinch. All along the dim-thrumming corridor, doors were opening and tousled heads were poking out. They glanced at Park as she passed; she wished she had taken the time to dress in her decksuit. When they reached their door, Hunter stopped and said, “Why haven’t you turned on the lights, Natalya?”
The surveyor didn’t answer. When Park peered into the dark room, she could see her sitting on her bunk with her knees drawn up to her chin. She was looking at something in the corner. Park stepped inside and said, “Where’s Elly?”
The keening sound was rising. It sounded like a scream of hysteria, with dry, creaking sounds puncturing it that could have been sobs or laughter. Park squinted and saw that the sound was coming from the corner, that Elly was in the corner, huddled up. She motioned for Natalya to stay on the bunk and knelt, keeping the towel tucked around herself. She said, as if she were coaxing a cat out from under a porch: “What is it, Elly? What’s going on?”
All at once the keening stopped. The figure in the corner stirred and said, “What?”
“Why are you screaming?”
“I’m not,” Elly said thickly. Natalya made a noise of disbelief. Outside, Park could hear Hunter saying, “We don’t know what happened. One minute we were sleeping, the next, she was having some kind of episode. She got out of her bed and lay flat on the ground.”
“How do you feel?” Park asked Elly. She reached out, felt around until she touched Elly’s ankle. The climatologist pulled her foot away. Assess for risks of violence, Park told herself. “You’ve been under a lot of stress,” she said gently. “It wouldn’t be unusual if you were to react to that.”
“What are you talking about?” Elly asked. She was sounding more lucid, impatient, as if she’d been shaken awake from a deep sleep. Hunter finally flicked on the light. Park had to stop herself from closing her eyes; she saw Elly recoil from the glare for a moment, then relax.
There was something red on her arm. In the sudden brightness Park couldn’t see what it was. She heard Natalya give a muffled scream behind her.
“Elly,” Park said, her own voice sounding strangely steady, even to herself. “What happened to you?”
The climatologist looked at her sleepily. She seemed to take no notice of the stripes she’d clawed into her arm. The nails of her right hand were speckled with blood. She shook her head and looked at Park with the innocence of a sparrow. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Wake me up. I think I’m having a nightmare.”