Chapter Three

The cruiser’s telescopes moved from one object to another, each rock in the system getting a few seconds of observation time. The data thus recorded was fed directly to Valk, the candidates spooling through his consciousness. He didn’t see the objects except as numbers: diameter, average orbital distance, albedo, spectroscopic profile. Each object in the system had to be evaluated, cataloged, rejected. “Object number 6020,” he said. “Four hundred and fifty-one kilometers across its major axis. Twenty-one AU from the star. Albedo point seven one, indicating an icy but dynamic surface. Spectral lines indicate no atmosphere. No satellites.”

“Uh-huh,” Paniet replied. “Dearie, do you know I could be working on actually repairing this ship just now? Oh, how I would adore to be tracing circuits and welding bulkheads just now. Compared to this snipe hunt.”

“Lanoe needs a planet,” Valk said. “Let’s move on. Object number 6021. Five hundred and twelve kilometers across its major axis. Twenty-one AU. Albedo point zero four, indicates a carbon/silicate hybrid composition, which is backed up by spectral lines. No atmosphere. One satellite, listed as 6021-a, one point six kilometers across major—”

“Enough,” Paniet said. “Enough. I’m headed back to the engines. If I can get a patch on the damaged shielding down there, it’ll make us harder to track.”

“That’s fine,” Valk said. “We don’t need to be in the same place to keep running down the planetary candidates.”

“Valk, my friend,” Paniet said. “Look at me a moment.”

Valk hadn’t even been aware that his visual sensors were switched off. He brought them back online and trained them on Paniet. Anyone else would have noticed no change in him—he was still motionless in the seat by the ship’s controls. Somehow, though, Paniet must have sensed it. “How did you know I wasn’t looking at you?” he asked.

“How did I know you were sitting there blind as a bat? Because you didn’t have any displays active.”

Valk looked around and saw it was true. Normally he kept at least one visual display going—a view of what was directly ahead of the cruiser. He maintained that display for the sake of anyone who happened to be standing nearby. He must have shut it down by reflex, to save power. He switched it back on now, even though there was nothing to be seen but the multitude of crowded stars.

“I … I don’t need a display to fly this crate,” he said. Trying to make it sound like a joke.

“I know you don’t,” Paniet said. The engineer sighed. “There are a lot of things you don’t need anymore, hmm?”

Valk had no ability to look ashamed or embarrassed. He had no face, and his body language was limited by what he could do with his arms in his bulky suit. “You’re suggesting that maybe I don’t need the human crew of this ship.”

There had been a time when he thought he was a human being. Tannis Valk, the Blue Devil, the hero pilot of the Establishment. The legend was that Tannis had been flying a routine patrol in an FA.6 one day when he was ambushed by an enemy destroyer. He was struck by an antivehicle round that turned his cockpit into a hell of fire. Even as his skin crisped and his muscles burned, Tannis had continued to fight, getting two more confirmed kills before he flew back to his base. Afterward he’d become a legend—the pilot so tough he refused to die. Though he had suffered third-degree burns over his entire body, he could still fight on for the great cause. In public, after that day, he’d only ever appeared in his suit with his helmet up and tuned to an opaque black. Supposedly to spare anyone from having to see what was left of his face.

The real reason was that the suit—and the helmet—was completely empty. Tannis Valk had died instantly when the fireball tore through his ship. The FA.6 had been smart enough to get the two kills and fly home on its own. The Establishment had a bad need for heroes, though. At the time it was fighting the combined fleets of Earth and the polys, and it was losing. So Tannis’s consciousness had been scanned from the charred ruin of his skull. Downloaded into a computer and made to think and see again. Not as a man, but as an artificial intelligence.

Creating an AI capable of independent thought and action was a serious crime. Giving such a being access to weapons—like, say, a cataphract-class fighter—was one of the worst crimes imaginable. The last time an AI had been armed, half the human race had died as a result. It was just assumed that any artificial intelligence would eventually turn on its creators and try to wipe them out.

The Establishment had been desperate enough to try it anyway. They had thought that if they told Valk he was still alive, still human, they could keep him on their side. Their plan had been to dismantle him and quietly erase his programming just as soon as they won the war. The problem was that they lost.

Valk had been left thinking he was a human being until shortly after he met Lanoe. When he’d discovered the truth, it had nearly driven him insane. He was only now starting to come to terms with what he really was. What he had always been.

“You’re afraid that I’m going to go rogue and kill you all,” Valk said.

“I’ll admit it’s a worry,” Paniet told him. “But not a significant one. I’ve worked with you long enough to know how loyal you are to Lanoe. I don’t think you would ever betray him.”

Valk was surprised to find how much relief he felt, hearing that. He knew there were others in the crew who didn’t trust him at all.

“Don’t forget,” Paniet went on, “I know computers better than anyone else here—except you. I know how computers think. I’m much more worried that you’ll just shut down on us. That you’ll get stuck on some impossible problem. Something that a human being could just shrug and put aside—but instead you’ll be unable to let it go, and so you’ll devote more and more processing power to it until you stop communicating with us altogether.”

“What, like calculating pi to the last digit or something?”

“Or, say, pointlessly cataloging every chunk of matter in this system, looking for a planet that isn’t there,” Paniet said.

“No. That can’t be right. Lanoe said the Choir wouldn’t have sent us here for no reason. There has to be something.”

“We would have seen it by now,” Paniet replied. “We’ve run so many sensor sweeps—a big planet couldn’t hide from us, not like this.”

“Most of our scans have been in the visual portion of the spectrum,” Valk pointed out. “If the planet was exceptionally dark, say, with an albedo below point zero one—”

“Ahem,” Paniet said. “You think I hadn’t considered that? But to have an albedo that low, the planet would have to be made of nothing but carbon nanotubes. We’re looking for a gas giant with a hydrogen atmosphere.”

“We don’t know what we’re looking for. It might not even be a planet.”

“I suppose that’s true, but—”

“I want to start running a series of transit photometry scans. If an exceptionally dark object passed in front of the star, we would see a dip in its light output,” Valk said. “Anyway. You don’t need to worry about me climbing up my own posterior and disappearing. I have a safeguard built in to prevent that.”

“You do?” Paniet asked. Valk thought he sounded skeptical.

“Yes. Pain.”

“I’m not sure I understand how that tracks.”

Valk couldn’t sigh, or snort in derision, or laugh. You needed lungs for those things. He could simulate them just fine, create sound files he could play when he needed to express an emotion. It didn’t feel the same, though. “I hurt. Just all over. Back when I believed I was a human, I thought it was pain from my injuries. Now I know better—it was something like phantom limb syndrome, except everywhere at once. I call it phantom body syndrome. My simulated brain expects to get constant signals from my nonexistent nerves, and when that input doesn’t show up, it assumes something is very wrong. So it tries to tell me that—by making me hurt.”

“Is it … bad?” Paniet asked.

“Excruciating,” Valk told him. “Worse when I move around, because I’m more aware of the fact that my joints aren’t there.”

“The devil you say,” Paniet swore. “I—I didn’t know.”

“It’s fine. I’ve lived with that pain for, well, the entire time I’ve existed. I know how to ride it out.”

“Couldn’t you just turn it off?” Paniet asked him.

“Of course. Easiest thing in the world—I just need to edit a one and make it a zero. But I won’t.”

“Why in Earth’s name not?”

Valk couldn’t smile. He had no mouth. “Because it’s the last part of me that still feels human,” he said. “You’re worried I’m going to turn into a pure computer and stop thinking like a human being. That won’t happen, you see? Because if I started down that road, the pain would bring me back. It would remind me of what I used to be.”

The emotion that crossed Paniet’s face then was difficult to parse. Valk chose to ignore it.

“Candidate number 6022,” he said. “Thirty-seven kilometers along its major axis …”

Four.

Numbers were easy. Especially the number four. He saw it in his head, rotating in empty space. Four four four four. The number was always there.

There were words, too, thoughts spooling through his head, what felt like whole sentences, memories of things said, things other people had said. When he tried to catch them, though, they turned to nonsense, melted in his hands. Turned into a ringing sound, the ringing sound, the ringing noise that filled his head and turned him inside out and—

And—

“Gah,” he said.

A word. A real word, in the oldest language. In baby talk. In the primal cry.

“Gah.”

It made sense. It was the first word that had made sense to him in a long time. It meant something.

It meant “get this thing off of me.” Except not quite. The word was missing something. Oh, right. It was emphatic. It needed an exclamation mark.

Get this thing off of me!

“Gah!” he said, thrashing against the mass on his face, against the intruder in his throat, inside of him—

“Hold on,” someone told him. A woman, and then he felt soft hands on his face, on his chest, and then a hundred-meter-long snake came slithering out of him, biting and tearing at his insides as it came, and he tried to scream but the woman shushed him and he couldn’t resist, couldn’t resist that oldest and first maternal command, and then he gagged and spat up the last of the snake, its twisting tail, and saw it was a length of plastic tubing no more than twenty centimeters long.

There was blood on it. Blood and spit.

That thing had been inside him. He was—he was hurt, he’d been—

“Wah,” he said, more baby talk, but now he was conscious enough, aware enough to feel shame. He was better than this, he was a Hellion, and that meant something, it meant he was tough, tough enough for real words—

“Wat!” he cried.

And because it was almost a word, because it almost made sense, he was rewarded. The woman pressed a squeeze tube of water to his mouth and he sucked at it, just like an infant sucking at a bottle—

No, damn it. He was an adult, a man, but—but the water in the tube was so perfect, so cool and soothing and clean. He sucked and sucked until it was taken away.

“Muh,” he said.

“In a minute. You don’t want to overdo it yet. Shh.”

The soft hand stroked his forehead. Eased away the tension there, the taut agony of straining muscles, of a pounding headache, and it felt so, so good.

“Ginj,” he whispered.

Which was not just a real word, but an actual name. Ginger. It had to be her—the only woman who’d ever shown him any kindness or understanding since he left his mother’s home back on Hel. The only friend he had in the world—

“No,” the woman said. “It’s Lieutenant Candless.”

Bury opened his eyes. Stared at her.

His old instructor, from flight school. Now his superior officer, the second in command of his ship. Bury stared at her with wide, terrified eyes. She’d been hard on him, so hard back in school, always pushing him, needling him, insulting him. She’d treated him like a child, like a petulant brat. He’d hated her, hated her like poison even when he’d respected her, even when he’d felt—when he felt—

“Off,” he said. “Get off!”

Her hands, those hands that a moment before had felt so comforting, pulled back. He couldn’t stand to have her touch him like that, it was just wrong, so wrong. He reached out and grabbed the side of the bed, hauled at it with both hands until he swung around.

“Bury, no—don’t move, you can’t move yet, you’re still—”

He ignored her. He needed to get away, needed to … to … Oh, by all the chapels in hell, he’d thought she was Ginger, he’d let her touch him like that, let her—

“Get away from me!” he howled, and tried to put his feet down, tried to put his bare feet on what he expected to be a cold, hard floor, except he wasn’t prepared for the fact that there was no gravity and he launched himself out of the bed, launched himself up into one corner of the room, behind the segmented arms of a medical drone. Grabbed on to anything he could and curled himself into a corner, staring down at her.

At her maddening, prim face. At her severe and demanding and unbearably smug face. Oh, by hell, by bloody, bloody hell, he’d thought she was Ginger, thought—

“Get out of here!” he screamed at her. “Get out!”

“Oh,” Valk said. “It looks like Bury’s woken up. That’s some good news.”

Lanoe scowled at him. “Sure,” he said. “Is that why you called me down here?”

Valk knew that Lanoe could come across as callous sometimes, but that the commander truly cared about his crew. He was just distracted by everything else that was going on.

It looked like Paniet didn’t understand that. The engineer visibly flinched. “When I got dropped on my head and went into a little coma, were you this angry about it?” he asked.

“Sorry,” Lanoe told him. He let out a long sigh of impatience. “Yeah, it’s good. I’m glad Bury’s going to be okay. Just—tell me what you wanted to say.”

Valk brought up a display and spooled through page after page of dense text. “We’ve cataloged eighty-six thousand seven hundred and ninety-one objects in this system. There may be a few we’ve missed, but they’re likely to be very small.”

“You counted eighty thousand rocks here?” Lanoe interrupted.

“Every star system is just littered with bits and pieces left over from its formation,” Paniet said. “Even a small one like this. Comets and asteroids, dwarf planets and scattered disk objects and meteoroids in vast profusion. Eighty thousand is probably just scratching the surface. The asteroid belt around Earth’s sun contains millions of objects more than half a kilometer across, and the Oort cloud out past the orbit of Neptune probably has trillions. No one has ever bothered to count them all. Such a thing might not even be possible.”

Lanoe shook his head. “I’m aware of how crowded the solar system is. What surprised me is that you scanned eighty thousand rocks and none of them were planet-sized. Because I’m assuming if you had found a planet you would have led with that.”

Paniet rolled his eyes. “Oh, indeed. And no, we didn’t find any planets. But it’s possible our survey wasn’t completely in vain. We did find one candidate mass that intrigued us. M. Valk, if you please?”

Valk brought up a new display. This one showed a light-enhanced view of the object they called 82312, an icy mass about three hundred kilometers in diameter. Its surface was mostly flat, a skin of sheer ice broken only by very deep craters. Paniet had said it looked like a hollow skull, if one were feeling poetic. When Valk looked at it, it just looked like a big chunk of frozen rock.

“Okay,” Lanoe said. “Now’s the part where you tell me why I should care about this thing.”

“Look at the metadata in the corner of the display,” Valk said. A list of numbers was printed there, showing 82312’s orbital parameters, its surface gravity, its hypothesized composition, its rotational period and values for its perturbation and precession—

“Just tell me, Paniet,” Lanoe said.

“It’s exactly what it looks like, a big chunk of dirty ice, but contain your disappointment. It’s only a few million kilometers away from our present position. We could hide the cruiser behind it so that Centrocor could never find us. If we’re feeling cheeky, we could even harvest an enormous quantity of deuterium and tritium from its ice.”

“Fuel. For the engines,” Lanoe said, giving Paniet a shrewd look. “Is that something we need?”

“Not immediately,” Paniet admitted. “Though if we’re going to be operating in this system for a long time, or if, say, we wanted to relocate to another star, one that might actually have planets—”

Lanoe nodded. “Understood. You’re saying this place would make a good base of operations. I agree. There’s just one problem, though. A couple million kilometers away is still a pretty significant distance when we can’t risk running our engines. The second we turn them on, Centrocor will know exactly where we are.”

“They would see the light generated by our main thrusters, yes,” Paniet said. “We can run our maneuvering and positioning jets without too much of a worry, though. Centrocor would have to have telescopes trained right on us already to see them firing. It’ll be slow going, but safe.”

“How slow?”

“We can be at 82312 in sixteen hours,” Valk told Lanoe.

“Sure.” Lanoe studied the image of the iceball and nodded for a while. “Sure. If Centrocor doesn’t find us by then … All right. Let’s do it.” He nodded one more time, definitively. Then his eyes narrowed and Valk knew he’d just thought of something. “One thing. If we burned our main engines just for a couple seconds, how much quicker could we get there?”

“Half the time,” Paniet said.

“Do that,” Lanoe told the engineer.

“But Centrocor—”

“Will see it and come investigate, yes. They’ll come look for us right here, where we are right now. By then we’ll be long gone.” And with that Lanoe departed the makeshift bridge, leaving the two of them alone with their instructions.

“I suppose he has a point,” Paniet said once he was gone. “But he’s taking a largish risk there, isn’t he?”

Valk cleared the displays and brought up the ship’s drive controls. “This is Lanoe we’re talking about. The man’s a master strategist. Did you see the look on his face just then?” he asked the engineer. “He gets that look every time he has a brilliant idea.”

If Bury pushed off one wall of the sick bay as hard as he could, it took exactly three-tenths of a second to fly to the far wall. He caught himself against the impact with both hands, then twisted around and launched himself through the air again, careful not to get tangled in the arms of the medical drone. Point two nine eight seconds, according to his wrist display. He turned around and got his feet against the wall and launched himself across the room one more time.

When the hatch opened, he barely had time to stick out a leg and catch the edge of the bed before he went sprawling into Ginger. Her eyes went wide as he bounced back, laughing. “Ginj!” he said. “Ginj! Hey!”

“You should be in bed,” she told him.

He shrugged and grasped the edge of the bed. He had no intention of getting back into that thing as long as he lived. “I feel fine,” he told her.

“The last time I came in here you were comatose.” She pushed her way inside the room and let the hatch close behind her. “You never were very bright, Bury. You could have died. Do you understand that? I talked to Engineer Paniet a little while ago. He says your fighter was a total loss—he couldn’t even rebuild it after it got hit by that missile. You—”

“I said I feel fine,” Bury told her, his voice sounding a little higher pitched than he’d intended. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. “Look, you’re worried about me, and I appreciate it. I really do, Ginj. If it makes you happy, I’ll sit down. But I’m fine.”

She frowned and looked away. “We need to run a bunch more tests. You lost a lot of blood, and there was some pretty severe organ damage. Rain-on-Stones fixed you up as best she could, but—”

“Who?” he asked.

“Oh, hellfire,” Ginger said. “That’s right. You don’t know anything about the Choir. About what we found in the bubble. You probably don’t even know where we are.”

“I’ve been napping,” he said, and smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.

What was going on?

“You want to get out of this room for a while? See some things?”

“Hellfire, yes,” he told her.

She nodded. For the first time he noticed that the red hair on one side of her head had been shaved away. She had a thin scar running across her temple. Had she been hurt?

What the ruddy hell was going on?

Valk launched a flight of microdrones—tiny robots no bigger than a human thumb, each carrying nothing but a camera, an antenna, and a miniscule thruster package. They spread out away from the cruiser in every direction, moving fast. They would let him closely monitor the volume of space near the cruiser—and hopefully, eventually, give them some sense of Centrocor’s movements.

“I don’t care for this one bit, ducks,” Paniet said. “We don’t know where the enemy are, any more than they can find us. They could be sitting close by right now—and your little friends there could be the thing that gives away our position.”

“Not very likely,” Valk said. “I’m of the opinion that more information is always better.”

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Paniet asked. “Oh, don’t give me that look. I was only kidding.”

“What look?” Valk asked. “I’m not physically capable of having an expression, much less an objectionable—”

“Don’t forget that having a sense of humor is a sign of functional intelligence,” Paniet told him.

Valk laughed. He played a sound file of a human laugh. For a moment he wondered if he was genuinely amused, or if some deep-buried subroutine in his programming had simply recognized that a joke had been told and responded accordingly. Or if that was even a valid question.

He never used to have thoughts like that.

The display in front of him split in two, then four, then sixteen as the microdrones came online. Soon one hundred and twenty-eight different camera views floated around him. He closed the subdisplays, because of course he didn’t need them. He could query each microdrone independently or call up a composite view as necessary.

As the tiny cameras maneuvered to spread as far from each other as possible, they gave Valk a good view of the cruiser. He hadn’t realized how badly damaged it was. Half the armor had been stripped from one side. The forward section, where the bridge used to be, was nothing but wreckage and skeletal girders. The damage to the thrusters looked the worst—one of the big cones looked like it had been chewed on by some enormous dog, and there was a deep gouge in the shielding back there. Paniet had completed all the repairs he could manage—if the Hoplite was ever going to be whole again, he’d told Lanoe, it needed to put in at a repair dock, and the nearest of those was ten thousand light-years away. Lanoe, being Lanoe, had simply told him to do what he could. Paniet had worked endless shifts putting the cruiser back together, but he couldn’t make carbon fiber sheathing or armor plate just appear out of thin air.

Valk brought up a display so Paniet could see how ragged the ship looked. “You missed a spot,” he said.

It was Paniet’s turn to laugh. “All right, all right. Are you ready for the burn?”

“Yeah.” Valk activated alarm chimes and flashing lights throughout the ship to let everyone know they were about to be subjected to significant gravity, if only for a few seconds. He called up a control board and lifted a finger toward the virtual key that would activate the engines. He didn’t really need the board—he could have made the maneuver as easily as thinking about it—but he thought maybe Paniet would appreciate the gesture.

The engineer strapped himself into a chair and gave Valk the nod.

The engines roared to life, ionized exhaust flooding out through the cones. The microdrones were programmed to turn to follow any moving body in their vicinity, so in the composite display the cruiser didn’t seem to move at all. Valk switched to an infrared view and saw the brilliant plume of heat they left in their wake, like a giant arrow pointing right at them.

Valk let the engines burn for five seconds, then switched them back off. He sounded the gravity alarm again, then let his arm fall back at his side.

“It needs a name,” Paniet said.

“What?”

“The iceball. The one we’re going to hide behind. We can’t just keep calling it 82312. At least I can’t. What do you think?”

Valk consulted a database, looking for a suitable name. “Caina,” he said, after considering and rejecting several hundred possibilities.

Paniet frowned. “I don’t get the reference.”

“Caina,” Valk said, “was one of the lowest levels of Dante’s Inferno. Because this is one of the farthest objects from the red dwarf.” He brought up a text display about the name, and Paniet scanned a few lines.

“A place of horrible cold and ice. Where only the very worst of sinners end up after they leave the world behind,” the engineer mused. “Sounds familiar.”

“Sinners,” Valk said. “We’re not that bad, are we?”

“We just got here,” Paniet responded. “Give us time.”

Bury hardly noticed when gravity returned. He reached out reflexively and grabbed a nylon strap hanging from the brig’s wall. When the gravity went away again, he let go. He never moved his eyes from the display on the cell’s hatch.

“That … thing … operated on me,” he said, very quietly.

“She’s a gifted surgeon,” Ginger told him.

“She’s a giant crab alien covered in bugs. Putting her in a black dress doesn’t help much.”

“We didn’t put that on her. That’s how the Choir all dress. They believe in living harmoniously—they all dress the same, eat the same food.”

“Sounds kind of, I don’t know. Dull,” Bury said.

“They govern by consensus. They’re telepaths. They share everything, their thoughts, their emotions … You can’t understand.”

“But you can,” he said.

It was the hardest part for him to accept. Not the existence of aliens—he’d heard all about the evil Blue-Blue-White, so another species of intelligent life wasn’t wrecking his brain. The fact that these new aliens could create wormholes and share thoughts across distances was all so abstract and weird he didn’t even try to process it. No, what sent shivers down his spine was that this alien had cut both of them open. The chorister had performed surgery on Ginger and himself. Those wicked-looking claws had been inside their bodies. The thing had put an antenna in Ginger’s head so they could talk. And it had performed surgery on him, cut him open and clacked away in his guts.

Commander Lanoe had let that happen to them. He’d ordered it to cut into them. To change them.

Bury pushed back away from the hatch of the cell. The thing sleeping in there—he couldn’t bring himself to call it a person—disgusted him.

He ran a hand down his chest. They’d taken him out of his suit and put him in a thermal comfort garment, the first piece of fabric clothing he’d worn since he entered flight school. Through the thin cloth he could feel the puckered scar that ran from his sternum down to his groin.

He knew he should be grateful. By all accounts, if the alien hadn’t patched him up he would have died in the sick bay. But he wasn’t grateful. All he could think about was those little spider things crawling all over Rain-on-Stones’s body. All he could imagine was bugs like that inside of him, their tiny legs wiggling in the dark of his abdominal cavity.

“I feel sick. I feel so sick right now,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ginj. I mean, I get it, you have a connection to that thing. But I can’t … Oh, hellfire.” An acidic belch worked its way up his throat. He tried to suppress it but there was no way to keep it down.

“Bury?” Ginger said. “Bury?”

He kicked his way out of the brig and back toward the sick bay. It wasn’t far, but he barely managed to get inside before he started heaving. There was nothing in his stomach, but his body kept trying to throw up anyway.

He could feel his heart pounding in his chest like a piston. The muscles in his arms and legs turned rubbery and weak. He crawled back into the bed and pulled a strap across himself. The effort of doing just that left him feeling drained and half-dead. He pressed his face against the pillow and clamped his eyes shut, even as his stomach twitched and spasmed inside of him.

“Bury,” Ginger called as she came inside the little room. “Your pulse is through the roof. You’re in shock, I think—I don’t know. I don’t know how any of these displays work. I’ll go and get Lieutenant Candless, she—”

“No!” he said. “No. Please, Ginger. Don’t—don’t tell her about this. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine.”

“You really scared her when you woke up and had your panic attack. She gave me strict orders to keep her informed about your health. I need to tell her.”

“No, you don’t. Four, Ginger. Four.”

She looked deeply confused.

“Four confirmed kills. I have four confirmed kills already. I have to get better so I can fight again. So I can get to five. If you tell her I’m sick, she won’t let me fly. Just—just let me sleep a little, and I’ll be fine. Four. One more and I’ll be an ace. I’ll get my blue star.”

“Even if it kills you,” she said.

He shook his head. “I’m going to be fine. I just need to rest, okay? I just need to rest a little. Please.”

“All right,” she said, with a sigh. “But if I see any sign that you’re not okay—”

“Of course. But I just need to rest.”

She nodded.

He waited until she was gone before he let himself heave again. This time something did come up. A thin trickle of acidic spit squeezed out between his lips before he could catch it. The medical drone reached down with a suction arm to vacuum it away.