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LENA CROUCHED ON THE floor with her back against the wall just outside the head as the crew seemed to insist on calling the bathrooms. She’d sneaked off after the meeting on the premise of needing to go, but just wanted some time on her own to get her head straight. She could have gone back to her cabin, but the ship seemed not to speak to her in public areas, and she really needed her own space. Her face was still wet from where she’d washed and she was enjoying the cool of letting it evaporate. Lena heard voices approaching and scrambled round the corner without standing, she didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. She heard the scouse tones of PO Lee and one of the male crew members she didn’t quite know yet.
“This is gonna be a long tour,” said the man, loudly.
“Shush!” Lee hissed back.
“Bollocks if he does. Fazar’s a donkey’s ass and everyone knows it.”
“Look, there’s no point in talking like that, Tony. We’re stuck with him whether we like it or not. It’s a long way out to Proxima even in this ship, if you start butting heads with Fazar this early, you’ll make your life a misery.”
“Pfff,” said Tony, slamming the stall door, “I had him for six months on the Justinian and that was long enough. The man’s an evil arse and that’s all there is to it.”
“Look let me rephrase that,” said Lee, “if you start butting heads this early, you’ll make my life a misery. And I’m the one who’s gotta put up with you whining about it. He seems okay to me.”
“You’re a bit of a golden girl, though aren’t you? Besides, he likes the ladies.”
“Yeah, well, so do I, do so he’d be on a hiding to nothing there, wouldn’t he?”
They both laughed at that and went about their ablutions in amicable silence. Lena wondered how long it would be until she was missed. She felt guilty eavesdropping, but this kind of intel was too useful to miss.
“Talking about the ship, whaddya think of her?” asked Lee, over the noise of washing her hands.
“Honestly?” Tony waited for the water running to finish, “It gives me the creeps.”
“God, you’re a proper misery today. Don’t you like her? She’s so sleek and so damn fast!”
“Doesn’t it bother you that she can fly herself, without you?”
“Mate, you know auto-pilot’s been a thing for like two hundred years, right?”
“Not like this though.” Now Tony was choosing to lower his voice. Lena had to shuffle her ear to the edge of the corridor to hear properly. She was sure someone was going to see her, but she had to know what everyone thought of Rowie. “It’s alive.”
“Well yeah, but not,” Lee sighed, “Little Lena says she’s okay.”
“What? The weird pale kid?”
Lena felt herself flush.
“Yeah. And she’s not weird, she’s... well, she’s ten.”
“Still weird.”
“She reminds me of my sister, okay? Now leave off her.”
“Okay, touchy, just saying, that it’s the lives of all of us you’re trusting to that kid and this alien hulk of whatever it is. The captain doesn’t properly trust it and she’s right not to—"
“What?”
“Did you hear?”
“What? I didn’t hear anything. You’re really starting to get paranoid. Find yourself a hobby. Didn’t you say you fancied one of the marines?”
“Shh! We’re out in the open now, they might hear us.”
“How old are you, twelve?”
And then the voices got too far away for Lena to hear. She slumped back against the wall—she didn’t realise she’d been clenched. What the hell had she gotten herself into? She should’ve been safe on a station or a planet worrying about VR games or boy bands or school or whatever the hell else normal eight-year-olds were supposed to worry about. Instead, she was trapped on an alien lifeform, hurtling at light speed into the vastness of space. Where her best friendship on the whole journey was the nascent one with the ship itself, where one wrong word could get them all ejected into space. Hot tears ran down her face, but there was no time to wipe them, she heard more of the slightly squeaky boots approach. She stood and ventured a peek round the corner—one of the marines. That was quite enough, she turned tail and ran the other way, not caring where it took her. One passage looked much like another and Lena suspected the ship remodelled itself for her as she went. Broadly, everything stayed in the same place, but if she was going somewhere, it always seemed as though she got there faster than she thought. Right now, this corridor was curving gently, with few passages off, good for running.
Smash.
“Oops, we are clumsy,” said Fazar.
Lena was face down on the deck, had she tripped? Her face was numb. The doctor had only just stopped eyeing her suspiciously from last time. Stabs of nerve endings woke, one at a time, each sending the same message—she had probably broken her nose. Her head buzzed with nausea. She could still hear Fazar’s voice. He was lifting her arm behind her back. If he were trying to hurt her twisting it, he’d have a job, her face was in too much pain already. She felt him kneel next to her, felt his warm breath against her ear.
“Hello, Little Lena, I thought it was time for your next booster,” Fazar said. At least she wouldn’t feel the needle. “And I needed to check a few things.” He stopped as if waiting for a reply. Lena didn’t feel like gracing him with one. “Firstly,” he pulled at her arm in emphasis, “what did you tell them?” He pulled again, it started to hurt the way he’d pulled it, maybe he could make it hurt more than her face.
“Noth-ing,” Lena’s voice was muffled from her face being pressed into the deck.
“Good girl,” said Fazar, sounding pleased with himself. “Next I needed to check that your dog is properly on a leash.” Lena assumed he meant Rowie. “Well?” another sharp twist of her arm, he was pushing her wrist back using her thumb, somehow. “Is it on a leash?”
Lena didn’t even know how to answer that. She’d tried to explain it all to Rowie and she thought the ship understood, but who knew? “Yes?”
“You don’t sound,”—he pulled—“sure!”
“Ow! Oow! Yes! Yes stop!”
He knelt alongside her. “Shhh! I don’t really believe you, but I suspect, if your friend were going to act, I’d feel those force fields again, wouldn’t I? And I don’t, so I suspect the gravity of our situation is appreciated by all. And you’ve explained our little arrangement, haven’t you, hmm?”
“Yes,” said Lena.
“Good girl,” Fazar’s pleased-with-himself voice again. “Well, I can see we’re going to have a working relationship that’ll function just fine. One last thing then.” Lena felt a knee in her back as she heard Fazar rustling in his pockets. Looking for the syringe, presumably. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
It did. She heard footsteps from behind them
“Oh, one last thing, the next person along, was the first to find you and you tripped over your own feet. New boots, eh? Take a while to get used to. Ciao.”
Lena laid there on the deck, it hurt too much to do anything else.
