Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

I suspect I fail to look contrite. She stops cold, in the middle of drawing breath to continue upbraiding me, and shuts her mouth with a click. “What is it, Casey?”

“Permission to go back out after Leslie, ma'am?”

“Denied.”

“Ma'am—”

Her eyelids tighten. “Casey, get the fuck out of my ready room before I have you spaced.”

But— I want to say. But Leslie's alive out there, but we got Charlie back, didn't we? But you don't leave your buddy behind, but—

— but we got away with it, ma'am.

She's not looking down.

“Yes, ma'am.” I nod crisply, and get the fuck out of her ready room.

I wind up in the smaller lounge — not the pilot's ready room, but the public one that, as Elspeth says, nobody uses — with my feet in Gabe's lap and a cup of nasty, sugary coffee in my hand, waiting for the post-combat-time shakes to pack up and head on home. Elspeth's the other way on the bank of couches, her feet between mine, and Gabe's got his back scrunched into the corner and is absentmindedly petting us both, with that look on his face that's half donkey between two bales of hay and half mouse between two cats, although really we don't treat him as roughly as all that. All three of us are staring out the porthole into space, where about half the baroque outline of the shiptree and half of Piper Platform's chained, rotund doughnut take turns flickering past as the Montreal 's wheel revolves on its pin.

It's nice to sit still.

“Happy birthday, Jen.” Elspeth lifts her head off the arm of the couch and feels around on the floor for her water bottle. She's reading something on her contact. I can see the green hairlines of the text paused in front of her pupil as she blinks and yawns.

“You almost got away clean.” Gabe winks at me, his catcher's mitt of a hand folding around my foot. My chest aches when I look at him, and I know he knows. Once upon a time, he was Captain Castaign and I was Corporal Casey, and he saved my life. And there were thirty-three other guys he didn't manage to get to in time. “All you had to do was keep the crisis going a little longer, and we would have had to wait until next year.”

“It's October in Toronto,” I remind him. “Heck, it's October on the Montreal . For that matter, in Montreal.”

He shrugs. “Vancouver's the capital now. Since we're not on Earth, I think we get to pick our time zone.”

“Following that logic, it should be Jen's birthday for, um.”

“Forty-seven hours,” Richard supplies helpfully, over the wall speakers.

“Not forty-eight? No, wait—” Elspeth blinks owlishly, having quite obviously confused herself. “I can't picture how that works around the international date line.”

“I'm all for longer birthdays.” Gabe's voice is unconcerned, mellow. He digs a thumb pad into the arch of my foot and I groan. The self-warming coffee cup makes my meat hand sweat. It can't ease the aches in a metal one that doesn't have any sense of pain anymore, but it's psychologically comforting anyway.

“Why not? It's been the longest year of my life. It deserves a longer birthday.”

“Shortest year of mine,” Gabe answers. “And the longest all at once. It's amazing how much fits into twelve months when you work at it, isn't it?” Somehow, he gets around that sentiment without bitterness, the old Gabe, looking up, meeting my eyes with calm acceptance and a sharp, whimsical smile. Healing, because that's Gabe.

He's got the knack of getting better, of growing through things. I don't, so much. But I make up for it by muscling through. Elspeth shoots me that mind reader look and I shoot it right back, Richard laughing his ass off at the both of us, and I drink my coffee and set the cup down on the floor, a flagrant breach of shipboard protocol. If I had the energy to go fetch Boris out of Genie's quarters, the whole impromptu family would be here, except the girls.

“We should page Genie and Patty,” Elspeth says, swinging her feet off Gabe's lap and sitting up. “And see if we can find something we can pretend is a birthday cake.”

“No candles shipboard.”

“You blow,” she says. “I'll flick a flashlight on and off. Wait, better, we'll get Dick to flicker the whole damned ship.”

“If Gabe were a better hacker, I could flicker the shiptree on and off in Morse code,” Richard answers. Gabe snorts, but holds his peace, switching both hands to work on my feet now that Elspeth has opted out. “It looks like a giant birthday cake anyway, and maybe we'd stand a chance of getting through.”

We laugh even though it hurts, or maybe because it hurts — like ripping off scabs — and Elspeth gets up to fetch the girls herself rather than just having Alan whisper in Patty's ear, and sometime long about oh three hundred hours on my second birthday Jeremy wanders in, looking like a man who's lost two falls out of three with his mattress, and Elspeth hands him a slice of the vegan brownies that are masquerading as my birthday cake, and between us we have a pretty good party after all.

1100 hours

Thursday October 4, 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

You'd think sitting in a hardbacked chair watching an unconscious man breathe would be about as exciting as a grain elevator, but damned if my heart isn't caught painful as a thumb in the hollow of my throat. Because he is breathing. Not awake, but breathing on his own, unventilated. And I know what it's like being stuck inside a body that won't do what you tell it to do, so I sit there beside the bed with my HCD propped on my knee and read to Charlie. Ulysses, currently. The Alfred, Lord Tennyson one, not the James Joyce one. I wouldn't do that to anyone who can't defend himself.

I've just gotten to the rousing bit at the end when the wheel spins and the hatch glides open with a little pop of balancing pressure. I keep reading, though; it's probably the corpsman coming in to check on the patient, and he can take a pulse through poetry. Except the corpsman wouldn't wait until I finish up and blank my optic, and then clear his throat.

I crane my neck around and face the hatch. It's Jeremy Kirkpatrick, his ginger curls squashed as if he hasn't combed them since he slept, crow's feet deepening alongside his pale eyes as he squinches down to peer in. “Jen? Got a minute?”

“Come on in. My company's not going anywhere.”

He hops over the knee knocker fast, dogging the hatch behind him, and glances down at Charlie's face. “Wainwright not letting us go after Leslie gets right up my nose.”

He sounds it, too. “You're old friends.”

“University.” He flops against the hatch and blows between rubber lips. “You're a love to look in on Charlie like this.”

“Don't let it get out. They'll just make more work for me if they know. I don't suppose you found out anything useful about the alien spit we brought from the birdcage?” The chair digs into the back of my legs, so I stand. Having somebody else in the room makes me restless. I want to pace but content myself by leaning over Charlie, smoothing the hair around his bald spot.

“Alien spit, huh?” He's grinning when I look up, a tired desperate grin that furrows those crow's-feet even deeper.

“Got a better name?”

“Not a more appetizing one. In any case, it would be easier to analyze if the xenobiologist weren't in a coma.” He comes around the end of the bed nearest the door and looks down at Charlie, the corner of his mouth dragging hard. “Dammit—”

“I'm sorry.” Out before I can bite it back, and he looks away from Charlie and frowns at me. I don't look up, but my peripheral vision shows me the deepening lines between his eyes.