Muskrat whined once—a high, nervous sound—and Teresa called for Xan to stop. A moment later, her face appeared at the door, flushed and sweaty. “Hey. Muskrat needs to use the little dogs’ room. Can I take Xan down to the machine shop so he can see how it works?”
Jim’s reflexive Sure, go ahead stumbled over the idea of Xan and Teresa alone in the ship. It wasn’t that he thought they’d do anything malicious—it turned out he trusted Teresa more than that—but in their present moods, something could happen by mistake. The machine shop of an aging Martian gunship wasn’t a great place for oopsies.
“I’ll come too,” Alex said, and tossed the last of his meal into the recycler.
Jim turned to Teresa, pointed his thumb at Alex, and said, “Don’t let him start playing with the tools.”
The girl rolled her eyes, seeing through Jim’s weak joke to the concerns behind it and dismissing them out of hand. Alex clapped his shoulder on the way out, and Jim drank more of his coffee as girl and boy and dog and man muttered and chuckled their way to the lift shaft, and then down.
“Thank you,” Fayez said.
“You’re welcome. For what?”
“Letting Xan come get a little time away from the pressure cooker. He puts a good face on everything we’re doing, but it’s hard for him. Every time Cara goes in, I think he worries about how much of her is coming back.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. We’re not in territory with much precedent. We’ll pretty much know there’s a massive change coming when it’s already happened.”
“I know the feeling,” Jim said. He finished his coffee and tossed the bulb away.
“Thanks for letting me come over here too. The Falcon’s a fine ship, and the company’s generally not the worst, but after a few months on the float, I do start fantasizing about long walks by rivers and university coffee shops.”
Jim laughed politely, but there was a tightness in his chest. He keyed in a simple breakfast of eggs and beans. “I am sorry about that.”
“About what?” Fayez asked.
“Sticking you here. You and Elvi. I mean, I did kind of fuck you two over by getting you the job.”
Fayez tilted his head. Jim had known him since Ilus, and the years lay gently on the man. His hair was still thick and darker than it probably had a right to be. The lines in his face mostly gave evidence of laughter. Now he only looked thoughtful.
“I know why we’re here. If anything, we should thank you for the opportunity.”
“Okay, now you’re bullshitting me.”
Fayez was quiet for a long moment. Then, “You have a minute? I want to show you something.”
Jim shrugged, paused the meal, and followed as the other man led the way to the lift shaft, then to the airlock, and into the Falcon. The weird astringent smell was still there, but it wasn’t as assaulting now as the first time he’d smelled it. Familiarity had numbed him.
Fayez turned down a long hallway, heading down toward the ship’s reactor and drive decks. It was eerie seeing the same Martian design language that had built the Rocinante grown and complicated into the Laconian flesh of the Falcon. It reminded Jim of a documentary he’d seen about parasitic fungi that took over ants. Here was a ship that had been Martian, that became infected by the protomolecule and the ambitions of Winston Duarte, and now it looked similar and acted similar and you could almost mistake it for the kind of ship that the Roci still was. But this was something else.
“You know we keep Xan isolated when Cara goes on her dives, right?”
“I do,” Jim said.
“The idea is that he’d just be an extra variable. Another influence we’d have to correct for. But he’s also the control group. We see how Cara changes and how he doesn’t, and maybe that tells us something we need to know.”
A dark-haired woman with her attention on a hand terminal drifted into the corridor in front of them. When she glanced up and saw Jim, a glimmer of panic came into her eye. He nodded as they passed.
“That makes sense to me,” Jim said.
“And when we’re not doing that, we use the same rig to isolate the catalyst. It’s a lot like Ilus. You had a sample of the protomolecule on your ship, and it was accessing all the artifacts on Ilus. Flipping switches. Seeing what came on.”
“Looking to report that the ring gate was built.”
“Which it never did, because there was no one to report to. Well, we have a sample here, and Cortázar figured out how to loop it back onto itself so that our artifact only comes on when we want it to. Clean and easy, right?”