She started with Tanaka, recording and rerecording her requests for clarification, always sure that she’d gotten every hint and nuance of the Roci’s presence out of the message and then second-guessing herself, deleting, and starting again. By the time she queued the message, her eyes were starting to blur with fatigue. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone through that. Next was a list of requests for Ochida and the other teams. She could front-burner the scans of Cara’s brain. If they could figure out what the signal carrier was between her and the BFE, maybe it would give them a way to interfere. And the quiet that came after Duarte undid the dutchman event? It wouldn’t seem strange at all for her to want follow-up reports on that. She wished that Tanaka had been a better field researcher. Or better at finding Duarte.
A soft knock interrupted her. When she cycled the door, Amos floated in the hall. He had his old flight suit and an apologetic smile.
“Hey, Doc. You got a minute? Or is this a bad time?”
Elvi shook her head, trying to clear it. The fatigue was just the unpleasant parts of being drunk. “Come in. I’m sorry. I thought I’d be debriefing you and Cara, but . . . I wanted to get these requests out and going before anything else.”
Amos pulled himself in and closed the door behind him. “It’s not a problem. I just needed to bend your ear for a minute.”
“About the experiment?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Amos said. “I just wanted to let you know this is all done now.”
Elvi shut down her display. The big man’s eyes were the same utter black as Cara’s and Xan’s. She was used to the look. His smile was amiable and maybe a little embarrassed. His tone of voice was conversational and calm. She didn’t know what made the chill run down her back.
“All what?”
“This. The things you’re doing with Sparkles and Little Man. They’re over now. We’re gonna need to pack this up and move on,” he said, and shrugged. When she didn’t reply, he looked away. “When you started before, I was sort of in on it. Impressions. Nothing you’d take in front of the judge, right? It’s why we had to come out. Needed to be here. Do it myself. That way I’d understand. So here we are, and I did the thing, and I get it now. So now I can tell you it’s over. It stops now.”
“You object to the experiment.”
“Sure.”
“I understand,” Elvi said, crossing her arms. Her comms announced a new message in her queue. She didn’t look to see what it was. “You aren’t the only one with reservations. I’m not going to lie about that.”
“Okay.”
“But the stakes are too high. Cara and Xan . . . and you? You’re the access we have to the information in that artifact. You’re the only ones who can get there.”
“That’s true,” Amos said, then frowned. “I mean, Duarte. But I don’t think he’s exactly in our assets column.”
“If there is any chance at all that we can fix this whole thing with the information that’s in there? I can’t stop.”
“You don’t have to. I’m here. You don’t have to stop it, because I’m stopping it for all of us.”
“If I have to compromise her . . . if I lose her? Sacrifice her? And what we get back is that everyone else everywhere gets to live—”
Amos raised a hand, palm out, like he was gentling an animal. “Doc. I get it. You’re a good person, and I like you. I trust you. I see that you’re not getting off on this. That’s why we’re not having the other version of this conversation. But it’s done. I’ve known a lot of people who had reasons that this time was different. That this once, it was okay. Maybe the kid’s bad and you’re really helping them. Or they’re into it, and so there’s no harm. And Sparkles is into this. We both know that, right?”
“We do.”
“So there’s all kinds of stories about making this okay. I’m not here to tell stories. I’m just letting you know.”
The ship seemed oddly loud. Elvi felt the thud of her heartbeat in her throat, heard it in her ears. She was suddenly profoundly tired, or suddenly aware that she’d been tired for what felt like forever.
“And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?”
“That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.”