“Still no sausage,” Jim said, and the dog barked softly.
“She doesn’t actually care about that,” Amos said. “She just likes having you around.”
Jim steadied the dog with one hand and petted her with the other. “You know, I would have said dog on spaceship was a very bad plan, but I do kind of like having her here. I mean, more when we’re under thrust.”
Amos rose from a workstation, a small welding torch in one hand and dark goggles to protect his eyes pushed up onto his forehead. A hydraulic valve was clamped at the station with a line of scorch marks along the ceramic where the metal sealant was still cooling. “She does get embarrassed when I have to take her to the vacuum fire hydrant.”
“The what?”
“It’s the idiom for where dogs piss,” Amos said. “I don’t make this up. I just follow the network groups.”
“Because there’s a lot of floating puppies,” Jim said to Muskrat. “You’re not the only one.”
“They cope with atrophy better than us too,” Amos said as he stripped off the goggles and fit them into his tool case. “Something about having more legs on the ground, I think.”
“Probably. I will miss her when she’s gone,” Jim said, then nodded at the valve. “Is there a problem with the water feed?”
“Nope. And there isn’t going to be. Mineralization was messing with the seal, and you wait until that’s bad enough for a little erosion, you might as well print up a new one, y’know?”
“I at least have it on good authority. That’s close enough for me.”
Amos snapped the welding torch into its place and pulled a polishing cloth out of his pocket. “We need to get the fuck out of the slow zone. Hanging out here like this is making my scalp crawl.”
“Yeah. As soon as Naomi gets through her data, decides for sure where we’re going,” Jim said. “I’m worried about the kid.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“It’s easy for me to forget how much she’s lost, you know? Her entire experience was curated to the millimeter before she came with us. A few months here—just enough to get comfortable and find her feet—and now another total change. It’s a lot. She’s fifteen. Can you imagine facing all that at fifteen?”
Amos looked over at him like he’d said something funny. “You stressed over Tiny? She’s going to be fine.”
“Is she? I mean . . . What do we even know about this school we’re taking her to?”
“We know it gets shot at less than we do.”
“Besides that.”
Amos put the cloth over his thumb, took a firm grip on the valve, and started rubbing away the scorch marks as he talked. “Tiny’s working out who she is. Shit, what she is. It’s what she was doing on Laconia. It’s what she’s doing here. When she goes to that school, it’s not like the job changes. The question is, does she have more to learn from a boarding school at the ass end of nowhere or getting missiles thrown at her with a bunch of old-fart revolutionaries?”
“I don’t think we’re really revolutionaries.”
“And,” Amos went on, raising his voice to keep Jim from changing the subject, “it’s not what’s really eating you. We both know that.”
Before Jim could reply, Alex’s voice came over ship-wide. “Hey, everybody. I was hoping . . . I kind of need to call a little group meeting? In the galley. If you can. Um. Thanks.”
Amos squinted at the valve, turning it one way and then the other before giving it a last, satisfied swipe with the cloth. He set it back in its clamp.
“Do you need to put that back in place?”
“Nah,” Amos said. “I got a spare holding the line for now.”
“Then I guess we should go see what’s up with Alex.”
“He wants something, but he needs to apologize for a few minutes before he asks.”
“Well, sure,” Jim said. “I mean, I wonder what he’s going to ask for.”
If there had been gravity, Alex would have been pacing when they came through the galley door. Teresa was already there, floating beside the wall without touching it. Her arms were crossed, her mouth was tight and small, and every now and then she moved her jaw and made some brief expression. If he had to guess, Jim would have said she was deep in conversation with herself and barely paying attention to them. Amos took a place at the table, rooting himself by his mag boots to keep his hands free to steady Muskrat. The dog seemed perfectly at ease, reassured by having so much of its pack together.