“Copy that,” Alex said, and the Roci shifted under Jim. They moved gently. Slowly. Waiting for the alarms that would mean the Sparrowhawk had only been playing dead.
The alarms didn’t come.
“So what now?” Alex said.
“Now we plot the fastest way back through the ring gate and out of here.”
“Any thoughts on where to?” Alex asked. “Firdaws is on the flight plan, but—”
“Freehold,” Naomi said, her voice calm and authoritative. “We needed resupply before, and we’re burning through a lot of reaction mass on the maneuvering thrusters. And I wouldn’t mind being under the protection of one of our own while we figure out how this went pear-shaped.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, his voice grim. “This kindness-of-strangers thing isn’t going so well for us.”
Jim heard Naomi’s restraints clattering free, and he felt her coming close. She stroked his hair, and he took her hand, kissing her fingers gently.
“That went very bad,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She waited a moment before she said, “What happened to Amos?”
Jim shook his head. We lost him, he tried to say. I lost him.
“Yeah,” Amos said. “I got pretty fucked up all right.”
He stepped in from the lift, his shredded flight suit as wet and black as if he’d poured ink on it. The exit wound on his chest was pale flesh around a flat circle of onyx. When he smiled, it seemed tentative.
Naomi’s expression went empty.
“Hey, Cap. We got Tiny back safe, didn’t we?”
It took a moment to understand this was really happening, but then Jim said, “Yeah. We did.”
“And the dog?”
“Her too.”
Amos stepped into the ops deck and lowered himself into an empty crash couch, grunting like he was sore. “Good. Tiny really likes that dog. There’s a hell of a mess in the airlock. I’ll get it cleaned up, but I gotta get some food first. I’m really hungry.”
Alex, drawn by the sound of Amos’ voice, came down from the flight deck. His face was pale. “Amos?”
“Hey,” the big man said, lifting a hand in greeting. “I think I must have took kind of a hit down there. I’m missing some of what happened.”
Jim wanted to feel joy, and he did. But there was something more with it. A sense of wrongness that came from trauma after trauma followed by something that violated his inborn sense of how the universe worked. What was possible.
“You died,” he said. “You took a round to the back, and it blew most of your chest out. I saw your spine. It was in pieces.”
Amos went still in that unnerving way he sometimes did, and then frowned, nodded. “Yeah, okay. I think I knew that part.”
Jim laughed, and it was disbelief. And maybe relief. And something else he couldn’t put a name to. “Is there anything that kills you anymore?”
“Pretty sure I’m starving to death,” Amos said.
“Well,” Alex said. “God damn.”
Naomi still hadn’t spoken. Amos touched the black circle of his wound, exploring it. It didn’t look like skin anymore. Whatever it was, it was what Amos’ resurrected corpse made when it replaced his injured flesh. Jim wondered what the inside of the wound looked like. For the first time it occurred to him that the changes the drones on Laconia had made to his old friend hadn’t stopped when they escaped the planet. Amos hadn’t become something different. He was in an ongoing process of becoming. Something about the idea was chilling.
As if Amos had read Jim’s thoughts, he frowned. “I don’t know how this whole thing works. But we’d be better off not doing it too often.”
Chapter Fourteen: Elvi
Elvi missed gravity. She wanted to be able to sit by Cara’s medical bay and feel the weight of her exhaustion bearing her down. The long, slight stretch along the back of her neck when her head hung forward. The heaviness in her arms and legs. She understood intellectually that she was near collapse, but the familiar somatic cues weren’t there on the float. The only one that seemed to remain was the trembling in her large muscles, and by itself that felt like fear.
Cara was strapped into the bay with wide, white bands that kept her from drifting. Her eyes were closed, her mouth relaxed and slightly open. Her lips were pale and bloodless as carved wax, with the tips of white teeth and a dark purple tongue behind them. Her breathing was deep, steady, and slow. Sedatives still worked on her and Xan despite the changes that the repair drones had made to their bodies. The drugs did metabolize faster, but that was fine. Their supplies were ample.