Chapter 2
Really Should Have Read the Instructions
Consciousness came back with a gasp.
“Easy, easy, you’re fine. Just breathe.”
The pod’s lid was already open, the cold air hitting his skin like a slap, and someone was pulling him upright before his eyes had finished adjusting.
His hand went to his throat before the rest of him caught up — two fingers against the bite mark, checking.
Still there. His chest had no hole in it, but his sternum ached with the memory of one, and his nervous system kept reaching for it the way a tongue finds a missing tooth.
“Wow, Levi, you weren’t kidding when you mentioned cryosleep doesn’t agree with you,” Maddie said. She wore a white uniform, holding a scanner in one hand, practically giggling to herself as she smoothed down his hair. “You look like shit.”
Play along. “Thanks, Maddie, that’s very helpful.”
His eyes swept the room while she ran the scanner over him.
His items were there — the compass wedged against the pod’s interior wall, the sanitarium map folded small near his hip, the journal pressing against the inside of his jumpsuit breast pocket.
Maddie’s scanner moved over his chest without pause. She wasn’t looking at any of it.
Leave them. You can come back.
He swung his legs over the edge, and Maddie’s hand was on his elbow before his feet hit the floor. “Uh, thanks for the help,” he began. “I need to go—”
“To the mess hall,” she said. “There’s coffee to help get your brain functioning again before Captain Reynolds calls a briefing. You can shake off the cryo fog on the way.”
I need to find Asher.
But Maddie was already walking, and the game had decided this time around to give him a person attached to his arm. If this was going to be his one chance to figure out what the game wanted from him, he’d take it.
The corridors were narrower and older than before.
An exposed conduit ran along the ceiling, the visible bolts painted over so many times the heads had lost their shape.
The floor plating had a grain to it, scuffed down the center where years of boots had worn the anti-slip coating smooth.
Somewhere above them a pipe ticked with thermal expansion, as regular as a metronome.
The lighting was the same blue-white LEDs as the pod bay, but half the strips had been replaced with a slightly different color temperature, giving the corridors a patchy, jury-rigged look. The ship had been out here a while.
Maddie talked the whole way.
Levi caught most of it. This was a research vessel in stable orbit around something called LV-347, surface teams had finished their run two days ago and returned with seventeen specimens in the cargo hold, and his job was to assess them before anyone made decisions.
She used words he didn’t have handles for — bioelectromagnetic signatures, geological strata, a lower shelf that apparently meant something not related to shelves — and he nodded at approximately the right moments and hoped his face was doing what faces were supposed to do as a man who was definitely a Geological Specialist.
Specialist. Sure. Absolutely.
He’d watched Ethan play Dead Space once, from behind the couch because Ethan laughed at him for being scared and he’d been too proud to leave. That was the full extent of his frame of reference for this genre. He was going to be completely fine.
The mess was low-ceilinged and smelled like burnt coffee with one overhead light that flickered every forty seconds or so, and someone had stuck tape to the panel below with NGUYEN KNOWS written in marker. Nobody had fixed it.
Jasper straightened for a moment as Maddie and Levi entered, smoothing down his grungy coveralls that read “engineering” across a patch on his chest, then grinned and slouched back into the posture Levi recognized.
There was no way the game would make Jasper, the least sober in any scenario Levi had been in thus far, still be high while in charge of making sure they didn’t run out of oxygen, right?
“Finally, dude! You looked dead in that pod, we were gonna shoot you out of the airlock if you didn’t get up soon,” Jasper chuckled, leaning back in his chair until the front two legs left the ground. “No offense.”
Fuck, he is high. I’m definitely going to die again.
“Some taken,” Levi said as he sat down.
Owen had three data pads arranged in a precise semicircle around his mug like he was performing a summoning ritual with them.
Zoe sat beside him, reading one of the data pads and writing notes on a piece of paper in front of her, the far end with her thinking already done.
Maddie settled across from Levi with a mug and reached for the coffee pot, and Tyler was in the corner attempting to pull a metal bracket off the wall.
“Tyler,” Elliot said as he watched, his arms crossed over his chest near a porthole.
“It’s loose,” Tyler replied.
“So why are you trying to pull it off the wall?” Zoe asked without looking up from her notes.
“In case it becomes a hazard.”
“It holds emergency oxygen canisters,” Maddie said as she poured coffee. “You just want everyone to watch you flex. Please leave it attached to the wall.”
Maddie pushed the mug toward Levi. “Owen, get Levi caught up on the reading.”
“So everything is on track in terms of our timeline. Before any mining equipment gets sent to this area, we have to classify the more unique asteroids in this area. LV-347 is thus far the most anomalous one we’ve encountered, so we’ll start examining those specimens first before we move on to a new location,” Owen said, pushing up his glasses as his eyes darted from screen to screen.
“Are the specimens…asleep?” Levi asked nervously, his hands tightening around the coffee mug.
Jasper laughed so hard he nearly fell out of his chair. “What?”
Zoe finally looked up from her notes at him, then glanced at Maddie. “Did he hit his head?” she asked.
Shit.
Levi took a long gulp of coffee that burned all the way down into his stomach, buying himself a second. “Um, sorry, bad cryo,” he said, fanning his mouth. “What is the containment situation on the specimens?”
“Containers are rated for biological, chemical, and radiological isolation, but no life, even on the microscopic level, was detected before they were brought up,” Owen said.
“They’re just five-foot cubes of surface samples.
We’ll have Zoe with us for the examination in case we do discover a new microbe, but the environment on the surface is incompatible with life. ”
Well, apparently not.
“There was a sensor alert yesterday on one of the containers, but I think that’s because Jasper was in there and he sneezed on it,” Zoe added.
“I said I was sorry,” Jasper said quickly as Elliot shot him a look. He leaned toward Zoe and whispered, “Don’t rat me out to the co-captain in front of me. Be decent. Do it behind my back.”
Levi took another burning gulp of lava-temperature coffee as he processed the information. Elliot wasn’t a lieutenant this time, he was the fucking co-captain. Meaning he would expect everyone to listen to him. Asher would have to listen to him.
“So,” Jasper said loudly, leaning toward Levi with a crooked grin. “You ever gonna tell us what happened on the Kepler run? Because Maddie’s version and your version are not the same story.”
The Kepler run. You were on a run. Called Kepler. Something happened. You and Maddie have different versions of it…she is a medic or a doctor. I look at dirt. What would we have to disagree on?
“Maddie’s version is wrong,” he said, which felt like a safe bet.
“Excuse me?” Maddie pointed at him with the coffee pot.
“I’m just saying, if there are two versions—”
Maddie set down the pot and leaned in, dropping to a hushed whisper, “What the fuck, Mercer? There are two versions because you told me one thing and then Elliot told me that you two—”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” Jasper said to no one in particular, looking delighted.
Oh god, what backstory do I have with Elliot?
Levi looked back over at Elliot, who hadn’t moved from the porthole, but he was looking directly at Levi.
The commanding posture he had when Levi entered the room slumped a little as their eyes met across the distance, and Elliot blushed, quickly looking back out at the stars.
I should just throw myself out of the airlock now.
Tyler pulled up a chair and fell into it with a resounding thud.
“Are we talking about how Levi is going to take the crown for ship slut again? Because I was really hoping I could win my title back,” Tyler said, grabbing Levi’s coffee from him and taking a drink.
“I’ll give three months’ pay when we get back if you only fuck top brass and leave me the ensigns. ”
Levi’s face was beginning to get hotter, and he wished it was just from burning his tongue. “I—what?”
“This conversation is disgusting.” Zoe shook her head and went back to her notes.
Jasper just laughed louder. “Okay, okay, Levi and I will talk the finer details later, right?”
All he could do was nod because the words ship slut wouldn’t stop echoing in his head.
The conversation eventually drifted back to what Owen had on his data pads, Tyler said something about orbital mechanics and made it three sentences before Jasper interrupted him with what he called “a more intuitive framework” involving a coffee spoon.
Owen asked him to stop because it was a poor representation of how the mechanics worked.
Jasper continued anyway, with a second spoon.