Chapter 5 #5
“Before you mute my side, Kodiak, know that I’ll be up at the orange door in precisely five hours. I hope to see you. For the good of the mission. For our lives. We need to meet. And you know what? People like me. You might like me.”
“The voice, Cusk.”
“Only if you agree to see me, Celius.”
A growl, then the comm shuts off.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 342 *-_
Four hours to go. I take frequent breaks from my asteroid-harvesting training reels to pace the Endeavor, sucking away at a water sleeve. This raging thirst won’t go away.
Seven sets of natty blue jumpsuits, seven rotating breakfasts (the berry oats look especially promising), seven rotating lunches, seven rotating dinners.
It tickles me that the Cusk planners organized my life into weeks, when I’m in an artificially heated polycarbonate hull surrounded by an imponderably immense void, a dust mote floating through an empty stadium. But at least I know when it’s Tuesday!
Three and a half hours to go. Once I’ve gleaned everything I can from the training reels, the only thing left to do while I wait out the final hours until we reach the asteroid is to complete some programming debugs from OS’s list. In between edits, I poke through every cranny of the ship.
I feel like I know it all now, except for whatever’s behind the portal reserved for our arrival on Titan. And whatever’s on the Aurora.
I keep flipping between giddiness and gloom, and from moment to moment I can’t predict which emotion is going to bubble up next.
It’s like my own mind is an abandoned house that I’m exploring.
I know the cause: I’m spending too much time alone.
That’s a fast road to crazy. I was known as the lone wolf back in the academy, love-’em-and-leave-’em Ambrose Cusk, but I wish I could go back and redo it.
Have some of the pillow talk I always avoided by sneaking away from whatever sweaty body was sharing my bunk, by ducking out in the predawn hours to train.
I open the last unexplored cabinet. My eyes dart with tears. I don’t remember deciding to bring this.
It’s a violin. My violin. I pull it out of its case, curl my fingers around its tangerine neck, its black fingerboard.
So delicate. The only delicate thing on the ship, unless you count me (and maybe Kodiak, wouldn’t know).
I tune it up, tighten the bow, and draw it across the A string, lancing the white noise of the ship.
Minerva laughed at me for loving the violin, called it a waste of time, and that’s probably why I kept doing it.
Like my mother, she gave me the most attention when I was disappointing her.
I start with scales before switching to the Prokofiev concerto, vibrato painful from my soft finger pads.
The pieces of this instrument were once trees that lived for hundreds of years, surrounded by other plants and woodland creatures long before I was alive, before any humans had ever gone to space at all.
I run my fingers along the lines of the wood grain.
Wood is so many things. It is hard and soft, it is smooth and rippled.
I’m an animal as well as a spacefarer.
I seem to have lost my calluses, and just a half hour of playing becomes too painful for my finger pads. I put the violin away, then plant myself in front of 06’s window and stare out. Space is disorienting and obliviating. I could stare into it forever.
An hour left.
You’re going nuts, Ambrose.
I immerse myself in the harvesting training reels, studying again and again the protocols, the emergency fallbacks for every possible outcome. Surely enough time has gone by.
When I approach the corridor that leads to the Aurora, the orange portal is closed.
I wait.
“OS, tell me how many hours it’s been since I invited Kodiak to dinner.”
“Five hours and sixteen minutes,” Devon Mujaba’s voice says.
That voice! “How much more do you think I should give him?” I ask.
“So far you have given him sixteen minutes more.”
“Fair. Is he just on the other side of his door?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Tell him I’ve authorized the orange portal to open whenever he wishes.”
“Acknowledged.”
“How long has it been now?”
“Seventeen minutes.”
I must be getting tired, because my hand goes to my wrist, as if we were within reach of the comm towers on Earth, as if I could bracelet-message Kodiak, or Minerva to complain about Kodiak. “Tell him I’m going to go eat, but he’s welcome to join me.”
“Kodiak Celius has requested to remain muted unless it’s an emergency.”
“I take it my mealtime happiness is not an emergency?”
“That is correct.”
My already brittle smile crumbles. I walk down my curving stair, back to full simulated gravity. “It’s okay,” I tell OS. “I could use some time alone.”
OS laughs mechanically.
“Who programmed you to laugh?” I ask. “You never laughed during training.”
“Your mother.”
Wow. My mother directed my operating system to laugh at my jokes. “Miss you, Ma,” I whisper as I settle into 04. I never called her “Ma” back on Earth. The very thought is preposterous.
I pick out a lentil curry, noticing as I do that Rover has already replenished the manicotti I ate earlier.
I place the pouch into its heating slot, cycle through to the curry heating option, and watch the timer count down from ninety.
I sit down, get a fresh sleeve of water, and open the roasting-hot bag of curry like a bag of chips, cursing when scalding bean slurry dribbles down my thumb.
Suddenly I’m furious. I hurl the pouch against the wall. It makes a violent green-brown spatter against the pure white surface, like I’ve taken a shotgun to some cartoon Martian. I suck on my burnt thumb. Fuck you, Kodiak Celius.
A heavy tread. I stagger to my feet.
I’m no longer alone.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 338 *-_
Sweet lords is the first thing I think on seeing Kodiak. This beauty is wasted on me.
My romantic partners (okay, fine, my “hookups,” haven’t quite managed the relationship thing) have always been ethereal and wispy, lighter-than-air abstractions of boys or girls or third-genders.
The cadets I kept favoring were waify and toneless, so I could lap them up like coffee or milk and then get on with my day.
Kodiak, though. He looks like he spends his day crushing warriors under the shield of Aeneas.
Muscles band his arms and neck. Thick, lustrous hair falls in blue-black waves along his cheeks, his eyes a speckled tan, nestled deep.
His olive skin is smooth and unmarred, except where thick stubble shades his jawline.
Even his stubble looks like it could take me in a fight.
Not my type, but as a purely aesthetic object, he’s marvelous. I’m hurtling through space with what can only be called a stud.
His thick brows knit as he scowls, shoulders bulging his jumpsuit where his body tenses. He clenches finger after finger under his thumb, knuckles popping. It looks like he could break his own fingerbones with that thumb.
I hold out my hand. “I’m Ambrose Cusk.”
He nods at the wall behind me.
I tilt my head as I wait for him to answer.
We stare at each other. Or I stare at him, and he lowers his gaze to the joint where table merges into floor.
I really have no idea what’s going through his head.
He’s being undeniably weird, and it strikes me that I can’t go ask anyone for their take on it.
We’re stuck with each other, and only each other.
The danger of that strikes me all over again.
He drags a hand through his hair, fingers disappearing in the thickness of it. My focus returns to our hands. Mine are strummers. His are crushers.
Dimokratía dresses its spacefarers in red acrylic. Kodiak’s uniform is so atrociously ugly that it’s actually pretty cool. An aviation-mechanic-in-space vibe, down to the nylon ribbing inlaid in the fabric. “I like your—” I start.
Kodiak’s tan eyes wander to the lentil splatter where I hurled my dinner, then he’s suddenly in motion.
He brushes past me, opens my food cabinet, and examines my pouches.
He holds them up to the light, gives one a rough squeeze, and then picks up another.
A moment ago I was desperate for him to do anything at all, and now I wish he would be still again. “I take it you’re hungry?”
He juts the lantern of his jaw and nods, like he’s only reluctantly conceding a point. His voice is low and dry. Husky. “Your food looks much better. Of course it would be. You Fédérations and your gourmet foodstuffs.”
“Yes, we do like our . . . gourmet foodstuffs,” I say. “What did Dimokratía stock you with, cabbage?”
He stares back at me.
“And maybe some potato soup? Only good sustaining food for comrades, right? Anyway, I see you’re checking out the manicotti. I had some earlier.”
He inserts the pouch in the wrong direction, and I know what kind of mess that means we’re in for.
I go to fix it, but Kodiak blocks me. I reach around him anyway and pluck the pouch out, reverse it, and put it back in.
My arm hair zaps against the fibers of his jumpsuit.
“There we go,” I say, giving the bulk of his upper arm a quick pat before I take my seat.
While I retrieve what remains of my lentil curry and sit with the pouch, Kodiak faces away from me, back tensed, watching his ninety seconds count down.
Rover ticks and whirs, cleaning up my mess while I study the V of Kodiak’s back, the glow of his skin at the nape of his neck.
He’s not exactly stirring romantic feelings in me, but he does make me wish I knew how to sketch portraits.
I’m usually the biggest physical presence in a room, but I feel insignificant around him.
He’s a miracle of proportions, writ large.
When his food is ready, he sits across the narrow polycarb table from me, tossing the searing pouch from hand to hand. Once it’s cool enough, he stabs it with a straw.