18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
There was a part of Kieron that had been hoping that Catalina wouldn’t get the defensive laser array done as quickly as she had promised. Now that the event he’d been working toward for so long was almost here, he felt … strange about it. Anticipatory but nervous, almost sick with it.
He couldn’t remember the last time his nerves had gotten the better of him so comprehensively that he actually had to sit in the dark and meditate about it for a while. It was embarrassing, and only something he would share with Catalina if her own nerves started to get the better of her again.
You could take your own advice. You’re trying, you’re making progress. It’s all right to feel conflicted. It’s all right to need to take time to be okay with the world around you. And for once, Kieron was actually ready to listen to himself.
That was growth, to be pondered later. Right now he needed to put his best foot forward for Catalina—and Elenus, who was glancing at him every few seconds, like he was worried that Kieron was going to break into pieces. He was worried, and Kieron didn’t like that. He decided to confront it head-on.
“Focus on the asteroid field,” he said briskly, grasping Elenus by the chin and pointing his face forward toward the viewscreen.
“Catalina is taking care of everything!” Elenus protested, actually moving into the grip.
Freak. Kieron loved the unexpectedness of Elenus’s physical desires.
“The defensive laser array is working perfectly, she’s pushing everything out of our path before it becomes an issue, and have you noticed how many steps out she’s able to calculate the physics of these little bumps and tumbles she’s giving our surroundings?
Have you? Because even before we sent the probes out there to help her, she didn’t send a single ricochet directly toward us, and only two third- and fourth-level collisions have slightly impacted our return route.
I want you to take note of the absolute brilliance of this programming because I designed her, and—”
“And she’s got a brain of her own that is far more capable of making calculations like this on the fly than your rudimentary program ever could have,” Kieron said, extra snarky just so he could hear Elenus squawk about it.
He wasn’t disappointed. “Are you kidding me? Is it any sort of logic to completely discount the building blocks I provided to this tender young soul that put her on the path to—”
“Daddee! Keeron! Shush! I’m trying to conceeentraaaaaate!”
“Oh, sorry,” Elenus said and put an exaggeratedly dramatic finger over his mouth as he turned to Kieron. “Shh, she’s got to concentrate,” he whispered—somehow more loudly than he usually spoke.
“Daddee!”
“Don’t make fun of her,” Kieron chided him, refocusing himself on the work they needed to prepare for.
Elenus’s lightheartedness in the face of almost everything was part of his charm, but Kieron also needed to concentrate.
He needed to control himself, no matter what they found—whether it was a ship with a body, an empty shell, or nothing at all.
He wasn’t going to let his emotions get the better of him out here, when it could be actively dangerous.
He had to keep it together for everybody’s sake.
“The first probes have reached the target location,” Kieron said, avariciously reading the data that flowed across Catalina’s screen. “We’ve got a space approximately five kilometers in diameter to cover, no pings yet … Catie, can you make any sense of their visual data?”
“These probes experience a rate of decaaaay that does not allow for accurate imagiiiing after ten minutes of exposure to the quasar,” Catalina said in an apologetic tone. “It has already been thirteeeeen minutes.”
“That’s all right.” It was too much to ask.
“I can send mooore!”
“By the time they get there, we’ll be there ourselves,” Elenus cut in. “Let’s keep all your processors focused on getting us there safely rather than racing probes through an asteroid field just to get Kieron information faster.”
The screen, and Kieron’s indicator for Catalina in his implant, blushed around the edges. “Daddeeee!”
“It’s fine,” Kieron soothed her. “It’s all fine.
We’ll be there soon.” He was getting some interesting data here and there—higher concentrations of rare metals than he’d expect to see in a random cross section of asteroids in this part of the field, a minor source of radiation that was almost buried by the quasar’s killing intensity but not quite …
“I’m pretty sure there’s something there.
What or how much it amounts to, I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough. ”
Elenus leaned in so close that his lips brushed the outside of Kieron’s ear.
Kieron flinched instinctively, unused to such close contact even though it wasn’t objectively violent or aggressive.
Elenus took the unintentional rebuffing in stride and repositioned himself before whispering, “Are you ready for this? Sure you don’t want me to take first crack at the analysis of the scene? ”
“No.” That would be unthinkable, handing over a vital responsibility to someone who hadn’t even known Zakari. “No, I have to be the one to do it.”
To his credit, Elenus knew when not to push. “All right, then. Catalina, estimate to arrival time?”
“One minute and seventeen point eight seconds, Daddee,” she said.
One minute, or a little over, before Kieron faced up to his greatest failure. One minute to come to grips with the outcome of his and Zakari’s actions three years ago—actions that had led to Zak’s death and had a scarce-and-falling chance of not leading to his soul’s exile from his home planet.
Kieron wasn’t the sort of person who prayed.
He hadn’t even learned about the existence of religion until he was off Hadrian’s Colony and shoved into a low-budget Alliance school.
There were so many religions, and so many among them purported to be the one and true religion.
At first it beggared his understanding that people could actually allow themselves to believe such things, until his mind made the natural parallel between religion and his own cult-like upbringing.
Blind faith is the problem, not religion.
Blind belief. That’s all you’ve let yourself have ever since Zakari disappeared.
It’s all that’s kept you going. What will you have now if your faith leads you to an empty hole in the middle of space?
How will you cope, knowing that your best was never good enough, that you were always going to be too late?
How will you live with your own failure?
Do you even want to?
“Ten secooonds,” Catalina said, breaking through his spiraling reverie. Kieron took a deep, slow breath.
Too late to go back now.
“All we can do is move forward,” Elenus murmured as if Kieron had spoken aloud.
Kieron—for reasons he didn’t even understand—reached out and grabbed Elenus’s hand, holding it like a lifeline as Catalina crested the final set of asteroids between them and the highest-probability site for finding remnants of Zakari in the known galaxy.
“I seeeeee somethiiiing!” Catalina exclaimed, highlighting it on her viewscreen and enlarging it so that they could see it too.
Kieron held his breath. Was it … was it …
Fuck … what the hell was that?
***
Whatever they were looking at, it was manmade—or at least, sentient-life-form-made—that much was clear.
The section that was visible head-on looked like part of a fuselage, but it was bigger than just that.
Some of the central cabin was still attached to it.
Not the part that would have held the pilot’s seat, though—this was too close to the back of the ship.
So not something that was likely to have Zakari’s body in it if it was even his ship.
Kieron cut through his own useless mental meanderings with a harsh pinch to the inside of his knee. “Catie, can you identify the model of the ship based on the pieces you see here?”
“Yess, Keeeeron. This is a piece of an XP-Dart 5.3, Xera Cona Factooory, on—”
“Thank you.” That was their ship. Xera Cona Factory was the largest manufacturer of spacefaring vehicles on Trakta, and Kieron and Zakari had poured most of their personal savings into getting this one.
When it was made, it had been middle of the line for mining vessels, but their custom radiation shields had elevated it to be far more expensive than it looked.
It had been equipped with all sorts of scientific supplies as well as the standard mining kit, and it was big enough for two to sit in comfortably for days on end while they worked.
It had been a joy, buying this ship. The first thing Zak had done after they got it was to take his children for a ride—in atmosphere, of course, because no Traktan parent risked their child to space if they could help it.
It had still been fun. Kieron had never felt more like a part of the family than he had that day.
And now here was a part of their lost ship. As much as it pained him to see it broken apart like this, he couldn’t just leave it here. The potential for learning more about what had happened to Zakari was too strong.
He cleared his throat. “How close can you get to it without risking impact?”
“Thirteeeeeen point two-one meeeters.”
“That’s still not close enough for you to risk getting into a greenie and going out there to poke around,” Elenus said quickly.
His hands seemed oddly twitchy, like he was on the verge of taking hold of Catarina’s external controls and turning them around …
or like he was trying to keep himself from grabbing hold of Kieron.
“There’s no safe range for that as far as I’m concerned.
I absolutely refuse to grow you another entire body’s worth of vital organs, do you hear me? ”
“I hear you, and I’m not an idiot,” Kieron said.
“Could have fooled me.”
“Keeeeron!” Catalina interrupted before the conversation could deteriorate any further. “Penetrating density analyssiiiis shows therrrrre is a high probabiiiility of organic matter insiiide the structure.”
What? Could it even be remotely possible that something of Zakari was left on this piece of ship?
Why in the back of the ship? Why wouldn’t he have been in the pilot’s seat, where he could see the pictures of his family he’d left stuck in the crevices on the dash?
Had the accident that took him out happened too quickly for him to get to the front …
but this wasn’t the part of the back that had held the bathroom either.
What the hell had happened here? “How big is the organic matter?” he asked, a little proud of how calm his voice was.
“Less than a meeeeeter loooong.”
Elenus spoke up. “Can you safely reorient to get us a visual confirmation?”
“Yess, Daddeeeee.” Catalina began to slowly, carefully move herself closer to the wreckage, and Kieron found himself holding his breath. He had no idea what they were about to find in there, and he was afraid to get his hopes up, but …
“Expanding bit.” Elenus pointed to a sharp, petal-like protrusion jutting through the fractured hull as their point of view changed. “Miners use them—”
“—to anchor their crafts to asteroids, I know.” He’d only been working from Cloverleaf Station for nearly half a decade now. “We always kept a full four-point set in the ship with us.”
“And what are the odds that your old partner put that one through your hull deliberately?”
“High,” Kieron said, his breath coming quicker despite how hard he was trying to stay calm. “I can’t think of any reason for it to be there otherwise.”
“He wouldn’t have gotten space sick and done something rash, or maybe indulged in a kill-pill if he knew he was going to die anyway—”
“He was orthodox Traktan,” Kieron snapped.
“That means no suicide, no intoxicants—he didn’t even use Regen unless it was a life-or-death emergency, because they take such a strong stance on purity of original form.
He wouldn’t have put a dart through the hull and compromised its integrity without having a very good reason for doing it. ”
“No one knows how they’re going to react to death until they’re faced with it,” Elenus said, more gently than Kieron was expecting from him. “I’m not blaming your friend for anything, I’m just … trying to understand.”
Kieron shut his eyes for a second. “So am I,” he confessed. It was easier to be honest with Elenus when he wasn’t looking at him.
“Keeeeron.” Catalina’s voice was soft, like she felt unsure about interrupting their conversation—or unsure about what she was going to say next. “I can seeeee iiit.”
Stay calm. “Put it up on the viewscreen, please.”
Their view of the space in front of them vanished, replaced by a magnified view of the chunk of his old ship. A small section was highlighted in … pink. Of course, in pink. Catalina couldn’t get enough of it.
“Enlarge, please.” It got bigger, the picture slightly clearer. Even Catalina didn’t have perfect performance in this much radiation, but Kieron thought he had an idea of what the organic matter was now. His mouth went dry.
“A little bigger,” he whispered. The image became a little bigger, and he saw … he saw …
“Is that an arm?” Elenus exclaimed. “How the fuck did he attach one of his own arms to the back of the ship? How did he—”
“The bit.” As soon as he realized what he was looking at, Kieron knew what had happened.
“The expandable bit. Zakari must have known what was going on, he knew he was going to die out here. The odds of the ship staying in one piece were small, but if he could break the ship apart himself and make sure each part carried a piece of him with it … then the chances of recovering some of him to put back into his family crypt increased significantly.”
“Oh.” Elenus fell silent, a rare enough occurrence that Kieron felt like rewarding him with some more knowledge.
“His whole body would be best, of course,” he said roughly.
“But having at least a part of it to bury legitimizes the eternal nature of his soul, in the eyes of his culture. Hundreds of years ago, Traktans used to cut off a finger or an ear before going to war and leave it at home, in case the rest of them was lost to battle. Most modern Traktans have given that up, but …” But the lesson had stuck.
“So, wait. He literally tore himself and your ship apart, into quarters, before he died, so that you’d be able to find a piece of him to send home?”
“Yeah.”
“Holy shit.” There was both horror and deep respect in Elenus’s voice. “That’s got to be the most badass thing I’ve ever heard.”
Kieron had to agree.