34. The Last Almost
THIRTY-FOUR
THE LAST ALMOST
Reyna ran.
She came out of the library and she ran, boots hammering the deck plating, one hand catching the corner at the junction to keep herself from overshooting it, and the message sat behind her eyes the whole way.
Wherever you are right now, please leave and initiate a vid call with me. We need to talk. Immediately. About the human woman.
Vondra had never once said please to her.
"Captain?" Reyna went past a startled ensign at the junction but didn't slow down.
Eight days that appointment had been sitting on a Coalition desk, and Reyna had spent those eight days checking the file three times a shift, waiting for it to change.
The human woman.
Reyna pulled on her office door, and she was through it before it finished closing.
She dropped into her chair. Her hair had come loose somewhere in the corridor, but she shoved it back off her face with both hands. She couldn't care less what she looked like right now.
She was shaking.
Ten minutes ago, Charlie Wickett had stood in the middle of a library and sung to her. Reyna had not come down from it yet. In fact, she could still hear the last three lines, the ones Charlie had sung right at her, in a room full of everyone they knew.
Later, Reyna told herself. I can have all of it later. In no time at all, I am going to walk back into that room and I am going to—
She didn't finish the sentence. She couldn't let herself. Not yet.
Instead, Reyna smoothed her collar and straightened her rank pin. She put her hands flat on the desk where they wouldn't betray her. She opened the channel to Admiral Vondra's office and waited for it to connect.
It's going to be fine.
The wall display came up, and the room got darker.
It always did with Vondra's calls because the Admiral's chamber drank light.
Reyna looked at dark water, faint and green at the edges where the station systems glowed.
And there, in the center of the frame, sat the Admiral, stone-still.
The great slabbed shape, barely distinguishable from the pressure around her, her geode eyes catching what little light there was.
"Captain Solas."
The vibration came through the deck before it came through the speakers. It always did.
"Admiral." Reyna said, addressing her superior. "I got your message. Is this about the appointment? Because if the committee needs anything else from me, I can have the full field record to you within the—"
"Reyna."
She stopped.
The resonance of Vondra's voice came through slowly. There was a drag, a place where the vibration thinned out before it finished. It was as though the Voxlink stripped that out and handed Reyna her own name, hollowed out.
But Reyna could hear the water surrounding her Admiral. She had heard it this way only once before, in this same office, in this same chair, when the Admiral told her that the search for Elena Voss was over and the Emberkind had a new captain.
"I need you to listen to me," Vondra said.
Reyna's hands started to shake even more, for a completely different reason than Charlie's song.
"The Coalition has reviewed the engineering appointment request for your provisional crew member." The water moved, barely. "The appointment has been denied."
Reyna didn't move.
"Denied," she said.
"Denied," Vondra repeated. "The non-contact waiver was rejected by the Oversight Committee.
The Qorrathi delegation filed a formal objection under the Protected World protocol, and the committee agreed.
A citizen of a non-contact civilization cannot hold a permanent senior position within the Coalition, vessel or otherwise. "
"With all due respect, Admiral, she has been holding that position for two weeks already and doing the job for six months.
" Reyna heard her voice get sharp, but she didn't stop.
"She rebuilt our thermal protocol. She brought a cascade back from the edge in ninety-two seconds with a technique that is not in any manual the Coalition has ever printed.
My engine efficiency is the best it has been in my entire command, and your own analysts flagged the numbers as an error because they couldn't believe them—"
"I have read the field reports, Reyna," Vondra interjected. Reyna felt the frequency move between them, a weight present in Vondra's words. "The data is extraordinary. Everyone can see that. But it's not about competence."
Reyna blanched. "Then what could it possibly be about?"
Vondra's geode eyes disappeared for a second, giving Reyna the impression she was closing and opening them again. "Precedent, Captain."
"Precedent?"
"Reyna, consider this. If the committee approves this, every civilization in Coalition space with minimal involvement in policy would have grounds to challenge the protocol framework. They've decided that door is to remain shut."
"Well, that's absolutely ridiculous. It's a stupid door," Reyna said. "Open it."
Vondra said nothing.
Reyna ran a hand through her hair. "There has to be an appeal process," she said. "There's always an appeal process."
"There is," Vondra answered. "I have already begun it. The timeline for response is six to eight cycles."
"Six to eight—" Reyna stopped. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, returning her hands to the flat top of her desk. "Fine. Fine! Six to eight cycles is... survivable. Charlie keeps doing the work, the bay keeps running, we just call it provisional on the paperwork and nobody has to—"
"Reyna."
Reyna stopped.
That was three times now.
Vondra did not interrupt people. She let you talk and run all the way out of things to say. Reyna had sat in this chair for years and had never once been cut across.
But now it had been three times in one call.
"What happens to Charlie in the meantime, Vondra?" Reyna said, clipped and low.
The water around the Admiral seemed to go darker.
"The committee has recommended removal," Vondra said. "They want her brought to the capital, so discussions can continue about her placement in Coalition space. They're sending transfer instructions before the end of the next cycle."
Reyna's mind traveled to her days in training at Novahall, where most it discussed the dangers of the vacuum.
How it would feel, how fast you would die, how much time you would have.
It told you what would happen to your body, your brain, and even your skin.
Textbooks described it as being akin to having the life force pulled out of you by the vast emptiness that is deep space.
Reyna thought, in that very moment, that she knew exactly how it would feel.
Because she felt nothing but her life force being pulled out of her at the thought of Charlie being taken away.
Placement in Coalition space.
She saw all of it at once. A room on a station nobody had ever bothered to tell Charlie existed. Rooms without a single engine in them. Charlie Wickett sitting in a corridor somewhere with nothing to fix and nothing to do but wait, being discussed.
They would call her Wickett, or worse, Charlotte.
Every one of them, every day, and not one of them would ever ask about Earth or find out that she sang.
Reyna could see her sitting in some waiting room with her hands in her lap and the knot on her bracelet turned around on her wrist where nobody could see it.
Some committee somewhere, deciding what to do with a human.
"No," Reyna said.
"Reyna—"
"No."
Reyna's mind whirled while her ears rang. It felt as though her brain was rejecting everything she'd just heard. Because it was.
And so was her heart.
She had been so goddamn careful.
Every night, Reyna didn't reach. Every hour, she held gold until her spine ached. Every time Charlie said her name, she let it go past her like it was nothing.
And for what.
She had done all of it to keep from feeling exactly what she was feeling right now, standing in her office at the end of the best night of her life, and here it was anyway, every bit of it, arriving right on schedule.
I could have told her.
That was it. That was the worst part. Months of nights in that room and she could have said it, and she would still be standing here now, except Charlie would know.
She would know that she is the best thing that has happened to me in seventy-five years.
She knew what she'd been doing. That was what made it unbearable.
She had kept Charlie at arm's length for six months on purpose, deliberately, every single day, and she had told herself it was for her own protection. That the distance was the thing keeping her safe.
And it turned out the distance was the injury.
Reyna sat at her desk with her hands shaking and understood, far too late, that the pain she had spent six months trying to avoid was not the pain of losing Charlie Wickett.
It was the pain of never having reached for her at all.
"Reyna," Vondra said, and the sound had a genuine concern in it now, low and unmistakable.
Reyna couldn't have cared less.
"I know what she is to that ship."
"You do not know one thing about what she is," Reyna snapped.
"Captain—"
"Do not." Reyna was on her feet. "Do not Captain me. Not now."
"Reyna, listen to me—"
"No. You listen." Her voice sounded completely unlike her own.
"You will tell that committee that they are removing the best engineer in this fleet from a ship that cannot run without her, all because she was born in the wrong place.
You will tell them that I, Reyna Solas, said so.
You will tell them that they have never met her, and they probably never will, and yet they are going to sit in a room and discuss her placement like she's a piece of goddamn salvage—"
"Reyna," Vondra said, interrupting once again.
Four times.
Reyna let her.
"I have said all of it. I said it for over six hours. It is on the record and will go in the appeal. But I am telling you, as your friend, that it will not be enough."
And that stopped her.