11. Althea
ALTHEA
The first jolt throws me into Caelis, and the second throws us both into the chart table, and after that I stop counting jolts and start counting the things that are on fire.
"They're herding us," I shout over the alarms. Saren is in the command chair, and he's not panicking, which is somehow more frightening than if he were. "They're not trying to kill us, they're driving us toward —"
"The current," Caelis finishes. There's an asteroid stream ahead, a river of rock running fast enough to peel a hull, and the hunters are walling off every other vector to push us into it. "Captain, the nav's lagging, I can't —"
"Then I'll fly it blind," Saren says.
"You'll fly it dead." I'm already at the nav console, shoving Caelis's hands aside, because this — this I know.
This is a salvage run with worse stakes.
"I read wrecks for a living. Rock's the same as a collapsing hold, it just hates you faster.
Give me the feed raw, forget the lag, I'll call it and you fly it. "
He looks at me for the length of a breath. Then: "Call it."
So I call it. Left, hard, now. Up, on my mark.
Hold. The stream takes us in and the ship screams in every weld, and I read the rock the way I've read every dying thing I've ever crawled inside, and Saren flies it with a touch I wouldn't have believed in something his size, and behind us the warship balks at the current and loses us in the noise of it.
We come out the far side scarred and venting and alive. And then the cost lands, the way it always does after.
The medical bay is full. Elsyn has more wounded than hands, so I become hands.
I clamp and I pack and I hold people down while he sets bone, and these are bodies that wanted me spaced two weeks ago, and not a single one flinches from my touch now.
Vasha hauls in a crewman with a crushed arm and watches me work on him and says nothing, but her eyes do something they haven't done before.
"You could have stayed at the nav," she says finally. "Safe. You came here instead."
"There's no safe on a ship this shot up," I say. "Might as well be useful."
"No." She sets the crewman's arm in the brace herself, gentler than I'd have guessed those hands could be. "You came here because you couldn't stand the not-helping. I know the difference. I've spent years pretending I don't have that, and I know it when I see it in someone else."
When the worst of it is stabilized I find Saren in the corridor outside, and he's been waiting, and the moment the hatch opens he crosses to me and stops short, hands flexing at his sides like he's fighting them.
"You're not hurt," he says. It isn't quite a question.
"Bruised. Standard." I'm too tired to armor it. "You?"
He doesn't answer. He lifts both hands and frames my face, careful, so careful, and presses his forehead to mine, and we stand there in the wrecked corridor breathing each other's air, and over his shoulder I see two of the crew watching, and I hear one of them murmur the thing they've all started to think — she's making him soft — and I feel Saren hear it too, and feel him decide, for once, not to care.