Chapter 4 Thresh #2
I go to the operations room. The species medical files are in a restricted database that I accessed three years ago through channels I won't describe.
The database is vast, a comprehensive medical reference for every known species in the Lattice, maintained by an academic consortium that has no idea their security was compromised.
I download the files for all seven species represented on the station, scrub the metadata to remove any trace of the access point, and transfer them to a datapad.
It takes an hour. When I deliver the datapad to the medbay, she's elbow-deep in an examination of Berec's lungs and doesn't look up.
"Thank you," she says to the datapad I place on the counter.
"Don't mention it."
"I won't."
The exchange is brief and efficient, and I find that I appreciate the efficiency. She doesn't make it more than it is. She doesn't perform gratitude. She takes the tool and uses it.
The day continues. I run security checks, adjust the perimeter sensors to account for a shift in the debris field that's moving a cluster of old mining equipment into our scan zone, and deal with a minor dispute between two residents over water ration allocation.
The dispute is settled quickly. People here understand scarcity.
They argue, but they settle, because the alternative is worse and everyone knows it.
Scarcity is a language this station speaks fluently.
In the late afternoon, I find myself in the mess hall reviewing supply logistics when Fen sits down across from me. She has the expression of someone who has been waiting to deliver news.
"She fixed the humidity issue," Fen says.
"What?"
"Nola. She gave me a schematic showing the optimal humidity gradient for mixed-species habitation.
She calculated it based on the population breakdown and figured out where to add moisture injectors that would benefit the Keth residents without pushing the human-optimal zones too high.
She factored in the Vorath quarters too, they need lower humidity than humans.
She did a whole environmental model. In her first week, Thresh. In her first week."
I process this. The humidity problem has been ongoing for a year.
Fen's been patching it with mechanical fixes, adjusting the existing regulators, running them harder, accepting that the system was designed for a single-species population and couldn't accommodate the diversity we have.
The new medic solved it with math and a schematic, and she did it because a Keth patient had dry skin.
"Interesting," I say.
"Interesting?" Fen repeats. "She's good, Thresh. She's actually good. Not just competent. She sees the whole system. The medical problem, the environmental cause, the engineering solution. That's rare."
I know it's rare. That's what concerns me. People this capable don't end up at the edge of space for the money alone. There's always another reason. Always a story behind the story, a push where the contract says pull.
But I also know that questioning a gift while people are suffering is a luxury I cannot afford. The station needs a doctor. She's a doctor. Until I have evidence of something else, the math is simple.
Night falls. The external cameras show the asteroid field in its slow orbital dance, the tumbling rocks catching starlight from the binary star at shifting angles.
On clear nights, the larger asteroids cast long shadows across the smaller ones, and the dead moons rise and set in patterns that look almost deliberate.
I used to watch them when I first arrived, before the watching became another thing I didn't have time for.
The station shifts to its quiet rhythms, the mess hall emptying, the corridors dimming, the residential section settling into the particular sounds of people preparing for sleep behind thin walls.
I do my rounds, checking doors, seals, corridors.
The routine takes ninety minutes and covers every level.
I know the sound each door makes when it seals.
I know which floor panels creak under weight and which are silent.
The station is my body, and the rounds are how I check its vital signs.
I pass the medbay at 2200 and the light is still on. She's in there, reading the species medical files I gave her, making notes in the margins of her datapad. Her posture is hunched slightly forward, the focus absolute. A mug of something sits beside her, forgotten and probably cold.
I stop in the doorway. She doesn't look up immediately, which means she's genuinely absorbed, not performing focus for my benefit.
Three seconds pass before she registers my presence, which is longer than most people take to notice a Keth standing in their doorway.
I'm not small. The fact that she's that deep in the material means the material has her full attention.
"You should sleep," I say.
"Says the man who sleeps four hours a night." She still doesn't look up. "Fen told me."
"Fen talks too much."
"Fen is worried about you." Now she looks up. That direct gaze again, steady and unhesitating. "You're running this entire station. Security, logistics, resident intake, medical triage before I arrived. One person can't do all of that indefinitely."
"I've managed."
"Managing and sustaining are different things.
" She closes the datapad. "You're showing signs of chronic sleep deprivation.
I can see it in the way you hold your jaw, the microdelays in your response time, the fact that your hands have a slight tremor at the end of the day that they don't have in the morning.
Your slit pupils are dilating slower than baseline Keth norms, which suggests neurological fatigue. "
I look at my hands. They're still. Right now.
But she's right about the tremor. It starts around 1800 most days, a fine vibration that I've attributed to caffeine and dismissed.
She noticed it. She noticed, and she cross-referenced it with Keth neurological baselines, which means she's already reading those files I gave her.
"I'm a medic," she says. "I notice things."
"So do I."
We look at each other across the medbay.
The silence is not uncomfortable. It's the silence of two people who observe everything and are unaccustomed to being observed back.
I observe the station, its systems, its people, its threats.
She observes the station's people, their bodies, their symptoms, their unspoken pain.
We're doing the same thing from different angles, and the intersection of those angles is this moment, this quiet room, this mutual recognition.
"Get some sleep, Thresh," she says. Not an order. Not a medical directive. Something softer than both. Something that acknowledges the futility of the request while making it anyway, because the making matters even when the compliance is unlikely.
"You first."
"Deal. I'll leave when you do."
I stand in the doorway for another moment. Then I turn and walk to my quarters, knowing that the medbay light will go off within minutes of my leaving, because she said she would and I'm beginning to think she's the type who keeps her word.
I lie on my bunk in the dark and think about the fact that she noticed my hands.
No one has noticed my hands. No one has looked closely enough, or cared enough, to see the small signs of what this station is costing me.
Fen cares, but Fen is a mechanic. She sees broken systems, not broken people.
The residents care about me the way a ship's crew cares about the captain: in the abstract, as a function.
They need me to work, so they hope I'm well, but they don't inspect the details.
She noticed the tremor. She noticed the jaw. She noticed the pupil response time. She read the species files carefully enough to know what the Keth baseline looks like and then she compared me to it and found me wanting.
She noticed.
I don't know what to do with that yet. I file it in the system, but the system doesn't have a category for "someone saw the thing I've been hiding." The closest approximation is "vulnerability identified," and vulnerabilities are things I fix, not things I sit with.
But I don't fix this one. I just lie in the dark and think about it until the four hours expire and the morning comes and the station needs me again.