Chapter 8 Thresh #2
The defensive inventory is brief and sobering.
I lay it out on the terminal like a surgeon laying out instruments: what I have, what I need, what's missing.
Fen can handle mechanical emergencies. Several of the longer-term residents have basic combat training from previous lives, before the camps, before the running.
But a coordinated military assault from Helix contractors would overwhelm us in hours.
Maybe less. The math doesn't change no matter how many times I run it.
I run scenarios anyway. Defense configurations.
Evacuation protocols. Bottleneck positions within the station where a small force could hold against a larger one.
The corridor junction between the docking bay and the operational section.
The residential section access point. The scenarios are not encouraging, but they're better than nothing, and nothing is the alternative.
At dinner, I sit in the mess hall and eat without tasting the food.
Nola is three tables over, talking to Dara and her children.
Mika is showing Nola something on a datapad, some drawing she's made, and Nola is paying attention with the genuine focus she gives to everything, leaning in, asking questions, treating a seven-year-old's drawing with the same seriousness she'd give a medical chart.
Salo is eating with the single-minded dedication of a five-year-old who has just been told that protein blocks help you grow big.
They're happy. The children are happy. Dara is smiling, the tension in her face eased by the simple normalcy of dinner and conversation.
Around the mess hall, residents are eating, talking, existing with the particular kind of normalcy that represents the entire purpose of Haven Station.
Normal life. Safety. The absence of fear.
I look at these people and I think about Helix contractors with military-grade ships, and the weight of responsibility settles onto my shoulders with the familiar pressure that I've been carrying for three years and that Nola identified, correctly, as hypervigilant coping.
She's right. I know she's right. But the alternative to hypervigilance is trust, and trust means someone else carrying part of the weight, and the last time someone else carried part of the weight, on a station called Threshold that no longer exists, they dropped it and people died.
Fourteen people. I can still name all of them.
That was before Haven. Different station, different circumstances. But the lesson was the same: you can't delegate survival. You can only prepare and respond and hope that the preparation is enough.
That night, I update the soul board in the operations room. Seventy-two. The same number. Nobody new, nobody gone. The marker feels heavier than usual in my hand. I think about the two stations that went dark. How many souls were on their boards. How many markers stopped counting.
Voss leaves in the morning. I watch the Rust Bucket undock and disappear into the dark, the asteroid field swallowing her ship within minutes, taking with it the last connection to the wider Lattice until the next run.
Nola finds me in the docking bay after the ship is gone. The bay is empty now, quiet, the cargo sorted and distributed. She's carrying a mug of the herbal tea she found in the supply crate, which she's been distributing to patients with sleep issues and anxiety.
"You're brooding," she says.
"I'm assessing."
"Those look the same from where I'm standing." She offers me the mug. I look at it. "It's chamomile. Human herbal blend. Safe for Keth. I checked. Twice."
I take the mug. The warmth of it is unexpected. Not the temperature, which is predictable. The gesture. She checked if it was safe for me. She checked twice.
"Voss told you something," Nola says. Not a question. An observation from someone who's been watching me the way I watch the sensors.
"Voss told me operational intelligence that's being reviewed."
"You've been in the operations room for six hours. You missed the morning briefing, which you've never done. And your jaw hasn't relaxed since yesterday afternoon." She sips from her own mug. "Something changed."
I consider deflecting. I consider telling her it's a security matter and above her access level.
Both are true. Both are also the kind of isolation response she diagnosed me with two weeks ago, the hypervigilant coping, the carrying, the refusal to share the weight because sharing means vulnerability and vulnerability means risk.
"Helix has escalated their search for unauthorized stations," I say. "They've hired professional military contractors. Two stations have been destroyed."
She absorbs this without visible reaction, which I appreciate. Panic is useless. What she says next is the thing that matters, the thing that tells me whether this information makes her want to leave or stay.
"What do we need to do?"
We. Not "what are you going to do." Not "should I be worried." Not "how soon can I get a shuttle out." What do we need to do. The pronoun is small and the implication is enormous. It's the sound of someone stepping forward instead of back.
"Tighten security protocols. Run more frequent sensor sweeps. Prepare evacuation procedures. And ideally, get fighters."
"I'm not a fighter."
"No. You're a medic. If something happens, you're the person who keeps people alive afterward. That's not less important. In a sustained engagement, the medic is the difference between casualties and fatalities."
She looks at me over her mug. The steam curls between us, thin and fragile. "You've never told me I was important before."
"I said your role was important. There's a distinction."
"Sure there is." She's almost smiling. I can see it in the corners of her eyes, that expression that's not quite amusement and not quite warmth and is somehow both, and that I've started cataloging with the same attention I give to perimeter anomalies.
"Drink the tea, Thresh. Then go run your sensor sweeps. But drink the tea first."
I drink the tea. It's not unpleasant. Mild, floral, with a faint earthiness that I suspect is more appealing to human palates but that settles in my system with a warmth that feels like more than just temperature.
She watches me drink it, and when I hand the mug back, our fingers brush.
Keth skin is cooler than human skin by several degrees.
The contact is brief, incidental, the kind of touch that happens when two people exchange an object and don't coordinate their grip.
She doesn't flinch at the contact. She doesn't comment on it.
Her fingers are warm and mine are cool and the differential exists for maybe half a second.
She takes the mug, nods once, and walks back toward the medbay. Her footsteps on the metal floor are steady, unhurried, the walk of someone who has decided where she's going and isn't rushing to get there.
I stand in the docking bay where Voss's ship was and where the silence now lives, and I think about the word we. About the way she said it, casually, as if the inclusion were obvious and not something I needed to earn or she needed to decide. As if being part of this was already settled.
Then I go run my sensor sweeps. The station is quiet. The Fringe is dark. Somewhere out there, Helix is looking for places exactly like this one.
They haven't found us yet.
The chamomile is still warm in my memory, the ghost of the mug's heat against my palms, and beneath it, briefer and more persistent, the half-second where her fingers touched mine.
I file both sensations under "operational awareness" and know, with the precision that makes me good at my job, that the filing is a lie.
I intend to keep it that way.