Chapter 17 Nola
The station briefing is tense in the particular way that rooms get when everyone already knows it's going to be bad news and they're just waiting for the specifics.
Thresh stands at the front of the mess hall and tells seventy-seven people that a ship was detected at the edge of the asteroid field.
He explains synthetic aperture scanning without condescension.
He explains what it means: that Helix may be systematically mapping Haven's location.
He explains the timeline: weeks, possibly longer, before they have enough data to pinpoint the station.
Then he says the part that matters.
"We are preparing for the possibility of an attack.
This is a possibility, not a certainty. Preparations include defense drills, evacuation protocols, and emergency medical stations.
Everyone will be assigned a role and a position.
No one is expected to fight who doesn't want to.
But everyone is expected to follow the evacuation protocol when it's activated. "
The room absorbs this. I watch faces. Some go pale. Some go hard. Some go blank, the shutdown response of people who've heard this kind of news before and survived it by going somewhere inside themselves where the fear can't reach.
The children don't understand the words, but they understand the room's energy. Mika reaches for Dara's hand. Salo leans into his mother's side. Dara's face is stone and her arm around Salo is the fiercest thing in the room.
After the briefing, people scatter into their various forms of processing.
Some go to their quarters. Some go to the rec area, where the card games will be louder tonight because noise fills the space that fear creates.
Some go to work, because work is the universal coping mechanism of people who've run out of other options.
I go to the medbay. I unlock the supply closet, lay out the tools of my trade, check the inventory on the datapad, and prepare for the thing that always follows bad news on a station full of traumatized people: the body's response.
Fear lives in the stomach, the chest, the jaw.
It presents as nausea, headache, insomnia, muscle tension.
Every emotion has a physical address, and my job is to treat the address even when I can't change the cause.
There's going to be a line.
I'm right. Within an hour, twelve people come to see me.
Not for medical reasons, though they frame it that way.
A headache that could be stress. A stomachache that could be anxiety.
Trouble sleeping that is absolutely fear.
I treat the symptoms because the symptoms are real, even if the cause is existential.
I give painkillers for the headaches and mild sedatives for the insomnia and I listen, which is the medicine they actually came for.
Vira comes in the afternoon. She sits in her chair, the one she's claimed as hers, and she doesn't sort bandages today. She sits with her hands in her lap, scales tight against her body.
"It happened before," she says. "At the camp. They came and they took people and some people didn't come back."
"This isn't the camp," I say.
"It feels the same." Her voice is small. "The waiting. Everyone pretending to be okay. The person in charge standing up and saying we're prepared. They said that at the camp too."
I want to tell her it's different. I want to give her the comfort of a distinction that matters. But she's not asking for comfort. She's telling me what she's experiencing, and the most respectful thing I can do is hear it.
"I understand," I say. "The feeling is the same, even if the situation is different. Your body remembers what happened before, and it's responding to the signals that feel familiar."
"Will they come?"
"I don't know."
"Will we be okay?"
"I don't know that either. But I know that this station is being defended by people who care about every person in it. And I know that you survived the camp, Vira. You walked through a desert for three days. You survived that. Whatever comes, you know how to survive."
She looks at me for a long time. Then she says, "Can you teach me?"
"Teach you what?"
"Medical things. First aid. If something happens, I want to help. I don't want to hide. I want to be useful."
The request lands in a place that I wasn't prepared to be touched. This young woman, who has PTSD and nightmares and scales that go pale when she's afraid, is asking to learn how to help because helplessness is the thing she fears more than the attack itself.
"Yes," I say. "I can teach you. Starting tomorrow."
She nods. She stands. At the door, she pauses.
"Thank you, Nola."
"For what?"
"For not telling me not to be scared."
After she leaves, I sit in the medbay and press my palms against my eyes for thirty seconds. Then I take a breath, and I go back to work.
The defense preparations intensify over the next week.
Thresh and Kael run daily drills. Zara has mapped three evacuation routes, each leading to a different emergency pod cluster.
Emergency supplies are cached at twenty points throughout the station.
The point-defense weapons, which Thresh has maintained for three years without firing, are tested.
They work. The sound of the test firing echoes through the station like a heartbeat.
I set up the secondary medical station in the residential shelter.
Level three, with its own power and water.
I stock it with delivery supplies for Petra and trauma supplies for everyone else.
Vira helps me set it up, learning as she goes: how to organize a field hospital, how to lay out instruments for accessibility, how to prepare bandages and suture kits.
She's a fast learner. She has the Keth attention to detail and a calmness under pressure that she doesn't know she has yet.
"You're going to be good at this," I tell her as we finish stocking the secondary station.
"I'm just organizing supplies."
"You're learning to save lives. The organizing is step one."
Petra is at twenty weeks now. The baby is healthy.
The kicks have started, and when I see Petra's face during a checkup when the baby kicks against my scanner, the expression of pure wonder and terror and love that crosses her features is something I file away as evidence that human beings are astonishing.
"I told Renna," Petra says during the checkup.
"About the baby?"
"She guessed. She said I was eating differently. She's been saving extra bread for me." Petra's eyes are bright. "She cried. She said it was the first good news on this station in months."
"She's right."
"Is the baby going to be okay? If they come?"
"The baby is going to be fine. You're going to be fine. I've set up a medical station in the shelter specifically for you. Whatever happens, I'll be there."
"What if you can't be there? What if you're in the main medbay?"
I think about the schematic Thresh showed me. The medbay between the attack zone and the shelter. The possibility that I might be cut off.
"Then Vira will be there. I'm training her. She'll know what to do."
"The girl with the pale scales?"
"Her name is Vira. She's stronger than she looks."
Petra accepts this. She has to. We all have to accept the contingencies, the backup plans for the backup plans, because the luxury of certainty was never available and pretending otherwise is the cruelest kind of lie.
That night, I don't go to Thresh's quarters. I go to the observation lounge instead. I need the asteroid field. I need the vast, silent expanse of something larger than the fear sitting in my chest.
Thresh finds me there, because of course he does. He always knows where I am, and I've stopped pretending I don't find comfort in that.
He sits beside me. Closer than eighteen inches now. Our shoulders touch. His is cool, mine is warm, and the contact point is the place where two temperatures meet and create something new.
"Petra asked if the baby will be okay," I say.
"What did you tell her?"
"That I'd be there. That Vira would be there if I couldn't."
"That was the right answer."
"Was it? The right answer would be 'yes, the baby will be fine,' but I can't promise that, and she knows I can't, and the knowing is the worst part."
He puts his arm around me. The weight of it is steady and firm and exactly what I need, which is becoming a pattern with him.
"I've been thinking about what happens if they come," I say. "Not tactically. Personally. What happens to us if this station falls."
"The station won't fall."
"Thresh."
"The station will not fall. I have spent three years building it, and I have spent the last two months adding people who will fight for it. Zara, Kael, the defense team, Fen, you. This station has more capability now than at any point in its existence."
"But if."
He's quiet. Keth quiet, the total stillness that means he's processing something he doesn't want to process.
"If the station falls," he says, "the evacuation protocols ensure that civilians reach the escape pods. Zara's routes are tested and clear. The pods have sufficient fuel to reach the nearest friendly station in seventy-two hours."
"That's not what I'm asking."
"I know." He turns to look at me. In the reflected starlight, his amber eyes are dark gold, and I can see the exhaustion and the vigilance and something else, something that he's only recently allowed to exist. "If the station falls, I make sure everyone else gets out."
"Including you?"
The silence is answer enough.
"No," I say. "Absolutely not. You do not get to play the sacrificial last stand while I evacuate in a pod. That is not happening."
"Nola."
"I'm serious. You are not expendable. You are not the acceptable loss in the math.
You are a person who has given three years of his life to this station, and you are going to survive whatever comes, because I have spent weeks making sure you sleep and eat and take breaks, and I am not investing all that medical effort just to lose you to a hero complex. "
His almost-smile appears. "Hero complex?"
"Hypervigilant coping with a martyr variant. New diagnosis. Just invented it."
"I'm not sure that's medically recognized."
"I'll write the paper. It'll be very convincing." I turn to face him fully. "Promise me. Promise me that the plan includes you surviving."
He looks at the asteroid field. Then he looks at me. "The plan includes me surviving."
"Was that so hard?"
"Harder than you know."
I lean into him. He holds me. The asteroid field drifts outside the viewport, silver and shadow and beautiful and useful, hiding us from the dark.
We sit there until the night cycle dims the corridors and the station goes quiet and the only sounds are the recyclers and the gravity generators and the three-beat heart against my ear.
Then we go to his quarters, and I sleep beside him, and the station holds, and the asteroid field holds, and we hold each other.
For now. For tonight. Outside, the rocks tumble in their slow, ancient dance, indifferent to the small dramas playing out in the station they hide.
The asteroids catch the binary star's light at shifting angles, and for a moment the viewport fills with reflected silver that looks like morning, like the beginning of something, even though I know it's just physics and photons and the accident of position.
It's enough. It has to be.