There was silence from the other bunk, in the waiting.
“Kid,” Fletcher said after long thought. “You hear me?”
“Yeah.” Earplugs were in. They were riding inertial, in this interminable waiting, and they could see each other. Jeremy pulled out the right one.
“I’ve had time to think. I shouldn’t have blamed you about Chad. I picked that fight. Down in the skin. I hit him.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said.
“Not your fault. Should have hit Sue.”
“You can’t hit Sue.”
“Yeah, well, Sue knows it, too.”
“You want to get her? I can get her.”
“I want peace in this crew, is what I want. You copy?”
“Stand by,” the word came from the bridge.
“Yessir,” was the meek answer. “I copy.”
Engines cut in.
Bunks swung.
“He’s never done this before!” Jeremy said. “Kind of scary.”
He thought so, too, though as he understood the way ships worked, he didn’t imagine JR with his hands on the steering. Or whatever it was up there. Around there… around the ring from where they were.
“Good luck to us all,” came from the bridge. “Here we go, cousins. Good wishes, new captain, sir. Good wishes, Captain James Robert, Senior. You’re forever in our hearts.”
“Amen,” Jeremy said fervently.
“Esperance,” Fletcher said. He’d looked for it months from now, not in this fervid rush.
But it was months on. It was three months going on four, since Mariner. Going on six months, since Pell.
It was autumn on Downbelow. It was coming on the season when he’d come down to the world.
It was harvest, and the females would be heavy with young and the males working hard to lay by food for the winter chill.
Half a year. And he was mere weeks older.
The ship lifted. Spread insubstantial wings…
Rain pattered on the ground, into puddles. Pebbles crunched and feet splashed in shallow water as they carried him, as Fletcher stared at a rain-pocked gray sky through the mask.
He knew he was in trouble, despite the people fussing over his health. They’d rescued him, but they wanted him out of their program. They were glad he was alive, but they were angry. Was that a surprise?
They carried him into the domes and took the mask off and his clean-suit off, the safety officer questioning him very closely about whether he’d breached a seal out there.
If he’d had his wits about him he’d have said yes and let them think he’d die, and that alone would prevent him being shipped anywhere, but he stupidly answered the truth and took away his best chance, not realizing it until he’d answered the question.
They’d found the stick, too, and they wanted to take that from him before he got into the domes, but he wouldn’t turn it loose. “Satin gave it to me,” he said, and when they, like his rescuers, suggested he was crazy and hallucinating, he roused enough to describe where he’d been: that he’d talked to the foremost hisa, and the one, the rumor said, who could get hisa either to work or not to work with humans, plain and simple. The experts and the administrators, who’d suited to come out and meet them coming in, pulled off a little distance in the heavily falling rain and talked about it, not quite in his hearing. They’d given him some drug. He wasn’t sure what. He wasn’t even sure when. Four of the rescuers had to hold him on a stretcher while the experts conferred, and he supposed they were frustrated. They shifted grips several times.
But then someone from the medical staff came outside, suited up too, for the purpose; and the doctor encouraged him to get on his feet, so that he could go through decon, with people holding him.
They wanted to put the stick through the irradiation, and that was all right: he took it back, after that, and wobbled out, stick and all, into a warm wrap an officer held waiting for him.
Then they let him sit down and checked him over, pulse, temperature, everything his rescuers had already done; and another set of medics went over those reports.
After that, when he was so faint from hunger his head was spinning, they gave him hot soup to drink, and put him to bed.
Nunn showed up meanwhile and gave him a stern lecture. He was less than attentive, while he had the first food he’d had in days. He gathered that he’d caused Nunn trouble with Quen, and that Nunn now found fault with most everything he’d ever done in classes. He didn’t see how one equated with the other, but somehow Quen’s directives had overpowered everything but the medical staff. He got sick, couldn’t keep the soup down; and Nunn left, that was the one good thing in a bad moment. He had to go to bed, then, and they gave him an IV and let him go to sleep.
But when he waked, the science office sent people with recorders and cameras who kept him talking for hours after that, wanting every detail. He slept a great deal. He’d run off five kilos, the doctor said, and he was dehydrated despite being out in the rain for days. It was an endless succession of medical tests and interviewers.
Last of all Bianca came.
He’d been asleep. And waked up and saw her.
“How are you feeling?” she asked him.
“Oh, pretty good,” he said. “They bother you?”
“No. Not really.”
“They’re shipping me up,” he said. “I guess you heard. My family wants me back. On Finity’s End.”
“Yes,” she said “They told me.”
“You’re not in trouble, are you?”
She shook her head.
And she cried.
He was incredibly dizzy. Drugged, he was sure, sedated so his head spun when he lifted his head from the pillow. He fought it. He angrily shoved himself up on one arm and tried to get up, tried to fight the sedative.
And almost fell out of bed as his hand hit the edge.
“Don’t,” Bianca said. “Don’t. I’ve only got a few minutes. They won’t let me stay.”
She leaned over and kissed him then, a long, long kiss, first they’d ever shared. Only time they’d ever been together, except in class, without the masks.
“I’ll get back down here,” he said. “I’ll get off that damn ship. Maybe they’ll put me in for a psych-over and I won’t have to go with them.”
“Velasquez.” A supervisor had come to the door. “Time’s up.”
She hugged him close.
“Velasquez. He’s in quarantine.”
“I’ll get back,” he said.
“I’ll be here,” she said. Meanwhile the supervisor had come into the flimsy little compartment to bring her out; and Bianca just moved away, holding his hand as long as she could until their fingers parted.
He fell back and it was a drugged slide into a personal dark in which Bianca’s presence was like a dream, one before, not after the deep forest and the downer racing ahead of him.
The plain was next. A golden plain of grass, with the watchers endlessly staring into the heavens…
Not there any longer. Never there.
Esperance was where. Esperance.
“Jeremy?” He missed the noise from that quarter. Jeremy was very quiet.
“Yeah,” he heard finally. “Yeah. I’m awake.”
“We’re there. You drink the packets?”
“Trying,” Jeremy said. And scrambled out of his bunk and ran for the bathroom.
Jeremy was sick at his stomach. Light body, Fletcher said to himself, and drank a nutri-pack, trying to get his own stomach calmed.
Esperance. Their turn-around point. Midway on their journey.