Cosmosis

Blunt

(English)

Watching someone die is worse than having it come on suddenly.

Michelle and I had successfully stretched out Dustin's last moments, but 'stretching' was the limit of what we could do.

My girlfriend clutched her brother's hand through the end. His body was wracked with failing organs and radiation. All she could do was cry and try to comfort him. All I could do was watch.

Her brother.

There was a moment, a bit less than an hour before he died, when I thought I might go over to him again. But he caught my gaze, and waved me off.

He didn't have the strength to lift his fingers more than an inch, but the words he gave me sunk into my soul.

<It needs to be you.>

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

Days later, those words were still haunting me.

I wanted to grind to a halt. I wanted to curl up in my cabin's bunk and rage at God and the universe.

I didn't.

The 'good' reason why I didn't was because of the people who still depended on me. There were still mountains to move in the wake of the attack on the space station, and the lion's share of the people moving those mountains answered to me. Priorities needed deciding, schedules needed organizing, and much of that fell to me.

The real reason why I didn't was because Madeline needed to grieve even more than me.

It had been one short conversation between myself, her best friend Aarti, and Drew. Since her brother died, the three of us had made sure at least one of us was in her orbit at all times.

Her brother.

Madeline didn't take it kindly. She wanted to be independent. Strong. So she lashed out, but her heart wasn't in it. All we could do was squeeze her tight in a hug and find more and more ways to nail home that she wasn't alone.

Tasser and Nai helped cover some of my responsibilities. I was lucky to have them.

Jordan withdrew too, holing up in the Siegfried's workshops with Shinshay.

Their secret project had been in the prototype phase for almost a year now. Deploying a completed version was the kind of game-changer that might have completely circumvented this whole disaster. She was probably feeling guilty about not having it completed.

There was plenty of that going around.

When Serral and Nai quietly tweaked my schedule to give me an almost six-hour empty window, it was something of a signal.

In the privacy of my own brain, I questioned the decision. But it needed doing.

So when that six-hour window of nothing rolled around, I disembarked my Flotilla and went aboard the station we'd saved.

Its gymnasium was nicer than the Siegfried's.

The local clocks shook out so that it was the dead of night aboard the station, and the gym was completely empty save for me whaling on a punching bad.

Vorak punching bags were so nice.

They didn't build theirs for durability like humans. No leather filled with sand. Bags were made to be melted down and refabricated every two or three days of use, and a uniform material comprised most of the bag. Something for a hyperactive Vorak to really sink their claws into, tear to shreds.

It was even reinforced with ceramic rods that snapped if you hit them hard enough. It was viscerally satisfying to take out my frustration on the bag and feel what felt like bone buckle under every odd impact.

But this hole in my schedule wasn't for a workout.

I just thought it was best to make sure I wasn't itching to hit something for the conversation that would follow.

With the augmentations in my hands, I could beat the bag to a pulp without even wearing gloves. I was halfway through doing just that when Nora finally arrived.

I didn't acknowledge her arrival, and I immediately realized what would be my biggest problem. Even with Dustin dead, that part of me that was hurt by her wasn't any less furious, and it galled me to my core that I needed to be the one to engage.

Dira, I hoped that wasn't just ego.

It didn't feel like it, but when did it ever? Being pig-headed had nearly omnipotent power to rationalize itself.

I just kept attacking the punching bag.

Maybe it was coincidence. Or maybe I was just angry enough that it was just a matter of time and wear.

But the chain holding up the bag snapped.

It fell to the floor with a hollow thud, and suddenly the satisfaction of hitting something so lifelike soured.

"Well, that's probably a sign…" I huffed under my breath.

"Sorry?" Nora said.

She hadn't quite heard me.

"Nothing."

Nora was seated on the ground, right next to the gymnasium door, her knees tucked under her chin. She didn't want to have this talk any more than I did.

I materialized a towel to wipe the sweat off my head, and I plopped to the floor across from her.

"So…" I said slowly, "exactly what kind of conversation is this going to be?"

She barely raised her head. Her eyes were marked by heavy bags and the redness that only came from crying hours on end. My face probably didn't look too different.

"…There's not a cell in my body that hasn't been dreading this conversation for years," she croaked. "I would love to want this conversation, but I don't…but I know we need to have it. And I don't think I have any right to say if this is going to be a personal or professional conversation."

I nodded.

God, she pissed me off. That was basically exactly how I felt about it too.

"Well then this is going to be a pretty evisceratingly personal conversation," I predicted.

Was that a real word? Bah, didn't matter.

"What first then?" she asked.

"Well, I figured we would ease into things and cover how we fucked up."

"If we're talking about a fuckup that isn't exclusively mine, you might need to narrow it down," she said reluctantly.

"Crew rosters," I clarified.

"Ah."

She winced.

About three years ago now, Serral and I had assembled our Flotilla. We cannibalized Wolshu Kemon's anti-piracy-pirates for ships and personnel, quickly setting about getting older abductees trained to fulfil expert roles too.

Roughly parallel to that time, Nora had built her own network of helpful aliens and trained abductees.

The Flotilla and the Missions had been the main two forces to represent Terra Firma out here.

And one of the first key parts of organizing an interstellar organization of any kind was personnel: crew lists.

It was a matter of course. The Mission had their crew, and my Flotilla had ours.

"We shared the lists with each other," she recalled.

"We didn't go far enough."

"…No, we didn't."

Emphasizing my point, I materialized papers with both lists of crew on them. Certain names were highlighted.

"We needed to have every human on both our crews look over both lists," I surmised.

If we had, someone would surely have recognized the fact that Dustin and Madeline shared a last name. It would have been one thing if there'd been two abductees named 'Miller', but not 'Squire'.

"Yeah," she agreed quietly. "…I had my people spread the crew lists around, but it wasn't a dedicated assignment. We thought it was low priority."

"Mostly housekeeping," I nodded. "I got the Mission crew list through Dustin. I assume you got our list through him too?"

She nodded.

"…Pen pal shit…" I muttered.

"What?"

"We've been staying out of each other's way," I said bitterly. "People died here because of that, at least in part."

That might not have been true. Dustin and Madeline realizing their siblings had also been abducted wouldn't necessarily have stopped him from dying.

On the other hand, it was braindead easy to see how Nora's crew and mine getting to know each other more might have led to us reconciling years ago. That kind of cooperation could have prevented this whole debacle.

"Fuck, what happened?" she breathed.

It wasn't a serious question. I knew she was just venting disbelief and frustration.

It set me off anyway.

What happened is you stabbed me right in the back," I hissed.

She flinched but said nothing.

My anger welled up further. She wasn't even interested in trying to defend herself.

"Say something!" I growled.

"Like what?" she snapped. "We both know what I did."

"Do we?" I asked. "Because I never got to pick your brain about exactly when you decided to try dragging me back to the rak. You never bothered explaining why you did it. Even afterward."

"I didn't want to patronize you," she said. "I left because I wanted to help my campers, and yeah, I tried taking you with me. Is there any way to elaborate in more detail that isn't just belittling your intelligence? I could get into the details of weighing the lives of my seventy-odd abductees against yours. I could spoon feed you details about what I knew about the Vorak enforcing our quarantine. I could—"

She bit off the list.

"Is that really want you want to hear?" she asked.

"Oh hearing any of those details would have been really nice…" I said, "…before you stabbed me in the back, I mean."

"I thought about it," she said, "I really did, okay? But I came at that idea a hundred different ways. If I told you what I was going to do, then the Coalition would find out. And they would never have let me go if they knew I was even considering trying to get back to my people."

Easy to say since you never gave them a chance to.

"Serral would have," I said coldly.

Nora returned my icy stare.

"You're too smart to pretend he wouldn't have been overruled."

"And you're too smart to pretend that's what matters here," I said.

You didn't just keep them in the dark, you kept me in the dark. After I helped you. After I trusted you.

"Okay, but was I wrong about you?" she asked. "Forget Serral. If I'd told you, are you saying you wouldn't have told anyone else? You would have listened calmly to my reasons and rationally evaluated what was best for all abductees? Not just you?"

"…So you just didn't trust me."

"Not about that," she admitted. "No."

"Why?"

"Because from the moment I woke up, it was clear what gear you were in: survival. You were on your own—responsible for just yourself—and I don't think you realized how your brain was operating back then. Since heading up the Flotilla, that's changed big-time, but back then? My top priority was everyone. Yours wasn't yet. It couldn't have been. The information was too new."

I clenched my fist and did my best not to scowl.

"Oh, that's nice. You didn't trust me, but it wasn't my fault? How gracious of you."

"Would you rather I blamed you?" Nora said wearily. "I could lie, if you wanted."

"You got on that rocket and asked me advice like we were such good friends, and you knew what you were going to try!"

"I didn't know," she said. The words were so quiet, I thought I misheard.

"What?"

"I didn't know! Not for sure," she said, failing to keep her voice from rising to match mine. "I just…I didn't know what I was going to do. I knew I was keeping an eye out for opportunities to get back to my campers. I knew the Coalition was never going to let that happen any time soon—I knew Laranta wasn't letting that happen."

I glared at her, trying to digest the words. I believed her. But my gut reaction said it didn't change much. Her winging it didn't make it any less of a betrayal.

"You had practice," I accused.

"What?"

"The paralysis trick you pulled," I said. "That wasn't you just 'keeping an eye out'. You'd prepared that. You made a superconstruct while I taught you psionics, and didn't tell me. Because you knew you might need to use it against me."

"…It was less practiced than you think," she said. "I didn't make the hijack-nerves while you taught me, they were what I made first with Adeptry. I made a primitive version based on proto-psionics that I must have gotten from the Beacon—but obviously I didn't know any of that then. I used the primitive version to interrogate Halax back on Archo; it's why I trusted him. The exotic-made nerves weren't about hijacking people's nervous systems originally. They were for lie detecting. It was my attempt at an Adept polygraph."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Measuring a target's unconscious responses directly from the nervous system instead of heartrate or perspiration.

"So what, our little spar with the starfish was unrelated?"

"I wasn't trying to test anything nefarious," she said. "Just proof of concept for using the nerves with psionically remote-controlled creations. I didn't have the idea for incapacitating people until you went and baited out Asu Tolar…and that didn't inspire a lot of confidence either."

"Because?"

"Because Laranta had a high-ranking agent working surreptitiously on behalf of our abductors?" she replied, like she was stating the obvious. "It was more reason why I felt I needed to leave, and why I couldn't tell anyone I wanted to."

I ignored that. If I chased that thread right now, it was only going to make me blow up sooner.

"What is it about Laranta that bothers you so much?" I asked her instead. This wasn't the first time she'd focused on Laranta, specifically, over the Coalition.

She opened her mouth, but I cut her off.

"I mean besides when Coalition brass thought about locking you up—she stopped that."

"She stopped that because Nai forced her hand," Nora said. "And Nai weighed in because of her friendship with you; Laranta didn't stop that. You did."

"Don't dodge the question," I said. "Because I gotta admit, looking back? Their idea of locking you up doesn't sound awful."

"Yes it does," Nora sighed, "and you know it. You're not an idiot. You know what would happen if I'd stayed in Coalition custody."

"No, I don't think I do," I said. "We can both make some good guesses, but neither of us really knows."

It was her turn to glare at me, and for the first time I actually felt like she'd found something I'd said to push back on.

"I think you're too smart for any of your 'good guesses' to miss the timeframe ENVY told us about," she said. "ENVY said abductees would start starving in two weeks. You think, if I stayed with the Coalition, we would have gotten to everyone in two weeks?"

"I think even with you leaving we didn't get to everyone," I said coldly. "Fine. Locking you up would have been a stupid idea. I said it because I'm blindingly pissed at you to this day. But you still didn't answer my question: what's your problem with Laranta?"

Nora deflated a little.

"Are you asking about now, or back then?"

"Why is the answer different?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"Did you forget where the first Mission is? I spend half my time on Archo. She's Coalition Admiral more or less in control of that whole system now," she said.

"The Deep Coils still occupy Harrogate," I pointed out.

"Yeah, I know that better than you," she said. "My point is that C2 has almost continuously lived under one armistice or another since you and I split, and Laranta has been the one in charge for most of that time. It's only been actual martial law for a week here and there, but the rest of the time? It's still pretty close."

"Okay, she's fighting a war, and you don't like how she runs things," I said. "Fine. You might even be right. I haven't been back to C2. But what about back then? Why is Laranta such a big factor for you leaving?"

"You probably don't want to hear that answer."

"Tough luck, buttercup."

"Laranta doesn't like other people having real power," she sighed.

There was clearly more to that thought, but she paused like she expected me to interject. I was definitely tempted to.

"Someone has to be responsible for us all," she said. "I'm not…I'm not trying to sound like a power-hungry bitch here. And I could talk for hours about how I wish someone else would take the job from me, but…"

But you were in a better position to do it than anyone else.

"From the moment I woke up in High Harbor, Laranta was only ever interested in helping us in ways that also helped her—I don't have any real evidence to corroborate that, but that's the instinct I got back then, and in almost four years of working in the same playground? I haven't seen a single thing to discredit the idea."

"…You're right, you do kinda sound like a power-hungry bitch."

"What did she do to make you such a fan?"

"I wouldn't say I am a fan," I said. "She's made a lot of headaches for me. And believe me, as badly as you think of her, Nai knows worse, but she still calls her 'auntie'."

"You and Nai are joined at the hip," Nora said, "but I know you don't just copy her opinions on people. Why do you like her?"

"I really don't like her," I said. "I just…I trust her motives."

"Why?"

I took my time to answer that one. There was one moment in particular that had won me over, but that wasn't my only reasoning.

"The same reasons you distrust her, almost," I said. "I trust that she's going not going to screw her own aims in the process of helping us. She's not going to bend over backwards trying to help us get home. She'll help, but not so much that it hurts her. So I don't have to guess about whether or not there's hidden strings attached to what she and the Coalition give us: there are strings, but at least they're out in the open."

"You trust her…because she's willing to be transparent about exploiting us?"

"She's transparent about benefitting from helping us," I corrected. "It's enlightened self-interest, and I trust that a lot more than…"

"Charity?" she prompted.

"No," I said. "I love the Org. Biggest non-profit in the cosmos. I'm fine with charity," I said. "I won't hesitate to accept charity, but I will scrutinize it."

"Then I can't believe I'm saying this, but you're actually more paranoid than I am," Nora admitted.

"I learned to be."

My words were icy cold and aimed right at her heart.

She flinched. How gratifying was that?

Yeah. Just how much of my paranoia is because of you?

"I think whoever—or whatever abducted us isn't just done," I said. "I think they wanted to be in control of us, and things went sideways. But I don't think they're just going to give up. We got abducted for a reason, and I trust the motives of the greedy a lot more than I trust anyone claiming to help out of the goodness of their heart."

"There are thousands of good people helping us," Nora frowned.

"I agree completely," I said. "But I'm not talking about suspecting the motives of an individual volunteering their time to help out of personal conviction. I'm talking about the big players. The ones with the power to stomp around in that playground you mentioned. Someone is out there. That's not paranoia either. Look at where we are. How we got here. That… thing isn't going to come up to us wearing a black hat and a curly moustache. They're going try being our best friend, and then when it hurts the most, when we might have a real shot of getting back home, they're going to slip steel right between our ribs.

"…So yeah. Laranta has been honest about needing to benefit from our relationship. I trust that," I said.

"Just what did she say to you?" Nora asked.

"It was before you woke up," I said. "I just knew the Vorak had abducted us. I was going over classified data, trying to understand exactly what everyone was doing when we first blasted into C2. She confronted me. She gave me a dose of cold water: forced me to see that the Red Sails didn't abduct us."

"She advocated for them?"

I nodded.

"She said she had to. She said she was covering her ass. Because I was ready to wage a war on Tispas and those furfish for what the did to me and Daniel," I said. "And if we had…"

I winced at my choice in pronoun.

'We'.

If Nora noticed, she didn't show it.

"Then the blame would have found its way back to her," Nora nodded. "Lying to a First Contact? Getting them to go after your military enemies? Even just with a lie of omission…"

The direction of the conversation irked me. It felt like Nora and I were agreeing, almost.

"Dustin—" I choked on his name. "Dustin said that you thought you were doing me a favor keeping your distance all this time."

"Wasn't I?"

"Yeah, but why do you think so? I know why I don't want anything to do with you, but why are you not desperate to try making some inane restitution."

"I am," Nora said. Her tone threw me. Light, quiet, like she was confused at the direction of the conversation.

"Got a funny way of showing it," I said.

"Gee, I thought about sending you a card with hugs and kisses so you would feel better and everything would be okay…" she snapped. "I'm not an idiot. I know you don't owe me forgiveness just because I feel bad about what I did."

I almost laughed.

"Yes, because I don't want to hear an apology; I want to hear all about what I owe you," I mocked.

"Because I owe you way more than a fucking apology!" she hissed. "You deserve more than that… penance, at the very least…but I don't have the luxury of flogging myself for your satisfaction. Look at where we are? What we do? An apology is all I can really offer…and I don't want to half-ass it."

"Saying nothing and not apologizing for three years isn't half-assing it?" I asked.

She winced.

"My crew has told me I shouldn't have waited either. I didn't listen to them because I thought it was better for you. That's another thing I'm going to have live with screwing up," she said. "And I am sorry…but I think if I only give you a bullshit, open-ended, 'I'm sorry for everything', apology…it's worse than saying nothing. That's why I've kept my distance. I'm ashamed, okay? Because I don't know what I can apologize for that isn't just…"

I didn't move an inch. I felt like I might explode, and I couldn't tell if it was from anger or anticipation.

How much of both our futures hinged on what she said next?

"Caleb…I'm not sorry for the parts that saved lives. I don't think I can be. People— our people didn't die because I left you behind. But I know I screwed you. I know I practically tried to kill you. I know I owe you a million times more than an apology could ever begin to help..."

"Well actually apologizing would have been a pretty good place to start," I said.

"I know," she said. "I just…I know it's stupid and pathetic and self-absorbed…I just don't know the right one."

Ohh…boy…

I was feeling such a complicated version of hatred right now…

"You said you're not sorry for saving lives," I said, voice hollow. "I can sympathize with that. What about the rest? What about the parts that didn't help everyone: the parts that just hurt me?"

She blinked, trying not to let the confusion show on her face.

"Are you sorry for betraying me?" I asked her.

Point-blank.

"I don't…I don't know if betraying you and saving the lives are separable," she admitted. "I've tried coming up with another way to go about things for years now, and I still haven't thought of a way to get one without the other."

"Are. You. Sorry?"

"I don't know."

Her voice actually cracked, and for the first time today, I felt her emotions shift to one stronger than her grief for Dustin.

Not for the first time, I cursed that my psionics didn't let me detect specific emotions. I could only detect their intensity and when they changed.

So when her emotions shifted, I had to guess 'to what' based on context.

It would have been so easy to think she was just being egotistical here. 'I don't know what part I should be sorry for' was just dripping with self-pity and self-aggrandizing.

But then she asked me a question with absolute sincerity behind her eyes.

"Would you ever apologize for saving Nai's life? Or—no, Tasser's life?"

It wasn't a rhetorical question.

She couldn't tell.

"I've seen the footage. After you escaped Korbanok? I saw the Vorak you guys fought on the road. I saw you go back for Tasser. You threw that rak out a window, and they died. If that rak's mom, or sibling—or even their kid asked you if you were sorry? I…don't…I can't even begin to try thinking through…"

I went quiet.

This was a side of Nora I had never seen before, and I suspected no one else had either.

She was so unsure because she couldn't puzzle out my reaction…because she was using my reaction as a guideline. Some part of her brain was evaluating based on 'what would Caleb do?'

I leapt to my feet, fury running through every corner of my blood. I almost punched a wall, I was so angry.

My preparations for this conversation had been wise. I managed to not put a dent in the gymnasium wall, and instead I stomped back and forth while I tried to breathe a little more steadily.

I dove back into my brain trying to remember exactly what parts of myself I'd shown to her. Did she know exactly how much I hated killing people? Did she know exactly how deep that question cut me?

It hurt because it didn't take any time at all for my answer to come from the very depths of my soul.

"No," I admitted, barely keeping myself from screaming. "No, I would never apologize for that. Not in a million years."

It was a tacit admission.

I would have loved to hold Nora to some different standard. I would have loved to be unfair and cruel. It would have been so easy.

But I just didn't have it in me.

I would never apologize for saving someone's life…and I didn't want Nora to apologize for saving people either. She couldn't separate them, and neither could I.

Stupid. Fuck. Damnit! What does that mean? Am I just being a child? What is there to apologize for then?

She could say 'I'm sorry betraying you was the best option'. She could say 'I wish saving lives hadn't meant hurting you in the process'. She could say all of that and more, and it wouldn't be the apology I wanted to hear.

And she'd figured that out before walking in here. And she walked in anyway.

It felt like closing my grip on rusty barbed wire, but I realized Nora had put a lot of thought into this.

All that thinking and she'd still come up empty…but not for lack of trying.

"I'm sorry I'm a piece of shit," she said. "I'm sorry I haven't figured out the right thing to apologize for. I'm sorry I—"

"Shut up," I said.

I almost shocked myself with how quietly I spoke. I actually felt calm too.

I was still seething with white-hot rage, but it was in check. For now. Because she said she understood she needed to apologize. And I believed her. For now.

"You said it yourself: I don't want to hear some bullshit blanket apology for everything," I said. "So sit there and blubber. I'll wait until we're ready to have the second half of this conversation."

She wanted to fight me. She wanted to try to keep talking through exactly how she'd wronged me, trying to find a way to make it right. Or at least better.

But one look at my face told her I was done talking about that for today.

She saw she wouldn't get any further, and I took probably a bit too much glee at seeing her give up, even temporarily.

Bit by bit she mastered her breathing, forcing herself to master the emotions coursing through her. Not just tamp them down.

Some small part of me was actually relived to see her so distraught. I wasn't the only one having a rough go of it.

When she finally spoke, there was life in her voice that hadn't been there when we started.

"…I still owe—"

"I know," I said sharply. "You definitely still have an apology to give, but I'll wait for the one I really want to hear. Amends after that. Penance . But right now, what we need to talk about next is what happened..."

Yesterday? Two days ago? The time had blurred together.

I waved my hand, gesturing to the whole big mess we'd landed in here.

This had been a pyrrhic victory at best, with SPARK and ENVY both involved.

Three humans were dead.

Jean. Victor. Dustin.

He was lying cold on a slab now.

"There's one word going through my head," I said. "How about you?"

It was just fascinating watching Nora's brain shift into 'business' gear. But maybe that was the wrong word for it. Because she was still personally invested all the way to the hilt. She went from angry, morose, and self-loathing to bristling, razor-sharp, and lethal in ten seconds flat.

She met my gaze and spoke the very word going through mine.

"Vengeance."

The hatchet was far from buried….but killing one of these damnable AIs would do wonders for my mood. And hers.

So, Nora and I spent the next hours plotting a murder.