Alex had found himself with a lot of free time since the attack. Worse, there was nothing he could do with it until after the mediboard had released his arm. That first morning after Carbon had left to work on the drives, he had made the mistake of finding out what injuries he’d actually sustained. The list was significant. Burns on all his limbs, of course, he’d known about that. He hadn’t known that the burn classification extended all the way to sixth degree until now, or perhaps he’d put it out of his mind instead of living with the horror of that knowledge. Severe radiation poisoning was a surprise, though it shouldn’t have been. He avoided symptoms because the board started triage on it immediately.

Entirely unbeknownst to him so far was the blast damage. The railgun round that had penetrated the bridge had given him a concussion and cracked his skull even through the armored seat and thick layer of crash foam. His Amp - a halo of electronics that had been implanted in his skull allowing deep machine interfacing - had been filled with bone fragments and flexed in a direction its manufacturer had never intended. This prevented it from turning on, locking him out of a direct connection to the ship’s systems. On the up side, it had kept his brain from being filled with bone fragments. He’d take that trade.

There was more, plenty more to look at according to how small the scrollbar had gotten as it loaded the list of wounds. He hadn’t even gotten down to the internal thoracic injuries before he backed out of it and never returned.

Doing anything with the tablet was cumbersome, at best, anyway. Everything had been designed to be used by someone with a direct interface, or at least two hands. Maybe if the gravity had been on, it would have been better. He tried working, but the tablet only had a single magnet in a very wobbly kickstand and the act of pinching the screen to zoom in on some passive sensor information sent it sliding off the table, out of reach. It bounced slowly around the sickbay, taunting him as he decided he’d wait until his other arm was available to try again.

Filling the many hours until then was a remarkably guilty experience. Carbon would show up a few times a day with food, looking progressively more burnt out as days passed. He would be dead without her, he knew, and the first time the door had slid open and he’d been watching some aggressively boring comedy show that had been packaged into the data stores his chest had constricted with panic. He had thumbed it off immediately, set the tablet screen down a little too hard and tried to look not guilty.

It hadn’t worked, he could see it in her face. That was interesting. He could see it in her face. Nuances he’d never consciously paid attention to didn’t spring out at him, but they were there. Her expression had changed, only for a second. Eyebrows leveling out, eyes squinting almost imperceptibly, ears compressing down further as her antenna lowered. A little sigh, resigned, and her face relaxed again. She knew there was nothing else for him to do yet.

Finally the day came. Both arms, and even his torso, were released back to his conscious control. A bit awkward at first, as he was now naked from the waist up and it was cold in there. Carbon had immediately suggested that she retrieve a shirt for him from his cabin, departing for it before he'd given her the passcode. He knew it should have been soft, he’d worn it all the time, though now it was now rough and abrasive against freshly regrown skin. A small price to pay now that he had his entire upper body back. His lower half was still covered in opaque nanite gel and a privacy shroud, but it was a small victory.

The light gray shirt bore the one of the Civilian Pilot Program logos, a scoutship over a starburst ringed with the program name. It had carried a bit more pride in the past, before he had realized he’d been chosen because someone had lied about his skill set and even that only came about because billions had died on Schon, the Tsla'o homeworld.

That also had given him some pause. He knew the two were not connected at all, but some deep, dark part of him wanted to blame the disaster on his desire to become a pilot. Entirely irrational, but it gnawed at him when awake and hunted him in his dreams.

At least now he could immerse himself in work without having to hope the feeble kickstand on his tablet wouldn’t collapse.

As a scoutship pilot, Alex was trained to do two things better than just about anyone. Flying at superluminal velocities was the flashy one. Everybody wanted to go fast and scoutships went god damned fast.

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The second was that he interpreted sensor data, which was actually a huge part of flying with FTL drives for humans. It was considered bad form to slam your ship into a celestial body at several times c and knowing what your sensors were telling you was paramount to not doing that. Word had it they would even revoke your license posthumously, if they managed to figure out it was pilot error.

But right now, instead of having terabytes of data streaming into his Amp and spread out before him like the universe itself was in his optic nerves, Alex was spending hours dutifully poring over enhanced pictures of the local system pulled from the passive sensors. Unlike his improving relationship with Carbon, this was more bad than good.

“So, I was looking at the sensor logs for the past few weeks.” Alex shoveled a fork full of Phad Thai into his mouth, his selection for the food exchange tonight. With the doors to the sickbay and mess both open, the built-in wireless on the tablet was strong enough to link to the dispenser, allowing him to set up a meal without having to actually physically be there. Another win in his desire to feel useful again.

“You do not sound pleased.” Carbon either liked it or had much better control over her facial expressions while eating than he did.

“I’m not. The Eohm are moving away, but they’re just going to the other side of the system. They appear to be mining a planet over there, they were probably doing a material trade when we arrived.”

The Eohm only talked to each other. There had been plenty of spying and attempts at retrieving data after combat. All that had been confirmed was that they did not appear to attempt communication with anyone who was not Eohm and the only documents that had ever been intercepted were related to mining and trading with other home fleets. Their intense xenophobia seemed to even extend to these endevors, so much so they wouldn’t mine a planet with anything beyond microbial life, simply skipping over it in favor of other, untainted worlds.

Carbon nodded at that. “I was afraid they would not move off. This somehow seems worse.”

“They will likely remain here for years, and never be more than a few minutes away.” This severely limited their options. If they wanted to do anything akin to leaving, they’d need to turn on several systems and that would tip the Eohm off to their continued life almost immediately.

Carbon stared into her tray and twirled her fork in the wide noodles idly. “I can manually prime the remaining engine and run diagnostics on it without turning the main reactor on. Once that is done you should be able to jump out well before they realize what’s going on.”

“Nope.” He tapped the back of his head, “my Amp is shot. No Amp, no quick jumps. We’ll have to fire up the AI to run a safe route based on the navigation maps and that will take at least an hour.”

“Where are they in relation to the local star?”

“Thought of that, too. The star will provide us with cover in about six years, which is five years after we starve to death in the dark.”

Carbon blanched, picked at her food like she did when she was thinking. “Could we shut down several compartments and use the power saved to operate the AI at a fraction of its normal speed so the reactor isn’t necessary?”

He nodded, lost in thought for a moment. “That might work. I’m not sure about the heat dissipation, it will probably want to have the cooling system on no matter what we do, but I will look into it.”

“Good.” She went back to eating, clearly pleased at a possible solution. “How are your legs doing?”

“Better. The damage to the bone is completely repaired and it’s started to regrow the muscle and skin. Should be up and about next week.” Alex poked at the dessert item, a baked pudding he couldn’t pronounce without seeing the name. “As up as zero g allows, anyway.”

“That is good as well. I will need help resealing the drive plate soon. Speaking of that, I have my doubts about how long the single repaired drive will be able to safely propel us.”

“Is it at least twenty four light years?”

She glanced up at him, talking around a mouthful of food. “I was going to suggest under a hundred, just to be safe. That seems like it is very specific.”

“It is. I found a Thackeray’s Globule just a bit over twenty three and a half light years from here. Real dusty, and SAPRAM readings in it fluctuate wildly. It would be impossible for a pursuer to tell where we went in it, and that’s even assuming the Eohm would try to follow once we leave the system. They have been known to track for quite some distance, but even if they do it won’t be any significant number of ships - they won’t leave a mining operation undefended.”

She smiled, perhaps with a touch of pride. “Very nice, Alex. That sounds like it will be perfect.”