February 27, 2363 AIA

Ionu

Alix stared out the porthole with the reader lying forgotten in her lap. Ciro, Jane, and Lynx were all on the bridge, crowded around the built-in console. They were trying to hack into the planet network. Since there was nothing for her to do, Reyer had come down to the main deck and spent a useless hour trying to distract herself with a book.

Now she watched the billows of red-orange sand obscuring the otherwise empty sky.

Through the haze of movement, she thought she saw two figures, more stable than the swirling dust around them. She stared at them, willing them to become even more solid. When she was sure, she sat up.

“It’s them!” she shouted. “They’re back!”

By the time she had returned her reader to its case, Jane, Ciro, and Lynx had all made it down the stairs. Reyer forced herself to her feet.

“Water, Ciro.”

Ciro went over to the food bin while Alix went to the hatch.

Lynx crossed over to her. “I advise you to wait, Miss Reyer.”

She felt nettled by the advice, but she saw the sense in it and waited until the figures had moved out of the sun, into the shadow of the Colibri. Then she opened the door.

Sand and hot wind rushed inside. A second later, a filthy hand gripped the edge of the opening. Vas hauled himself into the ship. Tennama followed. Both were coated in orange dust mixed to mud by their sweat. Jane swore when she saw them. Vas collapsed on the nearest chair, but Tennama didn’t make it that far. He threw down the pack he had with him and dropped on the bench next to the hatch.

Ciro tossed Reyer a bottle of water and cracked open his own.

“Head’s up, Tennama,” Ciro said.

He poured the bottle over the xeno’s face. Anthony shook his head to get the water out of his eyes, then brushed the stream into his hair, hoping the water might quench the painful heat radiating from his scalp.

Reyer was tending to Vas. She poured the water over his head with a little more care and brushed it back into his hair for him.

“More, please,” he whispered.

Jane brought out two more bottles.

Tennama drank most of his, then dumped the rest onto his shirt.

“Lynx,” Alix said, “get the first-aid kit.” To Vas, she said, “You could’ve waited until the next night to hike back.”

Adan lowered the bottle from his mouth and shook his head.

Tennama managed to choke out, “We were out of water, Miss Reyer.”

“You couldn’t steal more?”

“It was too risky,” Vas grumbled.

Tennama explained, “The only people we could easily steal it from would have suffered too much from the loss. Everywhere else was guarded.”

Adan took Reyer’s hand as she was running it through his wet hair. “We had to come back anyway, Alix. Besides, it wasn’t so bad. A nice walk in the early morning sun.”

“Sounds lovely.” She extracted her hand so she could grab the medicine Lynx was holding out. “Hold still, I have to treat these burns.”

“Did you learn anything?” Jane asked.

Vas’s face twisted with exhaustion.

“Not yet, Jane,” Alix said. “They need some rest.”

“And a shower,” Ciro noted.

Vas groaned, then shouted, “Tennama!”

“Captain?”

“Who’s closer to dead, you or me?”

“You mean this isn’t hell?”

“Right. You get the first shower. Don’t use up all the water.”

Reyer almost said something, but then reconsidered. “It may be easier to treat your sunburn after you’ve removed some of the sand.”

Lynx went over to Tennama and helped him stand.

Alix turned her attention back to Vas. “Do you want me to wait?”

“No. Please.”

She dumped some gel into her palm. “I’ll have to reapply it after your shower.”

“You’ll have to baby me twice? What a shame.”

Reyer made a small tsk noise, but she was gentle when she applied the gel to his furious red skin.

“Do you need us, Adan?” Ciro asked.

Vas grunted his denial.

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“Lynx, Jane, let’s get back to the console.”

“Any luck?” Vas called.

His brother hung back to answer while Jane and Lynx went ahead.

“Some. The trick is getting in without getting caught. There’s so little digital traffic, I’m worried anything we do will stand out.”

“Be careful.”

“I always am.”

When Reyer’s task was done, she put the bottle on the table and pulled a chair over so she could sit shoulder to shoulder with Vas. She wasn’t surprised when he leaned on her.

Minutes passed before the captain broke the silence.

“We might have been wrong about this place.”

“How so?”

“There were no xenos, Alix.”

“How many places did you check?”

“A few bars. The store. Anyone we passed on the street. We were paranoid at first, but toward the end Anthony was snuffing so hard I almost had to call him to heel. Bad dog! No sniffing strangers.”

Reyer thought for a moment. “That’s good. That means that we should have an easier time blending in.”

“You still want to go?”

“I think we should check everything we can. It makes sense that Chloe Naaji was the queen, and we know she’s been here. We haven’t found her yet, but she might still be in hiding, or she might have switched bodies. I don’t want to overlook something again.”

There was a short silence, then Vas echoed her: “Again.”

The word was like a dead thing in his mouth.

There was another silence.

“Do you blame you or me?” Vas asked.

She sighed. “Adan—”

“Don’t you ‘Adan’ me.”

“I don’t think this is going to be a useful discussion, Captain.”

“Right. You can go back to the Adan…thing.”

“Make up your mind, Adan-thing.”

“My objection wasn’t to you using my name. My objection had to do with your tone. You don’t get to dismiss this. You don’t get to dismiss me, Alix. And you don’t get to tell me it’s nothing.”

“Yes, sir.”

Vas had to clench his teeth. He did not want this to dissolve into a fight. And she was right: he had been giving her orders.

He waited.

She picked at the gel drying on her hands. When she spoke, her voice was subdued. “I asked Lynx about it. My plan only ever had a fifty-percent chance of success. At best. Yours—he says it was an eighty-four percent chance”—she waved her hand to dismiss the detail—“something like that. And even if we failed, there was an even better chance that Ciro would’ve been able to destroy the ship to stop them from leaving the planet.”

She paused, but Vas knew better than to interrupt her thoughts. If he spoke now, she would shut up and nothing in the galaxy would get her to talk about it again.

“I know this,” she said. “I know that yours was the better plan, but I can’t help wondering. Maybe if we had tried it my way—if I had spacewalked over to the other ship—none of this would’ve happened.”

Vas waited until he knew she was finished. “It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You’d be dead, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I asked Tennama.”

Reyer pulled her leg up onto the chair. “You’ve been thinking about it too?”

Vas nodded.

“Who do you blame?” she said. “You or me?”

“Me. I’m the one who should’ve made sure Harlan was dead. I was right there. My sword was in his side. The least I could’ve done was wiggle it around a little.”

A breath of laughter escaped Alix.

Vas went on, “But it doesn’t matter. Even if we had quartered him and buried the pieces, it wouldn’t have stopped the problem.”

“Is that what Tennama said?”

“There were other human-xenos we didn’t know about, including him. They weren’t on the planet, and we couldn’t have done anything about them. They had contingency plans.”

“Did they all know where the home planet was?”

“Harlan and Tennama made sure of it.”

“How long have you been worrying about it?”

Vas groaned as he tried to force his weary brain to calculate. “When did Tennama show up at Home Base? About an hour less than that.”

“We’re idiots, aren’t we? We did the best we could, and there were facts we didn’t know, but we—”

Reyer stopped when the door to the shower opened. Tennama came out in a fresh change of clothes, holding a towel, and looking much better for his time under the cool water.

He turned toward them, but Vas was too tired to sit up. If Reyer cared about PDA, she could stand up and dump him on the floor.

Either leaning on her wasn’t scandalous enough to worry about, or she cared about him more than propriety. She stayed where she was and continued with what she was saying.

“—we want to be in control so much that we try to blame ourselves rather than admit it was out of our hands.”

Tennama stepped into the main cabin. “What are you talking about?”

“Harlan,” Vas said, “and the fact we don’t control the universe.”

“Ah.” The xeno smiled sadly as he walked over and sat down on a nearby bench. “Is that a human thing? Blaming yourselves?”

“It’s certainly the common experience.”

“There must be something broken in a species that tortures itself. What good can it possibly do?”

Reyer sounded both tired and resigned as she said, “It’s how we survive.”

It took her a moment to realize both men were watching her.

“It’s another way we learn from our past,” she explained. “Even if there was nothing we could’ve done, if we torture ourselves with what we might have done, we can hope to do better next time. We can’t control the whole universe, but once we’re aware, we can control a speck more of it. Sometimes that’s enough.”

Tennama’s hands tightened around the towel. “You make it sound almost sensible, Miss Reyer.”

“What do you mean?” Vas asked.

Alix was surprised. There had been no challenge or ire in Adan’s voice.

Anthony explained, “Harlan is obsessed with control—”

“Was,” Adan corrected.

“I think whatever part of him is living on in the queen, it’s still obsessed with control. But someone must have forgotten to tell him the part about not being able to control the whole universe.”

To Vas’s surprise, he felt his shoulder shake from Reyer’s subdued laughter.

“No, I tried to tell him,” she said. “Many times. He didn’t listen.”

“Ah.” The xeno raised his eyes. “So the tendency came from Rurik?”

He spoke gently, watching her for any sign of pain or withdrawal, but she didn’t seem to mind the question.

“At least part of it did,” she said, “but it could’ve come from others. There are a lot of people who won’t admit they can’t control everything.”

“That’s a heavy burden,” Tennama said.

“I take it you don’t think that way?” Vas asked.

“Oh, no. Anthony knew much better than that.”

“He felt helpless?”

“Sometimes.” Tennama corrected himself: “No. I felt that way. Sometimes.” He laughed. “Maybe I’m no better than Harlan. Whenever I feel helpless, I rack my brains to figure out something I can do that might change things, then I go and do it.”

A half smile flashed over Vas’s face. Tennama saw it.

He raised his voice: “What about you, captain? Do you ever feel helpless?”

Adan pushed down on the table to force himself to his feet. “I wouldn’t know. I’d have to stop and think to figure out something like that.”

There was a pause.

“You…don’t…think before you go and do things?” Tennama asked.

“Not my style.”

“That’s what he claims,” Reyer said. “Yet he still manages to come up with plans.”

“How does that work?” Tennama asked her.

“I’ve given up trying to figure it out. He’s one of those things in the universe I don’t control.”

“Plans are occasional necessary evils,” Vas said, “so I’ve taught myself to fake them without wasting too much time on it—especially since they have to be abandoned the moment something goes wrong.” His hand hovered over the table before three fingertips came to rest on the surface. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and thoughtful. “I’ve also taught myself to learn from my mistakes.” He rapped on the table. “Alix, please tell everyone to start packing. Ciro will need the time to whittle down his tech collection to something he can haul.”

“We’re all going in?”

“Everyone except Lynx. He can protect the ship and be our quick get-away. It’ll keep him away from the sand. We’ll start the hike after sunset.”

“How long will we be staying?”

“As long as it takes to make damn sure the queen is no longer here.”