Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Six, Part Two

 Notes: Can it be, we're actually making positive progress toward treating each other like human beings? Break out the champagne!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Six, Part Two

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Chapter Six, Part Two

 

Kieron didn’t do impressed, not anymore. Too many times he’d been drawn into the larger world with the promise of something beautiful, something awe-inspiring, something that was meant to be special only to be let down, sometimes violently. He’d long since stopped listening to people when they promised him things, and had resolutely refused to allow his heartbeat to quicken when he saw something amazing. So what? There was plenty of amazing out there in the universe.

The Lizzie strained his own determination not to be impressed. Kieron was glad he was wearing his greenie suit when he got inside, so that the gasp he let out was shielded from Elanus. The ship was incredibly luxurious, despite its tight size, with surfaces that yielded just enough under his touch to let him know they were responsive, reactive to their surroundings. The furnishings themselves looked like old-world wood and leather, which of course was ridiculous—who would waste such things in a ship? And yet…

“You know, that suit is excessive in the Lizzie,” Elanus informed him as he slipped into the pilot’s seat. “She’ll more than suffice when it comes to your protection for the next few hours, if you’d care to be more comfortable.”

“We’ll see,” Kieron replied, but he did deign to take his helmet off. The air smelled faintly sweet…some sort of floral aroma he couldn’t identify, but it was warm and spicy in his nose. The door shut behind him, and Elanus patted the co-pilot’s seat.

“Join me. You might as well learn the basics of operating her while we’re out there.”

There went his heart again. Damn it. Kieron sat, though, and pulled the safety straps over his bulky suit.

“Lizzie’s AI is perfectly capable of getting her in and out of docking, but I’ll show you how to do it manually,” Elanus went on, then turned and winked at him. “If you ever open up the doors, Sparky.”

Oh, right. Kieron used his tab to open up Docking Bay Five, and just a few moments later they were sailing out into space. “That was fast,” he commented.

“Her propulsion system is based on old-school fusion reactors combined with some of the latest in energy storage capability. Basically, the entire ship functions as its own battery, and the propulsion system is modified to adapt to that.”

“The radiation shielding too?” Kieron watched as Elanus’s fingers danced across the controls, picking out things he could recognize here and there—the outline of the ship was particularly elegant, color-changing to show which thrusters were responsible for what movement, with a radiation-sensing overlay that would gradually turn from green to white as the shields broke down. Currently, even though they were out of the shadow of the station now, there was no more radiation within the Lizzie than Kieron would have experienced in the regular sunlight back on the Hadrian colony.

“So.” Elanus set them on a course toward the meteor field. “What do your little probes have to tell us? And please, just upload it directly to the Lizzie’s computer so she can incorporate their data into her mapping.”

“Let’s see how many get back to me first,” Kieron muttered as he accessed the probes.

Download most recent data?

Yes.

He got information back from ten out of eleven of them. The only one that didn’t respond was the one he’d sent farthest out, toward a cluster of mini meteors that had given a number of his miners problems over the last few years. They were full of heavy, valuable metals, but almost impossible to work with thanks to their penchant for bouncing off each other and ships alike when even slightly disturbed. He marked that location with a red X, then input the rest of the data into the Lizzie.

“These are the closest to the station,” he said, highlighting five of them in blue. Potential paths forward appeared on the viewscreen in front of them. “They’re broadcasting from well-known locations. I’m leaving them static for the time being—they’ll last up to a month if I don’t drain their power too quickly. I’ve got them set to react and record any unusual movement in the meantime. These next ones—” he made them purple “—are farther out, near targets that are still well-known, but more dangerous. This is the usual limit of the distance that miners like to go. There are plenty of specimens to work on within this band of meteors for now. Once you go much farther, things start to get complicated.” He pointed to the red X. “I only had one mining ship travel this far out this season, looking for rare metals. They made it back the first time.”

“But not the second time?” Elanus inferred.

“They pushed their luck too far. Their ship was caught between two meteors and couldn’t get out of the way in time. They died quickly, at least.”

Elanus huffed a sigh. “So we’re going to be sifting through floating ship debris as well as meteors?”

Kieron stared at him. “No, of course not.”

“You just said—”

“I said the miners died. I didn’t say I left them and their ship out here.”

Elanus blinked. “You…mounted a retrieval operation…for dead people?” He shook his head. “Wait, no, why am I surprised? Of course you did. That’s your whole reason for being here, isn’t it, finding a dead body to bring home.”

“I didn’t do it for their sakes,” Kieron said, a little harshly. “Ship debris would make this entire field less stable than it already is. If I left every ship that had an accident out here to float, the region would only become harder to navigate. It’s my job to keep this station prosperous, and that makes retrieval a part of my job.”

“Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?”

Um… “Yes?”

“Ah…hmm.” Elanus’s clouded expression cleared up. “I should have expected this from you.”

“What? Why—”

“Here, let’s navigate to some of the closer ones. You can practice flying while I start running my own sensor array. It’s been a long time since Catalina passed through, but we may yet be able to find traces of her energy signature.”

Kieron hesitated to call the next few hours “fun,” because fun wasn’t something he really felt qualified to have. However, he couldn’t deny that it was…stimulating, learning to fly an entirely new ship, checking in on his probes while someone else did the scanning, looking into the heart of the meteor field and the quasar without worrying about his or anyone else’s health.

That was the most beautiful thing, he thought as a massive meteor floated by. A second later the distant quasar came into view, so terribly bright it would blind him instantly if he were to look at it without proper shielding. As it was, the Lizzie did a good job of keeping the view manageable, even better than his own ship.

This was the swirling, churning heart of a new galaxy. This was a place that, in hundreds of millions of years, might have its own planets, its own systems. Perhaps not—this was a relatively small quasar compared to many others, but the fanciful part of Kieron liked to imagine that it would grow up to become something magnificent. If only he’d been able to continue his earlier research, with Zakari…they might know so much more about this quasar by now.

“You look like you’re in love.”

Kieron blinked, then slammed the button that cleared the viewscreen, leaving only data and sensor images. “Nonsense.”

“No, I’ve seen the faces of people in love before, and you matched them perfectly,” Elanus went on, like the jerk he was. “With the quasar itself? I’ve got to warn you, romances between humans and infant galaxies are doomed to failure.”

“It’s not a romance,” Kieron snapped. “I spent my first few years here studying it, that’s all.”

“Ah. A scientist whose love for quasar research has been frustrated.”

“It’s not my love for research that frustrates me.”

“Love for your friend, then?”

Kieron shouldn’t reply, he shouldn’t give Elanus anything the man hadn’t earned somehow, but sitting here in his marvelous ship, Kieron was moved for the first time to give something of himself for free. “Imagine experiencing nothing but conflict all your life, competing and fighting and running for every scrap, and then being told that you didn’t have to do that anymore. That you could live another way, with more than fear and anger in your heart. Imagine being brought into a family like that, hurting them again and again because you just didn’t understand but always, always being forgiven. Imagine having that.”

He frowned down at the controls. “And then imagine losing it. And this time around, you refuse to be forgiven, because you know their forgiveness is a lie. Who wants to live a lie?”

He glanced briefly at Elanus, expecting yet another quip or casual insult, but instead he got a dark, steady stare that made Kieron shift in his seat for no reason he could pinpoint. “We should get back,” Elanus said at last. “Do you have enough data to send out another round of probes?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Good.” He took over the helm control, turning them back toward Cloverleaf Station in silence, and Kieron was too afraid of what it might mean to risk breaking it.