Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Nineteen, Part One

 Notes: Oooh, things are starting to come together! We might even be in the final third of the book now! 

In other news, I'm getting eye surgery this Thursday. Not "OMG EYE SURGERY" but not "oh hey, now you can see perfectly, great" surgery either. I'll probably be blurry for at least a week, and unable to tolerate screens for several days. Soooo...I'm taking next week off from everything. Yep. All contracts, editing, writing, proofreading, regular reading, EVERYTHING. Except my family, and even that, my honey's going to be stepping up while I recover.

And then I'll be back and we'll all celebrate and YAAAY it'll be delightful. Be well, my darlins!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Nineteen, Part One

***

Chapter Nineteen, Part One

 

It took a combination of probes, guide lines, and tricky maneuvering on Catalina’s part to get the piece of Zak’s ship close enough for Catalina to latch onto. Towing it out of there wasn’t an option—the chances of it getting taken out by an asteroid were too high, and Kieron hadn’t come this far just to trip at the very end of the race. Five hours of painstaking patience resulted in the safe attachment of the ship fragment to their roof, and then Catalina spent another three hours getting them back to the station as safely as she could.

Kieron spent most of that time in silence. His mind was both racing and not, a hundred different thoughts flooding through it every minute, but none of them sticking for long. All of the implications of this find, everything he’d be able to say to Xilinn and Pol and Dagny, what it would mean for them to have him back home, what it would mean for Kieron for Zak to be home again…

That last part was the stickiest thought, the one that lingered longest. Kieron had dreamed over and over about what it would be like to recover Zak’s body, to be able to give him back to his family. He had never thought about what he himself would do next. Why would he? What future was out there for someone like him? He’d brought misery to Zakari’s family—not that Xilinn had ever blamed him. She wouldn’t, she wasn’t that kind of person. But he was to blame. He’d encouraged Zakari to pursue goals that weren’t in line with Traktan tradition, he’d enabled him to leave the planet and take up a very dangerous profession, and he hadn’t been with him the day it all fell apart.

If he had been, could he have helped? Would he have made it worse? Would they simply have died together, the way a part of Kieron had always hoped they would? Not that he’d wanted Zakari to die—he just wanted to know there was something for himself beyond solitude at the end. Selfish. So selfish. Thoughts like that had made contemplating the future nearly impossible, because what could it possibly hold for a man like him? Emptiness, loneliness, those were what he deserved. What he was destined for. All he should ever want or expect, and now…

Now he wanted more. Kieron wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but sitting here surrounded by Catalina, enveloped in her warmth and color and care, with Elanus absently reaching out to touch him every now and then as his hands flew across the control panels—not that his guidance was necessary for Catie, but it gave him something to do—made him want more. With them. Which didn’t seem…impossible.

But it’s not a good idea. At least, it wasn’t right now. Not while he still had to figure out how to get Zakari’s body back home, not while he was still working at the station, definitely not while he was Elanus’s employee. It was bad enough they were sleeping together. And there was still the issue of Deysan Moritz to cover, which…

It wasn’t like Kieron didn’t know where Elanus had shoved him, or the tech he’d shoved in there with him. It was more that he had given himself permission to forget as long as he was still on the hunt for Zak; permission not to fuck with a good thing while it was still beneficial to both himself and Elanus. But now that he had Zak back…and now that Elanus and Catalina were both safe…soon, he was going to have to confront Elanus over what he was doing to his former business partner.

Not yet. Not yet, no. Kieron didn’t like the fucker, after all—he’d tried to kill him and he’d kidnapped and tortured Catalina, which made him fucking scum as far as Kieron was concerned. But legally, there was more to it than that.

Deysan Moritz had his own set of allies, even now. Elanus Desfontaines had enemies who would use any hint of wrongdoing on his part to diminish his standing on his home planet and make life harder for him. Returning Deysan there, even with all the wrong he’d done, would damage Elanus. Doing whatever he was doing to Moritz right now was probably damaging Elanus—he was determined and strong, but he lacked the instinct for causing pain that had been beaten into Kieron as a child.

It was a conundrum, one that Kieron was going to have to face sooner or later. But not quite yet.

They had to take special protocols re-entering the station, thanks to the incredibly radioactive object that was accompanying them. In the end, Kieron used the station to grab onto the piece of his old ship and very carefully winch it into a different hangar, then run decontamination protocols for the whole thing while Catalina went back to her normal berth. Her skin ate radiation for breakfast, so to speak, so compared to the rest of them, she was positively sprightly as they docked, already planning her latest show and projecting pictures across the walls that were so realistic Kieron felt like he’d stumbled into someone’s dream.

“Darling,” Elanus said, one hand shielding his eyes as Catalina’s door opened, “I love you, you know I love you and all your magnificent creativity, but I beg you, please. Less sparkle, or I’m not going to be able to focus my eyes for a week.”

“Sorrrry, Daddee!” The glare diminished, and both Kieron and Elanus sighed with relief.

“Can I have a status check on Hangar Eight, Catie?” Kieron asked as he walked down her ladder. He was itching to go and see the remains himself, to get what was left of Zak into stasis before it decomposed further, but he also wasn’t about to irradiate himself again.

“Yes, Keeeeron. Decontamination protocooools should have the piiiiecess ready for piiiickup in two-point-four-five standarrrd houuuurs.” She shared the timeline with his implant, which included a nice visual component that showed the ship fragment’s radiation levels fading from bright white into a mellower yellow color.

“Thank you.” He set a mental timer to that approximation, then added another one thirty minutes after that after verifying that it would be mid-morning on Trakta. “You’re the best.”

The air turned even pinker, like the walls themselves were blushing under the weight of her regard. “Nooo, youuuuu!”

Kieron chuckled, then headed for his room. He wanted to shower and do some meditation, to get himself ready for handling what was left of his best friend. He didn’t object when Elanus fell into step behind him, keeping his pace leisurely so he didn’t speed right past Kieron. There was a time not so long ago that Elanus would have been delighted to make Kieron hustle to keep up, he knew.

It was nice that they’d come so far. Together. It made him happy and nervous all at the same time, because he honestly didn’t know what he was going to do with himself once it ended.

They showered together in silence in Kieron’s bathroom, close but not cloyingly so. Once they were clean and dry, instead of settling into meditation Kieron tugged Elanus onto his bed and tucked his head into the crook of his lover’s neck, holding him tight around the waist.

“How are you right now?” Elanus asked, running his free hand slowly up and down Kieron’s back.

“I’m…” Kieron thought about it for a second. “Happy. Tired. Excited. Anxious. Disappointed with myself. Angry.” He sighed. “A lot of different things.”

“Mm.”

“That’s it? Mm?”

“I mean, I could talk about how all that’s natural or that confusion is only to be expected or be a real bitch and say you should focus on the positive, but.” He kissed the top of Kieron’s head. “I’m trying not to overstep. This is a big deal for you, a big…moment. I don’t really think my opinion has much bearing on it.”

He was right, but Kieron kind of wished he wasn’t. If his emotions could be improved by advice, he’d be demanding it constantly, but they couldn’t. He had to figure out and fight through whatever he was feeling by himself. “I couldn’t have done it without you and Catie.”

“Well, we wouldn’t be here without you, so thank yourself.”

Kieron nudged Elanus hard with his chin. “I’m trying to be nice.”

“So am I. You give and give and then get surprised when someone tries to give back. Let it happen. Let us appreciate you. Let us indulge in you while we can.”

Because eventually it’ll end, Elanus didn’t have to say. Kieron knew he was thinking it. He tilted his head up so they could kiss, warm and so, so soft, then resolutely shut his eyes. “I’ve got an alarm set for when—”

“I know. Sleep until then if you can.”

It turned out, Kieron could.

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Eighteen, Part Two

 Notes: What's going on out there? What have they found? Is it Zakari? IS IT ALL OF HIM? Tune in to find out ;)

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Eighteen, Part Two

***

Chapter Eighteen, Part Two

 

Whatever they were looking at, it was man-made—or at least, sentient-lifeform-made—that much was clear. The section that was visible head-on looked like part of a fuselage, but it was bigger than just that. Some of the central cabin was still attached to it. Not the part that would have held the pilot’s seat, though—this was too close to the back of the ship. So not something that was likely to have Zakari’s body in it, if it was even his ship.

Kieron cut through his own useless mental meanderings with a harsh pinch to the inside of his knee. “Catie, can you identify the model of the ship based on the pieces you see here?”

“Yess, Keeeeron. This is a piece of a XP-Dart 5.3, Xera Cona Factory, on—”

“Thank you.” That was their ship. Xera Cona Factory was the largest manufacturer of spacefaring vehicles on Trakta, and Kieron and Zakari had poured most of their personal savings into getting this one. When it was made, it had been middle of the line for mining vessels, but their custom radiation shields had elevated it to far more expensive than it looked. It had been equipped with all sorts of scientific supplies as well as the standard mining kit, and was big enough for two to sit in comfortably for days on end while they worked.

It had been a joy, buying this ship. The first thing Zak had done after they got it was take his children for a ride—in atmosphere, of course, because no Traktan parent risked their child to space if they could help it. It had still been fun. Kieron had never felt more like a part of the family than he had that day.

And now here was a part of their lost ship. As much as it pained him to see it broken apart like this, he couldn’t just leave it here. The potential for learning more about what happened to Zakari was too strong.

He cleared his throat. “How close can you get to it without risking impact?”

“Thirteeeeeen point two-one meeeters.”

“That’s still not close enough for you to risk getting into a greenie and going out there to poke around,” Elanus said quickly. His hands seemed oddly twitchy, like he was on the verge of taking hold of Catarina’s external controls and turning them around…or like he was trying to keep himself from grabbing hold of Kieron. “There’s no safe range for that, as far as I’m concerned. I absolutely refuse to grow you another entire body’s worth of vital organs, do you hear me?”

“I hear you, and I’m not an idiot,” Kieron said.

“Could have fooled me.”

“Keeeeron!” Catalina interrupted before the conversation could deteriorate any further. “Penetrating density analyssiiiis shows therrrrre is a high probabiiiility of organic matter insiiide the structure.”

What? Could it even be remotely possible that something of Zakari was left on this piece of ship? Why in the back of the ship? Why wouldn’t he have been in the pilot’s seat, where he could see the pictures of his family he’d left stuck in the crevices on the dash? Had the accident that took him out happened too quickly for him to get to the front…but this wasn’t the part of the back that had held the bathroom, either.

What the hell had happened here? “How big is the organic matter?” he asked, a little proud of how calm his voice was.

“Less than a meeeeeter loooong.”

Elanus spoke up. “Can you safely reorient to get us a visual confirmation?”

“Yess, Daddeeeee.” Catalina began to slowly, carefully move herself closer to the wreckage, and Kieron found himself holding his breath. He had no idea what he was about to find in there, and he was afraid to get his hopes up, but…

“Expanding bit.” Elanus pointed to a sharp, petal-like protrusion jutting through the fractured hull as their point of view changed. “Miners use them—”

“—to anchor their crafts to asteroids, I know.” He’d only been working on Cloverleaf Station for nearly half a decade, now. “We always kept a full four-point set in the ship with us.”

“And what are the odds that your old partner put that one through your hull deliberately?”

“High,” Kieron said, his breath coming quicker despite how hard he was trying to stay calm. “I can’t think of any reason for it to be there otherwise.”

“He wouldn’t have gotten spacesick and done something rash, or maybe indulged in a kill-pill if he knew he was going to die anyway—”

“He was orthodox Traktan,” Kieron snapped. “That means no suicide, no intoxicants—he didn’t even use Regen unless it was a life-or-death emergency, because they take such a strong stance on purity of original form. He wouldn’t have put a dart through the hull and compromised its integrity without having a very good reason for doing it.”

“No one knows how they’re going to react to death until they’re faced with it,” Elanus said, more gently than Kieron was expecting from him. “I’m not blaming your friend for anything, I’m just…trying to understand.”

Kieron shut his eyes for a second. “So am I,” he confessed. It was easier to be honest with Elanus when he wasn’t looking at him.

“Keeeeron.” Catalina’s voice was soft, like she felt unsure about interrupting their conversation—or unsure about what she was going to say next. “I can seeeee iiit.”

Stay calm. “Put it up on the viewscreen, please.”

Their view of the space in front of them vanished, replaced by a magnified view of the chunk of his old ship. A small section was highlighted in…pink. Of course, in pink. Catalina couldn’t get enough of it.

“Enlarge, please.” It got bigger, the picture slightly more clear. Even Catalina didn’t have perfect performance in this much radiation, but Kieron thought he had an idea of what the organic matter was now. His mouth went dry.

“A little bigger,” he whispered. The image became a little bigger, and he saw…he saw…

“Is that an arm?” Elanus exclaimed. “How the fuck did he attach one of his own arms to the back of the ship? How did he—”

“The bit.” As soon as he realized what he was looking at, Kieron knew what had happened. “The expandable bit. Zakari must have known what was going on, he knew he was going to die out here. The odds of the ship staying in one piece were small, but if he could break the ship apart himself, and make sure each part carried a piece of him with it…then the chances of recovering some of him to put back into his family crypt increased significantly.”

“Oh.” Elanus fell silent, a rare enough occurrence that Kieron felt like rewarding him with some more knowledge.

“His whole body would be best, of course,” he said roughly. “But having at least a part of it to bury legitimizes the eternal nature of his soul, in the eyes of his culture. Hundreds of years ago, Traktans used to cut off a finger or an ear before going to war and leave it at home, in case the rest of them was lost to battle. Most modern Traktans have given that up, but…” But the lesson had stuck.

“So, wait. He literally tore himself and your ship apart, into quarters, before he died so that you’d be able to find a piece of him to send home?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit.” There was both horror and deep respect in Elanus’s voice. “That’s got to be the most badass thing I’ve ever heard.”

Kieron had to agree.

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Eighteen: Part One

 Notes: Who wants to comb a dangerous asteroid field for bodies? WE DO!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Eighteen, Part One

***

Chapter Eighteen, Part One

 

There was a part of Kieron that had been hoping that Catalina wouldn’t get the defensive laser array done as quickly as she promised. Now that the event he’d been working toward for so long was almost here, he felt…strange about it. Anticipatory, but nervous, almost sick with it. He couldn’t remember the last time his nerves had gotten the better of him so comprehensively that he actually had to sit in the dark and meditate about it for a while. It was embarrassing, and only something he would share with Catalina if her own nerves started to get the better of her again.

You could take your own advice. You’re trying, you’re making progress. It’s all right to feel conflicted. It’s all right to need to take time to be okay with the world around you. And for once, Kieron was actually ready to listen to himself.

That was growth to be pondered later. Right now, he needed to put his best foot forward for Catalina—and Elanus, who was glancing at him every few seconds like he was worried that Kieron was going to break into pieces. He was worried now, and Kieron didn’t like that. He decided to confront it head-on.

“Focus on the asteroid field,” he said briskly, grasping Elanus by the chin and pointing his face forward toward the viewscreen.

“Catalina is taking care of everything!” Elanus protested, actually moving into the grip. Freak. Kieron loved the unexpectedness of Elanus’s physical desires. “The defensive laser array is working perfectly, she’s pushing everything out of our path before it becomes an issue, and have you noticed how many steps out she’s able to calculate the physics of these little bumps and tumbles she’s giving our surroundings? Have you? Because even before we sent the probes out there to help her, she didn’t send a single ricochet directly toward us and only two third- and fourth-level collisions have slightly impacted our return route. I want you to take note of the absolute brilliance of this programming, because I designed her and—”

“And she’s got a brain of her own that is far more capable of making calculations like this on the fly than your rudimentary program ever could have been,” Kieron said, extra snarky just so he could hear Elanus squawk about it.

He wasn’t disappointed. “Are you kidding me? Is it any sort of logic to completely discount the building blocks I provided to this tender young soul that put her on the path to—”

“Daddee! Keeron! Shush! I’m trying to conceeentraaaaaate!”

“Oh, sorry,” Elanus said, and put an exaggeratedly dramatic finger over his mouth as he turned to Kieron. “Shh, she’s got to concentrate,” he whispered—somehow more loudly than he actually spoke.

“Daddee!”

“Don’t make fun of her,” Kieron chided him, refocusing himself on the work they needed to prepare for. Elanus’s lightheartedness in the face of almost everything was part of his charm, but Kieron also needed to concentrate. He needed to control himself, no matter what they found—whether it was a ship with a body, an empty shell, or nothing at all. He wasn’t going to let his emotions get the better of him out here, when it could be actively dangerous. He had to keep it together, for everybody’s sake.

“The first probes have reached the target location,” Kieron said, reading the data that flowed across Catalina’s screen avariciously. “We’ve got a space approximately five kilometers in diameter to cover, no pings yet…Catie, can you make any sense of their visual data?”

“These probes experience a rate of decaaaay that does not allow for accurate imagiiiing after ten minutes of exposure to the quasar,” Catalina said in an apologetic tone. “It has already been thirteeeeen minutes.”

“That’s all right.” It was too much to ask.

“I can send mooore!”

“By the time they get there, we’ll be there ourselves,” Elanus cut in. “Let’s keep all your processors focused on getting us there safely rather than racing probes through an asteroid field just to get Kieron information faster.”

The screen, and Kieron’s indicator for Catalina in his implant, blushed around the edges. “Daddeeee!”

“It’s fine,” Kieron soothed her. “It’s all fine. We’ll be there soon.” He was getting some interesting data here and there—higher concentrations of rare metals than he’d expect to see in a random cross-section of asteroids in this part of the field, a minor source of radiation that was almost buried by the quasar’s killing intensity but not quite… “I’m pretty sure there’s something there. What or how much it amounts to, I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough.”

Elanus leaned in so close his lips brushed the outside of Kieron’s ear. He flinched instinctively, unused to such close contact even though it wasn’t objectively violent or aggressive. Kieron took the unintentional rebuffing in stride and repositioned himself before whispering, “Are you ready for this? Sure you don’t want me to take first crack at the analysis of the scene?”

“No.” That would be unthinkable, handing over a vital responsibility to someone who hadn’t even known Zakari. “No, I have to be the one to do it.”

To his credit, Elanus knew when not to push. “All right then. Catalina, estimate to arrival time?”

“One minute and seventeen-point-eight seconds, Daddee,” she said.

One minute, or a little over, before Kieron faced up to his greatest failure. One minute to come to grips with the outcome of his and Zakari’s actions three years ago—actions that led to Zak’s death, and had a scarce-and-falling chance of not leading to his soul’s exile from his home planet.

Kieron wasn’t the sort of person who prayed. He hadn’t even learned about the existence of religion until he was off Hadrian’s Colony and shoved into a low-budget Federation school. There were so many religions, and so many among them purporting to be the one and true religion. At first it beggared his understanding that people could actually allow themselves to believe such things, until his mind made the natural parallel between religion and his own cult-like upbringing.

Blind faith is the problem, not religion. Blind belief. That’s all you’ve let yourself have ever since Zakari disappeared. It’s all that’s kept you going. What will you have now, if your faith leads you to an empty hole in the middle of space? How will you cope, knowing that your best was never good enough, that you were always going to be too late? How will you live with your own failure?

Do you even want to?

“Ten secooonds,” Catalina said, breaking through his spiraling reverie. Kieron took a deep, slow breath.

Too late to go back now.

“All we can do is move forward,” Elanus murmured as if Kieron had spoken aloud. Kieron—for reasons he didn’t even understand—reached out and grabbed Elanus’s hand, holding it like a lifeline as Catalina crested the final set of asteroids between them and the highest-probability site for finding remnants of Zakari in the known galaxy.

“I seeeeee somethiiiing!” Catalina exclaimed, highlighting it on her viewscreen and enlarging it so that they could see it too.

Kieron held his breath. Was it…was it…

Fuck…what the hell was that?