Nadia struck out my proposal with a single stroke. I had proposed taking Jalen to Grim HEX in the Red the next day, somewhere between Craig's six o'clock round, which had been held every morning since the flight to the Kestrel, and the inventory with Alice. As if a flight to Grim HEX could be done on the side. She had been sitting over her cargo papers for an hour, looking for a way to take Jalen today without endangering the delivery she had brought back from Orison the evening before.
"The MAX has been loaded since last night, twelve containers for the workshop on Grim HEX; I launch at ten. The workshop takes the parts until the end of shift; after that the MAX sits on the pad until tomorrow." She tapped the second line. "If Craig flies him in the Red tomorrow, there's nobody with him but the two of you, and you've got Craig's round at six and Alice at eight. If he flies with us today, he sits in the seat behind me, and Myra is there."
"Your plan is better," I said. Alice, standing in the doorway of the ready room, said that she would discharge Jalen at nine if the wound looked the way it had yesterday. I wrote the message to Rina myself.
Alice's Rounds
Alice's rounds took longer than usual that morning, because in his nine days on the Goodwill Jalen had loosened the splint twice on his own to move his fingers. The first time Myra had seen it. The second time Alice had seen it, and since then the splint had been fitted so that it took two hands to open. She took it off, looked at the suture, pressed in three places, asked about the feeling in the fingertips and put the splint back on. Then she sat down on the chair beside the bed, which she rarely did on rounds.
"Six weeks," she said. "No tools in the left hand, no holding on to grips, and no fiddling with the splint. Myra comes to Grim HEX in a week and takes the stitches out. After that we talk about the fingers. If anything gets warm before then, swells up or looks different from now, your sister calls us, and she does it before you talk yourself out of it."
Jalen asked whether he was allowed to fly. Alice asked back, in what. He asked whether he could work on the Kestrel once she was towed. Alice said: "With the right hand, and with Ivo next to you." He asked whether he could take the splint off at night. Alice stood up.
Myra said she would check the splint as well when she took the stitches out, and put it in her schedule before Alice could ask.
Jalen had spent the nine days in the recovery room, because Alice did not want to discharge him to a station without a doctor while the wound was fresh. And as soon as he could sit up, there was no keeping him still; someone had to be nearby to keep an eye on him. On the third day he had started, with his right hand, to reorganize the shelf of dressing supplies, by size and expiration date, the way the boxes above his workbench were arranged. Alice had let it happen. Myra had then needed two days to find things again, and after that had handed him the labeling. Since then a note in his handwriting stood at every compartment.
Jalen was in his late twenties and had flown the Kestrel for four years, most recently alone. That somebody else now told him when he flew where, he considered the real damage.
Nadia had combined Jalen's flight home with the delivery instead of planning it as a flight of its own. From her earlier runs between Area18 and Orison she knew how quickly a small change of plan shifted a whole day. I knew about myself that I liked to promise help before the consequences could be seen. That was why Nadia kept the crew's schedule, not I; I had asked her to. For the coming month she laid it in front of me, with a name next to every line.
The Flight to Grim HEX
At ten the MAX lay ready for departure at the Goodwill's docking collar. In the passage to the medical module stood two pallets of medical supplies that Nadia had brought from Orison the evening before. Myra and Alice put them away themselves; on their shelves every item was to be where they could find it blind in an emergency. Jalen stood at the airlock, looked out through the window at the MAX and could not take his eyes off her.
"Same hull as the Kestrel," he said. "Just more cargo space. I know every hatch on that thing."
"Then you also know where you sit," Nadia said, and pointed at the seat behind the pilot's.
Craig came aboard with a tool bag. Ivo had given him a new mount for the MAX's side console; he wanted to install it while Nadia secured the load. Ivo was over on the Dauntless's hangar deck and on the comm, and the two of them were arguing within a minute about the angle of the mount. Jalen listened from his seat. After a while he cut in.
"On the Kestrel I solved that differently. With an angle bracket, not the plate."
At the other end of the link there was a moment's silence. "With wire?" Ivo asked.
Jalen looked at his splint. "The wire was somewhere else. The bracket held."
Ivo let him finish. Then he asked for a measurement. It was the first conversation since the accident that was not about his hand or about what he was not allowed to do, but about what he could do. Myra sat down beside me and let the two of them go on.
I knew it from eleven years in Orison: whoever is allowed to go home is glad in the morning and quiet by noon. With Jalen it was because we made almost every decision for him. He wanted to work, but with a splinted hand he had no commitment for a new job yet. His sister had so far only told him that they would talk at home. He did not know whether that was good news.
Alice came to the airlock while Nadia checked the load one last time. She gave Jalen no more advice. She gave him an envelope with her surgical report, in case he ever had to go to another hospital after all, and told him not to open it with his left hand. Then she went back without waving. Alice does not wave.
Nadia cast off from the Goodwill, and the hospital ship fell away behind us until only her single lit module was visible and beside it, dark against space, the massive silhouette of the Dauntless. The jump into the belt is short; the way between the rocks is not. Nadia flew it with the patience she has for cargo and for little else. When she checked the load again after the jump, she asked Jalen whether he could help with the cargo papers. He could check the container codes on the display without straining the hand. He found a transposed last digit that would have led to a query at the pad. Nadia let him send the correction to the recipient himself.
Shortly after the jump, still well before Grim HEX, a voice came up on the open channel, no call sign. It wanted to know what we had loaded and for whom. Craig was already on his way to the turret when Jalen shook his head.
"Don't answer. Keep flying, to the pad. They ask everyone. Whoever answers is new here."
Nadia looked at him in the reflection of the canopy, then flew on without opening the channel. The voice asked twice more and gave up. Craig sat back down. He said nothing, but he nodded to Jalen, and Jalen pretended not to have seen it.
The Photo from New Corvo
In Craig's tool bag was a flat protective sleeve. When he emptied the bag after the installation to sort the tools for Ivo, it fell out, and an old picture slid from the sleeve. Four people stood on it under a sign of which only the upper half could be seen. I recognized Craig by his crooked smile; he wore no uniform and was perhaps in his mid-thirties.
He said the picture had been taken in New Corvo, a few years before the attack. The city lies on Aremis, the second planet of Vega, on a bay between forest and flatland. That the Vanduul had wreaked devastation there in October 2945, I knew not only from the reports. Afterward Alice and I had worked for four months in the field hospitals around the city. I had never told Craig that. He had never told me he came from there.
During the attack he had been on duty, with his squadron in the system but not over the city. In the weeks afterward he flew escort for the supply flights to Aremis. He remembered those flights precisely: which transports he had escorted, when they had arrived, which hospital had taken the wounded, Saint Aerik's, until there was no room left there. He said the name as if he had not spoken it in years. I told him that we had taken in the wounded those transports brought from the settlements around New Corvo once there was no room left at Saint Aerik's: in tents at the edge of the city. Alice had operated there in an operating room made of two containers set side by side. Whether we had crossed paths back then, neither of us knew. There had been too many transports, and too little sleep.
Where his sister had been in those weeks he learned only later. She had survived. When his last year of service was coming to an end, she wanted him to come home.
"Why didn't you?" I asked.
Craig turned the picture over. On the back was an address, corrected by hand several times. The last two entries were the same: his sister had lived in the same place for years.
He thought for a long time before he answered, and then he did not answer the question. He said that the city in the picture no longer existed, not like that. That he had seen it twice from above, in the weeks after the attack, and not since. That it was easier to have an address than to ring the bell there. I gave him time. Until Nadia prepared the approach we talked about everyday things: that his sister's name was Tessa, what she did, that she had helped rebuild a district, and why she still sent him the same address every year, as if he could have lost it. I made a note of the name.
Arrival at Rina's
Grim HEX was home for Jalen. For Nadia the cargo handover was waiting there. Myra led us from the pad through the passages without looking for the right turn, past Dumper's Depot and past stalls whose keepers watched us until we were around the corner. Above the atrium hung the big screen, half of which had been dead for years; the picture on it fell apart into stripes. "That was already broken when I left," Myra said. It was the only thing she said about back then. I would have liked to ask her when she had last been here. She looked as if she did not want to answer that question today.
Rina was waiting with a jacket for her brother. It was his good jacket, and she had opened the left sleeve at the seam so that it would fit over the splint. Jalen complained that she had cut up his good jacket. Rina said he could sew it back up himself as soon as the hand was ready for it. Then she took the bag from him before he could object again.
While Nadia counted the containers with the workshop, Rina asked Myra where on the station she had lived. Myra named a sector number, nothing more. Rina nodded as if she knew what had become of that sector, and asked no further. The two of them also understood each other through what they did not say. That stayed closed to me.
Then I told Rina what had come of my promise. Ivo had asked two shipyards, one on the Providence platform and one in Lorville, and both had answered: one would tow the Kestrel and survey her, the other wanted the quantum drive if the ship would not fly again. I went through both answers with her line by line and also told her what I did not know: which of the two her lender would prefer. Ivo would settle that with her if she wanted. Rina read both answers twice. Then she asked why we were doing this.
"Because I promised you," I said. "And because Ivo saw your brother's workbench."
The workshop accepted the twelve containers, twenty minutes before the end of shift. When Nadia signed off the handover, Jalen stood beside her and looked at the display.
"The papers," he said. "If you need somebody to check them. I don't need two hands for that."
Nadia looked at him, then at the splint, then at him again. "I'll be in touch," she said. It did not sound like a courtesy. With Nadia nothing sounds like a courtesy, and that is exactly why he believed her.
On the way back to the pad, Myra, with Rina's agreement, entered the date on which she would take the stitches out, and with it the business where Rina worked her shifts. That way Myra could reach her without Jalen having to come to the comm. Craig had stayed with the MAX; when we arrived he was just sending a message.
On the flight back he did not put the photo in the tool bag. He clipped it into the new mount he had installed that morning, right beside his seat. I did not ask him about his sister's answer.
