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She heard footsteps behind her. Pin-Lee paused in her pacing, turned, braced for another gritted-teeth calm explanation of What The Fuck Was Happening to a panicked family member or friend or acquaintance or distressed passerby who had heard the news by now (who hadn’t heard the news by now? And did anyone know what the fuck was happening?).
It wasn’t that. Instead she looked up to see Gurathin, travel bag slung heavy over his shoulder, and oh, no. Oh no, this was worse.
“This is the responder we’re taking?” he asked, his tone artificially neutral.
“Gurathin,” Pin-Lee said. “No.”
He frowned. “No, this isn’t the responder?”
No, don’t do this to me, she wanted to say. Instead she said, “No, you’re not coming.”
That stopped him. He blinked at her. “What?”
“Look,” she said. A frantic Station Security officer pushed past them and charged up the ramp into the ship, clearly engaged in a feed conversation and not looking at them. Gurathin glanced after her, then back to Pin-Lee. He tilted his head after the officer, shouldn’t we be going?
Pin-Lee snarled a sigh and pulled him off to the side, out of the way. Enough was going on already. “Gurathin, I’ve had this conversation already with Kanti, and with Rinku, and with Maja, and with Bharadwaj, and Bharadwaj is much more persuasive than you are. Ayda is having this conversation with her siblings and spouses right now. The team is her, me, the pilot, and the Station Security responder team. You’re not coming.”
“But,” he said, glancing into the ship. “I thought…”
She waited for him to finish the sentence. He didn’t. He didn’t need to. His expression closed, his jaw set; he looked irritated, which she knew meant he was hurt and didn’t want to let anyone else know that.
She had had to tell Ratthi’s oldest sister this—“no, you can’t come”—and one of Arada’s old friends who had been wracked with guilt over being the university bio lab manager and never being out there on the field projects with her; and Kanti, hysterical with fear and shame that she had left Amena behind, that she’d gotten to the baseship and Amena hadn’t, that she hadn’t stayed; and Bharadwaj, of course, touching Pin-Lee’s arm and asking her quietly if she should be there, if she should see this one through, and Pin-Lee almost broke down in weakness and said yes. Please. I don’t want to be the only one.
She had assumed the fact that Gurathin hadn’t been in that wave of people, in the first hour, first two hours, first three, as everybody panicked at the kidnapping raiders at the station door and Station Security scrambled a wormhole-capable responder and a crew to pilot it and two months’ worth of supplies to stock it with and Mensah declared on no uncertain terms that she would be going out there with the responder team, meant he understood. Meant that he knew how soul-destroying awful it was going to be, and was, intelligently, not taking part.
But nope, it was because he thought that it went without saying that he would be there with them.
“You’re going,” he said instead.
“Yeah,” Pin-Lee said. “Because I’m an expert in corporate legal contracts. And, increasingly, hostage negotiations.” Which was true. But it felt wrong to act like it was that cleanly logical. Like that was what her argument with Mensah had actually been about. “And... besides, Ayda is. I don’t think any force this side of the galaxy could stop her. And if Ayda is going into the Rim I’m never letting her out of my sight for a single second ever again.”
“That wasn’t—” He sighed through his teeth. “That wasn’t your fault. You don’t have to make this about a personal redemption.”
“It sort of was, and that’s not what this is about. I’m not—Gurathin, shut up,” because he was opening his mouth to continue arguing the point, “that’s not what this is about. The facts are, they took our people into the Rim. We’re going into the Rim. I’m an interpolity contracts lawyer who’s done a bunch of shit in the Rim. They’ll need me. You’re a survey scientist. They won’t need that. And—and Dr. Mensah is going up against a bunch of kidnappers again and some corporate fucks have SecUnit again and I’m not going to let any of that happen without the most suspicious asshole legal team right there with her. I have to be there. I don’t want to. But I have to. You don’t. That’s what it boils down to.”
“I’m increasingly going to call bullshit that you don’t want to get into the fray,” he said. “You keep jumping in, and you thrive in it. Big scary combat lawyer coming to the rescue.”
“That’s not—that’s not what this is, Gurathin, that’s not what this is about.” She gripped her arms across her chest, digging her nails into her skin because she wanted to break something, throw something, express the inexpressible in a way more socially acceptable than just screaming in the middle of the port. Was he going to make her say it? “It’s not going to be a rescue.”
“What?”
“Think,” she said. “Ayda’s daughter got pulled onto the ship with SecUnit. They’re together, and—she’ll probably be okay. But Arada, Ratthi, Overse, and Thiago are in a pod with two hundred person-hours of air, and the coordinates that ship gave us are almost a month away. The ship that had been shooting at them, not at all trying to take them alive. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think we’re going to find on the other side?”
He stared at her, and there it was. The look on his face. The realization. Why could none of these scientists do math? Why did she have to be the one to realize, to explain it?
“I don’t want to be the one to go and… and find whatever we’re going to find on the other side,” Pin-Lee said. “And you should know better than anyone how abjectly miserable it is to be the one on the ship. You can’t do anything, you can’t help, you can’t even get any news updates, you don’t know what they’re doing back home or what the situation will be by the time you get spit back out into realspace, you’re just… waiting.”
“I can handle it,” he said. “I did before.”
“It’s not about handling. It’s about—what’s essential. About putting as few people in danger as possible, because we knew what GrayCris wanted with Ayda but we don’t know what these people want or if they even want anything, and it’s about—” It was about how no one should have to go through that again. It was about how she was so fucking angry that she had to, again, and she was angry because if she wasn’t she’d break down completely. The tense two weeks she and Ratthi and Gurathin had spent on that gunship, she had to work hard not to drive herself crazy, trying to prepare for potential outcomes they’d find on TranRollinHyfa without enough information to assess what was realistic to expect and what was needlessly catastrophic spiraling. She’d tried not to let anyone catch her in the bathroom heaving up bile from a completely empty stomach because her stress was making her nauseous and her nausea was making her unable to eat and her inability to eat was making her even more nauseous and her body was trying to reject what was making her so upset, so afraid, but it wasn’t anything so easily expelled. She wasn’t sure she succeeded in hiding it completely but if she didn’t then Gurathin had at least done the polite thing and pretended he didn’t notice.
It was about protecting him from having to go through that. If she was able to acknowledge that she was being a little selfish, it was about not wanting him to see her as she went through that.
Bharadwaj would tell her that was not a reasonable way to view friendship and the emotional support that everybody needs from their friends sometimes, but then, she’d also told Bharadwaj not to come.
(If she was really going to let herself be selfish, she wondered what her life would be like now, if she had told Mensah no, back then, I’m not a survey professional and I don’t want to spend two months on some distant planet, I’m not going on that survey. She’d be home, in a nice little station apartment of her own with maybe a plant and a project that wasn’t a fraught personhood-rights one, she wouldn’t even know SecUnit, she wouldn’t be involved, and she would have a future that wasn’t just this, forever. Never feeling safe again, never being safe again, her friends never being safe again, dropping everything to hurtle across the galaxy after friends captured and hurt by shady and powerful forces, again. She wished it wasn’t her problem.)
(She didn’t wish that. Not really. Too much of her, too much of who she was now, was too bound up in it.)
(But after she had to pull Ratthi’s and Arada’s and Overse’s dead bodies out of a perfectly preserved anaerobic death trap, she suspected she really would.)
“It’s about staying here and not hurting yourself by putting yourself through it for no benefit to anyone,” she concluded, instead, like a hypocrite. “There’s no point to dragging you out there, in the middle of it. I just want you to stay here, where it’s—”
“Where it’s what?” he demanded. “What is it on the station, Pin-Lee?”
He glared at her. She glared at him back. He was the fucking worst.
“Where it’s safe?” he finished for her, when she didn’t. “Bot murders and kidnapping mystery ships and drugged assassins, oh, sure, but at least it’s safe?”
“Safer than it’ll be out there,” she said. The emptiest fucking promise she’d ever made. “Because if—if they’re dead. Then we’ll be flying right into the face of these ‘Perihelion’ people who killed them. And I do not want you to be there for that.” The words hung in the air between them, bleak and awful, and she couldn’t help it, she had to temper them with, “And—who knows. If SecUnit manages to take over the ship, turn it around, and come back here saying ‘all clear, I killed those bastards,’ you’ll get the news here before we do.”
“Does it know how to fly a wormhole ship?”
Pin-Lee threw up her hands. “Who knows? It might!”
“It might,” Gurathin murmured. He didn’t sound optimistic. “And if it can take over the ship quickly, the safepod is in the same wormhole pocket. Probably latched onto the ship. It might be able to bring them in.”
“Yeah,” Pin-Lee said. “Maybe.” In the hours since the information of what the hell had happened became clear, she had been cycling rapidly between constructing a plausible narrative to support that desperate hope, and telling herself not to cling to it, because a month of getting her hopes up would be far, far worse than a month of preparing for grief.
She wondered when she’d become so cynical. If that was due to the years of bulletproofing interpolity contracts so they couldn’t be taken advantage of, and preparing offplanet travel papers by predicting every selfish bullshit action that every sneering corporate rep might try to pull on her planet’s people, then maybe this was always going to be her life. A cute little house in a cute little planetside community building homes and writing poetry and having a family like a responsible adult was never going to be her life and she knew it. She would go crazy.
Maybe she was always destined to go crazy, because she was certainly going crazy here and now anyway.
“So what am I supposed to do?” Gurathin asked.
Pin-Lee shrugged, her hands spread wide. She let them fall to her sides in defeat. “Pray, I guess. Keep watching the skies, make sure there isn’t another wave. Commiserate with Bharadwaj over how much of a bitch I am.”
“You aren’t a bitch,” he said. “You are kind of an asshole, though.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The way he nodded, the slump of his shoulders and the shift of weight on his feet, made it clear that she’d won, that he was conceding, and she felt like shit about it.
“Look,” she said. “I—I’ll be back soon. We’ll be back soon. I promise.”
“You’d better.”
It was a lie and they both knew it. The destination that the mystery ship had given them in its weirdly apologetic kidnapping message was nearly a month away. A month there, who knows how long they would spend on the other side, a month back—she purposefully did not let herself think about how long she’d be away from home. But if everything went smoothly, if they arrived to find that in the wormhole SecUnit had staged a full takeover of the ship and killed all the raiders the moment one of them looked at Amena funny, if it was easy to find the pod and retrieve the four bodies inside (or if, after SecUnit’s full takeover of the attacker’s ship, it had managed to pull them inside before—no, she had told herself she wouldn’t get her hopes up. She had told herself, very sternly), then at least she’d be back more quickly than the last time she’d been away from Preservation.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if that could absolve anything.
“Mm,” Gurathin said. Not really an acceptance, just an acknowledgement. Then he conceded, “Me too.”
They stared at each other, neither willing to be the one to call this interaction to an end. It was stupid, it was immature, Pin-Lee knew that it was up to her to say well, goodbye then, but doing so would mean it was real. This uncomfortable liminality meant she didn’t have to get on the ship, and Gurathin didn’t have to turn away and trudge back to his station apartment, as if staying in this spot meant they could stop time and stop time’s inexorable consequences.
Mensah was the one to break the stasis. Pin-Lee got her message over the feed, They want to board the crew. We’re finally getting ready to go, moments before she saw Mensah coming up the docking bay towards the responder. She moved fast, walking but not running, holding herself together with what looked like an incredible effort.
“They’re collecting the crew,” Mensah said, nodding to Pin-Lee. “We should be gearing up to leave soon.” It was an impressively fast response. It was not fast enough. How fast it was barely mattered because they’d be spending 23 days in the wormhole anyway.
Pin-Lee took a breath. If Mensah wasn’t falling apart, she couldn’t either, not now. It wasn’t fair to expect Mensah to have to be the one to hold it together for her. (It wasn’t fair to Pin-Lee to have to hold it together, either, but it also wasn’t fair for her friends to get snatched right out of Preservation space to die, because fairness was a fragile human thing that was hard to build and easy to break and they just had to live with it.) “Right. Yeah. Let’s go.”
Turning to Gurathin, Mensah added, “Keep an eye on the station. Please. I don’t know what else is going to happen.”
She sounded so stressed and so angry and so, so tired.
If nothing else did it, that did. Gurathin straightened slightly, and said, “Ah—yeah—yes. I’ll—be sure to.”
“Thank you,” Mensah said, and the awkwardness of the moment was cut somewhat by her forward momentum as she turned, met Pin-Lee’s eyes for just a moment, and then carried on up the ramp and into the ship.
“Right,” Pin-Lee said, and followed her, charging into the ship.
Which felt wrong. Halfway up the ramp, she paused and glanced back. Hesitated. Gurathin was still standing there, watching them go.
More of the ship’s crew, and mechanics, and Port Authority, streamed up and down the entryway, making last checks and giving last instructions and organizing to board and take off. It had gone by in a whirlwind. It had been an excruciating wait. It was too real, too fast.
Pin-Lee turned around, ran back down the boarding ramp, and locked Gurathin in a hug.
He went “Uh—um?” upon impact, but after a second, found the presence of mind to drop his shoulder bag on the ground and wrap his arms around her shoulders too.
“Sorry,” Pin-Lee muttered into his shirt. Because what else could she say?
“Uh,” he said, and then sighed. “Just. Stay safe.”
There was that. That was a fair one. “Yeah,” she said, let herself stay here for one more warm moment, and then pushed away. “You too.”
“Mm-hm.”
Everything felt like empty promises, like a nightmare recurring and recurring, but making empty promises was how society kept functioning and the nightmares were kept at bay. Pin-Lee stepped away. She was ready. She had to be. She was needed to go show those fuckers on the other end of space that Preservationers would not just sit back and let this attack stand and would not just wallow and feel awful and make whiny wishes for impossible counterfactuals. She was going, to support Mensah, to save Amena, to find SecUnit, and to salvage from this what she could.
She could do that.
Pin-Lee turned her back on the station, let herself follow the frantic flow of activity getting ready to go, and the responder ship swallowed her up.