A Solid Core of Alpha (15 page)

Anderson would take a bite of something, licking his full lips experimentally, and those big brown eyes would get wide, and then thoughtful, and then he’d rub his tongue on his palate experimentally, and then—the good part. Then he’d smile up at C.J. like C.J. had just delivered him a brand new planetary system made of ice cream, cookies, and mammal-birds, and take another bite, almost like it was just for C.J.

That, and watching him eat meant that maybe the terrible pinched thinness would fill out a little. C.J. wanted him to be stronger. Wanted him to be
sturdy
. For one thing, if he were sturdy, maybe C.J. wouldn’t feel so responsible for the bringing about of those wonderful smiles.

So they sat, and Julio and C.J. told him their best stories about working at the space station—by unspoken accord, they tried to stick to the ones that would make him laugh.

“That’s not true!” C.J. was protesting as Marshall walked up. “Tell him the truth, Julio, come on, you owe me that!”

“I don’t owe you
jack
, man. I am not the one who let those little frozen reptiles out of the goddamned shuttle.”

C.J. shuddered. “I’m not either, man. That was the second’s problem. I said, ‘Hey, is it true those things freeze stuff with their pee?’ And Marshall’s second in command, who was not so bright that time out, thought I said, ‘That’s something I’ve got to see!’ And the next thing I know….”

Even Marshall shuddered as he stood behind Anderson. “Oh God, don’t make me remember.”

“Did they really freeze things with their pee?” Anderson asked, wide-eyed.

All three of them nodded in absolute sobriety. “It was horrible too,” Julio said, shivering again. “It smelled like rotten asparagus and cooked boots in a freezer. And that’s not the worst part!”

“There’s a worse part?” Anderson hung on their every word, and C.J. thought it might be more gratifying if maybe he’d heard someone else’s stories in the last ten years, but hell, if he and Julio were entertainment, they might as well give him his money’s worth, right?

“God, yes.” C.J. nodded. “Catching them, for the love of little baby asteroids hangin’ on their mama’s belts, it was a fucking nightmare.”

“See, the thing is, they froze too,” Marshall continued. The look in his eyes could only be termed “paternal,” and C.J. was glad. Marshall did the big brother thing for C.J. all the time, and C.J. loved him for it. “Their urine reacts with the oxygen, has some ungodly chemical reaction that only Cassie could tell you about, and then, once it froze the metal underneath the tile floors, their body temperature dropped, and they were these little, spiky, poison-skinned… what did you call them again?”

“Hockey pucks,” C.J. supplied, and Marshall nodded and went on.

“And they would reanimate without notice and go just absolutely berserk. You didn’t want to pick them up without the steel-lined gloves, and the thing is, once you had them, the damned things would wake up and you couldn’t hold on to them.”

“Holy cats!” Anderson exclaimed, the expression so young and so outdated that C.J. blinked. He really
must
have been living off of old comedy vids for the last ten years. “How did you get them?”

“Oh, man, it was epic!” Julio could tell a good story—and he was all hands. “You should have seen it. Stroke of genius, really. Marshall totally saved our asses.”

“That’s not true!” Marshall said, glaring at C.J., and C.J. shrugged.

“Sure it is. Now let him talk.”

“Okay,” Julio continued, “so suddenly C.J. and Marshall go off and powwow, and then C.J. takes off at a sprint down the one un-frozen spoke toward the hub. We have no fucking idea where he’s going, right? And Marshall starts organizing us, has us all get the emergency blankets from the supplies, plus welding masks, and those gloves, and whatever protective clothing we can find in an all-fired hurry, and the entire dock was there in shit like cooking pots and anti-grav boots and whatever the fuck else we could find. So Marshall puts us at this end of the dock, then C.J. comes back, and he must have ran to the hub and back in like… what was it, C.J., fifteen minutes? And man, that’s like three miles total, maybe even more, so he was just
flying
, and he comes back, and he’s got… God, I don’t even know what the fuck they were!”

“Skids,” C.J. supplied after a sip of his fruit juice. “There’s this game in the center of the hub, for teens, mostly, but you put these things on your feet, and they glide over just about anything, they’re like carpet skates without wheels, right? And the kids, they’ve got this big room full of stuff that they can just bounce off of, but I figure on the ice, they’ll work like magic, right?”

“They did,” Marshall said simply. “And then C.J. taught me the difference between hockey and curling—”

“What’s curling?” Anderson wanted to know, and C.J. burst out laughing, because he’d forgotten this part.

“It’s this sport where you slide weights across the ice, trying to hit center. The thing is, you’re allowed to ‘brush’ the ice in order to coax the weight the way you want it to go. And Marshall, he didn’t know a lot of Earth games then, so I told him—”

“His exact words were, ‘Hockey—you know, that game on the ice with the skates’, and the only thing I’d ever seen was Terran footage of people with the curling stones, so C.J. and I both grab brooms, the wide flat kind that you can swing, and after a brief lesson on the difference between a curling brush and a hockey stick—”

“I think I said, ‘Whack them, dammit! Don’t do their hair and make-up, jerk-off,’” C.J. said to Anderson, embarrassed and in a sotto vocce voice, and Anderson gave him a shy smile in return.

“So the rest of us didn’t know any of this!” Julio said, picking up the story. “We’re just waiting there with the open shuttle behind us and every protective thing we can think of on our bodies, and then here comes C.J. and Marshall, and they’re whacking this entire herd of ice-piss lizards, that’s an official name by the way, across the corridor, and they’ve gotten
good
at it by the time they get around to us.”

“God, I was sore for a week!” C.J. confessed. There had been a trick to lifting and scooting the things at the same time, and it had used muscles C.J. hadn’t known he had.

“So was I,” Marshall added, nodding emphatically.

“So they tell us to be ready, and then they start
shooting
them, like hockey pucks, up over the ice and into the blankets. And we’ve got two people per blanket, and every time one of those things hit a blanket, we would gather up all the corners, run to the open shuttle, and just throw them in.”

“The guy had it, like, minus fifteen kelvins in there by that time, so they hit the back wall and fell asleep,” C.J. explained, but Julio wasn’t done with the story yet.

“So every time either one of these jackasses shoots a lizard at us and hits the blanket, he holds both hands over his head and goes, ‘
Goal!
’ like they’re hot shit or something, and it isn’t until later that someone realizes—”

“That’s what they do in soccer,
not
hockey!” Anderson interjected, and Julio laughed so hard he sprayed soda and pounded the table.

“That’s what I’m sayin’. That whole time, we even thought they knew what in the hell they were doing!”

Anderson had a surprisingly deep laugh for such a thin, worried-looking boy, and C.J. grinned as he let it loose over their little corner of the world. Anderson had finished, and was still gasping for breath and going for a drink of his soda, when Julio looked at C.J. sharply.

“You know, I never knew that was your idea. This whole time, we thought that Marshall was the one who came up with that!”

Marshall’s mild gaze caught C.J. with surprising sharpness. “That’s because he didn’t want the blame if it went bad,” he said dryly, and C.J. shrugged.

“No worries. That meant you got to be the hero when it went right,” he said with a warm smile, but Marshall didn’t reciprocate.

“I’ve tried to promote him to assistant station master three times in the last two years. He won’t take it, but when something goes wrong, you can be bloody sure C.J.’s the one with the solution. Not bloody fair.”

Now Julio was looking at him, completely chagrined. “Really? Those other three guys wore their asses for hats, C.J.,
really?
”

Now C.J. was flushing deep to the roots of his ash-blonde curly hair. “Man, I got fired from my last two jobs. I really think this is more Marshall’s fault for relying on nepotism than mine for telling him no!”

He smiled when he said it and was surprised when Marshall’s face flushed to anger. Before the other man could speak up, C.J. pushed up from the table and said, “Julio, could you please tell Anderson what a fuck-up I am so he doesn’t get the wrong impression? I gotta have a word.”

“I take it you didn’t get to the shuttle,” Marshall said dryly, and then he waved C.J. off when he tried to apologize. “Don’t worry about it. I had time to get the analysis from your friend Jensen, and I’ve got to say, that’s what I’m concerned about. Do you think this… this other personality or holo, Alpha, was he the reason your sister got hurt?”

C.J. grimaced. “Hey, he beat the holy hell out of Anderson, apparently for a couple of years. But if it was him, I don’t think hurting Cassie was what he meant to do. I think it was probably just a burst of temper or something. We’ll have to ask Anderson, if he doesn’t….” C.J. swallowed and tried to keep his expression even. “If he doesn’t go stark raving bat guano on us, he might be able to help us figure out what to do with him. With all of them.”

“But for now?” Marshall was asking the question, but he really knew the answer, because he was nodding his head as C.J. finished speaking.

“For now, we leave the holos and work around them. We get our data from watching the histories, probably from day one, because I don’t know if
anyone
really knows what happened to the mining colony, and then we watch him program them and see how they interact. Anderson was right that those records are important, especially to the next of kin of the colony, so that needs to be done anyway. The rest of it is really important to the holo-scientists and the head-shrinks, and all of it is important….” He swallowed, because really, this was the part he’d wanted to say first.

“To Anderson,” Marshall said softly. “It’s okay, C.J., you can put his welfare on the roster.”

“The space station is a business, Marshall,” C.J. said reluctantly. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”

“Yeah, but we’re already getting government funding as long as we make the mining colony records public domain.”

“Not Anderson’s stuff, right?” Anderson’s adventures in holo-land seemed unbearably private. He couldn’t stand it if “boy abused by holo-spouse” was splashed on every media screen on the planet.

Marshall grimaced. “Christ, no. Have a little faith in us, Cyril. Anderson’s life will stay private until he makes it not private. But I do think he’s going to want to share a little of it. Julio says that the patents for the holo-improvements he’s done should set him up in style when he’s ready to go out and make himself a living.”

That cheered C.J. up a little. “I do have faith in you,” he said sincerely. “You know me, I land on my feet and hope everyone else lands with me. Now let’s go make sure that data transfer is going well. Tomorrow the real work begins, you know. That holo-shit’s going to punk us out, I’m telling you.”

“Not so fast.”

C.J. stopped at the unaccountably grim set of Marshall’s jaw. “Jesus, Marshall, what did I do now?”

“The Angloran isn’t working out as my second, you know that, right?”

C.J. grimaced. Yeah, he’d figured. Anglorans were sort of a nervous species. Not entirely humanoid, they tended to skitter on an extra set of legs, like a highly intelligent cross between the old Terran spiders and really big cats. X’tl’torp (the crew called him X) was difficult to read emotionally until something freaked him out and his hairy legs had him skittering halfway across the station. Apparently, there were a lot of predators on X’s world, and the whole skittering thing was a good reaction to have. But there were no predators on the space station, and a lot of keeping things sane was keeping your own head. No. X was not working out, and everyone knew he’d started putting out feelers—not his physical ones, thank God—looking for a job on Hermes-Gamma, where even the jungle climate was a little more compatible with his physical needs.

“Uh, no, I hadn’t heard,” he lied blandly, and Marshall glowered.

“Five months, C.J. He’ll be done in five months, and I want you in his spot.”

“Marshall…,” C.J. practically whined, and Marshall growled.

“No. No ‘Marshall, I want to slack! Marshall, I’m not good enough! Marshall, I suck at responsibility!’ You
rock
at responsibility. Most in-laws would be whining to the skies about what dumb motherfuckers they had to hire in order to please their spouses, but no. Not me. I’ve got one of the most highly qualified space technology engineers with extra units in space psy in the system, and you’re smart, and people like you, and you’re good at your job, and I can’t get you to commit!”

C.J. glared at him, feeling like a little kid. Marshall didn’t do it often, but when he pulled his big brother on, he did it right. “What brought this on?” he asked, uncomfortable.

“I told you your sister was hurt, and you were right there. You sat down with that kid, called in an extra resource, and brought out a game plan. I didn’t have to ask you to do a goddamned thing.”

C.J. blushed. “Well, you know, just looking out for my boy there.”

Marshall smiled a little. “Yeah, you are. But you were looking out for us too. Come on, C.J., you’re so afraid of letting people down, you’re letting them down! Tell me you’ll do it!”

C.J. blushed a little more and looked to where Anderson was quietly finishing his seasoned mammal-bird. The boy had looked at him like he was something, someone important. Someone worth listening to, after over a decade of talking to himself.

“I’ll think about it,” C.J. said, feeling an unaccustomed burst of responsibility sitting on his shoulders. “No promises, but… but I’ll think about it.”