A Solid Core of Alpha (33 page)

Anderson had been adopted by one of the facility animals, a giant ginger ex-Tom who kneaded his lap unmercifully as he sat—moderately sedated—in a lounge chair in the shade.

“I’ve been trying to figure out a name for him,” Anderson said, chucking the animal under the chin. “It’s hard. It seems that all the names I’ve ever liked are the names of someone I’ve killed.”

C.J. caught his breath then and wondered at the rush of adrenaline in his own veins. A tiny admission—a huge sliver of hope. “How about Conrad Jackson,” C.J. said grandly, and Anderson looked at him, more animation in his face now than C.J. had seen in nearly three weeks.

“Really?”

“Yeah!” C.J. grinned. “See, my dad’s name is Christopher James, my mom’s is Catherine Jennifer. So when we were born, they gave Cass and I the same initials.”

Anderson started laughing. “Cee, Jay!” he giggled, and C.J. nodded.

“Yup. I like this guy. Maybe we can keep him when you’re all done here. We’ll name him Conrad Jackson—he can be a C.J. too—he’ll fit right in.”

Anderson finished the visit with some color in his cheeks, and some hope, and C.J. walked away with a plan.

“I’m going to resurrect them,” he told Jensen, and the look on Jensen’s square-jawed, tanned face was nothing short of appalled.

“Resurrect
who
?”

“His family,” C.J. said with determination. “His holographic people. I’m going to fix them. There’s got to be a backup or a failsafe or something. We’ve got to be able to pull them back. They’re not dead. He’s got no guilt—”

“He’s still fucked up!” Jensen sputtered, as though he’d been trying to spit out something more profound, but that was as far as he got.

“
I know that!
” C.J. snarled, so out of character that he clapped his hand to his mouth. “But… just listen to me! He thinks he’s a murderer! Alpha, that bastard—”

“Who was part of his personality—”

“So he’s a bastard too!” C.J. snapped, willing the tears back. He’d cried a lot, that first week, and was determined not to give Jensen any more reasons to pump him full of sedation and then prod at his wounded feelings like a dentist prodded at gum rot. “You’re not hearing me! He’s not cutting himself a break! He’s not giving himself any slack! That’s why he’s lost in a fucking quasar implosion! He’d be bad enough if he thought he killed Alpha. You’d have to spend a year putting him back together then, right? But he thinks he killed them
all
… the good parts of himself too! All that’s left is… is his smile as a little kid and….” Oh fuck. No more. No more crying, no more helplessness, no more shoving off his over-amplified emotions on Jensen or Molly or his sister. He’d helped make this mess. He’d let Anderson seduce him when he should have been strong, and Anderson had walked into that room, his home, the inside of his brain put on holographic display for the world to see, and had a throwdown death match with the worst parts of himself with repercussions
no one
could have predicted. C.J. would not cry. He had to say this, but he would. Not. Cry.

“And…,” he tried again.

“His memories that you are good for him,” Jensen said softly, and C.J. closed his eyes tightly and nodded.

“You’re not going to be good for him if you get lost in obsession too,” Jensen pointed out. “And honestly, C.J., I think you may need to leave for a little while if he’s going to get better.”

C.J. whirled, holding his stomach in what felt to be a world-class wound of betrayal. “He needs me!”

“And he needs to know he’s real!”

“I can help him do that!”

“Not when you’re falling apart!” Jensen finished bitterly, and then he looked away. “Look, C.J., you wanted to make your point? Consider it made. You’re a stand-up guy. A forever lover, when it’s the right person. I get it. You were right all along. We weren’t it. We’re good friends, we were great in bed, but you’re right. You were right all along. I wasn’t going to work for you. I wasn’t who you needed….”

“It was the other way around,” C.J. muttered, “and we’re getting off the point.”

“That’s not true!” Jensen half-laughed. “I needed you plenty back then!”

C.J. shook his head. “No. No. You loved me,” he said sadly, and then thought he should be completely honest. “And I loved you to the point of space madness, but you didn’t need me.”

Jensen sighed, scrubbed his face with his hand, and then said, “Fuck it,” and took two steps toward C.J. and put his hands on C.J.’s shoulders. C.J. had always known Jensen was tall and built like a god, but he’d never truly appreciated his friend’s ability to protect people until C.J. himself was suddenly warmed by that massive chest when he needed it most.

“Listen to me,” Jensen said softly. “You’re right—I didn’t need you. Anderson does. You’re right about that, and I was wrong. You can be there when it counts, C.J., you’ve already proven that. You’ve gone through an awful lot for that kid, and don’t think it doesn’t matter. But you can’t do what he did. You can’t put so much of yourself into him that there’s nothing left of you. That won’t help him, and it will kill you, and we may not be meant for each other, but I love you, and Molly loves you, and your goddamned harpy of a sister loves you, and your parents think you walk on water. Please. For the love of all of us, walk away from this one for a little while. Go back to the station and work, and give Anderson some time. We can set up a daily video conference time, you can write him, and you can come back in three months and see if he thinks he’s real yet, okay?”

C.J. closed his eyes for a minute. God. Oh God. He was so tired. He couldn’t sleep anymore without Anderson’s breathing in his bed. He found himself waking up every night at screaming time, wondering if Anderson was waking up and needing him. He’d asked Jensen. The answer was no, because they apparently sedated the holy mother of shit out of the kid just to break his body of that rhythm. But now C.J. couldn’t sleep at night in his lovely little bungalow in the sparsely populated seaside vacation neighborhood.

Jensen had chosen this area specifically to start his facility. For one thing, it sold directly to the workers at the space station, and like C.J., Jensen’s specialty had been related to the particular psychological problems that developed in space. For another, he’d gotten funding from the Space Trading Federation, so much of his money came from the people who ran the station on the condition that he’d be available to treat the Federation’s people. It truly was lovely—tall, fragrant trees closed in and canopied any unoccupied land, and beyond them, and the gentle hills that sloped down to the shore, was the incessant soothing mutter of the ocean. C.J. had taken the photograph, the one he had at the station, not many clicks from his planetside home, and he loved it down here.

But now? Now, every shushing moment of peace seemed to echo, amplified by the roaring void where Anderson should be. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fucking fair. They’d been happy in each other’s arms, hadn’t they? It hadn’t been sweet—Anderson was too driven and C.J. too desperate for sweet—but there’d been a chance, hadn’t there? Sweetness would come? Tenderness would come? That was the way of things when you loved someone, right? It had been that way with his first girlfriend before university, and it had been that way with Jensen. First there was the thundering lightning strike of lust, and then there was a sweet, cleansing rain of kindness, right?

There would be kindness, C.J. swore. There would be tenderness, sweetness, soft touches, quiet moments—there had to be hope for that to come, or there was no hope at all.

“I can’t go,” C.J. mumbled against Jensen’s chest. “Let me see if I can bring them back. If I can bring the holos back, and he has someone, he’s not alone,
then
I can go.”

Jensen had sworn under his breath but had let the matter drop. C.J. had gone home, and every hour not spent with Anderson since then—and there were a lot, because Anderson was in constant therapy and near constant sedation—had been spent looking at the reconstruction of the holo-keyboard on his coffee table and trying to put together the puzzle of keystrokes that had led to the annihilation of Anderson’s second family.

Every time he thought he had it, thought he could reconstruct the sequence of keystrokes before the final, fatal two, his vision was impeded by the fight between Anderson and Alpha, the deadly, bloody mess of violence and suppressed sex that stripped Anderson of his illusions and his humanity and his dignity, right down to the pitiful end, when he woke up and called uselessly for his friends.

And that was where C.J. was now. Sitting on the couch between the four white walls and arched doorways of his bungalow, staring desperately at the monitor. He was trying to see everything at once—the keyboard between Alpha’s body and Anderson’s hand, the data that was scrambled by the multiple hits of their bodies against the console, and the logical sequence of the entire thing to see what it would have been if killing every hologram on the ship had been their intention in the first place. He was failing dismally. But still, he had no intention of quitting until Cassie barged her way into his home with nothing more than a “Little brother, are you home?”

C.J., who hadn’t realized she’d come back planetside, was startled into looking up. “Yeah, Cassidy. Where the hell else would I be?”

There was something in Cassie’s face then, something rough and painful. “C.J.,” she said softly, “you look like hell. In fact, I think hell would kick you out for your smell alone. How long have you been here?”

C.J. blinked, feeling dizzy now that he was looking away from his project, which was scattered across the kitchen table, for the first time in…. “Oh Christ, is it morning?”

“It’s afternoon, you dumbass. I couldn’t get a hold of you because….” She grimaced and looked at the offline monitors on the kitchen table. “Because apparently you have made sure no one could, and when I called Jensen to see where you were, he was almost frantic because you missed your visit with—”

C.J. launched himself wildly off of the couch and then fell on his ass. “Oh holy shit, Anderson! He’s probably frantic!”

“He’s fine! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

C.J. blinked. “I can’t feel my legs.”

Cassidy cried like a man, C.J. thought analytically. She didn’t wring her hands and search for a tissue and dissolve into a pretty little pout or a moue of unhappiness. She scowled like she was mad at the emotion and used the top of her shirt to wipe her eyes and just kept on talking like the whole thing wasn’t happening.

“Little brother, Anderson is fine, or, you know, as fine as you can be when your entire conscious and subconscious minds have checked out on a little break from reality to heal, okay? You show up tomorrow, or, you know, hell,
call
him tomorrow with video on the monitor, and he’ll know you haven’t forgotten him, okay? You hear me?”

C.J. nodded and did his own scowling. “I hear you. I just… I promised him I’d be there….”

“C.J., can you feel your legs now?”

C.J. grimaced. Yes, the painful tingling flooding them felt like his skin was full of hot ants. “Yeah.”

“Then get off your ass and take a goddamned shower. I’m going to cook you something and….” She looked around the kitchen with her nose wrinkled. “Maybe order some groceries or something. Or stock your refrigerator. Or, uhm, rent a flamethrower. But first, you get off your ass and get in the fucking shower, okay?”

C.J. wobbled up to a standing position and tried to focus on her. He’d missed his appointment with Anderson? But he’d come home the day before and sat at the table and….

“I was just about to figure it out…,” he mumbled, feeling like a little kid.

“
Cyril John Poulson
,
get your fucking ass in the goddamned shower
now!”

And he forgot what he was about to figure out. Leaning against the walls, he limped off to the shower, not able to think of much of anything at all.

He was a little better after the shower, but his body still ached all over from sitting cramped over the coffee table, focused on his obsession. Hell—his bladder still ached from holding it for what felt like a thousand years. And now, listening to Cassie rant as she pawed through his kitchen fixing up the groceries she’d had delivered into something that passed for food, he found the ache in his head surpassed everything else.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled through a mouthful of eggs and toast. Heaven. Fresh eggs, fresh bread, spread that wasn’t rancid—it was heaven! “I didn’t mean to worry you. Just got caught up—”

“Bullshit, Cyril,” Cassidy snapped, sitting down hard with a hot cup of Hermes-Eight coffee. Another thing that came along with the first colonists, but the particularly rich soil of Hermes-Eight gamma made it much more potent.

“It’s not bullshit! I was….”

Cassie shook her head. “No, that part I believe. What you’re doing to yourself here,
that’s
what’s bullshit.”

“If I can just… just get it to work, Cass….” C.J.’s voice was wobbling again, and he squinted at the clock, wondering how long he’d gone without sleep.

Cassie breathed out hard through her nose. “C.J., you ever think about the word ‘bullshit’?”

C.J. blinked. “Not particularly.”

“Do we
have
bulls on any of the Hermes-Eight planets?”

“Uhm, no.” They had a mammal with the potential to give milk and be used for meat, but it had a two-chamber stomach unlike the old Terran cows. It was also a burgundy-colored pinniped, with flippers instead of hooves, because it spent its time in many of the vast seas of Hermes-Eight-Prime.

“No. We don’t have bovine quadrupeds with a stud ‘bull’ to actually defecate on the surface of any planet in the Hermes-Eight system, do we? Do you know why we say ‘bullshit’?”

C.J. was staring at her like he used to stare at animated vids as a child. “Not a clue.”

“Because an entire collective arrived here in cryogenic suspension after carrying the
memory
of bulls and their shit to this system from over forty light-years away. They arrived here and built a life here and even improved upon space travel and technology so that our system, unlike some others we’ve heard of, is totally up on the ecological dos and don’ts that almost destroyed our home planet, but they were still a
collective
, and they still retained things. Things like… I don’t know, movies that you watch and books that you read, a lot of them originated on old Terra because our ancestors left us with a memory of those things, just like they left us with the memory of bulls and shit. Do you know what Anderson’s mining colony remembered?”