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  The girl nodded. “They’re made so they can take thirty people one light-year.” She wrinkled her nose. “Which is dumb, because they’re programmed for ten light-years away.”

  Anderson giggled. “Oh God, that would be awful! A big ship, full of skeletons all wasted away!”

  “Ewww! Anderson! Really?”

  “Here,” Anderson said with awe, forgetting he’d just tried to gross his sister out. “I want to touch it. It’s so shiny.”

  He must not have realized he was near one of the outer sensors, because he came up close to it, by the door, and put out a long-fingered hand. “It’s so smooth,” he marveled. “It doesn’t feel sturdy enough to go up into the atmosphere.” He turned to his sister then, frowning. “Isn’t there someplace closer they could go?”

  Mel nodded. “Yeah, they’re going to all be reprogrammed tomorrow. There’s a space station on Arachnos-Twelve that’s less than a light-year, but it’s really small—the council isn’t sure it could hold everyone in the colony.” She rolled her eyes. “But still, no skeletons in the ghost ship. Won’t that be nice?”

  Anderson grinned at her. “But it wouldn’t make such a good vid, right? Where are they programmed for now?”

  “Hermes-Eight-Prime. It’s about ten light-years away, but they’re trying to find a space station between the two. I guess, in a pinch, we really only need to put fifteen people on a shuttle. With some recycling and reclamation….”

  “Zzzzzzzz….” Anderson was pretending to sleep, and his sister was midway to smacking him on the back of the head when something caught her eye.

  There was a sudden flash of light across the sky, and both of them turned. “Oh God,” Mel muttered, almost instantly terrified. “What’s that?”

  “Was that a ship landing? I didn’t think there was one scheduled.” Anderson was younger—twelve. He wasn’t nearly as conscious of his own mortality. “Hey, look—there’s another one. It’s closer!”

  “Oh God,” his sister repeated, and their eyes fixed in horror to a far off mark beyond the censor’s scope.

  “Oh God,” Anderson echoed hollowly. “God… Mel… was that the school?”

  She didn’t answer him. Instead, she grabbed his arm and hauled him to the door of the shuttle. There was a change then, as the censors aligned themselves to both indoor and outdoor footage.

  “Can we focus on the in and the out, Cass?” C.J. asked tensely, and the image on the monitor split into two sections, one showing six different directions outside the shuttle and the other showing the four quadrants of the ship.

  Inside the ship, Anderson was unceremoniously thrown through the door by his sister. “Don’t touch anything,” she snapped, and then, looking up, her eyes narrowed and she made an instant decision. Without hesitation, she reached across the bridge console and grabbed something oblong and shiny.

  “What was that?” Cassie asked, and C.J. squinted at the object in Mel’s hand.

  “That’s the remote launch control,” he muttered, and he heard Cass gasp.

  “Where are you going?” Anderson was asking, his voice shrill. “Mel, don’t leave me!”

  “I’m going to go get our family!” Melody said, her voice so certain that it left no room for doubt. “Stay here. I’ll be back, okay?”

  “Mel, don’t leave me!”

  “I’m going to get Jen and Mandy and Mom and Dad if I can! Stay here!”

  Melody took off, and the shuttle door closed behind her. Anderson watched her go through one of the windows by the seat she’d all but thrown him in. He was having trouble tracking her with the limited scope of the tiny window when something caught his attention.

  Cassie and C.J. watched her go through the fisheye of the outer sensor. She took off running and was almost out of range when suddenly she stopped.

  “What’s that?” C.J. muttered. “Cass, can you pull back and see what stopped her?”

  Even as the girl on the screen turned around and started running toward the shuttle, the camera pulled back, and C.J. and Cassie both gasped.

  There was a wall of fire surging toward her, coming from what looked to be the annihilation of half the planetoid by a huge projectile.

  “Oh God,” C.J. muttered. “She’s stopped running. Why’d she stop running?”

  She should have been running. The girl on the screen should have been running for her life, but instead, she had the little oblong remote in her hand and was pushing buttons feverishly, looking at the ship with a quivering chin and a very adult resolution.

  “She’s firing up the ship,” Cassie said.

  And even though he knew what happened next, C.J. started to urge her on, “Run, dammit, run dammit, run, dammit….”

  “She can’t make it! She’s firing up the shuttle,” Cass said like it made perfect sense.

  It didn’t, not to C.J.

  “She can make it! C’mon, Melody, you ran in school! You can make it!”

  “She can’t make it!”

  The shuttle was making starting noises, and Melody still stood there, one hand to her mouth and one locked on the remote as she finished the launch sequence.

  “Run, dammit, run, you selfish bitch, run!”

  “C.J., she can’t make it!”

  On the shuttle, Anderson was looking around frantically as the systems started firing up around him, and the instant acceleration had him pinned to his seat, even as he fumbled to strap himself in. By the time he had settled himself so that he wasn’t being tossed around like a pebble in an empty shoe and pressed his nose to the window again….

  They both stopped screaming at the long-dead girl and watched through the shuttle’s censors as the planetoid disappeared in an explosion into the vacancies of space.

  “She could have made it,” C.J. said, wiping his face. “She could have been in there with him.”

  “She couldn’t have made it, Cyril,” Cassidy muttered brokenly. They were both riveted to the screen now, to the series of destructive explosions that were the entire series of small inhabited planetoids that made up the colony. On the inside camera, Anderson was sitting, his face plastered to the tiny window, weeping, screaming heedlessly, his face twisting, his nose running, a frightened child in a big, shiny box, about to hurtle into the empty, echoing depths of the biggest black of them all.

  He stopped screaming after about fifteen minutes.

  “What’s he looking for?” Cassidy wondered as the boy kept his face pressed to the glass of the shuttle’s thick window.

  “Anyone.”

  They watched silently, neither one of them facing the other, as Anderson fell asleep. Without comment, Cassidy fast-forwarded, and the time stamp on the video said that forty-five minutes had passed in real time before the remains of the asteroid belt disappeared and the shuttle was in open space.

  Anderson jerked on the screen, and Cassie slowed the film down as the automated voice told him that if he wanted to, he could go to the bathroom before the jump to light speed.

  “He doesn’t even try to reprogram it,” Cassie said quietly.

  “He doesn’t have the first idea how.”

  Anderson came back and sat down. This time, his sleep—helped along by the disorientation of the jump to hyperspace—lasted much longer.

  “What’s he doing?” C.J. asked. “With his hands?”

  Cassie’s voice was toneless. “That’s what you do when you’re holding someone small on your lap. He’s dreaming about his little sister.”

  “What’s he saying?”

  Anderson was mumbling in his sleep. Cassie turned up the volume and slowed it down, and they heard him clearly. “Mel, get them. Get them. Get the family. Don’t leave me alone.”

  Cassie turned the volume down after that, and they fast-forwarded the recording until Anderson sat up and looked blankly at the empty space in his lap, to his side, and in front of him. As Anderson started screaming, the outside censors showed, very clearly, the infinite black of ten years of hyperspace, with Anderson’s v
oice echoing inside.

  “She could have made it,” C.J. said, his voice so clogged he couldn’t recognize it. He stood up and steadied himself on the back of his chair. “That selfish bitch, she could have made it.”

  “Cyril, she couldn’t!”

  “She could have made it!”

  “She couldn’t. All she could do was save his life!”

  “She didn’t even try!” he shouted, and Cassie stood up and shouted back at him.

  “Of course she did! Do you think she wanted to leave him there in the cold and the black? Oh God, Cyril, do you think I’d leave you there in the cold and the black if I had even a chance to be with you?”

  “She left him, Cassie!” C.J. whimpered, so hurt to the core of him that he couldn’t stop weeping to save his life.

  “She had to, baby.” Cassie moved toward him, wrapping her arms around his waist with only a little hesitation. “Cyril, she couldn’t save their family. All she could do was save him and keep the colony alive in the memories on that ship.”

  “God, Cassie… tell me you would have tried. Tell me you wouldn’t have….”

  Cassie sobbed brutally against his chest. “I’m not that strong, baby… God help me, God help us both, I would have tried… I would have tried… just so you wouldn’t be alone….”

  They clung together like the children they used to be, children just like the ones they’d watched live and die, and sobbed.

  On the screen, Anderson kept screaming while the tiny ship continued its long journey in the fathomless dark of hyperspace, where not even a star’s light could escape.

  Chapter 10

  Growing Accustomed

  C.J. SAT in the corner of his couch and drained the three fingers of fermented Hermes-Eight-Gamma grain alcohol, wishing he had more ice. Cassie’s glass—drained, and drained again—sat on the couch end table, because when he’d told her he had smuggled alcohol into his room and asked her if she wanted some, she hadn’t even bothered to scold him but had just asked for more.

  She’d been wobbly when he’d called Marshall to come get her, and C.J. wasn’t feeling too steady himself.

  Four hours of work and four hours of drinking wasn’t his usual ratio, but he supposed he could manage it, after a day like this one.

  They’d tried to go back—they had. They’d pulled themselves together, laughed self-consciously, hugged each other, and then fast-forwarded through the film as they watched Anderson adapt to his new surroundings and try to be “normal.” They watched him pull up files, start a school cycle, a sleep cycle, and finally a play cycle on the holodeck.

  They watched him start to talk to the holograms.

  They watched him realize that he was losing it when he started answering back.

  They watched him wake up in quick time, five hundred times at least, to sit up and scream. They listened to the audio until, around the seventh or eighth time, he stopped making any sounds at all.

  They watched him start tinkering with the holodeck. They recorded everything he did, took notes, as it were, and sent the info to Julio—even as Anderson started to program his very first construct.

  It looked just like Melody. The long, butter-colored braid, big green eyes, the narrow-chinned, wide-cheekboned face. They could see it taking form right down to a small mole on the girl’s cheek, and then they watched as he wandered off of the holodeck, presumably to the bathroom, and came back.

  The look on his face as he saw the hologram and realized what she really was—there were no words to describe that sort of devastation.

  “Oh, Anderson….”

  The voice came from behind the two of them, because they hadn’t been able to speak since they’d sat down again, sniffling, trying to pretend that this was just one more day at work, and both C.J. and Cassie whipped their heads around to look behind them.

  All four of the holograms were sitting behind them in various positions, from cross-legged to leaning on each other, watching what they were watching with rapt eyes. C.J. had wanted to ask them how long they’d been there. Had they seen him and Cassie melt down on each other and cling together like lost kittens? Had they seen Anderson, alone on that ship, screaming and weeping and so very utterly alone?

  But he couldn’t ask them that, because to a one, to Bobby and the stoic Henry, they were crying, wiping imaginary cheeks on imaginary clothes that felt real enough to them.

  “Stop the film, Cass,” C.J. said gruffly, and she didn’t even try to argue with him. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said to Anderson’s friends. “I didn’t… I didn’t think you’d want to be here for this.”

  Kate shook her head—she’d been the one to speak in the first place. “It’s okay. I just… I knew, I mean, we all had to know, right? But this… I feel it… in my stomach, I feel how awful….” She pulled in a deep, shuddering breath and choked a little sob.

  C.J. nodded. “Do you guys have alcohol? Holographic grain pulp? Anything?”

  “Wine,” came Risa’s muffled voice. “Anderson liked to synthesize wine.”

  “Good. Then I suggest you all go get yourself some of that. We’ll see you tomorrow. Let us know you’re coming, and we’ll bring chairs.”

  “Where are you going?” Kate asked, seeing him stand up. He offered his hand to his sister, who, again, took it with a frightening lack of resistance or even questioning.

  “We’re going to get really drunk,” he said with decision, and Cassie said, “Oh, thank God.”

  And now, four hours later, Marshall had already come by to collect his wayward wife with hardly a flinch.

  “Bad day?” he asked as he came into C.J.’s quarters. He didn’t sound particularly surprised, but he did raise his eyebrows when Cassie started to sniffle.

  “Remember the ice-piss lizards?” she asked, sounding forlorn.

  “Yeah, sweetheart. How could I forget the ice-piss lizards?” He took both her hands in his and pulled her up and into his long arms.

  “I miss the ice-piss lizards,” Cassie bemoaned, her voice muffled in her husband’s chest. “I really fucking miss the ice-piss lizards. Could we have another shipment of ice-piss lizards, just for me?”

  Marshall rubbed her arms and looked over her head to meet C.J.’s gaze helplessly.

  “Really bad day,” he said softly, and C.J. nodded.

  “Don’t watch those recordings alone, Marshall,” he warned. “And don’t make Cass watch them over again. And,” he added before Marshall could even think it, “don’t ask me to do it either.”

  Marshall nodded. “I’ll get Michelle. She’ll want to see them, and she has better booze than you.”

  “But not today,” Cassie whimpered. “Today I need my alien man, with the big octo-peter.”

  C.J.’s eyes bugged. “Oh Jesus, Marshall… make her stop….”

  Marshall’s normally nearly albino skin suddenly washed a really vibrant lavender. “It’s… uh… my species has this sort of prong, to, uh, stimulate ovulation… it’s not really, uh, tentacle-y or anything….”

  C.J. laughed helplessly into his Scorch, as the locals called it, and waited for Marshall to drag his wife away. She was sobbing on his shoulder by the time they cleared the vacuum seal on the door.

  And now it was him, alone, but he didn’t know if he would ever call himself alone again. He listened to the space station whirring around him, heard the noises of people going about their business out in the corridor, and thought of the frenetic round of activity there in the hub of the station. Thought of the three planets within twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours away, and of the sturdy ships and the many escape pods that would evacuate the station. It was possible—the worst was always possible—but it was so highly improbable that anything that could destroy all that life would actually spare one unlucky soul to bear the burden of the dead.

  Not so with Anderson.

  C.J. couldn’t help it, he remembered being eye to eye with him that morning, of watching him lick that full lower lip nervously. He though
t of the texture of his fair hair between C.J.’s fingers—adult’s hair, but fine and smooth. He thought of the edge of Anderson’s cheekbones, the depth of his eyes with their rim of dark brown lashes, and the total trust he’d laid down in C.J.’s lap as he slept.

  He smelled young, like the human equivalent of baby powder, and his neck was so slender, and his collarbones were prominent and vulnerable. He made C.J. want to wrap his body around all of that tenderness, all of that vulnerability, and protect him and protect him and never let anything hurt him again.

  And that made C.J. think of Alpha, and in the haze of alcohol, C.J. couldn’t lie, not even to himself. Anderson he wanted to protect, but Alpha? Oh God…. His body had been taut and muscular inside that jumpsuit, and C.J. had felt—how could he not? It had been a slug to the gut, an obscene proposition from an obscene amount of testosterone. And still, it made C.J. hard. It made his cock hard, and it gave him visions of lying, face down, his ass in the air, as that fucker rode him and fucked him and pounded him and….

  His eyes were closed, his groin ached, and he reached under the waistband of his spiffy faux-denim pants with the holographic pictures of space ships etched on like graffiti, and grabbed his cock with his hand.

  Oh God… it felt so good….

  He squeezed through his underwear, the vision behind his eyes of Alpha grabbing him brutally, manhandling him, jerking him off with ruthless efficiency. The vision made him groan, and he set his glass down and reached his hand—still chilled from the ice—under his form-fitting breathable synth-cotton shirt and pinched his nipple and groaned again. He tried pinching it harder, like Alpha would, and his cock jumped in his hand. His cock jumped but his nipple ached, so he tried rubbing it with his thumb instead. He thought of Anderson, with pale, soft hands, doing the same thing, and his nipple started to tingle, and his cock ached even more.

  With a groan and a sigh, he dragged his pants and underwear down his hips and propped his feet up on the coffee table, spreading his body to the open air as he grabbed his cock again. He had lube in the bedroom, but he felt too good to move, too good to do anything but stroke it, squeezing at the base and along the shaft and then squeezing his skin around the crown, and slowly, slowly, back down again.