Illuminae (The Illuminae Files #1)(93)

I do have several queries, however, as to the means by which you acquired your data. I wonder if we might chat live via messager. Off the BeiTech grid.

I will be using my personal IM service at 8:00 p.m. this evening [Terran Standard]. I’m sure a group with your collective abilities will have few difficulties accessing it.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Frobisher, L.
Executive Director
BeiTech Acquisitions Division

Surveillance footage summary,
prepared by Illuminae Group Analyst ID 7213-0089-DN

It’s been eight days since Acting Captain Syra Boll heard from her crew that far, far behind them they had detected an explosion of such magnitude that it could only mean one thing. Eight days since she made an unthinkably foolish choice—since she made the only choice she could live with—and turned the Hypatia around.

Seven days since the Hypatia swept the debris fields and found the impossible. Kady Grant, half-dead in one of the Alexander’s only two surviving escape pods. From the other, Sergeant Kyra Tan howled threats at them and all their mortal descendents, and with reluctance, they left her where they found her.

Seven days since they reeled their savior in, left her in Shuttle Bay 1B to wait and see if Phobos Beta would come calling for her, or if she’d live.

After the first day, the symptoms of acute radiation poisoning began to recede, and she was able to uncurl a little, to move. To walk a slow lap of the shuttle bay, listening to her footsteps echo in the distance. And eventually to curl up on her hard bed once more, and wait.

It really didn’t look like victory.

The shuttle bay footage is of particularly high quality; the technicians monitoring her were nervous, made sure they could capture every pixel. But she showed no symptoms, and obediently offered her arm for a blood sample when the doctor made his house calls, wrapped head to foot in his bright green plastic suit.

No Phobos Beta. No hallucinated fears. Everything she feared had already come true. Hallucinations simply couldn’t beat the real thing.

This transcript begins at 16:22 hours, when a loud thunk echoes around the shuttle bay, signaling the airlock seal has been broken. With a long, low rumble the door begins to cycle open, light streaming in through the crack. She simply lies there, gazing into space, arms wrapped around herself.

A voice rises over the door’s rumble—male, teenaged, impatient. “Let me in, before I—”

Though she’s lying still on the bed, there’s a different quality to her stillness now. She heard the voice. She knows exactly who it sounds like. And the knowing, the remembering, cuts like a knife, because she knows it isn’t true.

The voice again, lifted to a shout: “Kady!”

She pushes upright like an old woman, one hand braced against the cold benchtop, levering herself up with a wince, until she sits. Then, deliberately, she swings her legs over the edge, so she’s sitting upright.

Second Lieutenant Ezra Mason stumbles through the door and comes to a halt a few steps inside the shuttle bay. She’s never seen him like this—in a clean UTA uniform, pips on his sleeve, hair cut regulation short, one arm in a cast from wrist to elbow.

He holds a battered and familiar datapad in his other hand.

She stares at him, expressionless. Eventually, she blinks slowly, draws the only possible conclusion. “I am sick. I thought the afflicted were supposed to see things that scared them.”

He shakes his head, walks closer slow and careful, as though he might spook her.

“You’re not sick,” he whispers.

“You’re dead,” she points out, voice rusty with disuse.

“Just a little messed up,” he murmurs, lifting his hand to show her the cast. “I took a beating when they attacked the shuttle bay, but I got out with the evac group.”

She shakes her head, matter-of-fact in her contradiction. “Even if you made it over here, Captain Boll flushed all the Cyclone pilots out the airlock. I couldn’t get the full name list, but Mikael—Chatter—from your wing, he was there. You would have been there, too.”

A shadow passes across his features at that. “I couldn’t fly my Cyclone over, not with a broken arm. I was med-evaced in one of the shuttles.” A ghost of his old smile. “Once I found out you’d flown over to the Alexander, I wanted to follow you. Tried to steal a ship, and when that didn’t work, I busted my way onto the bridge.” He pauses to shake his head. “I tried to make them turn around to get you. They brigged me.” His voice breaks. “I’m sorry, Kades. I shouldn’t have let them leave you.”

She considers that, holding perfectly still. Turning the logic over in her head, examining it from every angle. Analytical mind looking for the flaw that’ll tell her she’s hallucinating. That she’s sick, or dead, or still in the escape pod, submerged in fever dreams.

But she can’t find it.

“Ezra.” The dawn of hope in her whisper.

He nods, swallowing hard.

She pushes to her feet, swaying, and the movement seems to release him—the next moment he’s running across the shuttle bay, watched by the debrief crew in the doorway who know better than to move a muscle.

She steps forward, one foot, then the other, and then he reaches her, and they come together with a crash. Her arms curl up around his neck, and his mouth finds hers like he’s drowning and she’s air, and her feet come clean off the ground as the world is forgotten.