Page 72 of Deep Alien Obsession

HISTORY IS THE ONLY INGREDIENT THAT CANNOT BE PURCHASED.

Darius's hand finds mine on the deck.

"One more thing," I say. "Have you met it before?"

SIX TIMES ABOVE FOUR HUNDRED.

That stops both of us.

ACROSS MY WHOLE SERVICE I HAVE LOGGED THAT MANY PAIRS IN THIS CONDITION. MOST WERE WORKING PARTNERSHIPS. SOME WERE SIBLINGS. ELEVEN WERE PEOPLE WHO ACTIVELY DISLIKED ONE ANOTHER AND CONTINUED WORKING TOGETHER FOR DECADES ANYWAY.

SOME WERE ALSO WHAT YOU ARE. THAT IS NOT THE REQUIREMENT. IT IS A THING THAT SOMETIMES HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO SPEND ENOUGH YEARS FINISHING EACH OTHER'S WORK.

I let that rearrange me, and it proves to be the best news anybody has given me on this planet.

Because I did not want to be chosen. My whole career has been spent being sent — assigned, contracted, dispatched to nine worlds by people with budgets — and if this had been one more assignment handed down by something bigger than me, I have no idea what I'd have done with it.

It wasn't. It was a thermos joke and a cracked reader and sixty-three days of choosing, every single day, to keep working with the same difficult man.

"I'd have got there anyway," I say.

"Yes," Darius says. "So would I. It would only have taken longer."

"How much longer?"

"Considerably. I am extremely slow."

We finish the queue at 09:40.

Tomas comes down the commissioning ladder at noon with fourteen people, a stretcher, four crates of water, and the look of a man three days without sleep and intends to have opinions about it. He takes in the socket, the shoring, Elys Marr sitting under three handlers, and my name scratched into the slate up above, and says nothing whatever for about eleven seconds.

Then: "Right. Who's bleeding and who's arrested?"

They take Marr up on the fourth trip. He does not resist. Four of his crew are alive and go up with him, and the Authority has warrants for nineteen more, and by the time they reach the surface the infrastructure emergency has been in force for three days and Horizon's assets are already under Authority seal.

Kovic resigned at 06:00, before anybody asked him to, which Rhyss says is the most useful thing he ever did.

I go up last, with Darius, on ropes and a very long ladder, and it takes nine hours, and we say very little.

Halfway there, in the dark, he says, "Four hundred and six of us."

"I know."

"We are not special."

"No," I say. "We're just the ones who filed."

CHAPTER 38

DARIUS

The surface work takes three weeks and I do almost none of it. Correct outcome, and it took me some time to accept.

They put me in a hospital for four days. I had a hole through the left arm, another in the leg from Hub Seven, three cracked ribs I could not account for, and a doctor who used the word cumulative eleven times in one conversation. Claire had a concussion serious enough that they kept her a day longer, and she spent that day running unified command from a bed with a slate on her knees until Helena confiscated it.

So the city gets rebuilt by everybody else, and I watch it from a window.

Nine mobile units and four thousand volunteers, working off a temporary line strung through capillaries nobody upstairs knew existed. Alzohn structural crews and human pipefitters in the same shift rotation, which the Authority has been proposing on paper for two centuries and never once achieved, and which happens now in about a week because there is too much work and nobody has time to mind.