A Solid Core of Alpha (16 page)

Marshall made a fist-pumping motion at his side and a long, drawn out, “Yessssss!”

C.J. shook his head. “And I’m supposed to be the dumb kid!” C.J. muttered. “Come on, you big doofus. Let’s get to the damned ship.”

A
NDERSON
took them into the house—not with codes, but with a key that he had to run to C.J.’s room to fetch out of his pocket.

C.J. looked at the key blankly. “That’s a real key,” he said, and Anderson blushed.

“It’s the key to my parents’ house,” he said after a moment, the words hitting the air like stones into a still pond of water—the kind of pond with a monster living underneath.

C.J. blinked. “Really?”

Anderson nodded. “It was something my friends couldn’t replicate, and it just seemed like, you know, if anyone unfriendly wanted to go see them, they couldn’t get there without me.”

It was such an odd mixture of what was tangible and what existed in Anderson’s own mind that C.J. could only nod. “Sounds… logical,” he said after a moment, but when he looked up, Julio was using his fingers as a sort of cause and effect chart, and C.J. was relatively sure that that little talisman in Anderson’s hand was the key to the tangled mess that was Anderson’s own mind.

Still, they followed Anderson inside, and Bobby ran up to greet him. They hugged warmly, and then Bobby said eagerly, “So, what was it like? You saw a new vid. Was it as good as you hoped?”

Anderson looked at C.J. in embarrassment. “I fell asleep,” he apologized. “The gravity is heavier here. I’ll have to program that into the ship. I’m going to be asleep a
lot
.”

Bobby nodded, still excited. “I can do it. Hey, you brought someone new!”

Anderson turned to Julio, who was regarding what he knew to be a hologram with wide eyes. “Yeah, this is C.J.’s friend Julio.”

Bobby gave C.J. a genuine smile. “Well then, that’s okay. C.J. takes care of you. Any friend of his is a friend of ours.”

I’ll just bet
, C.J. thought dryly, but his smile was real as well. “Thanks, Bobby. Uhm, Julio is under strict orders. We’re going to be in and out, and he’s allowed to ask you and Kate and the others questions about your programming, and you can show him how it was done, but he’s not allowed to interfere, right, Julio?”

Julio swallowed. “It would be like dicking with a masterpiece, man. This old man’s just here to take notes, okay?”

Bobby nodded, then grinned irrepressibly. “Hey, wait until I tell Kate that I’m a masterpiece.”

“She’ll say you’re a piece, all right,” Kate muttered, walking in from what looked to be a hallway. The inside of the house was bright and airy. The floors were made of hard wood, and there were big, intricately looped rugs on the floor and a gathering of soft-covered furniture in what looked to be a living room. The sky outside the windows was early morning, coming in from the direction of the kitchen window.

The table itself was a bright, shiny red-colored wood with a bowl of fruit on the top of it, and a narrow kitchen was in a little nook behind it. The ship’s food synthesizer was the main appliance, and a mini hand-water fresher and recycler was the secondary one, but there were cupboards for dishes and decorative towels, and the tile was done in a merry little pattern of Earth farm animals.

“This is nice,” C.J. said to the general company. “Did you do all the decorating, Anderson?”

Kate snorted. “As if. That was me and Risa.”

Julio had pulled out a little electronic pocket tablet, and he was so surprised that he fumbled it. Bobby caught it before it fell to the ground and handed it back smoothly, and Julio took it with a distracted “thank you” and then almost dropped it again when he realized who had caught it.

After that, it took him a minute of stammering before he managed his question. “You guys… you did the decorating?”

Kate nodded, and Julio opened and closed his eyes and said, “It’s really nice. Uhm, was there anything else you guys did independently?”

Bobby shrugged. “Pretty much anything Anderson does, we can do. Pick out vids, choose what we’re going to do today, check the shuttle functions, program the deck….”

Julio had to sit down. “Okay, Bobby, Kate, could you get the others, and maybe we can have a little powwow? I’d like to know what, exactly, the five of you programmed.”

“Four,” Kate corrected absently. “Only four of us programmed stuff.”

“That’s right,” Anderson said quietly. “That’s right. Alpha never programmed anything.”

“He couldn’t,” Kate replied to Anderson. “We didn’t know how to give him that, and….” She blushed. “That’s not what we were worried about when we made him anyway.”

“Wait a second,” C.J. said slowly. His eyes were getting a little glassy—and from the looks of it, so were Julio’s. “When you say ‘we’, you’re talking about…?”

“Bobby and me,” Kate said, her voice so matter-of-fact that it was clear she couldn’t possibly know how huge this was. “We made Henry, and we made Alpha.”

A
NDERSON
didn’t last long in the shuttle, but for a while, he sat and talked animatedly with his friends (and after watching him do that, C.J. had an even harder time thinking of them as holos.) Julio sat and made furious notations on his tablet. C.J. and Marshall supervised the last of the file transfer and then looked at each other grimly.

The easy stuff was over. The next day, the real work would begin.

C.J. had been thinking about it, and he pulled Marshall aside before he escorted Anderson back to C.J.’s quarters. “He shouldn’t be here,” C.J. said quietly, and Marshall blinked.

“We might need his help!”

“Then we’ll ask for his help when we need it. Think about it, Marshall, what’s the first thing on those recordings going to be?”

Marshall blinked. “The emergency start-up feed on the mining colony.” They both met horrified gazes and shuddered. “Yeah, I get it. Michelle will be back tomorrow, and Cassie wanted to start him on an exercise regimen in the pool to help him get used to the gravity and beef him up a little.” They both looked to where Anderson had started to wilt into the overstuffed chair that he’d been sitting in while telling the others what he’d seen in the space station. “We’ll steer him that way while we get stuff sorted and then have him in for….”

They both sighed. They were managing the life of a grown man around the reality he’d created for himself. It felt… odd, and a little wrong, and it didn’t sit well with either one of them.

But the alternative—they’d seen the medical scans of the alternative, and that was unacceptable.

“We’ll have him in to ask questions and have supervised visits in the afternoons.”

C.J. nodded and then caught Kate’s attention. “Kate, I’m going to take Anderson back to my quarters. He’s practically asleep there as he sits. You can watch him on the monitor, but really, the station is down for the night, and we want to get his internal clock online, at least while he’s here, okay?”

Kate nodded. “Will you let him come back before….” She shifted and looked uncomfortable. “You
are
going to delete us, aren’t you?”

C.J. looked startled. “No!” he told her, and the relief that flood her strong-boned face practically generated its own heat. “No. Why would we do that? You’re Anderson’s friends. That would just be cruel.”

Her smile was really lovely, and C.J. had a moment to think that Anderson must have loved someone with a strong face and a lovely smile, because he seemed to have invested a lot in Kate the hologram.

“Good,” she said. “I… I’m glad to be here. Uhm….” And there was that smile again. “Is there any way we could get some new vids in here, then? Some comedy ones? We’ve been watching the same shit
forever
.”

C.J. had to laugh. Who knew? Even holograms got bored.

H
E
WASN
’
T
laughing the next morning.

He’d taken Anderson to his quarters and prepped the couch for him and then settled down to his console to do some work. He didn’t mind being Anderson’s de facto guardian, but he didn’t want to let Marshall down either.

He wasn’t surprised when Anderson woke up screaming silently less than twelve hours after the last time, and he was ready to rush in there and put his hands on the young man’s face and smooth his hair back and tell him that it was okay—someone was there.

He was unprepared for Anderson’s warmth in the dark, and the way he smelled spicy like C.J.’s soap, and like the chocolate pie that C.J. had bought for him after they’d left the shuttle, and like Chips, the gamma bird, who smelled like lavender and mint. (None of the residents in the Hermes system had any idea why, but it was one of the reasons the birds made such outstanding pets.)

Anderson took one of those deep, shuddering, post-sobbing breaths, and C.J. stayed there, crouched at his feet, hands on Anderson’s cheeks, for just a moment too long.

Anderson reached up and laced his fingers with C.J.’s, and C.J.’s breathing hitched. He really was a pretty kid—those pouty, full lips were
so
lush, and the dark brown eyes… mmm. C.J. looked at his own light green eyes in his coffee-cream skin every morning. Seeing the reverse contrast—dark brown eyes, pale skin—it was interesting, alluring, and so, so sexy.

Anderson dropped his chin then, so he could look out of those sexy eyes sideways, and C.J.’s heart sped up a little. Anderson knew it, too, the little shit. He knew he was pretty. He might have grown up alone, but he’d grown up with vids and pictures. He
knew
he was being cute. “I’m sorry I keep doing this,” he apologized. “It’s awfully kind of you to keep calming me down.”

C.J.’s sigh came from his toes. Anderson may have known he was being cute, but he was also being totally sincere. “I don’t like seeing people in pain,” he answered back with his own sincerity. “If I’d been good at that, I would have been like Cassidy, lots of degrees in medical science, instead of just the two in engineering.” And odds were, he thought with a little pang, he’d still be with Jensen, but it was nine years too late for that.

“Your sister just likes to be in charge,” Anderson said. “They get bossy that way.”

C.J. blinked. Interesting. “You had one of those?”

Anderson nodded and changed the angle of his chin so he wasn’t flirting anymore. “I had three, but one was older. She was….” He stopped. “I don’t have any words just yet. Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” C.J. told him, trying to reassure. He tried to move his hands, but Anderson captured them tighter and moved them to his knees.

“Do you like men, C.J.?” he asked, and C.J. felt himself blushing in the dark.

“I sort of play both sides,” he said, and now he was the one with his face turned away and his eyes looking front.

He was surprised at the wry twist to Anderson’s mouth. “Everyone seems to,” he said enigmatically, and C.J. shrugged.

“Hermes is sort of an open-minded place, all three planets. No crazy religious sects, no scary politics. You work your job, you contribute to the community, and you get enough credits to play. You feel like hibernating in your cave all day, and they feed you and ignore you. I’ve seen some of the footage of old Earth. I’d rather live here.”

Anderson smiled then. “Good,” he said. “Good. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that. I was told….”

“By who?”

Anderson shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about him, okay? He’s not a nice person. I would rather just… just sit here.” He smiled prettily, the way C.J. had smiled at Jensen.

“Okay, Anderson,” C.J. said softly, a shiver of foreboding creeping up his spine. “We don’t have to talk about him. That’s fair. What do you want to talk about?”

Anderson’s smile was soft and sweet. “Tell me about you,” he said with such utter guilelessness that C.J. found he had no choice.

He sat up then, moved to the corner of the couch, and Anderson simply lay down, as he had the night before, and rested his head in C.J.’s lap. C.J. found himself talking about planetside and growing up. His parents were still alive, and he and Cass and Marshall found themselves shanghaied into family dinners whenever they were downside. And in the quiet dark, as he ran his fingers through this pretty kid’s hair, he found himself confessing that he loved doing that. He loved going out in his dad’s catamaran on the great blue lake that broke up one of the eight continents below, and he loved hiking through the purple forests of the Amethyst continent with his father. He also had fun explaining to Anderson that someone really
must
have had a sense of humor when they arrived to colonize, because there was also Emerald, Garnet, Sapphire, Diamond, Ruby, Opal, and Pearl.

“It could have been a lot worse,” he said philosophically. “All of the major land masses and cities on Hermes-Beta are named after flowers. I swear to God, I’ve got a cousin who lives in Fuchsia.” Anderson’s quiet laughter against C.J.’s knees did nothing to relieve the intimacy of the moment.

“C.J.?” Anderson said after a pause.

C.J.’s hand didn’t stop stroking his hair. “Yeah?”

“How crazy am I?”

C.J. swallowed hard, and his hand stilled and rested on Anderson’s shoulder. “I’m afraid the vote’s still out on that one, baby,” he said truthfully.

“Why won’t you let me sleep in my shuttle?”

Oh God. “Because he was hurting you.”

“What if I deserved it?”

C.J. scrubbed his face with his hands. “What on Earth could you have done to deserve
that
?”

“I was weak,” Anderson whispered. “I was weak when I needed to be strong, and selfish when I needed to give, and that’s why—”

“Stop it!” C.J. snapped, his voice over-loud in the quiet dark. Chips rustled in his cage and then hummed softly and musically in his sleep. God love all gamma birds—C.J. certainly loved his. “You lived, Anderson. You lived, and you kept your colony alive in your records, and you weren’t squatting in a pile of feces eating your own hair, which is pretty much what we all expected when your ship made contact with us, okay? Everything else, man, that’s details. That’s trajectory calculations and rocket fuel. The main picture is that you lived. That’s a win right there. You are strong because you lived.”