A Solid Core of Alpha (24 page)

“Hey, C.J.,” Julio said after a quiet moment, when C.J. prepared to follow his sister.

“Yeah?”

“You and Anderson, maybe in the next two weeks or so, you two want to come with me down to the hub? I don’t know how he’s doing. I mean, he seems fine, or I wouldn’t ask, right? But I know me? I need a break. And you, brother? You look like death crapped you out and
then
warmed you up. What do you say? Some dancing with the party people in the hub? Could be just what the doctor ordered.”

C.J.’s shoulders straightened, and his head and heart were suddenly about ten pounds lighter. It wasn’t enough to fly, but still. “Sounds excellent, Jules. Man, remind me, I’ve got a couple of days off coming when we’re done with this shit. I want to hit the bar hard, you hear?”

Julio’s grin turned lascivious. “Maybe find someone else to hit hard, you know?”

C.J. flushed. No. Not with Anderson in their quarters, buying him soap and changing in front of him at every opportunity. Their thing might never actually become a
thing
, but C.J. wasn’t going to hurt him now by reminding Anderson that he might still be crazy.

Julio’s expression turned to sorrow. “I’m sorry, C.J., maybe not.”

C.J. grimaced. “Maybe not. But it sure will feel good to go out dancing.” He turned and looked at Cassie as she slowed her pace to wait for him. She was going to make him and Anderson something for dinner that night that didn’t come from a rations package, and he’d been looking forward to it for two days. “I’ll ask Cassie and Marshall, ’kay?”

Julio looked surprised and then happy about it. “Yeah, sure. I bet your sister can
dance
.”

C.J. found that the idea of dancing with her, just to have fun, was incredibly appealing. “I bet she can too. Hit me up later for deets, ’kay Jules? I gotta skid out, right?”

“Right. We’ll make it a plan!”

C.J. caught up with Cass and asked her if she wanted to go dancing in a week or two, and she looked at him in mild surprise and a lot of gratitude.

“Yeah, sure. I think Marshall would like to get the hell out of the rim and go do something that doesn’t suck too. Thanks for the invite, Cyril. It’s really fucking human of you.”

C.J. shrugged. “Yeah, well, you’d better not fuck up dinner, Cass, or I’m gonna tell you the wrong day and ditch out. I’ve been looking forward to something decent for two days.”

Cassie put her pert little nose in the air and rolled her eyes like a pro. “Decent. As if. It’s going to blow your little tiny pea brain out a ventilator shaft and turn your taste buds to space dust, asshole. Decent. It’s going to be fucking spec
tacular
.”

“Yeah, promises, promises. Go cook, woman. Anderson’s been packing on muscle these days, and I’m frickin’
starving
.”

Cassie sobered. “I’m glad to hear it, Cyril,” she said softly. “Anderson really is looking healthier, but you’re losing weight by the kilo. This shit we’re watching, living with him, it’s all taking a toll on my jackass of a little brother. It’s not a lot of fun to watch, ’kay?”

C.J. looped an arm around her shoulders. “You know me, Cassie, I’m never down for long.”

Cassie looked at him, and her eyes hadn’t been this gentle since his first pet, an Arachnian tarantula-kitten (a mammal with eight legs and multi-faceted eyes) had gotten crushed by their father’s commuter cycle. “C.J., you never let yourself get knocked down before. Be careful, okay? I know you’re playing mister big, responsible ‘I ain’t gonna get me some of that’, but just because you’re not hitting it doesn’t mean it’s not beating the shit out of you.”

C.J. took a breath and grinned, making himself as strong as he could so she wouldn’t worry about him. “C’mon, Cassie. You’ve met him. He’s adorable. He’s not going to hurt me.”

Cassie’s mouth thinned. “I’m not talking about on purpose, Cyril. I’m talking about what’s going to happen when he melts down and takes you with him.”

“He’s strong, Cassidy,” C.J. said, finally conceding that he had to take her seriously. “You’ve seen him. All that shit he did. He’s strong. Maybe he’s not going to melt down. Maybe he’s going to get here, and adapt, and assimilate into life, and fit right in.”

Cass stopped, seriously stopped him right there in the corridor, with the stripes leading to and from the spokes of the wheel and the myriad people passing them on either side. “You don’t really believe that, do you C.J.?” she asked, total concern in her voice.

C.J. looked at her and tried not to let the hurt he could feel welling up in his chest leak into his eyes. Failed. “It could happen,” he said weakly, and Cassie looked at him and nodded.

“Yeah, sure, baby. It could happen.”

I would have tried… just so you wouldn’t be alone….

He wondered if Cassie heard the words then, the ones she’d said after they’d watched Anderson’s sister send him into space. They were echoing in his head between them, then, and C.J. heard that she’d stand there with him, even if it meant she’d have a front row seat to watching C.J. go up in flames.

A
NDERSON
had a good time at Cassie and Marshall’s during dinner. He knew them well by now, and Michelle was there too. They talked a little about his physical therapy and how much better his stamina was than it had been a month ago when he’d arrived. Cassie and C.J. gave vague answers about how their work was progressing.

“We haven’t gotten to where the ship’s archival memory was compromised yet,” Cassidy said, dodging Michelle’s over-blunt question neatly. “We’ll let you know. But Julio is racking up discoveries for holo-science.” She looked at Anderson in real admiration then. “By the way, everything you did that can be patented will be. Julio’s making sure of that. He’s even got places to sell the patents, if you like. He says he can make you very, very rich, and you know, it doesn’t matter where you settle down, that’s going to make it easier.”

Anderson nodded. “C.J. told me,” he said. “That’s fine. Let me know what I have to sign. I, uhm, don’t know where I’m going to end up either, but… well, like you said. That’ll make it easier.”

“Do you have any ideas what you want to do?” Marshall asked, bringing Anderson a fruit juice. (Cassie and C.J. had already discussed that that was all that should be served—neither of them wanted to find out what would happen if they drank too much around Anderson. There was
boatloads
of shit they couldn’t say!

Anderson sipped and shook his head. “Holo-science sounds good,” he said with a sly little grin, and everybody laughed. Everybody except C.J.—he had visions of Anderson constructing another group of friends that he would have to abandon or that he’d have to lie to or lie about. Those visions, along with Cassie’s grim projections of a personal meltdown, made it one of the least funny things C.J. had ever heard.

They talked, they ate—Cassie cooked and seasoned a mammal-bird better than anyone at the station, everybody agreed—and talked some more. Michelle told them stories about growing up on Hermes-Eight-Beta, where the earth would stretch out with grain to the horizon and the nearest settlement was half-a-day’s air-sled ride away. Marshall told them stories of his home planet Artellus, and how the human incursion into the explored galaxies had been told like a myth in his grandfather’s time, but by the time Marshall was a child, sixty Terran years before—Marshall had a slightly longer life cycle than most humans—the space-warp drive that made space travel possible and lucrative for humans had become commonplace.

“Our sun is not nearly as bright as the one here in the Hermes-Eight system,” he said, explaining the pale skin and hair. “Most of us who want to leave Artellus end up on space stations or darker, uh, moister planets.”

Cassie looked at him drolly. “Moister? Is that a word?”

Marshall blushed, the edge of his pale ears turning lavender. “Uh, damp? Whatever. It got me double shower rations as an employee before I took over the station for the company, so I’m not going to ask which word to use.”

“You’re just going to stay moist,” Cassie said with a twist to her lips.

Marshall leaned over and whispered something that was probably most definitely lascivious in her ear, and she blushed and stopped taunting him. Anderson met C.J.’s eyes and smirked, and C.J. blushed all the way down to his toes.

C.J. and Cassie’s childhood came up, and C.J. let his sister tell his most embarrassing stories, hoping that maybe Anderson would see him as a person, a fallible one, and whatever Anderson felt for him, or thought he felt, it could be based on C.J.’s faults as well as the simple kindness of taking Anderson under his wing.

“He was awful,” Cassie said bluntly, smiling into Anderson’s eyes. “When he was eight years old, he decided that he wanted a pet. The campaign was
incessant
. Mom and Dad woke up and he’d say, ‘I want a spider-kitten’. He’d brush his teeth and say, ‘I was good, can I have a spider-kitten now?’ For three months, he couldn’t do a chore or obey a command or give up a concession without the words ‘spider-kitten’ coming out of his mouth. And finally, Mom was just at her wits’ end. She was like, ‘
Fine
, C.J., what-the-hell-ever. Dad will go out and order you a spider-kitten, but you’ve got to tell us one thing.
Why
does it have to be a spider kitten?’”

C.J. laughed. He couldn’t help it. It had been one of his better schemes.

“I didn’t say it out loud,” he said after a moment of exchanging truly evil grins with Anderson. “When did Mom tell you?”

Cassie just rolled her eyes. “Oh, she told me before Dad got home with Tuffles. She wanted me to have fair warning.”

“I give,” Anderson said, his eyes on C.J.’s face the entire time. “Why a spider-kitten?”

Cassie rolled her eyes again. “Because the damned things make this sticky-assed web, right? They cough it up like an Earth-cat coughs up hairballs. Anyway, he wanted to use them against me the next time we fought. He wanted the companionship—yeah. That was no joke—he’s loved pets, always has, and he takes good care of them too. But the reason this one
had
to be a spider-kitten was so he could put kitten-puke-silk in my hair!”

The table broke up laughing, and C.J. grinned and shrugged. “Well, what can I say, Cass. You were so much fun to tease, you know?”

“And
you
were a miserable little heathen!” she shot back. They grinned at each other, and then, somehow, the weight of the last month seemed to settle on their shoulders, pushing them closer together. She swallowed. “You turned out okay in the end,” she muttered, and he smiled back.

“Yeah, so did you.”

The dinner party broke up soon after that, and C.J. and Anderson made it back to their quarters in the quiet hum of the off-hours shift of the station.

They were right in front of C.J.’s door when Anderson stopped him by touching his shoulder.

“What?” C.J. asked, turning around with a smile.

“What part of my life did you watch today?” Anderson asked, suddenly very, very close to C.J., close enough that C.J. could feel his breath puffing lightly against his chin, and see how very dark brown his eyes were.

C.J.’s mouth went dry. “We’ve met Alpha,” he said, swallowing hard.

Anderson nodded. “I thought so. That’s why I stopped you.”

Breathe, C.J., breathe.
“Why’s that?”

“Because. When we go inside, you won’t let me do this.”

Anderson’s lips were soft, just like C.J. had dreamed. They were soft, and C.J. parted his lips eagerly before them and opened his mouth with hunger as Anderson pushed the kiss forward. C.J. welcomed Anderson in, sighing as the kiss went long and deep and wet. Anderson thrust his hips forward, and C.J. bumped up against the door. They were in a public corridor, he realized, and he opened his eyes and broke off the kiss and took a deep, gulping breath.

He thunked his head against the door and tried to keep the space station from swimming under his feet. “God, Anderson. You’re right. We can’t do that. That’s….”

“C.J.?”

“Yeah?” Because letting Anderson talk saved C.J. the trouble of unscrambling his brains.

“I closed my eyes for you. And you tasted real. When we go inside, and you sleep on your side of the bed, I want you to remember that. You tasted real. It’s the most real I’ve ever had.”

And with that, Anderson hit the seal on the door himself, and C.J. had to step aside to let him duck into their quarters first.

He let the door slide closed for a moment after that and just stood there in the corridor, calming everything down from his racing heartbeat to his raging hard-on so he could walk into the quarters he shared with the boy… man, with the man he was starting to become
very
attached to, and pretend that they were roommates and that C.J. didn’t know exactly what Anderson had just told him after melting every nerve in his body with a kiss.

T
HE
next day, Cassie and C.J. watched the screen as Anderson and his friends realized what a huge problem power rationing was going to become and Anderson had to make the decision to cut the school. It was the first time any of them—including the other holograms—got to see the violence that had been programmed into Alpha. The first hit had taken them by surprise. Anderson’s knowledge of the violence had been worse.

And even though they all knew of the escalation, watching it happen had been hard to bear.

“Do it,” Alpha said, barging into the little room that they had started sharing after the core of friends had moved into the house. Anderson had retreated there to brood over the decision, and the door slamming back had been loud and alarming.

“I said I needed some space!” Anderson protested. He’d asked everybody else, and they’d all stayed away.

For a moment, C.J. wanted to cheer. Hooray! Stand up for yourself, Anderson! You need some fucking space—this isn’t a small decision!

“Need space for what? To decide if a group of people who don’t exist are going to stop existing some more?”

“That’s harsh!” Anderson snapped. “Those people have become my friends! Besides—I already agreed—I’m a murderer, right? Fine. I’ll kill my friends.”