A Solid Core of Alpha (9 page)

C.J.’s mouth fell into a little “O.” “Who…?”

“Her name was Susanna, and space is a very dangerous place.”

Wow. Of all the stupid things. C.J. had never even seen the gruff holo-tech with a
woman
(besides Molly in a threesome, that is), much less someone who looked like the love of his life.

“I’m so sorry, Jules. I didn’t know.”

Julio shook his head. “What’s to know? Besides, I’m just trying, in my own lame-assed way, to tell you that life isn’t forever. You go ahead and play all you want, but if you find someone who looks good for the long haul, take them up on it, okay? Don’t say, ‘Hey, maybe when you get back from this little junket to an exploding star, maybe we’ll talk about it’. You hear me?”

C.J. nodded, most of his morning buzz from sex and Molly’s pancakes disappearing. “I hear you, I hear you. I just….” He looked out of the shuttle window, feeling the artificial gravity kick in and seeing space beyond his home planet. It looked like a green marble on black velvet, and the other seven planets in the star system surrounding Hermes, their sun, reflected various shades of ochre, gold, blue, gray, and even a stunning purple in the smallest one farthest from the sun. It was lovely, and C.J. always looked.

“Just what, little white man?”

C.J. glared at him. He was a good three inches taller than Julio, but he was also a good forty pounds lighter. His skin was also a very pale latte color, and he gave Cassidy a mental slap for getting their mother’s darker skin and dark exotic eyes. C.J. had nice bone structure, though, and startling green eyes, as well as tightly coiled coffee-blond hair found pretty much only in children of a mixed-race heritage. Calling him “little white man” was guaranteed to make him feel like a child, and C.J. softened his glare with an effort.

Julio was just trying to forget that he’d shared something personal. C.J. got it.

“Just that everyone’s a friend, you know?” he said softly. “Friends to sleep with or friends to play with. So far, no one’s really made my heart go all soft, the way it’s supposed to. That’s all I’m waiting for. Someone who makes me get serious.”

Julio grunted. “Yeah, but someone who makes your heart go all soft, that’s dangerous. That means you don’t have anything to guard it, you know? What happens if you do all that and you don’t get anything back?”

C.J. shuddered, and Julio with him. The view of the planets had faded, and C.J. jammed his shades back in place. “You’re as much fun as two tons of wet carbon-fiber wool, you know that?”

“Yeah, well, I do what I can.” Next to him, Julio settled back into his seat as well, and C.J. closed his eyes irritably and settled down to sleep off the rest of the eight-hour trip.

A
ND
of course, after all of that, they got there and had a two-day wait before the shuttle actually
docked
. And no one knew what in the hell was going on.

“Okay, there’s one survivor on the shuttle,” C.J. said patiently, and his sister nodded.

“Yes.”

“And he’s male.”

Again, that slow nod. Cassie’s eyes were wide and disingenuous, like she was humoring him or explaining for the umpteenth time why the health and hygiene files had to be closed to over-inquisitive fourteen-year-olds who couldn’t be bothered to put on their underwear between the bathing recycler and the living quarters. “Yes, Cyril, he’s male.”

“Call me C.J., big sister, or I tell your husband when you
really
hacked the H and H files and what you did with that information.”

Cassie’s eyes narrowed. “You have no idea what I did with that information,” she snarled, and C.J. grinned. He had an idea, all right. He’d heard the sounds coming from her room. Unfortunately, he had no proof, but, well, he could always bluff. Unfortunately, Marshall saved Cassie from C.J.’s prime opportunity to give his sister shit.

“Everyone knows what you did with that information, sweetheart. It’s the same thing we
all
did with that information when we got it. The only difference is you like to pretend that you didn’t. Now do us all a favor, Cass, and stop playing with your little brother’s mind, treat him like a professional, and debrief.”

“Thanks, Marshall,” C.J. said smugly, and Cassie’s beloved, the man—or, well, male Artellian, but their species was so damned near Terran humanoid that only someone with
really
good vision could tell the difference—who had stolen his sister’s heart, glared at him.

“And you, stop threatening her with embarrassing stuff from her childhood. Dammit, C.J., how is she ever going to tell
me
if you’ve made her think it’s too embarrassing to tell
anybody
?”

“She doesn’t want to
tell
you, Marshall,” C.J. said sourly. “She wants to pretend it never happened and that almighty Cassidy of the three
zillion
university degrees only has prurient thoughts with you, her one and only in the sanctioned marriage bed.”

“Well, that’s better than fucking anything that breathes, oh mighty underachieving manwhore!” Cassie rasped with venom, and C.J. smirked.

“Jealous?”

Before Cassie could come at him with an electronic pad stylus set on “disembowel,” Marshall stepped between the two of them. “If she’s not, I am,” he said smoothly. “Jensen and Molly’s bed is famous, which means that probably a few too many people have been there.” He looked pointedly at C.J., who blushed. “Now, you two, as much fun as it is to play mediator here, I’m going to remind you that you’re both under
my
employ here at the station, and maybe, perhaps, you want to do your jobs?”

Now they both flushed, the dull red coming up hotly over Cassie’s black-coffee complexion. “Sorry, Marshall,” she murmured, and then she glared at C.J. like she could bully him into submission.

He stuck his tongue out at her and then nodded obediently to his boss. “Sorry, Marshall. I just want a straight answer out of the… woman, that’s all.”

Marshall was extremely tall, over six feet seven inches, and had almost translucently pale eyebrows and hair. He raised those translucent eyebrows into his translucent hair and asked, “Okay, what was the question again?”

C.J. grunted in satisfaction. “See? That’s how oblique you’re being, Cass! All I asked was how many people were in the shuttle! She told me there was one, male, age twenty-two, and then she told me that she’s spoken to at least four different people on the bridge!”

Cassie surprised him then—she actually cracked a smile. “Yeah. Sorry about that. When you put it that way, it does sound sort of crazy.”

C.J. held out his hands expectantly, and Cassie threw her husband a disgruntled look. He threw back a look just like C.J.’s, and Cassie’s expression soured further.

“You know it only pisses me off when you side with him,” she said, and Marshall nodded as though this was reasonable.

“And since I only live to make you happy, my dulcet-tongued beloved, perhaps that should cue you in to when you’re being a raging bitch. Now explain again, from the top, like a brilliant professional and not a pissed-off sister, please? For me?”

Marshall was famous for his patience, and that last “for me” had a bit of a growl in it, which was probably why Cassie stopped glaring daggers at C.J. and started from the top.

It didn’t make any more sense the second time.

“The one passenger on board is a male, aged twenty-two years, nine months, twenty days.” She paused there, probably to let C.J. say what they were all thinking.

“That can’t
possibly
be right!” he burst out again, and she nodded and held out her hands.

“Look, C.J., we’ve sent out long-distance scans, and everything there indicates that he’s nowhere near his thirties, okay?”

“And we’re sure this shuttle is from the Cancer Nebula mining colony?”

Cassie nodded. “We have the records of every ship within a twenty-five light-year radius for the last one hundred years. This one was last registered at the colony, and according to the records that they’re required to send out by ansible, this kid was born almost twenty-three Terran years ago. It’s legit.”

C.J. and Marshall met eyes—Marshall’s eyes had a tri-colored iris, black inside of gold inside of blue. That alone might have made his sister swoon, C.J. often thought, just because it was so damned cool. But pretty eyes aside, Marshall was the one who could cut through Cassie’s temper, which the rest of the known world
swore
she didn’t have, and he had one of the sharpest minds C.J. had ever encountered, as well as one of the most compassionate hearts.

“Are you sure?” C.J. asked again in a horrified whisper, and for once, Cassie didn’t take exception.

“Yeah. He’s been on that space shuttle for nearly half his life,” she replied softly. “And as awful as that is, I think it’s why the everything else sounds so insane.”

C.J. took a breath, and much of his enmity toward his sister slipped away. “All right, Cass, hit me.”

She looked at Marshall, who gestured for her to continue. “The other ‘people’”—and C.J. could hear the air quotes—“in the shuttle are holo-generated.”

C.J. blinked, and Marshall blinked twice, and then C.J. said, “Hey, I was taking you totally seriously—”

“I
am
being serious!” Cassidy snapped. “We can see it in the scans. It’s sucking up a tremendous amount of energy—he’s almost out. But he has four or five different holos in there.”

“You don’t know?” Marshall asked.

Cassie shrugged. “That’s another thing. I’m getting to it.”

Marshall gestured for her to go on once again, and she looked at C.J., who nodded vigorously. This whole setup was… well, bizarre.

“Okay. He’s got semi-sentient holograms….” She paused again and glared at them so she could finish. “Who have been helping him run the shuttle, perform functions, what have you. They appear to be self-aware. They know they’re holo-programs. The one who’s on the com most often is a female. I asked her age, and she’s about four years older than Anderson, the actual live humanoid onboard. She introduced herself as Kate. Her husband, Bobby, usually works with her, and there’s another couple who takes a shift on deck named Henry and Risa. Apparently there’s been space debris up there—”

“There’s been meteor showers from that quadrant direction,” C.J. said absently, and Cassidy nodded.

“Well, apparently the auto-pilot wasn’t enough. Given that the entire shuttle has been converted to one big holodeck, the holo-programs have been helping to steer the ship. Anderson works as captain, and he’s up there when shit gets hairy, but otherwise, he’s working on some sort of records project for the mining colony, deeper inside the shuttle, where….” Cassie’s voice grew rough, and C.J. frowned at her. Cass was a lot of things—harping sister, raging bitch, crack analyst—but sentimental wasn’t one of them.

“Where what?” Marshall prompted gently, and Cass shrugged again.

“Kate says it’s where he doesn’t have to see the outside of the shuttle. I think… I mean, I can’t imagine. Can you? Can you imagine being twelve years old and realizing that it’s you inside a tin can for the next ten years?”

C.J. shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to be reminded either,” he said roughly, and Cass shuddered. “But that’s only four,” C.J. added. “You said there might be another one.”

Cass blew out a breath. “Yeah. That’s where shit gets weird.”

C.J. started to laugh, because, well, this shit wasn’t already weird?

But Cass shook her head. “C.J., baby….”

And C.J. looked at her sharply. The last time he’d heard his big sister sound that sympathetic, he’d been ten and had fallen out of a tree and broken his arm. “What?” he asked, feeling really out of the loop.

She just shook her head. “I don’t know. This kid… I’ve spoken to him maybe three times. He sounds… I mean, you know, if I’d been on that shuttle for ten years by myself, I’d be stark raving bugshit. There’s just no other way. I’d be out of my fucking mind. You’d need Teflon tensile rope and a power-winch to get me back to myself. I know that for a fact.”

“Yeah?” C.J. wondered what it was she was trying to say that she couldn’t seem to find words for.

“Well, there’s something wrong with him. I mean,
that
sort of something wrong with him. And none of the holos want to talk. When I ask them about the fifth power drain, they’ll acknowledge it, but they hate it. They hate it, and they’re
really
protective of Anderson, and whatever is going on in there, it ain’t healthy. I mean, bad fucking news. I hate to say it, but this guy might be living out his days down at Jensen’s little playhouse for the rest of his natural life. Whatever is going on in there, it’s starting to give me the heebie-jeebies.”

C.J. grimaced. “Well, does this pain have a name?”

“Yeah. The holos all call him Alpha.”

C.J. couldn’t help himself. He shuddered. “Well, you know, as long as it’s nothing fucking ominous,” he cracked. “Right?”

But Cassidy didn’t smile back, not even a little, and C.J.’s shudder got bigger and badder and scarier.

Alpha.

Chapter 6

Daylight

H
ALF
the Hermes-Eight space station turned out to watch the little K-3-458 shuttle dock in the bay.

The space station itself was roughly the size of the mining colony the shuttle came from, and the shuttle bay was designed to house starships, the kind with the enormous warp-drive engines that spanned light-years in a matter of months. There was nothing in the dock at the moment except a couple of tiny planet-to-planet shuttles that were used for the other two habitable planets in the system. They were mostly farm planets, agrarian interests, with small farmsteads of maybe a couple of hundred people per planet. There were always shuttles coming in with food for the main colonized planet at Hermes-Eight, so a few of those folks got to see the show as well.

If you didn’t know what you were looking at, it was sort of anti-climactic.

The shuttle that entered the bay was about the size of a regulation soccer field. Its skids looked locked shut, so it was a good thing it was docking in a station and not on a planet’s surface, and the hull was battered to the point where reentry into an atmosphere might have pulverized it anyway. That was fine, though. The space station had seen plenty of ships that looked that bad or worse over the years, and the imperfections of the shuttle seemed to make the ordeal inside that much more palatable. Well, the shuttle had survived, maybe the human being inside was okay too, right?