Ghost station, p.19
Ghost Station, page 19
What is this about?
“He didn’t say anything to me,” Ophelia says after a moment. More to see Kate’s reaction than anything else.
Relief spreads across Kate’s face for a split second before vanishing once again beneath the veil of concern. “Okay, I just—”
“But even if he had,” Ophelia continues, “I wouldn’t be able to discuss it with you. That’s how confidentiality works.”
A flicker of irritation creases Kate’s brows, but she stamps it out immediately and nods. “I understand. Of course.”
Ophelia gives her best professional smile and moves to walk past Kate, all the while thinking, What the fuck am I missing?
You really have no idea, do you? That’s what Birch said to her last night, what’s ringing through her head right now. And no, she really doesn’t.
“I was thinking, maybe it would be better if you came with us today,” Kate says.
Ophelia stops in surprise, turning to face her.
“If the weather holds, Suresh and I are heading back to the lander to get some parts for generator repair.” Kate lifts her hand up, and the lights flicker on cue. “But the commander will probably have Birch launch the drones today for an updated scan. You could go, maybe just keep an eye on Birch?”
That is … exactly what Ophelia should do.
But why does Kate, a person who seems very concerned about what Birch might reveal in private conversation, want to give her another chance to speak with him alone?
“I don’t think Etha—Commander Severin will go for that,” Ophelia says, kicking herself. One conversation, Phe? Really? One conversation and he’s “Ethan” now.
Kate waves a hand carelessly, not seeming to notice her correction. “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll talk to him. He trusts me.” She eyes Ophelia clutching her shoe. “You should too,” she adds after a moment, jerking her chin toward the shoe. “With … whatever.”
There’s a message Ophelia can’t interpret beneath her words, only that it feels abrupt, a little hard, and in some way disingenuous.
Or perhaps this is simply her inherent distrust of people rising up to kneecap her, as it frequently does. One might even call it paranoia.
“Dibs on the lav,” Kate says over her shoulder, as she heads back toward the C side.
“There are two—” Ophelia begins.
Kate points upward, still walking, and then Ophelia hears it: the faint off-key singing of a popular game show theme song, one that rhymes “prizes” and “sizes” with “thighses.” Suresh, it has to be.
With a sigh, Ophelia heads toward the galley instead.
* * *
By the time she gets her turn in one of the lavs, everyone else is dressed and ready for the day, in their envirosuits, with helmets scattered around nearby.
When she emerges from the C side into the central hub, the antigrav sled is near the interior airlock door, which is standing open. The sled is full, stacked two or three high with crates and strapped-down equipment. Scattered crates are open all around it, exposing their soft gray padded insides and the shiny metal bits stored there.
“This would be much easier if we had the rover,” Suresh says, lifting a closed crate to stack it on board with a grunt. “There’s not enough room.”
“Quit your whinging. It’s fine,” Kate says breathlessly, as she wedges a heavy-looking tool kit into place. The nearest crate tower wobbles, and Suresh and Severin rush to steady it.
“Oh, sure, it’s fine,” Suresh says through gritted teeth.
Once the crates are stable, Severin steps back, catching a glimpse of Ophelia. “Doctor,” he says in greeting, turning his attention toward her. Liana looks up from a tablet where she’s skimming something and waves.
True to her word, Kate must have spoken to him. Severin found Ophelia in the corridor as she was waiting for her turn in the sonic shower, told her she was welcome to join them today. He almost sounded like he meant it, too.
Perhaps she was wrong to be suspicious of Kate. Or maybe her suspicions of Kate had their origins in a baser emotion. Jealousy is such an ugly emotion, darling. It’ll prematurely age you like nothing else.
A classic from her mother. Ophelia rolls her eyes and turns her attention to something, someone, else. Birch is off to one side, scratching at his arm and staring off toward the airlock and the world beyond. At nothing. At everything.
“Listen up. We’ll only have an hour or so outside,” Severin says. “Kate and Suresh will be heading back to the lander to pull some supplies. Liana and I will be taking a few ice core samples. And Birch will be attempting to get a drone scan of the area, depending on conditions.”
Birch, at the sound of his name, jerks to attention, blinking rapidly. He sees Ophelia watching him and immediately stops scratching, dropping his hands away from his arms with a scowl.
“Let’s move, people,” he says to his team. “Clock is ticking.” Then he turns back to Ophelia. “Doctor, your suit?”
Shit. Right.
She turns and hurries as fast as she can back to the bunk room, grabs her suit and helmet. By the time she returns, the others are already in the airlock with the precariously loaded sled. Severin is the only one waiting for her on this side of the threshold, helmet tucked under his arm.
Ophelia can feel their collective impatience growing as she sits down to struggle into her suit. She manages to get it up her waist, and then, to her surprise, Severin—Ethan—approaches her.
He sets his own helmet on the table next to hers. “It’s easier if you stand now,” he says.
When she gets up, Ethan tugs the shoulder of the suit up and helps her get her arm inside, and then with rapid precision that speaks to his experience with this, he closes the fittings around the wrist and adjusts the elbow guard.
“Are you sure Birch should be cleared for duty today?” Ethan asks, not in a whisper but in a voice certainly too low to be heard by the others.
He’s asking her opinion. Trusting her. All she’s wanted from the beginning. An unexpected warmth curls through her, followed immediately by a sickening twist of conflict.
He keeps his focus on her suit, shifting to the other side to do the same thing to that arm.
“His blood work came back fine,” she hedges. Which means next to nothing except that he doesn’t have low iron or low thyroid levels making him worse.
When she got the med-scanner results back last night, his red blood cell levels were perfectly in range. No reason for his gums to be bleeding. White blood cells were up a little, but nothing that indicated an infection. Just some mild systemic inflammation, including what looked like a histamine reaction. The med-scanner suggested it was an unknown allergy.
“But you’re still concerned.” Ethan brings the zipper up from her waist, and for a flash, it feels too intimate, too close. Like being cared for. Heat rises in her cheeks.
“That’s what Kate says,” he adds.
Oh, well, if Kate says it …
Ophelia grits her teeth at herself, then nods. “I am. How long has he been part of your team?”
“Last six years.”
“How well do you know him? Do you know anything about his past?” My past. “Have you noticed anything like this from him before?”
Ethan shakes his head. “He keeps to himself. Plays that game with Suresh. Likes word puzzles on his tablet. Makes little creatures and things from paper. Doesn’t use a pillow. Won’t drink coffee or any other ‘stimulant,’ he calls it.” Ethan then gestures for her to lift her chin so he can close the fasteners at her collarbone. This close, she can see the faint freckles on his skin, where he must have been in the sun at some point or spent time under a sun lamp. Dark stubble is a shadow beneath the surface. The vulnerable underside of his jaw moves when he swallows.
“It could just be stress,” she says reluctantly. “Like I said, loss affects everyone differently.”
“But you don’t believe that,” Ethan says, stepping back. He holds out her helmet, and she takes it.
“I’d just like to keep a close eye on him for now,” she says, trying not to feel like a despicable piece-of-shit liar. “Has he said anything to you? About Ava?” About me?
Ethan doesn’t respond right away, picking up his own helmet from the table. “No,” he says after a moment. “But he was up, wandering around the hab in the night.”
“Are we going to do this or do you need to hold her hand some more?” Suresh’s voice is small and tinny inside the helmet she’s not yet wearing, but clearly audible. And impatient.
Ophelia glances over toward the airlock in time to see him lift his hands up in a What are you doing? motion.
Heat scores her cheeks. Suresh, she’s certain, only meant to imply that she was incapable rather than anything inappropriate, and yet it feels like the suggestion is hanging out in the air now.
Ethan, back to blank-faced as ever, puts his helmet on, twisting with efficiency until it clicks closed. He gestures for Ophelia to do the same.
As soon as her helmet is in place, he pivots and heads back toward the airlock, without waiting.
“Make sure you stick close, Doctor,” he says over the common channel.
Kate and Suresh lead the way outside, ducking their heads against the wind and tugging the sled behind them. Birch is at the back end of the sled, almost stepping on it in his eagerness to get out. He seems better now, more alert.
Liana is bent over her tablet, next to Ophelia, and Ethan brings up the rear.
“What do we think?” Kate asks, coming to a stop about ninety meters from the hab.
Ethan steps out of line and to the side, surveys the skies and the chipped-ice snowflakes spitting down on them. The wind swirls around him hungrily, but he remains stable, unmoved by it.
“Better than yesterday,” he says. “But that could change fast. Just stick to the line. We can get the spiders started and then come your way to help.”
“Spiders?” Ophelia can’t help herself.
“Yeah, the autodrillers! Remember?” Liana tips her tablet toward Ophelia so she can see three individual schematics of what does, in fact, look like a four-legged spider, with a proboscis thicker than its legs projecting from the center “body.”
“Meet Marvin, Mabel, and Denise.” Liana beams at her. “I program them with coordinates based on the scans we got on the mission briefing, and they core out a sample. We’ll do a couple of shallow samplings to gather data on the environment in the last few decades, snowfall, carbon dioxide levels, all kinds of stuff. They have diagnostic sensors that taste the ice and report back. But then we’ll try for a deeper sample. Roughly one kilometer is thousands of years.”
That piques Ophelia’s interest. “So you might end up with samples that could tell you what happened here. Maybe even biological specimens—leaves, or whatever the equivalent might be.”
“Exactly! If, for example, it involved volcanic activity, which is one of the theories, we’ll be able to pick that up from the higher levels of sulfur and ash or whatever. If there was an asteroid strike on this continent, then we might see a big jump in ammonium ions.”
As she’s explaining, Kate and Suresh are off-loading three large crates from the sled and dropping them on the ground.
“Hey, careful!” Liana protests, hurrying forward.
“Liana, love, we go through this every time. They’re in padded cases, they’re fine,” Kate says.
“Also, they’re not alive,” Suresh adds, sounding slightly out of breath. “Not pets, remember?”
Ophelia can’t see Liana’s expression, but her posture stiffens with hurt. Every team is, in some ways, like a family, with roles to play. When a family member is gone, there has to be some adjustment, or functionality can be impaired. Ophelia has no way of knowing whether Ava frequently intervened on Liana’s behalf or if Suresh kept his mouth shut more often in Ava’s presence, but her absence is notable at times.
Especially in that Ophelia finds herself stepping forward to defend instead of staying back, observing.
She catches herself and stops. Not my job, not what I’m here to do.
“You do know you’re an asshole, right?” Liana shoots back at Suresh.
“Let’s keep moving. Time is short,” Ethan says. “You can work out your personal disagreements in your sessions with Dr. Bray. In the meantime, we have work to do. Birch, I don’t know if the drones can handle this wind in a launch.”
Birch, in the process of tugging a shiny silver case off the sled, doesn’t respond.
Alarm flickers to life in Ophelia’s veins, tiny spikes of unease.
“Birch—” Ethan tries again.
“I want to try,” Birch says, hauling the case into his arms. It’s apparently lighter than it looks. “It’ll help if we’ve got updated survey data and visuals.”
No matter what, it would be better if he can keep busy, his mind present and occupied with work, but it’s not her call. Or at least not one she’s willing to make right now.
Ethan seems to reach the same conclusion, though. “Fine,” he says. “But don’t wander too far.”
With that, Kate and Suresh, still grumbling under his breath, venture off to the left, connect with the bright orange safety line, and vanish.
Liana makes herself busy dragging her spider crates into place, and Ethan helps.
“Here?” he asks.
Liana checks her tablet. “Still too close. The coordinates will keep them from running into each other, but we don’t want to destabilize the ice pack.”
Ophelia stays out of their way while keeping a close eye on Birch, who is slogging, in the direction of the city. He stops after a few minutes, kneeling to place the case on the ground.
She glances back at Ethan and finds him watching Birch as well. He gives her a nod, acknowledging that he’s aware, while Liana rushes from one crate to another, opening the lids and poking at whatever is inside.
Ophelia returns her attention to Birch … and the two black crystalline towers, slender and knifelike, tilted at the exact same angle, like two giant blades stabbed into the ground under the gray sky. No wonder the wind makes such strange noises over there. Whistling, calling, screaming.
The blanket of snow at the base of the towers is dramatically humped and bunched, unlike the smooth waves, gentle peaks, and rolling flatness all around her.
Then a mechanical whine loud enough to be heard over the wind pulls her focus to Liana and her spiders.
The automated drills stand themselves up in their protective packing, shaking and stretching each limb and joint before stepping out over the lip of the crate and skittering into the snow.
Ophelia’s revulsion is instinctive, automatic. She shudders. There’s no such thing as “good” insects or arachnids or other pests in an enclosed environment. Weevils, the same ones that once infested hardtack on long sea journeys, still manage to work their way into Goliath’s supplies from Earth, every once in a while. Ophelia has no idea what weevils actually look like, but as a child she always pictured tiny white spiders. They ate nothing with flour during those months. Those were thin months. People can travel to other planets and live in outer space, but they always bring their troubles with them.
The spiders spread out and find their places, coming to an immediate halt at some unseen signal, burying their feet in the snow, and then locking them into place with a series of loud clonks.
Ophelia turns back to the city, back to Birch. He’s standing now, but not moving, the case on the ground near his feet. She can’t tell if it’s open or not. But he appears to be staring at a fixed point in the distance, his hands clenched at his sides.
Fear zips through her, an electric shock to the nerves. Is he seeing someone out there? Is someone there?
She follows his gaze but can’t detect anything beyond the now increasing snow. No shadows, no movements. At least, she doesn’t think so. She can’t decide if that makes her feel better or worse. If she were to see something too, would that mean she and Birch are both losing their grip on reality? It’s a possibility that she has to keep in mind, unfortunately.
A half-forgotten memory surfaces abruptly. Ophelia’s father, with his head propped in his bloody hands on their kitchen table, sobbing, while her mother stands in the corner, trembling, a dent in the wall just to the right of her head.
The dent isn’t very big, but when the walls are thin sheets of plexiplastic over metal, it doesn’t need to be.
Urgency for answers swells in her, drowning out everything else. Including, one might argue, the common sense to leave well enough alone.
A glance back shows Liana and Ethan occupied with the spiders. So Ophelia makes her way over to Birch, calling his name over the common channel when she’s close enough. She doesn’t want to startle him.
“I don’t need you checking up on me,” he says, without turning around. He kneels down to open the shiny case at his feet. A dozen or so palm-size drones are tucked neatly inside protective foam.
With a little bit of fumbling, she manages to send him a request to switch channels.
He doesn’t move, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to ignore her.
But then his hand shifts to his wrist, and a corresponding crackle sounds inside her helmet. “We’re supposed to stay on the common channel, Doctor,” he says. “Though, wait, are you still a doctor if all your qualifications were done under a false name?”
It’s not a false name. Ophelia Bray is as real as anyone that money can buy. It’s Lark Bledsoe who doesn’t exist. Not anymore.
“I just need to ask you a question.” Ophelia hesitates, but in for a penny, in for a pound … of flesh. “Did you really see your brother outside?”
Birch shoots to his feet, spinning around on her, his expression contorting with fury. “I am not—”
“I mean, did you see him?” she asks quickly. “Or did you just see … someone?”
