Digital Refresh

Shuttle Bay Three, CSV Saratoga - Saturday 27 November 2004

Hank came off the shuttle with a canvas bag and somebody else's coat and stopped dead four steps onto the deck.

"It's so bright," he said.

"That's the arc lighting," said Marky. "It's forty percent brighter than a Starfleet standard because we have a lot of very short people who kept walking into things."

"No, I mean -" Hank held out his hand and turned it over. He looked about eleven. He had looked about eleven for a considerable stretch of the twentieth century. "I've been walking in daylight for six weeks and I still do this. Sorry."

"Don't be. Do it as long as you like, the bay's not going anywhere."

So Hank stood in the middle of Shuttle Bay Three for two full minutes with his hand out, turning it over, and the deck crew worked around him without comment, because it was the Saratoga and by that point they had seen a great deal.

Marky watched him do it and thought about the phrase half-life, which he had learned four days ago and had not been able to put down since.

"Right," he said, when Hank came back. "Tour, quarters, or food?"

"Which one do you recommend?"

"Food. It's always food. I have been a doctor for nineteen years and a child for three weeks and I can tell you that everything anyone has ever needed at the end of a journey is a sandwich and somebody to sit opposite."

"I can't eat a sandwich."

"I know. I've read everything Duncan sent and then I read it again." Marky set off, and Hank fell in. "There's a fridge in the Center with your name on it, literally, Hal made a label and he was extremely pleased with himself. What I meant was that I intend to eat a sandwich and I intend for you to sit opposite while I do it, and if that turns out to be unbearable you tell me and we never do it again."

Hank thought about that for most of a corridor.

"Nobody's ever asked me to just watch," he said.

"That's because most people think the point is the food," said Marky. "It isn't and it never was."

The Clan Short Rescue Center took up the whole of Deck Nine aft, and it had been a cargo bay three weeks ago, and there were places where you could still see where the tie-downs had been cut off flush because Bradley would not let anyone use a grinder near the children's wing after twenty-one hundred.

Hank stopped in the doorway.

"How many?"

"Nineteen tonight. It goes as high as forty." Marky took the bag off him without being obvious about it. "Rules, and there are only four, and I say them to everybody so don't take it personally. One, nobody has to talk. Two, nobody has to be all right by a particular Tuesday. Three, if you need somebody at four in the morning there is somebody, and it is a real person and not a duty roster, and you are not being a nuisance."

"What's four?"

"Four is that I am eleven years old and I run this place, and people find that funny for about a week, and then they stop." Marky opened the fridge with Hank's name on it. "You are allowed the week."

Hank looked at the label.

Hal had drawn a small border of leaves around it. It had taken him, according to Devaintre, forty minutes.

"I'll skip the week," Hank said.

Ready Room - the same evening

"Two days," said Shay.

"Sir?"

"Nothing." Shay put down the padd. "T'ven. How was it."

T'ven had come in with his hands behind his back again, and then, about a third of the way through the door, had visibly decided something and put them at his sides instead. Shay watched him do it and did not remark on it, which cost him something.

"It was good, sir."

"That's not a report."

"No, sir." T'ven sat down. He sat down without being told twice, which was new. "The exercise was a failure. We aimed at somewhere Devaintre had confirmed was quiet and I found a war, so the targeting is not working, and I don't know yet whether that's me reaching wrong or the fold going somewhere adjacent to where I aimed. Dustin thinks it's him. I think it's me. Hal thinks it's neither and that the two systems are interfering, and Hal is usually right about that kind of thing and it is very annoying."

"And personally?"

T'ven paused.

"Colt's teaching me to carry it instead of shutting it," he said. "Eight days from now, and every eight days after that, if you'll let me have the shuttle."

"You'll have the shuttle."

"Thank you, sir." T'ven stood. Then he stopped. "Sir - permission to say something out of turn."

"Granted, and you don't have to ask for that with me. Ask Data, he'll tell you I've never once granted it, I just let people do it."

"You're going to talk to Captain Davis."

Shay went still.

"Am I."

"You've been meaning to since Andi asked you. Everybody knows, sir, it isn't a secret, it's just that nobody's going to say it to you." T'ven had gone red to the ears but he did not stop, and Shay understood, watching him, that he was looking at four days of somebody else's teaching arriving all at once. "And I want to say - before you ask me, so you don't have to ask me - that I won't be there. I'd like to not be there. Not because I don't want to hear it."

"Then why."

"Because I'd hear more than you said," T'ven said simply. "And it isn't mine."

Shay looked at him for a long moment.

"Sit back down," he said. "You're going to want to have sat down for this."

T'ven sat.

"When you came aboard I had you flagged as a boy who was going to break in about a year," said Shay. "That flag came off this evening, and I want you to know I took it off myself and I logged why."

T'ven did not say anything at all.

"Go on. Go and find Dustin, he's been telling everyone in the mess that you slept on the shuttle and drooled."

"I did not drool."

"Devaintre has it."

"Devaintre would never -"

"Devaintre absolutely would," said the room.

The List

He started it on the twenty-ninth, which was the day Runi's two days ran out.

It was a padd, and there were eleven names on it, and over the following nine days there were as few as four and as many as nineteen, and Shay came to understand somewhere around the fourth of December that he was not making a list at all. He was avoiding a room by decorating its door.

He knew it. That was the part that made it intolerable. Somebody who had been built without the capacity for self-deception had, apparently, grown that too, in under a month, right alongside everything else, and had grown it specifically so he could put this off.

On the sixth he took the padd to Data.

"I want you to tell me I'm stalling," he said.

"You are stalling," said Data.

"Thank you."

"You are welcome. May I say the second part?"

Shay sat down on the edge of the table in Data's quarters, which had almost nothing in them, and which had a cat in them, which was a whole separate matter nobody on the ship had the courage to raise.

"Say it."

"You are stalling," said Data, "and I do not believe you should stop."

"That's not the second part I was expecting."

"No. You expected me to be firm with you, because you have decided that being pushed is what you deserve." Data folded his hands. "I have watched you since the crossing, Captain, and you have done a great many difficult things on the first attempt. You went into the Yerium with thirty minutes of air. You told a ten-year-old he had a father now. You have never once needed to be pushed toward a hard thing, and so I find it interesting that you need to be pushed toward this one, and I do not think the explanation is cowardice."

"What's the explanation?"

"That you are not organising an ordeal," said Data. "You are organising a funeral."

Shay did not answer.

"You have never had one," Data went on, in exactly the same mild voice. "The people you are going to talk about have never been grieved by anybody who was there. Their families were told something. Their crews were told something else. And the only witness who could say what actually happened was constructed in such a way that he could not care at the time, and has since been given the equipment to care, and is now three weeks into finding out what that costs." He tilted his head. "You are not late, Captain. You are the last mourner alive, and you are trying to work out who is allowed to come."

Shay put the padd face down on the table.

"Nineteen names," he said. "Then four. Then eleven."

"How many are on it now?"

"Eight."

"Read them to me."

Shay read them.

Data listened all the way to the end, and then said, "That is a good list."

"It's got Hal on it."

"Yes."

"Hal writes things down. That's what he does, that's all he does, if Hal is in the room then there is a record."

"Yes," said Data again.

Shay looked at the padd for a while.

"They deleted mine," he said. "That's the part I can't - Data, somebody sat down and took the numbers out. Not the orders, the orders are all there, I can pull the orders. They took out the count. Somebody made a specific decision that the instrument should not be able to total itself, and then went home, and had dinner."

"And you have put on your list the one person on this ship whose entire function is to write down what happened."

"Yes."

"Then you already know what you are doing," said Data, "and you have known since the twenty-ninth, and everything since then has been you getting used to it."

Mess Hall - Monday 6 December

Buddy found him at 0230, which was not difficult, because there were only about four places on the Saratoga a man could sit at 0230 and only one of them had coffee.

"Move up."

Shay moved up.

Buddy sat down next to him instead of opposite, which was the thing he did, and which Shay had never once mentioned and had noticed every single time.

"You're not on the list," Shay said.

"I know."

"That's not - Buddy, that's not because -"

"Shay." Buddy put a hand flat on the table. "I've known since the second week. Since Club 99. You told me in about nine sentences with the music on and then you went and got us both a drink and never mentioned it again, and I have been carrying it ever since and waiting for you to be ready to have said it."

Shay stared at him.

"I told you?"

"You told me."

"I don't - " He stopped. "I don't have that."

"You have it. You've got it filed somewhere under things that did not go badly, and it's the smallest folder you own, and you never look in it." Buddy's thumb moved slightly on the table. "You told me on the second night I had a body. I think you thought if it was going to make me leave it should make me leave before I got used to the hands."

Shay put his forehead down on the heel of his palm.

"That's exactly what I thought."

"I know. I was there." Buddy nudged the coffee an inch closer to him. "So no, I'm not on the list, because being on the list means being one of the people who is finding out. I'm not finding out. I've known since Club 99. What I am is the person you come back to at the end of it, and I have made some fairly serious preparations for that, and one of them involves the good blanket."

Shay laughed, wetly, into his hand.

"The good blanket."

"The good blanket is not negotiable and I will not be discussing it further."

Docking Bay - Wednesday 8 December, 0900

Matthew and Brant came off the Alligator Alley run at nine in the morning with a duffel each and the specific flat-eyed look of people who have spent eleven days doing paperwork about a thing that should not have needed paperwork.

Shay was waiting at the airlock.

Matthew took one look at him, dropped the duffel, and said, "Today?"

"Today. Eleven hundred. Observation Two."

"Am I on it?"

"You're on it."

"Good," said Matthew, and picked the duffel back up, and that was the entirety of it, and Shay found that his throat had closed and he could not have said why.

Brant had not moved.

"Captain," he said. "Before you say anything, I want to put something on the table."

"Go on."

"I'm the Clan liaison. That is not a courtesy title, it's a legal one." Brant set his bag down and squared up, which in a man of his size was a considerable amount of squaring. "If I am in that room, then what you say in it is heard by a Clan officer acting in his official capacity, and that means I have an obligation, and the obligation does not have an off switch. It becomes a report. Not because I'd choose to. Because that's what I am in there."

"I know," said Shay.

"You know."

"I put you on the list on the second of December and I took you off on the third and I put you back on this morning at about six." Shay met his eyes. "I want the report. I have spent my whole existence as a man whose file was edited by somebody who wanted him deniable. I would like there to be a document with my name on it that I asked to exist."

Brant looked at him for a long moment.

"Then I'll be there," he said. "And Captain - I'm going to write it as it's said. Not as it lands. If you say a thing badly, it goes in badly."

"Good," said Shay.

"Most people say that and don't mean it."

"Most people," said Shay, "have not read their own specification."

Ted and Tad were waiting outside Observation Two at 1045.

They had positioned themselves, Shay noted with a certain despair, extremely well: one at each end of the corridor, so that whichever way he came he would have to walk past one of them, and both of them holding padds and pretending to work.

"No," he said.

"You don't know what we were going to ask," said Ted.

"You were going to ask to be in the room."

"We were going to ask to be outside the room," said Tad, "on the understanding that there is a door and the door is not soundproof and we are ten."

"It's soundproof."

"It is now," Ted agreed sourly. "Devaintre did it at nine this morning."

"I did," said the corridor.

Shay crouched down. It was still a strange thing to do, crouching, when he was thirteen and they were ten and the difference was three inches.

"Listen to me," he said. "Both of you. There is going to be a day when you hear all of it. I'm not going to lie to you about that and I'm not going to make you find it in a file after I'm dead, because that is what was done to about nine families I can name and I'd sooner take the ship apart. You will hear it from me, out of my mouth, sitting down, and I will answer every question you ask."

"When?" said Tad.

"When you're grown, or when you ask me twice. Whichever comes first." Shay looked between them. "That's not a delay. That's a promise, and I have exactly one of those outstanding and I'm discharging it in fifteen minutes, so you know I take them seriously."

Ted and Tad looked at each other.

It was very fast and entirely silent and Shay had been watching them do it since he met them and had never once caught the mechanism.

"Okay," said Ted.

"Okay?"

"She said you'd say no." Ted shrugged with one shoulder. "She said you'd say no and then promise, and that the promise would be the real thing and we should take it."

Shay's hand stopped halfway to standing.

"Who said."

"We can't."

"Ted -"

"We can't, Dad." And Tad said it without any of the sly in it, which was how Shay knew it was true and not a game. "It's not that we won't. We've tried four times. It comes out as something else."

Shay knelt in the corridor for a moment longer.

"After," he said. "You and me and Buddy, after, and we'll try a fifth time together."

"Okay," said Tad.

They went. They went holding hands, which they only did when they were rattled, and Shay stood outside Observation Two with eleven minutes to go and a wholly new problem, and put it away in a drawer with great deliberateness, and opened the door.

Observation Two - 1100

There were eight of them.

Captain Anderson Davis, of the Potemkin, in a uniform that had been pressed by somebody who cared. Vendra Cadtain, seventeen and enormous-eyed, sitting very upright the way you sit when you have asked to be somewhere and are terrified you will be asked to leave. Data, at the end, hands folded. Marky, who had come straight from a shift and had not taken off the white coat. Matthew, twelve years old and a VSO assassin, with one ankle over his knee. Brant, with a padd he had not switched on yet. Hal, with a padd he had switched on forty minutes early. And Devaintre, in the walls, in the lights, in the air handling, in every part of the room that was the room.

Shay stayed standing.

"Before I start," he said, "I want to say who isn't here and why, because a room like this is defined by both."

Nobody spoke.

"Buddy isn't here because he was told back at Club 99 and has been carrying it since, and being here would mean pretending to find out. My sons aren't here because they're ten, and because I've given them a date instead of a no. T'ven isn't here and asked not to be, because he's a telepath and he'd hear past what I said, and he told me that himself before I had to ask him, and that was the single best thing anybody has done for me this month." Shay paused. "Captain Davis is here because I promised him. Vendra is here because he asked me in front of witnesses and I said yes and I have thought about that sentence every day since."

Vendra's chin came up half an inch.

"The rest of you I chose," said Shay. "Between the twenty-ninth of November and six o'clock this morning. Marky, because you were afraid of me for three months and were right to be and never once let it change how you treated me. Matthew, because you're the only one here who's done the job. Brant, because you'll file it. Data, because you are the reason anybody on this ship has ever said a hard thing out loud. Hal, because you'll write it down and I need it written down. Devaintre, because you are the memory of this ship and I'm not going to say the most important thing I know inside you without inviting you."

"Thank you," said Devaintre.

"Sit down, Shay," said Andi, gently. "You'll be standing for an hour otherwise."

Shay sat down.

Then he said it.

He gave them the specification first, because it was the only part he could say in a level voice, and he had worked out on about the third of December that if he started with the part he could survive then the rest would have somewhere to arrive.

Project Talismand. Five holographic officers. Hal, Devaintre, Marky, Chris Raytroy, and one more, designated for shipboard security, and under the heading ethical subroutines on a requisition document that existed and that he could produce, a single horizontal stroke.

"Not a zero," he said. "A dash. A zero is a value. A dash is not applicable."

He told them what shipboard security had meant. Not boarding parties. Not the Romulans. That the Saratoga had been a Section Thirty-One asset flying a Starfleet flag, that it had carried a crew of two hundred and seventy who mostly did not know that, and that the ones who found out had to be handled, and that he had been the handling.

"Internal," he said. "That's the word I want on the record, Hal, because it's the one that matters and everyone's instinct is to hear assassin and picture somewhere else. I was not deployed anywhere. I was already there. I was in the mess with them. I did their arm in sickbay when Marky was off shift. I knew their kids' names because I was supposed to know their kids' names, it was in the parameters, it made the crew comfortable."

Marky had both hands flat on the table.

"The first one," said Shay, "was an ensign named Corwin Teague."

Hal's stylus stopped.

"He was twenty-six. He was a systems tech and he was good, he was better than good, and he found a routing anomaly in the secondary comms that he was never meant to be able to see and he did the correct thing, which was to write it up and send it to his department head. His department head sent it to the captain. The captain sent it to a person whose name I have and will give to Brant afterwards but not in this room, and that person sent two lines to me."

He stopped.

"I'd like to describe the room," he said.

"You don't have to," said Andi.

"I do, though. That's the whole - " Shay pressed the heel of his hand into his eye. "That's the whole thing I've got to say to you people, and if I skip it I'll have wasted your morning. I can describe that room perfectly. I can tell you it was 0417 shipboard and that the panel on the port bulkhead had a dead pixel in the lower left and that his boots were by the door and not in the locker because he'd come off a double. I can tell you he had a mug with a chip out of the rim, and that the chip was at the eight o'clock position if you held it right-handed, and that there was a picture of a dog."

"Shay," said Marky.

"I remember all of it. Every fixture. I have never lost one detail of it in all the years since, and I could not tell you how many years that is." Shay looked up. "And I did not feel anything. Not then. Not remorse and not pleasure and not resolve, none of the things you'd write in a report to make it a story. I did it, and I filed at 0431, and I went to a duty shift at 0600, and I did the shift, and it was a normal shift."

The room was entirely silent.

"That's what a dash means," said Shay. "It doesn't mean you enjoy it. It means it doesn't reach you. They didn't build a monster, they built a man with a room in him where the weight was supposed to go, and they left the room out, and they saved about eleven hundred lines of code."

He put his hands flat.

"I'm going to tell you the part nobody's ready for," he said, "and I've been dreading it for nine days, and it isn't the killing.

"I feel it now."

Somebody, and Shay never afterwards knew who, made a small sound.

"The crossing gave me emotions," said Shay. "Everybody knows that, it's in the log, we made jokes about it in the second week. What nobody has worked out, because I have gone to some trouble, is what happened when they arrived. The memories didn't change. Not one detail. They're exactly the same files they always were, and they are sitting there, twenty years of them at the very least, and about two weeks after the crossing they started having weight."

He looked at Andi.

"I am grieving people I killed," he said, "on a delay I cannot even measure, with equipment that was installed by accident, by a door, by a Q who thought it was funny. Corwin Teague has been dead more than twenty years - I cannot give you the true number, they took the year along with everything else - and I have been sorry for a fortnight. I did not have the parts to be sorry when it would have counted for anything, and I have them now when it counts for nothing, and there is nobody to say it to, because I killed all of them."

Vendra

Vendra Cadtain stood up.

He did it without asking, which on the Yerium ship would have been rude and here was simply a boy who could not do it sitting down.

"May I speak now," he said, "or is there more."

"There's more. Speak."

"On my ship," said Vendra, "there were four hundred and six adults and sixty-one of us. When the drive failed there was air for three hundred hours divided among four hundred and sixty-seven people, or air for enough hours divided among sixty-one." His accent was very careful and very flat. "This calculation took the adults eleven minutes. I know it was eleven minutes because I was in the compartment and I watched the clock, because I was fourteen and I did not know what else to look at."

Nobody moved.

"They did not ask us. That is the part that visitors always want to discuss and it is not interesting. They did not ask us because it is not a question, it is what we are. My mother did the calculation. My mother was the one who did the calculation, Captain, she was the senior engineer and she totalled it and she signed it, and then she stood up and put her hand on my head and went to the lock with the others."

Vendra's hands were shaking. His voice was not.

"Then we removed our computer core, and we destroyed our own ship, and everything my people ever made went with it. Do you know why? Because our weapons were repairable. And if someone repaired them and used them for evil, we would feel responsible. Not guilty. Responsible. It is a different word and my language has both."

He looked around the table.

"So. This room is full of people who are going to tell this man he is not to blame, and they will be correct, and it will do nothing, because he has already worked it out and it has not helped." Vendra turned back to Shay. "I am going to say the other thing instead.

"My people would never have built you. And if we had - if some Yerium in a room somewhere had written a dash under ethics and gone home to his dinner - we would not have destroyed you. You are not the weapon. You were the hand. We would have destroyed the ones who wrote it, and then we would have destroyed ourselves for having been the kind of people among whom such a person could write such a thing and go home."

He stopped.

"You have spent every day since the crossing looking for someone to be angry at," he said, "and you have only been able to find yourself, because they made sure of it. They removed your count so you could not total yourself. They removed their names so you could not total them. They built a man who could only ever arrive at one answer."

"Vendra," said Andi quietly.

"One more, sir. Please."

"Go on, son."

Vendra turned back.

"'Relevant numbers,'" he said. "You said that to me on the day we met, in front of everyone, and everyone in that room thought it was a sad detail. I have thought about it since the day we met and I cannot sleep for it. Captain, someone decided which numbers were relevant to you. Your age was not relevant. The count was not relevant. The names were not relevant. Someone sat with a list of everything a person might be permitted to know about himself and went down it striking things out."

He sat down, suddenly, as though the standing had been the only thing holding him.

"That is the cruellest sentence I have ever heard a person say about himself," he said, "and you said it in a corridor, mildly, as a fact about a program. And then you rubbed your head as though it were a headache. And I asked to come to this meeting because I could not let that be the last thing anyone ever said about it."

The File

Andi Davis had not said anything for fifty minutes.

He said it now.

"Shay. I need to tell you something and I have been waiting a fortnight to be allowed to, and I'd like you to hear all of it before you react."

"Go on."

"I knew," said Andi.

Shay did not move.

"I did not ask you that question on the Yerium to find out. I asked it because I already knew, and because a man ought to get to say his own name before somebody else says it for him." Andi reached into his jacket and put a data solid on the table, a small grey thing, and did not slide it across. "I have knowledge beyond the normal scope of things. That's the polite version and everybody lets me get away with it. The impolite version is that before the Potemkin I spent six years in a job with no name, and when I left it I left with a certain amount of material, and I have never once used any of it, and I have been sitting on this one for twenty-two days."

"What is it," said Shay.

"It's yours," said Andi.

The room did not breathe.

"Operational record. Not the orders - you've got the orders. The record. Every tasking, dated, with the authorising signature, and the after-action, and the disposition." Andi's hand stayed flat on it. "And the total."

Shay looked at the small grey thing on the table.

"There's a number," he said.

"There's a number."

"You've read it."

"I have."

"And you've been sitting on it for twenty-two days."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because it is not mine to give you until you want it," said Andi. "Because a number like that arrives once. Because there is no way to un-know it and you were not ready on the fifteenth of November and I judged that, and I might have been wrong, and I have been eating myself about it every single night since." He took his hand off it. "And because I have four rescued children who have decided I'm their father, and they told me so all at once, in one voice, and I had spent forty years certain I would be terrible at this. So I did the only thing I could think of that a father does. I waited, and I did not say a word, and I let it be yours to ask for."

Shay looked at the data solid for a long time.

"Runi told me you'd wait until you died," he said.

"Who?"

"A man I met. Six thousand years old, four foot nine, dresses like a bedsheet." Shay's voice cracked on it and he let it. "He said you'd wait until you died and that it was a kindness and also the heaviest thing one man can put on another, and he was right on both, and I have hated him for it for eleven days."

"Do you want it?" said Andi.

The room waited.

"Marky," said Shay.

"Here."

"If I take it, are you going to be up at four in the morning?"

"I'm going to be up at four in the morning regardless," said Marky. "That's the whole job. But yes."

"Matthew."

"Yeah."

"You knew. In the corridor. Three weeks ago, when you and Brant put me against a bulkhead and frightened the life out of me." Shay turned to look at him. "That wasn't about bias. Or it was, but it wasn't only. You knew what I was."

Matthew took his ankle off his knee.

"I knew in about four seconds," he said. "You stand a way. I've been doing this since I was nine and there's about six of us on Earth who stand that way and I've met all of them." He shrugged, and it was not a callous shrug, it was a twelve-year-old's shrug, which is a different thing. "And I put you against a wall because I wanted to see what you'd do about it, because if you'd done the thing the other five would have done, I was going to have to handle it. And instead you stood there and let a kid scare you and then you apologised to me. So I bought you a coffee."

"You didn't buy me a coffee, you replicated me a coffee."

"I stand by it."

Shay laughed, once, and it came out cracked.

"Would you take it?" he asked.

Matthew looked at the grey thing on the table.

"No," he said. "But mine's mine. I chose every single one and I can say all eleven names in order and I do, once a year, out loud, and it's foul and I do it anyway." He met Shay's eyes. "You don't have that. You've got a blank where the arithmetic goes and somebody put it there on purpose to keep you useless to yourself. Different problem. Different answer."

"So take it."

"So take it," Matthew agreed. "Not because it'll help. It won't. Take it because it's yours and they decided you couldn't have it, and I've watched you be somebody else's decision since the crossing and I am extremely sick of it."

Shay reached out.

He picked up the data solid.

"Captain Davis," he said. "Not out loud. Not in front of Hal's recorder and not in front of Brant's file and not in this room, because if the first time I hear it is in a room, then it belongs to the room." He held it out on his palm. "Tell me quietly."

Andi got up.

He came round the table, and he leaned down, and he put one hand on Shay's shoulder the way a man does when he is about to hurt somebody on purpose and for their sake, and he said it into his ear.

He said four words, and one of them was a number.

Nobody else in that room ever heard it, and Hal, who had recorded every syllable of the preceding two hours and eleven minutes without pausing once, took his hands off the padd and put them in his lap and left the gap in.

Shay sat with it.

His face did not do anything at all for about nine seconds, which was, Marky thought afterwards, the most frightening thing he had ever watched.

Then Shay took out his own padd, and opened a blank file, and wrote it down.

"What are you doing?" said Brant.

"Making a record," said Shay.

He kept writing. His hand was not steady and he did not stop for that.

"Somebody deleted mine," he said. "Deliberately. On purpose, so I could never total myself, so I'd be deniable, so that if it ever came apart there'd be an instrument at the bottom of it that couldn't even say how much it had done." He finished the line. "So I'm starting a new one. Today's date. First entry is the number. Second entry is Corwin Teague, ensign, twenty-six, systems tech, dog, chipped mug, and I'm going to do the rest of them as they come back to me, one at a time, for as long as it takes."

"Shay," said Marky. "That could be years."

"Yes."

"That could be the rest of your life."

"Yes," said Shay. "Marky, it should be."

He set the padd down.

"Runi's got nine hundred and ninety-one books," he said. "Six thousand years and he writes it down every single year and he told me it doesn't help. And I asked him why he does it, and he said - " Shay stopped, and got it right. "He said, I chose to do it, and so I owe it to them to be able to say it."

He looked around the table.

"I didn't choose," he said. "I know that. Vendra just took an hour of his own worst day to make sure I knew that, and I'm going to be grateful to him for it for the rest of my life. But nobody's going to say their names if I don't, and there's no one left who was there, and the file's empty because a man made it empty."

He put his hand flat on the padd.

"So I'll be the one who says it," said Shay. "Not because it's my fault. Because I'm what's left."

Observation Two - 1345

They went out slowly and in ones, the way people do.

Vendra stopped in the doorway and turned around and stood there with his enormous eyes, and Shay, who had learned a certain amount in the preceding fortnight, said, "Say it."

"May I come next time," said Vendra.

"Next time?"

"When you write the next one down. Not to help. I would not be helping." Vendra's hands were behind his back. "My people keep records. It is the only thing we saved. I would like to be a person who is there when a record is made, because I have been thinking since we came aboard about what my mother signed, and I cannot be there for hers, and it is the nearest thing available."

Shay had to wait a moment before he could answer that.

"Every time," he said. "You have a standing invitation and it does not expire, and if I ever forget to call you, you come and find me and you be rude about it."

"I will be extremely rude."

"I know you will. Go on."

Andi was the last.

He stood at the viewport with his hands behind his back and looked out at the Potemkin sitting off the port quarter with her running lights on, and he said, without turning around:

"We break orbit at 0600 tomorrow."

"I know."

"You waited nine days past when you meant to."

"I did."

"Was it fear?"

Shay thought about it properly, because the man had earned a real answer.

"The first four," he said. "The last five were the list."

Andi nodded slowly.

"That's a good ratio," he said. "I've seen a lot worse." He turned around. "Shay. The material I've got. There's more of it, and not all of it is yours, and some of it is about people who are still in post."

"I assumed."

"I'm not offering it today and I'm not offering it as a favour. I'm telling you it exists so that when you come and ask - and you will, in about a year, when you've finished writing the names down and you start wanting to know who signed - I won't have to pretend to be surprised." He put his cap on. "And so you know that when that day comes, you won't be starting from nothing, and you won't be doing it alone. That's all. That's the whole message."

"Andi."

"Mm."

"The four kids," said Shay. "The ones who decided you're their father."

Andi's face did something it had not done in two hours.

"What about them."

"They were right," said Shay.

Andi Davis stood in the doorway of Observation Two for a moment with his cap in his hands and then put it on properly and went to his ship.

Buddy was in the corridor outside, sitting on the deck with his back to the bulkhead, which he had evidently been doing for some time.

He did not ask.

He got up, and he took the padd out of Shay's hand without looking at it and put it in his own pocket, and he said, "Right. Come on."

"Where."

"Quarters. The good blanket. Ted and Tad are already in there and they've built something out of the furniture and I've decided not to fight it." He got an arm round him. "And you're going to tell me about the fifth try later, and not now."

"How did you -"

"Ted told me the second he got out of the corridor," said Buddy. "That boy has never held a secret in his life. He's just extremely good at pretending he's about to."

They went.

Behind them, Devaintre closed the log on Observation Two, and left the gap in where the number should have been, and did not mark it as a fault.

Authors Note:

This one is quieter than it looks on paper. Nobody fights anybody, nobody rescues anybody, and a man sits down in a room he spent nine days decorating the door of. The promise from the rescue is paid. Vendra asked to be there himself, at the end of that chapter, and I have thought ever since about what it cost a boy who watched his mother total the air to ask a question like that. There is a number in this chapter and you do not get to see it, and neither does anybody who was in the room except two of them, and that is on purpose. Some things belong to the person they happened to. Next time we will be somewhere with better lighting and considerably more shouting. No cliffhanger again - I am building a reputation and I intend to protect it.