11. Looking Up
The engineers spent much of the rest of the day setting up instruments and cameras at different angles around the room. They measured the area around the artifact, marked distances with reflective tape, and moved everything that could be moved away from it, giving it a wide berth.
The following morning, Ava woke and lay in bed until Hailey arrived to help her dress and check her abrasions. The gel Hailey kept applying had worked remarkably well. While Ava’s skin was still bruised, the angry red lines of the cuts and scratches were almost invisible, having healed weeks’ worth in only days.
Ava’s muscle pain had dulled into a low ache, even after the medication had worn off. The one thing still holding her back was her shoulder. The strain she had placed on it left it vulnerable to reinjury with minimal effort.
She reminded herself of that as Hailey helped guide her arm into the suit sleeve.
Normally, one of their suits was kept in a single piece and was easy enough to slide into unattended. Fortunately, the suit’s components could be disengaged into separate pieces. This was useful when removing the suit from an injured spacer, but it also prevented the need to replace an entire suit when one component suffered irreparable damage.
This had been a great benefit when Ava initially needed to be suited with limited mobility. She would step into the lower portion of the suit, and the upper section would be lowered over her head. Once it was in place, Hailey would align the two pieces and activate the seal. Then Hailey helped Ava slide into the arm pieces, which were also aligned and sealed.
At this point, Ava was entirely capable of entering her suit by herself but could not yet negotiate her left arm into its sleeve, even with that section detached. Hailey was endlessly patient and claimed that she did not mind assisting, even though Ava had not asked.
Ava had quietly accepted that Hailey was going to be heavily involved in her recovery. She had even accepted that Hailey genuinely wanted her to heal.
It left a bad taste in Ava’s mouth.
Hailey left Ava to return to the med bay, or perhaps to speak with Kane on the bridge. Ava did not know and only marginally cared. She was focused on the day’s assignment.
She had originally been scheduled to spend the entire day in the cargo hold so the artifact could be studied while reacting to her. After some back-and-forth with Curry and Isaac—mostly Curry—Kane had amended the assignment to three days. That was the estimated time remaining before the
9Lives
made port.
To Ava, it was the most boring work assignment she could possibly have been given.
Ava sighed, walked to the sink, and looked at herself in the mirror.
She liked how she looked in the armored suit. It made her feel powerful and secure. Her face, on the other hand, looked young and tired.
She quietly studied her reflection.
She had the pale complexion of a spacer. Her face was neither thin nor round. She had always thought she looked plain. Her dark brown hair was tied in a loose ponytail but would hang past her shoulders if freed. She had deep, chestnut-brown eyes and dark, expressive eyebrows.
Her nose was straight except for a small imperfection where she had broken it during a childhood game of Space the Spacer. She had been afraid to let her father see it and had talked Ethan into setting it for her after watching a tutorial video on the asteroid’s local net.
She had cried and cried.
Kane had found out anyway.
The rest of her face was unmarked and unmarred, owing more to luck than any avoidance of misadventure.
Ava set her jaw as she looked at her youthful face. A part of her wanted to see age lines, perhaps even a streak of gray. She stroked a finger along the side of her face, from her right brow to her chin.
She imagined what she might look like with a scar.
Would it make her look more experienced?
She sighed and turned away from her reflection.
Ava picked up her helmet from the bunk and snapped it onto a clip at her waist, where it could hang out of the way but remain within easy reach. She turned to leave, and the door snapped open before closing behind her.
“Ava,” Captain Kane called.
Ava turned to see him walking toward her.
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“Are you heading down to the mess?” Kane asked.
Ava shook her head. “Not really hungry. Too much going on, and I’m not sure I want to see certain people just now,” she explained.
Kane nodded. “Makes sense. I completely understand why you would feel that way. But…”
Kane’s final word hung in the air.
Kane had always told Ava that anything before a
but
was like the void. Just empty space.
Ava drew in a breath and braced for impact.
“We need to resolve what happened yesterday. You need to speak with Ethan and Peters,” Kane continued.
“Peters?” Ava asked in shock. “Peters?”
Her mind raced for a moment as she tried to connect the dots.
“No,” she said. “The arm. I hit his arm.” She gestured toward her own upper arm. “Like here.”
“Yes, but as the leader of the team, you should not have struck him at all,” Kane explained.
“It was playful,” Ava argued.
“He bruised,” Kane stated.
“He bruises easily. Ethan hit him about a week ago. That is probably what caused the bruise.”
“That was the other arm. Yes, he still has a bruise there. Ethan is not the team lead. They are equals. As long as they are not fighting and there is no bad blood, that violates no ship standards. But a superior striking a subordinate is not right. It is not the kind of leader I want you to be,” Kane explained.
He had closed the distance but did not stop to speak with Ava. He continued past her, and she hurried to follow.
“It’s not like that. I wasn’t hitting him to make him follow an order. It was… I don’t know. I was upset, and he said something stupid,” Ava muttered.
Kane nodded. “Yeah, sounds about right. Peters’s mouth gets him in trouble more often than not, and I am not saying he wasn’t out of line. What I am saying is that you need to establish a firm boundary and maintain it.”
Set a firm boundary?
Ava thought.
Like with Ethan?
“But I am part of the team too. Shouldn’t I act like it?” she asked.
“Yes and no. It’s complicated, and you are going to have to determine how much of each world you can afford to surrender and what must be maintained. This is me giving you strong advice, driven by my own experience and observations.
“Violence should not be normalized by leadership, not only because it is wrong, but because it is inconsistent. Practicality and pragmatism matter. A lethal, powerful person might rule through fear for a time, but it will also be how they die. You are neither powerful nor lethal, so it should not even be considered.”
Ava tried to protest. She was, after all, trained in small arms and hand-to-hand combat. She might not be an elite trooper, marauder, or free-suiter, but she was competent enough to hold her own.
“In the suit, you’re more powerful than almost any natural human could dream of being. But even in the suit, you are slow and clumsy compared with the murderers I have seen, and there are far more powerful suits rated for actual combat. Even if you were a terror, all it would take would be for the second- and third-strongest crew members to team up against you. Does that make sense?” Kane asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Good. Loyalty is purchased through your actions and words. You say the right things and support them through your work, and people will follow you. They may even die for you.
“That does not mean people are only a means to an end, but it does mean they are also a means to an end. We all use one another as tools, in a way,” Kane began to explain.
“Dad, is this philosophy?” Ava asked, trying to steal Kane’s momentum before he launched into a full lecture on good and evil, morality, or some other such thing. She had even less of a head for philosophy than she did for history.
“Yes, you dock rat, it is. Now listen. It is important,” Kane said with a smile, without looking at his daughter.
They had reached the service elevator, and Kane entered a pin code to bring it to life. They boarded the spacious elevator, and it began its ascent.
“While we are doing things for one another and receiving things in return, we are not merely objects, even if we fulfill the role of one. A dockworker acts out a role, just as a doctor or captain might. But those are also people. Individuals. To lose sight of that is to lose your humanity. But to refuse to use people is to fail to operate within the system or network we inhabit. Does that make sense?”
“No,” Ava answered immediately.
“It will. Now, the role a person performs has obligations and expectations that are intrinsic and expected, even if they are not clearly defined or understood. For example, close your eyes and imagine a soldier. You can clearly picture one and know what they should look like or how they would act. That is your undefined conception of a soldier.
“Put it into words, and you begin to shape it into reality. You sort chaos into order by framing it with language.
“That is a tangent. The point I am getting to is that you should be the leader you would want to follow. You should aspire, at all times, to be the best version of yourself that you can be,” he said.
The elevator stopped, and the door slid open to reveal the cargo bay.
Neither Ava nor Kane moved to step out.
“How will I know what to aspire to be?” Ava asked pensively.
“That is easy. You need to look up. You model yourself and your actions after those you respect. If you want to become good at anything, you first find someone who is good at it and define what makes them so.”
“Articulate their virtues and perhaps even their faults. Try to emulate the advantages without accumulating the disadvantages. Finding that aspirational figure may be difficult, but that is what youth is for. You have time to make mistakes before you are expected to get things right.”
He placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
“I will be sending Peters and Ethan in to speak with you. It will help break up the monotony of the day. It will be alright. You will be alright.”
Ava took the cue and stepped out of the elevator toward the chair positioned near the artifact. She did not stop until she reached it.
She heard the gentle whir of the elevator ascending toward the upper hall.
Only once the whirring stopped did Ava turn and look up toward her father.