Peters saw Weir looking over at her vid unit, and he had a momentary flash of embarrassment at being caught in his peeping game. Rather than the negative reaction he expected, however, she turned slightly, tilting the unit so that he could see the screen. She turned her attention back to what she was watching.
Weir focused on the screen, blinking as the image changed rapidly, blurring first with a panning movement, then with a too-fast zoom. He saw the makings of a party, ribbons, balloons, heard the sounds of children and a thin background of music.
The image blurred again, then blanked. The screen cleared to show a child in a wheelchair. Weir estimated the boy’s age at four or five, wondering how far off he was. He could make only a bare guess at the nature of the child’s handicap, or how long he had been in the wheelchair, though the chair itself did not appear to have been heavily used. The boy was grinning happily, waving his arms. Not quadriplegic then, he thought; a simple paraplegia of some kind, leaving the mind intact and the body more or less functional. Some of these physical dysfunctions could be corrected now, with the help of nanosurgery, but not all.
The boy held up his arms, laughing. “Play horsey, Mommy, play horsey!” he called.
The image shook and shifted and abruptly zoomed back. Peters came into view on the vid screen, looking sunny and relaxed, her clothes bright and loose on her slender frame. To Weir she did not look the slightest bit like someone who spent a great deal of time in space.
Peters, watching, smiled.
Peters, on the screen, laughing, cried, “Want to play horsey, do you?” in a voice that bespoke motherhood and joy. She bent and grasped the child in one long swooping motion that made the boy howl with delight, lifting him out of the wheelchair, flying him through the air, somehow ending up with him on her back.
Somewhere deep inside Weir there was an ache. He chose not to address it, choosing instead to accept the diversion of Miller striding through the hatchway, coming back to the crew quarters from the bridge. He kept his silence as Miller sat down next to Peters, giving her a sympathetic glance.
“I put in for a replacement for you,” Miller said, without even glancing at Weir, “but on short notice like this…”
He might as well have pointed a finger directly at Weir. Shame burned in Weir’s chest, mixed with an uncomfortable rage. It isn’t my fault! he thought angrily. He had not planned this, arid he had not singled out Miller’s ship and crew. Miller did not seem to want to approach this rationally.
Peters shrugged and shut off the vid unit, putting it aside. “No, no, it’s all right,” she said, and gave Weir a friendly, understanding glance, almost speaking to him. “I talked to my ex. He’ll keep Denny over Christmas and I’ll get him this summer.” She gave Miller a brittle smile that told the truth about her dilemma and her feelings. “So everything’s all right.”
Miller continued to look at her for a few moments, his dark face unreadable. He wanted his scapegoat, Weir thought, his reason for being furious with the world. USAC High Command was too far away, too impersonal, for that purpose. Right or wrong, he had a passenger he could focus on.
Now Peters was trying to take that away from him by not letting Miller use her as a reason to put the screws to his enigmatic guest.
Miller softened momentarily, a flash that was gone as quickly as it came.
He glanced quickly at Weir, but there was no challenge there now. He did not expect this ad hoc truce to last.
Starck and Smith arrived, also coming back from the bridge, both of them looking tense, neither of them paying Weir much attention. Starck sat down next to Miller, leaning forward, while Smith took up a position behind the chair Weir was huddling on. Weir looked around, up, for a moment, risking a crick in his neck. Smith looked down at him like the wrath of God, his dark eyes unwavering. It figured, Weir thought. He had managed to usurp the pilot’s regular crew quarters chair.
Cooper and Justin paid the psychodrama no attention whatsoever, tossing the ball back and forth.
Behind Weir, Smith intoned, “Two hours to Neptune orbit.” The words had all the sound and authority of the Last Trump, meant to make Weir quake.
Smith’s pronouncement out of the way, Starck looked at Miller and said,
“All boards are green, everything’s five by five.”
“That’s good to know,” Miller rumbled. The ball whizzed by him, on its way from Cooper to Justin. Miller gave the younger man an impatient look that was tinged with the suggestion of violence. “Justin, you wanna stow that?”
Justin clutched the ball to his chest, looking abashed. Cooper grinned at him, while Peters offered a “I told you so!” look. Mom might let the boys get away with it, but Dad was home now….
Miller leaned forward, clasping his hands together, his expression deadly serious. “Okay, listen up,” he said, looking around at his crew. “As you all know, we have an addition to our crew. Dr. Weir, this is: Starck, my XO; Smith, pilot; Justin, ship’s engineer—”
“You can call him Baby Bear,” Cooper interrupted, sliding smoothly into the gap that Miller granted him. Justin grinned and Starck snorted, amused.
Miller looked around at Cooper, who was lounging insouciantly on his bunk.
“This is Cooper. What the hell do you do on this ship, anyway?”
Cooper gave a show of thinking, his eyebrows working.
Taking his cue, Justin said, “Ballast.”
Cooper leaned down over the side of the bunk, threatening to slide off onto the deck. He gave Weir a kissy-face stare that made the scientist flinch back.
“I am your best friend,” Cooper said, his voice singsong, “I am a lifesaver and a heartbreaker…”
Weir was not sure how he should react to this particular display, so he chose to avoid a response altogether. Helplessly, he looked at Miller, who looked impatiently back. “He’s a rescue technician. Peters, medical technician, DJ…”
“Trauma,” DJ said, softly.
So DJ and Peters were the medical tag team, one dealing with the broken ones Peters could not easily fix.
Cooper hauled himself back onto his bunk, his expression serious for once.
“All right, everybody knows each other. So what are we doing all the way out here, Skipper?”
“Dr. Weir?” Miller said, turning to look at the bedraggled scientist.
Weir cleared his throat, hesitating. At the beginning he had imagined dramatic pronouncements and grand moments. Instead, he was wrapped in a blanket, stuffed into a spacecraft that had very little to do with human comfort, and presented with a small crew that was almost openly hostile. Had he known how things were to have worked out, he would still have demanded to go with the salvage crew.
It was time he tried to smooth things over.
This in mind, he said, “First of all, I’d like to say how much I appreciate this opportunity—”
Miller rolled his eyes, shook his head, anger radiating off of him in waves. “Dr. Weir,” he growled slowly, “we did not volunteer for this mission.
We were pulled off leave to be sent to Neptune. It is three billion klicks past even the remotest outpost.” Miller took a deep breath. “And the last time the USAC attempted a rescue this far out, we lost both ships. So, please… cut to it.”
So there was another root cause of Miller’s attitude. Rescue and salvage was Miller’s life, and he knew the odds for success in most situations. What Weir knew and he believed Miller would eventually learn was that the Event Horizon was extraordinary, that the mission they were on was without precedent.