After dressing quickly, tossing some warm water over his face, and wetting down his short locks, Blair looked once more at his pathetic bunkmate, then hurried out.
With thirty seconds to spare, Blair made it to the flight wing ready room and strapped into a jumpseat between Hunter and Bishop. Pilots lined the walls, chatting with each other or staring straight ahead, sleeping with their eyes open. The six squadron commanders entered from a hatch that led to the flight control room. They eyed the rows, taking silent attendance. Blair glanced at the empty seat that belonged to Maniac. Zarya sat beside the seat, her gaze focused on the entrance in anticipation of Maniac's arrival.
"Lieutenant Marshall?" Angel asked, inspecting the room to be sure she hadn't missed him.
"Uh, he's sick, ma'am," Blair said. "I think he was going to see a medic and strap in down there."
She managed to restrain most of her sneer and the rage that lay behind it. "I hope you're right," she said, then hastened to the data net terminal beside the main hatch.
Blair looked to Zarya, who mouthed, "Where is he?"
Closing his eyes, Blair tilted his head to one side to show her. When he looked up, he saw Zarya swearing to herself.
After another moment, Angel returned from the terminal, her gaze like a flamethrower. "Lieutenant Marshall is not in sickbay. And if he's in his quarters, he's not answering my call. Any ideas, Lieutenant?"
Blair shrugged.
"I wouldn't find him dancing in the rec, would I?"
He stifled a snort. "I doubt that, ma'am."
Her exaggerated sigh said it all. She turned back to confer with Jinxman and Lightning, and for a moment the ready room's lights caught her at the perfect angle. Why did he keep seeing her in the light like this? Why did she have to be so damned beautiful?
Three days ago they had eaten breakfast together. They had drawn the stares of a few officers stuffing their faces, but she had been unfazed by that. The stares had bothered him more, and for some reason he couldn't get past the notion that he should keep his distance, that when she leaned over her food to say something, bringing her lips so close that it made him dizzy, he should keep his torso rigid. Twice he had even recoiled from her advance. They had chatted about the war, about news from Earth, about a new film showing in one of the vidrooms on Deck C. While her words came out naturally, gracefully, his dialogue felt forced, ragged, shaken by nerves and thoughts of rejection.
Anyone else would have probably asked her to come back to his quarters. Anyone else would have made love to her as though it were his last time. But Blair felt pinned under his insecurities, and when the breakfast was over, she headed back to her quarters and he sat there for an hour, damning his ineptitude. For the next two days he saw her only during training sessions. He had ghosted his way around the flight deck, hoping to bump into her, but instead bumped into Deck Boss Peterson-literally. The man ordered him off the deck. And so it went.
Then, last night, he had spotted her sitting alone in a far corner of the rec, watching Maniac and Zarya dancing. Tentatively, he had approached and had asked if he could join her. Her smile had been a perfect reply, and he had bought her next drink, an expensive beer produced by a boutique brewery on Nephele. She had never tasted it before, had said it was great, and had thanked him with a salacious look that continued flashing through his mind's eye. For the rest of the time they had just sat there, rapping idly about more trivialities until she had finished her glass, bid him good-night, and suddenly left.
Seeing her go, Maniac had looked to Blair, and his mouth had formed a single word: "loser."
Blair blinked off the memory as Maniac now scampered into the ready room, ducked by the squadron commanders, then slammed himself into his jumpseat. Zarya helped him buckle in as Lieutenant Commander Obutu rattled off the final countdown from command and control, each number booming through the ship.
The squadron commanders took their own seats, and Angel set her crosshairs on Maniac. At least the pilot knew better than to find her gaze.
Bulkheads groaned, overheads rattled, and lights flickered as the Claw's jump drive came on line. Blair had grown quite used to the shipboard effects of jumping, especially those associated with jumping known rifts in the space-time continuum. Jumping quasars, pulsars, black holes, and other unpredictable phenomena would always keep him on edge. But this standard jump freed him to focus on other things, other people, most particularly his mother. He hoped she would come to him and explain why she had not appeared during his jump of the supercruiser's gravity-well. He would demand that she explain the voice in his ears, the caress on his cheeks, the figure who had risen to beckon him from the plain of darkness.
Even as he turned his thoughts to her, the pilots' murmuring decrescendoed into nothingness. The straps of his jumpseat and the tug of his uniform surrendered to a feeling of numbness. He no longer detected the smell of detergent that lingered on everyone's uniforms, and his mouth lacked the aftertaste of last night's beer. He looked across the room at the other pilots frozen in mid-sentence, then he darted through them and into the cosmos as though strapped to a runaway drive. He orbited Earth several thousand times, slingshotted around Sol, then rocketed out of the Milky Way, heading deeper into the local group, toward Andromeda and its companion galaxies. And as he traveled, he glimpsed his mother for a moment. She looked repeatedly over her shoulder as she ran through a seemingly endless corridor of star clusters.
"Mother!"
"Don't come, Blair." She dissolved into the stars.
He willed himself after her, moved in front, and she came to a jarring halt, out of breath and beaded with sweat. The lines spreading out from her eyes had deepened since the last time he had seen her, and the color of those eyes seemed to fluctuate with the beating of her heart, sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes a color he could only describe as sad.
"What's wrong?"
"I want so badly to talk to you, my son. But I can't."
"Why?"
"Because if I change your path, I change the paths of countless others, including my own. I can do nothing for you."
"Just tell me about-"
"The voice? The caress? The figure?"
He took her shoulders into his hands, and he felt her warmth surge up his arms. "Tell me! There's no pain in knowing. The pain is my ignorance."
"Doesn't it bother you that some of us have murdered billions over the years?"
"Of course it does. It makes me question even more who and what I am."
"Don't ask that question. And don't go looking for the answer. Oh, Christopher. I didn't want to leave you-I didn't. Know that, at least."
"What about the voice? The hand I felt on my cheek?"
"Beware them," she said, then repeated the words until they blurred into gibberish, became a tone that rose in pitch until he screamed for it to leave.
It did.
His chin rested on his chest. He panted as though he had just run a dozen kilometers.
"You got to lay off that beer, mate," came a familiar voice. "Hard to really tell what they put in that microbrew. Better you fix yourself right with a nice oil can of Foster's. Over six centuries of tradition. You'll learn."
Blair looked up, saw Hunter unbuckling from his jumpseat harness. Some of the other pilots were already on their feet, and a casually dressed man beamed at him from the hatchway. A harder look revealed him as Paladin, hair still wet from a recent shower, cheeks freshly shaven. For his part, the man made no remark of Blair's particularly rough post-jump appearance and came quickly forward. "Mr. Blair. It seems that the Olympus has already jumped. We can get a rough estimate of her destination from the Claw's sensors, but I think you and I can do a more accurate job. Care to take a ride?"