All my life I’d heard that even very flawed people can rise to leadership under the right circumstances. I’d never believed it, not of someone with Ajit’s basic personality structure: competitive, paranoid, angry at such a deep level he didn’t even know it. I’d been wrong. I believed now.
Kane said, “I feel funny, and that probably means I’ve taken another minor hit and the program isn’t there to repair it. I think… I think…”
“Kane?” I took his hand.
He had trouble getting words out. “I think we better send the minicap now.”
“I agree,” Ajit said. “But that means we send it without the data from our next jump, to just outside the event horizon of Sag A*. So the Kepler won’t get those readings. They’ll get the work on shadow matter, but most of the best things on that already went in the second minicap. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I’m afraid if we wait to send until after the jump, nothing is what the Kepler will get. It will be too late.”
Both men looked at me. As captain, the jump decision was mine. I nodded. “I agree, too. Send off the minicap with whatever you’ve got, and then we’ll jump. But not to the event horizon.”
“Why not?” Kane burst out, sounding more like himself than at any time since the accident.
“Because there’s no point. We can’t send any more data back, so the event horizon readings die with us. And we can survive longer if I jump us completely away from the core. Several hundred light-years out, where the radiation is minimal.”
Together, as if rehearsed, they both said, “No.”
“No?”
“No,” Ajit said, with utter calm, utter persuasiveness. “We’re not going to go out like that, Tirzah.”
“But we don’t have to go out at all! Not for decades! Maybe centuries! Not until the probe’s life-maintenance power is used up—” Or until the probe is hit by space debris. Or until radiation takes us out. Nowhere in space is really safe.
Kane said, “And what would we do for centuries? I’d go mad. I want to work.”
“Me, too,” Ajit said. “I want to take the readings by the event horizon and make of them what I can, while I can. Even though the Kepler will never see them.”
They were scientists.
And I? Could even I, station bred, have lived for centuries in this tiny ship, without a goal beyond survival, trapped with these two men? An Ajit compassionate and calm, now that he was on top. A damaged Kane, gentle and intellectually gutted. And a Tirzah, captaining a pointless expedition with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
I would have ended up hating all three of us.
Ajit took my left hand. My right one still held Kane’s, so we made a broken circle in the radiation-damaged wardroom.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll send off the minicap and then jump to the event horizon.”
“Yes,” Kane said.
Ajit said, “I’m going to go back to work. Tirzah, if you and Kane want to go up to the observation deck, or anywhere, I’ll prepare and launch the minicap.” Carefully he turned his back and sat at his terminal.
I led Kane to my bunk. This was a first; I always went to the scientists’ bunks. My own, as captain, had features for my eyes only. But now it didn’t matter.
We made love, and afterward, holding his superb, aging body in my arms, I whispered against his cheek, “I love you, Kane.”
“I love you, too,” he said simply, and I had no way of knowing if he meant it, or if it was an automatic response dredged up from some half-remembered ritual from another time. It didn’t matter. There are a lot more types of love in the universe than I once suspected.
We were silent a long time, and then Kane said, “I’m trying to remember pi. I know 3.1, but I can’t remember after that.”
I said, through the tightness in my throat, “3.141. That’s all I remember.”
“Three point one four one,” Kane said dutifully. I left him repeating it over and over, when I went to jump the probe to the event horizon of Sag A*.
The second breach of the hull was more serious than the first.
The third minicap had not arrived from the probe. “The analogues are probably all dead,” Kane said dully. “They were supposed to jump to one-twenty-fifth of a light-year from the event horizon. Our calculations were always problematic for where exactly that is. It’s possible they landed inside, and the probe will just spiral around Sag A* forever. Or they got hit with major radiation and fried.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “How is the massive-young-star problem coming?”
“It’s not. Mathematical dead end.”
He looked terrible, drawn and, again, unwashed. I was more impatient with the latter than I should be. But how hard is it, as a courtesy to your shipmates if nothing else, to get your body into the shower? How long does it take? Kane had stopped exercising, as well.
“Kane,” I began, as quietly but firmly as I could manage, “will you—”
The alarms went off, clanging again at 115 decibels. Breach, breach, breach…
I scanned the displays. “Oh, God—”
“Breach sealed with temporary nano patch,” the computer said. “Seal must be reinforced within one half hour with permanent hull patch, type 1-B, supplemented with equipment repair, if possible. For location of breach and patch supply, consult—” I turned it off.
The intruder had hit the backup engine. It was a much larger particle than the first one, although since it had hit us and then gone on its merry way, rather than penetrating the ship, there was no way to recover it for examination. But the outside mass detectors registered a particle of at least two kilos, and it had probably been moving much faster than the first one. If it had hit us directly, we would all be dead. Instead it had given the ship a glancing blow, damaging the backup engine.
“I’ll come with you again,” Kane said.
“There won’t be any particle to collect this time.” Or not collect.
“I know. But I’m not getting anywhere here.”
Kane and I, s-suited, went into the backup engine compartment. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was nothing I could do. There is damage you can repair, and there is damage you cannot. The back end of the compartment had been sheared off, and part of the engine with it. No wonder the computer had recommended a 1-B patch, which is essentially the equivalent of “Throw a tarp over it and forget it.”
While I patched, Kane poked around the edges of the breach, then at the useless engine. He left before I did, and I found him studying ship’s display of the hit on my wardroom screen. He wasn’t trying to do anything with ship’s log, which was not his place and he knew it, but he stood in front of the data, moving his hand when he wanted another screen, frowning horribly.
“What is it, Kane?” I said. I didn’t really want to know; the patch had taken hours and I was exhausted. I didn’t see Ajit. Sleeping, or up on the observation deck, or, less likely, in the gym.
“Nothing. Whatever that hit was made of, it wasn’t radiating. So it wasn’t going very fast, or the external sensors would have picked up at least ionization. Either the mass was cold, or the sensors aren’t functioning properly.”
“I’ll run the diagnostics,” I said wearily. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I want to move the ship.”
I stared at him, my suit half peeled from my body, my helmet defiantly set on the table, pushing the statue of Shiva to one side. “Move the ship?”