When the live stream of the training mission starts, the Freelancers admire Delta as they usually do. York rips up sim troopers on another planet, displayed on the large screen in the window of the observation deck, and the other Freelancers watch with synchronized oohs. The team is one creature when they focus like this, and CT and Wash beside one another feel the effect of that body too.
"That's quite impressive," North says. South narrows her eyes and bares her teeth.
"Look at this," CT says, turning her head to the left and right. "He's baiting us with this."
"And the Loch Ness Monster faked the moon landing. We get it," South says, still looking at York with a competitive jealousy CT knows well.
"Tell me that when you don't get an AI either," CT says, and a more grim expression flickers across South's face. She, of all people, should be able to see the synthetic nature of her jealousy.
This was what it had all become: alliances within the team falling apart and re-forming, one sentence tipping scales back and forth. Survival of the fittest, Carolina preached, even while she tried to keep the team together. Weren't they all fit already? (Deceived, but fit.) Wasn't York wiping his hands of groaning men and women on the battlefield on the screen? Shouldn't it matter least of all to CT, who was leaving?
The exercise concludes. North and Florida cheer. CT turns away first, and Wash follows her.
"They're just caught in the moment," Wash says. "That's gotta hit hard."
He has chosen a relatively private helmet-to-helmet channel, audible not to the team but to the Director if he chooses to listen. The others can surely see CT round on Wash near the edge of the room, though, both of their armored footsteps slamming on the shining, dark floor.
You'll all know soon, she thinks. We'll walk into Alpha's storage room together and we'll save ourselves.
"Can't you see how it's dividing us?" she says, careful not to use the Director's name. She must accuse just enough to make dissent a part of her personality, but not quite enough to edge into insubordination, or to make anyone think she has already made plans.
Wyoming and Carolina argue in restrained, matching tones behind her. North and South talk about York's strategy, but it's more about reputation than action: Will his timing give him more points on the leaderboard? Will the algorithm favor one small moment, one step or shot, above another? Does it calculate for damage caused or damage prevented?
"There are bound to be some strange things in an experimental unit," Wash says weakly. It's just how Wash lies, unknowingly to himself as much as to anyone else. He evades, presents tangential facts that sound at first like answers. It is, she thinks, a useful way, and the only way he knows how. The Director lies the same way, sometimes.
"We were told we would have experimental equipment, not that we would be turned into guinea pigs."
He cups his fist in the other hand, rubs nervously at the patches of padding on his gloved fingers. "The Director knows more than we do about that."
Wash always makes it so personal, CT thinks. He's so indebted to Dr. Leonard Church, for reasons she doesn't entirely understand at the moment.
They walk out together, but part soon after. After she has been shucked out of her armor she stands in the observation deck, a cup of decaf coffee in her bare hands, a too-big sweatshirt hanging loosely from her shoulders. Wash finds her again, and she glances behind her to see him standing in the doorway, his hands swinging loosely at his sides.
Both of them have had time to divorce their thoughts from the other's, she thinks. Sometimes she catches herself thinking like Wash before thinking like herself. Sometimes she catches herself thinking like the Director first of all. Thinking like Leonard Church is a strategy that works for her. She must distance herself from thinking like Wash, though, because if the connection between them becomes too cloying she starts to hate it, and the hate is most painful to herself. She folds her hands inside the sweatshirt's sleeves and taps a rhythm, maybe a reveille, on her wrists.
The Freelancers have had several communal sweatshirts in their day. Maine's university pullovers were the first, and then York's grifball hoodie that ended up lying crumpled and thin on the sagging, out-of-place couch until someone put it on for warmth or comfort and later returned it to the common couch.
She wasn't wearing one of those, though, and she wondered whether Wash would recognize the meaning of that. She could have worn one of her own sweatshirts without worrying about any social signal it would send. Would Wash read into her choice, though? Would it be important to him that she hadn't chosen to wear her teammates' clothes? She doesn't want to be surrounded by the winners on the team right now, doesn't want to be reminded of them.
"I'm going to punch South for the Loch Ness Monster thing," CT says. "You know, during some sanctioned training activity."
"Carefully organized revenge," Wash says. "I like it."
CT's going to save South, and Wash wouldn't approve of the lengths to which she will go to do that in the course of her righteous revenge.
She'd seen the Director's plans regarding the simulation missions. He planned to make them harder, more fanciful as the project went on. They had descriptions like 'ancient alien war and/or impregnation, Scenario Three.' They would demand that the Freelancers spend more and more time separate from one another, with their AI for company.
Project Freelancer was designed like a frag grenade. Everything was close and under pressure at first, and then all the individual parts were thrown out farther and farther away from each other, the shrapnel landing at the circumference of a huge, jagged circle.
There were sim training scenarios in which the Freelancers turned their guns on one another because the others were invisible, or addled with gas. Unintentional friendly fire.
"Revenge?" Wash says again, feebly and then sharply, laughing at himself in the back of his throat.
Where does Wash stand? Somewhere between the golden children and the traitor, CT thinks. Wash maintains his place in the middle of the board with an effortless, self-deprecating calmness. He is an honest place in a sea of lies, and when he hates, he does it honestly.
She's going to run away. She's going to find a new place, and enjoy being exhausted there.
"You don't have to do this," she says, looking down at the floor. Forty decks beneath her, space is the open air above a canyon.
"Do what?" he asks.
"Comfort me."
"Yes, I do."
He feels it is his duty, and that reassures her that he is honest, or at least that he has compartmentalized. Wash and Internal Affairs are not entirely the same.
The night before the operation at the scrapyard, Wash doesn't sleep well.
Two weeks earlier, York had returned from the remote training in good spirits, laughing as he tugged his helmet off to reveal mussed hair. He'd had to wash the alien blood off before he got in the Pelican, he said. Decontamination procedures. He had experienced something alone, and although CT stood back from the group of Freelancers gathered to meet him, she thought the others felt his return as a surge of fear too. Who else would leave next, they wondered? Carolina shook York's arm by the elbow, chastisement and relieved touch all at once as her fingers clicked against the thick golden gauntlet.
After that there were further Director-mandated studies of Delta's implantation itself, of its effects on York's physical and personal performance. It was the beginning of the end of the experiments, CT knew, the final and most finicky part. But Delta was far from jumpy, and it was so convenient that the first AI would be so stable, would hide the vicious side of his calm personality so well. CT observed him without dislike. Poor Alpha, that he had come to this, but poor Delta too.
The Freelancers lived in their military rhythm, laughing with one another when they got the chance. Even South was personable, in her offbeat, prickly way. Everyone on the Mother of Invention pretends, CT thinks, not to know as much as they really do.
That's how the next conversation about division happens. Wash and CT have been toying with one another all along, ever since he caught her talking to the Leader, and she knows that things will have to end. Someone will catch the other, completely - either CT will gather enough data to take the Director's program down from the inside, or the Director's Internal Affairs team will prove their suspicions about CT. Because the divisions are so obvious, they don't talk about divisions any more.
For a while, the avoidance allows their relationship to survive.
They encounter one another silently, most of the time, because Wash needs reassurance and CT needs human contact, carefully measured out.
She sits up reading, her blanket piled around her, Wash's head pillowed on her stomach. He must be uncomfortable, she thinks, curled on his side in the small bunk. He isn't complaining, although she can see some tension or irritation in the curl of his hands, the twitch of muscle in his back. No surprise. The space walk tomorrow will be their first, although it has already been tested and simulated. The warmth of his cheek through her t-shirt makes her almost forget the gulf of the lower decks, the thousand hiding spaces fraught with guilt and fear.
The book propped in front of her is a comforting, cheap science fiction novel full of vacuous, childish, reassuring sentences, which she reads to him in a hushed voice, dramatic but not loud enough to carry to Maine on the other side of the room.
Wash turns his head, and the back of his skull digs against her ribs. She trusts that. She trusts the way love is imperfect, because it cannot be otherwise, and she trusts the fact that Wash never gave her false reassurances. If he hurts her, he will be honest and earnest about it. He will be as methodical as she is. She levers her hand between his head and her stomach to settle both of them.
The book falls to her side, and Wash glances at the fantastically armored creature on the cover with laconic appraisal.
"Think it'll be all right tomorrow?" he says.
"We have to do it either way."
"We've never been in space before." He presses on.
"We're always in space."
"I mean..."
"I know." She leafs through his hair. York has his own private mission tomorrow, the way Tex often does. (Tex's files, though, are usually behind stronger, more intricate walls.) So does CT, although it isn't in the records. She has hidden her data and planned its transfer down to the second, as long as the Leader's instructions and disorganized assurances can be trusted. She'll hand it over, and come back for more. She isn't sure whether Charon or the Oversight Committee are the more reliable, but both will be easier to test from inside the Mother of Invention. (And, besides. Besides. She will come back to the ship after her risky mission tomorrow. She has the skills for it.)
"Maybe if I'd been picked for a simulation mission, I would be more prepared," Wash says, soft and tired.
"You're on the leader board," she said, disheartened by her own bitterness. "That proves you're prepared."
"But still." Maybe the board didn't matter as much to him, and that was why he wasn't disturbed by it. "It makes us stronger." He means that competition makes them stronger, and she is taken aback. He can probably feel her muscles tightening.
"We might be chosen for simulation missions one day," she says, trying for the most shallow solution to the problem.
She has decided already, many times, that she will not be taking him with her. She will be back, though. She is not leaving yet.
The idea of days beyond tomorrow seems to comfort him. He turns over, his shoulder digging uncomfortably into her leg.
Does the leader board score for damage caused or damage prevented? Caused, she knows now. She's seen that data. Of course, it also assigns points for mission objectives - Tex skewed the whole system during the retrieval of the Sarcophagus. Alpha had to rethink some things, and now the Freelancers are graded on a curve. Beyond the pass/fail system, though, there is also a Rube Goldberg-complex mathematical system of contingencies and quantifiers: points for speed, points for style. It isn't very scientific, CT thinks. It isn't any of the things that the Director advertises it to be.
When did she and Wash develop their own private competition, their own private bitterness? She blinks, sleepy.
She will be back. She will be back.