“I cannot understand how so fractured a society managed to reach space.” Carbon shook her head and offered up the straw to the bag of food to him again.
“I hear that a lot.” He took a pull of passable beef stew and swallowed. It had been covered in school, actually. They - the Tslao, Eohm, and Tkt - all had apparently homogeneous cultures. The Tslao in particular had a difficult time wrapping their heads around the panoply of humanity. “Not that specifically, but something similar.”
She left his bag floating in front of him and took a sip from her own, considering his comment an invitation to continue. “Your dispenser has over a thousand kinds of soup available, even on local backup power. Scrolling through the list gave me the feeling of going mad. It seemed to never end and there were so many languages. I had to do research.”
“Really? I had never looked at the soups before.” In the few months he’d known Carbon, this was the most she had said to him outside of ship business. The tone was conversational and it wasn’t even directly critical of him! It was probably a good sign, but that was assuming he was reading her correctly.
“I will not accept ‘just pick something for me’ as an answer from you for your future meals.” She shook her head and took another pull from her bag. The markings on it indicated she was not giving Human cuisine a try tonight.
Despite his best efforts, he smiled at that. The attempt to suppress it just kind of twisted it a bit and made him look very smug.
She did mind that. Her expression darkened, her voice dropped away from the conversational tone she had just been using. “Are you mocking me?”
There went his progress. “No. I was just...” Alex tried to figure out how to say what he meant through the cultural barrier with a bit of grace. He failed at that, instead choosing to simply barge through it with as detailed an explanation as possible. “I thought the situation was humorous for its irony. I had not intended to cause you any trouble when you asked me what I wanted to eat, but offering what I perceived to be an easy option turned out to be the opposite.”
Her expression softened, voice chastened. “Irony. Yes.” Carbon sighed, set her food aside, and rubbed her eyes. He hadn’t noticed how tired she looked until now. “I am not being considerate of you, Alex. I confess that I very easily forget you are in this state.”
“It’s fine. I forget that I’m stuck here every few minutes anyway.” He grinned.
Miraculously, the corners of her mouth curled up just a bit as she held his packet of stew out to him again. “The mediboard indicates you should have your upper body back sometime in the next week. Your legs will take longer yet.”
He swallowed another sip of stew. “Good. At least I’ll be able to do something.”
“I do not know that there will be much for you to do. The ship is in good shape with the exception of the bridge and engine room.”
“Are the Ehom still in system?” He already knew the answer. If they had left, everything could be turned back on. They were still running just automated systems: life support, shielding and the kinetic buffers. Those would run for months after a ship’s crew was dead.
“Yes. They have moved away to one of the local planets, nearly the other side of the system. We are adrift and they have made no attempts to check the ship yet.”
“That’s something.”
“It is.” She fed him another sip of stew and looked away, expression guilty. “I have been meaning to discuss something with you.”
In his experience, good conversations did not start that way. “Go on.”
“After the attack, I entered the bridge-” she stopped and her eyebrows knit together, some internal tug-of-war going on. “When I got the crash foam off of you, there was so much blood.”
“My Amp wasn’t reporting vitals, you had no idea if I was still alive. I can understand why you did that.”
“Yes, that is exactly...” she trailed off, her eyes briefly meeting his before darting away. “What do you mean by that?”
“You performed a neural link with me while I was unconscious.” He had plenty of time to suss out possible explanations for why she had done it, and it probably wasn’t because she had been bored.
“You should not be able to remember that.” She seemed genuinely confused about this.
“Well, I do.” In event of a crash, the pilot was injected with a cocktail of drugs and nanites to mitigate injuries and keep him conscious enough to fly. That was the idea, at least. “Why did you do it?”
She hesitated, and looked like she was about to bolt from the room for a moment. “I had to know if you still lived.”
The way she put emphasis on it was telling, according to the primer. She had wanted to see if his collection of memories was intact. From learning to read to flying a scoutship, these were what made him unique, according to the Tslao. With his memories gone he would have been some sort of ghoul to them, and useless on the ship. “You would have left me to die if I hadn’t?”
“It is likely.” She look at the packet of food in her hands with deadly intensity that indicated she didn’t particularly relish the idea of someone dying on her watch, no matter what they were.
“I do not blame you. In the same situation I can’t say I would not have done the same thing.” It might have been a lie, but he knew it was the diplomatic thing to say. It let her save face.
She nodded, still looking guilty but more relaxed. “Thank you.”
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