Providence - Max Barry Page 0,28

good-bye to her husband for four years. Talia wasn’t going to say anything, but to be honest she wasn’t a hundred percent sold on how much of a sacrifice that really was. If you pressed her, Talia might guess that Jolene Jackson’s husband was one more person she’d run into space to escape.

“I see the argument,” she said. “But it’s situational. Some people struggle with this more than others.”

Jackson squinted at her. “You’re talking about Anders?”

Of course she was. “His boredom is creating operational problems. Gilly’s now an issue because Anders was too bored to keep his mouth shut.” Jackson leaned back in her seat. Her stupid sidearm gleamed. Sometimes Talia caught herself fantasizing about snatching that thing out of its holster and throwing it down a corridor, just to see Jackson’s expression. She had researched it, because she had nothing better to do, and discovered it fired compressed air. It made a loud noise and disturbed hairstyles, essentially. Jackson never put it down. “I don’t care what he told Gilly. I care about him skipping station. It’s dereliction of duty. And he doesn’t have many duties.”

She honestly wondered what Jackson did in her downtime. It must be something. How else could she believe that having few duties was a good thing?

“You say he was getting hydrexalin? How?”

“Medical. He deliberately engages in games with a high injury risk.”

“That stops.”

“The games?”

“All of it,” Jackson said. “I don’t care what you have to do. He’s absent from station again, I’m having him confined.”

She felt that would be bad. Locking Anders in his cabin: She did not have a good feeling about that. She would like to try some tactics that didn’t involve massively escalating the situation. “I’ll get him to station.”

“Make sure you do,” Jackson said.

* * *

—

Anders had a history. Her first day at Camp Zero, after the Service brass with stony eyes and whip-crack voices finished telling them what a glorious honor it was to be standing where they were right now, representing humanity in its hour of greatest need, fighting to defend our brilliant blue bubble against an evil alien aggressor, et cetera, and so forth, she had looked around to check out her competition and Paul Anders had breezed by. She stared after him and a girl beside her said, “Who was that?” and another girl said, “I don’t know, but I think I’m going to like it here,” and they had laughed and bonded while Talia tried to decide whether it would be weird to start laughing, too, and decided yes.

He was beautiful. There was the jaw, the eyes, the way that when he looked at you, he seemed to be asking, Who are you? and the answer could be anything you wanted. You somehow became a better, more relevant person in the spotlight of his gaze. It felt that primal. And when the stories began, they only increased his allure. Here was a Paul Anders story: One day, a nice girl, usually a Life candidate, was minding her own business, waiting for a shuttle, alone, not betraying any hint of the monumental pressure she was under every single waking minute, and Paul Anders happened to sit nearby. They got to talking, and the girl discovered to her surprise that behind Paul Anders’s soul-piercing eyes and unlikely bone structure was a careful thinker, not at all the shallow, narcissistic maniac you might have heard, so she allowed herself to continue to talk to him, and then they met up later—not a date, you understand, it actually didn’t really fit a label—and they had the most amazing conversation, where he revealed his incredible vulnerability, like the things he’d gone through, you couldn’t imagine, and she realized something: She didn’t allow herself to have fun anymore, or else she was only here because her mother had such impossible expectations, or else she was stronger than she’d thought, whatever it was, one of those, and then, not to make a big deal out of this because it wasn’t really the point, but they had sex. It was, let’s say, how to put this, because she didn’t want to sound conceited, but it did redefine her whole reality. Like it made it really clear that most people were completely