Page 15 of Cloverleaf Station

“But not the second time?” Elenus inferred.

“They pushed their luck too far. Their ship was caught between two meteors and couldn’t get out of the way in time. They died quickly, at least.”

Elenus huffed a sigh. “So we’re going to be sifting through floating ship debris as well as meteors?”

Kieron stared at him. “No, of course not.”

“You just said—”

“I said the miners died. I didn’t say I left them and their ship out here.”

Elenus blinked. “You … mounted a retrieval operation … for dead people?” He shook his head. “Wait, no, why am I surprised? Of course, you did. That’s your whole reason for being here, isn’t it, finding a dead body to bring home?”

“I didn’t do it for their sakes,” Kieron said, a little harshly. “Ship debris would make this entire field less stable than it already is. If I left every ship that had an accident out here to float, the region would eventually become impossible to navigate. It’s my job to keep this station prosperous, and that makes retrieval a part of my job.”

“Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?”

Um … “Yes?”

“Ah … hmm.” Elenus’s clouded expression cleared up. “I should have expected this from you.”

“What? Why—”

“Here, let’s navigate to some of the closer ones. You can practice flying while I start running my own sensor array. It’s been a long time since Catalina passed through, but we may yet be able to find traces of her energy signature.”

Kieron hesitated to call the next few hours “fun,” because fun wasn’t something he really felt qualified to have. However, he couldn’t deny that it was … stimulating, learning to fly an entirely new ship, checking in on his probes while someone else did the scanning, looking into the heart of the meteor field and the quasar without worrying about his or anyone else’s health.

That was the most beautiful thing, he thought, as a massive meteor floated by. A second later, the distant quasar came into view, so terribly bright it would blind him instantly if he were to look at it without proper shielding. As it was, the Lizzie did a good job of keeping the view manageable, even better than his own ship.

This was the swirling, churning heart of a new galaxy. This was a place that, in hundreds of millions of years, might have its own planets, its own systems. Perhaps not—this was a relatively small quasar compared to many others, but the fanciful part of Kieron liked to imagine that it would grow up to become something magnificent.

If only he’d been able to continue his earlier research, with Zakari … they might know so much more about this quasar by now.

“You look like you’re in love.”

Kieron blinked, then slammed the button that cleared the viewscreen, leaving only data and sensor images. “Nonsense.”

“No, I’ve seen the faces of people in love before, and you matched them perfectly,” Elenus went on, like the jerk he was. “With the quasar itself? I’ve got to warn you, romances between humans and infant galaxies are doomed to failure.”

“It’s not a romance,” Kieron snapped. “I spent my first few years here studying it, that’s all.”

“Ah. A scientist whose love for quasar research has been frustrated.”

“It’s not my love for research that frustrates me.”

“Love for your friend, then?”

Kieron shouldn’t reply, he shouldn’t give Elenus anything the man hadn’t earned somehow, but sitting here in his marvelous ship, Kieron was moved for the first time to give something of himself for free.

“Imagine experiencing nothing but conflict all your life, competing and fighting and running for every scrap, and then being told that you didn’t have to do that anymore. That you could live another way, with more than fear and anger in your heart. Imagine being brought into a family like that, hurting them again and again because you just didn’t understand them but always, always being forgiven. Imagine having that.”

He frowned down at the controls. “And then imagine losing it. And this time around, you refuse to be forgiven because you know their forgiveness is a lie. Who wants to live a lie?”

He glanced briefly at Elenus, expecting yet another quip or casual insult, but instead he got a dark, steady stare that made Kieron shift in his seat for no reason he could pinpoint.

“We should get back,” Elenus said at last. “Do you have enough data to send out another round of probes?”

“Oh. Yes.”