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“Well, go get it taken care of.”
Orion wasn’t sure he wanted to. Kaia hadn’t cut him deeply enough to scar, but he’d found something about having her mark on him satisfying. She was so nervous about it until he forced her hand. Just like he figured—once he started doing it for her, she tried to wrestle back some illusion of control by finishing the job herself.
“You’re aware Kaia came to me yesterday?” his mother asked.
Was she testing him? Seeing how much Kaia would’ve divulged?
“Of course.”
“Seems the academy has been good for her.”
“A good distraction, you mean. Like the one you have in mind for me?”
“I hope you don’t resent her for it, Orion,” Mare Halena sighed.
“For what?”
“The flying. You know commanders can’t be pilots.”
“Especially not if their mother sends them to a planet where they can’t fucking fly.”
“You still don’t understand any of it, do you?” Mare Halena was shaking her head.
“Understand what? That your paranoia caused all this? That you alienated your only son over a fucking repair job?”
“It was not just a repair job, Orion.” Mare Halena sighed. She looked old. Older than he’d ever seen her. “It may as well have been a suicide mission. There was a reason I was waiting to send someone out there. It takes time to decide who’s disposable to send to certain death.”
“What are you talking about?” Was she bullshitting him? He was fine. It’d been easy. Their crews had done that kind of patch job a thousand times before.
“We’d just detected a radiation storm incoming from the planet we were scoping. Not something any of our scans had picked up before. Made it unsuitable for life, of course. When I realized you were out there… Damn it, Orion, you were right in the middle of it. Turns out our blood afforded you resistance. Maybe just enough. But you could have died and left everyone on this ship to die with you.”
After so many years, this was the first time Orion had heard any of this. Why hadn’t she told him before, opting instead to send him off with no explanation?
But he knew why—things with Mare Halena were on a strictly need-to-know basis, even for her son. And all he needed to know as she’d doled out the punishment was that he’d fucked up.
“Were you protecting me or the colony?” He asked.
“Oh, please, Orion. I don’t have time for your childishness right now. I should be managing the H2O tanker delivery from Arvex.”
“Sure, Mother. You do that.” He had his answer.
* * *
Orion spent the rest of the afternoon in the ship’s physical library, in the stern. It was a place anyone rarely visited, but one that kept an extensive collection of old navigation records. All of them were available through virtual access, but his mother’s secrecy made him doubt his own approach to his research. If his mother knew he was up to something to the point of trying to get Kaia to distract him, he wouldn’t put it past her to implement some virtual access tracking.
Seemed she’d implemented some physical access tracking, though, in the form of his father. Per Halen entered the private reading cabin just as Orion was clearing away his records.
“Orion. I didn't expect to find you here.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
His father did a quick sweep of the documents Orion was stacking and setting face-down. “Ah, well. Your mother did ask me to check on you. She said you’d been… unfocused.”
“Doesn’t seem like she wants me to focus, Father.”
“She wants you to focus on therightthings. Learning how to take over this ship once… once the unfortunate time comes.” The wet glint in his father’s eye almost made Orion feel something. He had no idea how their marriage had worked for so long. How his father could tolerate Mare Halena’s iron grip and single-minded obsession with the ship, nor how his mother handled Per Halen’s meek demeanor. She hated weakness, and this man oozed it from every pore.
“Let’s focus then,” Orion leaned back in his seat. “What does the head geneticist have to do with the expedition?”
