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“Yes?” I answered, wondering if somehow he’d gotten a message for me.
“Wow—uh—we’re just surprised you’re back.”
I looked around the inside of my helmet nervously. “Was I gone a long time?”
Did the spaceship I’d discovered have a time distortion field?
“No, of course, everything’s fine.”
“Oh yeah!” I agreed. “Totally!”
“Elle?” Cepharius asked with concern.
“I’m trying to seem normal,” I thought out at him—and not like I hadn’t stumbled across a fucking spaceship in ALRI’s backyard.
“Is it working?” he thought back—and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
My kraken thought Star Wars might be real. I didn’t think metaphors were going to be his strong suit.
“Shush,” I chastised him, shooing him away from my head, so I could pretend I hadn’t seen a motherfucking spaceship today around other people.
Cepharius’s voice came into my mind, very quietly. “Why would you pump your own mother?”
“Ceph!” I shouted, and then I laughed at him.
I’d let him in when we’d both been crying and as exposed as I felt now, I didn’t want to push him away again.
I walked into ALRI through the water wall, but kept my suit on, so that I could safely bring in the ROVs Ceph had carried over. Ceph made it look easy, but they weighed about forty pounds apiece.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Marcus said, the first time one breached. “That seems mission related!”
“Probably!” I agreed, clomping away from the water to set it down gently, and go back to get the second one.
“I will go get you some more of your submersibles,” Ceph said. “This time I’ll look for ones that seem more intact.”
“Thanks,” I thought after him, while Marcus came down from his crane-nest and pointed at the broken metal box at my feet like it offended him.
“How am I supposed to ignore that?”
I put both my hands on my hips and stretched my back. “I don’t know what to tell you, Marcus. Don’t look at it, maybe?”
I heard Donna snicker as she helped me take off my suit.
Cepharius spent the next two hours bringing in any ROV that he could find, and I did my best to pop out any local memory circuits, hoping that I’d be able to run them through my tablet tonight. I got used to feeling Ceph’s presence ebb and flow as he came near and then went far physically.
“Are you two playing fetch?” Donna asked, unafraid to hang out in the dock room with me.
“Something like that,” I said, rubbing my gloved hands to warm them up—the ROVs came in at the temperature of the sea, so they were freezing—and I wasn’t familiar with all of Arcus Industrial’s tech. Plus, they weren’t all the same. But the dock room came with power tools, and I wasn’t afraid of using them.
She watched me eviscerate another ROV, pursing her lips and blowing air through them. “Damn. I really want to ask you things.”
I pried off the latest ROV’s top with a grunt. “I don’t know if anything I could tell you would make sense.” It looked like the sea had gotten into this one; it was filled with sand inside.
“What do you want for dinner?”
“Whatever you feel like making. You’re a good cook,” I said, taking a moment to grin at her as she squinted at me warily.
“And you’re just one of those people whose happy she’s not cooking, aren’t you.”
