“Yes, you did,” he replied, reaching out to squeeze my shoulder.

  "So Doc, what's the diagnosis?" I joked lamely, seeking distraction. "Will I live?"

  "No question about that,” Ben assured. "Though you may end up with a thin scar. Chicks dig scars, or so I'm told."

  I barked out a surprised laugh. "Not sure that matters since the only candidates around here are Ally, Ixy and Meg. Ally and Meg are too old, and Ixy, well…I think that goes without saying.”

  Ixy clacked with laughter while Ben paused thoughtfully. "True enough. But once we get you back to Earth, I’m confident you'll need to fend off admirers with a stick." He turned his attention to the screen. “Ixy, I need the Hilasol. I think there’s some in Room Two.”

  “Yesss,” she replied, backing out of the compartment to retrieve whatever Hilasol was.

  “Normally, I could heal you myself,” Ben said. “But we’re outside of normal right now.”

  “With Sigiltech?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “What else can you do with it?”

  “Not much, here.”

  “I get the sense there’s more to it than that,” I said, seeing the same distracted fade in his eyes when he said it.

  “You’re pretty perceptive; you know that?”

  “Mom always said I had her heart and Dad’s mind. I wasn’t always sure that was a good thing.”

  “I think it is. Can you keep a secret?”

  “I’d rather not, to be honest.”

  He hadn’t expected that reply, but he seemed to appreciate it. He considered how much to tell me before sighing. “I suppose you’re going to find out sooner or later. The thing is, I have a malignant brain tumor.”

  The reveal caught me fully by surprise. “What?”

  “My ability to channel chaos energy is the only thing that keeps me alive,” he continued. “Without it, the tumor would grow and spread to the rest of my body.”

  “They never cured cancer in the Spiral?”

  “It’s complicated. But no.”

  “And not being able to channel chaos energy as easily means⁠—“

  “I’m not entirely sure what it means right now,” Ben said. “I restore myself almost subconsciously at this point. A constant flow of energy to hold back the tumor. Maybe I can pull enough so it won’t be a problem. Or maybe it’ll become increasingly difficult over time. I don’t have those answers either. But I’m worried about it.”

  “So is Matt.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ben.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ixy conveniently returned with the Hilasol at that moment. I had no doubt she had overheard the conversation and decided to give us a moment of privacy. She passed him a small bottle. He opened it and dumped out a single, orange pill.

  “Not another pill,” I said.

  “This one is guaranteed to help you. It’ll fight the infection from the inside out, and prevent any of your other scrapes from suffering the same fate. One pill should be enough.”

  Ixy used her other limbs to pass forward a glass of water, handing it to me. “Thank you.”

  “Welcomesss.”

  I swallowed this pill more eagerly than the last one while Ben opened another cabinet, handing me a bottle of pink liquid. “Take this to the shower. Remove the bandages and wash yourself with it. Anything bad on the surface will die. Put on boxers and come back here. Ixy will patch you up again.”

  “Doctor’s orders?” I asked.

  “Yep.” Ben lowered his head, weariness bleeding through his otherwise friendly visage. Dark smudges underscored his bloodshot eyes. Using chaos energy to help fight off the Achai had clearly depleted reserves even a solid night's sleep wouldn't restore. Yet he’d shoved his personal discomfort aside, putting me first. Even after I was the one who had frozen and forced him to use his special abilities in the first place. Things hadn’t gone the way he and Matt had planned, but they’d given all of themselves trying to make it right so far, and I had no doubt they would continue to do the same going forward.

  "I really appreciate everything you've done for us," I mumbled awkwardly. "You and Matt. And I appreciate you asking me about my parents. It helped some, I think.”

  Ben blinked, clearly surprised by my spontaneous confession. “I’m glad it helped. I’m sorry everything went sideways. I give you my word I'll do everything in my power to return you and your friends safely home."

  “No, you won’t,” I replied.

  The comment surprised him. “Of course I will.”

  “I mean, you won’t do everything in your power. We’ll do everything in our power. We’re all in this together now. Whether you like it or not.”

  He smiled. “Fair enough. I know you feel like you let everyone down. But you did your best, and you learned something, I’m sure. Next time will be different.”

  I nodded emphatically, determined to prove him right. “It definitely will. You should get some rest. You need it as much as I do. Maybe more.”

  “Excellent advice,” Ben replied with an exhausted yawn. He put out his hand, helping me off the diagnostic chair. “I hope I’m not out of line when I say that I think your parents would be proud of you.”

  “No, you’re not out of line,” I replied, tears threatening once more. “They would be.”

  Ixy scuttled ahead while Ben and I returned to the elevator. He jabbed the call button with heavy eyes, sagging against the bulkhead. By the time metal doors opened, he would have fallen into the cab if I hadn’t caught him. Totally depleted, Ben didn't resist help onto the elevator or down the passageway and up the stairs toward his quarters. Ixy remained behind, waiting for me to come back after I showered with the pink goop. I found her lack of concern for Ben comforting. Once he got some rest, I imagined he would be fine.

  “Levi, open Ben’s door,” I said, approaching his quarters.

  “Only Ben and Shaq have access,” she replied.

  “Do you have cameras? Can you see me holding him up?”

  Apparently, the system did, though I couldn’t spot their location. The door unlocked and swung open. I steadied Ben over the last threshold, easing him gently onto the wrinkled bedding. He didn’t resist. Shaq poked his head out from beneath the blankets.

  “He’s just exhausted,” I said.

  “Mmmhmmm,” Shaq replied, nuzzling Ben’s face. He looked at me, his buzzing voice emulating “thank you” as best it could.

  “You’re welcome,” I whispered, ducking out of the room and pulling the door shut behind me. I leaned against the bulkhead and closed my eyes, conjuring an image of my parents. For the first time, rather than all-out sadness, I was grateful for everything they had done for me.

  No matter what happened from this moment onward, I resolved to always make them proud.

  CHAPTER 30

  While the ghosts of my parents would never fully stop haunting me, the hour I spent with Ben, both in sick bay and afterward, had a therapeutic effect I doubted sitting in an office and chatting with a therapist could ever replicate. With some of my demons subdued, if not settled, I more easily fell into a routine while we made the trek across the Warexia Galaxy toward the distant world of Goldhaven.

  As the current renters of the starship Head Case, Ben and Matt gave us options on how we wanted to spend our unexpectedly extended stay. If I’d wanted, I could have slept all day and watched movies all night, with intermittent breaks to eat pretty much anything I had a craving for. I could have sat back and let the real crew of the starship handle all the work while I lazed around with little motivation. After all, I had done the same at home plenty of times, taking advantage of my position as a high-schooler to skip out on as much responsibility as I could.

  But things had changed.

  Everything had changed.

  I had no desire to take advantage of our situation. No inclination to let anyone else do for me what I could do for myself. I quickly came to self-discover that the old Noah had died with my folks, replaced by the newer, more mature version who would spend the rest of his life fending for himself. I didn’t expect it to always be a smooth ride, but there was no way I would let sorrow, mourning, and loss get the better of me. No way would I let it turn me into a man I didn’t want to be, one who wouldn’t make Mom and Dad proud.

  With that attitude permanently in mind, I dove full-bore into being as helpful as I could. I educated myself on everything Head Case, offering my services wherever they were needed and in whatever capacity I could provide them. At first, Tyler and Alyssa were less inclined to do the same. While they too didn’t expect the crew to do everything for them, they had a harder time overcoming their frustrations about what they had left behind on Earth. Their lives that were on hold back there. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand their perspectives, but at the same time, I knew they were spending too much time looking in the rearview mirror. Of course, we were all nervous about what would happen once we came out of our hyperspace safe zone, but I knew the best thing we could do about what happened next was to be as prepared for it as could be.

  I convinced Tyler to tag along with me by the second day, and Ally finally relented by the fourth. I could sense Ben’s approval when I arrived on the flight deck early that morning with both of them in tow, my new recruits groggy but open to the training I had already been receiving on the intricacies of starship operation and maintenance.

  That day, and in the days that followed, we spent long hours on the flight deck, each of us learning to pilot Head Case. A patient and confident teacher, Matt instructed us on all of the main functions available through the pilot station that went above and beyond flight control. We learned how to plot hyperspace courses, add filters to the individual surrounds, monitor shield status, and of course everything about weapons and fire control.

  By the end of the sixth day, I had memorized the entire pilot station settings menu and its related gestures and could carry out tasks nearly as smoothly as Matt. He still owned all three of us as we worked our way through a series of increasingly complex simulations run by Levi, but my scores had improved enough that I was consistently coming within a few hundred points of his leading score. Not bad for a newbie, and Matt said he had total confidence that I would overtake him in time.

  While my bat-to-ball skills had been non-existent, my fast-twitch reflexes and positioning instincts in three-dimensional space were surprisingly refined. Even Ally conceded grudging appreciation for the smoothness of my vectors and my success at the computer’s simulated space slalom course.

  She was hardly a slouch herself.

  Our education expanded beyond flight operations once Meg finished the most critical of Head Case’s many needed repairs. She and Leo provided crash courses on damage control methodology and common quick-fix techniques. We learned to splice fried conduits, replace gel packs, recalibrate sensors, and fabricate replacement parts with the assembler.

  While Tyler struggled somewhat with the flight controls—his scores were consistently behind the rest of us—he took an immediate lead in quickly picking up the more technical aspects of starship repair. It didn’t surprise me. He’d always handled the hands-on assignments in class with natural ease, something that had made up for my stunning lack of focus in that category. It’s what had made us a great team on school projects. He would do the manual work, while I would write the reports and handle any equations. Together, we had generally put out grade-A work. It pleased both of us that the same held true when it came to starships, and our previously loose friendship continued to solidify into a tighter bond.

  What I didn’t expect was how more mundane shipboard chores managed to fill the gaps between study sessions. On the seventh day, Matt started posting a duty roster assigning different cleaning and routine maintenance tasks on a rotating schedule. I didn’t mind swabbing the decks or scrubbing the head, especially after sampling more of Asshole’s culinary masterpieces. If getting more familiar with mops and dust rags than I’d ever planned was the price for spicy chicken sandwiches and spot-on Reese’s milkshakes whenever I wanted, I considered it a bargain. My only gripe was that while Asshole had a pretty extensive array of recipes in his arsenal, the assembler didn’t know how to make onigiri or takoyaki.

  Overall, life aboard Head Case quickly fell into a comforting routine. We woke bright and early for a group workout under Matt’s demanding supervision. Breakfast followed and then morning lessons capped by lunch, with more training in the afternoon. Evenings brought dinner and socializing as a crew. Even Ixy, who generally only popped up for random jump scares as she carried out her own set of tasks, would come down from Deck Five to spend time with us. She especially enjoyed it when Ben and Matt would play their instruments in the lounge. It turned out they’d had a band back on Earth, and on top of being a great pilot and uber-handsome, Matt had a solid singing voice. While Ally had overcome her initial stuttering crush on him, she still had a tendency to swoon when he covered Post Malone.

  My favorite diversion was reading late into the night, sprawled across the bed I now took turns sharing with Tyler. We still intended to add another bunk when the opportunity presented itself, but our daily itinerary left us both too exhausted to go through the trouble. We kept the black sheets but added a brighter steel gray paint to the walls, along with dark furniture that appealed to our shared gamer aesthetics. I switched off the glowing overhead panel when Tyler started keeping me awake with his snoring, immersing myself in anything and everything I could learn about the Manticore Spiral through the documents and hypernet caches within the ship’s data stores. Of course, I’d sucked as much info as I could out of Ben and Matt, who had given us all a full retelling of how they had ended up in the Spiral in the first place. It made it easier to ignore darker ruminations about all I’d lost, which tended to hit me hardest during those late nights.

  All things considered, life was pretty good. Routine camaraderie balanced lingering trauma. I missed my folks, of course. But I was learning to live without them. My new, unintended surrogate family helped ease that pain.

  With three days to go on our long haul to Goldhaven, I found myself waiting in the lounge with Tyler and Alyssa, my tapping foot trying to release the tension created by an equal blend of fear and excitement. Ally played with her hair beside me to do the same, while Tyler rested on the adjacent recliner with his eyes closed, somehow immune to this particular brand of the unknown.

  My foot stilled when I heard Meg’s familiar light footsteps coming down the hall. Looking over my shoulder, she grinned and waved to me as she hopped down the three steps into the sunken lounge. Steps that were almost giant-sized for her and her brother.

  “Good afternoon, Space Cadets!” she cheerfully greeted us as she put a hand on my shoulder and her other one on Ally’s. Her voice pulled Tyler out of his nap, his eyes sliding open and his head lifting.

  “Hey, Meg,” I replied, smiling back at her. Ally smiled back at her, and Tee waved at her.

  “Ooh, I can feel how nervous you two are,” she said, giving us each a comforting squeeze before stepping back. “Does that mean you’re ready for your first spacewalk?" Despite sporting coveralls smeared in hydraulic fluid, her enthusiasm shone brighter than a dwarf star.

  “Yeah, sure,” Ally answered, her reply failing to come close to Meg’s level of excitement. “That would be…great.”

  I knew she had been dreading this moment from the first time Meg mentioned it. She wanted to go out into space, but she was also terrified of being jettisoned from the hull to be lost in the empty vacuum. It didn’t help that since we were within a hyperspace compression field, leaving that field would mean instant implosion even deep-sea pressure couldn’t come close to matching. On the upside, at least that kind of death would be quick and painless.

  “You’ll be fine,” Meg reassured. “We’ve never lost a crew member to a spacewalk.”

  “Yet,” Tyler added.

  “Stuff it, T-bone,” Alyssa snapped.

  “I, for one, can’t wait,” I said, hopping to my feet.

  “I’m ready,” Tyler agreed, lowering the footrest and sliding out of the recliner. Ally took a deep breath and stood, too.

  “Then let’s boogie,” Meg said with an inviting hand wave. We trailed behind her slight form, taking the elevator from Level Three to Five, which excited me almost as much as our imminent extra-curricular adventure. After nearly two weeks, this was the first time we’d been granted access to Level Five, and only now because Meg was with us.

  The elevator doors opened, light from the cab revealing the nearest part of the deck and leaving the forward area in light shadow. Still, I could see well enough to distinguish Ixy’s web. The multiple layers of webbing, thick and gray, covered the entire forward curve of the ship. Thankfully, it was bereft of any giant insects or other captured treats. I think Ixy rested in the center, but it was hard to be sure.

  Between us and the web, a huge mound of sand covered most of the metal decking, interspersed with a variety of random objects that looked as though they had been picked from a dumpster. It was definitely an odd sight within the otherwise tidy ship. We circled behind the elevator shaft and entered an engineering compartment, following it back through a second hatch and into a staging area.

  “This is so cool,” Tyler commented, rushing over to a row of space suits hanging from a rack attached to the bulkhead.

  Sleeker and less bulky than anything NASA could offer, the suits provided flexible protection using lightweight meta-materials that didn’t exist on Earth. Meg pointed out the flat oxygen rebreather hidden cleverly within the high collar before explaining the emergency thruster pack and a battery that fit snugly across our shoulders and back. I donned my suit quickly, fumbling only slightly with the hidden closure seam. Magnetic gloves and boots completed the ensemble.

  "Looking sharp, Red,” Tyler quipped to Ally once we were all suited up.

  “Again, stuff it, T-bone,” she shot back, her voice still quivering with nervous energy.