Chapter Five — Solá
Solá walked the ship the way another man might walk a fence line, checking for the place the wire had gone slack without anyone noticing, and he did it twice a night whether the sea asked for it or not, because a ship that only got checked when something felt wrong was a ship that had already let something go wrong once already.
Chief came with him, the way Chief came with everything, nails clicking on the deck plate in a rhythm Solá had stopped hearing as separate from his own footsteps sometime around the second week of the man's life aboard this vessel and every vessel before it. He didn't call the dog. He didn't need to. Chief simply arrived, the way weather arrived, the way Solá himself was known to arrive, and there was a comfort in that which Solá did not examine closely, on the grounds that a thing examined too closely tended to stop being simple.
He found the science team's comms corner mostly dark, mostly quiet, the way it should be at this hour, and Curiosity sitting square in front of the space-weather monitor with the stillness of an animal that had decided, some time ago, this was where she lived now.
Nobody watched that screen. It had been running since the comms suite was rigged in port — solar wind speed, a Kp index ticking along the bottom, an auroral oval nobody aboard had reason to care about this far south — left on out of the same habit that leaves a porch light burning long after anyone's expected home. The cat had claimed it three nights running. Solá crouched, once, and looked at what she was looking at, which as far as he could tell was nothing: numbers, a curve, the low hum of a machine doing exactly what it had been built to do and nothing more.
He did not think much of it. He filed it, the way he filed most small ship-facts that didn't yet have anywhere to go, and moved on.
He caught Yaz at the winch a few minutes later, standing well inside the operating radius with the rig under load, delivering some line to Bram about the recovered probe housing that Solá only half heard — something about the thing having been "really put through the ringer, or the wetsuit, I suppose, though I guess that's the same joke said twice if you sit with it, which you shouldn't, nobody should sit with a joke that long" — and Bram laughing in the specific, slightly pained way of a man who understood he'd been made the occasion for a bit rather than the audience for one.
"Cordero."
She turned, still mid-grin. "Captain."
"You're standing inside the fall radius."
"I am extremely aware of the fall radius, Captain, I helped rig this thing—"
"Then you're aware you're standing inside it."
He didn't raise his voice. He held out one hand, and she looked at it for a second the way people always did the first time, like the hand itself had to be translated before the meaning arrived, and then dug her buck out of her jacket and set it in his palm without further argument, which he respected.
"You just lost today's safety buck," he said, closing his fist around it. "And you need every one you can get to make it home."
"Worth it," Yaz said, entirely unbothered, "for the wetsuit line," and went back to whatever she'd been doing, and Solá, walking on, allowed himself something that on a less disciplined face might have been the beginning of a smile, and on his was simply the absence, for a moment, of anything else.
Bram fell into step with him a little later, on the way back toward the bridge, with the specific determined posture of a man who had been holding a question for some time and had finally decided the walk back was as good an opportunity as any.
"Captain. Can I ask you something."
"You can ask."
"Why's Heath aboard?"
Solá didn't break stride. It was, he thought, a very Bram question — asked plainly, with no attempt to disguise the asking as something else, the way William would have wrapped it in three sentences of pretext first, or Yaz would have gotten it out of him sideways, through a joke, if she ever bothered to try at all.
"Not my story to tell," Solá said. "It's a good one, though."
Bram considered this answer with visible effort, turning it over, and Solá could see him deciding, correctly, that this was the whole of what he was going to get, and that pushing further would not change that fact, only make the walk back less pleasant for both of them.
"Okay," Bram said, and let it go, which Solá noted, with the particular respect he reserved for people who knew the difference between a locked door and one that simply hadn't opened yet.
He did not think about the question again that night. He thought, instead, about the cat on the monitor, and the numbers ticking along the bottom of a screen nobody but her had any reason to watch, and did not yet have any reason himself to think it would matter, and would not have been able to say, if asked, why he kept thinking about it anyway.
[Ship's Log — R/V Corriente, Master's entry, day five]
0200 — rounds complete, all stations nominal. Comms monitor active, no anomalies reported by watch.
2140 — minor safety infraction, deck crew, corrected on the spot. No further action required.
Weather holding. Course unchanged. Vintimilla has redrawn the chart again — three pins now, where there was one a week ago. I have not asked her what the third one means. She'll tell the room when she's ready, or she won't, and either way it isn't mine to hurry.