When Tayen banded Jake, he answered almost instantly. He was tilted up in bed holding his phlex like a book. His long, sandy hair was going ten directions in the micro-gravity. He had a nervous habit of running a hand through it, sculpting it into spikes. Judging by the number of spikes, he had been doing a lot of thinking.
Tayen was uncertain how to start. "How are you feeling?"
"Fine, for not having a pulse," Jake said.
It was a running joke. When Tayen had tried to take Jake's pulse during medic training, she thought the monitor was broken and resorted to checking both his wrists and then his throat. Still no pulse. He played along, acting concerned, until he finally broke into laughter and revealed that he had an artificial no-pump heart.
Jake's artificial heart wasn't even the most unique thing about him. Conceived and brought to term on a space station, his birth had been big news in its time. He was hailed as "The First True Spaceman." It was a mixed blessing. Although normal-looking on the outside, he suffered from a constellation of internal issues from weak bones, anemia, an underdeveloped immune system, enlarged spleen, feeble kidneys, asthma, and a malformed heart. Since he was too fragile to transport to Earth, surgeons and specialists were sent to space, honing their skills in micro-gravity. It was good practice for the surge of space tourism and space maladies that would soon follow.
Jake's life was a series of firsts. At age nine, he became the first person to undergo a heart replacement in space: a no-pump model that would adapt as he grew. He was the first person to spend ten then twenty consecutive years in orbit, and the first space-born to complete high school followed by college and a PhD. The first citizen of the first space nation which he founded. Heliocentaur. Population: 1. It had its own constitution, which he wrote, of course.
So when Jake decided he wanted to be the first extraterrestrial to pilot a spaceship, it was as good as settled. But it wasn't enough to break just one record. The mission had to be epic. After considering various crew proposals, he finally hit on an underprivileged group that had yet to break the sky barrier: people with disabilities.
With the focus on the crew, Jake was able to hide the full extent of his own problems. During the first ten months of Earthside training, he took part remotely as a personatron: a holo-head on a robot body. With someone else it might have come off as creepy, but with his spiky hair, wide-angle gaze, and intense positivity, Jake was not just likeable but magnetic. It was like having a team coach, personal therapist, and eccentric friend all rolled into one. Aside from Chig, her best friend in high school, Tayen had never felt so comfortable with someone—even if he was a personatron. If his expression froze occasionally, they assumed it was a glitch in the technology. When he went offline for long stretches, they figured he had more important things to attend to. As the lone Heliocentauran, he must be very busy.
It was only when they arrived at Paranor Station for the final six weeks of training that they grasped the severity of his physical condition. Even in the station's micro-gravity, going the length of a corridor left him pale and gasping for air. Sometimes in mid-conversation, his eyes would go out of focus and he would grit his teeth for a moment before composing himself. The personatron interface must have been programmed to edit out moments like these. His condition continued to worsen until, on the second day into drift aboard the ship, he had to be evacuated. Diagnosis: constriction in the major veins leading to his heart. Over time, the constant, unidirectional blood flow had caused the valves to harden.
Jake listened attentively, sculpting out new hair spikes, as Tayen recounted the latest events aboard the ship. He burst out laughing when she reached the part about Vivian's cold shower. Vivian had been rinsing off lather when Jess abruptly cut off the hot water. The unheated water was so cold it hit Vivian like an electric shock. She pulled the emergency cord out of reflex, shrieking at the top of her lungs.
"Sorry." Jake composed himself. "I sympathize with her. It used to happen all the time on the station. You should have heard the tourists howl. To this day, whenever I take a shower, I always keep a squirt bottle of warm water handy just in case."
"It was just a faulty sensor reading," Tayen pointed out. "And Bobby and Jess still managed to bungle it somehow. What if it had been something serious?"
"The crew is just going through a transition phase, like an eyewall replacement cycle," Jake said.
"What?" Tayen was obliged to ask. The captain was fond of elaborate metaphors.
"When there is an instability at the heart of a self-organizing system, a hurricane say, there is a period where the system starts to lose coherence. It weakens and may even appear to be falling apart. But this is a natural part of its growth phase. It's reorganizing, finding its new center. Once it reforms its eyewall, it emerges even stronger than before. The crew is like that. It just lost its fearless leader—that being me, of course—and now it's sorting itself out. Rebalancing, you could say."
"It doesn't feel like that. Jess is in her own world, Vee is busy streaming, and Bobby is off doing God knows what—and Milo doesn't seem to care."
"Give them a chance," Jake spoke with conviction. "Working as a team doesn't come easily sometimes. It's all about building trust, and that takes time and commitment."
Trust. Right. Tayen remembered the last time she had placed blind trust in a crewmate. She wasn't about to make that mistake again, no matter what Jake said. "Why us?" she changed the subject. She had often asked herself that question. They were such a motley, misfit crew. The only thing they seemed to have in common was their brokenness. "There were thousands of candidates, right? What was so special about the five of us?"
"The details of the selection process are highly classified, but I'll let you in on the secret if you promise not to tell," he winked. "First, we went through a rigorous ten-step screening process—okay, it was more like a dart-throwing algorithm. In any case, we weeded out the wannabes from the serious contenders. That still left us with about five hundred strong candidates. From there, I went through each of the self-testimonials. There was just something about the five of you that stood out. You had this spark, this X factor I couldn't put my finger on. It's not very scientific, I know. There were lots of others just as well qualified. But it was there, I could feel it in my bones."
"Did you ever think you made the wrong choice?"
"About whom?"
"Any of us," Tayen evaded. "I mean, look at Bobby. He's always shirking his duties. He just does whatever the hell he wants and doesn't listen to anybody. I've tried telling him—"
Jake shook his head. "If you tell Bobby he has to do something, he'll do the opposite just to spite you. I'm sure any reasonable captain would have thrown him off the crew in the first week. Can't say that I wasn't tempted."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because if you give Bobby a hard problem, he'll bend the fabric of spacetime itself to solve it. You just have to let him work things out in his own way."
"And Milo? Does sullenness count as a special talent?"
Jake smiled. "He's a true leader. He just doesn't know it yet. Give him time."
"Jess, because she's a walking encyclopedia of space history?"
"There's that. And she has the constant wonder of a child."
"And Vee-Vee, not just a pretty face?"
"One of the bravest people I've ever met."
"That's funny," Tayen said. "That's what the reporters were always saying about me." She didn't mention how much she hated it.
"What Vivian did took a special kind of bravery," Jake went on. "Look at me. I was born a freak, and I'm a celebrity because of it. The more freaky things I do, the more popular I seem to get. I'm a regular freak machine." He pulled out a pair of matching hair-horns. "But Vee-Vee was the perfect image of what every young girl aspires to be. And she smashed her own idol in front of the world. I don't know how you get any gutsier than that."
Hearing Jake's praise for her crewmates, Tayen felt a familiar emptiness. You picked all these people for their amazing talents. Where do I fit in? Not only was she the youngest at only twenty, she was also the least experienced. She hadn't been to college much less graduate school, led a sports team to a championship, proved a new theorem, or accomplished anything of note. Though she didn't say any of this aloud, Jake's look pierced right through her.
"Did I ever tell you what I wanted to be when I was a kid?" Jake said. "I'll give you a hint, it wasn't a starship captain. I bet you'll never guess." He paused to let her try. "Give up? Lead singer for a band. That's right, I wanted to be the first space rocker. Seriously. I took voice lessons and developed some pretty crazy dance moves—the kind you can only do in low-gee. I started making the rounds in the meta-music scene and even put a band together. But then New Vegas went up and famous rock bands were performing every weekend with out-of-this-world light shows and acrobatics like nothing I'd ever dreamed of. No way could I compete with that. I was pretty bummed out at first. But then I realized I was thinking too small. And that's when I got the inspiration to become a space captain.
"My rock career wasn't a complete waste though. I learned a lot about what it takes to build a good team. It's like putting together a rock band. Did you ever hear about how the False Zirconians found their new lead singer? They held the usual auditions and were down to the final two picks. The first was an amazing vocalist that could sing the stripes off a tiger. The other was out of key but really hit it off with the band. Know who they chose? The one who fit in with the band. When they were asked why, they said, 'It's easier to teach someone how to sing than to teach them how to be a good band member.' That singer was Nash Cotton. The band went on to have their biggest hits with him. They just played New Vegas last year. I went to the concert. It was amazing. The band was so in sync. It's like they could read each other's thoughts."
"You picked me because I'm a good teammate?" Tayen asked. It wasn't the answer she was hoping for.
"Exactly! If a band was all lead vocalists, who would sing the harmony parts?"
"Then I'm like a... backup singer?" The image was so ludicrous, it was impossible to be offended. "Have you seen me dance?"
Jake appeared to contemplate. "Hmm, perhaps there is a minor flaw in my analogy." His gaze shifted. "Hey, Milo is banding me. It must be something important. Tell the others hi for me. I'm always here if they want to talk."