Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Far Future, no beta we die like distant stars

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-10 Completed: 2026-04-10 Words: 36,084 Chapters: 3/3

each of us, a little universe

Summary

A regular day in the life for Squad Leader Hollander quickly turns into a mad dash across the quadrant, leaving behind the life he always thought he wanted to save the one that really matters.

Notes

Story title and chapter titles are derived from Carl Sagan quotes.

Chapter 1: waiting to be known

"We've got incoming!" Hayden's voice splashed through Shane's speakers. "It's the Buzzards. They're flanking us."

"They're late." Shane whipped his tertiary screen into place, throwing external cameras up with the scanner overlay. "I want second line in 12-Beta formation. First line, you're with me. Arrow Strike. Third line, back the fuck up and start a net sweep. Show me lights, pilots!"

Fifteen green lights popped up on Shane's console.

"We're starlit!" Shane announced. "Go, go, go!

Now, he could forget about the rest of his squad, trusting them to do what needed doing. All of Shane's focus narrowed to the task. The Metros had been re-outfitted recently with the fastest sleekest mono-pods that money could buy. Pair that with the best trained squad in the corps and they had led in claims for two solars running. Now, they were well on their way to a third.

This moon was smaller than their usual targets, but their surveys had pinged back some rich veins of rare minerals. They would bag it, tag it and within two solar rotations, their bank accounts would swell as the Metro Corps miners set to work.

Shane preferred claiming colony-possible worlds, even if they paid a little less. Finding people homes came with a pleasant buzz on top of other successes. But money and winning was money and winning.

One of the Buzzard mono-pods started clipping towards him and Shane focused in. He waited until they thought they had him in stun distance then smashed his engines to a stop, dropped down several clicks and whipped himself into a tighte spiral that made it almost impossible for stun strikers to get a fix on him.

Hayden and JJ swept in and pinned them in, knocking out their engines in duel stun blasts, so perfectly timed it could've been used as a training video.

The goal was in sight. The moon had five prime landing spots and Shane had optimized flight paths for all of them. His sudden dive had put him in line with number three. Taking manual control, he threw himself against his harness. Flying a mono-pod took absolute concentration and more muscles than the human body technically had. The vehicle was your other skin, the exoskeleton optimized for survival and not comfort.

It took strength, discipline, and tenacity to last in a mono-pod. The average stint of a pilot across the corps was three solars, before their bodies or minds broke down with the strain. Shane's squad averaged five solars and he was on the verge of his sixth.

Piloting was his life. At five solar's old, Shane had slid into his father's old mono-pod for the first time. It had been love, even though the rickety thing could barely get off the ground. For the next fifteen solars of Shane's life, all of his passion and energy went to a singular goal: be the best. And he'd achieved it and kept on achieving it.

"Neutralized fourteen of them!" JJ's voice snapped in Shane's ears. "There's a fifteenth still loose. We're on your tail, but if they come from the side we're not going to close fast enough to nail them. You good?"

"I have it," Shane said with perfect calm. He rolled his shoulders and the pod shuddered around him.

He ran his hand over the controls, the intricate memorized dance hitting as he transformed the pod into it's landing formation. It meant going blind for fourteen seconds. Dangerous, but Shane knew exactly where the fifteenth Buzzard was: too fucking far to catch him now. The dipping spiral had accelerated him and he was going to have a rough landing. Everyone forgot how much damage Shane was willing to take to get where he was going.

The moon had no atmosphere to break his speed and no gravity, so he was all on thrusters as he rolled himself and by the extension the pod into a spear with the single, all-important spike at the end. His sensors rushed back online, screaming klaxons alarms for the strength of the impact and the too-late Buzzard. The chalky red rock rushed at him and Shane hit with the speed of meteorite, the spike smashing through layers of copper dust untouched for millions of solars.

CELESTIAL OBJECT 393482.2.133.01 HAS BEEN CLAIMED FOR THE METROPOLITAN COLLECTIVE COOPERATION. ANY FURTHER INTERFERENCE BY RIVAL CORPORATIONS WILL BE TAKEN AS AN ACT OF AGGRESSION AS ESTABLISHED WITH THE 15TH ITERATION OF THE ACCORDS OF CLAIMED PROPERTY.

"Status?" Hollander asked the computer.

"Pod is flight ready. Repairs required immediately," the mechanical voice reported. "Pilot has several major contusions. Medical has been alerted to check for internal hemorrhaging."

"Fuuck," Shane groaned and let his head fall back on his seat.

"You alive, Holzy?" Hayden asked.

"No," Shane told him with a grin. "We got fourteen of fifteen, huh?"

"You know it!" Hayden laughed. "Get up, you lazy shit, we're done here. Unless you need a hand?"

"I got it," Shane assured him, then widened the communication so his whole squad could hear him. "Good work everyone. Line leads, any injuries?"

"Clear."

"Clear."

"Clear."

"All right. Send me your reports, but should be a clean exit. Let's roll it back."

Shane didn't give himself any more recovery time. He rolled back out, snapping back into position and took the leaping launch up into space, even as his body complained of the abuse.

Hanging against the vast black, his squad threaded through the temporarily neutralized Buzzard mono-pods. The corps agreed on knockouts only lasted an hour. Just enough time for a head start to the next mark. The Buzzards would come back online pissed off. This kind of claim was their bread and butter. They'd need every second of lead time even with the long journey to their next target.

When Shane got in close enough to link up, he started ceding pieces of piloting to the computer. Hayden's pod clicked into his and then JJ's, the slight shudder always a bit of a relief. They were there. They'd all made it out again with a win under their belts.

"You're a mad man, Hollander!" One of the new guys shouted as the second line lashed in. "I've never seen anyone do that and live!"

"Welcome to the Metros, rookie," JJ cackled. "That's just a Tuesday."

Line reports came in as they hurtled through the black. Shane reviewed them on one screen as he monitored their docking maneuvers on the other. The third screen slotted back into console, the input unnecessary now.

It was rumored that Rozanov flew with all three screens active the whole time. A part of his legend that had snowballed out of control. Some people said he used four like a total psycho.

Shane touched his thigh, rubbing his thumb over his D.N. mark. The second one. Not the primary one they all had on their necks, visible through their suits. The one Hayden had had amended five solars ago, Jackie's contact glowing a gentle green for anyone to see.

"We're ready for you Squad Lead. Guidance interface live."

"Thanks, Station," Shane said, putting both hands on the controls where they belonged. "We're coming in. Minimal damage. Please tell Maintenance to work on pods 91 and 32 first, they took heavy impact. Rubbernecking, but they lost some paneling."

"You got it, Squad Lead."

The enormous Metro carrier loomed large in the windows behind Shane's screens. It was a whale in the ocean of stars and the mono-pods only tuna in comparison. Odd that the tuna were the reason for the whale. Shane had never thought about it that way until Ruby Pike had gotten obsessed with Earth marine animals and made the sensible children's comparison. Now he couldn't unsee it.

The bay doors opening slowly to take them in. Their fifteen-man squad all landed smoothly, locked in. Swallowed up. Then there was interminable wait for the bay doors to close and the docking cycle to finish pumping in breathable air.

It was too much time to think. So Shane got an early start on compiling his report, pulling in his line leaders quick and dirty analysis. Unfortunately, it had all gone so well that there wasn't much to add. He even beefed up the repair requests, outlining specifics that the Maintenance could find all on their own.

His own poor 24 had actually taken the most damage, but everyone knew by now that no one touched Hollander's pod except Hollander and if they were very lucky, an assistant from high-level Maintence ranking to hold his toolbox. It was his little eccentricity as admired , mocked, and gossiped about as Rozanov's screens.

Shane wished he could start working on the pod right now. Instead, he had to hit send on the report and wait. Over the speakers, his squad was winding down, talking shit to each other about who had been a little slow or out of alignment.

Then they started talking about women. A few of the guys had found temporary partners on staff, something that was constantly advised against. There were no consequences though, if you did. It was hard to keep people chaste and genderless for months away from home and the corp did like pilot babies, no matter how they came into the world.

"What about you, Holzy? Gonna come out with us tonight? Hit up the 5-forward bar?" Uther asked.

"Not tonight, thanks," he said.

The usual razzing cycled through, but JJ deftly turned them away to the next thing by starting up the age-old debate about recycled whiskey versus the onboard brewed beer and that was enough to take the heat off Shane.

Hayden dialed into the private channel again, just the two of them, in reality about a hundred feet apart, but their voices making it intimate and close.

"You gotta do one night this week. The new guys want to talk to you outside of work."

"I know," Shane said. "Tomorrow is fine. I just don't want to be there right after a win. Everyone will be fucked up in an hour."

"Want to hit the g-courts or did you take too hard a hit down there for it?" Hayden offered.

"Let's do a round," Shane decided. "If I get cleared."

"Sounds good, ping me when they free you."

Really what Shane wanted to do was go to medical, make his report and then go to his niche of a room and see if he had any communications from the latest relay. But Shane had a schedule that he forced himself to keep because he knew he did better on the longer outings when he did socialize a little.

One evening with Hayden every 3-5 days. One squad evening every 5-7 days. One night in the leadership lounge every 7-14 days, even though Shane hated it there and he had to wear his dress uniform. Send a communication to parents every other day whether he'd heard from them or not. Send a communication to Rose every 3-5 days.

And then there was the schedules that Shane didn't have to force himself to keep. Practice drills, flight simulations, maintenance checks and the single communication that didn't require reminders.

"You are a go to disembark," the Station Lead said. "Medical is waiting at bay door 12, Squad Leader Hollander."

"Thank you."

Shane keyed in his release code. Harness, helmet and chair locks disengaged and he was standing, vulnerable in only his flight suit and on his own power once more.

Exiting the mono-pod was bittersweet. Crusted over with sweat and a bit of blood, he did desperately want to leave, but he missed the protective shell immediately. His muscles all ached, not just from the crash, but the regular demands of manual piloting.

Touching the bold '24' painted on the nose of pod, Shane at last parted from it and stood, reborn and wrung out on the bay floor. He had to touch every line of the red and blue paint, then gave the pod's shell a pat, before turning on his heels and walking away.

His squad all went through their own rituals, superstitions rife among them. The days when pilots died in massive numbers were a full generation behind them, but the memory lingered and everyone remembered to be grateful they'd survived today. You thanked your pod, no matter how weird it looked.

"My man!" JJ swung in and slapped Shane on the back. "Great tuck and roll. I thought you'd bounce once for sure."

"The orbit worked in my favor," Shane said plastering on a grin. His hair was stuck to his scalp. Maybe he should shave it like some of the other guys did, but he never could bring himself too. "That stunner was a beaut."

"Eh, that was a cakewalk. Right, Pike?"

"Honestly it was embarrassing for them," Hayden agreed, smacking JJ's shoulder. "Poor fucking assholes. They're coming down the ranks hard."

There was more of that messy assessment and then Shane was in the waiting hands of the medical team. The scans came up clean, just bruising and three cracked ribs. A quick knit-n-rub patch had the ribs fixed, but the bruising was left to heal on it's own. They had time for him go about it naturally and the accelerant always had side effects. Shane was prone to nose bleeds from them, particularly.

Done with Medical, Shane still had bureaucracy to take care of. He headed up to Command. It was always busy up there, people rushing around in important circles. Back home, in interviews, Shane often got asked if he ever wanted to join command, not an atypical career path for a pilot, but Shane found the thought depressing. He was a pilot because he wanted to pilot. Command was talking endlessly, making hard decisions and giving speeches. Not for him.

He'd retire. He'd go home. He'd…something. Nothing he could consider seriously right now. He had solars left. The longest serving pilot had run for fourteen solars. Shane could make it fifteen. He wanted to.

When Shane stepped into Command, everyone stopped and saluted him. Shane saluted back. Captain Theriault was waiting for him.

"Excellent work as usual, Squad Leader," Theriault said solemnly.

"Thank you, Captain."

"I read through your reports. Anything off the record to add?"

"No, Captain." Shane liked records. He kept everything on record. Theriault always asked anyway.

"All right then. This was a good win today, but we're after much bigger game. We're re-routing."

"New target?" Shane asked hopefully. He hadn't been particularly interested in continuing through this system, battering through the dying Buzzards.

"The Sci-Soc threw us a report an hour ago. They picked up one of the Admiral drones and followed it on a hunch. It was headed to a binary star system with a Goldilocks world. Same size of Montreal-5."

"That's huge!"

Shane's heart knocked in his chest. That wasn't just a colony planet. That was a secondary base world. The thing every corp lusted after. A base of operations at this end of the spiral would put them in prime launch position for the next arm. They would set up the corps for generations of successful claims.

"Let's not get excited," Theriault said, even though his eyes were bright. "We don't have full survey back yet. But it could be a massive win. Forget first in rank, Hollander, they'll write your name on a moon. We're not the only ones who got the tip though. Seems like at least two other cruisers are headed that way, unidentified so far, but one of them is likely the Admirals."

They were doing well this solar. Hunter was back on his game after solars off it, annoyingly.

"How far out?"

"It's a haul. We're risking a good length of the contract on it, but Central gave the nod. A full lunar at maximum speed. Fuel burn will be- well. I'll worry about that."

A full lunar. Max speed. That meant no outside drills, sims-only. Shane could run the squad through workouts in the morning, sims in the afternoon, but that would still be a lot of open hours. The guys would fill them. The ship was set up to handle bored pilots, the entertainment decks filled with things from the educational to the borderline illicit.

Little of it appealed to Shane.

"That's fantastic news," Shane said. Because it was. Even if he had a lunar of days ahead of him to sort out. "I'll keep the squad ready."

"I know you will. Dismissed."

Shane's room was close to the bay. All of their rooms were just in case the cruiser stumbled onto something interesting and they needed to deploy fast. To make up for it, they all had their own spaces and the real luxury of windows. Squad Leader even got the one on the end so Shane had the sheer indulgence of two windows and only sharing one wall with someone else. Hayden was to his left and he always had his headphones on, either sending comms home or listening to one of his thousand shows he kept on. Shane never needed to watch another show again because Hayden would tell him the whole plot if he showed any interest.

The room was only big enough for a bunk, a locker, a small desk and the all-in-one bathroom stall that was both an amazing luxury and awful. They all complained about them so Shane didn't feel bad about hating it. Some of the other cruisers had communal bathrooms for the squad which had it's own downsides, but at least they didn't have to use the toilet in the same four cubic feet they showered in.

There wasn't enough time to check for comms which was probably for the best. He couldn't afford to get distracted. Shane changed into shipboard clothes, dumping his flight suit into the laundry. His bruises were starting to purple and ache, but nothing that would really slow him down. Giving himself one last stern warning about checking comms early, Shane left his room.

Hayden was already waiting in the hallway.

"Hey, man! Jackie said Amber has her first tooth! Look."

There were worse things than looking at pictures of kids Shane actually knew and cared about. Amber did have a tooth, the twins had won an award for an art project at school, and Arthur had gone on some kind of nature hike bringing back pockets of fat seeds that Jackie had dutifully planted in cups on the windowsill.

"I miss green," Shane said.

"Damn, me too," Hayden said, shaking his head. "Maybe we can stop by hydroponics after we smack some ball around."

There was always a court free this late in the day. The cruiser's simulated evening crept in as they whipped the ball around the court, somersaulting through the lessened gravity, and kept their paddles whirling. Hayden edged closer to a win than usual which Shane internally blamed on his bruises.

"Practice is helping," he said aloud.

"I'm going to beat you one of these days," Hayden said, launching himself off the floor into a lazy barrel roll. "And then I'll have to retire out so you can never take it back. You want to sneak in a shower?"

"We shouldn't," Shane said, glancing around. It was quiet.

"Hollander," Pike sighed. "What are we going to do with you? Come on, literally no one cares. Water allotment is water allotment."

"It's for staff," Shane muttered, but gave in.

Technically, the gym showers were for staff, but Hayden was right. Only the biggest rule sticklers cared if pilots used them. Their water allotments were all generous enough. And it was nice to have a shower somewhere you could stretch out a little. The heat helped soothe the worst of the bruising too.

"You eat yet?" Hayden asked, when they were both toweling off.

"When would that have happened?"

"I dunno, maybe the Captain was so happy with you that he treated you to some upgraded rations."

"You have a really warped idea of what goes on up there."

Hayden laughed, "If you could tell me anything, I'd know more, but as long as it's wrapped up in secrets, I reserve the right to make shit up. Come on, let's get dinner."

Dinner was the nutritionally compact units that had gained the unappealing nickname of 'nugs' and some green beans. Shane didn't mind nugs as much as some of the other guys. He liked them better than the green beans really which had book cooked to a limp and unappealing shape to hide their age. He ate both. They were almost at the end of fresh grown veg now. He'd miss them soon enough.

A full lunar. Fuck.

"You know something," Hayden determined.

"I know a lot of things," Shane said.

"I'm not fishing, man. I know you can't tell me. But give me a temperature?"

"Hot in a good way."

"Really? Cause last time you said that we cinched first in the rankings six months into the solar!"

Shane nodded, acknowledging and suppressed a smile as Hayden did a muted victory dance. They ate, they talked a little, they walked back to their rooms and said good night. JJ was only first heading out, but he was always good about not pushing Shane to come out once he'd given a no, so he only said good night too.

At last Shane was alone in his room and with plenty of time. He took out his comm and checked for messages. Three. One from his parents, one from his accountant and yes. One from the LIL-Y. No one was looking at Shane's communications. The Metro Corp had it's bad side, but they weren't the kind that surveilled it's employees constantly. Personal comms were personal. But Shane used the codename anyway, hiding reality under an automatic relay name. It made him feel a little safer.

Not safe entirely. Shane wasn't sure he'd ever felt entirely safe.

He grabbed his headset and jammed it on. Likely No one could hear him in his room, even without the headset, but it wasn't home. It paid to be careful. His parents' faces appeared on the screen. It was a good long comm , ten minutes of chatter from his Dad about work and the garden, ten minutes more from Mom going over the meetings she'd had in his absence and catching him up family news. They'd even visited Jackie this week.

Shane easily recorded his reply. Their claim flights were all intensely recorded, edited and turned into entertainment for civilians. His parents watched every one of his rushes, pouring over them, but they liked to hear it from him too and since he had little else to talk about, he just described it all again. Then he added on details about Hayden from them to pass on to Jackie if they saw her again. Friendly simple things.

The things Hayden had told him up front he told Jackie to give to Shane's parents if they asked. The innocuous details of their lives. Nothing scary, nothing sad. Just flavor in the absence of first hand experience.

Then Shane diligently listened to his accountant's comm, took notes and replied to them too.

Only once all of that was done did Shane allow himself to tap on the final communication.

Ilya's face flickered to life in front of him and Shane paused the video immediately before Ilya could say a word. He was sitting in his mono-pod to record, a habit of his. People loved to talk about how Shane did his own repairs, but Ilya did too. He was just more generous with the mechanics and worked alongside of them often pretending to that he was assisting them instead of fine tuning things himself.

Shane stared hungrily at him, traced the line of Ilya's jaw with his eyes and when that didn't suffice, with a fingertip, uncaring of the smudges it left on the screen. Ilya had a fatigue hanging around him that Shane didn't like. It had been there for the last few comms. He'd asked about it and gotten no reply so far.

Shane pressed play.

"Shane, hello," Ilya smiled, his face transforming from tired to alight with energy immediately. "I think you will catch this one very soon after I send it. I believe we are in the same sector. Exciting, yes? Send something back as soon as you get this and maybe I will get it quickly. I know we are not supposed to say this, but I do not think we are going to anything the Metro will care about."

"We care about everything," Shane said indignantly.

"I know, I know, you care about all these things," Ilya said with a wink and it went straight to Shane's heart. And a little lower. "We staked a claim this week too. Meteor field with grade B veins. Nothing they would report on to you, but pretty good for us."

"I'm sorry," Shane murmured to him. The Great Ilya Rozanov, who had staked claims on twenty-five of the thirty top producing planetary claims, reduced to being happy about grade B meteor fields.

All Shane's fault. His plan. A plan Ilya had willingly gone along with to bring them closer.

"Hayes has invented a new game," Ilya went on, leaving Shane behind this time. "It is very stupid and we are all very obsessed. We use the ball from the g-court in regular gravity. Good for strength building and breaking your back trying to roll it. I will teach it to you when we are home again."

Home. Ilya thought of Shane's lake house as home now. His chest ached.

"I miss you," Ilya sighed. "So much. I hate you for doing this to me. For solars, I wanted only to be out in the black and away from my home. This was the place I wanted to be the most. Now, I count days until we are planetside again like a homesick rookie."

Shane closed his eyes. "Me too. I want to go home too. And be here. I don't know how to do both."

"Ah, I should not use our time to be like this," Ilya said, shaking himself like he could buck off the feeling. "I hope you are in your bed because I have a good one for you tonight."

The fantasy Ilya laid out wasn't particularly filthy by their standards, but watching him peel off his flight suit enough to get a hand inside it and around himself to jerk off while he talked about it was. Shane listened to Ilya's breathing go ragged and harsh, before he took himself in hand too. He jerked himself ruthlessly, matching Ilya's pace as he described a long thorough rim job. With Ilya's voice in his ear, his face on the screen, Shane could almost imagine that he was there, so close and yet not touching.

Shane came only a few seconds before Ilya and he lay there wrung out, listening to Ilya's harsh intakes of breath, slowly smoothing out.

"Shane," Ilya said reverently.

"Ilya," Shane whispered back.

"Listen to me," Ilya said. "Do not die before I see you again or I will do terrible things to your ashes."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Shane asked him. "I love you too."

"Ah, time warnings, hello," Ilya grumbled, hand reaching out to swipe at some notification. "Maxed out again. Fine. Send me something back, even just a minute. Show me how wrecked you are from me, yes? I love you. "

The comm ended. Shane hit record before the darkness could get to him. He was a mess, but Ilya would want to see him flushed and hair a wreck from thrashing a little against the pillows.

"Hey," he said. "Same quadrant, huh? You know that's already too much intel. Maybe the Centaurs are after smaller game than us, but you never know. Play it safe, okay? We ate the last of the green beans tonight. I remember you said you hated them, but they're better than no vegetables at all. Do you still have anything fresh left? I hope so. We staked a moon today. Ungraded, but it's mineral rich."

Shane paused, trying to think of what else Ilya would want to know. They were still so new to this talking thing, only getting in snatches of actual conversation when they were home together. A collection of days that added up to less than a month really. A month, a decade. A few conversations, a lifetime.

What did you say with all that on your mind?

All Shane was sure of was that Ilya always listened to him now. Like every word mattered even when he deemed it 'boring'.

"I played some g-ball with Hayden today and I kept thinking about that afternoon when we played. Not just how the game ended, but like…I don't know. How much fun it was. I liked seeing you laugh and spin around like that. I thought you were going to hurl, but you just got dizzy and kissed me a million times. I want that more. I miss that. I miss you."

Pausing again, Shane's eyes flicked to the little red light. Hopefully it would feel to Ilya like he was looking him right in the eye. "I love you. I hope this reaches you before you go to sleep. I want to think of us going to sleep at the same time. Good night."

He ended the recording and hit send. If Ilya was right, the comm would go to relay and the Centaur's carrier would pick it up in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. Maybe Ilya really could fall asleep with Shane's voice in his ears.

A quick clean up, lights off, and Shane brought up Ilya's comm to him and started it at the beginning. Even though the sexy parts stayed sexy, Shane didn't get aroused the second time. He fell asleep, listening to Ilya describe how he would kiss him, slow and sweet while they made love and it changed the shape of Shane's dreams.

When Shane woke up, his hand clutched at his thigh, thumb pressed into his secondary D.N. mark so hard it felt as tender and raw as the day he'd lasared it there. It glowed it's healthy green. Somewhere, not even that far, it's twin glowed on Ilya's thigh as secret as a kiss pressed there. Without much hope, Shane checked for a comm. There wasn't another video, but to his surprised delight there were two lines of text. Smart. Ilya was so smart. Even if they were drifting further away from each other, that small a bit of data would fly across the relay.

We only have broccoli left which is a terrible vegetable, but I will eat them tonight for you, so you know I will not die of bad nutrition. I love you more than I hate them, see?

Shane read them lines a dozen times, then with a lump in his throat he deleted the video and the text. It was too risky to save them and he used to not even think about it. Now each time, it hurt a little more. Like he was erasing Ilya himself.

His alarm went off. Shane got up and ran through his morning routine. No drills today. He'd learned early that pushing the squad a day after the mission only bought him complaints and low morale. Instead he went back down to the gym, getting in his run and his yoga and his weights. It was all line staff there, everyone treating him with quiet deference. He didn't risk stealing a second shower with so many people there. It was rude enough that he did it once this week already.

Instead, he used his personal stall, watching his allotment trickle down.

At home, he and Ilya took long showers together, relishing the endless supply and each other. Did the Centaurs have a communal shower or the stalls? Shane should've asked him. Ilya would've taken it the wrong way and spun him some fantasy of being on a carrier together forced to share a single trickling stream. Or maybe that was the right way.

Shane didn't even get hard at the thought. He stared down at his disinterested dick with confusion. It lay there limp and unmoved. It's master was too far away now, apparently. Fuck.

At least there was 24 to work on. Shane gathered up his personal toolbox and went down to the hanger. The damage was mostly cosmetic, but the wiring on the left flank had taken a hard hit. Shane lost most of the day in grooming through the fine hairs of copper that kept him alive.

"Why don't the other guys do this?" Shane asked Ilya, the two of them squatting before Ilya's personal vehicle. Even planetside, Ilya preferred to go fast. The slick red rover wasn't a mono-pod, but it was impressive for something that needed wheels to go.

"Fix things?" Ilya asked. "They trust mechanics more than themselves, maybe."

"Maybe." Shane frowned, and handed him the dexadriver when he put his hand out for it.

"Or maybe it's because we know the secret."

"We do?" Shane asked, watching the trickle of sweat bead down the side of Ilya's neck. A tiny rivulet that made Shane terribly thirsty.

"Mm, we do," Ilya said, glancing at him with soft smile. "To do a thing well, you must know all it's inside parts. Run your hands through them. Make them yours. Yes?"

"Yes." Shane smiled back, reaching for him. "Exactly."

"Sir?" A low-level officer approached.

"Yes?" Shane asked, focus staying on popping out the last of the dents. He'd polish them too.

"Command requests you upstairs for a mission briefing."

"Acknowledged, thank you," Shane muttered.

Tucking his tools into the mono-pod, Shane followed the officer back up to Command. Delay would be disrespectful at best. Everyone knew Squad Leader Hollander was always respectful.

The news must've spilled from the inner circle out because the usual energetic hum of Command had reached a new pitch of excitement. Theriault was huddled with all the department heads and they welcomed Shane into their small group. The monitors in front of them were displaying trajectories, coordinates, timelines and a data feed coming from the Sci-Soc team. Shane read through it quickly, half-listening to Theriault explain the details of the find.

There were some discrepancies that Shane saw immediately, but he kept his mouth shut. No one wanted pilots to know about atmospheric conditions for long-term settlement. That was for wiser minds than them. The first time Shane had spoken up in a meeting like this, he'd regretted it for weeks.

"They do not like when we know things," Ilya grumbled. Both of them were in their pods, waiting for an exhibition match to start. The kind of bullshit bureaucrats loved and Shane used to hate until they became a way to see Ilya in the middle of a long contract. He loved hearing Ilya's voice in his ear as he flew, even if he was giving him shit. "I tell them that there is no chance we can land there. The first geologist's reports are clear, but they say the new reports are better. Stupid."

"We look at this stuff longer than they do sometimes," Shane agreed with a huff.

"Ah well. We get to say 'I told you so', at least."

"I don't. I stopped pointing that shit out a long time ago."

"Oh, Hollander," Ilya said with a despairing look. "You are too fucking nice for your own fucking good."

"Captain," a nervy navigation officer appeared, edging into the group. "I'm sorry for interrupting, but we have an incoming comm from another carrier. Non-Metro. The signal is shaky, but it's marked urgent and with distress indicators?"

Theriault grimaced, "Put it on screen."

The navigator squeezed through the group and their fingers flew over the keypad until a video came up. A face wavered (a middle-aged man with a shock of dark hair) and then snapped into clarity, the voice (steady, deep, concerned) following.

"-lease. This is Captain Brandon Wiebe of the Centaur Carrier, designation OT-2331B. We have been struck by a massive piece of debris left behind in an unclaimed meteor field. Our engines are offline and most of our powerbanks shattered on impact. We require a new powercell to complete any possible repairs. In the meantime, our life support systems are restricted. Our best minds have agreed that we can eek out five days more at best before critical shutdown.

"We have two hundred and fifty-seven civilians on board. We cannot open bay doors to even release our pilots and we are too far from our bases for our emergency evacs to have any hope of reaching them in time. We're not asking for or expecting any heroics. We need a single powercell with the promise that Ottowa Corp will repay you for the full cost of the item as well as an additional fee for your aid. If you could give us a bit of a jump start that'd be useful too. Additional fees paid for that."

Captain Wiebe's steady voice wavered, "Please. We know this is not standard operating procedure, but there are good people on this ship. They don't deserve to die. If you receive this message before 2230 on common date 121298 than we are still alive and can still be helped."

The message was likely only hours old. That time and date were still five days away. Combined with the rapidity of Ilya's text arrival this morning, they couldn't be more than a day's flight away.

"That is some shit luck," Theriault muttered.

"Their equipment is old as dirt." Jones, second-in-command, sounded faintly distasteful. "We could've survived a strike like that, I'll bet. That rust bucket should've been decommissioned solars ago."

"Bad things happen in space. New or old," Theriault said mildly. "Has anyone forgotten their lessons on that? Haven't we all had a close call?"

Jones subsided. Shane went on measuring his breath. It would be fine. Theriault was smart. He'd get them there in plenty of time.

"Lawrence," Theriault barked.

"Sir." The Chief of Communications was right there, already part of the huddle.

"Live record this reply and let's spend the extra credit to make sure it reaches them right away."

Good. That was good, Shane used all his energy on keeping his face blank and still. They would arrive, they would help. Maybe he and Ilya could have a nearly live conversation for once, ship-to-ship relay. That'd be nice. Especially because Ilya would likely be upset. No one liked to be reminded of how fragile ship life really was.

"Yes, sir." Lawrence took over the monitor now, entering in a long security code, then passing a few screens and putting in another. "Ready to record, sir."

"Captain Wiebe," Theriault said gravely, "I regret to inform you that Metro Carrier cannot turn around at this time. We are not at liberty from our corp to give away expensive supplies. We apologize for not being able to do more. Starlit peace to you and yours."

No one else said anything as Lawrence sent the message on. Shane waited for some protest, but everyone seemed to be in agreement.

"Is there someone else nearby that can help them?" Shane asked.

Everyone's attention fell on him. He'd managed to keep his voice steady and emotionless, so it must've been that he asked at all.

"You know the rules out here, Squad Leader," Theriault said with gravity. "We come prepared to die. Maybe someone else will help them, but we're all headed to the same place and it's not behind us."

"It would only be a day. A day for two hundred people," Shane pointed out, reasonably. "That's not much."

"It is when we're chasing the biggest claim we've had on offer for ten solars," Theriault said with a shake of his head. "And it would be two days. There and back again. Enough for the Admirals to stake claim and maybe the Raiders, if they're smart enough to track the drone too. We know they're close enough. We're not losing a secondary base world for a corp too stupid to properly outfit their carrier"

It was so final. So cold. Theriault had been born before the improvements of mono-pods and the Accord that put an end to the fatal violence of claims. Before it had become a sport, instead of a war. Maybe that was why he could be so calm about the deaths of an entire carrier. Maybe that's why all the old men he surrounded himself were staring at Shane like he was the one who was acting unusually.

Normally, Shane needed some time to process these kinds of unexpected shifts in a room. He would move his plans around carefully, re-wiring himself for what was required and make his move or apology hours or days later. But there was no time right now and this wasn't a faux pas at a party. The stakes had just become the highest they had ever been.

His piloting side kicked online. Pilots had to be calm under pressure. They had to make fast, decisive choices to get where they were going. And there was no better pilot in any of the corps. Save one.

"Understood," Shane said. "A shame to lose a competitor just when they were getting interesting."

"Ah," Theriault snorted. "Is that what was bothering you? Don't worry. You'll get plenty of fight out of the Admirals when we arrive. If you like, you can sign the condolences message we'll doubtless have to issue soon enough. All right?"

"Yes, thank you, captain," Shane said with no more emotion than he ever offered in Command.

Theriault whipped Captain Wiebe's face off the monitors. The Sci-Soc data returned. The meeting went on. Externally, Shane listened and even made occasional notes on his tablet. Internally, he was building out a plan. He didn't have enough time to make it a good one. The window for it all of it to work would be small. Fast. Decisive. Explosive. That was the best Shane could aim for.

When they were finally dismissed with giddy back pats, the solemnity of the Centaurs' fate already consigned to memory, Shane left. He was careful to not be the first to go, and stayed with the crowd. He got off on his deck and walked at a regular speed to his room. Hayden had left a voice note, telling him to come to the lounge when he'd showered and eaten for a night with the guys as he'd promised.

A night with the guys. Shane listened to Hayden's voice for what could very well be the last time. He didn't leave a note for him in return. If anyone suspected Hayden was in on this, it would be the end of his career too.

Safely in his room, Shane stripped down and checked his N.D. to find it still green. Of course it was. The message was hours old and Wiebe had said five days. Ilya was all right. He was fine. He likely hadn't even heard Theriault's cold-blooded dismissal yet.

Fuck, would Wiebe tell his people? Would he lie? Shane hoped he lied. No one deserved that clean cut to be their last contact with the world outside their ship.

Surveying his room, Shane grabbed his communicator, his photo of his parents, and after a moment's consideration, his spare flight suit. The last one, he rolled down tight and just managed to jam into a pocket. It bulged, but he would be grateful for a backup eventually. There was no bathroom on a mono-pod, only a waste elimination setup.

The nutrient soup that got pumped into pilots as they flew would sustain him for a day or two, but he'd need more. With a sharp hit with his elbow, he popped the emergency panel by his door. It was intended for worst-case scenario quarantine events and most people didn't even know they were there.

Today, Shane's obsessive need to research every ship he stepped onto paid off again. He pulled out the entire secreted box. Enough nugs for the flight out, water packets for when he'd recycled his piss too much to be useful, and some first aid stuff. Perfect. That, plus the more stripped down emergency kit in the mono-pod would be enough.

Carrying the red emergancy box around might raise a few flags, so Shane emptied it's contents into his secondary tool box. Having failsafes and backups always paid off. No matter how boring it might see, Ilya.

Without a look back, Shane left behind the room that had been his second home for five solars. Fuck it. The shower setup had sucked anyway.

No one paid Shane any mind as he went back to working on his mono-pod. Or at least looking like he was working. He waited until no one was close by to store the extra toolbox and the extra flight suit, strapping them down behind the pilot seat. He would need every inch of his precious cargo space for other things.

Polishing and babying the mono-pod also covered for Shane making some illicit adjustments. Things he had known to do for solars, but couldn't try before. The Accord held pretty firm on the things you could and couldn't do to a mono-pod, but the Accord was only for corps pilots during claims.

Shane as an independent entity had never signed the fucking Accord and the only thing he was going to go claim was some human decency. He made the goddamn adjustments. Some more analytical, quieter part of him got a little excited, even. It'd be interesting to see what it would be like to fly entirely unfettered.

The critical moment came. Shift change. The vast majority of the Maintenance clocking off for sleep and only the skeleton crew of the third shift coming on duty. Mechanics on third shift was for repairs to things that were hard to access when more people were around. They were direct people, generally uninterested in asking what anyone else was up to.

They were also familiar with Squad Lead Hollander's need to see his mono-pod in perfect condition over getting enough sleep.

Especially Third Shift Mechanical Lead Dobbs, who had gotten so sick of Shane's many requests that he had given him the codes to the basic utility and storage closets with the understanding that everything got put back where it belonged. Shane had scrupulously obeyed. He didn't want to get Dobbs in trouble.

Sorry, Dobbs. You'll get a write up and maybe two hundred people will live.

Letting himself into Storage B, Shane was confronted with a door that he absolutely should not have the code too.

Which would be a problem, he if hadn't casually memorized Dobbs' code by hovering over his shoulder at least once a month for the past five solars. They should really make him cycle it out, something Shane would've advised if anyone wanted to listen.

Too bad.

The door slid open and rows of expensive replacement parts gleamed in carefully maintained rows. Inventory on the Metro Carrier was immaculate. There was no time to browse, unfortunately. With a list that he'd built listening to his Captain plan a claim while damning people to death, Shane pulled his most frequently needed spare parts and started tossing them into a smaller empty container.

He stuck to things he could realistically use from inside the mono-pod. External damage would be what it was. He'd have to fly right and keep himself intact.

At the very back of the enormous storage space were the extra powercells. One alone could keep a mono-pod flying for solars. For a carrier, you would need dozens for a single mission. If Wiebe was asking for only one, he probably really needed two and keeping his request realistic to get it done at all.

Powercells. It was a very simple name for something so unbelievably expensive. Shane had only been allowed to install them himself under the strict supervision of a Mechanic Shift Lead. He'd never been permitted to take one casually.

But he had held them in his hands. He knew the shape and weight of them. Cradling one in his arms was exactly like holding one of the Pike babies. Such a small thing to have so much power. A simple metal canister and in it, the captured power of suns. Worth more than an entire solar of Shane's very impressive salary.

From the racks of dozens of them, Shane carefully pulled out three and put them at the top of his container. Might as well have a spare. Carrying out his haul, Shane made sure the doors re-engaged their locks behind him. There was security cameras everywhere. He didn't attempt to hide. This was not a heist. Everyone would know what happened soon enough.

The storage container wouldn't fit in Shane's limited cargo hold, so he had to transfer everything into the little niche. The powercells were priority, so they went in first and he packed everything else in around them.

The bay had cleared out significantly. There was a lone mechanic halfway into the floor, probably working on some misalignment in landing locks. Shane had never been nonchalant a day in his life, but he did know how to look busy and important. He walked across the bay into the quiet control room. With all the mono-pods docked and quiescent, there was no need to staff it. Any emergency would wake the poor personnel who slept directly behind this room windowless bunks for that exact purpose.

The door wasn't even locked. Who would want to break into a control room? It was full of obscure knobs, switches and screens. Too complicated for someone to come in and fuck up easily.

If one wanted to launch all fifteen mono-pods following protocol, it was probably next to impossible. Shane didn't give a shit about following protocol right now. He flipped up a plastic protector on the wall over the light switch and hit the single red button that he'd seen a thousand times in training videos.

EMERGENCY BAY EVACUATION

Klaxons started sounding immediately and the giant heaving engines of the bay doors creaked to life.

ALL PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE THE BAY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY

The lone mechanic sprung out of the floor and ran towards the exit, looking around frantically for what might have set off the alarms. Shane ran in the opposite direction. In the case of emergency, the mono-pods auto-unlocked, in case they were endangered and could be launched out to save them.

Not to help in the emergency, Shane considered for the first time, as he charged to 24 before the great bay doors opened into the fatal vacuum of space. The entire carrier culture was focused on the pilots and their pods. Maybe they valued the lives of even their own people less than Shane had thought only this morning. Shane shoved that thought aside in favor of swinging himself into the pilot seat. Helmet on, harness locked into place, Shane was one with his pod again.

"24, requesting clearance to leave," he muttered to himself, unable to leave without at least a little of the usual protocol, even if it was only to himself. "Granted? No? Too bad."

The launch sequence flew off his fingers and 24 gave it's waking shudder, rising off the ground. The bay doors were opening and Shane didn't wait for them to finish their gargantuan yawn. People were definitely waking up now, running for their stations. The alert had reached Command and assessment would begin. Hesitation was the difference between success and failure.

Shane could not accept failure.

He took off, turning sharply to line himself up. As soon as the doors were open just wide enough to fit, he slid through them like a thread through the eye of a needle. He was out. He was fucking gone.

Pulling out his monitors, Shane called for the location of every major carrier in the sector. No one had locked him out yet and he only needed one set of coordinates before they thought to do it. There! He grabbed them and saved them to a local computer, then started the navigation systems.

His headset started crackling, the computer announcing so many incoming communications that they practically ran over each other. Shane silenced all of them. The Command channel crackled through anyway and he let the Captain ream him out in an unheard stream.

Navigation ran fast, but it needed another minute or two. Shane picked a direction and gunned it away from the carrier. None of the other mono-pods would have his specific modifications now. Even if any of them had ever been able to keep up with him before, they were at a loss now.

Security vehicles? Best of fucking luck. Those fuckers ran slower than the worst mono-pads.

When he was far enough away that Shane was out of range of the short-range blasters and too small for the long-range missiles, he paused. He hung there and stared at the silver blotch with it's proud blue and red stripes that was the Metro Carrier.

Shane opened his communicator to a full broad spectrum. Larger than he'd ever gone before. He hit record for good measure and set it up to relay not only to every ship with open comm in the sector, but as a recorded message sent to his parents directly with a note that read 'Sorry. Please release to the press if you think it'll help'.

"This is mono-pod pilot Shane Hollander of the Montreal Metropolitan Corporation. An hour ago, I was told by my captain that we would be ignoring a direct request for aide to a competing corps' ship currently stranded within a day's detour of our flight path. We have good odds of claiming a very important world and according to my commanding officers that supersedes the lives of over two hundred people we could definitely help.

"That's the way of things, I know. But I'm so sick of the way of things. I'm going to do my best to help because that's what we should do. If I survive, I will likely be arrested and tried. I am guilty. I am admitting to guilt right now. I am guilty of wanting two hundred people to live. I am guilty of stealing from my corp to ensure that that happens. I am in violation of my contract. I am guilty and I'm not sorry. Except to my parents and Hayden and JJ. This is…not how I wanted you to find out some things about me. I'm sorry for that. I love you."

Shane made eye contact with the red glowing button. He could leave it there. It was all damning enough. If he lived, he would never touch a mono-pod again. It was strange how freeing that was in this moment.

He could stop. He went on.

"I lied only once in this message. I would like to correct it for the record. My name is not Shane Hollander. As of two months ago, before the beginning of this contract, my name became Shane Hollander-Rozanov. I'm coming, love. I don't know if I can do it, but I have to try. See you soon, I hope."

Shane closed off the comms.

The navigation monitor locked on it's target. Ten hours. Not even a full day. Motherfucker.

"Fine," he said to himself. "Fine. Let's fucking go."

To the mono-pods behind him, pod 24 accelerated normally for a handful of seconds, then simply disappeared from visuals and close radar. A tiny point of light in a vast field of stars winking out.

 

Chapter 2: every star may be a sun to someone

The only part of Shane that felt good right now was his left foot. It always had less to do during flights, his dominant foot doing most of the acceleration duty until he had to position for claims. He'd tried switching off limited success during practice and drills. More desperately, he had been trying on this flight, but it was simply too awkward to last for long.

So his lazy left foot was living the dream and the rest of him was a mess. Tense and aching from flight and worry, even Shane's teeth and jaw were reporting back distinct unhappiness.

The small problem that Shane had not really wanted to consider when he was head down, plowing through his heist to-do list was that mono-pods were not designed to be flown for this long. It wasn't impossible exactly. Certainly, Shane ran trainings with his squad that went to upwards of three hours when they were prepping for a new contract and out of shape with their lunars off. No one had ever been particularly appreciative of those long hard hours. Until they were in the thick of things and it paid off as their stamina far outlasted their rivals. That's when they bragged about Hollander's Horrible Hours.

Over the years, on very bad days, Shane had spent up to five hours in flight, concentrating on small gestures that could make or break his time getting the spike in the ground. Five-hour days were rare, but Shane was proud of them too in a twisted way. He got a small thrill out of the way the other guys reacted when J.J. breathlessly related these epic solo training sessions like it was something impressive Shane did instead of the way he tried outrun his thoughts.

So yes, Shane could do five hours. He'd be exhausted and sore, but proud. He could eat a good meal, take a few hours and maybe even do another half hour for fun, before bed. A pilot at the peak of his profession and the height of his career, Shane could manage a lot of feats.

He had, only once, done six hours as a show of power and endurance to break a record in orbit around Montreal-1. That had taken days to recover from fully, but he had a nice plaque from it.

Shane was entering hour seven now.

With vision blurred by fatigue and a flight estimate of three hours remaining, he had a very long argument with himself. After a tense stand off between his fears, the reality of the situation, and his own stubbornness, reality briefly won. Shane slowed down and hung in a single anonymous point in the vastness of nothing to take a quick rest.

Sagging against his harness, he became all too aware of the crust of dried sweat over inch of his body, the lankness of his hair and sandy grit in his eyes. With a groan, he lifted his helmet and fished out a nug, chewing on it without tasting anything. He stared out into the unfeeling darkness over his monitors. It felt good to have the helmet off, but the cabin airflow was much poorer than sucking from the tank straight through the helmet. A tradeoff he usually didn't have to think about, but he was starting to be uncomfortably aware of the counter he usually ignored on his controller dash.

A nap would be wise. He could bring his systems down low to conserve power with a few perimeter alarms and sleep. Sleeping in the pilot's seat wasn't ideal, but he'd done it before when they had to camp out a claim site for longer than anticipated or he'd missed his landing window in orbit. It was not a comfortable way to sleep and Shane had only managed it when he was truly exhausted.

Ilya claimed to like it. There had been some cheeky media photos years ago of Squad Leader Ilya Rozanov sprawled in the seat of his mono-pod, head cushioned by his discarded flight suit with his underlayer unzipped almost obscenely low and his face a little lax with sleep.

Shane had saved those photos to his home cloud than deleted them, then refound them and re-downloaded them countless times over the years. There was something in the careless way Ilya spread himself out into the machine that he operated like a second skin. As if he truly trusted it to hold him and keep him safe. There were countless perfect images of Ilya prepping for a claim or piloting or in his sharp dress uniform at formal events. None of them had given Shane nearly as much trouble as the sleeping ones.

Piloting had never felt safe to Shane. That's why he loved it so much. The promise of danger in every claim match made his blood sing. He didn't want to be comfortable or at home. He wanted to be deadly. The mono-pod was an extension of the sharpest parts of him, not something to make a nest in.

That Ilya could be so at rest in the the place that made Shane so keenly aware was grating, awful, terrible, charming, and endlessly enticing.

And he would never do it again if Shane didn't move.

But he was so fucking tired.

With a groan, Shane fished out a water packet and drank half of it, even though he badly wanted to quaff the whole thing. Instead of sleeping, he checked over all his statuses. All his repairs were holding. The fifteen lights of his squad were dark. He ran a fingertip over them. They would never go green again. Severed from the small connection, Shane's chest ached. Or maybe that was where the harness was cutting through his flight suit to bite at his skin.

Ilya flew without his harness sometimes. Ilya did a lot of dumb shit.

But Shane wasn't moving right now. He could undo it for a few minutes. Hesitantly, like he was suddenly stripping naked in front of a live audience, Shane released the straps. The release was delicious like jerking off for the first time after lunars in the barracks. He slithered forward in his seat to plant both his feet properly on the metal plating. There was just enough room for him to stand and wobble there on legs that were both horrifically cramped and entirely jelly at the same time.

Sliding back his monitors, he had enough room to do an aborted version of his pre-flight stretching routine. Everything went a little looser. He fished for the wipes that he used on 24's windows. They were soft and per-dampened with cleaning fluid. They weren't made for people, obviously, but pilots had used them as quick fix hygiene wipes for generations and it hadn't killed anyone yet.

There was no getting to most his body anyway without stripping off his flight suit and underlayer. Tricky to manage in the space provided and too rife with potential stupid accidents. Shane had known a pilot that once gotten stuck under his monitors trying to shimmy into a fresh underlayer mid-flight. That story had been retold so often that Shane didn't remember the guy's name anymore, only a blur of a face and a writhing secondhand embarrassment.

A perfunctory rub over his face, hair and hands felt good. The astringent smell made things seem cleaner than they were and Shane would take that.

Reluctantly resealing himself in his helmet, Shane pulled out his communicator. If he was taking a break, he might as well see if he'd gotten anything the from the Centaur yet. It took him longer than he'd like to sort through the detritus with dozens of messages from the Metro from every level of command. Listening to all of them would've burned precious minutes and he was sure none of them were glowing.

There were attempts to reach him from Hayden, JJ, and a few of the other pilots. Shane ignored those too with more of a pang. He promised himself that he'd look at them when things were less dire. Whatever they said, he doubtless deserved and then some.

Towards the bottom, he did find a message from the Centaur carrier. It must've been sent right after they received his transmission, coming in hours ago, but lost in the mayhem. He pulled up the comm with shaky fingers.

Captain Wiebe's face filled his screen.

"Squad Leader Hollander-Rozanov, we cannot thank you enough for your sacrifice to come to our aid. I don't know what we can do for you when this is all over. I don't know if we'll all be alive to do anything at all, but please know our gratitude at your attempt…oh fuck it. Who am I standing on ceremony for?" Wiebe said, waving his hand dismissively. "You're a fucking maniac and I know we've never met, but I might kiss you square on the lips myself when we do."

"Wiebe!" A familiar voice protested off-camera.

"I'm not sorry," Wiebe laughed tiredly. "Listen, be careful on your approach, the debris field from the collision is pretty bad from what we can tell. When you get within a few klicks, send a comm and we should be able to establish a ship-to-ship connection and give you better data. May the stars- all right, all right! Fine. This is really a break down in the chain of command."

"Fuck the chain. Useless busywork to make things go too slow," Ilya said, stepping into frame and shoving a little at his captain to move him out of the way. It was so casual and abrupt that Shane couldn't even process it for a moment. Shoving your captain aside? On the command deck? "Shane, you are insane."

"Hey!" Shane protested.

"I love you so much. I don't even know-" Ilya shook his head. "It is too late for warnings. You are coming and I love that you are coming and also I am going to kill you for it. All of your nice plans that you are always so proud of! So slow, so careful. Ilya, do not be impulsive, you say to me all the time. Follow the plan, Ilya. I follow along to the letter and for what? Only for you to be a total madman and run out on your whole life? You know they have put out a bounty on you already? You are crazy. You make me fucking crazy!"

"Sorry," Shane whispered to a face that could not hear him and despite everything, he was smiling at the beautiful man in front of him.

The beautiful man who shifted a little and then Shane could make out the bandage on his neck. Spotted with blood. What the fuck was that? It covered the D.N. tag that had gone red only a year ago and was likely now a dull gray. The one on his thigh would still be green, Shane's encryption bright beneath it.

"It is bad here," Ilya warned. "Not just the debris field. When you get here, be calm. Run all your scans. Be my Shane, the one who counts bolts and screws, not the idiot who burns down his career and his life to run away from home to save me, all right? Be so careful. You are no help if you die."

"I won't," Shane promised him.

"You got anything else to scold him about?" Wiebe asked, edging back into frame. "He's a busy man at the moment."

"I might," Ilya said sullenly, but he did step aside.

"Okay, Squad Leader Hollander-Rozanov. Hopefully we'll see you soon. We do have days left here, so watch out for yourself too. Don't push so hard that you don't make it. And let me be the first to say: congratulations on your marriage," Captain Wiebe said. He even sounded sincere.

The comm cut out, even as Ilya was attempting to step back to add something to it. He couldn't be too badly injured if he was up and around enough to be annoying people. Blood might be visible, but it had been bandaged and likely sealed already. It was fine. Ilya was okay. Shane was…well. He probably wasn't okay, but he would be.

The bruises from yesterday's claim throbbed a little. Reluctantly, Shane switched into low power mode. Ilya and Wiebe were right. He had to be careful or this would all have been for nothing. Perimeter alarms went up. He queued up the Centaurs' communication again, skipping to Ilya talking. Curling up in the pilot's seat, Shane listened and tried to doze as his husband scolded him.

His eyes snapped open two hours later. With a groan, he straightened his body again. He was cramped in new terrible ways, but some of the fog in his mind had cleared. Had he taken too much time? What if the Centaur carrier had suffered a cataclysmic meltdown while he napped?

No. Shane shook himself ruthlessly. There was no room for that kind of thinking. He ate another nug, drank a few sips of water, then pulled his helmet back on and buckled his harness. Drawing out his monitors, Shane checked his navigation. The comm from Wiebe and Ilya had given him fresh coordinates, more exact than what he'd skimmed off the Metro's systems.

3.2 hours left. Shane wiggled the toes on his left foot which was still reporting back a happy, well-lived life. Asshole. His right foot cramped as he pushed into acceleration. Shane gritted his teeth.

He was still forty minutes away from the coordinates when he spotted the first bits of debris. For a brief, terrible moment, Shane was certain that the entire carrier had simply exploded since the message had been sent. But the shards were not the gray tone of most modern carrier ships nor the black and red decorative stripes of the Ottawa Trading and Transportation Corporation. They were the bright orange and yellow of a defunct battleship.

The evidence of the wars once fought across the spiral was an ongoing nightmare. It was difficult to clean up the debris. Costly too. For the most part, space was so empty that corps considered it far, far easier just to leave it right where it was. They would, to follow the Accords, spray it in vivid neon colors and set up warning buoys around the derelict wrecks when they 'found' them. Read: were inconveniently reminded they existed.

It had been many solars since the Accords were first signed. Most of the warning buoys had gone silent with no requirements in place to keep them permanently powered.

A battleship could be twice the size of a cruiser. The Centaur must've gotten lucky and only been hit with a smaller piece of it or they would've been obliterated. Shane watched the first bits of shrapnel go by and slowed himself down to a crawl.

He opened up his comm and sent out a message to the frequency of Wiebe's comm, instead of the relay.

"This is Squad Le- no. This is Pilot Hollander-Rozanov. I've reached the edges of the debris field. Requesting any additional data that would help with my approach."

To his relief, his screen instantly jumped to life as soon as it was sent. He was close enough for a ship-to-ship link. A new face came on screen. A young man with a full beard and a cluster of decorative holograms jumping off his uniform. Rainbows mostly, but some of little animals doing simple animations. They distracted Shane as the man stabilized their connection.

"Pilot Hollander-Rozanov!" The man greeted. "I'm Communications Officer Harris Drover. Very happy to see you, sir. How are you?"

"Fine," Shane said. "But I'm seeing some of that shrapnel already and I'm still forty minutes out."

"Forty minutes? We didn't think we'd be seeing you for hours yet. Did you not sleep?"

"I took a nap. Were you using regular mono-pod speeds?" Shane asked.

"Uh, probably? I'm not the nav guy," Harris admitted. "I'm the talker."

"Tell your nav people that I've modified my pod then. My speed is currently 27% faster than the norm. Though I'll be slowing down coming in, obviously. Is there an approach I should be taking?"

"Oh, shit," Harris grimaced. "I was hoping Wiebe would be back up by the time you called. We made him go to bed, it's been a long few days."

"I'll talk to whoever about it. Captain, Navigation. It's not a protocol thing."

"It's not that," Harris pressed his lips together, then seemed to resign himself. "Great. I guess I just have to be the one to tell you then."

"Tell me what?" Shane asked, dread pitting in his stomach.

"Okay, so we were hoping to repair it before you got here so this would be a nonissue, but it turns out that the damage is worse than we thought when Wiebe made the distress call," Harris said. "Still fixable! We're working on it."

"Working on what?" Shane pressed.

"Sooo the reason we can't launch our pilots is that the debris didn't just hit us. It penetrated into the hull a little."

"How much is a little?" Shane asked in horror.

"It crushed one of our engines and it's pinning our bay door closed. That's why we can't launch anything. It's also obscuring our maintenance exterior exit. We can get some folks outside, but not the big equipment."

Shane stared at him. "What the fuck are you telling me right now?"

Harris winced. "We have no way to let you dock when you get here. The distress call was for a carrier, so we figured they'd be able to tug the debris free when they arrived or blast it off."

All this way. All this way and Shane might get to die right alongside Ilya without ever touching him again. He didn't have enough air to make it back to his now even more distant cruiser (no way had they slowed down just to recover him, even if they were in a fury, they'd be far far harder to catch now). Not that he wanted to go back. At best, he would be discharged, pay full restitution and become a pariah. At worst, he was a dead man.

"Did you tell him?" Another face appeared behind Harris', vaguely familiar.

"Pilot Boodram?" Shane frowned.

"Hey, you remembered me! That's cool. Hey, man. Thanks for riding out to us."

"I thought you were alternate squad lead," Shane asked, bemused. "What are you doing on deck?"

"I am! We knocked Rozanov out, so I'm temporary lead."

"You did what?" Shane's voice pitched upwards. "Explain."

"Wait, I tell you that you might be totally screwed, could die, and maybe came all this way for nothing and all you give me an intense look, but you're murder-level pissed because we made Rozanov sleep?" Harris asked incredulously.

"Hollander-Rozanov," Shane corrected. Now that it was out, there was no way Shane was letting anyone get it wrong ever again.

"Yeah, we're not calling him that, it's too long and it'll be confusing once you get here. You good with Shane?" Boodram asked. "I go by Bood, by the way."

"Shane is fine if you tell me why the fuck you knocked out my husband, right now."

"Woah, okay!" Bood held out his hands. "Roz has been going full bore for the last 46 hours. Since we took the hit. He didn't even let medical patch him up properly. We all got knocked around in the crash and he was just like free bleeding into his flight suit until we sat on him long enough for a bandage. So yeah, I put on that classical shit that always makes him drowsy and made him sit down and listen to Hayes' vid theories until he fell asleep. It took like four minutes and I promise we threw a blanket over him."

"Oh," Shane said, feeling a little ridiculous now. "Um. Thank you."

"You're welcome," Bood said. "It was more for us though. He's great, we love him, but fuck me, he's black hole levels of intense when he's upset and he was starting get a little incoherent there."

"He is a little intense," Shane agreed. "Okay, so I still want to get in closer to you. The second we have a solution to the docking issue, I want to implement it."

"How much air do you have left?" Bood asked seriously. "Wiebe didn't want to ask you in front of Ilya."

Smart. Shane would've lied if he'd been there. "Fifteen hours, give or take. If I come in close and power down some, I think I can stretch it longer."

"That's not very much," Harris said, clearly distraught over it.

"Are you kidding?" Bood clapped Harris on the shoulder. "For a pilot? That's like a lunar. We can do a shit ton in fifteen hours. Especially this pilot. Shane breaks records like he breathes."

"I know, I read all the press releases," Harris said. He rallied a little, tracking something on his screen. "Great! Okay. Shane, Navigation sent me their most updated scans and they said they can transmit any new findings to you immediately from here on out. I'll push those to you."

"Can I ask how they missed the debris in the first place?" Shane asked as smoothed over as he could. Which wasn't much because he wanted to rip out someone's throat with his teeth right now and he was starting not to care whose.

"Good question," Bood said darkly. "The beacons were decayed, but it wasn't a small mass. It's under investigation."

"Our Head of Navigation is a nepo baby and he's fine for the regular stuff, but anything even slightly out of sync and he's useless," Harris supplied.

"You can't tell him that!" Bood said.

"Why not?" Harris said, his exhaustion creeping back in. "Is Shane going to run back to the Metros and tell them? It's been a problem for the entire contract. His team is solid, but he has to get out of their way first. Wiebe sent him to his quarters to 'recover' two days ago. I'm not sure he realizes he's been grounded."

This was Shane's fault. It had been his plan that put Ilya on this ship. He was so tired and raw all over and he wasn't done yet, but Shane very badly wanted to hide under a pile of blankets from the crushing reality of it all. No wonder Ilya always looked tired these days. Was his husband holding the entire place together by sheer force of will?

"I've got the maps," Shane confirmed over the rising tide of too much feeling. "I'm coming in."

Enough, he told himself firmly. There was no time for this.

"Okay," Harris said. "I know you're probably in focus mode, but if you want, we can leave the comm open now. You're close, it's not costing us anything and that way you have some company."

The 'no' was on Shane's lips before he paused. He did need to focus. But he was used to focusing with other people talking all around him, his squad a chattering network that webbed around him even when he didn't feel like adding to it. Which was most of the time.

The last twelve hours had been a deafening silence and all it had made Shane was more tired. Harris had a nice enough voice. Bood seemed fine.

"Yeah, all right, thanks. I might not say much."

"That's fine, man," Bood said and drifted back off the camera again. "But I know how it is in the dark too."

After a second's hesitation, Shane grabbed a spare clamp that he kept as a redundancy. He locked his comm in place on the pole, so he could see the Centaur command deck under the radar.

Four screens. Ilya would be proud. As long as Shane didn't get distracted and get wiped out by the sharp remains of a dead war.

Moving slowly through debris at least required enough attention that Shane couldn't focus on how terrible he felt. With care, he threaded through two giant pieces neon. A new voice threaded into the comm.

"-eating the last of it."

"Hazy, do you want to meet the other half of Hollander-Rozanov?" Bood called out.

"Oh, we've met! He tried to bisect me when I was working for Toronto, but I'll say hi to our savior."

"Wyatt Hayes?" Shane guessed.

"Hey! He remembers." Hayes waved, coming on screen over Harris' shoulder. "Dude, you're a fucking madman. I think my longest flight was four hours and I was an old man the next morning."

"I think he's setting a record," Bood agreed. "How's it feel Shane?"

"Great," he said flatly. "I could do it again tomorrow."

"So you're dying?" Hayes guessed.

"Pretty much," Shane huffed out something near a laugh. "How's it going with your trade to Ottawa? Happy you made the leap?"

The matching slightly hysterical laugh was scary and reassuring all at once. "Fucking hated Toronto, but I gotta say, never had a near death experience with them before."

"What about before yesterday?" Shane asked.

"Honestly? Great. We suck, but at least it's not wall-to-wall assholes. You ever met Kent?"

"Once or twice," Shane grimaced. "He's a decent pilot."

"And fucking horrendous as a human being," Hayes said.

"Yeah," Shane admitted, then ground on the controls to swerve around a dagger of metal twice the size of 24. "That too."

"Your husband is a great squad leader, by the way. We're all kind of obsessed."

"Don't say obsessed," Bood said. "It makes us sound crazy. But yeah, he's been great. He's made us all better. Well, not Hazy. He came in great and Roz- Roz-Hol? Hm. We gotta workshop that. Anyway, he just leaves Hazy alone."

"It's true," Hazy said happily. "No backseat rear defense is fucking magical. You know how many Squad Leads think they know my position better than theirs? Get back in the front you divas and let me do my- uh- I mean-sorry."

"It's fine," Shane said, bemused. "Don't think I've ever been called a diva to my face before."

"I'm sure you're not?" Hazy ventured. "I mean, no one's ever said it behind your back to me."

"Only heard the good kind of rumors," Bood confirmed.

"But he's doing okay?" Shane asked, steering them back to what he actually cared about. "Ilya, I mean. Not today. Just…generally. He's all right?"

That was met with far less enthusiasm.

"Yeah, sure," Hazy said. "He's great on claims. Legendary. Even if we're not what he needs out there all the time, we're getting there."

Bood was suspiciously silent.

"Not during claims," Shane specified. "What's happening then?"

"He's a lot of fun when he comes to social stuff. But um. I don't know," Hazy wavered.

"We're not telling on our S.L.'s business," Bood cut in, his elbow appearing to cut into Hayes. "Shut the fuck up."

"I'm not bound by squad bullshit," Harris said and Shane had almost forgotten he was there. "You want my opinion, I think the powercell you're carrying will plug as much energy to this ship as you will into him. I like him a lot, but I could tell he was missing something. I hope it was you."

"I hope so too," Shane managed to get out. What had he done to both of them? "Three though."

"Three what?" Harris asked, his attention seemingly elsewhere on his workstation.

"Three powercells."

Even though Shane also wasn't looking directly at the screen, he became very aware of a lot of attention on him.

"Excuse me," Hayes said faintly. "You stole three powercells from Montreal?"

"I was already fucked from taking one," Shane shrugged. "Seemed like if you were hard up enough to ask for one, you probably needed two. Then a spare. Just in case."

"Just in case," Bood echoed. "My sweaty nutsack, just in case. Wiebe was right. Roz is going to have to wait at the back of the line, we're all kissing you when you get in here."

Shane pulled a face. "No. Ideally no touching, except him."

"Noted," Hayes said. "Can we clap? Sing? Start a small, barely noticeable cult?"

"No cults," Harris said firmly. "Don't you remember the pepper incident?"

"No?" Hayes floated.

"That was ridiculous," Shane snorted, then took a hard swerve. "Perfectly good veg and you let it rot for a joke."

There was a moment of silence and then Bood said, "I cannot fucking believe he told you about that."

"Why not? Didn't you tell your wife?" Shane asked, and then made a rough grunt as threaded himself between three fat chunks of metal.

"Sure, but-" Bood cut himself off. "No, you're right. Anyway, it was one pepper and we laughed about it for like a full lunar, so I think it was worth the sacrifice."

"Did Roz said you pictures?" Hayes asked. "Cause I drew a face on it."

"He didn't," Shane said when he'd finally gotten free of that mess.

"Here," Harris sighed. "I can't believe I still have this stored."

"You were in on it too," Hayes protested.

Ilya had told Shane about the Protective Pepper Watch, but he had not seen this photo of a red bell pepper mounted on a piece of piping with a stern expression drawn with what must've been a fingertip and mono-pod joint lubricant.

"That is sure…something," Shane settled on.

"Not the pepper!" Another voice cut in. "He is a nightmare!"

"Haas, what are you doing up?" Bood asked.

"I'm cleared to walk! It's boring in medical and you are the only ones awake."

Haas? The freshie? They let freshies on the command deck?

"We're keeping Shane company," Hayes said. "You might as well come say hello."

"Hello, Squad Leader Hollander-Rozanov!" A white-blond head appeared. Haas had wide watery blue eyes and his arm was covered in a pulsating bone-growth stimulator.

"Pilot Haas," Shane said gravely. "What happened to you?"

"Bad luck," Haas said. "I was working on my pod when the debris hit. I went straight across the room and into a wall. Broke my arm and had a concussion. It wasn't all bad though, we were lucky not to lose the seal, so I didn't die in the vacuum!"

"That is very lucky," Shane agreed. And useful to know. The bay was still safe for pilots, even if they couldn't get out.

"Thank you for saving us. It's very nice of you," Haas said earnestly.

"What's your protocol for entering the command deck?" Shane asked, hoping someone not Haas would answer.

"Usually tighter than this," Bood said with a sigh. "But not that tight. We're running lean on crew and don't stand on a lot of ceremony. Wiebe likes to have big meetings. But yeah, usually Haas isn't allowed to just walk in."

"I brought a message! I'm supposed to be here."

"What message?" Harris asked. "Why wouldn't someone use the internal comms?"

"The system in the back engines is glitching," Haas explained. "They wanted to tell command that they think with the powercell it should be doable to navigate back out and get home, but it will be very close."

"What about with three powercells?" Harris asked.

"Do we have three powercells?" Haas' face lit up.

"If they can find a way to get Hollander safely on board. Go tell them that."

"Yes, sir!" Haas said and then apparently dashed off again.

At least Shane had made someone a little happier if only briefly. The debris was getting closer together. Shane concentrated on not crashing while Bood, Hayes and Harris talked quietly among themselves.

The carrier finally came into view. The Centaur was smaller than the Metro, but it's paint job was fresher. Prouder. When Shane was six, his parents had taken him to its first launch. He had stood in the crowd and watched the carrier's enormous engines kick on, the intense glow of powercell fueled engines nearly blinding him even with the protective goggles his mother wouldn't let him take off. It had launched itself away from home, a blur of red and black and gleaming metal.

To a child, it had been the most magnificent craft ever made.

Now, Shane found it broken and aged. It wasn't hard to spot the spear of shrapnel that had struck into the back half of the craft like a spear thrown at a giant. Had it been aimed intentionally it could not have struck more true.

A claim spike, except the claim was made by unfeeling debris.

"I'm in sight range," Shane said quietly. "Requesting permission to magnetic lock onto the hull."

"You made it!" Harris cheered weakly. "That's great. Why don't you settle up by us. At least then we can see each other."

Did Shane want to be seen?

He checked his O2 gauge. Twelve hours left.

It might the last time anyone ever saw him. Grimly, he crept through the last few bits of danger, then crawled over the hull until he could orient himself to their floor direction. There were wide windows on the command deck, with strips of thick plating between them. It was child's play to deploy the maglocks.

Shane had made it. So very close. Separated only by a few layers of plex, metal and deadly space.

Bood appeared in the window and gave him a wide wave, followed by Hayes. Shane waved back at them. After a moment's consideration, he released his harness again. What was the point? Until they knew what he was doing, he was parked here. Might as well move around a little.

"Good to see you," Harris said. "Okay, now that you're docked, I need to sleep too. I'm going to leave Bood here for now, but Wiebe should be back up in an hour or two. He'll alert me if anything critical comes in."

"Sleep well," Shane said.

The command deck did have more personnel on it. All stations were staffed as far as Shane could tell, but none of them had more than one or two people on them. Probably working even leaner with so many people injured in the initial impact.

"You want to knock out for a bit?" Bood suggested. "I promise no one will stare, but it's probably safest to do it when we can see you. I can lock into your monitors too, wake you up if your levels are dipping."

Shane really didn't want to be watched while he slept, but Bood was right. He was down to the dregs of his energy.

"Not for too long," Shane said. "I don't have a lot of time."

"I know, man," Bood assured him. "But right now, we need the engineers clocking overtime, not you. Sleep a little and we'll get you up if anything changes."

"All right," Shane conceded. "Thanks."

It was one thing to sleep in the vast darkness, it was another to pass out while an entire command deck could watch him potentially drool with the terrible knowledge of his own demise hanging over him. Shane closed his eyes and promised himself that he only had to pretend for a few minutes, enough to get Bood's attention on something else and then he would go through his comms or something quiet.

"Shane," Ilya's voice caressed him.

"Mm?"

"Time to wake up. Let me see your pretty eyes, yes?"

With a sigh, Shane lifted his eyelids even though they seemed to have been glued shut. The effort at prying them open was the reward of the sight of Ilya. Too far away. Not on the pillow beside him, but out through the mono-pod windows and into the command deck. He was standing as close to the windows as he could. The bandage on his neck was gone, a proper medpack applied and he was wearing his leisure things, athletic pants and a tank top, all in black. His hair was a wreck and Shane longed to run his fingers through it.

"Ilya," Shane said helplessly.

"There you are," Ilya said as if Shane had wandered off outside without telling him. He had his comm in his hand, but his eyes were on the Shane before him, instead of on screen.

"Did you sleep?" Shane asked him.

"Some, yes."

"How long was I-"

"Four hours."

Shane sat up an scrubbed at his face, ignoring the screaming of his long suffering muscles. "That's too long. What did I miss? Do we have a plan?"

"There are plans. Several very stupid, terrible plans."

"Tell me the bad ones," Shane demanded.

"No. Drink and eat first. You have things, yes?"

"I grabbed the quarantine box out of my room," Shane told him. With a stifled groan he got his helmet up and off. It was one less layer between him and Ilya. A little more clarity. "You didn't go to the medic."

"Not right away. I had more important things like keeping this place from exploding," Ilya scoffed. "It was nothing. A tiny cut. I did not break my whole arm like Haas or get many electrical burns like LaPointe."

"Did anyone exit?" Shane asked quietly. He'd been leery of asking Harris and Bood.

"No," Ilya said with evident relief. "But five pilots will take more then med patches to heal and a dozen more broken bones among the crew. It was a hard hit."

"It looks like a claim spike," Shane said as he grabbed a nug and started chewing through it.

"Claimed," Ilya huffed. "Of course. Claimed by bad fucking luck."

"What are the bad plans?"

"No, we're not doing this," Ilya said. "You are eating and then we are letting the other people do the thinking for a little while."

That didn't sound half bad. The energy output, the restless sleep, and five thousand emotions he'd felt in the last day cycle were enough to cloud anyone's brain.

"Are you off shift?"

"No. My shift is here with you."

"That can't be right," Shane frowned. "Ilya-"

"Wiebe!" Ilya yelled. "Tell my husband that he is my assignment before he makes me clean the bathrooms!"

Wiebe's voice cracked into the channel, "I assure you that our Squad Leader is exactly where he's supposed to be right now. Mostly so he stops arguing with the engineers."

"But he's usually right," Shane pointed out and he could see Ilya's smug smile from here. Shane returned it.

"Yes, which is why he's still getting the reports," Wiebe said with a gusty sigh. "So he can argue with them asynchronously and I don't have to go arbitrate fights. Do you know how sad it is to watch engineers try to take on an elite mono-pod pilot? At least he does his best to keep them from hurting their hands on his face."

"Ilya!"

"Wiebe!" Ilya protested. "You were not supposed to get me in more trouble!"

"I'm not getting in the middle of this," Wiebe decided. "No formal updates right now. I'll check back in when I have one."

The channel closed.

"I can't believe you got punched by an engineer."

Ilya's noise of annoyance made Shane smile down at the tasteless last bit of food. "Oh, you can't?"

"Never mind. I'm actually more surprised that it doesn't happen more often."

"They like me," Ilya said. "Except when I find errors in their math. Then they hate me."

"I hate when you do that too."

"You use the computer too much to do it for you."

"I should do it in a notebook like you? Leave filly-sheets everywhere that clogs up vents?"

"One time!"

They were both smiling at each other. Exhausted and scared, but at least almost together.

"Did you even get to claim the meteor field?" Shane asked.

"Oh yes, very exciting," the laugh was broken up, not quite right. "No competition this far out."

"I'm sorry," Shane said. "This is my fault."

"You started intersystem war that no one could be fucked to clean up after and then made our navigator an idiot who does not double check for debris fields?"

"It's my fault you were here at all."

A long ragged breath, "It was both of our plan, not only yours. I agreed."

"But I knew it wasn't-"

"We decided," Ilya said firmly. "It made sense. No one could see this would happen."

"If we both survive this, it's all out now. I'm sorry."

"I'm not."

"What?" Shane blinked at him. "But, it's all fucked now. I told the entire fucking system about us."

"You told them that you were Shane fucking Hollander-Rozanov and you will not stand still while people die. You told the entire Accord-fucked system that you married me," the pride dripped from Ilya. "My brave husband. I don't care. They know now. Let them investigate and say terrible things. They are the ones that look terrible."

"I won't be a pilot anymore," Shane said. "Can you love me if I'm not a pilot?"

"I'm not going to yell at you because I know you are very tired, luchik, but please do not think so badly of me. You would love me if I could not fly anymore, yes?"

The idea made Shane want to scream. Not Ilya, who had been made to fly, who was the only person that had ever really given Shane a challenge. It was an unimaginable cruelty to even think about it. But…

"Yes," he said firmly. "Of course I would."

"There is your answer then. I love you, not the fucking mono-pod. Though it is a very nice one. You steal the best things."

"Shut up," Shane said with a tired laugh. "I basically own 24 anyway."

"You do not," Ilya said. "Though maybe now, yes. I do not know the law of flying off with corp property."

"I do, actually," Shane shrugged. "I put it in my contract. There's a deduction from my investment payouts four times a solar. I wanted to take it with me when I retired. Some guys do that. Not that I was planning on retiring any time soon, but I don't mind having an older model and I like this one."

"You can do that?" Ilya asked incredulously.

"Sure. It's a great deal for them. I'm paying down the full price instead of whatever discounted sale they'll make when they pick up the new models."

"Why did you not tell me this?"

"I thought you knew," Shane frowned. "It's in the contract options. Ottawa might not do it because they hold onto their pods longer, but I know Boston does."

"Options," Ilya said flatly. "The ones that they write in N.A. GenSpeak?"

"Oh. Shit. They didn't translate it for you?"

"Later on, yes, but not the first time," Ilya said, disgruntled. "I could have kept my pod."

"I don't know that," Shane tempered. "Really. Without looking at their options it might not have worked for you."

"How many payments do you have left on 24?"

"Two."

Ilya stared at him through the glass. "You did not steal it then. This part I know. 80% on payments and they cannot take it back from you. Sveta made sure I understood that when I buy my rovers."

"Oh," Shane said. "Well. That's nice. I'll only have to pay them back for three powercells. Only most of my life's savings."

"Three?" Ilya asked, his voice rising up. "What?"

"It seemed prudent."

"Tell me what you did. Start to finish. All of it now."

"I have to put my helmet back on," Shane demurred.

"Yes, yes, fine, breathe air, but tell me."

So Shane told him. Or tried. Ilya kept asking questions, making Shane explain one decision over another until it was more like a post-mission debriefing. That actually made it easier to talk about and eventually, Shane found himself arguing with Ilya about more efficient ways to rip off a class-A carrier without getting detected. When Shane started up his notes, sending a stream of text to a computer that would never sync up again, he realized what Ilya was up to.

"You're distracting me on purpose."

"Yes," Ilya said, raising his eyebrows. "So? You want to think about gauges and switches and time now?"

The hours that Shane was losing. The time spent waiting and not being with Ilya. The countdown to his very possible death.

It was deeply unfair. Why should this be the end after their years of the push-pull of them, chasing each other across the vast reaches of space and only catching up in stolen hours in rented terrible rooms? One golden summer was not enough, could never be enough. But it might be all they got.

Push. Pull.

"Ilya. What if your pods pushed the debris and I pulled it out?"

"That is one of the worst of the ideas," Ilya said disgusted. "No. You cannot manage this. We ran the calculations."

"That doesn't make sense. It's big, but if you have the force of your pods it could work."

"Four. Four could fit if we configure right to push. And you the fifth. The shape of the debris? You would link to it at the end, full thrusters and maybe, maybe we move it a little. Or maybe, you reach capacity and 24 is only more debris."

"I would stop before that happened," Shane protested. "Obviously."

"It could happen in a picosecond! It is a stupid risk for maybe no reward."

They both went quiet. Until Shane asked hesitantly, "What are they doing now?"

"Torches. They can get small equipment through and a few walkers. They are trying to cut through it."

"If they do, that could take a lot of the weight off. Take some of the strain off the pod," Shane pointed out.

"Yes. Maybe. I don't know." Running a hand through his hair, Ilya dislodged the few curls that had managed to stay reasonably tidy. "If they manage, I will tell you. For now…this."

"This," Shane said, wishing he could touch. Hug. Kiss. Not even for sex (Shane was pretty sure he couldn't physically do sex right now which was a horrifying thought), but for the animal reassurance of Ilya's hands on his body and his breath in his ear.

Shane pressed his thumb to his thigh. Ilya watched and dropped his hand too, rubbing over the identical spot.

Their green D.N. marks saying only Alive and Yours. The only two concepts that mattered.

"When we go to the lake next, what is the first thing you want to do?" Ilya asked.

Lunars and impossibilities away. "Why does it matter?"

"I want to know. Tell me." The strident demand in Ilya's voice always snapped up Shane's attention. Even if he didn't obey, he listened.

"You know the very first thing," Shane groaned. "Come on. I know the whole command deck can hear us."

"They are pretending very hard not to listen, but okay." Ilya grinned wickedly at him. "After that then."

"I want to swim," Shane decided. Mostly because he felt disgusting right now. "Dive off the dock into the water and stay there for an hour or two. Race you to the island and back."

"You want a rematch?" Ilya teased. "You are such a bad loser."

"You're worse, you cheater," Shane accused.

"I do not have to cheat to beat you."

"But you do it anyway."

"Eh, it's fun," Ilya said. "Your face! So cute when you scold me. What next?"

"No, your turn. What do you want to do?"

There was a pause, Ilya considering and then voice lowering, he said, "The fire outside. I want to watch you build that again. I want to learn how to do it too. I want to watch the flames with you. Be quiet with you."

"Yeah," Shane breathed out. "I want that too. I liked how we talk there."

"So do I."

This felt a little like that. Too seperate and too cold, but they were there, together in the darkness.

"Tell me something. Anything," Shane asked, almost under his breath. "About you."

"When I have stolen something too." At the window, Ilya shifted, elbow landing against the surface, his body pressing towards Shane. "My brother's cycle when I was fourteen. I rode it across the entire city and did not crash. A miracle, probably. I had never driven before."

"Why did you do it?" It was all too easy to picture a smaller, gangling Ilya gunning through crowded streets on a vehicle he could barely control.

"I wanted to fly and I could not. Junior league cannot practice outside of dedicated times. It was the only time I feel…anything, I think. I do not remember much."

"You don't remember being fourteen?"

"I remember the cycle. I remember meeting Svetlana. I remember flying," Ilya said with a shrug. "Everything else is better left forgotten anyway. You have a perfect memory, I'm sure. Every day recalled."

"No, not that far back," Shane said. "I remember some things. More than that, maybe, but not a lot. I wasn't having a great time. There was pressure already and I was clocking a lot of flight hours which was awesome, but it meant there was less time for normal stuff. Didn't have a lot of friends. Maybe none, actually. Squadmates, but not friends."

"Idiots then," Ilya deemed and Shane smiled at him because what else could he do?

"Yeah, well. I was probably a weird kid."

"Me too," Ilya said.

"No way. You were hot and popular," Shane said. "I was not getting laid."

"I wasn't having sex because I was hot and popular," Ilya huffed. "I did not want to be in my own body."

Oh. Shit. They were really doing this. Here. Now. Shane stood, carefully planting his hands around his dash, so he could lean forward to see Ilya better. "Is that still true?"

"No," Ilya said immediately. "Not with you. I am very much in my body when I am with you. Appreciating your body, mostly, but in mine, yes."

"Good. You would tell me? If it felt that way again?" Silence. Ilya's breathing a susurration of waves over the comm. "I want to know when you're not okay. I've been worried for lunars about you and you don't answer my questions on comms."

"I don't want you to worry. You have enough worries," Ilya said carefully.

"It's my job to worry about you. Like you worry about me. What the fuck did we get married for if not for that?"

"We got married so we would know if the other person was alive," Ilya snapped back. "So we could have verified D.N.s and not find out from a broadcast."

"Don't say that," Shane growled. "You know that's not all of it. Of course I wanted the D.N., but I wanted you more. I want to be your partner."

"Partners do not live on separate carriers across a system," Ilya said bitterly. "They do not need D.N.s to know. Do they?"

The rage in Shane warred with sorrow and anxiety and so much exhaustion it was a palpable weight over his shoulders. Why did Ilya always do this in the worst moments? It was like he wanted Shane to fail at reassuring him.

Shane sat with that a second.

Maybe Ilya did want him to fail. To prove that the worst was true.

"You're a fucking idiot," Shane said.

"My love says such sweet things," Ilya snarled.

"We had a plan. The plan apparently did not work for you and you didn't say anything. You just nodded along?"

"No," Ilya relented a little. "I thought it would be okay. It was okay for a while. But…no. It is not working anymore."

"Then we fix it."

"Yes? Before or after you are arrested?"

"Ideally before," Shane said.

"We may both die here and it won't matter."

The words landed ugly and dark, but true. And Shane preferred the truth.

"We might. But at least we won't die with you lying to me."

"It was not lies," Ilya protested weakly. "Only I did not say everything."

"Say it now."

"I do not want to waste our time with sorrows."

"I don't want to waste our time building up more lies."

Across the divide, they regarded each other. Ilya pressed his forehead to the window. "I am very tired. Numb, I think. Some days are worse than others. I miss you. I hate lying about you. I hate the hole in my life where you are supposed to be."

Shane had built his routines and life carefully to leave a niche for Ilya. A slot in his day where he was allowed to think about him. For years that had been fine. They saw each other so rarely, the words they exchanged so precious and few that he could hoard them to take out for later. It had been easy to continue that even after the golden time at the lake. He could pace through his routine and savor Ilya like dessert at the end of a long day.

The cracks hadn't started to show yet, but with the small and impossible distance between him and his husband, Shane could feel them. All the tiny fissures and stress marks that were starting to radiate out from his chest. There so many places Ilya should be, all the conversations that Shane wanted to have, all the kisses stolen in corridors and looks exchanged over the heads of lesser pilots.

"There's so many places," Shane said and it came out in a whisper. "It's not a hole for me. You're the sealant for a thousand cracks and seams. I'm going to come apart."

"Shane," Ilya breathed out.

"It's done now. Whatever happens next, it's together, okay?"

"Okay." The word was a covenant between them. The beginning of their years long dialogue. It was amazing it hadn't made it into their wedding vows, but they had read those off a screen in Shane's living room.

Shane pressed a hand to 24's window. It clenched into a fist and he banged once against it. Made to withstand far worse collisions, it only made a dull thud of a sound. Impotent.

"This is so fucked."

"It is," Ilya laughed quietly, a tired, humorless laugh.

"Any reports yet?"

Even though he would have heard them coming in, Ilya checked his comm, then shook his head. "Nothing. What are they doing down there?"

"Sweating," Shane guessed. "Tell me another story."

"Greedy boy."

"Yes."

"What do you want? More Moscow?"

"Boston," Shane decided. "Something you loved about Boston."

"Ah, it is a strange colony, you know. So much old and new all jumbled up. The maps cannot keep up. Marley gets us very lost once, trying to find a restaurant he loves."

The story was funny, but Shane didn't laugh. He only listened to Ilya's voice, his hand still pressed to the window, his body screaming its useless protests and the O2 counter, steadily counting down.

Just as Ilya was about to start another tale, Harris moved from his station to Ilya's side. He got up on his tiptoes to whisper into Ilya's ear, then gave an apologetic look to Shane, backing off.

"What?" Shane demanded when Ilya's face fell.

"They cannot cut through. Not without better equipment which will not fit out the remaining hatches," Ilya said. "They are attempting now to widen a hatch, but it may create more problems than it solves if we cannot maintain a airlock seal."

Shane's eyes flicked down to the ticking down number that spelled the end of his life, then back up to his husband. "Two hours, forty-two minutes."

"We will gather everyone here. A crisis meeting. Fuck!" Ilya slammed his hand against the window. "All day, every day a fucking crisis meeting. WIEBE!"

Within minutes, every department head and what seemed like half the squad were standing at the window. Formality had died on impact of the news, no one standing on ceremony as ideas were taken out and shot down. Everyone trained in space walks had been outside already and all of them had the same assessment: manual efforts with tools on hand were not sufficient. They needed to get out bigger guns. More pods, bigger tools. Anything with more power.

"If we can't sort this," Shane said, trying not to look at the counter, but it was too late. The numbers were ticking down in his mind now, his excellent internal clock suddenly a ceaseless punishment, "then we run the push-pull. Soon."

"No," Ilya grunted.

"The facts are the facts," Shane's voice was calm and steady as everything else about him shook. "In two hours and ten minutes, I will start to suffocate. It will be a prolonged death, but I will die. In one hour and forty minutes, the oxygen will already be depleted enough that performing any complex maneuvers will risk me passing out and failing to complete the mission, even if the pod stays intact."

"That doesn't give us a lot of time to figure something else out," Harris said pained.

"We can do anything in two hours," Bood argued, but he did not sound nearly as sure as he had at fifteen hours.

There was some brief excitement about using the onboard defensive systems to blast through the sections the walker had already weakened, but the carrier's own safeguards would not allow the enormous rays to target that close to the ship itself.

"What if we overrode them?" Hayes asked. "I mean, some of us are pretty good at coding that we use for totally legitimate reasons."

"I know about the data torrents," Wiebe said tiredly. "I don't fucking care about your media obsession, Hayes. Those safeguards exist for a reason. With the temp the rays blast at, we risk melting down any wiring that's sitting close to the hull. Could be nothing, could be catastrophic collapse. One or two degrees off and it won't matter if we get the bay doors open."

So it went. Around and around. Shane waited. He watched Ilya grow quieter and fold in on himself.

Eventually Wiebe got pulled away by some frantic report and got far enough from the group that Shane could tap his personal comm.

"Something you don't want to share with the group?" Wiebe asked, dropping his voice lower.

"We both know how this ends," Shane said. "I'll let them all keep talking, but it's on the push-pull. If I die, you'll send the walkers out to get the powercells. Ilya is not to be on that team."

"Hollander-"

"Please," Shane said roughly, "listen. Just a moment."

Wiebe nodded. "Listening."

"Under no circumstances is Ilya to see my body. He'll try. I don't care if you have to use the whole squat to restrain him. You do not send him. He's going to be fucked up enough, it'll remind-" Shane stopped himself. There was no way Ilya had told Wiebe about his past and it wasn't Shane's to reveal. "I can't have him go through that. Tell him they can't retrieve me and that I requested a pilot's funeral. A proper one from the war."

Wiebe surveyed his face. "Incineration. That's what you're asking from me."

"Before he can get in his pod. I'm sorry to ask it of you."

"I'll do it," Wiebe said with a nod. "He'll never forgive me, but I will."

"I know. Sorry about that. Doubt he'll forgive me either, but I'll be dust. Easier on me than you."

"We could still figure this out. You could still survive," Wiebe said. "Don't go forgetting that. Or acting like it. Men that die in their heads, don't do great flying."

Several desperate ideas were tried in that last crucial hour. The bay was flushed as if readying for vacuum to try to move the shrapnel. It didn't so much as shake. Every available walker went back out with every unconventional tool they could find. The attempt at widening a less convenient hatch was abandoned when the threat of a broken seal encroached.

Shane stopped listening. He only sat and watched Ilya move around the command deck with increasing agitation, holding himself like he might shatter. He asked brittle questions and shot out ideas like his brain was superheating.

"Ilya," Shane called to him when the timer in his head started flashing warning orange. The oxygen timer was still a sedate white. Fifty minutes, after all, was plenty of time to get back to your carrier. Fifty minutes was forever if you weren't fucked.

"No," Ilya said.

"I'm going to unlock and get in position."

"Please," Ilya begged. "Don't do this."

"You need to go too. Get suited up. We can stay on comms. Keep talking to each other."

"The odds are terrible!"

"I can die trying or I can die waiting around," Shane said reasonably. "And either way, you're not going to watch it happen. I won't allow it."

"Oh, here we are, the great Shane Hollander won't allow it!" Ilya bit off.

"That's Hollander-Rozanov to you."

Ilya subsided. "I don't want you to go."

"I'm not excited about it either, but I can't think of a better way. Anyway, if I can't be with you at the end, then I want us both where we belong. Flying and working towards the same goal."

A hitch in Ilya's breathing almost set Shane off, but he gathered himself and gave a stiff nod. The comm band broadened. "This is Squad Leader Ilya Hollander-Rozanov. The following pilots report to the bay: Hayes, Boodram, and Dykstra. NOW!"

Hayes and Bood took off running. Shane didn't know where Dykstra was, but he would bet the man was pelting down a corridor already. Ilya's word was law here and it was beautiful to see even in this terrible moment. Going to the window, Ilya slapped his hand flat against it and Shane did the same in 24.

"May all your stars align," Shane said.

"And see you safely home," Ilya echoed. "I love you."

"I love you too."

That was all Shane could stand. He strapped in and pulled on his helmet. Maybe Ilya agreed because he lingered only a moment longer, before he too was running. The harness burned as Shane pulled everything harshly into place, truly cutting into his flesh now, sores likely rising up. Sleep and stillness had only done so much for his recovery. Oh well. Either he'd live to get treatment or die before they had a chance to get infected.

Detaching the maglocks, Shane pushed off the command deck without any more goodbyes. No oxygen left to waste.

The shrapnel was wider around the pod. It was a good thing Shane had run Ilya's disdained computer calculations while everyone else tried to find new ways to fail at pushing off this moment. He had identified the best place to apply himself and this time didn't bother with the maglocks. Instead he accelerated towards the shrapnel and buried his claim spike into it. If he didn't hit the release, then the mono-pod would be tied to this shrapnel as firmly as a moon to it's orbit.

"I'm in position," Shane said over the comms.

"Heard!" Bood acknowledged. "We're suiting up. Hayes is overriding the controls to release the pods without opening the doors. He's halfway there."

"Heard," Shane confirmed.

The chances of success at normal flight speeds were 28%. If Shane burned everything he had in the first minute, it went up to 34%. The likelihood of the mono-pod tearing itself apart without the burn was 56% and climbed to 78% if he did. The odds were bad. Orange and yellow debris scattered out as far as he could see.

Was this how they had felt? Those pilots of old that he had so admired as a kid? Would he still love flying if every mission had been life or death?

He feared the answer a little.

As much as Shane didn't want to die, he felt electrically, terribly alive in this moment. He waited for the signal, every nerve buzzing, every synapse firing. Winning this meant more time. It was the highest stakes he'd ever played for.

"Unlocked!" Bood shouted. "Go, go, go!"

"Squad Lead Rozanov-Hollander in position," Ilya said seconds later. Seconds that meant he'd already been seated and ready, tossing aside every ready protocol. "Pilot Rozanov-Hollander, you wait for my signal."

"This is my mission," Shane said.

"My carrier, my corps, my mission," Ilya hissed. "Do not start with me right now."

"I think I should get this one," Shane complained.

"Kind of with your man on this one," Bood said. "We can't even see him right now. He's got to guide us."

"Seconded," Hayes said.

"Third!" Dykstra cut in.

"Traitors!" Ilya ground out. "Fine! You have command, luchik. I will play Pilot."

"Great," Shane wanted to laugh, so inappropriate and out of sync that he let it happen. Fuck it. "Just how it always should be."

"Fuck off," Ilya said and he was laughing too, hysterical and wild.

"On my mark!" Shane barked.

"Wait!" Harris' voice cut through the comms.

"For what?" Shane demanded. "We have to-"

"Wait, wait, please, give me- I have to patch them through! HOLD! HOLD!"

"We're holding!" Shane yelled back, rabid with impatience.

And then a green light came up on Shane's dash. One in a row of fifteen dead lights.

A voice cut through the comms.

"This is Squad Leader Scott Hunter of the Admirals reporting in. I have Pilot Vaughn, Pilot Huff and Pilot Bennett with me. Sounded like you guys could use a hand if you don't mind us butting in?"

"Fuck me," Shane breathed out.

"Hunter!" Ilya's voice pitched up several octaves. "Did you time that to look dramatic? Is this what you do when you are older than comets?"

"We can go," Scott said amused as three more lights came to life on Shane's dash.

"The claim. Why aren't you at the claim match?" Shane said, rocked to his core. "An entire new baseworld."

"Two hundreds lives and your sheer audacity? Doesn't compare to a regular claim," Scott said merrily. "No idea if we'll be welcome home now, but I'll be damned if you hog all the humanitarian glory. Now it looks like you're trying to pull that splinter out. Want some help?"

"Yeah! Yes!" Shane's calculation whirled out. Five was plausible. Five would be-

"Great, got a few other folks that want to say hi then."

"My turn?" Someone asked as the Admiral pods came into view. "This is Pilot Ryan Price out of Toronto."

"Pilot Troy Barrett, Toronto."

"Pilot Cliff Marleau, Boston!"

"Pilot Chris Connors, Boston!"

"Marley!" Ilya cried. "Price! What the fuck?"

"We all got the distress call, Rozy," Marley said. "We were all scratching our heads figuring how to sweet talk our commands and then Hollander shows us all up by ditching his entirely and stealing shit? Absolutely the fuck not. He doesn't get all the credit for saving your ass."

"We just wanted to help," Ryan said. "Well, I wanted to help and Barrett followed me. I thought he was going to drag me back, actually. But we had a nice long chat while we were trying not to die. This debris field is insane."

Green, green, green. Shane watched his lights come back on with his throat burning.

"Bonjour, bonjour! Are we too late to render assistance?"

Fuck it. Shane was just going to cry. No one could see him. "J.J.?"

"Pilot Jean-Jacques Boiziau reporting, mon capitaine!"

"And Pilot Hayden Pike! Sorry we missed the fun little welcome wagon, we almost got murdered by debris."

"Hayd," Shane said weakly. "What the fuck? The kids, Jackie, you can't-"

"Shut the fuck up, Hollander," Hayden said, paused and then said like it physically pained him, "Hollander-Rozanov. We are going to talk later, you asshole. But for now! What are we doing? Fun little outdoor party? Harris got us the word about your shrapnel issue."

"You started heading this way before you knew about the shrapnel?"

"Seemed to us," Scott said as two more lights flipped green on Shane's dash, "that a carrier ship stranded in a debris field that can't launch it's pods might need more than a few powercells. So we coordinated and took some humanitarian aid supplies. Extra rations, extra air filters, some random spare parts. I'm not entirely sure what Cliff has, sounded like he was just taking whatever wasn't nailed down in the bay, frankly."

"We were the furthest out," Cliff said, apparently unaffected by this assessment. "No time for big plans."

"Did you steal some donuts from the mess?" Ilya asked hopefully.

"They're stale as fuck, but they're yours if you don't die, you dumb fuck," Cliff confirmed.

"I will definitely live. Today is too good a day to die," Ilya determined.

"It is," Shane agreed. "Centaurs, you want in on these lights?"

Green. Green. Green. Green.

Fifteen. A full squad.

Shane closed his eyes and took the deepest breath he'd been willing to risk in hours. He watched as mono-pod after mono-pod winked into visible range. He had thirty minutes on the clock, but that was fine. A squad could do miracles in thirty minutes.

With a whoop of pure joy, he announced, "We're starlit!"

 

 

 

Chapter 3: if we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal

"Link up!" Shane ordered. "Spike in to the debris where you can. Just fall in where you can. We're not going for style, we're just all aiming for the same direction: away! Heard?"

"HEARD!" The comms were a cacophony for a second, and a joyous one at that.

"Centaurs, hold position, we're not changing your strategy. Just push on go. Heard?"

"Heard!" Ilya barked back.

New York, Boston and Montreal striped pods linked up, snapping together. Affirmations came over as spikes were sent boring into the enormous piece of debris.

"All right. Anyone not aligned?"

Silence.

"Count of three, we go full blast. Let's do this in one smooth motion. One. Two. Three. GO!"

24 shuddered and for a brief, horrifying second, Shane wondered if they should've paused to calculate again. It would've been terrible to die alone out here, but far worse to take so many other people with him. But the shuddering intensified until it was clear that it was the debris itself and not his pod coming apart.

"Don't ease up!" Shane shouted over the comms.

He threw himself against his controls, pushing forward as if he could shove the thing out by sheer will alone.

One thing that Shane had not factored in, considering his success chances had been so low, was what might happen if he did get the debris loose while going at max power. He would guess no one had had time to factor in what would happen if eleven pods did exactly that.

They pulled out the enormous spike and then with the gained momentum kept going with it, speeding towards the bigger cluster of the debris field.

"Release!" Shane said frantically. "Unlink and drop spike!"

"You fucking think!" Someone yelled back, but Shane had no idea who.

He was too busy catapulting himself up and away with the force of the released spike. The pod spun uncontrollably for a moment, but he ruthlessly harnessed the controls and leveled himself out, possibly breaking a finger smashing it against the console to do so.

The spin had left him facing the carrier which now had a sizeable ugly dent in the bay door. The bay door that was already opening with painful, shivering slowness.

"Check in," Shane demanded. Each green light on his dash flashed once then went steady. "Starlit. Good work everyone. Thank you."

"Hey, Shane?" Hayden's voice wavered a little over the comm.

"Yeah?"

"Fuck you."

"Yeah," Shane said with giddy laugh. "That's fair."

"I love you so much," Hayden groaned. "And I'm going to punch you."

"Do not," Ilya's voice snapped over the comm. "Shane, get in here before you pass out."

"Not worried about the rest of us?" Scott asked wryly.

"He has fifteen minutes of air left, so no," Ilya said.

"Fifteen minutes?" J.J. asked incredulously. "And you were going to do this on your own?"

"No comment," Shane muttered, concentrating on maneuvering toward the bay door.

"When you get in, we have someone in a exo suit waiting," Wiebe's calm voice filtered into Shane's comm. "Don't worry about a neat landing, just maglock down. We're going to have to do some serious logistics to fit 26 pods in here, but we'll let the guys with air worry about that. As soon as you're down, hold position. We've got a bubble for you. Not ideal, but it only has to last you from the bay into the airlock."

"A bubble?" Shane grimaced. "Yeah, okay. Good enough."

"If you complain about how you are surviving, luchik, I will kill you myself."

"Yes, dear," Shane said flatly.

"This is worse than the void," Hayden groaned.

The second the bay door was wide enough, Shane gracelessly clamored inside and obediently maglocked to the first free square of space, hyper-aware of 81 looming at his back along with the other three launched Centaur pods hovering near the top of their bay.

Five minutes left.

He undid his harness and took off his helmet. What did he even look like right now? Glancing down he found streaks of blood across his chest where the chafing from the harness must've finally given way to cuts. The helmet had cut into his neck too, something tacky and gross stuck around his jaw. The seal had started to disintegrate from his sweat. Gross.

A crew member in full spacewalk gear approached. A voice crackled not over the comms, but through the window over the suit's amplifier.

"Hi, Squad Lead Hollander-Rozanov. I'm going to partially deploy the bubble and then you'll open hatch. Ideally you get no vacuum exposure, but I need you to go on my mark. Then we'll do our best to not smack your head on the floor while we get you into the airlock. Sound good?"

"Fucking great right now."

"Fantastic."

Bubbles were for spacewalk cargo that needed planetside-like conditions to function. They were old tech and like the cleaning wipes, they were not intended for human use, but got used for it anyway. It was a stupid way to die if you stayed in for too long, but it would be far, far stupider to die within walking distance of an airlock .

"Five…four…three…" the bubble partially deployed around the hatch, sealing down around the mono-pod. Shane kept his finger on the switch. "Two…one…GO!"

He opened the hatch. With shaking arms and the tattered scraps of his remaining energy, he pulled himself up and into the clear wrinkly plastic. It sealed down around him and then he was being politely, but very very quickly dragged away from 24. Trying to walk would've been futile even if he could wish for a hair more dignity in this moment.

The airlock deployed and for a last terrifying minute, Shane ran numbers on the sealed air in a bubble versus the time an airlock took to dilate. It was closer than he liked to think and just when he was getting lightheaded, either from an actual lack of air or his own panic, he was heaved the last crucial span.

The bubble folded back up. Shane was on the Centaur. He stared up at his rescuer, who only gave him a wave, collected the bubble and headed back into the airlock.

"Where are you going?"

"I think if we don't bring Ilya in, he might try to see how long he can survive in a partial vacuum," a warm voice said.

"Wiebe?"

"Nice to meet you in person." A hand flashed into Shane's field of vision. Likely Wiebe intended it for a handshake. Too bad. There was no way in the system that Shane was greeting his husband laid out on the ground. He grasped Wiebe's hand and started to struggle to this feet. "Oof! Okay then, let's get you up. Little help!"

"Sorry, I know you said no touching," Harris said at his back, hands planting on Shane's shoulders.

"I'll make an exception," Shane gritted out.

Between the two men, they got Shane on his feet. He had to lean against the wall to stay there, but that was fine. Shane's body reported in a lot of unhappiness in being vertical again, but it would have to deal a little longer.

Up close, Harris was still a confusion of holograms, a generous beard and a sunny smile. Wiebe was a more somber presence except for the span of his relieved smile.

"The powercells," Shane said. "Those should come before Ilya."

"The powercells don't need oxygen. We'll just grab them after," Wiebe assured him.

There might've been more. Shane couldn't spare any attention for it. He was focused on the airlock. He thought he'd heard it open on the other end. Slowly and carefully, he pushed off the wall to stand on his own power, despite screaming warnings from every internal system. Standing on jellied legs, he squared his shoulders and raised his chin.

He could only maintain that position for another minute or so more. Lucky him, the airlock dilated and spat out the spacewalker and the bubble. With quick hands, the walker peeled the bubble open and before it was completely undone, Ilya was there.

Ilya was there. Standing in front of Shane. With a moan of deep pain and relief, Shane reached for him, swaying forward.

"I have you." Ilya met him halfway, getting his arms around Shane right as he collapsed forward. Swaying, Ilya took his weight and buried his face against Shane's neck. The smell must've been horrific, but Ilya only clung tighter. "I have you. Shane. My Shane."

"Ilyusha," Shane's voice was choked with something. Feeling. Blood. Who knew at this point? "I'm so tired."

"Sleep," Ilya said with that note of command that Shane took as law only in bed, ignoring it everywhere else.

But he was very very tired and Ilya was here. No one was going to die today. Their Death Notice marks would stay green, green, green.

"Starlit," Shane mumbled and then he was sliding into the dark.

When he came to, it was laying down. Everything stank like chemicals and the bed was blisteringly white. Medical. The same on every carrier, every hospital that Shane had ever seen the inside of. There was a voice filtering in. Sweetly familiar.

"Now, he is waking up. I will send you a picture of him with his eyes open, so you can see he is okay. Will be okay."

"Ilya?" Shane asked. His voice cracked. Hoarse.

"He is talking too. Medics say full recovery. I will give update tomorrow, if I can. Goodbye!" Ilya said, bewilderingly.

Shane blinked a few times, pulling the room slowly into focus. Ilya was sitting next to the bed bed, comm in his hand. He was still in his flight suit, but it was unzipped down to around his waist, only the tank top he'd been wearing on the command deck underneath.

"Where's your underguard?" Shane asked.

"I did not have time to put it on," Ilya scoffed. "This very insane man I love was going to die."

"I was not," Shane mumbled. "Was I?"

"A little. Maybe. But we are very lucky and talented, so we are both alive. And you have a new record."

"Yay," Shane said.

"Yes, good proof that there is a reason not every record should be broken," Ilya said dryly. "You have a broken finger, two broken ribs, every muscle fucked so bad they covered your whole body in medpacks and there were so many cuts you were more blood than skin."

"Nooo," Shane denied, then had to blink again to refocus. "Drugs?"

"Yes, luchik, many many drugs," Ilya laughed quietly, then finally leaned forward to take Shane's hand. "Pain killers. Antibiotics. Rapid re-hydration. Muscle relaxants. Nutri-dense feed. You know, all the fun things."

"Uh huh. Can I have water?"

"Yes," Ilya reached for a packet and held it to Shane's lips which felt wrong, but Shane wasn't sure where his hands were entirely so he dealt with it, sucking down a few sips, swishing them around his mouth.

"Who were you talking to?"

"Your parents," Ilya said.

"What?" Shane groaned. "Why? How?"

"They commed me directly. It only arrived an hour ago. Very worried about you, but they were told they could not use the relays to talk to a wanted man. So they messaged me, hoping you made it to me."

"Oh, wow. Are they okay?"

"They are very worried for you, but okay," Ilya said.

"But- I lied to them. About us. About me."

"You are alive. They did not ask me any other questions than if you were alive and in one piece. I think the rest will come later."

Shane nodded a little. His neck hurt. There was a medpack there too. He fell back asleep.

The next time he woke up, his head was much clearer and he didn't ache so much. The lights had been dimmed, but he could make out the outline of Ilya still in the chair. Except he was slumped forward, arms crossed on the edge of Shane's bed, his face cushioned against them.

Flexing his hand, Shane found the break healed and the worst of the cramping gone. He reached forward to touch Ilya's curls. They were greasy and gritty at the same time. A terrible texture. Shane pet him a little anyway.

"Awake again?" Ilya murmured.

"Mostly. How long has it been?"

"I don't know." Ilya reached behind behind without dislodging Shane's hand. He grabbed his comm and checked it. "Eight hours. Repairs are at 70% complete. We have some time before the decision must be made about where we go next."

Right. Shit. Ottawa had to hold to the Accords. Shane was a fugitive. Maybe they all were. Ottawa would have to return them to their home carriers or take them back to Ottawa baseworld until someone came to fetch them. On the one hand, it would be nice to see his parents. On the other hand, Shane would love not to be arrested.

"We need a plan," Shane determined.

"You cannot even get out of bed. What kind of plan are we making?" Ilya asked, shoving himself up with a yawn.

With scowl, Shane pulled himself up into sitting position. There was nothing attached to him now, medpacks and bonemender cleared away.

"Shane," Ilya scolded. "Lay back down."

"If I don't shower, I am going to freak out," Shane said carefully.

"Yes, okay that is fair," Ilya grimaced. "I would not mind water either. Let me…"

Ilya got to his feet and paced away then came back quickly before Shane could consider the odds of getting up on his own.

"Can we-"

"Give me five minutes. I will get clothes for both of us and get us both to the bathroom. Okay? Five minutes."

"Five minutes," Shane repeated with only a little edge of frustration.

Then he was being kissed. No tongue. Just a soft press of lips on his own, Ilya's hand fluttered over Shane's throat.

"I love you," Ilya said seriously. "Do not get out of this bed or I will be very pissed off. Heard?"

"Heard," Shane sighed.

"Good."

It was a very long five minutes, but Shane stayed where he'd been put. Though he did let the toes on his left foot curl and uncurl. It was still in better shape than the rest of him. His right foot let the toes twitch, but that was all it was conceding at the moment. Fair enough.

Ilya returned in a hurry, perhaps sensing that Shane was reaching the end of his patience. He had a bag with him.

"Come," Ilya said, going to Shane's side and sliding himself under Shane's arm. "I will get you clean."

It was a touch and go situation. Shane was wobbly and his muscles had not fully forgiven him for their abuses. The lingering painkillers threw off his balance too. Without complaint or teasing though, Ilya got him into medical's bathroom (blissfully almost normal size to accommodate patients in any state) and stripped Shane out of the flimsy gown he'd been draped in.

Reluctantly, Shane looked down at himself. The medpacks had taken care of the worst of it, but there were pink stripes across his chest and the bruising from what felt like a hundred solars ago was still there, though it was going yellow-green in most places.

"You look much better," Ilya said. "And a shower will fix more."

Showering with Ilya was a dance Shane had learned over the summer. They had to learn it all over again now, accommodating Shane's tentative relationship to standing and the much smaller stalls of a ship over the grand ones Shane's home boasted.

It felt so good to be clean that Shane didn't care that he couldn't manage it on his own. To have Ilya's hands on him again was a miracle. He clung whenever it wouldn't get in the way and once he'd swished twice with dental-bots, he started laying kisses wherever a patch of skin presented itself to him. Shoulder. Neck. Chin. All the tiny, lovable pieces that Shane thought he might never touch again.

"I can do your hair," he offered. "If you keep me upright."

"Yes, I can do this," Ilya said, embracing him.

Taking care of Ilya was pleasure spiraling on pleasure. To have him under his hands, alive and safe. To see him lunars before they could've possibly seen each other otherwise. To feel his trust and willingness to allow this intimacy. For Shane to even want it, to crave this tender moment, was a new hollowness in him so readily and unexpectedly filled that it made him want to weep.

The water allotment was not boundless, so Shane didn't stretch it out as much as he would've liked. He lingered a little after though, once he was sure he'd worked all the product out, his fingertips making circles over Ilya's scalp.

"I wanna do this at our house too," Shane told him, confessional under the beat of the water over both of them. "Wash your hair and hold each other in the shower."

"Me too."

They let the fantasy of privacy and endless time stay for a momment longer. Then the water shut off and Shane quickly went cold, his body ill-equipped right now to deal with rapid temperature changes. Ilya snagged a towel and rubbed him down vigorously before helping him into clean clothes. Loose shorts, a plain t-shirt, a warm sweatshirt. All Ilya's things, embracing him.

There was no scolding from a medic. No one had noticed their absence, still dealing with the wake of the chaos. Clean and mostly clear-headed now, Shane sat back down on the bed with a frown.

"We need to talk to all the other pilots that showed up here. Make a game plan."

"You need to stay down," Ilya said. "Take your pills, eat, and sleep."

"We don't have enough time for me to nap," Shane said. The thought of sleeping through more precious time made him twitch. He might actually have a problem with napping for the rest of his life if he thought about it too hard. "Let's get a plan in place and then I'll sleep."

"We meet here. I will setup a privacy screen. I am not letting you sit in a conference room right now, luchik."

Shane considered that. Sitting upright, engaging his core and having to look professional did actually sound like a nightmare at the moment. So as much as he loathed the idea and how it would look, he conceded that he would stay put.

As soon as Ilya created the the bubble of secrecy with a few sound blockers and some sheets, an army of pilots crowded in, carrying chairs. Except for Hayden who sat right down on the foot of Shane's bed, with a stormy expression daring Ilya to say anything to him about. With an eye roll, Ilya threaded his fingers through Shane's and ignored him. Shane mustered a smile for him.

"Hey, Hayd."

"Don't you 'hey, Hayd' me, asshole," Hayden said with a glare. "You owe me and J.J. a conversation as soon as you stop looking like an impact site."

That was probably fair, but Ilya was already taking aim. Shane squeezed his hand. "Don't. No time."

With a grunt of acknowledgement, Ilya subsided.

"You've got our attention," Scott said. He'd aligned himself beside Ilya which earned him some good will from Shane. "I assume we're trying to figure out how to keep all our asses out of prison?"

"Yeah," Shane said. "That, mostly. Way I see it the Centaur can either deliver us back to Ottawa for holding or to our carriers directly, right?"

"Right," Scott confirmed. "The Centaur needs to dock to complete repairs, but they're doing a bang up job of making themselves flight-worthy without that right now. Our carriers are all headed to the same claim, so it wouldn't be a hunt or anything. The claim is closer and then they'd be offloading the problem without having to deal with us directly."

They all sat with that for a second. Shane glanced around the room, taking in the arrangement of men. They'd all changed out of their flightsuits into what must've been donated outfits. Poor Price looked like he might bust out of the t-shirt he'd been given if he moved wrong. Sitting hunched over beside him, Barrett managed to still look like an advertisement for pilot recruitment despite the tortured expression on his face.

Marleau and Connors had also gravitated near Ilya too, but seemed the most at ease with the situation, Marleau's chair was tipped back and Connors was actively scrolling through messages on his comm as if that was the most important thing happening right now. J.J. and Hayden looked ready to start throwing punches.

What a squad.

A squad.

"Ilyusha," Shane breathed out. "None of them have a fucking squad to field."

"What?" Ilya frowned. "What do you mean?"

"No, no wait," Scott said sitting up straighter, almost toppling Marleau with the suddenness of the move. "He's right. We took the pods. None of them have a fifteen-pod team to field."

If only one pilot from each of the carriers had come, it wouldn't have made a difference. Everyone carried a spare mono-pod. But two? That was a luxury even Montreal couldn't afford. The space, the resources, all to have a second spare that would likely never be used? There were sometimes alternate pilots on board, but never enough alternate pods. If you suffered so much damage in a claim that you needed two new pods, you were better off heading back to your baseworld and figuring out a new contract strategy.

"The Accords have to allow for partial teams," Hayden said with authority then instantly wavered when attention fell on him, "don't they?"

"They fucking well don't," said Scott, already pulling the monitor for Shane's medical records over and flicking away the programming to run a search. "We almost lost a whole contract when we had an electronics failure four years ago. Yeah…here! 172.4.1: A claim may only be made by a full team of fifteen single-pilot vehicle (as meets the annually updated specifications in 313.1.15). The claim will be considered fair and legal only if all fifteen vehicle are present within no less than 100 klicks from the final spike. Any vehicle disabled in the course of the claim are still considered present as are any that were incidentally damaged or destroyed."

"So they'll have to wait for us to show and take the pods back. Or wait for reinforcements," J.J. said with a frown.

"What's that mean for us?" Connors asked without looking up from his comm.

"They need us," J.J. said. "To make the claim. That's leverage, right?"

"Maybe," Price said, lips compressed together, his hands folding over and over each other in his lap. "Or maybe they'll take our pods and shove whoever in them to get the job done while we rot in holding cells."

That bleak thought quieted them. Something itched at the back of Shane's mind though. He reached for the screen with a quick, "Can I?" and Scott nodded, passing it over. The Accords were long and dull. Shane had had to read through them like every kid in a corps school, but the only parts he'd paid attention to were about claims, specifically the mono-pod specs.

Ilya watched him closely. It was hard not to be aware of that focus. He'd been suspiciously quiet. Quiet enough that Shane had to wonder if their minds were running down the same flight course.

Tapping through them, Shane asked Ilya: "Do you have three team members that would be willing to defect?"

"You want there to be more of us?" Scott asked incredulously. "Why?"

"Probably, yes. If I asked," Ilya said. "They are new to Ottawa mostly. It is a very big risk. Big gamble. This is not very you."

"I've done a lot of not-me shit recently. And it got me back to you and both of us breathing, so I'm not sure I learned the right lesson from it. It's an even bigger risk for you."

"Mm, no," Ilya said, flicking that away with the hand that wasn't clutching at Shane's. "Reward is too big to measure risk."

"What are we talking about?" Marley asked, finally setting down all four chair legs. "Share with the squad, assholes."

"Exactly that," Ilya said, not looking away from Shane's face. "A squad. It is all you need."

"For what?" Scott asked, exasperated.

"To found a new corp," Shane said with a twitch of a smile. "1.19.3: A corporation may also be founded by fielding a complete squad and making a claim. They will all be out there waiting with their dicks in their hands and we've got the only full squad in this arm of the spiral. We can beat them at their own fucking game."

The silence became pandemonium. Every single pilot started talking, except Shane and Ilya. Ilya gripped Shane's hand a little tighter and then said with the weight of a man who regularly corralled fourteen idiot pilots, "Shut up."

Everyone shut up.

"We can do this," Ilya said. "It is very very big risk. If we do not make first claim, then we are all there for the taking. Separated back to our corps. Pods seized. Except for Shane's because he is weirdo who bought his."

"I did too," Scott said. "That's not weird. It's a standard contract amendment."

"Told you," Shane said.

"Yes, yes, you are both big time legal nerds, bond later," Ilya huffed. "The rest of us will lose our pods, our careers. Some of us our lives over it."

"Boston does love an execution," Marley said with a shrug. "But they'll do that anyway if we turn ourselves in. This way maybe we have a chance of doing something interesting."

"It's a prime baseworld," Scott said. "That's a ten-star first claim. We could build a corp base immediately. Everyone would want to contract with us, no matter how we got started. That's what you can use as leverage with Ottawa, Roz. The Centaurs can't field a squad right now, can they?"

"No," Ilya said. "One of our pods was damaged in the debris strike and two of my pilots are in medical comas to heal from the impact injuries. They will be fine eventually, but not good for flying. Maybe Ottawa say that two of you can join our squad instead though. Hunter and Shane because they own their pods could contract."

"We'll refuse," Shane said, glancing at Scott. "Right?"

"I'm not winning a future by selling out everyone else," Scott said firmly. "Absolutely not."

"Back up," Hayden said. "A ten-star claim? Shane mentioned it was hot, but not that hot. We're sure?"

"There might be something off about it," Shane admitted. "But I didn't get a good chance to dig into specs."

"It's your lucky day," Scott said. "I might've taken a copy before we headed out."

"Scotty was on this shit," Carter said with some satisfaction. Apparently the Admiral contingent was content to let their S.L. talk for them, but not if he wasn't going to take proper credit for his work. "You should've seen him. We did a surgical strike on the databases, took all the good stuff and fucking ran. They won't even know we've got it."

"Are we allowed to have that?" Price asked incredulously. They all turned to look at him and he flushed redder. "Obviously we're all committing a ton of crimes, I meant more would that invalidate our claim?"

"Spying is a fun little past time for corps," Ilya spat. "They love to steal and say that they do not. Punish the spy and say 'oh no, we would never!'. They ruin lives for fun and games. For more shit they do not need. This time, maybe, we get to play the game and come out alive. With money to burn."

"I don't really want to be like them though," Price said softly. "I see the plan. I'm on board. But I want…I want us to be better than them, not doing the same shit with a new name."

The thought settled new and wild and strange among them. Something else? What would that even look like? They were all corps-bred. Sure, there were the unaffiliated colonies speckled throughout the spiral, but everyone knew they were places without laws, filled with crackpots, criminals, and degenerates.

Degenerates like Shane and Ilya, who could have fled to one of those worlds instead of their terrible half-life arrangement. It would've been a lifetime of painful exile, except for how they would've been free to be with each other.

Living on the starving fringes wasn't any more appealing than become another towering corps.

"We have to call ourselves a corp. That's all they understand," Scott said slowly. "But we could make our own bylaws. That's our right. Found something new."

Found.

"What if we were a foundation?" Shane floated. "Like…like a charity on a bigger scale."

"Just give away profit?" Barrett asked, bemused. "Can we even do that?"

"Why not?" Ilya challenged. "Hunter, give the specs. Let us see this world."

They threw them on the monitor and when that wasn't large enough for the room, projected it right onto the wall. Some of the guys clearly checked out (Shane wasn't entirely convinced Connors had ever checked in. Maybe he'd come with Marleau because he hadn't been clear on where they were going?), but Scott, Ilya, Carter, and Price studied them intently. Shane would have liked to, but Hayden had pulled his attention with a hiss of his name.

"What?" he asked, his body starting to report the desire to pass out again.

"You know what!" Hayden whisper-yelled, gesturing at Ilya. Behind him, J.J. nodded fervently. "When? How? And for fuck's sake why?"

"Since our last year in juniors, messily, and because I love him," Shane said with what he thought was remarkable patience all things considered.

"Hollander," J.J. said with dead eyes, "We're gonna need a little more than that. It's Rozanov."

Shane stared at them. They had come across the spiral, given up their futures. To save this ship, but mostly on Shane's word that it needed doing. Maybe they were owed a little. Fine. Fucking fine.

"We've been seeing each other since we were seventeen," Shane said carefully because to admit to the messy frantic hookups stolen in shame-filled pockets across planets and ships and time was too much for him right now. "On and off. Trying not to be serious, but we were. Deadly serious."

"But you hate each other. We hate him," J.J. said. "All day, every day. 'Fuck Rozanov' is practically our motto."

"The corps' fucking motto, not mine," Shane said and he wasn't even angry. Maybe he was too tired to be angry. "I like flying against him because he's the best there is except me. It was a challenge. A fight. It's great, but I don't hate him. I never figured out how to hate him. When they sent me home early to recover from the concussion last season, I talked him into coming with me. We figured out our shit."

"And got married about it?" Hayden asked strangled. "Alone?"

"If we'd done it out loud, in public, how would that have gone?" Shane challenged. "We would've been strung up for the corps parade of traitors. Ousted, probably. Every claim we ever fought over would be re-investigated. They'll say it's because of who we are, but I don't care how 'legal' and 'accepting' everyone is, it'll be because we're both men and worse, both pilots. Worse still, me and him specifically."

Both of them seemed to want to argue, but there wasn't much they could say in the face of that. They had to know Shane was right. The corps sold merch about their rivalry, built propaganda campaigns around it. To spit in the face of that was to be hit with a tsunami in return.

"Did you ever let-" J.J. started and then fell into silence when Shane leveled him with a look.

"You both gave your fucking lives for me today, so I'm going to let that fly," he said flatly. "But you ever even imply again that I would cheat or let that fucker take a claim from me without a fight and I will punch you in the fucking throat. Understood?"

Behind him, Ilya was saying something to Scott, but Shane had no doubt the was also listening. That was one of Ilya's talents that Shane hadn't mastered, monitoring a room for threats. Shane was better at it in the void than Ilya, who was a more reckless pilot. In a crowd though, Shane lost track of the politics quickly while Ilya muttered streams of information to him seemingly without thought. They weren't often in public together, but Shane could now hopefully look forward to a lifetime of relying on that assistance.

"Fucker is definitely what I call Jackie in a good mood," Hayden said with false lightness.

"We're both still pilots. You want to hear our pillow talk, you can sneak into our bedroom at night," Shane said with a growl. "He's a fucker and he's my fucking husband. Right, asshole?"

"You say such pretty things," Ilya said dryly, but he reached out swept his thumb over Shane's cheek. "Where are my nice nicknames, luchik?"

"Find out what's wrong with our planet, Ilyusha and stop eavesdropping."

"Mm, yes, yes," Ilya lightly slapped Shane's cheek once. "Fine. I do all the work."

"Oh yeah, real hardship for you," Shane said, biting back a smile.

With a tilt of his head and a ghost of a frown, Hayden said, "Okay. I see it a little more now. What does 'luchik' mean? Is he calling you a dickhead or something?"

"Sun ray," Shane mumbled. It wasn't fair, really. Ilya insulted Shane all the time for fun, but he was definitely going to come off better than Shane on this one.

"Sun ray," J.J. repeated.

"Because he is my warm light," Ilya said, dripping in sweetness. Shane tilted his head back to glare at him. Not the time to be laying it on thick, but he only found genuine delight on Ilya's face.

They hadn't been able to say things like this out loud in front of people. Not ever. Barely to themselves yet. It did sound good. Shane swallowed hard.

"Yeah," Shane said roughly. "So. That. Is what it means."

"Oh Hollzy," J.J. said in complete despair. "You're a goner."

"Oh shit," Price said. His voice was resonant even though he was trying to say it softly.

"What do you see?" Scott asked. "Not viable for life? Are we fucked? Cause we are going to need somewhere to live so they don't-"

"Hollander, sorry Hollander-Rozanov, were you look at the geo data when you tweaked into something being up?"

"Yeah, partially," Shane said. "You see it?"

"Roz," Price reached out, grabbed Ilya's arm and hauled him bodily toward him as if he was barely aware he was doing it. Before Ilya could protest, Ryan was pointing. "We've all seen you do screwy numbers in your head, look at this."

"Get your-" Ilya started saying, but then he was leaning in to where Ryan was pointing. The green numbers scrolling slowly upward. Ilya's eyes danced back and forth, he went slack in Ryan's grip and planted his hand against the wall. The numbers bent around his fingers and he tapped at them with one restless finger.

"What are we looking at?" Scott asked, leaning in a little and then almost getting knocked clean to the floor when Ilya leapt backward at the same time.

"Shane! Your fucking mind!" Ilya shouted. "You saw it and they did not and they do not even know what they are missing. The landmass is small. Only big enough for a few small cities, so they could not use it as a big colony world, but we do not have to give a solitary shit about that."

"Why not?" Barrett asked, finally looking up from where his gaze had been glued to the floor.

"Because of the Boker readings and how they're correlating with the core samples," Ryan explained. "The drone didn't do a deep read, so it's hard to see unless you do some math that most command decks wouldn't bother with. They've got their coordinates, they'll go for the oxygen-rich temperate environment with a water source and worry about the rest later."

"But we know better because…" Hayden led.

"Because, you terrible idiot," Ilya said, grinning so wide Shane could see his back molars, "this entire planet is veined with sopher crystal. Fucking powercell juice. Anywhere it is, we cannot live of course, but what the fuck do we care? We are not a whole corp trying to launch out every which way. We only need one, very rich world."

"Sopher crystal would've disrupted some of the radiation readings that's what I saw," Shane said with some satisfaction. "There's enough landmass that we can sell some docking rights. Keep it equal across the corps we want to work with to give them their launching pad to the next system. They'll pay us coming and going. For the crystal. For the land rights. But we'll keep the best spots for the settlement."

"Where does the money go?" Price frowned, watching the numbers. "Sounds great to 'do good', but we need a plan. If we feed it right back into the corps, it'll disappear. Outworlders won't trust us to take it."

"So we don't offer it to corps or whole colonies," Scott said practically. "We offer it to people. We build a place fit for life and we take in people that don't or can't stay corp affiliated."

"Degenerates," Shane said to himself, then looked up and found Scott looking straight at him.

"No one should live in fear because of how they are," Scott said softly, giving a nod. "So we build a place where they don't have to."

"I like this," Ilya said and sat down beside Shane's bed again. "Now we must only do three or four impossible things to make it happen."

"Hollander already broke like seven records," Marleau said practically. "What's a few more?"

"If we can get this rustbucket turned around and pointed the right way, we can be there in half a lunar," Conners said, eyes still on his comm. "Only twenty-nine hours behind the Admirals and Montreal. We were lagging a little, but the Raiders should arrive before us too. They'll be waiting."

"Only twenty-five? How?" Barrett demanded.

"The trajectory here was fascinating," Connors said. "It's not surprising that no one found this debris field before. There's three bloated late-stage red supergiant stars that are doing a lot of work throwing out confusing readings that would skew monitoring systems, but once you get through that, we're actually substantially closer to claim with a few good slingshots to pick up momentum."

"How'd you know that?" Shane asked, staring at him.

Connors finally pulled his attention from the comm and gave Shane a faint smile. "I was considering nav-track once I retired, so I keep up."

"They could use you here," Shane said.

"We could," Ilya agreed with a sigh. "I must talk to Wiebe. Shane must sleep. Connors, with me. Everyone else, get the fuck out. Half a lunar is plenty of time to talk."

Shane wanted to protest. A pathetic whimpering part of him wanted to grab Ilya's hand and hold him there. But there were more important things for Ilya to do right now.

Always, there were more important things.

Shane was fucking sick of it.

He fell asleep before he could work through that thought all the way.

It was the last time he had to sleep in the medical. When he came to next, he felt worlds better though still not normal. He ate his rations and gratefully accepted half an apple, only a little wrinkled from storage, eating it in small bites. Ilya appeared not long after Shane had devoured it and was vaguely contemplating chewing on the stem.

"You are free," Ilya announced. "I talked to the quartermaster and they had a free partnered room. I have all my things there already. You have no things, I think, except for a flight suit and tools, but they are there too."

"You got my toolbox?" Shane asked, mood rising.

"Yes," Ilya said with exasperated fondness. "But a bed, luchik! Big enough for two."

A bed for two. And Shane's body no longer leveled in exhaustion. He set the breakfast tray aside and got to his feet. His bare feet.

"I don't think I can-"

"Everything you were wearing was decontaminated then washed," Ilya said and handed Shane his flight boots. "We will go through supply later and see if we can get you other things. But you have my clothes to wear. It will be fine."

"I can't just wear your clothes."

"Why not?" Ilya asked.

Huh. Why not? Everyone knew. Literally everyone. The whole system knew they were married. Shane pulled on his boots, his right foot threatening to cramp in memory, but he stretched a little and it gave way to peace.

"Too much?" Ilya asked wryly. "I will find you other things."

"No," Shane said and then hesitantly, he reached for Ilya's hand and took it in his. Everyone knew they were married. There was nothing to hide. "I'd rather have yours than a stranger's."

"Good," Ilya said casually, but there was a faint trace of pink at the back of his neck.

The corridors were as busy as any working carrier, maybe more so with all the repairs underway. Shane could see places that had clearly been de-prioritized, marked off with orange tape. The color alone made Shane a little uncomfortable.

"I think I might be slightly traumatized," Shane said absently to Ilya as he took in the worn down hallways. People clearly tried to maintain the place out of sheer grit so the painted stripes were still crisp, not a single light was out. But there were places that showed the wear of many feet passing through and patch jobs were patch jobs no matter how carefully placed.

"Yes. It was a lot. You were very brave," Ilya frowned.

"No, I mean by the state of this carrier," Shane said.

"Be nice," Ilya groaned. "It's old, but it works. They have been very kind to me here."

"You, Ilya Rozanov-Hollander, are telling me, Shane Rozanov-Hollander, to be nice?" Shane demanded. "Is it a no gravity day? Should we walk on the ceiling?"

"Everyone thinks I am so mean and you are so sweet," Ilya grumbled. "They do not know how you talk about them when they can't hear."

"They love you here," Shane said immediately a little apologetic. "Everyone I talked to in command pretty much said it outright."

"I claim many things for them." Ilya shrugged.

"You're a great S.L. and they love you," Shane repeated.

"You are saying our names a lot. Full names. Lots of times," Ilya said, definitely diverting on purpose. "Making sure people know?"

"I want to get a new D.N.," Shane said. "I don't care if it means doubling up. I want it where it belongs."

"Really?" Ilya's grip on his hand tightened. "But that will mean if one of us…that is a lot."

"The worst almost happened and we would've had to hope someone would think to do a full body scan," Shane said. "I'm not having that shit. If this fails and they get me, I want them to see you on me the whole time."

"Tomorrow then," Ilya decided. "We are registered already. I can get the etcher from H.R. and we can do each other. Bad spot to do it to yourself again."

"I'm not apologizing for that. You were being weird about it."

"Weird," Ilya repeated. "You who do not wish anyone to ever find out, wanted to wear my name on your body. I thought maybe- I don't know. That you had bad kinds of plans."

"Ilyusha," Shane gusted out, "never, okay? I just wanted to know if something happened to you."

A D.N. was such a fragile bond, only a tiny point of data, so small that any relay could carry it swiftly across the occupied system. The small steady sign of your loved one across the system was still living, still breathing. So small. A barely there reminder. And if it went out? If it went a terrible blood red and then faded slowly into gray? Then you carried that with you too. A history easily seen on your neck by anyone that met you. Unless you hid it away too as readily as you did your lover.

That was all Shane and Ilya had had of each other: deleted pictures, asynchronous comms, hidden D.N.s and a universe of silent fear.

No longer.

"I know that now," Ilya assured him. "It was not a very…mm. Rational thought."

"Ohh rational," Shane teased gently. "Memorizing tech support logs again?"

"It is better than looking them up mid-flight!"

"Four-screens, they say," Shane shook his head. "If only the knew the worse truth."

"What? That I am so smart I do not need a fourth screen?" Ilya preened.

"That you're just a big a dork as I am."

"Mm, no," Ilya sniffed. "This is lie. No one will believe you."

The room Ilya had secured for them was on the aft deck. Ilya indulged Shane's desire to peek into the large communal bathroom with full size showers. Gorgeous. Shane was absolutely using later.

The biometic scan on their room unlatched for Ilya as he approached, but he paused to program in Shane's data too.

"Thanks," Shane said.

"No thanks. You live here too, right now."

It was a slightly bigger niche than the one Shane had left behind. Like the rest of the ship, it was worn down by it's years of service, yet clean and functional. The bed was nothing like the one Shane had for them at home, but it was big enough for both of them to lay down as long as they were careful about their heads where the walls sloped together. Instead of the regular service bedding, there was a patchwork brown quilt laid down over it. Ilya's flight suit hung in the closet along with his dress uniform and a coat. His travel bag, familiar to Shane on the floor of a dozen borrowed rooms was flattened and stowed on the top shelf.

And somehow, laid on the back of the chair, was a very recognizable and worn pilot's jacket. The kind of thing no one bothered with anymore now that flight suits were more insulated. But Shane's father had had one and passed it down to Shane, who wore in on chilly nights at the lake house.

Shane had put it over Ilya's shoulders himself as they sat and watched the fire. He'd had no idea Ilya carried it away with him when he left.

"It was a very small risk. I kept it in my room," Ilya said, a little apologetically.

"Shut up." Shane turned on him and backed him up against the wall to kiss him hungrily, his hands scrapping up under Ilya's shirt, pressing his palms to his stomach, his magnificent chest.

For roughly twenty minutes, Ilya mostly shut up. His only spoke to issue harsh one-word commands and whispered gentle check-ins. They fucked like it was the last time. Or the first time. Shane rode him, hunched on the nook of a bed, so he wouldn't knock himself out until Ilya rolled them carefully, taking over. When Shane came shaking and practically in tears with it, Ilya went right on pounding him through it taking Shane's whimpers as justly due worship.

They were both shivering messes when their passions were spent, the circulating air pricking chills over sweaty skin. Ilya curled Shane into him, so they could share their animal warmth.

Tiny fleshy creatures in the fragile eggshell of technology suspended in the vastness of unfeeling space. They were never meant to be here. Humanity had trespassed far beyond their blue marble with their opposable thumbs and insatiable curiosity. Yet, no matter how far they wandered, they still wound up here. In each other's arms, providing warmth and affection. Making meaning where no meaning was to be found.

"I love you," Ilya said.

"I love you too," Shane said, tucking his head under Ilya's chin and finally, finally, began to weep in earnest, every feeling catching up with him at once.

Pulling up the quilt that Ilya had taken from a distant system that Shane could never visit, Ilya cocooned them and let Shane shed his necessary tears.

"It's too early to sleep," Shane protested some time later, when his face was dry again and his body a little cleaner (from proper body wipes this time, scented in something green and woody). "All I've been doing is sleeping."

"I have been very awake, luchik, for many hours," Ilya protested. "Let me sleep."

Since Shane was certainly not getting out of bed to leave Ilya behind right now, he settled down, his head on Ilya's chest. The steady thud of his heart was enough to keep Shane entertained for longer than he'd like to admit.

It was a peaceful afternoon.

Wiebe came over the loudspeaker, stirring them both awake hours later.

"Attention, all Ottawa personnel and our rescuers, while some internal repairs remain, our main engines are once more operational. They will be restarted shortly. We will be diverting from our intended route to return our guests to their respective carriers which we have been informed will be posted near a potential claim currently labelled TR-4598. Our arrival date is estimated to be 15.03.03.20. All section heads have new assignments for repair and upkeep during travel to be disseminated shortly. With thanks to the generosity of our visiting Admiral and Raider pilots, we have fresh rations that will make our extended trip more palatable.

"You may hear other words applied to the eleven men that came to our aid in the coming weeks then the ones I've used. Certainly their home corps have some objections on the way they conducted themselves. People you know contracted with other corps and even our own may message you. They may ask you innocuous questions about how these pilots are being treated. If they have been violent. If you do not feel yourselves at some kind of risk in their presence. They may mention rewards. Bounties. It will seem very casual, I'm sure.

"So let me be abundantly clear: the bravery and ferocity that it took for every single one of these men to leave behind safety and security to help people they had never met is the kind of act that transcends every day loyalties. If I discover that any one of my people has revealed so much as a favorite color of one of them to someone who might have a corps' ear, I will personally see to it that you never take to the sky again. We will not return their generosity of spirit with idle gossip, let alone outright betrayal. Bound by the Accord we may be to escort them back, but we are also bound by our shared humanity to make it as painless as possible.

"If you have any questions about this statement, I welcome you to visit me on the Command Deck and ask them. Over and out."

"What did you say to him?" Shane asked, bewildered.

"Nothing," Ilya said happily. "That is just Wiebe. I like him. He has a wife and children on Ottawa baseworld, so he cannot risk going against the corp, but they are a more flexible sort of corp anyway Already they have given him permission to move ahead and approved the 'lend' of three pilots. With the understanding that if we fail, the pilots will fail alongside us. Ottawa will publicly say they have nothing to do with it and they will not fly again."

"We can't ask that of your guys."

"Shane," Ilya rolled his eyes, "I do not have to. I'm going to have to choose which ones can come, they are are all trying to throw themselves at us. It's embarrassing."

"They are not. When did you even ask? I didn't know we were asking yet."

"Hayes is very clever. He figured it out before I could say anything and they cornered me this morning. We have nine volunteers."

"But they could lose everything."

"Yes, maybe," Ilya sighed. "I do not make them say this though. It is just true."

"Who should we take?"

"I do not think we can make that decision on our own."

"Oh. Yeah. Three S.L.s on one squad is a lot," Shane frowned. "Scott is pretty level-headed. I guess it's okay if he chimes in."

"He will want to make it a democracy. Have everyone vote."

"Even Connors?"

"What is wrong with Connors?"

"He didn't even seem to know where he was? I think he was checking his messages the whole time."

"He is definitely paying attention to what he cares about," Ilya laughed, "he is navigating. Always double checking work, like he said. He does not care about anything, but the stars. Piloting only gets him to them faster."

"So why did he come to your rescue?" Shane asked.

That quieted Ilya and he shook his head. "I don't know. Marley, I understand. We were close. I did not tell him why I left though. He was very angry with me and we have not spoke since. "

The question lingered in Shane. They stayed in their new room that night, but the next day, they had to venture out. They found all the other pilots gathered in the mess, passing around different ration types gathered from across four corps. Marley presented Ilya with a package of stale donuts with a winking bow.

"Fuck off," Ilya said, but he was grinning and took them and split each one into pieces to share around the table. Though he did keep on whole one for himself, eating it in slow crumbling bites.

It was a loud meeting and mostly social over useful. Hayden sat at Shane's other side, a little like he was hiding there while J.J. had found a spot by Carter Vaughn, the two of them trading elbow jabs and jokes already.

"Did they know each other before?" Shane whispered.

"No," Hayden whispered back, "but once we established comms with the Centaur, Harris put us in contact with each other too. We all talked a lot of shit, just to keep chatter up. It was also a good way to keep us awake. We slept in shifts, linked up, you know?"

"Sure," Shane said.

Hayden nudged his shoulder against Shane's. "Not all of us are badass enough to solo that shit."

"Nothing badass about it," Shane said, nibbling on his quarter of a donut. Ilya had tried to give him more, but Shane had never gotten a taste for sweets. "I just had to get here. No other acceptable outcomes."

"Badass," Hayden determined. "They're going to make a vid about it. At least one. Probably more."

"They won't. Because I'm not selling my likeness rights."

"Ah, you should," Ilya cut in. "This would be very fun. To see who they would cast as both of us, yes?"

"No," Shane said.

"Mm." That noise from Ilya usually meant he already knew how he was going to flip Shane's 'no' to a 'yes, please'.

Despite everything, that was how most of the journey went. There was work, of course. Ilya bullied his way back into engineering where Shane got to watch him in action. The engineers really did like him, apparently, the fighting more good-natured than Shane had been led to believe. Connors was swallowed up by the navigation group. Hayden organized an entire league of g-ball players from the awe-struck staffers, who had mostly taken a stance of mild reverence for their savior pilots.

J.J. attached himself to Carter, the two of them establishing a sort of rolling party in the mess that gained and lost people over shift changes.

When Shane finally felt like he could spend a few hours away from Ilya without comming him every five minutes, he ventured into the bay. It was very very crowded with twenty-six pods, but it was also beautiful. A full battalion. Shane had never seen so many together.

"Hello, Squad Leader Hollander-Rozanov!" Haas greeted him when he arrived. He was holding his own toolbox. "I know there is much work to be done and you prefer to do it yourself, but I am learning how to care for my pod too from your husband. May I assist you and learn from you too?"

"Uh..sure," Shane conceded.

Very quickly, Shane was glad he hadn't figured out how to say no. Haas was a great assistant. Whatever the over eager exterior presented, it hid a fiercely competent mind. Everything Ilya had ever said to the kid over one short contract had been stored away. Any time Shane reached for a tool, it was in his hand before the name could form on his lips.

24 wasn't in terrible shape, all things considered. It had come out better than Shane had from their joined ordeal. But there were plenty of things that needed fixing.

"Need to undo that," Shane said regretfully as he ran his hands over the adjustments he'd made to the engine valves.

"Why?" Haas asked.

"It's not up to Accord standards. If they can find a way to de-legitimize our claim, they will."

Haas nodded slowly. "Maybe you can do them again when the claim is done. The new corps will not field a squad right away."

That hadn't occurred to Shane and the thought was a chill hand around his heart. They would need a carrier ship. People. It would take time. At least a full solar, if not two, before they could go out again.

When he brought that thought to Ilya that night, Ilya had hummed low for a moment than said, "Why do we need to make claims to fly?"

"What do you mean?" Shane frowned. "That's the whole point."

"Is it?" Ilya traced his thumb over Shane's cheek. "You like the game of it. You don't give a shit about what you claim."

"I care about my bank account," Shane protested, but even as he said, it was weak. The game was the point. Winning was the point. The prize wasn't for him. The claim was for the corps and he got his tiny slice of the larger pie which he mostly used to make his few short months planet-bound livable. The thrill and the victory was what Shane craved.

"Yes and that will be very fat, very soon, if we go right. So. Why not make it a game? A game people can watch not only on big screens. We put them out with us in the void."

"Like an exhibition match! It'd be cheaper to mod out a few older ships with more viewing space then to get a carrier." Shane sat up a little. They'd been about ready to sleep, which was always when Shane's brain started to work against him the most. "We could drag a meteor or something into the planet's orbit to use as a fake claim."

"We could charge ridiculous amounts for seats," Ilya said delighted by the very though. "Our foundation planet, paid for in powercell dust and rich idiots who like to bet on the thing we love to do anyway."

"You're a genius," Shane declared.

"Yes," Ilya grinned and kissed him. "This is why I had to have you. Who else will tell me how smart I am and how my ideas are all good?"

"No no," Shane corrected, kissing him back, "very much not what I said. You have a thousand terrible ideas for every good one. But this is a great one."

The morale among the pilots shot up after they brought that idea to the table.

Slowly, Shane got to know everyone. He didn't go to the rolling party, but he showed up for all the g-ball games. He spent a few evenings watching vids with Hayes, Bood and Dykstra. At one point, he practically fell over Harris and Barrett of all people having a very intense discussion in a hallway.

"Sorry," he said making to go around them.

"No, stay a second," Harris said. "Troy and are talking P.R. and I know you've done your fair share."

"I have," Shane conceded. "What are you thinking about?"

"The claim will have to be documented and I don't trust the other corps to film it fairly. I've got a little light pilot training and I was thinking that I could take one of the spare pods out, equipped with better cameras."

"Oh, uh…" Shane glanced at Barrett, who gave him a pleading look. "Why can't you shoot it from the carrier? Use a drone? That's what they usually do."

"I don't love trying to see what I'm doing from in here, no matter how good the drone camera is. If I miss something, it'll be a problem," Harris said.

"We have our cameras too. I know they're grainy, but the corps always uses them for rulings, so they should be good enough for their standards," Shane offered.

"Let me blunter," Harris decided. "You need good propaganda. You already accidentally shot one incredible vid that is changing people's thinking, but that's not enough. We need clean shots of you guys doing heroic moves and catching what you say. Enough that I can splice together a dozen shorts and one longer piece. Things the news orgs can run untouched quickly."

"You can record the comms. I assume you will anyway," Shane said. "I don't-"

"That's it!" Barrett snapped his fingers. "Harris. Turn us into your drones. Strap the better cameras to us. They do that sometimes for P.R., right?"

"It's tricky," Shane said. "Usually that's only for planned shots. That equipment is easy to damage."

"Fuck the equipment," Harris said gleefully. "Let's do that. Better mics clipped you all of you and cameras bolted into place right to the hulls if I have to. Thanks, Troy!"

"You're welcome," Barrett said softly as Harris scurried away, presumably to make that all happen as quickly as possible.

"I didn't know he was going to do P.R. for us," Shane said, bemused.

"I think he wants to come with us? I don't know. It'd be good. We need someone who knows how to show us off," Troy tacked the last bit on with a glare as if he was daring Shane to contradict him.

The defensiveness reminded Shane of how aggressive Barrett could be. Yet, he'd been as quiet and diligent as anyone could ask since arriving.

"Hey, can I ask why…all of this?" Shane pivoted. "Why did you come with Price?"

Barrett folded his arms over his chest. How old was he? He seemed young just now. Closer to Haas' age than Shane's anyway.

"I've been hearing things about Kent. Things that matched up with what I know about him. I started asking around, learned more. I was so…yeah. I went to the Captain and he told me to shut up about if I knew what was good for me. I didn't really know what else to do. They'll go on protecting him when he's hurting people forever and I'll be the one sent planetside over it. So when your comm came through, it shook me a little. We were all watching and I noticed Ryan leave. He's a big guy, but he can disappear when he wants."

"I've noticed." Shane hadn't, actually. Scott had pointed out it the day before. Whatever. It's information that he has now.

"I followed him. I don't know. It made sense in the moment. He was gathering stuff up, so I did too and I guess I kind of knew then? But I wasn't ready to like…think about what we were doing. Once he started prepping to take off, I had like thirty seconds to make the decision, you know? And I just thought: do I want to stay here where people protect monsters or do I want to go be useful? So. Yeah. Here I am."

"Thanks," Shane said. "For being here."

"You're welcome, it's nothing," Barrett mumbled, flushed and walked of in the same direction as Harris. Was the conversation over? Apparently.

Tracking down Price was only hard as finding Hayes. The two had apparently been friends when they were both contracted with Toronto and had taken this time to reignite their bromance. Shane found them both quietly reading in the carrier's rec room in the middle of the day.

"Why didn't anyone tell me this was a choice?" Shane asked as soon as he stumbled in. "How is this the quietest room?"

"Used to be loud," Wyatt said from a beanbag chair. "Carter and J.J. cornered all the loud cool people, so now it's pretty chill."

Price was stretched out over a threadbare couch. He had once rammed Shane with his pod so hard that Shane had spun out for a ful minute, the dizziest he'd ever been mid-claim. A total meathead according to the the gossip, the kind of guy that got swapped around every corps in the system. All that he'd done since arriving was help, hang out with Hayes or disappear entirely.

"I got something on my face?" Price asked calmly, but Shane could see his shoulders inching up. Hunching in on himself.

"No. Sorry. I came to ask you something, but it's a little…personal." Shane admitted.

"I can go," Hayes said, making no move to leave.

"It's all right," Price said, curling into himself more. "Go ahead."

All at once, Shane was fairly sure he had transgressed in some way. It was a feeling that came to him often and he never knew what to do with.

"I wanted to know why you came here. Only Barrett followed you and I know everyone has all these good reasons. But I don't know if I would've done it. Without Ilya here, I mean. Sorry, Hayes."

"Nah, it's cool. I get it," Hayes said like really did understand that Shane wouldn't have tried to save his life without Ilya on board.

"Do you want me tell you why I came to make you feel better about that or are you actually asking?" Price asked, eyes still on his book.

"Actually asking."

The truth was, Shane didn't feel that bad about his reasoning. It got him to the right place, doing the right things. He'd lived buried in guilt and shame long enough. It had never gotten him anything, but stars between him and the person he loved most.

"Roz and me had a conversation a solar or so ago. Heavy one. On a rough day. Helped me a lot. So. I came when he needed help. Seemed fair. Also I like Hazy. I didn't want him to die either." Ryan's clipped sentences ran out of steam and he turned his attention back to his book.

"Thanks, I appreciate your honesty," Shane said and turned to leave.

"Wow. You two are conversation efficient," Hayes said with a grin. "And I like you too, buddy."

"I know," Price said warmly.

Following the data trail, Shane wound his way to the navigation offices. Connors had been given a small work station and he was scanning three screens and taking notes. He did his notes like Ilya, manual on filly-paper, scribbling out his calculations.

"Connors?"

"Mhm?" He didn't look up from his work. Shane didn't see a reason to make small talk.

"Why did you come with Marley out here?"

The pen in Connors hand stilled momentarily than started again. "Roz was the best S.L. we ever had. Always treated me like a friend. Didn't have a lot of those planetside, almost none in space. Especially not with me….anyway. I would've washed out without him. I wasn't going to leave him behind."

"Thank you," Shane said with more softness than he'd given Price.

"Didn't do it for you. But you're welcome." The pen started moving again. Shane was dismissed.

A web formed in Shane's mind. It was often how he pictured flight strategies, the connecting points between every pod, how to break and form the right connections to achieve his goal. As he rested his head on Ilya's chest that night he had to ask, "Did you plan this?"

"I assume we will fuck." Fingers ran through Shane's hair. "This is not planning, just a good bet."

"No, I mean did you set out to make sure all these people would like you and me enough to come help us if we came out or something?"

The fingers stilled. "What?"

"It's a pattern I'm seeing about who you reach out to."

"Just talking. Saying hello. I know you do not like to do this at big events, but I don't mind it. If I do it enough for the both of us, that's good, I think."

It was good. But it wasn't really what Shane meant. He didn't run Ilya down more about it though. Whatever his husband was up to, it was the helpful kind of mischief. Let him have his secrets.

In any case, Shane was exhausted and he fell asleep with Ilya caressing Shane's new D.N. mark, bright and glowing on his neck below the one with his parents' codes. It had been too tender to touch for the first few days, but now that it was free and clear, Ilya's fingertips lingered on it whenever he was close enough to touch.

For his part, Shane still preferred to stroke the one on Ilya's thigh though he felt a certain righteous lust every time he spotted his code on Ilya's neck. The only lit one, his mother's long gone from red to gray.

The Centaur flew on. They met with Wiebe, sent comms back and forth across the systems. They had meetings with every department. It was all useful and good, but Shane's teeth were starting to itch.

"We need to get out there," Shane whispered to Ilya over another ration meal. "We've never flown together as a squad."

"We will have no competition."

"We don't know that for sure," Shane said. "And even if we don't, we don't want to look like a meteor strike headed down."

"And it's a good time to make a statement," Harris said helpfully. "Sorry. You guys aren't good whisperers."

"We are great at whispering," Ilya said with no little consternation. "What kind of statement?"

"Solidarity for one. Everyone always says how hard it is for pilots when they get traded around because they're supposed to be so loyal to their corp. You guys spat in the face of all that which is cool, but that means you have to show your loyal to each other instead."

Which was great, but did beg the question, were they?

"Of course we are," Scott said without hesitation when Shane asked. "We came, didn't we?"

"In a dire emergency. What does it look like in a normal claim match?"

"What do you mean?"

"Whose squad lead?"

They both stared at each other. Silent.

"We could put it to a vote?" Scott ventured.

The meeting was a little tense. Harris was there as a neutral party, even though he kept eyeing the door a little too longingly for Shane's taste. They had all been fairly well behaved since coming on board. There'd only been one fist fight and that seemed to have mostly been a misunderstanding.

"Are we campaigning here?" Scott asked. "Or-"

"Get it over with," Ilya said with an eye roll. "You want to give a speech, Hunter? Bore us all for seven more days and then you can be leader because everyone else is in a coma?"

"Fuck you," Scott said with the weariness of a man many times his age. It probably didn't do him any favors.

"Everyone here knows our records," Shane said before Ilya could launch another volley.

"And compareswar stories while we are not around," Ilya said. "This is what we used to do whenever the S.L. left us alone at events. Try to figure out who has it worst."

"We would never," Hayden said loyally.

"Don't lie to the man's face," Marleau laughed. "That's just rude."

"Everyone knows Hollander runs the hardest drills," Barrett said, so quietly it was almost lost in the mix of noise. It was the first opinion Shane had heard him offer in a room full of people. What a compliment.

"Yeah, but they're what makes us the best," J.J. said.

"Sure," Marleau snorted. "He may keep you out longer, but Roz will come up with 'fun' new ideas that give you aches where you didn't even know you had a muscle."

Everyone looked to the Admirals contingent, waiting for something. All three gazed steadily back at them until Bennett said very calmly, "If you think I'll give up anything on Scott in front of his face, you're out of your fucking mind."

"Thanks," Scott said.

"You are afraid of him?" Ilya asked incredulously.

"I know it's real hard for you to imagine, Roz, but it's because we respect him. I know no one's ever done that for you before," Bennett said.

"Shane," Ilya whined. "They think you do not respect me."

"I don't," Shane said. "I love you. That has to be enough."

"Wait," Harris said from the doorway. "I have a question."

"Yes," Ilya said, "I have very low standards and it is enough."

"Not my question," Harris said without slowing down. Definitely very used to Ilya then. "Are you all voting on squad lead right now?"

"Yes?" Shane frowned. "Was that not clear somehow?"

"I thought you meant like a real leadership position. Not just who calls the shots in the sky. Those are two different things. You'll need to figure out who's at least nominally in charge, so when you do start talking to corps, it's with a unified voice."

A corps CEO was something else altogether. Shane definitely didn't want to do that.

"No thanks," he said quickly.

"Pass," Ilya agreed.

Everyone looked at Scott, who knit his eyebrows together in pure confusion. "What?"

"You are a pretty good statesman already," Bennett said.

"Yeah, great with a speech. People always like you. You're calm," Carter nodded slowly. "Controlled."

"They cannot act like you are a child," Ilya conceded.

"Wait," Scott said, eyes going wide. "No. Nope. No. I'm not-"

"You're the best we've got," Hayden said, then flushed. "Sorry, Shane."

"No, it's fine," Shane said quickly. "I'm good with that."

"Ryan should help," Barrett said.

"What?" Price's head flew up.

"You're really good with people when you give yourself the chance," Barrett said, squirming a little as the focus fell on him.

"I- what?"

"You'd do great!" Hayes said. "Scott can be the face so you don't have to worry about cameras or anything and you can have a cool office and write policy or whatever. No more flying."

"No more flying," Price repeated as if this was divine revelation.

"One more flight, Price," Ilya said with surprising gentleness. "But then yes, I think this is a very good idea for you."

Seemed like a horror show to Shane, but clearly Ilya knew something he didn't and he figured that was good enough.

"So yeah, that's good. So me or Ilya on Squad Lead then."

"I didn't agree to this," Scott pointed out.

"The best leaders are reluctant," Bennett said.

"That can't be right," Scott protested.

"I say Scott as leader, Ryan for vice or co or whatever," Carter pushed ahead, "and let the Hollander-Rozanovs joint squad lead. Take turns on who's running point. Everyone good with that?"

Before Shane or Ilya could even nod, the entire room said, "Heard!"

"Are you good with that?" Shane leaned in to whisper to Ilya.

"Oh no! I must lead with my husband and plan strategies and tell him what to do sometimes. This is terrible. Please. Stop," Ilya snorted and dropped his arm around Shane's shoulders. "I love it."

And all at once, the objections rising in Shane died. They could fly together. Lead together, whatever that would look like.

Within hours, they had everyone running sim drills in the Centaur training room. Everyone was experienced enough that they could skip over the basics and run on the highest difficulty. It took a few runthroughs, but Shane and Ilya found their rhythm. Taking turns running point fell to the wayside as they found a better rhythm of trading off depending who had the concentration to spare.

"Fuuuuck," Hayden groaned, rolling out of the sim chair onto the floor when the sims cut out and refused to let them keep going. "I regret everything. It's so much worse with two of them."

"Don't be such a weak punk," Marley said, but he was, notably, not getting up. "Hollander did this for a fuckload longer."

"Yeah, and he got hospitalized," Hayden pointed out.

"That was fun." Connors got out, stepped neatly over Hayden's prone body and gave Shane an affectionate slap on the shoulder. "Thanks, man."

"You're welcome."

"Where is my thank you?" Ilya demanded.

"Lost in the relay," Connors said with a wink and headed for the showers.

For the remainder of the journey, mornings were for workouts and drills, afternoons for the complications of trying to start a corps with no fucking idea what they were doing. The mornings were very well attended, the afternoon meetings sparse. Shane and Ilya went to everything, even though they didn't have much to add to the afternoon sessions. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The comms Shane sent to his parents said nothing about positions or foundations. It was too dangerous to bounce their plans around the system on corps-owned relays. Wiebe had his encrypted line to Ottawa, but he couldn't exactly let Shane use it to phone home. So there was nothing about his future, not even much about the past. He mostly told them about Ilya and apologized for all the ways he'd let them down. Until he got the comm back with his mother's eyes filled with tears, rejecting his apologies in favor of making her own.

"If you are already crying than I can show you this," Ilya decided and showed Shane a tearful message from Svetlana. They'd never even met, but she thanked Shane for saving Ilya with so much affection that Shane didn't know where to look. "I have told her to reach out to your mother."

"Why?" Shane frowned.

"Ah, because two very smart people working together is better than one, luchik. And then they will already be talking when we need them to start working together on Ottawa."

"Huh. You think I should tell Rose to reach out too?"

The jealousy that flashed across Ilya's face was an impressive storm, but before Shane could chide him about it, Ilya repressed it. "Yes. Probably. A very famous actress saying nice things about us has to be good. Harris would like that."

"Yeah, okay. I'll let her know."

They planned. They sent innocuous comms. They trained. They ate dinner with a rotating cast of people, all of whom Shane felt at least reasonably comfortable around.

Every night, Shane fell asleep with his head on Ilya's chest.

If they failed, at least they had had this.

"We'll be within close communication range within an hour," Wiebe announced long before Shane was ready to loosen his grip on their golden time together. "We have to discuss launch point."

It was only Shane, Ilya, Price and Hunter in a huddle with Wiebe. The other pilots had dubbed the four of them S.O.L. (supposedly for Squad Of Leaders, but they were a bunch of assholes so that was definitely a lie) and for lack of anything better, they'd been using it themselves.

"It's got to be a go before the other carriers scramble their squads to apprehend us. The more of their pods in the air and the more can go wrong," Scott said. "They might send out security, but the pods are faster and have better stun gear."

"It will be pods," Ilya agreed. "And they will want to make a big display out of it. So we know we could not run even if we wanted."

"So we cut them off," Price mused. "Before they even see us."

The maneuver that Shane had proposed a dozen times to the Metros and always been shot down by command came flaming back to life:

"We can maglock to the dark side of the carrier on approach, engines off, detach, stay behind it then make a break for it. They'll be watching the bay door and we'll already be launched."

"Is that…legal?" Hunter asked, already reaching for a monitor to run calculations.

"Why not?" Ilya cackled and pressed a kiss straight to Shane's temple. "My brilliant husband. Yes! Let's fucking do it."

It turned out there was a good reason that no one had used that particular feint before. Being maglocked to the side of moving carrier without your own engines running was a little like being strapped to the hood of one of Ilya's rovers while he was in particularly bad mood. It was dangerous, wildly out of control and if Shane hadn't been on comms and video, he might have been whooping like a kid doing their first flight sim.

Then J.J. yelled over the comms, "What a fucking rush!"

And everyone was giving breathless high-volume agreement so what the fuck was Shane holding back for?

"Whooo! Let's go!" He shouted over the line and Ilya's echoing laughter made him grin wider.

The only thing that cut off their raucous adrenaline fueled party was the appearance of their precious blue marble. Dawning over the hull, TR-4598 almost glowed with blue vitality under the warm light the yellow star that they would call their sun if this all worked out. The land mass splattered in the Northern hemisphere was a mottled orange and brown, a spread of smaller islands skipping across the surface.

"She's a beaut," Hayden said, his voice a little tight.

"As pretty as her name," Marley agreed.

Over the broadband comm, Wiebe greeted the other carriers as the Centaur slowed and turned in the process to shield it's clinging passengers from view.

With a slow inhalation, Shane ran his finger over fifteen green lights.

"Starlit," he said only for himself. They'd already checked in. Then over the comms, "On my mark, we follow Ilya's lead. Three. Two. One. Go!"

Detaching from the ship, 81 appeared to crawl along the hull before rolling away and slinking down the length of the carrier. They followed in a chain, Shane taking up the rear for now, watching for anything on their tail.

"There's activity on Metro and Raider. Admiral is either too far out or wasn't prepared for deployment," Price reported.

"We're not in ideal alignment," Connors said. "But if we compensate with angle on entry than we're golden."

"Send trajectories," Shane commanded and they were there in an instant.

"Engines on my mark," Ilya said a few seconds later. "We're going standard double helix formation until something changes. Heard?"

"Heard!"

The countdown hit. Their engines blazed to life.

Shane had flown a lot of claims that he'd said were 'the most important one of my life'. A lot of those matches had been against Ilya. The first junior championship that was a proving ground for any kid that dreamed of being a pod pilot. The last claims of two contracts that had cinched his squad recognition across systems. The record breakers, the record setters, his first as S.L., and every exhibition match, millions of eyes watching him fly for the simple joy of the game.

None of them compared to this.

His comm buzzed like an angry bee, incoming messages from Metros, command, his former squad. None of it registered. All of his focus was on the goal and they had nothing to do with that.

"Incoming!" Barrett yelled. "Metros are fielding a partial team with some security ships on their tails."

"Marley, Bennett, Hayes, fall back, get ready to net them if they get close, but stay in formation," Shane ordered. "It's more important we all get there before them."

"Heard!" They both said and Shane was no longer at the rear. Giving up his vigilant position, he gunned it forward, coming up on 81's right flank. They weren't close enough to make out faces, but even the sight of Ilya's pod gave Shane another shot of energy.

"Tighten up," Shane barked, glancing at his radar. "We're a cyclone, not an asteroid field."

"Raiders have a defense mounted. Too far away to do much, but closing in," Hayden said.

"Time to stop playing," Ilya said with a wild note of joy. "Let's show them how the job gets fucking done! Pull in!"

Their spiral tightened.

Fifteen pods, not attempting any fancy defensive maneuvers, not aiming to take out anyone, and seemingly ignoring their pursers, became an arrow pointed at their target. Somewhere in the distance, people that had once pulled Shane's strings were finding lax empty cord in their hands.

Before them, the blue glow of sopher crystal lines undulated under the wide crystalline oceans of their new world.

"Breaking atmo, in two minutes," Shane announced. "Connors, any adjustments?"

"I'm out of stars, S.L., you've got what I've got."

"We've got company back here!" Hayes called out.

"Not on our fucking watch, Hazy!" Bennett declared. "Stun and net!"

Silence for a beat then a triumphant, "Got 'em!"

"Who was it?" Hayden asked.

"Who gives a fuck?" Ilya snarled. "Attention forward!"

One minute to atmo.

There was only the claim. Only the goal. They were almost planetside.

"Got another one!" Carter said. "They're gaining a little. I see some Admirals now."

"Too far for to do shit," Scott said with a mix of disgust and relief.

If the pilots of the other squads were trying to signal them, no one picked up.

Fifteen pods breached into TR-4598's atmosphere.

"Landing formations!" Shane called out and started his own transformation. "Keep it together!"

"Huff, you're drifting out!" Ilya barked. "Bring it in."

Below them, the mass of land grew. There was, right in the dead center of it, a glittering lake that had been too small to see before.

In the last craze rush as they all deployed their spikes under Ilya's command, Shane also saw the future hurtling towards him. A new lake house with new traditions sprouting up amid alien plants. Both their pods safely kept in an outbuilding alongside Ilya's terrible rovers and Shane's more practical landrollers.

Tucking himself into protective ball, the shell of 24 braced for impact, Shane readied himself for all of it.

"NOW!" Someone commanded and it could've been him or Ilya. He wouldn't know for lunars until they watched the vid in front of the entire Accord Collective that it had been both of them in perfect harmony.

They hit the ground at the same time, spikes rocketing into rocky soil.

Instead of the standard computerized voice, it was Scott's steady voice that issued out on the loudest broadband comm in the system. A claim spike could not be ignored by anyone.

"Planetary object TR-4598 has been claimed for the Irina Foundation and Corporation. Any further interference by rival corporations will be taken as an act of aggression as established with the 15th iteration of the Accords of Claimed Property. All pilots part of this claim have been given sanctuary and immunity from rival corporations. The Irina Foundation and Corporation will begin accepting bids for launch points and sopher mining operations immediately. We settle this planet in the name of those that hide in the dark, the people who fear to live openly under your watchful eyes. We begin as we mean to go on: with freedom and dignity on offer to all. "

Then it repeated over and over, each pilot using a different language. Ilya and J.J. speaking in their mother tongues, then Shane with his borrowed one. From there, everyone had done their best with languages they were unfamiliar with until every common tongue had been spoken.

No other pods broke atmo. Shane lay on his back and stared up at the strange new sky above them. It was a cloudy afternoon. Fat purple-gray clouds traversed over a blue sky.

The air was breathable. Shane double-checked his gauges a last time and then tentatively opened the cockpit and removed his helmet, keeping it in his hands. He breathed in fresh, mellow air. It was warm and a little humid. Nothing chocked him or caught in his throat. Undoing his harness, he stood and surveyed the field of waving tall grasses. Nothing moved among them.

To his right there was a slice of blue glittering water. Oceans that would soon prove devoid of life, too poisoned by the sopher crystal that would quickly make them one of the richest corps in the Accord. Wealth they would pour into building beautiful cities that they filled with people, who had never had a chance to live loudly. Given the opportunity here, they would make a society filled with abundance and chaos and beauty.

For now though, there was only Shane in this field of grass dotted with the metallic sheen of his squad's pods. Gingerly, he walked along the carapace of 24 and made the leap to the neighboring 81's outstretched arm. With shuffling steps, he reached the cockpit window and knocked politely. Ilya's helmet came off and he gave Shane a grin as he opened up for him. 

A mono-pod was called that for a very good reason. It could only reasonably fit one person, especially a pilot-sized person. Unless you didn't mind being a little unreasonable. Unless you really wanted to fold yourself up to sit in the pilot's lap and the pilot was happy to wrap his arms around you and pull you in tight.

Their new sun spread warmth over their upturned faces.

"Welcome home," Ilya said softly.

All around them, pods opened like flowers. Their pilots shouted at each other across the rippling field. They had a lot of work ahead of them, but for right now, there was nothing more important than this.

"I like this sky," Shane murmured as Ilya kissed the top of his head.

"Our sky, luchik."

"Our sky. Welcome home, Ilyusha."