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The first time the announcement repeats, he’s curious.
“Officer Eiffel and the Ungrateful Lout…”
“Oh, hey,” he says, to a Jacobi who isn’t there, and who hasn’t been for a few days—they’ve been keeping him locked up elsewhere, “that’s you.”
The Jacobi who isn’t there doesn’t reply. It’s cute how they think they’ll make a crew member out of him, after they shot Maxwell—oh, he hasn’t said that, they haven’t said it, but they’re thinking it. It’s only natural. They’re all such… team players. They forgive so easily. Lovelace is a good commanding officer. Cunning as all hell, no doubt more so with her new alien physiology and neural hardware, and gloriously brave to boot.
This has to be her plan. Or the AI’s.
It’s such an obvious trap that he says nothing, and goes back to trying to determine how much a man can sleep in a day.
“…Though technically not until noon.”
“Better get some rest, Captain,” he says, just in case they’re listening. “That coil compressor won’t fix itself!”
He wonders why they’re having so much trouble, really. It should have been a simple fix, for what they wanted to do. Fix the engine, transfer Hera, fire up the ship.
Maybe they’ll leave him here. That’d be fun.
No, Jacobi wouldn’t let them do that.
Would he?
Jacobi doesn’t visit him for three days, Warren counts, and each of them seems to go more or less like the others. Sometimes Hera forgets how to properly carry her voice, so he catches bits and pieces of their conversations. He likes to guess who she’s talking to based on her tone. There’s only so many times a man can play I, Spy with himself in a room that is mostly wires that are either red, white, or green, and a window looking out on an inky void.
Sometimes he gets to see the star. It lights the room up blue, but it doesn’t do much else.
That’s all right, too, even if it is a little… boring.
“—Minkowski and Lovelace are working on the coil compressor.”
There’s a brief pause.
“Uh, no, you don’t get that privilege. That’s up to the Captain to decide.”
—Jacobi. Oh, too easy.
“Well, last time, you got your hair stuck in the gasket, so…”
Oh.
Eiffel, then.
Warren sighs, and decides that it’s very intelligent of Hera to occasionally let him hear her, so he’d think he might, perhaps, eventually overhear them conspiring about this time-loop charade, which of course… he won’t. The speakers cut out.
“It’s not nice to eavesdrop,” says Hera, suddenly.
“It’s not nice to pretend that day 1093 has repeated itself three times,” he replies.
“…Ooo-kay,” says Hera. “That’s a new one.”
“Don’t even try,” says Warren. “I can assure you, I have been tortured far worse. Did I ever tell you about my stint in the army?”
“You can tell me,” says Hera, “but I sure as hell am not going to listen.”
“You go right ahead and leave,” he tells her, “but I think it’s just such a damn good story, I’ll tell it to myself.”
And he does.
“Day 1093, eh?” says Warren, to Eiffel, who, if anyone, should crack first. Usually it’s Jacobi bringing him his daily lunch, a packet of freeze-dried food designed to give an astronaut enough nutrients and calories for a full day, and Jacobi’s been doing a beautiful job of pretending that it’s the same day over and over, but… he must be busy today.
“Oh, you can hear the announcements?”
Warren raises an eyebrow at him.
“Well done, Eiffel. Good play—oh, your confusion looks pretty genuine, too! You can go back and tell that to all your little friends. They should rely on your acting more! Didn’t know you had that kind of skill.”
“Uh, Hera?” asks Eiffel, holding the pouch out to Warren as though he thinks that Warren is going to reach out and bite him. “Why’s he going all… Arkham?”
“I don’t know,” says Hera, glitching on the third word. Ah-ha! Proof enough that the AI is experiencing some distress, but then, a lie detector’s never really accurate.
Eiffel hands him the pouch of food. Warren takes it.
“Oh, exciting,” said Warren, “Roast beef. Again. Aren’t you going to run out soon? How long do you intend to keep this going for?”
“Okay, geez,” said Eiffel, “if you’ve got a complaint about the menu, we can bring you something else tomorrow. But I’m not gonna be your Clarice, and you don’t have to be so… cryptic.”
Warren sighed, and leaned his head back.
“Quit talking to him, Eiffel,” said Hera, and Eiffel, without apparently even feeling the need to make another quip, left.
“Welcome back,” says Warren, on one of the few days where they let Jacobi bring him today’s roast beef pouch. They’d never brought him anything else. What was the point of this, anyway? “Thought you were too good for a cell with me these days.”
Jacobi’s lip twists in half of a snarl.
“I don’t want to be out there with them, either,” he says. “But it’s better than being in here with you.”
Warren shrugs.
“Suit yourself.”
Jacobi meets his eyes, and Warren’s… tired. God, he’s tired. He sleeps all day, because there’s nothing else for him to do unless he wants to pick a fight with Hera, and somehow, he’s still exhausted. His beard—
—is scruffy, but nowhere near what he’d expect after a month in confinement. He scratches his chin, distractedly, and Jacobi follows the movement of his hands.
Huh.
No—no, there’s got to be an explanation.
“You look off,” says Jacobi. “You okay, Colonel?”
“Fine,” says Warren, desperately aware of Jacobi’s eyes on him and of the casual concern lacing Jacobi’s words, delicate as cyanide on the rim of a teacup. How many days has it been? No, it can’t be more than a weeks, not with a beard like this, but he really thought he’d counted over twenty days. “How long have I been in here?”
“Uh,” says Jacobi, “like a week—are you really sure you’re okay?”
Jacobi sounds honestly concerned. And he looks honestly concerned.
“Yeah,” says Warren, no longer convinced. “If you can just hand me my lunch, Mr. Jacobi…? Then you can be on your way. I suspect we’ll both be the better for it.”
Jacobi pushes himself closer, off the handholds, and Warren has to catch his hand to stop him from pushing too hard.
You’ve been lying to me, thinks Warren, but he doesn’t say it out loud. Jacobi makes no move to pull away, and Warren realizes that no one has touched him in—in God knows how long, certainly not with the intent to be kind. Not even Jacobi, since—since they’d left Earth’s atmosphere.
“Hera,” mumbles Jacobi, “Hera, leave the room. Please.”
“I’m telling Minkowski you asked me to do that,” said Hera.
“Go ahead,” says Jacobi.
“Oh, like she really will leave,” says Warren, but she’s silent. Jacobi waits for a terrible second, and then leans forward, and presses a kiss to Warren’s lips.
It surprises him that it took so long. Poor pacing on their parts, really, this is a prank for day 4 at the latest. Warren opens his mouth, lets the kiss become something else—Jacobi can never resist, when Warren tilts his chin up, exposes his neck, bares all of those delicate veins and arteries. He may not have the full use of his hands, cuffed as they are in front of him—it’s fine. He doesn’t need it, to get Jacobi to climb into his lap and kiss him like there’s nothing else, anywhere.
It’s cruel, or at least, it would be, if Warren Kepler hadn’t been used to these sorts of games for the past decade or so. Much crueler than he thought they could have been. How’d they know? Had Jacobi told them?
Are they looking?
Warren kisses Jacobi with all the honesty that he has left in him and hopes so, hopes Minkowski and Lovelace and Eiffel and Hera feel like they’ve made a goddamn mistake, right up until Jacobi makes a soft noise, and all of his spite evaporates. Like a fairy tale. Spell’s over. He wishes, desperately, that he could break this fucking game they’re playing with him, snap Jacobi’s last shred of disloyalty or anger with him—
—but this is a deeper problem than just a goddamn fairy tale.
Jacobi’s fingers are playing against the zipper of his jumpsuit. Jacobi’s cheeks are pink, and his eyes close slowly.
Jacobi’s not worried about being pickpocketed or played for a fool, or that fear doesn’t show, or, worse yet, Warren realizes, he’s letting himself be played, same way that Warren tried to put the last shred of earnestness he had into that kiss.
“Why are you letting them do this?” asks Warren, as softly as he can—turns out there’s a little honesty left, after all, “why are you letting them use you?”
Jacobi’s perplexed at first, and then he pushes off, and heads back towards the door.
“No different from when you did it.”
The next day, Jacobi doesn’t seem to remember the kiss at all. He drops off Warren’s pouch of roast beef, and leaves.
A damn good show.
Minkowski brings him food for the first time on the thirtieth day 1093, by his count. Hard to keep track, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been imprisoned without any indication of being released.
These daily visits are the only reason he doesn’t believe that they’ve actually fixed it and left him behind, playing Hera’s audio recorded message for day 1093 on a loop to torment him until he dies of starvation or thirst. For one, that’s not like them, though, after the prank with Jacobi and the kiss he really can’t be sure how cruel they will or won’t be.
“So how goes the repairs?” he asks her.
She scowls at him. There’s a streak of engine grease on her face.
Hera’s voice cuts in over the speakers.
“—oh my god, if you guys damage the parts by having a weird fight in the middle of the engine room, I swear to god, I will back Lovelace and I will carry out your goddamn execution by any means necessary—“
He smiled.
Minkowski sighed, and looked to what would be heavenward, were there a ground below.
“I don’t need your pity,” she told him, “Captain Lovelace is the one trying to get all this together so we can go home.”
“Mm. And how’s she doing?”
Oh, Minkowski—as readable as a teleprompter. Well, to be fair, she’s been out of command for a month longer than anyone really anticipated that she would be. Must be… tough.
“She’s doing great,” says Minkowski. Atta girl, thinks Warren, but then, Minkowski’s always had that second-in-command’s loyalty down pat. Born to be a lieutenant.
“Any… instability? Any… temper tantrums?”
He knows he’s hit his mark when Minkowski winces, gripping the nearest gunmetal-gray handhold like it’s the only thing keeping her from bolting out of the room. She doesn’t want to reveal any insubordination. But she wants to hear what he has to say.
“You think she’s… losing her marbles,” says Warren. “Go on, you can say it.”
“No more or less than you did,” she retorts.
“You know, the real Isabel Lovelace wasn’t much of a commander either,” he says, looking upwards. “Had some complaints filed against her by her second-in-command, who called her a bully. Not hard to see why. Is she… following protocol? Does she seem… organized, to you? Or does she seem a little… spiteful?”
—it’s a lie—not the part about Lambert but the rest of it, but Warren’s always been good at those. Minkowski, he thinks, won’t like the psychological warfare. She’d do the best she could to get out of it. It wouldn’t have been her who came up with this idea, to torture him, and he’s damn sure she wouldn’t do it if she hadn’t been told to.
“Really?”
“Even as a human,” he confirms. “So if Zhang was right about the duplicates… Just do yourself a favor, and consider it.”
Minkowski’s eyes go wide.
His head hurts like hell the next day, and he thinks that there’s been a low-grade headache building for the past couple of cycles. It’s been hard to tell, to be honest. He isn’t quite sure what he remembers and what he doesn’t. Hera makes the announcement.
He catches clips of her conversations with Minkowski and Lovelace in the engine room through Hera, sounds like they’re making some real progress.
They also sound pretty… buddy-buddy. He can’t quite figure out what Minkowski would have been talking about, either—Lovelace seems perfectly calm and rational, frankly. Well, if his plan right now, a Minkowski mutiny, takes a while to pull through, that’s all right. He’s, apparently, got plenty of time.
Two weeks, and, nothing.
“Isn’t it time to give this up?” asks Warren, when Jacobi shows up with the daily pouch of fucking pureed, freeze-dried, roast… fucking… beef.
“What the hell are you talking about,” says Jacobi, and Warren scowls.
“This farce should be cancelled. Isn’t it getting old?”
“I’m doing my best,” says Jacobi.
“I mean the time loop,” says Warren. “Your… cute little charade.”
Jacobi’s face scrunches up.
“So, you sound bonkers,” he says, “and it’s only been like, a week and a half?”
“It has not and you know it.”
There’s a long, long pause.
“O-kay,” says Jacobi. “How long has it been?”
“I lost count,” says Warren, which, admittedly, sounds a lot more insane when said like that. “Somewhere around day 30. I lost count. I don’t know how it’s taken you all a goddamn couple of months to fix this place, when the repairs should’ve taken a week—I can only assume that Lovelace’s aptitude for fixing the Hephaestus did not translate into an aptitude for repairing the Urania—”
Jacobi’s staring at him.
Warren feels… strange. A little nauseous, like a very bad migraine.
“You’ve lost it,” says Jacobi.
Whatever, he won’t remember this anyway, thinks Warren, feeling a dull rage rise up in his chest, but that doesn’t sound right. Which is it now? Is he angry that Jacobi remembers, or that he doesn’t?
Warren can’t remember.
He wishes he could bother to be scared.
Well, well, well, he thinks, when Lovelace shows up.
Suppose it’s appropriate that they’d bring out the big guns last. He’s seen every other goddamn crew member, annoyed Hera half to death by singing show tunes for 7 days straight, even if Hera has pretended to be surprised by it every morning, annoyed himself even more—
Perhaps she’s here to tell him that they’re switching over to the Urania. He beams up at her, expectantly.
“Time,” she says.
He doesn’t let his smile falter.
“Time?”
“Time. Time travel. Time loops. Possible?”
Warren sinks back.
Fuck them, he thinks, and fuck me, too.
The files he’d read on it back in Goddard had been… some pretty wacky stuff. Very theoretical. Not a lot of real science, not that Warren has ever called himself a scientist, but the idea that a time loop could exist if people just followed a routine is… well, it’s ridiculous. He hadn’t read them very carefully, and there weren’t even any real conclusions drawn—
—but God, if it’ll get him out of this roast-beef flavored hell, he’ll give even an alien duplicate a summary of humanity’s most advanced research into the concept of time.
(He tries not to think about what it would mean that a kiss from Jacobi is not enough of a world-altering event to break the time loop—that nothing new was gained, nothing was lost from it. No earth-shattering discoveries.)
He gives her an answer—change the script and you’ll change the ending—and she leaves.
She’s not successful on the first day, he hears the Day 1093 announcement again.
And then things are a little different. There are shots fired from the engine room. Hera’s voice cuts in, all across the station, just once, you are despicable, Jacobi. Somewhere in the silence afterwards, he drifts off to sleep again, the blue starlight casting its strange shadows on the observation deck.
When he wakes up, his headache is gone. It’s day 1094.
Lucky them, he thinks, working through all of their… issues. Honestly, he’s almost proud. It doesn’t take him much thinking to figure out: if this is what it takes to get them to stay, Lovelace is as good as human, by the standards of the aliens, even if she could be turned into a megaphone for them at any moment. The next time he sees Lovelace, he has a compliment for her—whether she’s human or not. She hands him a freeze-dried chicken parmesan pouch, and he takes it, breaking open the little cap.
It’s the best goddamn thing he’s ever tasted.