Chapter Text
Too bad you killed the only person on this damn station smart enough to figure it out, Jacobi’d said, this time around.
He was right, and she hated it.
Not only for the way that it made Minkowski wince (as if Jacobi hadn’t been trying to kill the four of them at that very moment, as if they hadn’t succeeded in killing Hilbert), but the way that Eiffel winced too, the way that, if, for just a second, she’d thought she’d kind of even gotten Jacobi to feel like he was on their team—just for a second, the way that he bantered in the kitchen with Eiffel over coffee.
Maxwell had been better at this than any of them, and she might’ve been the enemy but with everyone’s lives on the line—
When she woke in the morning—day 1093, whoop de fucking doo—she hit the snooze on her alarm, because why the hell not, if it was just going to be the same as every single other day, and made her way down to the kitchen, where everyone seemed to have already gathered. Minkowski was arguing with Eiffel over something, and Jacobi was—in the middle of it, and Hera was—
“Ow!” said Jacobi, as Isabel walked into the kitchen.
There was a snide laugh, from a voice that Isabel didn’t immediately recognize as Minkowski’s or Hera’s, so she turned around to give whichever one of them it was a piece of her mind, as their commanding officer. What the hell were they thinking, anyway, antagonizing the prisoner?
And she felt her heart drop out of her chest, only to be replaced by cold fear and fury. It wasn’t Minkowski. It wasn’t Hera.
“Told you,” sang Maxwell, and Jacobi made a face at her. Maxwell’s long hair, which she never tied up, floated around her face, and, as it had in life, it gave her the eerie impression that she was underwater.
Was this a bad dream?
“Ohh, no,” said Isabel, “oh no, oh no—why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Uh, your rotation’s not till noon, Cap?” said Eiffel, as if the dead weren’t fucking walking in their god damn mess hall.
Isabel took a moment to process this, which was difficult through the blinding headache, the outrage that not even Minkowski had thought to wake her up for this, that day 1093 was still repeating itself—
And Maxwell, staring at her like she’d lost her mind.
“Wake you up for what?” she asked.
“You,” said Isabel, fully aware that this was a bad idea, but hey, who fucking cared, maybe they’d look around tomorrow and no one would remember anything and Hilbert would be back and nothing would have changed. “You’re supposed to be dead!”
There was a terrible silence, thick like smoke, heavy as rain. This was maybe not the best way to have gone about this.
“Whoa,” said Minkowski, “what’s going on here?”
“What do you mean, I was supposed to be dead?” asked Maxwell.
“You guys don’t remember?” Isabel asked.
“Bad dream, Cap?” suggested Eiffel, in a way that suggested that he neither thought that Isabel was correct nor that she’d had a bad dream.
“Where’s Hilbert?” tried Isabel, just in case, because at least if Hilbert was back then the numbers were back to what they’d been, and it was three against five.
“Oh, are we playing Questions Only?” asked Maxwell.
“Hilbert’s... dead,” said Minkowski. “Remember? The bomb? We had a funeral? And they shot you, and—”
“And Maxwell,” said Lovelace. “And I came back, and Maxwell... didn’t.”
Maxwell shivered, and silence fell over the room again. Everyone still kept staring at Isabel, which, frankly, was normally not weird, given that she was their captain, but she was beginning to get a feel for the times when she was being stared at because she was the captain giving orders, and times that she was being stared at for Weird Alien Stuff, and this was one of the Weird Alien Stuff times.
“So you’re saying...” said Maxwell.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Isabel. “But everyone remembers you, so...”
“I mean, I remember you waking up at your funeral—” said Maxwell, and, that was weird, because Isabel didn’t have the memory of Maxwell being there. “I remember what happened after. The Tiamat tapes? And Kepler and I talked about binary, and potential communication, and how all my notes weren’t going to be—”
She fell silent, as the others nodded.
Isabel shook her head, and had that dizzying, nauseating feeling of a migraine—head swimming, as if she felt the shaking of her own head at two different speeds.
“You weren’t,” said Isabel.
“I remember her being there,” said Jacobi, and, as Eiffel murmured his assent, Isabel turned to Minkowski.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I do too.”
“Hera?” asked Isabel, desperately, “Hera, do you remember Maxwell getting shot?”
“N-no,” said Hera, “I’m sorry, Captain. I can play you the video.”
Isabel Lovelace had not always been a woman who could recognize a losing battle, but today, she was.
“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Also, this is the 15th time this day has repeated, and Maxwell hasn’t been there for any of them yet, so...”
“Captain?” said Hera. “Maybe you should... go back to bed. Take today off. Jacobi can help Minkowski with the coil compressor.”
Isabel rolled her eyes.
“I’m not going back to bed. I can help with the coil compressor. Okay? It’s the star. It’s messing with us... Okay, I can tell when you’re all looking at each other. I am standing right here.”
“Why don’t you... go back to bed for a bit, Cap,” said Eiffel. “Wake up at noon for your rotation, get some rest.”
“I hate to say it, but Eiffel’s right,” said Minkowski. “Honestly, Captain, you don’t look so good.”
“...If I can interject?” said Maxwell.
Everyone, all at once, turned to look at her.
“I’m very curious about what Captain Lovelace was saying regarding the 15th time this day has repeated.”
Isabel covered her eyes with her hands, and shook her head.
“Headache?” said Maxwell. “Captain, if I may offer my expertise later, perhaps we could meet. If you aren’t too afraid to talk to a ghost, of course.”
Isabel glanced through her fingers, caught the glimpse of a sharp smile on Maxwell’s face.
“I’m gonna go back to bed,” she announced. “Maxwell. You, me, 13 o’clock. After I help Minkowski.”
“It would be my pleasure.”
“You think it’s going to be that quick—?” asked Minkowski.
“I know it is,” said Isabel, and shut the door behind her.
The coil compressor went as quickly as she’d anticipated—wow, I didn’t know you were so good with this, Captain—and Isabel found her way back to Maxwell’s cell, where Maxwell was currently contemplating the ceiling.
“You’re coming with me,” said Isabel, and Maxwell followed her out the door, down the halls of the ship.
“Captain?” Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Hera, as they crossed the threshold of the Urania.
“It’s fine, Hera,” said Isabel. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, send Minkowski after me.”
They settled, once they were far enough into the Urania, in a storage closet. Isabel had debated the armory—she’d never gotten to see it, after all, in all her time as the armsmaster, or the control room—but either place was likely to give Maxwell the opportunity for a weapon that Isabel wasn’t willing to give her. And Isabel didn’t know the Urania well enough to trust herself to hold her own.
Everything on it looked cleaner, somehow, than the Hephaestus. There was something very old-fashioned about the way that the Hephaestus’s panels were joined together, all metal bolts, the kind of thing you could imagine being hammered into place, where the Urania had joins between each panel that were nearly invisible. The Hephaestus itself was a dark gray color, where the Urania’s panels were all white. The door handles were smoother and rounder—
God, they’d really sent them up there with crap equipment.
Isabel tried not to let that old resentment bubble up again. It wasn’t necessary right now. She wasn’t the old Isabel Lovelace, she was the new Isabel Lovelace, whoever that was, and she was going to figure this out.
“All right,” said Isabel. “So, I wanna talk.”
“So good of you to invite me out,” said Maxwell. “Ooh, I feel like a supervillain. So. Days repeating. The dead returning.”
“That’s the gist of it,” said Isabel.
Nothing looked different about Maxwell. Granted, Isabel had never paid a lot of attention to her before. She’d always given Isabel the impression of youngness, though of course, that couldn’t be the case. She had mousy hair, and a sweet, charming smile, with a little bit of a gap between her front teeth. Freckles. She wondered if they were all in the same place. She wondered if anyone would notice the difference.
“You think I’m just like you.”
Isabel froze.
“Honestly, I haven’t had that much time to think about it,” she said. “But... yes. I think you’re like me. I don’t know why the hell else I’d let you out to roam with Jacobi, except that it wasn’t me and our friends on the other side of the star are just trying to come up with a plausible story to keep both of us free on the ship.”
Maxwell shrugged.
“You’re not very good at this,” she said. “You might’ve led some guerilla warfare against Goddard on this station before, but you never actually managed a coup. That’s not your fault, of course.”
Isabel stared at her.
“What, have you got pointers for me?”
“Sure,” said Maxwell. “Don’t take your enemy out alone to a scene they’re more familiar with. Fortunately for you, unless I’ve got a gun in my hand I’m not Jacobi or Kepler in a combat scenario. Or at least, leave the handcuffs on.”
“Hold your hands out,” said Isabel, and Maxwell did, giving her a wide grin.
Isabel handcuffed her again.
“Smart move,” said Maxwell.
“Only one way to test it,” said Maxwell, and Isabel’s jaw dropped, thinking of the gunshot that had rung out, over the walkie-talkies, that awful, terrible moment—
“No!”
(It was kind of a weird reaction, when she thought about it later.)
Maxwell raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t want to try getting Colonel Kepler’s psi-wave regulator up and running again?”
“Oh,” said Isabel. “Yeah.”
Maxwell laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that could make anyone else want to laugh, too. Her nose crinkled, and her eyes shut—
Isabel didn’t laugh.
“Let’s go for it.”
“Who shot Maxwell?” asked Minkowski. “In the world that you can remember.”
Isabel shivered.
She’d known this question would be coming and she’d let Minkowski corner her anyway, she’d let Minkowski take the lead in putting together the compressor coil. She could’ve made Eiffel do this.
(No, she thought, looking at the compressor coil. She really couldn’t. She really couldn’t let Eiffel do this, because they’d all die.)
And she couldn’t blame Minkowski. She’d want to know, too. The compressor coil grated against the sides of the engine, a horrible, metallic shriek. Minkowski was doing something wrong, because it hadn’t made that noise yesterday. Isabel itched to fix it, but with the way that Minkowski was looking at it, she couldn’t bear to bring herself to pull it away from Minkowski. It looked like concentrating on fixing the engine was the only damn thing that was preventing Minkowski from getting sick.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” said Isabel. “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t like telling her would mean anything, anyway. She’d just forget tomorrow.
But Isabel didn’t want to see the look on her face when she told her. It had been bad enough, to know that Minkowski had done it, it would be worse, somehow, she thought, to see the realization on her... friend’s face.
“No,” said Minkowski. “No, I really want to know. Who shot Maxwell?”
She asked it again as if repeating the question would make Isabel more likely to answer, and Isabel shook her head.
“Didn’t happen, right?”
“It was bad,” said Isabel, “Kepler had me and Eiffel in the Urania’s armory, and you had Maxwell in the Hephaestus’s bridge.”
Minkowski went white.
“Kepler counted down. He did eenie-meenie, like the fucking sadist that he is,” said Isabel, “over the speakers. And it landed on Eiffel.”
“I remember that,” said Minkowski.
“What happened next?”
“He shot you.”
Yeah, that was right. Isabel remembered the sound of it, and nothing else. She barely remembered waking up, and what she did remember of waking up was flashes of childhood cartoons, she remembered her parents’ faces and she remembered impossible smells, her mother’s cooking, she remembered flashes of songs, she remembered the way that her childhood dog’s fur felt under her hands, the way that an itchy dress her mother had made her wear slipped over her head.
She had vividly hallucinated a whole life, in the moment believing that it was the last thing she was seeing before she died. Now, she knew that it was a life that she had never lived, as much as it was, in a sense, her true birth.
That was what she remembered. It had hurt like hell, and yet every piece of it had been so familiar that her memories of the moment were of the warmth of it rather than the pain.
“What did you do?”
“Froze,” breathed Minkowski, as if she couldn’t help herself. “I froze.”
There was an ache in Isabel’s chest when she thought about it, when she saw the look in Minkowski’s eyes and the way that they shone, when she heard the crack in Minkowski’s voice.
“Then, you’re the one that froze,” said Isabel, “and the one I know wishes that she was you.”
Minkowski exhaled.
“I really did it. They said I couldn’t—”
“They were right,” said Isabel. “You didn’t.”
Minkowski swallowed.
“It’s just luck,” she whispered, “I—I think I could have, if it had happened just a second before, or a second after, I maybe—I maybe would have. My hands were shaking so bad, anything would’ve made me jump...”
Isabel shrugged.
“It wasn’t like you,” said Isabel, finally. “It wasn’t like her, either, and I wish she hadn’t done it.”
Minkowski turned around and promptly threw up into the nearest trash bin.
“Whoa! Whoa, hey,” said Isabel, pushing forward to grab Minkowski and hold her hair back, “you okay?”
“No,” croaked Minkowski.
Yeah, this was why she hadn’t wanted to do this.
“It’s okay,” said Isabel, “you didn’t.”
“But I thought about it—I thought about it for days,” said Minkowski, wiping her mouth, “I felt it, in my hand, and I couldn’t not feel it—”
“Hey, hey,” said Isabel, “c’mon.”
Oh, boy.
“I was so close,” said Minkowski.
“Yep,” said Isabel, “and I was pretty close to killing Kepler, too. It sucks.”
“Yeah,” said Minkowski. “Oh, god, sorry I threw up.”
Minkowski had done her best, but vomiting in microgravity could only be so contained.
“It’s okay,” said Hera, “I’ve got a vent there, and I’m not going to have any sort of sympathetic reaction if I try to clean it up—you two just get out of there, for a sec.”
Isabel considered it, and realized that she was going to have a sympathetic reaction of her own, if they didn’t do what Hera said, and she ushered Minkowski out of the room. Once in the hallway, Minkowski took a few deep breaths.
“Sorry you had to see that,” she said, suddenly.
“Hey, it’s okay,” said Isabel, “it happens.”
“It’s just—”
“Yeah,” said Isabel. “I know.”
The compressor coil didn’t get fixed that night.
It didn’t matter anyway, of course.
It took Kepler’s aid to get the psi-wave regulator up and running again. Stupid, really. They should’ve known how to do it themselves. They shouldn’t have had to rely on him, but they did.
Isabel had needed to very cautiously divide her resources. Eiffel could not be trusted to guard Kepler—that much, they’d already found out, and she couldn’t have Minkowski away from her. The psi-wave regulator would knock her out, too, which meant that the best bet was for Kepler, Minkowski, Maxwell, and Eiffel to work on the psi-wave regulator, test it on Maxwell—
And for Isabel to guard Jacobi.
“But I wanna be part of the action...” whined Jacobi, and Isabel hung out outside the door. “Man, what a crazy day, huh?”
“Yep,” said Isabel, “and it’s just gonna start all over again when we go to sleep tonight, but hey, at least I’ll know, right?”
Jacobi was quiet for a moment.
“So you weren’t joking. That’s five bucks I’m out.”
Isabel shook her head, then remembered Jacobi couldn’t see her.
“No.”
“Maxwell, dead? Man, never knew Minkowski had it in her.”
“Maxwell didn’t think she was going to do it. Minkowski didn’t want to, either.”
“Sounds like you came from the shit timeline,” said Jacobi. “Man, that’s gotta be a real mopefest. You all were bad enough with just Hilbert dead. And with you coming back as an alien, and all—that was pretty gross, either way.”
“You didn’t know I was going to come back!”
“Nah,” said Jacobi, “you’re from the timeline that killed my best friend, so, fuck you. Tell her I said I’m sorry about the cheeses when you put her back in her cell tonight. Pretty please. You know. Since you guys killed her and all.”
“...Fine,” said Isabel. “Guess I can do that much.”
They fell silent after that, but no sound came down the hallway. Isabel didn’t know when the reset happened, but she hoped, very desperately, that it would happen sometime after midnight. If they were in the middle of the test when the reset occurred...
She began to doze off, catching herself every now and then, as the night wore on. Isabel checked her watch frequently. Eventually, there was snoring from the other side of the door.
22:34. 22:48. 23:13. 23:47.
It was 23:56 when Isabel heard the first sound in the hallway.
“Jacobi,” she said. “Jacobi, wake up. They’re back.”
He must have been a light sleeper, because she heard him very nearly instantly.
“What? What’s going on?”
“Minkowski’s got Kepler...”
Minkowski was frog-marching Kepler down the hall, as much as anyone could in zero-gravity, followed shortly by Eiffel, who had Maxwell in tow. Minkowski’s face was gray, and at first, Isabel thought it was the bright lights of the hallway. As the four of them approached, however, she began to realize—
“She’s out,” Minkowski said to Isabel, who felt the blood drain from her own face.
“Had it set pretty high!” said Kepler, and there was an edge to his voice, the way it’d been the day that his whiskey got blasted out through a hole in the wall. “Against my advice, I would like... to say. She should regain consciousness, in a few hours... but I’d advise you keep an eye on her until then.”
“For what?” asked Minkowski.
“What the hell’s going on?” asked Jacobi. “Where’s Maxwell? Hey—open this door!”
There was a banging from the other side, as if Jacobi really expected them to let him out. As if—Isabel opened her mouth to tell him that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell, but she was cut off by Kepler answering Minkowski.
“For your own... edification, Lieutenant,” snapped Kepler. “We’ve got two moles on the station. Another one of you, Captain! Tell me, what do you think of returning to Earth now?”
And then, Isabel woke up, head swimming, her hand already reaching for her alarm clock.