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York is sunk into an armchair in the rec room when Wash enters, his shoulders level with the chair's arms and his legs stretched all the way out so he can prop his heels on the edge of the low coffee table in front of him. He's fiddling with...something, a silvery-white ball about five inches in diameter that he's twisting around with small, deliberate motions that alternate between sinuous and stepwise mechanical. Wash takes possession of the ottoman York has comprehensively excluded from his personal demesne and leans in for a closer look. "What is that? Another puzzle?"
York looks up, still manipulating the ball, then back down again before he can get too far along without paying full attention. "Oh, this? This is my thing."
"Your...'thing'," Wash says flatly.
North speaks without opening his eyes. He's taking up the full length of the couch next to York's armchair, his feet dangling off the arm. "Yeah, Wash. Haven't you seen his thing yet? He's been playing with it all day."
"Since I picked it up on shore leave yesterday," York corrects him. Something clicks inside the ball and he grins, adjusting his grip and increasing the speed of his movements. "Hey, Wash. Wanna touch my thing?"
"He's been saying that to everybody," says North. "Carolina touched it. Florida, too."
"Everyone wants to touch my thing," York informs Wash with pride.
Wyoming snorts from his spot against the wall and, without looking up from his datapad, says, "Grow up."
"Wyoming didn't want to touch my thing," York confides in a stage whisper.
Wash shakes his head, ignoring the nonsense in order to try to gather some meaning from the exchange. "So it's some kind of puzzle ball."
York takes his thumb out of the hole in the ball's surface and points a finger at Wash in thoughtful approval. "Hey, yeah. I guess you could call it that. A puzzle ball."
"I liked 'thing' better," says North.
"Children," mutters Wyoming, fully audible.
"Okay, sure," says Wash. "Can I see?"
York tosses him the ball. Something rattles inside as Wash catches it and he holds it gingerly, one thumb automatically finding a resting spot in the hole York's had occupied. "Uh," he says nervously, looking down at the ball and then at York, "I think one of us just broke it."
"That's a real grab for plausible deniability, Wash," says North. His eyes have opened just enough to watch the exchange. His eyelids flicker as he looks between them, pale eyelashes brushing his cheeks.
"Nah," says York, "it does that. I got a theory, actually—" He tries to lever himself up but is thwarted by his less than optimal position. He's forced to put his feet down and push himself back in the chair so he can lean forward. "What I'm thinkin' is, either there's some part that got knocked loose before I got it and the whole thing's gonna go FUBAR at some point, or," he takes the ball from Wash's hands and turns it so Wash can see the hole and its striated inner surface, "it's made like that and if you solve the puzzle, whatever's inside comes out." He sets his thumb inside the hole and performs a sequence of quick, fluid motions, reversing those he'd just done before sitting up. When he hands the ball back to Wash, the hole is visibly a few millimeters shallower.
Wash peers into it, trying to count the striations. The curved surface at the bottom is marked with grooves and slight variations in depth whose shapes match the patterns York was following. The material itself is flawlessly smooth, almost a velvety texture, like stone polished to a mirror sheen by constant water erosion. At first he thought it was plastic or bone but now, close to, he can see the faint grain of wood. He sticks his thumb in the hole again and uses it to push the bottom layer in a motion that follows the smooth arc of one of the grooves. The moving parts make barely a whisper of sound. In the new configuration, he can feel a gap in the surface of the inner sphere, geometrically shaped and smaller than the thumbhole, that offers a hint at the surface of the layer below. He gets his thumbnail in at the edge and pushes at the lower layer, causing the one he has full access to to rotate in the opposite direction and trap his thumb until he manages to move it back. He withdraws his thumb. "So when you solve a layer, the hole lines up with the one on that layer and you can reach the next one."
"Yep," says York. "That's the gist."
"That's...really cool." Wash hands it back. York immediately starts returning it to the configuration he'd reached before giving it to Wash, thumping back into his seat as he does. "I've never seen anything like it."
"Yeah, I'll bet," says York. "Guy I bought it from said his squadmate got it off a dead hinge-head. Then he kicked the bucket and my guy got it, so, y'know. Destiny, or something."
Wash is suddenly looking at the ball like it's made of fissile plutonium. "He got it off an Elite."
"Yeah, Wash." York sounds completely uninterested in dwelling on this part of the conversation. "That's what I said."
"An Elite."
"Yes, Wash. An Elite. You know it's not cursed, right, I was just joking about that destiny thing?"
"I know curses aren't real, York. I also know bombs are. And bugs. And beacons."
York's hands slow. "You really don't have a goddamn iota of faith in me, do you?"
"If you mean I don't have any faith in an object with unknown contents and a lot of moving parts that some hinge-head figured was worth carrying onto a battlefield, then yes. That's correct."
York sets the ball down on the arm of his chair. "Wash."
"What?" He keeps glancing at the ball, eyebrows and mouth drawn into a tight frown of anxiety.
York leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. "I'm a goddamn security specialist. You know what the first thing I did was when I got this? I scanned it, irradiated it, hit it with an EMP — all away from the ship, I'd like it noted, because like hell I was gonna lead anyone back here if it was transmitting — everything in the book. It's clean."
Wash frowns down at the puzzle ball, not looking at York. "It could be shielded. Or only start doing whatever it does when it's triggered by something."
"You know what the most molecularly advanced component in this thing is, Wash?" York picks it up, weighs it in his hand, still looking at him. "It's wood. Can you think of a way to kill someone with wood?"
Wash gives him an incredulous look. "Polearm, shrapnel, about thirty different kinds of traps, roadblock..."
"Remotely? At interstellar distances?"
Wash's expression is half defensive, half the expression of someone attacking a thought experiment. "Give me a week and some materials."
"Yeah, no. This thing doesn't conduct." He turns it and shows Wash a black mark on the surface, such as might be made by a spark from a live wire. "I swear to you, Wash, it's fine. On my honor as the Mother of Invention's top professional paranoid."
"The honor that set off an alarm at Cidade de Pedra the other week?"
"Maine shot the lock." York winces as he relives the memory. "Look, I know what I'm doing, okay?"
Wash shakes his head slowly as he stares at the ball, conflicted. "There could be something you missed."
"You're killing me. Listen, remember when I said Florida touched it?"
"I said that, actually," murmurs North.
York ignores him, turning the ball over and over in his hands as he watches Wash's face. "I had him check it over for me. You know the guy, he might as well have lived with the bastards. It's just a toy, some gator-faced motherfucker's fuzzy baby blankie that he just couldn't let go of."
Wash is now no longer regarding the ball like it's made of plutonium but a more mundane hazard, like contact poison. He looks back up at York, one eyebrow raised. "So you're messing with a hinge-head's fuzzy blanket."
"Well, when you put it that way, it just sounds embarrassing."
Wash steps on the heel of his sneaker and pulls his foot out of it so he can rest it on the edge of the ottoman. He laces his fingers over his knee and props his chin on top of them. "Why don't you just take it apart and make a duplicate? Then you can toss this thing out an airlock and it won't be our problem anymore."
"Wash!" York jerks it back against his chest protectively. "Don't ever let me hear you say that again. This is — this thing is a work of art, okay? Look," he shows Washington the hole again, angling it so light can get in from the overhead fixtures, and gestures for him to look. "See the grain? It matches up from layer to layer. This thing is all made from one piece of wood."
Wash's forehead wrinkles as he takes his hands out from under his chin to pull the ball closer, squeezing one eye shut so he can examine it more easily. "How did...no." He lets go of York's hands and sits back again. "Why do you care so much about this thing, anyway?"
York brings his hands back to his lap and starts messing with the puzzle ball again. "Aside from the fact that it's interesting?"
"It's not that interesting."
"Yes, it is. You can't keep your hands off it."
Wash tosses his head scornfully. "I was just curious. Plus you kept shoving it in my face, so it's not like I could say no."
"Couldn't say no to York shoving his thing in your face, eh, Wash?" North says.
Wyoming looks up from his datapad. "Stop," he says, very simply.
"Not my fault he keeps thrusting balls at people. Anyway, Wash can't keep his hands off it. You heard 'em."
Wyoming sets the datapad down on his lap and narrows his eyes at North. "Did someone change the enlistment age to twelve years old? I wasn't informed."
"I'm very advanced for my age."
"Yeah, wait till you get your growth spurt." York lifts the ball to eye level and reverses the last few moves he made. "Anyway, I figure it's a good idea to learn how to think like the enemy, right? Anything to give us an edge."
"By playing with the enemy's toys."
"Yeah. Also, I really wanna know what's inside."
"Our wholly avoidable deaths by our own damnfool hands?" suggests Wyoming.
"Hey," says North, "we're spoiled for choice there, so we might as well pick the fun option."
"Or," says York, "it could be a gumball."
Wash stares. "A gumball."
"Yeah. Haven't you ever gotten one of those capsules where you open it up and there's a gumball inside?"
"We didn't really have that where I grew up," says Wash. He brushes the cuff of his sweatshirt over his eyebrow, a mostly-unconscious pressure from the knob of bone on the inside of his wrist, then pushes his hood back and scoots forward to the edge of the ottoman. "Can I try?"
"Hell no," York says. "I want to solve it first. Then, maybe."
"And that's why you aren't EOD," North says contentedly.
Connie passes the open doorway of the rec room, then backpedals and sticks her head in. "Is that York's arum?" she asks. Her voice drops a full third on the word, rolling the R and popping the end of the M. It's slightly disconcerting.
"Is that satanic gibberish for my thing?" asks York. "Then yes."
"Either that, or she just called you something really rude," says Wash.
Connie enters and levers herself up onto the back of the couch North's occupying, shoving one foot in the crevice between the arm and the back cushions and resting the other on top of the arm next to North's ankles. That foot starts sliding to the left as soon as she places it, nudging North's feet toward the edge. He pulls his right foot back and sets it back on the arm on the other side of hers, then crosses his ankles and traps her foot between them.
"It's the name for your thing," she says. She makes an effort to extricate her foot, but North just tightens his calves, trapping it more firmly. She gives up for the moment. "I saw Florida messing with it earlier. I didn't want to interrupt."
"York's thing already has a name," says Wash. "It's Buffalo, for the record. Because it's a snow job."
"Yeah, you can shut up now." The arum clicks and York starts on the next layer. "It's New York, actually. So nice they named it twice."
"Thought those were your left and right nuts?" says North.
"Nah. Those are Manhattan and the Bronx."
Wyoming tests his datapad stylus for balance, then throws it at York's head. It hits him directly over the right eyebrow, right in the middle of the frontal lobe. York yelps. "Watch it! You could take an eye out with that thing."
"I live for the day," Wyoming mutters, returning to his reading. York throws the stylus back at him and he blocks it with the back of his datapad. Wyoming looks up at York again. "Well done. Retaliating at the most obvious possible moment. That won't turn out poorly in the field at any point, certainly."
"Hey, Wyoming? Stuff it."
"So the Rubik's tesseract wasn't enough, huh?" says Connie to York.
"Hepteract," he corrects. "Seven-dimensional hypercube. Don't even get me started on that one, by the way. I figure a couple more dimensions and I'll be able to take this lovely lady through slipspace any time I want."
"Sorry for not keeping track of your journey through extraspacial planes." She ghosts her hand along North's pant leg above his shin. His leg twitches sharply and his eyes open wide in betrayal, but Connie's hand is already demurely back in her lap. "So, can I see it?"
"My Rubik's hepteract, my nuts, or my thing? Because no on all of those. Unless you're my very special someone, in which case I'm open to negotiation."
"Your arum," she replies, doing the same thing as before. It's no less disconcerting a second time.
York throws up a hand and laments, "Why does everyone want to touch my thing?"
"And after they hear about the snow job, too," says Wash.
"No. You cannot touch my thing. Not until after I've solved it. Then we can talk."
"How many faces have you gotten on the hepteract?" Wash asks. "And you're still working on..." His mouth and throat move slightly as he practices the sounds Connie made.
North lifts his head. "Don't. Don't try. You won't even get close and we'll all be embarrassed. You the most."
"Thirty-five, and you're just trying to goad me into telling you to try yourself if you think it's so easy, which I'm not gonna. Until after I solve it, and then we'll see who's laughing."
"Me," says North. "And South. Connie. Definitely Florida. Probably most of the ship, actually."
"So, suck it," announces York to Wash. The arum clicks again and he rotates it around his thumb.
"What, your thing? No thanks."
Connie reaches down and squeezes North's shin without warning. He makes a noise of shocked incredulity as his leg jerks back violently, stopping short of his chin only by about a foot. Connie quickly extracts her foot and tucks it in with the other.
"Right," says Wash, getting up and slipping his foot back into its shoe, "I'm borrowing your icosahedral burr."
"Do not touch that," York says, pointing threateningly. "Or the locks. You can mess with the Gordian ring set."
"I hate the Gordian ring set."
"Yeah, well, you can play with that or you can sit around holding your dick. And don't even think about doing both at once, I'll kick your shit right off the ship."
"Like you're sitting around holding your thing?"
"Exactly. You do not want to do to your dick what I'm doing to my thing. Trust me, it won't be pretty."
The arum clicks again as York speaks, this time locking in place. He grimaces and reverses the sequence. Connie rests her chin in her hand and watches closely, barely blinking.
York looks up after about two minutes. "Hey, can you not stare like that? It's making me kinda nervous."
"Performance issues are a natural part of everyone's life, York," North says. He sounds legitimately close to sleep this time. "Just don't worry about it. You'll get through it, one way or another."
York reaches over and presses his thumb firmly into the exact center of the sole of North's foot. North makes a sound sort of like a reversed shriek, a vocalised gasp that starts him coughing after he, apparently, chokes on his uvula. He torques off the couch and hits the floor. "You bastard," he wheezes.
York settles back into his chair with an air of satisfaction. "Don't diss my thing." The arum locks up again. "Ah, hell."