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They worked on the hulks towed in from the Orion Nebula, outer hulls blasted open or caked with plasmid residue from the frequent interspace jumps. In the gravity well of the Toulon gas giant, the great shipyard saw the Empire’s fleets constructed and repaired by convicted criminals shipped in from across the galaxy to crawl like insects over their ruined hulls.
Not a breath Jean Valjean took in that place was not foul with the swampy ocean-smell of recycled air and half-dead tank algae; not a gram of oxygen his lungs consumed went unnoted in his commissary logs. He slept in a respirator, side-by-side with a hundred other men in one of a hundred dormitories, all without stable habitation. No warmth in that place; no light but that from the stars.
After twelve hours inside the suit the heat coils would sear their way into his naked back, the unforgiving metal struts of his suit pressing hard enough into malnourished skin to draw blood. The gravity here would crush a man without an exosuit, and had done, many times. Valjean had watched the guards in their steely grav armor pull a prisoner from his suit like some pink and slimy mollusk from its shell. They’d tied him to the post for forty minutes as a punishment for brawling. By the time they untied him his lungs had sunken onto the jutting teeth of his shattered ribs, his eyes bruised red with broken vessels, his tongue three times its size.
At a certain point Valjean had retreated so far into himself that even the horror could not follow. He had squeezed his mind down to a pinhole, lost or cut away his memories of the sister on Faverolles fleeing the birth penalties for her five extra children, forgotten the station’s bio-tech trees he had pruned for all his adult life, forgotten sunlight, forgotten joy. The tiny, bitter kernel which his soul had shrunk to impermeability, buried within stone.
He did not notice the young guard, faceless behind the black graviglass helm; the young guard barely noticed him. To recognize the individuality of another would require a degree of humanity which could not survive in that place. All prisoners were brutes, all guards were demons, and the stars unblinking spectators to the spectacle of human torment below.
***
On the planet of his birth, Javert had always looked to the stars. He could not see them, of course; smog had long since painted the sky into a yellow-grey haze that only the sun could penetrate. He rarely saw that, either; the city buildings cast shadows at every hour of the day, and only the richest could make their way to the upper levels. Javert was poor. His mother told fortunes and did other things for money that he was not able to comprehend until he was old enough to have forgotten her entirely. But when he was young, she showed him pictures on her battered tablet before she was thrown back into the vagrant’s prison mill and he never saw her again. Pictures of velvet blue sprinkled with diamonds, and tales of fresh water and clean beds and food that wasn’t scraped from larval casings.
It would be fifteen years before he saw the stars. But he could watch the ships as they erupted from their docking bays, twice every week. Transport ships, bringing rock and biomass and necessary personnel to the ships and stations and more civilized worlds which waited beyond the haze.
Of the afternoon when he saw his mother for the final time, he retained two vital impressions. His mother had been filthy, dressed in rags with what dignity they could afford her, yet with no water to waste on washing her face and nothing but her fingers to comb her hair. The privatized police van into which she’d been loaded was black, sleek, and clean. He would forget the details of those images, along with his mother’s face and the spices she used to make their food palatable. But for the majority of life the impression would linger, deeper than even memory could reach: that there were those who society embraced, and those it did not.
He understood which of the two choices would get him on an outbound transport.
***
“Monsieur le Capitaine.”
The inspector’s official datachip sat neatly in his gloved palm. His outfit was immaculate, though it did not fit him particularly well. He had not had it tailored and it appeared to be well-used. His hair was unfashionably long, on both his head and his cheeks; his nose was sharp and his lips thin, his chin jutting and his brows heavy. The eyes which sat beneath them were narrowed from frequent frowns. He had the squint and the gangly, too-thin look of a man who’d been born on-planet, and the intensity of one who had made it out. He had been a guard at the shipyards of Toulon.
Captain Jean Madeleine did not recognize him--he had read the man’s file in detail from the moment it had been spat out by the massive yet infinitesimally petty bureaucracy of Earth Central some three weeks ago. It had taken that long to reach the coordinates where they could take on their now-mandatory police inspector; their profit margins to population ratio had exceeded the lowest threshold which Earth had decided required a more personal oversight. Inspector Javert was that oversight. He was to watch everything that was done on the Montreuil , ensure that law and order was being carried out to the standards that Earth Central had decreed, and report back any suspicions of noncompliance to his superiors in the inter-planetary police. The paperwork assured Madeleine that he would perform this duty beyond reproach. It assured him that he could rest easy knowing his ship would be safe from lawbreakers.
He kept his face composed into a pleasant mask. In the 19 years since his release from prison he had created his face the way an artist created a painting, layer after layer, each year smoothing over the features which once had been as hard as a clenched fist, sullen and contorted.
“I reviewed your credentials,” Madeleine said as he accepted the datachip. “It is clear you possess a great dedication.”
“That is kind of monsieur to say,” Javert said, the compliment sliding off him like oil against water. His eyes remained leveled on the wall panel behind Madeleine’s head, where the crest of the Montreuil hung behind him. “I have done my duty, and will continue to do so.”
“I am sure of it,” Madeleine said, and stood to shake the man’s hand. “Welcome to the Montreuil .”
The man’s saturnine face remained without any expression as his long gloved fingers closed around Madeleine’s. If there was a flicker of churning recognition beneath the frozen surface of deference in his eyes, Madeleine could not feel it; he could only hear the ice shifting beneath his feet.
*
In Captain Jean Madeleine’s ship quarters, there was not much of import to note. A simple bed, no larger or more luxurious than that in any private quarters. A nutrient dispenser of the same caliber; nothing to mark his status. And the two silver lights, styled after the elegant candlesticks of old earth and magnetized at the base for use in ship life. The room was kept to a near-Spartan neatness; the latter were kept polished to immaculacy by frequent handling.
He had worked his way up from a laborer who had joined the ship’s crew almost by happenstance, in a matter involving an unexpected engine fire while the ship was docked. It was an old ship, possessing only a tugline drive rather than something capable of piercing interspace. Its task was to ferry a cargo of jet from the volcanic moons in the outer rim to the inner planets. With a crew of nearly two thousand, one more soul with useful hands and a willingness to use them was not often noted. But he had made certain suggestions to the ship’s navigator, and discovered a particular balance of fuel which helped the ship’s sluggish engines run more efficiently; every crewmember received a higher bonus as a result, and it was not long after that when he was first elected captain. It took much cajoling from his crewmates to convince him to accept the appointment; a sign, they thought, of his naturally humble nature.
They were not wholly wrong. The Jean Valjean who captained the Montreuil was indeed a man who admired that particular virtue. He had been a beast, alone in a galaxy that seemed nothing but a cold vacuum, devoid of other life.
He stepped up to the candlesticks and touched a finger to their power button, illuminating the room with the soft, warm light that supposedly mimicked flame. He stood with his fingertips resting on the cool metal for some time, staring into the light.
***
Javert was not a suspicious man. To be suspicious required a degree of prejudice and imagination which Javert did not possess. Rather let us say that he was a deliberate man; a man of certain principles; a man who, having sunk his teeth into something, could not be persuaded to let it go. Is the hound called suspicious when he catches scent of the wolf?
No, Javert did not play host to such feelings. He had merely noted, in his detached and pitiless way, a certain resemblence in the physiognomy between Monsieur Madeleine and a convict he remembered from his days at the prison-yards of Toulon. He had noted without interest how the captain’s shirts stretched across the breadth of his shoulders; how his hands, though nimble, were calloused like a workman’s. Simple things that might have meant nothing at all.
It was not until the accident that the tally of such observations became clear.
The cargo bay door had been marked in need of repair for some time, and due to a combination of lackluster effort and a genuine backlog of work, had not been properly repaired. If any ship mechanic had taken a closer look at its unmaintained mechanisms they would have pronounced it a death trap. In theory it was only a minor oversight--only a single sensor was outdated, and only then by six months. The chances that it would fail were low; the chances that any failure would result in any negative effect lower still. It was the sensor which informed the mechanisms in the 800-pound door that there was an obstruction between it and the floor.
There were many doors on the Montreuil and the maintenance requests were endless--so it was that no one looked at the door at all, until during a routine dock and unload it came sliding down onto Monsieur Fachelevaunt’s back.
Javert had been one of the first on the scene. He inspected the makeshift levers and lifts that the fellow cargo workers had constructed--he could see at a glance they would do no good. It was only because the door was in such poor repair that its descent did not kill the man instantly. At the ship’s heydey, such a door would have sheared a man in half without difficulty. Still, the door was immovable; the man would be crushed, degree by degree, as the door forced itself through the obstruction between itself and the floor.
Javert had sent for a jack, for all the good it would do. The man would be crushed long before the earliest hope of its arrival. Now there was little more to be done than stand around and witness the man’s death, as his cries and groans became quieter, more piteous, in the moments before they would become screams.
He saw the captain’s approach by the ripples in the crowd. When at last he stepped forward, his expression was far more frantic than Javert had even seen it. With a few words from the surrounding observers he had understood the situation; his face settled into the mask of determination Javert had become far more familiar with.
“There’s still time to help,” he said, his voice carrying over the crowd. “A strong man could slide under the door and lever it up before it crushes him.”
The bystanders milled anxiously; no one in the crowd stepped forward. He knew Madeleine must see the futility in it even as his jaw grew tighter.
“I’ll give a five percent bonus from this haul to any who can lift that door.” It was a high price; many working on the Montreuil would not see more than a fraction of that per trip. Still none stepped forward. Madeleine’s eyes raked the faces around him, waiting for a reply. It was not often the captain was kept waiting by his doting crew; today none stepped forward.
“Ten percent,” Madeleine said. Still no one moved.
“It’s not the money that’s stopping them,” Javert said at last. At the sound of his voice, he saw Madeleine go rigid. Like a deer stiffening at the first scent of the wolf. Javert smiled.
“It’s the strength,” he continued, his posture straight, eyes not on the groaning man beneath the metal door but on Madeleine himself. “I’ve only seen one man capable of it, and he was a convict. A brute of a man who didn’t even need his exo-suit to operate in tri-Earth gravity.”
Madeleine stared at the man beneath the door with an expression of quiet anguish. Javert was not a particularly religious man, beyond what was expected of him by polite society. He could not help but note the resemblance between Madeleine’s face and the expression of the martyrs saints. This observation did not count in Madeleine’s favor. Javert went to church with the same unwavering commitment as he dressed himself for work each morning; he looked upon Madeleine’s saintlike face with the same unmoved scrutiny as he had inspected the metal friezes of those men shot with arrows, their eyes turned to God.
Madeleine turned to Javert, met the gaze which pierced him to the bone, and smiled with an edge of sadness. Then he went down onto his stomach and slid beneath the door.
Javert did not heed the cries of alarm from the crewmates surrounding him. He watched, his face blank but for its usual expression of sharp dourness, as the muscles beneath the man’s shirt tensed, and then heaved with a vulgar strength. The door gave a shriek of metal and tortured hydraulics, and then, impossibly, began to rise.
He saw, rising to all fours with the weight of that terrible metal door upon his back, not Capitaine Madeleine of the Montreuil. Not Madeleine’s face contorted into a snarl of agony and effort, his rough workman’s hands in trembling claws. Beneath Javert’s unrelenting gaze, Jean Le Cric raised the door upon his back until both he and Fauchelevent could be freed.
In the chaos of the immediate aftermath there was no time for words. Madeleine was swamped by his crew, hands reaching to clasp his shoulders but then shying away at the last moment, as if afraid to touch something so mighty and so holy. It was well; Madeleine did not look as if he would have borne any touch lightly. He was pale with strain; his face was tight. Amidst the voices and the adoration and Fauchelevent’s cries of pain and relief, Madeleine’s eyes found the gaze which bored into him from across the crowd, silent and unwavering amidst the chaos. For a moment, Madeleine held it. And then he looked away.
***
Fantine’s body was still cooling in its bio bed, trailing tubes that could not save her lungs from the engine fumes she had inhaled after being cast from the ranks of the Montreuil's essential staff. Javert did not seem to notice it. His eyes remained locked on Valjean’s, his face contorted into a snarl as he raised his shock baton.
“You ask for leniency?” he hissed. “You know nothing of hardship.”
Valjean raised his hands as if in surrender; but the words which came were anything but. “Three days, Javert. That is all I need.”
“You have stolen enough time already,” Javert snarled. “Enough air, enough water, enough food--you'll take nothing more."
The shuttle with its constant emergency store of food and spare credits was a five minute sprint away. Valjean held the passage in his mind, alongside the words of his final promise. Then he shifted into a fighting stance, and faced Javert’s savage grin with no expression of his own.
***
Within the great station of New Paris, a man could disappear. Among the oxygen-scrubbing ferns and ivies of the convent of Petit Picpus, a man could find himself again.
Valjean had grown accustomed to being on the run, as much as he had stayed in one place. The casual glance behind the shoulder had become a common affectation, in spirit if not in body. He disguised the limp left by his prison exosuit with such habitual care, the only thing which reminded him of it was the dull ache. In a way, being driven from the Montreuil was almost a relief: the hanging axe which finally fell, the sputtering engine which finally gave out.
But now he had a child. She had been so tiny, light as a bird cradled in his arms as he fled through the station’s maintenance corridors. He’d kept his old signal scrambler to hide from the cameras, his digital lockpick disguised as a coin. Each time Station’s jaws came close to closing around him, all he thought of was the tiny hands which grasped his coat, the head of brown curls tucked under his chin.
Now he turned the soil, mingled it with chemical fertilizers, pruned errant growths and tested the gas exchange on the plants bioengineered leaves. Not safe--never that. But another respite, and one he hoped would last.
The convent was actually a ship, docked indefinitely at New Paris’s central docks for as long as it was willing to lend its garden to the continual ordeal of scrubbing oxygen. But the station’s authority did not reach beyond the convent ship’s door; that, Valjean knew, was what had saved him. He felt the prowling of familiar shadows in nearby corridors, separated only by a few walls of titanium.
He too had been turned, pruned, tested. He still could not allow himself to believe that the divine hand was not reaching for him, ready to pull him up by the roots. And yet when he saw Cosette, happy and growing and calling him Papa --he found he was not so afraid.
***
At last, the tension broke.
For months Javert had watched the unrest grow, the station’s wide thoroughfares turning cold and suspicious at the sight of his Station coat and holographic credentials. Javert had never been greeted warmly in his life (except by one man, a man who had never once been real), and so he had become a connoisseur of animosity; he could taste it on his tongue, a serpent laving at the air, and know the exact character behind the hard eyes and cold shoulders.
He had felt the break coming, though he did not know how the bone would splinter. When news of Fleet Leader Lemarque’s death rocked New Paris’s streets and news filtered through Station’s security channel that a gaggle of schoolboys had managed to jam a crucial set of blast doors half-closed and were defended it with stolen phase guns, Javert was not surprised. He was ready.
He donned plainclothes as his superiors demanded, and sent himself into the grinder.
***
The boy was safe, for the time being. Valjean’s gaudy station guard uniform gave him passage through the ranks of station security gathered outside the rudimentary barricade. His quick-talking granted him a stay of execution among the revolutionaries.
Children. That had been his first thought, on seeing them with their guns, clean-faced and yet unstreaked by the grey smears of plasma discharge. The one whom his daughter had professed her love looked like one of the youngest.
It would have been easy, to dismiss the note which had brought him here as an idle dalliance, the solar-storm of first love; but he knew nothing of that passionate, devouring love, and he did know his daughter. She was not the sort to throw her heart away idly. As much as it broke his heart to feel her slipping from his fingers, he would not break hers in turn.
He had thought perhaps he might find death, huddled under in the shelter of the blast doors half-closed like jaws mid-clench. He had not counted on the eyes which met his across the overtaken cafe, black as the void and filled with the same recognition Valjean was struggling to hide. The years had marked his face, carved new lines around his mouth and deepened the ones around his eyes. It was still a proud face, defiant now in the humiliating grip of the bindings which held him.
“A spy,” the leader said. His tone made it clear that Valjean could expect no better treatment if he himself intended to betray them. “We’d shoot him, but we may need the phase charge yet.”
“You may,” Valjean agreed, tearing his eyes away from the bound and kneeling figure. He could feel Javert’s eyes boring into the back of his neck, fierce and heavy as a hand gripping his collar. He accepted the rifle pressed into his hand, humming with contained power, and thought of turning it on the man who had hunted him half his life.
His hand tightened; he did not look back.
***
They bound him with the same plastic straps used to secure cargo during high-gravity maneuvers, hard edges biting into his neck and wrists and groin. The intent was to discomfort him; it was successful. He knelt for hours in the abandoned cargo bay, listening to children being shot and waiting for the cold, clear sense of justice to settle into his bones.
It never came. He felt only hollow as the energy blasts dispersed over the metal crates within which he had been sequestered; hollow, as the shrieks of pain rang through the red-tinged night of the emergency lightning. Hollow, as Jean Valjean took him by his bindings like a horse by the bridle, leading him to the place where he would die.
He fixed his face into a sneer he did not feel as he stumbled after that irresistible grip. He’d heard Valjean’s voice, bartering for his life like a petty trinket in exchange for a favor. It was humiliating; it was difficult to care. Soon he would be dead and he would care for nothing at all. He had nothing to cleave to in life but his duty; to die carrying it out held a certain kind of satisfaction.
At last the pressure on Javert’s bindings ceased; they had reached their destination. He raised his head, which had remained bowed while he staggered along to reduce to pressure of the bindings lashed across his body. He saw the door, and the words printed above it: F-Airlock 185.
If there came a thrill of wild terror through his crude flesh, an inner flailing against the death Javert found himself staring down in unsympathetic grey print, no sign of that turmoil reached the surface of his expression. His face remained in its usual cast: full of a mournful disdain, at his plight and that of the world.
Hands on his shoulders turned him to stare into the face of his murderer. Jean Valjean looked--tired. If Javert had ever imagined the moments before Valjean took his life, he would not have imagined this: the still, sad eyes, the down-turned mouth. Of Madeleine there was only a passing likeness lingering in the set of the jaw. Of Le Cric, there remained nothing at all.
Javert drew himself up as much as he was able with the bindings biting deep into the tender crease between thigh and groin, the exposed column of his throat. “Go on then,” he said. “Take your revenge, Jean Valjean. You’ve waited long enough.”
Valjean opened his mouth as if to speak--and then stopped. His hand went to his pocket and drew out a slim plasma cutter.
“A knife!” Javert exclaimed, cold delight beating like wings in his chest. “You’re right, that suits you better.” No cold, airless death for him. It would come in hot gushes of blood, sharp agony as long as Valjean saw fit to draw it out. If his muscles trembled, it was a weakness in the body rather than the mind. He was so tense with waiting for death that when Valjean’s knife passed through his bonds his posture did not change at all.
Valjean stepped back in front of him once the last of the plastic bindings had been cut away, his eyes dark and unreadable. Javert watched as he disengaged the plasma cutter and slipped it back into his pocket.
“I don’t understand,” Javert said.
“You are free,” Valjean said. “Get out of here, before they come to check after me.”
Javert’s face split into a snarl. “You think this changes anything?” he hissed. “You think you can buy your freedom with my life?”
“I expect nothing of you,” Valjean said. He sounded very tired. “You will do your duty, I am sure.”
There was nothing of mockery in Valjean’s voice, and yet Javert was certain of it all the same. Through the numbness, anger spiked black and hard. He was not aware of his actions; he barely felt the fingers which seized the station guard uniform Valjean wore, nor the hiss of Valjean’s breath on his face as he shoved him against the closed airlock door.
“You will not escape me again,” Javert snarled. “All those years of pilfered water and air and rations that should have gone to law-abiding citizens--you will face justice, Jean Valjean. I will see to it if it kills me.”
“I have no desire to escape you,” Valjean said. The hand he lay on the back of Javert’s did not seek to pry loose his grip. It merely rested there, dry and gritty with the discharge powder from his phase rifle. The lines which weathered Valjean’s face looked deep as canyons in the hellish red light. A map of the years Javert had chased him, written into his very flesh.
“If I should survive the night,” Valjean said, “you’ll find my residence at Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7.”
“Rue de l’Homme Armé,” Javert repeated like a sleepwalker. His hands still fisted Valjean’s coat; his nose hovered so close to Valjean’s they nearly brushed. The body so close to his radiated warmth. He wished to tear into it, to bury his face into the bared juncture of Valjean’s neck and sink his teeth into his flesh. He could not have released his grip any more than a hound could loosen its jaws on the neck of a rabbit.
But the tender, loathsome hand which rested on the back of his own tightened, and another joined it; no strength in the galaxy could have resisted the strength in Valjean’s hands. His hands were removed, and returned to his sides. Still he stood close enough to taste the smell of Valjean’s sweat on the air, to distinguish the individuals hairs left in disarray by his temple. At once, the fury returned.
“You should kill me,” Javert spat. “Why will you not--”
But Valjean only shook his head, and pushed Javert gently back; the hands on his shoulders were so powerful, Javert had no choice but to be moved. Valjean stepped back; Javert did not follow.
“Go,” Valjean said. A command from God Himself would have carried less weight.
Javert went.
***
There were none who saw the lone figure standing at the parapet over the churning flow of the water reclamation canal, dark against the dull green lighting of the maintenance areas and the mist rising from the water. Few came here, especially during the station’s conventional sleep cycle; there was no real reason for Jean Valjean to be here at all. Yet he had felt, as he delivered Marius’s prone form to the doctors’ care, a premonition which lead him back.
It was not far from the opening to the waste chutes through which Valjean had labored to freedom; not so far from the place where the unthinkable had happened. Javert, that unshakable pillar of Station’s authority, had willingly let Valjean pass. There had been a moment, as Valjean stepped by him--a flash of dark eyes which no longer seemed empty, but rather in turmoil. No hand had shot out to stop Valjean’s passage, though he had seen the dark glove contort in a ghost of the action.
Now Javert’s hands remained slack and empty at his sides. He had removed his hat and his gloves, laid them neatly on the boundary between him and the roar of water below, as if taking care that they might not be gotten wet. The inspector had always been a fastidious man. The thought made Valjean’s stomach clench.
“Javert.” The figure on the parapet did not turn. The only sign that Javert had heard him was a minute straightening of the spine. “Come away from there,” Valjean said gently. “The water is very fast.”
“I should hope that is so,” Javert said, and laughed. A terrible sound, hollow and full of fury. “Go away from here, Jean Valjean.”
“I will not.”
“Fine. It makes little difference to me.” Javert head tilted downward. Below, thousands of tons of water surged through the broad channel, propelled by turbines which churned it into a spume. Any body which fell into that coursing channel would be crushed and cut to ribbons, their blood bone and flesh reclaimed by the station’s filters, scrubbed into shower water and fertilizer. An efficient death, and an agonizing one.
Valjean took another step. The distance between him and Javert would take him a handful more to cover; he was too far to reach out and grab the back of the man’s uniform. “Come down,” he said, more softly than before. “Please.”
At that word, Javert turned. His face was still in profile; Valjean could see only a sliver of his eye. The blackness which before had been as still as empty space was slicked green by the maintenance lights, glittering with terror and disgust. The mouth below it twitched.
“Always asking for more, Valjean,” Javert said. He sounded very tired. “Well. Someone was bound to deny you eventually.”
The black eyes closed. Like a needle to the heart, Valjean realized too late what was about to occur.
“Javert, wait--” He took a step forward, raised his hand--and watched as Javert
In a moment he would disappear; a moment longer, and he would be swept into the turbine. Only a fool would think himself capable of swimming against such a current; only a fool would think of leaping after him in the first place.
Valjean did not think. He merely leapt onto the edge of the parapet in the eerie green mist, fixed his vision on the dark figure disappearing beneath the water, and dove.
***
When Javert woke, he was still drowning.
The water had forced its way into his throat and was strangling him from the inside out. He gagged, thrashing against the heavy press of water on his limbs--only to find he could not move. He was paralyzed, suspended in a darkness as thick as syrup, and his throat was a screaming agony and he was breathing .
“Javert?”
The voice came from all directions. He could feel it vibrating against his skin. If his throat was not a rictus of agony, he might have given a despairing laugh. Of course. Even here, in the moment of his death, Jean Valjean’s voice would find him--
Except he wasn’t dying. Air flowed into his lungs, despite the water which encased him and the darkness of the canal’s bottom. The pain grew no worse, and no better. He merely hung, suspended in the final act of his life, with the voice of Jean Valjean worming into his very pores. Surely, then, this was hell; and proof enough that God was vindictive.
“Javert, the doctors tell me you are awake.”
Ah.
Not hell, then. But not something so terribly different.
“You are in a biotank,” Valjean’s voice continued. “The turbines broke both your legs and nearly crushed your skull. They’ve had to regrow half of your lung tissue. You--you almost died.”
Yes, that was the idea , Javert might have spat, if his lips were not paralyzed by drugs and gagged by the breathing apparatus wedged down his throat. He might have snarled for Valjean to tear it out, and let him finish what he had started when he threw himself into the water. As it was, he could do and say nothing. Only listen to the cadence of Valjean’s voice, as soft and unwanted as a down blanket to a burn victim.
“Try to stay calm,” Valjean’s voice continued, and behind it came the indistinct buzz of other voices, the beeping of a machine. Javert’s heart would not heed such foolish advice under even the best of circumstances; instead it is bent on hammering its way out of his chest. He tries to thrash, to rail against the calm words Valjean murmurs over his tank’s comm channel, even as he feels the sudden, flattening stillness of a tranquilizer flooding his veins like cool water.
His last thought before he was dragged beneath the blank surface of unconsciousness was that if there was a God, it would appear He had a morbid sense of humor.
***
The public medlab was a dreary place, all dull and dented metal and crowded waiting rooms. He’d been keyed into the lab’s visitation system when he first carried Javert through the emergency doors, the inspector’s tall frame hanging limp and a patter of pink-tinged water bursting around Valjean’s feet. The staff had asked no questions; that was not their function.
He bypassed the milling and occasionally frantic crowd, heading through the narrow corridors which seemed to get darker for the powerful white lights set in the ceiling. In one hand he held a folding stool; in the other, a tablet. After the days spent in the clean, stark private room where Marius was being healed, moving through the corridors with their haggard staff and oscillating viral sweepers omitting the smell of burning hair was a sharp contrast. Marius came from a family which could afford to purchase the privilege of a higher-tier citizenship. As a low-ranking member of the station’s staff, Javert had earned the right not to be placed in the city’s comfort ward and pumped with a cheap cocktail of narcoleptics until his injuries finished him off.
Javert’s medpod was one in a long row, silent metal tanks without windows and covered in screens and blinking apertures. Difficult not to see them as coffins, despite Valjean’s best efforts. Cosette was able to sit by her beloved’s bed and hold his hand, to press a gentle kiss to his brow; when he first woke, it had been to the sight of her smile. Javert healed in darkness and isolation, but Valjean would not permit him to be alone.
He settled next to the pod and unfolded his stool--there was no guarantee of finding a chair, and he’d long since learned to bring his own. For a moment he stared at the displays on Javert’s pod, the obvious heart rate and blood pressure lines and many more diagrams Valjean could not hope to understand. He knew that the cocktail of medicines surging around and inside of the man’s body were meant to heal wounds, prevent infection, keep his body nourished and hydrated. The pattern of electrical impulses sent through the medical gel would stimulate his muscles, prevent them from atrophying too greatly. He could tell by looking, after weeks of practice, that Javert was awake.
Valjean leaned forward and pressed the comm button.
“Good morning,” he said softly. “Did you rest well?”
He waited; almost instantly the screen which registered the minute twitches of Javert’s muscles blipped twice in short succession for two twitches of his fingers. No.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Valjean said, and meant it. He could not imagine what it was like, trapped for weeks in a pod with no more comfort than the regularly induced comas and the prattlings of a foolish old man. Valjean had proposed this system to allow some small measure of communication; he was not certain whether Javert found it helpful, but at the very least he used it.
“I thought we might continue our reading,” he said, shifting the tablet on his lap. “Would that be acceptable?”
A long pause. Within it, Valjean imagined many of the things Javert no doubt wished he could say--sentiments Valjean likely would not have been happy to hear. The reply, when it came, was a simple Yes.
“Very well,” Valjean said with a smile. The screen registered an impatient rhythm as he navigated to the text he had recited during his last visit. The flickers on the screen continued as Valjean read, a litany of words and questions in a conversation Valjean could not perceive.
***
They gave Javert no warning before dragging him back into the air. The sudden cold clarity of drugs being evacuated from his system; a sharp buzzing sound unlike any he had heard before. He waited, suspended and motionless; in the weeks of his convalescence, he had become quite good at doing nothing. The tank’s electronic voice buzzed through the medigel which encased him: “Pod opening procedure initiated. Please stand by.”
That was the last thing Javert heard before the gel rushed out of the pod and his back settled against the metal base blinking at the strange and novel sensation of feeling wet. His eyes which had grown used to the heavy cloying press of solution now burned in the air. When the first crack of light around the pod’s hinge appeared, he barely had the presence of mind to squeeze his smarting eyes shut.
Even behind his lids the light was blinding, a red bruise blooming against the darkness. He heard voices not modulated by faulty electronics for the first time since the night he dove into the water. Gloved fingers thumbed his eyelids back to shine a bright light in his eye. Javert tried to snarl and jerk away--and was immediately reminded of the breathing aperture still clamped over half his face.
“Pupil dilation is good,” the voice said from above him. “Can you hear me, monsieur?”
Given that Javert could scarcely move and certainly not speak, he settled for raising a single tired eyebrow.
“This is going to be unpleasant,” the voice said, and then the tubes lodged deeper in Javert’s throat than he would have thought possible began to slowly withdraw.
*
They moved him into the recovery ward, a hard cot separated from his neighbors on either side by half a paper curtain and two feet of space. He would have a week here to allow the muscle stimulators pressed like thumb tacks into the meat of his legs and back to return his body to a state where it could operate on its own. As it was, he could do little more than shiver in the grip of the headache the coma drugs had left in their wake.
When the footsteps drifted to his bedside, too slow and heavy to be that of the harried nurse, Javert was almost relieved.
“So,” Javert said without opening his eyes. “You’ve tracked me down here as well, then.”
Silence greeted his words, for long enough that Javert had no choice but to open his eyes. Jean Valjean stood at the foot of his bed, clutching a metal stool and a tablet and looking wan. There was something about the sight which caused Javert’s breathing to pause in his chest, and his heart to give a hard thud against his ribs. How many weeks had he lay still and silent in his pod, with only the sound of this man’s voice to ground him? This man, who he had hunted like a hound over the course of half his life--and who had brought him to heel as surely as any dog. In his presence now, without the barrier of metal and glass and near-death between them, Javert felt the familiar urge to seize him, hold him, prevent any escape; and he felt also this new instinct, to tilt his head and show his throat.
“You were not in your pod,” Valjean said. “I thought--” He broke off, swallowing, and all at once Javert realized. The idea that Jean Valjean had been concerned for his well-being was no less absurd even after the man had saved his unwilling life and sat at his bedside for weeks on end. Javert forced a harsh laugh.
“What--that I had finally managed to finish what I had started? We should both be so lucky,” Javert said.
Valjean’s brow darkened. “I wish you would not speak that way.”
“If you do not wish to hear it the solution is very simple. Leave.” Javert turned his head away.
The silence drew out, and he would not glance back at Valjean’s face to gauge the man’s reaction. “Is that truly what you wish?” Valjean spoke quietly. There was something in his tone which made Javert certain that he would do so, should Javert truly ask.
“Pah.” Javert said, looking away again. “Stay or go. It means nothing to me.”
The pause drew out again; this time, it was the metal scrape of Valjean unfolding his stool which broke it. When Javert gleaned up at him, the man’s expression was strange; it almost seemed to resemble a smile. He could not look at it for long.
“Shall I continue our reading?” Valjean said, as if it were perfectly reasonable for him to seat himself at the bedside of a man who had done nothing but persecute him. “It seems a shame not to find out what will happen.”
“You could have read the rest yourself,” Javert grumbled, still averting his eyes.
“I could have,” Valjean agreed; and when no further protests came, he began reading once more.
***
Valjean shuffled across the scuffed metal floor of his living quarters to reach the sparse kitchen. It contained a small stove and an icebox, with counter space to prepare the simple meals most spacefaring souls could scrape together; it also contained the ration dispenser, its nozzle a hooked metal beak protruding hungrily from the wall. It was this last which held Valjean’s attention; he moved slowly, his joints creaking and aching within the sheath of his trembling flesh.
He raised a wavering hand to the keypad and programmed the next ration: five percent less nutrient-dense than before. He was not hungry; he did not deserve to remain strong on the rations which were meant to feed honest men. The nozzle produced its thick sludge of calories and nutrients into the bowl Valjean held beneath it, an unappetizing paste which could be baked or fried or supplemented with additional foods, in order to make it more palatable. Valjean ate it cold and without seasoning. It was not so bad when you got used to it; it was no worse than he deserved.
He finished perhaps half of his bowl before setting it aside; the mere act of eating exhausted him. It was in such a state, slumped in his chair and trying to catch his breath, that he heard the faint beep of his quarters recognizing a registered guest, and the hiss of his doors opening.
There was nothing to be done; Valjean could barely raise his head. When the heavy boots with their clanking magnetic grips moved through the central room and towards the kitchen, he could do nothing; he could scarcely bring himself to care. He’d had no visitors; he’d stopped checking his shipboard correspondence. When the boots passed the threshold of his kitchen and stepped into his field of vision, it was all he could do to lift his head and stare into Javert’s eyes.
For a long while there was only silence; Javert’s eyes were merciless in their transit of his body, from his bare feet on the cold floor to his hands hanging limply over the arms of his chair. When at last they met Valjean’s eyes, they were filled with a terrible resolve.
“You were not responding to your communicator,” Javert said, straightening his spine as he once had done in a shipboard office very far from here. “You have missed two of our appointments without explanation.”
Valjean had put away the chess set, discarding the game left from their last “appointment.” He had put away the book he would read silently while Javert paged through the news on his tablet. The tea Valjean purchased specifically for Javert’s visits had long since run out, and he had not replaced it. There had seemed little point.
Valjean opened his mouth to apologize, but his mouth was too try for speech and Javert had not ceased in berating him.
“You are ill,” he said. “Do not try to deny it. Where is your daughter? She would not permit you to go on like this.”
When it became clear that Valjean was expected to reply, he licked his lips and forced them into the shape he needed for speech. “She is with her betrothed,” Valjean said. His voice was barely more than croak, dry as an untouched crypt. “There is nothing she needs from me anymore.”
“And I suppose that was your own cunning deduction,” Javert growled. “It wouldn't matter to you, then, that it was her who sought me out?”
Valjean’s body went colder than it was before. He struggled to draw breath; the air seemed to enter and leave his lungs without nourishing his body at all. “What did you tell her,” he said, his voice barely more than a breath.
“That you were an old fool, and as stubborn as a mule, and that I would find you and correct whatever idiot impulse had made you push your own daughter away.”
Valjean sagged back into the chair; he had not been aware that he had tensed. “You would not understand.”
“You are right--no one would. You are behaving ridiculously, and I’m here to stop it.”
He stomped past Valjean without another word, striding to the atmospheric panel on the wall. In the months since his release from the clinic, he had almost entirely recovered from the limp which had affected his steps ever since; still Valjean could see the familiar stiffness in his movements, even as he went around the room in a flurry of activity. He turned up the environmental controls from the minimum setting Valjean had left them on; he increased the lights as well, left dim as candlelight. For a moment his footsteps moved into the bedroom; when they returned, Valjean found a soft and heavy weight draping around his shoulders, and strong hands tucking it close.
“Get up, Valjean,” Javert snapped. “You’re going to lie down on the couch.”
“I don’t--”
“I will hear no arguments. Up. Or I will try to lift you, and without your strength I’m as likely as not to spill us both on the floor.”
Whatever strength Valjean had possessed, it had forsaken him now. Even with Javert’s help, he could scarcely get to his feet; by the time Javert helped him lower himself to the couch, a cold sweat drenched his hairline. He could only allow himself to be arranged, and the blanket tucked back around him, and try to catch his breath as Javert moved around his living space. When the hands returned to lever him into a seated position and something warm and fragrant passed beneath his nose, his stomach convulsed as if he’d been struck. For all the times Valjean had watched Javert eat his scarcely-heated nutrient rations straight from the dispenser, he had found some protein flakes in the back of Valjean’s cupboards and heated it until it steamed. From the first bite Valjean could taste that the calibrations had been set as high as the dispenser would allow; it was rich and dense and his body trembled so badly he could barely hold the spoon.
Javert said nothing; he merely sat on the edge of the couch and watched as Valjean ate. At times Valjean would stop and set the bowl down; Javert would neither take it away, nor demand he keep eating. In time, the roiling of Valjean’s stomach would quiet and, with no further options, he would lift the bowl again beneath the deep, placid darkness of Javert’s eyes.
“You mustn’t tell Cosette,” Valjean managed to say, even as his eyes grew heavy. “Please. I won’t have her see me this way.”
Javert looked very much as if he planned to argue, but then the hard line of his mouth softened. “Very well,” he said, in a clipped tone belied by his eyes shifting away. “Do not think you will get rid of me so easily, Valjean. I intend to see that you are on the mend, or find myself at the wrong end of your daughter’s sentiments.”
“That would suit me,” Valjean said. Finally his eyes closed; as a result, he was not certain whether the gentle press of a hand over his own was merely his a figment of his exhausted mind. Truthfully, he did not care. He felt the warmth and the comforting weight of Javert’s hand like an achor as sleep took him, and if he’d known it to be real he was not certain he could have found the strength to squeeze it back.
***
The future, Javert mused, was a strange country.
He walked at Valjean’s side in the Jardin de Luxembourg, below the strip of reinforced glass which bared the greenery to the void. In the station’s programmed evening, the lights had been permitted to fade; little more than starlight guided their steps along the path, and they walked it alone.
“Beautiful,” Valjean said, his eyes tracing the leaves which shifted and rustled in the station’s circulating air. His hair captured the starlight, pale silver curls brushing the back of his collar.
Javert snorted. “Necessary,” he corrected. Without such things, after all, the air within their tenuous metal bubble would soon become unbreathable.
“They can be both,” Valjean said, and Javert had not known how to recognize fondness until he’d seen it in Valjean’s face. Javert merely huffed. He would not give Valjean the satisfaction of agreeing with him; it was pleasant enough to merely walk, their hands folded behind their backs and their shoulders brushing with each step. Soon they would return to Valjean’s quarters, where his daughter and her husband would join them for dinner; Javert would make his excuses, and be dragged into the proceedings all the same. As the evening wore on he would state his intent to return to his own lodgings, and allow himself to be talked into sleeping on Valjean’s couch. So it had gone; so it would go again.
As a child he had stared upward and dreamed of seeing the stars. Now he walked beneath them and stared at Jean Valjean, their pinpoint reflections glittering in his eyes.
A strange country, yes. But it felt like home.