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Fighting on station is always confused, chaotic, and everyone tries to watch for civilians. Still, deep-space stationers are a hard people, and many of them will join the battle even without any uniform—it is hard, sometimes, for the strivs to understand, that someone whose place is elsewhere will not hesitate to throw himself into a firefight, often even if it causes difficulty to his own side. Niko, though, for all his striviirc-na upbringing, cannot help but empathize. Humans feel a stronger connection to people than to place, he thinks, and will put themselves where they do not belong if they can protect their families and friends.
(He wishes, sometimes—often—that they could bypass these stations altogether and take the war directly to Earth, or even to Pax Terra; he, too, is human, and he feels an occasional kinship with the people on these stations, the prisoners they take from deep-space carriers, who are fighting the same pirates, living on the same border.)
The result, though, is that station fighting catches innocents in its crossfire, and all the combatants can do is try to minimize it, to focus their attention on the jets in their black uniforms, to shoot merchants or dock crew only if they are shooting too. On Chaos, so far on the edge of Hub space, they often are.
But no one expects a small child on the battlefield. A ripple runs through the sympathizers as they each spot the small figure darting between the soljets on the other side; he should be running away from the battle, but instead he is running away from—what? Niko scans the area behind him, picks out the person moving at a similar direction and speed just as the man raises his gun.
The pulse knocks the boy to the deck; Niko has a moment of sheer disbelief that anyone could deliberately try to kill a child like that, and then he is pushing the line forward, calling for a pointed attack on that spot, until they have covered enough deck for Niko to drop down to one knee and pick the child up. He darts back to the ship to give the boy to a medic; all told, he spends only a minute getting him to safety. He only realizes after he has given him up that he is cursing a society that would allow this to happen to its children.
* * *
With their first awkward, stumbling conversation, Niko knows that something has changed.
It would be wrong to say that Nikolas S'tlian had nothing before he met Jos Musey. It would be equally wrong to say that he understood nothing, that all his training and experience and everything that he had ever learned were meaningless before that moment, when the pirate Falcone shot a nine-year-old child on Chaos’ deck.
That is what feels true, though. It is the strangest sensation, at first; he can feel his na rearranging, focusing itself, orienting around this boy, even as Jos watches him with mistrustful eyes and steps away as Niko approaches. Jos is hostile, angry, frightened; he does not like Niko, he does not trust him, and yet it does not seem to matter. Jos is his.
His place is with Jos; therefore, he had no place before Jos, and so he had nothing. He did not understand, before he met Jos, where his place was; therefore, he understood nothing.
He talks about it with his mother, sitting and drinking yenn.
“I remember the first day I was on Aaian-na,” she says to him. “Your father and I, we were brought to the ki’redan-na, and he took us walking. We went many places, but every step I took was in the right direction. Aaian-na has not always been kind to me, and the strivs have not always been welcoming, but my place has always been here, and I only knew it after we arrived.”
His mother has an accent. It is delicate but noticeable, and he has always wondered, when he hears her speak, about her life before Aaian-na; he used to ask her, when he was very young, but she never told him anything from before she saw her first striviirc-na. Ash always said that it didn’t matter, that her place was here, and maybe Niko should have listened to him, because now he thinks he is beginning to understand.
He is careful, the first days when Jos is awake—after he starts to learn what Falcone did to Jos, to read the fear in the boy’s stance and in his words and see how much he still lives by Falcone’s side, he thinks of nothing but being careful. This is a fragile thing which he has, so fragile that he cannot even touch it with a single finger, or it may be dislodged from its place, and fall down to shatter on the floor.
The slight language barrier makes it more difficult; he cannot always read the nuances of what Jos is saying, and it is sometimes hard to tailor his words to impart safety and calm. “Why,” he says to his mother after his first halting conversation with Jos, “did you not teach me Hub Standard along with Ki’hade?”
“There were political reasons at the time,” she says, “if you remember your history. And I seem to recall someone disdaining his language lessons, when we did start teaching you.”
He and Ash had made a pact, once upon a time, that they would never speak what should have been their native language as well as they did Ki’hade. In retrospect, it was a less than practical decision, though Ash appears never to have regretted it.
“Do you want me to come in and speak with him?” his mother asks.
He sighs. “No,” he says. “Another strange adult would not settle him.” And his mother is blunt to the point of being unforgiving; she taught him well, but she would not be—careful. He is still so afraid of what will happen if someone is careless around Jos. “I am trying to teach him that the room is his place,” he says, “that I am only visiting. He has too often had others invading.” Niko does not fight in anger, and because of that, he hopes that he never meets Falcone in battle; he will break that rule without a qualm.
“Besides,” he adds, “he needs to learn Ki’hade.”
“Achievable goals are excellent instruments of healing,” is all Enas says to that.
* * *
Niko has been fighting a war since he finished his training, so he has seen many traumatized victims, many orphaned children, many displaced people. He doesn’t know why it was Jos who caught and held him like this, but he will never forget the feel of that small body as he picked it up off the deck of Chaos, and the knowledge that Jos would have been dead if not for that moment of his attention is enough to make him feel sick, when he thinks about it.
He is not sure, though, if he has ever seen anyone more unsure of his place than Jos. It is almost unbelievable, how certain the boy is that any moment, Niko or Falcone or anybody else will come in and take him away—that he has no say in anything that happens to him, that he cannot choose where he stands, and so it is pointless to even try.
He breathes carefully through his anger, and he trains long hours when he is not teaching Jos Ki’hade. He hopes that his mother is right, that if Jos can master this thing, he will be aware of his own accomplishment. That he will understand that his actions have weight, that he can make choices and that the choices will mean something. And that someday he will choose his own place, as Niko has chosen his.