RESEUNE ONE left the runway and Jane clenched her hands on the leather arms of the seat. And did not look out the window. She did not want to see Reseune dwindle away. She bit her lips and shut her eyes and felt the leakage down her face while the gentle acceleration pressed her into the seat.
She turned her face toward Ollie when they reached cruising altitude. "Ollie, get me a drink. A double."
"Yes, sera," Ollie said, and unbelted and went to see to it.
Phaedra, sitting in front of them, had turned her chair around to face her across the little table. "Can I do something for you, sera?"
God, she needs to, doesn't she? Phaedra's scared. "I want you to make out a shopping list. Things you think we'll need on-ship. You'll have to place some orders when we make station. There's an orientation booklet in the outside pocket. It'll review you on procedures."
"Yes, sera."
That put a patch on Phaedra's problems. Ollie was walking wounded. He had asked her for tape. He—had asked her for tape, azi to Supervisor; and she had refused him.
"Ollie," she had said. "You're too much a CIT. I need you to be. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes," he had said. And held up better than she had.
"One for yourself too," she yelled at him, over the engine noise; and he looked around and nodded understanding. "And Phaedra!"
Peggy came up to Ollie's side at the bar, wobbled as the plane hit a little chop and then ducked down and took out a pair of glasses.
For Julia. Back in the back. Julia and Gloria.
"You've mined my life!" Julia had screamed at her in the terminal. Right in front of Denys, the azi, and the Family that had come to see them off. While poor Gloria stood there with her chin quivering and her eyes running over. Not a bad kid. A kid who had had too much of most things, too little of what mattered, and who stared at the grandmother she had hardly ever seen and probably looked for signs of ultimate evil about her person. Gloria had no idea in the world what she was going to. No idea in the world what ship discipline meant, or the closed steel world of a working station.
"Hello, Gloria," she had said, nerving herself, trying not—God, not ever—to compare the kid against Ari—against Ari, who might hear a plane take off and might look up and realize it was RESEUNE ONE. Nothing more than that.
Gloria had run over to her mother. Who was about to hyperventilate. Who managed, atop it all, to impart a sense of the ridiculous to their departure. It was probably just as well they were traveling with Reseune Security. There was no trusting Julia not to bolt and run in Novgorod.
Irrationally afraid of the shuttle, the void, the jumps, all the things that involved a physics Julia had never troubled herself to learn and now decided she could not personally rely on.
Too bad, kid. I wish I could make a bubble for you where things work the way you want. I'm sorry it all overwhelms you.
It did from the moment you were born. Sorry, daughter. I'm really sorry about that.
Sorry you're going with me.
Ollie brought back the drinks. He was pale, but he was doing quite well, considering. She managed to smile at him when he handed her hers, and he looked at her again when he sat down with his own drink in hand.
She had taken half of hers down without noticing it. "I'll be all right," she said, and lifted the glass. "Skoal, Ollie. Back where I came from. Going home, finally."
And on her second double: "It feels like I was twenty again, Ollie, like nothing of Reseune ever happened."
Or she had gotten that pan of her numb for a while.