Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [75]
All this took the edge off the frustration, particularly for Yoshi, who’d come as an intern and who must have been worried that she might not be invited back. The weeks passed, and the general morale recovered and was reasonably high when they returned at last and docked at Sky Harbor.
Yoshi told Kane that she would stay the night with Emily at the Royal Palms in Terminal City, and then spend some time with her family until they were ready to try again. There was no indication, no nonverbal signal, that she was not telling the truth.
Tripley promised to hustle the repairs along. He estimated a relaunch in about a month. Was that satisfactory for Kane?
It was.
Tripley informed him that he would receive a bonus for his performance. Then he left Kane alone in the pilot’s room.
The captain spent a few minutes with the instruments, collected his sketchbook, and left. The imager blinked off.
It was over.
“No matter how many times we run it,” said Solly, “it’s going to keep coming out the same way. Nothing happened.”
The flight home had required forty-one days. They went back and looked again, with no idea what they were hoping to find. When Tripley spoke of Yoshi, he showed a genuine affection for her. And he seemed far too gentle to perpetrate either physical or psychological violence against anyone. His clone-son, thought Kim, was a different order of beast altogether.
They reviewed Kane’s conversations with the other crew members, listening, moving on. Kim watched Emily as the days ran down, thinking how luminous her sister looked, how energetic she was, how driven by the great search. And she was within days of losing her life.
But gradually an inconsistency emerged. She watched the interplay between the captain and Emily, went back to their conversations in the first part of the mission, and compared the earlier with the later. “Do you see it?” she asked Solly.
He leaned forward and squinted at the screen. She’d frozen the images, a few days from the end of the voyage. Kane and Emily had been talking about getting more serious about their physical conditioning programs on the next flight.
“What?” said Solly. “I don’t see anything.”
“What happened to the passion?”
“What passion?”
“Do they sound like lovers to you?”
“They never sounded like lovers to me.”
“Solly, they were hiding it before. Maybe from the others, or from the imager. Maybe from each other. Now it’s just not there.”
“Maybe they had a fight. We can’t really see very much, you know.”
“No, it’s not like that. There’s no tension between them on the return flight. This isn’t the kind of behavior you’d see in the aftermath of a breakup. It’s simply a cordial relationship between congenial colleagues. Not at all the same thing.”
The train was pulling into the outskirts of Eagle Point.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
Kim shut down the program but she stared at the screen until the train stopped moving. “I’m not sure,” she said.
They checked into the Gateway and Kim stayed up most of the night replaying the conversations between Kane and Emily. Outbound, the captain’s depth of passion was quite evident. He loved her sister. She could see it in his eyes, in his tone, in his every gesture. She wondered what the interaction between the two was like when they were away from the recording devices.
But it had changed during the return. Not because, as Solly had suggested, they’d had a falling-out. In that event they’d have been cold in each other’s company. The body language would be exaggerated. She’d see resentment in one or the other. Or both.
But none of that was present. Their mutual regard was precisely what one might expect from good friends. Nothing more, nothing less.
Again and again, she listened to their final conversation, recorded during the approach to Sky Harbor:
“Thanks, Markis.”
“For what?”
“For getting us back. I know we put some pressure