Helis made it out of her hazmat gear, through the showers, back into civvies and almost to her office without talking to anyone, but of course Isla found her at the top of the last flight of stairs.
“How’d it go?” Isla asked.
Helis was, as ever, annoyed to have to look up so far to make eye contact. “Don’t worry, I got your frilly blue weed things, they’re in quarantine.”
“I meant for you.” Isla was doing her best to look concerned rather than nosey, but the veneer was thin. “Your first time since Daoud, and all that.”
“It was fine, and all that.” Helis managed to slide past Isla, who didn’t follow her. Small mercies.
Safe in her office, she burst into tears.
*****
The mission had started all right — this planet was as beautiful as always, all reds and purples. Daoud’s replacement seemed obedient enough — stepping where instructed, doing nothing stupid. But Helis had been unable to lose the shaking from her hands. The boy had had to collect most of the samples.
Helis put three digestives on a plate and half-arsed her mission report. The boy had been obliging, the samples had been collected, nobody had had a sudden reaction to a mysterious pile of goo and died before Helis could get the epipen into his thigh, yadda yadda yadda.
She paused for a long time looking at the free-text field for any other comments.
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“Daoud’s ashes are only a 17th of the way between here and home,” she wrote. “Here I still am, clipping weeds for you lot to study because you’re scared to get your hands dirty, and given what happened to Daoud, I can’t even blame you for your fear.”
It wasn’t like anyone ever read the reports.
Isla walked in without knocking. She was carrying a scent bottle.
“I meant to say,” she said, “before you rushed off, although I certainly don’t know what the hurry was: I made you something. Oh, you have biscuits!”
*****
Fifteen years passed. Helis’s hands shook continuously now. No more field work: instead, she trained the poor buggers who went out. This was worse, not because she missed the action but because there had been only five fatalities since Daoud and, as all the kids she was training knew that she had loved him, they did not take her caution seriously.
“One death every two years,” Dile said. He was simultaneously one of her brightest students and one of the most annoying. “One every two years is odds I can look in the eye.”
“I don’t want you to look them in the eye,” Helis said. “I want you to vanquish them before they see you coming.”
Dile tapped his stylus against his knee, drummer’s fidget. “Do you train us in ways you weren’t trained yourself?”
“Some things have changed, yes.”
“Would any of those things have stopped your partner dying?”
Helis couldn’t make herself reply.
“Well then,” Dile said.
Helis’s face must have done something because Dile added, “I’m not being facetious here. I’ll use common sense — we all will. But this hyper-vigilance you’re demanding, I’m not doing it.”
“Oh, do what you like,” Helis said, “and I’ll pray your ashes don’t have to be sent home.”
Not her most professional moment. When she got back to her apartment she took out the bottle Isla had synthesized for her, years ago — the smell of Daoud’s sweat. Helis drenched her pillow in it, and then she screamed into the pillow. First time in years.
It wasn’t even mourning. She missed Daoud still, yes. But this was a different grief, a pre-grief, for Dile and whoever might need a bottle of the smell of him to get by if he wasn’t careful.
*****
Dile died three years later. He hadn’t even been on a mission, which was the thing that made Helis so angry. He’d keeled over in the gym, and when they’d cut him open to find out why, they’d lifted out a tumour as big as two grapefruits. Not carelessness. Nothing Helis could have prevented by being a better teacher.
There was a station funeral before his ashes were sent home. Helis was planning to go, but she had a cold and didn’t want to infect anyone. She watched the stream from her bed. How much snot for Dile, and how much just from her body?
