Of course he was alone. He’d been alone since they did the thing to his head, or maybe even before that.
“You don’t need to be soft with me. I know I’m f****d up. Tell it to me straight. I’m no good for any kind of job, except to be a kitchen hand, as long as you keep me away from the knives.”
With a soft—annoyed?—sniff, she turned on one of the wallscreens and navigated through menus until the screen displayed a series of pretty images of objects in space, which she flicked through one after the other. There were about twenty pictures that seemed randomly thrown together—moons, pitted surfaces, sharp-edged segments of a planet with rings: Saturn, he remembered; cryovolcanoes spewing ice dust into space: on Enceladus—he remembered that, too. There were nebulae, multiple-star systems, gra
