“Me? Like… what do you mean?”
“She came asking for you, Serpint. Why? Did you ever ask her?”
“No. I don’t even think I knew about that. ALCOR gave her to me and…” He shrugs. “I liked her. She’s fucking dangerous, and terrifying, and so whatever, right? Got myself a new, cool ship.”
“There’s more to this story,” I say. “Much more. And we don’t have any clue where things are going now. But before we go back I have one more thing to tell you.”
“OK,” Serpint says.
“And it’s gonna be hard to hear, so… be prepared.”
“I can take it,” he smiles.
I nod at him. “I know you can.”
“So shoot. Tell me.”
“Draden…”
“What about Draden?”
“You remember that time you two were fucking around on the bot lifts in the open space and he fell?”
“Yeah,” Serpint says, furrowing his brow. “ALCOR caught him. He was fine after he came out of the medical pod.”
I shake my head. “No, ALCOR missed.”
“ALCOR doesn’t miss,” Serpint says. “He’s omnipresent. And even back then we had hundreds of safety servos.”
“No, he doesn’t miss,” I agree. “But he did that day.”
“But Draden was fine. He went into medical and came out fine. I was there.”
“You were there when he came out, yeah. But you were on level one hundred and seventy-three when he fell. I saw it, Serpint. I was on level twenty-six. I saw Draden fall and I looked down and there was a safety servo under him, but it didn’t catch him right. He slammed into it hard. Draden died that day.”
“No,” Serpint says. “Draden died back on Cygnus Station when I stole Corla.”
“No, he didn’t. He died when he was thirteen and that servo did it on purpose.”
“What?”
“ALCOR did it on purpose, Serpint. He let him fall onto the lift and then he popped up next to me trying to explain.”
“Explain what?”
“Why Draden needed to go into a special cryopod. He killed him that day so he could use it as an excuse to get my permission to level Draden up.”
Serpint just looks at me. Confused. So I decide to just spell it out.
“Draden’s alive, Serpint. I know this because after what ALCOR did to him, he can’t die.”
Serpint is silent for several long minutes.
Then he says, “But… I left him behind. I left him with—”
“That’s the hard part, Serp. You left him with someone I know.”
“Who?”
“My son.”