Surit returned to his cabin much later, after a restless few hours overseeing the code patch. The shuttle had no extra room, so all personnel kept sleeping quarters on the Note. The lights in his cabin were down, but Tennal wasn’t asleep; instead he was sprawled back on his bed, watching a training module on a light-screen over his head. He looked better than when Surit had last seen him. Surit realized he was watching the pale light flicker off the sharp planes of Tennal’s face with a gaze that lingered too long. He made himself look away.

Tennal waved the screen aside lazily as he saw Surit come in. “Hey, boss.”

“More pilot training?” Surit said. “It’s halfway through night shift.”

“One of the rankers you sicced on me has this way of looking like the world’s going to end tragically if I don’t finish this, and I think the other one might actually kill me if I slack off,” Tennal said. “Also I can’t sleep. Where have you been?”

“I was supervising the maintenance,” Surit said, sitting heavily on his bed. He was almost too tired to start stripping his uniform off, but he did it mechanically. Tennal pulled the training module back up in front of his face. “We’ll finish tomorrow morning.”

“How’s it looking?”

“I think we’re safe to fly,” Surit said. He didn’t say, I don’t know what went wrong, because there was no point unsettling everyone else, but it sat at the back of his throat like a lump. If he didn’t know what had gone wrong, it could go wrong again. He pulled his sleep shirt toward him. “If you don’t want to be aboard the shuttle tomorrow, you can stay here on the mothership. The commander said you should be spending more time in solo study.”

“Fuck that,” Tennal said cheerfully. “You don’t get rid of me that easily. Want the ops room gossip from when you were at dinner?”

“I thought I asked you to go to Medical,” Surit said, his voice muffled in the fabric over his head.

“I went to Medical,” Tennal said. “Then I went back to the shuttle to help because I’m a model soldier and deserve a medal. Well, actually I hung around and watched. Half the unit blames the maintenance crew for screwing up, but the rest of them think their last mothership fucked up and gave them a dodgy patch.”

It was still completely new to Surit, this experience of having an ally to feed him information, rather than having to run a unit on orders and guesswork. “I’ve been on that kind of ship,” Surit said. It wasn’t impossible.