Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t really enjoyed the meal, that Yahvi was worrying her, or that the poor communication session with Keanu reminded her of the burdens of being female, Rachel decided she’d had enough.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Since you two are talking, tell him that I’m going to see Sanjay, then Zeds.”

“But Kaushal—”

She was walking away before Taj could finish reminding her that Wing Commander Kaushal didn’t want her “bothering” the doctors or patient.

There must have been something in her manner—Rachel knew that in certain situations she had a lean-forward, purposeful stride that tended to enhance her power—but the moment she arrived at the ICU and announced that she was here to see Sanjay Bhat, Wing Commander Kaushal emerged from around a corner. He closed a cell phone and said, “Give me one moment to summon the surgeon.”

He walked away, leaving Rachel wondering what had changed his mind about allowing her access to Sanjay. She also wondered whom he had been talking to. And, while she waited, where was Pav?

Kaushal returned with not one but three doctors, all of them in white lab coats. “They will tell you everything they can,” Kaushal said. The five of them slipped into the team conference room.

No introductions were offered and, frankly, Rachel didn’t care. Her eye immediately went to the X-rays on the light board.

The obvious senior doctor, a tall, stooped Hindi with glasses and wavy gray hair, spoke. “The patient was unconscious upon arrival. Our initial diagnosis showed that his left frontal cranium had been struck by a heavy object.

“Fortunately, the object was largely flat—”

“Except for a few protruding switches,” the second doctor said. He was much younger and seemed to Rachel to be impatient.

“The flat surface resulted in a blunt-force injury that was spread over a considerable area. It was as if he had fallen onto a floor or street from a height of perhaps two meters.

“There was some lateralization; his left pupil was blown. The bones were fractured across the entire area.”

“Would I be right,” Rachel said, “in thinking that the front and left part of his head got mashed in?”

“Crudely.” The doctor seemed testy; obviously he was not used to interruptions. “But, yes, the skull was deformed. There was considerable brain swelling, which we alleviated by drilling these holes.” His pointer glided across three tiny dark spots.

“After twenty-four hours, the swelling has subsided, though the patient’s head still shows a great degree of trauma—“

Just listening to the cold, grim precision of the diagnosis made Rachel want to weep. Given what she had seen in the cockpit, she had suspected that Sanjay’s injury would be severe, but here was proof.

The senior surgeon continued, but Rachel could no longer understand his words. She finally blurted, “I want to see him.”

They took her around the corner to a hospital room, and there lay poor Sanjay, the left half of his head covered in thick bandages, the usual monitors recording a steady but slow heartbeat.

Rachel reached for his hand. To her dismay, it was cold and limp, like that of a corpse. Sanjay had been part of Jaidev’s group, spending his days constantly busy improving life in the habitat. Did he have a lover? He was old enough to have memories of Earth . . . were there family members or friends he wanted to see here? She remembered a brother—then cursed herself for her lack of knowledge. Some leader she was turning out to be! She finally asked, “What is the prognosis?”

“All we can say is that he’s stable.”

Stable! What a horrible state!

Rachel let go of Sanjay’s hand and walked out.

As a leader, as a wife, and especially as a mother, Rachel had developed several operating rules.

Rule number one: Face the bad news because it doesn’t get better with time.

She had accomplished that with the visit to Sanjay.

Now it was time to deal with Zeds. Focusing on the challenges of making the Sentry happy, or finding a way to give him useful work, kept her from wondering where Pav had gone and why he was leaving this to her. There was no one she could ask—as she slipped down the stairs from the second-floor ICU to the ground floor and its high-altitude chamber, she passed no one at all.

Once she was on the ground floor, she saw only a couple of medical people, and a single guard outside Zeds’s chamber. No Taj, no Tea, no Yahvi or Xavier.

Rachel almost regretted walking away from Kaushal and the surgeons so abruptly.

Of course, she could have diverted to the conference room to retrace her steps and find her missing husband and family members. But that would have forced her to ignore rule number one.

Sure enough, Zeds was chafing at the confinement. “We discussed this, did we not?” she said. She was working through Zeds’s mechanical translator, usually a smooth process, aided by the fact that Rachel knew some Sentry Sign, and Zeds had a lifetime of vocalized English and Hindi.

“Mental preparation is no substitute for the experience.”

“You hate it.” Here she used Sentry Sign.

“I don’t use that term,” her Sentry friend said, in his typically obtuse way. “I would simply prefer to be allowed out of this chamber.”

“You’ll have to wear an environment suit.”

“We discussed this, did we not?” Zeds was also fond of echoing human statements, usually with the exact tone and a pretty fair imitation of one’s voice. This made the Sentry fairly unpopular with most humans.

“And you said you would prefer to minimize those events, due to the discomfort—”

“My current feeling is that I would be more comfortable wrapped in the suit and walking around than unwrapped and confined here.” He was sitting, as Sentries do, in a kind of yoga posture, knees up, his arms wrapped around his body and legs, with zero eye contact. Which was understandable, since even sitting down he was as tall as Rachel.

“I will do what I can,” she said, “as soon as I can.” Then she added, “How are you finding the meals?” Zeds had spent enough time in the human habitat on Keanu to have sampled, and learned to like, certain human foods. His physiology allowed him to receive some nourishment from them, too.

But those foods were largely unique to Keanu; they were now in Bangalore, India, and while Pav had made heroic efforts to identify foods that were similar to those in the Sentry diet, it all seemed to have become seafood chowder. (The Yelahanka and ISRO authorities had insisted on equating “aquatic race” with a diet of shellfish.)

Based on the amount still left in the one bowl Rachel could see, the Indian shellfish remained untouched. No doubt this contributed to Zeds’s testiness.

“I have been subsisting on my emergency rations.”

“I will work on that, too. And promptly.”

Few Sentries, out of the hundreds in their Keanu population, wanted anything to do with humans. But Zeds not only tolerated humans, he sought them out, integrating himself into Rachel’s world to the extent he could. (He had to wear, at minimum, breathing support gear, and often more than that.) Rachel was never sure exactly why.

Zeds was a connate of DSA, herself a connate of Dash, the Sentry who had been part of Rachel’s father’s final “journey” across Keanu twenty years ago. Perhaps there was some genetic disposition to reaching out to “aliens” . . . maybe he was just curious.

For all that Rachel liked Zeds, she had resisted the idea of bringing him on this trip for exactly these reasons; he complicated everything.

But she knew, instinctively, that he would be useful.

And what the hell . . . Adventure belonged to his people. And it was one of Rachel’s other rules . . . when in doubt, be fair.