A Solid Core of Alpha by Amy Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

throat. “Yeah,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from the night before, from shame, from fear. “I know.”
    “Anderson,” Alpha said warningly, “you know you made me do that.”
    Anderson nodded, not really in agreement but more in self-defense. If he nodded, Alpha would let him out of the room, and he could go check on the warning alarm that was echoing through the ship.
    “Let me come with you,” Alpha demanded, and Anderson shook his head.
    “No. Kate and Bobby are better at navigation and steering. You need to stay here.”
    Anderson zipped up his coveralls—one of the last few pairs that hadn’t been cannibalized for fiber or used for substance for the synthesizer—and hurried out of his room, wondering if Alpha would put to rights the knocked-over lamps and furniture or if all of it would be in a pile in the center of the room when he got back. He didn’t know, sometimes, which tack Alpha would take in his increasingly desperate attempts to manipulate Anderson’s behavior.
    God, his body ached. It felt as though all of him had taken a beating, and not just his throat and his rectum. He made his way through the house and opened the front door to the bridge console, a few feet away. He could hardly look Kate and Bobby in the eyes as he took his place up in the front of the shuttle.
    “Oh God,” Kate hissed as he sat down, and he looked away.
    “Kate, I don’t want to talk about it,” he murmured, checking readings. Hyperspace had ended the year before, leaving them with coordinates to an occupied space station and a whole lot of space debris to pilot through. Kate had been studying her piloting and navigation while Anderson and Bobby had still been in school, a program they’d had to cancel not long after Alpha had joined them. That had been a good time, actually—they’d been optimistic that they could find a closer space station and pilot their way to it. When Anderson realized that they’d taxed their fuel reserves too much to bring the ship out of hyperspace, change directions, and then make the jump again, the good time had ended.
    They’d progressed on their original heading, the one programmed into the ship by people long dead, and continued the awful balancing act of life versus bare survival—a balancing act that had lasted nearly five years. When they’d gotten the warning that hyperspace only had a few months to go, Kate had given Bobby and Anderson a crash course in steering and navigation, and they’d been learning by doing ever since.
    It had been easier in that first year, before they’d been forced to cancel programs and make hard decisions. In the first year, it had been like a real relationship—Alpha hadn’t been as controlling, and Anderson’s free time had still been his own.
    Now, things were not so easy.
    Bobby tugged at the neck of Anderson’s regulation orange and gray jumpsuit, and it ripped a little, even as Anderson recoiled with a shouted, “Hey! Give me some space here!”
    “Space?” Bobby snapped. “Space? That’s all Alpha’s been making us give you. How long since we had a movie night, Anderson? Read a book, threw a disc, went to the park together?”
    “The school program,” Anderson mumbled. “We canceled it, and he felt… you know… superfluous.” That had actually been a long time ago—and it hadn’t been Alpha’s trigger by a long shot—but it was easier to say.
    “ Look at yourself! ” Bobby shouted, and Anderson cringed.
    “Shhh… Bobby! If you’re not careful, he’ll come up front!” Mostly, Alpha was kept in the house or in the backyard by Anderson’s directive—it was the one thing he had stood absolutely firm on, and the other holograms had backed him up. But there was nothing physical keeping Alpha from interfering with engineering or programming, and Anderson wondered daily if he should change that.
    Bobby shook his head, carefully tracing the bruises at Anderson’s throat. Six years ago, the touch would have made