Temperance is happy to share what she knows about spacetime magic. She wants a very streamlined and efficient portal-effect. The energy they have to work with is impressive, but not infinite and not much when you're working on interplanetary scales. At any rate, a second set of eyes is more than welcomed.

Lord spends most of his time in his lab, making preparations for the trip. The planet was picked because it orbits a distant star, and while it is halfway habitable they can't work on the assumption of regular trips. So he is doing bioengineering to answer all their needs at their new home. There are some shipments to and from the surface with the relevant materials.

And since Lord is so busy, they have some people assigned to interface with the Captain on his behalf, so they work together to keep the harmony inside the cramped little station.

Keeping the harmony is really difficult. Made harder when some people try to leave the station for a pointless rescue mission.

Henry was already pretty irritable lately; now he is on their newly improvised brig.

Sadde goes to visit him.

Henry observes Sadde come in, but doesn't say anything, not even a hello.

He sits in front of Henry, frowning. "We will get him back, you know."

"It is my responsibility to get him back."

"Oh, so you want to be his hero more than you want him back? Then be my guest, I can open the hatch for you and you can see how you fare on your own."

"I don't want other people to risk it. And... I am not sure if anything will work and in that case I don't think anyone else should try."

"Ah, of course," he says, nodding seriously, "so since nothing will work the best thing you can do is kill yourself. Makes sense."

"If it wasn't for me..."

"...yes? Do complete this sentence, please. If it wasn't for you...?"

"Well, for a start, his family would've never been broken apart. He and his mother wouldn't need to live in poverty. And his mother only kicked me out, not him, but he decided to tag along anyway."

"Ah, naturally, so you decided to be born, and you decided for him that the best thing he could do was tag along anyway, because Gabe has no volition and you're the only person here who can make meaningful choices."

"Me deciding or not, doesn't change the fact that me existing affected his life negatively. And I could have left Gabe and he would've gone to his mother."

"Okay, now I would like you to model Gabe in your head and ask that guy whether he would agree with his assessment that you affected his life negatively."

"The problem is that if I try to model Gabe reacting to me murdering a stranger, his reaction would be to help me hide the body and not care at all about the victim."

"The fact that his moral reasoning is lacking is not the question we're addressing, here."

"No, but I can't really trust his answers to things, model or not."

"People don't have a single measure of how good their answers to things are, that's not how it works! Just because he's bad at morality doesn't mean he's bad at, I don't know, cosmography or, more relevantly, knowing what's good for himself. It is furthermore extremely unhealthy that you think you do know that better than he does."

"He loves you. You love him. Your family situation is crappy, fine, so was mine, but sometimes life just sucks and it's no one's fault and there's nothing we can do to prevent it. Your happiness is not any less important than his, and it sounds very much like if you'd just left him you'd both have been miserable so I have no idea how you expect this to have been a superior solution. You certainly couldn't have predicted this little predicament here and blaming yourself for making any decisions that didn't take this possibility into account is unfair and most of all extremely dumb. Now, we have a higher probability of rescuing him and Isra and everyone else if you stop throwing a tantrum and help us, but we're going to go ahead and try to do it regardless of whether you think it's a good idea or not, so your choices are stay here and mope while we go do it, throw your life away in a pointless mission and then we go do it anyway, or be with us when we go. What do you want?"

"I didn't mean to put anyone in danger."

"I know," he sighs. "And I don't blame you. I understand. But you won't help anyone—yourself, us, or Gabe—if you just go on a suicide mission. You can kill yourself after we fail, if you like, but don't just assume we will and give it all up."

Henry hugs his knees and starts crying.