Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  I’m pretty sure I can do that. Mai Lu makes sure to drill emergency procedures into the junior crew every chance she gets. It’s just that I might have been doing something else when she did it last, and I might not have been paying attention to which buttons she pressed the time before that, or what she meant when she said we had to be really careful not to soak the gel.

  I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the oxygen levels, but... Yeah, there’s that but again.

  Buts aren’t going to get my mum out of stasis. I flex my fingers over the dome, warming them up like an Old Terra pianist, and touch the golden circle in the middle. Holos spring up around my hand: heart rate and blood oxygen and, I don’t know, stuff that tells me Mum’s alive and breathing in the blue-green goo. And there, at eye level, is the button that says “revive”. My heart’s beating hard, competing with the creepy-crawlies and my lungs for space in my chest. I flex my fingers again, trying to chase the nerves out. It doesn’t work.

  I press the button.

  Nothing.

  I press it again.

  Still nothing.

  There should be graphs and yellow words popping up in my face. I remember that much because Mai Lu screeched at me when she realised I wasn’t paying attention. She’d used that particularly shrill tone that I swear can cut through bulkheads, and even now the memory of it makes my ears ache.

  There aren’t any graphs though, or Mai Lu to stand at my shoulder and yell in my ear. There’s just the “Revive” button and Mum floating in the stasis pod, a thick sheet of plasglas and fifty litres of goo between me and her.

  I hit the button, my fist driving right through the holo to smack against the pod. Apparently creepy-crawlies feed on frustration, or else there’s something else growing my chest, shoving a lump up my throat.

  The pod remains stubbornly closed.

  ‘Citiali, why’s it not working?’

  Her face materialises under my fist. ‘All systems are functioning normally.’

  ‘No they’re not. I can’t wake Mum.’

  There’s a thread of desperation in my voice. It’s born from the tightness in my chest, the mess of anxiety, frustration and the creepy-crawlies.

  ‘Open it!’

  ‘I cannot.’

  I bang my fist on the pod. Through the holos and goo, Mum is peaceful. And dead, a small part of me says but I push it away. She’s not dead, the monitors keeping track of her heart say so and I can sense her in my head, still gripped in the nightmare.

  ‘Dad.’ He bursts into my head like a revelation. That makes it sound like I forgot I have two parents, but I didn’t. I’d been so fixated on Mum...

  There are only four pods in the stasis unit, and Dad is right next to Mum. His pod is misted over with condensation as well, and I wipe it away to make sure he’s in there. Dad’s a tall man, with my pale gold skin and black hair, and he’s hard to miss even amongst the gel. Like Mum, he appears serene, and maybe a little dead, but no, I can sense him too. Peaceful where Mum’s freaking out in her nightmare.

  Relief floods through me and I rest my head on the pod for a second, before I touch the revive button. His vitals spread over the plasglas, and... and...

  No, that can’t be right. It can’t be.

  The bouncing line that tracks Dad’s heart is flat, like flatter than the decking. Next to it, the map of his brain is dark, no bright pops of colour showing his dreaming mind. Nothing.

  ‘That’s not possible.’ My voice echoes in the stasis unit. I turn, seeking Citlali. She’s back to hovering behind me, pale blue and transparent enough to glimpse the bulkhead through her. ‘My dad’s not dead.’

  Citlali’s expression turns confused for a second. ‘Jiro Darzi died two weeks, three days and seventeen hours ago.’

  ‘But he’s not dead. I can feel him.’

  And there’s that flicker, a nanosecond too long as Citlali processes the concept of being able to feel someone without physically touching them.

  When she finishes flickering, Citlali is wearing a sad, sympathetic expression. It’s one of those slightly wrong expressions, where her eyes are a fraction too large and the corners of her mouth a little too downturned. Most of the time, Citlali is pretty good at simulating emotion, she’s even funny on occasion, but she hasn’t nailed the really big emotions yet, especially the grief and compassion she’s trying to project now.

  ‘I am sorry Kuma, but your parent is d—’

  I interrupt her with a hand in her face. Like, literally in her face. The light particles that make up her form fizz and spit around my wrist.

  ‘Citlali,’ I say. ‘You suck. Now, run a diagnostic.’

  ‘All systems are operating within parameters.’

  Frustration, anger and not a little fear boil out of my chest in a… let’s not call it a scream. The sound echoes in the pod. ‘Dad’s not dead!’

  ‘Jiro Darzi died two weeks—’

  ’Shut up!’

  I’m breathing hard and my vision’s kinda white around the edges, and there’s this buzzing in my ears, drowning out the sound of the AI. It’s like everything in the world is focussing down to the flat line on Dad’s monitor, with its high-pitched whine somehow messing with the AI’s words until all I hear is dead.

  Dead.

  Dead.

  Not even the Dad-coloured whisper at the back of my psyche can drown it out, as if it says it often enough, maybe I’ll believe it. And maybe I will because the AI can’t be wrong. Can it? I mean, it’s the ship.

  Grea. Grea will know what to do.

  There was one more pod to try and open. Grea. My twin sister’s pod is right next to mine. The dome is almost white with condensation. I wipe it away, but there’s still something clouding the plasglas, like the condensation somehow made it inside. I scrub harder, which is about as helpful as you would expect, and scowl at my reflection. Yeah, sometimes I’m not the brightest. Grea would argue that that was all the time, and then I’d send an emote into the nearest critter so strong, it would squeal and run up the nearest object, which was usually Grea’s leg. And then she’d squeal and I’d smile and sometime later that night I’d find something nasty in my bed.

  I hit the plasglas, trying to dislodge whatever it is clouding the inside of the pod.

  A patch of… fug flakes away, leaving a hole big enough to peer through. I put my hand on the plasglas, spreading my fingers and leaning my forehead against it, squinting to see through the twilight inside the pod.

  When I said twin before, I meant identical twin. My sister looks exactly like me, same black hair and gold skin, same dark eyes. Her hair is longer though, bound up in a braid that trails all the way down her back. You might ask how it happens that we’re identical but not... what with me being a boy and Grea a girl. Well, for one, we’re not exactly identical, and two, there are some things biology doesn’t get right.

  I can just make out Grea. Like Mum and Dad, she’s floating in the stasis gel, eyes closed, but where they were peaceful, Grea’s wearing a frown. No, not a frown but a full-on grimace – her face twisted up and teeth bared. She’s curled on her side, knees to her chest, hugging them like she’s trying to make herself really, really small.

  Grea? I reach for her psionically, stretching through the goo with my mind, trying to connect with the part of my sister that’s an empath like me. I stretch and stretch and stretch, further than I should have to, further even than when I searched the ship. Just like I did then, I sense nothing. My sister is right there in front of me, I shouldn’t even have to reach for her.

  She’s my twin, my identical twin. We’re not merely siblings, we’re a whole, a living, functioning, interconnecting crazy-making whole. Even in stasis/sleep slipping into Grea’s brain should be like talking to myself. It’s not even like she’s trying to shut me out, she’s just not there.

  A thought pops into my brain, not even fully formed, just a floating mass of emotion, like instinct and my heart stops in my chest.

  Old Terra
, what if she’s dead?

  Everything in me stops.

  There’s a big dark hole in the pit of my chest and I’m staring down its gullet.

  What if she’s dead?

  No. No, she’s not dead. She can’t be dead. I saw her move, didn’t I? Twitch her little finger?

  Easier than breathing. Except breathing’s not so easy at the moment. The creepy-crawlies are making a renewed assault on my chest and there’s not enough oxygen in my lungs because my vision’s going kinda dotty and there’s that wheezing sound again as I try to draw in air.

  The revive button is under my fingertips and Grea’s vitals are spreading across the top, the lines and monitors moving like they should. Her heart jumping up and down in a steady rhythm, the neural monitor flashing with greens and reds. I frown at the picture of her brain. Is there meant to be that much red staining her cortex? The map makes it appear like there’s a storm going on in my twin’s head, popping and flashing with bursts of yellow and streaks of white.

  A couple more thumps on the plasglas and more of the fug drops away, making a bigger window. I press my forehead to the pod once more, hands pressed flat either side of my head. It won’t help me break through the... whatever the blank space is between us, but still…

  Whatever it is, Grea’s not dead. I won’t let her be dead. I have to tell my heart that, and maybe my lungs, because right now it feels like the first is pounding the other flat against my ribs, squishing all the air out of my body.

  It’s so quiet in my head. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before, maybe because I was too busy yelling at the AI. But now… now that quiet place is bringing back the pit in my chest and sucking all the warmth out of my bones. All I can see, all I can hear, is that silence and the endless black swallowing everything. Mum. Dad. Grea. The ship. Onah. The ship. The oxygen—

  ‘Kuma?’ Citlali is a blue glow in the corner of my vision. ‘Remember to breathe, Kuma. In. Out.’

  The memory of Citlali scrunching up her nose as she pretended to breathe flashes in front of my eyes, enough of a distraction to halt the spiral of panic.

  And that’s when I notice the fug clogging up Grea’s pod, really notice it. One of the pieces I thumped loose is floating in front of my nose and it looks strange, like a piece of grey-green carpet trailing strands behind it. The strands wave and wriggle in the stasis gel, reaching out to similar strands on the fug still attached to the plasglas. They connect and the mired one kind of pulls the other back into place.

  I jerk back. Stare at the door a second as the fug slides back over the clear patches. I turn to the Citlali. Point. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What is what?’

  I stick my finger to the pod. ‘That. The moss or mould or whatever it is crawling all over Grea’s pod.’

  Citlali follows my pointing, not because the avatar needs to see but because that’s how she’s been programmed, to appear as human as possible. I don’t know why anyone really thought that was necessary, since a third of the crew aren’t human and no one bothered to program Citlali to make the qwans or rucnarts more at home. I guess they figured there wasn’t much point, or maybe there wasn’t enough time. The Citlali was one of the first deep-space ships, designed before the war broke out. Jim Engineer likes to remind everyone he was there when they eventually started construction, as the war was winding down. And right about then, everyone was still struggling to think of the “kin” as more than really smart animals.

  I mean, I guess that’s a hazard when two of the species that almost wiped you out look like really big Old Terran birds and cats, but you’d have to be an idiot not to see the intelligence in their eyes. The war sorted that.

  ‘Grea Darzi’s stasis unit is functioning within parameters.’

  ‘There’s fug in my sister’s unit. That’s not normal.’

  ‘My sensors do not indicate any “fug” in the pod.’

  ‘But it’s right there!’ I poke the plasglas, shaking another clump of mould loose.

  ‘My sensors do not—‘

  ‘Your sensors are fucked. There is fug in my sister’s pod and you can’t see it!’ I yell the last in Citlali’s face. It feels good, even if it doesn’t actually mean much. Citlali doesn’t care, can’t care no matter how well she’s been programmed to simulate emotion. Maybe if the spit flying from my mouth had splattered in her core instead of the deck, she might do more than blink at me. But the core isn’t here. No one is here except me.

  A fuzzy blue critter scoots across the deck plating, heading for the spit glistening on floor. Okay, so no one is here except me and the critters and if you’re including them you may as well include Citlali, as useless as she is right now.

  And right now, I’m not including them. The brief moment of satisfaction that came with swearing at the avatar is fading, draining out of my toes as the cold, hard grate of the decking digs into my feet. It sucks the warmth out of me, and I shiver, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is invading my head. Silence. So much silence. Not the kind that assaults your ears, but the kind that slithers up your spine and knocks on your skull.

  The kind that tells you you’re all alone.

  That I’m all alone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Screw being alone.

  That was the thought that got me moving again and on the hunt for someone who could actually help. There was something wrong with the AI, that much was as obvious as gravity, and someone needed to fix her. I was about as good with fixing shit as I was at operating the stasis pods. Of course, getting out of stasis had been the easy part.

  Thanks, Onah. Not.

  The stasis unit is a six-metre-long rectangle that houses my family’s pods. Four pods side-by-side, a curving bulkhead creating the ceiling and the opposite wall. One end is a door and the other is another bulkhead. It’s got the only decoration in the otherwise bland unit with its not-quite-white walls. Big red letters are painted on it, each one the length of my forearm. “Emergency supplies”, it reads.

  It’s not quite the last thing I saw before Mum sealed me in my pod, but it’s not far off. I try not to think about why it’s there, or why we might need the supplies behind it. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I hadn’t been born in space where everything outside the Citlali’s bulkheads would kill me.

  The other end of the unit is a thick, round door. And it won’t bloody open.

  ‘Come on, Citlali, let me out!’

  ‘The door is open Kuma.’

  ‘It. Is. Not!’ I spit each word out as I push against the steelcrete. There’s sweat trickling down my spine. I’ve been at this for a while now, since right after I finished screaming at the avatar. Not my proudest moment. I give the door one final shove, gripping the latch in both hands and straining with every muscle in my body. Which really isn’t saying that much. Mum’s always at me to spend more time with the other kids in the gym, but... Ugh. Scrawny is as scrawny does I’d say, right before I remind her that an exosuit doesn’t care if my muscles bulge like Mac’s or not. Then Dad’ll say something about not always having an exosuit and Grea...

  The tightness floods back to my chest, rushing from the silence in my head. I’ve never been unable to sense anybody before and it’s so... empty. So still.

  I bang my forehead against the door. Not now. Freak out later, get the door open.

  Get the door open.

  That light suddenly pouring out of my ears? That’s the glow going off in my head.

  ‘Shit.’ Sometimes I’m an idiot. Grea will argue that I’m always an idiot, but she’s biased. I push my mind away from thoughts of my sister. We’re not thinking about her right now, we’re thinking about getting out of the stasis unit so I can track down Jim Engineer and tell him his precious AI is shit-for-brains fucked.

  It’s right after Mae Lu finishes drilling emergency revival procedures into our heads, that Jim doubles down on the boredom with a “refresher” course on stasis units. I never really get past the bit where he drones on
about how each unit is a self-sustaining lifeboat and how to... blah, blah, blah. That’s the point where I tend to sneak off. But Dad caught me one day and well, he made Mae Lu seem nice. Which is why now, I remember there’s an emergency door release.

  I’m on my knees on the deck, twisting the little button that should... A pop of air and then a section of the door comes out in my hands. It’s not an actual section of the door, just a plate. Behind it, nestled in a cut-out the size of my head, is a square handle. The emergency release. There’s writing here too. “Twist and pull.”

  I grip it with both hands, set my feet and twist. The handle doesn’t budge.

  A thought sneaks into the back of my mind that maybe I should have listened to Mum about the gym, but I ignore it in favour of setting my feet and twisting harder. I throw everything I have into it, from my toes to my teeth. In fact, I reckon if I tighten my jaw any harder my teeth are going to shatter and then—

  There’s a groan and then I’m flying forward, and it’s not the jaw clenching that’s going to pulverise my teeth, it’s the decking. My nose smacks into the floor, my chin and forehead not far behind. I’m going to have grate marks imprinted on my face for the rest of eternity, but at least the door’s open, or partly open.

  ‘Kuma, are you well?’

  I really wish the AI would stop asking that. ‘No,’ I mutter and pick myself up. That’s when I notice the blood on my lip and the droplets on the floor. I run my tongue over my teeth to check they’re still there. Everything seems fine except for the numbness in my lip. Out the corner of my eye I notice critters rolling toward me, come to clean up yet more biological muck. I’ve never really seen them this diligent before, swarming on every little speck of dirt like they don’t have anything else to do. Maybe they don’t. The crew’s not exactly meant to be awake yet.

  Guess that makes me special.

  The handle’s popped out of its hollow. Once again, I wrap my hands around it, but instead of twisting this time I pull. The pull comes easier, or maybe it was as hard as the twist but I was expecting it? I don’t know and I don’t really care, the only thing that’s important is that the stasis door is open. It rolls aside, opening up onto darkness.