Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  When I said darkness, I hadn’t mean that comforting kinda dark with the soft glow of distant light, or even the slightly more nerve-wracking darkness of a full-on blue out. The light from the stasis unit is far behind me, so far behind I can’t even pick out the soft residual glow of where it might have been.

  This darkness is absolute.

  I might as well be walking down the corridor with my eyes shut, except there’d be more light then, even if it was only imagined.

  And it would really have stuffed up following the map on my palm unit.

  And that would have made finding Jim Engineer’s pod kinda interesting. And not in the good way.

  The Citlali shouldn’t be this dark. There are all sorts of lights on a ship like this. Emergency lights. Lift lights. Display lights. Lights that come on when you have to go for a pee at night. Lights that simply are. Even the walls glow, a faint sheen that’s only perceptible when it’s not there. Hell, the critters glow. But there’s none of that here, nothing save what’s on the screen floating above my palm, and even that is barely enough to make out the deck plating.

  The corridor I’m in winds around in a gentle curve with the spokes of the hallways cutting through it. The curve isn’t something you’d really notice, not where I am, on the outer ring of Stasis deck, where my family’s unit is, but once you wander down one of the spokes, toward the Core, the curve gets really obvious.

  I follow the map down one of those spokes. Jim Engineer should be somewhere in the middle ring, not quite as protected as the inner rings – reserved for the sick folk and really important people – but doing better than the Darzis. Engineers being a little harder to come by than xenobiologists, or at least that’s what Dad says.

  And you know, I get it, I really do. If a meteorite hits the ship, it’s the engineers you don’t want getting blown into space, since they’re the ones who can put the ship back together and all.

  I hope I find Jim soon.

  As much as the darkness bothers me, it’s the cold and silence that feeds the creepy-crawlies nesting behind my ribs. There is nothing in the corridor, not even the hum of the Citlali’s engines or the hush of the air cyclers. Every sound echoes, from my boots on the deck to the rustle of my clothes. Not even the AI is around. I left its avatar in the unit, waiting in the doorway like she was waving me off to war or something. And the cold... my breath frosts on the air and my nose is a leaky block of ice. I keep wiping it on my sleeve but it keeps dripping. I’d be worried the enviro systems weren’t working, except I haven’t suffocated yet and my toes haven’t fallen off, so there’s got to be something on.

  ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ I mutter to myself to keep the silence at bay, but each word booms and echoes. Somehow the echo makes the silence worse, talking back to me in my own voice, but different. Hollow. Lost. Ghostly. Reminding me of Mum and Dad and Grea in their pods. Thinking of them turns my thoughts to the rest of the crew in their pods, floating in stasis gel while they wait for Citlali to cross the cold dark between solar systems.

  They’re all around me, silent as the dead. It’s freaking me out, and if the memory of the biting thing in my mind and the sharp sting of fear in Onah’s wasn’t making a knot at the back of my skull, I’d try reaching out to them. Skim their emotions and invade their privacy merely to reassure myself they’re still alive. I swallow and make a turn at the next ring, trying to keep my eyes off the dark outlines of circular doors, each one another stasis unit. There could be corpses behind those doors. Dead people that I once knew.

  A name pops up on the map and I stop. Macario. Mac.

  My best friend is in there. Should I go in, try to wake him up?

  The temptation is strong, but then I think of Grea and the fug, and then, instead of Grea, I imagine Mac curled up in his pod, and the pit in my chest yawns.

  I scuttle back from the hatch, breathing hard. It takes me awhile to bring my breathing under control and when I do, my heart’s still pounding, almost, but not quite filling the silence. I swallow it back and straighten my shoulders.

  I need to find Jim Engineer.

  His unit is up ahead. Another hundred metres and I’m there, standing in front of the portal, pressing the release. Frankly, I don’t know why I bothered.

  Like in my unit, nothing happens. The controls are as dead as a black dwarf star.

  I’m down on my knees again, pushing at the emergency panel embedded in the door, the deck icy even through my pants.

  The panel pops out with a hiss of air, but only a few millimetres. I scratch at the opening, trying to hook my fingernails between the panel and the door. I manage to grab it, just a little, and pull. It doesn’t budge.

  I’m getting really sick of things not budging.

  I try again, digging my fingernails in as deep as they’ll go, setting my forehead against the steelcrete and bracing my whole body to pull.

  And land on my butt with a hot, ragged pain in my index finger. I stick it in my mouth, tasting blood from a torn fingernail as I inspect the panel.

  ‘Fuck.’

  It hasn’t budged. Not so much as a nanometre.

  Sitting back and kicking the door is like spitting at Citlali’s avatar. It makes me feel better but doesn’t do a whole lot of good. And it doesn’t make me feel better for long. The hollow echo of boot on hatch makes the silence deeper, playing again and again through the empty corridors. Alone, alone, alone it says.

  I kick the door again to show the silence I don’t care.

  I’m sure it believes me as much as the pit in my chest does.

  I need a pry bar to peel the panel away and get at the emergency release. Anything stronger than the keratin in my fingernails will do. I think.

  I hope.

  That’s what I’m telling the panic building in my chest. That’s what I’m telling myself. So that’s what I’m going to do.

  Now if only I knew where to find a pry bar.

  I’m on my feet, jabbing at the raised square of flesh in the bend of my elbow that activates my palm unit. The subdermal’s pretty basic and I probably should have taken the time to grab the biocomp out of my locker, but it’ll do. The screen pops back up above my palm, the map with it. It’s only a partial map, but it’s better than nothing. The Citlali AI may be frizting, where it’s not down altogether, but the subdermal still works a treat. Too bad most of its functions are tied to the ship. The only reason I have the map is because I downloaded it before going to stasis/sleep.

  There’s a maintenance locker on every deck, tools to be used in emergencies, or when you can’t be stuffed trudging up to Engineering. I head for the centre of Stasis. The lockers are scattered all over the place, not always in the same location. There should be one on this ring but the spoke is around the corner and the Core not far from that, and there’s always a locker there.

  I should probably know the layout of the ship better; I’ve spent my entire life aboard Citlali. Like. My. Entire. Life. But everything’s different in the dark, and Stasis has never been one of my favourite places. All the empty pods, all that time spent doing nothing except dreaming and sleeping. Waking up a centimetre taller than when you went to sleep. It’s pretty disturbing, even for me. So I’m following the map, using it half as a guide and half for the light it casts.

  The thump of my boots on the deck continues to echo, but I’m trying to ignore that. Focusing instead on the first time Dad took me planet-side.

  I’d stepped out of the shuttle, watched my boots hit the moon’s surface with a lazy crunch, glanced up and… freaked. It was the sky. No amount of lying on your back, gazing up at the Atrium’s holographic clouds can really prepare you for that. Or, at least, that’s what Mum tried to tell me while Grea laughed her arse off.

  I’ve gone EVA before but staring up at that thin blue sky was different from floating in space. It felt like I was going to fall into it like… rage. What? No, that’s not right. That rage isn’t even mine.

  I stop, rub my eyes and try to sort
the pounding in my head. There’s a wave of emotion in there that’s not mine. It’s strong and has that sharp jangle only the kin have. Somewhere in my daydreaming it crept up on me like the scent of Mum’s cooking, gentle and patient, but now it’s a roar commanding me to listen.

  Someone’s awake. Someone besides me, is awake!

  It’s a rucnart, one of the gigantic feline-like tree-kin, that much is obvious from the roar, but I reach back, opening myself up to it.

  Opening yourself up to a rucnart is like putting your hand in its mouth. Kinda stupid and best not attempted without medical supervision, but I’m desperate.

  Of all of the kin, rucnarts are the most volatile. The qwans are crafty, their minds honed to icy daggers while the tree-kin – the rucnarts – are roiling balls of barely-leashed violence, pushing menace ahead of them like a star pushes light. Even if they weren’t the height of a human and twice as long, with six legs and all the claws and teeth to match, you’d leave them alone.

  But like I said, I’m desperate.

  An empath doesn’t listen so much as feel. Anger. Pain. Fear. The rucnart’s emotions rocket into me one by one, each hitting harder than the last, pounding at the barrier between what is me and what is not.

  My knees tremble. The fear is an ugly yellow wave winding around my heart while the anger wraps around the fear, tries to pry it free, and the pain... The sound that comes out of my throat isn’t me, it’s small and scared and everything the mind behind the command doesn’t want to experience. I try to shove the emotions away, try to block them from my psyche, but the other mind pushes. I push back. It pushes again, harder this time, trying to escape its pain by giving it to me. But it’s not my pain and I won’t take it. I. Won’t.

  Shutting my psyche down takes more effort than it should, leaving me breathing hard in the darkness, the glow from the map scrunched up against my chest. There aren’t many aboard Citlali strong enough to match me, not even among the kin, or so I’ve been told (not even I’m stupid enough to challenge a rucnart or qwan to a psionic weigh-off) but that’d been close. And I can’t help but wonder who it was.

  Slowly, carefully, I reach back along the remnants of the link, trying to find who it belongs to. The anger snaps at me first, sharp glistening teeth trying to sink into my brain. I make myself slippery and ghost-like and sidle past it and the teeth latch on to nothing. The emotions get thicker the closer I am to the source. Like before, they try to wrap me up and pin me in place, but like before I flit past. The pain comes next and then the fear.

  Slipping into a rucnart’s mind is nothing like slipping into Mum’s or sharing thoughts with Onah. Mum is... well, Mum. Warm and comforting, reminding me of home. I’ve never really shared Onah’s mind before. We’ve talked, like in the Dreaming, him picking thoughts out of my head and me picking thoughts out of his, but being in his mind? Where there’s an entire world between human and Jørgen minds, there’s a galaxy between Jørgen and the native Jørans we’re modelled after. We feel different, for one. Human minds, even the mostly-human ones, are... static. They have colour and flavour but they don’t move like Jørgen minds do, don’t snap and hiss.

  Our minds, Jørgen minds, are restless knots of energy, always moving, glowing even on the psionic plane we call the eter. And Jøran minds... well, take the restlessness of a human-Jøran hybrid and slide it all the way up to one trillion.

  Even skimming the rucnart’s mind is like being in a hurricane. She sweeps me up and whirls me around, the force and restlessness of her psyche trying to hook claws under my shields, trying to tear them away and... get in? Underneath all the pain and fear and anger, there was desperation.

  The rucnart, p’Endr, was trapped inside her pod. That realisation pulls me out of her clutches, landing me back in my own body before the next thought goes through my mind. P’Endr was awake, not in some kind of induced hibernation, but awake. Eyes open with goo down her throat and in her lungs, watching as the same fug that’s crawling over my sister’s pod, crawls over hers. I shudder. For a nanosecond, I’d felt the fug clumping in her fur, swimming in the stasis gel, tasted it as it floated in her mouth. I can still taste it on my tongue – cold with the sharp tang of copper but something else as well, something that reminds me of maggots.

  Nausea rides up my throat. I gag.

  I have to get p’Endr out. That decision isn’t quite mine; I can tell by the way it burrows into my brain, like a slither of ice seeking out my heart. As short as my contact was, p’Endr managed to plant a command. I could ignore it, pluck it out and trash it like one of the worms on Ag deck. But it wouldn’t do any good.

  P’Endr didn’t need to give me a command. I’m already racing toward her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The map doesn’t work, but I don’t need it. The stream of pain coming from p’Endr is its own map, pulling me down the corridor like a lodestone in my gut. I sprint past a spoke, following the pain, only to skid to a halt, pinwheeling my arms as my feet keep going while the rest of me is wrenched back the way I’ve come.

  I dive down the spoke, away from the core. Silence is no longer pressing on my ears. The TRANG TRANG TRANG of my boots on the deck are drowning it out, competing for space with the thump thump thump of my heart and p’Endr throwing herself against my shields.

  She’s one of the older rucnarts, with a heavy dose of white around her muzzle and frosting her red and sand-coloured coat. She’s lean too, with the short, almost bobbed tail of the desert clans and the overwhelming strength to match.

  The closer I get, the harder it is to shut her out. She’s pounding against my psyche, clawing at my shields, trying to climb in my head. Panic is riding her hard and she’s throwing it at me with everything she’s got. It’s making the commands she’s trying to force through my shields, sticky – like psionic napalm, trying to burn through my resolve. I push her back, again and again and again, but the distance between us is no longer enough to buffer the power of her psyche and as strong as I am...

  I skid around another corner, hanging onto the bulkhead to help slingshot me around and to keep me upright. Trying to keep p’Endr out is taking everything I have now, leaving nothing behind for my knees to keep me up or my feet to keep pounding the deck. I try to reach out to her, pushing all the calm and assurance that’s left in my bones, giving up what’s left in me to get her out of my head. A minute or a few seconds, that’s all I need. All I need.

  I push the emotions, smooth and blue and deep, trying to smother the raw, jangling fear, the panic and pain that’s taken over p’Endr’s mind. I sense her on the other end, the emote crashing over her psyche like a cooling wave, soothing the raw, bleeding skin of her mind. The fear beats back, bucking under my blanket of calm. I dig deep into my anima, my core, pulling on every last drop of power and pouring it into the emote.

  Empaths can’t form command spheres. Creating psionic packets of instruction that control another’s actions is a skill that belongs to telepaths, those with the ability to hear thoughts. The tree and air-kin use it to program the critters aboard the ship, waking every ten ship years during stasis/sleep to reinforce and update them. It’s a skill rare among Jørgens, and feared by most. But empaths miss out on it all together.

  But what we lack, we more than make up for with other skills. Emoting is a Jørgen skill, no one really understands why us hybrids can do it and the kin can’t. Everyone agrees it’s got something to do with the human part of our genetics, but humans are such psionic nulls that no one can agree on what. Some of the psi researchers back on Jørn thought it had something to do with how our brains are wired, or at least that’s what the records say. No one’s really bothered to keep researching aboard Citlali. There wasn’t much point until Grea and I were born. All the Jørgens that signed onto the crew were telepaths to one degree or another, and after... Well, the whole emoting thing? I’m not supposed to be doing it.

  You see, where command spheres are scary, most telepaths can defend against them, plus the qwans wou
ld let the rucnarts eat us if we, you know, broke the “no command sphere” rule. You can’t defend against emoting though. Not unless you have a little bit of empath in your DNA.

  Even a psionic null can tell when a telepath is messing with their minds, there’s this kinda push, a perception of something alien in your skull, something that doesn’t belong. You may not perceive it right away, but you tend to notice it when the command sphere unfurls and you start doing shit you had no intention of doing. But an empath, we kinda ride in on the air cruising into your lungs and set up shop in your limbic system, whispering in your ear and tweaking your heart strings. There’s nothing alien about a good emote, and if we do it right, you’ll never even know we were there.

  You pick a fight with your mum? That’s all you, or rather the emotional reaction I set off in your amygdala.

  And that’s why I’m not supposed to do it, at least not anymore. No one really worried about it when I was a kid because my emotes were so obvious, but now... Let’s just say I’m good at what I do. Not even Grea can out-emote me.

  I’ve never tried to emote a rucnart though. It’s not so much sliding in on a breath of air, but grinding over an asteroid with my tongue, all rough edges and colours that don’t make sense. And while I emote, I’m dodging the claws and teeth trying to rip me apart and take over my mind. A little part of me, the only part not occupied with keeping p’Endr off my psionic back, tells me it could be worse, I could be trying keep Onah out my head. The tree-kin may be able to rip my chest open and eat my heart in ten seconds flat, but the air-kin are the true psionic powerhouses aboard Citlali. Dad says that only the swatai, the water-kin, are stronger, which is why there aren’t any on board. That, and we don’t have enough water for them. He seemed really glad about that.