Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  ‘But… it’s here.’

  Lab stares at me.

  ‘How can you not know what it is?’

  ‘Details regarding the object are sealed.’

  ‘But you know it came from Megora.’

  Lab blinks, and suddenly it’s like there’s something floating in the air between us, some secret meaning. It’s probably h’Rawd’s memories still taking up space my head, mixing with the creepiness pulsing off the disc, making me see things or rather, feel things, that aren’t there but… but Lab never blinks. Never.

  I step back, pressing into the bulkhead behind, wishing I could melt right through as I remember the mad expression in Ag’s eyes, and the malice that had hung in the air.

  Deep breaths, Kuma, deep breaths. It’s probably a glitch.

  The AI blinks again. There’s a pause and then she does it again, eyelids moving in a rapid flutter before she stops.

  My heart’s beating hard. Thumping against my ribs, and I’m halfway up the bulkhead at my back, deciding whether or not skidding over the top of the lab benches will get me out of here faster than a simple mad dash to the door.

  Lab is still staring at me, expression as bland as the bulkhead, like she’s waiting for something.

  I stare back, trying not to breathe too loud, in case the sound sets her off.

  Lab floats closer. ‘The records are sealed, Kuma Darzi.’

  What? ‘The records?’

  Lab’s head turns transparent, or more transparent, a barely-there ghost over the shiny, pulsing oval stuck in the bulkhead. ‘Only the captain is authorised to unseal them.’

  I swallow back memories. ‘The captain’s dead.’

  ‘Authority has passed to the XO.’

  The memories are crawling up the back of my throat. I swallow harder. ‘Dead too.’

  ‘The Chief Medical Officer.’

  I shake my head. ‘No.’

  Lab’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s something in her eyes, or maybe it’s that she’s moved closer, her nose almost touching mine, and there’s nowhere to look but into those all-green orbs. ‘All authority rests with the highest ranking, functioning crew member.’

  ‘But I’m the only one…’ Oh.

  Right.

  ‘Lab, unseal the…’ I wave at the oval. ‘The object’s record.’

  Of all the things I expected to unfold in the space before me, it wasn’t the captain. She’s looking out at me, light hair and pale skin, her eyes the same brilliant blue I remembered, but instead of anger making them hard, they’re filled with something else, an emotion that makes them big and liquid. Fear. The captain was afraid.

  ‘Play it.’

  ‘If you’re seeing this, things have gone horribly wrong. The beacon we found in Megora must be destroyed. Do it now. We should have jettisoned it when Onah asked us, but AD’s argument was compelling, and I could not bring myself to let such an important piece of Jørn’s history go. But I fear that AD has done more than study it, and now that he’s missing…’ Her mouth thins, and lines appear in her forehead. Pain? Worry? More than fear, more than uncertainty. The expression makes my stomach curl in on itself and my heart contract in sympathy. ‘I don’t think we’ll find the body.’

  She shakes her head and her expression firms, becomes the stern face I’m used to seeing, before she continues.

  ‘Onah is reporting a new wavelength in the Aer, something neither he nor the other Jørans can pin down.’ She pauses. ‘It’s the beacon. I’m sure AD found a way to amplify its signal, and then hid it. He may have even tampered with the Citlali’s navigation, but I can find no trace of it.

  ‘The qwans always seem so in control, but when Onah came to see me he was scared, shaken in a way I haven’t seen since the war. Whomever that beacon is calling, they terrify the Jørans more than Regan’s final stand.’ She leans close. ‘I don’t want to meet the beings who can do that. Not yet, not ever. Find the beacon and destroy it, before it’s too late.’

  The captain disappears.

  I’m left staring at the shiny, pulsating oval in the bulkhead. At the beacon.

  I guess I found it. Except I hadn’t, not really.

  Lab pops into being, her green head obscuring the beacon.

  I’d been led here.

  ‘You knew where it was all along.’

  Lab doesn’t respond, just blinks at me.

  I peel myself from the bulkhead. I’m pretty sure I’m getting this now. Lab wants to tell me something, but for some reason she can’t come right out and say it. I have to ask.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the captain where AD hid the beacon?’

  Lab blinks.

  It’s like playing twenty questions, but instead of a yes or no, I’m getting eyelids.

  ‘Lab, unseal all records concerning the beacon.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are not authorised.’

  ‘I’m the highest ranking, functional crew member.’

  Lab doesn’t respond.

  ‘Who is authorised?’

  ‘Jori Darzi and Arthur David Tudor.’

  Ooo-kay. Well, that puts a stop to that.

  We stare at each other for a long moment.

  Dude fuzzes against my neck.

  ‘You require a path the Medical.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lab nods, a strange motion for a bodiless head, and then a map springs up before me. ‘You will need tools,’ she says.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Dad likes to say that, I’m not really sure why, or why you’d want to skin a cat. It seems kinda stupid, and messy, and painful for the cat, but maybe Old Terra felines didn’t feel things like that? I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know and I’m getting tired of that, of bouncing around this ship not knowing what I’m doing or where I’m going or if anything I’m doing is worth anything.

  I’m tired. Tired and cold and alone. Tired of holding on to memories and not letting the shit at the back of my brain in. Tired. Tired. Tired.

  Maybe, if this doesn’t work, I’ll go crawl into my pod and sleep through the rest of this. Whatever this is.

  It’s the fullness in Dude’s belly that’s driving me now, giving me the energy to rip the cover off the air duct.

  After dumping the whole beacon thing on me, Lab had pulled a blueprint of Citlali from her databanks. It’d been full of blank spots, like something had eaten it, but the bits we needed were still there. Mostly.

  It was the fuzzy, half-eaten bit that’s worrying me.

  I peer down the shaft. There’s not much to see. The shaft is a pit. No lights, only blackness. Deep, dark, endless and at the end of it… That bit’s fuzzy, fuzzy like the fug-eaten star on the speedway hatch. If I’m lucky, at the end of it is Medical. If I’m not… Well, that’s what the drone’s for.

  I heft the head-sized sphere scrounged from Dad’s lab. Drones don’t need lights. It doesn’t take much to sync it with my palm unit. A few swipes across its control panel, a little bit of spit to connect it to the biocomp and voila. I’m wired for sound, video and a few senses usually reserved for Old Terran superheroes, like heat and x-ray vision.

  I drop the drone down the shoot.

  It plummets.

  I just about plummet in after it.

  Shit. Was it supposed to do that?

  Did I turn it on?

  I open my palm, scrambling for the controls.

  Telemetry spreads over my hand, visuals and heat and electromagnetic readouts. And there. Anti-gravs.

  I hit the button.

  There’s no crash, no shattering plasform and biogel echoing up from the bottom of the shaft.

  My heart slows. The vid above my palm is black, but the telemetry is still flowing, filling the other screens with data I’m not really sure how to read. I mean, I know how to read it, heat is heat after all, either hot or cold, and speed is... well, you get the idea. I don’t know what it’s telling
me about the shaft. But hey, at least the drone isn’t scrap.

  I activate the vid.

  A glow rises from deep in the shaft, and on my palm unit I see...

  ‘Crap.’

  Fug. Lots and lots of fug.

  And now I know why the drone didn’t die.

  The fug’s all over the shoot, thick enough that it’s caught the drone.

  A hit of the thrusters and the drone pops free. No warning lights yet. The fug hasn’t had a chance to eat the plasform.

  I guide the drone upwards. It doesn’t get better. I’m not sure how long the shaft is, but about thirty metres down the fug starts. Which means there’s a fuck-load of distance between it and Med.

  Shit.

  I wasn’t getting down the shaft without help. Lots of help.

  Like the fire and brimstone kind.

  The shaft was too narrow to fit me and the Franken, but... I eye the flamethrower.

  In the end, I don’t bother with finesse or stripping the power out, I point the barrel down the tube, tape the trigger on and let go.

  Probably not my brightest move, but the engineering shit was giving me a headache.

  The explosion rings in my ears.

  I guess that was the end of the Franken.

  I rub my ears clear of the sound and peer down the shaft. A red glow is rising from the blackness, gentle heat against my face and the scent of soot. It’s fading fast, but the smell of carbon on the warm updraft is encouraging. I send the drone down again, holding my breath and letting it out again in a rush when it hovers at the bottom of the shaft. One-hundred and fifty metres of air-duct and not a trace of fug. Unless you counted the ash.

  I’m not.

  Leaving the drone where it is, I check the grav harness wrapped around my waist. It’s a thick white band of plasform and biogel, two bulbous ends on the points of my hips and another over my butt. They glow solid white, signalling full batteries. A separate indicator flashes on the screen over my palm, along with a little warning light telling me the stabiliser is damaged. I’m ignoring it.

  There wasn’t a lot of choice of supplies in Dad’s lab and the stabiliser wasn’t that important anyway, not when all I need is a few minutes of antigravity.

  I pick up Dude, tuck him into the little pocket I’d made over my chest and swing my legs over the side of the shaft. A deep breath, set the delay on the harness’s grav activation to two seconds, and push off the edge.

  Those initial two seconds suck.

  The antigrav kicking in sucks harder.

  One moment the belt is glowing, the next it’s blazing with light and I’m trying to keep hold of my stomach as the belt tried to push what little is left in it, out.

  As I’m winding the bile back down my throat, that stabiliser I wasn’t going to worry about? I should have worried about it.

  Not my brightest idea.

  The grav harness is flashing a frenetic dance of red and the read-out above my palm is doing the same, only it’s also showing how long the shaft is and how far I have to fall.

  Really not a good idea.

  My breath is stuck somewhere between my lungs and my throat, and my heart is beating out a rapid tattoo in time with the warning lights. There’s a thought caught somewhere between my lungs and heart, that if I don’t move, the harness will last longer; that somehow me not moving will make my mass less, take the strain off the power reserves.

  Another part of my brain, the bit that sounds like Grea, tells me I’m an idiot and if I pass out from lack of air, I’ll really be in the shit. It’s got a point, but I’m still holding my breath.

  There’s no lights in the shaft, only the mad red blink of the harness and the equally mad glow of my palm unit. I can’t see the bottom, can only make out the smooth sides and the darker lines where the steelcrete plates fit together. If it weren’t for those lines, I could fool myself into believing I was hanging there, not moving, going neither up nor down. At first the lines move past at a leisurely pace, three breaths between joins, and then two, and then one and now faster. Two lines to a breath, three. Or they would, if I was still breathing instead of imagining myself smooshed against the steelcrete, a Kuma pancake with a dollop of Dude on top.

  The harness blinks faster and now there’s a warning flashing over my palm, and the shadow lines are ripping past and I really wish I’d taken the other harness as my palm unit keeps searching for the bottom—

  The harness squeals. Dies.

  The light dies with it.

  I fall.

  I can’t see anything.

  Am I actually falling?

  Pain lances up my legs. Meets my side, my face.

  There are stars. Not the pinpricks of suns, but bright supernovas, exploding along with the pain in my head. Then, nothing.

  Dude is sitting on my face.

  How long have I been out? With the harness dead, there’s no light. I press the spot by my elbow, groaning as the movement makes my head throb and pain ricochet through my back.

  Open my palm and my biocomp flares to life.

  The light has new pain stabbing at my eyes. I squeeze them shut and try to ignore the throb in my skull. I want to lay here, safe and sound on at the bottom of the shaft, away from fug and death.

  There’s a soft patter down my chest and then a skritch skritch coming from my waist.

  I ignore it. Everything hurts and I’m tired, so tired.

  SKRITCH.

  I open my eyes.

  Another soft patter, this time up my chest and there’s Dude, wicked little claws extended and raised above my face.

  ‘Holy Terra!’

  Adrenalin shoots through my system, chasing the tiredness away and obliterating the headache. I’m on my feet—

  BANG

  Ow.

  My knees hit the deck, one hand reaching out to brace myself while the other rubs the back of my head. The painkilling effect of adrenalin flees before the burst of light in front of my eyes when my head hit the top of the duct.

  I peer upwards.

  The movement sends new spikes of pain through my skull, so I lift my sight enough to see the edge of the duct I’d brained myself on.

  Dude climbs onto the back of my hand, a ball of warmth and fluff, a fuzz. It’s thready, and there are hints of pain in it, staining the golden presence black. It’s enough to remind me of my mission.

  I tuck him in the pouch on my chest and only wince a little as my back sends up a flare of abused muscles, while something in my side adds a fiery spike of protest.

  ‘Okay, Dude. Let’s get you to Medical.’

  I press the spot on my elbow and my palm-unit springs to life. There’s enough light from the screen to spot the drone; still in one piece but dark and rolled up against the side of the duct. A swipe across my screen and for a couple of heartbeats, nothing happens and I wonder if I crushed the drone when I fell, but then it flickers, a rapid pulse that makes my head pound harder, before it solidifies.

  Another couple of swipes, and even if I don’t have a map, at least I can see where I’m going. There are only two directions available, so I pick one and start crawling. It seems to take forever; every shuffle forward sends pain through my nerves. My ribs are on fire, and it feels like there’s jagged bits of plasglas in my knees, grinding against bone. Then there’s the fire running up and down my back. The worst is my head, the way my skull seems too small for my brain. It’s making it hard to think, hard to move and there are moments when I realise I can’t remember what I was thinking the second before, can’t remember how I got here.

  Between two of those moments, I pass through a sharp blue glow that’s strung up across the tunnel. It seems familiar, tickling a memory of another blue light, one that sparked around a big round door protecting something…

  The memory escapes me, and trying to pull it out is making it harder to put one hand in front of the other so I push it aside.

  There’s a tingle as I pass through the light. The air on the other side sme
lls different, cleaner, without the heavy scent of carbon and soot.

  I stop then, just for a bit, to give my eyes a rest and chase away the pounding in my skull.

  It’s Dude’s fuzzing that wakes me, reminds me that I have a job to do. I follow the glow of the drone, and when I remember, I hope against hope that I picked the right direction.

  The top of my head smacks into the drone, and the next thing I know I’m tumbling through a hole in the floor, catching myself on the edge long enough to halt my descent a second. And then I’m tumbling through nothing and...

  I’m standing. Wobbling down a corridor and I’m not quite sure how that happened but I’m not complaining. My feet seem to know where they’re going, or maybe that’s the glow of the drone leading me on.

  My knees don’t hurt anymore. In fact, nothing really hurts. Not my ribs, not my back, not anything. Not even my head. I can’t feel anything, and something deep in my brain suggests that that’s probably bad, but the rest of me is too tired to do anything about it, so I log the thought and keep following the drone.

  I little bit of me wonders where the fug is, and then my legs stop.

  The drone is floating on ahead, and I try to move after it, but even though I can lift my feet, there’s something in the way of my thighs.

  I look down.

  It’s a wide, flat thing, as high as my waist and the length of my body.

  Huh.

  I know what that is. I do. The name’s not coming though.

  There’s a blank bit there, a little reset, and now I’m around the wide flat thing, trying to find the thing I was following...

  The room I’m in is dark, and there are more of those flat things laid out in a circle around a clear space, and in the clear space there’s a glowy thing floating above another glowy thing stuck in the floor and…

  Oh yeah. The drone. I’m following the drone.

  I shuffle forward.

  The drone’s right there, except it’s not moving this time, and that’s not really a bad thing because all this walking is making me tired and…

  …And…

  Huh, that glowy floor thing sure is pretty.

  I wonder what happens if I touch it. I’ve got to make my knees work first. I’m pretty sure they bend…