by Lydia Kang
I’m stubborn that way.
“Fenn.” Hana’s voice sounds as real as if it were whispered in my ear. “I’m on my way. Do you read me?”
“Yes. Transmission is perfect. But as soon as we get into the northeast quadrant—your puppet, I mean—you need to stick to the script. No slipups. No ‘Fennec is the true Master of the Universe, and everything needs to bow to His Greatness.’”
Hana snorts. “Roger that. You can be sure that I will never say that. Ever.” She pauses. “Why did they always say ‘Roger’? Who the hell was Roger?”
I can hear her smile through the mic. And I smile, too.
“I don’t know. No one says that anymore, you know.”
“Ah. But they say ‘Master of the Universe’ in normal conversation?”
“Of course.” I grin.
On the holo monitor in front of me, I see that we’re on the cusp of entering the two quadrants.
“Hana. You’re there. Don’t move. I’ll give you the go ahead when I get the biometrics that Cyclo is responding positively to the puppet, and that’s when you enter.”
“Roger that.”
She’s got to stop it with the Roger this and that. “So remember, I can speak to you, but you mustn’t talk to me. If you absolutely must, make sure to switch your comm direction to me, not the drone. Just focus on Cyclo. Our audio communication for me is one way to you. But you go both ways, so be careful. I have your visual, your audio, and your biometrics, so I’ll know what’s going on.” I take a controlled breath, trying not to sound overwhelmed, which I am.
Here we go.
I drive the Hana puppet forward. In bits and pieces, she’s perfect. Her smoothly moving, weighted shoes have been programmed to imitate Hana’s actual gait. Though the weight isn’t perfectly like hers, lighter by at least sixty pounds, hopefully Cyclo won’t notice. The swishing ponytail leaves a wake of Hana-scented molecules in the air. The gloves also swing to and fro, just as Hana’s hands would have.
The puppet moves forward to an entirely different quadrant, where Hana’s room is, far from where I am. The color of the dark alpha ring is already lightening from a navy blue, drastically changing to white. What looks like beige scar tissue lines the walls and floor, and the corridor has contracted in areas, like someone punched the walls inward here and there. The outer exoskeleton must have broken and been repaired in a few places. But how long will it hold? Biologic vessels always have to deal with this instability—there’s a reason why most living things like being under the comfortable atmosphere of a planet, not in a frozen, airless vacuum of space.
I walk the Hana puppet farther in, about thirty feet, and pause. The walls are a blotchy mix of pale blue, pink, beige scars, and occasional ripples of her healthy medium blue. But that healthy blue is the minority—the other colors wink on and off erratically, like some sort of broken vid display.
The puppet is right in the middle of the healthiest area, if you can call this health. Some of the blue sections flash faintly with iridescence. Cyclo can sense Hana nearby. I know enough of Cyclo’s colors that the lack of red is a good sign. I see a touch of gold, too. I think that means she’s curious.
“All right, Hana,” I say. “You’re on. Don’t walk yet, just engage Cyclo.”
Hana nods. She’s not moving into the storage areas yet. She’s in the process of climbing down to the beta ring, and carefully maneuvering the hover container with her. She clears her throat.
“Hello, Cyclo,” she says, and simultaneously the speaker on my floating drone transmits her voice.
Cyclo immediately responds with more happy colors—iridescent blue. My drone picks up the UV colors that apparently Hana can see but I can’t. There’s a shimmering of violet wherever healthy tissue is showing.
I move one of the gloved hands to gently touch some of the walls, and step the Hana puppet forward. I make the ponytail toss left and right, and the tips of her black and white hair graze the wall as well. Some colors flash here and there, and Hana hesitates.
“I don’t understand. You’re here? Of course you’re here. So am I.”
Hana’s biomonitor shows she’s getting tense. I don’t understand the complexities of Cyclo’s language, but something is off.
“If you can speak that way, then good. If it’s easier. I don’t want you to feel pain, Cyclo,” Hana says.
In front of the mass of drones, a portion of the wall begins to stretch forward. I move the puppet backward, just in case. But it doesn’t try to touch the fake Hana bits. It rises up into a cone, puckers, and a mouth forms. Just a tube, really, no face. Far more crude than the face that spoke to me when I cooked, that morning a few days ago.
“Hello Hanaaaaa,” Cyclo phonates. But it sounds terrible. Like an old man who’s been inhaling cobalt dust from the mines. “My nerves function poor not optimally at now. But your primitive communication…is…was…follows a simpler of neural pathways.”
“That’s good,” Hana says. But inside her helmet, I can see she’s frowning. There’s something decidedly…insulting about the way Cyclo said human communication was primitive. Maybe it is, but still. Weird that she’d say that to Hana.
“I’ve missed you,” Hana says, soothingly. I let her puppet take a few steps around, touching the wall on occasion, but never long enough to get pulled in.
“Yes, yes,” Cyclo says. “I am very happy…you haven’t been hurt…by it.”
It. It? Does she mean me?
“I’m well,” Hana says. “I know it takes more energy for you to be here, to talk to me. I know how hard that is.”
“I try. I am trying,” Cyclo says. “Look what I can do.” All the blue areas of matrix in between the hard, stiff sections of scar tissue bulge outward. A warped show of strength.
I look at the visor readout that shows Cyclo’s activity on the ship. Our sensors show that her activity has risen where the Hana puppet is, decreasing nearer to the vacuole chambers. Excellent.
“Keep talking, Hana. But I think you’re good to enter the next sector,” I tell her. “She’s concentrating her energy on the puppet. It’s working.”
Hana nods again, and she takes her first step. The radiation readouts are already high where she is. We need to stay far away from here once we’re done with this sector. It’s anything but safe. Her breathing rate stops as she holds her breath and takes another step. Cyclo’s activity levels continue to shift toward the northeast quadrant, like her energies are surrounding the Hana puppet.
Emboldened, Hana starts walking at a quicker pace down the beta hallway, her booted feet making little noise. Her steps are soft from the lighter gravity. The walls around her are a very muted pale blue, the color of a quiescent Cyclo. They don’t change as she walks. Maybe Cyclo’s nerve endings are dulled enough to not notice her footfalls, or the movement of air from walking. Meanwhile, she keeps chatting up Cyclo, just as she finds a stairway down to gamma. Beyond that is the core where she’s headed.
“He’s leaving, you know,” she says. She’s talking about me. “It will just be us alone soon. And we can be the way we used to be.”
“Come, then.” Cyclo’s phonating mouth bubbles, and a rivulet of a brown liquid dribbles out. Another extension of the matrix, blue mixed with speckled brown spots, reaches for one of the puppet gloves. “Come to me. Sleep.”
“I am tired, but not right now. Soon,” Hana says, trying to sound playful, but nervousness enters her voice. I make the glove gently swipe away the offering of Cyclo’s extended blob. The hair drone swishes it again, and the shoes do a slow walk in a circle. The hem of her tunic flutters.
“Skin…your skin is sick,” Cyclo says. “You have too much silicone in your perspiration.”
The real Hana freezes.
“Don’t,” I tell her. “You’re only ten feet and two right turns from the containment vacuole we need. Keep talking.”
>
Hana takes a deep breath. “Oh. I was cleaning some silicone…um…I was using a skin conditioner. With silicone in it.”
“Hana no additives. I can do that brilliant,” Cyclo says. “I better your dermis with superior emollients. Come. Where are out? Come to me. I will check function.”
“And what about you, Cyclo? Are you functioning all right?”
“Efforts are concentrating where needed. I am compensation adequately.”
I frown. Cyclo’s lying to her. I mean, look at how she needs to talk. Her language is completely off. She’s already contradicting herself.
Hana walks in a tall, narrow part of the corridor, and several openings show the entrances to various storage areas. Yellow and pink flashes of light come from the walls.
“What does that mean?” I ask Hana, who pauses to read them. Hana touches a sensor on her helmet suit and switches her comm to me.
“It’s gibberish,” she says. “Nothing.” Hana’s now in the core, and the gravity is nearly nonexistent in the center, despite the spinning of the giant ship. She bounds right, and there’s a tall, open door, the membrane across it cracked and peeling back. She pushes herself delicately through, but the hovering container behind her won’t fit.
“I can’t risk breaking the door open further,” she says. “I’ll have to bring the boules a few at a time.” She switches her comm back to Cyclo and begins talking about the rotational axis of Cyclo this time of year around the moon.
I know Hana can see what I can—that the radiation levels in there are sky-high. Probably why Cyclo’s walls are decaying and look burned in places. Some of the boules there—or maybe the other larger vacuoles—have failed.
“Whatever you do, don’t let your suit get compromised,” I tell her. “You’ll absorb over fifty Gy of radiation. You’ll die within minutes.”
Hana gives a thumbs-up, letting me know she understands. Or telling me to shut up. She’s already too busy to switch her comm to talk to me, and she’s chatting about what she plans on eating tonight for dinner and convincing Cyclo she doesn’t need a hibernation right now. Cyclo is really pushing it.
Hana stands in front of a tall vacuole that looks like a thirty-foot-tall purple egg, with jagged cracks running in fracture lines along half of it. The shell is translucent, and inside there are countless fist-size boules. Supercooled liquid flows between the boules, keeping them from overheating from the constantly emitting radiation.
I’m no radiation specialist, and I try not to panic, wondering how we’ll get the boules out without spilling all this cooling liquid, and keep the vacuole from melting down. We just need a quarter of the container filled, and I pray that the engine will take them in as a radiation source. Hana walks over to one of the cracks and gently pries it open with a thick piece of a shell that’s about to break off anyway.
“Wait, Hana. If we spill too much of that coolant, there’ll be a meltdown in that quadrant.”
Hana nods.
The liquid is constantly replenishing itself. If she can manage to allow only a small leak, we may have time to make this happen.
It gives way with a sharp crack, leaving a triangular-shaped hole. Immediately, an iridescent coolant starts pouring out. But as soon as it hits the air, it oxidizes and hardens. Even better. It’s self-sealing. Hana can poke one of the boules with her gloved finger, but the opening is still too small, especially after the coolant forms a scab-like rim around the opening. She pries another edge, working it with her hand until it, too, gives. A flake the size of her palm gives way, and coolant gushes out. She pulls out an orange-sized boule with her other hand and stands aside so as not to touch the hardening coolant on the ground.
Yes! She did it!
Hana starts pulling out boule after boule, her gloved hands getting mucked up from the hardening coolant. She’s starting to worry, and her conversation with Cyclo gets more disjointed.
“I…yes. I want to sleep. But I don’t want to sleep. I mean, I need to stay awake. I’m tired,” she says. Hana shakes her head. She’s getting frazzled.
When Hana has an armful of boules, sticky and plastered with dried coolant, she steps out through the broken door and carefully deposits them in the hovering carrier. She goes back and starts to pull out more. She only needs another armful or two. One of the boules is blocking the others behind it near the cracked opening, and she gently pulls it out.
The boule shatters in her hand.
Hana cries out in dismay.
She drops the broken boule, and its gooey contents glow faintly red, dripping onto the floor. It sizzles as it hits the coolant pouring out, and steam rises up. Her glove will be compromised if the temperature melts the fabric. It’s going to eat through her glove if she doesn’t get it off right now.
“Get out of there, Hana!” I yell at her. In my panic, I’m not paying attention to how I’m driving the Hana puppet. It bounces erratically, doing a jig as I mishandle one of the Hana foot puppets. It tips over just enough that the titanium weight falls out of it with a clunk.
Hana jumps through the door and pushes the hover container with her, but she’s got to get rid of that glove soon. It’s got enough radiation to make us both sick if we’re near it for more than ten minutes, unprotected.
“Hana! Take the glove off, now!” But at the same time I yell at her, Cyclo is speaking, too. She’s confused.
“Hana,” Cyclo’s voice rises. “This is titanium. From Selkirk. Why?”
“Oh, I…I think I need to go back for a little bit,” she says. She carefully peels off her glove, flinging it behind her. But now she’s exposed in a high radiation area, and she needs to get out of there. She starts running, pushing the container before her.
“Something is…broken,” Cyclo trails off. “I have vacuole that contaminated. I have breach,” Cyclo says. Her colors immediately become muted. “You need to be kept safe. I will seal the breach,” Cyclo says, and immediately reaches out a large blob of matrix. “And keep you in room, asleep. Now.”
“NO!” I yell.
“No, Cyclo, NO!” Hana yells, as she reaches the end of the containment hallways where the radiation levels are low again. But she’s still not in one of Cyclo’s dead zones yet. She’s got about fifty feet more to go, and up to the gamma ring first.
Cyclo’s matrix arm reaches out for the limping Hana puppet. I’m not fast enough with my drones to dodge it. It immediately surrounds and takes in the drone holding her hair. I try to make the feet run away, the gloves, but the arm swishes deftly in the air, and the Hana puppet goes flying in seven directions. Left foot there, right shoe behind, gloves flopping down ten feet away. I can’t get control of anything because it’s all gone to hell. Cyclo’s matrix tenderly picks up each of the puppet pieces, enclosing them in dabs of blue.
I know what Cyclo is thinking and feeling, even as I watch the blue dabs handling the pieces of the puppet one by one. There is no skin. There is no pulse within any of the pieces. There is no heart.
There is no Hana.
In less than a second, Cyclo crushes every one of my bots, each disintegrating within her matrix. Cyclo spits out the shoes, rejecting them, and then vomits out the large lock of Hana’s hair like a piece of recently swallowed poison. On my visor, I see Cyclo’s activity shift like a tsunami toward the west gamma quadrant, where Hana is now only thirty feet away from a dead zone.
“HANA. Run!” I yell.
Chapter Thirty-Three
HANA
I run at full speed to the beta ring, There’s a hallway of darkened blue only a few feet away. Finally, a safe zone where Cyclo can’t contact me.
I have to get this suit off. There are drips of contaminated material on the fabric. I’m sweating from the hot, confining suit and from sheer panic. I know I’ve absorbed radiation.
What’s the point of flying away in the Selkirk if I die of radiation poi
soning? I unzip and kick away the suit, stepping out of it barefoot. My hands grasp the helmet, and I see Fenn staring back at me in the video comm.
“Hana. Run. Cyclo knows you’re there. Get into a dead zone with the boules as fast as you can.”
I put my hands on the hover container, ready to push it at a run, when I jerk forward.
My feet are stuck.
No.
Around me, the walls and floor have started pulsating between the islands of beige scar tissue. With each subsequent pulsation, they go from pale blue, to deep blue, to purple, and then red.
The color of Cyclo’s rage.
My legs are fully encased now, and the container with the boules is harshly jerked out of my hands. It floats on an undulating river of greenish-blue matrix before tipping over. In slow motion, the boules spill out and float farther and farther away from me. Our only chance at leaving Cyclo has been torn from me. From us.
“Hana! I’m coming!” Fenn yells, the last thing I hear before Cyclo pulls away the helmet and any contact I have with Fenn.
“No! Fenn! Fenn!” I scream, lunging to grasp it as it’s pulled away. The matrix flows up and around my torso, under my clothes. It’s so jarring, the varying degrees of icy cold and burning hot temperatures against my skin, because Cyclo’s self-regulation has gone awry. A thousand thoughts burst into my brain. I am never going to see him again. This is what it’s like when your heart breaks. Cyclo will tear him apart. I cannot bear the breaking of us.
But all I can manage is to scream his name, over and over again.
Cyclo tries to silence me. Wave after wave of chemicals are pushed into my skin, trying to force me into docility, but I’m fighting so hard. I kick. I scream. I am the girl that will not submit. Enough of my body is submerged in her matrix that I can hear her voice in my head.
Stay with me
Stay with me
My sweet Hana
Stay with me
It’s a song that’s almost a lullaby, one that Mother never sang to me. One that Cyclo never sang, either, but really has been the only truth that she’s ever told, the only truth she’s held while she’s been dying. She wants me all to herself. My eyes close as I sink into Cyclo’s generous, formless arms. I should have known it would end like this. I should have saved these last moments for Fenn, instead of trying to figure out how to leave Cyclo.