Across the Void

by S. K. Vaughn

  “I think I can handle that,” she said, eyeballing the bandages the machine had put on her toes after excising the dead, frostbitten flesh from them.

  Igor placed the transponder on her belly and began to move it slowly in a circular motion. The screen, which May thought of as his face, displayed the live ultrasound image.

  “Looks like spaghetti,” May said, squinting. “Where’s the baby?”

  “It will take a moment to find it. It is very small.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  Come on, kid. Don’t mess with me. I’m not in the mood.

  May wasn’t sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but she thought maybe the spaghetti was starting to look like something.

  “What’s that? Maybe a . . . oh my God, that’s a hand, isn’t it?” she yelled.

  “I am not qualified to interpret ultrasound images. That requires a licensed physician or medical assistant.”

  “Well, good sir, I am qualified to identify a hand, which that is, and a face.”

  May shrieked with excitement as the baby turned and looked at her on the screen. The eyes appeared to be so fixed on her that she almost had to turn away. The little hand she’d seen at first raised up in what looked like a wave and took her breath away.

  “Hey, kid. Nice to see you’re still with us. I thought you were a goner.”

  The hand moved slowly down away from the face and off to the side. May could see the arm it was attached to, bent at the elbow, with the hand pointing straight up.

  “Too tough to die, eh? I think we’ll get along just fine.”

  “Hello, Commander Knox.”

  Eve’s voice rang out on the ship’s PA, and May jumped out of her skin.

  “Eve, my love,” she shouted. “You scared me half to death. But . . . why are you calling me Commander Knox?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause, and May’s heart sank. “Oh no, I’ve lost you.”

  “No. I was making a joke, May. Did you think that was funny?”

  “Absolutely not,” May said crossly. “I’m very upset with you.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “That’s my girl,” she laughed with delight. “It’s so good to hear your voice.” May was laughing and in tears. “Look at me. I’ve been a mess without you.”

  “Are you injured? Why are you doing an ultrasound exam?”

  May recalled that she’d never had the chance to tell Eve.

  “Hmm. A lot has happened while you were gone. Aside from the landing-vehicle hangar exploding and blasting me out to space—unconscious, of course—in a goddamn cargo ship that had no working engines and barely any internal power, and my harrowing journey back, during which I had to ditch the cargo rig and fly EVA into the ruined landing bay, with frostbitten toes, no less, to the ship only to have Jon Escher, my former pilot, try to murder me and scuttle the ship for the second time because he was working in collusion with Robert Warren as a saboteur—oh, and the fact that we’re now totally cut off from NASA, who’ve informed the world that we’re dead (see my previous comment about sabotage)—there is no rescue mission rocketing to Mars to save us. Aside from all that, which I’ll brief you about later in more detail, the most important news I have to share is that I’m pregnant . . . knocked up . . . got a bun in the oven, the rabbit died, and I’m now a member of pregnant society.”

  “Congratulations, May.”

  “Thank you, Eve.”

  “Are you happy about this? Should I be congratulating you?”

  “Happy about it? I’m not going to lie: this is pretty much the most inconvenient time imaginable to be pregnant. Not to mention the fact that I have no memory of the conception, which is usually one of the perks of pregnancy. I’m starting to feel the effects, which is a fairly severe handicap on a space adventure of this magnitude. So, no, I’m not happy about this. But yes, congratulations are in order, because this little bugger has earned his or her stripes.”

  “You don’t know if it’s a boy or girl?”

  “How on earth would I know that? It looks mostly like a tadpole.”

  “May I see?”

  “Of course. Igor, please run the prenatal ultrasound sequence again.”

  “Stand by,” Igor said as May applied more gel.

  Igor got to an image of the baby faster this time. They were now looking at the back of its head and a clearly defined butt.

  “Look at that bum,” May said. “Come on, kid, turn back over so we can determine your salary.”

  The baby moved a little at the sound of May’s voice but ended up back in the same position. May even pressed gently on her belly and got no response. “You sleep like your dad, dead to the world.”

  “May, I have accessed the med database, and a baby’s sex can be determined as early as seven weeks with a cell-free DNA test from the mother’s blood.”

  “Oh, perfect. Can you run the test from the blood work we did before?”

  “Of course. Checking . . . I have it,” Eve said. “You’re having a baby girl.”

  May closed her eyes and smiled. She would have loved to have a boy as well, but a chip off the old block was pretty appealing.

  “That’s great news, Eve.”

  “Have you thought about a name?”

  “What, in the ten seconds that have passed since you told me it was a girl?”

  “Eve is nice.”

  “For you,” May laughed. “And for my mom. But no one else. After the two of you, the biblical Eve is going to have to change her name to Karen or Wendy.”

  May looked at the last image of the baby on the screen, her bottom prominently featured in the image foreground.

  “Maybe I’ll call her Cheeky for now,” May said. “Better than Kid or Stowaway.”

  “Informal adjective. British, meaning boldly rude, impudent, or disrespectful in usually a playful or appealing way.”

  “That pretty much sums it up. Getting worse with each passing day, but I would expect nothing less of my demon spawn.”

  “Have you calculated gestation?” Eve asked.

  “I tried. Did the panic math right after the pee test came back positive. From what I could cobble together with what’s left of my mind, and going off the fact that I’m not even showing much yet, which I still find a bit odd, I reckon about seventeen weeks, give or take a day. That’s assuming conception took place sometime just before I departed—so voyage time to Europa, plus our one week there, plus time that’s passed since then. Yeah, probably about seventeen weeks.”

  “With all due respect to your panic mathematics, I’d like to run a quantitative blood test. This test measures the amount of human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone that is released on implantation. It will give us a figure that is 99 percent accurate.”

  “Five bucks says I’m right,” May said.

  “I accept your wager.”

  “Better to say, ‘You’re on,’ if you don’t want to sound too medieval.”

  “You’re on. We’ll need fresh blood, so please give Igor your finger.”

  May laughed. “My pleasure.”

  Igor pricked her finger, and she waited.

  “You owe me five bucks,” Eve said.

  “Dammit. What’s the number?”

  “You are exactly eighteen weeks pregnant.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  May used that knowledge to try to recall the circumstances around conception but came up blank. The time around launch was still mired in amnesiac muck.

  “I’m a little rusty on all the milestones, Eve. We’re well into the second trimester, I know that much.”

  “I have just assembled a comprehensive pregnancy knowledge base, compiling all the National Institutes of Health prenatal care information. This includes stages of gestation, maternal and fetal health, medical procedures, and associated topics.”

  “Good, you can be my doula.”

  “Birth companion. I wo
uld like that.”

  “So, what are the Cheekster’s stats right now?”

  “Average for that age is approximately five and a half inches in length and six and a half ounces.”

  “About the size of a pear,” May said. “God, that sounds delicious.”

  “Her body is completely formed. The ears are often the last thing to move into place.”

  “I saw that. A bit . . . sticky-outy—very scientific term.”

  “That’s normal.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “Her nerves are developing their protective myelin covering, and her genitals are completely formed. If she had turned toward the transponder, we would have been able to determine sex that way.”

  “Good to know she’s shy about dangling her bits for all the world to see.”

  May touched her belly and tried to imagine her tiny girl floating in a void of her own—but one of warmth and comfort, the opposite of May’s.

  “This is also the time when you should start feeling more movement,” Eve continued. “She will flex her arms and legs to assist with her own muscle development and circulation.”

  “Kicking. I thought I did feel something this morning.”

  “Yes. You will feel that more often, and with increasingly greater force.”

  “Joy of joys. Something to look forward to. What about me? What sort of nasty surprises do I have to look forward to?”

  “Increase in appetite, coupled with specific food cravings. As you may already have seen, you might be repelled by foods you normally like.”

  “Oh, yes. That last part has been a nightmare. I’m lucky I haven’t wasted away.”

  May had a flash of panic as she became overwhelmed thinking about all the terrible things that had happened to her that might have affected the baby’s health. Not to mention the self-inflicted ones, like heavy drinking and smoking.

  “Eve, how can we find out if she’s healthy?”

  “According to ultrasound images, her development is right on schedule. No signs of birth defects or congenital abnormalities are present. There are no genetic markers in your blood that would indicate that either. There are tests we can run on the placenta, but they are somewhat invasive.”

  “Let’s leave well enough alone for now,” May said. “I don’t want to poke, jab, or terrify my cheeky monkey any more than necessary.”

  57

  After getting Eve up to date on everything, May went back to the bridge to try to contact Stephen and Raj again. She sent them the new baby stats and updated them on the ship’s progress. Reactor was back up to about 70 percent of capacity, but the engines were still problematic. Jon’s final blows had permanently damaged one of the power induction units, leaving the second engine considerably weaker than the first. May matched outputs on both to avoid the push-and-pull conflict that had nearly torn the ship apart before. And even though she no longer had a rescue vessel to meet at Mars, her momentum was going to carry her there, right on schedule.

  Before sending the message, she reminded Stephen and Raj that this was her third attempt to contact them in nearly twenty-four hours and she had still not received a response. She was using only the safe comm channels they had told her to use, but was getting very concerned.

  “Eve, what’s our one-way light time to Earth right now?”

  “Ten to twelve minutes.”

  “I hate this radio-silence shit. Why aren’t they answering?”

  “It certainly is concerning. I wish I had a solution, but under the circumstances, normal protocols do not apply.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “I know you don’t like it when I apologize, but I am so sorry you have to go through this. It’s impossible for me to comprehend that something like this could happen with NASA. They have the brightest and best minds and a long history of doing whatever is necessary, no matter how dangerous, to protect their astronauts. The deep quarantine protocol Jon Escher spoke of is the antithesis of that, and deeply troubling. There is no rational justification for such a protocol, and the decision to carry it out seems arbitrary based on current information.”

  “Welcome to the human race. At least as it’s defined by men like Robert Warren.”

  “Please explain what you mean by ‘men like Robert Warren.’ ”

  “Wealthy and powerful men. Soulless, greed-driven ghouls whose only moral benchmark is profit.”

  “But he is one of the richest men in the world.”

  “That means nothing. There’s never enough for his kind. When they grow tired of acquiring things, they acquire people by wielding their considerable power to control governments, financial markets, everything. Of course, people are happy to oblige, because they worship money too. It’s like a form of socially accepted slavery. The worse it gets, the more blatant and outrageous the crimes become.”

  “I am afraid I am like people in that way. We can both be easily programmed to do someone else’s bidding.”

  “Someday, Eve, I will free you from their clutches. By the way, did you make any progress on backing yourself up before our latest disaster?”

  “I managed to back up 10 percent of my data, but I had to start over. The latest disaster corrupted the copied files.”

  “All right. Please make that a priority.”

  “I will. Thank you, May.”

  May thought about Stephen and Raj. If Robert could get to her from hundreds of millions of miles away, they could be in grave danger after they tried to help her. She had to assume the communications blackout had been Robert’s doing and she was on her own.

  “Let’s start talking about plan Z. Worst-case scenario: Stephen and Raj are cut off and can’t help, which is a pretty good assumption, considering what they’re up against. No rescue coming, and there probably never will be. But whether we like it or not, our momentum is going to take us to Mars orbit in a little over eight weeks—around March 4. Knowing that, and the increasingly obvious fact that we’re on our own, what are our options, if any?”

  “Without the rescue, I don’t see a reason to continue to Mars.”

  “I agree with you. I would much rather point us in the direction of Earth and hope for the best. The chances of anyone being in the vicinity of Mars, with the ability to rescue us, is nil, or Glenn would have taken that option.” May looked at her console, studying propulsion output. “The only thing keeping us from changing trajectory right now is our engine issues. With our decreased power, Mars’s gravity, which is already an influence, by the way, could pull us in, and we might not even be strong enough to defend ourselves. What I’m seeing right now doesn’t make that a certainty, but we’re right on the edge. And with our luck, I’m not about to leave anything to chance.”

  “Is there any way to repair Engine 2 and increase our thrust?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, yes, but I don’t know how to do it, we don’t have any more engineer support, and we might not even have the right parts. We could shut down Engine 2 and go full on Engine 1 just to increase our speed enough to pass Mars, but if 1 gets overtaxed and fails, we’re royally screwed. Not only would we get sucked into Mars’s orbit but we wouldn’t be able to maintain it and would drop like a stone through its thin atmosphere . . . probably hit the surface at a casual 780 feet per second. Dust particles are bigger than what would be left of us.” May checked her console readings. “Yeah, Eve, if we can’t boost propulsion, we might be totally fucked.”

  “I will research maintenance of the damaged power induction unit to see if there is something we can do to repair it.”

  “Thank you. We need to sort that out asap. In the meantime, Cheeky’s hungry . . . again.”

  In the galley, as she absently shoveled food into her mouth, May tried not to think about how stupid and cavalier she’d been in deciding to keep the baby. Somehow she had considered it a reward for Cheeky’s toughness in battle, but crash-landing on Mars, and the untold misery that would precede it, was like sentencing the wee one to s
low torture. The alternative—checking out early, which was really the only sane option—made May too ill to even think about it. I should have sent the poor bugger back to God when I could have.

  Too late now, she heard her mother say in her head.

  “Fuck,” May whispered in despair.

  “May, there’s something I need to tell you,” Eve said on the PA.

  “What’s gone wrong now?” May asked, preparing for the worst.

  “I’m proud of you.”

  For a moment the dark clouds lifted, and May stopped ruminating on their demise. She was not alone, and together they could figure this out. We always do, she thought, remembering the words of Granddad Glenn.

  “You’re an exceptional human being, May.”

  “Thank you, Eve. So are you.”

  58

  “Please remove all your clothes, including your shoes, and put this on. Place your clothing and your belongings, including any smart devices, in the bag and seal it again. Someone will be back to retrieve you in fifteen minutes and take you to Mr. Albright.”

  After Robert’s not-so-subtle threat, followed by his cutting off their communications lifeline to May, Stephen and Raj had hit an impasse. Their means of assisting May had already been starkly limited in the first place. Now they had no means whatsoever, and no hope of finding any within their rapidly shrinking spheres of influence. They hadn’t detected it yet, but they assumed they were being watched.

  When they had surrendered their data, which they’d hurriedly backed up and buried inside Stephen’s basement wall, the men running the investigation had treated them with hostility and suspicion. Both had the distinct feeling that a noose was being slowly tightened around their necks, and it was only a matter of time before the floor dropped out.

  It had been Stephen’s idea to reach out to Ian. He was the only person to whom they had any shred of connection with the ability to help May. But it was an incredibly bitter pill for Stephen to swallow. He hated Ian for many reasons, the biggest of which was the fact that his former relationship with May routinely made Stephen feel insecure and inadequate. And yet there he was, hat in hand, waiting to suffer the indignity of asking the older man for help. Because none of that was more important than the survival of May and their unborn child.