In Between the Stars

by A. A. Ripley

  She tried the latch. It gave way easily but the door remained shut. She pushed it but her feeble attempts met solid resistance.

  ‘Push!’ Inan called to Hijinks. They pushed together. The door trembled. ‘Again!’

  They pushed with all their strength. The door moved, letting a sliver of feeble light into the darkness. Finally, the opening was big enough for them to slip through.

  The room was small, made even smaller by all the equipment gathered there. It looked as though it was used for miscellaneous storage with tubes, oddly-shaped brackets and boxes strewn all over the place. There was another door on the other side. Hijinks immediately started to look for a way to open it, but it had neither latch nor electronic pad.

  Something else caught Inan’s attention. There was a large console with a flat, smooth, dark surface. Its triple displays were all blank and silent, but just underneath them there was a solitary light. Its red luminescence was fading in and out, with the rhythm of a slumbering heart.

  ‘What do you think that is?’ asked Inan.

  ‘No time, we’re still running. Let’s find way out,’ replied Hijinks, but Inan didn’t listen. Guided by an impulse, she reached out and touched the light. It went out again and then suddenly snapped back to life with a violent green. The displays flickered and powered up. A rush of air blew a cloud of dust when the powerful fans of the cooling system started to rotate. A human voice poured out of the speaker and lines of script started to appear on the screens.

  ‘What did you do, Inan?’ said Hijinks, but it was the machine that answered.

  ‘Input accepted. Switching to tradespeak mode. Uploading personality interface.’

  ‘Ah, I slept, I think…’ the voice that came from the speakers was softer than a standard machine simulation. It was gentle, dreamy, like that of somebody who had walked the silent corridors of the artificial mind alone for too long.

  ‘What… who are you?’ asked Inan. The displays were blinking with a distorted image. Whatever the image had been in the past, it was now lost among dead pixels and glitching code.

  ‘I was… I am a starship. Yes! A mighty warship! I forget sometimes, you know. This other one that talked to me said I have a name, Gloria… yes, yes, that’s what he said.’

  An AI! It was rare these days to have a sentient computer aboard. Some races even banned them altogether, believing that a sentient being should never be bound to a life as a starship. Inan remembered one story especially, the one about a computer that went insane and tried to kill its crew on an early in-system exploration mission.

  ‘Leave the machine and help me. They must know now we’re gone,’ said Hijinks from under a pile of odds and ends he was exploring for something useful to prise the door open.

  ‘Your friends are looking for you, I know,’ said the AI. ‘They put red lights out – how festive! I’ll tell them you’re here!’

  ‘No, wait!’ cried Inan. ‘We’re… we’re playing a game! Don’t tell them, we want to win.’

  ‘Oh, a hide-and-seek. I love hide-and-seek! But it’s not so much fun if you have eyes everywhere like me.’

  ‘Can you help us?’ said Inan. ‘We don’t know how to get out of this room.’

  ‘Do you have authorisation? I used to ask that all the time,’ Gloria giggled. ‘No, of course you don’t, but I’ll let you through anyway. Let it be our secret. I lo-oooove secrets!’

  Inan wanted to say something, but Gloria kept babbling.

  ‘I have one of my own, secret that is. Somebody gave it to me a long, long, long time ago. Here. Maybe you should have it. I’m bored with it already.’ A compartment opened with a barely-audible click and a small, flat object dropped on the surface of the console. Inan took it between her thumb and index finger. It was black, blacker than anything Inan had seen before. It was like a shard of a black hole, a piece of nothingness staring back at her.

  There was a buzz and the doors opened with a thud.

  ‘Here you go. Free as ping-pong balls!’ chirped Gloria.

  Inan had no time to think about that cryptic statement, because Hijinks pulled her out into the corridor.

  *

  The ambient light pulsed red, just like the computer had said. There was no doubt in her mind that humans were pursuing them. Any moment she expected to hear the pounding of boots behind them.

  They ran along the corridor. Inan was following Hijinks, hoping that he knew where to go next. She had no idea if they were going towards or away from danger. The corridor ended abruptly and Inan and Hijinks found themselves staring at a cargo-lift door. Inan pressed some buttons on the control panel, thinking that one of them would call the lift to their level. No luck. The door stayed closed; no movement could be heard from the massive self-sealing entry.

  ‘What was that?’ said Hijinks, and now Inan could hear it too. Above the usual ambient sounds of the ship, the sound of footsteps rang, reflected from the walls of the corridor. They were coming for them! The footsteps approached and in her mind’s eye Inan could already see the burly shapes of humans, their weapons hanging from webbing like deadly parasites, an army of Bandit-like monsters behind them…

  ‘Alan!’ cried Inan ecstatically. ‘How did you find us?’

  ‘I knew you’d show up somewhere around here,’ he replied as he jogged up to them, ‘and Gloria showed me where exactly.’ In the cranny of his elbow rested a small, flat device. There was a pattern of malformed pixels and glitches displayed on it, just like in the room with Gloria’s console.

  ‘More players, more players! The game’s afoot!’ tweeted Gloria via the mobile unit.

  ‘We need to hurry. I just barely managed to get away from a search party.’ He spat out the words while working skilfully on the lift’s panel. The car arrived and the massive door opened with a sigh. ‘Quick, get in!’

  ‘This lift will take us to one of the auxiliary flight decks,’ continued Alan when they were on their way down. ‘From there, we will be able to take a small craft and you can fly us out of here.’

  ‘What do you mean “you can”?’ I don’t know how to fly!’ said Inan, dismayed.

  His face fell. Did he really just assume that two alien beings would be naturally gifted pilots? He probably thought that they were space adventurers or at least intergalactic merchants, like those characters in cheesy, multi-entertainment programmes. A grave silence filled the small space, as Alan’s escape plan disintegrated like a colony hit by an orbital bombardment.

  ‘A shuttle,’ said Hijinks, breaking the dead silence.

  ‘What?’ said Inan and Alan simultaneously.

  ‘I can fly a shuttle,’ repeated Hijinks. ‘A small freighter, if automated.’

  ‘Hijinks, you’re beautiful,’ said Alan, his eyes lighting up like twin reflections of the same spark, while Inan just stared, wondering how many surprises were still hidden behind Hijinks’ furry exterior.

  The lift came to a stop.

  ‘It is not far now,’ said Alan. ‘Don’t turn anywhere, just go straight ahead.’

  *

  They rushed down the corridor. Suddenly, the world flipped. She felt a blow that landed her prone on the floor. Inan saw Hijinks flung through the air, crashing against the wall. Dazed and confused, she lifted her head. She saw a shadow oozing from its hiding place, slowly becoming human. A female, nearly dwarfed under the bulk of a gun, stared down at her. Paralysed from the stunning attack, she could only peer into the dark and chilling void of the weapon’s barrel.

  ‘A warning!’ she snarled. ‘One move and I’ll end you, alien.’ Inan’s thoughts were trapped in her head as though inside a gravitational singularity – taking forever to emerge into thought. A trap! He knew! He must have! Keeping her eyes on them, the human patched herself through to the communication system. She started to talk rapidly, no doubt informing the rest that the escapees had been apprehended. She l
owered the gun just a little, not expecting any resistance from either Inan or Hijinks. She was mistress of the situation, mistress of them. Inan knew that this was the end of their escapade; the precious moments when they were free had run out. They’d be locked away again, or maybe even worse, now that they had proven themselves to be troublesome.

  There was a deafening crack. A disgusting sound, like a joint being torn out of a socket. Nothing happened for the longest second. Then, like a bad actor, their captor lost her facial expression. She tried to turn, but each move was stunted and shaky. She dropped the gun; it fell harmlessly on the floor. She followed, knees buckling, head first, into an ugly, mangled heap. Horrified, Inan watched her eyes, staring into non-traversable distance and then going out like a meteor that burned to ashes in the atmosphere. Then Inan found enough courage to get up and look away from the dead body. She saw Alan standing there like a petrified fossil. His features were drained of colour and senses. In his hand, he still clutched a small microwave gun, deadly at short range. In the charged ambience only the voice of Gloria was heard, humming absent-mindedly to herself.

  Alan threw away the gun as though it were a poisonous amphibian of the Derai Moons, and gave them a dejected look. Hijinks gathered himself. Armed with a battery of reassuring sounds, he moved towards their shocked companion. Inan joined the marsupial. They took him, pulling gently, past the corpse and towards freedom.

  *

  The auxiliary flight deck was empty. The emergency lights were on, covering the parked ships in ruddy shadows. They turned on the main lighting and finally they could see the array of small spacecraft parked there.

  ‘Which one should we take? This one?’ said Inan, pointing to a cone-shaped craft with pronounced stabilisers and an array of thruster nozzles grouped under its wings.

  ‘No, that’s fighter-class. No life support for us all. We need this,’ said Hijinks. “This” was a stubby, trapezoidal ship with a half-sphere main engine mounted to its rear. It was graceless and ugly, with streaks of blackened insulation from multiple atmospheric re-entries on its plating. It was the last one Inan would have picked from the hangar.

  ‘Hurry and start the flight-prep,’ said Alan. ‘Soon they’ll find… her.’

  Inan noticed that Alan shuddered with this memory. She felt embarrassed that she had doubted his intentions back there. She would never have even thought that if he was izara, if he was… Hijinks. How stupid. Not so long ago she thought Hijinks might want to kill her and now she felt ashamed of her suspicions about Alan.

  How does one escape from a goliath-class warship exactly? Inan listened to Hijinks and Alan throw back and forth technical names and procedural details. The phrases ‘disable the main sensor array’ and ‘tactical lock-on’ and ‘instant depressurisation’ were flying right over her head, sounding like babble at the very edge of her linguistic comprehension. She started to feel like a second tail on an izara – the most useless piece in the set.

  ‘I’ll make Gloria disable the ship’s directional sensors. It’ll give us time to get away,’ said Alan, concluding the long unintelligible technical debate.

  ‘Can we take her with us?’ asked Inan, jumping at the occasion to add something helpful.

  ‘No, her main personality banks are located deep beneath the bridge. I can’t even copy her to this platform; it is only strong enough to maintain a short-distance uplink,’ he said. His voice sounded sad and tired. At this moment Inan understood something – he was leaving the only friend he had ever had on this ship. Inan felt a surge of sympathy. She almost reached out to console him, but then she stopped mid-gesture. What did she know about consoling alien species? Yet, against her better judgement, she extended her hand and ever so slightly touched his arm, just with the tip of her claw. Inan hoped he’d understand.

  The small craft came to life under Hijinks’ hand like an armoured flower. The flight console lit up as the marsupial booted the pre-flight program.

  Hijinks switched onto the ship’s main communication channel. The speakers exploded with the torrential roar of human voices, barking to each other with urgency.

  ‘What do they say?’ asked Inan.

  ‘They know where we are now,’ said Alan, his face changing with this horrible realisation. ‘They are bringing equipment to cut through the door!’

  Inan looked suspiciously at the hangar entrance. Was it her or the door that began to glow faintly? Were there humans on the other side of the bulkhead, teeming like insects and powering up industrial-grade laser cutters?

  ‘No more dawdling, load up!’ called Hijinks to them.

  *

  Inan strapped herself into the seat harness and hung there like the victim of a humongous arachnid. Hijinks and Alan were strapped in too, Hijinks still finishing the system check and Alan working with Gloria, trying to convince the unstable AI to help them.

  ‘Okay, my eyes are closed. The doors are open, now you can hide in deep spaaaaace!’ sang Gloria through the device. Inan could feel a subtle shudder that went through the body of the ship. It was the force of the air that was rapidly evacuated into space.

  ‘Hide and seek is tiring,’ complained the AI. ‘I think I’ll have a nap, a long, nice nap. Goodnight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. What am I saying? I never had bedbugs in my life!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alan, his voice suddenly lower and softer. ‘Goodbye Gloria.’

  He touched the screen and it went black as a starless night. A split second later, Hijinks hit the thrust-engine control. They were forced out of the flight deck into open space. Napoleon Bonaparte spat them out like an inedible piece of meat.

  *

  The shuttle shook violently, as if it were about to break in half. Inan kept her muscles tense, as if she could keep this pile of junk together by the power of her will. The well-worn metal groaned under the strain. There was a smell of melting insulation; a threat of fire hung morosely in the air. She screamed when a high-pressure line burst. It twisted and thrashed like a mad snake, emitting a high-pitched whine and hot, acriol air.

  ‘It’s fine. Fine!’ shouted Hijinks over the snake, the thrusters and vibrating metal.

  The acceleration held out for a couple more minutes before they had enough velocity to clear the Napoleon. When they were in the clear and the engines shut off, Inan noted that the old clunker at least had a functioning artificial gravity.

  Inan disentangled herself from the safety harness and stood up. On the screen with the rear view, the Napoleon Bonaparte hung unmoving, a crippled sea-hunter. Inan was full of joy. They were out, finally out! Free to go wherever they wanted. She would soon go home; maybe even salvage whatever was left of her bright future…

  ‘Incoming call,’ said Hijinks with surprise.

  ‘Don’t answer!’ cried Alan. ‘They’ll trace the signal back and blow us into pieces!’

  ‘Receiving only, no acknowledgement,’ said Hijinks and flipped a switch. ‘They’ll get nothing back.’

  It was Cochrane. His face loomed from the monitor like the view on a toxic planet – unwelcoming and frightful.

  ‘You!’ he said, his voice as calm as the husk of an obliterated vessel. ‘You, Alan, are a traitor. You’d rather throw your lot in with those aliens than with your own kind. If you think we were harsh on you, wait and see how the galaxy treats humans. Your new “friends” will turn on you the moment you dock in a spaceport.’

  ‘As for you two,’ he continued, ‘whoever you truly are, I salute you. It takes a mastermind to deceive me and my crew. Posing as two shipwrecked castaways – your plan worked, but not for long. You stole from me, but I will get it back. It belongs to me, to us. We know how to use it, but you won’t be around to see its power used. I have ways and I have allies. Allies to every human in the galaxy who is sick of being treated as though they were Lifted. You can tell your employers that.’

  The transmission end
ed. In the deep silence, Inan could feel her high hopes being eclipsed by inarticulate dread. She had already got more than she bargained for when she dreamed of exploring the universe. What had she got herself into this time?

  The chime sounded and interrupted the anxious stillness. It was the signal of the main engine now at full charge. They were ready to commence the extrasolar flight. With a wide gesture Hijinks turned on the engine, putting a stop to Inan’s troubled thoughts. The universe dissolved around them.

  *

  A human female stood in the middle of sick, oppressive shadow, her form half-fluid, disgustingly stretched and framed in the angular shape of the long-winded corridor. Her face was twisted in an unnatural sneer, like a distorted reflection in a deep, dark pool. The menacing shape of her eyes grew wider with each second, their colour darker than a starless night, shining only with a glassy reflected light of a shade of gunmetal. Those eyes seemed to grow until they swallowed everything, caught Inan in the embrace of eternal, cold void…

  Inan woke up with her heart pounding and her limbs as heavy as a world. The fear of the dream did not dissipate at once and her mind was still covered with impenetrable, blank mist. She was in darkness, but not a deadly and cold one. No, this was the darkness of a sleeping starship; illuminated with a chain of small night-lights going round the room and with the soft glow of emergency markings. Now she remembered how she got to be here, curled in a triple-bunk bed. Since their escape, they’d been travelling for a few ship-days. Hijinks started to refer to their vessel as Yi-yik-ke. The marsupial laughed when Inan tried to repeat the high-pitched sounds and refused to give a translation. Inan started to suspect that it probably meant something very obscene. The tiny ship became their little pocket universe. There was the cockpit – the domain of Hijinks, full of equipment that was nothing like that which Inan had seen on her brother’s freighter or anywhere else. The consoles had no places for the command spikes, or claw-depressions housing switches. The displays, more often than not, were full of strange shapes and illegible figures. But Hijinks was completely at home here, piloting their little home with a steady hand. The crew quarters were just one chamber, with a triple sleeping bunk in one corner and tiny galley and a table in the other. The rest of the space was separated by a flimsy wall and consisted of their bathroom facilities. All of it was made of the same greyish-blue metal, both walls and furniture that shone with a muted sheen of bare utility. Apart from that, there was a small cargo space on board and a tiny engineering room that had enough space for one person to work, providing that this person was not born and bred on a high-gravity world.