In Between the Stars

by A. A. Ripley

  Third Hijinks Inan? Her thoughts crept lazily just above her consciousness, feeding on the meaning of those words. They meant something, something important…

  Hijinks! Alan! Inan opened her eyes. White light stabbed her in the retinas, before forming the faces of her friends stooped above her. Inan groaned.

  ‘What is going on?’

  ‘Nothing good,’ said Hijinks. ‘We need to go.’

  The white envelope of the sphere was gone and the discs were no longer afloat but lying around, like drops of the blackest rain. Small mechanical creatures of various sizes and shapes were milling about, losing their way, bumping into each other and crashing down to the floor, just to get up again and continue in the opposite direction. Cables kept falling from above, with every shudder of the whole chamber. Brilliant, oversaturated white flashes took over from the steady glow of ambient light. The floor quivered slightly. Sharp high-pitched noise filled the air, changing modulation every few seconds.

  ‘She’s right,’ agreed Alan. ‘Can you get up?’

  She got up, but then the station jerked, as if it had been seized by a sudden spasm. Inan rolled on the floor, hitting the dais with her side. When she picked herself up, the floor was tilted, clearly leaning towards the centre.

  Inan realised that whatever she had done within the heart of the Actuality Regulator had caused a catastrophic failure of the entire system, of the entire station!

  ‘Which way?’ said Inan, looking around anxiously. There were three entrances to the chamber and she hoped that Alan and Hijinks remembered which one they had come from. She was sure that getting lost now would spell their doom.

  *

  Hijinks and Alan led her out into the hall of the pillars. The chamber had changed. An electric storm blazed in the thorny crowns of the pillars. The light drained and poured again into the air with the rhythm of the discharges. The cables were writhing and twisting above their heads.

  As they rushed down the main aisle, a piece of a crown shattered and fell off the pillar. Still half-connected to the main part, the electricity made it thresh about, spraying sparking arches.

  ‘Around. To the left!’

  Inan dived between the side-pillars. Not this time! Not this time! she thought, passing a few openings. This time she wouldn’t get turned around. She counted the pillars, turned and counted again as she went back on course. They got out onto the main aisle, clearing the collapsed pillar.

  Inan cried out in triumph. Now they could get out easily.

  Something passed next to her and disappeared into the shadows. A shape dashed from between Alan’s ankles – one of the small constructs she had seen earlier. Then another and even more, like a stampede of terrified rodents.

  Inan looked behind her and saw what they were running from. The floor was crumbling, like dry earth between fingers, leaving just the pillars growing into the endless abyss.

  ‘Run!’ she wailed. ‘Run! Run! Run!’

  They ran towards the open gate. Just a few metres more!

  But the abyss was faster. The rumbling of disintegrating floor caught up with them.

  ‘Jump! Now!’ She leapt and glided over the opening maw of nothingness under her feet for, she thought, forever.

  They flew through the door and landed in a heap safely on the other side of the threshold. Behind them, the room was no more, just emptiness punctuated with what remained of the pillars. But there was no time to stop now. Before them were the corridors of the middle part of the station, the ones that Cochrane had led them through. Inan realised that there was no way that they could traverse them on their own. Maybe if there was time… But there was none. The air from the tunnels was hot and smelled of burning, marking her tongue with bitterness. Something was on fire in there.

  Inan stopped abruptly.

  ‘Through here!’ called Alan and Hijinks simultaneously.

  ‘We can’t go in there. We’ll never find a way back! Cochrane had help in going through. Cochrane had—’ There was a bleep somewhere within Inan’s clothes.

  ‘What was that?’ said Hijinks.

  Inan dug out the comm-pad from her clothes. The map was still displayed, their location marked with a red dot.

  ‘It was Jumbob’s,’ said Inan. ‘He made it here. And made a map. He—’

  ‘Long story,’ interrupted Hijinks. ‘Can you work it?’

  Inan touched the display and tried to find meaning in a tree of commands and input boxes, but to no avail. It was set up to guide to the kill-switch but how to change the destination point? It was like no map she had seen before. It made no sense to her. Inan knew there were answers in there; she just didn’t know how to ask the right questions.

  ‘I can’t,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know where we should go!’

  Panic had seized her. She had their salvation in her hands, but it might as well be a chunk of stone. This was as far as she could take them.

  ‘Alan?’ said Hijinks, gently taking the device from Inan’s hands.

  Alan took it from Inan’s hands. He worked on it for a moment, mumbling something to himself. Inan looked into the tunnels; the hot air carried the moan of expanding metal. Was the gloom flashing orange or was it just her imagination?

  ‘I think I’ve got it!’ called Alan. ‘Follow me!’

  He plunged into the mouth of the tunnel. Inan and Hijinks followed.

  The air of the tunnels was filled with heavy smoke. The stripe of blue light was still lit, but it blinked like a damaged sign, fading in and out. Inan caught Alan’s clothes tightly and gripped Hijinks by the hand. Like a frightened centipede, they moved forward.

  Left, left, right and down. They followed the curvature of the tunnel, passing the forks and crossings. In the depths of side-tunnels the fire blazed, melting metal glowed blood red. Hot air invaded Inan’s nostrils and choked her as if bitter water was filling her lungs. When she thought she could take no more, they passed through the exit.

  Chased by the scalding air, they ran out onto the gallery.

  Inan suddenly realised something. This was not where they had come from; this was where the pirates had come from! Inan could see in the distance the blazing twin suns of the engines, carrying the pirate ship towards the surface. A few more seconds and they were gone. Inan, Alan and Hijinks were now the last living creatures on the station. But not for long. The station barely held, the graceful struts of the gallery giving way one after another.

  She could no longer see the way, dust and smoke rising all around them. Inan felt the floor shift a bit. The slant became steeper, steep enough for the rectangles on the side to slide towards them. More drones rushed past them; finding no other way they plunged into the abyss below the gallery.

  There was nothing left to be done but push forward, hoping they could still find a ship off the station. They kept moving, dodging the falling debris. In the gloom that was slowly consuming the rest of the station’s illumination was a shape that seemed familiar. A tubular body, ugly and without style, was still resting safely in its berth.

  Inan was filled with renewed hope. She knew this ship even before she heard Alan calling out, ‘It’s Yi-yik-ke, we’re saved!’

  Inan thanked silently whichever pirate had piloted it there.

  They hurried over a rickety bridge to the airlock. The moment the outer doors sealed behind them, they heard the rumble of the crumbling walkway.

  On the bridge, Hijinks pounced on the controls, rushing through the pre-flight routine. The floor trembled, carrying the tremors of the unstable platform.

  ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ implored Inan silently. Instinctively, she crawled into her chair. She heard the manoeuvring engines roar and she felt them pushing against the berth. The engines stalled.

  Inan’s heart almost stopped.

  Yi-yik-ke sat heavily onto the pad and tilted to the left, barely keeping balance
on the damaged platform.Hijinks was out of her seat a second after.

  ‘Alan, watch for fire alarm. Inan, come,’ she called and rushed out into the corridor. Inan followed, trying to adjust to the angled floor.

  ‘Hold this!’ she said, thrusting up the access trapdoor on the wall. Inan grabbed the handle and held it up, while Hijinks dug into the mechanical innards. She pulled on a conduit, ripping off the thin insulation.

  The engines coughed and died. Hijinks swore.

  She pulled again, and again. The engines kept silent like voiceless singers. Something rolled on the floor past Inan towards the back. The floor angle deepened.

  Hijinks reached even deeper into the mechanism. Blue sparks flew and crackled.

  Then Inan heard the most beautiful sound in the universe – the engines firing up. They had lift-off!

  Back on the bridge, the main screen showed the tunnel high above them – a jagged break in the ceiling. It looked impossible to thread a spaceship through.

  ‘What is that?’ yelled Alan.

  Inan looked closer. A diaphanous seal blocked the exit, pulsing and vibrating with the tremors of the dying station.

  ‘We’re ramming it!’ Hijinks yelled back.

  ‘What? No! You don’t know what it is!’

  ‘It’s better than staying. Ram it, Hijinks!’ Inan called back.

  They hit the seal with full power. The crash was ear-splitting, dominating the roar of the engines and rumble of disintegrating walls. Inan smelled burning insulation, but they were still flying.

  In the tunnel, the thunderous rumble recoiled from the walls and drowned the sound of engines. Inan closed her eyes, pushed her face into the back of the seat and wished it all over.

  A silence followed.

  Inan opened one eye carefully. She was half-expecting to see naked void, the last sight she would see before her lungs and eyeballs froze solid and her oxygen-deprived brain ceased to work. But instead she saw the bridge of Yi-yik-ke, the only stars – the ones displayed on the main screen.

  Hijinks was still at the controls, putting as much distance as possible between them and the dying station.

  The concentric ellipsoids were breaking apart, bit by bit, and floating away. Fire was spouting from the wide cracks that ran alongside the curvature, the yellow and orange flames feeding on the oxygen escaping from the interior. The station had lost its atom-like shape; swarms of debris were growing in the places where the hull had given way under internal pressure. The cable structures were detaching one by one, clouds of solar matter spilling from them. Inan couldn’t see the central sphere anymore; its surface was lost among the fire and wreckage. The once omnipotent machine was nothing more than an extremely large haze of space junk. The Actuality Regulator was no more.

  Had that actually happened? Did they just save the universe from being rewritten on the whim of a mad human? It seemed ludicrous to her, like an overblown space drama. Yet it had happened and, for now, the only ones who knew what had really happened were the three of them.

  *

  ‘It is hard to believe that one of those stars holds a planet that is my home,’ said Inan, looking at the screen. They were travelling towards more civilised parts of the galaxy, leaving the decision as to their final destination for later. They dropped below FTL speed and the universe turned from uniform grey into black that was decorated with the countless lights of distant stars. They had just come into range of an info-hub; the public communication channel was murmuring softly with the echoes of words spoken between light years.

  ‘I wish I could point it out to you,’ she continued.

  ‘I wish,’ said Alan, ‘that I could point out mine too.’

  Inan fell silent. It was true; during all these adventures they had failed to uncover anything about Alan’s homeworld. They had preserved the universe as it was, but that meant also that some things hadn’t changed. Alan was still lost.

  ‘We should look for it,’ said Hijinks, as if it was a matter of fact.

  Alan laughed mirthlessly.

  ‘I wouldn’t even know where to start. My only hope is that Yarg will discover something about me.’

  Inan wondered if this task was not beyond the skills of the broker from Middlelink. But she would never say that to Alan.

  ‘But we will look for it, won’t we?’ she said.

  On one of the control monitors an icon showed up. A small, unimposing icon signifying that a message intended for this ship had been received. It blinked at Inan mischievously.

  THE END