by Rob Boffard
Jack looks beyond the gate; maybe he’ll be able see the wormhole. But there’s nothing there. Without the gate forcing the wormhole throat open, it will have shrunk back to its original size: a tiny dimple, all but invisible unless you know what to look for. An untrained observer, trying to find one against the blackness of space? No chance.
It wouldn’t help them anyway. Even if they could somehow enter a wormhole that hadn’t been forced open by a gate, there’s no exotic matter around to shield them. They’d be torn into subatomic confetti.
Years to build this gate. Less than a day to destroy it. Less than a day to close off this section of the Galaxy for good. With them as the only humans for light years in every direction.
The main deck is silent. Even the Panda’s engines seem muted. Jack looks down at his hand: he’s still holding a pint glass, half full of icy water. He stares at it, and then the anger is there, boiling up from inside him.
He hurls the glass across the deck. It smashes against the wall, and he hears someone gasp. He doesn’t know who, doesn’t care.
“Fuck,” he shouts. How could this have happened to him? He’s not even supposed to be here.
Even in his fury, he can see the irony. They’re not trapped – they can go wherever they want. It’s just that it’ll be hundreds of years before they reach anywhere. As if to remind him of just how much time they have left, his stomach chooses that moment to wake up, growling in annoyance, sending a shivering ache through him.
He doesn’t have another glass to throw, so he slams his foot into the nearest plastic chair. The material’s too tough for him to make a dent in, but he doesn’t care. He kicks the chair again, suddenly more angry at himself for wasting the water in the glass than anything else. Then he slumps onto the seat, chest heaving. The rage ebbs, drawing back like the tide, replaced by a terrifying apathy. He doesn’t want to do anything. He just wants to sit here, and not talk to anybody, for a very long time.
The thirst, held at bay by the first few sips of water, begins to creep back up his throat.
“All right,” Seema says, far too quietly. “So what do we do now?”
Nobody says anything. Anita’s pulled Corey in close, her hands on his shoulders as they stare upwards. Hannah has gone very pale.
Seema licks her lips. “I said—”
“Nothing we can do.” Volkova is sitting on one of the plastic seats, arms folded, head down.
“There has to be something.” Seema spreads her fingers, patting the air as if telling everybody to calm down. “Because we’re not dying out here. Is there a message we could send? A distress signal, or—”
“It won’t work,” Hannah says.
Seema swings around. In the space of half a second her expression goes from one of forced calm to full-on, twisted fury. “Don’t say that. Don’t you say that.”
Hannah isn’t crying, not yet, but it’s impossible to miss the redness in her face, the hitching tone in her voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what—”
“Figure something out. That’s your job, innit?”
“Nobody’s going to die,” Anita says. She’s got both her sons now, holding them close.
Jack tries to tune them out, not wanting to think, not wanting to do anything. He turns his head to see Volkova looking at him.
She blinks slowly, as if she isn’t really seeing him. In that moment, she looks twenty years older. She gets to her feet, moving with agonising slowness, and starts walking towards the cockpit.
He almost stops her. Demands she do something. Only: what’s the point? All the flying in the world isn’t going to get them out of this. He even knows what she’ll probably suggest: heading for Bishop’s Station, even though there’s no hope in hell of ever reaching it alive. There’s nothing else they can do.
At least we’ve got some ice, he thinks bitterly. His gaze tracks back to the viewing dome, to the slowly spinning debris. It’s not just the gate. There are pieces of ship floating there as well – at least two or three, judging by the shape of the wreckage. They must have been here when the Colony ship arrived – maybe they’d only just come through. They wouldn’t’ve known what hit them.
Were they trading vessels? Fighters? Maybe he should ask the kid, the one who knows so much about ships. He’ll do it later. Right now, he just wants to sit where he is and wipe his brain clean.
But how? How is he supposed to do it when he can’t even have a drink? The thought of another JamFizz makes him want to scream. He closes his eyes, the anger building again, his mind refusing to turn off.
It had been that way ever since Hec had told him to leave. He could even pinpoint the exact moment when it had first started: in the hospital waiting area, sunlight streaming through the windows and painting the sterile tiles with gold.
He remembers the nurse’s face: her stupid, bovine face, telling him that no, Senhor Alarcón não quer visitantes. Smiling thinly at his useless, scattershot Portuguese, refusing to let him past. There was no way that Hector would have told her that. No way. But he had, and there wasn’t a damn thing Jack could do about it. Not then, and sure as hell not now.
He should have stuck it out. He should have pushed the goddamn nurse aside, marched into Hec’s room, told him –
His thoughts move in familiar directions, the paths so automatic that he doesn’t even realise it’s happening. Usually, he manages to fight them off. This time, he doesn’t bother. Who gives a shit? He rolls in them, lets them wash over him.
After a while – he isn’t sure how long – Jack looks up. Volkova is gone. Malik Livingstone is buried in his holocam again, but Corey and his parents are still staring out of the dome, shocked expressions on their faces. So is Brendan, although his wife has her head bowed, hands in her lap, shoulders moving in silent, hitching sobs. Lorinda – God, he’d almost forgotten about her – is sitting opposite him, rooting through her bag. Hannah is off to one side, her back to him, head bowed.
This is worse than after the attack – worse than when he’d thrown up, which he can still smell. At least he felt something back then. Now? The emotion’s been sucked right out of the room.
Nobody’s looking at anyone else. Nobody’s asking: what’s next? What are the options? What pointless vote should we have now? Even Seema appears to have given up. At least, he thinks, she was wrong. No one’s messing with them. There’s nothing going on behind the scenes. They were attacked, they survived, and now they’re stranded. End of.
He runs through their options – it’s pointless, but it feels like something he should do. There aren’t any other jump gates in this part of space. The nearest settlement is light years away. They could go back to the station, try to … what? Find supplies? They’d have better luck holding hands in a prayer circle. Could they take the escape pod? No – as much as he hates to admit it, Hannah was right about that. All that would happen then is that they’d be adrift in an even smaller vessel, with next to no power.
“Would anyone mind if I went outside for a bit?” Lorinda says.
Jack blinks. Nobody else reacts to her words, so maybe he imagined it, or didn’t hear her right.
Lorinda clears her throat. “I said—”
“What do you mean, go outside?” Everett says. Jack gets a bizarre image of Lorinda putting her coat on, stepping out for a breath of fresh air.
“I mean, to take a closer look at the gate.”
They all turn to look at her. Everett and Corey exchange a confused glance.
Lorinda gestures to the open pod. “There’s a suit back there – two, actually. If one of you can help me into it, I think I might—”
“Why?” Hannah says.
“There may be something out there we can use. A comms module, a distress beacon. Maybe even some food – the freeze-dried stuff is still good, even if it spends time in a vacuum. Happened to us once, back at our mine.”
Jack lowers his head, slowly scratching the nape of his neck. “You wanna go. Out there.”
“No,
I said it purely for your entertainment.” Lorinda gets to her feet, carefully placing her bag on the seat behind her.
“But you can’t even climb down a ladder,” says Corey in amazement.
Lorinda sighs. “True. But I’m not bad in zero-G – or don’t you remember how I caught you before?”
She winks at him, and starts walking towards the escape pod, using the backs of the plastic chairs for balance. Jack stares at her back. She’s crazy. Cooked. All of this has snapped her mind.
“Ma’am,” Hannah says. “I really don’t think—”
“First off,” says Lorinda, not breaking stride, “I’ve asked you repeatedly not to call me ma’am. Second, I don’t believe it makes one damn bit of difference to our situation if I go outside or not. Third, as I keep saying, we might find something of value out there, and four, I’m quite comfortable in low-gravity environments.”
“Yeah, but …”
“But nothing. I spent my whole life mining asteroids, so how about we stop with the pointless objections, and let me do as I please?”
“But you’ll die.” Corey Livingstone is looking at her like she’s not only being stupid, but like she’s told him she’s grown an extra head.
She grins at him. “Nonsense. I, young man, am going to live forever.”
“You can’t just take a suit,” Jack says.
“Why not?”
He opens his mouth to tell her exactly why they might need it later, but he doesn’t have a single thing to say.
“Glad that’s settled,” Lorinda says. “Now then: are you going to stand around, or are you going to help an old lady into her spacesuit?”
Chapter 21
Corey’s friend Allie is pretty good with numbers. If – when – they actually start their ship company, she’s going to handle the business side. It’s always seemed kind of strange that she wanted to do that, instead of being a pilot – when it comes to 866 Industries, she was the fearless one.
As he watches Lorinda struggle into her suit, helped by Hannah and his dad, Corey can’t help but think of the one time Allie went a little too far.
They were out by the dried creek bed, round the back of her house: a deep, meandering depression baking in the hot afternoon sun. Allie lives near the edge of the Austin suburbs, her house in the shadow of the mine, the hundred-foot-tall mountains of earth dumped on the surface from the tunnelling operations below it. The dump stretched for ten square miles: quarries and dirt roads and acres of barren, orange earth, broken by the shadows of the vast cloud seeders that dominated the Austin sky.
Corey, Jamie and Allie weren’t supposed to go into the dumps, but they’d done it anyway, more than once, sneaking through a tunnel some kid had once made under the rusted fence.
The site was supposed to be able to detect anybody with a lens or a neurochip trying to gain access, but they’d heard from Mohammed Al-Mukhtar at school that his uncle worked on the scanners, and they’d all been shut down for maintenance since forever. The earth on the huge mounds of dirt was soft and grainy, but once you’d slid down it a couple of times, you kind of got over it. The creek bed was far more promising.
On this particular day, they had their hoverboards with them, and one of them – Corey can never remember who – suggested they build a kicker off the edge of the creek. There’d been some argument about whether this was a dumb idea or not, but they were bored, itchy with heat, and they’d got tired of racing through the creek itself. A ramp to jump off, Allie told them, would be bàng. And they’d be able to make it to the other side of the creek, easy. It wasn’t that wide.
It took most of the afternoon to build. The dirt at the edge of the creek was hard-packed, and Allie had to go and fetch a couple of shovels from her mom’s garage. But in the end, they had a steep ramp, rising to a lip like a sideways apostrophe. The top of the ramp was two feet above the ground, eight feet above the dried creek bed, and that was when Corey and Jamie started thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Not Allie, though. Allie hadn’t said anything, just given them this look, like she couldn’t believe she had to put up with such losers. Then she’d activated the board, hopping onto it, knees bending to take the impact. “One of you make sure you get this,” she said, pointing towards the creek, as she shot off in the opposite direction. “It’s gonna be good.”
He and Jamie had done a quick round of rock-paper-scissors-fire-water, and he had ended up on the other side of the creek, in the full glare of the sun. The sweat baked on his forehead as he looked up towards the ramp, activating the camera on his lens.
Jamie waved at him, letting him know that Allie was coming. He narrowed his left eye, zooming in on the ramp, which suddenly seemed as high as a ten-storey building.
He heard the rumble of the board before he saw it, a low hum with a clattering undertone from the dirt and pebbles it was displacing. Allie came hurtling over the top of the ramp, ass out like she was doing a squat, one hand gripping the edge of the board. In the second she cleared it Corey thought she really was going to make it to the other side of the creek.
Then he saw the look of panic on her face, and her back foot sliding off the board, and he realised she wasn’t. He saw it all through the camera, saw her topple over backwards as her board shot forwards. She slammed into the ground so hard that Corey felt the impact rumble through his shoes. A second later, the front edge of the board cracked against the other side of the creek, its generator shattering like a light bulb. Then he and Jamie were sprinting towards their friend, a curiously dry taste in Corey’s mouth.
Allie sat up before they got there. There was huge cut on her forehead, oozing blood. Below her skate shorts, her knees were raw meat. She blinked at them, her eyes huge.
“Ow,” she said, as if she’d just skinned her knuckles.
Then she kind of slumped over, and Jamie had to run and get his dad. Allie ended up spending the night in hospital, the cut on her forehead eventually turning into a wicked scar. It was a couple of weeks before they all went hoverboarding again, even though it was the perfect summer for it, and they never did build another kicker.
Corey didn’t mind too much. He didn’t think about what he liked to call Allie’s Leap too often, but, deep down, he knew how lucky she’d been. If she’d come off her board a second later or earlier, or if she’d hung on, she’d have been eating through a tube for a few months while the nanobots fixed her, instead of sitting in the dirt saying “Ow”.
If Lorinda goes too far out there, she can say Ow as much as she wants. They won’t be able to hear her. And they won’t be able to do anything to help. Corey turns away, jamming his hands into his pockets.
The Reptar figure Lorinda brought on board has made it down to the bar, perched next to a couple of glasses, arms raised to attack. Corey has no idea how it got down there – last he saw it, it was on the main deck. Seeing the toy makes him think of Jamie, and he looks back at Lorinda, feeling more helpless than he has on this entire trip, even when they went zero-G.
The spacesuit isn’t exactly top-level Frontier tech. It’s clumsy and bulky, with white fabric and neon-yellow markings. There are thrusters at the shoulders and waist. They’re fed from a backpack, moulded to the suit, that holds both the oxygen and the propellant. Lorinda has to stand with her arms out, like those scarecrows Corey’s seen in old pictures, while Hannah clips her gloves on.
His dad is fiddling with her oxygen, muttering to himself, his brow furrowed in concentration. Corey doesn’t know why he’s bothering. The suit might look old, but if it’s in the escape pod it’s designed to be used by people who have probably never been in space before. You shouldn’t have to mess with it to get it to work.
They’re in the bar, a few steps from the Red Panda’s airlock. Despite the freezing temperatures, the rest of the passengers have clustered on the stairs, watching the proceedings. Corey wishes they wouldn’t. It reminds him that there’s nothing else upstairs, and nothing outside, either. It
reminds them of just how screwed they are, a million times more screwed than they were with the fire, or with the frozen water supply. And what does Lorinda even think she’s going to find out there? Another gate?
“So,” his dad says. “You’ve got about two hours’ worth of oxygen in here. At least, that’s what I can tell from the—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Lorinda says, tapping at something on the suit’s oversized wrist control. She sounds relaxed – excited, even. “Next thing you’ll be telling me that I don’t have to spend an hour in the airlock to depressurise. I know how a spacesuit works, Everett. Besides, I won’t be out there nearly that long. I’m just going for a little look.”
“I’d still be more comfortable if you let someone else do it,” Hannah says. She looks as if she’s about to throw up.
“I’ll be fine, dear. I’ve spent more time in space than you have.”
“I just don’t see what you’re going to find out there,” Hannah tells her.
Lorinda shrugs. Corey doesn’t think he’s seen anyone in a spacesuit manage it before. “Freeze-dried rations, if I can find some. They’re nasty, but I’m a little bored of soychips. Now: perhaps you can help me with my helmet?”
“What? Oh. Sure.”
But you’ll die, Corey’s original idea comes back to him: the one about the Colony ship disappearing during a jump, reappearing, thinking that the war was still on. His lips are suddenly dry. They don’t have the faintest idea what’s out there, and now Lorinda wants to go right into the middle of it.
“Watch out for the reactors,” he says, pushing himself off the bar.
Lorinda looks up. “I beg your pardon?”
“The reactors on the destroyed ships. They’re fusion, probably, so they might still be hot, even though they’re in the vacuum. You’ll burn yourself if you get too close.”
She’s not gonna burn herself, it’s almost absolute zero out there, stop being a dumbass.
“Got it,” Lorinda says. “Anything else?”