329 Years Awake

by Ellie Maloney

“I see your point, but still, I wouldn’t purposefully try to get killed, if I were you.”

  “How old are you, Ensign?”

  “Why?”

  “Stop acting like a child. Now, next time, clock the loop. I need to know if time elapses at all, if we are going back or forward in time, and how long this whole event lasts.”

  ***

  Thirty loops later, we stopped counting. Over that period of time, I was killed roughly half the time. Half of the time, the Unkari soldier received a crack in his skull. Here is what we learned.

  First, the loop lasted about three minutes. The countdown started at the moment we tried to piss off the guard. From the moment he barged in we had three minutes to get out. After three minutes we both ended up back in the cave, no matter how far we made it.

  Second, if we did not engage the Unkari, time passed and nothing happened. Once we spent seventeen hours waiting, and nothing happened at all. We were getting weak and hungry. My rations were taken when we were captured, so our provisional situation was dire. We decided that we had to act, otherwise we’d just starve to death.

  The third conclusion followed from the second one, and it was stranger yet. We were not going back in time. Radiation decay does not lie. River’s atomic clock counted forward, and we were getting weaker. Weaker meant older. Whatever it was, it was killing us slowly and with style.

  10

  CAGED

  “Mazula, you said you’d chop me for steaks…”

  “Uh?”

  “Would you really eat me? I mean, if I die first. Would you?”

  River was fingering the slippery wall of the Salonimite mine, where we were kept hostage. The Unkari guard was still outside the barred door. I had no answer to River’s question. I was preoccupied with thoughts on how long our military uniforms could keep recycling waste products and generate breathable oxygen. Normally, a mission should not last longer than three weeks without service or replacement. This setup was not optimal, and it wasn’t the most efficient uniform either, but it was made specifically for the deep space missions - like this one on Erinozhan, where there was no breathable air for human biology. Normally we would get a drop of spare resources (everything from nutritional packs, air and waste filters, medicine cartridges, and such); but we were being kept hostage, and our clock was ticking on numerous accounts, nutrition obviously being one of them.

  In the absence of my participation in River’s existential gastronomy musings, he persisted. “I gave it some thought and decided that you… well, I think you should. I mean, if your moral code demands permission from me, if that would make it easier for you, know that you got it. There’s no shame in wanting to live.”

  “River, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “You have my permission to eat my dead body, what else? Haven’t you been listening?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, Ensign, I haven’t. I’m busy thinking about how to keep us alive.”

  I was about to lose the hell hounds on this officer, but when I turned to face him, all my bravery was gone. River rocked himself, grabbing his knees in a bear hug and passing a barely audible humming sound.

  “River, listen to me, you are not going to die.”

  “I already died eleven times. I had my throat cut three times, my lungs pierced twice, my neck broken three times, suffocated once, but mostly shot… I could write an encyclopaedia on near-death experiences. Mazula, if only you could understand, I remember all of them. Isn’t this ironic? All of the injuries in the loops were undone, but my broken ankle from almost a week ago remains broken... If I believed in hell, I’d say this should be it.”

  “But you didn’t really die in those loops.”

  “It felt real to me. Hurt real, too. Weren’t you afraid of dying?”

  “I was.” I honestly replied, but could not think of anything else to add, suspecting that it would only fuel his derangement, so I went back to the assessment of the situation.

  Breathable air would not become critical for another ten days or so. That’s plenty of time. Neither of our cat suits were damaged. All things considered, it was a critical advantage. Exposed to -190C and Erinozhan’s methane-based atmosphere would be lethal.

  Our food situation obviously sucked, but it would not become an emergency for at least eighteen hours. The water situation was getting critical, but we still had time. In the worst-case scenario, we could take a small amount out of the cat suit circulation. Normally, it would be an extremely bad idea, because our oxygen supply depended on that water, but in the absence of options, any idea was workable.

  I also considered the possibility of a rescue mission. The problem was that our mission was beyond classified. Officially, the Unkari and Earth Nations were not at war, at least no missiles had been fired. Yet. But we knew that the Unkari had designs on our quadrant of the galaxy. For an old and extremely long-living species as they were, they considered their home galaxy, Sagittarius Dwarf, which was being slowly swallowed into the Milky Way by the gravitational pull, a legitimate real estate situation. From the perspective of humans living an average 150 years, that was ridiculously overdone strategic planning. For the Unkari, it was nothing more than responsible nation-building. With that being said, our top-secret intelligence mission was to keep silent for two months - the entire time it takes to reach Erinozhan from Earth - carry out the intelligence mission, and come back.

  None of the 380 officers and 240 civilian tech-support folks who stayed in the orbit escaped Erinozhan. I remembered E. N. Obama, the run-down Galactica-class vessel, being dragged out of the shipyard of the orbital recycling station specifically for this mission, so that nobody could ever flag the assignment. Officially, E. N. Obama was decommissioned. Officially, our entire crew was quarantined on Dzhu-Imani orbital, on the outskirts of the remote 87th quadrant, where the quantum tunnelling communication grid (which we called the com tunnel) was not installed yet, and the data exchange was carried at regular light-speed via Morse. That meant three years and change for any word to reach the nearest outpost with the com tunnel, which in turn would forward the data via the broadband subspace to the Earth Nations headquarters. In other words, our silence had a reliable cover.

  I had a painful flashback of the E. N. Obama being blasted into nuclear dust. When its shield started collapsing due to the impact of the Unkari missile, portions of its body flickered in and out of vision in the sky. I was hiding in the pile of methane snow, keeping surveillance through a small perforation, just big enough for my portable telescope to feed the video of my surroundings on my retina, when suddenly I was blindfolded by a white flash that illuminated everything on the dimly-lit surface, with nuclear-scale brightness. One of Obama’s fusion reactors was breached. How do I know that only one of eight reactors was affected at first? I zoomed on the ship and saw the hull of a giant vessel popping like a firecracker dead in the middle, spewing what looked at first like colourful confetti, but I knew better. They did not die in an instant, as would be the case if the entire fusion reactor chain collapsed simultaneously. Poor civilians, one way or another persuaded to sign up for this audacious mission, were tossed in the vacuum like wedding rice.

  To my knowledge, nobody survived. Nobody but the newbie Ensign River and myself.

  There will be no rescue mission. Ensign River was all the help I could hope for. Between his leg injury and scrambled brains, there was not much help to be expected.

  ***

  “What would you eat first?” River raised his voice again as if echoing my assessment of his togetherness.

  “You mean, if you…”

  “I mean when I die, Mazula. And it will happen soon. I had spent seven days on two-day rations. My leg is infected. There is no damn thing good for eating on this planet. Let’s get real here. Indulge me, would you? What would you sample first?”

  “River, spare me, I may throw up, a
nd I have nothing in my stomach.”

  “I think you should start from the hip. I am pretty sinewy otherwise. Used to be a runner for the Academy team.”

  I did not reply to that last one. To be honest, I knew that River was going through the motions being captured and all, but his panic was not helpful. I had to concentrate on the plan. For the umpteenth time, I went over the mission details in my head.

  First, why was I here? I was sent to Erinozhan for a classified intelligence operation of the Royal Moroccan Fleet. The Earth Prime Senate delegated us to follow up on the intelligence that the Unkari possessed advanced technology and were testing it on this abandoned Salonimite facility. What the technology was, we didn’t know. All we had to work with were the intercepts that our analysts put together like bread crumbs from the bread basket. For all we knew, the Unkari were celebrating a formidable accomplishment in advancing their project, which, supposedly, would give them leverage against us. The confusing part was in the fact that in sheer brute power and technology, the Unkari already exceeded humans. The workable hypothesis was that the Unkari looked for the ultimate solution that would bring their victory without losing a single Unkari life. Our xeno-anthropologists claimed that, due to their extremely long life span and low birth rate, the Unkari valued life much higher than the human race.

  Second, what did I know about the location? Erinozhan was actually a large moon of the fifth planet orbiting a K-class star of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy. The proper astrometric designation I did not remember, and normally I wouldn’t need to. The chances of a ranking Lieutenant like me needing to navigate through galaxies were slim. Now, on second thought, I probably should have paid attention during those briefings. Oh well, no point on chewing on the same dead cat.

  Man, I must’ve been hungry for having such gourmet thoughts. “What the hell,” I thought and walked to the barred door.

  “Hey you!” I yelled at the guard. River jerked and looked at me pleadingly.

  “I can’t take it, Mazula. No more, please…”

  The guard rose from his makeshift stool and hissed at me.

  “Yes, I am talking to you, fucking tripod. I need food! You understand me? Where I come from, starving prisoners is considered a war crime.”

  I looked at the guard and he looked at me, slightly tilting his head to the side.

  “River, I think he knows what I am saying. This is different. This time, we won’t run and see what happens.”

  “I can’t run anyway. Not with my blooming gangrene.”

  Meanwhile, the guard left and returned within a few minutes. He came back carrying a box about twice the size of a regular shoe box. Approaching the door, he retrieved his combat knife and, pointing it at us, opened the gate and slid the box through.

  We shrugged, but I decided to roll with it, and picked up the box. It was heavy, black, matte. Its texture reminded me of graphite. While we were scratching our heads as to what this box was supposed to mean, the perimeter of the cave lit up with a green glow, and something of a cylinder glass environment descended from the ceiling.

  “What the…”

  “This can’t be good, Mazula! What do we do?”

  “Hang tight! We don’t have many options!”

  The cylinder tightly connected with the floor, enclosing us in a test tube of sorts.

  All of a sudden, the air around us hissed, and the gravity rapidly decreased. River and I slowly floated off the floor and hung in mid-air.

  “Mazula, they are gassing us,” screamed River.

  “They can’t gas us! The cat suit provides complete climate control.” Indeed, every inch of our body was covered with elastic semi-organic material. Frantically River pressed his palms to his face, as if reassuring himself that the protective headgear was securely in place.

  “Remember your Academy training, we ran rapid decompression and purge cycle scenarios. Brace for impact, remember?” River did not respond, evidently completely frozen in the face of possible suffocation.

  “Ensign River! Respond!”

  River did not respond.

  “Ensign River, damnit, comply with the training sequence. Brace for the purge cycle.”

  “Bracing for the purge cycle!” cried out River, and his voice modulator quivered because of his high-pitch cry. Meanwhile, the purge cycle was over. The capsule filled with some gas composition, and we smoothly descended on the floor. River collapsed to the ground, grabbing the base of his foot. He was in pain. The uniform was initially equipped with analgesic and blood-clotting compounds that automatically were released based on the pain indicator scan. A few hours ago he had red-zoned on meds, which had turned him into a raw nerve. I glanced at the back side of my wrist accessing the B5 monitor and requested an environmental scan.

  “River, are you ok there? Check your B5 for the environmental data.”

  River complied and immediately perked up.

  “It’s breathable. I cannot believe it,” whispered River.

  “Yes, it is. What is that supposed to mean? First, I asked for food. Second, we received the box. Third, we received a human habitable environment.”

  “They want us to remove the headgear. Maybe they want to poison us after all.”

  “Maybe. Although it doesn’t make sense. What’s in the box?”

  “Well, if they want to poison us, this is poison.”

  “Could be. However, think of how many times this strange space-time loop has repeated, yet this scenario is different.”

  “I’ve been thinking, Mazula. I don’t think it’s a space-time loop. It’s something different. Entirely different…”

  “Oh yeah? Wait, River, let’s figure out what’s going on at the moment first. I say let’s check out the box.”

  “Alright. It’s your call.”

  Could it be that simple? Could they bring us food in that box? It made sense. The Unkari knew their enemy well enough to know that we could not remove cover in the hostile methane-rich atmosphere and without removing cover, we could not ingest anything that was not military rations pre-packaged to be delivered through the uniform.

  I had only one way to find out, so I retracted the headgear.

  Sharp breath.

  “Oh?” River gasped, but would not say a word further. There it goes again.

  “What, Ensign? You have issues with trans women in the military?”

  “Mmm no, not at all… You are just so…”

  “Big? Tall?”

  “Yeah… I just assumed… But I don’t mind…”

  I was annoyed. Ok, so I wasn’t the most petite trans woman, I get that. Just a dash under 7 feet tall, I wear XXL uniform size - more than one standard deviation from most women in combat. This is what you get for spending most of your life bulking up in the military and not getting on blockers earlier.

  And, by the way, my transition was not over. Although I was planning on having more intervention sometime in the future, I didn’t want to interrupt my service. While on active duty, you get only so much leave time, so the process was slower than I expected.

  But for crying out loud! Do they always have to react like that? If I was a tiny sophisticated missy, they wouldn’t give a damn. But this pressure even for the gender non-conforming folks to conform to a gender stereotype really gets on my nerves. I am not going to stop being a soldier just because now I have breasts. See, I don’t make fun of River for needing a bar stool at a dinner table, do I? I don’t ask him how many of his smart books he stacks on a chair before he can reach the edge of the table with his nose.

  Ok, ok. Stop it, Desiree. You are better than that…

  I knew I had to let River off the hook. I went through this with my buddies and even though they were supportive, it was not easy for them to accept a woman into their testosterone-reeking man-cave, even though I was one of them for years.

  “
Relax Ensign, I get it. It’s not like I wear my identity on my sleeve. But hey, we have other things to talk about now, don’t you think?”

  “We sure do…” said River mysteriously, and added: “How is the air?”

  “Try it yourself. It’s… well… it’s wonderful.”

  “I’ll wait, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Suit yourself. But I need to figure out what is in this box.” I picked it up again. It was about one kilo in weight, with a small black button on top.

  “Hey you there! Yes, I’m talking to you, Lenar Unkar Warrior.”

  “Mazula, it’s not a diplomatic cocktail party.”

  “Shhh River. This is the first time he did not hiss at us. Yes, Lenar Unkar Warrior, I am talking to you. What does all of this mean?”

  The Unkari looked intently at me and made a limb gesture, sliding it towards his jaw and down the neck. “Hfoooo,” whistled the guard.

  “Hfu? You mean, food?”

  “Hfoooo. Umn Ukrishn.”

  “Food! Human nutrition!” exclaimed River. “No way! All this time we just had to ask?”

  “Evidently so.” I pressed the button on top of the box. A cloud of steam ushered out of it, emitting a smell of… well, the closest description would be boiled grass. River hopped closer. He stretched his wrist towards the box, pointing the B5 for the analysis of its composition.

  “It’s definitely organic. Terrestrial organic, I mean. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, ok… It’s analyzing. A bunch of minerals, plant-based protein, fiber, fatty acids. It’s going over the database looking for the match. Mazula, I’ll be damned, it’s a synthetic approximation of spinach and beans, all scrambled, but the composition is really close.”

  “That’s good enough for me!” I said and checked the pot for a spoon. A spoon was obviously too much to ask, and I scooped the green goo with my finger, studied it for a second, and finally delivered it into my mouth.

  “I bet the grass in my yard tastes better. River, come here, man, let’s eat before we start dying again.”