Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  Of course, it’s possible none of those people survived the crash, and that thought aches twice as much. If I ever want to see my family or friends again, I will have to venture into the John Muir.

  Alone.

  And to think I ever wished for adventure.

  “You can do this, Laura,” my mother’s voice echoes through the bridge’s empty chaos as the message plays again. “Never forget, you’re a Cruz.”

  Fortuna, gloria, y familia.

  You’re a Cruz. My ancestors were among the first to leave the Colonies, searching for the history we’d lost to the stars. They were explorers and adventurers, masters of physics, and great storytellers of history. While not every Cruz has fallen in love with shipraiding, it still feels like a family tradition. So much so that, when the day came for me to enroll at the uni, I chose to enroll under my mother’s surname, Cruz, and not my father’s name, which would have been a more traditional choice. I suppose the move was political, too, knowing my mother will choose one of her children to succeed her someday, and that Gael has no interest in running the Cruz outfit.

  I do.

  You can do this.

  Using an arrowhead to cut the top half of my flight suit away, I make bandages from the extra fabric. I tie several wide bands around the hole in my thigh. When I stand again, the pain’s less intense. With only a tank top and bra underneath, I shudder in the cold.

  There’s one other thing my mother left behind, something I can’t bear to leave.

  I trudge back through the Rio Grande bulkhead, my eyes on the Declaration’s case. Of all the artifacts on display, it’s the only one small enough to take with me into the John Muir, and the only thing I might be able to save.

  Nocking an arrow, I take aim and fire straight into the cables. They hold. I fire a second arrow, then a third, till the cables rip and the case falls. When it hits the floor, the floatglass shatters. The sound’s dampened by the lack of air pressure in the tunnel, but still makes my shoulders rack up around my ears. I glance over my shoulder.

  Nothing moves.

  Taking a knee, I remove the remaining floatglass shards from the Declaration. It’s a large artifact—almost a meter in length—but light. If my father caught me touching it bare-handed, he’d probably murder me on the spot. I don’t know how long it took Dad to restore this document. Days. Weeks. I doubt he even breathed on it while he worked.

  And here I am, cradling the fragile parchment in my bare, dirty hands. I don’t dare fold the thing. Carrying it in my hands seems foolhardy. I need some sort of transporter tube or case. We have lots of tubes in the stockroom … which lies on the other side of the ship. I won’t have time to reach them, not when the air pressure has dipped so low it’s hard to breathe.

  I cast around for something, anything I can use to protect the artifact. My elbow hits the side of my quiver, and an idea forms half a second after. Setting the Declaration aside, I swing the quiver off my shoulder and remove the arrows inside.

  The quiver stands taller than the Declaration is wide. It’s not an ideal transportation method for a six-hundred-year-old document, but it’ll have to do.

  Holding my breath, I roll the Declaration into a tube, then slide it into my quiver. To keep the document safe, I tuck some of the artifact’s mounting materials inside, too: a piece of bioengineered vellum that will hydrate the parchment and keep it from drying out and cracking; a flexible sheet of clear titanium, one that will keep my arrowheads from scratching or damaging the document; and a hunk of gauze at the bottom to keep everything in place.

  With the artifact stowed safely away—or at least safely enough—I sling the quiver over my shoulder and rise. Stringing my bow over my chest, I trudge back through the bulkhead, past Mami’s message, and toward the wreckage of the John Muir. Unprepared. Unready. But not unafraid.

  Heading toward the unknown.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  LOCATION UNKNOWN

  TUCK

  I wake up slowly.

  In the dark unknown.

  A cold breeze curls inside my hood.

  Metal creaks in the darkness.

  Dripping water echoes in the hollow space around me. Each plop sends ripples of pain through my skull. I can feel every centimeter of the harness that keeps me bolted to my seat. The side of my head aches. My flesh is gashed open. Tender. When I reach up to touch it, I find my hair thatched over the wound.

  What … the … hell happened?

  I wipe condensation off my face with one hand. I remember fire. And falling. Holly, screaming.

  “Holly?” I ask, wringing a few words from my groggy brain. “You there?”

  Silence.

  “Hey … answer me!”

  Nothing.

  “Dejah, hello?”

  No answer, no luck. No stir, no hum in my head. The ebb and flow of images, thoughts, and emotions fed to me via the coglinks lies silent. I haven’t been this alone in ages.

  Frag me.

  With a shaking hand, I reach for one of the flares sewn onto my slimpack. I bend its plastic body, snapping its insides like bone. Light bleeds out, casting a green glow on everything within a five-meter radius.

  I’m in the tram car, which seems to be perched at a sharp angle on a chunk of tunnel procrete. Water simmers below, black as crude oil. It looks like the deepdown sea—a massive water well that spans the outer deck of the Muir’s deepdown ring. If the deepdown sea is visible, I’ve fallen through not one, but two of the ship’s decks.

  That was one helluva distraction, Aren. Whatever his plan had been, this couldn’t have been the outcome he’d been hoping for—situation normal: all fragged up.

  The sights sucker punch me. Shattered chunks of the Muir’s tunnels thrust out of the darkness like eldritch teeth. Apocalyptic. Busted tram tracks roller-coaster in the air. Cavernous moans reverberate through the space. This time, this busted time should’ve been the end. Nobody deserves this kind of luck, to wake up in time to watch the last star of hope explode. Who knows what systems went down with the tunnels? We might’ve lost mission-critical stuff. Life support. Air pressure. Heating coils. From where I hang, the Muir doesn’t look salvageable.

  No way she’ll survive a fallout this bad.

  If the ship doesn’t survive, neither will we.

  The coglinks aren’t functional, so the ship’s power grid must be down. Neither the ship nor the park will last long without power. Six hours, tops. The air reclaimers stagnate without an energy supply, so the park will suffocate from an excess of carbon dioxide. Without heat, everything will freeze. Without the tram systems, the other curators won’t be able to reach the main power hives for hours—assuming the power hives aren’t also damaged. Depending on my location, I’ll need to get either the main or auxiliary power hives back online. Or else hasta la vista, baby. We’ll all die.

  The good news? Our gravitational rings haven’t failed … or else I wouldn’t be hanging here like a little glitch. Good on you, Mom, for making those rings store solar power. My solar plexus is thanking you right now.

  Since no one’s coming to save the ship’s damsel-in-distressed ass—or mine, for that matter—I should probably get to work. And quick.

  Holding my flare high, I glance around me. “Holly?” I whisper.

  The seats behind me are empty. Dammit, where is she? Did she wake up first? Nah, I don’t think she’d leave me here. As much as I don’t want Holly to be dead, the Muir desperately depends on her being alive. Two people need to turn the keys in the power hives to bring the ship back online after a crash. I can’t save the Muir without another set of hands, and I have a feeling the mourners won’t oblige.

  “Holly?” I hiss, a little louder this time. No answer.

  I put a hand on my harness’s release. My lungs and guts tighten, shallowing up my breathing. I fight to take a deep breath. Yank the release tab.

  The harness dumps me onto the seats in front of me.

  I lie still for a few seconds. Blood
’s on my tongue. My chest’s bruised so deep, I feel like the harness’s straps still dig into my skin.

  The tram groans, a tired, low creak that aches in my teeth. It wobbles on an unsteady fulcrum of procrete. Even a small shift in its center of gravity could send it plummeting into the deepdown sea. But I’ve already been on that ride, and spoiler alert, it sucked.

  I scoot toward the aisle, slow and steady, then climb the sides of the seats like a ladder. The tram senses every shift in my weight and complains.

  When I don’t find Holly curled atop the seats, I curse under my breath and check the seats across the aisle. The girl’s gone without a trace. She left no blood, no swatch of fabric, no proof of life. I’ve got to find her. Best-case scenario, she woke up before me, maybe thought I was dead, and moved on. Worst case, she was thrown from the tram in the fall. She could’ve ended up anywhere in the wreckage.

  I drop my flare, counting the number of seconds it takes to hit the water. One. Two. I make a quick calculation in my head, figuring I’m fifteen meters above the surface. If I make a mistake free-climbing the tram, the water’s surface tension won’t feel like hitting procrete at that height. Unless the water’s real shallow or hiding metal spikes under its surface, it’s a survivable fall.

  Striking a second flare, I crawl out of the tram’s window. I wish the power grid hadn’t gone down with the tunnels. Wish I could call Holly’s name aloud out here, too, but if I endured the fall, so did the mourners.

  Ignoring how the metal squeals, I pull myself onto the tram’s roof. The back half of the tram’s caught between two slabs of procrete. I climb the crag with clumsy, cold fingers. The grade isn’t steep. The edges drop off into nothingness, though. Blackness, a sort of darkness we didn’t have on Earth.

  A perfect pitch dark. A complete absence of light. Void-like. Terrible.

  I spend the better part of an hour searching for Holly among the ruins. There’s no evidence anyone’s been here, no curators, no mourners. She’s disappeared, and with every minute that passes, my panic and frustration only ferment in my gut.

  Where are you, Holly?

  Eventually, I pull myself up onto the t-One tunnel’s outer flank and find a large crack. I drop into the main pipeline, landing on the balls of my feet. My knee twinges.

  Though I know the Muir better than anyone else, her ruins feel foreign. The tunnel’s structural ribs—spaced ten meters apart—place hurdles in my path. Mourners croak somewhere in the darkness, making small, froglike sounds. They’re searching for one another. Others make death rattles in the darkness. Their bodies clang against the tunnels ribs or whistle past me in the air as they fall.

  Holding the flare high, I work my way up the tunnel. I freeze whenever a croak sounds close. The grade grows steeper with each rib. Soon I’m climbing again, wedging my hands and feet into cracks, resting on the ribs jutting out from the walls. I realize the tunnel must rejoin the aft deck at some point, but it’s nowhere in sight.

  As I pull myself up onto another ledge, something moves at the edge of the flare’s light. My hand goes to my knife. When I lift my flare higher, I realize it’s not a mourner.

  It’s Holly.

  She lies on a slab of procrete, half-crushed under a large boulder. Her dark hair spreads like an oil slick under her head. Wait, that’s not her hair.

  My lips open in an unspoken no.

  No, no, no—not another one.

  I scramble across the rib toward the blood-blackened procrete ridge she’s on. Her breathing whistles, wet. The burst vessels in the whites of her eyes make them look diseased. Blood speckles her lips.

  Christ, God, dammit, take me instead. She’s just an innocent kid. Haven’t enough people died on my watch?

  Holly’s eyes burn in the flare’s light, fearful. I kneel beside her. My toes squelch in her blood. I lay a hand on her forehead. Her skin burns hot enough to blister. She trembles under my touch. A sheen of sweat clings to her brow. Her hair soaks up her blood. She looks so fragile, like the bones in her face are a cheap plastic shell.

  With the ship’s systems down, we can’t communicate via our coglinks.

  Holly squints at me, trying to see past the flare’s brilliance. “Tuck…?” she signs one-handed, forced to spell everything out letter by letter. Her other arm lies useless, broken in a compound fracture. The shattered bone thrusts from her skin, glistening. “Don’t … stay … mourners … close.”

  She’s dying, and she’s thinking about my welfare? I put my flare down.

  “I not leave you.” My sign language isn’t great, but I can read it okay. Aren made all curators learn it, just in case we needed to communicate in the deepdowns during a power failure. At the time, I blew the classes off.

  I am the biggest asshole in the whole universe.

  At this point, I’m not even certain that’s much of an exaggeration.

  “Save … the … ship…,” Holly signs. “The park … it’s important…”

  “I will. Ship survive.”

  “Go … I … am … dead … already…”

  My hands hang in the empty space between us.

  “Survival … is … a … barbaric … thing,” she says.

  Why do the stupid things I say always come back to bite me in the ass?

  Holly coughs. The sound echoes up the tunnel like an explosion. Blood splatters my arm. I cast my cloak around her body to shield her from the monsters. She uses the back of her good hand to wipe at her mouth.

  Croaks and chirps tumble down the tunnel.

  “Go,” she signs to me. “But … before…” Holly presses her dekapen into my hand. Most curators carry them—a single shot of barbiturates, paralytics, and potassium. But it’s not the nice, yellow kind of potassium you used to find in bananas. It’s part of a deadly cocktail, an escape hatch, a last resort.

  Mercy on a stick.

  My eyes widen. “No.” I shake my head. “No.” That’s one word in sign language I know for sure.

  “Please … can’t … do … this … myself…”

  “No,” I sign as violently as I can. “No, not that.”

  Holly folds the pen in my fist, lifts it, and positions the tip over her jugular. Her fingers leave bloodstains on my skin. “Easy…,” she mouths, but her fingers tremble. “We … can … together…”

  Tear tracks cut through the blood on her face. Her breath begins to wheeze. It’s the very edge of a sob, held back. The sound’s trapped in her throat.

  “Please…,” she mouths.

  The croaks of the mourners crawl closer. My fingers curl tight around the dekapen.

  I can’t take her life.

  I won’t leave her alone.

  But I’ve got to get the power back on.

  Clock’s ticking. Tick. Tock.

  I can’t look in her eyes and do this, I can’t, even if killing her looks like mercy and will get me out of this damned tunnel with my honor intact and with enough time to save the ship and everyone on it, so maybe I don’t lose the rest of them tonight, too.

  We’re all so lost out here.

  Forgotten.

  Alone.

  I lean down and press my mouth to Holly’s, tasting her blood, her sweat, her saliva, and the last few seconds of her life. It’s the only way to articulate any kind of human affection and warmth in this dark place.

  She deepens the kiss, mouth opening to meet mine. Her chest expands as she takes one last breath. My hand shakes and sweats. She slips her good hand into my hair, down my neck, and finally, grasps my hand that holds the dekapen.

  Her fingers squeeze mine.

  Don’t miss, I tell myself. For the love of God, don’t miss.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  CRASH SITE

  LAURA

  After the crash, the Conquistador’s smarthull melded itself to the terrarium ship, creating a tight seam … or so I hope. The closer I get to the big ship, the stronger the gravity becomes. The first phosphorescent arrow painted on the floor glows near t
he maw of the John Muir, left behind by Mami’s crew. The path tilts down at a twenty-degree angle, the arrow pointing into the ship’s throaty, unbroken shadows.

  I creep toward the tunnel, careful of my bare feet and the crash debris, nocking an arrow. With each step, pain stabs into the wound on my thigh. A breeze whooshes by me, eager to escape into the Conquistador and beyond that, space. It’s so cold, the air plucks my skin and leaves gooseflesh in its wake. It smells peppery, like carbon and blood. The scent wakens some primal knowledge in me, one telling me to run. Leave this place. But I can’t. As Dad would say, quoting some old poet, the only way out is through.

  The light strangles where the ships meet, the fascia of one of the John Muir’s tunnels ripped away. Inside, the floor drops about two meters. The big ship’s viscera hang from the ceiling, ducts and tubes and cords, now barely contained by an arched support beam. The metal walls wear rust, but otherwise stand bare. Shipbuilders didn’t start using the sensitive nanoparticle paint until about two hundred years ago, so it’s what I expected from an Exodus-era craft.

  At the bottom, three human-shaped lumps lie in ponds of blood. Guts blister out of abdomens. Chunks of bone lay scattered about like jagged, broken glass. One man’s been decapitated, his head resting on its ear a meter away. Their flight suits, while shredded, bear both the rearing Cruz lion and the Panamerican flag. Their faces are too ravaged to recognize, especially since they lie deep in the darkness.

  Nothing moves. My breath snags on a skipped heartbeat.

  Blinking back tears, I lift some tubing aside and ease down into the tunnel below. My bow’s bottom edge rattles against the shorn metal lip of the ship. I land inside the John Muir with a whump, then creep around the bodies and gore on the floor.

  “What did this to you?” I ask them.

  I spot my answer in another step: a fourth corpse rests down here, one with sagging pale skin and tattered clothing. A trail of black blood leaks out of the plasma bolt hole in the monster’s skull. Its rib cage looks too big, the skin no thicker than a papery membrane over the bones. In the fleshier places, the lower back and buttocks, the creature’s pores resemble Dad’s Great Barrier Reef coral fossils, the surfaces bleached pale. A few holes yawn so wide, I could almost stick my pinkie finger inside.