Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  We run again, moving as quietly as stolen whispers.

  The next time Tuck halts, it’s beside a set of doors wearing an orange stripe down their middles. The words AUXILIARY POWER ROOMS are painted in large letters on their faces.

  We’re here.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  AUXILIARY POWER ROOMS, AKA “THE HIVE”

  TUCK

  Part of me can’t believe we made it here. We had a clean run from the crash site to the auxiliary power hive. No mourners, but the guy in the EVA suit couldn’t be anything but trouble.

  Laura did okay out there—no tripping, no talking. A few stumbles, but nothing that took her down shrieking. Maybe fate’s finally tossing me a little slack.

  … Or maybe it just knows I’m desperate enough to fall for the long con. I shouldn’t have touched Laura, dammit. Even holding her hand, lost in the dark, has made me want to slide my hand into hers and twine our fingers together.

  It’s stupid.

  I can’t afford to care about anyone these days.

  Not if I want them to live.

  Despite the cold, I’m sweating by the time I pry the auxiliary power hive’s ocular panels apart. Without power, all the ship’s touchlocks are down, forcing me to open the doors manually. Taking the flare from Laura, I step into the Hive’s antechamber first. These rooms haven’t been used for centuries. My toes sink into the dust on the floor. I wriggle them around. Nothing better than the feeling of dead skin, spores, and space rock between the toes, am I right?

  Laura follows me inside, making a face at the grime on the floor. Once the door panels lock behind her, I say, “We’re okay to talk here. The Hive’s hermetically sealed off from the rest of the ship—”

  “Who was that man we saw?” she asks, interrupting me.

  “Santa Claus, for all I know,” I reply.

  She steps closer. “You mean there are unaccounted for persons aboard the John Muir? People who may or may not support your crew’s mission?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so. My crew hasn’t had access to a functioning EVA suit since stasisbreak. Whoever he is, he’s not one of ours.”

  Her brows knit and her mouth opens in an O shape, but before she can say anything smart-assed, I take her by the wrist and lead her over to an aged map of the place, one that hangs on the wall by the door. Dammit, touched her again.

  The map shows a top-down view of the auxiliary power hives, a grid of twenty-one hexagon-shaped chambers, positioned in three groups of seven.

  “You see why we call the power rooms the Hive?” I ask, pointing to the honeycombed rooms. “Six power reactors are attached to each of the three auxiliary core rooms. We need twelve cores total to power the ship, though we’d be more comfortable at eighteen.” To be honest, the cores look less like beehives and more like flowers—six reactor rooms surround each of the core rooms like petals. Hallways connect the three core rooms, making it possible to move between them.

  Laura considers the map. “Basically, our existence depends on this one sector of the ship.”

  “Pretty much,” I say.

  “Is there any way to defend them?”

  “Maybe? What do you mean?”

  “If the hacker survived the crash, he will no doubt try to sabotage the John Muir,” she says, tapping the core rooms with a knuckle. “Is there a way to secure them from attack? Can we use one of the ship’s systems to lock their doors, or build a protocol that will keep unauthorized persons from accessing the cores?”

  I consider her for a moment: the long nautilus curl of her eyelashes, the determined set of her jaw.

  This is the part where, in movies, the guy says something really charming to impress the girl. “You really are a nerd,” I say.

  I’m not very good at being charming, am I?

  “¿Y que?” She laughs. “You think you’re el muy muy? I don’t think you have the right to call anyone a nerd, Tuck. Mr. I’ve Seen Every Pre-Exodus Movie Ever Made.”

  “Fair point,” I say, and think, Is she flirting with me?

  Nah.

  But now I wish I’d paid a little more attention in high school Spanish.

  We cross the auxiliary antechamber. The three doors to the core rooms stand closed. My flare’s light bounces off the doors’ dusty, stainless-steel surfaces. A single horizontal break point bifurcates the doors through their middles. Faded two-meter-tall letters—A, B, and C, respectively—mark each door.

  Blast doors.

  “Dammit,” I say, rubbing my chin with my hand. My crank’s useless on doors like these. “I forgot these doors don’t open easy. We’ll have to crawl through the maintenance ducts.”

  “Maintenance ducts?” Laura asks, but I’m already moving past the door for core room C. To the left of the core room doors, there sits a rebar ladder. Three meters up that ladder, there’s a small door that leads to a smaller duct. The door’s heavy, made of fifteen-centimeter-thick steel, and meant to protect the ship from radiation leakage in case of a reactor failure.

  Like from a crash.

  What I haven’t told Laura? I’m not certain the reactors will be stable. In order to reach the core rooms, we’ll have to travel through about fifteen meters of tunnel, which could potentially be exposed to radiation. Since my Geiger counter was built into my HUD—which depends on the ship having, y’know, power—I’m not going to know if we’re being exposed to something nasty.

  But without her, I won’t be able to get the cores online. Two people have to turn the keys in each of the core rooms, at the same time, in order to reroute the power systems.

  I won’t make that decision for her.

  I don’t want to be that kind of asshole.

  As she joins me at the ladder, I pause. Turn. “You should know … if the reactors are busted, we might be exposed to some radiation.”

  “I’d say more than some, ay?” Laura says, looking up at the meter-wide maintenance duct. She pulls her hood a few centimeters closer around her face, as if to shield herself. “Eighteen nuclear reactors will create more than some radiation.”

  “It wouldn’t be a pretty way to go,” I say.

  “Neither would suffocation in the dark,” she replies, putting her hands on her hips. “Come on, vato, I’m starting to think you’re scared.”

  Hell yeah, I’m afraid.

  I’m scared my stupidity’s going to get you killed.

  “Pfft,” I say, more to myself than to Laura. “I’ve got nothing to be scared of in there.” Gripping the ladder’s rungs, I climb up to the duct door and unlock the manual clamps securing it to the wall. The hinges groan as they move for the first time in centuries. Dust explodes in my face. I sneeze. “Hope you don’t mind a little dust.”

  “I’m an archeologist-in-training,” she says, coming up the ladder below me. “Dust is kind of my thing.”

  “And you think I’m the nerd,” I say, using both hands to propel myself into the duct. I remind myself to breathe, only to snort dust like cocaine. “Grab the door, will you?”

  Behind me, Laura sneezes as she reaches up to close the duct door behind us.

  “I thought you liked dust,” I say, crawling forward a couple of meters.

  “Not up my nose, I don’t,” she replies.

  “Lightweight.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  She snorts. “That’s what I thought.”

  It takes a few minutes to crawl through the ducts. Laura coughs and hacks behind me. Perhaps I should’ve let the lady go first, but you know what they say about hindsight.

  When I find the first core room door—marked with a big red C—I pop it open, then slide out feetfirst, ignoring the ladder. I land in a crouch. Dust plumes around my toes. Laura climbs down the ladder, civilized and neat. She comes to my side, smacking the grime from her clothing.

  “It’s like a tomb in here,” she says, examining the room as I hold up a flare. Dust covers everything. It slides off instruments and coats the soles of my feet
. Laura’s flare strikes several dingy glass screens. Each one of the room’s six walls has a large rectangular window set inside it, to allow technicians to monitor the cores while they are in use.

  Right now, nothing’s visible through the cloudy glass. All light passes through the panes and withers on the other side. We can’t see in. Thanks to my flare, something could definitely see out.

  “Oh my god!” Laura almost squeals, holding her flare over the computer. “Is that a keyboard?”

  “Uh … yes?” I say lamely.

  She sets her flare down on the desk, using a single finger to punch the arthritic keys. They click to the touch. “I’ve only heard about these. You really needed physical buttons to input information into your computers?” She lifts up the keyboard, looking underneath. “Had you moved on from Bluetooth by this point, or was that still popular? I’ve always been unclear on midmodern methods of wireless transmission.”

  Anxiety fists in my chest. I tell myself to shake it off, but I realize if we get out of here—if we make it off this ship—I won’t understand a thing about her world. To her, my tech’s no more impressive than, say, an abacus would be to me.

  I’m a relic, just like everything in this room.

  Everyone I loved on Earth has been dead for centuries.

  I’ve known this for a long time, of course. There’s a big difference between knowing something and feeling it.

  “Wow,” Laura says, setting the keyboard down. “I heard the Nero group tracked one of these things down recently, but I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve seen the desk-mounted variety—”

  “You realize you’re creeping me out, right?”

  She looks up at me. Blinks. “What do you mean?”

  I open my mouth to explain but realize I don’t have the words. Explaining things to people takes too much energy and time, two things I don’t currently have. “Just … never mind. Keep an eye on those screens while I cycle the breakers?”

  “Cycle the breakers?” she asks.

  “Reboot the power.”

  “Ah, alternating power systems must’ve been such a pain. Sure thing.” Laura drops into a chair, dust swirling around her hips. She wipes the screens in front of her with the corner of her cape, humming a song I don’t know.

  I turn toward the reactor control panels. The buttons, knobs, and switches are hidden under a century’s worth of dust. Most of the labels are for different areas of the ship. Current redirects and such. A big red button is marked EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. The breakers dot the far side of the control panel. They’re old and crackle to the touch. One switch snaps off when I try to cycle it, and I curse. I doubt anyone’s touched these switches since the crew went into stasis—after all, we’ve never needed anything more than the main power hive.

  “How weird is it,” Laura says softly, looking into the control panel’s blank screens, “to know the world has moved on without you?”

  “Let’s just say I have a little more empathy for Marty McFly these days,” I say, frowning when I can’t manage to get the control board to respond. Damn. Did we need to turn the reboot box keys before we tried to cycle the breakers, or after? Or is the ship fragged beyond repair?

  Laura looks up at me from the chair, lips pursed. I study the switches, trying to let on that I would like to skip this conversation without having to be an asshole. If I don’t look at her, maybe she’ll take the hint and abandon her questions.

  “Tuck?” she asks. I pretend to ignore her. I want to go back to the light banter, which never means much of anything. Banter doesn’t ache, it doesn’t hurt, and it never takes itself too seriously.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, clearing her throat. “I can see how it would hurt to be left behind. Maybe not forgotten, but left.”

  Sadness sneaks into her voice. I’m not sure she notices, but I do.

  “Hey,” I say, reaching out to touch her shoulder. I stop myself. My hand hangs in the air, all awkward. She eyes me like I’m crazy, but I shouldn’t get too close. Touching her will only create more problems for me down the line. I drop my hand. “Let’s just save the heavy stuff for after we get the ship back online, okay?”

  “Okay.” She cocks her head a little, spinning in the chair. “You and me, off to save ourselves and the whole human race.”

  “Damn skippy,” I say, kneeling down by the desk and prying an old drawer open. I rifle through its contents, looking for the keys to the room’s reboot box. “I’m here to kick ass and chew gum, and, girl, I’m all out of gum.”

  She looks at me funny, a half smile, half frown on her face, until I say, “It’s a movie quote. From They Live? The Muir ran out of gum about six months ago.”

  “You like old movies, don’t you?”

  “Anything retro and lame, yeah. I watch them at night—not much else to do around here. You guys still have movies, wherever it is you’re from?”

  “Panamerica. And ‘movies’ are a little different now … more like immersive versions of your old video games. Very few films are made for a flat screen.”

  “Then cancel what I said before. I don’t want to go back.”

  Laura laughs. Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out half a pack of mint gum. Taking a piece, she hands the rest to me.

  It’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in centuries. I can say that literally, you know.

  Maybe I’ll want a life on the other side of the universe after all.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  SHIP’S AUXILIARY POWER HIVE

  LAURA

  “There are two reboot boxes in each core room.” Tuck points to the rusty, dingy beige panels on either side of the room, positioned between reactor observation windows. Each panel has a silver eye, one with a vertical black pupil that bisects its cornea.

  No, not an eye. I search for the word in my head—it’s an analog lock. People used to put them on doors, vehicles, and such to keep valuables safe. We have passcodes and facial recognition tech in Panamerica, so no one has used analog locks in centuries.

  Tuck continues, “If we want to reboot the systems, we need to turn our keys at the same time in every room. I think.”

  “You think?” I ask. “You’re not sure?”

  “We need to find the keys for those reboot boxes,” he says, ignoring my question as he walks toward the door. “Keep looking in here, I’ll check core room B…”

  Tuck pauses, glancing back at me.

  “… You do know what a key looks like, right?” he asks.

  “Of course I do,” I say, rolling my eyes as I rise from my chair. Dad keeps an entire glass jar full of useless old keys at home. Coins, too.

  Tuck grins, and I realize he was teasing me. “Be right back.”

  As he cranks open the door and steps into the hallway beyond, I take a knee in front of a small filing cabinet under the control panel. Rust covers the drawers’ facades. One of the drawer pulls breaks off in my hand when I touch it, forcing me to pry the drawer open with my fingernails. Nothing inside looks helpful—I find rusty pens, old calculators, and brittle notepads; a mug with a crackle of dry coffee at the bottom; and a few strange coins. I search through the cabinet, in the closets, even in the trash cans, hoping to find something. Anything.

  I see plenty of junk, but no keys. Frustrated, I peer at the control panel, scraping dust off it with my fingertips, looking for clues. The panel buttons, though rimed with dust and age, glitter like raw gems. Despite the danger and desperation of our situation, there’s something awe-inspiring about it, too. How many archeologists have seen a functioning Exodus-era ship? As far as I know, my family and crew are the first.

  If we make it back to the Colonies, we’ll have the most amazing story to tell.

  Something thumps behind me. “Bueno, that was quick,” I say, turning. “Did you find them—”

  Tuck isn’t standing behind me.

  In fact, the door Tuck left through isn’t even open.

  The maintenance duct bangs closed as a man in a full EVA
suit—bulkier than anything we have on the Conquistador—rises to his feet. I drop my flare on the ground, shocked.

  Tuck’s words echo in my head: Whoever he is, he’s not one of ours.

  The man’s ancient EVA creaks as he steps forward. I watch myself stumble backward in the reflection of the helmet, catching myself on the control panel. He’s got some sort of long wrench, one thick as my wrist and covered in old blood. A long time ago, that EVA suit must have been white; now it’s gray with age and covered in rusty stains. Someone’s drawn an ouroboros insignia under the old US flag on his arm.

  I pull my bow off my back and reach for an arrow.

  The man in the EVA’s too quick. He lunges at me before I can nock, swinging the wrench in an arc. I duck under his swing. The air whistles over my head. Grunting, I kick a trash can into his legs. He turns into the attack, going down hard on one hip and tumbling into the chair behind me. The wrench bounces free of his hand, clattering on the floor.

  I scramble for an arrow as he untangles his limbs from the chair. Just as I yank a shaft from my quiver, he pushes me into the ground, crushing the air out of my lungs. I drive my elbow into his rib cage. The EVA suit protects him from some of the damage, but I still feel a bone crack under the pressure. Agony shudders through his frame. My own elbow buzzes with pain. He grabs my head, smacking it against the floor, but not hard enough to daze me. His EVA suit impairs his speed, but also makes him invulnerable to pressure point attacks.

  “¡Hijo de puta!” I snap. My fingers curl around the wrench as he shoves my head into the ground again. I use physics against him, relying on my lower center of gravity to twist, unseat him, and dump him on the ground next to me. Scrambling away, I get to my feet. I throw the wrench out of reach, grab my bow off the floor, and whirl on him.

  My hands shake as I nock the arrow. The man in the EVA rises, hands up.

  “Hey, Laura, I found these in the…” Tuck says as he walks back into the room. He spots the man in the EVA, eyes widening. He glances at me, appraising my condition with a glance, then back at the guy in the EVA. “Who the hell are you?”