Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “Coming home,” I said, then reset my course back to the pod and headed back. Going home was easier than coming out, and I felt myself slowly getting the hang of it. Space-borne EVAs were never going to be my thing, but I at least owed it my full effort.

  We proceeded from there to our second and then our third assignment, and each one went better than the previous one. Just one more to go, but we’d been out almost seven hours and we were both tired. Tired enough for the walls to come down, emotionally at least, if not the very solid physical barrier between our two compartments inside the pod.

  “Just one more and you’ll be rid of me,” I said as we were about halfway to ansible number 4.

  “Don’t be stupid. I don’t want to be rid of you,” Natalie said.

  “You could have fooled me.”

  She sighed. “I’m not blaming you for things, Peter. I just… I just want to protect myself. Emotionally.”

  “I understand that.”

  “There are other reasons. Things we need to discuss before I leave,” she said in a much softer tone. That intrigued me.

  “Do we have time to talk about them right now?” I asked.

  She stayed silent for a moment, then, “Probably not. Fifteen minutes to the last ansible. We should stay focused on work. We’ll talk on the trip home. We’ll have plenty of time then.”

  “Okay,” I said, but now my mind was spinning with thoughts of what other “things” we needed to discuss besides her assignment to a ship other than Starbound.

  Presently we pulled up to the last ansible, but it looked like it was completely out of commission. It was still in place, but dark, and I got no readings on my scan of its systems.

  “Well, shit, we’re going to have to go in and lock on, I think. The power’s out. We may need the pod’s power to jump-start the ansible back up,” I said.

  “Got it,” she replied, and then began the very delicate maneuver of piloting the repair pod to inside a meter of the ansible before locking onto the thing with the pod’s clamps. “Locked down,” she said after about ten minutes of difficult maneuvering. “Check your jet-fuel reserve before you go out.”

  “I’ve got enough, I think. Besides, we are locked on to the thing,” I said.

  “Always overconfident,” she said, but I ignored her. I just wanted this mission to be over.

  I emptied the environment from my side of the cabin and made my way out of the hatch again, using just a small burst of the jets to get clear. I managed to grab one of the EVA handles on the ansible pretty easily and then I made my way hand-over-hand to the control panel.

  “I’m not an electrician, but this puppy looks dead to me,” I said. I proceeded to activate my monitoring tool and scanned the whole unit. There was residual power in some of the components but the backup batteries were cold, indicating it had been offline for a while. The system was double-redundant though, like most space systems, meaning the ansible’s failure wouldn’t have been noticed by the overall system until we conducted our maintenance mission. I called up the repair procedure and it had me removing the power system panel and attempting a reboot. That took almost fifteen minutes and the reboot attempt was a no-go.

  “You’re going to have to extend me the power cord to re-fire this thing,” I said.

  “Acknowledged. Is there a matching plugin on the ansible?” I looked for a minute, and found it in a very inconvenient place.

  “There is, but whoever designed this power panel never expected anyone to have to use it, based on its location. Complete crap design,” I said. Natalie extended the power cord out and I had to go and retrieve it, no easy task, and I was using up more and more of my cone jet propellant sliding back and forth.

  “You’ve only got twenty-two minutes of environment left in that suit,” she said in my ear as I struggled to turn myself upside down and invert my position relative to the pod. “If you can’t get the repair done in that time, you’ll have to come back in and reload.” That could take another thirty minutes, and I didn’t want to waste that time.

  “Understood. It should be doable,” I said as I struggled with the cord, getting it wrapped around my arm and stuck under my shoulder before I finally got the thing in my left hand, stretching it out towards the ansible plugin. “Cripes, it’s a dozen centimeters too short,” I said.

  “Are you sure? The repair kit says it should reach from this position.”

  “Well, since my arm is fully extended and the cord is taut, then yes, I’m pretty damn sure it’s not long enough,” I snapped.

  “Maybe your arms are too short,” she deadpanned.

  “I think that’s a conversation for another time,” I said.

  “Try again,” she pushed me, without any further comments about my physical shortcomings. I stretched it again and felt it give a little, the connectors finally clicking together. As soon as I let go though, the connection broke.

  “Shit. I’m going to have to hold this thing while you charge the line. It won’t stay connected on its own,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure!” I yelled. We were under pressure now, for time, environment, everything. “Sorry. Yes, I’m sure I’m going to have to hold it while you run power through the damn line.”

  “That’s against the regs.”

  “Natalie…” I heard her sigh in my com.

  “All right, but once the ansible is running you let go,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  I waited as she ran through the power protocols, then extended my arm one more time until the connectors clicked.

  “Ready here,” I said.

  “Okay. Power coming through the line in 3… 2… 1…”

  I wasn’t sure what happened next. There was a bright spark and I couldn’t see for a few seconds. By the time I got my bearings all I could be sure of was that I wasn’t attached to the ansible anymore. I looked out my visor and all I could see was that the ansible and pod were passing frequently in and out of my visor’s line of sight, and growing more distant with each pass.

  I was spinning away in free space.

  I tried to determine the axis of my rotation, and as best I could I took a guess and fired a series of short bursts from my left cone jet. This had the desired effect of slowing down my spin rate but left me with essentially no propellant left in my suit. I eventually got my rotation stopped so that the ansible and pod were constantly in my line of sight.

  I checked my com but it was dead, as were my environmental controls and all the suit’s systems. Clearly I’d taken a jolt from the electrical system on board the ansible, possibly a spark from one of the internal components that stored energy. It wouldn’t have taken much to create a feedback loop through the line that blew me off into space, but as I’d said, I was no electrician.

  Then I looked up and I saw something else, something which disturbed me a lot. A blue-suited figure was floating free from the repair pod and coming right for me.

  I watched as Natalie approached, maneuvering toward me much more skillfully than I could have done. Within a few minutes, she had me wrapped in her arms. I watched as she plugged in an auxiliary power line to my suit.

  “Can you hear me?” she said into my now-functioning com.

  “Yes,” I said. “You can’t stay out here in that skin suit. You won’t last twenty minutes. It’s not built for extended EVAs.”

  “I know that. And I used six minutes getting to you.” She adjusted my arm panel, checking my vitals and environment. “Christ,” she said. “You’ve got a leak somewhere.” We both struggled to hold on to each other as we looked for the leak, and then found it readily enough. There was a burn hole on the outside of my left forearm. “That short knocked out everything in the pod, Peter. It’s rebooting, but it will take twenty minutes to come back online.”

  “And you have less than fourteen minutes in that suit,” I said. She turned my arm monitor panel to me so I could see it.

  “At the rate you’re losing ai
r and heat, you’ve barely got six,” she said.

  “No chance of making it back to the pod?” She shook her head.

  “I used almost all my propellant getting to you, and yours is nearly gone, too. We don’t have enough to get back,” she said.

  “So we’re going to die out here,” I said. She said nothing to that, just looked at me through her visor.

  “I managed to get off a distress call through my autonomous suit com, but without the longwave boost from the pod I doubt anyone heard it,” she said. We stayed silent for a few moments, just holding each other.

  “Maybe we should have that conversation we were going to have on the trip home now,” I said. Maybe I just wanted to talk about something, anything, besides the fact that I was most probably going to die in my girlfriend’s arms in a few minutes, and then she would die after me.

  “Jesus, Peter,” she said, looking away from me.

  “Just tell me, Natalie.” I could feel my mind beginning to fade, and I was starting to get very cold. I tried to focus on her face, but it was getting harder to see her. My visor was fogging up.

  “There was another reason I wanted to switch assignments from Starbound,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  There was a long pause, and I felt my life ebbing away. It was so damn cold…

  “I’m pregnant, Peter. I’m going to have our baby. That trip we took to the Tasman Islands between semesters, I forgot to take my pregnancy repressors,” she said.

  I willed myself out of the fog, fighting hard for my life. To get back to her…

  “I worried about that. I… I didn’t take mine… either.”

  “Don’t talk, just listen,” I heard her say. “I didn’t want to burden you, for you to feel obligated to stay with me. You had so much in front of you…” My eyes were closed now. All I could do was mumble some words, but I wanted to touch her, to hold her one last time, but we were separated by the damned suits, and the cold vacuum of space.

  “I love you, Peter. I always will,” I heard her say through tears and sobbing. And then everything was dark around me, I couldn’t hear her voice anymore… and it was so cold…

  * * *

  When I woke up for the third time, the doctors told me that I’d been in an induced coma for nine days and that I’d almost died. This time the information stuck. In some ways, I wished I had died. Serosian came to see me the second day, and I demanded to be let out of the hospital. It was him who had rescued both Natalie and me, in a small Downship used for diplomatic missions. Turned out he’d been tracking me, just in case. Something about me being “a valuable asset to the Union,” or some such crap. Whatever. It didn’t comfort me, at all.

  Natalie, well, Natalie was gone off to Carinthia and her assignment on H.M.S. Impulse. She left me a small handwritten note stating that our child had been put in stasis pending adoption by a couple in New Auckland. I wouldn’t be allowed to know their names, or anything more about them. I guessed it was the right choice, her choice, but it hurt me badly.

  After a day out of the hospital Serosian came to see me again in my new stateroom on High Station, a serious upgrade over my Academy lodgings. The privileges of being a junior officer, I guessed.

  “And how is our first Lightship Academy valedictorian?” he asked, sitting across from me.

  I shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I suppose,” I replied. “This has been quite an unpleasant ride for me. I missed all our Academy celebrations, the parties, seeing my friends, and I’m on forced leave for three more days before I can report to Starbound.”

  “And you’ve lost your girl.”

  I looked up at him. “Yes. That, and… other things.”

  Serosian leaned forward. “That’s part of why I’m here, Peter. Natalie left me a note, too. A request, really. And I’m here to fulfill that request,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He stood up. “Get dressed, Lieutenant. I have something to show you,” he said.

  I did, and we went back down to the medical bay. Several medical technicians nodded to us as we passed, Serosian speaking softly to them. Eventually he led me into a darkened room where we both sat down and the thick soundproof door was quietly shut behind us. He leaned over to me and spoke in a whisper.

  “Just listen,” he said, and I did. As the room grew quieter I realized I could hear something, but not quite make out what it was. Then it dawned on me.

  A heartbeat.

  Slowly a light on the wall came up, and I could ever so faintly see a small object in extremely dim blue-green light floating in the dark. I stood up to get a better look. “Is this—” I whispered.

  “This is your child, Peter. She’s in stasis right now, growing very slowly, but eventually she’ll be accelerated to full term and her adoptive parents will take her home.”

  “She?” I asked. Serosian nodded.

  “You have a daughter,” he said.

  A tear came to my eye. “But only for a little while,” I said. “Can I touch her?”

  Serosian nodded. “That’s what this chamber is for, to simulate the touch of a parent on a mother’s womb. Go ahead,” he said.

  I went to the wall and touched the amniotic sack. It flexed and gave freely, so I put my arms around my daughter, for what I was sure would be the only time.

  And I cried.

  * * *

  Once more I stood in the observation lounge on High Station, staring out at the stars and wondering what might have been between Natalie and me. Serosian’s parting words still hung in my memory.

  “You still have Starbound to look forward to, Peter, and my guess is you’ll have plenty of adventures ahead of you. This is just the beginning,” he had said. I hoped that was true, because it felt like the end of something very big and very important in my life, and I hoped the next chapter would end with me being happier than I was now.

  I thought of Natalie, and our love, one last time, and then I vowed to put it out of my mind and get myself ready for the job ahead.

  I had a feeling that the Union Navy was going to need me to be prepared.

  In 1995 Catherine Asaro’s popular Skolian Empire series began in Primary Inversion with a sort of intergalactic Romeo and Juliet story. Since then, many books and stories have followed. The author herself introduces this next chapter: “The choice made by the brothers in the ‘Wages of Honor’ plays a role in several of my books about the Ruby Dynasty. It features in The Radiant Seas after Soz becomes Imperator and must take the Radiance Fleet into the largest battles ever faced by the Skolian Imperialate. She has a decision to make, one that will affect the lives of millions, even billions of people. Sitting in the darkness of her quarters on the flagship of the fleet, she contacts her father during the last moments before all interstellar communications fail. She asks him who he thinks made the right decision in the War of the Clans, Eldrin or Althor. Her father tells her that he doesn’t know, but that both of her brothers acted with honor. The decision Soz finally makes changes the course of an interstellar war. I’ve wanted to write this story for a long time, so when Bryan asked me if I would contribute a Skolian story to the anthology, I knew the time had come to put it into words.”

  THE WAGES OF HONOR

  CATHERINE ASARO

  I. CHILD OF THE CATHEDRAL

  Eldrin gripped the hilt of his great sword with both hands and swung the weapon in a wide arc. Light slanted through the Stained Glass Forest, dappling him with color while he practiced. Only two other sounds broke the drowsing silence of late afternoon, the chirp of prism-crickets and the rumble of a transport taking off from the tiny, distant starport. He circled his blade around and around, savoring the strain on his muscles. At sixteen years of age, he enjoyed the exertion; it created a hypnotic sense of motion that almost let him forget why he had come here. If only he could empty his mind and escape his thoughts. They threatened to spiral out of control, once again dropping him into the ice of his memories.

 
; The ice of death.

  No! He swung the sword faster, striving for an exhaustion that would blanket his mind. If only the serenity here could soothe him. The Stained Glass Forest reminded him of the library in his home, with its windows designed in mosaics of colored glass. He couldn’t read the books, not even a few words, but he loved that room, the way sunlight pouring through the windows cast patterns of colored light across the floor. Here in the forest, the trees and their branches were poles of glasswood, each tree a single color: red, blue, green, or gold. Spheres of the same colors hung from the branches, some small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, others ten times that size. The two suns of the planet Lyshriol were setting behind the trees, the large amber sphere of Valdor partially eclipsed by Aldan’s smaller gold orb. In their light, the forest glowed like a living cathedral of stained-glass windows.

  Eldrin paused and poked his blade into a sphere above his head. It popped, showering him with glitter, the pollen that would someday grow more trees. He laughed, such a rare sound nowadays, and brushed the pollen off his loose shirt. He sang a few lines of an aria he had been composing, and the music soothed the ragged edges of his thoughts.

  A voice rumbled behind him. “You fighting bubbles now?”

  Eldrin looked around to see his brother Althor a few paces away, dressed in trousers and a dark shirt. He was holding his own great sword, the blade resting casually against his shoulder. Although only fourteen, two years younger than Eldrin, Althor already stood taller than him, taller indeed than any man in their village. His shoulders were broad, his muscles developed and large, and he was still growing. The light glinted on his curls, making him look even more like their mother, with the same metallic gold tinge to his skin and hair.

  “Where did you come from?” Eldrin didn’t want company; he had come out here to be alone.

  Althor walked over to him. “I thought we were going to practice.”

  Damn, he had forgotten. He almost told Althor he didn’t feel like it, but he didn’t want to look weak to his “little” brother. So he said, “All right.”