by Neil Clarke
“What’s wrong with it?” asks Marika. “It froze?”
Konstantinova frowns at the diagnostic. “Doesn’t look like it. The mechanism still registers. Something must have broken loose while we were sleeping. Maybe we can open the nav panel in the back and—”
“In the asteroid belt,” says Marika. “Something hit the hull.”
“After last time, there better not be a fucking thing wrong with that hull,” says Konstantinova.
“But it sang,” Marika says quietly.
All at once Konstantinova has a vision like a reel of film, as a sliver of rock careens into the hull, as a few grains slice through the hull and nick the fuel line, as forty years of a microscopic accident converge on them at once when there’s not enough pressure in a valve.
She tries for words, and for a moment fails.
“We can’t access that now,” Walters says. “We’re heading into the atmosphere, we’ll burn up if we go out there. Let’s pull out, we’ll look at it from a steady orbit.”
“If we pull out now,” says Konstantinova, “we’ll burn the fuel we need to launch from the surface of Dee and go home. So we take our chances in the water, or we take our chances on the ground.”
This shouldn’t be such an agony; this isn’t the first time she’s been here. It should get easier. This should have an answer, by now.
“All right,” she manages, “pull out and circle back on a one-way trip. This is the go/no go. Vote.”
She waits without turning for them to weigh in. She has a new respect for Mission Control, forty-one years ago; this is a silence that’s hard to allow.
At last, Walters says, “No go. We’ll take our chances in the water.”
Marika doesn’t say anything. Konstantinova frowns at the comm, wonders if she missed it; if Marika answered while Konstantinova was still talking.
(Marika has that habit, and her answer is always Go.)
But she waits for an answer a long time, until there is the sound of something sealing; Konstantinova sees the warning light go red under her fingers before she registers that Marika is opening the outer hatch.
Click.
(The transit is over; they are parting.)
*
The hairline crack is in the hydraulics panel. As Marika approaches it, moving hand over hand along the side rails, one bead of gasoline pushes through it and away.
“You won’t get home,” she says into her mic. “You’ve lost too much already.”
She doesn’t know if the connection is still live; she forgets if she turned it on or not, and her heart is pounding too loudly for her to hear a thing.
She grips the screwdriver in her free hand and gets to work. It’s familiar by now, and the screws come apart one by one, cling gently to the magnets in the fingertips of her glove.
The suit warms up with her work; her visor fogs. She tries not to panic. There’s not enough air to panic. (She disconnected—there wasn’t time for anything else.)
If she lets go of the handrail, she’ll vanish.
She imagines a darkness like the darkness of the boat on calm water, imagines stretching out a hand as she falls.
The screwdriver shakes; she clamps down with numb fingers to keep it from escaping, drags off another screw.
But it’s useless. Her helmet is fogging up from the inside now—she can’t see, she can’t see, and there’s not enough time left to hold her breath and wait for equalization, not enough oxygen left to hyperventilate and turn it into droplets big enough to see around.
She shoves the pick in at an angle, to avoid her eyes.
Three stabs before the visor cracks; another three before she can wedge the pick inside and wrench it out.
The shield winks once and spins gently out of sight, knocks away a scattering of gold where the coating has flaked off under the chisel.
She exhales, so her lungs don’t explode from the decompression, and turns to the bulkhead with shaking hands. She has to work fast—she forgets how long you can last before the darkness swallows you.
(You have fifteen seconds. Go.)
The last screw opens; the panel opens.
She slices the fuel line where it’s torn, shoves the healthy end of the hose back into the joint, throws the clamp shut. Stray gasoline floats past her in black pearls.
(She’s freezing; her lips are numb; when she blinks her eyelids crack, snap off, go flying.)
The panel begins to vibrate as the system kicks in.
(Seven seconds.)
She slams the bulkhead shut, fumbles three of the screws back into place. It’s all she manages before her fingers freeze.
Far away, Konstantinova is saying something about re-entry, about being out of time, she’s panicked, she’s screaming—but the last of the air escapes the suit, and then there’s silence.
(Marika breathes in; her lungs collapse.)
The ship is accelerating now, dragging her.
She pulls free.
The motion spins her slightly, away from the planet towards the sky. For a moment, the full view stuns her.
She thinks, It’s beautiful.
It’s the first time in her life she’s ever thought it.
(This is why: there is no seeing.
Now there is only the sky; she’s looking, for an instant, straight to the stars. This is the true geography.)
The Milky Way rips through the black at a different angle; this sky is a stranger, a ceaseless riot, sharp and steady-bright.
It’s a lovely war.
(Two seconds.
One second.)
After it’s over, Konstantinova will emerge from the sea.
She will stand on the deck of the Alkonost; pull off her helmet; breathe.
The night will be deep. When she turns her face to the sky, to search for a place to begin with her numbers, the ghosts of the stars will flicker and shine.
An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. An can be found online at an.owomoyela.net.
TRAVELLING INTO NOTHING
AN OWOMOYELA
She was offered the comfort of a drug-induced apathy. She refused.
The cell where she waited to die was, in true Erhat fashion, humane. Really, it was no worse than the room she had rented when she’d first arrived on the station, except for the hard lock on the door. She still had the same music at her fingertips, the same narrative media, the same computerized games of skill or strategy or wit or pure abnegation. All she lacked was freedom.
And a future.
Fuck.
She’d taken to pacing. Four steps wide, seven deep, over and over again until the door chimed—ahead of schedule—and her body seized up in panic, her breath vanished, and her hands fisted of their own accord.
But the voice which came through was . . . curiously non-final. “Kiu Alee. Do you consent to receive a visitor?”
She hesitated a moment, staring at the door. As her heartrate slowed, she said, “Yes”—more from morbid curiosity than anything else. After a moment, she added, “I didn’t know I was allowed visitors.”
The door slid open.
The man on the other side, flanked by a guard whose presence seemed almost cursory, was much taller than anyone in the local Erhat population—much taller than her, as well. Over two meters, at an estimate; he looked taller, with the long black robes that fell in a line down his body. His limbs were long and thin, like articulator arms on a dock, and his movements were fluid, but still hesitant. He had to duck his head to come in, and when he did, he stood there like an abstract statue, head tilted, eyes unfocused, ear turned her way.
Blind. Kiu blinked, moving slightly; tr
ue to her suspicion, his head turned to keep his ear angled toward her. Why someone would choose—with the number of augments and prosthetics available—to remain deprived of such a primary sense—
Of course, though, the same could be said about her, and everyone like her. She had no augments to increase her awareness of electromagnetic fields; no augments to expand her visual spectrum. That was her choice. It was every bit as much a choice as this man’s probably was.
And the network of filaments laced through her brain like capillaries didn’t even tie into the social web of the station, the system, the entire Erhat cultural organization. That had made her suspect here, long before she’d murdered someone.
“Kiu Alee,” he said. His accent was strange, all rounded vowels and soft consonants, with an undertone of resignation. “I am Tarsul. You are a long way from home. Do you really intend to die here? I can give you a chance to live.”
Kiu jerked back. “Me?” she said. “Why? For what?”
“Because you have an artificial neural framework,” he said, and her surprise fell again. Of course—her augmented brain, her implanted-in-vitro augmentation, the neural scaffolding too integrated and expansive for any post-maturation implant to match. That made her special. This man arrived because she had a technology he needed; beyond that, he probably didn’t give a whit about her.
And yet, she still wanted to live. What was a little indignity: if her life was only worth anything because of her brain, it was still better than it being worth nothing, without it.
“I’ve spoken with the authorities,” Tarsul said. “They’ve agreed to release you if you never return to their territories.” And why not—no further resource cost to house her, to destroy her body, to update the judicial records any further. And the Erhat government cared very little for any problems faced by those outside its borders. “This suits me, as if you agreed to come with me, you could not return, in any case.”
Kiu had already agreed in her mind by the time that he finished talking. Still, for appearances sake, she hardened her voice, and repeated, “And for what?”
“I need you to pilot a ship,” he said.
The ship, as it turned out, wasn’t so much a ship. More of an engine rig.
More of an engine rig, burrowed into the side of a wandering planetoid, with access corridors and neural interfaces spidering across the surface.
Tarsul had said very little—in her cell, escorting her through the Erhat station’s corridors, bringing her onto a transport which didn’t look like it belonged in any of the territories she was familiar with. Though the transport, at least, had felt as though it wasn’t completely alien; when they docked at the rig, the transport fit into the docking moors like a foot fitting into a glove, and they descended into smooth black halls, ambient light which seemed to glow from the air itself, a gravity which tugged more lightly than the Erhat station and more strongly than a planetoid of this kind should have merited, and a persistent low hum which modulated and changed in a kind of cadence, almost like distant voices. Kiu regarded it all with mistrust.
Tarsul closed the transport up behind them, fingers fluttering over the airlock console, which murmured back a long sequence of slow melodious notes. At length they petered out, and Tarsul laid his hand flat on the console. It didn’t respond in any way.
“The transport has been disabled,” he said. “Its engines and communications are no longer functional. I can explain where we’re going, if you’d like to know.”
Kiu raised an eyebrow, aware that he wouldn’t be able to see it. He might hear the skepticism in her voice, though. “All right. Tell me.”
He turned back to her, as though he’d expected her not to care—to be so grateful to get out of an execution that she’d sashay off anywhere at all, without a question or a second thought. Too bad; she had plenty of second thoughts. The fact that she had no options didn’t stop her from having second thoughts.
Well, there had been the one option: to die. But she wasn’t so principled that she thought that was an option at all.
“My home,” Tarsul said, “is in the black. Interstellar space. It was built by refugees of the Three Systems’ War.”
Kiu frowned, and searched her memory for the war he named. She had the vague impression of learning about it at some point—some incidental bit of history, consumed more for idle interest than relevance. “Is that ancient history?”
Tarsul hmmed, deep in his throat. It didn’t sound like he was disagreeing, though. “We have a long history,” he said. “A long, very isolated, history. My arcol-ogy”—the word he used sounded ancient—“was designed to be impossible to track. Impossible to find. Utterly self-sufficient in every degree. It almost was.”
Kiu had never heard of any permanent settlement outside a star system. Settlements in interplanetary space were uncommon; some of the larger stations might have held their own stellar orbits, like the Agisa Station Network where she’d grown up, but if anyone had asked her prior to this, she’d have said there was nothing of consequence drifting in the interstellar medium. Some ships in transit, maybe some ancient lost exploration vessels, or probes, or unfortunate failures of experimental engines. Not a—an arcology, some kind of station she’d never heard of.
“Why?” she asked. Tarsul looked surprised; maybe he was expecting her to care more about what had gone wrong. She didn’t. “Refugees, yeah, I get it. But you had the materials to build a new station? And you didn’t just . . . go to another system?”
“A cultural complaint,” Tarsul said. “Believe me, if interrogating our history were to do any good . . .”
He let out a long, long breath, and apparently decided not to explain.
“The arcology was meant to be a closed system,” he said. “No resource loss.”
Kiu snorted.
Tarsul inclined his head. “It almost was.”
“So . . . this.” Kiu spread her hand out toward the consoles and the interface bay, indicating by implication the planetoid they were connected to. Tarsul’s head shifted—tracking the sound of rustling sleeves, maybe. “We’re delivering raw materials?”
Tarsul made a soft, affirmative noise. “Though it took me less time to locate this planetoid than to locate a pilot.”
“I’ve never seen this kind of ship before.” Kiu looked again at the composite walls, at the console. “Who made it?”
“A state secret. One which has not been shared with me.” Kiu’s eyes narrowed; Tarsul’s tone cooled. Still, Kiu could recognize some of herself in that tone: a faint undernote of resentment, more well-hidden than she’d ever managed.
Or maybe that was just her imagination, painting commonalities where none were to be found.
“How am I supposed to fly it? I’m not licensed to fly—”
Anything. She had the basic safety certifications for automatic craft in Erhat and Agisa, but that mostly consisted of knowing how to set a distress beacon and fire the maneuvering thrusters if a collision was detected. And she’d never used any of those skills.
“Are you planning on teaching me?”
“The accelerator flies itself,” Tarsul said. “It only needs to be reminded of where to go. As for that, you’ll have a better idea of how to do so than I will.” He brought his hand up, gestured to his own head. “It’s not . . . precisely the same technology as the neural frameworks I’m familiar with. But they seem compatible enough. This is the third time someone has made this journey. Neither of the previous attempts encountered any difficulty.”
Encouraging.
“We can begin, if you’d like,” he said. “After bringing this planetoid out of this system and setting its trajectory, there will be very little to do. The accelerator is well-provisioned, and there’s stasis if you’d prefer it. Perhaps an hour of your effort, and in return, I and my people will make sure you’re accommodated for, in perpetuity.”
Desperation made odd promises, Kiu thought. Lucky for her. “All right,” she said. “Show me what I need to
do.”
The pilot’s interface was a little alcove, tucked away down a winding corridor studded, irregularly, with doors. No door separated the interface, though; Kiu had to wonder what design sensibilities this place had been made to accommodate.
The alcove was moulded into a kind of recumbent chair, with a webbing of wire connectors and something that looked like a scanner module near the headrest. The module lit up when Kiu approached, and Kiu could feel it ghosting over her augments. She cast a glance at Tarsul, but Tarsul gave no indication that he felt anything, or knew that anything was going on.
“So, no . . .”
Ceremony? Nothing I need to know? Evidently not. Kiu breathed in, and lowered herself into the chair.
She’d used neural interfaces before. This was a different model, but . . . compatible enough, Tarsul had said. She leaned her head back, reached a hand up to take hold of the interface wires, and felt them coiling, responsive, toward the ports on her scalp. A moment of cool intrusion, warming into connection—and then, abruptly, Kiu wasn’t herself any more.
She was—
Much older, hands on the smooth black composite, not for any interface, just to feel the substance of the accelerator. A cold, clear purpose underlaid with urgent anger. Turning her head, a jangle ofstrange senses moving within her, seeing Tarsul standing beside her, expression sad. Seeing—
Someplace different. Long corridors, not as winding as the accelerator’s. No windows; what few windows graced the arcology’s walls faced the sweep of the Milky Way’s arms edge-on, not the much sparser starfields orthogonal. The space filled with voices. Footsteps. The scent of green growing things. The sound of—
Someplace different. The accelerator, but not a part she’d ever seen. Argumentative tones, not in a language Kiu had ever learned. Her voice—not her own—responding in kind. Kiu—
Kiu snapped her head back.
The accelerator—
—flooded her.
Remembered.
And through it all, existing in clear pinpoint precision, knowledge without history or context, a location—nothing more than the endpoint of vectors and accelerations, no fixed point because it had no fixed referent, or possibly the one fixed point in a universe where everything else, including the engine, was moving in the ordered cacophonic chaos of orbital motion, stellar drift, universal expansion.