The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  I might be able to move into the engine room before the gunfire.

  I might be able to intervene, at that crucial moment, to save the bull nuke’s life.

  She could protect him while he caused the failure.

  Moss chipped away the ice. She took hold of the hatch, using her body weight to push until she felt the lock slip and she was able to open the iron door. She took a deep breath, readying to move quickly. Libra’s entry was a circular black void, and when she climbed through, she was engulfed in flame.

  Fiery air, liquid waves roiling through the airlock. She was bucked by a lurch in the ship, alarms clanging. We’re falling. Her suit was fire-resistant, but the flames had wrapped her in a cocoon of light, and she felt her skin warming. She could burn alive. Another jolt, tossing her. Libra crashed in a roar of tearing steel. Her head hit a wall, cracking her visor. The smoke of the electrical fire filled her faceplate, and she choked, coughing, her eyes burning.

  She covered the faceplate crack with her gloves as best she could, but smoke still streamed in, blistering her. Her gloves were scorched. Her suit had melted in spots; the multilayer insulation was rated to a high degree of Celsius, but the engine-room fire would incinerate her. She crawled along the floor, as low as she could get to avoid the smoke, but the air was black where it wasn’t fire. Her suit was on fire now, the flames burning through her layers of protection. She felt the heat and screamed, I’ll burn, I’m going to burn alive—I’ll be in this loop, I’ll burn forever.

  She saw blue light within the fire. She felt mounting tension, the immense crack of electric shock: the B-L misfire. As Moss floated upward, the fire and smoke disappeared, the conflagration gone in an instant except for the flames still crawling along the legs of her suit. She hit the ceiling, bounced. The fire-suppression system belched a stream of foam that doused her suit fire. No gravity. She was in the loop now, certainly. She must have entered at a different point from before, this time during the ship’s crash. Am I stuck in the loop? It was like wondering if she was stuck in a dream.

  Then everything happened too quickly. The two-tone clangor of the Power Plant Casualty alarm rang through the ship, but Moss was out of position, her suit stiff with the foamy fire suppressant. She scrambled, but the clatter of gunfire cut down her hopes. She was too late, everything was playing out as before. That gunfire meant the bull nuke had been shot. She wasn’t in time to save him, to help him start the cascade failure of the B-L drive.

  She tried to remember.

  After the sound of gunfire, Hyldekrugger had brought her into the engine room. That’s where Moss went now, hoping she might be able to pick up where the bull nuke left off, thinking she might be able to figure out the control panel. The engine room was just as she’d seen it that first time, the silver containment vessel of the nuclear reactor, the B-L drive in its own compartment. The body of the bull nuke floated above the control panel, gluey blood in a long bubble from the bullet wounds in his gut.

  She pushed the body aside, took off her scorched gloves, her helmet, let them float away. The control panel was a gray metal morass of switches and knobs, meters and blinking lights. It had been built in the 1970s: no AI interface, no digital screens. Again Moss was seized by a dreamlike frustration. She had to accomplish a task but didn’t know how, had to spark a cascade failure but didn’t know which switches to flip. Try anything—but, No, that won’t work. There were fail-safes. The whole thing would just shut down, requiring an override code from an engineering officer.

  Hyldekrugger hadn’t wanted to stay in this room, she remembered, because Patrick Mursult would be here soon, a Navy SEAL in the frenzy of mutiny. We don’t want to fight him, not here. The nuclear reactor rattled, a grinding whine, and the lights of the ship went out, casting her in pure darkness.

  There had been a flashlight, she remembered. She floated to the near wall, feeling Velcro, feeling metal tools attached there, things she couldn’t recognize in the dark. She recognized the shape of a flashlight when her fingers found the lens. She pulled it from the Velcro, turned on the light.

  I need help, she thought. I need to find Remarque before they kill her. How?

  She drifted into the passageway lined with portal windows, where she had first looked out and seen stars. The stars were brilliant now, burning cold in their multitude. The Power Plant Casualty alarm fell silent, and the running lights snapped back on. A flighty panic, adrenaline coursing through her. Moss realized she wouldn’t know where Hyldekrugger would be, knew she would die if any of his followers saw her.

  But she did know that Nicole Onyongo would hide in the brig eventually. Nicole had escaped into the brig, fearful that Hyldekrugger might kill her in his bloodbath. But where was Nicole hiding now? Moss thought back. Nicole had mentioned this to her, she was sure, when they were in the orchard together, Miss Ashleigh’s orchard, and Nicole had smoked her cigarette . . .

  Moss floated near the ship’s electrolysis cabinet, and the memory clicked: Nicole had said she was hiding in the life-support room when the fighting broke out. The electrolysis cabinet was a narrow compartment housing the water reclamation system and the oxygen generation system.

  She shimmied through the portal into the electrolysis cabinet and swung the door closed after her. A small workspace was nestled behind the chrome tanks, a chair with a writing desk bolted to the wall.

  A volley of gunfire erupted in the passageway. She wanted out of the space suit in case she had to fight. Beneath the suit she wore only the long johns she’d taken from the body, that other version of her. Little protection, but at least she would be able to move. She unbuckled her waist harness, kicked off the charred, foam-coated pants. Moss tried to slide from the torso piece of her suit, pull her arms from the sleeves—

  “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Moss turned at the voice. The woman was hiding beneath the writing desk, tucked back into the shadows. So young, just out of her teens, her hair frizzy black, burnished with hickory accents. Beautiful brown eyes. Her T-shirt and shorts were spattered with blood. Her own? Her hand was wrapped in a bandage. She was barefoot, a gun floating near her feet.

  “Nicole,” said Moss.

  “How do you know me?”

  “I’ve known you before, in other times,” said Moss.

  “How is this possible?” asked Nicole, terrified, her skin lathered in sweat. “There are strange things happening. I don’t understand. What do you mean, in other times?”

  “Help me with my suit,” said Moss.

  The request brought Nicole out from hiding. She helped Moss unfasten the torso assembly, tugged it over her head. Nicole had left her gun floating near the writing desk, a Beretta M9, and she didn’t react when Moss plucked it from the air. Either Nicole wasn’t afraid of Moss or she was beyond fear.

  “Did you use this?” asked Moss.

  “I’ve never . . .”

  Moss checked that a round was chambered. “Would you know how to destroy the B-L drive?”

  “No, only the engineer officer or the bull nuke would know.”

  “Where are they?” asked Moss.

  “Dead,” said Nicole.

  “Remarque’s not dead,” said Moss. “Can you get me to her?”

  “You can’t . . . You don’t understand! She wants us to die,” said Nicole. “She said we have to kill ourselves. She’s gone insane. Why do we have to die? We can hide in the prison. We’ll be safe there.”

  “I need to find Remarque,” said Moss.

  “They won’t look in the prison—”

  “Listen to me, Nicole. Listen,” said Moss. “You’ve left this all behind. You were a nurse at a place called the Donnell House when I knew you. You helped people, elderly people. You took care of them.”

  “A nurse,” said Nicole. “My mother was a nurse. I went to medical school because of my mother. And my father convinced Remarque to take me on this ship, because of my training. I miss him so much, I miss my father.”

  “Help me.
”

  “How do you know me?” asked Nicole. “What’s your name?”

  “Shannon.”

  “Shannon, I don’t want to die.”

  “Don’t fear dying,” said Moss, holding up her wrist, showing Nicole the ouroboros bracelet, the snake swallowing its own tail. Nicole put her hand to her own wrist, her own bracelet.

  “Yes,” said Nicole. “Yes, yes.”

  “I need to find Remarque before they kill her,” said Moss. “She’s not the one you should fear, Nicole. She can help. I need her.”

  “She’s in the wardroom,” said Nicole. “Remarque and Krauss locked themselves in. Cobb and some of the others are waiting to ambush them.”

  “Where is the wardroom?”

  “I can get you there,” said Nicole.

  Nicole opened the portal door, disappeared into the passageway. A moment later she waved for Moss to follow. The ship smelled like death: loosed bowels and exsanguination. Nicole swam smoothly through the passageways, practiced, pulling herself along the handholds while Moss followed several feet behind. She led Moss through the Quad-lander stowage compartment, where three Landers were folded into their launch bays; they gleamed with a coating of dust that shone like diamonds. Moss realized that these Landers had come from Esperance.

  “Up through here, through the bunks. The galley leads to the wardroom,” said Nicole.

  Libra’s galley was a stainless-steel box designed for zero-g food prep. Counter space limited, rectangular pots on hot plates, a cavernous utility sink filled with canned goods, the room like an Escher drawing. Culinary specialists would crowd in here, walking up the walls and across the ceiling to reach the bread ovens, dropping to the floor to keep the coffee brewers filled, standing on one wall to boil meat before jumping across the room to fold dough for pies.

  “Most of them are above us, in the crew’s mess,” said Nicole. “We can go this way.”

  The galley opened up to a second prep area meant to serve the wardroom, the formal mess cabin for the commander and her highest-ranking officers. A narrow passageway lined with stainless-steel cabinets, every nook and cranny stuffed with canned foods. Nicole stopped, turned back, but Moss pushed ahead of her.

  Two men waited at the wardroom door. They wore camouflage, the larger of the men shirtless, though it looked like he was clothed in blood. Cobb, she thought, nothing like the older brawler she knew, but a sharply chiseled warrior, his hair trimmed to a prickly crew cut. Their backs were to her, but she could see they each held a weapon, Cobb’s an M16 rifle, the other man with his sidearm. She imagined coming up behind them—silently, floating over—and casually executing each man, a shot in the back of the head. Cowardly, but she needed to kill them to save everything. Moss sighted Cobb’s center mass and shot.

  Cobb spun toward her. She’d hit him, his narrow eyes confused. He raised his weapon, firing off a series of aimless rounds that tore through galley freezers before he’d marked where Moss was. Moss returned fire, reclined backward in the air, drifting with the recoil of her gun but keeping her aim, firing as she’d been taught to fire in zero-g, the smoke from her barrel puffing in spheroids pierced by bullets. She’d landed a grouping of shots, several rounds in Cobb’s chest that spurted out bubbly spatter, and watched him go limp before feeling a sting in her left shoulder, again through her left breast. She screamed—more in surprise at the sudden pain than at the pain itself, but the awareness that she’d been shot grew as the pain increased like a spreading burn. She had lost sight of the second gunman, ducked back into the galley. Nicole was already cowering there. Blood had spread through Moss’s shirt, over her chest and her left sleeve. It was increasingly difficult to breathe.

  “Give up,” she called out. “Drop your weapon. I’m NCIS—you don’t have to do this.”

  She’d seen videos of firefights between patrol officers and armed men, people who’d been pulled over on routine traffic stops for minor infractions, who’d gotten it into their heads that someone had to die. Moss had always marveled at the simple brutality of the exchange of fire, two men separated by a short distance—how straightforward it all was, no acrobatics or sharpshooting, just two men walking toward each other, firing rounds until one person lost the strength to stand. She heard movement and raised her gun. She recognized the second gunman, so much younger than when she’d seen his suicide in the mirrored room. Fleece was a young man here, nothing like the obese corpse hanged from the tree of bones, though behind the thick lenses of his glasses she saw his eyes and remembered that this man had recently lost his mind on the surface of Esperance. He ran toward her along the ceiling, firing rounds, his face a mask of confusion and rage. Moss felt another sting, this in her left thigh, above her prosthesis, but she gained her balance, expecting more stings across her body, expecting a sensation like being stung to death by a swarm of bees, and fired into the approaching gunman, calmly unloading her weapon into his center mass just as if she were at a range firing at a paper target. Fleece died, but his body kept coming, spinning as blood spun from him. She lowered her shoulder to absorb the blow, but he flew over her, crashing against a bread oven.

  “Ow, fuck,” said Moss. Three rounds, she thought—I took at least three rounds. She had heard stories of people taking thirty rounds or more, so pumped up with adrenaline that they continued to resist arrest long after they should have died. But one bullet can kill you, she knew. One bullet is enough.

  “Okay,” she said, struggling. “Nicole, okay. We need Remarque,” but the pain intensified. The bullet wound to her thigh bled heavily, blood spilling out over her prosthesis and rising around her. “We need to find her.”

  “I have to stanch your bleeding,” said Nicole, applying pressure to Moss’s thigh, but blood still pulsed from the wound. Nicole found a thin dish towel in the galley, looped it around Moss’s thigh as a tourniquet. Blinding pain. Moss screamed as Nicole tightened the knot.

  “We have to go,” said Nicole. “Shannon, they’ll have heard—”

  “No, we need Remarque,” Moss growled.

  She pounded on the locked wardroom door, a larger door than the iron portals throughout the rest of the ship, meant for ease of access for the dinner service. She slapped at the closed door, leaving handprints of blood.

  “Shannon Moss, NCIS! Come out, we’ve got to hurry! Remarque? I need you for the B-L— Ah, fuck. I’m NCIS. Come out—”

  Nicole pounded at the door with her. “It’s Nicole Onyongo! Come out! Hurry! It’s Onyongo—”

  The wardroom door opened. Moss had seen a photograph of Remarque, in the Libra crew list, but even so she was much younger than Moss had imagined. Remarque was only a few years older than Moss, her hair a whitish silver color, cut in a boy’s style with swept bangs. In her cotton slacks and U.S. Naval Academy sweatshirt, Remarque looked more like a woman’s soccer captain than a professional soldier. Lean, athletic, her jaw squared. She came from the wardroom with her hands raised, projecting calm rather than surrender. Chloe Krauss followed, the ship’s weapons officer, her hands also raised, a taller woman than Remarque, her crimson hair cut high and tight. Without weapons they had retreated to the wardroom, where they locked themselves in. Eventually, Moss knew, Chloe Krauss would have been shot in the ensuing firefight and Remarque would have been subdued, taken to the crew’s mess, where Hyldekrugger would have slit her throat in front of his men, then passed around her ruined body.

  “You’re hurt,” said Remarque. “We can help you. Krauss has training.”

  “We don’t have time,” said Moss. “These men, they all fought against you because you wanted to destroy Libra . . .”

  “How did you get here?” asked Remarque. “You aren’t my crew.”

  “You have to finish what you started,” said Moss, her breath rattling, the taste of blood in her mouth. “Cascade failure, the B-L—”

  “Who are you?” asked Remarque. “How do you know all this?”

  “Do you know what a thin space is?” asked Moss. “A space
-time knot?”

  Remarque’s left eye narrowed, a rakish expression of calculation. Her jaw tensed. “All right. Let’s get to the engine room,” she said. “The B-L was damaged in the initial fighting, but I need to spark a cascade failure for it to develop into a singularity.”

  “Hyldekrugger’s in the crew’s mess,” said Nicole. “He’ll be coming.”

  Krauss snatched Cobb’s rifle, the M16, loaded a new magazine.

  “We can make it to the engine room through the Quad-lander stowage compartment,” said Nicole. “That’s the way we came.”

  “There’s a quicker way,” said Krauss. “We can drop through into the gunnery, a straight shot to the engine room.”

  “I can’t,” said Moss. She was losing blood, felt cold. A forest in winter, an eternal forest. The tourniquet had already come loose, and blood stained the air around her. “I can’t move anymore.”

  Nicole held her. “Let’s go, let’s follow them.”

  Krauss led them belowdecks, into one of the thruster houses. She unlocked a portal door and dropped even farther down to one of the cavernous gunneries, the munitions storage. They passed the starboard laser generator, a gray box with a lens. Moss smelled fire as they neared the stern. There’d been fire when she was locked in the brig, she remembered. How long before the inferno would bring down the ship? We could run out of time, she thought. We’d run out of time, and I’d never know it. If the B-L drive misfired, the crew of Libra would reset like chess pieces for a new match.

  “Up,” said Krauss.

  An iron ladder led to the engineering department, the passageway to the engine room. Moss floated ahead of Nicole, Remarque bringing up the rear, closing the iron door behind them. As they entered the engineering department, however, a voice called out to them.

  “Drop your guns! Remarque, give this up! Drop your fucking gun, Krauss!”

  Patrick Mursult barred the portal to the engine room, M16 in firing position. He braced himself to counter the recoil of his rifle fire, three magazines floating within arm’s reach for reload. Devastation crashed through Moss: she had saved Remarque only to lead her into this different death. He could kill them all in a rapid spray just by easing back his finger.