“JEFF,” said Phoebe, “we’re coming to you. When’s the next gap we can fit through?”
“Calculating. . . . There is one coming up in approximately twenty seconds.”
“Watch out,” said Liam. They pulled in their feet as a two-meter-wide rock drifted by.
Overhead, the biggest boulder yet cast them in shadow.
“Okay,” said JEFF, “in five . . . four . . .”
“I don’t see a gap,” said Liam. The distant cruiser was nearly hidden by the rocks.
“It will be there if you go . . . now.”
“Fire!” said Phoebe. Her main thruster burst in a jet of white smoke that immediately froze.
“Wait. . . .” Liam hesitated for a moment—because he still didn’t see the space—and then he fired his thruster too late, and now the skim drone was lurching forward but also starting to spin.
“You were supposed to fire at the same time!” said Phoebe.
“Sorry!”
“You’ll need to correct for that spin and move toward me more quickly,” said JEFF, “or the gap is going to become a wall.”
“Fire your port thruster,” said Liam. They both did and the spin slowed. He could see it now, an opening appearing ahead, the cruiser in clear sight. But everything was moving and it would close soon—
“Forward again,” said Phoebe. “Full power on three.”
“Yup.”
This time they hit their controls at the same moment and burst forward, arms burning as they pressed on the side of the ship, the thrust threatening to throw them over the top of the heavy drone.
“Please go faster,” said JEFF.
“Burn again,” said Phoebe. “Three-two-one-now!”
The boulders blurred all around them, far too close for comfort. A small rock clipped Liam’s boot. Countless tiny ones pelted the sides of the skim drone, making no sound but sending vibrations up Liam’s arms.
“It’s closing!” said Phoebe.
The trapezoidal window to the Cosmic Cruiser shrank.
“One more burst,” said Liam. They fired again, speeding up even more—
“Ah!” A rock hit Phoebe’s arm and her hand slipped free and the force of her thruster pushed her headlong over the canopy of the ship.
“Phoebe!”
She got her bearings and stopped firing her pack, but Liam was still holding down his main rocket, and just in the second it took for him to stop, he’d accelerated more than Phoebe, overtaking her. The edge of the ship knocked her in the shoulder. She spun around, clawing for the tow handles, but the ship slid right over her and then she was tumbling along its underside.
“Grab the claw!” Liam said.
“I missed it!”
Liam pushed himself down, hanging on to the tow handle with the two free fingers of the same hand holding the thrust control. “I’m here,” he said, reaching for her. Phoebe came somersaulting by his feet. His fingers scraped her leg, now her side. Her arms flailed, slapping into his. She was almost past him, into the boulders—
His hand caught her wrist and he squeezed as hard as he could, straining to keep hold of both her and the skim drone. “I’ve got you!” His shoulders burned. He wouldn’t be able to hold on for long—
They sailed through the gap and out into free space.
“You are clear,” said JEFF.
“Thanks,” said Phoebe, breathing hard. Her eyes met Liam’s.
“No problem,” said Liam, gulping air and smiling.
Phoebe smiled back, but then her eyes widened. “We’re going to hit the cruiser!”
Liam turned and saw the ship growing before them. “Come on!” He yanked Phoebe up and they scrambled over the drone, racing to the other side to provide a reverse thrust.
“We’re not going to make it!” said Phoebe.
“Hold on,” said JEFF. “I’m moving.”
In a burst of white light, the cruiser’s engine fired and the ship shot out of their way.
“Sorry, this engine is quite sensit—” JEFF’s link cut out.
The cruiser was instantly lost among the dark and stars.
“JEFF?” Liam called.
“He’ll be back,” said Phoebe.
Liam craned his neck toward the comet fragments, the long band like a trail of smoke behind them now, so quickly reduced to little more than glints of light and holes of black against the stars. It spiraled in his vision, the only sign that he and Phoebe and the drone were not just moving away but also end over end. Liam winced, trying to find his center.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” said Liam, but he gripped the tow handles tighter. The feeling was creeping up farther inside him. Not just dizziness, but the sense of being unattached. Not even boulders around them now, just darkness, infiniteness in all directions, nothing and nothing and more nothing.
“Liam, we’re good. You got this.”
He shut his eyes tight, took a breath, and then checked the watch. Its blinking had stopped. He wasn’t going to die. Not now, anyway. That doesn’t mean you’re not just going to float away until your life support runs out—
“—ello, Liam and Phoebe.”
“JEFF!” said Liam. “Where are you?”
“Right behind you.”
The cruiser slid over them, its bright exterior lights creating an island in the dark, its retrorockets puffing lightly.
“I have matched your velocity,” said JEFF.
Phoebe reached up and snagged her tether, which still dangled below the ship, a gold clip at its end. She hooked it to her waist.
Liam let go of the tow handles and flexed his sore fingers. He floated to Phoebe and took her hand. She retracted the tether, and it pulled them up to the cruiser’s main airlock door.
Liam opened a panel beside it and unspooled a second tether, which he clipped to his waist. He exhaled hard and pushed off the hull, floating to the rear underside of the ship, where the skim drone’s dock was. There, he unhooked a thick black cable with a four-pronged metal plug at the end. He pushed down to the skim drone, sailing through open space for a moment. Funny how all it took was a little tether and he wasn’t scared at all. Or at least not nearly as much. He still fixed his gaze firmly on the drone, not the infinite behind it.
He plugged the cable into a port on the back of the drone, which activated the power and allowed JEFF to slave its controls. The little craft blinked to life and rose toward its dock.
“I’ll get the net.” Phoebe moved to the midsection of the cruiser and activated a large hose, a half meter wide, guiding it out of its compartment. JEFF released the skim drone’s claw, and Phoebe pushed herself toward the slowly drifting comet fragment. When she was close, she aimed the flat silver end of the hose at it.
“Please move to a safe distance,” said JEFF.
Liam and Phoebe pushed back to the airlock door and hung on to long handles on either side. The hose flashed to life and a metallic net shot out of it, corralling the boulder. Once it was fully encircled, the net ballooned into a spherical shape, its triangular gaps similar to those of the colony dome back on Mars. The netting began to shimmer, and a rippling plasma field ignited. In a few moments, the boulder began to vent steam from all over as the plasma field heated it and melted the ice inside. Now, a series of drills on slim cables snaked out from the mouth of the hose, little rockets firing to guide their movements. They began to bore into the rock, and globules of water floated out, which drifted toward the hose and were sucked in.
“Hopefully that’s the last time we’ll need to do that,” said Liam. He opened the airlock door and slipped inside.
“But we’re getting so good at it!” said Phoebe, slapping his back as she followed him.
“Well, we keep not dying. That’s something.”
Back inside the cruiser, they slid out of their suits and hung them on charging hangers in the closet. Liam and Phoebe both wore black thermal tops and bottoms, Liam with his Dust Devils jersey over that. Phoebe slung her atmo pack ove
r her shoulders and pushed the ends of the thin twin tubes into her nostrils, coughing lightly.
There was a crunching sound, and JEFF rolled out of the short hallway that connected the cockpit to the main cabin. His wheels were magnetized so that he stayed rooted to the floor in zero gravity. His wide panda face in its permanent grin. “Refueling should be complete in about an hour,” he said, “at which point we can finally complete our journey.”
“If there’s no malfunction,” said Liam. “Any more info on why we drifted off course?”
JEFF’s eyes flickered, a sign that he was calculating something. “Not much,” he said. “I have run comprehensive diagnostics and updated a number of faulty circuits. But at this point, we are too close to Delphi for a similar course discrepancy to impact our arrival. I will be staying in active power mode for the rest of the trip, so unless something occurs that is—” JEFF’s voice cut out midsentence, and his eyes flickered again. This had been happening, now and then, as if JEFF’s processors were lagging. Of course he was nearly a decade overdue for maintenance. “—beyond my diagnostic parameters,” he finished, “we will be fine. Shall we prep for stasis?”
Liam glanced at Phoebe.
“How about in a little bit?” she suggested. “We’ve got a couple things to do first.”
“We are only three days over the minimum safe time period for stasis according to the Human Long Travel Protocol,” said JEFF. “I would offer to let you stay awake for the final three minutes and use Tranquil to minimize the travel fatigue, but I’m afraid we don’t have the food or oxygen rations.”
“We were just thinking like an hour or two,” said Liam.
“Acknowledged,” said JEFF. “You will be pleased to know that because the stasis period will be so short, you will not need to eat slow fuel.”
“Bonus,” said Phoebe.
JEFF looked at her, and for a moment, his eyes flickered again.
“You okay there?” Liam asked.
JEFF turned. “Yes. If you need me, I will be spending the refueling time repairing the skim drone’s battery.”
“Sounds good.” As JEFF moved to the supply cabinets by the airlock, Liam motioned toward the rear of the ship with his eyes and he and Phoebe floated that way. They passed the bathroom and entered one of the two smaller compartments at the back of the ship, where their parents’ stasis pods were located.
The four pods were lined up side by side, their insides glowing a mellow amber, their back control panels blinking steadily with green and white lights. Liam and Phoebe visited them often during each waking period.
Liam floated between his parents. He rubbed away the remaining frost on the flex-glass tops of the pods, left over from the ship being on low power during transit. Their expressions were peaceful, despite the red burn marks on their faces from the lab accident on Mars.
He double-checked their control panels: all systems stable. “Almost there,” he whispered, and placed his hands gently on the glass above their faces. A lump formed in his throat. Phoebe sniffled, gazing down at her parents, too. She looked up at Liam and smiled.
“You want to go first?” He double-checked the doorway, but he’d heard the airlock open and close as JEFF went out to work on the skim drone.
“Sure.”
Liam slipped off the alien watch and handed it to her. She put it on her own wrist, took a deep breath, and instead of clicking the dial to the right, which made time go forward, and where there was the danger of running into the Drove, she turned it two notches to the left.
Barely a second passed while she seemed unnaturally still; then she flinched and gasped, out of breath and blinking rapidly.
“How was it?” Liam asked.
“Amazing. Awful.” A tear sprang free and floated away from her eye, a tiny trembling droplet. She pulled off the watch and handed it to him. “Your turn.”
“Did you go to the playground again?”
Phoebe nodded. “And a few other places.”
Liam slid the watch back on and gripped the dial. “See you in a blink.”
He turned it two notches to the left, too. He felt a strange lurching, like a wind was kicking up through him, and he entered the timestream. If he looked down at himself, he could see that he was still on the cruiser, but he also seemed to be standing in a kind of foggy space, and outside of that, the world had started to clip along in reverse, slicing from one moment to the next, backward through time. Out into space, into the skim drone among the comet fragments and then back on board the ship and into a long, formless gray nothing.
The watch showed you the world from your own perspective, and this grayness was the years he’d spent in stasis. He clicked the dial another notch to the left. Time yawned backward even faster. Liam felt himself spreading out, thinning, as if space was opening between all the molecules in his body. He fought the wind and held himself steady against the strange, detached feeling. It scared him but also felt peaceful and made him smile. He liked it, maybe even craved it.
The first time he’d traveled backward with the watch had been at their first refueling stop after Saturn, three years into the journey. He’d finished pulling in the asteroid they’d targeted and was still disoriented from stasis. Hanging out by his parents’ quiet pods with no word from Mina, he’d been overwhelmed by the desire to be home, to have anywhere that felt like it was his. He’d been wondering about the left hemisphere of the watch, and that was when he decided to try it out, learning that not only could it take him backward, but also that, for whatever reason, the Drove never showed up when he traveled in this direction. He’d shared it with Phoebe that very same day.
Lights began to flash, a brief period of activity—their last refueling, three years earlier—then more stasis void before that first stop. Light again, and soon after, Liam was back near Saturn, back in their solar system, and then in a flash of orange light he was on Mars.
He scanned the blur of passing time, and when he saw what he was looking for he clicked the dial back one notch toward the center. The wind and speed settled. Liam saw his apartment back in the colony, his room, and then the view from his balcony. Now he pressed the symbol in the left hemisphere, which had been blinking since he’d first turned the dial. But instead of releasing it, he held his finger down on it.
This was something else he’d learned about the watch since Saturn. When he’d first used it to view the future, he’d simply pressed the button and released it, which caused a message to appear in scrolling alien symbols before returning him to his present. It also gave him a whiplash feeling like his bones were separating, and nearly made him throw up. But if he pressed the button and held it down, time paused, frozen in the moment around him.
Liam suspected that, for some reason related to his human biology, the watch didn’t work the same for him as it did for the dead alien from whom he’d gotten it. Three-dimensional being with four-dimensional technology, the metal-suited man from the Drove had said when Liam had run into him on Mars. When that alien had pressed the blinking button, he doubted that she got that flashing message, or that she was thrust back to where she’d begun. More likely, he guessed that she could move to a new spot in time and remain there. But while Liam couldn’t stay where he traveled, this pause maneuver was a nice discovery.
Outside the timestream, it was a sunny afternoon on Mars. A frozen moment: he and Mina were sitting cross-legged on their balcony, playing a virtual card game called Pioneers of Andromeda on a slim video board between them. The sun gleamed through the dome overhead. Their parents sat by the large window just inside the balcony door, which was open, Dad reading on a holoscreen, Mom applying moisturizing electrodes to her bare feet. Her hair was down; Mom only ever wore her hair down on weekends.
He viewed it all out of his eyes as if he were back sitting right there. A still life of his family, some random weekend maybe six months before they’d left. Liam had stumbled upon it during an earlier time trip, and the scene had made him choke up. He wished he
could actually be there again reliving it, hearing the bustle of the avenue below, the voices from nearby apartments, Mina’s annoyed grumblings whenever he made a good play, feeling the heat of the Martian day, but those details were lost to him. From the paused timestream, everything was silent and still.
He’d been other places: to the field station tunnels, one time to school, another time to watch the classic grav-ball championship game of 2212 between the Dust Devils and the Canyon Bombers—Phoebe had gone back to that game, too, and they loved to debate the subtleties of that triple-time classic that had been won, sadly, by the Bombers—but most often he came here, to this moment on the balcony. He would look at his family, and at the colony skyline and the landscape and even the sun that had once frightened him so, and he would have a profound feeling that was sad but also calm. How many weekend afternoons had there ever been like this one, when Mina hadn’t been off doing her own thing, and Liam and his parents hadn’t been out at the field station? Would there ever be another?
He missed this so much.
Still, he had to be careful. Because the longer he stayed here, even with the world on pause, the more he felt that widening within, as if he was losing touch with the solid, physical version of himself that was still on the cruiser. Sometimes, he felt like he was more here than there.
He looked at his sister and parents, trying to memorize the image perfectly, and then he did something that he’d been practicing each time he came here, something he hadn’t even told Phoebe about yet, mainly because he wasn’t sure how to explain it. Even though the past version of himself on the balcony was frozen and focused on the game, Liam found that, if he concentrated with great effort, he could turn his viewpoint toward the circular window that led into his room. The watch was linked to his personal experience, but he’d been able to ever so slightly expand that viewpoint and see what past-Liam hadn’t been looking at—his old bedroom, or the people paused in midstroll on the avenue below. There was something extra stretchy-feeling about doing this, and it made his head split with pain, but each time he could move a little further out of his own experience, almost like he was stretching a muscle.
The Oceans between Stars Page 5