One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  “What are the risks? Like, medically?”

  “Minor risk of infection. Though there aren’t many human pathogens here, and our machine will sterilize the injection site.”

  “What about rejection? Is my body going to attack the device?”

  “It is inert. It’s a foreign object, but not biological, so your immune system likely won’t attack it. There might be some localized swelling or soreness.”

  I took a breath to steady myself. “Luka. Level with me here. What are you not telling me? Should I really do this?”

  He exhaled, and he seemed smaller. Younger. When he turned his eyes on me, his gaze was the color of a cloudy sky. “My concern is the unknown. If this does not end well . . . it will be my fault.”

  I bit my bottom lip. He was still reeling from survivor’s guilt.

  “Cassie, I would not offer if I thought it was not worth the risk.”

  I steeled myself. “Then let’s do it.”

  He was right in that the procedure was virtually painless. I sat very still while the robotic arm did its work, meditating on the image of Earth rotating alone in the void of space.

  It was over in less than fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t let myself think about the long-term consequences. What was done was done.

  In the moments afterward, as fight-or-flight hormones circled my system, searching fruitlessly for an enemy to vanquish, Luka worked on the nearby console to ensure that Sunny was installed correctly in her new home.

  Finally, he stepped away, eyes watching me with cautious curiosity. “Try it now.”

  “You all right in there, Sunny?” I asked, feeling odd and a little light-headed.

  Sunny’s cool voice sounded quietly in my mind, only this time without the barrier of an external medium between us. Cassie, all my systems are functional. Thank you.

  Oh God, I had an artificial intelligence speaking directly to my brain.

  Calm. Focus. “She’s good. Is there anything else we need to do?” I asked, letting my hair fall back down, gingerly grazing the spot behind my ear that still tingled slightly as the anesthetic wore off. I could feel it there if I tried—the hard little cylinder, the cold spot touching my skull. I chose not to think about it.

  “I would not try accessing the data at this point. Let yourself become acclimated first.”

  “How should I do that?”

  “I can’t answer that for you. How did you acclimate the first time?”

  “By being semiconscious and in a dreamlike state while floating through space for about six months.”

  That didn’t elicit the response I’d hoped for, but there was at least a twitch in the corner of his mouth that might’ve been mistaken for amusement. Then it was gone. He turned his back to me, resetting the machine and placing everything where it had been. “Give it time.”

  I took a shaky breath and slid off the table. The motion tilted the room violently to the side, and suddenly I couldn’t feel the floor beneath me anymore.

  Luka spun to catch me by the elbows, and I realized my legs hadn’t been ready to support me. “Take it easy,” he murmured.

  I forced strength back in my quadriceps and regained my footing. His hands drifted away, and I didn’t waver again.

  “I’ll walk you back to the ship,” he said, eyeing me warily up and down.

  “I’m fine now.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he walked with me down the hall anyway, keeping his distance but also a careful eye on me to make sure I was still steady.

  And to be honest, I was grateful.

  Ten

  “WE ARE LOADED and ready for lift-off.”

  I’d already strapped in while waiting for Luka to make final preparations for launch. He stopped beside my chair, kneeling to meet my eyes. “How do you feel?”

  “Just . . . a little light-headed. I think that’s fair, all things considered.”

  His mouth twisted, but he nodded and moved to the seat slightly ahead and to my left, at what I’d already started to think of as the helm. He slid his helmet over his head and it sealed with a soft shhh of air.

  “You read me?” came his voice, soft and close over the comm.

  “I read you. You need any help?”

  He glanced sideways at me, eyes tired and distracted. “The ship is designed to be piloted by one. But if we run into that vrag ship again, you can handle the guns.”

  My insides felt like lead. “I think I can do that.”

  Luka manipulated the control panel with deft touches. The door slid closed, and the ship started to hum.

  G-forces pushed me back into my seat as the ship tilted and ascended. A hatch in the ceiling opened, letting us pass to the surface. Luka guided the ship expertly through the thin atmosphere and into the harsh, glaring radiation of Kepler-186.

  Once we were reasonably sure the vrag were not waiting to ambush us, Luka navigated us away from the moon and we headed into the black.

  My stomach pressed down into my intestines as the land grew farther away and smaller beneath us.

  “Does this ship have a name?” I asked, speaking quietly so as not to be too much of a distraction.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I would just feel better knowing its name.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s no designation in the computer.”

  “It’s bad luck to fly a ship without a name, you know.” I didn’t know if that was true, but it sounded good.

  There was a hint of humor in his reply. “Human superstition doesn’t apply to megobarian technology.”

  “But there are humans on this ship,” I said vaguely, wondering if he still counted himself among them.

  “Then you should name it,” he said, his eyes trained on the vast expanse of stars as we left solid ground far behind. The black of space wrapped around us, cold and merciless as the sea. “A human name. A lucky one.”

  It came to me suddenly, dredged out of the depths of some vague memories of school assignments. “Penelope.”

  He risked a quick glance at me. “Penelope?”

  “The wife of Odysseus. She waited twenty years for him to return from war.” Lucky Penny, I thought.

  “Let’s hope our Penelope is as faithful as the original.” Luka drew in a few orders to the ship, and the walls around us subtly shimmered, the transparent display of the universe outside becoming clouded. “Not as good as an invisibility cloak, but this will at least minimize our heat signatures from the vrag.”

  “How long before we get back to Earth?” I asked.

  “About a week.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “An experienced pilot could get there in a few days. I’m not an experienced pilot.”

  He misread my incredulity. “It took Odysseus six months to get here!”

  “I told you. We didn’t give you our best.” He looked over at me. “I’m about to turn on engines that utilize exotic matter to warp a gravity well in front of us, letting us perpetually fall into it in the direction of our choosing and move at superluminal speeds through the universe. Relatively, we won’t be moving very fast, but I’ve never done this unsupervised before. You might want to brace yourself.”

  And then we opened up a bubble in space-time and twisted the universe around us.

  Eleven

  LUKA GOT THE ship to a point where it could fly itself, and leaned back into his seat.

  The g-force had lessened. It didn’t feel as though we were moving at all, but for the gentle vibrations of the ship.

  “So we’re moving through space-time right now,” I breathed. “This . . . is amazing.”

  He twisted off his helmet and looked at me with lifted eyebrows. “You’ve done this before.”

  “Yeah, and I was in a steel tube, asleep. Can we see what it looks like? Outside?”

  He tilted his head, as though the thought had never occurred to him. He touched his fingertips to the smooth interface again, and the bow of the ship went transparent.

  I
gasped out loud.

  Putting my helmet on the floor, I unbuckled myself and approached the nearest wall. Directly in front of us was the darkness of space—no stars. Nothing at all, actually. A dark and limitless abyss. That must be the distortion of space-time, not allowing us to see light.

  To our left and right, the light of distant stars seemed to stretch in stationary lines, like a long-exposure photo.

  My heart sped up. Surreal didn’t cut it. Right now, in this moment, we were outside of the regular course of time. Outside reality as we knew it. “And this is just normal to you?”

  “No.” His soft footfalls almost echoed behind me. The ship was so quiet now, everything so deceptively still. “None of this is normal.”

  We had kept ourselves busy on the surface, effectively keeping away the memory of seeing Exodus burn. But now that we had some downtime, the grief threatened to break over me like a dam.

  But Luka . . . he’d seen his entire family die. In the moments of silence between us, I could see the horror of it dawning on him anew. His eyes had become distant.

  I needed to keep him talking, focused on the task ahead. I needed him to be in the here and now with me.

  “A wrinkle in space-time,” I murmured, glancing back at him. “I’m standing here experiencing it and I still don’t believe it.”

  He gave me a grimace. “I understand. There are things I have seen that I do not want to believe.” He left my side.

  I caught up to him. Put my hand on his arm.

  His eyes were full of tears, and he jerked his arm away.

  “I’m so sorry, Luka,” I said helplessly, emotion rising in my throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why would he have done that?” He choked on the words. The nightmare had caught up to him. “Why did he not evacuate everyone?”

  No answer I gave would suffice. I tried anyway. “I . . . guess he didn’t think he had a choice. Maybe he thought if he sacrificed himself, he could save you.”

  Luka shuddered and moved away from me, into the narrow passageway that led off the bridge.

  I hesitated a few moments, wondering whether to leave him be. I thought about what I might want in that situation. Having someone to talk to might not help much, but being alone would feel far worse.

  He had his back to me, hands braced along the rail. His head was bowed, shoulders tense. I approached him slowly and realized he was trembling.

  “I should have stayed on board,” he said through gritted teeth. “I should have died with them.”

  Cautiously, I placed my palm on the center of his back. “He wanted you to live.”

  “Living is . . . harder.”

  I took a step closer. Nodded against his shoulder, feeling the shaking tension in his muscles. “It is.”

  His breathing was ragged, eyes screwed shut.

  My own tears hovered against my eyelashes, but I held them back. I slid my hand down his arm to rest over his clenched knuckles. “This is awful. I know it is.” My voice cracked, betraying me. “But you’re not alone.”

  He didn’t respond, and I felt a choking in my throat. This was so far beyond my skill set. I didn’t know how to do this—to comfort people. I didn’t have a way to help. If Mitsuko had been here, or Emilio . . .

  But Luka only had me, and I only had him. I swallowed and made my voice stronger than I felt. “I can’t do this by myself, Luka. I cannot fly this ship. We’re in this together, okay? And we’re not out of the woods yet. I need you. We only have a few days before we get home, and those things are still out there. We need to be prepared. We need a plan.”

  After a long time, he gave a nod. His throat bobbed as he swallowed a few times, and he swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Home.”

  I smiled. “Yeah. We’re going home.”

  Hard to grieve with an audience. So after I thought Luka was more stable, I left him on the bridge while I explored the rest of the ship on my own.

  Penelope wasn’t very big. I’d already seen half of it just loading the supplies on board. There was a closet-sized infirmary and crew quarters for maybe six people, with bunks built into the bulkhead to save space, designed much like it had been on the moon base. I found a few small laboratories whose purpose I couldn’t guess.

  The only place left was the hangar deck—where Luka had loaded the droneship containing whatever secret weapon his family had died to protect.

  He’d said it was inert, but I still felt a tingle of fear as I entered the compartment. Cabin lights came on automatically as I approached, revealing the stationary vehicle that towered over my head like a two-story tank, anchored now to the bulkhead. The droneship was obviously meant to handle all kinds of terrain, able to fly through space and traverse inhospitable land with massive rolling treads. There, at the front, was the space in which Luka and I had huddled in a pocket of air and grief. I headed around toward the other side.

  And there it was. Clutched tightly in its rear cargo hold was a metal box, roughly the size of a compact car.

  I couldn’t reach it; it was mounted at least twelve feet high. There didn’t seem to be anything special about it. I shivered anyway.

  We knew nothing about what we were bringing home.

  “Hey, Sunny?” I spoke quietly, feeling silly. “Do you know anything about this thing?”

  I found I didn’t need to be more specific. I could almost feel her reading me, a small and curious presence. Sunny had direct access to my occipital lobe now, and could read what my brain was interpreting from my eyes. She saw, heard, felt everything I did.

  Creepy? Yes. Convenient? Also yes.

  Cassie, I do not have access to my external sensors. I cannot tell you anything about this device that you don’t already know.

  Well, that was a limitation. I certainly didn’t have as many data-collecting tools as she was used to. “You haven’t been able to access any of the data you copied from the megobari computer yet?”

  No, Cassie.

  “Well, keep trying.” Maybe she was trying to adjust to this new symbiosis as much as I was.

  I continued around the other side of the droneship, and stopped short. There was something attached to the back of the crate—maybe a control panel or readout.

  Impulsively, I climbed up the massive treads of the droneship, finding footholds and handholds as I went, until I was able to pull myself easily up to a grate where I could stand level with the weapon. There were symbols carved or stamped into the metal.

  “Sunny, you’ll let me know if this is a bad idea, right?”

  Affirmative.

  Not seeing any hinges or openings, I raised my hand gingerly to touch the small square I’d seen from the ground.

  Even through my suit, I felt the static spark tingle my fingertips, but I didn’t let go. What are you? I asked silently, and felt Sunny echo my curiosity in her calculating, machinelike way. My goals were her goals now.

  Almost instantly, a small transparent window formed on the side of the container nearest me. There must be some kind of computer intelligence monitoring whatever was inside that box, and it understood my command as easily as the ship obeyed Luka’s.

  Shaking now, I stepped closer to the transparent window. My breath caught in my throat.

  I had no concept of what I expected the weapon to look like—okay, maybe I did expect it to look like a bomb, or at least some kind of projectile. Something that fit my very human mindset of ways my kind had historically killed each other.

  But this . . . I didn’t even understand what I was seeing.

  A seething, warping, crackling prismatic mass of a color that was difficult to determine but that hurt my eyes to look at. A swirling energy kept barely at bay within a spherical framework of interconnected black lattice that hung suspended by some invisible force in the center of the chamber.

  It was . . . almost alive. Churning and snapping like an electrical storm. The lattice must be what was keeping the energy contained, but what the hell was it? How did it work? H
ow did you activate it? Luka’s father had said this was something that could not be aimed. So was it more like a bomb? The energy—whatever was driving it—seemed ready to burst forth on command. What was its energy source?

  Without really meaning to, I suddenly felt as though I had given Sunny a directive, and she had acknowledged it, without ever speaking a word. I felt her delve into her memory stores—somehow knowing, without really knowing, that she was trying to answer my questions as though I had posed them out loud to her.

  I steered clear from the box and climbed down, leaping the last few to the floor. I looked up just in time to see the transparent window going opaque again.

  Best to keep my distance from . . . all of that. There was no filter between me and Sunny anymore, no door to close to separate my internal thoughts from directives meant for her. I couldn’t go around accidentally activating things on this ship before I knew what I was doing.

  Especially not . . . whatever that was.

  I set up camp back in the crew quarters, claiming a bunk and surrounding it with the things I’d grabbed on my detour through storage: freeze-dried food and drinks in the neat little NASA-brand packages; my Personal Preference Kit, or PPK, filled with a few sentimental items I’d been allowed to take on the flight; a few changes of clothes; and a blanket.

  There was a small alcove near my chosen bunk. I carefully unpacked my PPK and laid out the photos of my family, and was struck for the first time that there were four more PPKs that I’d left on Odysseus.

  Bolshakov. Copeland. Shaw. Jeong.

  I repeated their names again. Four astronauts who’d never see Earth again. What had they brought with them? Photos of family who’d never see them again, who wouldn’t even have bodies to bury? People they loved and didn’t get to say good-bye to? Mementos of their lives back home?

  The small knit bag in my hand slipped out of my fingers and onto the floor. In the rush to leave, I hadn’t even thought to grab the others’ personal items. What kind of person was I to think only of my own survival and not spare a thought for them? For their families?

  Of all of them, of all their combined skill sets and abilities, I was the one who was still alive.