A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Jenny Perez coughed to get our attention. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but there seems to be a problem with the water filtration system.”

  “What kind of problem?” I asked.

  “A fairly wet one.”

  THREE

  DJ SPRINTED TO THE LOWER decks where the water storage tanks were located. Jenny and I caught up a few seconds after. The doors to the room were shut, and DJ was heaving on the handle to force them open. The hologram hadn’t told us what we might be walking into, and I wasn’t convinced rushing in was the best idea. No one had asked me, though.

  When DJ finally wrenched the doors open, lukewarm water streamed into the corridor.

  “This seems bad,” Jenny said. Again, she wasn’t wrong.

  Together, we sloshed into the room and immediately spotted the problem. A pipe as wide around as DJ’s torso that ran from one of the enormous tanks into the wall was spewing water into the air like a fire hydrant. The sound of it was deafening.

  DJ was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him over the geyser. I had a pretty good idea what he was saying, though. We needed to shut the water off. The tanks were huge, and Qriosity’s water filtration system was exceptionally efficient, but we couldn’t afford to have gallons of water spilling into the ship and going to waste.

  I pointed at a valve on the tank, and DJ pointed at another where the pipe ran into the wall. We didn’t know whether the busted pipe was carrying water into or out of the tank, so we needed to shut both valves to be sure.

  We slogged through the ankle-deep water to reach the valves. I gripped the wheel in both hands and tried to turn it clockwise, but it refused to budge. I hoped DJ was having better luck than me. Jenny appeared with a crowbar, which she shoved through the spokes of the wheel. Then we each grabbed one end and used the additional leverage to turn the valve. Even with both of us, it was difficult, but the flow of water from the busted pipe slowly began to recede until it was nothing more than a dribble.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said.

  “You needed the shower anyway.” Jenny pinched her nose.

  I shoved her playfully, and she pushed me back. Jenny felt like the sister I’d begged my mom for when I was little. Before I understood where babies came from or why my father was never around. Either way, I was glad she was on Qriosity.

  “Uh, Noa? Jenny?” DJ sounded more serious than usual. “I think you should check this out.”

  DJ was standing over the busted pipe. There was a hole the size of a basketball in it, and the edges of the thick metal looked like they had been eaten through.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” DJ said.

  “I have.”

  Jenny and DJ turned to look at me.

  “The day I died,” I said. “There was a hole like this in the coolant conduit. Conduit F-519.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forget the details of that day. They were like the seam of a sock poking my toe inside my sneaker, irritating and impossible to ignore. The darkness of space, the sound of my own voice in my helmet. I remembered everything, right down to the taste of the air in my suit.

  “That can’t be a coincidence,” Jenny said. “Right?”

  I was starting to think that Jenny’s theory about there being another person living on Qriosity might not be as far-fetched as I’d initially believed. Worse, though—that person might be a saboteur.

  “What could do something like this?” DJ asked.

  “I don’t—” I stopped, and my eyes shot up to meet his. “Wait, we’re thinking this is a what? Why not a who?”

  “Whom,” Jenny said.

  The blood had drained from DJ’s face. The last time I’d seen him that scared was in the video when he was pumping my chest in the airlock, trying to bring me back to life.

  DJ sputtered, “I mean, I don’t know, I guess. It might not be a what—”

  Jenny ran her fingers over the ruined section of pipe. “No, I think you’re right. Feel how the edges are pushed up?”

  I traced the border of the hole. The metal felt rough and jagged. It did not feel like damage caused by someone burning a hole into it from the outside.

  “Are you saying that you think something came out of the pipe?” DJ asked.

  But she didn’t need to answer. Jenny, DJ, and I pressed ourselves together. The room took on a sinister quality. The receding water, which was less than a couple of centimeters deep now, could have been hiding anything.

  “We should talk about this somewhere—”

  “More secure,” DJ said, finishing Jenny’s thought.

  “Ops?” I asked. “Maybe we can rig the scanners to turn inward and check the ship.”

  “Good idea,” DJ said. “We should definitely do that.”

  A wave of déjà vu washed through me, and my knees nearly buckled. “Not again.”

  “What?” DJ grabbed me under my arms to help keep me upright.

  “I’ve done this before.”

  “This?” Jenny asked. “You’re stuck in another loop?”

  I shook my head, trying to sort reality from my confused memories. “No, I don’t think so.”

  DJ kept us moving toward the door. “Let’s talk about it when we get to Ops.”

  But the feeling was growing stronger. “There was one loop where I tried to stay awake for as long as possible because I wanted to see what would happen. There had been a monster chasing me, but I assumed it had been a hallucination. I’d been awake for days by that point.”

  Jenny’s voice was trembling when she said, “What happened?”

  It might have been better if I hadn’t said anything, but I couldn’t keep it to myself now that I’d brought it up. “It ate you and DJ, and then it eventually got me, too.”

  “But it was probably a hallucination,” DJ said. “You don’t know for sure.”

  “Great,” Jenny said. “We’re being stalked by a monster that’s got a taste for human flesh and lemon cake, and we’re all out of lemon cake.”

  “Let’s not panic.” The way DJ managed to remain calm awed me. No matter what mess we stumbled into, he rarely let it fluster him. “We’re going to—”

  “Warning! Magnetic containment of Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor is failing. Total failure will occur in four minutes and seven seconds. Warning!”

  DJ’s calm vanished. Without a word, he dashed into the corridor at a dead run.

  “Wait!” Jenny called. She turned to me. “Where’s he going?”

  “Reactor Control,” I said. “Probably. Come on!” I took off after DJ, running as fast as I could. Climbing the ladders recklessly. There might have been a dangerous monster on the ship with us, but that wouldn’t matter if the reactor’s containment failed and Qriosity exploded.

  I was running so fast that I nearly missed the door to Reactor Control. Jenny had fallen behind, but I could hear her cursing me for not slowing down, DJ for taking off without saying why, and Qriosity for not having an elevator.

  DJ was standing at a console, tapping the screen furiously. As I entered the room, a metal shield lowered around the core and the doors slammed shut behind me. “Warning! Radiation exposure protocol has been activated. Warning!”

  Jenny banged on the doors even as I yanked on the latch to open them. “DJ? Noa? Are you in there?” The doors were too thick for her voice to travel through. I was hearing her over the comms. “I can’t get in!”

  “We’re in here!” I yelled back, though I wasn’t sure she could hear me. “What the hell is going on, DJ?”

  DJ didn’t reply. He didn’t even look up from what he was doing.

  “Noa?” Jenny called again. “Oh! Oh God, I think there’s something out here! Open the door! Noa, open the damn door!”

  The lights flickered once and then died, plunging the room into darkness.

  A loud clang like a bell echoed through the room.

  Jenny screamed.

  FOUR

  I CALLED JENNY’S NAME. I called DJ. Neither answered. I would
have given one of my ears for light to see by. I didn’t know why the power had failed or why the loss hadn’t triggered the emergency lights. I had no idea if Jenny was alive or why DJ wasn’t responding. Anything could’ve been hiding in the dark. Anything could have been waiting for me to move within reach of its grasping limbs so that it could snap my neck and eat me in peace.

  “DJ?”

  If DJ had answered, he would have told me that everything was going to work out. That we were safe. But I didn’t feel safe. The current crisis reminded me of the sci-fi flick starring Jenny Perez, Project Vortex: In the Beginning. The movie’s premise is that an alien infiltrates a deep space vessel, the ENS Eden, stalks, and kills the entire crew except for Jenesis Paine, the ship’s medic played by Jenny Perez, who survives by putting on a spacesuit and luring the alien monster out of the ship, where she wrestles it into submission and then flings it into a nearby star. I’d seen the movie six times, and I’d given up expecting it to make sense.

  I’d been in Ops when the fold drive had last engaged; the nearest star to Qriosity was over ten light-years away, so we wouldn’t be doing that.

  The emergency lights flickered on, filling the room with an ominous red glow that made me feel like we were definitely trapped in hell. But hell was better than nothing. I scanned the room and spotted DJ crumpled on the floor in front of the console he’d been working at earlier.

  “DJ!” I crawled across the floor to him. Blood stained his face from a gash on his forehead. His eyelids fluttered when I rolled him over, and he turned to the side and vomited. The sharp tang triggered my gag reflex, and I tugged my shirt over my nose and turned away. As soon as DJ had emptied his stomach, I dragged him to the other side of the room.

  “DJ? Talk to me. Are you okay?” I pulled off my shirt and pressed it to DJ’s head to stanch the bleeding. There was so much blood, but my mom had told me once that even superficial head wounds bled a ton, often making the injury seem worse than it was.

  “Ow.” DJ tried to touch his forehead, but I batted his hand away.

  “You hit your head pretty bad. You’re bleeding and probably have a concussion, so take it easy.” I wasn’t sure how DJ had hurt himself, but everything on Qriosity seemed like it was designed to kill or maim us, so it could have been anything. “Do you know what happened to the lights?” I asked. “Did the reactor shut down again?”

  “No.” DJ spoke slowly as I cradled his head in my lap, keeping pressure on the wound. “The magnetic shield around the reactor was fluctuating. I shunted power from non-essential systems to shore up containment.”

  “Good thinking.”

  DJ smiled weakly. “Where’s Jenny?”

  I’d been so busy being scared of the dark and then worrying about DJ that I’d forgotten about Jenny. She was out there alone. No, she wasn’t alone. She’d said there was something in the corridor with her. “She was right behind me, but the doors shut and I couldn’t open them, and she was screaming. DJ, we have to get out of here so we can find her.”

  “Help me up.”

  I lifted DJ gently out of my lap, stood, and tried to pull him to his feet, but he clutched his head and doubled over, moaning in pain. I lowered him back to the floor. “Yeah, that’s not going to work.”

  “I’m sorry, Noa. I’m sorry.” DJ repeated it over and over, his voice thick with tears.

  I smoothed back his hair, combing my fingers through it and whispering to him that it was okay. DJ tried to close his eyes, but there was an episode of Murder Your Darlings where Marco had suffered a concussion while helping Anastasia solve the case of a serial murderer who targeted brown-haired baristas. He’d gone undercover at the Happy Bean and had been assaulted while emptying the spent coffee grounds into the compost bin. When Anastasia had found him, she’d told him that he shouldn’t fall asleep with a concussion or he might not wake up.

  I doubted the show was a useful source of sound medical advice, but I refused to take risks when it came to DJ.

  “Eyes open, DJ.” I gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “I need you to talk me through how to fix this mess. We’ve got to unlock the doors. Jenny might be in trouble.”

  DJ opened his eyes wide and blinked like he was trying to convince his body that he didn’t want to sleep. I peeled back my shirt, which was now soaked through with DJ’s blood. The wound was still bleeding. I hopped up and grabbed the first aid kit from the other side of the room. I dug out the tube of InjureEZ Wound Sealant and squeezed the gray paste across the gash. Almost immediately, it spread to cover the cut, and DJ’s face relaxed at the same time.

  “How does that feel?” I asked after I’d wrapped gauze around his head.

  “Little better.”

  “Do you think you can help me?”

  “I’ll try,” he said through clenched teeth.

  I hated that he was hurting, and I wished I could take him to medical so MediQwik could work its science magic, but I couldn’t unseal the doors without him. I took my bloody shirt and spread it across the vomit puddle by the console so that I didn’t have to look at it, but the smell was overpowering. My stomach lurched.

  “Doors first, okay?” I said.

  “Yeah.” DJ might’ve had a concussion, and he might have been a little sluggish, but he was still the smartest person I knew. If anyone could get us out of the reactor room, it was him. “What’s the screen say?”

  The terminal was filled with readouts of the various systems, most of which I was unfamiliar with, but a flashing alert at the top of the screen caught my attention. When I tapped it for more information, the floor dropped out from under me.

  “There was a radiation leak, DJ. That’s why the doors sealed shut.” I immediately began imagining my hair falling out and my skin sloughing off. Tumors bursting from my skin. Of all the ways I’d nearly died aboard Qriosity, radiation was my least favorite.

  “How much radiation?” DJ asked, sounding infinitely more calm than me.

  “This doesn’t say,” I told him. “It only says that we’ll reach fatal exposure in four hours.”

  “Four hours is plenty of time.” DJ had scooted into a sitting position and was watching me patiently. His face was covered in blood, he had a concussion, and we were both being irradiated to death, but he looked like he had everything under control. Like we were still in the garden arguing about colors.

  “What about Jenny?” I asked.

  “We can get the comms working,” DJ said. “Then the reactor.”

  I stood over the console completely certain I had no idea what I was doing. How was I supposed to fix anything when there might be a monster loose on the ship? When Jenny might be fighting for her life? When Qriosity might explode?

  “How do I do this?” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  “I’ll talk you through it.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “How do I do anything right now?”

  “You just do it. You do it because not doing it could be the difference between surviving and not. You do it because no one else can.”

  DJ’s pep talk didn’t make me less terrified, but it did get me moving. “What do I do first?”

  One step at a time, DJ walked me through how he’d diverted power from secondary systems to the magnetic containment field that shielded us from the reactor core, and explained how to return power to the communications system.

  “Will we lose containment again if I do this?” I asked. “I don’t want to dump more radiation into the room.”

  DJ shrugged. “Probably not. Internal comms aren’t a big drain on the system.”

  “You’re guessing, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe a little,” he said.

  “How often do you do that?”

  DJ looked away sheepishly. “It’s an educated guess. I didn’t have time to calculate exactly how much power the containment system needed, so I threw everything at it just to be sure.”

  I laughed out loud, letting the sound fill the room with madness. “We rea
lly are one stupid mistake away from death out here. We’re kids playing with stuff we don’t understand.”

  “Noa—”

  “It’s a miracle we haven’t blown up Qriosity yet.” I chose to believe the numerous times that I had blown up the ship during my time loop didn’t count.

  When my laughter faded, DJ said, “Either we give this a try or we abandon Jenny. You know what she would do.”

  “Leave us and save herself?”

  “Not a chance,” DJ said. “She loves your baking way too much to let you die.”

  I said a silent prayer, held my breath, and redirected power back to comms. I waited for an alarm to warn me that containment was failing again, but a minute passed and nothing changed. The computer said we were still four hours from dying of radiation poisoning. I tried the comms.

  “Jenny? Jenny, can you hear me?”

  I waited again. Waited for Jenny to respond. She should have been able to hear me no matter where she was.

  “Why isn’t she answering?”

  “I’m sure she’s safe,” DJ said. “She’s too smart to die.”

  “But she said something was out there with her, and she sounded so afraid, and then she screamed—”

  “Take a breath, Noa, and let’s see what we can do to open the doors.”

  DJ’s first suggestion was to attempt to override the radiation containment protocols. The work went slower than it would have if he’d been the one doing it instead of having to explain it to me, but I tried my best, and he was patient. The computer, however, refused to cooperate.

  “Damn it!” I said. “I think this means there’s still radiation leaking from the core, but I barely understand any of this nonsense.”

  “It’s okay,” DJ said. “We’ll just have to fix the radiation leak. We can do that.”

  I turned around and leaned my head back, raking my fingers through my hair. “Why does everything on Qriosity have to be so difficult? I miss home.”

  I expected DJ to tell me that home was far away and we had to focus on the problems we could solve, but instead he said, “I miss the ocean.”