“Open the cabinet, and you will see. Keep in mind the inventory quantities, however. I will not allow you to use up your rations irresponsibly.”
“I won’t try to use them irresponsibly. So. How’s the pizza around here?”
“There is no pizza. The closest I can offer is manicotti. Monsieur.”
I tilt my chin toward the ceiling. “Manicotti, really? And your humor settings . . .”
“My sense of humor is programmed deep in my bios. Like yours.”
“I just—my mother doesn’t make jokes, so it’s weird to hear anything lighthearted in her voice. Could we switch you to someone else?”
“Of course. I have a few hundred possibilities.”
“Oh, are you using the commons voice set, same one that ships on the Zen 10.0?”
“Yes.”
I grin. “So you can be Devon Mujaba of the Heartspeak Boys? Voice 141?”
OS changes to a purring countertenor. “The one and only.”
“That’s amazing,” I say. “Don’t ever change. Devon’s my favorite.”
“My ship is yours,” OS says as Devon Mujaba. “All my rooms and corridors are yours.”
“Okay, stop,” I say. “Take a ten-minute hiatus on humorous responses. That was a little creepy. You’re a little creepy, OS, to tell you the truth.”
“‘Creepy’ is not an adjective I’ve ever applied to myself,” OS says in its new super-sexy voice. “You have given me something new to think about. If you help me identify ‘creepy’ whenever it occurs, I can learn to predict and avoid it so you do not experience an unpleasant reaction.”
“It’s best we set some expectations for our relationship. I’ll start by informing you when you’re being creepy.”
“And you can start by refreshing those harvesting procedures,” OS says.
“Wow, that was salty. I kind of like it,” I say, smiling up at the disembodied voice, my hands punching into my pockets, to show off the muscles of my arms. Am I flirting with my operating system? I think I’m flirting with my operating system. That voice. “Food first, though. I’m starving.”
“My reference sources indicate that after physical trauma, you should not yet be hungry. I was ready to have Rover hook you back up to an intravenous drip to feed you.”
“Well, your data was wrong. I told you I’m not your run-of-the-mill crewman. I hope Rover’s a good chef.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 342 *-_
It’s a good thing the manicotti has a printed label on it, because I wouldn’t have known what it was otherwise. It’s basically white gluten and red oil, with dominant polycarb notes. Pretty close to my own home cooking, actually. Not like the manicotti Minerva used to make us every Friday night. I run my fingers over the printed name. Getting this meal onto Fédération ships was her doing, I’m sure of it. I remember watching her fingers as she sprinkled sea salt and Parmesan.
I stare at harvesting training reel projections while I chew, surrounded by the humming machinery of the Endeavor. I’m sort of loving the chance to eat manicotti, it turns out. Minerva used to cancel awards ceremonies, training sessions, anything that came up on a Friday night, all so she could be with her little brother. I could eat this manicotti forever.
A voice comes on. I sit up, rod straight. It’s not Devon Mujaba. This voice is low, almost a growl. Sounds like gruel and bar fights. Fédération language, but with a Dimokratía accent. “Put the OS’s voice back to the female one.”
“Spacefarer Celius?” I say, getting up so quickly that I bang my head on an open cabinet door. “Is that you?”
“Do as I ask. I don’t have access to OS personalization.”
“We should meet.” My voice breaks. It hasn’t done that in years.
“There’s no need for that.”
“Of course there is. We need to plan out the asteroid harvesting, for starters. Come over for dinner. I insist.”
The ship’s sensitive mics pick up his slow breathing, the friction of his jumpsuit as he readjusts his body. “Did you really just invite me over for dinner?”
“I ate, but in another five hours or so I’ll want some more. Maybe we should actually call it dinner number two. Come over for dinner number two.”
“Meeting you isn’t permitted.”
“Isn’t permitted by whom? Your Dimokratía commanders? It’s only the two of us here. Well, plus OS and Rover.” There’s no answer, except for more soft breathing. Vulnerability is the one thing you have to learn, the mission’s head psychologist once said. The Cusk family didn’t prepare you for it. I cough. “Kodiak, do you remember anything of the launch? Or anything right before it? I’m scrubbed as of a few days beforehand, as far as I can tell.”
“I’ll ask you one more time. Put the voice back.”
“Before you mute my side, Kodiak, know that I’ll be up at the orange door in precisely five hours. I hope to see you. For the good of the mission. For our lives. We need to meet. And you know what? People like me. You might like me.”
“The voice, Cusk.”
“Only if you agree to see me, Celius.”
A growl, then the comm shuts off.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 342 *-_
Four hours to go. I take frequent breaks from my asteroid-harvesting training reels to pace the Endeavor, sucking away at a water sleeve. This raging thirst won’t go away.
Seven sets of natty blue jumpsuits, seven rotating breakfasts (the berry oats look especially promising), seven rotating lunches, seven rotating dinners. It tickles me that the Cusk planners organized my life into weeks, when I’m in an artificially heated polycarbonate hull surrounded by an imponderably immense void, a dust mote floating through an empty stadium. But at least I know when it’s Tuesday!
Three and a half hours to go. Once I’ve gleaned everything I can from the training reels, the only thing left to do while I wait out the final hours until we reach the asteroid is to complete some programming debugs from OS’s list. In between edits, I poke through every cranny of the ship. I feel like I know it all now, except for whatever’s behind the portal reserved for our arrival on Titan. And whatever’s on the Aurora.
I keep flipping between giddiness and gloom, and from moment to moment I can’t predict which emotion is going to bubble up next. It’s like my own mind is an abandoned house that I’m exploring. I know the cause: I’m spending too much time alone. That’s a fast road to crazy. I was known as the lone wolf back in the academy, love-’em-and-leave-’em Ambrose Cusk, but I wish I could go back and redo it. Have some of the pillow talk I always avoided by sneaking away from whatever sweaty body was sharing my bunk, by ducking out in the predawn hours to train.
I open the last unexplored cabinet. My eyes dart with tears. I don’t remember deciding to bring this.
It’s a violin. My violin. I pull it out of its case, curl my fingers around its tangerine neck, its black fingerboard. So delicate. The only delicate thing on the ship, unless you count me (and maybe Kodiak, wouldn’t know). I tune it up, tighten the bow, and draw it across the A string, lancing the white noise of the ship. Minerva laughed at me for loving the violin, called it a waste of time, and that’s probably why I kept doing it. Like my mother, she gave me the most attention when I was disappointing her. I start with scales before switching to the Prokofiev concerto, vibrato painful from my soft finger pads.
The pieces of this instrument were once trees that lived for hundreds of years, surrounded by other plants and woodland creatures long before I was alive, before any humans had ever gone to space at all. I run my fingers along the lines of the wood grain. Wood is so many things. It is hard and soft, it is smooth and rippled.
I’m an animal as well as a spacefarer.
I seem to have lost my calluses, and just a half hour of playing becomes too painful for my finger pads. I put the violin away, then plant myself in front of 06’s window and stare out. Space is disorienting and obliviating. I could stare into it forever.
An hour left.
You’re going nuts, Ambrose.
I immerse myself in the harvesting training reels, studying again and again the protocols, the emergency fallbacks for every possible outcome. Surely enough time has gone by.
When I approach the corridor that leads to the Aurora, the orange portal is closed.
I wait.
“OS, tell me how many hours it’s been since I invited Kodiak to dinner.”
“Five hours and sixteen minutes,” Devon Mujaba’s voice says.
That voice! “How much more do you think I should give him?” I ask.
“So far you have given him sixteen minutes more.”
“Fair. Is he just on the other side of his door?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Tell him I’ve authorized the orange portal to open whenever he wishes.”
“Acknowledged.”
“How long has it been now?”
“Seventeen minutes.”
I must be getting tired, because my hand goes to my wrist, as if we were within reach of the comm towers on Earth, as if I could bracelet-message Kodiak, or Minerva to complain about Kodiak. “Tell him I’m going to go eat, but he’s welcome to join me.”
“Kodiak Celius has requested to remain muted unless it’s an emergency.”
“I take it my mealtime happiness is not an emergency?”
“That is correct.”
My already brittle smile crumbles. I walk down my curving stair, back to full simulated gravity. “It’s okay,” I tell OS. “I could use some time alone.”
OS laughs mechanically.
“Who programmed you to laugh?” I ask. “You never laughed during training.”
“Your mother.”
Wow. My mother directed my operating system to laugh at my jokes. “Miss you, Ma,” I whisper as I settle into 04. I never called her “Ma” back on Earth. The very thought is preposterous.
I pick out a lentil curry, noticing as I do that Rover has already replenished the manicotti I ate earlier. I place the pouch into its heating slot, cycle through to the curry heating option, and watch the timer count down from ninety. I sit down, get a fresh sleeve of water, and open the roasting-hot bag of curry like a bag of chips, cursing when scalding bean slurry dribbles down my thumb.
Suddenly I’m furious. I hurl the pouch against the wall. It makes a violent green-brown spatter against the pure white surface, like I’ve taken a shotgun to some cartoon Martian. I suck on my burnt thumb. Fuck you, Kodiak Celius.
A heavy tread. I stagger to my feet.
I’m no longer alone.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 338 *-_
Sweet lords is the first thing I think on seeing Kodiak. This beauty is wasted on me.
My romantic partners (okay, fine, my “hookups,” haven’t quite managed the relationship thing) have always been ethereal and wispy, lighter-than-air abstractions of boys or girls or third-genders. The cadets I kept favoring were waify and toneless, so I could lap them up like coffee or milk and then get on with my day.
Kodiak, though. He looks like he spends his day crushing warriors under the shield of Aeneas. Muscles band his arms and neck. Thick, lustrous hair falls in blue-black waves along his cheeks, his eyes a speckled tan, nestled deep. His olive skin is smooth and unmarred, except where thick stubble shades his jawline. Even his stubble looks like it could take me in a fight.
Not my type, but as a purely aesthetic object, he’s marvelous. I’m hurtling through space with what can only be called a stud.
His thick brows knit as he scowls, shoulders bulging his jumpsuit where his body tenses. He clenches finger after finger under his thumb, knuckles popping. It looks like he could break his own fingerbones with that thumb.
I hold out my hand. “I’m Ambrose Cusk.”
He nods at the wall behind me.
I tilt my head as I wait for him to answer.
We stare at each other. Or I stare at him, and he lowers his gaze to the joint where table merges into floor. I really have no idea what’s going through his head. He’s being undeniably weird, and it strikes me that I can’t go ask anyone for their take on it. We’re stuck with each other, and only each other. The danger of that strikes me all over again.
He drags a hand through his hair, fingers disappearing in the thickness of it. My focus returns to our hands. Mine are strummers. His are crushers.
Dimokratía dresses its spacefarers in red acrylic. Kodiak’s uniform is so atrociously ugly that it’s actually pretty cool. An aviation-mechanic-in-space vibe, down to the nylon ribbing inlaid in the fabric. “I like your—” I start.
Kodiak’s tan eyes wander to the lentil splatter where I hurled my dinner, then he’s suddenly in motion. He brushes past me, opens my food cabinet, and examines my pouches. He holds them up to the light, gives one a rough squeeze, and then picks up another. A moment ago I was desperate for him to do anything at all, and now I wish he would be still again. “I take it you’re hungry?”
He juts the lantern of his jaw and nods, like he’s only reluctantly conceding a point. His voice is low and dry. Husky. “Your food looks much better. Of course it would be. You Fédérations and your gourmet foodstuffs.”
“Yes, we do like our . . . gourmet foodstuffs,” I say. “What did Dimokratía stock you with, cabbage?”
He stares back at me.
“And maybe some potato soup? Only good sustaining food for comrades, right? Anyway, I see you’re checking out the manicotti. I had some earlier.”
He inserts the pouch in the wrong direction, and I know what kind of mess that means we’re in for. I go to fix it, but Kodiak blocks me. I reach around him anyway and pluck the pouch out, reverse it, and put it back in. My arm hair zaps against the fibers of his jumpsuit. “There we go,” I say, giving the bulk of his upper arm a quick pat before I take my seat.
While I retrieve what remains of my lentil curry and sit with the pouch, Kodiak faces away from me, back tensed, watching his ninety seconds count down. Rover ticks and whirs, cleaning up my mess while I study the V of Kodiak’s back, the glow of his skin at the nape of his neck. He’s not exactly stirring romantic feelings in me, but he does make me wish I knew how to sketch portraits. I’m usually the biggest physical presence in a room, but I feel insignificant around him. He’s a miracle of proportions, writ large.
When his food is ready, he sits across the narrow polycarb table from me, tossing the searing pouch from hand to hand. Once it’s cool enough, he stabs it with a straw.
“You open it by—” I start, before he cuts me off with a slashing gesture. So I watch in silence, chin in my hand and uncomfortable smile spreading over my face, while he pricks the unprickable.
“I assume OS has filled you in on the asteroid harvesting?” I ask.
No answer. My patience frays. Looking like Virgil’s dream warrior boy will only get you so much leeway for rudeness, and Kodiak’s using it up quick.
He jabs harder, so much the straw bends.
“Let me,” I finally say, tugging the pouch toward me. He avoids my eyes, which means I can search his face while I ease open the pouch. There’s equal harshness and gentleness there, somehow. A soft soul with a hard wall. My patience refills. There’s some hope for us.
I place a fork in front of him. Kodiak begins to eat.
He abruptly stops, puts the fork down, and gazes out from behind long lashes. It’s maybe the first time he’s looked at me. Tan doesn’t quite capture the color of his eyes. They’re soft, silky clay.
As we stare at each other, a sort of panic floods my body. I need to say something to break this charge. “Have we met?” I sputter.
“Have we met?” he repeats, like he’s trying out the words, like this is his first experiment speaking Fédération. Or like he’s teasing me. He rubs his chin.
My cheeks grow warm. Vulnerability, Ambrose. Try it. “OS told me that I passed out at launch. I’m trying, but I can’t remember anything from then on.”
Kodiak sniffs his food and leans back in his
chair, tilting it on two legs like he’s a kid killing time in detention. “That sounds like a serious problem,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, watching him for clues to just how big a problem he thinks it is. I examine Kodiak’s posture and attitude, even as I know the unconscious parts of me are processing increased pupil size and erect hairs. What can I surmise from all that? Only this: he is unimpressed by his new companion.
I’m tempted to inform him that I was top of my class at the academy, that I come from the birthing apparatus known as the Cusk family, which is the centerpiece of the Fédération economy and much of the Dimokratía one, that if he’d read a single news source in the last few months he’d know everything from my star sign to my shoe size. But I also know that bragging only proves insecurity, and I won’t give him that satisfaction.
Who cares if he’s unimpressed with me? He’ll become impressed in time. They always do.
“Look,” he says with that husky voice, “it seemed important to meet you, but we don’t need to do this ever again. I had no say in who your Fédération capitalist cabal let pay his way onto this ship. I assumed that it would be some coddled Cusk princelet, and I was right. Making this a joint mission at all is a mistake. I have a long list of ship maintenance to accomplish, and all I need is in the Aurora. I will not disturb you in your work, and I insist that you do not disturb me in mine. If you have an emergency, OS will help you. If and only if OS is unable to help you, I’ve instructed it to patch you into my quarters.”
I bite back the words that come first. Quite a speech. Did you write it ahead of time? The canned quality makes me think he’s not as sure about this plan as he’s letting on.
“This wasn’t supposed to be a joint mission,” I say, keeping my voice steady.
“Clearly Fédération didn’t have the resources to do this on its own, so your corporate family had to approach Dimokratía as well. You’d have known that if you didn’t knock your head and forget about it. That’s not my fault.”
Tipping his head back, Kodiak holds his dinner pouch to his mouth and squeezes the contents into his throat. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. He closes his eyes, savoring the taste, then rubs the back of his neck and stands. “Thank you for the food,” he says.
The Darkness Outside Us Page 3