Titan . . . isn’t there?
His arms still crossed, Kodiak faces up and down the ship.
The ship itself doesn’t exist?
I might not know what he’s trying to communicate, but I do know that the dread is back, mixed equally with fear. Blood pounds loudly through my veins. “Kodiak,” I say, even though he can’t hear me, “just come back inside. Right now. Do you hear me? Stop what you’re doing and come back in.”
I put my hands to my heart, and then gesture to the airlock entrance. Again and again.
Finally, Kodiak nods. He starts moving too quickly, and his feet miss the rungs. His legs kick through empty space, then manage to catch the ladder. Kodiak pauses before continuing toward the airlock, more carefully this time. He keeps one hand always gripping the ship, taking no chances despite the backup tethers.
“Come on, come on,” I whisper to myself, hands clenched.
He stops. At the gray door. The one that’s blocking the last remaining secrets of the ship. “No, keep going to the airlock, Kodiak, I just want you home,” I say under my breath.
I’m about to leave 06 and head back to the airlock entrance when the Coordinated Endeavor rumbles. I thought I knew all the ship’s noises, but this one is new.
I race back to the window, the bulky suit pitching me forward so I fall against the view of Saturn. The ship has released a blast of air, right against Kodiak.
It yanks him free of his handholds. Jerking and flailing, his body sails into space. He reaches out, just managing to snag a finger around a rung.
Another blast. It knocks Kodiak off the ship’s hull again. His hand swings through space to grab back on but misses, slicing through the void.
He falls up toward Saturn, jerking to a stop when he reaches the end of the tether. That slender line is all that’s keeping him from slipping into the expanse, from suffocating in space or burning as he tumbles through Saturn’s atmosphere. Kodiak’s legs kick frantically while he reaches one hand and then the other around the tether, dragging himself back toward the Coordinated Endeavor.
Vision blurring with tears, I stagger toward my airlock. “OS, there’s been an accident!” I cry. “I’m mounting a rescue!”
“There hasn’t been an accident,” Mother’s voice says calmly.
“Yes there has,” I say, my voice choking.
While I yank at the airlock’s handle, I manage a glance through the window. Kodiak’s got the tether securely in his grip and is pulling himself back to the ship, narrowing the distance between himself and the hull.
He’s going to be okay.
Except something impossible is happening.
“I love you,” comes my mom’s voice. My heart seizes. This is really my mother’s voice, not the voice skin OS uses to simulate her. “My darling Ambrose, I love you.”
“What’s happening?” I yell while I jerk the airlock’s handle. “Stop. Everything stop!”
The ship shudders, followed by a horrible rending and slicing, car accident sounds. I watch in shock as Kodiak’s hands race faster and faster along the tether, but his body stops making any progress toward the ship.
His line has been cut.
Kodiak holds the snipped end up to his helmet in disbelief. He pedals and swims toward the spacecraft, but his movements do nothing to bring him closer. He’s drifting.
If I get out there soon enough, I can save him. I’ve got the airlock wheel open now and press my shoulder against it.
The ship rumbles again, and there’s another vent of air. It sets Kodiak spinning as he shoots outward, away from the ship, away from Saturn, away from Titan, into the distant mass of stars and light-years of cold and empty darkness.
“Kodiak, I’m coming!” I scream. I’m in the airlock now, and fight to close the interior door, so the chamber can decompress and I can go out.
As I push the door closed, I hear the external airlock door whir and shudder. “OS, I’m not ready. Don’t open the external door yet.”
“I love you,” my mother replies.
A click, then a roar. The internal door blasts out, knocking me to the ground.
The impossible has happened. Both airlock doors are open.
I try to drag myself back into the ship, but my gloved hands skid along the smooth floor while the great hand of the universe yanks on my collar, sprawling me out toward space.
I hold myself against the wall, clutching with all my strength, my sputtering brain trying to figure out what’s happened and what I can do to stop it.
A click, and my helmet rips off from the suit. I see, in the corner of my vision, Rover with its whirring hands.
Rover unfastened my helmet.
The roar is so deafening that I can’t hear it. The ship’s air has turned cold and soupy and sharp. The walls themselves scream as dust, polycarb wrappers, food containers all whirl past me, the same force that’s pulling on them pulling on me, cutting my skin as we’re dragged into space.
Flying debris slams my head against the airlock doorway again and again, my vision sparking with pain and my mouth filling with blood until I’m soaring through the opening, past an open stretch of metal and polycarb until I’m outside the ship, until I’m drowning in a vacuum. Until I’m in outer space.
I gasp and heave and struggle, but my lungs won’t fill. The void around my face is so cold it’s hot, pulling at my skin and at my lungs. Every membrane of my body trills. The ship spins away from me, sometimes in view and sometimes careening away to reveal the darkness and the stars that spatter it. Saturn, impossibly massive, should be dancing agile circles around me, but I can’t even see it. Saturn is not there.
Saturn is not there.
How can I rescue my sister if Saturn is not there?
I will drown.
I will freeze.
I will burst.
My brain strobes light and dark and light and dark. As I continue to spin, I glimpse a last vision of a suited figure, arms and legs flailing. Kodiak will outlive me by hours, until he slowly goes cold in the gloom of space, until he’s dead like me.
My death is now.
My heart clenches and collapses, pulling my lungs down with it. My vision turns from white to red-black as my eyes freeze. I don’t feel pain, only shock. Beneath that explosion of sensation, my last thoughts are of Kodiak dying alone, of both of us dying alone.
I wish I could share dying with him.
Part Two
“191 DAYS UNTIL TITAN.”
Minerva’s voice turns urgent: You let me go alone. I need you. Save me, little brother!
The floor hums. An image returns: my parents, my brothers and sisters, frolicking on our Cusk-branded pink sand, Minerva splashing through waves of steaming seawater in her white racing suit, my mother yelling “Faster, Minerva, you can go faster,” my molten bronze fingers searching the scorching artificial grains for a seashell. My family’s spaceport is distant in the blue, radio arrays wheeling. Pleasure satellites haunt it.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
“OS, did Rover just poop?”
“In a way, it has,” OS says. “The microfauna of your intestines need to be replenished immediately to prevent any inflammatory autoimmune response. These organisms are selected to populate your tract with healthy proportions of bacteria.”
Rover refills the cup of water.
“Down the hatch,” my mother’s voice says.
There’s a pause. “That’s probably the first time you’ve heard this voice of mine say such a thing.”
It’s true. My mother would never say “down the hatch.” My surrogates would, but Mom’s more polished. She’s never been near a diaper. I barely even saw her for the first ten years of my life. A door, a knock, no answer. Minerva: As long as I’m alive, someone loves you.
I pop the pellet into my mouth and chase it with water. The agony of swallowing makes me roar. Eyes streaming tears, I fake a smile. “Please, ma’am, can I have some more?”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
Strange. The yellow portal is surrounded by polycarbonate that’s a different color than the rest of the wall. Close but not quite the same. I nearly missed it.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
I nervously whisk my hands over my hair, feel the capillaries pulsing under my scalp. I understand OS’s words, but all the same I can’t make any sense of them. “What the hell are you talking about? Reciprocal permission from whom?”
“From the Dimokratía spacefarer,” OS answers.
I hear the hum of the ship all over again. It breaks over me, stops time for long seconds while my skin crawls.
“OS,” I say slowly, “are you telling me that I’m not alone on this ship?”
“That is correct,” my mother’s voice says. “You are not alone on this ship.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
I open the last unexplored cabinet. My eyes dart with tears. I don’t remember deciding to bring this. Just as I start to play the Prokofiev, the balsa-wood bridge shivers and slides apart, folding into two pieces. I don’t hear anything; it must have broken earlier and been pieced back together.
I hold the thin balsa in my fingers, tears in the corners of my eyes. I can print a new bridge. But it will be polycarb, not wood. Wood can’t be printed. Wood can only be grown. This bridge was once alive, part of a tree surrounded by other plants and creatures. It once pulled carbon from the air and made it solid.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
As I near the orange portal, it opens.
Oh my.
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.
Our hands. His are crushers. Mine were just stroking a violin.
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.
“Do you have any strange rooms on your half of the ship?” he interrupts.
“Sorry, what?” I ask as my hand flutters to my throat.
He lets out a long breath, like speaking to me is an ordeal that will simply have to be suffered. “Do you have any strange rooms on your half of the ship?”
I understand the words. Still, my mind sputters on their meaning. “Strange?”
Kodiak’s neck muscles cord and uncord as he strains to tolerate my idiocy.
“No,” I manage. “I don’t.”
“I think I might need your help,” this warrior statue says.
I nod, eyes wide.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 502 *-_
The Dimokratía half of the ship is like mine, only even more spare. It looks like the inside of a shell. Not even a pretty one, just a calcium-white skeleton no one would think to bring home from the beach.
As I pass through it, my mind is divided between the spartan walls and the mesmerizing sight of Spacefarer Celius’s ass shifting in his red pants. When we turn an unexpected corner I trip, sprawling onto my face.
Marine ships have lips in every doorway, to prevent stray water from sloshing through, but spaceships don’t. Or shouldn’t. This room has one, though, and I just face-planted because of it. Kodiak drags me to my feet. His grip is so strong that I get some airtime before landing.
That’s when I see the room that I tumbled into. The walls are gouged, like it had some disease and scratched itself to death. I pull the fabric of my jumpsuit over my mouth and nose, so I don’t breathe in anything from the powdery surfaces. “What in the lords is this place?”
“I have no idea,” Kodiak says.
“You didn’t do this?”
“No. I figured you did.”
“This is my first time in the Aurora. This definitely wasn’t me—will you look at that!” In the middle of the floor is a radio device. Headphones and cables—real cables!—run to and from it.
“Have you tried using this thing?” I ask.
Kodiak shakes his head. “I was worried it might be full of Fédération propaganda.”
I wonder if he’s kidding. He certainly hasn’t cracked a smile. “OS,” I ask. “Can you help us understand what we’re seeing here?”
“I cannot,” my mother’s voice says from outside this room. “I wish I could clean it up for you, but you are looking into a blank space of my awareness. If you repair my code, I can rebuild Rover’s tracks and return this ‘blind room’ to its original state.”
“But why isn’t this room already in its original state?” I ask.
“I can provide no answer that would satisfy you.”
“Do you mind if I give this device a listen?” I ask Kodiak.
He shrugs, fists tight at his sides.
I place the headphones over my ears. Static. I scrunch my eyes and worry the dial on the device. Still just static.
“Well,” I finally say. “We’ve woken into a mystery, haven’t we?”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 499 *-_
Kodiak surprises me by showing up at dinnertime that night. He pores over my food options, then selects a lentil curry. He hands it over mournfully, as if choosing that curry means never getting to choose anything else ever again.
“You know you can come over for a meal anytime,” I say, giving the back of his hand a short stroke.
He withdraws his hand from the tabletop, stares at the countdown on the food heater like it’s the floor indicator on a particularly awkward elevator ride.
“Have you figured out anything more about your strange room?” I sputter.
He rubs his chin.
My cheeks grow warm. Kodiak’s willingness to meet me makes me decide to take a risk. “There’s something else strange happening here. 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.
I nod. I don’t love his tone, but there’s no denying that he’s precisely right. If I got knocked around hard enough to make me forget the entire launch, that’s trouble indeed.
He rubs the back of his neck, swallows some words.
“I’m sorry?” I ask.
He coughs. “I wouldn’t even tell you this, but with that strange room in the Aurora, I think we need to pool our information.” He coughs again. “I . . . I seem to have the same problem.”
My back goes straight. “You don’t remember your launch, either?”
He shakes his head. There’s a sheen at his temples.
I hear the hum of our ship, a dust mote floating in a grand hall. “Kodiak, what happened to us?” I whisper.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 494 *-_
I finally take Kodiak’s advice and set an alarm for 07:00 Mari time, so we can both start the day with a jog through our ships. We begin at opposite ends and do a circuit, meeting in the zero-g center, whipping past like aerodancers as our first glimpse of each other for the day. He runs for an hour, but I’m slowly working my way to the thirty-minute mark. While Kodiak finishes his run, I pick a room and get started on my tasks.
Outside the airlock, beside the remaining suits, I find a smooth space, softer and slightly discolored, like the wall around the yellow portal.
I load the training reels up on my bracelet, scanning for footage of the airlock. Kodiak pounds by in his bare feet. “What are you doing?”
“Tell you on your next lap!” I say as he runs past.
There. I pause the reel. Four suits in this footage, and only three here now. In other reels, it’s down to three suits, though I can find curious artifacts in the video, like it’s been altered. Even the hook has been digitally removed. Someon
e has gone to great lengths so I don’t realize a suit is missing.
Next time Kodiak runs by, I call out for him to meet me in the blind room once he’s finished.
“Mysterious!” he calls as he pounds past.
When he gets to the blind room, breathing heavily, sweaty hair matting either side of his face, I’m there to greet him. “One of my spacesuits is missing,” I say.
“Okay . . . what does that mean?” he asks, mopping the back of his neck with a towel.
“Let’s go to your airlock,” I say, pointing farther into his ship.
His eyes flash with irritation, but he waves me onward.
He’s missing a suit, too. Keeping silent, I lay my hand over the smooth portion of the wall where his fourth suit should be.
Watching Kodiak’s reaction raises my pulse a little, like I’ve laid my hand on some equally smooth place on his skin. Sweat dots the fabric stretched tight over his chest. He nods his head in the direction of the blind room.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” OS asks from the next room over.
“No, thank you, OS,” I sing.
Kodiak lowers himself to the scuffed and bare floor. I kneel next to him, so we can whisper. “They sent us out with two suits missing?”
I shake my head. “For a mission this important, a suit missing from each ship? Doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree,” Kodiak says, scowling. I can feel the warmth of his breath.
Two spacefarers. Two missing suits. Two forgotten launches.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 293 *-_
Then she’s back. “—the ship, Ambrose! The wear on the ship is too great on the approach, more than mission control predicted. You must finish OS’s tasks as soon as you can. Any defect, like . . . in the old shuttles, will lead to catastrophe. The ship must be . . . pristine to survive the friction and heat. My brother, I love you, there is no one better to—”
The transmission cuts out. I hang in the stillness, not daring to breathe, waiting for Minerva to return.
“There is no more incoming data to process,” OS says finally. “I will let you know the moment anything more comes in.”
“Play this transmission over,” I order, hands over my mouth, tears streaming from unblinking eyes.
The Darkness Outside Us Page 13