by Barry Lyga
Thanos could hear the calm sureness in Cha’s voice whenever he spoke about his practices—the discipline and peace he wished on all those he met. He quickly learned that Cha meditated at every chance and would expound his philosophies at any opportunity.
“You see, Thanos,” Cha said calmly that first evening as they lay in their bunks, “the universe itself can best be imagined as a garden. If we care for the garden, it grows and thrives, and even those areas that are not tended to do better, for they neighbor well-tended plots. The more peace we spread, the more the universe itself responds with peace.”
Thanos thought of the word spread and gardens and manure. It seemed apt.
And of course the universe was nothing like a garden. The universe was—as best physics could tell—a recurring cyclical spasm of matter and energy that expanded and collapsed on a timescale unfathomable by mortal comprehension. There was no point trying to explain this to Cha.
“There is a rhythm and harmony to the universe,” Cha went on. “When they are in tune, life goes well for all beings and there is peace. The reverse is also true, commutatively: when we bring peace, the universe itself is in harmony. The more peace we bring, the more the universe itself provides peace. Don’t you just wonder at the splendor of the universe we’ve been given?”
“I wonder only if this particular sermon might end so I can sleep,” Thanos grumbled, then pulled his pillow over his head and tried to sink into the dark of sleep. It took a long time.
He dreamed.
Of her.
She told him…
He could not remember.
CHAPTER XIV
HE WAS ASSIGNED THE MOST MENIAL OF TASKS—SCRUBBING clean the reinforced pulsoglass that made up the Golden Berth’s four thousand one hundred and twelve portholes into the inky, empty blackness of outer space.
He knew how many there were because he counted them as he cleaned them. By the time he got to the last one, the crew of motley aliens and castaways had already dirtied them again, and so he started over.
Roaming round and round the ship’s circumference. No beginning. No end. An ignominious fate for Thanos, son of A’Lars, son of Sui-San, putative Savior of Titan. A mind that once developed a perfect, painless, and fair method of killing was now put to the task of wiping windows clean of greenish alien slime that had hardened into a stubbly, pebbly shell.
Sometimes, he needed a chisel. The first two broke.
The one benefit to his task was that it took him all over the ship. Along the way, he met many of his fellow “indentured servants” who had never left their section of the ship. There was an entire family working the galley who were descended from the ship’s original cooks and stewards—they’d never ventured farther than the general mess hall. (“My grandfather once brought a meal to His Lordship in his personal quarters,” one of the cooks confided in Thanos. “Came back unable to speak. Later, we realized that was because His Lordship had removed his tongue.”)
The entire ship was a sealed system, both literally (in the sense that it was spaceworthy) and figuratively (in the sense that pretty much nothing and no one entered or left).
They had their own society here. Their own currency. Their own culture, a hodgepodge of ten thousand different eras and worlds.
Thanos took advantage of his meanderings around the ship. So long as he did his job, no one bothered him. In fact, some of his fellow servants even seemed happy to see him. In short order, he was surprised to find that he felt more welcome and at home on the Golden Berth than he had in his entire life on Titan.
In spite of himself, Thanos found himself adapting to the rhythms and tides of life aboard the Golden Berth. He began to feel comfortable there, accepted by its low-class buffoons in a way the elites of Titan had never even considered. Much to his surprise, he began to relax, and even his attitude began to take on their loose and decompressed miens. If not for the danger still looming over Titan and the oppressive presence of His Lordship, he might have even begun to enjoy his time on board.
Still, as welcomed as he felt, this motley collection of ragged servants and slightly less ragged sycophants could never measure up to the memory of Titan and its people. He knew that he needed to get off the ship. And then find a way to the Kree Empire, where he could marshal forces to save Titan. It was imperative that he rescue his people from their own blindness and ego, that he force them to see the error of their ways and listen to him.
He needed a plan. He needed a way out.
The first order of business in any plan would have to be removing the shock collar he wore. He tried brute strength to start, gripping the collar tightly and applying all his muscle to it. It had clicked around his throat in two pieces, but nothing he did separated them even a millimeter.
Next, he purloined a medical laser when Cha was distracted in the medical bay. But the laser, designed to cut flesh and bone, had no impact on the metal collar, not even when he modified it to run off a stronger power source.
He was unaccustomed to failure. He’d never really had to plan beyond his initial impulses, letting his intellect guide the way to success. Now he was up against the limits imposed on him by circumstance, and it galled him.
He considered storming the control room, turning the ship around, setting a course for Hala, for Titan, for anywhere, really.
But there were loyalists to contend with. And besides, Thanos had no idea how to pilot a ship like the Golden Berth.
Lastly, he considered outright escape. Every day, while cleaning, he scoured the ship for signs of life pods or other vessels. For equipment he could use.
Nothing. No ejectables. None of the space suits fit him, and they were all of dubious integrity, in any event.
His Lordship was a dullard and a crank, but he was ineluctably in charge. There was nothing Thanos could do in his current predicament. He knew he had no choice but to play along for the time being.
For the time being.
If there is nothing I can do in my current predicament, then I will have to change the predicament, he realized. And this will call for drastic measures.
Night and day had only abstract meanings on a wheelship, but the crew did attempt to simulate them. Unfortunately, given the panoply of worlds from which the crew hailed, no one could agree on exactly how long a night or a day was supposed to be. So sometimes the days would be twenty-four hours long, bisected into day and night. Other times, a night would last thirty hours or more, or a day would go on for a week, or there would be three hours of darkness, followed by sixteen hours of middling, murky dawn, followed by a gray twilight of ten or more hours. It was maddening, until eventually Thanos learned to ignore light and dark altogether.
He was sleeping during an actual period of darkness during his fifth week aboard the Golden Berth when something woke him from a deep, dreamless sleep. He lay there in his bunk for a moment, listening, hearing only silence.
But there was something wrong about the silence. Something lurked within it.
An opportunity, perhaps.
“What’s happened?” he asked aloud, not expecting an answer.
“The engines have stopped,” Cha told him, already awake and sitting upright. “We’re adrift.”
The silence. He thought of the silencuriums on Titan, but that led him to painful memories of Gwinth and Sintaa, so he shoved his attention back to the present. He’d become as accustomed to the thrum of the engines as to the chill of the metal collar he wore. And now the sound was gone.
There was no atmosphere in space and, thus, no friction to slow and stop the Golden Berth. Inertia would keep the wheel turning, though eventually internal pressure would slow it down and gravity would become a memory.
But more important: Without its engines running, there was no way for the ship to accelerate when necessary or to maneuver. It would simply continue at its present course and speed until something got in the way. Like a planet.
Or a star.
Without engines, they’d be unab
le to resist the gravitational pull of most celestial objects. They would crash. And die.
“I have no intention of dying,” Thanos rumbled, swinging his legs out of bed.
“Who said anything about dying?” Cha sat on the upper bunk, legs crossed, arms extended, palms up. His eyes were closed. He was meditating. “The universe did not put us on this ship and fling us into the void so we could die.”
“That sounds like exactly why the universe would put us on this ship and fling us into the void,” Thanos pointed out, pulling on his clothes. “You believing your fate is larger than a silent meaningless death does not mean physics will stop working to kill you.”
“You don’t need to believe in the universe’s plans for you, Thanos. The flowers grow regardless.”
“A comfort to a man trapped in a rusting hulk of a ship with no way to maneuver,” Thanos said, and wrestled open the ancient, malfunctioning door. He managed to slam it shut behind him before Cha Rhaigor could spew out more nonsense. In his time on the Golden Berth, Thanos had almost unconsciously come to like Cha; his confidence in the idea of an almost irrationally benign universe, on the other hand, rankled. Most of what Cha attributed to fate or general goodness flew in the face of the logic, reason, and science upon which Thanos had built his life. A regrettable flaw in an otherwise good companion.
He stomped through the corridors. He found the engine room, where Demla stood, scratching his head, peering at a flickering, static-filled readout. The ship was so old that all its controls were two-dimensional—screens and touch pads. No interactive holograms.
Demla was a minor engineering flunky who monitored the engines and was authorized to do no more than bellow for help if anything went wrong. With him was Googa, the chief engineer. As best Thanos could tell, Googa’d gotten the job because he happened to be nearby when the last chief engineer died. His Lordship made do with the resources at hand.
Speaking of His Lordship: He was there as well, standing imperiously in his velvet cloak, bare-chested and wearing a pair of unflatteringly tight underpants. As always, Robbo stood right next to him, ready to use the collar remote to brain-freeze anyone who looked at His Lordship with even the slightest disrespect.
“I don’t want a primer on engine physics,” His Lordship was saying to a cowering Googa, one eye throbbing through a rainbow of colors. “I just want you to start the engines again. We have hundreds of light-years to go, and it’s going to take more than the three centuries I’ve allotted if we don’t have engines. My plan requires meticulous timing. If we’re off by a few decades, I have to start all over again.”
Googa bobbed his head. “I understand, my lord. But we’ve run dry. As best I can tell, we’re too far from any stars for our solar sails to pick up sunlight.”
“Then find some stars!” His Lordship railed. “We’re in space! It’s filled with stars!”
“But we’re in the Raven’s Sweep, my lord! There are no stars here.”
“’at’s why’s called the Raven’s Sweep,” Demla added helpfully.
“No kidding!” screamed Bluko.
“Shut that thing up,” His Lordship growled, pointing to Bluko, “or I’ll have it shape-shifted into a turd and flushed.”
“Flush this—” Bluko began, cut off when Demla slapped a hand over his beak.
“I know why it’s called the Raven’s Sweep,” His Lordship went on. “But there have to be stars somewhere. I can see them out the damned portholes!”
“Those stars are too distant for our solar sails to capture any of their energy, my lord.” Googa paused. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Why would I kill you?” His Lordship asked. “You’re the only one who understands the engines. Don’t be an idiot. You’re indispensable.” He turned to Robbo. “I’m going back to sleep. If this imbecile doesn’t have the engines running in, say, two hours, give him a headache that’ll make him piss his pants and wish he had died in the womb.”
“Got it,” Robbo said as Googa whimpered.
His Lordship turned to leave and did a double take at the sight of Thanos lurking in the doorway. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Thanos ignored him and directed a question over his shoulder at Googa. “Is the hydrogen scoop functional?” Most vessels that could achieve anything close to the speed of light possessed a hydrogen scoop, designed to gather stray hydrogen atoms from the space before the ship. Space wasn’t a perfect vacuum, and at near lightspeed, even an atom could be catastrophic in a collision.
“Com-completely func-functional,” the engineer stuttered, flicking a terrified side-eye at His Lordship. “Uh, my lord…?”
His Lordship stroked the loose wattle of flesh hanging from his jawline. “Do you have any other questions, Thanos, or are you just here to banter about hydrogen scoops?”
“I have some thoughts on our predicament,” Thanos allowed. “May I?” He gestured to the control board.
Googa swallowed hard and looked over at His Lordship, who nodded. Thanos squeezed his bulk behind the control board.
He studied it for a moment and found himself gesturing in midair for controls that weren’t there. After a moment’s confusion, he instead tried tapping directly on the screen before him. That worked.
“Huzzah!” His Lordship chortled. “Victory!”
Thanos ignored the jibe and the nervous laughter of the others. He quickly scanned the region, just on the off chance that Googa was an idiot who’d missed something.
Turned out Googa was not an idiot, at least not in this matter. There were, in fact, no stars within range. No sane or competent ship’s captain would have ordered a trek through the Raven’s Sweep without first being certain of having sufficient fuel to get through. His Lordship, obviously, was neither sane nor competent.
Still, His Lordship’s fate was inextricably intertwined with Thanos’s—for now—so he had no choice but to figure out how to get out of this predicament. Either that or spend the rest of his life drifting aimlessly through the Raven’s Sweep.
As he became more comfortable with the machinery at his fingertips, he found it easier to formulate a plan. The Golden Berth was ancient and decrepit, but it had enough usable, functioning tech that he began to perceive the outlines of a way forward.
“There are no stars…” he began.
“I salute you, Admiral Obvious!” His Lordship crowed, and then nearly collapsed in a fit of coughing and expectorating. Demla, Googa, and Robbo all rushed to his side.
“No stars,” Thanos continued, repressing his glee at the savage wheezing that had cut off His Lordship’s mockery, “but there is an energy source nearby. A magnetar.”
A magnetar was a hyper-dense neutron star that emitted no light but did emit strong magnetic fields. There was one four light-days from their present position. Magnetars did not last long—only about ten thousand years—so they were incredibly lucky that this one was active.
“We can modify the hydrogen scoop,” he told them, “to collect gamma radiation. It’s a simple enough procedure.” The hydrogen scoop not only gathered up stray hydrogen atoms; it also directed them to the ship’s internal fusion reactor, where they could be mashed together to create energy.
Googa left His Lordship’s side and joined Thanos at the control board. “Well, yeah, but that magnetar isn’t emitting any gamma radiation.”
“It will,” Thanos said. “We can use our defensive shields to create an overlapping series of magnetic pulses that will—”
“Mimic the magnetar’s interior magnetic fields!” Googa exclaimed, his excitement growing. He hip-checked Thanos to shove him away from the controls, but Thanos was three times Googa’s size and didn’t budge.
“The result will be a starquake on the surface of the magnetar, which will throw off massive amounts of gamma radiation. We can capture it and use it to power the ship. But we’ll need to have our timing down precisely—the starquake could last as little as ten milliseconds.”
Googa pretended to d
ouble-check Thanos’s math, nodding very seriously and grunting portentously as he skimmed through the numbers on the screen before him. When he was finished, he looked up at His Lordship eagerly.
Meanwhile, His Lordship had managed to recapture his breath and was wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “All I heard,” he said, “was Tech tech the tech to make the tech anti-tech and blah blah blah one one zero one one zero zero zero one.” He flapped a hand at them. “Don’t bore me with petty details. Can you make it work?”
“Yes!” Googa said immediately and enthusiastically.
“Yes,” Thanos said a moment later.
“Good.” Both eyes turned solid pink for a few seconds, the first time Thanos had seen them match. His Lordship chucked Robbo under the chin. “Kill Googa and bring me Thanos when he’s done.”
Googa’s eyes widened. “My lord! I have served you urrrrrrrk!” His speech devolved into a long, strung-out syllable as Robbo stepped close to him. Thanos watched dispassionately as Googa clutched his head and sank to his knees, then collapsed altogether at Robbo’s feet.
A moment later, Googa’s eyes exploded, spraying vitreous humor and blood on the floor.
“S’pose I gotta clean that up,” Demla grumbled under his breath.
Thanos watched as Googa’s body twitched far longer than he would have thought possible or necessary. Eventually, it stilled.
Robbo sniffed loudly and cracked his fingers. “What are you looking at?” he sneered at Thanos. “Get those engines powered up or expect the same.”
He turned on one heel and left. Demla looked over at Thanos and whistled long and low, his eyes wide with disbelief.