Cold Between Stars Read online

  Anything.

  But it’s not the everything that I sensed in the river. Where is the knowledge, the promise of knowing?

  I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face. There’s nothing here. Nothing and—

  Wait. I twist around. There is something. Behind me, a weird little shiver over my skin, except it’s not so little, raising goosebumps up and down my arms. And suddenly I’m picturing myself in Dad’s lab, but this time there’s a creeping chill running over my body, the same sense of being repulsed that I felt from the disc in the wall. It’s stronger here, and it’s coming from behind me, from Citlali.

  AD was right. It is a beacon.

  And something’s answering it.

  I twist back around.

  There’s nothing to see, only the same electric shiver of intent I saw within the fug.

  Is that what I sensed before? Is that what’s hiding behind the fug?

  A piece of the darkness moves, or does something move in the darkness? It’s hard to tell. There’s no light to see by, and yet...

  It’s a ripple masquerading as sight, fooling my senses. I guess my brain has no reference for what it’s experiencing and so the movement whispers against my skin, shivers down my bones. I sense the thing out there, and it’s more than witnessing it with my eyes, or touching it. It’s all of my senses wrapped up into one with the added something of my empathic abilities. I experience the being, the weight of its thoughts, the slow, bleary beat of its consciousness, muffled under a heavy kind of sleep. Heavier than stasis, heavier than anything I’ve ever sensed. It’s like death, except that’s not right. It’s the moment before death. Like the weight that invaded p’Endr’s bones as she breathed her last, the darkness that clouded her vision, the stone that stilled her heart. Whatever is out there, it’s asleep and not quite dead.

  Death sleep.

  It’s dying. The thing is dying. Why? How?

  I will myself toward it, but no matter how hard I propel myself, how fast I move, how far, it never gets any closer. Always a whisper against my skin. Sleeping and yet not.

  I need answers. I came here for answers. I need them to stop the fug, and the thing has them, is the everything I came for.

  I can’t leave until I have answers. I won’t leave.

  There’s no time in this place, or at least, I don’t think there’s any time. It’s strange, there and not, like my sight. I chase the thing for an eternity, and yet it’s a moment as well, a heartbeat. I don’t feel hunger or fatigue, but I sense myself growing weaker, like I’m fading. I take a moment to rest. To think, to try. Chasing the thing isn’t working. I have to be smarter.

  My thoughts are like fairy floss, thin and fluffy, shredding before I get hold of them. It takes effort – a long slow second to form a thought but only a moment for it dissolve. And now I’m wondering why I’m trying. What was I doing? What’s the presence out there in the dark?

  I chase it. I have to know.

  Something, not the thing I’m chasing but another thing, breaches the darkness behind me. Pain laces my body.

  The void is gone. I open my eyes to soft grey and a bright red flash. My brain is mushy. It takes a moment and another flash before I recognise the slow glide of a scanner passing over me, and the contours of a ceiling.

  The Med lab.

  I’m on my back. The pain that ripped me out of that place is gone. In its place is a heaviness I haven’t felt before, like all the marrow has been scooped out of my bones and the hollows filled with steelcrete. I try to sit up.

  I get as far as lifting my head before blackness pulls at the edge of my vision.

  When I try opening my eyes again, Dude’s sitting on my forehead.

  He fuzzes.

  Hey, little guy. Wait. That was wrong. I meant to say that, so where are the words?

  Confusion is muddying my brain. I’m missing something, something more than the warmth in my bones.

  There’s a hiss, a cool shh-stick in my neck. I turn my head to see a med bot, a hypo in one of its arms, before darkness takes me again.

  Being drugged isn’t fun, which is probably why I bitch-slap the med drone the moment it comes near me. The thing hits the floor and I’m pretty sure I hear plasform crack.

  Thankfully, I can get up this time around. My back is a solid ache, doing as much to get me to my feet as the thought of the horde of med drones probably coming for me right this nano-second.

  I spin around.

  Nothing, just the one drone, slowly picking itself off the deck. It’s not big, about the size of my fist, and egg-shaped. It hovers, a spot lighting up on the rounded point of its nose before a scan snaps out of it, the fan of red passing over me, head to toe and back.

  The light snaps off and the drone darts back into its dock in the wall.

  I relax, but only by an iota, and take stock.

  I’m in the Med lab, in the exact same spot I sat to venture into the void, but the place seems different. Or maybe that’s the way I smell?

  I lift my arm to check.

  Whoa. There must be something wrong with my shipsuit, because I could knock myself out with that odour. Then again…

  ‘Med?’ My voice comes out as a thin whisper of sound, and it feels like my vocal cords are clogged up. I clear my throat and try again. ‘Med, how long was I out?’

  The AI’s blue face appears in front of me. ‘You have been unconscious for seventeen days and sixteen hours.’

  I mustn’t have heard that right. ’Seventeen days?’

  ‘Indeed. After thirty-six hours of mental communication, your vital signs became critical and I was forced to administer electric shocks to sever the connection. After which I deemed it necessary to enforce an extended period of recuperation.’

  I remember the hypo-stick and translate “enforced recuperation” to mean induced coma. And now I’m remembering chasing the thing, of pushing myself further and further, how my thoughts turned to taffy, and that sense of fading.

  It’s not that I’d chased the thing for so long and so far that I’d almost died, that make my insides go cold. It’s the realisation of how very far that was, and how much farther the thing was, the distance between us.

  And I’d sensed it.

  I push myself off the bed. My legs wobble for a moment, before holding steady.

  A med bot hovers in front of me, and another next to my shoulder. I have the sense that if I so much as lean the wrong way, they’ll “enforce recuperation” again.

  Let them try.

  I need to save Grea. What’s happened to her in seventeen days? Is she huddled up in her pod? Is she still breathing? Or is she like Captain Lyn, stuck in stasis gel, reaching for air?

  But even if I go down there, storm the stasis unit with Franken-thrower and Dude, what am I going to do? How am I going to pull her out, and what about Mum and Dad and Jim Engineer?

  I need answers. I’d reached through the fug to get them, found something else and almost died.

  Mum, Dad, Grea, even dying doesn’t change anything, except what I do next.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Shuttle bays are just big airlocks. That thought pops into my head as I stand in front of the one on Ag deck, wishing for something a little more substantial than my shipsuit to protect me. I remember standing in this very spot, rolling my eyes as Dad double-checked the seals on my envirosuit.

  ‘We’re in the outer hull, kiddo, only the ice hull and thirty centimetres of steelcrete between us and space.’ He’d tugged on my helmet, almost pulling my head off my shoulders.

  ‘I need my head, Dad.’

  He’d bopped me on said head, his fist THUNKING on my helmet’s plasform. ’A micro-fracture in the hull is all it takes, kiddo, and you’re breathing vacuum.’

  I’d rolled my eyes again. ‘You can’t breathe in vacuum, Dad. There’s no air.’

  His face had turned grim, the skin around his eyes tightening, his mouth firming. ‘Exactly,’ he’d said. He’d turned away but in that secon
d, I’d caught a rush of emotion rolling off him in a black wave of grief.

  The memory of it hit me in the gut. I hadn’t asked him about it then, or later. I’d asked Mum, but she’d got that same expression on her face and said she’d tell me some day. An echo of Dad’s emotions had rolled off her before she’d caught it. She’d never told me what caused it but I didn’t really need the details anymore. I recognised that particular, piercing shade of darkness, caught a shadow of it every time I imagined Grea’s hand reaching out of decaying biogel.

  Dude fuzzes, trying to comfort me.

  I tilt my head enough to feel the smooth, warm glide of Dude’s fur against my chin. Tension runs up and down my spine, making the hair at my nape stand on end as I try to remember where the envirosuits are.

  That memory of Ag’s emote is haunting the shit out of me. It’s more than the fact she did it, it’s the chilling menace in her eyes… if I could have crawled back up the air duct to Lab Two to access the shuttle bay there, I would have. If I’d thought I could shoot myself out an airlock and swim to the source of the fug, I’d have done that too, anything but stand here and test my memory of Ag’s expression.

  But I can’t do any of those things.

  I breathe deep and punch the door controls.

  If Ag wants to suck me out into space, she’s going to have to be quick about it.

  The shuttle bay is cold enough my breath frosts on the air, which isn’t a good sign. It should be the same temperature as the rest of the deck, pleasant enough that I’m not getting goosebumps under my shipsuit. The only light comes from the hallway, and it throws my shadow across the grated decking, all the way to the sleek-nosed shuttle sitting in the middle of the cavernous space. Wider across than the freight tubes, its wings tucked up against its sides, the shuttle takes up most of the bay. There’s enough room either side for it to lift on its thrusters and turn around.

  The height of two decks, the bay is bigger vertically than it is horizontally.

  I glance up, catching glimpses of the catwalks overhead and the framework where the other EVA vehicles are stored, their bellies little more than lighter patches of grey in the darkness.

  I can’t see the hatch that separates the bay from the launch tunnel, it’s hidden behind the shuttle and smothered in darkness. I’m safe so long as the internal doors are open, or at least that’s the theory, but in theory the captain should have been safe in her stasis unit and Ag shouldn’t been able to emote.

  The spare envirosuits are in a locker along one side of the shuttle bay, or at least they should be. Somewhere between Onah pushing me out of stasis/sleep and learning about the beacon, I’ve stopped believing in the way things should be.

  A light comes on over the shuttle. A drone hovers over its nose, shedding light like a miniature sun.

  ‘Ag? Is that you?’

  It blinks.

  I take that as a yes.

  Ice slithers down my spine while I try to get an eye on the suit lockers.

  The drone dips and zooms toward the back of the shuttle, away from the inner doors.

  Okay. To follow or not to follow? If I go deeper into the bay, I stand less chance of making it out to the safety of the corridor if Ag loses her shit.

  The fact that I’m not sensing anything from Ag is what decides for me. As far as my psyche is concerned, it’s just me and Dude up here, playing chicken in the dark.

  I follow the drone.

  I’m halfway around the shuttle, half my attention on the drone while the rest of me eyeballs the envirosuit lockers. I’ve decided that I can reach one and drag a suit out before Ag opens the outer hatch by more than a few centimetres, long enough to slam a helmet over my head. I might even get a leg on and be able to active the mag boots before the out-rush of air drags me across the deck.

  Dude’ll have to hang on though and he might not make it.

  Surreptitiously, I bring up my palm unit and make a few modifications to my shipsuit. There’s a tingle over my chest as the nano-fabric adjusts itself, a few seconds and when it’s done my sleeves are up around my elbows, but there’s an expanded Dude-sized pouch over my heart.

  The drone has stopped by the shuttle’s tail. It’s hovering at head height, waiting for me.

  Casually, I shift Dude from my shoulder to the pouch.

  The slow shushing sound doesn’t immediately register in my brain. It’s coming from the shuttle bay doors. Not the inner ones, the ones that lead to the rest of the ship, but the outer ones. The ones that lead to vacuum.

  I’m across the decking before my head has time to identify the sound. The locker is under my hand, the panel sliding aside. I grab the suit first, thrusting one leg in, activating the mag boots, just as I planned, before I realise that the outer door isn’t moving. A quick check over my shoulder and yep, the inner doors are open as well.

  The drone is bobbing over my head, helpfully directing light into the locker and lighting up the space around me so I don’t have to guess what part of the suit I’m shoving my other leg into.

  I look directly at the drone and frown. If I was trying to space someone, I wouldn’t be so helpful.

  Since I’m half in anyway, I finish putting the suit on. Not speeding through it, but not dawdling either. Taking the time to make sure the seals are green and the nano-fabric adjusts to the Dude-shaped lump on my chest. I tuck the helmet under my arm. It’s a larger model than the one I grabbed from Ag deck, a transparent dome of plasglas, but my thumb against the rim collapses it into a ring a centimetre thick, ready to slip over my head.

  ‘So. You’re not trying to kill me.’

  The drone blinks.

  ‘So, what are you doing?’

  It zips away, back toward the rear of the shuttle, but this time, instead of hovering, it turns its light on the outer doors.

  There’s not much to see, at least not at this distance. I follow the drone and take another look.

  The outer doors are made of the same steelcrete as the inner ones, except thicker, without the smooth off-white finish. They’re bigger too, half the height of the shuttle bay and as wide. The engineers had built these two slabs of steelcrete and no one had tried to pretty them up, like someone had decided that we all needed a reminder that these doors were here to keep us safe, not comfortable.

  I guess that was the reason for the big, read letters emblazoned on the deck underneath them, and again on the doors themselves. “DANGER. VACUUM.”

  I know. It seems kinda redundant, but people are stupid. Grea says that all the time, mostly when she’s looking at me. Onah refines that, he says humans are stupid, and I can never quite tell if he’s including Jørgens in that, or just referring to the full-humans. It doesn’t really matter, because right now I’ve got other things to worry about, like the faint shimmer of light over the steelcrete.

  Steelcrete doesn’t shimmer, not on its own at least. I move a few steps closer.

  It’s not shimmering on its own now either. There’s ice over the doors, a thick skin of it slithering outwards from what must be a micro-fracture in the hatch. What could crack steelcrete?

  I lean closer, then jerk back.

  Fug. There’s fug in the ice, trapped in it like… like… fug in ice.

  Except the fug’s moving, spreading through the ice in grey-green veins. Growing, expanding… cracking the ice, splitting it, and now the soft shush that drew me here is sharper, louder.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  It was a good thing I was in the suit.

  One moment I’m staring at a widening crack in the ice and the next, there’s a gale in the shuttle bay. The sound of it drowns the wail of the siren. Whistling past my ears, pushing my hair in my face, and taking my feet out from under me.

  I hit the deck back first, my head follows and stars burst in front of my eyes. Everything around me goes fuzzy, and there’s a strange metallic fullness in my nose, like my brain is trying to escape out my nostrils. The blow scrambles my brain and for a moment I’m nowhere –
here and yet not as it goes through a quick reset.

  It’s a nano-second, long enough to skid a few metres along the deck as vacuum tries to suck me out into space, along with the atmosphere. Somehow, I’ve managed to hold onto the envirosuit’s helmet during the moment my brain was getting scrambled.

  Small mercies.

  I can use some of those right now.

  I jam the helmet on and the dome explodes around my head. I hold my breath until I hear the shuuuush of oxygen.

  The micro-fracture isn’t so micro. There’s a massive split in the steelcrete doors that separate the shuttle bay from the ice hull, and it’s growing.

  Now I get why the drone was blinking its circuits off.

  It would really help if Ag found some working vocal circuits.

  I wait until my boots hit the doors before activating the mag circuits.

  There’s no way I can hear it over the noise of escaping atmosphere and sirens, but I imagine the shhhtuck sound of them sticking to the metal.

  Getting up isn’t as easy as it sounds. The grav is still on, and with my boots stuck to the wall the only way upright is to flip around onto my belly and push myself off the deck.

  I’m glad I’m wearing the helmet.

  I hit the bulkhead hard, and even with the plasteel protecting my head, stars burst again in front of my eyes and my brain resets for the second time.

  It resets pretty fast, a blink, which is just as well ‘cause I’m staring at a crate rocketing toward my face.

  Shit.

  I throw myself to the side, the crate embeds itself right where my face used to be.

  Shit.

  Adrenalin shuts off the front part of my brain. There’s screaming in there; blind panic leaving no room to reason, to survive.

  I can feel it behind the wall of neuro-chemicals, but it can’t reach me. I have the unpleasant idea that the neuro-chems are like the ice over the door. They’re going to crack soon enough, and once they do, it’ll be bye-bye Kuma. The thought dumps more adrenalin into my system.

  Rational thought is trapped somewhere between the gibbering panic and the chems. It’s instinct as much as the knowledge embedded in my brain by a lifetime of emergency drills that guide me now.