Cold Between Stars Page 15

  The inner bay doors are still open. If I can get to them and hit the emergency close, I’ll be fine. Except walking across the deck is like trying to climb a mountain in a tornado. The air wants out, and it’s taking every loose thing with it. Tools and envirosuits, even a fuzz-ball a little too much like a critter for my comfort, comes whizzing at me. I never knew there was so much stuff in this section of Ag, and it’s all aimed at my head.

  ‘Ag! Shut the inner doors!’

  Nothing happens. It was worth a try.

  A look up confirms that the vehicles suspended overhead are moving too. Not in an insane, Kuma-killing way, but a gentle sway that nonetheless gives the panicked, gibbering part of my brain another reason to squeal in terror and wonder if getting crushed by a maintenance bot would hurt.

  Thanks brain. Really didn’t need that.

  The only thing that’s not moving is the shuttle.

  If I can get to it, I’ll be safe.

  Safe.

  That’s the only thought the not-gibbering part of me needs.

  I duck and weave my way across the deck to the shuttle.

  It takes longer than it should, but a check of my chrono reveals it’s only been a few minutes since the ice cracked and unleashed hell.

  Once in the lee of a landing strut, the tornado lessens and I’m able to stand upright. I pray the fug hasn’t gotten to the shuttle and slap the lighter patch of hull on its belly.

  The square lights up from within and a corresponding rectangle glows on the shuttle’s belly, and a long narrow ramp pops out and clanks onto the deck. I’m up the ramp in seconds, into the tiny confines of the airlock.

  The door snaps shut behind me.

  Silence. It’s hard to realise how loud the gale is until you’re out of it.

  There’s a faint ringing in my ears, and the ragged sound of my breathing seems loud, too loud, but not loud enough to drown out the pounding of my heart. Or the shoosh of the inner airlock cycling open and the clank as the gangway retracts into the hull.

  The strength goes out of my legs at the same moment the crying, screaming, gibbering part of my brain breaks through the adrenalin.

  I don’t know how long I’ve sat in the airlock, but my eyes hurt and my nose is raw from wiping it on my sleeve.

  Somewhere in the storm of crazy, enough sense broke through for me to collapse the helmet. I reckon it was around the time Dude squeezed through the collar and threatened to suffocate me by curling under my nose.

  I feel old. Everything is heavy, my head, my heart, my feet. I can do something about my feet by turning the mag-boots off. The rest of me… I sniff and wipe my nose a final time.

  The only way out is through, or at least, that’s what Mum says.

  The thought of Mum makes my throat close up again and brings the burn of tears to my eyes but I push it back and get to my feet.

  The cockpit is through the main cabin, a big open space stuffed with equipment. The cockpit is separated from the cabin by the backs of two flight chairs. The space lights up at my approach, first the glows in the floor and the spine of the shuttle, then the cockpit itself.

  There are no windows, the hull’s stronger when it doesn’t have holes in it, and so when the cockpit lights up, it’s not just with the glows you see by.

  The curved expanse of dull grey steelcrete that forms the nose of the shuttle is there one moment and gone the next. In its place is the shuttle bay.

  I slip into a flight chair and take stock

  Sometime during my breakdown, the bay’s inner doors closed, killing the tornado.

  The shuttle is a miniature version of the Citlali, with all the same scanners, meant to take the crew where the bigger ship can’t go. Moons and asteroids, even atmosphere, all of the things that Citlali is too big to survive. The best thing about it? There’s no fug.

  The shuttle AI boots right up.

  It’s not the same AI as Citlali, not even a fragment, and it’s nice to see a different face hovering over the console, even if it looks like it sucked a lemon. Narrowed eyes and pursed lips, and that wasn’t even shuttle’s angry face. Not that he’s capable of angry, his face is stuck like that.

  I clear my throat and wipe my nose.

  ‘Shuttle, prep for flight.’

  There’s a shiver of power, more felt than heard, and a holographic, head-sized sphere appears in my lap. The shuttle’s control sphere.

  I sink my hands into the light, spread fingers sliding in up to the knuckles. You can’t hear the engines roar, but I imagine I can as the shuttle lifts off the deck.

  A slow twist of my hands engages the thruster and a grid overlays the canopy as we start to rotate. There are distances, scans and readouts popping up around each new item, the information fading to the background when my eye passes over them without stopping.

  Then the big outer doors are coming into view, “DANGER. VACUUM.” blazing red over the screen, another smaller blaze joining it as the scanners pick up the micro-fracture.

  I ignore it.

  The outer doors open.

  If you were expecting to see stars through the widening gap, you’d be disappointed. I mean, there are stars out there, but they’re not right there, like on the other side of the doors. I’ve got to make it through the ice hull first.

  I lift my hands within the control sphere and the shuttle rises off the deck; stretch my fingers and feel the kick as the rear thrusters engage, propelling us forward.

  It always gets me how big the shuttle is when you’re in it. The nose passes through the bay doors and it seems like the wings are going to scrape the sides of the tunnel. I know it’s not, because there aren’t any warnings blaring in my face and the readouts tell me I’m three metres clear on all sides, but still there’s sweat trickling down my spine, and I’m in danger of biting through my lip.

  It gets worse on the other side of the hatch, in the ice tunnel.

  It’s not like the tunnel is any smaller than the hatch, it’s not. It’s… dark, I guess. Holos light up the sides, pulses streaking past me above and below, red for starboard, white for port, blue and green for top and bottom. They’re guides, there to stop me from crashing into the ice or arriving in the shuttle bay upside down. The holos don’t touch the ice.

  The ice isn’t just black, it’s a soul-devouring nothingness that makes the vacuum of space appear homey. I know I should be used to it by now – Dad took Grea and I on our first extra-Citlali excursion when we were two weeks old – but there’s always been something about the ice hull, something… wrong.

  Now I recognise it for what it is. The beacon.

  I’ve tried explaining it others, but they look at me like I’m stupid or delusional, or pulling some kind of long-running joke. The only other person who really gets it is Grea, although she pretends not to. Grea pretends a lot of things, that she’s the smartest and the most responsible, that she doesn’t believe in the same weird shit that I do. She fools a lot of people – Mum, Dad, Mac (who should know better), even herself – but she can’t fool me, which pisses her off.

  It doesn’t change the fact that every time I go into it, all that ice makes my stomach curdle. Like there’s something in there, alive and watching me. Except every time I try to find it, stretching my senses until my brain threatens to peel off the inside of my skull, all I get is the same sense of something on the edge of my understanding. Sometimes I think, that if I could turn my brain on its side and squint, I’d see it.

  I used to believe that if I could see it, it wouldn’t weird me out so much. That was before I knew about the beacon.

  The outer hull that I bang on inside the ship isn’t really the outer hull. There are two other hulls wrapping it up like a giant onion and the thickest one is the ice hull.

  It takes a lot of water to run Citlali and it isn’t like there are any resupply stations out here because, well, no one’s been out here before. So we had to bring it with us. Beyond the steelcrete wrapping around the habitual areas of the ship is
the ice hull, a twenty-three-metre thick sheet of ice wrapped in its own steelcrete skin. It covers the Citlali, providing us with all the water we’ll ever need and additional protection from the dangers of space.

  And yeah, it’s ice, not water. When the environment outside can boil/freeze your insides in ninety seconds, keeping water liquid takes energy, a lot of energy, and it’s not like we’ve got a tribe of swatai swimming around in there. Or maybe we have and someone forgot? I imagine a group of small, lizard-like creatures with fins and triangular heads, frozen in the ice hull for the last hundred and twenty-three years and Jim Engineer going ‘whoops’.

  It’d be funny, if I didn’t have training memories from the last time someone killed a tribe of Jørans.

  There was no one left to say ‘whoops’ after that.

  It seems like forever before I’m passing through the final hatch.

  Where the ice hull gives me the creeps, floating out into space is like entering everything. Like that moment in the eter when it felt like I was about to slip through the fabric of reality. It’s indescribable, massive. Different. Dark. Really, really dark.

  I’ve never been in interstellar space. I mean, I have because the Citlali has to pass through it to get to the next solar system, but I’ve never been awake, never been in it, a part of it like I am now. It doesn’t appear any different. I mean, there’s no sun casting a shadow against the ship, no moons, no planets, just a trillion tiny pinpricks of light out there in the void. I could be in the middle of the Thorum system, except… I don’t know. The void appears bigger somehow. Emptier. Colder.

  If I believe Onah, somewhere out there are a horde of pale, wide-nosed aliens bent on eating us. On getting revenge.

  A shiver prickles my arms, embeds itself deep in my bones. Suddenly it’s quiet. A tomb. I shiver again.

  I turn the shuttle around, twisting my hands in the control sphere. Somewhere out there, the thrusters are firing. If it weren’t for the pinprick stars, moving like molasses, and the scanners, I wouldn’t know we were moving. There’s no sound, no inertia to guide me. I should be used to it by now, I know, but there’s something strange about not feeling where you’re going. Every time I take the controls, it’s a few days before I get my space legs back. Grea takes to it like a critter to junk, like she’s got vacuum in her legs or something. She can’t fly atmosphere like I can though. Pity there’s none here.

  It’s a slow-moving age before I get my first glimpse of Citlali. It’s a slither at first, the curve of the engines coming into view and then the giant curve of the hull. It’s too dark to see it with my eyes, the light from the distant suns is barely enough to cast the ship in dull shades of grey, a shade lighter than the void. It’s the shuttle’s scanners that do most of the work, the AI who fills the viewscreen with an image of the Citlali, or how it would appear under the glow of a closer sun. The ship appears the same. What I can see of it. Even with the scanners, we’re too close to see the whole of the squished oval shape, thinner and pointier at the bow and rounded at the stern. A quick check shows we’re three kilometres from the ship. You can’t see much from three klicks out, even if there was enough light.

  I let out a breath, feel tension ride out of my shoulders. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but a hole in the outer hull had been the least of it. Maybe a horde of tiny fug ships, carrying bits of the—

  ‘What’s that?’ I point at a faint trail of heat snaking away from the hull.

  The AI enhances the image, and now I’m not looking at a thin yellow-red ribbon of heat, I have a screen full of data and an up-close and personal view of... I lean closer, narrowing my eyes. The screen blows the image up.

  There’s no colour, but I recognise the tendril-like stuff floating through the vacuum. I jerk back. Fug. Forget ships, or bots. That’s a fug flotilla, a barge, a hover, a sled, a... a...

  Thought stops, because there aren’t only pieces of the hull being carried off. The viewscreen is enhancing the scan as I watch, and as I watch my stomach is trying to crawl out my mouth. There’re more than steelcrete and plasform in that trail of fug. There’s blood and bone and skin.

  The AI enhances the scan, building a new image from the data rushing across the screen. A face stares back at me.

  I know that face.

  Vomit explodes in my mouth.

  I turn away from the console, spewing acid and what’s left of the ration bar over the deck.

  There are orange flecks in the bile sprayed across the decking. Mac used to say it was little chunks of the carrot farm growing in our belly. I used to believe him, right up until I turned five and Mum sat me down and told me about stomach lining and how carrots really grew. Grea pretended like it was funny, but I knew she believed Mac too. We all believed Mac.

  There’s a flurry against my chest, and then Dude is popping his head out of my shipsuit, making like he’s going to scamper down and start on the vomit spreading across the deck. I take him out, put him down and then slowly, because my bones hurt almost as much as my heart, turn back to the viewscreen.

  Mae Liu’s face is still there, eyes and mouth open, like she’s surprised.

  ‘Stop!’

  The viewscreen goes dark.

  There’s a question I have to ask, should ask, but I can’t quite get my mouth around the words.

  ‘How... how many—‘ I swallow. “People” makes the acid roil in my stomach. ‘How many biologicals in the... the fug?’

  ‘I do not recognise the definition of “fug”.’

  ‘The trail, the stuff, the...’ I wave my hand at the viewscreen.

  ‘Scans show several dozen biologicals in the trail. I estimate thirteen are former crew members.’

  Please, let none of them be Grea.

  I take my hands out of the controls. ‘Follow it.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The shuttle knows where it’s going. We’re following the trail of fug, Citlali getting smaller and smaller in the port-side canopy. I try not to notice it, the way it kinda zooms outwards like a holo. The holes in the hull aren’t as obvious, dull blue patches on the otherwise grey hull. It’s always strange, seeing Citlali like this. The long, blunt-nosed shape always looks weird, unexpected, like I had something else in mind. Don’t ask me why, it’s not like I haven’t seen the ship a million times on a holo. It still hits me in the gut, the reality of it.

  The shuttle keeps following the fug and eventually, the Citlali is an after-image on my eyeballs. Still, I can’t help but stare out the canopy. All around me is black and cold and nothing. Except now, I’m reminded of the space beyond the eter, and instead of vacuum, I see possibilities and wonder.

  A million light years away, suns burn but that light makes the darkness darker. I can’t help but wonder how far away they are, how I was supposed to wake up not here, but four light years away, with the light of the Thorum system’s sun recharging Citlali’s batteries. Instead I’m here, without even an AI to keep me company.

  Dude fuzzes and sneaks under my chin.

  ‘Just you and me, Dude.’ I bury my fingers in his fur. ‘Just you and me.’

  Except that’s not quite true. The presence I sensed in the everything is out there, a pinprick of light in the void, brushing up against my awareness like someone switched on a light. It’s not as bright as the distant stars, but it’s stronger than it was, still quiet, still in something deeper than sleep but not quite a coma. It grows stronger the farther along the trail we go, not because it’s waking but because we’re getting closer.

  The shuttle’s sensors beep and a map overlays the canopy, partially obscuring the void.

  I think we found the presence.

  There’s a ship out there. Another ship, and it’s close. Like, really close, which isn’t right. The shuttle’s sensors are good, really good, because that’s its primary function, to go out and scan stuff. Usually asteroids and moons and whatever the research teams find. It can find a rock small enough to fit in the palm of my hand from a tho
usand kilometres, and yet, it missed the hulk hanging in the dead of interstellar space. The thought of why that is doesn’t bear dwelling on. If the fug can get to the shuttle, then this could be a one-way trip. I really don’t want to be an alien meal.

  I study the data on the screen. Really study it. Not simply the ship-shaped blob on the shuttle’s sensors but the heat map. Whoever’s out there, they’re cold. Not in-the-lips-blue, but a frozen to the bone icicle. The shuttle is picking up the faint hum of power, but it’s a thin shell, barely enough to make a blip on the sensors. Nowhere near enough to run life support or engines or an AI. Do aliens have AIs?

  We’re closer now, close enough for the shuttle to pick up more, things like carbon and the ship’s age.

  It’s not fear that takes my breath, although that’s there too, bottled up in my throat. It’s awe. The ship was old before humans colonised Jørn. Which means this could be one of Their ships.

  There’s silence in my brain after that thought. Just... silence.

  Wow.

  If this is one of their ships, it’s been here for a thousand years.

  And there’s something on it.

  Alive.

  Kinda.

  Maybe in a coma, but it’s breathing. I’m pretty sure, ‘cause otherwise I wouldn’t have sensed anything when I ventured in the place beyond the eter.

  On the screen, the alien ship grows. Not that I can see it. It’s still too far away for the visual sensors to pick up, but the shuttle AI does a good job of guessing.

  A model of the ship appears in the middle of the console. It’s not much at first, a barely formed blob of light swirling in the middle of the cockpit. After a few minutes of staring at an oval the size of my head, it starts to take shape. The oval flattens. Still round but thin in relation to its length, with a rounded bow and a sharp, almost fin-like stern, or what I guess is its stern.

  It looks… it looks like Citlali.