Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge

by Kevin Emerson

  “Ow!” I felt the sharp poke on the back of my leg and flinched away. There was something pointy sticking out from one of the rocks, but first I checked my communicator. If I’d gotten a suit tear… But there was no alert, no flashing warnings. I sighed with relief. Gotta be more careful! I thought angrily. No Robot here to warn you when there’s danger…

  And yet, even the Robot probably wouldn’t have noticed this. I bent down and examined the base of the rock. The pointy thing was actually a shell. It was a dark gray to camouflage with the rocks but had those light blue edges that we’d seen on other shells, which would make it glow at night. The shell shape was like the others we’d seen, which most resembled the common periwinkle snail back on Earth—but this one was larger and pointier, maybe a different subspecies, which meant Mom and Judy would definitely want to see it. I pinched at it and pulled, and it popped free with a dry crunching sound. That was a clue for what I found when I turned it over: The inside of the shell was empty. So much for finding a new life form.

  “You almost killed me,” I said to it, and I nearly tossed it out in the water, but I noticed that the inner walls of the spiral shell were shiny with purple and orange iridescent patches. It was worth adding to my collection back on the Jupiter. I opened a waterproof pocket on my belt and dropped the shell in.

  Another wave of burning on my neck… I leaned back against the rock, catching my breath. Above was a rare hole in the clouds, and I could see just a bit of the lavender-and-blue sky up there. Pretty nice view.

  “It would be cool if we could stay in this place after dark, wouldn’t it?” I said. I imagined being here, sheltered from the wind, waiting for cloud holes like this one to show glimpses of the stars. It always seemed like when the Robot looked up at the stars, he was thinking so much, or maybe knew so much, like he had traveled to so many of them. I’d always wished he could tell me about the places he’d been on his amazing ship, where he was actually from.…

  I dropped my head and sighed, the feeling hitting me all over again. He’s gone, stupid. “You wouldn’t fit into this place anyway,” I said, looking back at the sky.

  “Fit where?”

  “What the—” I jumped at the voice. Suddenly, there was something right beside me! A blur, here in the rocks, but it wasn’t something, it was someone.

  I was no longer alone in the space. Clare was sitting there with me.

  CHAPTER

  Of course, I didn’t know she was Clare yet. I didn’t even know what she was. All I knew was that there was a girl literally sitting right across from me in the hideout.

  “Who are you?” I said breathlessly.

  She looked around my age, but unlike me, she wasn’t wearing a space suit. Instead, she had on a shimmery black shirt and pants, silvery-looking socks, and no shoes. Her hair was black and wavy and pulled back in a ponytail. She had light brown skin and dark brown eyes.

  She glanced around the space like she hadn’t heard me.

  “Are you from here?” I knew that was a dumb question because that was obviously impossible. And yet, how was she surviving without a suit?

  Leaning against the rock, breathing hard, I realized there was something else about her that I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around: When she’d appeared, she hadn’t just been sitting across from me; there had also been this buzzing feeling in my knees and shins, because in that moment, she’d been occupying the same space as me, like literally; our legs had overlapped.

  “Hello?” The girl’s voice sounded almost distant, like it was on a wind. She looked at the sky, then right past me, then at her own hands.

  “Um, hey.” My heart was pounding and my whole body felt like an exposed wire.

  She blinked hard and held up her hand in front of her, and I could kind of see through it, like she wasn’t really a solid object but more like a projection. That made sense with our legs overlapping. She was studying her hand, too, like maybe she was noticing this as well.

  I reached out toward the hand she was holding out, and my gloved fingers went right through her.

  That made her flinch, and her eyes finally tracked up and seemed to see me.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “I’m—I’ve been right here.”

  Her mouth scrunched. “Okay, then I’m back. I saw you, but then I was gone for a second. Where am I?” She looked out beyond the tall rocks again.

  “Well, you’re on a planet, but we don’t know exactly where.” I took a deep breath and tried to relax. “Who are you?” I asked again.

  “I’m…” Her face went blank for just a second, like she was in thought. “Sorry, I’m Clare. Clare Williams of the… the salvage ship Derelict. That’s what I’m supposed to say now, not of…” Her face fell. “Not of Antares B, not anymore.”

  “Antares?” I said. “You mean like the star?”

  Clare looked up at me. As she did, a ripple of light wrinkled across her face. She was definitely some type of hologram or projection or something. “Do you know it?”

  “I mean, I know of it. It’s a binary star, right? The big one is red.”

  Clare nodded, but her expression darkened. “Antares A. The destroyer. A red supergiant. We live in its shadow… well, if shadow meant its glaring, universe-size brightness.”

  Okay, so if I was keeping score, this projection of a girl named Clare that had suddenly appeared in front of me was also from another star system. At least I could understand her. A glance at my communicator showed that my translator program was not running.

  “We speak the same language,” I said.

  Clare flicked her head and blinked rapidly. “Not exactly. My real-time translators are running pretty hot. It’s weird to hear my voice like this.”

  I glanced at her hands and wrists, but didn’t see any tech there like a communicator or anything. “Your translators?”

  Clare peered at me, studying my suit, and nodded to herself. “You… wouldn’t know about that, would you? Inter-cortex enhancements. The nanotech install is standard for everyone.” She blinked again. “It’s like seeing two things at once. Everybody says you get used to it, but…”

  “So, are you human?” I asked.

  “Human.” Clare paused. “Those are the people who migrated from Sol.”

  “Sol, um, you mean the sun? Migrated?”

  “Yeah,” said Clare. “Alina says that, judging by your suit technology, facial features, and ancient dialect, you are a human of the twenty-first century. For me, that was many years ago.”

  “You’re from the future?”

  Clare glanced around again. “I guess so? I mean, it’s just regular old present day to me. But you must be one of the original Alpha Centauri colonists.”

  A wave of nervousness flashed through me. “Um, I guess, except we haven’t gotten there yet. I’m part of the twenty-fourth colonist group, but we’re lost. It’s a long story, but if you’re out at Antares in the future then does that mean we’re going to make it?”

  Clare blinked again, which seemed to indicate that she was reading data. “Alina doesn’t have any information on specific colonial groups, or individuals, unfortunately. Maybe if we were still wired to the central cortex, but we lost contact with them.”

  “Who’s Alina?”

  “Oh, that’s our local intelligence on the Derelict. Automated Learning Interactive Network Assistant, I think? One of those words is probably wrong… but don’t worry,” Clare said, reading the expression on my face. “The Alpha Centauri colonies definitely did succeed. They were the first major post-Earth settlement in the home galactic quadrant. After that—hold on, let me read this.…” She squinted like she was trying to focus. “Homo determinus expanded out into the second and third galactic quadrants and today occupy settlements in fifty-four star systems.”

  “Homo determinus? Not sapiens?”

  “You’re Homo sapiens,” said Clare, “but if I remember right from science class, we changed our species name when we began to make upgrad
es to our bodies using nanotechnology.”

  “Determinus, like you determine your evolution,” I guessed. “That’s cool. Okay, but if you’re from the future, what are you doing here?”

  Clare stood up, looked out across the gray ocean, and sighed. “That would be the current life-threatening question. Where to start… well, okay, first of all, it turns out that Antares was a stupid place to go live, because it is currently about to go supernova.”

  “Is that why you called it the destroyer?”

  “Yeah. It’s so annoying. All my life and my parents’ lives and their parents’ even, we’ve known that Antares A was nearing the end of its stellar life cycle, that someday it would go supernova, and that it could happen at any time.”

  “Then why even go there?” I asked.

  Clare shrugged. “Why else? Exo mining, gamma harvesting, gravity assist waypoint, the Antares system has it all.… But I’ve had to memorize evacuation plans since I was old enough to walk—from our house, from my school, to the nearest spaceport. And now…” She breathed heavily. “It’s actually about to happen. We’re on our way back to help with the evacuation, but something’s gone wrong.”

  “On your way back… so you’re on a ship right now? I mean, the rest of you?”

  Clare nodded. “The Derelict. My family’s ship.”

  As she said this, another ripple flashed across her, and for a second she disappeared completely. I found myself just looking at the rocks, hearing only the sound of the wind and waves—

  Then she was back. She shook her head, dazed. “Did I—sorry. That was weird.” She rubbed her head. “I was just back on my ship for a minute.”

  “You disappeared,” I said.

  “It was like I blinked, and I was there. And everyone was shouting, all the emergency systems freaking out. We’re in so much trouble, and I’m… what am I doing here?”

  I could barely keep up with what Clare was saying, so I tried to focus on one question at a time. “What happened to your ship?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t really know; I don’t think my parents quite know yet, either, at least not based on how they keep shouting. We were far out on a salvage mission near the BiFlexion Reach—sorry, that’s the very outer edge of the nebula that Antares A creates. It’s really beautiful, if you don’t mind deadly radiation. We were on our way to salvage a junker that had been abandoned and presumed lost; my parents had gotten a tip about its location. The price for junked ships has been going up since Antares started making more rumblings like it might collapse. I guess when you’re going to evacuate a planet, any ship is a good ship.

  “Anyway, we’d almost reached it when the call came from home: Helium levels in the core of Antares A had dropped past the critical threshold. The supernova will happen any time now. So, we turned and burned for home. Our ship has been commissioned to carry two hundred evacuees. But on the way we’ve run into something.… I think my brother might be hurt.” She closed her eyes tightly for a moment. “I can’t tell. I can’t see it now.”

  “You have a brother?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Clare, rolling her eyes. “He’s so annoying—sorry, are you somebody’s brother?”

  “Yeah, I have two sisters.”

  “Well, you’re probably a good one. You’ve already listened to me for ten times longer than my brother ever would.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “I think I know the feeling. So, you say you ran into something?”

  “Yeah. We were flying along, and suddenly all the ship’s systems started going haywire, things shorting out and shaking and my parents running around. I heard Dad shouting a bunch of garble from the engine room about temporal phasing in the engine’s vacuum core. He asked me to bring him some tools and I literally just went in there with him, like a minute ago—and then the lights started flashing and—zip! Here I was, sitting in this little spot across from a kid in an orange suit.” She looked around. “On some dreary planet.”

  “Wow,” I said. This was unbelievable. “But you’re not really here. I mean, you’re like a projection. But your… mind is here? Is that right?”

  “Maybe that’s more accurate. All my senses and data are telling me I’m here, except…” She waved her hand, and her fingers flashed right through the rock. “Pretty weird, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I thought of the portal in the cave on our last planet, of stepping through and traveling back to Earth, of briefly being on that massive alien ship. “But weird things can happen in space. So, when you just blinked away a second ago, was, like, all of you back on your ship? Had any time passed there?”

  Clare thought for a moment. “Yeah, I was lying on the floor, on my back, like maybe I’d fallen down? And I felt whole there, not like here.”

  “Does Alina know what’s happened to you, or your ship?” I asked.

  “Not yet. So far she’s referring to whatever we ran into as a space-time anomaly.”

  “It sounds like that’s what transported you here.”

  “Right.” Clare looked over her shoulder, even though there was nothing there. “I need to get back. If we’re in trouble, I…” She closed her eyes tight, and I heard her saying quietly, “Wake up, wake up.”

  “I don’t think this is a dream,” I said. “I mean, I’m not a dream.”

  Clare opened her eyes and sighed. “I know. I wasn’t hoping that you were. I mean, except that I was. But how can I be here, wherever this is? There are no planets like this in our star system.”

  “Ours, either.” I thought of the Robot’s engine, the one that had brought us here and was now lying dormant in our cargo hold, the same kind that powered the Resolute. “There are ways that you can get across the galaxy fast.…” That reminded me of the doorway in the cave again. “You didn’t run into any guys in black cloaks with red goggle eyes, did you?”

  Clare’s brow wrinkled. “No. At least not that I saw.”

  “They are invisible sometimes.…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry, nothing, just thinking of ways you might have ended up here.”

  “Hang on.” Clare winced. “Aah…” A ripple passed through her and she sort of blipped out for a second. Then she was back. There were tears in her eyes. “That hurt.”

  “Did you see anything that time?”

  “The engine room. I had just enough time to sit up and look around before I flashed back here. And… I felt a lot of pain. It’s like I’m being torn apart.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That sucks.”

  “Pretty much. But I did hear Alina refer to the thing we ran into as a quantum field rift. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Clare suddenly smiled. “I haven’t even asked you your name.”

  “Oh man, I’m sorry; I’m Will Robinson, of the, um, the Jupiter 2.”

  “Is that your ship?”

  “Yeah. We’re out of fuel and stranded here.”

  “Did you come here through some kind of rift, too?”

  “Sort of, but not like the one you’re talking about.”

  “And you have no idea where ‘here’ is.”

  A memory flashed through my mind, of first arriving in this system, and of what the Robot had said about this place: Danger.

  “No,” I said.

  Clare looked at the triangle rock formation around us. “This is kind of a cool little spot.”

  “Yeah. I just found it.”

  Clare stood and peered through the gaps. “Your ship’s that way, I take it?”

  “How’d you know?” I said, following her gaze. The Jupiter was hidden behind the Serpent’s head.

  “Well, I don’t see a boat, and there’s no land in any other direction. Ooh…” She looked at the waves. “It doesn’t look like there’s going to be any land in your direction for much longer, either.”

  She was right; the long spit of sand between me and the Serpent head had started to shrink. The largest waves were a
lready lapping over and briefly meeting in the center. “Yeah, I should probably—”

  I turned and Clare was gone. There were no marks in the sand. Like she’d never been there.

  Except then, zap! She was back, her mouth moving, only this time there was no sound coming out.

  “Clare? Hey.” I waved my arms at her. “I’m right here.”

  There were tears now in her wide eyes. She looked around like she was blind, and then her gaze suddenly snapped to me. Another ripple of electricity passed through her holographic body—

  “Will!” she said, her voice edged with static. “It’s getting worse here, I—”

  Disappeared.

  Just wind.

  Then back again. “We’re trying to move away from the rift, but we’re in trouble!”

  “Is there anything I can do?” I said helplessly.

  “I don’t know, I—I’m trying to—”

  A flash and she was gone again.

  Now back. “This is getting hard to handle. I feel like I’m going to pass out.”

  “I want to help,” I said. “I just don’t know how.”

  Clare looked out beyond the rocks. “You need to go,” she said.

  “You don’t need to worry about me.” Except, checking the tide, I realized she was definitely right.

  “Can you come back later?” Clare asked.

  “Um, yeah, I mean, there will be another low tide tonight, although I’m not sure it will be low enough to make it back to this spot—plus it would be tough in the dark and wind.” Not to mention that Mom and Dad would never let me, I thought. “But I can definitely get out here again tomorrow morning. Can you still come back here?”

  Clare was breathing hard, her face red. “Just tell me how long it will be until you can get back to this spot, and I’ll figure it out.”

  “But how would you even do that—”

  “Will, please!” A double ripple of jagged static passed through her. “Just tell me and I’ll try. And if we never see each other again, it was nice to meet you.”

  I swiped through screens on my communicator until I found the tide table I’d made with Mom. “I can be back in nineteen hours”—that number might sound odd, but the days are shorter on this planet than on Earth—“will that work?” I didn’t add: Will your ship even survive that long?