She might very well be cruising around space on the equivalent of a toddler. A toddler that controlled the airlocks. Or worse, a teenager.
“Bero,” she said his name gently, as if she were talking to a pouting child. “It’s just us here. Let me help. What’s gone wrong?”
The yellow lights pulsed. “Airlock two has failed to seal.”
“It was open?”
“My sensors detect that the primary gasket has failed.”
Sanda sucked her teeth. “How much atmosphere have we lost?”
“Negligible. My systems can recycle indefinitely, and what I cannot synthesize, I scrape from local space.”
Right. The ramscoop. That was a nifty little piece of tech the Icarions had worked up. Too bad their heads had gotten too big, their reach too long and greedy. “Okay. So we’ve got a leak. Interior door or exterior?”
“Exterior.”
“No problem. You keep that interior door clamped shut, and I’ll shimmy down with a replacement gasket. Easy.”
“There are no replacements on board this ship.”
“What?”
Hesitation. “I am modeled as a cruiser, but I am primarily a research station. I was meant to stay in LPO around Icarion while my crew performed experiments. It was not foreseen that I could not dock with the nearest station to receive necessary repairs.”
“But you were an experiment in interstellar ships. Surely they planned to take you on a long haul at some point.”
“I was the first of my kind. I believe they intended to keep me in-system for evaluation.”
“Shortsighted,” she grumbled.
“Not the most shortsighted of Icarion’s decisions.”
She couldn’t argue with that. Bero still hadn’t brought the lights up, and the twilight creeped her out. It reminded her how close she was to the end of her own dawn. Focus on the problem. “What’s on the ’lock, anyway? Vulcanized rubber?”
“Icarion utilizes a proprietary material in all its—”
“Yeah, yeah. So does Ada.” Did. “But it’s rubber, right?”
“Correct.”
“I saw plenty of tubes in the medibay. Big, honking, thick things. If I slice them in half and glue them in with some SealFoam, it should hold.”
“Inadvisable.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “Look, Bero. I’m a gunship sergeant, right? Not one of your fancy researchers. I may not know the proprietary formula for your precious gasket rubber, but I shoot straight. I know what will work. I make—made—snap decisions for a living. It’s what I do. Let me help.”
“Inadvisable,” said the stupid hunk of metal.
“You know what’s inadvisable? Shooting across interstellar space at eight percent c with the damned door hanging open. I’m no prude, but I’d hate for you to run all over known space with your proverbial pants down. Know what kind of wobbles we could develop at those speeds? Any deflection could kill us both. And I’m guessing you’ve got more than one airlock, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Bero. Listen. This has to be fixed, and I’m the monkey on this ship with opposable thumbs. What’s the big deal, anyway? Why don’t you want me doing this?”
“It’s… It’s dangerous out there.”
Oh. Sanda may have just woken up to a barren, lifeless star system, but Bero’d been living in it as long as she’d been asleep. What would it have done to her, wandering the void, skimming pieces of destruction from two once proud and thriving civilizations hoping to pick up something that might still be breathing? Something that might say your name. It’d only been a day for her, but she wondered how Bero had felt hearing someone for the first time in 230 years. How he’d felt talking with someone. For a mind like his those few hundred years had to have felt like more than a lifetime. It had to have felt like aeons. No wonder he was afraid. He’d be insane not to be.
“I know,” she said. “Humans weren’t exactly built for space, were we? But here we are. We’ve engineered our way around our weak, fleshy bodies. This jumpsuit I’m wearing? It doubles as a pressure suit, and the collar here?” She ran a thumb over the ribbed neckline. “Locks right into a helmet, complete with HUD so you and I can stay connected. I bet there’s even a radiation oversuit around here somewhere, and lifepacks. I trained for EVAs. It will be okay. Let me help?”
A pause.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
She smiled, recognizing his echo of her earlier words. Things might take patience and some hard work, but they’d get along just fine. They’d have to, if they would ever make it to Atrux alive. She hoped that system was still inhabited by the time they got there.
The yellow lights winked out, and regular lighting came back online. She leaned on Grippy, borrowed strength from his servos. The door dilated, red LED arrows guiding the way along the hall floor.
“Radiation suits, helmets, and lifepacks can be found in each cabin’s closet, and extras are in the closet near the ladder to the command deck.” Bero’s voice had its confidence back, now that he was treading familiar territory.
“On it,” she said, steering Grippy around to reach the closet. Lucky for her, Icarion suits used the same FitFlex tech Ada’s did. One size fits all in space. The cost reduction from only having to create one template far outweighed the cost of the increased tech. “Are we under thrust?”
“No. I stopped accelerating to scoop your pod. We’re in orbit around Dralee.”
“Anything nasty in the local atmosphere?” She shrugged into the radiation suit and clicked the helmet into place. The HUD lit up, Bero spooling her information from her lifepack and vital sensors.
“Negative. We are shadowside from Cronus, radiation levels are within acceptable minimums.”
With Grippy’s help, she gathered up an armful of intubation materials from the medibay and split them neatly down the center with a pilfered scalpel. Wasn’t a sanitary use of the equipment, but she figured if she were ever in bodily need of a scalpel, then things had gone so far wrong that sanitary didn’t much matter anymore.
She shoved a can of SealFoam into a belt pocket and hooked the tubes to a strap under her arm. Leaning on Grippy, she made it down the hallway like some sort of avenging octopus. Grippy let Sanda go, and she eased over the hatch, settling herself onto the ladder with care. The empty calf of her Icarion suit flopped below her, dragging on the rungs. By the time she made it to the bottom, she was grateful for the low-g environment. Now that she was floating free, she took a moment to fold up her loose suit leg and GripTape it in place. Good enough.
Handholds were anchored to the nominal ceiling of Bero’s command deck. A massive smartscreen dominated the forward bulkhead, a handful of chairs with five-point harnesses facing it. All was dark, save yellow lights gleaming around the flawed ’lock. She forced herself to look away from that ghost town of a deck, to ignore the empty seats where once a thriving crew must have sat. She had a problem to solve.
She grabbed a handhold and pulled herself toward the ’lock. A touchscreen expecting a palm print stared back at her, but Bero overrode the required security check. Handy, making buddies with the ship itself.
The door unsealed, swung outward. No dilating doors on airlocks—too many points of failure. And then she was staring down open space. The HUD shading her eyes flickered, a glimpse of something white and sharp drifting off into the distance erased by onyx. She shook her head to clear it. Probably just dust burning up, or some artifact of the display filtering ultraviolet light. The equipment was old, but they rated these things for decades of regular use.
She hooked herself into a tether and drifted forward. The exterior door hung open, its hinges still intact. They’d been lucky that Bero wasn’t under thrust when the gasket failed.
Three large tears marred the rubber of one of the inset gaskets, spaced apart as if someone had dug their nails into it and ripped. She ran her hands along it, feeling out how securely the rest was still attached. Th
e edges were ragged, the rubber brittle against her gloved hands. A few hundred years of outgassing and even proprietary rubbers failed.
“Sanda?” Bero’s voice filled her helmet.
“Everything’s fine. It’s just a few tears in one gasket. I’m removing it now.”
She unzipped a pry tool from her belt and worked the failed gasket free, then clipped it against her suit for later study. The sliced-up tubes were a rough fit, and it took a generous dousing of SealFoam to make them stick. By the time she finished, her arms shook and sweat dripped into her eyes. She’d forgotten to pull the blasted sweat band across her forehead. Stupid move, that. Something as simple as a few drops of sweat getting stuck up your nose and around your mouth could mean a slow, drowning death in low-g. This job was quick enough. The next one might not be.
She finished up the fix and paused, staring out across space.
It used to calm her. Maybe even thrill her, a little. All that emptiness stretched out between planets, between stars. All that ever-expanding blackness, and her people, the Primes, held the key to punching through it. To threading a needle from one point to another and thumbing your nose at Einsteinian relativity. He’d allowed for wormholes, but even the old crazy-haired boy hadn’t dreamed of travel as efficient as the Primes had made it.
Now, that space threatened her. Enclosed her. As a kid, she’d read a lot of adventure books. Ones with people stranded on some lonely planet. They’d excited her. Made her dream of how she’d go about surviving in the same circumstance. She wished such situations were only properties of fiction.
Despite the gates, it happened sometimes. People ferried around within star systems on fusion rockets, and those could run out of fuel. But you were never too far from a rescue. Not really.
Dralee, in orbit around its rocky planet Belai, had been the farthest edge of Prime-controlled space when she’d been out patrolling the stars. There’d been a military tug-of-war over the moons around Kalcus, but as it was closer to the sun—and thereby closer to Icarion—Ada had done little aside from slapping Icarion’s hand. Dralee, technically, was the farthest she’d ever been from home.
Sanda marked the stars, lined them up in her mental map, spun it around, and looked toward Ada Prime. She’d always had a hard time getting her head around the vastness of the star system, but she could read a map faster than she could swing a wrench, and stars didn’t drift much. What felt like a vast timeline for her was little more than a blip on the cosmic scale. Even over a couple hundred years, their relationship to each other looked remarkably the same.
There used to be two spheres of light out there, visible even from this distance. The gate, and the dwarf planet Ada, forever pirouetting around each other on the farthest edge of the star system. Her visor adjusted, filtered harsh light, and fed her back little more than a dim smudge of white where her home should be. Rubble, probably. Maybe it’d coalesce into a new planet someday. She’d never see it, but she hoped her descendants might. If Biran had escaped, she might already have descendants.
That was the problem with space once you took the Casimir Gates out of play. Scales got too long for human lives.
She pulled herself back inside, shut the door on all that emptiness, and filled in all the seams of the door with SealFoam, just in case. No one’d be using that airlock again. Didn’t really need two, anyway, with only one passenger aboard.
Once she was back on the command deck, Bero cycled the lock. It would hold, for now.
“Light up the screen, Bero.” Sanda popped her helmet off and pulled herself toward the captain’s seat. It was on the large side, but the harness adjusted itself to her frame.
The smartscreen flashed to brilliant life, numbers flickering at its edges, simulations of the local neighborhood drawing orbital lines. A litany of you are here and this is there streamed before her. She shook herself. She had to chase off the melancholy that’d settled in her bones looking at Ada Prime. Had to focus.
“Seventy-five years to Atrux. We can do this, Bero. You got the power, and I’ve got the maintenance skills. But for me to survive hopping in and out of stasis, we need to refit my evac pod, or scavenge a new one.”
“There is a rubble field, left over from a skirmish, on the way. Useful parts may be available, and I can reach it within twenty days.”
Useful parts. Right. Evac pods with bodies long since mummified, drifting in decaying orbits, or pods that never got the chance to encase their human passengers. She’d heard stories of people misfitting their pods, of shifting their seats the wrong way and getting cut in two when the pod deployed. Heard stories of medis popping open pods only to find an arm within, nothing more. The worst of it was, those misfired pods would be the least depleted, and have the most materials leftover for her to use. If she were very lucky, she might find someone still alive. Like her. She couldn’t be the only one, could she?
“Set course, then. Will that put us in a good position for a grav assist around Kalcus?”
Hesitation. “Yes.”
“But?”
“Once I initiate the gravity assist trajectory, I will quickly reach speeds at which my ramscoop will take over, and—”
“And no more scavenging.”
“Correct.”
She swallowed. “Well, all right then. I’ll just have to make sure I find everything I need before we slingshot out of this system. How are food stores?”
“I am made for carbon synthesis, and the pods should provide you with ample nutrition while in coldsleep.”
Ugh. She’d had her fair share of carbon synthesized nutriblocks, and they were always nasty, bland little bricks or dollops of sludge. But it’d keep her alive once she was going in and out of the pod for repairs. That was all she could hope for.
She unstrapped and pushed toward the handholds in the ceiling. “Steer us true, Bero. I’ll go have a look around those labs of yours.”
“Why?” Bero’s voice tightened, worried.
“Easy, old man.” She grinned and kicked, flopping the rolled-up leg of her jumpsuit around. “I’m going to go see about a leg.”
“My facilities are not set up for biomechanics.”
“Maybe not, but I got a whole lot of rubber, metal tubing, and time.”
And maybe, just maybe, if she kept her hands busy, she could chase that smudge of greyish light where Ada used to be from her mind.
She swung herself onto the ladder and started up, regretting every bit of gravity that dragged her down. Muscle mass was so overrated.
CHAPTER 9
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
TWO DAYS AFTER DRALEE
For security reasons, every Keeper had access to the emergency systems on Keep Station. This was so that, if something were to go wrong, they could override any part of the station—to contain a kidnapping attempt, or to thwart a terrorist effort. Biran doubted that, after today, he’d get to keep those privileges. He only had one shot. And he had to make it count.
He sat at his new kitchen table, his arm propped up so that the camera on his wristpad would frame his face against the family pictures hanging in his foyer. Public outreach 101. He wondered if they’d regret teaching him such tactics. Probably, but he didn’t care.
Hidden from public view, behind his arm, a slender black ribbon snaked across the torn remains of brown wrapping paper. The package had arrived that morning, deposited through the slot in his front door by an automated bot that did not know the weight of the slim bundle it carried. The handwritten address had shaken Biran to the core, the familiarity of the letters reaching out to slap him across the face.
To: Keeper Biran Aventure Greeve
Ada, Keep Station, Keeper Residences
[I know you’re there by now :P]
Inside, a simple black-covered paper notebook. The thing was so old-fashioned as to be retro-chic, its unlined pages containing a slim piece of paper with Sanda’s hasty scrawl: Sorry I couldn’t be there in person. Someone has to protect the universe. Love you, Li
ttle B. Happy Graduation!
The book weighed down his inner jacket pocket. Biran took a drink of water and stared at his reflection in the wristpad’s screen. His mirror image was not him. It appeared so still, so calm. It didn’t display the tremble in his fingers, the stirring of his belly as every ounce of his body screamed at him to stop this. To call it all off and find another way—a way that wouldn’t get him into trouble.
He’d tried that way. Tried to go talk to Director Olver, even though the same fear shaking him now had wracked him then. The fear shouting at him was a liar, brain and body chemistry gone off the rails. The calm man in the mirror wasn’t him, might never be him, but he needed to become him, at least for a little while. Needed to pretend he could be brave. A notification blinked in the bottom right corner of his screen—incoming messages from Graham and Ilan. They were worried. They had every right to be.
Biran entered the override codes and watched his face appear, screen-in-screen, on every wristpad on the station. EMERGENCY BROADCAST spooled below his face in bright red letters, on constant repeat.
“People of Ada Prime,” he began, speaking slowly and lower than his normal voice so he’d sound confident. Prickles rose across the back of his neck as the phantom eyes of thousands turned to watch him.
“I am Keeper Biran Aventure Greeve. My sister, Sanda Maram Greeve, is the captain of Gunship-SM178. One of the lost ships in the Battle of Dralee. Every ear on this station—on planet Ada—has heard the reports coming in.
“The battle was a total loss. The gunships were taken unexpectedly, and unawares. They fought bravely. They died bravely.”
He closed his eyes, breathed deep to rally himself.
“This message is not about me, people of Prime. It is not about my sister. It is not about loss or bravery. It is about information, as such things always are. Good information, and bad information. And you. All of you.”
Outside, tires crunched gravel faster than the speed limit. Biran kept his voice level. Channeled that calm reflection of himself. They would not rush him.
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