by Anna Gaffey
“He only doesn’t remember you.”
Whatever she saw on his face made her pause. Happy memory restoration or not, Jake still wasn’t very good at hiding his feelings.
“I’m sorry, Jake. He’s a little tense with all of us. Mistrustful.”
“Ergo, broken.” Jake felt a little tense himself, and dislocated and furious, with an ominous threat of headachy nausea lingering on his horizon, and Rachel wasn’t helping a goddamn bit, pity or no pity.
“He’s bound to come around sooner or later.”
“You all keep saying that, but—never mind. Tell me what this is. What we’re looking at.”
Santos sighed. As if keyed to her breath, the viewscreen shimmered into a new image: the three bright suns scan. Eos 2130, Eos 2242, and Eos undated. Or what Jake was thinking of as Eos 2242b. “We’ve already seen this,” he objected.
“So look at it again.” Santos smacked the tablet lightly against her palm and squinted at him in annoyance. “Maybe you’ll see something new.”
“Doubtful. I’m still trying to get used to the incredibly bizarre anomalous shit drifting off to starboard—”
“Jake.”
He relaxed at the return of her sharpness. “Okay. We’ve got three scans of Eos and the surrounding space. No Selas, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Scans one and two are helpfully dated with what I’m supposed to presume is uncorrupted metadata. Though I don’t know how I can, with that third garbage scan. I figure there’s an issue with the Harmon’s scanners. Has to be, since that weird anomalous shit is reading so crazily and we can’t reach the nearest comm buoys, either—”
“The scan isn’t garbage.”
“Don’t be silly.” Jake stared at her. “Of course it is. You’ve got Eos as nearly…” He did the math as cleanly as he could and hazarded, “Three thousand years too young.”
“She is.”
Santos met his gaze without guile. Jake snapped his mouth closed. Not 2242b, but 750-something, B.C.E.? “That’s not funny.”
“Given the circumstances, I have to agree.”
“Damn it, Rachel.”
“You’re right. We don’t have the same quality of scanning equipment on the ship. It’s quick and dirty. But it’s sufficient for our needs.” With darting fingers, she called up the numbers, the comparison table, the single undated scan of Eos the Monster. “We began when we noticed the constellation positions had shifted. From what we’re reading, Eos has more hydrogen to burn than she did when we arrived. More than when the 2130 crew settled in. A lot more. And I can see you scanned for the buoys as we did.”
“They’re malfunctioning.”
“No, Jake.” She knew he was equivocating, and she was being far too patient with him. “They’re not there. And we’re three thousand years earlier than when we came from.”
“Give me real numbers.”
Santos tapped out a code and passed him the tablet, and watched Jake with uncomfortable scrutiny as he plowed through the correlating layers of data. On one level, the “real” numbers made sense to him. On another, he couldn’t think through the looming internal disbelief, and panic. Be calm, he told himself. No one needs another freakout. He looked sideways at Santos. “Who ran the scanners?”
“Hark and Vanna. Vanna is amazing. She has a log of readings she took before and after the blast, and she picked up a massive amount of that—that light, that radiation we first saw in the Astro lab, on you and in the legacy scans. The stuff that blasted us when Selas went poof. The stuff that’s floating out there now in little pockets.”
“Temporal fluctuations.”
“Yes, little clouds of them. Dimensional byproduct. Temporal gunk. I feel dizzy when I get too close to one of them.”
“You do?” Jake felt a little better. He and Con had been closest to the explosion of Selas. Could that have something to do with Con’s memory loss? No, Con hadn’t known him on the surface, either.
“In any case, Vanna’s picking up where Kai left off. But that was his theory.” Santos paused. “He…didn’t get a dose of the serum before the blast. We’d administered it to everyone else, even Nat and Toby. And the whole Harmon crew was dosed already, on the ship. Kai was already so low, vitals-wise, that Lindy was waiting for him to recover. The planet blew—unexpectedly, to say the least—and the light, it did something to him.” She swallowed, and rubbed a hand over her throat as if to help the words out. “He was babbling until Lindy put him out. She had to induce a coma.”
The crate felt unbearably hard beneath him, and Jake shifted. Was any of this real? He could be dead and Santos never rescued. What if they were all caught in a long interminable dream between blinks of an eye, between penultimate and final breaths of stale, failing oxygen supply or the silent thundering surges of a planetary explosion, dreams in each other’s dying thoughts? He looked up at the viewscreen, and through the windows again. If the stars were true, if all this was real, wasn’t anything possible? Weren’t the dying brain’s flickers just as probable?
No! Rebecca, roaring like static in his mind. What kind of Jeong are you? Remove your head from your ass and get moving. Time’s slow, but it’s still a-flying.
Where was she coming from? It was as if he had no control again, like the penitence nightmare. Jake winced under the echoes of her voice, and cleared his throat. “All right. If I’m understanding this?” He waved the tablet at the screen, at her. “If we are where. No. When. When I think you’re saying we are. Then I’ve got just one question.”
Santos snorted.
“All right, fine, I’ve got a million and one questions, all of them probably more pertinent in the long run, but I need to know why Marathon.”
“Why Marathon?” Santos looked perplexed.
“Why aren’t we going back to Earth? The one planet we know to be habitable. We’re displaced—” He poked at the tablet a little too wildly, and it clattered to the floor. Santos picked it up. “Presumably because of the blast of that thing—which, I might add, wasn’t necessarily a destructive blast. So why in the name of all gods and demonologies are we not headed at full speed toward the planet we know for a damn fact is specifically tailored to support human life?”
“We can’t.”
“Of course we can. We’ll hide out in the wilds of…I don’t know, Old Montana. With the bears. Or Goa, or Korea. Maybe Hawaii. You and Carmichael could populate the islands, be your own great-great-great-great grandparents. There you go. Egotistically satisfying and sensible.”
“Jake, we can’t.” Santos tucked her hair behind her ears with quick, irked jabs.
“Why not?”
“We don’t have enough fuel.”
There was a short silence. Then Jake laughed. “That’s the stupidest excuse I’ve ever heard. We can make fuel if we need to. We have the technology.”
“We could have made fuel,” Santos corrected. “Without cost, too. If we had the station in working order. Or any of the stellarcore facilities. We don’t, because they don’t exist yet. Any fuel we make cuts too far into our current supply, which we’re already bleeding through just sitting here. We’re alone out here.”
“So we go to closer worlds. Petel Eight.” Or not, probably. “Or Tau Ceti Two.” Jake looked away from her shaking head, but her words rapped out inexorably.
“Both colonized slowly over a period of time. With processing for atmosphere enhancement, because they’re unlivable without it. You know this, Jake.” She made a quick, cutting gesture. “Marathon is our closest bet for a habitable world. Three months out to Earth’s four. And we can’t stay here much longer. Eos is kicking out more radiation than in our time. We made the best decision with the data and choices we have. I’ve discussed it with Griffin, and we’ve agreed that, once you’ve fully recovered, you should take the lead for Science. Do you have any objection to that?”
Jake rubbed his arm port. “Would it matter if I did? Where do I go if I don’t want to tag along to Mara
thon, our last great isolated hope? An escape pod with a pile of rations, two weeks of oxygen, and the pod’s Heart derivative for company?”
Santos sighed.
“A vote would’ve been nice. Some choice.”
“None of us got a choice.” Her voice rang out over the deck. “Unconscious people don’t get a vote, either. You think I’m looking forward to waking Toby up after the vault? Explaining the serum? It wasn’t any easier with him being sedated, if you’re wondering.”
“Never mind that.” He glared at her. “An argument would’ve been nice. To make sure you’re not being remote to any possible…possibility.”
Santos crossed her arms. “Sell me on it, then. How long would it take you to rig up some alternate source of power strong enough to propel us all the way back to Earth? Where we’ll live wild and free among the bears?”
“That depends on the kind of help I could expect from unwilling participants. Look—” Jake cleared the tablet and forced another connection with the ship’s Heart, trawled through the various layers and levels for schematics, for power conduits. “We have Eos and its new charged-up output, we have containment nodes, we’ve got the ingredients. We could do it.” He had to convince her. His fingers skittered, trembled, and he cursed them.
“Maybe we could,” Santos said. “But we won’t. We didn’t. We don’t.”
“We don’t. What the fuck does that even mean, Rachel?” His head was aching again, and he wondered if that close pocket of temporal byproduct gunk had infiltrated the room. Why not? Physical matter wouldn’t stand in the way of temporal runoff. He’d probably been walking through it since Lindy released him.
She took the tablet back and opened a new layer, one beyond the briefing displays. “I haven’t shown anyone the last update from Earth. We received it through the Harmon before the blast, before we lost contact with the buoys. You remember the all that chatter about the Gunaji.”
He remembered. “Ship named after Our Savior Smita.” Rations-freighter-my-ass Gunaji. A dozen scientific probes. Currently our destination is—uh—undisclosable due to security concerns. Defense priority two-delta. Avert your eyes and shut the fuck up. “Overblown jerk of a captain on a secret mission to the Beda system…”
And Con had said, It’s going down in Beda. At Marathon.
“Earth picked up on some garbled, degraded transmissions. They sent in the Gunaji. She hadn’t gotten clearance to pass orbit and land at the time we got their info, but they were getting minimal signal readings using probes. Transmissions. Spatial scans.”
“Of what?”
“Settlements on Marathon’s surface. They leapfrogged a dozen more probes out to butch up the signal, and they pulled a gem’s worth of data.”
“And?”
“Human settlements, Jake. And the transmission in Earth standard, a general welcome hail. ’Casting out in old-time, standard, and something more advanced.”
The ob curtains glimmered, and then the blackness of space was awash with new electronic stars: a rain of green roiling symbols and digits and text. Jake dropped his face into his hands. Encryption. The data rolled endlessly before them. And then he straightened as the symbols arranged themselves into a familiar pattern, incomprehensible but known, known to him, and he leapt up. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Recognize it?” Santos sounded flippant, and he was sure then—she had recognized it, too. Seen it as his.
“It’s different. Degraded, yes. It’s a little more complex, but I can see the root of it. The shape of it.” He turned back to her. “It’s mine. Or something based on my lab encryption. And this is transmitting from Marathon?”
“In 2242,” Rachel said.
Her quiet triumph, her acceptance spooked the hell out of him. “Yeah, yeah. But in this form, right? And the degradation?” A fresh rush of déjà vu; he’d had this conversation, with Con. Con, who would no longer remember it.
“Give or take a few centuries? Three thousand years old.”
Jake stared up at the ceaseless stream of data, and behind it, the weak glimmering of stars. “So you think this is proof.”
“To me, this makes it clear. We don’t know how to go forward again. And from what we know of 2242, of this transmission, I think it’s clear that we don’t. Go forward, that is. And we don’t go to Earth. We stay in this time. We go to Marathon. And we survive, and you—we create this message. If you feel like betting, I’d wager every credit you have that the correct version of Restore is tangled somewhere in this code mess.”
“Cheap bet for you,” Jake said. “If what you’re saying is true, neither of us has any damn credits anyway. What if we don’t go?”
“Maybe someone will figure out what Leech is, and how to destroy it, without our help. Your help. The help of the serum. Maybe.”
Dark chills spun through Jake. “I want to work on it now.”
“That’d be fine with me,” Santos said crisply. “Except we’re short on fuel, and we’ve got vaults to make, the first one in a couple of hours. Cryo is prepped and ready, so if you want to eat and contribute something, you’ll have to get moving.”
“Contribute how?”
“Help clean the labs. And the bilges.”
“That’s just cruel.”
Santos shrugged. “Hey, you get blown up and pass out too much, you have to take the leftovers.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“We have reached Marathon and we have settled into standard orbit. Are commencing with monitoring and recording transmission, and we have a team working on the encoding as we speak. Dr. Chang says that it seems familiar, but I suspect that may be wishful thinking. Please advise on further itinerary.”
Excerpt: streaming commtext, priority immediate
12/01/2242
Captain J.L. Fletcher
Rations Freighter (Brooks class) S. Gunaji
United Worlds DS 2155-12
Marathon, Beda System
02 November 758 (BCE, Estimated Earth Calendar)
16:47 (Internal Ship’s Time)
Later, he was able to remember the moments before the Harmon’s first vault with perfect clarity, but, as Jake lived it, he seemed to skip without grace from one moment to the next, following disjointedly in Santos’ wake. He was not sure how they got from the ob deck to the lab. He simply noted the screen of stars and data, and then the coldness of the corridors and the dimmed auxiliary glows, and then the serviceable little lab space with its scuffed floors and parka-ed scientists bustling in and out. He spent an hour or so taking orders and giving shit to Lashti Vanna and the twig-limbed Quinn. He imagined telling Con about it, or bribing Vanna to talk to Con. But the Con in his mind recoiled, and said only, Tell me—
At one point, Vanna pulled him aside.
“You’ll be our Science lead, won’t you, Dr. Jeong? I’ve been sitting on so many questions to ask you, ideas to run by you, you can’t imagine. I’ve got this wonderful weird new encryption… But first, what do you think of our formulation? Especially since we followed your notes. Our first subjects were scavs, but surely you’ve been able to tell that, given the average age and inexperience of our crew, ha! It was hard to convince them of our sincerity. But we did. And they’re here, and they’re as strong as we are. What do you think? We did follow the procedure. Captain Griffin made sure we did not deviate.”
“Followed to the letter,” Quinn added, peeking around Vanna’s bulk.
It reminded Jake too much of his sojourn inside Con’s mind: their expectant faces shadowed in the dark of Silverman’s quarters, Con’s last words with Silverman, Jake’s own revulsion. “My formulation?”
Lashti tipped her head to one side. “Restore, of course!”
Jake tried to smile. “Of course.”
Something had been simmering in his head since he’d gotten the serum, along with the return of his memories. His experience and education with path and genetics was trickling back, in bits and scraps; a sparkle of chemical and molecular structur
e here, a stray diploid there, all slotting alongside his current knowledge. It should’ve been wonderful, but it was disconcerting—not to mention rusty from disuse—to reach for a skillset when he’d been accustomed to staring into a gap of dark nothing. Con must’ve expected this, must’ve told Santos and the rest. How else would they expect him to lead the labs?
He managed to avoid any further conversation while they put the lab into order, and then he escaped to the bilge, where he donned goggles and green scrubs and helped a silent, goggled woman named Elena swab, scope, and flush the reclamation tanks and shitlines. After the first stretch of trading off weight distribution, he found time to examine his new apparatus, and how it bore prolonged weight better than his flesh-and-blood left leg, and yet recovered more quickly. The bruises he’d sustained to his neck and face no longer felt sore. Perhaps Lindy was wrong, and his leg would eventually, inexorably knit back together?
Those were reasonably pleasant thoughts, with less agreeable ones clamoring behind them. Con’s reaction to the mindblitz handshake. The still figures in sickbay, in the station infirmary, Mei’s wrists straining against her plastic bonds. Mick and Mei suspended, dust motes, chilled space trash—no. Not that. Jake closed his eyes and the station loomed, grey and vast as it had been under his gloves and pressure suit grapple, and beyond that he saw the yawn of green Selas, alluring, intoxicating, pitiless, hollow, gone. Gone like the station, his surroundings, his people fractured. Carmichael and Nat and Kai might recover, but Mick and Mei were lost. Con…better to have an indifferent Con than to have lost him as well.
Finally Santos appeared again, and he stripped out of the stained scrubs and followed her to the mess hall.
Someone had painted the walls a pale nonregulation blue. He tried to remember why they’d come there, and why he couldn’t remember. Probably there was an unhelpful temporal explanation. Out-of-time swings got you reeling? It could be recursion. Try another then another then another! He tried to breathe in ease, calm, cold stillness.
