by Joe Vasicek
Aaron was here, somewhere in the darkness. That knowledge was as clear and sharp as a distress beacon in the midst of the starry void. Isaac knew that if he left, his brother would be lost. His palms felt clammy and the sweat on the back of his neck was cold, but he forced himself to press onward, navigating the maze of broken machinery and empty corridors. He passed several bodies but didn’t dare look at them, knowing that if he did the ghosts trapped within them would haunt him forever. His brother was not a skeleton—his brother was alive. Somewhere. That was the hope, at least.
“Aaron?” he said. Though his external speakers carried the sound of his voice, it only came through as a weak feedback echo picked up by the microphone. The smallness of the sound made the derelict station feel even more vast and empty than before.
He took another step, but his feet felt weighted down, as if he were swimming through syrup. Only through sheer force of will was he able to break through and keep moving. If he stopped, he knew he would never be able to move his legs again. He felt as if a weight were growing on his chest, pressing him down, but by exerting all his strength, he managed to force his way through it and put one foot in front of the other.
“Aaron!” he called again, a tinge of desperation in his voice. “Aaron, where are you?”
A half-opened doorway lay in front of him. It looked strangely familiar, though he couldn’t quite place it at first. Then it hit him—the cryotank. He stumbled around the corner and saw it, sitting in the center of the room exactly as it had before.
Instead of the henna girl, though, it contained his brother.
“Aaron!” he said, gasping for breath. “Oh, thank God! Hang on, I’ll get you out of this place. Just—”
His feet refused to move. Try as he might, his boots might as well have been welded to the floor. A low, insidious panic set in, and darkness began to cloud his vision. The inky blackness seeped into the room from the hallway, spreading across the floor and ceiling. He turned to the cryotank, and saw to his horror that Aaron’s body was beginning to shrivel. His skin blackened and drew tight against his bones, while his eye sockets shrunk and his lips pulled back to reveal decaying yellow teeth. In just a few moments, he would be a withered corpse, just like all the others on the station.
“Aaron!” Isaac screamed, but there was nothing he could do to delay the awful finality of death as the blackness swallowed them both.
* * * * *
“Isaac? Isaac, are you all right?”
Isaac jerked awake with tears streaming down his face. His breath came short and fast, his heart racing even though he was lying on his back. He was in his bunk on the Medea, with Aaron standing over him, his face a picture of curiosity and concern. The familiarity of his bed, with its firm mattress pad and old, faded display screen on the underside of the top bunk calmed him a little, but the dream had been so vivid that he couldn’t help but shudder.
“I’ll be fine,” he muttered, wiping the moisture from his eyes. His undershirt was soaked with sweat, and he felt in desperate need of a shower.
“Did you have a nightmare?” Aaron asked.
Isaac groaned and slipped his feet over the edge of the bunk, sitting up. “Yeah, I guess.”
“What was it like? What happened?”
“It—it’s hard to remember,” he lied. “But you were in it, I know that.”
“Really? What did I do?”
You died.
“Nothing much. How are the energy reserves coming? Are we ready to jump yet?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Aaron. “Last I checked, they were at eighty-five percent.”
“Have you set the coordinates?”
“Not yet. I’ll get on that right away.”
“Please do.”
As Aaron ducked through the doorway to the cockpit, Isaac yawned and rose groggily to his feet. The Medea’s cabin looked much as it had when he’d gone to sleep: A small pile of dirty clothes sat on the semi-circular couch ringing the opposite side of the wall, with an unfinished game of damka on the lounge table. The holographic tabletop still displayed the red and black hex board, even though a bowl of half-eaten synthmeal sat in the center of it. Isaac sighed and picked up Aaron’s dirty dishes, scraping the leftovers into the recycler and placing the bowl in the universal washer unit in the wall. His brother could be such a slob sometimes. The clothes would have to wait for the next wash cycle, which probably wouldn’t be for another two or three dayshifts. Honestly, how hard was it to find a wall compartment to stow them in?
How can you be so petty? he thought, a wave of guilt hitting him as he remembered the dream. He’d just watched Aaron’s body disintegrate in a cryotank, and now he was getting upset at him for being a slob? Even if the dream wasn’t real, the emotions it had evoked were certainly poignant enough. Besides, this far out into space, the line between reality and imagination often grew fuzzy. They still had a full two weeks to go before they arrived at the next port.
He found the compartment for his own clothes and opened it, rummaging through until he found a clean undershirt and set of boxers. Clothes in hand, he went to the bathroom at the back of the cabin and palmed the door open. Space inside was tight, even with all the zero-gee hoses on the toilet coiled up and retracted. Still, with quick, practiced movements, he undressed and stepped into the cylindrical shower unit.
As the water washed over his skin from the multi-directional wall jets, he thought back to his dream. He could still feel a twinge of panic and helplessness from watching his brother die.
Aaron was never supposed to have joined him. As the oldest son, tradition required only Isaac to leave on his father’s starship and seek his destiny across the Outworlds. He’d spent his whole life preparing for that, knowing that when the time came to leave, he would be on his own. Most star wanderers never returned to the world of their birth, and he didn’t expect to be an exception.
He also hadn’t expected the famine at Megiddo Station to drive his whole family away before he’d had a chance to leave.
Only a couple of months after they’d fled to Oriana Station as refugees, his father had taken him aside. “You ready to take the Medea, son?”
Isaac’s heart leaped at the question. “I’m ready, Dad,” he answered, trying not to sound too eager. The last few months had been a nightmarish mess, trying to get everyone in the family from Delta Oriana to the Alpha Oriana system. It hadn’t been easy. Isaac had seen, firsthand, as his father struggled with all the logistics of migrating between stars. In the end, they’d had to sell almost everything they owned just to get passage. Thankfully, they’d all made it, but now they were forced to live in a cramped, below-decks apartment on a station where most of them didn’t speak the language. There was so little room, they had to sleep crammed together on old, flat mattresses that did little to soften the hardness of the metal floor. As much as Isaac knew he would miss his family, he also knew that now was the time to leave.
His father nodded, staring off at the wall. “Your mother doesn’t want me to let you to go,” he’d said softly, so that the others in the kitchen and family room couldn’t hear.
“Can she stop me?”
“No, but she’s definitely going to try. Here, let’s take this outside.”
He followed his father out the narrow apartment hallway to the front door, where they exchanged their slippers for shoes. His father moved quickly, glancing over his shoulder—no doubt making sure that his mother didn’t see them go. It pained Isaac to see his parents being so deceptive with each other, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. Better to go along quietly than to spark another argument.
They stepped outside, the door hissing shut behind them. The windowless corridor extended in both directions, though it turned before the curvature of the station became apparent. The walls and lights were drab, all the doors exactly the same.
“If you’re sure you’re ready, I want you to go as soon as you can,” his father told him. “There’s nothing for you here. Take the Me
dea and find a place as far away from this mess as you can.”
Isaac nodded dutifully. “I’ll do my best.”
“There’s something else.”
His father laid a hand on his shoulder and glanced to either side, as if afraid that someone in the corridor might be listening.
“The Medea isn’t typical for most Outworld starships its size. It was built from the hull of a deep space hauler, so it’s got enough room, systems, and storage space to support up to two people. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t be asking this of you.”
Isaac nodded. Nothing his father had said was anything new. They’d both just flown the Medea together on the three month journey to Alpha Oriana, where his father had taught him most of the controls. He still felt a bit new to the ship, but didn’t doubt he could figure out the rest on his own.
“I want you to take Aaron with you, son.”
“What?” said Isaac, giving his father a puzzled look. The request had caught him completely by surprise.
“You heard me. There’s nothing for either of you here. The best I can give you both is a chance to strike out on your own.”
“You mean, you want me to drop him off at one of the nearby systems?”
“No,” said his father, looking him in the eye. “I want you to take him with you, as your partner and copilot. Wherever your wanderings take you, I want you to go together.”
Isaac frowned, unsure how to respond. There was nothing in the traditions about brothers going out to become star wanderers together. Usually, it was only the oldest who left—if everyone from the same generation left for the stars, it would throw everything in turmoil back home.
Our family is already in turmoil, he realized. And we no longer have a home to go back to.
“Does Aaron know?”
“Not yet,” said his father, glancing over his shoulder. “I haven’t told anyone else about this but you. If word of this got to your mother, she’d do everything in her power to stop us.”
“So when are you going to tell him?”
“Not until you’re ready to go. And since we can’t let your mother find out about that either, we’ll have to prepare everything in secret. I need you to pack your things—yours and Aaron’s—and sneak them on board the Medea. Can you do that?”
Isaac drew in a sharp breath and bit his lip. “I don’t know—I think so, but …”
“But what?”
“Shouldn’t we tell him about it now? Give him a chance to make the decision himself?”
“We can’t risk that. You know how he is. The boy can’t hold a secret. If we tell him now, your mother will find out about it, and there will be hell to pay.”
Won’t Mom raise hell about this either way? His father was right, though. If their mother found out about their departure before they left, she might actually be able to stop them. At least this way, they were sure to get away.
But neither of them would be able to say goodbye to their family.
“It’ll still be Aaron’s decision whether to stay or to go,” his father reassured him. “If he doesn’t want to join you, we’ll unload his things and let him stay. But if he wants to go out with you, will you take him with you?”
Isaac nodded slowly. “Yes. I can do that.”
“Will you promise to watch out for him? Make sure that nothing happens to him? He hasn’t been preparing for this like you have—he isn’t nearly as mature or as ready as you.”
“If he isn’t ready, why do you want to send him with me?”
His father sighed. “Because there’s nothing for us here at Alpha Oriana. This isn’t a place of opportunity. If you boys are ever going to make something of yourselves, it will be out there, in the stars. I hate to cut you loose like this, but I don’t really have a choice. So will you promise to look out for him? Keep him safe, and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid?”
Isaac swallowed. He felt as if his father had put a heavy weight on his chest. It was one thing to leave his family without saying goodbye, but to take responsibility for his younger brother on top of all that? It made him feel as if he could barely breathe.
What if something happened to his brother? What if he failed to protect him?
“I know you can do this, Isaac,” his father told him. “As the oldest son, you’ve always set a good example for your siblings. They look up to you. I know this is hard, but I have every confidence that you’ll do fine.”
“All right,” said Isaac, taking a deep breath. “I’ll do it. I’ll do my best.”
His father smiled. “Thank you, son.”
A change in the pressure of the shower water brought Isaac back to the present. He’d been in long enough that the water recycler was starting to back up. With a heavy sigh, he switched off the wash cycle and let the vacuum in the drain suck the precious moisture back through the filters and into the Medea’s reservoirs.
I’ll do my best, Father. I promise.
* * * * *
“It’s about time you finished washing up,” Aaron said as Isaac ducked into the cockpit of the Medea. “Everything come out all right?”
“Yeah,” said Isaac, taking his seat on the left. The forward window was fairly narrow, but it stretched from one side of the cockpit to the other. Control panels and display screens filled the space above and below, most of them dormant since they were out in deep space. On Aaron’s side, the nav-computer showed the starmap with vectors for triangulation. Since they’d already located their position in this sector, the vector lines were green.
“Where do we stand?” Isaac asked as he brought up the screen for the jump drives. His main screen displayed a status readout for the main reactor and the energy reserves: eighty-eight percent maximum, enough to jump as far as point-two light-years with reasonable accuracy.
“Looking good. Coordinates set for a point-two-eight light-year jump, which should put us near a brown dwarf binary—uninhabited, of course.”
Isaac frowned. “How close is that binary? Are you sure you want to push it?”
“We want to make good time to the New Pleiades, don’t we? The binary’s not too close—about five thousand standard AU, give or take a hundred.”
That’s still too close for the mass we’re hauling. Traveling through jumpspace was tricky. The transit time was almost instantaneous, but it was impossible to pinpoint the sidereal exit point with complete accuracy. In general, jump accuracy decreased exponentially relative to the distance they tried to jump. He could set the target coordinates, but there was no guarantee that the ship would end up anywhere near them. The only way to mitigate that was to pump more power into the jump drives, but the power requirements increased dramatically with the ship’s mass. That was why most Outworld starfarers flew small one-man starships—anything larger than that, and the fuel requirements would simply be unsustainable. Even with a ship as small as the Medea, it took hours to build up enough of an energy reserve to make a reasonably accurate jump.
“We can’t have that binary anywhere within our exit zone,” said Isaac. “Better cut that distance to at least point-two-two.”
“Oh, come on—the odds that we’ll jump into one of those stars are so astronomically low, there’s no point in even worrying about it.”
“Yes, but there’s still the danger of solar radiation, as well as the navigational hazards of jumping into a gravity well. We don’t have the proper shielding to graze the—”
“All right, all right,” said Aaron, rolling his eyes. “I’ll cut the jump distance to point-two-four. Happy now?”
Isaac sighed and rubbed his forehead. Why was his brother so difficult sometimes? It wasn’t like they were at cross-purposes with each other. They both wanted to get to the New Pleiades as soon as they could. Perhaps he was coming down with cabin fever again? Long voyages could be especially difficult, with months going by without contact with anyone else. Sometimes, Isaac didn’t know how they got through them.
“Great. Set the coordinates, and I’ll make th
e jump.”
It didn’t take Aaron long. “Got it,” he said barely half a minute later. “Ready when you are.”
Isaac glanced over the new coordinates, checking them for anything potentially hazardous in the vicinity. Besides star systems and rogue planets, they had to keep a close eye on the density of the interstellar medium. Plenty of starfarers had died from hull breaches and equipment failures from jumping in and out of high density regions, especially around nebulae. Fortunately, the space between Esperanzia and the New Pleiades was mostly clear.
He nodded. “Right. Initiating jump.”
The bulkheads behind them began to hum and throb. A queasy sensation grew in Isaac’s stomach, starting off small but soon filling him with nausea. He began to feel dizzy, as if the gravity had been shut off. The stars in the forward window seemed to flee away from him, even as the bulkheads of the ship began to close in. Isaac closed his eyes, and in that moment something flipped, as if the universe itself had become inverted. The sensation passed, and when he opened his eyes again, the view had returned to normal. A couple of the brighter magnitude stars had shifted a few degrees, but the starfield was otherwise unchanged.
“Commencing sector scan,” said Aaron. “No large objects in the immediate vicinity. Looks like that dwarf binary is somewhere off our bow. Scanning for transmissions … nothing.”
Isaac let out a long breath and nodded. His grip on the flight stick loosened as it became clear that there was no need for immediate sublight maneuvers. No debris fields, no gravity wells, no dangerous radiation sources—nothing but the wide, empty vastness of space.
“Looks like it’s just us, then.”
“Yeah, looks like. I’ll get started with the triangulation.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow and glanced sidelong at his brother. “You in much of a hurry? We’ve got at least eight hours until the jump drive’s charged.”
