At the Helm: A Sci-Fi Bridge Anthology (Volume 1)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  There wasn’t time anymore.

  The oxygen reserve inside the star was nearly depleted.

  • • •

  On the day the star began to fuse silicon, Carindi leaned against the smooth curve of Ei’Pio’s enclosure, arms and legs outstretched, as though it were possible to reach through the glass to embrace Ei’Pio and keep her safe.

  There were less than two standard days left.

  The child hadn’t slept for days, having figured out long before how to order the suit to inject stimulants into ius body. Iad was determined to watch Ei’Pio and keep her from trying to break through the yoke.

  “Do you wish you’d had the opportunity to mate?” Carindi asked after a long silence.

  It was a painful question and one that Ei’Pio privately contemplated frequently. If she could have raised her own children as she’d raised Carindi…

  She sighed. “No. It is a tremendous expenditure, and unlike sectilian mothers, I would not be able to watch my children grow.”

  “If you could, though, here? We could keep them all safe, here, inside. We would keep you alive as you’ve kept me alive. I would make a door so I could come inside the enclosure and help you care for them.”

  Such a tantalizing fantasy.

  Carindi went on. “We could raise them together, you and I. Show me again, the day of your birth. Please, Pio. I want to imagine your babies.”

  Ei’Pio’s mantle throbbed unsteadily. It had become easier to daydream than to focus on the awful present. She showed the child again.

  Afterward, she thought perhaps the child had fallen into a light sleep. She prepared herself to break the yoke. This time it would work, no matter the cost. She would not allow Carindi to die in the supernova.

  But then the child spoke again. “I’m not sure what gender I was meant to be, genetically, but I want to be a girl like you.”

  Ei’Pio pressed her suction cups to the glass as though to caress the young face. It was Carindi’s first declaration of gender preference. In Ei’Pio’s eyes that made her an adult. Ei’Pio could now let go of the gender neutrality she’d carefully maintained, like all sectilian adults did, in order not to bias a child’s preferences.

  “You are a woman, my dear Carindi.”

  Carindi’s brows pulled together. “I used to think that perhaps it would have been better if I’d died in the plague.”

  Ei’Pio said softly, “I remember.”

  “I want you to know that I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad I was able to keep you company, Pio.”

  Ei’Pio held the girl’s earnest expression. “I know.” After a moment passed, she continued. “This time has been a great gift.”

  “Borrowed time,” Carindi murmured. Suddenly the girl broke the tension with a grin. “I want to swim with you, Pio.”

  Ei’Pio’s limbs twitched with fatigue and the lingering pain she couldn’t seem to shed. “You’ve never swum before.”

  “There must always be a first time,” Carindi said with a smirk, mimicking Ei’Pio’s mental voice.

  “So I’ve said to you many times, my dear girl. How will you deal with the problem of access?”

  “I’ll just cut a hole at one end of your enclosure. Just enough to fit through. The ship will flood, but what difference does it make now?” Even through the suit, Ei’Pio could see the girl shrug.

  Ei’Pio sighed. “It doesn’t.”

  “It’s settled then. I’ll go fetch a laser cutting arc and cut through on Deck 1-C. You stay here where you’re safe.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  The young woman walked away, footsteps slow and shuffling, the shoulders of the suit hunched. Just as Carindi was about to stride out of sight, Ei’Pio saw the girl halt and heard Carindi’s mental voice muttering, “Swimming, cutting… access, draining. Wait a minute. Wait… a… minute. Praise the Cunabula!”

  The girl was running.

  She bounded to the nearest deck transport and slammed into the control, cracking the plastic the symbol was made from. She was breathing so hard she was nearly hyperventilating. “Don’t get your hopes up, Pio. We’ve been disappointed before, but I’ve got an idea!” Her mental voice was euphoric.

  Ei’Pio followed Carindi, inside and outside of her mind. Through cameras as well as the girl’s eyes, she watched the teenager bounding from place to place on the engineering deck, gathering tools.

  The girl’s momentum never stopped. Her energy had been renewed. She opened one of many engineering bays and slid the mechanicals out as far as they would go, then stuck an arm in behind them, up to her shoulder. She began to wiggle and push, grunting and straining.

  Ei’Pio asked her repeatedly for more information but was met with silence. Carindi’s attention was focused elsewhere.

  Abruptly, the girl raged, “I cannot believe this. What if all the engineers on the ship had sectilian body types and there were no atellan engineers aboard? Then what would they do if they needed to get in there?”

  “Get in where?” Ei’Pio begged.

  “I’ve found it, damn them,” Carindi spat. “The control panel for the yoke. But I can’t fit in there with the suit. Only an exceedingly thin atellan could fit.”

  The young woman paced up and down that small section of the engineering compartment. Ei’Pio could feel her mind buzzing with conflicting thoughts and ideas. It was impossible to keep up. The girl was forming a conclusion, but keeping Ei’Pio at the surface of her thoughts so she couldn’t see what it was.

  Ei’Pio began to feel an overwhelming sense of dread. “Slow down, Carindi. Let’s work through this. We’ll do it together. There has to be a way.”

  “I can’t slow down, Pio. You know I can’t.”

  Ei’Pio commanded the camera she’d accessed to zoom in on the girl. She watched Carindi pace and flail her arms around. She searched for something reassuring to say.

  The girl stopped her pacing.

  “I always knew this day would come,” Carindi said softly. Her voice was unsteady. Then she sounded more certain. “Helmet retract.”

  Ei’Pio contracted into a ball, crying, “No, Carindi!”

  But it was too late.

  The helmet was slipping back into the shoulders of the suit, revealing a mass of matted hair curling around Carindi’s head and neck. The skin on the girl’s face was so pale as to be nearly translucent, stretched tight over the bony prominences of her cheeks. Her eyes were large and brown and luminous.

  Carindi smiled at the camera through which, she knew, Ei’Pio was watching. “I’ll be fine. It’s just a few minutes. I’ll put it right back on.”

  Ei’Pio watched in horror as the front of the suit split open and fell away from the skeletal shoulders of a teenaged girl who was only three quarters of the size she should have been, had she been free to eat, exercise, and grow normally.

  Carindi stepped out of the suit and staggered, falling to her knees, catching herself with her hands on the mechanicals. She stifled a cry of pain, then said, “I don’t seem to have much in the way of muscle mass.”

  Ei’Pio quickly moved to adjust the gravity to something Carindi could tolerate, all the while begging the child to put the suit back on immediately.

  Her pleas were ignored.

  Carindi pushed her tools into the tiny crevice and eased herself in after them. The camera picked up the sounds of power tools, clattering metal and plastic, and the girl’s grunts of effort, but all Ei’Pio could see were two impossibly fragile alabaster legs sticking out into the room. Carindi’s thoughts were doggedly full of electronics—circuits, relays, networks, and arrays.

  “This. Is it. I’ve done it!” Carindi crowed. “Move the ship, Pio, with my blessing.”

  “First the suit,” Ei’Pio insisted.

  Carindi’s mental voice ground hard. “Move it. I want to feel it move. Now.”

  “You won’t feel anything. Inertial dampening fields—”

  “Now, Pio,” the girl commanded.

  But Ei�
��Pio was motionless. She couldn’t take her eyes from her girl.

  Carindi eased out of the tiny compartment and slumped against the housing. Streaks of dark blood ran down from her narrow nose over her pale grey lips. Her eyes were bloodshot and brimming with tears. She coughed weakly.

  “Carindi, my dear one… please.” She couldn’t say more. Her mind had turned to black static. Her limbs were cold and numb.

  The girl struggled toward the disarticulated suit on hands and knees. When she reached it, she sprawled forward against it, panting. She leaned her head against the suit and turned her face to the camera, chin tucked low. “I was never meant to live, but you were, Pio. You are my dear subidia, my surrogate mother. I want you to live free.”

  Ei’Pio’s limbs shook violently with emotion. She whispered, “What am I without you?”

  “You are free. Free… to find your own way.”

  Those were the last thoughts of the girl, Machinutorus Carindi Palset Teruvah.

  Her beloved Pio was alone again.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jennifer Foehner Wells is the bestselling author of Fluency and The Druid Gene.

  Jen was born in 1972 and was raised primarily in rural areas surrounding Highland, Illinois. She grew up reading voraciously and was turned on to science fiction at a young age when a family friend lent her a compilation of Ray Bradbury’s short stories as well as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, among many other great works of the genre. In 1995 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Monmouth College, Illinois.

  After graduation, Wells worked as a lab technician in an animal disease diagnostic lab and as the assistant store manager of a locally owned greenhouse, before stopping work outside the home to raise children. As her children got older, Wells made use of her spare time to pursue hobby writing, which eventually turned into her writing her debut novel, Fluency.

  Jen resides in Indiana with her two children.

  You can find out more about her work at www.jenniferfoehnerwells.com. If you’d like exclusive access to updates about her new releases and the opportunity to receive limited content, ARCs and more, please subscribe to her newsletter.

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  INTO THE DARK

  BY ROBERT KROESE

  Matt Edlund craned his head to the left and pulled down on his neck tendons with his right hand, producing a cathartic series of cracks. It was an entirely unconscious movement, something he did every few minutes as he stared blearily at the mass of rock suspended in the middle of the LCD screen in front of him. The rock hadn’t moved for nearly six hours, which was, all-in-all, a good thing, but it made for some pretty boring television.

  “How are we doing on the mass estimate?” He said into his collar mike.

  “No change from the last three times you asked,” said a woman’s voice in his ear. He could hear the wry smile in her voice, and he pictured her rolling her eyes. That was Serena. Patient. Long-suffering. Always in control.

  “Sorry, sweets,” he said. “Guess I’m getting a little bored with this show. Seriously, it’s like watching a Terence Malick movie.”

  “Who?” she asked absently.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m distracting you. Just do your thing. I’ll shut up now.” Serena didn’t share his encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century movie trivia; she used her brain for more important things, like calculating the mass of the three-kilometer-long asteroid that was tethered to the rear end of the CMS Morgana.

  The asteroid, officially named (21482) Olive, was an irregular hunk of stone, iron, and various other minerals like platinum, cobalt and palladium. The stone was worthless, dead weight. The iron, while not worthless, certainly wasn’t worth a 600 million kilometer round trip to retrieve it. The hope was that there was enough of the other stuff to make this expedition worthwhile. Asteroid mining was a hit-and-miss business; CMS had been lucky to have made enough “hits” in a row to become the leading extraterrestrial mining company in the solar system. A few misses, though, and they’d be out of business. The magic number was three percent: if an asteroid’s composition was at least three percent “valuables” – that is, valuable minerals – then the expedition would pay for itself. The mix was always different. Some minerals were worth more than others, and prices were in a constant state of flux, but the three percent rule of thumb had remained surprisingly reliable since asteroid mining began with CMS’s first flight nearly twenty years earlier.

  Still nothing happened on the monitor. The rock remained motionless as ever. Matt yawned and cracked his neck again. He resisted the urge to ask Serena for an update.

  Ideally, Serena would have calculated Olive’s mass before they had anchored it to the Morgana, but that wasn’t how mining worked. Actually, in an ideal universe, CMS’s unmanned probes would have calculated Olive’s mass and composition precisely before the Morgana had even arrived, but that wasn’t how mining worked either. Asteroid mining was, in short, a series of increasingly more accurate intelligent guesses. The CMS geologists would select the optimal asteroid for mining, based on mass, estimated composition, distance, orbit, proximity to neighboring asteroids and other hazards, and a host of other considerations. Then a mining ship like the Morgana would be sent out to tether the rock and tow it back to earth.

  At this point the composition of the rock didn’t make any difference to Matt and Serena. The Morgana didn’t carry enough fuel for them to seek out another target, so they would tow Olive to orbit around Earth, where the drillers would determine whether CMS was going to have another quarter of strong earnings. But getting Olive back to earth was by no means an exact science either: the geologists had determined Olive’s mass to within a margin of error of plus or minus zero point eight percent – which was impressive, but zero point eight percent is a pretty big margin when you’re towing a few million tons of rock through the gravitational sphere of Jupiter. A trajectory error of a tenth of a degree might be the difference between getting home safely and spending the next thousand years as the latest addition to Jupiter’s collection of moons.

  The most accurate way of measuring Olive’s mass was also the most primitive: see how hard it is to move. And that’s precisely what Matt and Serena were now doing. He had fired the Morgana’s thrusters at full power for exactly three seconds, and now Serena was attempting to calculate how far out of its orbit Olive had budged. Or maybe she was trying to calculate the difference between the Morgana’s current position and where the Morgana would have been if it hadn’t been tethered to Olive when Matt fired the thrusters. Matt had graduated with honors as an engineering major from Cal-Poly, but even trying to keep track of the number of variables Serena had to work with gave Matt a headache. The Morgana floated at the periphery of Jupiter’s realm of influence, so she would have to take into account Jupiter’s pull as well as that of several neighboring asteroids, in addition to the mass of the Morgana and the thrust it had produced.

  “Okay, got it,” Serena said at last.

  “So?” Matt asked. “What’s the magic number?”

  “I’m sending you thrust vectors.”

  “So that’s how it is, huh?” Matt asked.

  “Yep,” replied Serena. “Don’t worry your pretty little head with things like mass and acceleration. Just do what you’re told.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied Matt. The sad thing was that Serena was only half-joking. She knew that the mass number would be meaningless to Matt; all he needed to do was punch in the thrust vectors. Serena was the brains of this operation; he was, at best, the hands and feet.

  Matt squeezed his eyes tight and cracked his neck one more time. With any luck, they wouldn’t have to do another calibration for three days or so. He unsnapped his shoulder harness and lightly pushed off against the rubber-matted floor. Grabbing a rung above his head, he propelled himself through a narrow steel tunnel, re-emerging in the Morgana’s nav center. Serena greeted him with a smile and a hug.

  “That�
�s the longest we’ve been apart for three months,” said Matt.

  “I don’t think it counts as being apart,” replied Serena. “You were ten meters away. And we were in constant radio contact.”

  “Still, I missed you terribly,” said Matt.

  Serena stuck out her tongue at him. She was petite, with short brown hair and a pretty face liberally dotted with freckles. There was no one Matt would rather be stuck in a tin can with for six months.

  “Tomorrow’s our anniversary, you know,” he said.

  “Is it?” Serena asked. “We should—”

  A warning chime sounded and a red light flashed above their heads. “Shit,” said Matt. “What now?”

  Serena scanned the warning message that had popped up on her monitor. “Winch number three is sticking,” she said. “Can you cycle through the self-test?”

  “Yeah,” said Matt, maneuvering himself in the zero gravity to his station next to Serena’s. She had been using both stations for the thrust vector calculations, which is why Matt had retreated to the rear observation station. Now he nestled himself next to her again, and brought up the self-test application for the towing winches. “Gimme a sec.”

  Olive was tethered to the Morgana by three steel cables. The thinking was that if one of the cables was severed by a rogue meteor or one of the pitons that secured the cable to the rock broke loose, there would still be two cables in place. The problem with this system was that it required a mechanism to equalize tension between the three cables – which is where the automated winches came in. If one cable was pulling too hard, it would release some slack on that cable and tighten the other two in an effort to keep the load evenly distributed. If one of the winches had jammed, that was bad news.

  After a frustrating several minutes of tapping keys and waiting for a response from winch number three, Matt sighed. “No good. It’s stuck bad.”