“It’s always been deactivated for convenience, but this ship is equipped with a basic security system. This is from three months before our most recent refueling stop.”
As Liam watched, Phoebe stuck something to the back of JEFF’s neck, then sat in the copilot’s chair and brought up a holoscreen. In the dim, distorted picture it was hard to tell what she was doing, but Liam felt a terrible sinking inside.
“The digital fingerprints are extremely hard to detect, but after much analysis, I was able to determine that Phoebe is the one who caused the course errors on our journey, resulting in our late arrival at Delphi.”
Liam peered at Phoebe. “You made us late? On purpose?”
Phoebe’s lip trembled like she was about to say something, but a tear fell instead.
“Liam, please check the left leg pocket on Phoebe’s pressure suit.”
“Why?”
Phoebe stared hard at him. “Liam, please . . .”
Liam knelt and unzipped the pocket, his fingers shaking. He pulled out a small, silver cylinder with a tiny screen, a red button on its side, and a black suction cup on its end.
“That is an electrical dampening device,” said JEFF. “It could be used to disable my systems briefly, as well as to erase a hard drive like the one in the backup recorder, destroying any evidence of who or what attacked the Scorpius. Is that correct?”
Phoebe didn’t answer. She looked away, staring at the floor and sniffling.
“Phoebe.” Liam thought of his suspicions, of the strange vision down in the sublevel. “Did you?”
“I . . .”
A warning beeped on the console and the security feed blinked out, replaced by the map showing the space right around Delphi. A new light was blinking there, close.
JEFF tapped the light. “There is a spacecraft inbound for our location.”
Liam’s heart raced. “What kind of ship?”
“A Nebula Class Comet H-6.”
“One of ours?” said Liam. “It could be someone who stayed behind to watch the supernova. They could help us—”
“I don’t think so,” said Phoebe quietly. She held up her link. A white light was flashing there.
“What’s that?”
“Liam,” said JEFF, “any other ship would have received the emergency bulletin we heard and changed course by now.”
“It’s a message,” said Phoebe. “It’s from them.”
The watch had started blinking, too.
Liam looked at the map, at the ship getting closer. “What are you talking about? Phoebe, tell me what’s going on.”
“Liam, you have to let me go and then I’ll explain.”
“Negative,” said JEFF. “Liam, it is against my protocols to put your safety at risk.”
“I need to know,” said Liam. “Are you . . . ?” He didn’t even know where to start. “Are you a traitor? Your parents, too?”
Phoebe shook her head emphatically. “I’m on your side. I can prove it, just—”
Far off in the distance, a flash of rocket engines: the sleek Comet dropping from the clouds, racing toward them across the sea of ice.
“It’s them, isn’t it?” said Liam, adrenaline boiling his nerves. The watch was blinking faster. “It’s Barro.”
Phoebe nodded, tears falling. “You have to let me go.”
All at once he remembered back at Saturn, as he made ready to fly away in the skim drone, seeing Barro and Phoebe talking through the window. Liam had assumed that Phoebe had been stalling, but was she . . . ? No. Phoebe had shot them out of the sky before they could get Liam! Didn’t that mean she was on his side?
“We have to get out of here. JEFF, do we have enough fuel to take off?”
“Yes, and to break orbit, but not enough to get much farther than that.”
“Liam, please trust me,” said Phoebe. “We should stay and—”
“Stop it!” Liam shouted. “How can I trust you? Is it true? Are you working with them?” More thoughts cascading down now. “Did you sabotage the turbines on Mars? Is it your fault my parents are injured?”
“No! Mine are hurt, too, remember? I just—”
“Are you the reason my sister’s in danger?”
“Let me explain!”
A distant roaring reached his ears now. The approaching ship’s engines.
“I suggest that we take off,” said JEFF. “Perhaps we can outmaneuver them and then return for fuel.” He moved into the pilot’s chair and buckled in.
“We can’t outrun them!” said Phoebe. “Liam, we can trick them. I have an idea—”
“I would advise that you not listen to her,” said JEFF, firing up the main thrusters.
Phoebe glanced at her link, the strange light blinking there. “Liam, you have to believe me. I wasn’t sabotaging us. I was saving us!”
Liam fell back against his chair. He glared at Phoebe and felt himself shaking with hate, and yet she was crying and she was still Phoebe and what was he going to do?
Out the windshield, the brilliant glow of rockets drew closer.
7
DISTANCE TO CENTAURI B: 3.3 LIGHT-YEARS
“Initiating liftoff sequence,” said JEFF. “Liam, I suggest you buckle up.”
“No!” Phoebe struggled against her restraints. “Liam, please! Trust me!”
The Comet was gaining on them. Liam looked from Phoebe to JEFF. His heart pounded and his guts were doing somersaults.
He considered the dampener in his hand.
“Red button,” said Phoebe, her eyes wide.
“Do not listen to her,” said JEFF.
Liam gritted his teeth and thought he might explode. Phoebe was his friend, even if all this was true, but there wasn’t time to figure it out!
Unless . . .
He looked down at the alien watch, blinking furiously. Put his fingers on the dial. The mere touch of the cool metal made his head swim. If Phoebe had really betrayed him, he needed to know for sure. Needed proof.
“Hold on.” He clicked the watch dial to the left. The world halted, slipped, and lurched backward, all the movements unnatural, like they were being pulled on strings. Their words being sucked back into their mouths, JEFF zipping out of his chair and back in, Liam and Phoebe jerking backward from the cockpit, putting their helmets back on, reverse-jumping from the airlock and retreating into the station. . . .
But at the same time, Liam also standing there in the cockpit, that strange double sensation of two realities at once: where he was physically, and what he was seeing in the timestream. It made his head ache. He could feel his chest rising and falling in his present but could also hear the electric sound of his backward breathing through the pressure suit speaker as they reversed their way into the station, past the steam chambers, down the stairs, and into the sublevel where the recorder and scanner were located.
Now Liam backed down his corridor, Phoebe down hers. Liam watched her going in reverse to undo what it was she had done to the recorder, either simply starting it up, as she claimed, or also erasing it. He needed to know, and to do that, he had to somehow follow Phoebe. He studied the watch—its left hemisphere symbol was blinking, as it always did when he traveled into the past, but he didn’t want to pause time like he did when visiting his apartment on Mars. He wanted to move with time, just not his own time. Was that possible?
Liam concentrated as he had on his apartment balcony. He focused on Phoebe and pressed forward, trying to reach her. To move down the hall, even though that wasn’t part of his past. But it didn’t work. He kept retreating, following his own timeline, into the scanner compartment where he knelt and turned it back off. He tried again to push out of himself, this time through the wall—that didn’t work either. His past self stood and backed into the corridor once more. Liam kept pushing. If he didn’t get to Phoebe soon, he would miss it—
Do I trust her? That thought appeared in his mind—it had been right at this moment, as they’d first separated in the hall, when Liam had paused, fe
lt a sliver of doubt and considered following Phoebe—
Suddenly, his vision seared with pain, and it seemed like he was being pulled in two. The world lit up in white for a moment, and then he was moving down the corridor toward the door where Phoebe had gone, walking forward instead of backward. Liam’s head ached, and he realized that he could no longer see the present-time version of himself in the cruiser cockpit. Instead, he had an uncanny sensation of moving in two directions at once. One version of him was still backing up the corridor, as he had in the past, but now this other version was walking forward through the doorway to where Phoebe was, and somehow, he was seeing both realities as if from his own eyes. Neither felt quite real, and yet both felt like they were actually happening.
Liam entered the recorder compartment and found Phoebe kneeling by the controls, which were in a console on the wall. “How’s it going?” he heard himself say. It felt like he had really said this, and yet also like he was hearing someone else say it.
She started. “What are you doing here?”
“Just, um, figured we should stick together,” this other Liam said.
“No, Liam, you shouldn’t. I, um—” Phoebe moved quickly, tapping at the recorder controls, but her body was blocking what she was doing.
Liam stepped beside her. He saw that silver dampener stuck to the control panel. A yellow light flashed on it, and a string of numbers on the panel display was rapidly counting down. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing—”
“Are you sabotaging it?” he said. “I can’t believe it!”
“It’s not what you think!” said Phoebe. “I did it for us. I’m on your side!”
Liam lunged toward the control panel. “I’m not going to let you hurt anyone else!”
“No, Liam— Don’t!”
He tore the dampener off the controls. An automated voice blared in the compartment:
“SECURITY BREACH DETECTED. SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED.”
“What did you do?” Liam shouted.
“I didn’t mean to—I— You’re not supposed to be in here!”
Liam looked from the recorder to the dampener in his hand. He felt thoughts coming together that seemed to be new to this version of him—his suspicion on Mars, the way Phoebe had talked to Barro, JEFF’s strange behavior, thoughts the real version of him (and yet it was getting quite hard to tell which one was real, or even what might make one more real than the other) had already figured out, except technically wasn’t that in the future from this point? He felt dizzy trying to fit it all into his head.
Meanwhile the version of Liam in the recorder compartment spun and ran out the door.
“Wait!” Phoebe called from behind him.
And then there was a whump of air, and that explosion that Liam had sort of experienced before erupted behind him, bursting through Phoebe and storming down the hall, grabbing him and hurling him forward. He was thrown to the ground, fire everywhere—searing pain all over but especially in his eyes.
And yet at the same time the other version of him was still reversing through time, meeting back up with Phoebe and retreating up the hallway before any of that had ever (or never) happened. Liam felt like he was being pulled apart, split down the middle. A wind blowing between his eyes, through the middle of his chest—
And then all at once, everything stopped. It was as if the universe itself had been put on pause.
Liam gasped but also found himself feeling whole, like he was back in his body and had returned to his present—just one of him, not two—and yet he wasn’t in the cruiser cockpit at all anymore. No Phoebe, no JEFF. Instead, he was standing in the sublevel corridor. Silence around him.
An orange light flickered in the corner of his eye. Liam turned and froze. There was someone just down the corridor, kneeling and shining a light against the wall. At first, Liam feared it was the metal-suited man from the Drove, but this being wasn’t wearing a space suit of any kind. It was taller, spindly, dressed in black robes, and had dark blue, translucent skin, and milky white eyes. The light was dim, but Liam thought he saw the outlines of four legs folded beneath the robe, and more than five fingers on each hand.
The being was holding a round orange crystal just like the one Liam had in his pocket, and examining the wall in the crystal’s light, running its fingers up and down the panels there. The being was also wearing a watch just like Liam’s.
This creature looked like the one he’d seen in the observatory on Mars. More than that, it looked identical. But could this really be the same alien? She’d been very much dead—
And now she saw him. She turned off the orange crystal, stood, and walked toward him, gliding like a spider on her many legs. As she moved, Liam had a strange sensation that the alien was blurry. She was here in the corridor, but she also rippled like she was a hologram, or, many holograms together. One moment her face looked smooth; another, it looked wrinkled, older.
She stopped before Liam, towering over him. The only sound was her breathing, slow and reedy, coming through two noses, one above the other. She held her orange crystal out toward him and cocked her head as if trying to tell him something.
Liam stood there, fingers tingling, heart racing. The alien looked at her crystal, then back to him again. She had large, pearlescent eyes with no irises or pupils.
Liam reached into his pocket, removed his own crystal, and held it up. The being nodded. Her mouth opened and she spoke in long, whispery sounds. For a moment, Liam couldn’t begin to understand, but then both of their crystals glowed brightly, pulsing in bursts of light that increased speed and also synced up, such that soon they were blinking rapidly together.
Her whispers began to untangle into words.
“You’re wearing my watch.” The being’s translated voice sounded the same as the voice on the recordings that were inside Liam’s crystal, the ones about the infected stars and the supernovas that he and Phoebe had listened to on Mars.
Liam looked from his wrist to hers. “How do I have this if you still have it?”
“Where did you get it?”
“Uh, I got it from you? Or someone like you.”
“There is no one like me. When did you get it? What location?”
“Oh, um, Mars. It’s—I mean, it was—a planet in our old solar system. We found your observatory, and you were inside it.”
The being made a sound like a sigh. “Ah, the red planet, in that single-star system. That explains it. You found me after my death.”
“I—I guess so, yeah. I wasn’t stealing it, I just thought, since, well, it seemed like you’d been dead awhile.”
She blinked.
“I’m Liam. Who are you?”
The being still didn’t answer. She glanced at her version of the orange crystal sphere, studying it. “I’m running a diagnostic on your conceptual capacity.”
“Like, you’re scanning my brain?”
“In order to determine if you can comprehend the answer to your own question.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The being studied the flickering light. “Well, it’s worth a try. I am a chronologist. I manage this sector of the galactic.”
“A chronologist?”
“We are tasked with recording the long count of this universe.”
“Okay. . . .” Liam looked around. “Where are we? Is this the past? Because I have to get back to my present. We’re in danger and—”
“I have constructed a brief bubble within space-time so we could meet. Time is ‘frozen,’ as you might say.”
“So I’m here? Or I’m back there?”
“Yes.”
“Um, okay.” Liam decided to move on. “But if you were dead on Mars, how can you be here now?”
“Now and then are constraints of three-dimensional beings. You also have my recorder.”
Liam held up his orange crystal. “This one is that one?” The chronologist nodded again. “There was a message,” said Liam. “It transl
ated into our language—is that what the crystal is doing now? Translating between us?”
“One of the recorder’s functions is to bridge communication. What did the message say?”
“That we should take the crystal to the nearest regional manager’s office.”
The chronologist sighed again. “I see.”
Liam cocked his head. “You sound disappointed.”
“You cannot exactly get to my office.”
“Well, no. We looked it up; it’s pretty far away.”
“That is putting it mildly.”
“Yeah, so we decided to take it with us, because we need the information about the stars, what the Drove are doing to them, so we can show it to—”
“Hold on. The who?”
“The Drove. You know, the guy in the— Oh.”
“What?”
“I was going to say the guy in the metal suit, but . . . he, well, I don’t know if I should tell you.”
“You should tell me.”
“He’s the one who kills you. On Mars. Or already did?”
“I haven’t gone there yet. It is in my future. So you took the crystal because of the message. And you took my watch because . . .”
“I wanted proof about you. None of my people have ever seen an alien before. Or we hadn’t, as of then. I’m not sure what’s happened since.” Liam held out his wrist beside the crystal. “Do you want them back?”
“I am going to need that crystal, and you shouldn’t have taken the watch, but I cannot take either of them at this moment, because I already have them. That would likely cause another superposition, and you’ve already created enough of those.”
“Superstitions? What do you mean?”
“Do you even know what a superposition is?”
“Not really.”
“You have been using the watch.”
“Just a couple times,” said Liam.
“And what made you think that was a good idea?”
Liam shrugged. “It helped me see what was going to happen, so I could save people I know from dying. And . . . I’ve also used it to go back in time a bit.”
The chronologist focused on her crystal for a moment. “According to your nuclei, you have made twelve discrete arc-lines in space-time. That is no small amount for a being of your composition. You’re fortunate that you weren’t torn apart into your base particles.”
The Oceans between Stars Page 11
