“Jordy!” she called over her shoulder. “I think we got one!”
“You sure?” Jordy was back adjusting the shield phasing. It had been a string of thuds followed by curses ever since he’d left the cockpit, as the ship kept rocking back and forth in the radiation storm, and the spaces in here were incredibly tight.
Slim people, the prior owners of this ship, Kyla thought. Very slim. The straps that held her in the pilot’s chair were extended to their maximum length and they were still cutting into her shoulders and waist. You’re no spring chicken, her dad had said once—or a few times too often—when she was a teen, something that she’d been pretty sure he meant not just as a nod to time passing but also as a critique, and yet thinking of it made a lump form in her throat. He was probably long gone by now.
She pressed a lever on the side of the chair and it swiveled to face the front console. She tapped the blinking light and a liquid spherical map appeared. It was helmet-sized and aqua blue, floating in a concave depression. Lights flashed within it, all of them white except for one, which was red. Kyla slipped her hand into the sphere and pinched the green one. This caused a target shape to blink on the windshield, and a route map to zigzag through the debris.
Kyla locked in on the coordinates and fired the thrusters, the force pushing her into her seat.
“Ow! Careful!” Jordy yelled from the back.
“You be careful!” Kyla squinted, peering out into the radiation storm that blossomed in space all around them, a riot of maroon and yellow feathering in iridescent clouds tipped with nucleic fire. Nothing visible through that target finder yet.
There was, however, something much larger and closer, a growing silhouette against the background inferno, heading in their direction.
“You got those shields realigned?” Kyla called.
“Mostly!”
She rolled her eyes. Nothing was ever a simple yes or no with Jordy. “Well, hurry up!” She reached back into the spherical map and tapped an enormous white signal. Its details scrolled on the windshield. “I think we’re about to have a close encounter with Charon!”
She made a course correction and burned the engine. The ship darted but was immediately shoved by a heavy wave of charged energy, which threw them back the way they’d come. The silhouette racing toward them had grown to take up nearly half the cockpit view. A great hulking half-moon of rock, streaming a fog of melting ice behind it. Her readings flashed again. Definitely Charon, the sister satellite to good old Pluto, or what was left of it.
“Okay, they’re set—ow!” The craft rocked again, and Jordy slammed into the ceiling as he floated back to the cockpit.
“Buckle up already,” Kyla barked.
Jordy dragged himself into his chair and strapped in. “Why are we flying toward that?”
“I’m working on it!” Kyla hurried to plot a new vector.
They bucked and rolled in another energy wave, tossing them closer. The great chunk of destroyed subplanet filled their view, heading straight for them, impossibly large—
Kyla held her breath and burned the lateral thrusters. One . . . two . . . three . . .
They slid just out of Charon’s way.
“Have a nice trip,” said Jordy, looking over his shoulder.
Kyla tapped the red blinking light and corrected course toward it.
“Man,” said Jordy, his face lit by the fury of magenta and yellow ahead of them. “The old girl really had some energy in her.”
Kyla opened her mouth to agree, but her voice hitched up and she clenched herself against a tremor of sadness. No more tears, she told herself. Especially not in front of Jordy, of all people. And especially not for something that can’t be helped. That was her mom talking. Keep that steely exterior! That had always been Mom’s way, and Kyla had never been able to live up to it. Besides, it was okay to be sad about the death of your home star, no matter whether you could do anything about it or not. And yet it seemed like there must have been a way to stop it, but how? These choices had been made before they’d even known any better.
And it was far too late now.
“Looks like a small cruiser,” said Jordy, analyzing the data from the red dot. “About five thousand klicks out. I’m not getting any engine readings.”
Kyla shook her head. “No way that thing has power. They’ll be lucky if they even have a hull, being out in this storm.”
“What’s the point of this assignment, anyway?” said Jordy. “Nothing can survive a supernova.”
“Captain said it’s our duty to be sure. We owe it to humanity. No soldier left behind, right? If anyone was stupid enough to stick around here and somehow survived, it’s our duty to bring them home safe. And besides, if we do find survivors, you know we need the help.”
“Can’t argue with that. Maybe we can finally start getting actual downtime and have some fun.”
“Fun?” said Kyla. She tensed up. That feeling again . . .
“Okay, there it is,” said Jordy, pointing. “I have visual.”
Kyla saw it now, too: a small metallic flashing, reflections of the roiling storm. They were closing fast. Kyla reversed the thrusters and burned, slowing them down. “Anything?” she said.
“I’m running scans now. It’s hot enough, but so far no life-forms.”
The shape grew, and Kyla could make out the curves and jagged edges. A military transport, she thought, or what was left of one. The front half was intact but it was blown apart at its middle, trailing a tangled mess of electrical innards and chunks of its fuselage. “Doesn’t look promising.”
“Nope. Life signs officially negative. Oh well.”
Kyla watched the wreck drift by. No signs of fires or light inside. She turned away, biting her lip. “Maybe it was left behind.”
“Maybe,” Jordy said quietly.
“Attention, Gamma Fleet, all ships reporting top-off and our safe window is closing. Break off your current course and return to the portal, over.”
Kyla keyed the mic. “Roger.” She reversed course and burned the engine. “Guess that’s that.”
Jordy exhaled. He gazed out the side of the cockpit as a V-shaped formation of five ships soared past them, their wide, oval-shaped wings glowing iridescent green. “Looks like success. Man, I bet those things are fun to fly.”
“Yeah.” Kyla lingered on the supernova storm, its undulating waves making the stars behind it wobble and shimmer. I’m sorry, she thought, and had to clench her gut again. It didn’t seem fair to anyone, least of all to her and Jordy and the rest of the crew. A hopelessness gathered inside and shuddered from her stomach to her shoulders. What kind of universe let this sort of thing happen?
An alarm flashed on the dashboard.
“Aw, man,” said Kyla. She bent and fished into the leather bag she’d attached to her seat belt.
“Really?” said Jordy. “Another cascading event?”
“Looks like it.”
“Why can’t they get these things under control?”
“Have you ever looked at those portal systems? It’s a wonder we don’t end up with two heads using all this crazy technology.”
Kyla produced a copper-colored metal cube. Through a clear window she saw the current date and time on a digital watch face held inside. “All right, we should be okay, just hang on.”
The alarm went from beeping to buzzing, and all at once the space around them and within them seemed to light up in sizzling white.
Kyla’s head split with pain, and she felt a flash of burning, followed by a sensation as if her arms and legs were gone, as if she was floating, nothing. Except also everywhere. Sound was gone. Just white. She opened her eyes—or maybe they had been open and her brain simply needed a minute to believe what it was seeing—and saw many versions of herself, as if she were standing in a square of mirrors reflecting infinitely back on one another. Except this wasn’t quite that, because in one direction she saw herself younger, and a teen, a child, and yet somehow many, many versio
ns of each, fanning out, and in the other direction she got older, her hair graying, skin sagging, her body eventually suspended in some sort of gold-plated geriatric suit. And even further in the first direction she was an infant and then there was a red darkness and then something like starlight and back in the other direction there was something like a brain in a clear box of turquoise liquid and then also red darkness and more starlight.
All of this was very large. And getting larger by the moment, except it seemed that there was no moment, just more versions of her expanding and expanding outward from her present self—
And just as suddenly all of it was gone and Kyla was back in the cockpit, singular, buckled in her seat, blinking and looking out the cockpit window at the yellow fire of the supernova.
“Aaaooow.” Jordy winced, rubbing his palm against his temple. “That always hurts!”
“No kidding,” Kyla croaked. “What does the computer say?”
“Hold on.” Jordy fished an injector out of his thigh pocket and stabbed himself in the side of the neck with it. He spasmed, briefly, and held it out to her. “Want some?”
“No, thanks.” She was still seeing double and her head felt like she imagined a piece of synthetic steak felt as it was being freeze-dried, but the pain blockers Jordy preferred dulled her reflexes too much for flying.
Jordy checked the comms. “The ship thinks it’s the year 8047.”
“Okay.” Kyla opened a panel in the bottom of the copper box, whose internal clock hadn’t changed. She uncoiled a small magnet cup and affixed it to the console. “Resetting actual time.”
The box hummed. All the lights on the console flashed and the readouts spun and realigned themselves with normal old present time.
“Everyone all right out there?” the captain asked.
“No!” Jordy moaned.
“We’re fine, Cap,” said Kyla, “just rebooting the clock. That one seemed more severe to us, sir.”
“They are getting worse.”
“Did we lose anybody?”
“Negative. No reports of paradox psychosis. But the sooner we wrap up this mission, the better.”
“Copy that—we’re on our way.” Kyla burned the thruster again, increasing their speed. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, trying to move away from that strange sensation, the vision of herself in so many forms. All of them had seemed like ghosts. And yet more. And it made her feel like she herself, here and now, was somehow less real.
“Whoa, heads up,” said Jordy.
“What?” Kyla turned her head too fast and it lit up with pain.
Another red light had started blinking in the navigation map.
“Looks like we’ve got one more out here.”
“It’s probably just another ghost ship. We’re on beam for the portal.” She looked back at the nova storm again. “You heard the captain—sooner we wrap, the better.”
“Mmmm . . .” Jordy tapped the controls. “I don’t know, scans are showing a more organized heat map from this one.”
“Like what?”
“Signatures consistent with life-forms.”
“How many?”
“More than one. Fewer than five.”
“Jeez, be a little less specific.”
“Scanners are on the fritz with this storm, not to mention that time freak-out back there. We’ll have to get closer to find out.”
“Captain won’t like it.”
“Captain doesn’t like anything.”
Kyla flexed her fingers and sighed.
“Okay, wait—” Jordy adjusted the scanner. “There, two life-forms. Confirmed.”
“What kind of ship are they in? If it’s military—”
“I can’t tell. Not getting a reading from the ship anymore. I— Come on!”
“What?”
“They’re gone.”
“How can they be gone?”
“Well, I don’t know. All this interference. Might just be an error. Or they might have just died while we were watching.”
“Can you lock on their last known coordinate?”
“Already done. It’s close to the portal, actually. We’d barely have to slow down.”
“You had to say that.”
“It is technically our mission.”
Kyla sighed, still heavy inside. Do what needs to be done, Mom scolded.
“Miss you,” Kyla said to herself. Suddenly she was back at the launch on Mars, hugging them both, crying and secretly hoping they might cry too, but of course they didn’t.
“Huh?” said Jordy.
“Nothing.” Kyla shook her head. “All right, I’m initiating intercept. Captain,” she hailed. “We’ve got a possible live one out here. Won’t hold us up too long, over.”
There was a long pause.
“I told you,” Kyla muttered to Jordy.
“Affirmative,” the captain finally replied. “Make it quick.”
“All right, let’s go save some lives,” said Jordy.
“Right.” As Kyla burned on an intercept route, her heart leaped. A little bit of good they could do. It would be nice, considering what was already done.
12
DISTANCE TO DELPHI: 547,000 KM
Liam’s next thought was that he had just been without thought, without anything, like a wave was receding, but instead of water there had been nothing—a hollow, cold absence. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he’d just been, and a new fear spiked through him, as if he couldn’t actually recall anything about himself—
But then he remembered that doorway in the timestream, their classroom on Mars frozen around them, and then that rippling black and the feeling of falling. In the dark, it had seemed for a moment as if he had seen something huge and geometric, like a cityscape, or a ship, black and smooth and hulking . . . but it had been only a glimpse.
Before that, they’d been on Phoebe’s home world. Telos, which was Aaru-5. Before that, on the cruiser, escaping Delphi.
Shouldn’t he still have been able to see his body back there? Except Liam felt a cold sensation on his cheek. He picked up his head and saw that he was lying on a floor made of carpeted panels and gazing at a wall with a closed door. It was very quiet, just a sort of breezy sound, a distant whirring like fans. Cold, too. But the light was red. Flashing.
He turned his head and saw that he was on a walkway. There was a railing beside him. Beyond the railing, hundreds of meters away across a vast space, he saw a long swath of green grass crisscrossed by white paths. And even though he was looking sideways at it, it was somehow also beneath him.
He lurched up to his knees and took in the huge cylindrical space around him lined with walkways that each passed hundreds of doors. A starliner core—the Scorpius! Unbelievable! Somehow they had traveled across space. Could that be possible?
Red lights flashed silently on every deck. Everyone must be in stasis, part of the emergency protocol.
Phoebe groaned. She was lying on her back a few meters down the walkway, rubbing her face. Liam saw that the watch was blinking blue on her wrist, and while that at least meant it was working normally again, it also meant they were in danger.
“Phoebe.” Liam crawled over to her and shook her shoulder. “Look where we are!”
“Everything hurts,” said Phoebe. She blinked, and as she saw what was around them, her eyes went wide. She bolted up. “The Scorpius? How did we get here?”
“I don’t know. That door. It’s like we teleported or something.”
Phoebe slowly got to her feet and looked down at herself. “I can’t see my body back in the cruiser anymore.” She tapped her arm. “Feels solid. Are we really here?”
Liam hopped up. “I think so.” He glanced around, half expecting to find that trapezoidal doorway still nearby somewhere, except he didn’t see it.
The staterooms were all closed, with red lights beside their entry panels, indicating that the doors were locked, the pods inside in stasis. Liam leaned on the railing. The park, the glass
domes of its restaurants and common halls, all still. No movement on any of the other walkways either. Just the whirling of the red emergency lights. He pulled out his beacon and pressed the glass top. It didn’t blink back.
A low rumble shook the ship and pressed on Liam’s ears.
“That didn’t sound good,” said Phoebe. She looked out over the railing. “This core seems different than it did in our orientation, doesn’t it?”
“I guess. I don’t know. Let’s find a VirtCom port and figure out where we are.” Liam started down the walkway. As he walked, he realized that Phoebe was right; there was definitely something different about this core from the one he’d seen in the orientation guide. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But his head still ached, his thoughts were still foggy. How in the world had they gotten here?
He reached a gap between staterooms, expecting to find a panel where he could access the VirtCom and other passenger systems, but the wall was blank. He noticed, too, that the door to his right had a green light instead of a red one. He pressed the access panel and it slid open. Empty inside. No stasis pods. No personal effects. Not even any furniture other than the modular desk and table that were built into the wall. He was surprised that there could be any spare rooms, especially with one of the cores damaged. And the stasis pods clearly hadn’t been ejected, because then the back wall of this stateroom would be open to the vacuum of space.
The ship shook again, the rumble interrupted by a distant crashing sound.
Liam turned around and studied the expanse of the core. “There aren’t any of those cable transports,” he noticed now, “the ones you use to get from one deck to another. They were everywhere in the orientation.”
“Maybe this core doesn’t have them?” said Phoebe.
“No climbing domes, either, the ones that could simulate gravity on different planets. And . . .” He noted other doors here and there on other decks with green lights. “I don’t get how there could be so many empty rooms.”
“Maybe they didn’t have time to finish all the cores?” said Phoebe. “I mean, the departure date kept getting moved up.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t explain the empty rooms. Unless . . .”
The Oceans between Stars Page 17
