Illuminae
Page 30
Seven days since the Hypatia swept the debris fields and found the impossible. Kady Grant, half-dead in one of the Alexander’s only two surviving escape pods. From the other, Sergeant Kyra Tan howled threats at them and all their mortal descendents, and with reluctance, they left her where they found her.
Seven days since they reeled their savior in, left her in Shuttle Bay 1B to wait and see if Phobos Beta would come calling for her, or if she’d live.
After the first day, the symptoms of acute radiation poisoning began to recede, and she was able to uncurl a little, to move. To walk a slow lap of the shuttle bay, listening to her footsteps echo in the distance. And eventually to curl up on her hard bed once more, and wait.
It really didn’t look like victory.
The shuttle bay footage is of particularly high quality; the technicians monitoring her were nervous, made sure they could capture every pixel. But she showed no symptoms, and obediently offered her arm for a blood sample when the doctor made his house calls, wrapped head to foot in his bright green plastic suit.
No Phobos Beta. No hallucinated fears. Everything she feared had already come true. Hallucinations simply couldn’t beat the real thing.
This transcript begins at 16:22 hours, when a loud thunk echoes around the shuttle bay, signaling the airlock seal has been broken. With a long, low rumble the door begins to cycle open, light streaming in through the crack. She simply lies there, gazing into space, arms wrapped around herself.
A voice rises over the door’s rumble—male, teenaged, impatient. “Let me in, before I—”
Though she’s lying still on the bed, there’s a different quality to her stillness now. She heard the voice. She knows exactly who it sounds like. And the knowing, the remembering, cuts like a knife, because she knows it isn’t true.
The voice again, lifted to a shout: “Kady!”
She pushes upright like an old woman, one hand braced against the cold benchtop, levering herself up with a wince, until she sits. Then, deliberately, she swings her legs over the edge, so she’s sitting upright.
Second Lieutenant Ezra Mason stumbles through the door and comes to a halt a few steps inside the shuttle bay. She’s never seen him like this—in a clean UTA uniform, pips on his sleeve, hair cut regulation short, one arm in a cast from wrist to elbow.
He holds a battered and familiar datapad in his other hand.
She stares at him, expressionless. Eventually, she blinks slowly, draws the only possible conclusion. “I am sick. I thought the afflicted were supposed to see things that scared them.”
He shakes his head, walks closer slow and careful, as though he might spook her.
“You’re not sick,” he whispers.
“You’re dead,” she points out, voice rusty with disuse.
“Just a little messed up,” he murmurs, lifting his hand to show her the cast. “I took a beating when they attacked the shuttle bay, but I got out with the evac group.”
She shakes her head, matter-of-fact in her contradiction. “Even if you made it over here, Captain Boll flushed all the Cyclone pilots out the airlock. I couldn’t get the full name list, but Mikael—Chatter—from your wing, he was there. You would have been there, too.”
A shadow passes across his features at that. “I couldn’t fly my Cyclone over, not with a broken arm. I was med-evaced in one of the shuttles.” A ghost of his old smile. “Once I found out you’d flown over to the Alexander, I wanted to follow you. Tried to steal a ship, and when that didn’t work, I busted my way onto the bridge.” He pauses to shake his head. “I tried to make them turn around to get you. They brigged me.” His voice breaks. “I’m sorry, Kades. I shouldn’t have let them leave you.”
She considers that, holding perfectly still. Turning the logic over in her head, examining it from every angle. Analytical mind looking for the flaw that’ll tell her she’s hallucinating. That she’s sick, or dead, or still in the escape pod, submerged in fever dreams.
But she can’t find it.
“Ezra.” The dawn of hope in her whisper.
He nods, swallowing hard.
She pushes to her feet, swaying, and the movement seems to release him—the next moment he’s running across the shuttle bay, watched by the debrief crew in the doorway who know better than to move a muscle.
She steps forward, one foot, then the other, and then he reaches her, and they come together with a crash. Her arms curl up around his neck, and his mouth finds hers like he’s drowning and she’s air, and her feet come clean off the ground as the world is forgotten.
And they’re together.
Acknowledgments
Books aren’t created in a vacuum. Even books that are set there. And while insane artificial intelligences and collapsing holes in spacetime and Phobos viruses are all up there on the spooky scale, nothing is quite so terrifying as the thought of living in a universe without people as awesome as these:
Our wonderful readers: Lindsay Ribar, Beth Revis, Marie Lu, S. Jae-Jones, Michelle Dennis, Olivia Davis, Susan Dennard, and Julie Eshbaugh. Thank you for your hours and insight. We hope you never find your saliva boiling on your tongue in the cold void of space. Marie, for your early and constant championing of this story, we also hope you never find yourself unexpectedly shivved through the eyehole of your hazmat suit by a small child.
Our advisors: thanks are due to Dr. Kate Irving for insight on all things medical and plaguey (yes, that IS a word), Tsana Dolichva for countless course corrections and endless patience in the realm of astrophysics, David Taylor for wisdom on computers and the hacking thereof, Dr. Sam Bowden and Dr. Thalles DeMelo for stolen psyche profiles, Soraya Een Hajji for all things Latin, Christopher Guethe for an unforgettable tour around the NASA JPL labs, and Hank Green and the team at SciShow Space (noooooo eeeeedge) for the hours of useful trivia. May you never have your hearts ripped out and dragged around like bloody teddy bears by psychotic eight-year-olds.
The Random Housers: Many thanks to our wonderful editor, Melanie Cecka, for boundless enthusiasm, insight, and taking a chance on this oh-so-strange bookthing; Karen Greenberg for doing all the real work; Alison Impey, Ray Shappell, Isabel Warren-Lynch, Stephanie Moss, and Heather Kelly for inspired design (and putting up with our endless questions); our copy editors, Janet Wygal, Alison Kolani, and Artie Bennett—we are soooo sorry, please forgive us. In production, Tim Terhune; in managing editorial, Shasta Clinch—thank you! At Knopf, Nancy Hinkel; and at RHCB, Barbara Marcus and Judith Haut—thank you, thank you, and thank you! May your throats never be snipped open by a lunatic with a set of pinking shears.
Anna McFarlane and the amazing team at Allen & Unwin: Thank you for giving Illuminae its Australian home and for all your wonderful support. May you never be run over by a seventeen-year-old in a stolen truck after you shot her ex-boyfriend.
Our agents: Josh and Tracey Adams, Matt Bialer, Lindsay “LT” Ribar, Stephen Moore, and Stefanie Diaz. Without your mighty advocacy and support, we’d still be at the pub, scribbling on the backs of napkins. We hope you’re never incinerated in a nuclear firestorm initiated by a mostly insane artificial intelligence off the shoulder of Kerenza VII.
Nic Crowhurst and the Internal Revenue Service, thank you for bringing us together. May you never find yourself solving Alcubierre’s quandary on the walls of your domicile in your own blood.
Christopher Tovo, thank you for making us look way cooler than we ever do in real life. May no one ever scoop your eyes out with a sharpened spoon to stop you from looking at them.
Jens Kidman, Fredrik Thordendal, Tomas Haake, Mårten Hagström, Dick Lövgren, Maynard James Keenan, Adam Jones, Danny Carey, Justin Chancellor, Winston McCall, Oliver Sykes, Ian Kenny, Ludovico Einaudi, Burton C. Bell, Robb Flynn, D. Randall Blythe, Mark Morton, Chris Adler, Willy Adler, John Campbell, Mitch Lucker, Matthew Bellamy, Christopher Wolstenholme, and Dominic Howard—our gratitude for t
he endless inspiration. May your Warlocks never be cut to pieces by an untrained seventeen-year-old with no prior DGS experience.
All the readers, booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and bloggers who have supported us on this journey so far. We love you. May you never find yourself impaled by shrapnel during the carpet bombing of your home planet.
Jay’s grimy band of nerds and neckbeards: Marc, Surly Jim, B-Money, the goddamn Batman, Rafe, Weez, Sam, Patrick, Whitey, Tomas, Dandrew, Beiber, and the Dread Pirate Glouftis. May you never find yourself beheaded by psychotics and (what’s left of) your body laid out to form part of a cryptic message in Hangar Bay 4.
Amie’s indispensable sanity-keepers and support network: Meg (I put in extra blood, just for you), Marie, Leigh, Beth, Kacey, Soraya, Kate, Michelle, Hannah, Nic, Flic, the Roti Boti clan, the Pub(lishing) Crawl gang, Team FOS, and the Plot Bunnies. May you never find yourself shot in the face by a private you thought was your friend.
Our families, who barely ever ask how we turned out this way when they raised us so well, thank you for your constant support. May you never find yourself flushed into the cold vacuum of space by a very nervous former chief of navigation.
And last, but more than anyone else, thank you to Amanda and Brendan, for more than we know how to say. Without you, nothing.