by M. R. Holman
began to slow. She knew the problem. In her time experimenting with the machine before the race, she had discovered that the carburetor, the primitive fuel delivery system, would sometimes get its components stuck. She rapped the side of it with her knuckles like she was knocking on a door.
That did it. The bike backfired, shooting flames out of the exhaust pipes and onto the sand as the sound of freedom echoed across the dunes. She gasped and sped forward faster than ever. It was an immense chore to even hold on. Her breaths became short and labored. Her vision swam. Her left arm was numb and she was only vaguely aware of her location in relation to the ship. She looked for the wristwatch on the handlebars and dimly registered that she could no longer see. She let go of the throttle and rolled.
At some point she hit the ground. She knew that it had happened but she did not feel it, at least not in the normal sense. Kendra lied still in the sand for a moment, but then realized she had begun to move again. Her helmet had slid down over her goggles and she could not see anything. She tried to feel the ground, to pat her hands against the sand to see if she was still sliding, but her hands could not find a solid object. Was she flying? Was she floating? Was this death? In her impaired state she did not know or care. She did not know if she still had time or if time even existed anymore.
Her body stopped moving abruptly. She was lying flat on her back. Kendra extended the fingers on her right hand and felt cool metal. All that she could imagine was that she had somehow found her way back to her motorcycle. She tried to grip the handlebars but all that she could feel was flat. A motor roared to life and she experienced the same sensation she had felt when the bike took off across the beach.
Kendra gasped and opened her eyes wide. Through the dust, moss, and sand flecked across her goggles she saw a crowd of slaves standing above her. They were Percy's other slaves, the slaves she had freed.
"You made it just in time."
"We carried you in."
"Thank you…"
She tried to sit up but her whole body ached. Several of her fellow former slaves helped her to her feet. She raised her bloodstained left arm as best as she could and beckoned to the porthole window. They walked her to it. Kendra lifted her right hand, lowered her goggles to her neck, and watched Echo become an increasingly tiny yellow and blue dot in the otherwise endless expanse of space.
A Meeting of the Black Knight and the White Queen
The hum of an air cleaner was the only sound in the dimly lit recreation room aboard the men’s portion of a spaceship bound for a distant water-laden planet. A man sat alone in a nearly trancelike state, staring at a chess board on the table before him as an endless expanse of stars spilled across the porthole window beside him.
A neatly folded stack of papers sat beside the chess board. At once, the man’s trance broke and he looked at his watch and then stared at the open doorway expectantly. He glanced at his watch again, and then again as he had not actually acknowledged the time on the first two attempts. It had been two hours and ten minutes since the last move had been made on the board, and he knew he would only have to wait one more minute for the next. For reassurance, he checked his watch once more before resting his hands on his lap, his fingers twisting and his palms sweating.
A small, round, automated vacuum cleaner glided through the doorway. A neatly folded piece of paper was taped to the top of it and the man grinned momentarily before stifling his glee, hiding his joy from no one but himself. He leaned down and snatched the paper from the top of the tiny robot. The man’s heart was pummeling his ribs as he fumbled to open the letter as the robotic vacuum cleaner zipped around the room.
The note began:
Knight E3 to take Queen. Check
“Smart move,” he whispered to himself. He moved the pieces on the board and carried on reading the note.
‘You think you’re pretty slick, don’t you Black Knight? Well, I think I’ve got you this time. You never do fail to surprise me though… So I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
I think I’d have gone crazy on this ship if it wasn’t for you and our game. I don’t know why they could not prolong our hibernation cycles so that we could have a companion in our sections during our watch duties... I guess it really is all about money on this expedition.
But… Then again, if I did have a companion in my section I might have never responded to an invitation to a chess game taped to the top of the ship’s automated vacuum cleaner. It’s that kind of creativity that keeps me guessing in our game.
I look forward to the day when we reach our destination, when I can meet you, finally, in person. I’m sure that I’ll know who you are the moment I see you. I just wish it wasn’t so far away. Even with the stints of prolonged suspended animation, the time seems to just drag on and on and on. You’ve been a spark in the otherwise dark and dull time that has been my three month watch.’
The warm feelings began to fade. He became worried. He re-read the line several times before flipping the note over and continuing, hoping that whatever was written there might quell the ominous chill that had sunk to the very core of his being.
‘It’s with a heavy heart that I tell you that this will be my last move in the game. My watch of the female sector ends today and I re-enter suspended animation for three hundred and sixty days. I hope dearly that our watches will coincide again when I am awake. I’m sorry that I did not tell you sooner. I could hardly bare to think about it.
Until we meet in orbit,
The White Queen’
The man’s shoulders slowly sunk to their lowest possible point and he leaned across the table, placing his head in his hands as he read the final line of the note.
‘P.S. I think there is only one move left for you on the board. Do you see it?’
He let the words wash over him. He looked up and they seemed to be burned into his eyes. She had neglected to tell him that her watch was ending. He, however, had neglected to tell her that he was assigned to be the watchman of his sector for the entire mission. There would be no prolonged sleep for him. For him, there would be only three hundred and sixty more torturous days of loneliness until she was awake again. She was the only one that had answered his notes on this mission. He was selected as watchman for his mental fortitude in loneliness simulations, but he discovered over the course of the mission that they were flawed – no one could possibly be prepared for a mission like this.
He stood up with no real plan of what to do next, and realizing this, he sat down again and put his head into his hands. He stood back up and walked to the book shelf in the recreation room, browsed the shelves for roughly a tenth of a second and then returned to the table. He looked down at the board, but there was no real reason to. He knew every piece on the board. He could either go to the white queen with his black knight, taking the queen but leaving his king vulnerable, thus ending the game, or he could move his king behind the black knight, saving him, but only briefly.
He turned to the porthole and gazed into the pinpricks of light shining against the utterly black backdrop of space and put his head against the window. Although it was very thick, it was still chilled by the absolute cold of space. The stars outside of the window were what had drawn him to this mission. He had studied them on earth, surrounded by people, and wished only to be with the stars. Now he was here, and he wanted only to be with another person – the White Queen.
Which move had she been referring to? There were clearly two moves left. Two moves with very different outcomes. One move was immediate and violent, in relative terms, and the other move simply delayed the inevitable…
He walked to the doorway with purpose but halted immediately when he was framed by the metal beams that made up the opening into the room. “One move…” he said to himself over and over. He had realized, of late, that there was a possibility that he was reading too far into her notes. He feared that his mental state had become unstable as he had been deprived of actual human contact for years now. Had he been reading
too much into her notes? Had he been reading too far into their relationship? He wondered if it was appropriate to call it a relationship at all… They merely exchanged notes secretly and played chess remotely…
As he stood in the doorway, teetering on the verge of making a mission and even life altering decision, he hesitated and retreated to the table. He had to be sure before he made his move, but he also had to act quickly. There was no way of knowing how much time remained…
He picked up a letter at random and skimmed through it in a daze. It did not matter, he knew every letter, every word, and every pen stroke as well as he knew each position of each chess piece on the board that the notes laid next to.
Certain words within the notes they had exchanged struck him especially hard in this moment. He had considered, and at times even suspected, that they had been cues or suggestions. Before now, he had resigned that it was his own damnable hope that had led him to these conclusions, but now it was though he was reading them in new light, like he was seeing them clearly for the first time -
‘The white queen isn’t going anywhere as long as the black knight is on the board…’
He threw the note aside and picked up another.
‘…only a little longer until…’
His
