15.0

Bohr’s guest privileges included a stunningly generous water allowance, so Ravi entered the lifeboat for the trip home clean enough to share a watch with Sofia. Outbound, he’d have fried his motherboard to be lying where he was now, smelling halfway decent, lightly strapped in, and with Sofia only centimeters away, running through the last phases of the countdown. Now, however, he couldn’t care less. Truth was, he was terrified of another “episode.” He didn’t want Sofia to be around if he were to have another hallucination, but the alternative, standing watch alone, seemed even worse. At least if he went crazy with Sofia lying next to him, she would be able to stop him from doing something truly stupid, like blowing up the boat.

Between unclamping from the Bohr, orienting the lifeboat’s blunt nose, and firing up the drive, Sofia had directed a stream of friendly, mostly mindless chatter in his general direction, to which he had responded barely, if at all. Trapped in his own head, he simply didn’t have the energy.

That he was nutso, there could be no doubt. There was no girl. She had simply appeared on the couch beside him and vanished in a flash of unjacked agony. It would have been impossible for her to flee the flight deck in that amount of time. And even if she had somehow, she would have floated into Ansimov and Sofia coming the other way.

All of which led to one inescapable conclusion. He would have to drop out. Get treatment before he killed somebody. Find something else to do with his life. His heart pumped lumpily in his chest. More than once, he fought back the urge to cry.

“Ow!”

A jab in the ribs brought him back from the brink.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sofia asked. “You’ve hardly said a word all shift.”

“Nothing.” And then, slightly more honestly: “I’m just not sure I’m cut out to be an engineer, is all.” The thrum of the lifeboat’s engines pushed him gently into his couch. Which was nothing compared to the wheel-load of misery pressing down on him at the same time. This is what happens, his father might have said, when you try to be something you’re not.

“Don’t be silly. Everyone says you’re doing great. Even Warren.” She chuckled quietly. “At least when she’s not going on about your lowlife family.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my family,” Ravi bristled. But in his mind’s eye he could see his mother trying to look presentable in front of the ombudsman. Begging him not to sentence Dad to another bout of torpor. “And even if there was, it’ll be different after planetfall. New start for everybody.”

“You think so?”

“You don’t?”

Bored with using implants, Sofia reached out a slim arm to adjust the instruments.

“Different? Maybe. But probably not better.” Sensing Ravi’s resistance, she turned in her couch to look at him directly. The glow from the control panel threw soft shadows across her body. “Look,” she said. “The fleet’s been out here for one hundred and thirty-two years. Thanks to the LOKIs, we’re the only human beings in deep space, and we’ve become like our own little civilization, you know? A civilization with only a handful of murders, almost no crime—a few delinquents notwithstanding”—she didn’t quite meet Ravi’s eye—“and everyone pretty much gets along with everyone else. When, in all of human history, has that ever happened?”

Ravi nodded in reluctant agreement and stared out the flight-deck window. The star-speckled black gazed back at him.

“Landing on a planet’s not going to change any of that,” he countered after a moment’s thought. “We’ll still be the same people.”

“No, we won’t. Destination World is going to change us because planets aren’t starships. Planets sard you up. We’ll end up like Homeworld, with murders and crime and everyone looking out for themselves.” She was fully animated now, her eyes gleaming with passion. “It’s the ship that keeps us together. The ship that makes us our best selves. If people don’t do their jobs here, other people die. Crappy engineering repair? People die. No-good botanists? People die. Incompetent purser? People die. And everyone knows it.” She put a hand on his wrist, the grip firm, insistent. “Up here, we’re all in this together. Down there? Well . . .” Her voice trailed off. Indescribably sad and more than a little angry.

Ravi could see from the readouts that the soft push of the lifeboat’s engines was beginning to pile on velocity. But for all that, the bright stars remained nailed in place, like lampposts in the dark. They didn’t give a cracked lining about Sofia’s worries. Or his own, for that matter.

“Yeah, well. It’s not like we can do anything about it, is there? Come Braking Day, we’re all going down, whether we like it or not.”

Neither of them spoke much after that.

Profound misery, Ravi discovered, did have one upside. He lacked the mental energy to be sick. He made it all the way back to Archimedes without a single incident. Once aboard, he had thought about going straight to Chen Lai and getting it over with. Instead, though, he had simply headed to his quarters. Looking around the tiny space, he was once again teary-eyed. After tomorrow, he wouldn’t be able to afford it. With a sigh, he slipped out of his fatigues, pulled his bunk down from the wall, and crashed out.

He was staring at a plate. Blue, and yellow, and cursive black in an interlocking pattern of organic molecules.

Mossy tendrils squeezed the roundness out of it, making it jagged and ugly. An irregular triangle of green, replicating itself into a vast, poisonous lawn, across which walked a man in a long coat, and buckled shoes, and an enormous white wig. He was holding BozBall in his hand, plain, and black, and without features. He tossed it into the air and watched it soar into skies seared by a frightening ball of fire. Up and up it went, until the sky blackened, and the ball of fire went away, and a dusty-blue river of stars wound across the universe.

BozBall, blacker than black, continued to climb, reaching for the smoky ribbon of lights far above it. And as it climbed, a little star detached itself from the others and dropped down to meet it. A star that acquired shape, acquired substance. A blunt, rounded nose. A flared stern. A grit-stained hull covered in huge, stenciled numbers. isv-1-lb-03.

The lifeboat, Spirit of St. Petersburg.

BozBall fell toward the lifeboat, bounced against the hull, and grabbed on with spidery legs. It scuttled forward, toward the prow, where a girl with dyed-blond hair and a slightly crooked smile was waiting for it. She scooped it up with one hand and placed it on a panel only centimeters from the thick, tinted window of the flight deck. Her mouth moved out of sync with her voice, which came from far away, whisper-faint.

“Come get it,” she said.

Ravi woke with a start, tensed against the eye-stabbing impact of a headache. Except the headache didn’t come. Still, he didn’t quite trust his implants.

“Lights,” he croaked.

It was barely 0130. Technically morning, but not really. As he opened up his chipset one channel at a time, it was easy to tell that the ship was fast asleep. The flow of data through the hive had slowed to a trickle, just an automated system or two whispering in the night-cycle.

Come get it.

The voice echoed in his head as if the girl were beside him, breathing in his ear. He glanced around, startled. There was no one there.

He settled back on his bunk, uneasy. This, he thought to himself, is what it’s like to go crazy. He closed his eyes, determined to go back to sleep. Might as well get a few more hours of peace before admitting to the whole world he was a nut job.

Come get it.

He screwed his eyes tight shut and forced himself not to react. Crazy was a state of mind. A bad state of mind, to be sure, but a state of mind nonetheless. And it was his mind, no one else’s. He got to decide what went on in there. If he ignored the voice, pretended it wasn’t speaking, it would have to go away. He unclenched his eyelids, forced himself to relax, to take deep, even breaths.

Come get it.

Come get it.

Come get it . . . .

“Shut up!” he shouted, unable to take it anymore. “Shut up, shut up, shut UP!” He was sitting on the edge of his bunk, yelling at an empty room. He caught an unflattering glimpse of himself in the sink mirror, slack-jawed and deranged. He lurched to his feet, scrambled over to his space chest, and dragged on some fatigues.

“Sard you,” he said, still talking out loud. He pulled on his boots. “You want to see crazy? I’ll show you crazy, you bescumbered SOB.” He stumbled out into the darkened corridors, still talking to himself. “I’m not crazy. You’re crazy. And you know what? I’m going to prove it.”

He caught a paternoster to the hubs and jumped viciously “down” in the direction of the boat elevators. He blasted one with a furious stream of code and made it open for him. Only when it started rumbling down the spine on its 3,500-meter journey to the pylons did he realize he’d forgotten to bring any sick bags. As it happened, however, he didn’t need one. He made the trip without incident.

The elevator thudded and hissed as its various airlocks and connectors linked up with Spirit of St. Petersburg. Fortunately, he was still registered on the lifeboat’s system as crew, so he didn’t have to hack the security. The vessel let him in without a whisper of complaint.

Ravi floated into a black void of cold, gasping for breath. The lights and the heaters had been off for hours, and the air was dizzyingly thin. Ship’s Regs required that lifeboats be “habitable” at all times, but heating an empty vessel wasted energy, and air left alone in the compartments would find a way to leak. Most of it had been sucked back into the tanks. Entering a dormant lifeboat wouldn’t kill him, but it wasn’t exactly fun.

Ravi forced himself to calm down and breathe slowly. He reached out with his implants and turned on the lights. Synced to the ship, they were only night-cycle bright. Even so, it was plain to see that the boat’s surfaces were beginning to ice up. They greeted the sudden illumination with a reluctant glitter.

Wishing he’d thought to bring gloves, Ravi drifted “up” through the hold, guiding himself with numb fingers. He flitted quietly through the passenger compartments and the crew spaces, all the way to the flight deck. Once there, he didn’t bother to jack himself in. He didn’t need to fire up the whole boat. All he needed was one little drone. He reached out with his implants until he found it.

The inspection drone was nestled in its usual compartment, midships, in the outer hull and close to a secondary airlock. The flight deck faded into the background as the drone’s sensors flooded his mind’s eye with imagery. The insides of his eyelids were suddenly awash with starlight as the compartment doors cycled open. The drone pushed itself out on a little puff of gas and floated toward the lifeboat’s nose. Distorted by the wide angle of its camera lens, the hull appeared to curve away on all sides like an enormous, convex plain. Sensors sent strings of green numbers across Ravi’s vision. Released from captivity, the drone was doing its job: inspecting. The hull was fine, it kept saying. Everything was nominal.

The curving plain suddenly steepened and fell away as the drone reached the nose. Parts of the flight-deck window floated into view, looking far bigger than it actually was. The drone hovered stoically in place while Ravi got his bearings. It took a few moments, but he managed to find the corner of the window he was looking for. The drone moved slowly now, in parallel with the window’s edge. As it drifted along, Ravi counted the panels. One. Two. Three.

Attached to the fourth panel, only centimeters from the window, was a little black ball.