Screw being alone.
That was the thought that got me moving again and on the hunt for someone who could actually help. There was something wrong with the AI, that much was as obvious as gravity, and someone needed to fix her. I was about as good with fixing shit as I was at operating the stasis pods. Of course, getting out of stasis had been the easy part.
Thanks, Onah. Not.
The stasis unit is a six-metre-long rectangle that houses my family’s pods. Four pods side-by-side, a curving bulkhead creating the ceiling and the opposite wall. One end is a door and the other is another bulkhead. It’s got the only decoration in the otherwise bland unit with its not-quite-white walls. Big red letters are painted on it, each one the length of my forearm. “Emergency supplies”, it reads.
It’s not quite the last thing I saw before Mum sealed me in my pod, but it’s not far off. I try not to think about why it’s there, or why we might need the supplies behind it. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I hadn’t been born in space where everything outside the Citlali’s bulkheads would kill me.
The other end of the unit is a thick, round door. And it won’t bloody open.
‘Come on, Citlali, let me out!’
‘The door is open Kuma.’
‘It. Is. Not!’ I spit each word out as I push against the steelcrete. There’s sweat trickling down my spine. I’ve been at this for a while now, since right after I finished screaming at the avatar. Not my proudest moment. I give the door one final shove, gripping the latch in both hands and straining with every muscle in my body. Which really isn’t saying that much. Mum’s always at me to spend more time with the other kids in the gym, but... Ugh. Scrawny is as scrawny does I’d say, right before I remind her that an exosuit doesn’t care if my muscles bulge like Mac’s or not. Then Dad’ll say something about not always having an exosuit and Grea...
The tightness floods back to my chest, rushing from the silence in my head. I’ve never been unable to sense anybody before and it’s so... empty. So still.
I bang my forehead against the door. Not now. Freak out later, get the door open.
Get the door open.
That light suddenly pouring out of my ears? That’s the glow going off in my head.
‘Shit.’ Sometimes I’m an idiot. Grea will argue that I’m always an idiot, but she’s biased. I push my mind away from thoughts of my sister. We’re not thinking about her right now, we’re thinking about getting out of the stasis unit so I can track down Jim Engineer and tell him his precious AI is shit-for-brains fucked.
It’s right after Mae Lu finishes drilling emergency revival procedures into our heads, that Jim doubles down on the boredom with a “refresher” course on stasis units. I never really get past the bit where he drones on about how each unit is a self-sustaining lifeboat and how to... blah, blah, blah. That’s the point where I tend to sneak off. But Dad caught me one day and well, he made Mae Lu seem nice. Which is why now, I remember there’s an emergency door release.
I’m on my knees on the deck, twisting the little button that should... A pop of air and then a section of the door comes out in my hands. It’s not an actual section of the door, just a plate. Behind it, nestled in a cut-out the size of my head, is a square handle. The emergency release. There’s writing here too. “Twist and pull.”
I grip it with both hands, set my feet and twist. The handle doesn’t budge.
A thought sneaks into the back of my mind that maybe I should have listened to Mum about the gym, but I ignore it in favour of setting my feet and twisting harder. I throw everything I have into it, from my toes to my teeth. In fact, I reckon if I tighten my jaw any harder my teeth are going to shatter and then—
There’s a groan and then I’m flying forward, and it’s not the jaw clenching that’s going to pulverise my teeth, it’s the decking. My nose smacks into the floor, my chin and forehead not far behind. I’m going to have grate marks imprinted on my face for the rest of eternity, but at least the door’s open, or partly open.
‘Kuma, are you well?’
I really wish the AI would stop asking that. ‘No,’ I mutter and pick myself up. That’s when I notice the blood on my lip and the droplets on the floor. I run my tongue over my teeth to check they’re still there. Everything seems fine except for the numbness in my lip. Out the corner of my eye I notice critters rolling toward me, come to clean up yet more biological muck. I’ve never really seen them this diligent before, swarming on every little speck of dirt like they don’t have anything else to do. Maybe they don’t. The crew’s not exactly meant to be awake yet.
Guess that makes me special.
The handle’s popped out of its hollow. Once again, I wrap my hands around it, but instead of twisting this time I pull. The pull comes easier, or maybe it was as hard as the twist but I was expecting it? I don’t know and I don’t really care, the only thing that’s important is that the stasis door is open. It rolls aside, opening up onto darkness.
When I said darkness, I hadn’t mean that comforting kinda dark with the soft glow of distant light, or even the slightly more nerve-wracking darkness of a full-on blue out. The light from the stasis unit is far behind me, so far behind I can’t even pick out the soft residual glow of where it might have been.
This darkness is absolute.
I might as well be walking down the corridor with my eyes shut, except there’d be more light then, even if it was only imagined.
And it would really have stuffed up following the map on my palm unit.
And that would have made finding Jim Engineer’s pod kinda interesting. And not in the good way.
The Citlali shouldn’t be this dark. There are all sorts of lights on a ship like this. Emergency lights. Lift lights. Display lights. Lights that come on when you have to go for a pee at night. Lights that simply are. Even the walls glow, a faint sheen that’s only perceptible when it’s not there. Hell, the critters glow. But there’s none of that here, nothing save what’s on the screen floating above my palm, and even that is barely enough to make out the deck plating.
The corridor I’m in winds around in a gentle curve with the spokes of the hallways cutting through it. The curve isn’t something you’d really notice, not where I am, on the outer ring of Stasis deck, where my family’s unit is, but once you wander down one of the spokes, toward the Core, the curve gets really obvious.
I follow the map down one of those spokes. Jim Engineer should be somewhere in the middle ring, not quite as protected as the inner rings – reserved for the sick folk and really important people – but doing better than the Darzis. Engineers being a little harder to come by than xenobiologists, or at least that’s what Dad says.
And you know, I get it, I really do. If a meteorite hits the ship, it’s the engineers you don’t want getting blown into space, since they’re the ones who can put the ship back together and all.
I hope I find Jim soon.
As much as the darkness bothers me, it’s the cold and silence that feeds the creepy-crawlies nesting behind my ribs. There is nothing in the corridor, not even the hum of the Citlali’s engines or the hush of the air cyclers. Every sound echoes, from my boots on the deck to the rustle of my clothes. Not even the AI is around. I left its avatar in the unit, waiting in the doorway like she was waving me off to war or something. And the cold... my breath frosts on the air and my nose is a leaky block of ice. I keep wiping it on my sleeve but it keeps dripping. I’d be worried the enviro systems weren’t working, except I haven’t suffocated yet and my toes haven’t fallen off, so there’s got to be something on.
‘Come on, come on, come on.’ I mutter to myself to keep the silence at bay, but each word booms and echoes. Somehow the echo makes the silence worse, talking back to me in my own voice, but different. Hollow. Lost. Ghostly. Reminding me of Mum and Dad and Grea in their pods. Thinking of them turns my thoughts to the rest of the crew in their pods, floating in stasis gel while they wait for Citlali to cross the cold dark between solar systems.
They’re all around me, silent as the dead. It’s freaking me out, and if the memory of the biting thing in my mind and the sharp sting of fear in Onah’s wasn’t making a knot at the back of my skull, I’d try reaching out to them. Skim their emotions and invade their privacy merely to reassure myself they’re still alive. I swallow and make a turn at the next ring, trying to keep my eyes off the dark outlines of circular doors, each one another stasis unit. There could be corpses behind those doors. Dead people that I once knew.
A name pops up on the map and I stop. Macario. Mac.
My best friend is in there. Should I go in, try to wake him up?
The temptation is strong, but then I think of Grea and the fug, and then, instead of Grea, I imagine Mac curled up in his pod, and the pit in my chest yawns.
I scuttle back from the hatch, breathing hard. It takes me awhile to bring my breathing under control and when I do, my heart’s still pounding, almost, but not quite filling the silence. I swallow it back and straighten my shoulders.
I need to find Jim Engineer.
His unit is up ahead. Another hundred metres and I’m there, standing in front of the portal, pressing the release. Frankly, I don’t know why I bothered.
Like in my unit, nothing happens. The controls are as dead as a black dwarf star.
I’m down on my knees again, pushing at the emergency panel embedded in the door, the deck icy even through my pants.
The panel pops out with a hiss of air, but only a few millimetres. I scratch at the opening, trying to hook my fingernails between the panel and the door. I manage to grab it, just a little, and pull. It doesn’t budge.
I’m getting really sick of things not budging.
I try again, digging my fingernails in as deep as they’ll go, setting my forehead against the steelcrete and bracing my whole body to pull.
And land on my butt with a hot, ragged pain in my index finger. I stick it in my mouth, tasting blood from a torn fingernail as I inspect the panel.
‘Fuck.’
It hasn’t budged. Not so much as a nanometre.
Sitting back and kicking the door is like spitting at Citlali’s avatar. It makes me feel better but doesn’t do a whole lot of good. And it doesn’t make me feel better for long. The hollow echo of boot on hatch makes the silence deeper, playing again and again through the empty corridors. Alone, alone, alone it says.
I kick the door again to show the silence I don’t care.
I’m sure it believes me as much as the pit in my chest does.
I need a pry bar to peel the panel away and get at the emergency release. Anything stronger than the keratin in my fingernails will do. I think.
I hope.
That’s what I’m telling the panic building in my chest. That’s what I’m telling myself. So that’s what I’m going to do.
Now if only I knew where to find a pry bar.
I’m on my feet, jabbing at the raised square of flesh in the bend of my elbow that activates my palm unit. The subdermal’s pretty basic and I probably should have taken the time to grab the biocomp out of my locker, but it’ll do. The screen pops back up above my palm, the map with it. It’s only a partial map, but it’s better than nothing. The Citlali AI may be frizting, where it’s not down altogether, but the subdermal still works a treat. Too bad most of its functions are tied to the ship. The only reason I have the map is because I downloaded it before going to stasis/sleep.
There’s a maintenance locker on every deck, tools to be used in emergencies, or when you can’t be stuffed trudging up to Engineering. I head for the centre of Stasis. The lockers are scattered all over the place, not always in the same location. There should be one on this ring but the spoke is around the corner and the Core not far from that, and there’s always a locker there.
I should probably know the layout of the ship better; I’ve spent my entire life aboard Citlali. Like. My. Entire. Life. But everything’s different in the dark, and Stasis has never been one of my favourite places. All the empty pods, all that time spent doing nothing except dreaming and sleeping. Waking up a centimetre taller than when you went to sleep. It’s pretty disturbing, even for me. So I’m following the map, using it half as a guide and half for the light it casts.
The thump of my boots on the deck continues to echo, but I’m trying to ignore that. Focusing instead on the first time Dad took me planet-side.
I’d stepped out of the shuttle, watched my boots hit the moon’s surface with a lazy crunch, glanced up and… freaked. It was the sky. No amount of lying on your back, gazing up at the Atrium’s holographic clouds can really prepare you for that. Or, at least, that’s what Mum tried to tell me while Grea laughed her arse off.
I’ve gone EVA before but staring up at that thin blue sky was different from floating in space. It felt like I was going to fall into it like… rage. What? No, that’s not right. That rage isn’t even mine.
I stop, rub my eyes and try to sort the pounding in my head. There’s a wave of emotion in there that’s not mine. It’s strong and has that sharp jangle only the kin have. Somewhere in my daydreaming it crept up on me like the scent of Mum’s cooking, gentle and patient, but now it’s a roar commanding me to listen.
Someone’s awake. Someone besides me, is awake!
It’s a rucnart, one of the gigantic feline-like tree-kin, that much is obvious from the roar, but I reach back, opening myself up to it.
Opening yourself up to a rucnart is like putting your hand in its mouth. Kinda stupid and best not attempted without medical supervision, but I’m desperate.
Of all of the kin, rucnarts are the most volatile. The qwans are crafty, their minds honed to icy daggers while the tree-kin – the rucnarts – are roiling balls of barely-leashed violence, pushing menace ahead of them like a star pushes light. Even if they weren’t the height of a human and twice as long, with six legs and all the claws and teeth to match, you’d leave them alone.
But like I said, I’m desperate.
An empath doesn’t listen so much as feel. Anger. Pain. Fear. The rucnart’s emotions rocket into me one by one, each hitting harder than the last, pounding at the barrier between what is me and what is not.
My knees tremble. The fear is an ugly yellow wave winding around my heart while the anger wraps around the fear, tries to pry it free, and the pain... The sound that comes out of my throat isn’t me, it’s small and scared and everything the mind behind the command doesn’t want to experience. I try to shove the emotions away, try to block them from my psyche, but the other mind pushes. I push back. It pushes again, harder this time, trying to escape its pain by giving it to me. But it’s not my pain and I won’t take it. I. Won’t.
Shutting my psyche down takes more effort than it should, leaving me breathing hard in the darkness, the glow from the map scrunched up against my chest. There aren’t many aboard Citlali strong enough to match me, not even among the kin, or so I’ve been told (not even I’m stupid enough to challenge a rucnart or qwan to a psionic weigh-off) but that’d been close. And I can’t help but wonder who it was.
Slowly, carefully, I reach back along the remnants of the link, trying to find who it belongs to. The anger snaps at me first, sharp glistening teeth trying to sink into my brain. I make myself slippery and ghost-like and sidle past it and the teeth latch on to nothing. The emotions get thicker the closer I am to the source. Like before, they try to wrap me up and pin me in place, but like before I flit past. The pain comes next and then the fear.
Slipping into a rucnart’s mind is nothing like slipping into Mum’s or sharing thoughts with Onah. Mum is... well, Mum. Warm and comforting, reminding me of home. I’ve never really shared Onah’s mind before. We’ve talked, like in the Dreaming, him picking thoughts out of my head and me picking thoughts out of his, but being in his mind? Where there’s an entire world between human and Jørgen minds, there’s a galaxy between Jørgen and the native Jørans we’re modelled after. We feel different, for one. Human minds, even the mostly-human ones, are... static. They have colour and flavour but they don’t move like Jørgen minds do, don’t snap and hiss.
Our minds, Jørgen minds, are restless knots of energy, always moving, glowing even on the psionic plane we call the eter. And Jøran minds... well, take the restlessness of a human-Jøran hybrid and slide it all the way up to one trillion.
Even skimming the rucnart’s mind is like being in a hurricane. She sweeps me up and whirls me around, the force and restlessness of her psyche trying to hook claws under my shields, trying to tear them away and... get in? Underneath all the pain and fear and anger, there was desperation.
The rucnart, p’Endr, was trapped inside her pod. That realisation pulls me out of her clutches, landing me back in my own body before the next thought goes through my mind. P’Endr was awake, not in some kind of induced hibernation, but awake. Eyes open with goo down her throat and in her lungs, watching as the same fug that’s crawling over my sister’s pod, crawls over hers. I shudder. For a nanosecond, I’d felt the fug clumping in her fur, swimming in the stasis gel, tasted it as it floated in her mouth. I can still taste it on my tongue – cold with the sharp tang of copper but something else as well, something that reminds me of maggots.
Nausea rides up my throat. I gag.
I have to get p’Endr out. That decision isn’t quite mine; I can tell by the way it burrows into my brain, like a slither of ice seeking out my heart. As short as my contact was, p’Endr managed to plant a command. I could ignore it, pluck it out and trash it like one of the worms on Ag deck. But it wouldn’t do any good.
P’Endr didn’t need to give me a command. I’m already racing toward her.