Shuttle bays are just big airlocks. That thought pops into my head as I stand in front of the one on Ag deck, wishing for something a little more substantial than my shipsuit to protect me. I remember standing in this very spot, rolling my eyes as Dad double-checked the seals on my envirosuit.
‘We’re in the outer hull, kiddo, only the ice hull and thirty centimetres of steelcrete between us and space.’ He’d tugged on my helmet, almost pulling my head off my shoulders.
‘I need my head, Dad.’
He’d bopped me on said head, his fist THUNKING on my helmet’s plasform. ’A micro-fracture in the hull is all it takes, kiddo, and you’re breathing vacuum.’
I’d rolled my eyes again. ‘You can’t breathe in vacuum, Dad. There’s no air.’
His face had turned grim, the skin around his eyes tightening, his mouth firming. ‘Exactly,’ he’d said. He’d turned away but in that second, I’d caught a rush of emotion rolling off him in a black wave of grief.
The memory of it hit me in the gut. I hadn’t asked him about it then, or later. I’d asked Mum, but she’d got that same expression on her face and said she’d tell me some day. An echo of Dad’s emotions had rolled off her before she’d caught it. She’d never told me what caused it but I didn’t really need the details anymore. I recognised that particular, piercing shade of darkness, caught a shadow of it every time I imagined Grea’s hand reaching out of decaying biogel.
Dude fuzzes, trying to comfort me.
I tilt my head enough to feel the smooth, warm glide of Dude’s fur against my chin. Tension runs up and down my spine, making the hair at my nape stand on end as I try to remember where the envirosuits are.
That memory of Ag’s emote is haunting the shit out of me. It’s more than the fact she did it, it’s the chilling menace in her eyes… if I could have crawled back up the air duct to Lab Two to access the shuttle bay there, I would have. If I’d thought I could shoot myself out an airlock and swim to the source of the fug, I’d have done that too, anything but stand here and test my memory of Ag’s expression.
But I can’t do any of those things.
I breathe deep and punch the door controls.
If Ag wants to suck me out into space, she’s going to have to be quick about it.
The shuttle bay is cold enough my breath frosts on the air, which isn’t a good sign. It should be the same temperature as the rest of the deck, pleasant enough that I’m not getting goosebumps under my shipsuit. The only light comes from the hallway, and it throws my shadow across the grated decking, all the way to the sleek-nosed shuttle sitting in the middle of the cavernous space. Wider across than the freight tubes, its wings tucked up against its sides, the shuttle takes up most of the bay. There’s enough room either side for it to lift on its thrusters and turn around.
The height of two decks, the bay is bigger vertically than it is horizontally.
I glance up, catching glimpses of the catwalks overhead and the framework where the other EVA vehicles are stored, their bellies little more than lighter patches of grey in the darkness.
I can’t see the hatch that separates the bay from the launch tunnel, it’s hidden behind the shuttle and smothered in darkness. I’m safe so long as the internal doors are open, or at least that’s the theory, but in theory the captain should have been safe in her stasis unit and Ag shouldn’t been able to emote.
The spare envirosuits are in a locker along one side of the shuttle bay, or at least they should be. Somewhere between Onah pushing me out of stasis/sleep and learning about the beacon, I’ve stopped believing in the way things should be.
A light comes on over the shuttle. A drone hovers over its nose, shedding light like a miniature sun.
‘Ag? Is that you?’
It blinks.
I take that as a yes.
Ice slithers down my spine while I try to get an eye on the suit lockers.
The drone dips and zooms toward the back of the shuttle, away from the inner doors.
Okay. To follow or not to follow? If I go deeper into the bay, I stand less chance of making it out to the safety of the corridor if Ag loses her shit.
The fact that I’m not sensing anything from Ag is what decides for me. As far as my psyche is concerned, it’s just me and Dude up here, playing chicken in the dark.
I follow the drone.
I’m halfway around the shuttle, half my attention on the drone while the rest of me eyeballs the envirosuit lockers. I’ve decided that I can reach one and drag a suit out before Ag opens the outer hatch by more than a few centimetres, long enough to slam a helmet over my head. I might even get a leg on and be able to active the mag boots before the out-rush of air drags me across the deck.
Dude’ll have to hang on though and he might not make it.
Surreptitiously, I bring up my palm unit and make a few modifications to my shipsuit. There’s a tingle over my chest as the nano-fabric adjusts itself, a few seconds and when it’s done my sleeves are up around my elbows, but there’s an expanded Dude-sized pouch over my heart.
The drone has stopped by the shuttle’s tail. It’s hovering at head height, waiting for me.
Casually, I shift Dude from my shoulder to the pouch.
The slow shushing sound doesn’t immediately register in my brain. It’s coming from the shuttle bay doors. Not the inner ones, the ones that lead to the rest of the ship, but the outer ones. The ones that lead to vacuum.
I’m across the decking before my head has time to identify the sound. The locker is under my hand, the panel sliding aside. I grab the suit first, thrusting one leg in, activating the mag boots, just as I planned, before I realise that the outer door isn’t moving. A quick check over my shoulder and yep, the inner doors are open as well.
The drone is bobbing over my head, helpfully directing light into the locker and lighting up the space around me so I don’t have to guess what part of the suit I’m shoving my other leg into.
I look directly at the drone and frown. If I was trying to space someone, I wouldn’t be so helpful.
Since I’m half in anyway, I finish putting the suit on. Not speeding through it, but not dawdling either. Taking the time to make sure the seals are green and the nano-fabric adjusts to the Dude-shaped lump on my chest. I tuck the helmet under my arm. It’s a larger model than the one I grabbed from Ag deck, a transparent dome of plasglas, but my thumb against the rim collapses it into a ring a centimetre thick, ready to slip over my head.
‘So. You’re not trying to kill me.’
The drone blinks.
‘So, what are you doing?’
It zips away, back toward the rear of the shuttle, but this time, instead of hovering, it turns its light on the outer doors.
There’s not much to see, at least not at this distance. I follow the drone and take another look.
The outer doors are made of the same steelcrete as the inner ones, except thicker, without the smooth off-white finish. They’re bigger too, half the height of the shuttle bay and as wide. The engineers had built these two slabs of steelcrete and no one had tried to pretty them up, like someone had decided that we all needed a reminder that these doors were here to keep us safe, not comfortable.
I guess that was the reason for the big, read letters emblazoned on the deck underneath them, and again on the doors themselves. “DANGER. VACUUM.”
I know. It seems kinda redundant, but people are stupid. Grea says that all the time, mostly when she’s looking at me. Onah refines that, he says humans are stupid, and I can never quite tell if he’s including Jørgens in that, or just referring to the full-humans. It doesn’t really matter, because right now I’ve got other things to worry about, like the faint shimmer of light over the steelcrete.
Steelcrete doesn’t shimmer, not on its own at least. I move a few steps closer.
It’s not shimmering on its own now either. There’s ice over the doors, a thick skin of it slithering outwards from what must be a micro-fracture in the hatch. What could crack steelcrete?
I lean closer, then jerk back.
Fug. There’s fug in the ice, trapped in it like… like… fug in ice.
Except the fug’s moving, spreading through the ice in grey-green veins. Growing, expanding… cracking the ice, splitting it, and now the soft shush that drew me here is sharper, louder.
‘Oh shit.’
It was a good thing I was in the suit.
One moment I’m staring at a widening crack in the ice and the next, there’s a gale in the shuttle bay. The sound of it drowns the wail of the siren. Whistling past my ears, pushing my hair in my face, and taking my feet out from under me.
I hit the deck back first, my head follows and stars burst in front of my eyes. Everything around me goes fuzzy, and there’s a strange metallic fullness in my nose, like my brain is trying to escape out my nostrils. The blow scrambles my brain and for a moment I’m nowhere – here and yet not as it goes through a quick reset.
It’s a nano-second, long enough to skid a few metres along the deck as vacuum tries to suck me out into space, along with the atmosphere. Somehow, I’ve managed to hold onto the envirosuit’s helmet during the moment my brain was getting scrambled.
Small mercies.
I can use some of those right now.
I jam the helmet on and the dome explodes around my head. I hold my breath until I hear the shuuuush of oxygen.
The micro-fracture isn’t so micro. There’s a massive split in the steelcrete doors that separate the shuttle bay from the ice hull, and it’s growing.
Now I get why the drone was blinking its circuits off.
It would really help if Ag found some working vocal circuits.
I wait until my boots hit the doors before activating the mag circuits.
There’s no way I can hear it over the noise of escaping atmosphere and sirens, but I imagine the shhhtuck sound of them sticking to the metal.
Getting up isn’t as easy as it sounds. The grav is still on, and with my boots stuck to the wall the only way upright is to flip around onto my belly and push myself off the deck.
I’m glad I’m wearing the helmet.
I hit the bulkhead hard, and even with the plasteel protecting my head, stars burst again in front of my eyes and my brain resets for the second time.
It resets pretty fast, a blink, which is just as well ‘cause I’m staring at a crate rocketing toward my face.
Shit.
I throw myself to the side, the crate embeds itself right where my face used to be.
Shit.
Adrenalin shuts off the front part of my brain. There’s screaming in there; blind panic leaving no room to reason, to survive.
I can feel it behind the wall of neuro-chemicals, but it can’t reach me. I have the unpleasant idea that the neuro-chems are like the ice over the door. They’re going to crack soon enough, and once they do, it’ll be bye-bye Kuma. The thought dumps more adrenalin into my system.
Rational thought is trapped somewhere between the gibbering panic and the chems. It’s instinct as much as the knowledge embedded in my brain by a lifetime of emergency drills that guide me now.
The inner bay doors are still open. If I can get to them and hit the emergency close, I’ll be fine. Except walking across the deck is like trying to climb a mountain in a tornado. The air wants out, and it’s taking every loose thing with it. Tools and envirosuits, even a fuzz-ball a little too much like a critter for my comfort, comes whizzing at me. I never knew there was so much stuff in this section of Ag, and it’s all aimed at my head.
‘Ag! Shut the inner doors!’
Nothing happens. It was worth a try.
A look up confirms that the vehicles suspended overhead are moving too. Not in an insane, Kuma-killing way, but a gentle sway that nonetheless gives the panicked, gibbering part of my brain another reason to squeal in terror and wonder if getting crushed by a maintenance bot would hurt.
Thanks brain. Really didn’t need that.
The only thing that’s not moving is the shuttle.
If I can get to it, I’ll be safe.
Safe.
That’s the only thought the not-gibbering part of me needs.
I duck and weave my way across the deck to the shuttle.
It takes longer than it should, but a check of my chrono reveals it’s only been a few minutes since the ice cracked and unleashed hell.
Once in the lee of a landing strut, the tornado lessens and I’m able to stand upright. I pray the fug hasn’t gotten to the shuttle and slap the lighter patch of hull on its belly.
The square lights up from within and a corresponding rectangle glows on the shuttle’s belly, and a long narrow ramp pops out and clanks onto the deck. I’m up the ramp in seconds, into the tiny confines of the airlock.
The door snaps shut behind me.
Silence. It’s hard to realise how loud the gale is until you’re out of it.
There’s a faint ringing in my ears, and the ragged sound of my breathing seems loud, too loud, but not loud enough to drown out the pounding of my heart. Or the shoosh of the inner airlock cycling open and the clank as the gangway retracts into the hull.
The strength goes out of my legs at the same moment the crying, screaming, gibbering part of my brain breaks through the adrenalin.
I don’t know how long I’ve sat in the airlock, but my eyes hurt and my nose is raw from wiping it on my sleeve.
Somewhere in the storm of crazy, enough sense broke through for me to collapse the helmet. I reckon it was around the time Dude squeezed through the collar and threatened to suffocate me by curling under my nose.
I feel old. Everything is heavy, my head, my heart, my feet. I can do something about my feet by turning the mag-boots off. The rest of me… I sniff and wipe my nose a final time.
The only way out is through, or at least, that’s what Mum says.
The thought of Mum makes my throat close up again and brings the burn of tears to my eyes but I push it back and get to my feet.
The cockpit is through the main cabin, a big open space stuffed with equipment. The cockpit is separated from the cabin by the backs of two flight chairs. The space lights up at my approach, first the glows in the floor and the spine of the shuttle, then the cockpit itself.
There are no windows, the hull’s stronger when it doesn’t have holes in it, and so when the cockpit lights up, it’s not just with the glows you see by.
The curved expanse of dull grey steelcrete that forms the nose of the shuttle is there one moment and gone the next. In its place is the shuttle bay.
I slip into a flight chair and take stock
Sometime during my breakdown, the bay’s inner doors closed, killing the tornado.
The shuttle is a miniature version of the Citlali, with all the same scanners, meant to take the crew where the bigger ship can’t go. Moons and asteroids, even atmosphere, all of the things that Citlali is too big to survive. The best thing about it? There’s no fug.
The shuttle AI boots right up.
It’s not the same AI as Citlali, not even a fragment, and it’s nice to see a different face hovering over the console, even if it looks like it sucked a lemon. Narrowed eyes and pursed lips, and that wasn’t even shuttle’s angry face. Not that he’s capable of angry, his face is stuck like that.
I clear my throat and wipe my nose.
‘Shuttle, prep for flight.’
There’s a shiver of power, more felt than heard, and a holographic, head-sized sphere appears in my lap. The shuttle’s control sphere.
I sink my hands into the light, spread fingers sliding in up to the knuckles. You can’t hear the engines roar, but I imagine I can as the shuttle lifts off the deck.
A slow twist of my hands engages the thruster and a grid overlays the canopy as we start to rotate. There are distances, scans and readouts popping up around each new item, the information fading to the background when my eye passes over them without stopping.
Then the big outer doors are coming into view, “DANGER. VACUUM.” blazing red over the screen, another smaller blaze joining it as the scanners pick up the micro-fracture.
I ignore it.
The outer doors open.
If you were expecting to see stars through the widening gap, you’d be disappointed. I mean, there are stars out there, but they’re not right there, like on the other side of the doors. I’ve got to make it through the ice hull first.
I lift my hands within the control sphere and the shuttle rises off the deck; stretch my fingers and feel the kick as the rear thrusters engage, propelling us forward.
It always gets me how big the shuttle is when you’re in it. The nose passes through the bay doors and it seems like the wings are going to scrape the sides of the tunnel. I know it’s not, because there aren’t any warnings blaring in my face and the readouts tell me I’m three metres clear on all sides, but still there’s sweat trickling down my spine, and I’m in danger of biting through my lip.
It gets worse on the other side of the hatch, in the ice tunnel.
It’s not like the tunnel is any smaller than the hatch, it’s not. It’s… dark, I guess. Holos light up the sides, pulses streaking past me above and below, red for starboard, white for port, blue and green for top and bottom. They’re guides, there to stop me from crashing into the ice or arriving in the shuttle bay upside down. The holos don’t touch the ice.
The ice isn’t just black, it’s a soul-devouring nothingness that makes the vacuum of space appear homey. I know I should be used to it by now – Dad took Grea and I on our first extra-Citlali excursion when we were two weeks old – but there’s always been something about the ice hull, something… wrong.
Now I recognise it for what it is. The beacon.
I’ve tried explaining it others, but they look at me like I’m stupid or delusional, or pulling some kind of long-running joke. The only other person who really gets it is Grea, although she pretends not to. Grea pretends a lot of things, that she’s the smartest and the most responsible, that she doesn’t believe in the same weird shit that I do. She fools a lot of people – Mum, Dad, Mac (who should know better), even herself – but she can’t fool me, which pisses her off.
It doesn’t change the fact that every time I go into it, all that ice makes my stomach curdle. Like there’s something in there, alive and watching me. Except every time I try to find it, stretching my senses until my brain threatens to peel off the inside of my skull, all I get is the same sense of something on the edge of my understanding. Sometimes I think, that if I could turn my brain on its side and squint, I’d see it.
I used to believe that if I could see it, it wouldn’t weird me out so much. That was before I knew about the beacon.
The outer hull that I bang on inside the ship isn’t really the outer hull. There are two other hulls wrapping it up like a giant onion and the thickest one is the ice hull.
It takes a lot of water to run Citlali and it isn’t like there are any resupply stations out here because, well, no one’s been out here before. So we had to bring it with us. Beyond the steelcrete wrapping around the habitual areas of the ship is the ice hull, a twenty-three-metre thick sheet of ice wrapped in its own steelcrete skin. It covers the Citlali, providing us with all the water we’ll ever need and additional protection from the dangers of space.
And yeah, it’s ice, not water. When the environment outside can boil/freeze your insides in ninety seconds, keeping water liquid takes energy, a lot of energy, and it’s not like we’ve got a tribe of swatai swimming around in there. Or maybe we have and someone forgot? I imagine a group of small, lizard-like creatures with fins and triangular heads, frozen in the ice hull for the last hundred and twenty-three years and Jim Engineer going ‘whoops’.
It’d be funny, if I didn’t have training memories from the last time someone killed a tribe of Jørans.
There was no one left to say ‘whoops’ after that.
It seems like forever before I’m passing through the final hatch.
Where the ice hull gives me the creeps, floating out into space is like entering everything. Like that moment in the eter when it felt like I was about to slip through the fabric of reality. It’s indescribable, massive. Different. Dark. Really, really dark.
I’ve never been in interstellar space. I mean, I have because the Citlali has to pass through it to get to the next solar system, but I’ve never been awake, never been in it, a part of it like I am now. It doesn’t appear any different. I mean, there’s no sun casting a shadow against the ship, no moons, no planets, just a trillion tiny pinpricks of light out there in the void. I could be in the middle of the Thorum system, except… I don’t know. The void appears bigger somehow. Emptier. Colder.
If I believe Onah, somewhere out there are a horde of pale, wide-nosed aliens bent on eating us. On getting revenge.
A shiver prickles my arms, embeds itself deep in my bones. Suddenly it’s quiet. A tomb. I shiver again.
I turn the shuttle around, twisting my hands in the control sphere. Somewhere out there, the thrusters are firing. If it weren’t for the pinprick stars, moving like molasses, and the scanners, I wouldn’t know we were moving. There’s no sound, no inertia to guide me. I should be used to it by now, I know, but there’s something strange about not feeling where you’re going. Every time I take the controls, it’s a few days before I get my space legs back. Grea takes to it like a critter to junk, like she’s got vacuum in her legs or something. She can’t fly atmosphere like I can though. Pity there’s none here.
It’s a slow-moving age before I get my first glimpse of Citlali. It’s a slither at first, the curve of the engines coming into view and then the giant curve of the hull. It’s too dark to see it with my eyes, the light from the distant suns is barely enough to cast the ship in dull shades of grey, a shade lighter than the void. It’s the shuttle’s scanners that do most of the work, the AI who fills the viewscreen with an image of the Citlali, or how it would appear under the glow of a closer sun. The ship appears the same. What I can see of it. Even with the scanners, we’re too close to see the whole of the squished oval shape, thinner and pointier at the bow and rounded at the stern. A quick check shows we’re three kilometres from the ship. You can’t see much from three klicks out, even if there was enough light.
I let out a breath, feel tension ride out of my shoulders. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but a hole in the outer hull had been the least of it. Maybe a horde of tiny fug ships, carrying bits of the—
‘What’s that?’ I point at a faint trail of heat snaking away from the hull.
The AI enhances the image, and now I’m not looking at a thin yellow-red ribbon of heat, I have a screen full of data and an up-close and personal view of... I lean closer, narrowing my eyes. The screen blows the image up.
There’s no colour, but I recognise the tendril-like stuff floating through the vacuum. I jerk back. Fug. Forget ships, or bots. That’s a fug flotilla, a barge, a hover, a sled, a... a...
Thought stops, because there aren’t only pieces of the hull being carried off. The viewscreen is enhancing the scan as I watch, and as I watch my stomach is trying to crawl out my mouth. There’re more than steelcrete and plasform in that trail of fug. There’s blood and bone and skin.
The AI enhances the scan, building a new image from the data rushing across the screen. A face stares back at me.
I know that face.
Vomit explodes in my mouth.
I turn away from the console, spewing acid and what’s left of the ration bar over the deck.
There are orange flecks in the bile sprayed across the decking. Mac used to say it was little chunks of the carrot farm growing in our belly. I used to believe him, right up until I turned five and Mum sat me down and told me about stomach lining and how carrots really grew. Grea pretended like it was funny, but I knew she believed Mac too. We all believed Mac.
There’s a flurry against my chest, and then Dude is popping his head out of my shipsuit, making like he’s going to scamper down and start on the vomit spreading across the deck. I take him out, put him down and then slowly, because my bones hurt almost as much as my heart, turn back to the viewscreen.
Mae Liu’s face is still there, eyes and mouth open, like she’s surprised.
‘Stop!’
The viewscreen goes dark.
There’s a question I have to ask, should ask, but I can’t quite get my mouth around the words.
‘How... how many—‘ I swallow. “People” makes the acid roil in my stomach. ‘How many biologicals in the... the fug?’
‘I do not recognise the definition of “fug”.’
‘The trail, the stuff, the...’ I wave my hand at the viewscreen.
‘Scans show several dozen biologicals in the trail. I estimate thirteen are former crew members.’
Please, let none of them be Grea.
I take my hands out of the controls. ‘Follow it.’