I run until my lungs ache. I run until I taste blood and there’s not enough oxygen left in my suit to take a full breath. I run until my legs are jelly and spots fill the edge of my vision.
I run and I run and I run.
Emergency bulkheads open before me and snap shut on my heels. I stop only when the map on the HUD tells me. All the while trying to get Core’s not-voice out of my head.
Stasis separation.
It echoes through my bones, burrowing deeper with every jarring stride. The speedway’s up ahead, a waiting palette illuminated in the spitting lights. I jump on. It takes off.
Stasis separation.
The grappling cable took out the section of speedway I’d arrived on, obliterated it like the steelcrete were Old Terran paper, or tissue or skin… or… or….
Stasis separation.
I run and jump and tumble down maintenance ladders half-eaten by fug, all the very long way to Lab One, at first following Core’s voice and then the map after the AI froze on my HUD, brows raised and her eyes wide in an expression of surprise real enough to send bolts of alarm through my gut.
Only two more decks to go and I was on Stasis.
There’s another voice at the back of my head, knocking on my skull, trying to worm its way into my marrow.
Sister.
No. I push it away, wall up my psyche and concentrate on the rush of lights and shadow, the hum of the palette on the mag lines. Concentrate on the cold, hard lump of fear behind my heart and try to convince myself that it’s going to be okay, that we’re not going to be lost in the void. Like Aeotu.
Sister.
The palette slams to a stop, throwing me across the slab of steelcrete and against the guard rail at the front. I have time to gasp, to grab a new handhold before we plummet. It’s seconds but it seems like hours that I’m flying through the air, feet over my head, hands cramping around the guard rail, sweat slicking the inside of my gloves, muscles screaming as gravity tries to rip my arms from their sockets.
Then more pain, new pain, slamming into the palette, curling in on myself at the last second, my shoulder crunching against steelcrete, fire consuming my back, my arm, my fingers, even as I flail for the rail, only one hand working.
I’ve barely got a finger on it before the palette roars sideways.
I’m slammed into another guard rail, and now that fist in my back is a dagger in my chest and an alarm screaming on my HUD.
But there’s no time. No time.
Only three words float through my brain, each one worse than the last.
Stasis.
Separation.
Sister.
A final shuddering halt, as bone jarring as the last. I want to curl into a ball, but those three words keep me going.
The map flashes on my HUD, almost hidden under the med warnings.
The speedway has dumped me on Med/Command, at a small freight dock. One more deck to Stasis. One more deck. I can do that. I slide off the palette, stumble to the controls and try to ignore the dagger digging into my chest with every breath.
The door opens. There’s a drone waiting for me, hovering at head height, Core’s gold face projected before it.
‘Core?’
Nothing. The AI is frozen.
I shuffle forward, reach out, gloved fingers passing through Core’s nose.
The holo shudders, begins to speak and I know from the way her gaze skims over my head, that it’s a recording. If Core had been there, she’d have looked me in the eye.
‘Kuma, separation systems compromised. Manual engagement required. Instructions in drone.’
The drone leads me to a hole in the deck. A literal hole, the edges ragged and crumbling, fug clinging to the steelcrete. Most of the fug is inert, the once grey-green strands now just a dull grey, but some of it still moves, and its colour has changed as well, to a bright red that makes something deep down in the pit of my being want to scream and hide.
I swallow. Core said the fug was repairing the Citlali now, not eating it, and there are more important things to worry about.
Power sparks in the thick section of deck and shimmers in the waterfall of biogel from broken conduits. Beyond is Stasis.
I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. Unless the fug ate through the floor below.
The drone hovers over the hole.
‘Down.’ It uses Core’s voice and face, but it’s not Core, its tone flat, its expression wooden. ‘Down,’ it says again, the face morphing into an arrow plunging into the darkness.
Just in case I didn’t know where down was, I guess.
‘Gravity’s still on.’ Jumping down that hole’s going to hurt.
‘Down.’ The drone hovers closer. ‘Down.’
The fact that falling a few metres in full gravity is going to break more of my bones doesn’t seem to bother it.
Okay. I grab the drone, hugging it to my chest, step off the deck and let gravity take hold. Pain slams through my chest as the drone’s antigravs whine and the thing shakes, throwing itself left and right and into my ribs.
I grit my teeth and hold tighter.
The drone thrashes, my grip loosens, slips and—
The deck slams into my feet, not hard enough to break bones but enough to force a groan from my lips as the vibration ricochets through my ribs.
My vision blurs, or maybe that’s the drone darting out of reach.
I take a moment to push the pain aside then I’m on my feet and following the drone again. Pain swamps my side, turns my pace into a shuffle, narrows my vision.
‘How much farther?’ My voice is hoarse, the words difficult to get out.
The drone doesn’t answer.
I want to stop, to catch a breath that’s suddenly coming too short, but I have to keep going, have to keep going.
Something skittles up my leg.
I yell, jump sideways and try to keep my feet as pain balloons, swamps my vision, takes my breath.
A golden fuzz shivers through my shoulder, dulls the pain.
Breathing comes easier, my vision clears.
‘Dude.’
He chitters, the not-sound warming my skin, chasing away the fear that’s been with me since the Atrium.
The drone flashes, lighting up the hallway, and in that brief flash I can’t ignore the holes, the pockmarks and cracks that lace the bulkheads. There’s fug there too, most of it dull and grey but some, some of it writhes in between the breaches in thick pulsing webs of blood, almost as if it’s trying to stitch the damaged steelcrete together.
Maybe it’s a trick of the shadows, or the pain gnawing at my chest, but for a moment I swear it’s watching me, those red strands reaching out, whispering in my ear.
Sister.
I yank my mind away, close it off, wall it up and think of something, anything else.
It’s not hard.
I need to get to the separation controls, need to save the crew, save Grea, and yet…
My eyes snag on the bulkheads, the holes in the steelcrete. Through them my HUD picks out the hum of stasis pods, the pulse of blood in veins. If Stasis separates, those people will only have the thin skin of emergency shields to protect them, and when the power dies, so will they.
‘Core. Core, we can’t do this. The units are compromised.’
Static on the comms and the drone shooting ahead of me.
I hobble after it, ignoring the dagger stabbing me in the side with every shuffle, concentrating only on the drone and the new, desperate knowledge that I need to stop this, to warn Core. It’s almost enough to block the whisper at the back of my skull.
I don’t know where the drone’s leading me. The emergency separation controls are at the centre of the deck, two rings out from Core, and we’re heading outwards. Maybe the fug ate those controls, maybe there are secondary ones in the outer rings. Maybe Core saw the damage and is… is what? Getting me to repair the bulkheads before the alien ship swallows us whole?
Come on, Kuma, you’re not that stupid. There are no secondary controls. Even you know that. So why the lie?
The drone’s stopped in front of a stasis unit. There’s no name on the hatch, only a number and the tag “SOS” stencilled in orange. It opens and inside it’s like all the other units, four stasis pods side-by-side, the unmissable “EMERGENCY SUPPLIES” on the rear bulkhead, except the pods are empty.
I’m back-peddling as fast as the pain in my chest will let me, ‘cause I know what’s happening now, know Core lied because otherwise, otherwise I would have… What? Fought an alien spaceship? Grabbed a multitool and started welding bulkheads while my ribs slowly punched a hole in my lung? Would have saved the day with nothing but my bare hands and a faithful critter at my side?
My breath’s coming hard, fogging up the HUD and my heart’s pounding.
No. No. It doesn’t end like this.
The drone flickers and now it’s wearing a hasty copy of Core’s face, its expression wooden, eyes staring somewhere over my shoulder.
‘All stasis units compromised. Unable to complete full separation.’
And now I’m hobbling forward, making up all the distance I put between us. ‘We can fix it. I can get a repair kit and the critters—’
‘Engine containment has been breached. Emergency shielding will fail.’
Engine containment. My mind flickers back to the miniature sun glimpsed through a hole in Engineering. Picture the blue energy field around it growing dim then dying. I don’t know what happens next but I can imagine it, a wave of light and heat turning my atoms to dust.
The holo shudders and suddenly it’s Core staring at me, the lines of her face shifting, turning the concern and urgency of her expression into something that’s almost real, as the AI takes over from the hasty fragment left in the drone’s circuits.
I lunge toward her. There’s a thought worming its way to the forefront of my head, an idea that if I can grab her, touch her, I can reach through the drone and make the AI understand.
Understand what, I don’t know. It’s a fuzzy, urgent, terrified emotion permeating every fibre of my being. But I know, know I can save us, if only—
Core/drone zips out of reach and I have to catch myself on the open hatch before I fall through it.
I turn.
And that’s when the fug pounces.
Dude leaps from my shoulder, fangs and tiny claws bared, a split-second before the drone slams into my chest.
I’m flying backwards, heel catching on the stasis unit’s seal as Dude meets the red fug head-on.
And then the air’s exploding out of my chest and the drone’s shooting back up, arrowing for the hatch.
Urgency helps refill my lungs, fight past the pain and panic, roll to my feet.
The hatch is closing.
The drone’s on the other side, probes in the control panel, and there’s Core’s voice. ‘Stasis separation in fifteen seconds.’
‘What? Wait. No!’
‘Goodbye, Kuma.’
‘No. Dude!’
The hatch closes.
I slam into it, already scrambling for the controls. No. No. No. I wasn’t leaving him to the vacuum.
The control pad dies. Just. Dies.
Okay. Don’t panic. The emergency lever—
CLUNK.
The sound reverberates through the bulkhead, everything in me stills. No. Not yet.
SHUSSSH.
That one’s barely even a sound, it’s a feeling, a sensation shivering up my spine, swallowing me in dread.
‘No.’ I’m on my knees, pushing the emergency panel out. There’s still time, there has to be time. The panel comes away and there’s the lever and—
SSNUCK.
The lever’s gone, sucked into the hatch at the same time the stasis unit shudders, the gravity goes and—
“DANGER. VACUUM.”
The words are too big to miss, letters as big as my head popping into existence over the door.
I punch the hatch, kick it, slam my hands into the steelcrete but… nothing. Even the biogel feels dead. Hard. Cold.
No. No no no no no.
I grab hold of the panel, pound on the door and try to ignore the fact that I’m floating half a metre off the deck.
‘Core! Open up! Core!’
The power goes, the holos and lights with it.
I scream, the sound echoing in my helmet, high and sharp, matching the pain in my chest. The fire of the rib pressing on my lung, mixing with the claws wrenching my heart in two, shredding the muscle, ripping it apart until there’s nothing left but me.
Just me.
Alone in the dark…
…Sister.