I need answers to some very big questions. OS could be telling us anything it wants to. The only information we’ve gotten that hasn’t been under its control has contradicted everything we thought we knew. It says that we’re in an impossible year.
Time travel in space is theoretically possible. Time is a dimension, just like length, width, and depth—and like those, it can be traveled. The conditions for time travel areimpossible for living bodies, though. We’d have to speed up to near-light speeds... and take on infinite weight as a result. That sort of body-mass index is definitely bad for the health.
Okay, that’s at least one option off the table. We haven’t traveled in time.
The radio waves would have, though. They move at the speed of light, faster than the ship, so we’re listening to radio from the past—how far into the past depends on how far away from Earth we are. It could be that many more than 140 years have passed back home, if we’re light-years away.
I return to the yellow portal. Past this door is where I found my own blood in an impossible place. Shrapnel is still blocking the portal from closing, but Rover printed the gap between portal and wall over with polycarb. The gray covering is so thin it’s almost see-through.
I fetch my violin case and headlamp. I remove the delicate wood instrument and lower it gently to the floor. I shut the case.
Then I bash it into the thin polycarb covering.
Shards fly in all directions. The ones that make it far enough to enter the ship’s gravity plink to the floor.
“Spacefarer Cusk, what are you doing?” Mother asks.
“None of your business, OS,” I say. I leap into zero g and soar to the edge of the yellow portal, gritting my teeth as thepolycarb edges cut my fingers. I fly into the darkness beyond.
The last few shards of polycarb float to either side. They’re thin, and actually a little soft. Rover’s printing doesn’t produce anything as hard as the ship’s original polycarbonate.
I slither in, moving shoulder by shoulder and hip by hip, arms down at my side, the red nylon of Kodiak’s jumpsuit catching on broken polycarb as I go. It’s cold and musty, and my head and shoulders keep banging against pipes and outcroppings. At one point I nearly wedge tight, neck wrenching against a bundle of wires.
I could be trapped forever in here, or at least long enough to starve, with no microphones nearby to alert OS, and Kodiak sealed off in his own quarters.Keep it together, Ambrose, comes Minerva’s voice in my mind.If I didn’t die on Titan, you’re not going to die here.
I free myself of the wires, and by sheer force of will manage to continue floating forward instead of backing out. I’m not sure what’s come over me, this reckless push, except that for now, answers mean more to me than my own life. I’ll risk annihilation if it means finding out whether everything I’ve ever known has been annihilated.
As I press toward the engine room, the rumble of the ship’s machinery gets louder and the air gets colder, so that my breath creates clouds that glow in the field of my headlamp. The surfaces begin to sear the flesh on my fingersand wrists. I try looking back, to see how far I’ve come, but can’t angle the light over my own body.
Whenever I pause in the open air, the chill draws down around me. It’s like I’m in a morgue, like I could die. Like I am dead. My heart asks: Would that be so bad? My teeth chatter while I consider what dying would mean, when everyone I’ve ever known might have died long ago.
Except for Kodiak.
Minerva comes to me again, imperious on a beach.Swim to me, Ambrose.
I push off the cold wall, stroking through zero gravity. The passageway opens into a chamber. My shaking headlamp shows a broad cylinder in the center, trembling with contained power. The ship’s engine.
Around the edges of the room are full food pouches. Rover tracks are embedded in the walls, so the robot can supply the ship’s habitable areas.
I listen for Rover’s sound, but can’t hear much over the booming engines. At least I have a break from OS communication; there must not be any speakers in this uninhabited region of the ship.
As I float closer to the engine, I train my headlamp on its smooth surfaces. Deep in the center of the cylinder, shielded by its thick metal, is what looks almost like an old-fashioned dry cleaner’s rack, a circular rail with polycarb-wrapped bags draped along it. Each is filled with somethingbulbous and weighty. I ease closer.
My feet scuff against some object in the zero gravity. As it floats up into my view, I see it’s a stretch of heavy polycarb. I take it in hand. It’s a different sort of material than I’m used to feeling in the ship, and my mind conjures up old memories of chicken breast, sealed and juiceless from the freezer, plastic adhered to plastic to keep meat fresh, only with a gray film to it, like it’s been shielded from radiation. I’m surrounded by small globes of an oily fluid that has beaded in the zero gravity. I work my way forward cautiously, careful not to directly contact the humming metal of the ship’s engines.
The rack comes into view. The polycarb is luminous in my headlamp, my light catching air bubbles within the fluid. I maneuver so I can see the first bag.
A face.
A face and a body, wrapped in the shielding polycarb sheet, sealed in its juices, mouth open and eyes sunken and closed. Before the creature can get me I’m kicking against the side of the engine and scrambling backward. I swear I can feel shriveled arms grabbing my ankles, teeth piercing my calf. Space itself joins the enemy, the darkness outside ripping open the fragile membrane of the ship, just like this creature could part my skin with its teeth and claws.
My desperate scramble snags me in cables and cords, sears my cheek against the frozen exterior wall of the ship,yanks my finger backward when it unexpectedly hits a metal spur, the sound of bone breaking or ligament tearing, I don’t know and can’t know because all I can do is continue forward, shoulder against beam and pipe, struggling for freedom from cables that ensnare, that pull me back each time I manage to leave.
There is no sound of the creature behind me, a creature that I am coming to realize was no creature at all. I saw a lifeless body.
A sliver of light appears in front of me, beyond it the familiar far wall. Finally I emerge into the open light, my body tumbling forward and out, falling to the floor as it enters gravity, knocking my violin and sending it clattering. A delicate wishbone pop as the balsa-wood bridge snaps.
Pain lights up my body. The fresh agony in my shoulder fades to reveal my finger’s pain throbbing beneath, the digit probably broken, already blueing. That pain is joined by the sear of my cheek, where the frozen metal of the exterior wall did its worst damage.
