I scream despite myself, despite knowing that there’s no way that the ship’s pane would break under a simple wrench. But the horror of it, the horror of imagining cracks appearing, followed by explosive decompression, my pulverized body dying four ways at once... macerated, frozen, asphyxiated, boiled.
Kodiak strikes again. I hear a ticking sound from the next room over as Rover speeds toward us.
Stop it!I cry, or think I cry.We’re heading to a home, a home just for us!I’m staggering across the space between us, reaching for the wrench. He brandishes it at me, then swings it toward the clear pane, only I’ve put myself between the wrench and the airlock door, the wrench is full in my view, my nose fills with the smell of metal, and then the metallic smell is my own blood, and I’m howling against the floor, watching my blood pool against the white floor, rivulets of red running through the grooves between the panels.
I get to my feet and manage it for a moment before I’m back on hands and knees, the world blinking and bright and then narrowing and dark. I scream, as if screaming will help me stay conscious.
One eye is blinded by blood, but through the other I see Rover whiz toward Kodiak, only to be knocked off itstracks by him. He’s swung the wrench at it two-handed, like a baseball bat. Rover grinds and sighs uselessly in the corner of the room.
Kodiak shouts something that’s both far away and close, something I can’t understand. It resolves into words, sob-choked words. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
He’s moving away from me, backing to the edge of the room. Not to the rest of the ship. To the porthole. To the airlock. My view of it wavers.
“Stop,” I manage to gasp, my lips slick with the blood running down my face. “We’re going... we’re going...”
“I’ll come back with a doctor!” Kodiak says.
“No. You’re wrong,” I say, blinking heavily against the lightness, the strangely heavy lightness, tugging me down. So curiously heavy, this empty. “Kodiak, you’rewrong!”
Kodiak’s against the airlock, turning the handle. OS speaks, but I can’t make out its words in the roaring bright. The handle turns and turns forever under Kodiak’s sure hands.
“We’re going to pass this test,” Kodiak says.
“Stop,” I gasp.
But he doesn’t stop.
Kodiak looks back to me. “Sunlight, Ambrose! Think of all the sunlight!”
The airlock door shudders as he gives it a final turn.Kodiak throws his arm over his eyes, as if to protect his vision from the brightness to come.
The airlock opens, and the universe roars. The thunder on the other side is not full of light. It is only dark, and so cold.
Part Four
AMBROSE: 9 REMAINING.
KODIAK: 9 REMAINING.
“191 DAYS UNTIL TITAN.”
An earlier Ambrose embedded a reel for me. I wait days to play it, scared of what I’ll find.
One sleepless night, I start it going.
“I have reason to believe that I’m going to die,” my own recorded voice tells me. It’s breathless and manic. Paranoid. “OS has no use for us anymore, not now that we’re refusing to repair the ship. We’ve jammed the airlocks, but that won’t be enough. I’m embedding surveillance of myself, so you’ll know my story. Every twenty-four hours that I survive, I’ll restart the recording.”
I shiver when I realize what that means. I’m about to watch myself die.
I lean forward.
It’s me. I’m sleeping, in the very same bunk I use now, my back to the room. No one else is there, and nothing is happening.
The timestamp in the corner jumbles as I speed the reel ahead.
I slow it again. Rover has inched in along the ceiling, its robot arms dangling. There’s something pointed in eachgrip, maybe a sliver of printed polycarb. I zoom in. “What arethosefor?” I whisper.
My breathing catches as I watch Rover stalk toward my sleeping body. Rover ticks closer and closer, coming to a stop near my head. It holds there, so motionless that I have to check the timestamp to make sure the reel is still playing.
