“I told you to stay with the LINA,” I snap, louder and meaner than I intended.
“Write me up later,” Kane says, ascending the staircase along the outside of its curves, just as Voller and I had done. But he’s moving even faster. “Voller, you need to shut the diagnostic off.”
“Diagnostic?” I ask. “What diagnostic?” Once Kane reaches my level, he moves past me without hesitating. At the top of the stairs, the corridor branches into two options, one on either side of the nonfunctioning elevator.
“The corridor on your left,” Nysus says helpfully, and Kane follows the suggestion, pulling himself along the wall through an open bulkhead doorway. I trail behind him, working to keep up. The lights aren’t on in here. But at least this portion of hallway is also uncluttered, unlike the ones Voller and I encountered on the lowest levels.
Actually, this section appears untouched. The Platinum Level suites are all gleaming wooden doors, lush carpeting, even a side table—bolted down—with a vase of wilted and frozen but still beautiful fresh-cut flowers. Orchids. In space. I can’t imagine how much that one line item must have cost. I bet every single one of these rooms was the recipient of those gold faucets. Forget the dog walkers and assistants to assistants.Theseare the people who need fresh flowers and water delivered via precious metal. Of course,theirsection would be untouched.
But then, as we pass, I catch a glimpse of smeary bloody letters, written on the wall near the floor. The words are too muddled to decipher without stopping.
“Voller!” Kane says again.
“No fucking way,” Voller shouts, and my uneasiness increases.He’s always been a bit volatile, but not like this. “That’s what shows—”
“I know what it shows,” Kane says. “Turn it off before it gets to the gravity generator and the heat.”
As if the ship is reacting to Kane’s words, I feel the disorienting pull and release of a gravity generator, like a hand tugging you gently beneath the water and then letting go. It’s a warning sequence, three blips—minor, temporary increases in gravity—usually accompanied by a countdown over a ship’s PA system.
I have no idea what diagnostic they’re talking about or why Voller thinks it’s important, but I can now see the more immediate problem Kane is worried about.
“Voller!” I shout, then I make an effort to temper my voice. Shouting at him hasn’t worked so far. “We have frozen bodies in the atrium. They were above us. Just floating out there in the dome. A hundred or more. And those are just the ones we found. If the gravity kicks on in full, they’re all going to come crashing down.” I hesitate. “There will be… pieces everywhere. And we have no idea what kind of damage sudden gravity could do.” Anything not strapped down would fall at full force. Not to mention the strain on the ship itself, out here in the cold of space decades longer than she was supposed to be.
And if the heat and oxygen came on, it wouldn’t take long before decay became an issue. There wouldn’t be anything left for the families of theAurorapassengers to find. The same warmth that had kept me alive on Ferris for a month had turned the dead into… puddles of barely recognizable biological material.
Voller doesn’t respond, and the grav generator gives another warning tug.
Ahead of me, Kane pulls himself along faster. Where exactly is this fucking bridge?
We round the corner at the end of the corridor and find ourselves in a wider but more utilitarian space. The carpet here is an industrial blue, and the walls are metal rather than wood over metal. Emergency lights are on, casting harsh shadows on everything. Atiny, shiny red bead clicks against my helmet faceplate once, and then twice, before floating away to join hundreds just like it in the air around us.
I catch my breath. Blood.
To our left, about twenty feet away, a metal door stands open slightly. It’s markedBRIDGEand marred with blood spatter and clumps that look like gray matter, hair, and bone splinters, now frozen to its surface.
My stomach roils.
Near the door, two bodies inAurorauniforms float in and out of the shadows, locked together, their arms linked in eternal struggle. The stitchedAurorapatches on their left sleeves are a simple but elegant arrangement of two triangles with a circle rising above, in what might look like an alien moon rising above mountains. But given what I know now, I suspect it’s meant to be another representation ofGraceand/orSpeed. The silver pips on the uniform collars and the embroidered stripes at the shoulders—respectively four and three—identify them as the captain and first officer, but I don’t need that to recognize them.
Captain Linden Gerard looks just as she did in the launch coverage I watched so obsessively all those years ago. Only now her eyes are closed, her expression almost peaceful beneath the blueish sheen of frost. Her blond hair is coming loose from its tight braid, standing around her head in a fuzzy crown. If not for the small, ragged hole in her uniform, just above her left breast, and the wide circle of blood around it, she might be sleeping.
First Officer Cage Wallace, by contrast, is missing a good portion of his left temple in a gaping exit wound, his expression—what’s left of it—pained.
“Fuck!” Voller snarls. “Shutting it down,” he says through clenched teeth, right as the third gravity tug starts.
The pull at my body vanishes immediately, and the emergency lights shut off, leaving me blinking to adjust to the dimness of just our helmet lights. A moment later, the hum of the engines grows quieter and then stops.
Kane and I make our way to the bridge door, and I carefully avoid looking toward Gerard and Wallace, lest they be doing something that should be impossible for the dead to do.
Inside the bridge, wide windows looking out onto a black field with faint pinpricks of stars offer a little more illumination. The arc-shaped space is larger than I expected, and it’s not the site of utter chaos that I imagined. Darkened banks of control panels toward the front of the bridge and along the back walls reflect our helmet lights back at us in their smooth, unbroken sheen. Empty chairs—captain, first officer, navigator-pilot, and communications—wait in readiness for their occupants to return. Polished woodgrain decorates the base of the heavy cushioned seats and along the housing for the control panel banks. Lush carpeting adds a hint of elegance to soften the obvious work space. Hints of the luxury seen in profusion elsewhere in the ship.
However, unlike what we’ve encountered in the rest of theAurora,I see no signs of violence or anything even out of place. No scorch marks from damaged control panels, no equipment or tools left out after an attempt at a frantic repair, no nooses floating through the air, or bloody handprints on the carpeting or walls.
Everything is… pristine.
One control panel is lit up along the back wall, and Voller is a pale shadow in front of it, motionless in his suit.
“Voller,” I say as Kane and I pull ourselves toward him. “We’re here.”
