Chapter Thirty
FENN
I didn’t realize I’d passed out until I woke up.
It’s almost pitch black, and so very cold. I blink, trying to reorient and extricate myself from these terrible nightmares that still gnaw at the edges of my consciousness. Until I realize, with a dread like I’ve never had before, that they weren’t nightmares.
Portia.
Gammand.
Miki.
Gone.
My eyes adjust to the darkness. Hana isn’t here. I’m still in the exit bay of the Selkirk. I stand up, joints creaking and muscles angry with overuse.
“Hana?” I call. Faintly, from somewhere deep within the Selkirk, her girlish voice calls back.
“Here, Fenn. I’m in here.” She still sounds so young, but there is a raspy tiredness to her voice like she’s just aged fifty years. I limp past the bay and head deeper into the belly of the Selkirk. On the left, I pass the storage areas, and on the right, the regular living quarters and the engine room. I remember all these places like it was a long, long time ago. As if I am walking through a museum of my life and everything I see is a relic and a wreck. Finally, I reach the bridge.
Hana is sitting in the captain’s seat, which seems far too large for her. She sits with her knees clasped to her chest, staring out into space, where the rest of the Alcyone nebula looks absolutely magnificent, despite the fact that inside it’s collapsing. Kind of like Cyclo. Kind of like us.
I sit next to her in the copilot’s chair and find myself laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Hana asks. She doesn’t look at me, just keeps staring straight ahead into the bleak recesses of starry sky.
“Portia. I remember how she was so good at driving the Selkirk. And when I got a little too snide, she flipped me onto my back to teach me a lesson.”
Hana looks sideways at me and smiles a little, but it disappears fast. She goes back to staring out into space.
“Just sitting in the bridge here—it’s the farthest I’ve ever been from home,” she says after a long silence.
“I’m not so sure you should call Cyclo your home anymore.”
She bites her lip. Her hand goes to something on her lap. A book.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a book of short stories. Can your holofeed recognize the infrared spectrum?”
“Yes, why?”
“I can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, but I have this feeling that Mother hid something in here. On the opposite end of the light spectrum.” She hands me the book, and I thumb through it. It’s well worn, a book in a foreign language. I touch the holofeed chip in my forehead and ask it to do an infrared screen. Hana goes to my side and puts her cheek against mine, so we can see together if there’s anything.
Hana inhales sharply.
It’s writing. In English. Laid atop the printed characters—Korean maybe—in ink so diluted that the writing is hazy and faint.
400221.78
Sol 649
Today, I did something I shouldn’t. I am the most selfish being on this ship, and I am risking her life and mine with my ego, my need to make something like me, but better. She is only one cell old today, and I have already hidden her in Cyclo, in the walls of my chamber, where Cyclo is feeding her the necessary gestational embryonic fluids I’ve stolen from the incubation lab.
Today, I have made the best and the worst mistake. She is only one cell old today. One. I will call her Hana. And I will call myself her mother, but what I am really is a monster. I know what I must do to keep her secret.
I am a monster.
“A monster?” Hana says. “Why would she think of herself like that?”
“Well, what kind of a person would make a human, just to keep them locked away for their whole life?” Fenn asks quietly.
Hana shakes her head and flips the pages. “This is the day I was born.”
400221.358
Sol 655
Hana is born today. She is terribly ugly. Wrinkles everywhere, a cry that makes me want to bite my own tongue, with a nearly full head of cocoa hair but that shock of white by her forehead. I don’t know anything about rearing infants. I hold her, and she is so soft, so fragile. I’m terrified. Usually I send them to station one, where the director takes charge of the newborns. Thank goodness Cyclo knows. She takes Hana in almost as soon as she’s born, for her first oral feeding. I only hold her for an hour at night before we both go back into Cyclo’s matrix to sleep. If not for Cyclo, Hana would be discovered and destroyed according to protocol.
Hana’s eyes fill with tears. She flips forward, to her sixteenth birthday, about a year before the evacuation.
Cyclo’s degeneration has finally begun. Waste storage is at max capacity. Solar energy production is decreasing rapidly. We are tentatively planning our evacuation and recruiting for the terminal data crew. At some point, her degeneration will be exponential. I am finding that Cyclo is keeping Hana longer than I ask for, and she tells me that Hana has been optimally fed, when in truth, I know that cannot be. Our heme stores are gone, and Cyclo cannot possibly give Hana the amounts she needs, but Cyclo tells me I am wrong. Cyclo does not disobey; it is not possible for her to do so, and yet this has become a source of investigation by the engineering crew, who are also finding aberrations in their measurements vs. what Cyclo tells them. It is as if the ship does not want to admit that she is failing.
Speaking of failures, I will have to tell the crew about Hana. The sooner, the better. But I find that 16 years is a long time to lie. One learns to lie about everything, to the point where telling the truth is impossible. But I have time.
So her mother knew even then, but she didn’t say a word to Hana, or to the crew. I flip to the last entry, the entry where we’ll find whether she ever planned to tell them about Hana.
400237.009
Sol 108
One of Cyclo’s vacuoles has leaked and flooded a portion of the core. It is not a critical systems breakdown, but we will evacuate in approximately two weeks, enough time to leave in an orderly fashion. But today is the day. The day I tell the world that I am a liar and a thief. That I have loved someone so much I’ve given up my future career and likely my legal parental rights. I’ve kept Hana to myself too long. Today is the day I will tell them.
It will give Hana two weeks to meet the crew and say her goodbyes to Cyclo. Cyclo asked me today what my agenda was. She has been watching me in a way she hasn’t in the last few weeks. She noticed that I was nervous and upset. So I told her. Not that I was telling the crew about Hana, but that she was dying. Cyclo says she knows. And she said she was thankful that she would not die alone.
I don’t know what she means by that. Surely she understands what an evacuation is.
And then she asked me if I would tell them about Hana. I was surprised she would ask. Cyclo does not usually ask me questions; it ought to be the other way around. Normally I would report this behavior, but it’s about Hana, so I cannot.
But I am tired of lying. And I owe Cyclo the life that she’s given to me these past twenty years, and to my daughter.
So I told her the truth.
That is the last entry.
Oh God. I read the time and date. It was one hour before Dr. Um died. Two hours before the Calathus was fully evacuated. She told Cyclo that the crew would learn about Hana, and that they would leave Cyclo to die alone, with a terminal data crew from the Selkirk climbing aboard her like ants on an earthen carcass.
She didn’t want to die alone, so she killed Hana’s mother, so no one would know about her.
So they would die together.
Hana pushes the book away, and I drop it to the floor, trying to steady her. I blink my holofeed off and watch as Hana’s eyes unfocus. I know what she’s thinking—imagining her mother being murdered, her mother’s blood spattered across the hospital bay. I think of Gammand, and how he was torn to pieces. Was that what happened to Dr. Um, too?
“Cyclo got what she wanted,” Hana whispers. “A secret, all to herself. Just as the crew abandoned her forever.”
I have an overwhelming desire to hold her so tight that we both pass out and forget the hell we’re going through. She seems to know what I’m thinking because, though she keeps staring forward, she reaches out her hand blindly to find mine.
“They knew Cyclo was murderous,” I say. “And they dangled the Selkirk crew like bait when she was starving to death and angry. So the next Cyclo they make won’t do the same things. They needed to learn about the devil so they could fix all its faults for the next, new, more expensive version.” I pause. “I didn’t want to die like this.”
Hana releases my hand, her face furious. “I didn’t want to die like this, either.”
“Cyclo won’t kill you. Don’t you see? She’s had ample opportunity to do that. Cyclo wants to kill everyone but you. She wanted you all to herself.”
“She’ll keep me until she dies, and then I’ll die with her. Cyclo’s killing me, too.”
After a few minutes, my hand feels emptier than it’s ever felt in my whole life. When she stands, I’m sure she’s going to leave me here alone so she can process whatever horrors she has in her head. But instead she walks over to my chair and sits in my lap. She curls her legs onto mine, leans her head on my shoulder, and wraps her arms around my neck.
“I’m so angry, Fenn. And so very tired,” she whispers. “I want to live. I only started to learn how, and it’s all over soon. Even if I’m the last to live, it won’t be long before I die, too.” Her hand grazes my jawbone and slips behind my neck, pulling my face closer to hers. Her pupils are huge in the darkness, a void so big that they look entirely black. She kisses me, and it’s unexpectedly hungry and raw. My arms go around her and squeeze her tight as I kiss her back with equal ferocity. I dig my hands hard into her waist and pick her up. She wraps her legs around my waist, and I lower her to the rough floor of the cockpit as the starshine streams in through the windows. My hands become saturated with her tears and mine as I cradle her face in our never-ending kiss. But I don’t let go. I won’t. I’m afraid I’ll lose her right here, right now, if I let go for one infinitesimal second.
It’s a second we don’t have to spare, but for this one moment, we are rich. We are infinite. We are devastation clinging to inevitability, and nothing else matters.
…
Dawn rises with Maia’s crystalline blue light illuminating the cockpit with a small bit of warmth and a brightness that has no business being cheerful right now. Exhaustion has stolen our wakefulness, on and off, for a handful of hours. A fitful kind of sleep where we reach out, frantic, in our moments of wakefulness. We test to see if our hands are still working, if our bodies are still warm, if we’re still alive.
We are.
For now.
Finally, I sit up. I’m starving, despite hunger being the last thing I should really care about right now, since I’m gonna die soon. Hana sits up, too, and holds her belly.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says.
“Let’s find some breakfast and wash up. We’ll keep to the dead side of Cyclo. It’ll just be us.”
In silence, we walk around the west quadrant until we find the bridge—unchanged since the last time we went there to get gear, days ago. Hana washes her face with some precious filtered water from our stores, and I put out some energy bars to eat. We chew them mechanically, all the while holding hands with our free arms.
I check on my bots—they’ve returned periodically to the bridge to recharge, then continue their data collection. And on my holofeed, I’ve been watching the green portion on my progress meter going up and up. I’m near 70 percent now. I’ve gotten so close.
But that damned progress bar shows the raw truth. I’ll never finish my tasks. Not before I die. ReCOR will win, and I’ll lose, as will Callandra.
All I can think is that I want to move back onto the Selkirk and die there. At least we wouldn’t be on Cyclo. She could implode, and we wouldn’t have to feel her wrath as she disintegrates, and we wouldn’t have to risk that somehow she’ll regenerate just enough to reach out and strangle us.
If only the Selkirk had fuel. If only we could fly it out and send a distress signal and get off this death trap. Secretly even, so I can still get my death benefit. I wish—
“I wish we had fuel,” Hana says suddenly.
I drop my energy bar and stare at her. “I was thinking the same thing. Sort of.”
“But if we leave, then you’ll forfeit your contract. You realize that they’ll have all this data once we’re gone. They’ll know you didn’t die here. By surviving, you lose.”
“I know.” I pick up my pendant. “I keep wondering if I can win both ways, but I don’t know how.”
“You haven’t watched the message from your sister yet, have you?”
“No,” I say. “I guess I’m waiting until the last minute.”
“Maybe there never will be a last minute.”
“What?” I turn to her, trying to hear her better. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if we could get the Selkirk to work again? Could you fly it? Does it have autopilot?”
“I could fly it. Badly, but I could fly it,” I say. “It’s not like we’re launching off a planet. It would be much easier. But the Selkirk was sent on this mission with just enough fuel to get here. Not to leave. It was a one-way trip.”
“What kind of fuel?”
“I think it’s a radioisotope engine. As the radioisotope decays, it heats a fluid that combusts and creates thrust. But the problem isn’t the fluid—we have stores of that still. The isotope in the engine has a short half-life, and it’s basically dead. So, unless there’s a secret polonium core replacement you haven’t shared with me, then we’re out of luck because the previous crew took all the spares with them when they evacuated. It was part of their protocol.”
Hana bites her lip, thinking. She’s relentless, this girl.
“Then maybe we can find another source of radioactivity,” she says.
This time, I’m the one who goes quiet to think. We have the hydrogen, but we don’t have the isotopes. Unless…
“Hana. What do you know about the different radioactive stores on Cyclo?”
“I know where they are. And that the walls of the vacuoles holding them won’t last for much longer. Even if we could access them without Cyclo hurting us, how would we move the right isotopes into a holding cell for the Selkirk? Cyclo hasn’t neatly organized her waste products.”
She’s concentrating so hard that a little crease shows up between her eyebrows. God, I love that little crease. But it’s giving me an idea.
“Want to do something dangerous and probably deadly?”
“What have we got to lose?” Hana says, kissing me lightly on the cheek. Her face, though, is grim and determined. “I’d sail into a solar flare with you, Fennec, if it means having a few more minutes together.” She pauses. “You know, you’re nothing like your name.”
Again with my name. Why does anyone care?
“So, what, I’m not like a moth? Cyclo mentioned that, too.”
“Not just any moth. A luna moth. The pretty green ones on Earth, big as my hand.” She searches my face and shakes her head. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Luna moths emerge from their cocoons with no mouth. They live only days, never eating, because they’re born to die.”
Somehow, knowing this, knowing my namesake, makes me so angry. I refuse to just settle for death.
I refuse.
I reach for her hand, and she threads her fingers through mine without hesitation. Without Hana, I might have given up a long time ago.
“We need to get off this damned ship,” I say.