Chapter Thirty-One
HANA
These are the things I know.
I know how to knit. I know how to make a darn good reconstituted gomtang out of freeze-dried foods. I know twentieth-century English, a smattering of Korean words and phrases, chemistry, advanced cyclonica biology, organic chemistry, and calculus.
I know how to kiss Fenn. And I know we are going to die very soon.
What I don’t know: how to harness Cyclo’s enormous stores of radioactive waste to find something that the radioisotope engine of the Selkirk can use. How to do this without Cyclo killing Fenn. How to do this without becoming so irradiated and sick that we end up wishing Cyclo had killed us anyway.
“Hana?” Fenn touches my arm and shakes me out of my reverie. We are sitting on the bridge, poring over the maps of Cyclo and the informational scanners that are still functioning around the ship, which were first set up when the Selkirk crew arrived.
“What is it?”
“Here.” He points. “It’s the core of the ship where most of the waste vacuoles are. But the waste materials are a mix of isotopes.”
“How will we get the ones that are compatible with the engine? We have no way to purify radioactive ores.”
“We don’t. We take what we can. This one’s a bad idea.” Fenn points to a vacuole that has a solid waste of mixed isotopes. “But this one is better,” he says, showing me the one that has the surface isotopes that were prepacked by Cyclo’s skin into smaller boules, they called them, covered with a layer of lead. “Those, we could gather safely. We’d just have to figure out a way of placing the boules’ contents within the engine, hope the elements are hot enough to superheat the hydrogen gas, and hope it’s enough to keep the environmental and communication elements of the ship functioning.”
“Will it work?” I ask, anxious.
“Probably not,” he says, and gives me a level stare. “We haven’t got an alternative. We have no way to contact anyone for help. Doran might come to rescue us, but he may not. Cyclo has shut down seventy-five percent of her quadrants. It’s only a matter of time before the other ones malfunction, and then one little breach in her hull and we’re done for. We don’t need the Selkirk to run well. Just to keep us alive long enough to get away from Cyclo and send out a distress signal.”
I stare at the map. The best way to get to the vacuole we need is all the way across on the other side of Cyclo, and unfortunately, it’s also located in one of her functioning slivers of the western quadrant.
“If I go there, Cyclo will try to engage me. She may try to stop me.”
“Then I’ll go,” Fenn says, but I shake my head.
“No way. She’ll kill you in an instant.”
“She will. She’ll squash me like a bug.”
Our shoulders sag. We’re already failing before we’ve begun. Just like when Portia realized she was nearing the end, and Cyclo took her. Thank goodness she didn’t take Fenn then. I could have lost him, too.
“She didn’t kill you,” I murmur to myself.
“Well, yeah. Not yet,” Fenn says.
“No. I mean when Portia was attacked, Cyclo tried to get to you, but she only ever had the energy to focus on her. Not more than one person. She’s been saving her energy, using it when she can, and budgeting. She knew if she put energy into attacking you hard, she’d let go of Portia.” I snap my fingers, or at least try. I never mastered the technique, despite ten years of trying. “You know, I think Cyclo can no longer see me.”
“See? Like, with eyes?”
“Yes. She has photoreceptor cells on the surface of her matrix. But during my last trip to my room, she said she couldn’t see me. She’s blind, Fenn.” I smile slowly.
“You have a plan, Hana?”
“Yes.” I beam. “But we’re going to need your nanobots. And I’m going to need a really sharp knife.”
…
This is a terrible idea, but sometimes terrible ideas are all you have.
We find some scalpels from the medical unit, and Fenn readies his nanobots and several of the larger drones that he brought but hasn’t had a chance to use. We gather a bunch of syringe-like ampules, and Fenn lays out all the drones he has and turns to me.
“Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I say.
First, I reach for my long hair, and with Fenn’s help, cut off foot-long locks. When we’re done, what’s left just grazes my shoulders, a strange feeling. I tie the cut hair into a bunch and attach it to one of the large drones. Fenn gets a beaker full of anticoagulant ready and ties a tourniquet gently around my left upper arm.
“This feels really wrong,” he says as I clean off my skin with disinfectant.
“Not as wrong as it feels for me,” I say, taking the knife. “Here goes.”
I carefully press the blade against the crook of my arm, where a vein is bulging out. I only need to nick the vessel—enough to get an ounce of blood. It turns out my body is really good at protecting myself, and I don’t press hard enough to do anything but make a small slice in my skin. Scarlet blood beads, and it itches. Darn it. I have to do better.
I heave in a big breath, bite my lip, and press harder. The knife tip plunges in, only a few millimeters, but it’s enough. Surprisingly, it hurts more now that it’s over. Dark red blood pours from the cut vein, and Fenn maneuvers the beaker to collect the rivulet of blood, swirling it with a plastrix stirrer to keep it from coagulating. I bandage my arm and start using the blade to do other things, like shaving off extra skin from my heels and trimming crescents of growth from my nails. I scrape dry skin from my legs and arms and pull out several eyelashes. I spit into a cup. And then I jog in place for a good fifteen minutes, until sweat pours down from my forehead and chest. We mop up the sweat and skin oils with two thin, stretchy plastrix gloves.
We take a pair of shoes that I never wear, and Fenn ties two pieces of solid titanium (broken off of the Selkirk) to each shoe—about thirty pounds or so each. And then we attach them to two of the largest drones, the ones that are the size of my head, which Fenn hadn’t used yet. I pull off my tunic and throw on an ill-fitting jacket of Portia’s, and we load this plus microscopic bits of my skin, hair, sweat, and blood to roughly twenty nanobots and thirty microbots in his fleet. The smallest minibots contain the ampules of my blood.
“Are they charged?” I ask.
“Charged and ready to go.” He turns on his holofeed and opens a control board in front of his face. It’s far larger and more complicated than any I’ve ever seen. “Doing a test walkabout now.”
I stand back and watch as my weighted shoes begin taking very realistic, bodiless, legless steps without me. Above it, a smaller drone swings my cut-off ponytail, complete with white stripe, jauntily above my tunic. The gloves, covered in skin cells, skin oils, and sweat, reach out here and there, once swishing against my arm. It does feel like a touch, though not a warm one. Where my face should be is a single drone, quietly flying along with a tiny speaker that will transmit my voice. Within what would be my body, a blur of other bots of different sizes (some of which I can’t see, but I know they’re there) carry vials and ampules of my blood, like a blurred, red hive of angry mosquitoes.
It’s me, on a molecular, weighted, phonic level. But it’s not me.
My decoy.
“So, I’ll walk the Hana decoy to the opposite quadrant. You’ll start talking to Cyclo, wearing a helmet so your true voice won’t be heard. I’ll make sure your decoy touches the walls here and there, brush your hair up against Cyclo’s surfaces. Lately, she’s so depleted of energy she can only focus on one part of the ship. And right now, it’s concentrated around your old room, where Portia died. So the decoy will stay in that area. You’ll fake being hurt, and we’ll release the blood, but I’ll keep the decoy running to keep from getting caught.”
I take a deep breath. “This isn’t going to work. She’ll know it’s not me.”
“It’s been almost twenty-four hours since we last had contact with her. Cyclo is degrading at an exponential rate. She’ll be decrepit enough that it will fool her.”
Fenn sounds so much more confident than I am. But then I see his eyes. They’re a touch glassy. The skin between his eyebrows twitches. He’s not confident, but he’s trying to be brave. For me.
“Are you ready?” Fenn asks.
“Yes,” I say, though I’m not. How could anyone be ready to do this? But I must. I believe in surviving. I believe in having a life that is mine, not something that’s been artificially crafted for me and then abruptly taken away.
I believe.
And thus, I must do this.
I put on my gear, consisting of radiation-proof suit and helmet. It belonged to the Selkirk, but there was only one, for Miki, who needed to wear it for some of her radiation studies. It doesn’t fit me at all, but Fenn finds that there’s an inner layer that stretches to fit adult humanoids of varying size. It’ll be enough to protect me, but it’s, unfortunately, way easier to breach. It’s all I have.
Fenn programs my mic to transmit to both him and the speaker for the Hana puppet. Behind me, a frictionless storage container that can easily be remotely maneuvered is already set to follow me. Its hover-pack is fully charged, enough to carry about the hundred pounds we’ll need. They’ll be so hot that I won’t be able to carry them in any sort of satchel. They’d burn right through.
Once again, this has to be me. Only Fenn can skillfully maneuver the Hana puppet, and if there’s any chance that Cyclo attacks me, I can reveal myself (at the risk of irradiating myself) and survive.
We haven’t said it, but Fenn and I both know that if this doesn’t work, our bag of tricks is empty. The show will be over, and Hana and Fenn as the universe knows us will be nothing but deconstructed organic matter that used to think, used to feel, used to love.
I tell myself that when that happens, it means that I will no longer be lied to. But it doesn’t make me feel better at all. My hand goes to my helmet to drop the face shield in place, but Fenn stays my hand.
“Be careful, Hana,” he says.
“Kiss me goodbye, Fenn,” I whisper. “Just in case.”
“No,” he says. “Because I’ll see you again. I’ll give you your kiss then. I promise.”
You promise? Please, don’t be lying to me, Fenn.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll see you later, then.” I smile and turn away.
Outside of the bridge, the hallway goes in two different directions. I go right, clockwise, toward the west quadrant where the radioactive waste vacuoles are. And Fenn stands in the dark hallway, his holo visor a huge bubble in front of him as he maneuvers the Hana puppet to walk counterclockwise within Cyclo, toward my room.
I walk the curving hallway, the storage container floating effortlessly behind me. I do the math in my head and know that in ten feet, the hallway will curve to the point where that will be the last glimpse of Fenn I have. Maybe forever.
A few steps later, I’m there. I turn my head, and through the face shield of the helmet, all I see is Fenn’s back, and his arms gesticulating like a dancer as he commands my puppet on his holofeed to keep walking.
Oh, stars. I’m going to miss this boy so very much.
Fenn never turns around.