The Oceans between Stars Read online

  Now all was quiet. Sleeping pods across the fleets, all the orphans inside dreaming their molasses-slow dreams, a light coating of ice on each small window. Here, a bot moving about, performing basic maintenance. There, a human waking to take his watch on a starliner bridge, relieving another bleary-eyed colonial officer who trudged back to her pod, lonely footsteps echoing on the metal corridor floors. She’d seen enough of the infinite for a while, thank you very much.

  On icy Delphi: the chugging of mining equipment and trash incinerators, cleanup from the second-to-last fleet and the Starliner Saga. When its passengers had woken up and learned that their sun was truly gone, they’d had quite a party. To hear their raucous din, you might have thought theirs was a joyous celebration, but as with most funerals, if you studied their faces, you would have known otherwise.

  On they went, the ships racing across the ocean of space, blips barely visible in the dark, the humans on their way to Aaru-5, the closest planet that might be able to support them still well over a hundred years away.

  But see this:

  On one small ship near the very back of the line, still a few months from Delphi, a girl who is not asleep. On a human ship, in human clothes, a girl . . .

  But not a human at all.

  She has left her pod, awakened by an alarm she set just before their last refueling stop ended. The other passengers are still asleep. This girl checks her link. She has little time, and much to do.

  She floats through the ship in low light, little more than a shadow in her black thermal wear. She keeps one hand on the wall because balance has never been as easy since she had to lose her tail. As she floats, she slips her atmo pack over her shoulders and presses the plugs into her nostrils. Can’t afford to have her cough kick in, though the air on the ship is far better than it ever was on Mars.

  The skin on her hands, feet, and face is striped, some human color still, but the wider streaks reveal lavender with grayish-black dots. The putty-like skin covering is meant to be reapplied every few days, but she’s been in stasis three years since their last stop, and even in the cold, still pod, the cream dries and flakes off. She has to wake up early to clean up the mess, to reapply.

  But there are other things that must be done first.

  She slips into the cockpit. The ship’s panda-shaped bot sits in the pilot’s chair in low power mode, his eyes glowing a mellow orange above his permanent, creepy grin. Carefully, she lowers herself behind him and places a metal cylinder against the back of his head. The cylinder is smooth and silver, as long as a pinkie finger, with a black suction cup at one end. She presses the cup tight against the metal, then pushes a red button. A white light starts to blink on the cylinder’s opposite end. Normally the bot would awaken in the presence of a passenger, but this device will keep him asleep while she works.

  The girl buckles herself into the copilot’s chair and checks her link. She scrolls through the usual menus and then taps an icon that no normal human link has. A message awaits her. It is cold inside the ship, but before she activates the message, she slips off her gloves, pulls the link out of its port on her sleeve, and cups her hands around it.

  The message is not displayed in the visual spectrum of light. Nor is it presented in her native language; the coverings that she wears on her eyes so that they appear human would make it impossible to read, anyway. Three years, or if you counted stasis nearly thirteen, of seeing the world as if it has lost its color, its depth, and by evening when the lubricant has worn off, the maddening irritation. Just one of many things she has never told even her closest friends. Nor has she complained. Her mother would just remind her of all the more important things they’ve lost.

  The message arrives in pulses of heat, created by running the link’s processors at full speed in quick bursts. She feels the heat as a code in her palms, long bursts and short, some hotter than others. Even that sensation is dulled, since her bristles were shaved off.

  Slowly, she decodes the message, and it fills her with worry and frustration.

  We know you are confused, but you must not forget our mission. We can forgive what happened at Saturn, but you must turn your link’s locator back on so that we can intercept. It is what your mother and father would want.

  The girl curses to herself. They don’t know what they’re doing. They thought they did, but they don’t know what she now knows. She tried to convince Barro back at Saturn, while Liam ran off with the data key, but he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t take her seriously. They never did.

  She will show them this time.

  Think of your brother. Of all those who must be counted. Think of your people. Our very survival depends on you.

  Yes, she thinks, it does, and she grits her teeth and deletes the message.

  She does not turn on her link locator. She has a plan of her own. But as she replaces her link, she shivers. It is a plan that means she is almost always alone.

  The girl puts on her gloves. She taps the ship’s navigation and brings up a holoscreen. A map of the journey to Delphi, with key statistics. Speed: thirty-five thousand kilometers per second. Time to arrival: one hundred and forty-two days, eight and a half hours. They are a day behind schedule because at their last refueling stop, three years ago, they discovered that they had drifted ever so slightly off course. This meant it would take them an extra day to catch the Scorpius at Delphi. The starliner will be moored there for five days, and they’ve been scheduled to get there on the second day; now it will be the third, and that’s fine. They have enough fuel to make it without any more stops.

  But she needs them to need one more stop. Just to be sure.

  The girl pairs her link with the console and activates another icon that no human link would have: a viral program that slaves the ship’s navigation and allows her to make changes to their course without the ship’s computer, or its bot, knowing. Her father built it while her mother was decoding human speech—changing code and changing vocal cords, communication surgery. In a way, it’s what she’s doing now.

  Except Dad would be furious, she thinks. Both of them would be. Maybe she will be able to convince them, when the time comes. But she still has no plan for that.

  She loads their course plot on the holoscreen. Hours of study under her stern mother’s eye, learning these systems, on top of all the human customs, the history. Many hours here in the dark too, before their last wake-up, figuring out just how much to alter their course.

  She is betraying them now, betraying them all—don’t think about that.

  She makes the change: barely a hundredth of a degree. That should do it.

  The girl confirms the new settings, and the ship shudders as its lateral thrusters fire. A short pulse, just a momentary vibration, then silence again. So much silence out here.

  She watches the ship’s trajectory change just so, then taps off the holoscreen, exits the program, and disconnects her link. She removes the cylinder on the bot’s neck and glides out of the cockpit.

  Back in her compartment, she gets her backpack and heads to the bathroom. She looks in the mirror, her face half her own, half an imposter’s. But since that last day on Mars, she wonders: Which is which? It feels like neither. It feels like both.

  How will she make him understand?

  She rubs the old putty off, the flakes floating in the air around her. When she’s finished, she gets the ship’s vacuum, switches it to zero gravity mode, and sucks up the mess. Then she unscrews a metal container, dips her finger into the cool, thick putty, and lifts it toward her face. Pauses again.

  Why bother?

  Why keep hiding who she is, when it is no longer certain who she should be hiding from?

  But no, one thing at a time. There may still be a way to not lose everyone she cares about.

  And so a half hour later she reemerges from the bathroom, the mask reapplied and nearly set. She enters the compartment where her parents sleep. Carefully, she opens their pods, one at a time, with a hiss of frosted fog. The
pods can’t be open for long, less than a minute, or the temperature and fluid parameters of stasis will become imbalanced, forcing an emergency wake-up. This would jeopardize their health, as their wounds from the explosion on Mars are no better than they were ten years ago, merely paused. But also, then she might have to explain herself.

  She moves swiftly. There’s not time to remove their old masks, so she quickly vaccuums what’s flaked off, dabs on fresh putty, and smoothes it as best she can. Before sealing them up again, she kisses each of their foreheads.

  Finally, she returns to her room. Before she gets back into her pod, she pauses, a nervous flutter in her chest. She opens a drawer along the wall and pulls out a link. She turns it on, and as it powers up, her heart begins to beat faster. This makes the artificial pump just below her single ventricle speed up, and there is a strange sort of sucking in her lungs and she has to fight back a cough. Before, it was easy to blame it on the Martian dust. That had probably been part of the cause, but what excuse will she make now that it is only guilt and fear?

  The home screen appears and she taps the video file there. When it starts to play, she fast-forwards until a boy’s face appears, cheery, then she jumps ahead to his last appearance.

  “See you soon, guys,” Shawn says.

  And this makes her heart race even more, and the pump labors to keep up, and, as tears spring from her eyes, the girl taps pause and doubles over, coughing until her insides ache. She looks back at the file, at her friend’s face. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “Good-bye.” She shuts off the link and closes her eyes. Holds her breath. Too many tears might stain the putty before it has completely set. The lies, the lies, the lies.

  The girl exhales and puts the link away. Returning to her pod, she pauses to gaze into the one beside hers, through the frosted flex-glass at the still face of a boy, her friend. Not an enemy, she has decided. But if he knew . . . And he’ll need to. Soon. Is there any way he will understand?

  She lets her forehead fall against the glass. “I’m doing my best.” When his eyes are closed, she thinks that he almost looks like Mica. They look nothing like us, her mother had said when once, back on Mars, she’d given voice to this observation. It is true that there are so many differences. And yet, something about Liam’s face . . .

  She raises herself, takes a moment to check her reflection in the top of the pod and to smooth the tear lines. The putty barely budges. It is so uncomfortable. Like having a wet towel draped over your skin, day after day.

  Stop complaining, her mother would say. Be strong. We can’t afford not to be.

  You’re right, Mother.

  The girl floats back to her pod, buckles herself in, and activates the stasis sequence. As the flex-glass top lowers, she breathes deep, but her hearts will not slow their off-kilter beat, and tears threaten her trembling eyes once more, until the cold and gas coax her under.

  Her thoughts begin to slow. She thinks of Shawn, and the others.

  I’m sorry.

  The world dims. Liam, Mica . . .

  I’m sorry.

  A moment later, orange lights blink on around the inside perimeter of the pod: stasis reengaged.

  The ship, now still again, continues through the dark, ever so slightly off course from where it was headed. One one-hundredth of a degree, such a little thing . . . but perhaps just enough to determine the fate of this universe.

  2

  DISTANCE TO DELPHI: 282.7 BILLION KM

  TIME TO ARRIVAL: 93 DAYS, 13 HOURS

  “Liam, do you see it?”

  “Not yet.” Liam peered out the canopy of the skim drone. A river of icy boulders floated all around him, looming shadows against the distant stars, their metal-and-frost surfaces gleaming now and then as they tumbled through the drone’s exterior lights. The rocks were actually fragments of a pulverized comet that had once been the size of a small moon. They slipped along through the dark of space at eighty kilometers per second. Not that Liam could tell; he was moving right along with them, and the stars were all so far away in every direction that there was nothing to indicate that they were moving at all.

  Nothing above, below, anywhere.

  “How close am I?”

  “It should be visible out your starboard side,” said JEFF over the link.

  A proximity alert began to flash on the navigation screen.

  “Liam, look out!” said Phoebe.

  “Got it.” Liam hit the joystick control and fired the starboard thrusters. The skim drone jumped sideways just as a boulder twice its size spun down from above. His maneuver wasn’t precise, though—it was hard to operate the controls while wearing this space-grade suit with its thick gloves—and the boulder clipped the back corner of the craft, sending a shudder through it.

  “That was close,” said Phoebe.

  “They’re all close.” Liam’s fingers tingled. His head and back still ached from reanimation, though at least his stomach had calmed down. He breathed deep and tried to relax, but it wasn’t easy when he was navigating these boulders. Half of them were bigger than his ship, and they kept ricocheting off one another in sprays of dust. The biggest danger was getting caught between two of them. The skim drone’s fragile exterior was little match for what amounted to multiton billiard balls.

  Liam spied a midsized rock ahead. He tapped it on the sensors. “What about that one?”

  “Acknowledged, analyzing,” said JEFF. “I’m afraid while the mass and composition are right, it contains too little water to suit our needs.”

  “And you’re sure we can’t just grab a couple of these smaller ones?” Phoebe wondered. Liam saw her in the rear camera, wearing a space suit and floating, upside down, it seemed, on a tether beneath their Cosmic Cruiser, the boxy spaceship that was only meant for travel around the old solar system, but which they’d now managed to fly for nearly a light-year with the help of a special engine they’d salvaged just before leaving Saturn. An engine that was now low on fuel. Again.

  “We only have time for one, right, JEFF?” said Liam. The engine was powered by nuclear fusion, and water was its fuel source. There was plenty of it frozen inside these comet fragments, but they also needed to choose one that wasn’t too difficult to mine: if the pockets of ice were too small, or if the composition of the surrounding rock was wrong, it could take many more hours to extract the water.

  “Correct. Attempting to mine more than one fragment, even if they are small, will add variability, and thus further the risk of missing our rendezvous window with the Scorpius.”

  Liam held his breath against a flare of adrenaline in his belly. “We don’t have much more rendezvous time to lose.”

  “Unless you get crushed trying to find the perfect rock,” said Phoebe.

  “Well, yeah.” The skim drone’s sensors blared and a smaller rock clanged against the underside of the craft.

  “See what I mean?”

  “The fragment we pinpointed is the best option,” said JEFF. “But you are the acting captain, Liam, so just say the word, and I will reply: aye aye!”

  Phoebe sighed.

  “Was that not funny?” JEFF asked.

  Liam swallowed, a metallic taste in his mouth. He’d broken out in a clammy sweat, his heart rate increasing. “No, it was fine, JEFF. I’m just not in the mood.”

  It was true that Liam was the acting captain. While his parents were technically the owners of the Cosmic Cruiser, they were still in stasis due to the injuries they’d sustained on Mars, which required the advanced medical attention they could get only on the Scorpius or at Delphi. But he certainly didn’t feel like a captain. These worries, spinny feelings that tied him in knots, had been getting worse after each stasis period. JEFF said some of it was due to disorientation from stasis, and some due to the prolonged time in low gravity, no matter how much the pods attempted to compensate for it.

  But Liam knew it was more than that. It was also the time, and the distance. There was nothing, ever, anywhere, out here in the darkness.
And if they didn’t refuel fast enough, if they didn’t make it to Delphi in time to catch the Scorpius . . .

  Liam’s hand left the controls and drifted to his other wrist. On the outside of his puffy white suit was the strange silver watch that he’d found in the hidden observatory on Mars, on the wrist of a dead alien being. The watch’s face was split into two hemispheres, each with an odd symbol. There was also a dial around the outside. Turning the dial allowed the wearer to move through time—not to time travel, exactly, because Liam couldn’t stay where he went. He could only observe.

  It had been helpful on Mars, and at Saturn, allowing Liam to see potentially disastrous events in his future and find alternative solutions, but it had also been dangerous: when he used it, he entered a sort of timestream, and inside, Liam had encountered a metal-suited man who was part of the Drove, the beings responsible for blowing up the sun. That man had killed the alien in the observatory, and he’d wanted to take the watch from Liam. He’d also offered to bring Liam to something called the Dark Star. Liam had encountered the Drove again when he’d used the watch at Saturn, this time in strange, liquid black ships, and so, though he’d wanted to many times, he hadn’t traveled into the future since. Also, using the watch made him feel very strange, not just the splitting headaches and nausea, but also like he was coming apart, unsticking first in his thoughts and then in his very molecules.

  “Liam?” Phoebe asked. “Do you see it yet?”

  Liam glanced at Phoebe in the camera. She and the cruiser had drifted—or maybe he had, who knew?—such that she now seemed to be floating on her side, with the cruiser pointing up and down. “No,” he said. “Just a sec.”

  He returned his hand to the console, and as he did, for just a moment, he felt a hollowness inside that he yearned to fill. There was something else about the watch, an urge that the time trips stirred inside him—to keep going. To see what was out there even further into the future. Where did Liam and his friends end up? How did he die? But even beyond that—what happened to this galaxy? How did the universe end? It had seemed, during those moments in the timestream, like he could have found those answers if he’d just reached far enough . . . even though at the same time, he’d experienced a chilling fear, like if he traveled that far he might not be able to return. Still, if it hadn’t been for the danger of the Drove, he felt like he would have attempted it, and this was something he didn’t want to admit to Phoebe or JEFF.