Starship to Demeter (Starship Portals Book 1) Read online

  After the experiment check, she was trying a 180, flipping one way, then the opposite, since there was no ‘up’ in the vacuum, when she felt a difference in her oxygen level. It could only be a leak. Her oxygen was streaming out somewhere below her visor, where it was usually sealed tight. She flipped down the sun visor, the second layer that was used for welding work or when exposed to bright light, to see if it would click and seal. It didn’t. She tried to feel the spot where it was leaking, to block the stream. She got her finger on it. There must be another leak, because the air quality continued to deteriorate.

  “Rai, alert, helmet failure. Oxygen deficit.”

  There was no answer. Unless she was unable to hear Rai because of the lack of oxygen around her ears. She had felt them pop.

  With a push of her feet Noor launched herself off the cargo door, across the airlock, toward the hatch. She was close enough to oxygen. A crackling in her ears was the only sound, an interior body sound within, in the wide absence of sound around her. She tried not to gulp the last of her oxygen, but the instinct was so strong she couldn’t stop a big breath, which started full and rich and ended flat. She breathed out, the carbon dioxide puffing out into nothing, the last of the air in the balloon. A fizzy bubbling sensation on her tongue told her she was in trouble, the last of the moisture in her mouth evaporating. She had about two to three minutes to get out.

  The means to open the hatch was a flat lever the size of a hand to be turned from horizontal to vertical. Once the lever was turned, she would push a large button to release the door and slide through the skin-like membrane. Her muscles still worked. She flipped the lever, breathing in relief, but there was no air to breathe. Her lungs made the movements and got nothing for it. She pressed the button. Nothing happened.

  She couldn’t stop herself from hammering on the door, though the sound wouldn’t carry.

  “Rai. Rai.” She didn’t have air to form words. The red of worry, the deep dark red of danger and rescue, floated in front of her eyes. She pushed her hand at it. Her body was lifted by the vacuum, away from the inner hatch. With a flailing motion of her arms and legs, she reached for the hatch door, but the hull-side cargo door was too far away to push against with her feet and she floated back toward the hull, as if she’d paddled backwards in the ocean.

  “Rai.” She formed the last word with her mouth.

  Yarick Cole, on his new daily perambulation dictated by Inger, saw a small puddle of clothes at the end of the long hall to the hatch. He was exploring, walking every arm and corner of the ship, at his own slow pace. It was better than the physio, to his mind, which resembled nothing so much as a torture device.

  He looked at the clothes, then up at the porthole window in the hatch door. Something was floating in there. He crept closer and looked through.

  The sight that met his eyes, a body floating, hair seeping out in tendrils from the visor, caused him to slam the emergency open switch, without thinking too clearly about the consequence. The skin of the tube blew back into the hatch, he was sucked toward it, and the floating figure slid away toward the cargo door. Yarick tore at the skin with scrabbling hands, hacking at it with his stick in one hand while he tried to rend it with the other. It didn’t want to tear. He launched himself forward into the vacuum, one foot hooked for safety on the stretchy skin.

  The stick helped him grab her, the hook on the end encircling her arm. He vomited, the sick floating out in a spray of tiny globules he ignored as he reeled her toward him. With a yank he got her into the tunnel of silky stretchy intermediacy, the portal between death and life.

  They were forced out with his desperate pull, like mammals falling from the womb of a tall creature, splat on the hard ground. Her leg was caught in the skin. On his hands and knees he untangled her and struck at the switch with his cane. It enclosed itself like a mollusk snapping shut as he yanked an oxygen cube from the wall, piercing and pressing it over her mouth.

  “Send help.” His words wheezed out. “Emergency, send help.”

  Sasha took over in pod one, Kal in pod two, as they waited to hear back from Rai. Kal studied her passenger manifest as the two passengers in her pod struggled into their exosuits while the crew slipped into theirs like the second skins they had become. Kal used little memory tricks to help her remember the background of the passengers, the better to manage them.

  Crew in her pod were Gunn, Inger, and Haven. Big engineer and fix-it person Gunn, MD Inger—a decent sort but testy—and payload specialist Haven, who could crawl through all the cargo holds and not get lost.

  Passengers were the missing Yarick (thrower-upper, AI wiz and polymath, former advisor to Noor who Noor appeared to have an antipathy for, nosy parker), Wei (artist, short dark hair swept back in a pompadour, compact and athletic-looking, daughter of somebody famous, Kal couldn’t remember who), and Davena (hydroenergy and botany specialist, Maori, rumored not to suffer fools, round and powerful with a bellowing laugh). Pretty good so far.

  Davena and Wei were not too bad with the suits. Kal could whip them into shape. It would have been nice to have Noor in her pod instead of Gunn. She hoped she wouldn’t ever have to occupy a pod longterm with Gunn. Better not to let her thoughts go there.

  Gunn was strapping in docilely enough at the moment. Red-haired Haven was inward and quiet, as usual. She wasn’t very verbal unless necessity required. Haven liked making complex line art with a ruler. And puns. That was Kal’s in with Haven.

  Everyone else was suited up in pod two and were now strapping in. They were in the oval transport module, the seats ringing the oval so they all faced each other when in place. The crew’s seats could be swiveled and slid to other parts of the module depending on what sort of operation was needed. Kal locked her seat facing the oval for this simulation.

  The pods’ other attached modules, including hypersleep chambers, sleep bay, infirmary, mess, and hydroponic garden, made the pods much larger than they seemed from this compact module where they conducted drills. The pods were fully sufficient for long distance travel, but a far cry from the comfort of the ship.

  “Report, pod two.” Sasha’s voice came over the comm from pod one.

  “Suited and strapped in,” Kal replied. “No sign of Yarick, Captain.”

  Before Sasha could respond, a distress call came over the all comm. It was Yarick.

  “Rai?” Kal called as she unbuckled as fast as she could.

  “Malfunction in cargo airlock seven,” Rai said.

  Kal hadn’t given the order to seal the doors yet and she was up and out of the pod before anyone else had time to react. Lumbering like a bear in the exosuit, she heard Sasha’s feet beating behind her.

  That airlock was one level up. They stumped up the spiral ramp to the floor above and down the too-long corridor to the dark recesses of airlock seven, their movement lighting up the passage as they went. Down another offshoot arm of the corridor and Kal could see Noor on the floor, Yarick kneeling beside her. He held an oxygen cube to her mouth. Her hair spread around her head, black tendrils, Medusa’s snakes transformed into silk.

  Kal knelt on the other side of Noor, breathing hard. Running in the exosuit was like running through sand in one point two times the gravity.

  Noor was wearing the light suit. If she had been in an exosuit it would have shocked her heart if her heart went out of rhythm or stopped. The light suit couldn’t. Closing her fingers around Noor’s wrist, Kal felt for a pulse while she leaned down, pushing Yarick and the cube out of the way to feel for Noor’s breath on her cheek.

  She couldn’t tell if it was the oxygen from the cube rushing out or Noor’s breath. Then Inger was there, beside her, moving Kal firmly aside. Inger had retrieved a kit from the wall next to the airlock and set it next to Noor. Kal opened the kit while Inger unzipped Noor’s suit. Inger smoothed sensors on Noor’s chest, plugged them into the kit, and placed a mask over her face.

  Inger waited calmly while the sensors acted. They lit up red and Inger said, �
�Stay back.” They inched away. Noor’s body convulsed. The sensor glowed green.

  “Sinus rhythm,” Inger said. Everyone else was coming forward now, crowding the corridor.

  “Get the hell back,” Inger barked.

  Sasha came forward as Yarick retreated. Sasha squeezed Yarick’s arm. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded and turned into the cluster of people now in the larger corridor. Chyron supported his arm as he found a place next to her. A space widened around them, the other travelers giving them room.

  Inger punched another button beside the airlock and released the bodyboard. She set it next to Noor, then peeled off and placed five magnets on Noor, one on each limb and one on the back of her head.

  “No hover transfer. Lift her.”

  Kal on one side, Sasha the other, with Inger at Noor’s head, they moved her on three. The magnets snapped into place and Inger activated the neck brace, which wrapped itself around Noor’s neck. Inger set the hover to waist level and they moved with her on the bodyboard, parting the other travelers as they moved through, down the long corridor on the way to the infirmary.

  After the rescue—Inger at Noor’s side, Yarick’s face a study in shock, Noor’s transportation to the infirmary and placement in an induced coma—the initial panic was over. In Sasha’s mind it was a blur, since Inger had determined all that was to be done. The horror of it was setting in. Everyone except Inger and Sasha had finally gone to bed. Sasha was numb.

  She stood on the bridge, haunting Noor’s usual spot where Noor worked through the night.

  She couldn’t go to bed with Noor in a coma, anyway.

  They were locked in orbit around Sextant, their first swing around the planet before they swooped again and caught the gravity assist to Demeter.

  Inger wouldn’t make predictions.

  Sasha’s hand brushed the space over the trajector and brought the three-dimensional plot of their path into view. This system, dubbed mythian for its star, Mythos, as their own was called the solar system for the Sun, or Sol, had a collection of fourteen planetary bodies in orbit. They were approaching from deeper space, traveling in toward the star Mythos at its center, to reach their planet of choice, the fifth closest to Mythos. Since they had passed the cusp of the sixth planet and entered orbit around it, theoretically the next tricky bit wouldn’t come until tomorrow.

  Sasha stared at the slowly rotating projection, seeing where they’d come from and where they were going as a faint line of light, navigating through the worlds. She stared for a long time.

  They were on a new course, re-calculated by Rai since the portal jump, which brought them closer to Sextant than the original trajectory of the earlier mission. It was a gamble, as Sextant was ringed with planetary asteroid bands like Saturn, giving the ship a moderate danger of interference. Rai calculated and set the odds as minuscule, as long as they stayed at their current velocity vector relative to Sextant before the slingshot, midpoint reversal, and slowdown as they approached Demeter.

  Using an image near her, Sasha entered some variables, throwing alternates at the projection to see what-if scenarios play out. Mythian flare, asteroid sheer, and so on. The small slice of mythian system before her rippled in altered states as she forced it through shifts in potential realities. It was soothing. If this, then that. Safe, safe, safe. The ship kept them safe.

  Sasha wondered how soon her role might be redundant. Would it ever? Would human cargo always need a human attendant, a monitor to shepherd them through the perils of space? Sasha liked to think yes, for her generation at least. She wondered what Rai would think of this.

  Sasha said to the holo, “Ice and asteroid storm promoted by mythian flare, ship adjacent. Forty degrees to starboard relative to Sextant. Planned trajectory.” The image rippled. It showed a larger-than-scale model of the ship in the place she had indicated. Specks showered the ship in waves.

  Gliding her fingers on the console, Sasha studied the projection. This trajectory still gave her pause. She would ask Rai to perform more analysis in creative mode. Passenger Gwendy Lewis was available, too, for consultation, a back-up trajectorist on contract, who was disembarking longterm on Demeter.

  Sasha couldn’t talk to Noor about it now.

  Later, unsure how much time had gone by, she heard the door of the bridge open and saw Kal.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” Sasha asked.

  “Nope.” Kal’s eyes were bleary. “Heard anything?”

  Sasha shook her head. “Inger said the coma will help her recover faster, like you said. No news other than that.”

  Kal slumped down in her usual seat. She said, “Have you gone over what happened?”

  “I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the holo yet. I need to,” Sasha said.

  “I’ll watch it with you, if you want.”

  “Thanks, Kal,” Sasha said quietly. “Dim lights,” she said to Rai. “Bring up cargo seven airlock during Noor’s experiment check.”

  With the room dimmed to grayness, the holo appeared before them brighter than it would have otherwise. Sasha sat in the seat opposite Kal, the holo between them.

  In the holo image, they saw Noor wriggling into the airlock. She sealed the door, re-established the vacuum, and went about her experiments. Watching her floating there was mesmerizing. In the quiet of the night-time ship it was as if they were watching a window opened into the past, which they were. When Noor started doing her stunts in the zero G, Kal and Sasha couldn’t help but smile. In this moment it hadn’t happened yet. Sasha wished she could freeze Noor there in time.

  The next few minutes grew tense, then harrowing. Seeing Noor struggle for air, try to stop the leaks, call through her comm for Rai, struggle to get out through the hatch and fail, was excruciating. It was when Noor’s face was flipped up toward the camera and they could read her lips when she had run out of oxygen, what she was saying, still trying to say, that Sasha and Kal’s eyes met over the holo with the impact of what had happened. “Rai,” she was saying. “Rai.”

  Rai had not answered. Rai had not helped.

  4

  Rai

  The Tube was one of the only spaces on the ship not in view of cameras or sensors. It was not literally tube-shaped but had been christened that by a Londoner, one of the ship designers, who thought it had a subway-like feel. It was a couple of rooms, rectangular and lined in a row like a train-car, designed with a nautical air and simplicity, which could be used for private conversations or assignations, as required.

  The teak accents of wood and sleek, Art Deco details in the walls and furniture gave the impression of being inside a twentieth-century pre-war yacht rather than confined to an internal chamber without windows, only mock portholes with images to imply they were at sea.

  Although consideration for the crew had been a minor concern, it being more designed for the high-profile passenger who might need to have an ears-only conversation, it was utilized by crew and passengers alike, if necessary. No one had made use of it so far on this mission, as far as anyone knew. It was as if no one wanted to be seen to want extra privacy.

  No record within.

  Sasha and Kal’s eyes were locked. Noor floated in front of them in the holo, now unconscious, as they waited what seemed an eternity for Yarick to break through.

  The image pulsed, like a power surge, Noor’s back arching in a spasm while she floated, unaware. The image flickered out. Sasha snapped at Rai to reestablish playback.

  Rai informed them a power surge had interrupted transmission. There was nothing more.

  Not seeing her rescued was terrible. That last image of her floating, convulsing, trapped forever in a vacuum, could not be erased.

  Rai. What Rai had done. What Rai hadn’t done. Right there in front of them, in the record.

  Kal could see the slow expansion of Sasha’s irises. The muscles from her jaw to her neck were tight.

  Fast and slow, instantaneous yet endless, in that moment they had to read each other’s minds.
How could either of them say anything? Noor had asked for help and Rai had not answered. Rai was going to let Noor die. Noor’s comm had worked. Rai had heard her. She had done nothing.

  Being alone here on the bridge, the two of them, the rest of the ship asleep except for Inger, far away in the infirmary, Kal felt a dread and fear she’d never known since the first time she’d set foot on a ship. Ships were her home. This ship was her home.

  The Ocean was life. Rai was life, to them.

  After an eternity, stiff like she’d been fished out of ice water, Kal stood up. She didn’t know what to do, but she couldn’t sit anymore.

  Sasha didn’t move.

  After a longer silence, Kal spoke to Sasha. “I think I’ll turn in.” They had to get out of here. They couldn’t say anything about it. For at least a few breaths, Kal was desperate to leave the bridge, where it felt like Rai’s presence was magnified, inescapable.

  Sasha reached out and grabbed Kal’s wrist. An electric flash burned through Kal. Sasha had never touched her, except to help her in an exosuit.

  “Kal,” Sasha said. She let her grip on Kal relax. Her fingers followed the trace of Kal’s wrist down to her hand, which she wove her fingers into. Kal saw Sasha lick her lips. Kal swallowed.

  What was happening? The lights were still dim, with no light from the holo anymore. Was this real? Kal kept those dreams so locked down she didn’t let herself think them often, but sometimes, sometimes she did. Had she blacked out in shock? She might open her eyes in the infirmary, with Inger bending over her, any second. Kal blinked rapidly.

  “Kaliska,” Sasha said. She stood. Her voice was lower than usual, rougher. Her fingertips curved in a rake that carved against Kal’s palm. Kal’s hand jerked, flat and rigid. She didn’t pull away. She couldn’t move.