But The Stars Read online

  Back on Earth, Dante had bathrooms bigger than the cabins on the Acheron. Given the way the craft’s outer wings open telescopically, there’s plenty of space available, but each cabin is self-contained in the event of catastrophic depressurization while the crew are sleeping (which is roughly a third of each twenty-four hour period), so the cabins are sized for interstellar travel and have rapid decompression kits, acting as mini-airlocks and even life rafts if needed. They contain food, water, air, electricity, basic medical supplies, recycling units and survival spacesuits. Everything someone could possibly need for up to six months is packed in around them in the walls, hidden behind panels, concealing a volume far larger than the rooms themselves. They’re lifeboats.

  The Acheron has a modular design. Its primary configuration optimizes resources for deep space exploration, but the various modules are self-contained and have reaction controls—tiny thrusters that allow for local maneuvers. Over a hundred possible contingency configurations are possible should key portions of the Acheron become disabled due to fire, collision or equipment failure. Regardless of what happens in a catastrophe, survivors can downsize and carry on.

  The psychs back on Earth told Dante there was value in having areas of different sizes on the Acheron, like small cabins, large exercise rooms, round viewing bays, long medical wards, etc. They said the mind thrives on even subtle differences, but that argument never convinced her. A few extra feet in her bedroom would be nice. The backseat of her Tesla on Staten Island was more roomy than the couch in the cabin. The narrow table in front of the couch tends to be a dumping ground for Mags. It’s covered in multi-purpose tools, portable scanners, battery packs, wiring looms and network interfaces. If anything, the table looks like a workbench in a car dealership rather than someone’s home. That’s the problem with space travel—no spare parts for a quadrillion miles so everything gets repurposed.

  “Coffee?” Mags asks, getting herself a cup and looking at the ship’s time—2:37 AM.

  “Sure.”

  Mags waves her hand over the fabricator in the kitchen and signals using her neural interface. Coffee is one of the first commands most people learn when it comes to a fabricator. Who doesn’t want a perfectly brewed cup every time?

  She also opens a bottle of whiskey. When it comes to alcohol, it’s the imperfections that make it interesting, so she and Naz run a still in engineering. Besides, there’s a bit of pride to be found in creating something rather than relying on a machine for absolutely everything.

  “So, how do we stop them?”

  “I don’t know,” Dante replies. “But they’re losing control.”

  “How so?” Mags asks, pouring a drop of whiskey in the coffee and handing it to Dante. “I figure if none of this is real, there are no calories, right? Or alcohol? Not really.”

  Dante smiles, sniffing the cup. “Smells real.”

  Mags raises the bottle, holding the open neck beneath her nose. “Yeah, the smell. It’s really strong.”

  “They’re learning,” Dante says.

  “Fast.”

  “They’re shutting down the points of difference, trying to make it impossible for us to tell.”

  “Assholes.”

  Dante shrugs. “Well, at least it tastes real. If they were jerks, they could make it taste like dirt.”

  “It tastes goooood.” Mags leans against the bench, pushing laundry onto the couch. “How long do you think there is between each cycle?”

  “What do you mean?” Dante asks.

  Mags snaps her fingers. “For us, each iteration is the next thought. Like falling asleep at night and waking in the morning, hours become seconds, but they need some time to analyze what happened, right? To figure out what we meant by smell. To replicate that particular sense in here—wherever here actually is.”

  “I guess,” Dante replies, not having thought of that angle before. “Could be days, weeks, months.”

  “Years?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  Dante sips her drink.

  Mags asks, “So... how are they losing control?”

  “Look at all the sex.”

  “Yeah, it does seem a little desperate, huh?”

  “Ya think,” Dante laughs, sitting perched on the edge of the thin table.

  “Hey,” Mags says, nudging Dante with the drink in her hand. “They’re not the only ones learning, right? We’re learning too. And we’re remembering.”

  “We are,” Dante concedes.

  Mags has a funny look on her face, screwing it up slightly as though she’s doubting herself and what she’s about to say. After a moment, she asks, “Dante, are we in heaven or hell?”

  “We’re alive,” Dante replies. “So neither.”

  “Purgatory it is then,” Mags says, charging her glass and drinking to that. Dante laughs, agreeing with that sentiment. She sipping her coffee as though responding to a toast.

  There’s a knock at the door. The cabin is small enough that Mags can wave her hand over the locking mechanism by reaching in front of the kitchenette. The door slides open. Cap is standing in the corridor wearing only an old pair of underpants. His hairy chest and slightly round belly protrude over the worn waistband, but he doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps Dante’s being a bit of a prude, but as the elastic has largely failed, the fabric covering his crotch hangs a little loose, allowing his scrotum to appear on one side. Dante focuses on his eyes.

  “This is progress, right?” he says with his arms stretched wide, announcing his arrival as though he were a prince at court.

  “How did you?” Dante asks, gesturing toward the corridor, curious how Cap found the two of them.

  “I checked your quarters first, then Vichy’s. Figured you’d be down here.”

  The timing is about right. Seems everyone wakes at the same time in each new simulation.

  Vichy pokes his head around the corner and waves. Typical Vee. His mannerisms are almost comical. In any other context, Dante would laugh at his weird smile. He rubs the stubble on his chin. “We remember. That’s good, right?”

  Dante salutes with her coffee/whiskey and takes another sip, but she notes there’s no hit from the alcohol. Seems the aliens haven’t figured that one out yet. Shame.

  “Wanna drink?” Mags asks.

  “I sure could do with one.” Cap walks in and takes a swig from the bottle and hands it to Vichy, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “It would be nice if this shit happened during the day when we were dressed.”

  “All this has got to be deliberate, right?” Dante says. “They revive us when we’re closest to a dream state, keeping us off-guard.”

  “Not always,” Mag says. “I think they’re probing. Trying different things.”

  “Why would they do that?” Vichy asks.

  “To learn everything they can about us,” Dante replies.

  “What do you remember?” Cap asks, addressing Mags.

  “It’s weird,” she says. “Somethings are really clear, like Vichy opening that panel. Others are vague. I remember Angel being injured or something, but she’s alright now, right?”

  “She is,” Cap says.

  Benson wanders down the corridor, having heard the talking. He leans in the doorway, unable to enter the small apartment without squeezing past Cap and Vichy.

  He asks, “Why the hell are they doing this to us again and again?”

  “I don’t know,” Dante says. “But we’ve turned a corner. We’re remembering more clearly each time.”

  “We need to learn about them,” Benson says.

  To which Dante adds, “And fast.”

  Mags seems troubled by that. In a curious voice, she asks, “Why did you say fast?” She’s picked up on the alarm in Dante’s voice.

  Dante didn’t want to be the one to point this out, especially not here, crammed inside a tiny apartment on the lower decks of the Acheron, but it has to be said, even if the answer’s obvious. “They’re keeping us alive, right? That takes effort—r
esources. Once they’ve got us figured out… Well, they won’t need us anymore, will they?”

  “Damn,” Vichy says, cutting off Mags, who was clearly going to say something far stronger.

  Benson asks, “But if this is an illusion, what can we do? How can we fight back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fuck.” Cap slams his fist into the plastic cabinet over the sink.

  To Dante, acting out like that seems out of place given their captors aren’t actually present, but Cap’s frustrated, feeling the pressure. Even though it’s not directed at her, the thundering echo within the tiny cabin leaves Dante feeling vulnerable. She slips back onto the couch, squeezing in beside the laundry, dejected. Bravado is misplaced arrogance. Dante will have none of it. Benson’s right. What the hell can they do against an alien species that can manipulate their sensory inputs with near perfect fidelity?

  “I don’t like this,” Cap says when no one speaks in response to his outburst.

  “Nobody likes it,” Mags says, stating what seems obvious.

  “So what’s next?” Cap asks, angry and annoyed. “We could wake anywhere, right? Hell, they could cram us all inside an airlock and flush the chamber. We’d suffocate. I mean, not really, but it sure as hell would feel real.”

  “It would,” Dante concedes.

  “I hate this shit,” Cap says, stepping around the small apartment, apparently ready to run through the walls. “They could kill us time and again—in a thousand different ways—and we’d suffer every time. And we’d never be able to do a damn thing about it.”

  “Maybe that’s not what they want,” Benson offers. “If they could do that and they haven’t, perhaps that tells us something about them and their intentions.”

  “Like what?” Mags asks.

  “That they’re not sadistic,” Benson replies.

  “Yet,” Dante says, although she immediately regrets saying that. None of them need the stress of worrying about the future. Alien illusions be damned, the future has always been shrouded by a mist. Anyone that thinks otherwise really hasn’t been paying attention. On that fateful day when her dad grabbed her from the swings, thirteen people died in her small town. Not one of them thought—today. Not one of them believed it would happen to them, not until their homes were being torn apart around them. Even then, it had to be someone else. Death comes for others, for people on TV, strangers in a mall, not them.

  Dante’s got that sick feeling in her stomach again.

  “So what’s their end game?” Mags asks. “I mean, Dee’s right. All of this costs them something. They’re studying us—they must be. What do they hope to learn from us? Our weaknesses? Our strengths? Our reasoning? By now, they must know that without technology we’re as helpless as a newborn kitten. They could kill us, but they haven’t. They clearly understand enough about us to simulate life onboard the Acheron.”

  Benson asks the question that’s burning in the back of Dante’s mind. “Are we prisoners of war?”

  Cap says, “We need to know what Zoe saw down there.”

  “At first, I thought so too, but now I’m not so sure,” Dante says in a soft voice. Although her words are quiet, barely above a whisper, they get everyone’s attention.

  “What do you mean?” Vichy asks.

  “In my first encounter—well, the first encounter I remember, there was this sexy, muscular nurse, I guess they figured I was into that or something, he wanted to know how we knew what we were up against on P4.”

  Cap is silent. His eyes narrow, focusing intently on her.

  She says, “It’s like an undercurrent at the beach, you know? Calm, still water on top, but beneath the surface… Vee, you asked, what do they want? What if what they want is to learn how to be more effective? I mean, none of us remember what actually happened, right? I know I don’t. I can barely distinguish where the past stops and the intrusion begins.”

  “So we’re lab rats?” Mags asks.

  “Maybe,” Dante says.

  Vichy’s frustrated. He says, “So every interaction—every iteration is out of our control. It’s all just some mind game to draw information out of us.”

  Benson doesn’t help. “They’re torturing us, tormenting us.”

  Mags laughs, but not because anything’s funny. Her response seems to be out of frustration, perhaps sarcasm.

  “What?” Dante asks her.

  “Torture never works,” Mags replies, “but I think you’re right. You want to know what I think? I think we’re getting the carrot.”

  “The carrot?” Dante asks, not making the connection.

  “Your sexy nurse,” Mags says. “Think about it. How do you motivate a donkey? With a stick or a carrot?”

  No one responds so Mags says, “How much do you know about twentieth century history? Specifically, World War II?”

  Dante shrugs, not sure how well she’s expected to understand events that occurred over a hundred years before she was born. Nazis bad. Allies good. Millions dead. That kind of stuff. Cap is unusually quiet.

  “My grandmother used to tell us the story of her grandfather in British Intelligence.”

  “Mags, please,” Vichy says, wanting to move the conversation along.

  “Hold on,” she replies, raising her hand and refusing to be sidelined. “This is relevant. It’s important. Trust me on this.”

  No one speaks. For someone as rash and impetuous as Mags, the way she slows her speech, choosing her words with care, is almost hypnotic. The crew is used to flamboyant Mags—vibrant Mags. None of them have ever seen Mags being reserved, and she uses that, wanting her words to carry weight.

  “My grandmother took me to England when I was thirteen. She wanted to see Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, Stonehenge, places like that. But for her, the highlight of the trip was Trent Park, because that’s where her grandfather was stationed during the war. This place was a mansion. One of those beautiful old period homes set on a hundred acres with dozens of stately rooms.

  “The ceilings were easily twenty feet high with crystal chandeliers hanging from ornate brass fittings. Gilded wallpaper in the hallways. Every room had a fireplace. Ornate vases sat on every mantle along with antique clocks, although no two could agree on the time. Dante, you would have loved it.

  “I remember the daffodils on the lawn outside. I’d never seen so many flowers. It was like seeing a football field covered in brilliant, bright yellow flowers, all swaying in unison with the wind. At the time, I really didn’t understand where we were. I asked my grandmother if we were going to meet the Queen. She just laughed.”

  Mags is lost in a distant memory. No one interrupts. It’s as if they’re all back there.

  “There was this mosaic in the courtyard, a symmetrical pattern in the cobblestones. We walked in that way, but I never saw it. I was too close to see it clearly. It wasn’t until we were up on the third floor, looking out the window, that I saw it and realized how stunning it was.

  “I remember staring out at lush green forests in the distance. To one side, thick hedgerows surrounded an ornamental pond bigger than any swimming pool I’d ever seen, reserved only for ducks and goldfish.”

  Cap purses his lips. His brow furrows as his eyes narrow. Dante’s surprised. She’s half-expecting him to get annoyed at this distraction, but he focuses intently on Mags, listening carefully to her every word. Like all of them, he’s no longer in orbit around some strange star dozens of light years from Earth. He’s back there with her.

  “Torture,” she says, bringing herself back to the subject. “The British never tortured the generals and colonels they captured during the war. Nope. They didn’t even put them in prison. Nope. They put them in Trent House. The German army was decimating the continent, destroying Europe, razing entire cities, killing millions, and the British let these guys play billiards in the drawing room. They even gave them brandy and cigars!”

  Cap nods.

  “That’s us,” Benson says as the realization hits.


  Mags smiles. “Those German generals gave the British everything—the location of the V2 rockets, the state of the Nazi uranium enrichment program, the concentration camps, eyewitness testimony to mass murder on a scale no one had ever thought possible—everything the Allies wanted to know.”

  “So this is a setup,” Dante says.

  “I think so,” Mags replies.

  “How can you be sure?” Cap asks.

  “I can’t,” Mags says. “I mean, look at us. Look at what’s happening to us. Hell, they could have tortured us thousands of times over and we wouldn’t remember it, right? Maybe they tried the stick already and have moved on to the carrot.”

  “But why?” Vichy asks. “All this is incredibly elaborate, but it makes no sense as we’ve seen through their façade.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Benson says. “If you want to fool the next crew.”

  Dante’s head is spinning. Ideas rush at her out of the darkness, flooding her mind with a variety of concepts, overwhelming her. She feels dizzy with the realization of what’s happening to them.

  “We need an anchor,” she says, struggling to make sense of her own thinking. “Some way to tell we’re in the illusion. Something they don’t understand.”

  “What do you mean?” Vichy asks.

  “Smell,” Mags replies. “We told them about the sense of smell and—voila—we can smell whiskey, sweat, musty clothing, dank air conditioning.”

  “Dante’s right,” Benson says. “They’re constantly adjusting, slowly drawing us in deeper.”

  Cap looks worried. Vichy’s quiet.

  Dante says, “We need something to hold on to, something to guide us home.”

  Benson says, “We need a pole star.”

  Dante’s quiet on that last point. For her, the stars are a place of refuge. Instead of pointing out the inconsistency inherent in seeing the constellations from WISE 5571, she simply reinforces her concern.

  “We each need something to hold on to as there will come a time when we can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.”

  “Oh, we are so totally fucked,” Mags says, dropping her empty plastic cup in the sink and watching as it rattles around before coming to a halt.