But The Stars Read online

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a lie.”

  He nods. “So what would you really do?”

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t lie to them.”

  Again, he nods so she continues. “I’d tell them the truth. We’re going to die. I’d give them a choice. Linger with a dying spacecraft. Overdose on sedatives. Or curl up in a pod forever. It’s all the same in the end.”

  The doctor smiles, but there’s something strange, almost wicked about the way he looks at her. It’s as though he’s staring through her. It’s only then she realizes she’s never met him before. After nine years of training, meeting countless other scientists, specialists, senior administrators, trainers and astronauts, why is it only now he’s participating in the program? Now when they’re about to launch?

  He asks, “You encounter a hostile alien species—one that kills several crew—takes over your craft—controls your minds. What do you do?”

  She thinks for a moment. “If they can control our minds, what can I do?”

  “You tell me.”

  The darkness beyond him—it’s alive. She can feel it. She’s lost—floating in space, but the stars? Where are the stars? Where are those guiding lights leading her home? Dante repeats his words back to him.

  “Observed, analyzed, considered and predicted, right?”

  The doctor laughs softly, coming to a halt in front of her, staring down at her. Tentacles reach from the shadows, touching at his shoulders, but he doesn’t flinch. Neither does she.

  Dante knows.

  Thin tendrils slither around the doctor’s legs, reaching across the floor, moving into the light, but she’s not afraid. Without breaking eye contact, she says, “They can control us, oppress us, even enslave us, but they can’t break us.”

  And with that, the doctor fades from view.

  Mags

  The darkness surrounding Dante feels inviting, almost invigorating. Her eyelids flicker, but don’t open. The hum of the vents, the creak of the hull as someone moves around on another floor, the texture of her blankets, the light creeping in beneath her bedroom door—strange as it may seem, these are the things she relishes about life on board the Acheron. There’s comfort to be found in familiarity.

  “Dante, I need you on the bridge.”

  Although she hears those words, Dante doesn’t immediately grasp their meaning. Her eyes open. She rolls over on her bed. A soft light blinks on her darkened wall screen. By default, only audio will come through until she accepts the call. At first, she’s tempted to think she’s dreaming, but Cap’s angry voice blares from the comms device.

  “Now!”

  “On my way,” she replies. Cap ends the call and wall screen falls dormant again.

  Dante sits up on the edge of her bed, resting her bare feet on the floor. With only a pair of underpants on, she gathers her thoughts as she stumbles to the wardrobe, grabbing a bra, a t-shirt and a pair of long pants.

  “What’s going on, Jeeves?”

  “From what I’ve been able to ascertain,” her artificial assistant replies, “Mags is having a psychotic incident.”

  Dante inadvertently twists her bra strap in the rush to fasten it behind her back. Every second counts. Comfort can wait. She slips on her shirt and pants. As she rushes out of the bedroom, she hops, putting on a pair of shoes without socks.

  Although she’s never actually needed it, Dante keeps a heavy trauma kit in a backpack by the door of her tiny compartment because medical is on the lowest level, while the bridge, the dock, the engine bay and airlock are up near the hub of the wheel-like structure that is the Acheron. Within the pack there are a couple of oxygen cylinders, several full-skull masks with buddy-breathing attachments, thermal insulation blankets and a rapid decompression kit. She looks more like a firefighter than a medic, but the array of medical supplies will come in handy.

  As she climbs the ladder between floors, making her way up one of the spokes toward the hub, she mentally reviews her inventory, thinking about what she can use to calm Mags. Drugs, though, even tranquilizers, only go so far. In the heat of the moment, the best medicine is a confident voice, so she steels herself to remain calm.

  Angel grabs the top of the ladder, leaning into the shaft and calling out, “Hurry.”

  Dante should have taken the cargo elevator as it’s exhausting climbing with a medical pack on her back, but the ladder was closer and should be quicker.

  As much as Dante enjoys being up on the bridge, she spends more time in medical. The bridge is located on the level just below the hub at the heart of the Acheron.

  Spaceships are all about maximizing space. When traveling between stars, the Acheron closes in much the same way an umbrella folds up, minimizing damage from interstellar dust while traveling close to the speed of light. When moving within a system, the curved floors unfold like the petals of a flower. As they’re set at various distances from the hub, they’re comprised of telescoping sections that slide in and out of each other much like the old spyglasses favored by pirates in movies. The hub itself is the axis of the starship. It houses the engines, fuel tanks and reactor. It’s not pleasant close to the axis as it turns, so the crew tend to avoid going up that high. Even the bridge is too close. Up there, the illusion of gravity created by the spinning craft becomes muddied by a weird sideways, Coriolis motion. In the same way that hurricanes form due to the spin of Earth, it’s easy for Dante to get dizzy when turning one way or the other when she’s close to the axis of the craft. More than one crewmember has thrown up after twisting out of a chair and getting to their feet too quickly.

  Dante works with her hands and legs, setting a constant pace on the ladder, focusing on her breathing. Yeah, the elevator would have been smarter, but, hey, she’s still waking. As she approaches the top, Angel holds out a hand, helping her up the last few feet.

  Angel’s their resident nuclear physicist. She’s the mission conversion specialist. To Dante, she’s a magician. She waves a wand and mutters the secret incantations that moderate the dark matter conversion at the heart of the Acheron. Over a beer one night, just before they launched, Angel drew Feynman diagrams on the back of a napkin, explaining how it all worked. All Dante got out of it was that one squiggly line hits another squiggly line. Something extremely squiggly happens in the middle, and lots of squiggly things rush off in the other direction. Baryons, mesons, hadrons, fermions and demions—Angel might as well have been explaining math to a monkey. Dante nodded politely, smiled, and sipped her beer.

  “You’ve got to talk her down,” Angel says in her characteristically soft voice. At five-foot five, with blonde hair and a toned body, Angel’s always been the most feminine of the women on the crew. Dante’s never seen Angel get upset about anything, let alone angry—this, though, has her rattled.

  “What happened?”

  “Mags started arguing with Cap. She wants to abort the surface mission. Leave the robotic equipment down there. She says we’re in danger.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know. She’s crazy—violent crazy—like, throwing things around crazy.”

  That doesn’t sound like Mags, but Dante trusts Angel and Cap. They’re the only steady couple on the Acheron. Everyone else bed hops, even Dante. Oh, she has her favorites—Vichy for a good high, Naz if she wants a bit of rough and tumble, and Mags when she’s feeling playful.

  Since the early days of space exploration, NASA has favored odd numbers over even. A crew of eight divides into four pairs, which although it might seem stable, favors closed decision-making followed by deadlocks. A crew of nine ensures there’s always a swing vote and avoids embedded cliques from forming. When it comes to sex, though, it also means there’s got to be some free thinking or someone gets left out. The prudes wearing suits, sitting under the spotlights in the prime-time television newsrooms might not want to think about sex in outer space, but NASA understands it’s as natural as breathing or defecating. To treat
sex as anything other than natural has always been a mistake, so NASA made sure there was a broadly compatible mix within each of the crews bound for the stars.

  Cap and Angel, though, are old school. The rest of the crew make fun of them, calling them monos. For Cap, it’s probably as much about being practical as it is emotional. Commanders tend to be loners because sleeping with the crew weakens their perceived authority. According to the latest psych studies Dante’s read, that’s not entirely true, but it does impact decision making. It’s not that humans can’t avoid cognitive biases, but that they’re largely defined by them, so those in command try to avoid feelings that might get in the way of hard decisions. A steady relationship with sweet little Angel has allowed Cap to sidestep the issue. For Angel it’s old fashioned love. That she was up on the bridge in the middle of the night is no surprise as she tends to shadow Cap.

  Dante rushes along the corridor behind Angel, with the oversized, bulging backpack bouncing on her shoulders. There’s yelling up ahead. Dante has her hands up, holding onto the straps, steadying the heavy pack as it sways on her light frame.

  “Put it down,” Cap yells at Mags. He has both hands out in front of him, gesturing for calm, but his raised voice isn’t helping.

  It takes Dante a moment to realize what Mags is holding. She recognizes the shape—a gun—but there aren’t any guns on the Acheron. It’s some sort of construction tool, probably taken from one of the robotic workers. It’s the kind of device used to fire nails or embed rivets, only the safety bar, which normally has to be depressed to arm the firing mechanism, has been mangled and pulled away from the barrel. Mags waves the bulky weapon around, threatening to use it.

  “Take us out of orbit,” she says.

  “Mags,” Dante says, interrupting them. She swings the pack from her back slowly, resting it gently on the deck, trying not to make any sudden movements. Dante slips her hand in one of the side pockets, searching for an injector.

  “Stay out of this, Dante.”

  “Mags, please. Don’t do this.”

  The bridge is oval in shape, with entrances at the widest points and a forward-facing windscreen—that is, if there were anything other than stellar winds in space.

  To anyone looking from outside the craft, the bridge goes around like a piece of gum stuck on a wheel. As the crew are pushed outward by the illusion of centrifugal force, they feel as though they’re stationary even though they’re in constant motion. To them, it’s the vast starry sky that’s rotating.

  Cap is at the back of the bridge by the command deck. Mags is directly opposite him, by the navigation desk in front of the window. She waves the gun around, trying to cover as much space as she can, wanting to keep everyone at bay.

  “Get back. All of you. I’m warning you.”

  Vichy is on the opposite side of the bridge from Dante. He inches along the instrumentation wall toward the nav desk, trying to get closer to Mags. Vichy is slight of build and doesn’t come across as threatening. He aces his medical exams as his cardio routine is worthy of an ultra-triathlete. Admittedly, Dante’s given him plenty of rather close and personal examinations—just to be sure, of course—at least that’s the joke between them. On a small craft like the Acheron, lines become blurred, which is something her AI assistant Jeeves takes pains to point out. A bazillion miles from Earth, who cares?

  Vichy picks his moments, moving almost imperceptibly, looking for an opportunity to lunge at Mags and disarm her. When Mags turns toward Dante, he edges closer. He has his hands up, appealing for calm, but he’s not saying anything and lowers his head, looking at his feet as the gun is waved briefly at him. Dante understands what he’s doing, but she would prefer he backed away. If anything, he’s liable to enflame the situation by cornering Mags. If he rushes her, he could get hurt.

  Angel copies his tactic, moving in from this side. Dante is on the verge of yelling at them, wanting everyone to stand down, but if she draws attention to them it will only make matters worse. By duplicating Vichy’s calm approach, Angel is slowly restricting the space available to Mags as she strides back and forth in front of the broad windscreen.

  “You don’t understand,” Mags says, pleading with Dante. “None of this is real. None of it. You’re not real.”

  “I’m real,” Dante replies, stepping lightly as she moves over beside Cap, wanting to keep the focus on her and off Angel and Vichy.

  “No. You’re not. You’re no more real than anyone else in this stupid, fucked up, crazy dream.”

  “Mags, please. Don’t do anything rash.”

  Cap picks up on Dante’s strategy. Slowly, he waves his hands, moving them in a broad motion, making himself appear larger, keeping the attention on the two of them.

  “Mags. Listen to Dante. She’s your friend.”

  Dante says, “I can help. Don’t worry, Mags. It’s going to be okay.”

  “You think they’re going to section me?” Mags says, laughing. “You think that’s what I’m worried about? Shit, girl. If you’re real, you missed the goddamn memo on this one.”

  “Mags, please.”

  Dante looks down at the bulky gun in her friend’s hand. Power adaptors and batteries dangle beneath it. A magazine has been snapped on one side. The breech and chamber are oversized, designed for rivets as large as a beer can. She can’t have more than three loaded with any charge.

  Within the confines of the bridge, ricochets are possible as the instrument panels are designed to be rigid in case of micro-meteor impacts. But if one of those rivets hits the ceiling, it’ll puncture the hull. The bridge is built to withstand strikes from pebble-sized objects, with a self-sealing membrane between the layers of sheet metal. Anything larger than that shows up on radar and is normally avoided or deflected by a laser long before it reaches the Acheron. Dante doubts the engineers that built the Acheron ever considered this kind of scenario—a projectile being fired from within the craft. She’s nervous. The bridge would depressurize almost instantly if any of the panels came away.

  “You don’t understand,” Mags says, grabbing at the side of her head with one hand, clutching her hair as though she has a migraine. “We need to leave. We have to get away from here.”

  “Why?” Dante replies, hiding a needle-less-injector by her side in a closed fist.

  “If I’m wrong, we’ll move out of range and—and—and the pain will stop. If I’m right, you’ll see. You’ll see them. They don’t like change. Things change and they show themselves. And then you’ll know.”

  “Who will show themselves?” Dante asks, edging closer to her friend, trying to keep her distracted. Dante’s feet glide across the bridge, barely lifting from the floor.

  “You know. You must know,” Mags says, getting a little too wild with the robotic rivet gun and swinging it at Dante.

  “Easy,” Dante says, holding one hand out, appealing for calm, keeping the injector hidden in the other.

  Mags yells, “This is nothing but a dream—an illusion—a nightmare! Nothing is real, but no one believes me, so I’ll show you. I’ll prove it to you.”

  Cap is silent, leaving Dante to respond.

  “This is real,” Dante says, stepping forward. She speaks softly, barely above a whisper. “You’re real. I’m real. Cap’s real.” Dante avoids mentioning Angel and Vichy, hoping they’re somewhat invisible to Mags as they creep along the bulkhead, sliding slowly along the curved sides of the bridge toward the windscreen.

  Mags asks. “How do you know what’s real? You’ve used a neural cap. You know the kind of worlds they can create.”

  “No one’s creating any worlds, Mags.”

  “What is real? I want to know what’s real.”

  Mags presses her palm in the center of her forehead, closing her eyes for a brief second, allowing Vichy and Angel to creep closer.

  “I need to know,” she says, looking Dante in the eyes.

  “Put down the gun and we’ll talk,” Dante says. “You know me. You trust me. Just—put down
the gun.”

  “Trust you? I don’t even know if you’re really Dante. You could be one of them.”

  “Mags, you’re being silly—irrational. You’re not going to hurt anyone.”

  Wrong choice of words. Mags raises the industrial gun, pointing it squarely at Dante. Her eyes narrow as she aims at the center of Dante’s forehead.

  “Do you really think so? Do you really want to find out?”

  The gun quivers as Mags struggles to hold it aright. Whether that’s because of the artificial gravity and the weight of the device or the emotional strain, Dante’s not sure. Sweat beads on her forehead, but she’s determined not to lose her nerve.

  “You can’t lie in a dream.”

  “What?” Mags asks, looking perplexed.

  “You want proof this isn’t a dream, right? I’m telling you, you can’t lie in a dream. To lie, you have to fool someone, but in a dream, there is no one else. In a dream, you are everyone you meet. They’re all constructs of your imagination so you can’t lie to them, and they can’t lie to you. You can’t lie to yourself, right? Not knowingly.”

  Mags falters, lowering the gun.

  “So this… this is real?”

  Dante nods.

  Beyond Mags, out past the javelin-like tip of the Acheron, the stars drift past. All of creation seems to revolve around their tiny spacecraft. In the low light on the bridge at night, while the Acheron is in the shadow of the massive planet, the stars shine with stunning clarity against the immense depth of space. Tens of thousands of stars break up the darkness. The familiar shape of Orion comes into view. Those particular stars are off-kilter, but they’re brilliant, shining like diamonds in the dark of night.

  “So what is this?” Mags asks, pointing at the stars. “You see them too, right?”

  Dante nods. Her eyes seek out the glowing shell of Betelgeuse, the remnants of a red supergiant that went supernova, leaving little more than a smudge in the sky. It’s distinct because of its ruddy color, marking the wounded shoulder of Orion, the great hunter. The irony is, what appears as a recent explosion is actually well over five hundred years old. Being six hundred light years distant, humanity has only just seen this colossal explosion and its expanding shell dissipating into interstellar space.