Noumenon Infinity Page 18

  But the whispers soon became a rumble.

  “. . . I know the buoys are down, but shouldn’t we have heard something by now?”

  “. . . How far out would you have to go for Orion not to look like Orion anymore?”

  “. . . This isn’t good. Sirius is roughly six-point-two light-years from Earth, Betelgeuse is sixty-five. If we’re so far away we can’t even pinpoint those . . .”

  The pitch of the rumble rose steadily. The harried panic of the initial accident had died away, but now it was replaced with another kind of fevered concern.

  What if they were out of Earth’s reach? What if they were good and truly on their own?

  Lost.

  Thankfully, they had leadership that understood how to handle a crisis. Captains Tan and Baglanova did their best to calm their crews. They made sure everyone had a job, something to focus on. After all, though they had to hold out hope for rescue, they couldn’t sit around and wait for aid to appear. The work was good—kept everyone who could be on their feet busy. Working with your hands often kept your thoughts in check, Stone found. Prevented your mind from wandering too far from the now.

  Kept him from thinking about the fact that his friend Eric was MIA. That the bodies that had been retrieved from outside were from his division.

  “He was on Life when it happened,” Justice told him. “He might be fine. We won’t know until we reestablish communications.”

  Stone had known Justice a long time. They used to serve together in the air force. She wasn’t always the coolest head in the room, but she was never unreasonable.

  And yet, every time he glanced out a porthole, he felt sick.

  There were truths they would all need to face soon, and they hung over everyone like storm clouds, waiting to let loose their loads. But as long as there was work to focus on, they could pretend everything would be fine.

  Fine. Sure. Fine.

  After the initial panic and shock, the rush of manic activity, everyone became subdued. There was little chatter in the halls, nearly no chatter during work. Everyone was in their own fog—not quite in denial, but not yet ready to accept that things could not proceed as usual.

  While anyone who’d ever worked on a satellite or switchboard tried their hand at contacting Earth, the small group of navigators had recruited every amateur astronomer aboard to help place the convoy in time and space. The team, led by Carmen Sotomayor, was working around the clock. Justice, whose expertise was in biology and genetics, had even volunteered.

  Stone was no good with star charts past reading them, and he’d never been much of a communicator. But he’d gotten his degree in mechanical engineering, which made him a hot commodity during reconstruction.

  He was just finishing up in the water-reclamation center when Dr. Kapoor came looking for him. When she came around the corner, he quickly composed himself, forced a mild smile.

  He’d tried to forget about her disappearing. Brushed it off as a dream. Because it had to be, right?

  That would have been the easiest solution—just pretending it was a concoction created by his stressed-out mind. And it would have explained everything, except . . .

  Except how she’d disappeared in the EOL and reappeared in the bathroom. Those were two solid points in reality. She had been in mission control, unquestionably. And she’d been in the men’s room, also indisputable.

  “What can I do for you, Vanhi?”

  The sundial sat heavy in his uniform pocket. He’d carried it with him every day, hoping to run into her so he could return it. He’d envisioned pulling it out and tossing it to her with a casual “You dropped this,” but now that the opportunity presented itself, he hesitated. He still had questions, and letting go of the sundial felt like a finality—as though giving it up meant never being able to broach the subject of her disappearance.

  “I’d like your help in examining Breath’s main SD drive,” she said. “Captain Tan wants to run a test dive as soon as possible.”

  He wiped off his oil-coated wrench with a rag before slotting it into his toolbox. Two other engineers ran by, aiming for a sewer pipe whose pressure gauge was pinging red. “I’ve never put a hand on one of those, I’m not sure I—”

  She waved aside his concern. “I need all of the competent engineers I can get. Your file says you worked for JPL.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Used to help design LEO drones before I learned to fly them.” It was strange to think of those as “simpler times”—when he’d lain awake at night, daydreaming about the flight instead of the design.

  “Then come on.” She was peppy in her insistence, had more of a spring in her step than anyone had a right to after all that had happened. “The job isn’t rocket science, but it’s rocket-science-adjacent, so you’ll do fine.”

  He thought about protesting, and snuck a quick glance at the questionable sewer pipe before deciding everyone else had it under control. “Let me just go tell—”

  “Already worked it out, you’re free to go.”

  Well, all right then. When the mission head says jump, you say how high?

  He gathered up his tools and fell into step behind her.

  If a ship were a peach, then the SD drive would be its massive, impenetrable pit. That was how Stone had first been introduced to the drive concept, anyway.

  To tell the truth, he was a bit intimidated. He’d never been down to see it before. He’d put hands on a lot of engines in his life, but there was no way he would have been able to pick the drive out of a lineup. It looked more like a building than a motor, and the peach pit analogy seemed woefully inadequate. The thing was bulky and foreboding—more like a sleeping animal than a seed to Stone—occupying the lowermost levels of Breath.

  There was a touch of burnt ozone in the air, mixed with something that might have been iodine. Dr. Kapoor assured him the smell was normal, as was the prickle in the atmosphere and the slight heat rolling off the walls.

  But that strange crackling sound? Not normal. That was what she needed help with.

  “Trying to track down the cause and button ’er back up,” she said. “I think it has to do with excess vibrations in one of the outer chassis layers, but I can’t be sure.”

  She set him up in one quadrant, and gave him the necessary equipment to scour every outer inch of the machine. A handful of other engineers worked the remaining sections, and many more were set up to run diagnostics on the inner portions of the drive.

  When a break was called, Dr. Kapoor returned. He thought she was there to talk findings, but she had other things on her mind.

  “So . . .” she said, clearly trying for a casual lead-in to a not-so-casual conversation.

  He lifted his safety goggles onto his forehead. “Yes?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to thank you without it sounding flippant,” she admitted. “Or patronizing.”

  “Why would ‘thank you’ sound patronizing?”

  “I don’t know, it just feels like it could be. Maybe because . . .”

  He nodded, rolling his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “I feel it, so you must be feeling it,” he said. “Because we feel responsible,” he added after a moment, spelling it out.

  She had to have wondered, just as he had, if things might have gone down differently if she’d made one extra choice, given one more command. He’d replayed the last half hour before the accident over and over in his mind, looking for the opening that could have changed everything.

  But, even if he’d been able to spot it, what would it matter? You can’t travel backward in time.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “But, you aren’t responsible, you have to know that,” she insisted. “I’m the mission head, it all falls on me.” Her gaze retreated then, someplace he couldn’t follow. Then he realized: she was looking back before the collision. What could she have to feel guilty about before all this shit went down?

  “It was an accident,” he said, clearing his throat, attempting to make both
of them feel better, knowing words were beyond inadequate. “It wasn’t even an accident caused by human error—”

  “We don’t know that yet,” she said with a sigh, letting her eyes flick up the side of the SD drive. She put her hand over her mouth, mumbled something behind it that sounded like “This is a punishment.”

  For what, our scientific hubris? he thought, but said nothing.

  She squared her shoulders to the drive, planted her feet as though challenging the engine. She looked as immovable as a mountain, with deep veins of guilt running through her interior like layers of hidden gold.

  He found himself wishing he could mine her guilt away. She didn’t deserve to carry the weight of all this.

  Hell, they didn’t even know what all this entailed yet.

  His empathy emboldened him. Maybe he could ask now, while she pretended to be a mountain. “What do you remember? Not just about the accident in general, but what happened to you, personally?” It was obviously a leading question. But maybe if she sensed that he knew, that he would believe her, she’d open up to him.

  “I remember the bathroom, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “I know I fell and you caught me. That you took me to the medics. That’s what I mean—I know what you did and I’m grateful. Really.”

  “No. I mean, you’re welcome. Of course. But . . . how did you end up in the bathroom? It’s not even on the same level as the EOL.”

  “I have no idea,” she admitted. “Honestly, one second I was watching the pod slam into us, and the next I was crumpled on the floor with you, so . . .” She held up her hands.

  “You just blacked out? You don’t remember feeling weird—” he mumbled his next word “—insubstantial?”

  “What does that mean?”

  He was trying to feel her out, to get a sense of her sense of things. But what the hell, why not go for broke?

  “I saw what happened to you,” he said, voice low. He glanced around, making sure no one else was paying attention. “The accident did something . . . unnatural to you.”

  A guarded look came into her eye. “Like what?”

  “I can’t say exactly. The doctors didn’t find anything weird?”

  “They ran a full CAT scan and everything, I’m fine. Not even a broken bone or a bump on the head. Lots of other people weren’t so lucky.”

  “I know—I know. But, when that wave of—energy, sparks, whatever the scientific term for it is, if there even is one—when it hit you, you didn’t feel funny?”

  She thought for a moment, readjusting her glasses as though through them, things might become clearer. “Kind of fuzzy, I guess? Not my memory, I mean the feeling. I thought it might hurt—”

  “Me, too,” he said.

  “But it didn’t. And then there was kind of a stretchy sensation, if that makes any sense. Not like, when you stretch and your joints pop, but like, I don’t know, if your muscles became taffy.”

  “Yeah, okay. Okay.” His fingers twitched and he wished he had a holoflex-sheet or a pen or a stylus or a piece of charcoal—anything. Something to take notes with. He wanted to put it down exactly as she said it, for evidence.

  “Then I was falling and you caught me, end of story.”

  “Your muscles were taffy and then you were falling?” he asked.

  “Did I stutter?”

  “No, it—you didn’t say you blacked out.”

  She shrugged, as though it were out of her hands. “I don’t remember blacking out, but I mean, I had to have. I do remember feeling hella groggy, like I’d just woken up from the worst hangover ever.”

  He wanted her to say more. He wanted to grab a damn screw and start scratching her account into the SD’s hide. “So it seemed instantaneous for you? Mission control to bathroom, boom, blink of an eye.”

  “Yeah. Wish I could tell you how I got in the loo, but . . . Did someone drag me there and leave me there? Did something happen to them while they were trying to help me? You know, I kind of don’t want to think about it.” She turned away, clearly ready to refocus on the task at hand.

  “I think you should get tested,” he blurted.

  “For . . . ?” She didn’t look at him, just went on examining the drive’s seams.

  “That’s the thing, I don’t know. I saw what happened—I know how you got from the control room to the bathroom.”

  That elicited a whirl. “You do?”

  Okay, poor choice of words. “Well, not how, but I saw it all happen. You disappeared. One second that tangerine wave is slamming into you, and the next you’re behind me in the bathroom. Floating, by the way. You fell because you were floating.”

  “Because the gravity was out?”

  “No, it was back. Had been back for a long time. I saw you disappear, then I went to the medic, then I scared some poor lady with a baby and nearly puked all over my shoes and when I was at the sink you just poofed!”

  “Poofed?”

  “One second, I’m thinking you were vaporized, or that my brain is bleeding out behind my eyes, and the next you’re pulling a Tales from the Crypt ghost act.”

  “Mendez Perez?”

  He’d taken a breath to continue, but let it out slowly. “What?”

  “Did the doctors okay you to come back to work?”

  He hated the look on her face. It was full of caution and pity and something akin to motherliness which really freaked him out. “The medic said I shouldn’t do anything too strenuous for the next few days. But it’s been a few days. I’m fine.”

  “Are you?”

  “Okay, now you are being patronizing.”

  “I’m sorry, but you just said I disappeared. Wait, actually, poofed was the word you used. You said I poofed.”

  “Well, you did. From your glasses to your shoes to your hair and your fingernails, you . . . you . . . wait.” He fumbled in his pocket. He hated that his adrenaline had spiked, that trying to convince her of what he knew sounded loony had fazed him. But, here he was. “Look. You disappeared, except for this.”

  The dial was firm and heavy in his palm, its gnomon proud and shiny. “I looked for you after I saw what I saw, and this was by your desk.”

  Her right hand immediately went to her left wrist, covering over the leather strap that, even at this moment, encircled her arm. “How did you—?”

  “Here,” he scurried up close to show her the dial’s underside, how the loops through which the band had been threaded were perfectly intact.

  She didn’t draw away. But she did pick up the dial, turning it over and over. Then she looked him square in the eye, her expression sterner than any he’d seen in a courtroom or funeral home. “If you’re lying to me, I’ll know. If you stole this off me when I was unconscious—”

  “I’m not lying. I didn’t steal it. Why would I do that?”

  She swallowed thickly. “I don’t know.”

  It came out as a sharp shout, and they immediately pulled back from one another, as though to let more air in between them.

  Dr. Kapoor pressed the gnomon between her fingers, as though letting it read her prints. “C?”

  “Yes?” came the chipper voice of a personal assistant.

  “I need you to confirm something for me.”

  “I will do my best.”

  “At what hour on July sixth did you stop reading my biometrics?”

  “At nine-thirteen a.m. I lost sensor-to-skin contact. When you did not put me back on, I let the session time out to conserve battery life. Would you like to change my settings for a longer time between loss of contact and sleep mode?”

  “No, C, that’s fine. What do you remember happening at nine-thirteen?”

  The little PA began drawling out a word-for-word transcript of the incident. Helpful, for convoy records, not so much for settling the matter between Stone and Dr. Kapoor.

  “Thank—thank you, C, that’s enough. So, to verify, you were not removed by someone else?”

  “Oh, no. I fell onto your desk. Everything was
very bright and shiny, and I’m afraid there was a surge that distorted my visual recordings. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

  Vanhi met Stone’s gaze once more—her eyes were still narrowed critically, but it wasn’t a criticism aimed at him. “I’m guessing when we get to review the tapes of the control room, we’ll find a similar distortion.”

  “Probably Tan’s already discovered that,” Stone said. Damn. Damn it all.

  “You’re not a thief,” Dr. Kapoor said, and it sounded only mildly like an apology.

  “No. So how did that get off your wrist without the band being unbuckled?”

  She didn’t answer. That was fine, he didn’t really expect her to.

  “I think I should go now. I’m just going to be a distraction from here on out,” he said, hands in his pockets as he took a few steps back. “I’ve given you a lot to think about. Believe me or don’t—either way, remember that you’re a scientist. And, you know, human. If something bizarre had happened to me—something that hinted at new physics—I’d want to pursue it.”

  She nodded, once again considering the dial in her hand. After he’d gone a good way down the access hall, she called, “Stone?”

  He stopped, looked back.

  “Just a thought,” she called. “But what if it did?”

  “Did what?”

  “What if whatever it was happened to you, and not to me?”

  For the most part, he tried to avoid her after that. He didn’t know if she was looking into it, and he didn’t want to think about what it meant if she was right. What if she hadn’t disappeared and he hadn’t simply hallucinated it and instead the weird, bastardized mingling of SD pockets had done something to him instead? Maybe it had rearranged his brain cells.

  In any case, it hadn’t liquefied his organs or given him spontaneous leprosy. He’d gone back to the medic and the doc couldn’t find anything amiss. He had no residual effects from the concussion, and his ankle was supporting weight just fine.

  Maybe he should just forget about it. After all, there were bigger things to worry about.

  Like how in three weeks they’d already gone through two weeks’ worth of supplies. Captain Tan had them all rationing, but the restrictions weren’t tight enough. Clearly, he was still holding on to hope, thinking someone would hear one of their distress calls.