Noumenon Infinity Read online

  If a rescue party was on the way, they were sure as hell awfully quiet about it.

  As far as surprise parties went, this one blew.

  Most people Stone talked with were still in denial. No one wanted to think about the larger implications of being lost in space. People often mentioned going home. “When we get back” preceded a statement about once an hour in conversation.

  But Stone had a feeling—the sickening kind, that burrows into your skin like a tick—that “getting back” was a far-flung fantasy.

  He might not be an astronomer, but he knew his stars—Earth-view stars. And he wasn’t seeing any familiar patterns.

  Their dip into SD travel had taken less than a minute—it shouldn’t have sent them into unrecognizable space. Not if they’d entered a typical travel SD.

  They were far from home, he had no doubt. The real question was, how far?

  Sotomayor’s team had at least figured out they were still in home country. Meaning, they were still in the Milky Way. They’d spotted Andromeda, Triangulum, and what they thought was the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal. If they could verify, then triangulation was theoretically only a few calculations away.

  But they have to remember the time . . . Stone thought.

  How could they have traveled so far in such a short amount of time? No one talked about it, not even their mission head, but the crew weren’t idiots. They knew that time flowed differently in the SDs, relative to normal space. And in all of the ones they’d ever cracked, it seemed to move faster relative to farther. So, if they’d caught a “current” that could propel them an unfathomable distance nearly instantaneously, then . . .

  Then they’d probably traveled forward in time at a traumatic rate.

  It was ironic, really. They were the convoy built to stay put. And now they were experiencing what all of the other convoys were experiencing, except none of Convoy Twelve’s crew had signed up for it. They weren’t bred for this, weren’t born to it. There was no special committee that had scrutinized their genes to make sure they could survive out here without any Earth contact. Their ships hadn’t even been designed for it.

  They had personal ties to Earth like none of the other Planet United Missions did. And if Stone was right about their displacement, then shit was going to get ugly eventually. Real ugly.

  But, hey, maybe they’d get lucky. Maybe they weren’t so far out of their local star cluster.

  Maybe . . . Maybe . . .

  Maybe, for now, he should stop speculating and try to go on as if things were normal.

  On his way to the mess hall, he met Mrs. Tan—the captain’s wife—coming down the hall from the opposite direction, flanked by two other women. The three of them were talking emphatically—happily even—in Cantonese, and Mrs. Tan walked with a heavy sway to her step, hands braced against her lower back. Everyone on board knew she’d be giving birth soon. It had been an anticipated day before the accident. Hers was to be the first born aboard. There’d been a few other pregnant crew members, and they’d all planned to go back to Earth for the big day. But not Mrs. Tan. This was their home, she’d said in the announcement, and she wanted to welcome their first child into their home on day one.

  That had sent lots of people buzzing. Hers wouldn’t be the first baby brought to term in space, but it was a first for Convoy Twelve.

  The three woman gave him stern nods as he passed, and he nodded respectfully back.

  The halls were mostly empty this time of day. Meals were strictly scheduled now, and rationing enforced. If you missed out, you missed out. He hoped there’d be some fried plantains left. He’d never forgive himself if he lost his chance at eating a fried plantain ever again.

  Jumping onto the nearest elevator, he straightened his uniform, checked his posture. He’d taken to paying attention to the little things—those he could keep in order. There was so much that was out of his hands, so maybe if he—

  His primping was interrupted when the lift stopped on the next floor—still several levels away from Breath’s mess.

  Surprisingly, it was Dr. Kapoor who stepped in beside him.

  He swayed back a bit, toward one wall, putting a good gap between them. They nodded at one another, but initially said nothing.

  The elevator jolted back into action, and moments later the monitor above the emergency panel lit up. It flickered, black to silver to bright white, before a star-scape flooded it from corner to corner.

  At the same moment, the lift went dark and stopped its upward grind.

  “What the—?” Kapoor muttered, immediately pressing the manual activation button. Nothing happened.

  Captain Tan’s voice came through the elevator speakers. “Moments ago, our astronomers confirmed that one set of objects within our field of vision—previously thought to be stars—are, in fact, unidentifiable.”

  Stone and Dr. Kapoor automatically shared a look.

  The vid feed zoomed in. What appeared to be faint, distant stars resolved into fuzzy objects. Not planets, or asteroids, not nebulous gasses, but something more . . . geometric. One was distinctly diamond shaped.

  “They have definitively identified half a dozen massive objects, and suspect there are many more less-reflective objects in the vicinity. Most of them are similar in size to our sun, and sit at distances less than a light-year from one another.”

  It was like some scene out of an old 1950’s sci-fi flick, grainy black-and-white footage and everything.

  “Current consensus is that these cannot be naturally formed structures. Our top priority remains determining our location. But I have consulted with our security teams and want to assure you that we are making plans. Should we note signs of activity within the region, you will be updated immediately as in accordance with the Planet United Consortium’s guidelines. Thank you for your attention.”

  The screen went dark again, and the lift rumbled back to life. The lights came on and Stone snapped. The carefully constructed focus that he’d been maintaining—the walls he’d built to help him not think about Eric, not think about home, came crumbling down. “‘You’re God-knows-where in the galaxy, the Ghost-knows when, and oh, by the way, there’s some massive alien structures off the port bow, thank you and have a nice day?’”

  He kicked the wall, and Dr. Kapoor jumped. Her normally richly pigmented cheeks had gone a sickly sort of gray-brown. There was no way to tell if she was upset by his outburst or upset by the news, and he didn’t care.

  The wall took it, so he dished it out. Again and again, he struck the baseboard with his noninjured foot, needing to scream, needing to tear at his hair, needing to change the form of something in here because son of a bitch they were fucking lost in space!

  Everything hurt, everything burned—all of that abstract distance scrunched up into nothing, leaving him with a tsunami’s worth of difficult emotions.

  “I suggest you calm yourself, sir,” said Dr. Kapoor’s sundial.

  He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Why the hell should I?”

  The sundial didn’t answer, and when he looked up, he saw that Vanhi wasn’t cringing away from him. Instead, her eyes held a point in the distance, someplace outside of the elevator. “Did the captain just say there were alien structures on our horizon?”

  “Yes,” he said emphatically, as though she were agreeing with him over her PA. “Thank you.”

  He wanted the elevator to stop now. It was stifling, cramped. Claustrophobic.

  His madre was prone to claustrophobia. That was why she’d never visited him or his cousins in the States—planes were too much. He’d traveled home to Puerto Rico whenever he could, spent every last second of leave there, because she couldn’t take flying in a shoebox.

  A sudden pang of realization struck him between the eyes.

  If his worst fears were true, he’d never see her again. His madre was light-years away now, and even if the convoy found its way back, there’d probably be nothing left of her except a bit of dirt at the bottom of a
pine box. If even that.

  Now he knew—that sick feeling turned into a sick certainty—there was no going home again.

  He didn’t know where they were or even when they were, but there had to be a reason no help had come. The distance was too far, and time stretched too thin.

  “She’s dead,” he said with a sort of manic awe. “They’re dead. Everyone, they’re all dead.”

  “Are you having a breakdown?” Kapoor asked, still staring, still placid.

  “Yes!” he yelled, balling his fists and kicking the wall again.

  “I think I am, too,” she said flatly.

  The elevator dinged.

  And then, she was gone.

  One instant, she was there, sharing in his freak-out in her own statuesque way. And the next—poof.

  Just like he’d said before.

  Poof.

  The sundial seemed to hover cartoonishly in midair for a moment, before realizing it was no longer tethered to a strap or a wrist. It clunked to the thinly carpeted floor, rolling on its side, twisting round and round with its gnomon pointed toward the center of its pirouette.

  Stone allowed himself a moment of stunned stillness before he fell to his knees and picked up the dial—just as the doors were opening.

  “C?” he asked it hastily. “C, tell me you got that. Tell me you recorded what just happened.”

  His understanding of everything was inside out, filleted open. The physical, the metaphysical. Time, space. Reality, unreality. Nothing worked the way he once thought it did.

  There were people outside the lift, staring at him as he yelled at what appeared to be an inanimate object.

  “Come on, C, talk to me! Tell me to calm down, anything!”

  The PA kept its silence. Whether it had shut off, refused him because he was unauthorized, or was quiet because it had somehow been whisked out of the device just as Dr. Kapoor had been whisked out of the lift, he couldn’t say.

  “Stone?”

  Justice was there, lifting him to his feet. She was bigger than he was, could enfold him in her arms as though he were a small child.

  He felt like a child. And he felt a like a weary old man. And he felt out of his body with no age at all.

  Clutching the dial to his chest, he let her lead him through the crowd and toward sustenance.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I need help, Justice. Please. Help me.”

  The announcement of the megastructure field sent a buzz through the convoy. They had so much to worry about already. Fear and excitement knotted together like taffy in the hearts and minds of most aboard, making everyone feel sticky. Was this a good thing? Who could they report this discovery to if Earth wasn’t answering? Would they die out here, alone in the presence of definitive proof of alien intelligence?

  If nothing else, it confirmed what they’d all feared: they were nowhere near home.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Stone said for the umpteenth time, tired now of banging his fists against the Plexiglass walls of his brig cell. The inside of the double pane was smeared with his finger, fist, and palm prints.

  Steve Weaver, a security guard Stone hadn’t had any occasion to speak with before, twisted his lips skeptically. He was a stocky man, head shaved like a cue ball. He reminded Stone of a lot of bouncers guarding the doors at nightclubs in San Juan. All he was missing was a tight black T-shirt and a sneer. “Look, I’m not an appeals court,” Steve said levelly. “And no one’s charging you with anything. Not yet.”

  “Then let me out.”

  “I can’t do that. Doctor Kapoor is missing, you were the last to see her, and you—” he made a vague, round gesture through the air “—you said she disappeared in front of you. So.” He said “so” like it was its own full stop.

  “I didn’t hurt her, I said—”

  “Poof, yeah, I heard you. That’s why Doctor Taylor is on her way. Feel free to sit on the cot and relax for a while till she gets here.”

  “Yolanda Taylor? The shrink?” There were three counselors in the convoy—two now, he supposed, since they were each assigned a ship. Everyone had monthly visits with them, but they were just check-ins. This clearly wasn’t just a routine chat. “Yeah, great, you think I’m psychotic.”

  Steve made a noncommittal shrug. “I’m no doctor.”

  “Hey, you know, if I needed help I’d be the first to get it, all right? What I had in the elevator? Panic attack. That’s what the meds my friend brought were for. I’m down with mental health accountability—but this is not a mental health problem. Don’t get me Doctor Taylor, get me, I dunno—” he snapped his fingers—“Doctor Dogolea. I need a physicist who knows SDs.”

  “You don’t want a psychiatrist . . . you want a physicist?” Steve asked slowly, as though the concept were some kind of code he needed to decipher.

  “Yes.”

  Steve rolled his eyes. “No.”

  Stone was about to lay into him, demand a message be sent to Gabriel Dogolea, when the yellow-white light shifted to eggplant-purple.

  Oh no. The drive tests. Even with Vanhi missing, they were still going to go through with—

  The bottom dropped out of Stone’s stomach. “Call the bridge,” he said, voice deadpan. “Tell them not to dive. Do it now.”

  “What? Why w—?”

  “We can’t dive with Kapoor missing, all right? Listen to me—” He tried to stay calm, composed. Flying off the handle wasn’t going to help her. “We cannot dive while Kapoor is missing. She could die.”

  He wasn’t sure how he knew—he just knew. If they left now, when she came back there’d be no ship to come back to. No men’s room, no mission control, no elevator. Just the vacuum.

  “There’s no time to explain, Steve—make the call!”

  Steve moved toward the comms panel, but with a hesitation to his gait.

  “Now! Now!” Stone urged, even though his insides were shriveling. His liver felt like a raisin, his stomach like a fraying coconut husk. Steve wasn’t going to get the message out—there were gears turning in his cue ball skull, trying to determine if Stone was cracked or if Kapoor might truly be in danger. Not because he believed Stone’s story, but because Stone might have stashed Kapoor somewhere dangerous.

  “N—!”

  The shift came. The dive was complete. They were officially in an SD, testing their engines and leaving their head far away in the blackness of space.

  Then it was over. The brig washed purple again, and moments later they’d reemerged.

  Stone was sure they’d left his insides—his skeleton, his guts, his very veins—back where they’d begun. His skin was an empty sheath, devoid of sense and feeling.

  He stumbled away from the Plexiglass, sitting down heavily when the backs of his knees hit the cell’s cot.

  “We killed her,” he said, sounding more awed than terrified, even to his own ears. “We killed her.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting you that shrink now,” Steve said casually.

  Though his eyes were open, Stone could no longer perceive Steve. All he could see was Vanhi, floating just as she had in the bathroom, but with millions of kilometers of emptiness around her. He saw her eyes flying open, her mouth gasping like a fish on land, arms reaching for something she could not touch—a life preserver that did not exist.

  “I want Justice,” he said, “Justice Jax, the geneticist. I want to see her now.”

  “First you want a physicist, now a geneticist—they’ve got work to do, they’re not at my beck and call.”

  Stone took a shaky breath through his nose. Despite his lungs expanding, filling, he felt oxygen deprived. “You tell them both that I say Vanhi Kapoor is dead. They’ll come.”

  He wasn’t wrong. An hour later, the narrow hall outside his cell was nearly filled to capacity. Dr. Dogolea was there, as was Justice and Dr. Taylor, along with several other security guards and members of command.

  “Did you bring it?” Stone asked Justice, pressing his nose to the
glass.

  She looked over her shoulder to where Dr. Taylor and Aksel Baglanova, Breath’s captain, were ardently discussing Stone’s medical needs. “Yeah,” from her jumpsuit pocket, she pulled out the dial, flashing it at him for only a moment before putting it back. He’d begged her to take it, to not let anyone else see it. “For the love of sin, what the hell is going on?”

  Mac Savea, a six-foot-seven titan of a man from Samoa and one of the highest-ranking security officers, slid close to Justice, raising an eyebrow.

  Justice shot him her best get out of my space face, but he ignored her.

  “You say you want to help Dr. Kapoor,” Mac continued. “Then all you have to do is tell us what really happened.”

  “He did,” Justice snapped, her quick retort evidence of her deep loyalty more so than her belief in Stone’s story.

  “Get out of the way,” Steve said, brushing Justice aside to make a space for Dr. Taylor.

  “Hi, Stone. Is it all right if I call you Stone?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” The patronizing lilt in her voice was not a good sign.

  “I’ve discussed your situation with Captain Baglanova, and we agree that the brig is not the best place for you.”

  “Great,” he said, backing away from the glass, ready for it to slide open. He still felt numb, was still processing the fact that Vanhi was gone. Just like that, forever.

  “I’d like you to accompany me to the medical bay,” she continued evenly. “I want to keep you under observation for seventy-two hours, that way I can assess how to best treat you.”

  “Yeah, fine,” he said. Maybe he did need help? Who knew anymore? Not him.

  “Can you make it under your own power?”

  “Versus?”

  “I can sedate you and get a gurney if necessary.”

  “No. No.” I can’t . . . Did I imagine everything?

  “Hey!” Justice said sharply, smacking the glass. “Don’t you bug out on me.”

  “I’m tired,” he told her. He didn’t know what to think and couldn’t feel a damned thing. Was it better if he’d made it all up in his head? No, because Vanhi was really missing. Which meant he’d done something horrible. Maybe it was an accident, maybe not. If he couldn’t trust his own eyes, his own mind . . .