Noumenon Infinity Page 21

  “Feels strange,” she said, rubbing at her bare wrist. “I feel more alone now.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “You know, back home, I never felt alone,” Stone confessed. “I mean, I’ve always been around people. My parents owned a farm—had land—but that didn’t mean we were hermits. And then, when I enlisted, I was constantly surrounded. Privacy didn’t exist.

  “Now we’ve discovered evidence of intelligent life, and I feel . . . isolated. Shouldn’t the universe feel smaller, not bigger and more empty?”

  She glanced to where his fingers curled over the edge of the bedspread. Each digit was its own entity, yet they were connected. Like everyone on the convoy.

  Cautiously, she slipped her hand down over his, covering those fingers with her own. He didn’t shoo her away. If anything, he leaned closer, tilted his head toward her. She took a deep breath, committed the spiciness of his scent to memory. It was a fragrance she’d look for now whenever she woke up.

  “I think it’s okay to feel alone. We’re so used to having Earth right there, a phone call away. But now . . . We’re going to have to rely on each other’s company. Who knows when we’ll see other people again?”

  “We have to become a family,” he said, “All of us in the convoy.”

  “Right. All we have is each other.”

  Twenty-Seven Days Since the Accident

  Stone hadn’t seen Vanhi since she gave him the sundial. They were both too busy. But he did check in every day to see if she was aboard or dancing in the ether.

  Last he’d asked around, Dr. Dogolea said she’d disappeared during drive maintenance. That was twenty-three hours ago. Stone threw himself into his work, trying not to worry about what he couldn’t control.

  Reconstruction was going well. Everyone was putting in overtime work. Justice was doing her best to help improve their food situation, and he was trying to make sure the inner hulls were sound.

  Today he was pulling a double shift, and had half an hour to get clean and comfortable, eat his meager rations, and get his butt back to the shuttle bay for the next changeover. It wasn’t much, but he planned to revel in it.

  A shower was most definitely in order.

  After he turned on the water, Stone didn’t wait for it to warm. He shuffled in under the spray as soon as his work clothes were pooled on the bath mat, a fresh set folded on the back of the toilet tank.

  His muscles tensed when the first drops of chilly water splattered across his skin, but he relaxed into the steady pressure after only a few moments. He was sore already, his lower back twinging every time he bent or reached. How was he supposed to keep this up for another eight hours? He was an ADCO, damn it, not a moving man.

  The shower quickly did its job, with the help of a well-worked lather. He passed his soaped hands over his pectorals and collar bone—beneath the dog tags and the sundial—then across his abdomen and pelvis, muscles jumping under his careful touch, eager to unwind. The sweaty stench he’d had to stew in for the past shift slipped down his body and into the drain, leaving the faint scent of “ocean breeze” behind. The bar was nearly gone, but he had one more from the original stash. Then it was old-fashioned synthesized oils from now until eternity.

  Perhaps it was a waste—this extra shower. But he valued his cleanliness. It was difficult enough to get away from the smell of unwashed human on a spaceship, no need to add to the problem.

  He washed his shoulders and his glutes, then ducked his face under the spray to drench his hair.

  As he pulled back, eyes closed, the water stopped. That happened sometimes—plumbing interruptions when water was suddenly diverted to a newly opened tap.

  But he also felt a shift in the air—a heaviness in front of him.

  Spooked, he swiped at his eyes, slid backward, bare feet squeaking hollowly against the fiberglass.

  But he was too slow—a dead weight slumped into him.

  It took a half second to catch up, to slip from surprise into concern, then into pure chagrin. “Vanhi?”

  “Mhhhhuh?” She leaned into his chest, fully clothed, her back instantly soaked. Shaking off her jump-sleep, she automatically pulled her shoulders to her ears, pressing closer, trying to get away from the wet shock. “What the—Oh. Oh.”

  “Shit,” Stone cursed, stiffening, realizing he was bare-ass naked with Vanhi-Fricking-Kapoor curled against his chest. With a continued litany of “shit, shit, shit,” he pushed her away, toward the wall. “Shit. Hold on.”

  She bowed against the tiles, her forehead pressed to the mist-covered porcelain.

  He tripped and nearly smacked his face on the toilet bowl as he scrambled to leave the shower stall. Groping for where he’d hung his towel, he tossed it over his shoulder the moment he laid hands on it. “Here—oh, damn it.”

  Vanhi made some sort of odd gurgle in the back of her throat, but caught the off-white cotton in a fast hand.

  Of course, genius that Stone was, he’d thrown her a towel but neglected to turn off the water.

  “Sorry, shit, I didn’t—”

  The nozzle whined and the pipes groaned as he spun the shower handles. As soon as the pitter-patter of water died, he understood the strange sound Vanhi was making.

  She was laughing.

  She hid her face behind the soggy towel, wheezing into it, shoulders shaking.

  “I’ll just . . .” He backed out of the bathroom, sliding the pocket door closed behind him.

  Mortified, he stood dripping on his living room carpet, balls-to-the-world naked. His fresh uniform was still atop the toilet’s water tank.

  “Great,” he mumbled to himself, one arm slung over his chest and the other over his groin, like he was hiding from a crowd in an embarrassing dream. Could this be a dream? Maybe this was a dream.

  Vanhi’s laughter grew more raucous.

  Not a dream.

  He hurried to his dresser, hands shaking from the sudden adrenaline spike. It’s not every day you get ambushed in the shower. He struggled to find the correct pieces to compose an actual outfit. One sock and an undershirt weren’t going to cut it. Nor were two button-downs. Son of a bitch, why was his brain short-circuiting?

  Pants. You need pants, dumbass.

  But he was too slow. Behind him, the pocket door was jiggling in its frame. Vanhi struggled to get it to open. It always stuck a little, and this time it gave Stone a grace period in which to dive for the bed—still soaked—pulling the comforter into his lap just as she stepped out.

  She was still laughing, ragged towel limp at her side, glasses fogged beyond use. She wiped at the lenses as she tried to get a word past her giggling.

  “Vanhi, I am so sorry,” he said earnestly before she could speak. “I wasn’t thinking. I used to shower with my tags on all the time. I should have considered—”

  She waved his apology aside, wiping her glasses on a mostly dry bit of her shirt. “It’s fine. Stone, I’m fine. But you, I—” She set the frames back on her nose and burst into another round of hysterics. “No, I shouldn’t be—it’s not funny, I’m sorry, you must be—”

  But it was funny, and her laughter was contagious. He tried to keep a straight face, but his sides tickled with her amusement.

  “This is still better than waking up in an exam room,” she said. “Much warmer welcome.” She giggled once more—clearly having meant the water was warm. But when she caught her unintentional double entendre, she froze. “I—I mean, it’s nice not to wake up alone.”

  Yeah, that didn’t make it better.

  Flushing, she hid behind the towel.

  Stone’s very unhelpful hindbrain provided him with a plethora of comebacks. The mildest and quippiest—It’s nice not to shower alone—nearly escaped his lips before he swallowed it down.

  He tried not to think of her flush against him, the weight of her, the floral scent of her—

  “I’ll do better next time,” he promised breathlessly, clutching the bedspread tighter to his crotch. He did not need an erection ma
king this any more awkward than it already was.

  “This was . . .” Vanhi started and trailed off, moving toward the hall door.

  Nice? Fun? Humiliating?

  “This was good,” she said simply, awkwardly. “But I should probably change into some dry clothes.”

  “Me, too,” he said frankly.

  Her only reply was a bashful smirk before she escaped out the door, her soggy shoes making a squish squish squish as she went.

  With a huge sigh of relief, Stone flopped onto his back and stared blankly at the ceiling.

  “That was . . . educational,” C said after a time.

  Her next few reappearances weren’t nearly as eventful. She reappeared while he was at work on Breath—nearly got squished between the hinges of the thick radiation-resistant door they were installing, but was none the worse for wear. She reappeared in his kitchen, thankfully far from the hot plate. And she popped up on his way back from a shift doing laundry for his floor—landed in the laundry cart, cushioned by perfectly folded uniforms that were not-so-perfectly folded when she climbed out again. She helped him sort them all after.

  Every time she solidified next to him, his heart jumped and his throat would tighten. Not from the surprise—that first incident in the shower apparently inoculated him against all sudden shocks—but from the proximity alone.

  It was weird: being lost in space while simultaneously experiencing something so pedestrian as a crush.

  Of course, it didn’t feel pedestrian. It felt big, as though he was filled up with it, running over with it. Sometimes, when he saw her, his smile broke free before he had the chance to compose himself, as though his grin was the spillway on his emotional damn.

  He was light with it, and heavy with it, and hoped that, just maybe, she might be bursting at the seams the same way he was.

  And C was a comfort he never knew he needed. All those nights he’d lain awake, thinking, staring at his blue-and-red walls turned deep gray in the dark, he’d needed to talk things out. Needed to express his fears, doubts—to get it all out of his head. But journaling had never been his thing, and besides, a page couldn’t help him process, whether it was digital or paper.

  But C he could muse to openly. Without worrying about judgments, or lectures.

  He’d thought Vanhi’s attachment to the PA endearing at first. Now, he had no idea how she’d been able to give it up. How could she give something so valuable to Stone? A last gift from her sister, a constant companion, a tether to reality—she’d given all these things to him of all people. She’d trusted him.

  It was impossible not to feel proud and humbled at the same time.

  He was especially glad for C the day Tan made a final ruling on Life. They’d thought, hoped, that it might be nearby. But all evidence pointed to one of two possibilities. One, that it hadn’t made the jump with them. Which, if they could ever confirm, would be a relief. But, if it hadn’t stayed behind, it must have been destroyed. Which meant all of their MIA crew members were surely dead.

  “Today, we say goodbye to one of our triad,” the captain said solemnly over the convoy-wide system. “We were Life, Breath, and Pulse. And though one ship has left us, we choose to believe that our companions aboard made it back to Earth. We choose to believe they lived long, happy lives. We choose to remember them in the spirit in which their ship was named.”

  When the announcement finished, Stone mumbled a quiet “Amen.”

  The rest of the day was filled with quiet contemplation. There was a sadness most crew members found difficult to work through. The captain declared it a day of mourning, dismissing everyone unessential from their day’s duties.

  Stone would have preferred to work, really. Spending twenty-four hours locked in grief felt wrong—disrespectful, even. At least he had a bright spot: Vanhi. Today she offered him a special opportunity to escape the noise in his own head.

  “Come with me to the astronomy lab,” she said at his door. It wasn’t a demand, nor was it an excited invitation. Her tone was somber, yet her body vibrated with urgency. Behind her stood Dr. Dogolea, his usually expressive face a blank mask.

  “Captain Tan just summoned me,” Vanhi said. “Carmen Sotomayor—and your friend, Justice—they’ve been finishing up some calculations, and . . . they’ve found it. They know our position in time and space.”

  A sickening cocktail of excitement and dread tumbled together over ice in his chest. This was good, wasn’t it? Now they would know what they’d need to do to get back to Earth. Now Vanhi would have another piece of the accident’s puzzle: knowing the result of the SD bubble entanglement meant they could more easily work backward, better identify which experimental SD had captured them.

  “The captain said I should bring two colleagues,” Vanhi continued. “I’d like you to come with me and Gabriel.”

  He nodded, and silently fell into step. C said nothing, heavy against his chest.

  The astronomy lab was a domed room at the bottom of Pulse. Its curved windows allowed for easy space viewing, and its large, externally mounted telescope had been designed to take pictures of Oort cloud objects for researchers back on Earth.

  Here, the telescope had found the field full of alien objects. But it had also helped them identify Triangulum, the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal, and a handful of other galaxies. It had given them the information they needed to find their place in the universe.

  As the three entered, Stone noted that opposite the windows sat a bank of computers, their monitors all displaying various galactic models. He couldn’t make out what they said, though.

  He smiled at Justice when he caught her eye. She did not smile back.

  Both captains were present, as were their first officers, all in full dress uniforms out of respect for the dead. Vanhi, Stone, and Gabriel waited for directions before sitting.

  Carmen Sotomayor opened with a breathless welcome. She was their only fully deaf crew member, though they had several partially deaf crew members as well. Justice was one of only a handful aboard fluent in American Sign Language, which was a factor in her volunteering to work with Navigation in pinpointing their position. Sotomayor’s translator, Twinkle Pemba, was also present.

  “I’ll cut to the chase,” Carmen signed and said. “Using multiple landmarks as points of triangulation, we were initially unable to decipher our location because each object’s position was dramatically different from the records we have. We believed this was because of distance. And, we were partially correct. Justice?”

  Justice was already moving, having been watching Carmen for her cue. She brought up a diagram of the Milky Way on a monitor. “Here,” she said, pointing. “Is Earth. And here—” she pointed at an arm of the galaxy on the other side of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s black hole center “—is where we are.”

  Everyone in the room leaned forward, as though the distance between their eyes and the image mattered in grasping the concept.

  Stone didn’t lean forward, though. Rather, he stifled a sudden burst of vertigo. Internally, he flailed—it was like thinking you’d gone to sleep in your own bed and waking up in a stranger’s. He had suspected they were far, but they were so far out of their local star group they might as well be off the map.

  Carmen continued. “The reason this took us so long to work out is because many of our landmarks are still not in the right place, even accounting for the distance, the new perspective. We had to make sure we were accounting properly for the rotation of the galaxy as well. That we were factoring in enough of it.

  “A galactic year is approximately two hundred and twenty-five to two hundred and fifty million years. So, we set our year, twenty-one twenty-seven, as year zero and advanced the models from there.”

  Vanhi’s hand shifted under the table, searching for Stone’s. They found each other’s fingers and held tight.

  Everyone held their breath.

  “We’ve done the calculations again and again,” said Justice, signing as she spoke. “We wil
l of course need an independent team to review the conclusion, but we’re confident enough that we think your team,” she gestured to Vanhi, “will find our work invaluable at this stage.”

  Justice, you’re one of my best friends, Stone thought, but for the love of everything, get on with it.

  “We are,” Carmen signed and said, “approximately fifteen kiloparsecs, and one hundred thousand years, from where we began.”

  The room erupted—the captains demanded they run the calculations in real time, so that they could see for themselves.

  Only Stone and Vanhi sat quietly. He tried to meet her gaze, to see how she was taking the news, but he had trouble lifting his stare away from the monitors.

  The sense of vertigo heightened, making Stone swoon. He needed to go lie down, to shut his brain off for a little while. He needed to let this hellish realization percolate, because he didn’t have the mental tenacity to deal with it right now.

  But the meeting dragged on, Carmen and Justice becoming more frustrated the more they were asked in a disbelieving tone to “run the damn models again.” It wasn’t that the others thought the two of them hadn’t done their job, they simply hoped that maybe, this time, the mistake would be revealed and this cruel joke would be over.

  Stone’s vision began to tunnel. Suddenly, there was a soft hand on his shoulder. It was Vanhi’s. “Hey,” she said quietly. “Do you want to get out of here? I think the captains have a lot more to discuss with Sotomayor and Jax. I don’t think we—” She interrupted herself, turning to the captains. “Sir,” she addressed Tan, “may Mendez Perez and I be dismissed?”

  “You have all the notes you need?”

  “For now, sir.”

  He nodded his acquiescence.

  Once they were outside the lab, Stone rubbed at his eyes, leaning heavily against the wall. “Thank you,” he said. “I just . . . I don’t know how to . . .”

  “Yeah, me, too,” she said, wide-eyed—empathetic, but clearly also reeling. “Do you want to . . . to get our minds off it for a while?” She took his hand, and he understood what she meant. She wanted to forget for a moment as well, to shut off the fear and the doubt and the analytical part of her mind.