Sarah K. L. Wilson

“When you’re done plotting the course send it to my console so I can check your work, honey,” my mom said.

The scent of her hot coffee filled the tiny cockpit and my mouth watered. I’d been at the helm for eight hours and my eyes were watering from staring at holo-projections. My hands itched to get down below and dig into whatever was making that ticking sound in the water filter. A slipping gear, maybe? We didn’t have spares. We never did, our margins were so scant. I’d wanted us to invest in some last planetfall, but we were too low on air so we topped that up instead. I’d have to fabricate what we needed or jury-rig it from something else.

Mom propped her feet up on the wall and leaned back into the rigid pilot chair. She had a knack for absorbing stress and worry and never letting it back out again, like a black hole of comfort.

I tried to concentrate on the numbers, carefully plotting our course, instead of what might be making the ticking sound. The computers do the bulk of the work, but I’m still needed to make decisions. Decisions like whether to choose the course that optimizes fuel or gives us the better safety margin around an obstacle, whether to burn to one location and coast in a minor grav-wave or whether to take advantage of a planet’s gravity to boomerang around it. Humans are always needed for these things because we can’t possibly put all of the data the computers would need to make those choices into them on a twenty-four hour basis, and unlike larger ships our supplies and circumstances are not constants.

Nothing is constant in the Awenasa. Nothing but family and devotion. Everything else is the pawn of entropy.

I sent the complete course to my mom’s console and stood up, arcing my back in a deep stretch. I moved carefully and deliberately – as I always did – to avoid bumping anything important. There isn’t a square inch of Awenasa that isn’t essential. I don’t know how mom and dad squeezed the money together for a rogue trading vessel. They change the subject when I ask. I also don’t know if what we do is always legal. They change the subject when I ask about that, too.

My dad pulled himself up into the cockpit and squeezed in beside my mom. He had been sleeping through the past eight hours and was fresh for his shift. He grinned and slid his calloused hands over hers as he tinkered with her display. I turned my face away from the intimate moment. It’s awkward to share 200 square feet of space with your parents every day. You can’t avoid everything. I would never admit it, but I prefer it this way. I get a kind of happy emotional stability from their devotion.

“Did a good job on this one, Roman,” my dad said right after he kissed my mom’s neck. I rubbed the back of my neck and felt my face get warm. “We’d almost live on this course.”

Both of them laughed at my expense and I shook my head.

“Just try to do better, old man,” I said, running my hands over the tattered seat and letting them puzzle out how to fix it. The next time there was nothing else to do I was going to repair that rip.

“I don’t have to. Your mom could plot her way out of a black hole. She’ll fix this up. Come on, there’s work below. I need that creativity of yours to help me fix a problem with the secondary air filter pump.”

We went below and settled into the careful rhythm of our work, watching each movement so as not to damage or dislocate anything in the tiny space ship. I handled the rippled air filters gently, they smelled different than the rest of the ship, like they’d pulled that smell out of the air completely.

“I’ve finished plotting the course,” mom called, “Brace yourselves for maneuvering.”

The ship shuddered and I squeezed my eyes shut praying Awenasa could take the strain, just as I did every day since I first realized that only an elderly bucket of bolts kept us all from sucking vacuum every day. I gripped a grab-bar and fought the normal gut-twisting feeling and then as it released me I opened my eyes.

My dad blinked and rubbed his forehead with one hand.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no…” Mom said.

My dad’s face went grey and fear shot through me. I had never heard my mom sound worried before. I took a step forward, but my dad pushed past me, knocking over the tool bag. It crashed to the floor and I dove towards it. My tools. If we left them loose down here they could hit something vital. A curse from above changed my mind. I clambered up the cold metal ladder to the cockpit.

I caught Mom’s coffee mug as I pulled myself into the cockpit. Dark liquid trailed behind it, leaving a pool across the deck.

“Please, please, no…” Mom said. She was leaning so far into her display that I couldn’t see anything, flicking her hands in quick maneuvers.

“Easy, now,” Dad said, “Easy. They haven’t spotted us. It’s only a kilometer. Just ease her back around.”

His knuckles were white where they gripped her worn chair back. Sweat slid down the side of his face.

I felt hot worry bubbling up in my belly.

“What happened?” I whispered.

“We’re over the border to Blackwatch space,” my dad said, “and there’s a patrol ship showing up in our sensor sweep.”

“My calculations…”

“No, honey. It wasn’t you,” Mom said, not looking up. She was lying. She didn’t make mistakes. “The computer-”

The whoop of an incoming message cut her off. My mom flicked the audio on.

“Unknown vessel this is HMSS Goldcrest. You are in Blackwatch territorial space. Man your life boats immediately. Your ship will be fired upon in ten minutes.”

“HMSS Goldcrest, this is Independent Light Craft Awenasa. We miscalculated our course and are leaving immediately. Please hold your fire,” Mom said, her face taut and pale.

“Awenasa, Blackwatch Space has been clearly violated,” the voice sounded irritated. “Your ship is forfeit. Man your life vessels immediately.”

“We have no-”

“Get out of that ship in whatever you do have and wait for our rescue or you will die! I have my orders and I will follow regulation to the letter.”

Mom leaned even further into her display, her knuckles white where she gripped the controls, she opened her mouth to speak, but my dad laid a hand on her shoulder. A flicker of terror flashed across her face.

“No time. He won’t negotiate. Come on, Alicia.” He turned to me. “Get below and get the emergency suits out.”

My mouth opened to protest, but I shut it with a click. I didn’t need to tell him that, like everything else in the ship, our suits were too old and worn. We bought the new suit for doing repairs on the outside of the ship, but the other two were twenty years old. I put a new patch on one just last week when I did the maintenance checks. I’d wondered why I was even bothering to patch something we couldn’t use. We kept them, like we kept everything, in the hope we could use them for parts.

I slid down to the storage locker and dragged the suits out, laying them on the bench and starting up the computer interfaces. The new one whirred to life immediately, and I checked the seams with the practice of daily inspections while I waited for the others to boot up. My parents slid in behind me and my mom grabbed me in a fierce hug.

“It’s not your fault,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “It’s mine.”

“Don’t say that,” my dad said, emotion making his voice gruff. He shoved the new suit under my nose. “Put it on.”

“No,” I said, clenching my jaw. “Mom, you put it on.”

“No,” she said, her face twisting in a sob. She gripped my face fiercely between her hands. “I love you so much, Roman.”

I choked. “Put it on, Mom!”

“Five minutes, son,” my dad said softly, handing my mom an old suit.

She kissed him passionately, and for once I didn’t look away. I couldn’t see anything anyways. My eyes were too blurry.

“Now, son,” my dad said.

“No! Mom-”

He slapped me across the face. I’d never felt his hand before.

“The suit. Put it on.”

He and mom struggled into the antiquated suits. I fumbled with the new one. My hands were shaking. I stripped out of my clothes, attaching the plumbing painfully in my haste, and sealing it up. Before I pulled on the helmet my dad gripped my hair forcefully and kissed my forehead. I didn’t remember being kissed by him before, either. He flipped his own helmet on and helped me secure mine.

“Here,” my mom said, clipping me in to the safety strap we all wore and flipping the signal on the emergency transponder.

I didn’t ask if they’d really send a boat for us.

I didn’t ask if the transponder still worked.

Dad entered his security code, overrode the locks, and levered the hatch open. Red emergency light filled our home along with the whoop of the emergency signal as Awenasa lost pressure.

I swallowed my terror and stepped out with them into the free-fall of space. My dad launched off with a push and we were adrift.

I tried not to cry. I couldn’t reach up to wipe my eyes or nose if I did. We had spent my whole fourteen years on and off that tin can. Sometimes my parents and I had worked on company planets or asteroid installations, but we always ended back at home: Awenasa.

She was drifting far beyond us now, flashing red in my too-crystal space vision. Beyond her a massive ship lurked, white and lit up with tiny pin-prick lights across her predatory shape. HMSS Goldcrest let off a tiny flash and then Awenasa shuddered, flaring orange-red, and exploded into tiny pieces. The deadness of empty space kept me from sharing the force of her death, or hearing the sound of it. It was almost as if it wasn’t real at all. I felt my breathing speeding up uncontrollably and turned to my parents. I saw my mom’s look of love and heard her voice over the radio.

“Slow your breathing down, son. Don’t panic. They’ll come for us.”

She and Dad were holding hands. I reached for hers, watching those steady cinnamon-brown eyes as they reassured me.

Just as I grasped her hand, she started choking, flailing and losing the grip of my dad’s hand.

“Mom! Mom!” I screamed over the radio.

Her gasping seemed to go on for a long time, although it may have only been seconds. When the silence came, it seared me.

“Roman,” Dad said. “Look at me, son.”

Mom drifted slowly away from us, still attached by the cord. I sucked in massive gulps of air, choking them out again in sobs. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. Dad pulled me in close by the tether. He gripped my helmet and pulled it in close to his so I could only see his face. His features acid-etched themselves onto my mind so that later I would always recall this moment with eidetic clarity. Neither of us wanted to see the most precious person in our universe drifting into nothing, just a corpse in the cold vacuum of space.

“You are everything to us – your mom and me. We worked hard for you.”

“I wish you didn’t have to.” I hated how small my voice sounded.

“No, son. I mean that it was worth it. Your mom could say it better, but it’s left to me. It was always worth it. You were our joy. You were what lit up our little spacecraft and kept us going from place to place. We always wanted more for you than we could give. You have to know that we are so proud of you. So proud.” He choked, his own eyes streaming with tears. His hands on either side of my helmet gripped tightly, like he could somehow protect me even now. “I love you. I’m so proud of you. I’ll always be proud of you.”

“I know, Dad,” I said, my words thick with tears.

He released my helmet and drew me in to a hug and through the impersonal thickness of our suits we tried to pour all the love we had left.

“It’s going to be ok-” he began, but his body started to spasm.

I was caught in the tangle of his arms, but I didn’t dare push him away. I didn’t want to see what was happening.

“Dad!” I yelled over the radio, “Dad!”

Just like Mom, he eventually stilled. I couldn’t bear to look at his facemask. I shoved his body away with my eyes jammed shut, and was pushed away by the force of my own efforts.

We hung together, but far apart, in space. Me, alive and broken hearted in the one working suit. Both of them on the ends of the tether, dead in their ruined suits. In the midst of it all I lost track of where the HMSS Goldcrest was. If she was still out there, she was behind me now. I tried to use the tether to spin around and look, but I was disoriented and lost in the endlessness of space.

Panic seized me. They weren’t coming for me, after all. I would die here in my suit with my parents. My suit was rated for eight hours? How long would eight hours feel as I drifted in nothingness knowing the end was coming? I fought down the bile in my throat. I couldn’t afford to inhale my own vomit in the suit.

My suit was designed with a clock, but it was offline. In our haste I must have forgotten to check that it was on. What else had I forgotten? It could be any small thing. Just one little mistake and I would die much sooner than eight hours from now. I hoped I’d forgotten something. I didn’t want to live the hours ahead of me. I wanted to drift into the sweet embrace of death with my family.

My heart already ached from missing them.

I drifted for so long that I was too tired to think. I was fearful one moment, enraged the next, broken with sorrow in the third. The endless looping of the cycle left me drained and empty.

I tried counting stars. I tried not to think about what came next. I tried not to hope that someone might still rescue me. I tried not to count the minutes. I tried not to think of Mom and Dad or their last words to me.

I didn’t know how long I floated for. It felt like days, although I knew it couldn’t be more than eight hours. I wanted my parents back. I wanted to hug my mom one more time. I felt like I was crumpled inside every time my gaze drifted to one of their empty shells. Some vital support inside my soul had buckled.

My tears were cried out and being recycled by the suit and my mind was floating in its own distilled pain when I saw the search lights. Rescue had come after all.

A beam of light settled on me. I could hear nothing in the vacuum of space, but a whisker beam laser pierced the darkness and pinged my helmet. Communications.

“This is the rescue pinnace of the HMSS Goldcrest. Stand-by for retrieval.”

I followed the beam with my eye and watched as a small hatch opened on the side of the looming pinnace and a suited man launched out from the small craft, a red ribbon of safety cord tracing a path behind him. He drifted slowly through space and as our interval narrowed I saw a shadowed face within his helmet. He looked serious, but not hostile. I reached out a hand towards him. As he covered the last inches he grasped my hand and pulled me in towards him, clipping a line from his safety line to my suit.

He put his helmet against mine and spoke.

“The other two? They aren’t moving or answering communications.”

“Dead,” I croaked. I had to cough and try again before he could hear me.

“We’ll need to cut them loose. I can’t reach from here.”

He handed me a small cutter just like the one from our toolkit in the Awenasa. I took it and stared at the small tool in my gloved hand, tracing the imprinted brand name on the handle. A simple swipe would slice our webbing, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t set them loose to drift forever in the black of space without me. They weren’t supposed to die like this, and I wasn’t supposed to leave them. I wished that there was wind they could sway in or a current to watch them drift in. I could still pretend there was some life there, but they hung in concrete motionlessness.

“Now, boy. We don’t have time to waste. My orders say to bring the living and leave the dead or leave you all out here. You want to die stargazing? Now’s your big chance.”

I gripped the cutter, and bit my lip. My blood tasted of iron. For a moment I thought of cutting the man before me instead of the webbing. It would be too small of a revenge.

If I died here with my family there would be no revenge at all.

I drew in a ragged breath and swiped the webbing, clenching my jaw and my stomach. I retracted the blade and handed it back.

A moment later my rescuer’s hand gripped my belt and the two of us were being reeled up into the pinnace. It seemed to take a long time for the winch to bring us in. I craned around, trying to keep my parents in my view. This was my last chance to ever see them, even as empty husks.

There was a thump on my helmet and my rescuer put his head close to mine and spoke again.

“Forget them, son. You have bigger troubles waiting.”

“Bigger than losing everything that matters to me?”

He laughed and the sound grated on my raw soul.

“You’ve been drafted. Welcome to the Blackwatch Imperial Marines.”