Novels

The medical station on the Croatoan was, as Victoria had said so many years ago, cramped. At its best, it meant that Victoria was always within arms reach of all her tools, and no time was ever wasted looking for a vital instrument.

Nevertheless, there was no escaping the fact that there was really only enough room for a single medical bed, and just enough room for a single person to walk around it.

Sughouri was lying on that bed now, staring at nothing at all.

They talked every day, sharing thoughts and feelings and experiences. Sometimes Victoria was excited, marveling at what it had been like. Other times she was like a cautious parent, warning Sughouri against thinking to fast, or feeling to hard on herself.

They had taken Sughouri apart, neurosis by neurosis. They talked about how hard it was to live in a military family. They talked about having friends torn away, and how no satisfactory reason was ever given, because what answer could be satisfactory? They talked about how her parents never explained their sudden absences, how their clearance didn’t extend to family members, especially children.

How long had Sughouri wandered? Years. Only seconds. Her heart ached, her limbs burned. She was dying, crushed by the intense weight of Proxima b. Her mind wasn’t working properly anymore. She was dreaming while awake, whispering to ghosts and crying out to absent friends.

She was in the mine. She knew she was. The tunnel kept going, and if she kept walking, she would soon come to the same door that connected to the refinery. She would see empty hoppers and pickaxes, and then she would be halfway there.

When she thought of it, she checked her watch.

It had been ten minutes since she fell.

“Sughouri?”

A passing fancy flit through Sughouri’s mind. She didn’t have to answer Kristiana when she called. What would that do to them, to be cut off? How would they react?

“Yes?” she answered, the moment past.

“What are you doing? You’re not supposed to be up for another two hours.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Sughouri shrugged. “Things to do today, so might as well get started.”

“Such as?” Victoria now. They all suspected. They had to have suspected for days now. They were watching her vitals every second of every hour. For all her naivete about space and the sciences, Victoria wasn’t stupid about people. Besides, they could see where she was heading.

It had taken almost four days for Sughouri to finish her work. Cutting through the door was difficult enough, and took two four-hour days before she was finished. Then she fed a flexible camera through the hole, bringing along a connector cable with it. Breaking into the keypad took another day, and connecting her hacking kit into the security lock was no small feat in itself.

In the end, it took a full thirteen hours to break through the military-grade security lock on the door, and once she had finished, she had to return to the Hut and leave actually opening the lounge for the next day.

Today.

It had been a harrowing week for Victoria. Her mind filled with inescapable imaginings fueled by her past. Behind that door, there could be two hundred corpses, perfectly preserved in their final moments of death. It would be her job to discover what those final moments were.

Kristiana’s head was throbbing.

“Hamēstagān is a place referenced in the Dādestān ī Dēnīg, a ninth-century Persian religious text,” she recited. “It had been written by Zoroastrian high priest, and it’s composed entirely of ninety-two questions followed by the priest’s answers. Hamēstagān is a place where dead souls are sent to wait. It’s a neutral place for those whose good and evil deeds are in perfect balance, to wait for the day of judgment.”

“Okay, but what does it mean?” Sughouri said over the com. “‘Gone to Hamēstagān.’ Is this their way of saying they knew they were dying?”

“That’s one possibility,” Kristiana admitted. She didn’t like how excited Sughouri was getting. If she started to panic or lost control, there was nothing any of them could do. “We don’t have all the information yet, so it’s counterproductive to start guessing wildly.”

“It’s not wild,” Sughouri huffed. “It’s right there, on the wall of a flipping kitchen: Gone. To. Hamēstagān. Look, I’m all for restraint when it comes to making guesses, but it’s not like they’re speaking in code, here.”

“Section A,” Sughouri said as she dragged her LED across the sign. “This must be the place.” Sughouri glanced to make sure that Churji was still following along behind her. She was used to working in silence, hearing only the sounds of her suit, and periodic visual check-ins were vital to keep things moving smoothly. Her chest was beginning to hurt, but Victoria hadn’t said anything, so it was probably just her imagination.

“Hold up,” Zuri’s digital voice came over the comm. “Wolf just stopped. You’re close to where the drone broke down, and it doesn’t want to go further.”

Sughouri glanced back again. Churji was sitting a few paces back, camera steadily tracking her movements. She checked her suit and said; “I’m not getting any radiation, or environmental hazards from my suit. Can you tap it into my camera feed? I’ll go on ahead and it’ll see everything’s safe.”

“Is that right?” Victoria’s voice was delightfully confused. “Is Wolf that smart?”

Sighouri liked nicknames.

Normal names were universal. She was Sighouri to everyone, and always would be. But to her grandmother, she had been Noyoner moni. To her niece, she had been Sig. At the academy, she had been Bandar, thanks to her limber limbs and loud laughter. To her longest-term lovers she had been Ya amar, Jaanu, and Shona, respectively, and for two months on the ISS she had been Bullet.

The CHR-3 was Churji to her, and the Croatoan was the Śabādhāra. Everyone saw different things when they looked at the world, and to hang every viewpoint, every facet of a gem under a single name was unwise at best. Dangerous at worst.

Kristiana called them ‘colonists,’ but they could just as easily be pioneers, explorers, Noriamians, Proximans…

Sughouri was about to be an archeologist, or an SAR Engineer, or a surveyor, or a migrant, or an ex-pat.

Zuri’s fingers itched. It had taken almost an hour for Churji to reach the main computer center in Central Control, then another hour for Sughouri to inspect the systems and wiring to make sure everything was still within proper working order.

“Okay,” Sughouri said at last, “I’m turning the computer on. Zuri, it’s in your hands now.”

Zuri could feel her shoulders relax as, on the screen, Churji’s claw threw the final switch. The feed swung about as all around it, lights began to flicker to life. When Churji turned back to the main screen, the system boot process was spinning past, throwing error after error, the same errors mirrored on Zuri’s personal screen.

“That doesn’t look good,” Victoria muttered.

“Nah, it’s fine,” Sughouri waved a hand. “The system is looking for a bunch of systems and hardware we haven’t turned on, that’s all.”

And likely never would, Zuri noted. No need for waste recyclers or temperature control now.

Victoria used to think that space was empty. Now, she knew that what she thought of as void was really full of radiation, background static, dust molecules and dark-matter. As far as was practical, however, it was all empty.

For centuries, humans were taught the solar system on a scale that was reasonable. No, more than reasonable; conceivable. The astronomical distances between even the earth and its moon were difficult to comprehend on a visceral level. The most common emotion when seeing the planets of the solar system to scale for the first time was awe, coupled with no small amount of disbelief.

But the sun really was that much larger than Jupiter, which really was that much larger than Earth. And seeing the planets’ sizes was nothing compared to the distance between them. To truly understand the distance one light-year covered was nearly impossible. Such a massive stretch of sheer and unmitigated emptiness.

There was a terrible thing that happened when the human mind is faced with emptiness; The brain tried to fill it.

“The elevator will reach the ground in five minutes,” Kristiana said. It was an unnecessary report, Victoria thought. The four of them were seated in their chairs, staring at their screens. She couldn’t imagine that any one of them wasn’t perfectly aware of exactly how much longer they would have to wait.

“What do you think they called it?” Sughouri asked.

“Called what?” Zuri asked.

“Well, the star is Proxima Centauri. They wouldn’t have stuck with Proxima b, would they? We don’t call Earth ‘Sol Three.’”

“There wasn’t anything in the Compact about naming the planet.” Kristiana said.

“I’ll bet you they did all the same.”

Victoria scratched at her hairline. “Noriama, probably.”