Thrum

My first thought is that my crew is sleeping. All three of them, peaceful, eyes closed against the still air. And if I leave them here, eventually they’ll come traipsing one by one into the galley for cups of bitter dehydrated coffee, happily bitching and jostling in that cramped space. But their chests don’t rise and fall. Their eyes don’t move under the lids to indicate a dream cycle. And their faces, as much as I try to rationalize it — their faces are gray and mask-like, nearly unrecognizable.

The crew of the Pioneer has been dead for a long time. I’m the only one left. We made it to our destination, and I’m the only one left.

This realization doesn’t hit me like a blow; it seeps into me, slow. Like the inevitable pull of a deep current, my body tossed by swift waters. When the brain begins to gasp for oxygen. When the senses dull and inevitability takes hold. Like shutting down.

All around me the white walls close in. The sharp smell of antiseptic and recycled air threatens to choke me. I’d rather I could smell them. I’d rather their rotten flesh gag me in its decomposition than feel separate from them, as if they might still be alive somehow, trapped in stasis for eternity.

I remember what we learned in training: the chance of death during stasis was small enough, they’d said, that it was worth the risk. This mission was worth the risk.

Their calculations must have been wrong.

It happens. This is deep space and not the first manned mission beyond Earth. But it is the first to move beyond Sol, to seek the reaches of the cosmos beyond our star. It takes years to get out of the Sol system, and even longer to get to the next system over, which is where we are. Where I am. Space, of course, is bigger than anyone comprehends, bigger than the human mind can handle. We’re able to come to some understanding of it with mathematics, and philosophy, and even art. We can look at pictures, read comparisons, and conduct complex equations to try to make sense of it.

But the fact is that the biological makeup of a human brain is too simple, its neurons too few, to understand the true enormity of our universe. It is incalculably and emphatically beyond us.

Thank God for that.

I look down at Lily for a long time, the papery skin at the edges of her eyes. Her red-brown hair is still glossy; I remember she’d washed it before we departed. She’d said she wanted to look nice after sleeping for several years. As our psych officer, she was supposed to help with situations like this. If something went wrong, if we started to feel the strange psychological effects of deep space travel (and we would), it would have been her job to talk to us about it. Work through it. Medicate us, if it came to that.

I can’t stop thinking about the way she used to wind her hair into a messy bun, how pieces used to always fall free around her face.

I’ll have to find my own drugs, now.

I don’t remember coming out of stasis, the excruciating process of it. That’s both by design and a quirk of the human brain, we had been told. Being essentially frozen in a dreamless state for years isn’t normal. Lily had said the amnesia wears off eventually, and by then, you’re recovered enough to handle it: The memory of waking. She’d described it as a sort of second birth. A horrible, painful wrenching from a drift in nothingness, from a peaceful emptiness into the screaming-bright now. We are infants after stasis: helpless, naked, and wailing.

I’m glad I don’t remember it. I hope I never do.

Mahdi lies next to Lily. I study him, too, his peaceful expression. His full black beard is exactly the length it was when we left Earth, his skin as smooth and brown. As if he never aged, never died. Stasis freezes you like that.

My mind — against my will — goes to my brother. I wonder if Henry ever grew the mustache he wanted to, or if his upper lip remained bare but for the few scattered hairs he had carefully maintained for most of his adult life, in the vain hope of more.

I remember some of his last words to me, his sad smile. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, MiMi.”

But Henry would be an old man now, thanks to special relativistic time dilation. And by the time I return to Earth, if I’m granted that grace, my brother will be long dead.

There’s nothing I can do with the emotion that overtakes me in a swell, threatening to undo me. So I take a deep breath and pack it away, setting it aside for later. I can’t right now. I don’t have the strength.

Finally, I move to the last stasis pod and say a silent farewell to Vasilissa. She and I never got along. She was argumentative, self-righteous, and always said my introversion was going to be a liability on the mission. Well, assholes are liabilities too. But in death, she has faded to a shadow of herself, and a pang catches in my chest. I’d do anything to be at the receiving end of one more of her dagger-sharp glares.

A repetitive sound pings in my ears, high-pitched and unrelenting. I realize it’s been going off for some time now. I tear my impotent gaze from the bodies, still zipped up snug in their stasis pods, and go thoughtlessly toward the sound.

I think I’m in shock.

I climb up a ladder on my way to the cockpit, where I’m sure the alarm is sounding. I pass through the galley on my way. It’s dark, empty. Of course it is. Did I expect to see someone there, heating up water? Did I expect to hear laughter, to see my crew? It is a dead space, a circular coffin of a room in a coffin of a ship.

A heavy stone settles in my stomach.

I continue up the ladder, focusing on the now. On what needs to be done. It occurs to me that I’m strangely spry for someone who just woke up from stasis. The sleep should have taken a toll on my agility, if not my muscle mass. Electrodes kept our muscles from atrophying, but it should have taken days for me to regain my strength.

Yet here I am, flying up a ladder as if it’s nothing. Spurred by grief, perhaps. Or maybe the scientists got it wrong. They got the survival rate wrong, somehow. I don’t want to think about what else they might have fucked up.

The cockpit is small, just big enough for two if we didn’t mind being crammed together. A sharp pain twinges in my chest. A cramped cockpit is a problem for another universe, one where Lily and Mahdi and Vasilissa are alive. I settle myself in one of the tiny swiveling chairs and scan the dash. For a moment, I’m overwhelmed with sensory input — buttons, lights, screens, readouts. My head spins, and I bend over, swallowing bile.

The alarm sound continues.

“You’re fine, Ami,” I say, almost scolding, as if I’m a wayward child. “You know this.”

I take a few deep breaths, the way Lily taught us — four seconds in, hold it for three, and eight seconds out. Something about the vagus nerve, lowering anxiety, that kind of thing. I take a second to wish, fervently, that she was here with me. That she was leaning over me, arms wrapped around my shoulders, her voice in my ear, her hair tickling my cheek. A lump forms in my throat.

“You’re fine,” I say again. It’s less convincing this time.

At last, the dash controls resolve into something I understand. I know these symbols, these buttons and readouts. I learned it in training. But I’m not supposed to be in this situation; Mahdi was both pilot and engineer. The rest of us were only trained in case he… He should have been the one…

The thought stutters, and I close my eyes. I’m here now. I can’t look back.

The alarm screams and screams.

I swallow hard. Stop the alarm, that’s all. One thing at a time, and the first thing is to stop the alarm.

Scanning the controls, I see it: a throbbing red pulse on the diagnostic screen. It’s a malfunction. No, two malfunctions, both triggering the alarm. One is located at the fuel tank, the other at our comms array.

“Pioneer,” I say.

Yes, Ms. Selwyn.

I’m taken by the ridiculous urge to ask the ship computer to address me by my given name. Ms. Selwyn sounds old, like someone on her way to death. “Diagnostic summary, please.”

Fuel reserves are at a critical low. The long-range communications array is nonfunctional.

I wait, but Pioneer seems finished with the diagnostic. “I need more information than that, Pioneer. Why are the fuel reserves low? We should only have used a fraction of it.” As I ask the question, I check our trajectory and see we’re exactly where we’d planned to be. Well, close enough. We’ve drifted a bit further than we should have, just beyond the outermost planet in this system, but that’s all.

I have located an external leak. A hull breach. She reads out some coordinates, an exact location on the hull, but I’m barely comprehending. I nod as if I understand. As if this has sunk in.

“What caused it?”

Unknown.

“And the comms array? What happened there?”

An unknown hardware malfunction.

“So it’s… broken.”

No answer. Wonderful. Our comms array is out of commission, and there’s a breach in the hull. There’s not supposed to be significant debris in this pocket of space, but we did veer off course. And deep space probes are known to be fallible. Maybe a meteoroid, or some chunk of space rock, hurtled through our comms and the hull like a bullet.

“Pioneer,” I say, “can you tell me when these malfunctions occurred?”

The hull breach occurred at 0439 hours this morning. The communications array malfunctioned at 0502 hours this morning.

So recently. And twenty-three minutes apart.

Two meteoroids, then.

I stare at the diagnostic screen as if looking at it will lead to comprehension. As if by looking at those two pulsing dots hard enough, I might bring my crew back to life, fix the ship, and set everything to rights. My mouth tastes sharply of bile, and I swallow roughly.

The alarm sounds.

“Turn that thing off, Pioneer,” I snap.

Disabling the alarm.

In the following silence, my ears ring as if the alarm is still shrieking, unending, unstoppable, echoing forever in the darkness of my mind.

I consider going outside to attempt to fix the hull breach and quickly realize the futility of it. I’m not going anywhere fast. Pioneer is practically at a dead stop, relying on inertia to keep her going unless I fire up the engines. But that won’t happen without any fuel. My priority is the comms array. If there’s anyone out here at the edge of the system, God willing, a distress signal might save me.

In training, they went over the probability of us finding intelligent life in Sol’s neighboring systems. It was as close to zero as a number can get without being utterly zilch, but it was still a high enough number that a few Earth governments joined forces to make this mission happen. That tiny number used to fill me with this vibrating eagerness, an aching hope, the need to see and understand and know what lay so far beyond us.

Now, that number is the reason I’m going to die out here. Alone.