The Edge, page 14
I try the door. It’s locked. It twitters at me, a negative beep.
The footsteps cease. They’re done, standing – I think – above me; at the other end of the ladder to the servers. I push the door again, to see; and the negative beep again, an earcon of denial that feels personal, even if I tell myself that it’s not, because of course it’s not, there’s simply no way it can be.
Back to my room. Nobody else here. No sound above me; nothing tracking.
Desh messages, the exact moment my door shuts behind me.
‘I’m bringing Ukonvasara around. You ready?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He doesn’t say anything more.
Xavier stands outside my room, and he listens to me breathing, in the dark.
I stand at the window in the donut, and I watch as the ship is manoeuvred into place: lifted up to be attached to the airlock in Zvezda. It has been kept below, at the base of the station, locked into place like some sort of limpet, stuck to the side of us. It needs to be taken to Zvezda so the Raft can be kept at the main airlock; sensible, as the traffic to board one will be far greater than the other.
Once, these sorts of ships were purely for speculation: smaller research craft, like modified planes, designed to get up past the atmosphere, skirting the space between Earth and the Anomaly. Then we covered them in cladding and plating to make them look the part, even if only piecemeal. Engineers stopped building anything designed for actual exploring, and we shoehorned things into place instead. Build up on top of it, covering it up, going over and over until the original bones are impossible to see beneath the shell.
This one isn’t painted with its name. The serial number has been covered over, a plate of thick metal patchwork where it would have been. The whole ship ramshackle, as if built from pieces left lying around. A triumph of engineering, in its own way: that this piecemeal craft is going to hold, to go into that darkness and do what it’s going to do. Not built from one piece, not printed out and glossed to a sheen; more, it exists, and its existence alone is a miracle. Manufacturing too slow to get the craft to where we need them to be, so pieces taken from wherever they could be found. Assembled by professional repo men, rag and bone men.
I remember our launch: sitting in my chair, slanted back. Repurposed chairs from aircraft, from those really high-end 797s that they made at the start of the last decade; all of them locked in halfway-back upright positions, all with extra straps, as if it were some sort of rollercoaster. Lie back, belt up, and wait, as the others all got in. Talking to the people around you about what to expect. We’d seen the VR simulations of the station, to get to know our way around a little better, but those things always made me sick, and I refused to take pills in order to play a game. There was a screen in the cockpit, a screen we could barely see; but it was showing the broadcast of the launch footage as it happened. A strange moment, like looking at yourself, or thinking of yourself, in the third person.
She is on the craft; She is waiting for launch; there she goes, up to the space station. Even when we docked, she was there, disembarking; the footage broadcast back to Earth, there to see as I walked past the camera, and there she was.
The door to Zvezda opens for me this time, of course it does. I climb upstairs, to lights everywhere, to servers whining and humming. The only light not on from the Imminent Room. Dark inside. Dark from the edges of the door, like negative light, somehow—
‘Good, you’re here.’ Sian, from the airlock to Zvezda. I step inside, and the others – Berry and Gibson, at least, red-eyed and mourning their friend, wingmen in need of a leader – are already in there. Standing, it seems, until I appear; then it’s as if they’re engaged suddenly, suddenly activated, doing their work.
Xavier used to say that I was paranoid.
The airlock at the far end is now open – where once I saw Cohen’s face at the window, his hand on the glass, it’s not just pulled back, fastened. The maw, instead, opening onto the ship. Ukonvasara is curious inside: empty, but not. Lived in, the parts reappropriated from so many other ships. I stand in the doorway as the others grumble their way to their jobs, and I find myself lost for a moment in my own memory of getting on board this ship, or one just like it, when I came up here. Trying to place the seats in the flooring; in the boltholes that have been made, then emptied, then filled or covered over. Trying to picture exactly where I would have been sitting, when it was my turn.
‘Start it up,’ I say.
‘You do it,’ Berry replies. His voice bitter, full of rage; as if Cohen’s death was my fault. He is standing by the panel. His hand closer than mine.
‘The fuck is wrong with you?’ I ask him. I push past him. My hand on the panel, and it scans me. I give it permission, and it lights up. This needs to be done live, otherwise the system won’t boot properly. We need to cut the limiter, then Desh can upload his code: a piece of software that’ll tell ground control that the ship is still under their control, even as it’s not. Freeing it, even while lying that it’s still absolutely theirs.
A strange, dirty hack job of a technical achievement.
Berry lifts the panels, wrenches them up, and exposes the guts of the ship. ‘You ready,’ he says, less a question and more a statement, so I kneel down, slide into the space between the exterior and the hard floor. For the longest time the ships have been two shells: an inner and an outer. Where the wires run. It’s been argued that it isn’t the easiest way to build a ship, that it’s a waste of space; but having somewhere to hide the guts, the working, feels paramount to me. Nobody wants to see the working, I used to say. Nobody wants to see the wires.
I flick my light on, and the wires are chaotic, a total mess. Cables that run all the length of the ship, that run top to tail; cables that aren’t even used any more, that are cut off and clipped and tied, but that were too much hassle – I can only assume – to remove, so they’re here, like remnants of a previous civilization in the bowels of the ship only years before our own. I find the cable that links the system to the remote system, to the override, then I speak to Desh.
‘You got the limiter fake-out ready?’
‘Yup.’
‘I’ll cut, then you run it. We’re fast enough, they won’t even notice.’
‘Running it now.’
I climb back up, into the ship itself. ‘What error code have we got?’ I ask Berry, standing at the terminal.
‘Nothing,’ he says. I lean over: Enter coordinates, it says on screen.
‘It’s not a diagnostic. It’s just accepted it.’
‘So?’ Desh asks. Listening in.
‘It shouldn’t. I should have to okay it.’
‘I did that my end,’ Desh says. His voice in my ear, so close it’s like I can feel his breath. ‘Shut her down, let’s get back to work.’
So I do. I shut Ukonvasara down, and I turn off the power.
Goodbye Ali, it says on screen, as the colour blinks to black.
8
I have such ideation of death, only occasionally, but such overwhelming ideation.
I imagine myself in these scenarios, and up here it’s worse, so much worse, because the opportunity presents itself so easily.
This is not a death-wish. It’s not a suicidal urge, despite what Xavier presented to the courts in his own attempts to ruin me. It’s a clear and simple realization of visuals inside my head, repeatedly, of how I could die. Not how I should, or how I want to, but how I could, if it were to happen.
Choking, on a piece of something unappetizing.
Slipping in the shower, one of the plastimoulded fittings being just the right height and angle for me to smack my head onto, cracking my skull, blood spilling out onto my feet, pooling around my body as my heel blocks the drain, and the water and blood mingle around my body, breaking out over the edges of the shower, onto the bedroom floor; and then flowing, to the hallway, the donut, where somebody finds it, a trail of pale pink that they can’t help but follow.
Out there, in the darkness, coughing, sputtering, unable to breathe, even as I try to; and then into the Anomaly, where God knows what happens, but death is inevitable, and there is no coming back from it.
When I was a child, I would leave my house at night and walk towards the back of our garden, the edge of the perimeter; and I would stand there at the fence, and wonder what might be beyond it. Out in the darkness, because there was nothing to light the land but the moon and the stars, no ambient light, no bleed from our house when my parents were in bed; and I would stand there and wonder what could be out there, in that darkness. A killer, a wolf, something only imaginable in horror films that I stayed up to watch long after my parents thought that I was in bed …
This is not new, is what I am saying.
I’m saying that this ideation is not new to me.
When I wake, it’s to silence from the rest of the station. A dream that I once had: that I was the last person here, up here alone, and engulfed by that thing, and discovering what was inside it. A secret, an Easter egg, a prize, almost; knowledge, and truth, the reveal of something otherworldly. I get showered and dressed, and I leave my room, knowing that it’s the last time I will do these things up here, in this place. I’ve done them many times, so many that I’d lose track if it wasn’t for calendars; but this is it.
Outside, in the donut, most of the others are staring out of the window. The Anomaly has done what it always promises to do: crept forward. Not by much, but framed against the Ukonvasara, against our stage in orbit – this being the moment we’re closest to it, for this cycle – it suddenly seems so much closer. It’s so close that it looks as if we’re staring at a wall of sheer darkness.
‘Insane, right?’ Mon asks. I step up next to her, get close to the glass. My face pressed to it; and the darkness through it has these shades to it. Not just black, not an absence. Something there.
All this time I thought it was black.
‘Colours,’ I say. ‘Xavier, the knot, they say it’s coloured. They believed it wasn’t dark.’
‘Throw spaghetti at the wall enough, some of it’ll stick.’ Mon touches my face, tilts it slightly, so that I’m looking upwards. ‘See the angle? There’s a membrane or something on it. A bit of something before the dark.’ She’s right: it’s slightly translucent.
‘How did we not know?’ I ask. ‘How did we not see that?’
‘We’ve never had the ability to spend time this close to it before,’ Hyvönen says. ‘The drones never saw it.’ He’s behind us, somehow snuck up. His slippered footsteps gliding across the floor. ‘This is incredible, you know. That we are all here to witness this.’
‘No,’ Gibson says. ‘Fuck this. Fuck this, get me off here.’ He turns, and he’s furious. ‘You think I fucking signed up for this?’
‘Mr Gibson,’ Hyvönen says, reaching out for him – as if his touch might somehow soothe the raging beast – but Gibson steps back. He stares at Hyvönen, fixes on him.
‘Let me off,’ he says. ‘You said that this was the last day, but that fucking thing is so close—’
‘And I will send you home. You’re in no danger from it. The algorithm knows exactly when the Anomaly will move, and by how much.’
‘Fuck your algorithm. You fucking liar.’ He’s seething, that’s clear. His eyes wet, his teeth bared. Restrain him, leash him, hold him back.
‘Mr Gibson, I would urge you—’
‘Fuck your urges—’
‘I would urge you to remember who you are talking to.’
Gibson laughs, spits a laugh, hacked out. At Hyvönen; at all of us. ‘Liars. Liars, and murderers, and the walking fucking dead. That’s who I’m talking to.’ He points to the Anomaly, his finger swiping at the air, over and over, emphasizing his point. ‘That thing … You can see it. You can touch it, you can feel it. It feels so cold, doesn’t it?’ He starts to back away. Walking backwards, looking at us; as if he’s clutching a pistol, aimed at us, a getaway car waiting on the street outside to whisk him away.
He moves, turns. Runs. ‘Where’s he going?’ Sian asks, and Desh’s eyes flicker behind his glasses, as he sifts menus; as he tracks Gibson’s location.
‘He’s at the changing rooms, the, the airlock. Fuck.’ His voice pausing, but we already know. ‘He’s at the Raft.’
I’m fast. I’m used to running the donut, so I’m faster than the rest of them, and I’m at the changing room, but Gibson’s gone, and the airlock door is shut. I yank the emergency lever, but I see him, through the glass, holding it on the other side. Holding it upright, and I think, it shouldn’t be allowed to work that way. What a stupid design.
‘Gibson,’ I say, but he can’t hear me. He mouths words at me, and I try to lipread them, but his intonation’s sloppy, his lips wet. He beats one fist against the glass, and turns, stepping through the Raft’s door. He pauses, then strikes the glass again, making me jump backwards a little, as the room behind me fills with the rest of the crew. But he’s in the Raft, and he’s got the door shut, locking this one behind him.
‘Fuck,’ Sian says, through gritted teeth, and Desh swipes feebly at the air, abandoning his little glances in exchange for more efficient gestures, trying desperately to shut the ship down.
‘He can’t fly it,’ I say, ‘not without permission from ground control, right?’ A look between them all, that I recognize. Something I don’t know.
‘It’s untethered,’ Desh says.
‘Untethered? What do you mean? I haven’t done that!’
‘Cohen did it,’ Sian says. Quick, so quick. As if that shuts it down.
‘When?’ I ask, but nobody answers, and the answer doesn’t matter. What matters is stopping Gibson stealing the ship. ‘I can try getting out there,’ I say. ‘The hatch underneath, maybe I can manually freeze the ship’s functions.’
‘Berry can go,’ Sian says, but I grab her, even as Berry’s hesitating, about to move.
‘Berry’s not trained to do it,’ I say. ‘He’s an appliance tech—’
‘It’s true,’ Berry says. He’s scared: a kicked dog, tail between his legs.
But Sian argues with him. ‘You’ve done walks. You know how to fly the thing, you must have some idea how it works.’ She’s furious now herself, and we feel the rumble, the vibration, of the Raft’s engines starting, coming through the tether arm, shaking our temporary firmament.
‘I’ll do it fastest. I know what to disengage,’ I say, and I open the suit cupboard, pull one of them down and lay it at my feet, stepping into the heel holsters.
‘Let her go,’ Hyvönen says.
‘We need her,’ Sian says, but Hyvönen doesn’t react. ‘Tomas,’ she says, the first time I’ve ever heard her use anything remotely close to casual terms with anybody, but he holds up his hand, to silence her.
‘Let her go.’ To me, then: ‘Please, Miss Becker,’ he says, ‘prevent Mr Gibson from making an egregious error.’
Mon helps me into the suit, fastens me in, checks my cables. Everybody’s frantic, and the rumbling of the engines, so curiously silent, no noise bleeding into this space at all, but it goes through us, vibrating us, making our teeth chatter at the back as if we can’t stop grinding them through nightmares.
‘Okay, secure,’ Mon says, and Sian holds the arm of the secondary airlock. She’s about to pull it for me when she looks to Hyvönen, again.
‘We’re sure?’
Hyvönen nods, so Sian moves the arm, and the door opens, and I step through. I watch her clamp it shut behind me, and I pull the other arm, locking the door behind me. Safety first, I think; and the arm opens, and that familiar tug of the void, of weightlessness and being untethered. Except, there’s the Raft, nudged up against the station, so smooth and perfectly clean, an escape pod that’s never been used.
I can see, from here, Gibson through the window.
He stares at me, locks eyes with me.
Shakes his head, no no no.
I think of Theo; of not getting to see him again. If this ship leaves, we don’t know how we’ll get home; if we’ll be inside that thing before they can send another craft to get us.
I push off, grabbing the Raft’s side, my hands clamping onto the folded metal handholds along the edge of it. Pull myself over the crest of the ship, and the rumble of it increases, and I feel Gibson beating his fist against the walls of it – get away! get away! – as I go for the panelling below, where I can access the mechanical override.
I don’t hear the docking arm detach; I see it, when it’s pulled back, and the Raft starts to move. The panel’s off, though, and the controls exposed. Like an over-complicated fuse box, switches and wires, and I know what I’m looking for; as the ship moves away from the station, starting to turn, and I look back—
The Anomaly, we are heading towards it, as the craft accelerates—
I detach the accelerant pipe, cut the cable to turn off the power, and the burn from the engines dies, but the momentum doesn’t, and the Anomaly is fifty feet, forty feet—
I let go. Grab my own tether. Clamp it to the exposed panel, the ship attached to the station—
‘Lock the station in place!’ I scream into my comm.
‘What?’ Desh, or Berry, or Hyvönen, somebody replies, so I scream it again, as they clock what’s going on, what I’m going to do.
The station is the ship’s anchor. I kick backwards, away from the ship, drifting. My suit’s boosters giving me just enough oomph—
The Raft carries on forward, and it pulls the station. Only ever so slightly, but the thrust from the ship is enough.
I hear the screams from inside the station, or I think I do; not screams, not really, but audio fuzzing in the white noise of my communicator, in the hiss of my own breathing inside this helmet.
The station has thrusters, to help it move into place, to keep it where it’s meant to be when it drifts. They kick in, offering their own opposing force, as the Raft shifts, closer to the Anomaly—
I am back from all of this, watching it as if it’s a movie playing out in front of me. As the Raft slows, but perseveres; as the station’s thrusters blare white-blue flame, gas blowtorches welding space apart from itself; as through the window, in the donut, the crew watches, nail-biting tension, Desh swiping wildly, Hyvönen a kid with his nose pressed against the glass; as the thrusters work, and the station stops moving, so I scan my gaze along the tether, to the Raft, just in time to watch it reach the Anomaly itself, and slide into the darkness.
