Bianca
I’d always found space travel to be mind-numbingly dull. This trip wasn’t proving to be any different. The ship I was on offered lots of entertainment, a paid staff to keep us amused, and yet…every day was the same. If I had my way, I’d never take another six-month trek across the galaxy ever again. I walked the track, my fifth lap—it was important to keep muscle mass up—and stared at the stars outside. Just a whole lot of nothing interesting to look at.
It would be nice to be able to run. I looked over my shoulder. If the monitors weren’t looking, maybe I would. My last three heart scans had been decent. I was probably safe to run a little bit. Like maybe a mile. I scanned the wall, and the telltale red light that followed me, monitoring my heart rate at all times, presented itself. Yesterday, I’d had a break. A little boy on deck five had broken his leg. That had temporarily taken their attention off of me. But it looked like it had returned.
And that sucked. A lot.
When we got to Jooron Five, my brother’s personal physicians would replace my beating heart with a mechanical one that would mean I could run as much as I wanted. Of course, I’d be doing it with a fake metal heart that would have to be replaced every three years. I shook my head. I was lucky to be alive, lucky to be here, lucky I had a family with enough currency and political connections to make this possible for me at all.
Most people would have been euthanized at birth for my kind of defect. I’d gotten twenty-two good years with little interference
I had to remind myself on a daily basis to count all the ways I should feel grateful. Thinking about others helped me to not to dwell too much on myself. I just wasn’t that good at it.
My wrist dinged, and I looked down at it. My brother reached out from Jooron Five. This was his daily phone call, albeit three hours later than usual.
“You okay? I thought you forgot me.” I spoke as his face twisted into existence on my holowatch. The images were never perfect, but they were better than nothing.
“Forget you? My twin? Never. No, I had to put down some rebels. Took all morning. Paperwork and all that. Why can’t people stay where they belong?”
I shook my head. “You know I have no head for politics.”
It made little sense to me. We’d technically taken over the rebels’ planet…so weren’t we the ones not where we belonged? If I asked that, I got a long-winded answer about destiny and rights. I’d quit asking. Give me a school where I could teach literature and art; I was happier that way.
“How are you feeling? What are you doing?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m on the track. If you wait three hours to reach me, you get me where you find me not waiting for your call.”
The fuzzy image projecting from my watch looked like it was frowning. Or constipated. “On the track? Bianca, tell me you are not running.”
“Of course I’m not.” Unfortunately.
He sighed over the tiny speakers in my watch. “It’s just a day and a half now, and then we’ll get you all fixed up.”
Fixed. With a metal heart. Right. “Yeah,” I said.
“Bianca…” My brother could sound gentle when he tried. Most of the time, his voice boomed, instructing people on how they ought to live, behave, believe, and vote. He took his authority seriously as the youngest enforcer ever elected to the inter-planetary coalition—the Union. But right now, he was just my brother—my worried brother—when he said, “Let us pray together.”
Oh, not this again. I closed my eyes to keep from rolling them all the way back in my head.
“Ancient and holy ones, log our plea,” he intoned, and I gritted my teeth. “Protect my sister on her voyage, and bring her safely to Jooron Five. Wrap her in your gracious mesh of grace and grant—”
All at once, his voice sliced to silence. I opened my eyes. His holo was gone.
“Miss Cervantes?” came the normally placid voice of the ship’s captain, who was currently not placid at all. I could hear voices in the background shouting. “Please strap into the nearest impact web immediately. Might be a good idea to fill your chamber with fluid, too.”
I couldn’t fill my chamber with fluid. My body—my heart—couldn’t handle the added pressure. But if the captain had forgotten my special health accommodations, she must really be distracted.
“What happened? My brother’s call got cut off.”
“We were pulled out of hyperspace,” the captain said. “And had to put shields up. Now really, the impact web.”
On the bridge, two people were arguing. I could hear their shouting match clearly, though I had no idea what they were talking about. What was the Everlock, why couldn’t it exist, and why the heck was it obstructing our route to Jooron Five? This was a known spacelane. From the sound of the crew, though, they were as confused and horrified as I was.
Plus, the captain was no longer paying me the least bit of attention, though she’d left a channel open. I heard her screaming, “No, Lieutenant Godfrey, to port! You expose our flank, and those plasma cannons are going to light us up. Talley, don’t flood the bridge! The plasma. No, just do it! All ancient and holy ones…”
Emergency lighting glowed blue on the floor panels, and I chased them at a run, which felt like a vise squeezing my chest. I couldn’t stop. The lights led me to a pressurized containment chamber that doubled as a shower area for people using the track. If we lost gravity, for whatever reason, this chamber could be pressurized and filled with fluid, just like the bridge, to keep a fragile human body safe from violent impact. It also contained impact webbing rolled up in easy-access cabinets. I released one web, fitted it around my body, and secured the clasps, all with trembling hands.
Just in time, too, because right then, the deck lurched. If I hadn’t been hooked into the web I would have slammed into a wall, or worse. The room went sideways; I could feel the oblique angle in my guts, even though the protective web kept me from crashing into anything.
The channel on my holowatch wasn’t transmitting voices anymore, just alarms and the whooshing of protective liquid as it filled the bridge and presumably all the cabins where the other passengers were strapped in.
Or at least, that was what I assumed the sound was. Except down the corridor, still lit in emergency blue, that didn’t look like a fluid surge. It looked like fire, and then the chamber locked. And the lights went out.
Without warning, the entire ship jolted onto its side. I cried out.
I wasn’t sure what happened after that. I had a sense of falling, of floating. Darkness. Pain. Pressure. Then nothing. The sweet relief of oblivion.
I woke up flat on my stomach. And on fire. Without thought or reason, I rolled, slapping at my clothes, smothering the flames, but realizing too late I’d traded burning pants for burned hands.
Tears flooded down my face, and I screamed at the top of my lungs. Where was I? And oh holies, my fingers. Had I burned them off? What was…
I had died. That had to be it. I’d died, and I’d refused to say the prayer with Brent. The Holy Ones had sent me to the underworld to roast in flames for all time. Movement caught my eye, and a second later, I stared up at a man.
At least I thought it was a man. He wore a covering on his face, blocking me from seeing anything but his brown eyes as he stared down at me. His hair was dirty blond and hung slightly over his eyes. I didn’t recognize his uniform as any from the empire, but I didn’t know all of them.