“You are repeating this encounter, just as we are,” Zila says.
“Slipper, this is Kim, do you copy?”
Still no response. The lieutenant curses under her breath.
“If it is indeed the year 2177,” Zila insists, “Terra is in the middle of a war with Trask. Your station looks severely damaged. We have no proof of our identity. If you bring us aboard what is clearly an experimental military installation during wartime, this will end poorly.”
“I wasn’t asking you to vote,” Kim snaps, waving her pistol. “Move.”
? ? ? ? ?
Lieutenant Kim herds us up to the cockpit at gunpoint, and controlling her fighter via some kind of remote console on her wrist, she begins towing our damaged shuttle toward the station. The task is slow, laborious—Kim seems to know what she’s doing, but it’s not as though fighter ships are really made for this kind of job.
Zila, Scar, and I are on our knees in the center of the cabin, fingers laced behind our heads. Kim looms behind us. Every now and then, she tries to raise the station on comms.
Bad news is, she seems to be getting angrier every time she fails, and this girl has already killed us a lot today. Good news is, we can whisper while she swears up a storm.
“Was Zila serious?” Scar murmurs, leaning close. (How does she still smell good, doesn’t she sweat?) “Time travel?”
My shoulders rise and fall in the tiniest of shrugs, and I glance at our Brain, who’s lost in her thoughts again. “I don’t know. It sounds insane. But I don’t have another explanation that fits the facts.”
She chews her lip, eyes wide and worried.
This is bad, bad, bad.
If the year our angry dirtgirl gave us is right (which it can’t be, because time travel), Terrans and Betraskans are at war. We will be for another two decades. And I’m being transported onto some classified military base drifting on the edge of a dark matter storm in the middle of some station-wide catastrophe. Zila’s promise that this will “end poorly” might just be the understatement of the century.
Whatever century this is …
I don’t say any of this out loud, but I don’t have to. Scar leans in silently, pressing her shoulder against mine.
“I am very charming,” I murmur. “They’ll probably leave me alone.”
Lieutenant Kim raises her pistol. “You. Shut up.”
I shut up. And I press my shoulder back in against Scarlett’s, drawing what comfort I can from the contact.
Cat is gone. Tyler is gone. Auri and Kal are gone.
After so many years alone, my squad has become my clan. A thousand invisible tendrils tying me to each of them in a way Terrans can’t possibly understand. I’m always tuned in to them, always monitoring where they are, the way they move around me. It’s instinct. A Betraskan without a clan spends every moment aware that they’re a tiny speck in a big universe, and that they’re not connected.
I felt that pain when my parents sent me off-world to live with my grandparents, away from all the rest of the family, because it would be easier on me with access to zero gravity. My grandparents were all right—they’d chosen to go where they were, could head home anytime. Me? My bond had been cut, whether they said it out loud or not.
I felt that same pain every day at the academy, always surrounded by other people, never tied to any of them.
But the pain of losing my squad one by one is even worse.
I don’t want to lose Scar and Zila too.
It takes us almost thirty minutes to reach the station, and along the way, we get our first really good look at the dark matter storm. It’s mind-blowing in scale, trillions of klicks across, and the scope of it makes me feel like an insect looking into the face of the Maker.
It’s entirely black, so deep and complete your eyes hurt to look at it. But every now and then, it lights up, thrumming with intermittent pulses of quantum energy, deep mauve running to blood black. Its edges writhe and twist and knot around themselves like serpents made of smoke, big as solar systems. But within a few moments, that dark light dies, and blackness always comes crashing back down.
That length of huge metallic cable trails from the station, hundreds of thousands of kilometers out into the pulsing dark. As we draw closer, I can see more clearly where it ends—a vast structure out in the invisible chaos. Its surface is flat, metallic, rippling like oil on water. A thousand-kilometer-wide testament to the absolutely breathtaking insanity of our captors.
A quantum sail.
This station, this rig—all of it must have cost a fortune to build. And the thing is, if you could ever make one of these things work, the power source would be unimaginable. But the reality is that setting up a quantum sail in a dark matter storm and tethering it to the station that you yourself are on is like slathering your favorite body part(s) in freyan and marching straight into a caladian’s den. You are absolutely, positively asking for—nay, jauntily demanding—a very unpleasant and ultimately terminal experience.
“These people are deranged,” I whisper.
We draw close to the dumpy station, still spewing vapor out into the dark, its hull scarred and blackened. It’s just ugly, like someone really angry built it. I don’t know what it is with Terrans and their design aesthetic.
We cruise into a small landing bay, and though Lieutenant Kim still hasn’t managed to raise her commanders on comms, the automated docking arms latch on to our ships, the shudder of impact running through the whole shuttle as we’re brought down onto the deck.
As the bay doors cycle closed behind us, Lieutenant Kim orders us to our feet. My heart is in my mouth as she marches us down to the shuttle airlock. Even though I’ve already been killed nine times today, my body is still full of adrenaline, my brain ringing with the thought that I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die.
Our airlock door clunks open, and we step into a secondary airlock connected to the main hangar. The bay is bathed in flashing red light. Pistol aimed at us, Kim types an access code, the main hangar doors open, and we’re suddenly stepping out into a scene of total chaos.
Dozens of crew in military uniforms are running around, feet stomping on the metal floor. Thick smoke billows from vents in the ceiling. Half the hangar is in the dark, the other half lit by emergency lighting. A squadron of fighters like Kim’s is bathed in a flickering bloodred glow. Terrans are scurrying around, wearing breathers to protect themselves from the fumes. Scar starts coughing, Zila too. The stink is like burned hair and plastene.
The wall to our left has a long plexiglass window, and I can see the distant sail dancing like a kite in a storm, the tempest pulsing beyond. It’d be almost pretty if it—
“Attention, Glass Slipper personnel. Hull breach on Decks 13 through 17.”
The loudspeaker temporarily drowns out everything else, and when it cuts out, an annoying siren starts whooping instead.
“Move,” says the lieutenant behind us, poking me between the shoulder blades with her gun.
“I don’t want to,” I say.
“What he said,” Scarlett agrees.
“Attention, Glass Slipper personnel. All engineering staff report to Gamma Section, Deck 12, immediately.”
“This will end poorly,” Zila predicts again.
“Kim!” a voice roars. “Where the hell have you been?”
We shamble to a stop, and Kim comes to attention. The speaker is bearing down on us out of the red light and smoke, a huge, broad-shouldered man with no hair on his head but one of those weird mustaches Terrans grow, looking like it’s trying to crawl out of his nostrils. When he spots me, his eyes bulge wide, and my stomach crawls up into my chest.
“What the hell?” he barks. “Is that a goddamned Betraskan? Explain yourself, soldier!”
“Apologies, sir!” Kim salutes. “I tried to raise command on comms but got no response! These three broke the exclusion zone, sir!”
“So shoot them!” he roars.
BOOM.
The whole place shudders as something, somewhere, explodes.