Thrum

Just before I suit up to fix the comms array, I completely lose my shit.

It comes all at once: the panic, the horror, the grief, the knowledge that I am utterly, utterly alone. The dam breaks and floods me so I can’t hear or see or think; I’m awash with pain, and there’s nothing to hold on to as it drowns me.

I slide to the floor just outside the airlock, curl myself around my knees, and try not to pass out. My breathing is too fast, too shallow. I know this, distantly. But no matter how many times I try Lily’s breathing technique, I can’t stop gasping. I’m running out of air, or gulping too much of it, I can’t tell. Tears stream down my face, but I don’t remember allowing myself to cry. My chest lurches in painful hiccups. My vision blurs.

I’m hyperventilating. The thought comes from far away: this is a panic attack. Alert. But the thought is so far away that it’s unreachable.

Lily would have clicked her tongue at me. “Remember what I taught you,” she’d say. “We, as humans, too often forget what grounds us to the physical world, to our own bodies. When you think about breathing, you forge a connection with yourself. When you control that breathing, the connection grows stronger. And you begin to find peace.”

I just — I can’t stop thinking about them, how we all got into those pods together, eyes shining with anticipation. Knowing we’d wake up together, too. We were going to make history, we said. The four of us were going to discover life in other systems. We were going to change the world.

I can’t even connect with myself. How am I supposed to connect with an alien lifeform? The mission is over. I can’t do it on my own. I can’t. I can’t.

My vision darkens at the edges. I need to slow my breathing, or I’ll lose consciousness. Finally, I bury my wet face in the crook of my elbow, hoping to cut off my access to oxygen. The paper bag method, but for girls adrift in deep space. When the vivid black and yellow spots in my vision finally begin to fade, I sit up, drenched in tears and snot.

I draw a slow breath, the way Lily taught us. Then I struggle to my feet.

“You’re fine, Ami.”

I stand before the spacesuit, gazing into its reflective helmet. Something in me wants to speak to it, wants to comfort myself with this human-shaped carapace, this thing that will keep me warm and breathing and alive when I open the door to the universe.

But it’s only a spacesuit. And all I see is my own face staring back at me, blotchy and tear-stained, with strands of jet-black hair clinging to my sweaty skin. I’m sickly pale, but for the angry red that mars my cheeks, and the bloodshot whites of my eyes. I find no comfort in my reflection. She’s a stranger to me.

Slowly, meticulously, with a touch of paranoia, I begin to pull on the spacesuit. I check it more than a dozen times — every joint, every fastening. I check the oxygen tank over and over, obsessively. I check my biometrics, again and again. We’re meant to do this in teams. One person helps their partner suit up, and vice versa.

But I’m alone.

So I check, and check again, until I’m certain the suit won’t fly apart the second I’m in zero pressure, condemning me to a swift and horrific death in the vacuum of space. But my heart doesn’t slow. It’s a relentless thing, loud in my chest, uncontrollable, and far too fast.

“You’re f-fine.”

I’ve done this a million times in training. Under water, in simulations, all of it. So many times I couldn’t begin to count. I know what I’m doing.

But that doesn’t make it easier, stepping into space. All alone, with only a tether to hold me in place, only molecules and fibers and inorganic material to trust.

I wish someone, anyone, even Vasilissa — I wish she was here. She was fearless. An asshole, but fearless.

“Pioneer,” I say, “I’m going out. To fix the comms array.” I’m not sure what to say next. What does the ship care if I’m gone? If I never come back? “You may need to talk me through it,” I finally add.

Affirmative.

I clamber into the airlock. The suit isn’t incredibly bulky, but I’m not used to it in the artificial grav. It weighs me down. My chest tightens, dread rising in my throat.

No, no. I’m okay. It’ll only take a few minutes.

The act of closing the airlock door behind me, sealing myself inside what will soon become a vacuum, feels interminable. As if I’m in slow motion, the heavy bulkhead door is like the portcullis of an ancient stronghold, and I’m about to turn myself over to the invading army.

When the door is safely sealed, I go to the control panel. It’s not complex; everything on this ship is as simple and hard-wired as the engineers could manage, lessening the possibility of tech failure. I study the panel’s square buttons and an antiquated display showing the airlock’s air pressure status. It’s equal with the interior of the rest of the ship.

I press one of the square buttons with an awkwardly suited finger, and the airlock begins to lose pressure. I drift slowly up as the air leaves this liminal space, this breath before I give myself up to the vastness of space and God, and then there’s a decisive beep! from the panel.

It’s safe to open the outer door. I tether myself to the ship using heavy-duty clamps, giving myself just enough slack in the tether, everything exactly as we learned. If I just do these things by rote, surely I can’t make a mistake. Nothing else will go wrong. After testing my lifeline, I wish I’d had a drink of water; my mouth tastes like bile.

And I don’t want to go outside. But I’m all that’s left. I have to do it, or accept that I’ll die out here.

So I step into the black.

I’m drifting half out of the ship, half in, but even then it feels as if the infinite universe is reaching for me with inexorable fingers, with hands made of whorls of starlight, of depthless lightless chasms that hum like monsters of the cosmos. The air in my lungs feels like a dare. I’m challenging the firmament in its horrible power, and it is gazing right back at me, unimpressed.

I grab the line, wrapping my suited hand through the tether. I swivel my head as much as I can and see, with a sickening swoop of the gut, that I’ve drifted a few yards from the ship. I’m surrounded by nothingness; if I were to cut the tether, I would drift out here until I ran out of oxygen, suffocating in my suit.

Heart in my throat, I pull myself back to the ship, clutching at one of the outer handholds. I breathe deeply. “Don’t hyperventilate,” I say, unable to ignore the quaver in my voice. “You need the oxygen.”

Somehow, I manage to breathe evenly and pull myself hand over hand along the hull of the ship. As I approach the comms array, its delicate silhouette of metal shining brightly in the starlight, I see how damaged it really is. It looks as if a piece of it is missing. Not bent out of shape or damaged, but missing, like a branch snapped from a tree.

I suppose a meteoroid could have done this. A lot of things could have done this.

I finally reach the array and fasten myself to it using heavy-duty hooks and the slack in my tether. “Pioneer,” I say. “Are you seeing this?”

Affirmative. The camera on your helmet is operational.

“I meant the broken array, smartass,” I reply, indulging in rudeness, petulance. Sweat beads on my upper lip.

Affirmative. It has been damaged.

I glower at the array, trying to make sense of it. I peer at the place where there should be evidence of a break. Of metal snapping away from metal. Instead, I see serrated lines, regularly spaced. “How was it damaged?” I demand.

It appears to have been snapped off by space debris.

I squint. “No, look at the ridges. Someone, something — it’s been sawed off.” The words are so small on my tongue, just syllables, but I feel like I’ve swallowed poison and spat it out, coating my mouth with slow death.

Pioneer says nothing.

“Pioneer,” I insist. “Look. Do you see that? It wasn’t snapped off. The metal would be smooth. It’s been cut.”

Negative, says Pioneer. The comms array was snapped off by space debris.

“Look!” I say again, tapping the metal. “That’s not a snap.”

Pioneer says nothing.

I wait for a moment, breath heavy in my lungs, throat tight. There’s no use arguing with a ship. The camera on my helmet must be positively antiquated. “Fine,” I relent. “How do I fix this, then?”

It cannot be fixed without the missing part.

A chill grips me. “Surely I can improvise.”

Negative.

“Tell me what I can do,” I say, voice shaking. I’m almost halfway through my suit’s oxygen reserve.

There’s a long moment of silence. At last, Pioneer says, I have calculated for every possible mode of repair with the aim to communicate long-distance. There are none. The missing part is necessary for long-distance communications.

I can feel sweat gathering on my lower back and between my breasts. My hands shake in their clumsy gloves. I’m going to die out here. “What about short distances?” I hazard, grasping at final straws, at impossibilities.

Affirmative. The communications array could be reconfigured to allow short-range communication. However, the chance of anyone receiving your communication would be an infinitesimally small number. Almost zero.

“But it’s possible.”

Affirmative.

Then I’ll do it. I have to. It’s the only way I’m going to stave off the looming certainty of my death. I need to be busy. I need to try. “Talk me through it, Pioneer.”

She does. With the clear instructions only a computer could manage, she tells me which tools to use and where they’re located on my suit’s belt. She explains how to open up the belly of the array to reveal its living wires, where to reroute them, and how to do it all as efficiently as possible with as little chance for a fuck-up.

I follow each instruction, one after the other, until I’m soaking with sweat — even my high-tech suit can’t absorb the moisture I’m putting out — and after what feels like an eternity, I’m finished. The array is fixed, Frankensteined into a semi-useful version of itself.

“Pioneer,” I say, putting away my tools, “put out a universal distress call. I’m going to look at the fuel tank hull breach.”

Negative, says Pioneer. You only have ten minutes of oxygen left.

“It won’t take me ten minutes,” I insist. I don’t voice the second part of my thought, which is: I just want to look. There’s no way I’m fixing a hull breach, let alone in that short a time. But the comms array’s sawed off edge is a sickness in my gut, a painful eyelash in my eye that won’t budge. Someone… something… did that.

I swallow a bead of terror that threatens its way up my throat. I need to know.

So I pull myself hand over hand along the ship, my stomach in knots. I feel the vastness at my back like a loving nightmare, tendrils of it wrapping around my ankles and throat until I’m inevitably lost to it. I keep imagining the cosmos wrenching me off the ship, dragging me deep into itself, and I am a prisoner there forever, eyes wide, my screams soundless in the vacuum.

When I get to the fuel reserves, I see the breach immediately. It’s not the jagged pockmark of a meteoroid or space debris. A panel of the hull is missing. It’s a square of black against the ship’s dull white, too precise to have been an accident of nature. Someone removed this panel.

I don’t get any closer; I don’t go to inspect it. I don’t want to see the same ridges I saw on the comms array, the evidence of a saw that cut through it with precision.

I can’t get back inside Pioneer fast enough. I yank myself along the tether. My mind makes up stories, envisions horrors. What if the thing that cut the comms, the monster that opened our fuel tank, is still here? What if it’s clinging to the ship from the outside like some horrible lamprey, watching me?

By the time I get back to the airlock, my heart threatens to seize, my stomach to purge itself. I pull the slack of my tether inside, wrenching the outer door closed. The door moves slowly, painfully so, and I imagine hands curled around it from the outside. Long, pale, inhuman fingers, reaching and probing.

Finally, the airlock closes. I lock it, check that it’s sealed at the control panel, and slam my thumb on the repressurization button. There’s a whoosh and a fizz as air fills the room, and I steady myself as the false grav kicks in. As soon as the display turns green — pressurized — I whip off my helmet. I’m drenched in sweat; my hair clings to the sides of my face like wet threads. I unzip and unbutton myself, scrambling desperately out of my suit as if it’s somehow contaminated.

When I’m free, I leave it there on the ground like the shed skin of a firmamental creature. I’m too shaken to hang it up properly, and I won’t be going out again. I can’t.

“Pioneer,” I say, my voice so weak and shaky it’s almost embarrassing, “is there anything… alive? Out there?”

I almost fall apart in the moment of silence before she responds.

Negative.

Part of me doesn’t believe her. What if our idea of biological life is utterly foreign to what’s out here, systems away? What we understand of the universe is so small, so pathetically minor, that it’s almost laughable. It’s laughable that we brought these tiny instruments, this breakable ship, these fallible scientists, all the way out here looking for life when our only frame of reference for “life” is what’s on Earth. Our knowledge is so minute, a tiny droplet in a vast sea that never ends, and we had the audacity to think we knew what we were getting into.