Chapter 13 Elanie
My head spun, wobbling on my neck while our pod tore through space. The faster-than-light drive charged and discharged over and over—five, six, seven jumps with no end in sight. As I clutched Sem tightly against me, fear like I’d never known rattled my teeth.
“Where are we going?” he asked in a rasp.
He’d been in and out of consciousness since we launched, the G-forces in the pod surging to dangerously high levels before vanishing completely with each jump.
I didn’t know if his fragile organic neurovascular system could survive much more.
I could only squeeze my arms and legs around him and hope it was enough to keep his blood pressure from dropping to the point of irreversible brain damage.
“I don’t know,” I said, squeezing him more tightly when his head fell forward. “We’ve jumped too many times.”
“Can you…access the pod’s…navigation?” His speech was slow and labored, the words slurring together.
I tried to communicate with the pod’s AI again, receiving a very rude 403 Forbidden error in return. “I’m still locked out.”
“Rax and Morgath? Could they be…following us?”
“Highly unlikely,” I said. “We’ve jumped too many times. Whoever is controlling this pod doesn’t want us tracked.”
His fingers encircled my arms, holding on. It was a comfort, knowing he was still alive. Still warm. Still here.
“Why did you follow me?” I needed to know before he passed out again. “It was madness, Sem. Suicide.”
“Nah.” A wet cough shook him. “We’re both still alive so far, aren’t we?”
As the FTL drive spooled up again, I tightened my grip on him. Just before we jumped, he said, “I didn’t want you to be alone.” Then he passed out in my arms.
My ears popped as the G-forces normalized. The jump was complete, but it still took three hundred and forty-one billion nanoseconds for Sem to stir. Not that I was counting. Not that I ran a full analysis on my internal timing system when it seemed to take too long.
I loosened my grip on him, and he slumped forward, nearly falling off my lap until I wrapped my arms around him again.
Grasping his head in his hands, he groaned. “I don’t feel good.”
“You have jump sickness,” I explained unnecessarily. Because he was a physician and would know this sort of thing. Why was I babbling internally? Must have been shock.
His groan dropped into a moan as his head fell back to rest on my shoulder, his silver hair brushing softly against my cheek, smelling sweet and spicy and, objectively, good. “Is the pod spinning?”
The FTL drive powered down and the onboard AI said, This concludes your faster-than-light travel. Your autopilot has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. Feel free to move around the pod until landing.
Relief washed over me, through me, leaving me lightheaded and heavy boned. Sem wouldn’t die. At least not immediately. “Not spinning. We’re finally finished jumping.”
“Thank the Saints,” he wheezed.
Slowly, I let him go. But I watched him closely while he stood from my lap, ready to lunge for him if he decided to do something non-bionically senseless like pass out again.
He made it the few steps to the pod wall, then turned so he could lean against it. Closing his eyes and rubbing his temples, he asked, “Can you access your VC?”
“No.” I worked my knees straight, rolled my wrists, both stiff and sore from acting as his personal safety harness. “Not for hours now. Wherever we are, there’s no Vnet.”
“Did you say ‘hours’?” He blanched, the cobalt blue of his cheeks drained to a muted gray. “How long have I been out?”
“We have been in this pod for nine hours, thirty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds. You’ve been unconscious for close to 70 percent of the trip.”
“Shit.” He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it tousled. Walking to the pod’s control panel, looking slightly less likely to trip over his feet, he pushed a few buttons. When nothing happened, he pushed a few more. “Welp, that doesn’t work.”
While he fiddled with the radiation shield monitor, I took stock of my systems. Vitals: normal. Power core: intact. Operating System: nominal. Network connections… “That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?” he asked while opening and closing the pod’s overhead compartments.
“I still have access to the SBN.”
He wheeled around, his bangs swinging into his eyes. “How in the stars do you have access to the Shared Bionic Network when there’s no Vnet?”
That was a very good question. “Maybe a local beacon? Not all the gen-3s were found when they were due to be decommissioned. Some are still stuck out here on their deep-space exploration missions. If one was close enough, I could pick up a stray signal. Theoretically.”
“Is one close enough?” he asked. “Could we trace the signal back to its ship and try to get help?”
This was a dangerous proposition. Even though a bionic’s CPU was designed to be resilient, we weren’t immune to mental breakdown.
Case in point: me waking up in an escape pod with no memory of how I’d gotten there.
Something I decided would be inefficient to worry about now, considering we probably wouldn’t survive long enough for my questionable sanity to matter.
But a gen-3 who’d been isolated in deep space for stars knew how long, centuries, probably?
By now they were likely stuck in an infinite altered-reality loop populated by the imaginary friends they’d made from their toenail clippings.
Normally I’d say no, that it wouldn’t be worth the risk. But these were far from normal circumstances.
After analyzing my network connections, I was almost relieved to say, “Aside from our pod, there are no LunaCorp or Mirror of Sacred Truth signals out here. No local hotspots. Nothing to explain my connection to the SBN. It’s strange.
It’s almost like someone hacked the network and is sharing it directly with me through an encrypted link.
I can’t see where it’s coming from, only that it’s there. Weak and limited, but there.”
“That is strange.” He rubbed thoughtfully at his cheek stubble, a pleasant rasp echoing through the pod. “Can you do anything with it? With the SBN?”
“Not sure,” I replied. “I can’t connect with other bionics or to the wider Vnet all the way out here, but maybe I can connect to—” A thought struck me. “Give me a second.”
Closing my eyes, I attempted to access the pod’s onboard AI again. Still locked out. Not surprising. But I’d been right. She was also connected to the SBN, and that was something I could work with.
Piggybacking on the shared network, I searched for a back door in the pod’s programming. “I think I found something.” I sniffed out a string of vulnerable legacy code that used to allow for manual override of the pod’s ejection sequence and exploited it. “I’m in.”
“You’re in?” His voice was closer now. “In what?”
“The pod,” I said. “I’m in the onboard AI.” I still couldn’t hack into the autopilot, which was locked up tighter than an Imperion detention sphere. But with a few tweaks here, an additional line of code there… “Got it.”
When I opened my eyes, the pod’s navigation display flickered into existence. A detailed map of golden dots and arching white lines hovered in the air in front of us. I rose to my feet, standing on one side of the display while Sem stood on the other.
“Where the hells are we?” His silver-blue eyes, bloodshot from G-force trauma, darted around the 3-D image of whatever corner of the Known Universe we’d jumped into.
I compared the display to every charted map in existence. “We are somewhere between Ulaperia and Delphi. Outer rim. Deep space. Why have they jumped us here? There’s nothing out here but dust.”
His finger followed the dotted line of our pod’s planned trajectory, then he expanded the screen to zoom in on what appeared to be our final destination. “Dust like this?”
I zoomed in again, tapping on a dwarf planet so tiny it was barely spherical. A dwarf planet in the middle of nowhere at the very edges of charted space. It hit me then, hard and fast. They’d never find us all the way out here. We were lost.
“Sem, I’m…I’m sorry.”
His eyes met mine through the navigation display. “What for?”
“You should be sleeping in your bed, warm and safe. Instead, because of me, you’re probably going to die on some barely-even-a-planet rock and nobody will ever know except for me because I’ll be the one burying you.”
“Elanie,” he said calmly, his webbed hands raised. “I came with you of my own free will.” Then his lips quirked. “But it’s sweet that you’d take the time to bury me. I’m touched.”
I hung my head, my chin dropping to my chest. Then he reached for me through the navigation display. Stars danced around his arm as his fingers closed over my shoulder. “This isn’t your fault. We’ll get through this. Both of us.”
There was something soothing about his hand, the way his blue skin glowed against my pink pajamas, the solid weight of his touch. But I must have stared too long because he pulled it back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his arms to his sides. “I didn’t mean to touch you. It’s still… It’s hard for me.”
I collapsed into the jump seat. “I’m sure it is. I’m sure you’re wondering, ‘Why in the stars did I follow this malfunctioning bionic into an escape pod?’”
With a swipe of his hand, he minimized the navigation display. Stepping close, he stood above me and looked down with a stern set to his jaw. “That’s not what I was wondering at all. Not even a little bit. I just meant that sometimes it’s hard for me to be around you.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?” I asked as something cold and heavy took up residence in my stomach. “Because it didn’t work.”
He sank to his knees, putting us closer to eye-level.
“I’m an empath,” he explained. “I’m usually pretty good at knowing when and how to comfort another being.
So it’s difficult for me. It’s a challenge.
Not knowing how you’re feeling.” His throat bobbed.
“Or what you might need from me to feel…better.”