17. No Sleep
No Sleep
Jude
Iwoke to the station simulation sunrise. A soft glow climbed one curved wall of my quarters, bleeding slowly across metal and shadow until it reached the edge of my bed.
“That’s alright, SOL.” I scrubbed a hand down my face, and swung my legs over the edge of the mattress. “What time is my meeting with Admiral Pike?”
“1400 station time.”
“Mhm.” Cold soaked into the bottoms of my feet, I frowned down. A glass lay tipped on its side near the corner of my bed, slowly dripping the last ribbon of water across my sheets. A puddle shimmered on the floor beneath it. I stared at it for too long.
“...Did I knock that over?”
I grabbed the glass, stepping over the mountain of dirty laundry I’d piled against the wall. Yanking a towel free from somewhere under a jacket, I dropped it onto the puddle with my foot while shrugging into my station blues one-handed. “Alert Lieutenant Jones I will be in after I check on Solace.”
There was a fractional pause before SOL detached from its charging cradle and floated after me as I grabbed my jacket and boots from beside the door. “You skipped dinner yesterday.”
“I wasn’t hungry.” I shrugged, tying the laces, and buttoning my collar.
“You skipped breakfast as well.”
The door hissed open.
“You are exhibiting signs of elevated cortisol response, sleep deprivation, and malnutrition. As one of the principal engineers maintaining Echelon’s infrastructure, your continued health remains statistically beneficial to the survival of approximately thirty-seven thousand—”
“I’m eating,” I muttered.
“You are not.”
I grabbed a ration bar from the cabinet above the sink just to shut SOL up. “There. Happy?”
SOL rotated in the air beside me. “Moderately.”
I took one resentful bite as we stepped out into the corridor.
It buzzed softly, dim morning lights reflecting along the curved steel walls while ventilation hummed somewhere deep beneath the flooring.
Through one long port window, an ensign floated weightless against the black.
Tethered to the exterior hull, tiny against the endless stretch of space, she guided herself carefully along the station framework while planets glowed distant beneath her.
I slowed instinctively. Earth was far-off. Hazy and dark.
“Captain?”
I blinked, and kept walking.
The command center doors slid open to reveal Commander Zhang already standing inside, one hand curled around a steaming mug of coffee while pale holographic displays cast shifting light across her face.
“She’s not on,” she said before I could ask.
I exhaled through my nose.
“I assure you,” Zhang continued, not unkindly, “I will alert you when she is.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“Then why aren’t you at your desk working? How much sleep have you gotten, Captain?”
I glared at her.“That’s what I thought. Get to work Ransom, or get back to bed.” She sipped her coffee. “And eat something, we don’t need you to be pissy.”
“Why is everyone on this station obsessed with feeding me?”
“Because you look like shit.”
Ring two smelled faintly of burnt coffee, which meant Elias was already here.
I stepped into the lab to find half the central console dismantled and pieces of SOL’s auxiliary processors spread across the workbench in the corner. Elias glanced up from beneath the hood of his sweatshirt.
“You’re late.”
“And you’re not in uniform.”
Elias shrugged. “SOL, power down in your charging bay.”
I dropped into my chair behind my desk. “What are you doing?”
“Just a systems update. I woke up with a crazy idea this morning so I made some coffee and came in early. I want to test a few things.”
Only then did I notice the old radio setup sitting neatly arranged beside my terminal, half taken apart and rewired into my computer. I stared at it. “...What’s this?”
Elias scratched the back of his neck. “I had some extra time this morning so I patched a direct line through secondary comms.” He spun a screwdriver between his fingers. “Thought maybe you’d like to stop sprinting to Command.”
All I could do was look at him for a long second. He was… it was—
“That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“I know. Don’t make it weird.”
SOL’s voice filtered softly through the speakers overhead. “Powering down, Lieutenant.”
He pushed himself toward SOL on his rolling chair, gliding across the floor. “By the way, your dad stopped by.”
My shoulders tightened instantly. “What’d he want?”
“To check on you, apparently.”
“All the way from Station Eight?”
“He heard about the—uh, well, you know.”
“That my girlfriend is stuck on a nuclear-torn Earth while I’m up here in space?”
Elias went quiet, and the word sat wrong the second it left my mouth.
Girlfriend. Solace was my—my what? Friend?
Partner? The love of my life? None of those words felt big enough.
None of them came close to explaining what she had been to me before the Scourge, or what she still was now after seven years of silence and grief and trying to survive the shape of her absence.
I’d spent seven years believing she was dead.
Elias cleared his throat softly. “He seemed worried.”
“Sure he was.”
“Well, he stood outside the lab for like ten minutes pretending to look at the maintenance hatch, so whatever version of worry that is.”
I rubbed both hands over my face. “Did he say anything else?”
“No. I told him you wouldn’t be in for a few hours and he finally left.” Elias rolled back toward the central console and nudged a crate of processor parts aside with his foot. “Anyway. Good news is you should be able to talk to Solace here from now on.”
The day eased forward after that. Most of it blurred into routine research logs and diagnostics.
Elias stayed helping recalibrate one of SOL’s damaged processor clusters while I met with Commander Zhang and Admiral Pike to go over SOL’s ARS-7 readings over what used to be Asia. It was miraculous, actually.
Every day Earth inched toward resurrection.
When I returned to the lab, I struggled to focus. I caught myself staring at the speaker more often than not.
By evening, the lab and our research wing had emptied out almost completely. Artificial lights dimmed into the station’s nighttime cycle, washing the lab in muted blue.
Elias stretched beside the doorway and pulled his sweatshirt hood up again. “I’m heading out before Kit comes looking for me.”
I glanced up from the monitor. “Coward.”
“You staying?”
“Yeah. Just a little longer.”
His eyes flicked toward the radio, then he nodded once. “Try to sleep at some point, okay?”
“No promises.”
He snorted softly and slapped the door controls on his way out. “Night, Jude.”
“Night.” Then the door slid shut behind him.
And I was alone. Deep in the walls, the station groaned and hummed around me with the slow, steady rhythm of a sleeping giant’s heartbeat, the ventilation sighing between pulses like breath.
Years ago the noise used to keep me awake.
Now it marked the passing hours better than any clock.
My terminal cast pale light across the desk while static crackled softly from the radio speaker beside it.
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my eyes. I was really fucking tired, even though I’d given everyone shit about it. My eyes were heavy as I settled into the seat. Just for a second, I told myself.
Just for a minute.
The exhaustion hit me harder than expected, and my head tilted back, the static blurring into the hum of the station.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, I fell asleep.
“...Hello?” The voice cut through the static like a knife.
I jerked awake so fast the chair nearly tipped backward. For one terrifying second I thought I’d dreamed it. Then—
“Jude, can you hear me?”
My heart slammed violently against my ribs as I grabbed the microphone, button flaring red when I turned it on.
“Solace?”
Static crackled hard through the speakers.
“Oh, thank God. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to reach you again.”
I sighed, head hitting my desk. Me neither. God I was so worried…
“I’ll never leave you again.”
She made this noise in the back of her throat—disbelief bleeding through, even if she’d finished it off with a nervous laugh. “I’m just so happy to be talking to someone.”
I was on my feet before I realized I’d moved, one hand gripping the edge of the desk so tightly my knuckles hurt. “Me too. How are you? How are you feeling? Are you okay?”
Of course she isn’t fine, you idiot.
“Erm—” I cleared my throat. “Have you slept?”
This time she did laugh. Full and bright. “All I do is sleep. I’m relieved to be awake.”
The transmission broke apart into sharp bursts of interference.
“—you still there?” she asked, voice thinning and returning in uneven pieces.
“Yeah, I’m here.” A soft crackle followed, like wind scraping across a rough surface.
“Good. The signal keeps dipping every couple seconds.” I sat back in my chair, letting the tension in my shoulders ease for the first time in days. Her voice wasn’t a memory this time. It was real.
“You sound better,” I said.
“I slept for like fourteen hours.”
“That’s—”
“Normal these days.” There was a faint rustle on her end—fabric shifting, maybe her repositioning against a wall. I could almost picture it: dim bunker light, dust in the air, her sitting cross-legged. “What about you?” she asked. “Have you slept?”
I glanced down at my desk. “Define slept,” I laughed. I made a mental note to stop by the medical bay and get some sleeping pills so everyone would stop being up my ass about it.
“Jude.”
“I closed my eyes.”
A short burst of laughter cracked through the static. “That is not the same thing.”
“I disagree.”
She snorted.
“So what do you do down there all day?” I asked, rubbing a hand over my face to stay present, to stay in this. Although I wasn’t sure I even wanted her answer. She was alone. By. Herself. For. Years.
“Oh, you know. The glamorous post-apocalyptic routine.” A pause, then the faint sound of something clinking—metal maybe, or a tool set down. “But hey! I finally have a microwave.”
“No fucking way.”