Tethered

Chapter 9 #2

That shouldn’t make me want to laugh. I bite down on the inside of my cheek to hide a smile. I genuinely want to know. “Do you sleep upside down in a dark corner or something?”

“According to Khrys, I don’t sleep at all.”

“Wow, you are defrosting all the jokes today.”

The corner of her mouth curls. “What can I say, you bring it out in me.”

My gaze snags on the sight before I manage to drag it away. “You dodged the question.”

“I didn’t bring anything with me.” She shrugs.

That’s...insane. People accumulate shit naturally, even if it’s just a small thing here and there. She has nothing? Is this woman a psychopath?

My expression must say it all because Tanisira is gracious enough to say, “Just ask.”

“Nothing?” I mouth, incredulous.

“There was nothing of my past life that I wanted to keep.” She checks the time and stands, managing to do so gracefully. “Time to head out. Are you ready?”

Immediately, any ease I felt disappears.

I inhale deeply, hold the air in my lungs, and exhale slowly.

Then I nod and follow behind, lumbering to my feet.

We take up positions in front of the exterior hatch and Tanisira directs me to stand on top of two clear marks.

They’re next to a matching set of her own, peeking out from beneath her boots.

My tether snaps taut when I wobble forward, nearly giving me a heart attack.

Even though the stuttering of my breathing is muted, I wonder if she can’t hear it anyway. This time, I don’t even attempt to check my vitals on the monitor. I don’t want to know.

“Opening exterior hatch now.” Kit’s voice echoes in my ear. “Tethers unlocked.”

The hatch swings open with a hiss that raises all the hair on my body.

Under my suit, I probably resemble a porcupine.

The door clunks into the bulkhead and I push my gloves into my hips, trying to fortify my spine.

Ahead of me stands a portal into nothingness.

I stare through it, vaguely aware of sweat not dripping down my skin, but running up my back.

Beside me, Tanisira turns and taps oh so gently on my faceplate.

It jolts me out of the icy grasp that had locked my muscles.

Through her visor, her eyes look ochre and gentle.

“I’ve got you,” she says.

I feel an instant aversion to her words because no one’s got me. But her gloved hand takes hold of mine, despite how awkward it is, and she starts walking. These suits are so heavy, and yet I can feel Tanisira’s quiet strength as she guides me along. One step, two, three, four—

Oh.

Oh my—

I’m floating in space.

A darkness like nothing I’ve ever experienced before surrounds me.

I expected it to blanket me, but it’s more an absence of light than the presence of shadows.

Without the torches embedded into my suit, I think I’d still be able to see my hand in front of my face, though not with any great detail.

That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, I decide, when I acknowledge that I’m nothing but a mote of carbon amongst an incomprehensible number of stars.

With awe, my head cranes to take in the blazing auras speckled as far as the eye can see. I remember Vee telling me once that stars don’t twinkle in space; it’s through the lens of Tellurian’s atmo that they look like that.

It’s incredible.

Belatedly, I realise that I’m drifting away from Tanisira a little. When I turn to look at her, to check if she’s as amazed as I am, the movement sends me on a small orbit. I don’t have time to panic about the sheer weightlessness of it all because the sun looms in front of me.

“Is that the fucking sun?” I gasp.

That deep, honest laughter pipes through my helmet speakers. “Unless you know of another one.”

There must be some serious shielding on these visors because looking at it doesn’t burn out my retinas. I wish I could show Vee this wonder. It’s huge, dazzling, and humbling. My heart pounds a staccato beat against my sore ribs, but it’s no longer because I’m scared. I’m grinning.

I couldn’t feel less remarkable, and yet nothing has ever felt so freeing. In the face of such brutal insignificance, how can anything seem more real than this? A sense of serenity settles over me as I float there, taking in the speckled darkness.

It starts as a sort of niggling in my head, a nip at the edge of my subconscious.

Something I should be taking note of but can’t quite put my finger on.

I try to drill down to that elusive thought, but it’s almost impossible when there is so much and yet so little around me.

Every time I try, the gleam of a distant star draws my attention.

But when it hits me, I almost choke on my own oxygen.

It’s not just that I feel weightless—there’s a distinct lack of pain in my body that I can’t remember ever experiencing.

I can sense that it’s still there, but it’s more of a distant sensation.

The tenderness makes itself known behind a veneer, but the relief is overwhelming anyway.

It’s wonderful.

I seek out Tanisira and discover that I can spin, but I can’t seem to move in any other direction. My jerky movements snag her attention, and I see her amusement when she glides towards me with the sleekness of a wild cat. It takes everything in me not to pout like a child.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“How do I do that?”

She gives me a quick tutorial, and I immediately try to flip onto my back.

The problem is that in space, there’s no up or down.

If the Midas, sleek and streamlined, wasn’t alongside us as an anchor point, I wouldn’t be sure I’d moved at all.

Still, I close my eyes for a beat and picture myself coasting in the void like the universe’s tiniest mote of dust. Tanisira lets me have my moment, but we did come to do a job, and I follow her to the nearest of many rungs fixed to the hull.

“I can’t believe the ship is moving right now.”

“I know. It never gets less awe-inspiring.”

We clamber up onto the surface of the Midas, and it stretches out ahead of us for what seems like miles.

A setting on the gravboots allows us to move around.

There are strips of lighting that run all along the ship and I blow out a raspberry as I take in the visible damage.

Tanisira probably knew what to expect, but I’m floored by the sheer number of pits, dents and dangling equipment.

A significant number of them are small and harmless in isolation, but there are some whoppers.

I approach one such dent with a circumference three times the length of my body.

Trepidation sets my nerves alight.

“It looks worse than it is,” Tanisira says softly.

I must look daunted. Trying to rearrange my expression, I raise an inquisitive eyebrow. “How do we go about finding and logging Kit’s blind spots? Do you have a map?”

Now that I’m no longer so panicked, I can appreciate that I’ve been a bit of an amateur.

First, coming up here without blueprints.

The surface area we must cover is vast and doing it blind is a guaranteed waste of time.

Second, though I imagine Kit’s capable of taking notes, I didn’t think about that until just now.

Tanisira taps on her screen, and an image emerges on my visor, overlaid on the expanse of the ship in my eyeline.

I make an embarrassing sound, shift my field of view and watch the digital image move with me.

I focus on the details themselves and notice markings that seem to indicate sections that have been surveyed.

That just leaves several spots on this side of the hull that need investigating.

“I’ll go starboard, you go port,” I say. “Meet at the end and come at the ship from another side?”

That’s not going to be as simple as it sounds because of the shape, but we only have to map the blind spots, so it won’t be too awful. Tanisira’s helmet tilts to the side in response.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing, it’s just interesting to see you taking charge out here.”

“You mean, Captain, that it’s interesting to have a subordinate boss you about.”

The more time I spend with Tanisira, the more she grows on me. In retaliation, I find myself wanting to hunt for flaws—snuffle around in her psyche and root them out.

Tanisira shakes her head, looking amused, and heads towards the port side. “I mean, valeja, that you were a mess yesterday at the very idea of doing this.” Amusement laces her words, as tangible as a ribbon.

I’m smiling before I can hide it. Maybe she always had a sense of humour, and I just had to get her to like me before she would share it.

“Touché,” I say. I don’t know what valeja means, and I’m certainly not going to ask her. I’ll have to corner Devyaan later. “How do we go about logging the problem areas?”

“Get a good look at each of the relevant sections, and Kit will take care of the rest.”

Essentially, we end up walking around in circles every time we come across a blind spot, and I’m grateful for the gravboots as I battle through several dizzy spells.

Tanisira, however, doesn’t seem to have any such problem and makes her way across the ship’s surface much faster than I do.

But I’m not too mad about it because every time I look up at the vast darkness, pride shoots through me.

I’m on the hull of a ship in space. So, watching the captain pace ahead of me is nothing at all.

Drawing some water from the bag inside my suit, I head off to the next location on my visor. Tanisira works on a dent close by, and it’s my turn to ask a question. “What convinced you?” I ask, speaking to her back.

She doesn’t seek elaboration, and a beat passes. “I believed you from the beginning.”

I startle in surprise. “What?”

“After I left you in my cabin, the conversation played in my mind. Mostly, it was the look in your eyes that weighed on me. Something didn’t feel right.”

That stuns me and, grasping for something to say, I end up blurting, “Don’t you trust your intuition?”

“Always,” Tanisira murmurs. “I had reasons for not wanting to believe you. I can admit that, and I apologise for keeping you from Vee.”

What reasons?

I frown at the back of her helmet, but she doesn’t turn around.

Eventually, I continue with my task, thoughts whizzing around my head as I try to figure out what she might be hiding.

I’ve known her for three days, but I think I can safely say that the captain is objectively a decent woman.

I thought I could, anyway. Is she not? Vee really likes her, has been spending a lot of time near her, if not with her. Is she not?

Tanisira’s voice snags my attention. “There’s a saying in Suryā-Vānī that doesn’t translate to Tellurian, but it’s what came to mind when I reflected on that day.

It means something like, ‘If the love shining through your eyes is only a fraction of that in your heart, they are very lucky indeed’,” she says.

I can’t help it, I melt. I don’t know how Tanisira knows I’m approaching but she turns without any surprise when I lay my hand on her elbow. “Say it in Surya-Vaani.”

I don’t want to hear those beautiful words in my clunky language.

I want to hear them from her honeyed tongue.

At this, Tanisira meets my eyes. The intensity of her gaze makes my skin prickle.

I’m beginning to understand that the captain is just a very sincere person.

I suspect, with a helping of nervous excitement fizzing through my veins, that there’s nothing buttoned up about her at all.

She maintains eye contact as she translates in her mother tongue, and it’s beautiful.

Bottle that up and sell it, it could ignite water.

I have to look away, snap the chain that binds us in the moment.

Furthermore, I put some distance between us.

I don’t want to, which is exactly why I do.

Letting Tanisira get close to me, right now, is a bad idea all around.

We return to our tasks—I, in a contemplative hush.

Sometime later, my head jerks up when Beau’s voice filters through. “Dinner will be ready soon, and Dev is not taking no for an answer,” they chuckle.

I turn in time to see Tanisira’s head swivel towards me from the opposite end of the ship. I shrug noncommittally. Honestly, it’s nice being out here with her, not to mention productive

“This is my last one,” she says, pointing.

“Same.”

“Thanks, Beau. We’re practically finished, so tell Devyaan we’ll be in soon.”

As if on purpose, my stomach cramps painfully. I wanted to swing by the med bay after this, but it’ll have to wait until after dinner instead now.