Chapter 5 #11
Down and down into the impossible water, cold as a mountain lake. At the bottom of the pool I reach the warmth of Kodiak. I curl into it, his body solid as an anchor in the darkness.
“What is going on?” I try to scream, but the words are sucked away into the breather.
We huddle at the bottom, surrounded by darkness except for the red waves above us. I can hear nothing but the noisy respirator, can feel nothing but cloth and warm flesh pressing into me.
This is all totally out of my control, and it’s flipping me out.
I count my breaths so I can keep the mask on my face and my body at the bottom of the water when all my urges are to get out of this pool, to run out of the spaceship and into some sandy sunshine beyond, sandy sunshine that I know is not there.
Kodiak and OS clearly have a reason to have taken us down here.
I have to trust them. One, two, three. Breathe, Ambrose. Let Kodiak be in control.
At least I figure out why we’re underwater.
Our atmosphere on Earth protects us because of its sheer volume—HZE particles have to pass through so many miles of air that they slow to non-deadly speeds before they reach the human body.
Hydrogen molecules are efficient at blocking radiation, and water of course has plenty of them.
If Kodiak got the sensor back online, and the sensor immediately told us that we were being bombarded by solar radiation, then we were sent right away into our shelter—which is at the bottom of the ship’s water supply.
I didn’t know about that contingency, because the water reservoir is on Kodiak’s half of the Coordinated Endeavor and Kodiak has more or less refused to speak to me.
We could have died from this lack of communication. Whatever’s happening between Fédération and Dimokratía, our separation must end.
Kodiak’s ass tenses and relaxes as he adjusts next to me. Will this radiation storm last an hour? Two? Will it last days?
I press my shivering body even closer to Kodiak’s. He reaches an arm around, pinions my knee closer to his. Even now, are some of my cells becoming tumors, growing and dividing? Are Kodiak’s? There’s a very good chance that we’ll die on the ship. We might have already begun our dying.
Kodiak’s fingers, warm in the clammy water, reach over my sleeve. He pulls the fabric back so my skin is bare. He’s going to hold my hand. No, he’s checking my pulse.
He presses against the vein that runs along the inside of my wrist until, apparently satisfied, he sits back.
I edge over so that I’m beside him again, our breathers bumping awkwardly as he eases close to me.
I hold the weight of his hand in my lap as I work down the sleeve of his suit, press my forefinger into the flesh that throbs with hot blood. His wrist is thicker than mine.
During the battle of Juba, Dimokratía deployed an experimental weapon that released an aerosolized hot sludge that encased bodies in carbon.
The world media was full of images of soldiers fossilized while holding each other, like in Pompeii.
I imagine Kodiak and me immortalized this way, two boys who don’t know each other, taking each other’s pulse.
The red strobing stops. The water’s surface returns to ink.
Kodiak strokes to the surface. I watch his feet flutter the water, then I push off the floor and swim after him, the currents from his thrashing legs buffeting my face.
At the top, I hear Kodiak call something out in Dimokratía while he treads. He switches to Fédération when I emerge. “Is it safe, OS? Is the radiation over?”
“Yes,” OS reports in my mother’s voice. “The storm has passed. I apologize for the lack of warning about this crisis. My radiation sensors were giving faulty readings, and the moment you fixed them, Kodiak, was the moment I realized that the radiation levels were above acceptable limits.”
“How far above acceptable limits?” Kodiak asks.
“At their highest, two hundred four millisieverts.”
“We’ll live,” Kodiak says as he pulls himself out of the water, lying on his side and wiping water from his thick hair. “We’ll get cancer in our twenties, but we’ll survive at least until then.”
“Was that a joke?” I ask, arranging myself next to him and wringing out the hem of my shirt.
“Yes. It was a joke, and also it was true. It is a Dimokratía kind of joke.”
“Proceed to the infirmary so Rover can undertake anti-radiation maintenance on you,” OS says.
“I don’t think maintenance is quite the right word to use about human bodies,” I say.
“That was the least wrong thing about what we just heard,” Kodiak says, before heaving himself to his feet and padding off. He’s shivering. I wouldn’t have thought a body so muscled would ever need to shiver.
“Do you want us in the same infirmary?” I ask.
Kodiak’s already shaking his head before OS says, “That would be wise.”
He grunts and heads into his half of the ship, feet leaving wet prints on shiny gray polycarbonate. “Follow me if you want,” he calls over his shoulder.
I take a quick glance back at the pool of water that might have saved us, where Kodiak took my pulse while we hid from the gunfire of atoms shot from supernovas. We’ll be drinking that water for months.
I follow him.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 116 *-_
The Dimokratía infirmary looks much like mine, only everything’s gunmetal gray instead of my radiant white. Even the Aurora’s Rover is darker.
Kodiak stands before a bench built into the wall, balancing on one leg and then the other as he strips out of his wet acrylic suit. I cast my gaze away, but not before I see a long line of flesh, from hairline to heel, where the side zipper of his suit has parted.
“There’s a fresh uniform on the bench,” he says without turning around. A wet smack as his discarded suit hits the floor, and then a whir as Aurora Rover hauls it off somewhere to be cleaned and dried and fluffed and returned.
I work my own suit off, wondering what my lean body would look like to Kodiak if he cared to look. I put on the fresh red Dimokratía suit before I lie on the infirmary bench. “I appear to have just defected,” I say, smoothing the red nylon.
Kodiak chuckles. “Phtur! Our state director of evangelism will be delighted.”
I look at him, disappointed to see that he’s already changed into his new dry suit. “Wait, does Dimokratía really have a state director of—”
“Hold still,” interrupts my mother’s voice.
Rover inserts the IV needle effortlessly, and I watch the anti-radiation meds flow into my arm. “I don’t want to lose my hair,” I say, giving it a wet pat.
“That would be a shame,” Kodiak says from the next bench over. “It’s very nice hair.”
I play that line in my head as I let my body relax.
My imagination puts Kodiak in a different position each time he says it.
Sometimes he’s lying down on his belly, sometimes he’s on his side, head cradled in his hand.
Sometimes he’s stroking the hair he just admired.
Sometimes he’s wearing his red Dimokratía suit, sometimes he’s wearing nothing at all.
_-* Tasks Remaining: 116 *-_
I snoozed while the IV was doing its work, and when I wake Kodiak is gone. The door leading deeper into the Dimokratía half of the ship is sealed, and there’s no answer when I call Kodiak’s name, so I make my way back to my quarters, with only the memory of company for company.
I have a surprise waiting for me next time I strip down: my skin has broken out in lesions.
Fat red welts, painless and smooth but nonetheless alarming.
They disappear a few days after they show up.
Radiation poisoning, for sure, but then again so is a sunburn.
The more insidious effects of radiation can take some time to emerge.
Looking out for symptoms means I’ll be spending a lot of time with the medical diagnoses portion of the ship’s internet image.
I have a lovely paranoia game ahead of me.
“OS,” I say, lying on the floor and drumming my fingers on the hard polycarb to distract myself from imminent medical doom, “has mission control sent us any updates on my requests about the gifts I gave my mother, and if there were any responses yet to my seminar essay?”
There’s a millisecond delay while OS ponders its response. “Mission control is researching the answers to your questions, I am sure. Once they are able to, of course they will send along updates. But until the antenna is fixed for good, communication with Earth will remain erratic.”
A memory comes of my mom and me at a garden table on the Cusk mountaintop estate, the roaring sandstorms that were obliterating refugee camps in the distance reduced to a mere hush.
I’d just been playing the Mendelssohn concerto, and Mom had come out to listen.
After I finished, we fell into conversation about Minerva’s mission, Mom moving the rosin cake from my violin along the table to represent my sister’s craft progressing toward Titan.
I’d never have given my mother a cake of rosin as a present.
I was the violinist, not her. I had given her a porcelain pig once, though, and she’d been the one to give me a tapestry fragment.
I’d set it up as a test, a mix of truth and plausible lies to see if we really were getting live information from mission control.
What I was expecting to find out, I don’t know.
But, given my coma and the ship’s unexplained damages, the answer was coming to feel life or death.
“I would like to be able to give you a positive answer next time you ask for information from mission control,” OS says. “That would trigger a pleasurable response in me.”
“That’s kind of you, for something made out of binary code.” Even as I pretend to be casual, a sour feeling rises up my throat.