No, no, come on, there must be something here. What’s going on? She called up all the information the ship could give her. Why am I awake? There were no mechanical errors, nothing was flagged, except . . . she was awake because an order had been sent to wake her. Emergency codes, overriding the failsafes that would normally keep her under.
Idris . . .? But what if it hadn’t been Idris? What if Idris was blithely doing his thing, and instead something else had woken her? Sprung her into this vacant, insubstantial vessel so it could hunt her down?
And it was there, in Command with her, right behind her. The Inimical, the thing she couldn’t ever see. The horror of it flooded her, fingers digging into the back of the captain’s chair like claws.
Kris lifted her knife, catching a glimpse of her reflection in its gleaming blade. She looked away hurriedly, in case she saw something over her own shoulder. The knife, yes. The knife – that would be no use whatsoever against the other, but she could still use it. She could sever the ties binding her to this place. She could rob the Presence of its prey.
It loomed closer: worse than pain, worse than death, the incarnation of All Bad Things. She brought up the knife.
The ship fell from unspace with a sudden wrench. There was no physical shock but Kris stumbled anyway. She found herself a metre from where she’d thought she was, with Solace’s elbow in her face. In that moment of reflexive surprise, she almost cut her own throat. She locked eyes with the Partheni over the poised edge of her knife and allowed Solace to take her hand and gently push it away.
‘What . . .?’
‘Here, attend!’ Kit was crouching on the pilot’s board. There was a peculiar yellowish foam about his small limbs that Kris had never seen from a Hanni before, and his six feet were rattling back and forth erratically. He had brought them out of unspace, she realized, done it manually using Idris’s console.
‘Sound off,’ Solace snapped into the comms. ‘Olian? Trine?’
Kris pulled herself together, checking the readouts. ‘Both still under. The general wake-up order only went to the suspension beds. Olli’s in the drone bay and Trine just put themselves under standing up. Idris, why’d you wake us?’ Kris blinked. ‘Idris?’
The pilot was slumped in his seat, staring, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. For a terrible moment she thought he was dead. Solace tried to take his pulse the old-fashioned way, but Kris grabbed Command’s ancient medalyser from its niche by the door. It established he was still with them, but blood pressure, respiration and brain activity were all flagged as problems. Kris felt panic clutch inside her. Idris was out, and he was never out. He didn’t even sleep. But right now, there was nobody behind those staring eyes and his brain was burning up.
‘We need help, medical help. Unless you . . .?’ She looked hopefully at Solace but the Partheni just shook her head.
‘This goes beyond battlefield trauma. Where even are we?’ Her words created a silence that rippled out as Kris just stared at her. Because if they’d exited unspace in the deep void then that was it. Unless they could get Idris back, none of them could get the ship anywhere. Nobody would ever find them again, a grain of sand in the immensity of an empty universe.
‘Kittering, when you brought us out . . .?’ Solace started slowly.
‘Zero navigational data was available,’ the Hanni’s translator confirmed. Figures flashed up on its arm-screens. According to the computers they’d been going from nowhere to nowhere with a pilot catatonic at the helm. Jumping them out into the real was the only thing Kit could have done.
Kris thought about the doomed freighter Gamin, which had ended up in the deep void and died there in desperation and madness. Unless they could get Idris awake and able to fly, then . . .
‘Wait,’ Solace said. ‘We have transmissions. I’m getting . . . news mediotypes, entertainment? A rewatch of last cycle’s Heirs of Space . . . what?’
‘Trash,’ said Kris, who secretly enjoyed it. ‘Terrible, terrible slush.’ She had never been happier to stumble upon bad media in her whole life. ‘Origin?’
‘We’re . . .’ Solace tapped at the screens. ‘Huh.’
‘What?’ Kris craned past her to see what their rebooting computer was showing them, as it reformed its map of local space. ‘Holy equity . . . did Idris do this?’
They were still a long way out, far further than any normal exit from unspace would have deposited them. But there was an inhabited world out there. A familiar one, well travelled and populous. Berlenhof, heart of the Colonial Sphere.