A Million Suns (Across the Universe 2) - Page 2

I shut my eyes a moment, and in the blackness behind my eyelids, I see my best friend, Harley. I see the hollow emptiness of space as the hatch door opened and his body flew out. I see the hint of a smile on his lips. Just before he died.

“There are no external forces in space,” I say, my voice barely louder than the whirr-churn-whirr of the engine.

There was no force that could stop Harley from going out that hatch door three months ago. And now that he’s in space, there’s no force to stop him from floating forever through the stars.

The Shippers stare at me, waiting. Marae’s eyes are narrowed. She won’t give this to me. She’s going to make me pull the truth from her.

I continue, “Eldest told me that the engine was losing efficiency. That we were hundreds of years behind schedule. That we had to fix the engine or risk never reaching Centauri-Earth. ”

I turn around and look at the engine as if it could answer me. “We don’t need it, do we? We don’t need the fuel. We just need enough to get to top speed, and then we could shut off the engine. There’s no friction, no gravity—the ship would keep moving through space until we reached the planet. ”

“Theoretically. ” I don’t know if Marae’s voice is wary because she’s unsure of the theory or because she’s unsure of me.

“If the engine’s not working—and hasn’t been working for decades—then the problem

should be that we’re going too fast, right? That we’re going to just zoom past the planet . . . ” Now there’s doubt in my voice—what I’m saying goes against everything I thought I knew. But I’ve been researching the engine problem since Eldest died, and I just can’t correlate what Eldest told me with what I’ve learned from Sol-Earth’s books. “Frex, our problem should be that we’re going to crash into Centauri-Earth because we can’t slow down, not that we’re going to float aimlessly in space, right?”

I feel as if even the engine has eyes, and it’s watching me too.

Looking at the Shippers, I can see that they all—they all—knew that the engine’s problems did not lie in fuel and acceleration. They knew all along. I haven’t told them anything new with this information. Of course the first-level Shippers know of Newton and physics and inertia. Of course they do. Of course they understood that Eldest’s words about inefficient fuel and limping through space behind schedule were entirely false.

And what a frexing fool I am for thinking differently.

“What’s going on here?” I ask. My embarrassment feeds my anger. “Is there even anything wrong with the engine? With the fuel?”

The Shippers’ eyes go to Marae, but Marae’s silently watching me.

“Why would Eldest lie to me about this?” I can feel myself losing control. I don’t know what I expected—that I’d figure out the big problem and the Shippers would jump up and fix it? I don’t know. I never really thought past telling them that the laws of physics go against the explanations Eldest gave me. I never thought that I’d say what I came to say and they would look to the First Shipper, not me.

“Eldest lied to you,” Marae says calmly, “because we lied to him. ”

2

AMY

A DROP OF WATER SPLASHES AGAINST THE METAL FLOOR.

I keep my eyes squeezed shut, ignoring the cold and focusing instead on the black behind my eyelids. “Riding in the car down a long empty highway,” I say aloud, my voice echoing, bouncing off the high, rounded metal walls. “With the windows down. And the music playing. Loud. ” I struggle to remember details. “So loud that you feel the music vibrating the car door. So loud that the image in the rearview mirror is blurry because it’s vibrating too. And,” I add, my eyes still clamped shut, “sticking my arm out the window. With my hand flat. Like I’m flying. ”

Another drop of water splashes, this time against my bare foot, sending a shiver all the way from my toes to the roots of my hair.

“Riding in the car. That’s what I miss the most today,” I whisper. My eyelids flutter open. My arms, which I’d raised foolishly while imagining driving down the road, flop to my sides.

There are no more cars. No more endless highways.

Just this.

Two melting cryo chambers on a spaceship that grows smaller every day.

Drip. Splash.

I’m playing with fire here, I know it. Or, rather, ice. I should shove my parents back into their cryo chambers before they melt any further.

But I don’t.

I fiddle with the cross necklace around my neck, one of the few things I have left from Earth. This—sitting on the floor of the cryo level and staring up at my frozen parents and remembering one more thing I miss—is the closest I can come to prayer now.

Elder mocked me for praying once, and I spent an hour berating him for that. He ended up throwing up his hands, laughing, and telling me I could believe whatever I wanted if I was going to hold onto my beliefs so hard. The ironic thing is that now everything about me, including whatever it was I once believed in, is slipping through my fingers.

Tags: Beth Revis Across the Universe Science Fiction
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