The Long Forever. Eugene Lambert

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СКАЧАТЬ to see the escape craft, I help carry the man Cam stunned. Skinny guy doesn’t look thrilled, but climbs down himself and keeps his gob shut.

      It’s accessed through a second airlock. Disappointingly, the inside is a small compartment, with two recesses in the walls either side, one pod above the other. Murdo and Cam wrestle the unconscious guy into the upper left. When they’re done, they step out to make room and I shove skinny guy ahead of me into the cramped interior.

      ‘Upper right,’ Murdo orders.

      Skinny guy hesitates, shaking. A shove from me gets him moving though. He clambers up and rolls into it.

      Murdo hits a switch. ‘Sweet dreams.’

      Translucent panels swish downwards to close off the two occupied pods. A dazzling blue light fills them. I smell that sharp stink you get when electrics short out. And jump back as skinny guy’s hand, fingers spread wide, slams the inside of his panel. The blue light fades away, but the hand stays planted. Frozen.

      That does not look like fun.

      ‘Let’s go,’ Murdo says, already shuffling his way out.

      Back in the hold, we crowbar open all the wooden crates that were loaded aboard on Wrath. Nestled inside each is a small unmarked metal chest. I worry darkblende’s not stamped on them, or its tech name – promethium. Murdo says I’m a gom for thinking it would be. Screens on the chests list the weight of their contents. Twelve crates, with five hundred kilos in each.

      Whatever it’s worth, Murdo bloodshot eyes go greedy.

      Minutes later, with the crates hammered closed again, he’s back in the pilot’s seat with as many of us as can squeeze inside the flight deck watching him. Sky’s not here. She stayed in the crew compartment, busy sulking.

      ‘Where are we going?’ I ask him.

      ‘Shanglo.’

      ‘What’s there?’

      ‘An old contact. Deep pockets. Doesn’t ask questions.’

      As his fingers tap and slide on the control screen, Murdo tells us Shanglo is the moon of a planet orbiting a half-dead sun. At max drive speed it’ll take seven standard-days to get there. Our curved blue course line shifts inside the glowing star map to point at a closer bit of space. The map zooms in and a new destination star pulses red. Looming over it, as if about to pounce, is what looks like an orange dust storm shot through with wisps of yellow and green.

      ‘What the hell’s that?’ Cam asks.

      ‘Some kind of nebula. Dust and gas, that’s all.’

      With a flourish, he stabs at his screen. I feel the lurching sensation as the freighter’s drive kicks in. The stars in front of us seem to smear themselves towards us. But the flight deck’s shielded, so that’s as bad as it gets. Until the view ahead snaps to a sudden dark nothingness, like a cleverbox screen that’s been powered down.

      Nobody whimpers exactly, but I hear shocked curses.

      ‘Hey, where’d the stars go?’ I say, startled.

      Murdo slumps back in his seat with a satisfied sigh. ‘Relax. They’re still out there. We just can’t see them through the dee-emm, now that we’re shifting.’

      Dee-emm. Shifting. I’ve already passed on the little I know to the other kids. Like how suns are so far apart even light takes years to travel between them. How our dee-emm drive ‘shifts’ us into something called dark-matter space so we can go faster. Murdo calls it a sneaky short cut, a clever way of going behind the back of regular space.

      ‘I see weird stuff out there,’ a boy called Taka calls out.

      Me too. Mostly it’s darkness so deep it feels as if it’s sucking my eyeballs out of my head. But there’s something else. Oily and slippery, it oozes around the edges of my seeing. Look straight at it though and there’s nothing.

      ‘What the heck is that?’ I ask Murdo.

      He glances around. ‘Spacers call it “seeing the spooks”. It’s to do with the way the dee-emm drive operates. And why we leave the flight-deck lights switched up when we’re shifting, so we can’t see outside. Spend too much time watching them, you end up going crazy. Some say –’

      He hesitates, then flicks the lights back on.

      ‘Tell us,’ I say, catching his eye.

      He grimaces. ‘They say spooks are alien life forms. Monster space fish who swim around in dark matter.’

      ‘What do you say?’

      ‘I say we’ve plenty to worry about already,’ he growls.

      Life aboard our star freighter takes getting used to. The crew compartment would’ve been cramped for five, and there are thirteen of us. But the hardest thing is there’s no day and night, which makes it tough to sleep.

      Murdo’s feeling better though, and loving life.

      He says we have to wean ourselves off Wrath-time and onto the standard-time spacers use. Standard-hours are about the same length, but there are only twenty-four in a standard-day! We all moan like hell, feeling cheated, but he just laughs at us. Says standard-months have more standard-days in them, so what’s it matter anyway?

      Well it turns out it does matter!

      He re-calculated our ages in standard-time. I’d been looking forward to turning seventeen in two Wrath-months; now I’ll have to wait six more standard-months.

      The only person more fed up than me is Sky. She was seventeen, now she’s back to being sixteen!

      With bog all to do, we count the days down to Shanglo. I teach the others stupid games I played as a kid. They teach me some of theirs. By far their favourite thing is to get me or Sky or Murdo to tell them stories about our adventures. They never tire of listening. But three standard-days out of Wrath we hit our first snag. Anuk put Stitch in charge of the food because he’d done cooking duties back in her camp. Now she drags him in front of Murdo, a face on her like thunder.

      ‘Tell him!’ she rages.

      Shame-faced, Stitch admits we’re almost out of food.

      ‘He couldn’t be arsed to check,’ Anuk says.

      I figure Murdo will go off on one, but all he does is shrug. ‘Just as well we’re only four days out from Shanglo, not a month out from Enshi Four. Isn’t it, Sky?’

      Sky gives him a spike-eyed glare, but says nothing.

      Anuk says we’ll manage, but it’ll mean short rations and going hungry. Been there, done that, but it’s still bad news. Murdo reassures us we’ll be able to load up with food at Shanglo.

      Everybody settles back down.

      But when nobody’s looking, Murdo whispers that I should meet him outside the cargo hold. Before I can ask why, he slides off in that direction, real furtive.

      I СКАЧАТЬ