Something Took The Ship

Rell was off the bench before the sound had finished.

"Suits."

That was all. One word, and eleven people went through one door, and I have been in drills that went worse with a month's warning.

Kosh took the doorframe with both hands, swung himself through it, and left the bar of hull stock lying on the deck behind him. I remember thinking, he carried that all the way here and now he does not want it. I remember that I found this funny. I would like it on record that I found something funny at that point, because I do not think I have since, not in the same way.

The suit lockers are eleven metres aft of the mess. I know the number because I set the brackets myself, four years ago, and I had to argue with Bo about the spacing, and I won, and he has mentioned it since.

Eleven metres. It took us far too long.

Here is what a suit is, since I am supposed to be keeping a record and I have never once put one down.

It is not black. That is the first thing, and everybody gets it wrong who has not worn one. It is pale. It is pearl, and there is a violet in it that only comes out when there is a light for it to come out in.

Ribbed, all the way down, like the inside of a chest. Gold worked into it in lines so fine you only catch them side-on, and nobody has ever been able to tell me what the lines are for. I have asked people who should have known.

The face is one plate of dark violet stone. It is not glass. You can see out of it perfectly well and I could not tell you how.

It weighs almost nothing until you put it on. Then it weighs exactly enough.

Whoever made them made them to outlast us. They have.

And here is the part I want down now, while I am thinking of it, because it took me a while on the rock to notice and I do not want to have to explain it later:

in the dark, they are grey.

All of it. The pearl and the violet and the gold — all of it needs a light to be any of those things, and out past the fire there is no light, so there is no pearl. Out there we are the colour of the rock.

You only ever see what we are made of when you are standing near something warm.

I got mine on, and I turned round, and I counted.

Rell. Kosh. Oksa. Ilse. Teo. Sera. Nima. Anna. Bo. Ruben. Jun-ho. Collars locked, all of them.

Eleven. And me.

Ruben still had his kitchen cloth over his shoulder, on the outside of the suit, where it did nothing and could do nothing, and that is what I was looking at when it happened. A man in armour older than the ship, with a tea towel on his shoulder. I have never mentioned it to him. I am fairly sure he knows.

Marek and Corrigan were forward, on the boat deck, four bulkheads away. Rell had the channel open and was saying Marek's name in the flat voice, the one that is not a question.

Marek said, "Boat deck."

Rell said, "Get out."

And Marek said, "Working on it, Chief," in exactly the tone he used for everything, and it is not even a good sentence, and the next I heard of him we were already falling.

Fourteen.

Then the stars went out.

I want to be careful here. This is the part everyone gets wrong, including the people who were in the room.

The ship did not break.

I have had that argued at me by men who were standing next to me at the time and I will not have it. Nothing tore. Nothing blew. The hull did not open and there was no air lost anywhere, and I know this because I checked, afterwards, and because it is the one thing I am actually qualified to speak about.

What happened is that the light went, all of it, everywhere, at once. Every port. Every screen. Not switched off. Covered.

And then the frame began to take a load.

You have to understand what the frame is for. The frame is what the ship pushes against. It has one job, and it complains constantly, and the complaint tells you what is happening to it.

I put my hands on the number-two housing and I listened to it with my palms, and I have never in eleven years heard a hull make that shape of noise. It was not the noise of something breaking. I want to be precise, because I have been precise about everything else and I am not going to stop now: it was the noise of something being held.

Even. All round. Everywhere at once, and very gently, and getting less gentle.

The tick in the number-three frame stopped. That tick had been there for two years. Anna heard it stop too, four metres away, in the dark, in a suit, and she turned her head and looked at me, and neither of us said anything, because what would you say.

Ruben's burner went out.

I do not know why I have put that in the record where I have put it. It went out and I saw it go out and I have thought about it more than I have thought about the rest of that hour.

It got cold. It got very cold, very fast. The suits took the cold. That is one of the things a suit is for and I had never once had cause to be grateful for it before.

And then we were being carried.

I am not going to tell you what it was. I did not see it. Nobody saw it. There was nothing to see, because we were on the inside of it, and the inside of it was the only thing there was.

It was dark, and it was not the dark you get in space, which is full of things. It was dark like a room with the door shut.

It was quiet. There was no signal on any band. Nima kept working the whole time. She kept working when there was nothing to work, and I want that written down.

We were moving. I could feel us moving. I could not tell you toward what.

And it took its time.

We have never agreed how long. That is the only part of it we argue about. It is the only part that feels as though it ought to have a number, and none of us can leave a missing number alone.

Teo says hours. He is a reactor man and he does not exaggerate.

Kosh says under a minute. He never once let go of the rail, and Kosh's arms are a serious instrument, so I take the point.

Bo says fifty-one minutes, flat. He is the only one of us who was watching a clock, and I do not believe him, and I cannot tell you why.

Oksa will not give a number at all.

Sera was praying. She has asked me to leave that out and I have left it in, because she was nineteen, and she should not have had to be ashamed of it.

Ilse gave no number either. Ilse was not counting. Ilse was holding on to Sera.

And Anna did not count the time. Anna counted the hull — the load coming up through the plate, the way you would count a pulse. She says it never once faltered. She says it flat, like a reading off a gauge, and her hands do a thing while she says it that the rest of her has never noticed.

And I counted, against my own heartbeat, because a heartbeat is the only clock you have in the dark, and it is a liar, but it is a liar with a rhythm. I got to a number. I am not going to write it down. I was frightened, and a frightened woman with her hands on a shaking rail is not an instrument, and her number is worth nothing, and it goes in the record where the others go, which is to say nowhere.

Rell let us run at it for six days and then wrote it in the log as unknown, which was the only true word any of us had brought her, and that is where it has stayed.

Then it let us go.

One moment there was only the inside of it, and then there was a below. There was light down there — not much, and the wrong colour, and a long way off — and a thing does not throw you toward a light unless the light is a floor. There was a horizon, and it was coming up to meet us. Marek was on the channel in a voice I had never heard him use and have not heard since.

She did not come apart.

I want that in the record, and I have said it out loud to people who never asked. Something took her whole and kept her as long as it wanted her, and it did not break her — not in the dark, and not on the way out. She went into it one thing. She came out of it one thing.

And then it spat us at the ground, the way you spit out a stone.