Archive of Our Own

Beeping. Then a grip on her calves — squeezing in pulses she didn't ask for. Grip and release. Grip and release.

Carol Sturka threw up before she opened her eyes.

The basin was already there. A robot arm had swung it into place. Nothing came up but bile. Thin, yellow, burning. Her stomach was empty. She'd been on IV nutrition for — how long? She didn't know where she was.

She knew who she was.

Carol Sturka. Fifty-three. Albuquerque, New Mexico. PhD in astrobiology, collecting dust. Novelist, collecting royalties.

She got her eyes open.

Ceiling — low, metal. A status panel she couldn't read yet because her pupils were doing whatever pupils do when they haven't worked in a very long time. Red emergency lighting. She was in a pod. Medical. The kind that did the living for you.

Her last clear memory was cold air. A deck.

The catheter needed to come out.

She pulled it herself. Didn't wait for the robot arm. Didn't check for a release procedure or an approved removal protocol. Her hands found it and her hands removed it with the unsurprised hands of a woman who had never once in her life waited for institutional permission to take something out of her own body. Her hands shook. The robot arm offered a sealed wipe.

Cheap beer. The taste of cheap beer and someone else's mouth. That was part of the last memory too.

She tried to sit up. Her abdominal muscles had an opinion about this, and the opinion was no. Her arms were — Jesus. Jesus. Gaunt. She held up her right hand and stared at it. Tendons. Skin like paper. Nails that had grown two centimeters past her fingertips, ridged and yellowing.

After that: nothing.

She tried again. On the third attempt, swearing at her own stomach the whole way, she got upright, and the gravity was wrong.

She'd known it from the first second — her arm lifting too easily, the bile hitting the basin at the wrong angle, the way the compression sleeves fought differently against her calves — but she'd been too busy with the catheter to think it through. Now she did. Her arm had lifted six inches on the first try. She'd lost — what, thirty percent of her muscle mass? More? At one-g that arm shouldn't have moved at all. At a third of a g, the math worked. Roughly.

A third of a g. The Meridian had full gravity. So did every hospital she'd ever been in. So did Earth.

Someone had started a rotation. The ship — because this was a ship, this was a spaceship, Carol was in a spaceship — wasn't under thrust. She couldn't feel the engine vibration that would mean the drive was burning. Attitude thrusters, then. Spin gravity. Whoever woke up first had done the math and started spinning the ship because they knew the rest of them couldn't walk at zero-g with months of atrophy.

The status panel was resolving. Her pupils were working now, sluggish but functional, and the panel said what she already knew and didn't want confirmed:

She was on ISV-4. She was at Tau Ceti. She was twelve light-years from Albuquerque.

"Fuck," she said, to nobody.

She swung her legs over the pod edge. Bare feet on metal. Freezing. She was wearing the cryo suit — thin, clinical, smelling of preservative and the sour-sweet underside of a body that had been kept alive without its participation — and the ship was cold. Not dangerously cold — the thermal system was running — but the kind of cold that meant the system wasn't trying.

She stood. Sat back down. "Oh, fuck off," she told her knees, and stood again. Held the pod rim.

The ship had six air handlers. She could hear two. Maybe a third, intermittent, the whine cycling in and out like it was deciding whether to bother. She listened the way she used to listen to Helen's breathing at night. The ship was running. It was running at maybe forty percent of what it should be, which was not great, but it was running, and she was standing in it, which was more than she'd expected.

She let go of the pod rim.

She went to find who else was awake.

—

Carol walked with one hand on the wall because the gravity kept lying to her. A third of a g meant every step launched her an inch too high, and the spin meant every turn of her head produced a lurch in her inner ear that had nothing to do with the bile situation and everything to do with Coriolis forces, which she understood theoretically and hated physically. The floor was cold through the cryo suit's thin soles. The walls were cold. The air was cold. The ship was, in every measurable sense, unwelcoming, and Carol respected that in an environment because it meant the environment wasn't trying to sell her anything.

Half the corridor panels used metric. The other half used imperial. Eighteen nations had built this ship and hadn't agreed on how to measure it. The Mars Climate Orbiter had crashed for this exact reason, and that was just a robot. Near the galley, someone had corrected a few of them — black Sharpie, small handwriting, imperial readings crossed out with single lines. Not scribbled. Struck.

At a junction, an oxygen readout said 3.1 with no unit. Carol stopped. If that was kPa, they were all dead. If it was PSI, the air was fine. She found the manual override, checked the sensor directly. Normal.

She passed a door marked BAY 2. Closed. The air near it was colder — leaking from the seam at the bottom, carrying a smell she didn't stop to identify. She kept walking.

Past the galley. Past the engineering bay — closed.

She was passing the medical bay — a name on the door panel, DR. K. DIABATE, MISSION PHYSICIAN — when the ship spoke.

"Good morning, Dr. Sturka. Hull integrity is nominal. Power distribution is at thirty-one percent across four active circuits. Current shipboard time is 04:17. I am ANISE — Artificial Navigation and Information System—"

"I don't—" Carol started.

"—You are aboard ISV-4, in stable orbit around Tau Ceti at approximately 1.2 astronomical units. Thermal regulation is operating at twenty-two percent capacity. Shall I continue with orbital parameters?"

The voice was female, patient, and not interested in being interrupted. HAL 9000 with customer service training.

"What — what happened to the crew?" Carol said. Her voice cracked on "crew."

"Four crew members experienced preservation failure during transit. Commander Kowalska's pod is active. Engineer Oviedo exited preservation approximately seventy-one hours ago. Shall I provide details on the preservation failures?"

Four crew members. Preservation failure. Carol's hands found the doorframe of the medical bay and gripped it.

Commander Kowalska's pod is active. Active. Whatever had killed four people in their pods hadn't killed —

Zosia.

Carol let go of the doorframe.

"Mr. Oviedo is currently in the galley."

Carol went to find him.

—

He didn't look up.

The galley was small — the word "galley" was generous for a counter, a heating element, and a fold-down table designed for seven people to eat in shifts. He sat at the fold-down table with graph paper and a mechanical pencil and did not look up. Orbital mechanics. She could see the equations from here, upside down. He did not intend to stop because a woman he hadn't met was standing in his doorway.

He was mid-forties. Wiry in a way that cryo had sharpened into something closer to wire — drawn face, forearms that were mostly tendon, dark circles that lived in a neighborhood past exhaustion. A beard he hadn't had on the Meridian. Two, maybe three inches of cryo growth plus three days of not caring, black going gray in patches, unshaped, unattended. He looked like a man who had woken up, assessed the situation, and decided that the situation did not include grooming. Behind him, the ration supply had been sorted into two piles: a large one labeled CREW in marker, and a smaller one behind a strip of tape labeled MINE.

"I'm Carol Sturka," she said.

"I know who you are." He still didn't look up. The pencil kept moving. "The novelist."

"The — no. The biologist."

Carol sat with that. She'd spent eight months teaching Kusimayu the reproduction protocol. Kusimayu was supposed to be here. Something must have pulled her at the last minute — medical, failed screening — and ISDC had put Carol in her pod instead.

She pulled out the other chair. Sat. He let her.

"The AI says you've been awake for seventy-one hours."

"The machine counts hours. I count problems." He turned the graph paper toward her, though she hadn't asked. Return trajectory options. All of them crossed out. "There is not enough fuel to go home. I have done this calculation eleven times. The answer is bad. I want it to be wrong."

He reached behind him without looking, pulled a ration pack from the CREW pile, and slid it across the table.

Carol looked at it. Looked at him. He was back in the equations.

She opened it. It was terrible. She ate it.

"Something killed four people in their sleep. The pods say malfunction. The pods are lying." He looked up for the first time. Dark eyes, weighing her. "I do not know what killed them. I will find out. This is on my list."

He had a list. Carol looked at the graph paper, the crossed-out trajectories, the mechanical pencil worn flat on one side. She bet the list was numbered.

ANISE cut in: "Dr. Sturka, I can provide a comprehensive mission status briefing at your convenience, including crew manifest details, orbital parameters, and—"

"Christ, she talks," Carol said to Manousos.

"It makes sounds. I do not listen."

"She," ANISE said, mildly.

Carol looked at the graph paper. Eleven attempts at a return trajectory, all crossed out, all showing the same answer: not enough fuel.

"The rotation," Carol said. "How did you start the spin without talking to her?"

"Operations manual. Deck three." He didn't look up. "I read it."

She wanted to call it insane. It was also the reason she wasn't floating in the dark.

The pencil was down. He wasn't looking at the graph paper anymore.

"I told ISDC no. I built the countermeasure. I trained a man to deploy it. I said no." He stopped. Started again in Spanish — one sentence, hard and quiet. Then back, like he'd caught himself. "Do you understand? I remember their hands on my arms."

She believed him. She'd watched him work for ten minutes. A man who did orbital mechanics by hand because he didn't trust a computer to be wrong correctly. You don't walk that man to a pod.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it.

"I don't want sorry. I want fuel."

Carol sat with this. Her own gap — the kiss and then nothing — didn't feel like force. Force you remember. Manousos remembered every second. Carol remembered a mouth and cold air and then a pod. Whatever happened between the deck and Tau Ceti, it hadn't been hands on her arms. She would know. She was sure she would know.

Manousos stopped writing.

"Don't open bay two."

Carol heard it.

She was going to open bay two.

He knew she was going to open bay two.

He said it anyway.

—

The air in bay two was different. Denser. Flat. A metallic smell that wasn't recycled air.

Four pods. Dark indicators. No beeping. The systems in here hadn't failed. They'd finished.

"Dr. Sturka, I can provide detailed preservation failure logs for each—"

ANISE stopped. The silence came back, and it was heavier now because Carol had made it.

Frosted glass. The outline of a face underneath. She wiped the condensation with her sleeve and read the nameplate: KOUMBA DIABATE, MISSION PHYSICIAN.

Koumba. She'd known him for eight months. He'd learned everyone's drink order on the Meridian within a week — Carol's was black coffee, no sugar, and he'd never once gotten it wrong. He'd brought her one at 2 AM in the lab once and hadn't asked why she was awake. She'd drunk it. She hadn't said thank you.

She moved to the second pod. Wiped the glass.

XIU MEI, ASTROBIOLOGIST.

Xiu Mei. Three weeks into training, she'd stopped Carol in the corridor and asked: "Was the Stellavore migration pattern theoretical or did you model it?" Nobody had ever asked Carol that about her own work.

LAXMI SUBRAMANIAM, ASTROPHYSICIST.

Family photos taped to the interior of the glass. A man. Two children. The younger one mid-laugh, blurred from movement. Laxmi had propped these same photos against her tablet at every briefing during training. Had caught Carol looking once and said, simply: "My reasons."

Fourth pod.

OTGONBAYAR, NAVIGATOR / BACKUP PILOT.

Notes in a handwriting she didn't recognize, clipped to the interior of the pod. Otgonbayar hadn't talked much during training. He'd sat near Zosia at every briefing — pilot team, same orbit — and once he'd caught Carol tracking her gaze toward Zosia and hadn't reacted. Hadn't looked away. Just registered it and moved on. Carol had felt seen in a way she hadn't wanted to be seen.

She checked the diagnostics on each pod. Physical button, no power required. All four returned the same readout:

PRESERVATION FAILURE — NEURAL PATTERN DISRUPTION.

She checked the timestamps. Pod one: T+21,700:11. Pod two: T+21,700:22. Pod three: T+21,700:31. Pod four: T+21,700:47. Four failures in a thirty-six-minute window. Nine hundred and four days into transit. Near the end.

Carol stood in the middle of bay two with four dead people she'd eaten meals with, and her biology brain did what her biology brain always did: it worked the problem. Four identical failures. Sequential, not simultaneous. Same cause, propagating. During approach — close to Tau Ceti, close to the organism. The pods didn't coordinate this. Four separate systems don't develop the same neural preservation failure in half an hour by coincidence. An external event. She didn't know what.

She filed it.

A silk sleeping mask was clipped to the inside of Koumba's pod. Black silk, with a small embroidered K on the corner. The man had packed a monogrammed sleeping mask for a one-way mission to a dying star. Carol looked at it for a long time.

Carol had packed — what? She didn't remember packing. She'd worry about that later.

She closed the door to bay two.

She went to find the fifth pod.

—

The fifth pod was in the main cryobay, ten feet from where Carol had woken up. Active. Status lights cycling. She looked at the external monitor first — data before faces.

She knew whose pod this was. Data was easier than the glass anyway.

Zosia's face. Cryo had done what cryo does — drawn the cheekbones sharper, thinned the jaw, pulled the skin tight over the architecture underneath — but it was her. The face from across the mess hall, from briefings, from the deck.

Dark brown hair loose around her face, longer than Carol had ever seen it, falling past her shoulders. Paler. The cryo pallor made the burn scars stand out at her collarbone — pinkish-white ridges disappearing under the cryo suit's neckline.

For the first and last time, Carol was looking down at someone who would tower over her the moment she stood.

Her hands were on the glass.

She hadn't put them there. They'd gone flat against the surface while she was reading the scans, palms down, pressing, as if she could feel the face underneath through the frost. She noticed. Pulled them back. Put them at her sides.

Carol had kissed this mouth three days ago. Or two and a half years ago. Or both — the cryo made the math meaningless. She had kissed this mouth on a cold deck and the monitor behind her was showing something she couldn't read and didn't want to.

She stepped back from the pod.

"ANISE. Revival protocol — what's the risk with that neural activity?"

"The connectivity disruption is significant, Dr. Sturka. Revival is within standard parameters, but I cannot predict cognitive outcome. There may be memory loss. There may be more."

"Start it."

"Dr. Sturka, I would recommend—"

"Start it."

Carol watched the wake sequence initiate. I am waking up a woman whose brain is fucking broken because I need her to fly this ship.

She stood there. Forty minutes, maybe fifty, before the body would be ready.

—

The bar was called Duke's and it was not a good bar. Carol had chosen it because it was not a good bar — because the lighting was honest about being bad, the bourbon was honest about being cheap, and nobody in Duke's at 4 PM on a Wednesday was pretending to be anywhere they wanted to be. She fit right in.

She was two years into not writing. Two years post-Helen. The breathalyzer car was in the parking lot. Helen had installed it. Helen was dead. Carol still blew into it every morning.

Her phone buzzed. She looked at the name and almost didn't answer.

She answered because she was on her third drink and curiosity beats self-preservation at three drinks.

"Carol." Rosen was being careful. She'd never heard him be careful. "I need — we need. I need to ask you something."

"You need to ask me something."

"Yes."

"Carol—"

"I just want to be clear about what's happening here, Alan, because in twenty-three years of knowing you, you have told me things, informed me of things, corrected me on things, and once explained to my — once explained, to my face, at a faculty dinner, that my doctoral thesis was 'ambitious but premature,' which is what men say about women's work when they mean 'correct but inconvenient.' You have never ASKED me anything. So I want to savor this."

"Are you drinking?"

"I'm in a bar at four o'clock on a Wednesday, Alan. What do you think?"

He told her.

There was an organism on the sun. Alive. Feeding. It was growing. The sun was dimming. Climate models gave them thirty years, maybe less.

Carol listened. She held the phone with one hand and the bourbon with the other and she listened, and about halfway through the description she put the bourbon down and didn't pick it up again.

He sent it.

She looked at it on her phone, in a bar, at 4 PM, with the bourbon going warm beside her, and her hands started shaking. Not from the drink. From recognition.

She knew this organism. She'd invented it — or thought she had. Six novels. The Stellavore. The thing that ate stars in her Wycaro books. She'd built its biology from scratch because nobody was going to check the science in a romance novel, so she'd made the science real. She'd modeled it on her laptop in a Marriott in Denver because the conference hotel had good wifi and she had nothing else to do that weekend.

Now the science was on the sun. Eating it.

Her fake aliens were real. Twenty years of fiction and the fictional part was the romance, not the biology.

"We need you to come look at something," Rosen said. He was being humble again. She could hear the effort and she was petty enough to enjoy it. "My lab. Confidential. We have samples."

She looked at the data again. She looked at the bourbon.

"Alan, I —" She stopped. "I'll be there tomorrow."

—

Rosen's lab was on the third floor of the biology building at UT Austin and it smelled exactly the way it had twenty-three years ago. Reagent, floor wax, underfunded science.

The samples were in a containment unit on the bench. Crystalline dust, collected by solar probes. The collection process killed most of them. Most. A few cells in Rosen's batch were still alive. Every major lab in the world had a batch. Nobody could do anything with them.

Carol looked at them under the microscope. She'd drawn these cells. She'd written about them. She'd known they were real. Somewhere. Not on our sun. But somewhere.

She told Rosen she'd need a week.

—

The monitors changed.

Carol came back to the pod, to the present, to the red lighting and the cold and the readouts that had been shifting for the last forty minutes while her mind was in a bar in Albuquerque and a lab in Austin. The wake sequence was running. Vitals climbing — heart rate, respiration, body temperature ticking up degree by degree.

Carol stood over the pod with her arms crossed and her hands tucked against her ribs, because her hands had already done one unauthorized thing on the glass today and she didn't trust them.

Christ.

Zosia's hands gripped the pod rim. Blind reflex — the fingers found the edge and locked down.

Then her eyes opened and there was no gradual waking. There was only the box and the dark and the not knowing, and the body's answer to that was to get out. Now. By any means.

Zosia fought the pod. She was tall — long limbs, long frame, all of it crammed into a space designed for efficiency not comfort — and she thrashed against the sides and the compression sleeves were still squeezing her calves and she couldn't get her legs free and the noise she made wasn't a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was the sound of someone trying to breathe in a space that wouldn't let her.

Carol did not step back.

"Hey. Hey — look at me."

Zosia's eyes were wild. Dark brown, the pupils blown, tracking the ceiling, the walls, the pod rim, the red light — everything too close, everything closing in.

"Look at me."

Carol's voice was the only thing in this room that wasn't metal or machine or the hiss of compression sleeves. It was rough and cracked and it sounded like gravel and she made it steady anyway.

Zosia looked at her.

The thrashing stopped. Not all at once — the limbs went still before the breathing did. But she was with Carol now — locked on, holding still.

Zosia breathed. Her knees were up, her shoulders hunched, pressing away from the walls of the pod. She was taller than Carol — taller than most people Carol had ever stood next to — and she was making herself as small as she could. Carol, who had spent her whole life looking up at people, stood over her.

The breathing steadied. The grip on the pod rim loosened — not released, loosened. Zosia's head turned — her own hands, the pod wall, the red-lit ceiling. Back to Carol. Her shoulders dropped a fraction. Back to the ceiling. Back to Carol. Each time, she stayed a little longer.

"A ship. ISV-4. We're at Tau Ceti."

Nothing.

"What's my name?"

Carol's throat closed. She kept her mouth shut until it opened again.

"Zosia. Your name is Zosia."

Zosia said it back. Testing it. "Zosia." She said it again, quieter, and it still didn't attach to anything.

Zosia looked at Carol. The face was right. The burn scars at the collarbone were right. The dark brown eyes were the same dark brown Carol had spent eight months not staring at across briefing tables, the same dark brown from the deck with the ocean behind them and cheap beer on both their mouths.

Nothing behind them recognized Carol Sturka.

"Who are you?"