I’ve gotten hurt in a lot of interesting ways, even before I ended up on Persephone. I’ve chipped a tooth when someone hit me in the face with a broken tuba. I’ve had my hair set on fire with rogue fireworks. I have scars on my arms and legs from the time I jumped onto a tarp that I mistook for another roof. Though to be fair on that last one, if the gang that had been chasing me at the time had caught me, I’d probably have been dead instead of scarred.
The point is I have a lot of stories about times I got hurt. But I didn’t think I’d ever add being thrown through out of a room by exploding batteries to that list.
The suit protected me from the worst of it. Probably outright saved my life, but I still slammed against a wall and hit the floor dazed, with tiny phantom lights dancing in my vision. I lay there stunned. I knew I should be moving but I couldn’t piece together exactly how I was supposed to do that. There was a flickering light coming from somewhere close by. I thought it was a warning light of some kind.
Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. The words were chased by an old man’s hearty laughter in my head and I realized what I was seeing. The wrappings I had put on to make up for the cold were on fire. Which was bad because I was still wearing them.
As I realized this, the suit also seemed to pick up on it.
Fire detected. Initiating roll mode.
“Oh no,” I said and then my whole world turned into a blender as the suit began to spin like I’d been caught by an invisible crocodile that had gone into a death roll.
I don’t know how long it rolled me but the fire did eventually go out. What I do know is that two concussions in one day followed by rapid spinning led to something I’d feared since the day I first put on the survival suit. I threw up.
It was both better and worse than I expected. It was better in that it did not spatter against the screen in front of my face and dribble down my chest. It was worse in that the tube I used to eat shot out into my mouth and down my throat and, with a sound like a tiny vacuum, it sucked up the vomit before it could hit my tongue.
Then it slithered back out of my mouth and I just sat there for a minute gagging and trying to will the tears out of my eyes.
“Euclid? Are you okay?” Ai asked.
“No. No I am not.” I said.
Cyrus laughed until he couldn’t breathe.
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You would think that the worst part of my day would be over but the whole thing wasn’t completely and utterly ruined until I got a good look at the ship’s batteries. What was left of the batteries anyway. Ai had done some analysis and determined that there was an enormous power surge from my suit that overloaded the batteries and caused the explosion. Her best guess as to why it happened was that it was something faulty in the suit’s programming or something had gone wrong due to the damage the suit had sustained.
The damage to the ship wasn’t irreparable. Honestly, given what could have happened it wasn’t even all that bad. The problem was going to be finding replacement batteries. Finding something that would be able to handle the power necessary for lift off would have been hard enough but the real problem was finding ones that had enough power and were also small enough to fit in the relatively tiny ship Ai and I had put together. It had taken us nearly six months of scavenging to find that set and we had been incredibly lucky to do so at all.
The Reliant had small craft that were lightspeed capable. If you got lucky, they might have even survived and you could take them, a voice in my head whispered. It was hard not to snort with derision at the very idea that I could get lucky.
“Ai, run some scans. See if you can find any ships I could get to that could have another set of batteries.”
“What about the ship back at the A.I. nest? It looked pretty much intact,” Cyrus asked. I shook my head already knowing what Ai would say.
“That ship is in good condition but it isn’t capable of outer space travel. It was more than likely meant for intercontinental flight at most. And that’s assuming that the nanobots having cannibalized the internal parts of the ship to create more of themselves.”
“Damn. Well, I’ll run some scans, see if I can’t find anything.”
“You’re cheerful for someone who might’ve just been handed a death sentence.”
“I haven’t died once in the entire time I’ve been alive. I see no reason the trend won’t continue.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Neither does pessimism, kid. You should get some sleep.”
I wanted to argue with him but sleep was too tempting.
“Yeah, whatever,” I mumbled as I crawled out of the useless ship. The trip through the bowels of the Ariel to where I made my bed was always grueling. Between my pounding head, my still nauseous stomach, and the damage to the suit, it felt longer and more horrible than ever.
I couldn’t simply go straight to the room I’d made my own. This was both a feature and a bug. On the one hand, the difficulty in getting to the room was part of why I’d picked it. This way, if some animal got into the ship and started looking for a bite of Euclid before it made its den, Ai would have plenty of time to wake and warn me. But it did still require me to make the journey myself. That required crossing to multiple levels of the Ariel multiple times. Parts of the ship had become completely impassable in the crash, but what had been the dormitory required a particularly tight squeeze through a hole in the ceiling that I was only able to reach because of the suit’s ability to help me jump higher than I normally could.
Inside the dormitory was the worst part. No matter how many times I came in here I never got used to the bodies.
The crew of the Ariel had mostly been asleep when the crash began. A few of them were out in the halls now, most still in their rooms but I knew they were there. I’d had to check a lot of them before I found an empty room. The cold kept them more or less preserved. Now they were puffy and in pale shades of green and purple. I had eventually turned their faces away from me so I could walk to my room without their glassy stares. I had regular nightmares about frozen blue fingers tearing open the door to my room and the dead coming in for me.
One way I’d found to avoid that nightmare and any others was to work myself into such a state of exhaustion that even my brain was too tired to think up horrible ways my life could end. So as I crawled into the tiny cubby I’d claimed as my own, I had the audacity to think that the one good thing that would happen today was that I’d be able to get a good night’s dreamless sleep.
But the universe must have heard me and it has a sick sense of humor.
I found myself wandering the halls of a ship so familiar it burned. The air was what really stuck with me, the way it moved over my skin, didn’t circulate up into my face with every breath. People say dreams can’t hurt you because they aren’t real. They’re wrong. That’s what makes them hurt so much.
I walked through the halls with the steady pace of a ghost looking for someone to haunt. I knew where I was going and if I’d had any control over my legs I’d have run screaming the other way. But the smells of fire and oil grew as whatever sadistic subconscious force dragged me forward. As far as I was concerned, the sign above the door might as well have said, abandon all hope rather than just engineering five.
Cursing -- loud, emphatic, and creative -- echoed out from those doors. That sound felt like coming home. It couldn’t have hurt more if it had been loud enough to burst my eardrums.
Inside that cavernous room that housed everything from air and spacecraft to amphibious ATVs, one man worked tirelessly to keep all of it running day in and day out. I saw him from across the room, his bald pate shining in the light from the great engine in the center of the room. A streak of black that ran from his forehead to the top of his crown, the result of a nervous gesture that he’d gained back when he had hair.
He was nearly as wide as he was tall but, other than a belly that hung a little over his belt from a few too many beers, the man was hard as a sledgehammer. The muscles of his shoulders and neck bunched and stretched the material of a threadbare shirt that had once been tan but was now spattered with dozens of stains of nearly every color between dirt brown and oil black.
I couldn’t see what he was working on but the tension in his shoulders and the beads of sweat pouring down his head and staining his shirt spoke to the effort he was putting in. As I neared, I heard something click together and all the tension left the man. He sat back on the rolling chair and slumped, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
“So, ya screwed it all up again huh?” he said, his back to me.
“Of course I did. It’s what I do,” I heard myself say. The old man gave a weary shake of his head. I could imagine the look of disgust on his face, his broad, flat features curled up in a sneer, grey eyes rolling in exasperation. I flinched when he spun his chair around to face me.
Between his big bushy beard and the smile on his face he looked like Santa Claus. His eyes sparkled as he clapped a greasy mit on my shoulder. He shook me a bit until I looked him in the eyes.
“Then ya did good kid. You tried. That’s all that matters.”
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His tone was earnest. Genuine. It should have washed away the cobwebs of self-doubt and hatred that filled my head. Instead it set them on fire.
“That’s all that matters?” I heard myself spit, the memory sharp and clear as broken glass. “That’s not all that matters. All that matters is whether or not it worked and it didn’t. Just like it didn’t last time and just like it didn’t the time before that. That’s all I do, that all I am. I’m a mistake and so is everything I do.”
I turned and walked away. I could hear Rip back behind me calling my name. His voice was gentle at first, then it was hard and commanding. Neither drew me back. I just walked away into the darkness.
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“Euclid? My sensors indicate that you are awake and have been for some time,” Ai’s voice said in my ear. I wanted to tell her that her sensors were lying. I wanted to tell her to go to hell and just let me lay here until I starved. Instead I bit back on all of that and sat up. She only wanted to help after all.
“Yeah, I’m awake,” I said. “Let me get some food before we start talking about our next move okay?”
“Time is not a particularly relevant factor at the moment. That is acceptable.”
I stood up and stretched. The suit helped, pushing my body a little further than I wanted to go. Sometimes I thought it was going to malfunction and snap my ligaments but today it was merely uncomfortable. Damn the luck.
Once I was moving I crawled through the ship in the odd snaking pattern that would take me to the cafeteria. While I went, the suit’s mouth tube poked at my face until I let it give me some mouthwash. The stuff was weirdly flavored and I suspected that it was the same fluid that just got filtered and then reused every morning but I wasn’t about to ask and find out while I could lie to myself and pretend that the suit somehow had an infinite supply of whatever it was.
The cafeteria didn’t have a lot of options for me. In fact, it had only two. Both options came in shrink wrapped blocks that I couldn’t actually eat. I put them up to the chest piece of the suit and it would chop up and absorb the block and then feed it to me though, you guessed it, the mouth tube. I had two options. “Chocolate” and “Vanilla”, though they were more like, “nearly edible somewhat chocolate flavored mush dust,” and “all but inedible and completely flavorless mush dust.” I guess those names didn’t fit well on the packaging though. The only bright side of the whole thing was that I had enough of them to keep me alive for what Ai calculated to be thirty two years at my current consumption rate. But I didn’t think I was going to make it through the back sixteen if I had to eat the vanilla packets.
But I had to admit I did feel a little better once I had some of the mush in my belly. I would have killed for something with caffeine in it though. That would have made everything so much more bearable.
I knew where Ai would want to talk to me without having to ask. It was one of the only rooms in the entire ship that, more or less, completely functioned. When the ship was whole, it had been the command center for the entire ship. Screens covered the walls along with banks of controls but in the center of the room was the main feature.
A wide table with a holographic screen stood in the middle of the room. Ai could project herself anywhere in the ship where the room’s hologenerator still functioned but she couldn’t project anything that wasn’t humanoid or more than one thing at a time. I’d asked why that was and she’d said something about the programming being limited to prevent a hostile takeover of the ship using misleading holograms.
The holotable on the other hand could show essentially anything over its surface. We’d used it for planning many times. She’d shown me the inner layout of ships before I’d gone to salvage from them, the lay of the land on the way to scavenging sites so that I could avoid particularly dangerous areas and she’d used it to show me the positions of the huts in the yeti village and where their tech stash was likely to be.
Now she stood next to it once again in her incongruous dress, her expression serious. Cyrus’ waved at me from the large view screen at the back of the room. I couldn’t see through his helmet but his wave gave me a sense of a jovial smile.
“Euclid, we have things to discuss.”
“No joke,” I said, feeling somewhat ambushed. “I guess you two came up with some options last night.”
“Sure did!” Cyrus said, his voice practically beaming.
“Yes,” Ai said, her near-emotionless tone much more serious. “We have two options for you. Cyrus, would you like to go first?”
There was something in the way she spoke that put me on edge. It was nearly defensive. I’d never heard her talk that way before.
“Sure thing! Euclid, I’ve found another set of batteries that are compatible with your ship and a power source for those batteries if they need charging. And best of all, they’re in the same place.”
I felt my jaw fall open.
“What? Are you serious? How did you find that?”
“I am very good at what I do. Also I’m spinning above the planet so I can cover a lot more area than you two.”
“That’s amazing Cyrus. Where are these batteries?”
“Well…” Cyrus hedged.
“That’s the problem,” Ai said. She waved a hand at the holotable and a familiar map of the area surrounding her ship appeared. It zoomed out until I was looking at an area of about sixty miles in every direction.
“Up until now we have limited our resource gathering to this area.”
“Because it’s how far out I can get on the air bike and still get back before nightfall with a couple hours of time to search any given site or ship,” I said, nodding.
“Correct. That is what I told Cyrus.”
“But that is a huge limitation on your range of possibilities. Ships go down all over Persephone, not just in your immediate area.”
“It is also a significant limitation on risk,” Ai said, her tone prim.
“You risk nothing, you gain nothing,” Cyrus answered.
“Yeah, but you’re the one risking nothing,” I said.
“Not true! I’m risking everything on you, kid. If you bite it out there, I’m screwed.”
Which was hard to argue with. There couldn’t be all that many people on the planet he could contact. Ai and I would have found at least some sign of them with her scans. Cyrus took my silence as agreement and continued.
“So, all you have to do is get a little out of your comfort zone and-“
“Six hundred and thirty eight miles to be exact.”
“Right. Just a hop, skip and a jump away,” Cyrus said as though he’d wanted Ai to interject that, “and boom. You’ve got all the resources you need.”
“Six hundred?!” I asked, thrusting my head forward in incredulity.
“And thirty eight.”
“We don’t need the exact number, Ai.”
“I disagree.”
“I can’t go that far!” I said.
“Sure you can. You’ll be fine,” Cyrus said, like he was talking to a child that was afraid of stepping out of its mother’s sight.
“I’ll only be fine if nothing goes wrong with the air bike, nothing eats me, and I don’t freeze to death during the nights.”
“None of those things have happened so far!”
“Several things have gone wrong with the bike,” Ai interjected calmly. I thrust a hand at her, in agreement.
“See?”
“Three hundred and seventy nine separate repairs have been needed to be exact.”
“And clearly you’ve overcome them,” Cyrus answered. “You’ll be fine. And because you’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. Everyone wins!”
I pressed the base of my palms into my eyes and wished I had some freaking coffee.
“Alright, so we’ll call that plan B. Ai, surely you’ve got something better.”
I expected her to answer quickly. She didn’t. Her hologram just seemed to freeze for a moment. I thought it might have been a glitch of some kind but I’d never seen that from her before. Finally she said,
“The plan I propose puts you at significantly less direct risk. It will allow us to stay within what we have previously considered your safe range. And we will not have to gather any new resources to manage it.”
“Why do I feel like there’s a catch?”
“Because there is one. Ai, Tell him the catch,” Cyrus said. Again there was that moment of silence.
“Instead of gathering all the energy we need at once, we will take it from many smaller sources. The batteries we have can be repaired though it will take time.”
“How much time?”
“My estimate is approximately six months.”
“Six months?!”
“For the batteries,” Cyrus said, something almost gleeful in his tone. “Tell him how long it will take to get the power for them.”
I turned my incredulous look on Ai. How many months was I looking at here?
“To find enough power for the ship, I project three to five years.”
“Years. Years?! Those are my options?” I asked. If I could have grabbed my hair I would have pulled it out. I sat down in one of the chairs bolted to the floor in front of a workstation and just stared at the floor for a minute.
Could I survive another three to five years here? It had always been a possibility that I would have to spend a very long time on this planet but with our ship coming together so quickly, it had always seemed that escape for me and Ai was right around the corner. Now it was like a crevasse had opened up and swallowed that hope.
But then there was Cyrus to deal with. Not just his plan but Cyrus himself. He couldn’t sit there for three to five years. He’d starve long before that. But I was barely handling this when it was just my own life I was taking into my hands. I couldn’t add Cyrus’ weight to that could I? I wasn’t smart enough for this. I wasn’t strong enough.
I looked up at Ai. She smiled at me, her expression sad and understanding. She’d known me long enough that she could all but read my mind. She understood what I was feeling and she’d given me another option. I could just worry about myself. Take the safer, longer route and tell Cyrus, ‘Sorry man. Bad luck you had to pin your hopes on me.’ But I knew the truth. The only reason I would do that is because I couldn’t bear to try to help Cyrus and fail again.
I wished she could do more to help me but that thought was as intangible as she was. I wanted to hit something. This wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t have to make this decision. I shouldn’t have to roll the dice with my own life on the line, much less someone else’s.
You tried. That’s all that matters.
The words made me want to scream, both in terror and frustration. There was no one else here who could try. I was the only one that could do this.
“I’m sorry Cyrus,” I said. He froze at my words. I could imagine the smile he’d had, certain I was going to go with his plan, sliding off his face. I was glad he couldn’t see the expression on mine. “I’m sorry you’ve got to depend on someone like me to get this done.”
“Kid-“ he started but I couldn’t bear to hear whatever he was going to say so I stood.
“Ai, use Cyrus’ information to chart a course for me to get to the ship he’s found. I’ll need to cover as much ground as possible every day but I’ll need places to shelter too.”
Ai looked back at Cyrus and I couldn’t help but wonder what expression was on her face. When she turned back to me, her face was blank. She nodded.
“Very well.”
“What are you going to do?” Cyrus asked in a low voice.
“I need to repair this suit. I’ll freeze if I try to make the trip like this. We’ve found some parts of other suits. I should have enough to replace the outer shell.”
“I see,” he said. I turned to head to the door.
“Kid?”
I stopped. I didn’t look back.
“Tha-“
I held up a hand to cut him off.
“Stop,” I said. “Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything. Save it for if I get you out of there.”
I left before he could answer.