On the tenth alignment, Addict was in trouble. His canopy frill had errantly deployed. The sphincter was tight around his neck, constricting him like a python. His face was pressed against the canopy, the pressure distorted his features and made his skin livid. Addict’s head looked like a sausage about to pop out of its casing.

He tried to catch the eyes of the other pilots. His mouth moved frantically. We couldn’t hear him, but he must have been begging for help. Murderess, Liar, and Corrupt all looked away. At last, Addict’s eyes locked on mine. I didn’t look away.

His agony was exquisite.

HELP ME! Addict mouthed. Then he stuck out his tongue and traced the letters against the canopy glass in reverse.

H E L P M E

Addict’s ship was rejecting him. During acclimation, the drills had told us that was impossible. They said if you made it twenty-eight days inside your ship, she was yours forever.

They lied.

All I could do was shrug. What did Addict want me to do? Ram his ship with mine and kill us both? He was doomed, I was doomed. There was no escape.

During the mission briefing, Tsuros had warned the squadron not to attempt to fly out of the null-space bubble. He claimed that hitting the edge of the field was like flying into a black hole. A ship that hit the border would be ripped apart by the interaction between null-space and real space. Because we were inside an envelope of time compression, it would take a subjectively infinite amount of time for a ship that hit the border to disintegrate.

I can remember Tsuros’ exact words:

“Sub-atomic pieces of you will be materializing along the flight path for billions of years. If you’re lucky and go in headfirst, you might only be conscious for a hundred million years of it.”

This might have been another lie, a fable to keep us from trying to escape. But I believed this one. There was a sacrosanct awe in the way Tsuros described the billion-year breakup. I think he recognized a suffering beyond anything he could personally inflict. He had to respect that. Addict painted more letters against his canopy with the point of his tongue.

HELP OR BOOM

I understood. Addict was threatening to deploy the bomb, here and now. I looked to the other pilots. Corrupt waved his hands, signing NO! Liar’s jaw flapped uselessly. Murderess wasn’t even watching. She stared emptily out her cockpit, a feverish cast to her skin. As usual, they were no help.

The green light in Addict’s cockpit faded, the realignment window nearly closed. His face was piggish and insipid, with his nose smashed against the canopy. I stared into his eyes, desperate pools of dying light.

“DO IT,” I signed back.

All was dark.

☼

I had two hundred hours to wonder what it would be like to be blown up by a baryon bomb. Would I have time to see a flash of light? Would the bomb even generate light, or would they be anti-photons? I didn’t know.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

I kept turning to Addict’s position, waiting for the doomsday flash. Tsuros hadn’t briefed us on what would happen if one of us was crazy enough to pull the trigger halfway to the target.

It would kill us all, surely. But what next? Maybe the ripple would expand throughout null-space, killing every other ship in transit. Maybe it would blow a hole in the universe and flood ours with matter built on an entirely different set of physical laws. Perhaps the pillars of time themselves would collapse, trapping us all in an instant of antimatter annihilation for eternity.

It was useless to wonder, but I had nothing else to do. In the end, it didn’t even matter. Whether through courage or cowardice, Addict never managed to detonate the bomb.

The eleventh alignment came at last, and Addict was dead. I stared at the distorted outline of his face, crushed against the canopy by his ship’s heaving innards. A gory halo of dark, jammy clots floated around his head in the compression fluid. How he’d suffered!

As I gazed at his wretched face, I felt certain he must have tried to deploy the bomb. Was he too injured to perform the firing sequence? Maybe there was a timer to keep us from blowing ourselves up. Maybe he didn’t even have a bomb. What if the Hezo only had enough material to make one? What if I was riding on top of it?

You’re the only one who matters.

For the next five alignments, Addict’s ship continued to bioluminesce as it drifted away from our formation. His light had taken on a sickly brown-yellow tone. On the sixth alignment, his ship failed to light. I couldn’t see it out there in the dark, but it was too soon to have drifted out of the bubble. I think he killed his ship as he decomposed. Poison unto the end. So then, there were four.

But not for long. Murderess’s condition continued to deteriorate. She had lost a great deal of weight, her face was skeletal. Her eyes were glazed over, and her skin was blotchy. She was dying.

Sometimes, she would be furious, beating against the canopy with her skinny fists. Sometimes, she would weep, covering her face with her hands to hide from us. Still, she managed to align her ship each time. No one wanted the billion-year death.

On the thirty-second alignment, Murderess didn’t move. Her face was frozen in a rictus of suffering, and I suspected she was dead. On the thirty-third alignment, there was no doubt. For seven more alignments, I watched her rot, then her ship died, too. Then there were three of us, Liar, Corrupt, and I.

I confess, it took me much longer than it should have to realize what had probably killed Murderess. Thirty-three alignments at two hundred hours per. For several alignments afterward, I searched Corrupt’s face, looking for some sign he knew. I saw only fear, he trembled all the time now. Like a rat.

Liar held better than Corrupt. During the alignments, he was alert and composed. Somehow, he’d managed to catch religion. Every alignment, he did a little ceremony where he held both palms together and nodded his head towards me. Then he would smile and draw a symbol on his canopy that had no meaning to me.

I felt uncomfortable when he did this. We were outside the bounds of the physical universe, yet I still couldn’t escape the feeling there were mijing standing right behind us. In the old days, we would have both been executed for participating in religious delusions.

My own fears ebbed and flowed like the tide. Every time I thought I’d truly resigned myself to death, I would find a fresh layer of hope had sprouted beneath. I’d spend days stomping it out. Man is such a curious onion.

I had endless time for such idiot musings. I plumbed every crevice of my memory. I thought of Pirate and his sculptures. I thought of Tsuros and his crushing fingers. I remembered my capture on Keilu Five, the stunning feelings of loss and abandonment.

I dwelt on Murderess and her terrible fate. For several alignments after she died, I suffered intrusive thoughts. I had a sharp, insane desire to trigger the bomb and cleanse myself of what I’d seen. But they faded, like everything else.

The lights of the forty-fourth and final alignment dimmed. I drifted in the space womb, waiting to fly my impossible mission. Ready be reborn in fire, extinguished in an apocalyptic explosion.

I confess, I was eager.