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  Holston couldn’t deal with any of those questions. He couldn’t understand what had happened around him, but he knew how to handle bloody noses. “Are you okay?”

  She waved off his attempts to help. “I’m fine. I went to a mixed boot camp. I’m used to these kind of things.”

  “Lemme see.”

  Liao pulled away from him. “I’m fine, really. I… I don’t want you to see me bleeding.”

  Holston could understand that. He nodded. “No worries, then. It looks like it’s stopping anyway.”

  “I hope so. We’ll go inspect the jump drive tomorrow morning, before dawn, but we could use some sleep. Here’s your, um, shirt.”

  She sounded worried, frightened even, and wouldn’t look at him. Holston stepped forward, taking the limp clothes and then slid his free hand into hers.

  “We’ll find out what’s going on, okay?” He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt.

  *****

  Holston got dressed and the two made their way back to the ship. They slept, fitfully and uneasily, and the moment they were both awake Liao called the Beijing’s senior staff together for a special meeting. The missing seconds were now obvious—the crew, the ship and everything they had brought with them were phasing in and out of reality. Holston silently watching the proceedings.

  But none of those who vanished had any memories of their time before. To them, it was as if no time had passed at all.

  Liao gave an exasperated sigh. “How could we have not noticed this before? If we were leaving our reality, every day or so for a few seconds, then surely the things we were interacting with would also leave. Say, if I were holding a spoon, would the spoon not fall to the ground when we disappeared?”

  Holston spoke for the first time. “Well, that time I was in your tent the lights winked out, but you were yawning and had your eyes closed. Maybe they didn’t wink out at all, but the whole ship, the tent, everything all vanished. It was cloudy that night so there would have been no stars, no moon.”

  “I didn’t even consider that. It’s possible. But still.” Liao turned to Rowe. “Why haven’t we been affecting our environment?”

  Rowe, distinctly unladylike, scratched her armpit. “Dunno. Well, I mean, the jump drive emits a faint radioactive signature on a non-harmful band. The Toralii were able to detect it from space. Maybe whatever the radiation is, long enough exposure causes the materials to be treated as part of our universe for the purposes of the phasing. It’s complicated and I can’t really explain it right now since, fucking hell, I don’t even really know, okay? It’s just a theory.”

  Saara interjected with some point in her deep, rumbling voice. She didn’t seem to agree.

  “It could be,” said Rowe. “The jump process could have affected the metal on a quantum state, causing the fluxes, but why would the jump drive be immune?”

  Saara spoke again.

  “I don’t know! I don’t fucking know! It doesn’t make any—”

  “Okay, okay. Rowe, calm down.” Liao held up her hands. “Nobody can solve anything by fighting amongst ourselves. Let’s just take a breath and work towards fixing this.”

  Rowe frowned. “Fix this? You mean force the ship to phase us back permanently so we can go home?”

  Holston caught a flicker of emotion across Liao’s face. He could see what she was thinking, clearer than if he was thinking the same thoughts himself. Holston had not left with them when they had phased out. Any plan that involved the Beijing returning to its own timeline would be without him.

  “We don’t know if that’s possible,” said Liao, “we don’t know much of anything.”

  “What would it take for the ship to return?” asked Holston, “Whatever is happening appears tied to your… ‘jump drive’. Is it still active?”

  Liao nodded. “The jump drive is self-powered. It’s always active, or at least, functional in a minimal-power state. To actually jump takes considerable energy.”

  “Energy that you can’t currently deliver with only one working reactor.”

  “That’s right,” said Liao.

  “But if you could deliver it, it would return you to your universe?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “It might,” Rowe interjected. “See, the jump drive works by essentially remapping spacial coordinates from one place to another. What if it’s possible that the coordinates were remapped to a different time instead? Space and time are intrinsically linked. It could be that part of the malfunction that brought us here was coordinates that were basically junk. Random, just garbage, but so aligned that they took us to another time instead of another place. All we’d have to do is power the drive, feed in the coordinates in reverse, and we’d appear where we left. Presumably that includes time-wise as well. Presumably.”

  Liao didn’t seem convinced. “But we’ve jumped the ship to hundreds of locations. There’s never been any instance where it’s pulled us back or affected time.”

  Holston studied Liao for a moment. Years of working as a sheriff told him something was up. She’d obviously enjoyed the picnic, but if the ship left it’d be leaving without him. Was her resistance to Rowe’s musings wishful thinking?

  Rowe tiled her head to one side. “Actually, there might very well have been. Do you remember during the battle of Kor’Vakkar, when we tried to jump the ship but the jump point was occupied? It could be that there’s been some kind of feedback that occurred when we got pulled back. An error that’s been festering all this time. Maybe we really did go, but we were thrown back from some point in the future.”

  “An interesting theory,” said Holston, “maybe things are more simple, though. I don’t know. The jump drive brought you here, didn’t it? Maybe it’s trying to take you back.”

  Liao regarded him, a curious but approving look painted on her face. “You speak of it like it’s alive. It’s not magic.”

  Holston smiled whimsically. “Sufficiently advanced technology often appears as magic. What I see as kind of sentience, the actions of a thinking mind, miss Rowe here would probably just understand as a simple system error.”

  “An interesting philosophical point,” Liao said.

  Rowe nodded. “Right. Anyway, it’s possible that powering the jump drive will return the ship to where we came from. It could also be that the jump drive’s active status is what’s causing the drifts back. If we give it more juice, it could anchor us there permanently. I reckon we should fire up the other reactors, see if we can make it happen.”

  Liao shook her head. “But it could also be the low power mode that’s keeping us anchored here in the first place. If we shut the jump drive down completely—and I mean completely—then that could also take us back to our normal time.”

  Rowe groaned. “Could be. No way to know, but we can’t just do nothing.”

  “The lost seconds are increasing,” said Liao, “and I don’t like the fact that we can’t control it. Rowe, can you work on boosting the jump drive’s power levels with whatever power we have left? Just a little, I just want to see if it makes the time-skips worse, or better.”

  “Better?” Rowe narrowed her eyes, and Holston could sense the suspicion in her tone. “What defines better? You mean home, right?”

  Holston could see that Liao hesitated, ever so slightly, at the question. He could tell she was deliberately not looking at him.

  “Of course, whatever gets us home.”

  Chapter VI

  The Ship’s Rusted Guts

  There was so much to see and do that Holston felt a vague sense of guilt that, between spending more time with the alien, seeing more of the world he’d always hoped to explore and any number of other activities he could be doing, he had chosen to follow Liao into the innards of her downed spaceship. Since the Beijing was speared into the ground at almost a perfect forty-five degree angle, walking along the metal corridors was a task performed with a harness attached to a series of cables attached via metal inserts to the walls. Liao and Rowe mano
euvred through this place with practised ease but Holston was a little slower. The hot corpse of the ship made the sweat pour down his body, the nanoweave clothes sticking to his skin.

  He did his best to keep up, though. He wanted to see this for himself.

  Navigating the ship’s internals was akin to worming his way through a maze of steel intestines. It groaned occasionally as the heat of the day caused the metal in the ship to expand and contract, a noise like a giant groaning in agony as the tiny Human parasites wiggled and writhed their way through its body. The heavy nails that were welded onto the bulkheads seemed like the bites of tapeworms on the walls of the ship.

  The Operations room was at the heart of the ship. With half the ship embedded in the ground, though, now it was almost at ground level.

  “Here we are,” Liao pushed the rusted door open to reveal a spacious room full of silent computers and dust. “Welcome to Operations. Or what’s left of it.”

  Holston cast a critical eye at the sloping, decaying body of the ship. It was rotting away, turning the same coffee brown that the entire landscape was. The ship was becoming part of his dead world. “I thought the ship’s only been here a year. Why’s the metal look so bad?”

  Rowe shrugged off her rope, resting up against one of the slanted consoles. “The atmosphere. Only the outer hull is protected against it and the airlock doesn’t work too well anymore. As we’ve opened and closed the airway to go in and out, the toxins are leaking in. They’re eating away at this ship from the inside… in a few decades, it’ll probably collapse in on itself.”

  Holston settled against one of the tilted chairs in the floor, holding his rope in one hand, watching as Liao did the same. “Okay, so, we’re here. What’s the plan?”

  Rowe jabbed a finger at the console. “Well, we have one partially active reactor. It’s enough to start giving power to the jump drive, just to see if it’ll stop the jumps or make them worse.”

  “I was actually looking for specifics.”

  Rowe laughed obnoxiously Liao shot her a dark look.

  “Seriously silo-man,” said Rowe, “I could explain it to you but we don’t have all day. In short I’ll give it a few megawatts, enough to bring it out of its sleep state, and see what it does.”

  Holston shuffled on his perch. “Fine, well, let’s do it then.”

  Rowe flicked the switch on the terminal and it flickered to life. “A’right, old boy, let’s see what you can give us.”

  “Boy?”

  Liao smiled to him. “Captains are married to the job. So the Beijing’s male.”

  “Cute.”

  A barely noticeable hum, right at the limit of his hearing, was the only reaction the ship gave.

  Rowe studied her dusty instrument panel. “Okay. Power’s been restored to Operations. We have control.”

  Liao nodded. “Good. Try increasing the power by one megawatt. Hold steady for one hour, then power it down. If there’s an increase in the time skips our computers should be able to track it.”

  Rowe rolled her shoulders. “Eh, maybe. Each skip is a few seconds now, so after a few days or whatever, we might be able to observe a statistical variance…”

  “I know you want to charge the drive as far as the reactor’ll allow, Rowe, but it’s not going to happen. We need to take things carefully. We don’t know if this will make the skips more or less common.”

  Rowe looked agitated. “Right, so, one megawatt. Done. Okay, the drive’s coming out of sleep mode now.”

  Nothing seemed to change, except a flashing orange light on Rowe’s console. “So. I guess we go and wait, now, huh?”

  Liao groaned, pushing herself up off the console, using the rope to bring herself to a standing position on the rusted metal deck. “Now we go and wait.”

  “Waiting I can do,” said Holston.

  Liao slowly climbed up towards the entranceway to the room, bracing herself against the doorway, extending her hand to him. He shifted himself up the slanted floor, using the rope to haul himself to the hatchway, taking her hand. Together the two lingered in the hatchway for a moment, hand in hand, exchanging a glance that, although initially brief, seemed to not want to be broken. He squeezed her hand tighter, until Rowe gave a polite cough from inside Operations.

  “How about you two go on ahead and I’ll just stay here, huh?”

  *****

  Liao lead the way, lowering herself down the slanted corridor, Holston following on the same rope. They worked in quiet, slope-walking from rusted corridor to rusted corridor.

  “So,” said Holston.

  “So?”

  He unhooked the rope from the pivot, moving to attach it to the next one. “I want to talk about what happened last night, Melissa.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much to tell. You know as much as I do.”

  “You know that answer isn’t anywhere near good enough.” Holston paused at the top of the passage, passing the rope down.

  Liao made her way up, threading the rope into her harness and walking on the rusted steel. “I don’t know. I think it is. We’re both single now, Holston. I’m in my thirties. I haven’t done living yet, you know. James is gone. I know that.”

  “I know what you mean. Seeing Allison’s grave...” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

  Liao began moving down the next corridor, and to his infinite relief she didn’t press him to continue. “Look,” she said, “I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m not saying I can explain what I’m feeling. All I can say is: I don’t know what to say. I know I can be somewhat… impulsive.”

  Impulsive was one way of putting it. It felt insane, to be kissing this strange woman he’d known for a measure of days, so soon after walking into the wasteland and dying. Had the fluid messed with his brain? Was he thinking straight?

  “You don’t say,” he said.

  “Hey, you’re being impulsive too, you know.”

  Holston put one foot in front of the other, clambering down the long, dark shaft. The only light was Liao’s torch. “I know. I can’t explain it, I feel like there’s a connection between us. Maybe it’s that fluid, perhaps it’s just… fate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His back hit the bulkhead and together the two of them lay at the end of the corridor. He turned to look at her. “I mean, look. Look at the sequence of events that would have taken place for you to have met me the way you did. First of all, the precise malfunction that your ship experienced seems highly improbable in the first place, let alone it bringing you here. Then you would have had to meet Allison before she died, then you would have to have also met me before I died.”

  Holston stopped, looking around him. “Wait, this is the port airlock. We came in through the starboard.”

  “I know.”

  “But the starboard side is closer.”

  She shifted her back across the bulkhead, sliding up beside him, resting her side against his. “I know. It’s just that we were so rudely interrupted last night.”

  Holston casually draped a hand across her shoulder, leaned in and kissed her hair. It had been recently shampooed, the scent clearer in the clearer air of the ship’s interior. “Well, now you mention it, the starboard side is pretty nice.”

  “My favourite.”

  He embraced the madness, leaning forward and pressing his lips to hers. His hands slid down around her body, drawing her against him, their harnesses clinking together as they slid close. Holston closed his eyes. He pressed her chest to his, their hearts pounding in their chests, beating against each other, against the cold, rusted metal of the dead ship as they kissed within its metal shell, their hands gripping each-other tightly.

  Then he was falling.

  *****

  Holston plummeted through the empty air and crashed onto the ground, air blown from his lungs. Groaning he rolled onto his back and stared up at the open sky, at the tiny metal ball floating in the heavens.

  Shit. He was exactly where the ship would rea
ppear, probably within a matter of seconds. What would happen then he had no idea but he could guess. Holston scrambled to his feet, winded but sheer terror forcing his body to move, forcing him to move. His feet dragged across the ground as he staggered, getting as far away as possible, everything in his body screaming to get clear of the ship when it returned.

  The seconds turned into minutes as the poisoned air, its toxicity somehow rebuked by the fluid, filled his lungs once again. He sat on the rise, staring at the floating silver ball suspended in the sky and he waited. The seconds turned into minutes as he awaited the ship’s eventual return. Liao would be back. They had only been gone a few seconds last time.

  It took him some time to realise that he was still clothed. The nanoweave clothes hadn’t disappeared when the rest of the Beijing’s crew had. He rubbed his thumb over the black sleeve, playing with the impossibly thin and smooth fabric. It was just as it was before, solid and real. Here.

  Yet the ship was not. None of their stuff was.

  She wasn’t.

  Chapter VII

  Decisions

  Evening

  Time slipped by and by, the hours passing one by one. The sun had once again retreated below the jagged teeth of the distant mountain range when the Beijing reappeared without a sound. Holston jumped to his feet, sprinting over towards the airlock just as Liao opened it from the inside.

  “-STON!? HO- oh thank God, there you are! I thought, I thought, I thought—”

  He leapt into her arms, hugging Liao so hard he thought he might crush her. They stayed that way, half in and half out of the airlock, holding each-other as though the mere strength of their grip could keep them from flying apart again. “I’m here.”

  She hugged him back. He knew what she was going through. The fear that he was gone forever. The fear that he’d rematerialised inside the ship, or simply vanished, never to be seen again.