IGMS Issue 49 Read Free Page B

job. I squeeze the tension back down in my gut and stand.
    "Alright, go easy on the air," I call out. I pick my way between people's limbs, and force a smile into my voice. "What's the matter?"
    A fist brandishes something in my face - a blue sculpture, a waxy model of a Buddha cradling a child. Or an almost-Buddha. It's the rock formation Justin loves, that he saw six klicks from the colony. It's a perfect copy, near as I can tell. I take it and look down at Justin. His face is pinched, indignant, but he's still crouched on the floor.
    "You made this?" I try to make it sound like praise.
    Two of the group haul him up off the floor. "Out of the generator sealant," one says.
    "While we're gasping in here," the other adds.
    "They were scraps. We're not even low, there's plenty," Justin says, hunching his shoulders in. "It matched the blue of the rock."
    With a snarl, one of the mob buries his fist in Justin's stomach. They throw him back to the floor and lay in, kicking and yelling and screaming. I scramble at shoulders and arms, trying to pull them off or dig them aside but it's no use. I stand back, hold out my little thumb drive and suck in as much air as I can.
    "Stop or I will tase every one of you!" My voice fills the hall.
    They actually hesitate, and half-turn toward me.
    "Since when do you have a taser?"
    "For security." Seris' voice rings out firm, backing me up. "I need people I can depend on. Each of you, separate corners, right now. We don't have the air for this."
    There's a pause, a precipice. I swallow and force my hands steady, sure they're going to call my bluff. But it passes, and they skulk away to their corners. I sink down next to Justin, hoping it looks more like I'm concerned for him than that my legs have given out in relief.
    He's in bad shape, but he's breathing. We wheel him to the medibay on a food trolley, headlamps cutting through the dark. I prise the model from his broken fingers so we can set them. He must have grabbed it in the fight after I dropped it. The little figure crumbles in my hands.
    It takes twelve hours to get the power back.
    Anna finds me later, staring at my star charts. She stills my fingers; I hadn't realised they were tracing my constellations.
    "What's that?" She points to a blank spot I've ringed in red.
    When the sun sets in its blaze of purple, there's a hole in the sky above us where there are no stars. A place of emptiness, a ravenous darkness.
    "It's where Yllikos was meant to be, if he hadn't eaten his mother. She left the gap as a reminder."
    Anna gives me a chuckle. Anything to break the strain.
    I don't think that patch is anything so benign.
    I can't tell if it's moving; I need better telescopes than we have, and more time. Maybe it's fleeing our presence, carving a swathe of nothing out from us. Or it might swell up around us, eat everything down to the atoms and scatter them to the wind in a few billion years. When the colony marker for each sunset strikes, I can feel it yawning above, something inside me reaches back, and I close my eyes and count a Fibonacci sequence with my breaths until I can keep my face in check.
    Two days later, the tunnel walls above us collapse.
    It's a quake beyond all our measurements; it feels like the whole planet is convulsing in a death spasm. The impact pierces through to the top stasis layers, crushing the pod down so that it bulges at its equator and tears apart at the seams.
    We lose fifty people inside a heartbeat. There's no way to get to them safely. We seal off the top third of the pod and the outer layers near the equator, and hold a day-long memorial for the friends we've lost, and the ones we barely knew. I keep my Fibonacci mask on over the darkness, talking to each of the crew, weekly hour-long sessions about the loss and the dark and the fear, and the beauty above that will make it worthwhile.
    Seris sits straight-backed throughout her sessions, no talk of sculptures or canyons. She never flinches, those gold-green