stroll to the end of the street. The impossible just became possible.
That’s what the Fold lets us do.
Thing is, impossible always comes with a price.
Dad would tell us horror stories about it. The storms that spring up out of nowhere, closing off whole sections of space. The early exploration vessels that just disappeared. That breath-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling of never being alone.
Turns out the effect of Fold travel on sentient minds grows worse the older you get. They don’t recommend it for anyone over twenty-five without being frozen first. I get seven years in the Legion, and after that, I’ll be flying a desk the rest of my life.
But right now, it’s a little over an hour ago and I’m flying my Phantom. Crossing the seas between stars in minutes. Watching those suns blur and the space between them ripple and distance become meaningless. But still, I’m starting to feel it. That breath on the back of my neck. The voices, just out of earshot.
I’ve been in here long enough.
The Draft is tomorrow.
I should be getting my zees.
Maker, what am I even doing out here?
I’m prepping a course back to Aurora when the message appears on my viewscreen. Repeating. Automated.
SOS
My stomach drops, watching those three letters flash on my display. The Aurora Legion’s charter says all ships are duty-bound to investigate a distress call, but my sweep detects a FoldStorm near the SOS’s origin that’s about four million klicks wide.
And then my computer translates the distress call’s ident code.
Ident: Terran vessel, ark class.
Designation: Hadfield.
“Can’t be …”
Everyone knows about the Hadfield disaster. Back in Earth’s early days of expansion, the whole ship disappeared in the Fold. The tragedy ended the age of corporate space exploration. Nearly ten thousand colonists died.
And that’s when my computer flashed a message on my display.
Alert: Biosign detected. Single survivor.
Repeat: Single survivor.
“Maker’s breath … ,” I whisper.
•••••
“Maker’s breath!” I shout.
Another arc of quantum lightning rips the Hadfield’s hull, just a few meters shy of my head. There’s no atmo and my ears are full of liquid anyway, so I can’t hear the metal vaporizing. But my gut flips, and the water filling my helmet suddenly tastes like salt. It’s covering my mouth now—only my right eye and nose are still dry.
It had taken me a while to find her. Trawling through the Hadfield’s lightless gut as the FoldStorm rushed ever closer, past thousands of cryopods filled with thousands of corpses. There was no sign of what killed them, or why a single girl among them had been left alive. But finally, there she was. Curled up in her pod, eyes closed as if she’d just drifted off. Sleeping Beauty.
She’s still sleeping now, as the tremors throw me into the wall hard enough to knock the wind out of me. The water in my helmet sloshes about, and I accidently inhale, choking and gasping. I’ve got maybe two minutes till I drown. And so I just drag the breather tube out of her throat, rip the IV lines out of her arms, watch her blood crystallize in the vacuum. The whole time, she doesn’t move. But she’s still frowning, as if she’s still lost somewhere in that bad dream.
Starting to know the feeling.
The blob water covers both my eyes now. Closing in on my nostrils from both sides. I squint through the blur, hold her close and kick against the bulkhead. We’re both weightless, but between the Hadfield’s tremors and the water near blinding me, it’s almost impossible to control our trajectory. We crash into a cluster of pods, full of corpses long dead.
I wonder how many of them she knew.
Bouncing off the far wall, my fingers scrabble for purchase. The belly of this ship is a twisted snarl, hundreds of chambers packed with pods. But I aced my zero grav orienteering exam. I know exactly where we need to go. Exactly how to get back to the Hadfield’s docking bay and my Phantom waiting inside it.
Except then the water closes over my nose.
And I can’t breathe anymore.
Which might sound bad, I know. …
Okay, it really is bad.
But not being able to breathe means I don’t need my oxygen supply anymore, either. And so I aim myself at the corridor leading away from cryo. Reaching to the back of my spacesuit, I find the right set of cables and rip them loose. And with a burst of escaping O2 acting like a tiny jet propulsion unit, we’re flying.
I’m holding the girl tight to my chest. Guiding us with my free