Providence - Max Barry Page 0,38

human vessel had needed to repel at once in the history of the war. “How many huks incoming?”

“Two thousand,” Jackson said. “Brace, brace.”

There was a jolt. A noise rolled through the ship like thunder. He felt tremors through his legs. A succession of impacts, until everything was shaking. He lost his grip on the board and fell to the floor. His drill clattered to the ground and spun toward the wall.

“Breach,” Jackson said. “We have depressure.”

6

[Beanfield]

THE DARK

Something tugged at her. There was hair in her mouth. When she pulled it free, it went right back in. There was a breeze. A wind had sprung up, making things difficult. There was always something.

“We’re hit,” Jackson said in her ear. “Major damage across multiple decks, concentrated in decks A through C, aft. Weapons, Intel, Life, call in.”

She opened her mouth to respond. Then she noticed a hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before.

“I’m fine,” Gilly said. “No damage in Eng-13.”

“All good,” Anders said. “Weapons station clear.”

The hole was as big as her head. Its edges curled inward, reaching toward her like a metal flower. Its middle was dark and unknowable. She turned the other way. On the opposite wall, near the floor, a second hole. The edges of this one were smooth. She leaned forward in her harness until she could see into it and found herself staring through thirty feet of insulated armor and then a ladder shaft and then a corridor and her stomach lurched at the perspective and she turned away.

“Life,” Jackson said. “Call in.”

She looked at the first hole again. Her hair flapped into her face. Because that was where the air was going. Toward this hole. It slid past her ears into the dark flower and the heart of the flower wasn’t shadow, she realized. It was space. What she had at first taken for glints of reflected light, those were stars.

She stared. Something inside her turned. As a kid, she had often visited her grandparents’ farm outside Des Moines, and there she had lain on a short grassy hill and fell in love with the night sky. Years later, she had kissed a boy on a beach with his face ringed by stars. At Camp Zero, the sky was a relentless slab of cloud, but occasionally it cleared, allowing her to look up and see them waiting for her, her stars; they had been waiting her whole life and she only had to find a way to reach them. But now that she saw them unfiltered, she felt revolted. They weren’t beautiful. They were the lights of anglerfish, deep-sea monstrosities with glowing lures, calling the small and stupid toward jaws and needle teeth. There was only death out here, only void and fire, and the true beauty in the universe was what she had left behind. She had grown up in a warm, safe bubble of air and failed to realize how miraculous it was. The ship had protected her for a while, but now it had a hole, and was leaking.

Her ears popped. She opened her mouth but her voice was gone. Sound was tinny, as if transmitted from far away, on bad equipment. The ship was groaning. She couldn’t hear this, but she knew it was true. The air was leaving and the ship was groaning. I’m passing out, she thought. It was a bad thought but not an urgent one. She reached for her straps but her hands were tinny and far away, too. She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do. It was something. She had run drills. She had run disaster simulations for every possible scenario, even though, it was understood, especially by Life candidates, the chances of anything going wrong were effectively zero. There was, perhaps, a certain smugness you unavoidably developed in Life, after learning that a lot of the ship’s safety features existed primarily for psychological reassurance. The jettison pods, for instance. They could shoot you all the way home, if you ever needed to abandon ship, but there were no conceivable circumstances in which anyone would be better off outside the ship, and the real reason the jetpods existed was to make the crew feel better. This was the