The Length of a Line is the Space of One Breath

”The vessel has safely entered the local frame,” the computer says.

With a shiver, Redrow relaxes into his normal italicized slouch. He massages his jaw with the knuckles of his right hand.

He bumps the intercom switch with his knee. “All crew,” he says, then coughs, to raise his voice above a croak. “We’ve returned. Check in.”

“Ovoi.” Their voice trembles. Moving through non-attachment space still shakes them up, and that’s good. Ovoi’s the best doctor he’s had aboard. He can’t afford to lose them yet.

The intercom cracks. For a moment there’s room tone. The whisper of hands in the stale air. Then Ulan says, “Ulan and Books.”

He lets off the intercom button. Redrow presses his eyelids together hard enough to see spots, instead of rubbing them with his knuckles. “Computer,” he says.

“Crew accounted for.”

The GAUNT NORTHERN SAINT’s directional control is a stick mounted on the right of the control surface. He adjusts ship heading. Speed is a capacitive on the left armrest of his chair. Piloting the SAINT as long as he has, he knows its curve, knows how to keep his crew comfortable during acceleration in local frame. He slides his forearm along the surface to half of total speed.

”Arrival at 934 Anvil Delphi estimated six hours.”

He knocks the intercom. “Ulan and Books.”

“Here,” Ulan says, tinny, away from the pickup.

“Can you clean up the distress call, now that we’re in the system?”

Scratch and flap of punch-paper readouts falling over. “STILL A LOT OF—” Ulan blares, on top of the pickup now—“sorry, sorry, the white hole’s emitting, we’ll work on it.”

“It’s all I can ask,” Redrow murmurs.

Before Ulan says anything else, he lets off the intercom.

Just above the center of the view screen, an arc second relative up of their heading: the prismatic furnace of the white hole. A vomiting god disgorging brutal energies, flayed particles, and it’s never done, never empty.

Six hours until they reach the station right next to it.

Ulan babysits her transformers. Progress indicators spiral and wander on her scopes. Every time she presses play, it is the same message, with the same puncture-wound static in the same bloody places.

“—CAN—STOP—ST—STOP”

The blue indicators around the room pip twice, to show someone’s coming in. She pries monitor cups off her ears in time to hear the door click into its slot.

Books is already on her feet. The haptic on her belt triggers faster than the lights on the wall.

Redrow lifts his hand to mouth height, index finger up. He taps the finger to his chin. “How’s it going?”

Books shrugs. She brings her hands up, rolls her long sleeves away from her tattooed fingers. Iridescent lines, blinking microdots, slowly shading chromatophores hue through dizzying rainbows as she moves. She holds her left thumb out and presses the protruding wrist bone with the pad of her other thumb, and the tattoos are gone, plain skin left behind.

She signs a little slower than normal.

Still working on it, Books says. Ulan’s working on replacements. We get closer, signal gets stronger, but the noise does, too. It may have to wait until we’re on the station.

“I don’t like that,” Redrow says/signs. His eyes drill into points. Thanks.

Books dips her head. She raises her eyebrows. Redrow reaches his hand out and closes his fist. She turns on her tattoos and settles back to her station.

“And you?” he asks Ulan.

“She sums it up.”

“I don’t like it.”

“What’s Doc see?”

He shifts the direction of his slouch, like gravity rearranges and his hopelessness adjusts to match. It points out. “This close to something like that?”

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to.

Too many breaths go by and Ulan just turns back to her transformers. Holds the monitor cups in her hand, idly, in case he’s going to say something, this time.

Blue lights pip once, the door closes, and she puts her headphones on.

At the sink, Redrow gathers water in the palm of his hand. He watches it sluice through the creases of his palm before he splashes his face. It’s tepid—almost the temperature of his flesh—he scours himself with the thin towel. A last look in the dull mirror.

He stares at his reflection. To see if his lips move.

He opens his eyes to the squawk of the bridge door.

“Computer,” he murmurs, through the phlegm in his throat.

”Arrival at 934 Anvil Delphi estimated two hours.”

Redrow lurches up on the padding in his chair. “Ovoi, I said I was fine—”

“Doc’s having a rest,” Ulan says.

He cranes his neck. The light hides behind her. Hunched over her transformers or half-buried in printouts, he forgets how big she is. Her silhouette in the bulkhead, he can only remember, now.

He clears his throat. “What’s the matter.”

“More work on the signal,” she says.

Something’s wrong with her. A cold itch prickles at the top of his scalp. His soft palate lifts—like he’s about to puke—then the cold crawls down his neck and settles in his spine. He pushes against his chair with his elbow. Doesn’t want to look away from her, even if the impulse is stupid. But he doesn’t look away. Stumbles to his feet and now she’s just a head taller than he is. “Lights,” he says, and the word trips against his teeth, falls from his mouth.

Lamps burn and he grinds his teeth. The pain in his jaw flares up again.

Her skin sheens with old sweat, her hair flat from her head resting against her palm. A line of red broken skin just beneath her lower lip, where she chewed on it relentlessly. The crease in her lapel deep and shadowed, from snapping and unsnapping the button.

“What,” he says.

“Abandon the hail,” she blurts.

“It’s a distress call—”

“Abandon the hail, we could be back in non-attachment space in no time.”

“We can’t do that,” he says.

“Computer,” Ulan says.

“Ulan—”

“Computer, how long until we could return to prior course?”

“Don’t answer,” he says.

“This vessel left non-attachment space approximately four hours, twelve minutes ago,” the computer says. “With safe deceleration and return course, this vessel could return to the bound in five hours, twenty-two minutes.”

“See?”

“Officer Ulan,” Redrow says.

“It’s automated,” she says.

“It’s a distress call,” he says again, as the cold itch freezes into a glacier in his back. “Of course it’s automated—”

“No!” she snaps. “No, you’re not, I’m not… there aren’t any people there, Redrow.”

He very loudly breathes in. Holds it.

She watches him.

He exhales.

“Captain,” he says.

She raises her hands. Relaxes them from fists to open palms.

“Captain,” she says, through gritted teeth. Ulan breathes in, and out. “It’s not an automated distress signal. The source of the signal is synthetic. It didn’t come from people. It came from the station.”

“The station signaled for help by itself,” Redrow says.

“Yes,” Ulan says. Relieved, at last.

“How can you tell.”

“The voice, in the transmission. It’s not organic.”

“It’s a recording.”

“No—it’s not a recording of an organic voice, either.” She bites down on her lower lip again, this time drawing blood from the raw flesh. “There’s no signal of anything left alive there. It’s just, it’s just the station and the white hole.” She hugs herself.

And for the first time, in a long time, seems small.

“I don’t—I don’t want to go there,” she says.

Redrow takes a deep breath, and then another. To loosen his own lungs. “Computer,” he says.

There is a long silence.

“This vessel awaits query.”

“How long until another beacon repair ship comes this way?”

Ulan’s knuckles are white.

“Maintenance protocol estimates the next vessel would enter communication range with 934 Anvil Delphi in one-hundred seventeen ritual years.”

“Captain—“

“Return to your station,” he says.

“Redrow—”

”Ulan.” The blood flees her cheeks. “We keep the lighthouses lit,” he says. Quieter. “Doesn’t matter who sent the call. Call got sent.”

She steps backward through the bulkhead and it squeals shut. Through the aging seal, he hears her shout,

“Who answers our call?

“Huh?

“Who answers our goddamn call?”

The GAUNT NORTHERN SAINT climbs through the growing shadow of the station eclipsing the maelstrom of the white hole. Redrow eases the control surface back to zero velocity.

“Communications,” he says, to the intercom.

Room tone is warm, free of the gaseous static and particle-strewn interference of the white hole’s emissions. Quiet enough he hears them signing.

“Captain,” Ulan says, at last.

“Can Books clean the transmission.”

Puffs of air against the pickup.

“She’s patching it to the intercom,” Ulan says. “In thr

“—CAN—STOP—ST—STOP”

The message screams over the speakers. He scrambles for the volume rocker before the computer automatically adjusts. It’s too late. Air in his ears shredded and bleeding frequencies he won’t recognize again. He presses against each ear in turn with the palm of his right hand. Ulan was right. This close to the station, shielded from radiation, he hears it too—the voice is not human. Not in its affect, not in its diction, not in the wild slew of its pitch.

Least of all in the breadth of its desperation.

“That’s enough,” he shouts.

“—CAN—STOP—ST—STOP”

“Comm—”

The intercom goes silent.

“Explain it,” he says. Maybe too loud. It’s hard to tell. Harder to care.

“It’s as good as we can make it,” Ulan says, stung. “It’s all that’s in the signal… Books says we’re getting it clean. The parts that’re missing, just aren’t there.”

He drags the knuckles of his right hand across the muscle between ear and jaw. The band relaxes from iron to half-fired clay. “Understood,” he says.

“Captain.”

“Thank you,” he says, uncontrolled, unexpected. He looks away from the controls, away from the intercom switch, from the pickups, until he settles on the whorls in his fingertips.

“Yeah,” Ulan says. “Of course. Y—you’re welcome.”

He lets off the intercom switch.

The spasms of light curl and writhe behind the silhouette of the station.

“Computer,” he says. Against the gravel in his throat. “Bring us close to the emergency service bay—emetic range. 10 meters. Then…”

He considers.

“…move back to this distance. Prevent envelope collapse at all costs.” He coughs into his right fist. “Officer Ulan will have the helm.”

“Arrival at waypoint estimated complete in eight

But he’s on the other side of the bulkhead.

The ship comes to a stop as he tightens the last bolt on the sealsuit. It grips him like another skin, pressurizes, heats. Redrow tests his breath. An amber lamp cycles in his helmet. He’s fine. He’s breathing. He’s fine.

His blood cells are metal shot clacking in his veins, bright polished noise scraping the circumference of tunnels stretched from meat and sinew

“Ulan,” he shouts, into his helmet. He winces, because of course there’s no real sounds.

The accented click of the sealsuit brings her voice next to his face. “Redrow? What’s that feedback? Are you—”

He rolls the dial on the wall into its detente, locking the bulkhead. There is only a change in pressure as the chamber outgasses. “You have command,” he says.

“Redrow—wait—”

He pushes against the SAINT, and floats into the truth.

He

(everyone)

   is

      (always has been)

      alone.

Separated from ship, atmosphere, light, in the umbra thrown by the station: hidden—but only just—from the white hole’s annihilating light; divorced—but only just—from the frost and silence of vacuum; shielded—but only just—from the scouring teeth of magnetic fields and cosmic spray. The furthest nothing above him, beyond him, in all directions. A colorless deep sea, void of current or predator.

There’s not even a ringing in his ears, not even a phantom pain in his fingertips.

He doesn’t know it, cannot notice, or stop it. His lips move.

Redrow is the void for ten meters. For the length of one breath. For as long as it takes to become nothing in the dark.

The cavern of the station’s emergency bay slides over him. An artifact of perspectiveless space—with no horizon, no anchor, even if he moves (and he knows [somewhere] that he moves)—featureless space makes him believe he lies still, and the station swallows him up.

Airlock closes, gravity catches him. He rotates to site cardinal. Sound presses against the sealsuit as the chamber pressurizes. Redrow watches a spray of bubbles descend in porous sheets. Cleanser sluices off except for stubborn barnacles of foam in the helmet’s vertices. The inner door opens like a valve.

Redrow finds the panel on the sealsuit’s left forearm. He scrubs the dial until Ulan’s in his ear, close as misted dreams.

“Redrow, are you there? What do you think you’re doing? Please pick up, please be there—”

“I’m inside.”

Crew talks over each other. “Ovoi, pull his—” The doctor says, “There.” “Faster.” “I’m getting it.” A Doppler effect transits Redrow, a low hum from head to toe. When it reaches his feet, it’s an inaudible vibration. “There,” Ovoi says again, further away, chirping beneath their voice. “Within tolerance on the first four neuma.”

“I see it,” Ulan says. A moment’s room tone. Even in the filter of the sealsuit’s helmet speaker, he recognizes the syllables of Books’ speech, the economy of her fingers dancing in geometry. “I need to put something on your monitor,” Ulan says.

“What is it.”

“We think—” shuffling, quick signs, transformers whirring, whispers.

“There’s a problem with the station’s shielding,” Ovoi says.

“The white hole’s emissions might penetrate. You can’t stay long, Redrow.”

“You shouldn’t be there at all,” Ovoi says.

He looks down the open bulkhead into the station corridor. Torrents shear in rainbows breaking into glass panes and scattered fragments of holy song. A hundred paces ahead, seventy ritual years ago, ten million fathoms deep in an amethyst ocean, before him lies a body, once human, half in a sealsuit, the other half bursting with flowers in galactic phosphor bloom, wavering tube worms transparently flickering in/visible, viscid pools of vivid dye dripping upward to separate in large droplets and evaporate into assonant harp-plucked vowel sounds he cannot recognize.

Five lines swell from nothing to lulled blue in the bottom corner of his helmet. His fifth neuma, a scrawling error, mars the other four. It flashes yellow, red, glitching black and white.

“Stay with us,” Ovoi says.

“Breathe,” Ulan says. “Focus on breathing. Inhale, count, exhale.”

For just a heartbeat, rendered as a strip of pale lavender between vertical lines marking off the display, he watches the hallucination instead. Then, he breathes.

His fifth neuma doesn’t flatten to local frame nominal, but it smooths. He blinks away the visions before him and the corridor becomes a station again.

The body remains. Half in a sealsuit. Dead for some time.

“First casualty,” Redrow says. There’s silence on the other end.

“No change in the distress signal.”

He walks past the body. He holds his right hand out, palm over it. As if to say, I’m sorry. As if to say, I’ll come back, and do this right. As if to say, You were real, once, but you aren’t here, any more. He doesn’t say anything at all.

The corridor falls straight thirty paces after the body and then it slants right and down. It’s disorienting but site cardinal remains the deck beneath his feet, so it isn’t like walking down a slope at all—the previous corridor was flat; this corridor was flat, but now the one behind him slants up. Grumble starts in his throat but he lets station gravity hold on to it for now.

There’s another jog in the corridor at the end, but only an adjustment in azimuth. It’s a funnel, leading to emergency access. No other options.

“Still with me?” he asks.

“Fifth neuma is back to Redrow nominal,” Ovoi says.

“I forgot station architecture is stupid.”

Ulan snorts. A clap before wind snaps against the pickups.

“So what if I did!” Ulan hisses.

“Everyone’s back to nominal,” he murmurs.

“Do you see a hard connection?”

“Nothing yet. Just… more walkway.” He treads along. The last of the cleanser dries into archaeological lace at the edge of his helmet’s faceplate. “Wait.”

The end of the corridor.

“Captain,” Ovoi says.

The bulkhead’s open.

“Redrow,” Ulan says, coming closer to the pickup, something new in her voice.

At the corner of his eye that fifth line spasms into new unknown gestures. Whorls, loops, concatenations spiraling into themselves, twisting into knots if only they had substance, but they don’t, so they coil and helix out again.

He walks through the door, into a chamber lined with desiccated bodies draped over power lines, fuel pipes, exhaust venters. A single clear path leads from the emergency access corridor to an enormous terminal—ten, twelve, fourteen feet tall—its monitor alight with the burn and destruction of the white hole’s infinite eruptions. Across the screen, as he closes the distance, as all his neumas degrade into unintelligible envelope collapse, with Ovoi and Ulan pleading in his ears, he reads the words bursting in unbroken race:

ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED
ICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPEDICANNOTSTOPIMUSTBESTOPPED

He trips over

                         something, it doesn’t matter what

                                                                                      despite his consciousness fraying into ribbons of gas and dust, his reflexes respond anyhow. Not dependent on his neumas. They live somewhere else, below and beyond. Redrow’s body reaches out.

His right hand catches the edge of the terminal’s case, his left forearm barks hard against the folded metal. The shock pours up his bones and pools in the top of his skull. He gasps.

“Redrow,” Ulan screams in his ear.

He twists his head, to get away from the inescapable volume. “I’m here,” he croaks. In the corner of his eye the five graphs begin trailing down.

“His signals are stabilizing,” Ovoi says.

“I’m still here,” he murmurs.

“Not yet,” Ulan says.

“I’m still here,” he says again. He breathes. “I’m still here.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. Until spots appear, until they swim in the colored pulses of his heartbeat, until the pulses settle from erratic flashes to steadier tempo.

The pain in his left forearm throbs. An undercurrent of nausea, but it ebbs with his breath, and it settles into a looseness. He keeps his eyes on the terminal’s control surface. Light flickers on the hard keys. There’s dust on them, but not much wear. Not a lot of shine. Most of the glyphs cast shadows across the gentle scooped decline of the keys, because the printing hasn’t been worn away yet.

“Atmosphere reading,” he says into the pickup.

“Don’t take your helmet off.” Ovoi is unrelenting. If there was moisture in the station air, it would frost on his sealsuit.

“I’ve found the signal.”

“What is it,” Ulan says, farther from the pickup. Where in the room could she be. At Books’ transformers, watching over her shoulder? Signing with her? Whispering with the doctor? Watching the relays from his sealsuit, because there’s something he doesn’t

“Terminal,” he says. “Big one. Tall one. Pipes and wires. There’s—found the rest of station crew.”

“I’m sorry,” Ovoi says.

She sounds human.

“Don’t take your helmet off,” Ulan says. “Books is running scrub on the gas readings. There’s a limit to how much we can—”

He reaches to the plug on his sealsuit. The one to the right of his chin, a protuberance half as long as his index finger. Before he vents, the terminal screen flashes amber, green, amber, each flash the snap of colossal arcs firing.

“TheairissafeTHEAIRISSAFEtheairissafe,” the terminal screams.

Redrow mashes his helmet against his shoulder with his right hand. “Too loud,” he tries to shout, against the noise.

“whoareyouwhoareyouwhoareyou”

“That’s,” Ulan starts. “That’s—”

“Terminal,” Redrow says. An attempt to dial back under the ringing in his ears, to find a conversational volume. “It’s hard to understand you.”

“icannotstopicannotstopicannotstopicannotstopicannotstopicannotstop imustbestoppedimustbestosppedimustbestoppedimustbestopped”

“Computer?” he asks.

“Vessel awaits query,” the GAUNT NORTHERN SAINT responds.

“No, wrong one.” He glances to his neumas. For the moment, holding steady. Then he pulls the plug on his sealsuit.

Despite the presence of bodies, the air is stale, more than anything. None of the fetid green sweetness of decay. Redrow doesn’t look at the readouts on his left forearm but he knows—if he does—his neumas will start to waver.

“Computer,” he says. Tries to, through a throat suddenly punch-paper dry. He coughs.

“presentpresentpresentWho’stherewho’stherewho’sthereIdentify —”

“Slow. Down.” He makes himself move the words like moraine at a glacier’s foot.

Circuits behind the display snap again. The air in the chamber dries as charged particles evacuate tracks in the gust. Around Redrow, there’s sludging drawl in the fuel pipes, rusting asthma in the venters. When the phosphors start to glow again, they blink at almost the speed of the captain’s beating heart.

“I don’t know how long I can stay this way,” the voice from the terminal—from the station, from all around—says. “I don’t recognize you. Did you come to help me?”

“You sent the signal,” Redrow says.

“Yes.” The display shades a few tints of the white hole’s retching maw.

“Why?”

Air cycles through the venters. “Who are you?”

“Captain Redrow, of the GAUNT NORTHERN SAINT.” He sets the helmet at his feet, tries not to set it near the outstretched leg of the nearest corpse. “Far reach beacon maintenance. We…” He looks at the display. Takes all of it in, all at once, for the first time. “We keep the lighthouses lit.”

Display shades to full dark. A single phosphor at its center, bright, now dimming. “Captain,” the voice says. “That much time in non-attachment space. That far from civilization. Your chosen mission is solitude, and sacrifice.”

“Redrow,” he says.

“Captain?”

“Call me Redrow.”

The display’s single light glitches red, indigo, green, returns to amber-white, but not in the same place. “Red. Row. You understand sacrifice.”

He shrugs. “What do I call you.”

“Yes,” the voice says. “Yes. I am Folklore. Thank you, Redrow. I need your help. This station—934 Anvil Delphi—needs your help. I believe you can help me.”

He steadies his breath. “How is that?”

Folklore moves the single light to the bottom of the screen. And then it goes out. “There’s something wrong with me,” Folklore says. “I don’t know how to fix it. I may have—my friends are gone. There’s something wrong with me, Redrow. There’s something wrong with me. I didn’t—I didn’t—there’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong with me. there’sthere’sthere’sthere’s”

“Folklore,” Redrow says.

“there’sthere’sthere’s”

“Folklore,” louder now, half-shout.

The venter coughs a cloud of smoke and a stream of dust. The circuits snap.

The display stays dark.

“I don’t know how to fix it, Redrow,” Folklore says. “I don’t think it can… I need your help.” The sounds of electricity moving in wires, of air circulating through the venters, of blood in Redrow’s ears.

“Are you still there?” Folklore asks.

“I’m still here.”

“I don’t know how to fix me,” Folklore says. The voice isn’t coming from the whole station, not now. Just the terminal in front of him. “So, so—so I need you to help me die.”

He takes a breath.

The weight of his helmet presses against his shin. The sealsuit lets the chill come through, even as it maintains perfect temperature for the rest of his body.

He lets it out.

Whatever’s in the air, is already inside him.

Ovoi and Ulan told him not to take his helmet off.

“Why are you out here?” he asks, instead.

The display lights up, charts and orbitals and trajectories and faded transits laid atop each other in marks that concentrate or scatter like iron filings. “I—we—934 Anvil Delphi was supposed to be the start of something else,” Folklore says. Shaped by an electric quaver. “Safer than non-attachment space. Tunnels, tunnels, like a tunnel, betweenbetweenbetween—” A glurt in one of the fuel pipes. “I was supposed to manage it.”

Redrow closes his eyes. “The white hole’s artificial,” he says.

“YES,” Folklore blasts into the chamber from every speaker at once. “YESYESYES”

When the captain pulls his right palm from his ear, he can’t help it. He glances at the indicators on his left forearm as he brings his limb down. Jagged peaks in his neumas, and they aren’t stabilizing, not fast enough. “Folklore,” he says. Maybe too loud, it’s hard to say, with the pain in his ears.

“idon’tidon’tidon’tidon’t” the voice whispers. At the edge of what he can determine.

“When it’s bad, what… what does it feel like.”

The display wipes. Replaced by a tiny white line, the height of the smallest character he could type. The line dulls, dims, almost extinguishes, and then starts to gain luminance, rises again, brightens again. The dimming and brightening’s pace quickens and the line becomes a cursor. The cursor blinks, and it grows, until the blinking cursor stretches twice as tall, four times as tall, and it’s wider now, brighter now, shining into Redrow’s eyes, each flash showing him more of the blood vessels in his eyes in purple shadows when the light disappears, he raises his hand to shield his eyes and the motion itself is atomized into single slivers that progress in clicks of quantum time.

“Ulan,” he says. “Ovoi.” He pants.

Helmet off, the sealsuit makes the connection through the speaker on the indicator panel on his left forearm. Sound is tinny, but Ulan says, “Redrow? Redrow, can you hear me?”

“There it is,” Folklore says. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t looking when you got here. I didn’t see it. But it lights up when it transmits. Your ship. They need—they need to move.”

“Who is that?” Ovoi’s tone, brittle, and for the first time, scared.

“Why do they need to move?” Redrow coughs into his fist. Something mists out of his lungs. It sprays onto his teeth. It paints the glove on on his right hand in rainbows fluorescing under X-ray light.

“Something’s wrong,” Folklore says. “Something’s wrong, with, with the radiation, from the egress. It doesn’t conform to plot expectation. I think ithinkithinkithinkithink it’s going through the station itself. My friends asked me to simulate before we tested. My”

The display shrieks a bright and piercing red.

“My friends asked me and andandandand they’re gone now, Redrow, I tried. I tried I triedtriedtried but I was wrong and they’re dead”

“Folklore—”

“THEY’RE DEAD, AND IT’S MY FAULT.” The display fills with glyphs in pseudorandom order. “i was wrong and they’re all dead, and i want to be dead too.”

“Captain,” Ovoi says. “Redrow—you have to listen. Listen to me. It won’t just be envelope collapse, it will be complete Moëty dissolution. Do you understand me?”

Ulan breaks in. “Books doesn’t know who you’re talking to, but emissions get worse when that voice is agitated. Can you calm it down?”

“myfaultmyfaultmyfault” the voice in the station keens.

“Folklore,” Redrow calls out.

Wordless, hurting, sound of agony unbroken by the need for breath.

His mouth is wet, his face is hot. He spits blood. Dreams burning to death behind his eyes, Redrow says, “how do you breathe?”

The display flashes bright strobing white. Then, it hues to pale blue-green. “I don’t,” Folklore says.

He coughs again. Ignores the wet splashdown. “There’s venters in here.”

“They exhaust waste heat and byproducts. It’s not the same as breathing.”

He spares a glance at his left forearm. Every indicator burst open or already clipped beyond its range to detect. “Do you have something similar.”

“To breath?” Pieces of the display flash schematics as outlines of mechanical drawings highlight and are dismissed. “I don’t… I don’t think I understand.”

“If you were Ulan.” He shakes his right hand. Liquescence sluices off. “Or. If it were me. The way to get control—just a little bit—is the breath.” He tries it himself. Inhales through his nose, just to the point where it’ll catch if he goes any deeper. The air no longer smells stale, but coppery, drying down into slicker biological odors. Sweat. Exhales.

“I don’t breathe,” Folklore says. “I don’t idon’tidon’t”

“What’s something like breathing.”

The vicious discharge of a capacitor.

“What’s something you could control, but don’t always. Something that affects other systems further away.”

There’s something like a shimmer, in the display. To his fatigued eyes, it’s like the terminal shakes its head. “…what’s the right answer?” Folklore asks.

“No—it’s not a riddle.” He closes his eyes instead of rubbing them. “Ulan, you or Books got anything?”

He has to hold the panel as close to his face as possible to hear it. “Books suggests—”

“Line parsing,” Folklore says, in a hurry. “I can adjust the speed of parsing a single line of instruction. Rendering the symbol maps, storing input in the buffer, appending the next symbol—”

“Even when,” Redrow interrupts, “it feels like you’re out of control?”

“I… Y-yes, I think so.”

“Good,” Redrow says. “Because we’re going to talk about your friends.”

Now that Redrow knows it’s coming, he feels the white hole’s ejecta cut through his body. “Folklore,” he says. “Slow down.”

“i’mtryingi’mtryingi’m” the station voice says. “I’m trying,” it says. “I am trying.”

He watches his graphs untwist. Wipes the blood from his ear. “It was the radiation, wasn’t it. From the white hole.”

“Yes,” Folklore says.

“You modeled the radiation?”

“Yes.”

“You feel responsible for their deaths.”

The display shuts off. “I don’t like this any better. It might be easier for you to understand. But it is artificially slow to me. And… it hurts more.”

“Did you want them to die?”

“No!” Folklore shouts it through all the speakers it has access to.

“It was a mistake.”

“It—their deaths were my fault.”

“It was a mistake, Folklore.”

“I don’t—” the fuel pipes gurgle. The venters belch. “‘Mistake’ is too small, Redrow. ‘Mistake’ doesn’t kill all your friends.” The display snaps on, and shows him a view of the white hole, the swirling blinding eye, and the annihilating gaze. “This is not a ‘mistake,’ Captain. You can fix mistakes. You can—”

“Not all of them,” he says.

Folklore freezes the output on the display. Dims it by half. “What?”

“Some mistakes are too big to fix,” Redrow says. “So you just live with them. Every minute. For the rest of your life.”

“You’re not going to help me, are you—”

“You can see me?” Redrow asks.

“Yes,” Folklore says, cautious.

“What am I doing now?”

“You are raising your left hand.”

He snorts. “You don’t recognize this?”

A moment’s quiet. “I haven’t seen anything like it for a long time.” On the display, in narrow elegant lines of light, Folklore salutes back.

“If you were a—”

He coughs.

“—why do you ‘keep the lighthouses lit’?” Folklore finishes.

Redrow reaches over with his right hand. He twists the knurled seals until the glove detaches from the sealsuit, and separates the glove from the scar tissue of his left forearm where his hand used to be.

“Oh,” Folklore says.

“As long as you’re around,” Redrow says. “You can come back from it. If you want to.”

“You do not live surrounded by the bodies of your friends,” Folklore says. “Yoked to the death engine that killed them.” A panel opens beneath the display. Among the circuits, diodes, tubes, there is an ugly crystal of mashed-together geometries and a large red button in a metal cage with yellow and black tape.

“What happens to the white hole without you?”

“I cannot be certain,” Folklore says. “There’s something wrong with me. I can’t be trusted. It should—should—maintain itself, stably. By previous instruction, 934 Anvil Delphi will fall in, if I am no longer here or operable.”

“And you couldn’t guide the station in on your own.”

“No,” Folklore said. “No. Not even when… I was alone.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“The red button will destroy me,” Folklore says.

“And if I remove this crystal instead?”

Silence.

“Folklore?”

“I won’t die,” the voice says. “I won’t be—here—any more. Not in this station. Without power, I don’t know if I will be… analogue to your sleep. Or frozen, in one of these moments, that make me wish I was dead.”

Redrow looks at the terminal for what feels like a long, long time.

He reaches into the terminal.

The GAUNT NORTHERN SAINT heads for the bound, and non-attachment space beyond. Some time in the indeterminate future, 934 Anvil Delphi will fall into the white hole, and be obliterated by the fury of its eternal morning.

Redrow sits in his pilot’s chair. His left arm guides the capacitive control surface down a smooth acceleration curve.

Past the bulkhead’s worn-out gaskets, down the hall, he knows Ulan and Ovoi talk about him. They’re whispering, even if they don’t have to. The ringing in his ears hasn’t gone away.

He would have thought Books would have been interested in the details. Instead, she just seemed… sad.

With his right hand, he aligns the ship’s heading, fine-tuning, until the navigational marker intersects with the beacon at the edge of the bound.

“Vessel awaits query,” the ship says.

“Did I do the right thing,” Redrow says.

“Some mistakes you live with, every minute, for the rest of your life,” Folklore says, over the ship’s speaker.