Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(3)

She hangs weightless above the pod, anchored by her IV lines, still encased in freezing cryogel. The Hadfield trembles again and I’m glad I can’t actually hear what the FoldStorm is doing to the hull. A burst of jet-black lightning crashes through the wall beside me, melting the metal. The water leaking into my helmet is creeping closer to my mouth every second. I start scooping handfuls of goop off the girl’s face, slinging it across the chamber to spatter against yet more cryopods. Row upon row of them. Every one filled with this same freezing gel. Every one with a desiccated human corpse floating inside.

They’re all dead. Hundreds. Thousands.

Every single person on this ship is dead, except her.

The holographic display inside my helmet flashes as lightning liquefies another piece of hull. It’s a message from my Phantom’s onboard computer.

Warning: FoldStorm intensity increasing. Recommend immediate departure. Repeat: Recommend immediate departure.

Yeah, thanks for the advice.

I should leave this girl here. Nobody’d blame me. And the galaxy she’s going to wake up to? Maker, she’d probably thank me if I just left her for the storm. But I look around at those corpses in the other pods. All these people who punted out from Earth all those years ago, drifting off to sleep with the promise of a new horizon, never to wake up again. And I realize I can’t just leave her here to die.

This ship has enough ghosts already.

?????

My dad used to tell us ghost stories about the Fold.

We grew up on ’em, my sister and me. Dad would sit up late into the night and talk about the old days when humanity was taking its first baby steps away from Terra. Back when we first discovered that space between space, where the fabric of the universe wasn’t quite stitched the same. And because we Terrans are such an imaginative bunch, we named it after the single, magical thing it allowed us to do.

Fold.

So. Take a sheet of paper. Now, imagine it’s the whole Milky Way galaxy. It’s a lot to ask, but you can trust me. I mean, come on, look at these dimples.

Okay, now, imagine one corner of that paper is where you’re sitting. And the opposite corner is alllll the way over the other side of the galaxy. Even burning at the speed of light, it’d take you one hundred thousand years to trek it.

But what happens when you fold the paper in half? Those corners are touching now, right? One thousand centuries of travel just became a 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.