The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(3)

Reading the prophecies gave Lenson this same maddeningly unpin-downable sense of intellectual dissatisfaction on top of his boredom, so he did the only logical thing he could about it: He fell asleep, tablet in hand. This was an excellent plan, until suddenly the Agreed rocked violently, spilling Lenson from his bunk, and a roaring wind tore through his cabin, sucking the air from it for several seconds until the cabin door slammed shut.

Lenson lay on the floor, confused, gasping for breath, wondering what happened, and listening to several high-pitched whistling sounds in his cabin. His door had slammed shut but the seal was not perfect; likewise while the air vents in his room had sealed when air begun rushing through them in the wrong direction, there were tiny places where air snuck around the seal.

As a child who had lived on a spacecraft all his life, Lenson did not need to be told what those whistling sounds meant. He went to his door and pushed it completely shut, sealing it. That meant the only place his cabin was bleeding air was through the vents. The vent seals, unfortunately, were out of his reach, inside the walls of the ship.

His tablet pinged and Lenson answered it to find his mother on the other end. After the several seconds of weeping relief she had that her son was alive, she filled him in on what had happened.

“Motherfuckers shot at us,” she said, and it was the first time Lenson had ever heard his mother use that particular profanity. “They couldn’t catch up to us and we weren’t responding to their hails, so just before we entered the Flow they launched three missiles at us. Our defenses stopped them, but one detonated too close, and parts of the missile ruptured the hull near you. We’ve sealed off those areas, but we have a problem.”

“What is it?” Lenson asked.

“We’re in the Flow now,” Gonre said. “That means we have to be careful not to disturb the bubble of space-time around the ship. If we disturb it too much, and we rupture it, that could mean trouble for the whole ship.”

Lenson knew his mother was underselling the danger. The Flow was like a river that spaceships traveled between star systems, that could take the ships back and forth faster than if they traveled in normal space, where they could only go as fast as the speed of light. But while the Flow was like a river, it wasn’t a river—it was an extradimensional whatever-it-was that if you were ever exposed to it directly, you would just disappear. Ships traveling in the Flow had to make an energy bubble that trapped a bit of space-time with them so they could still exist inside the Flow, and if the bubble popped, so did everything inside it.

“So we just have to be careful on our way to you, and in fixing the ship,” Gonre said.

“Mom, I’m losing air,” Lenson said.

Lenson watched his mother do a very good job of not losing it. “How much?” she asked.

“Only a little now. I lost a lot at first, but then the door closed and I sealed it. But there’s still air going out of the vent.”

Gonre turned away her tablet for a moment to yell at someone on the bridge. Then she turned back to her son. “We’re going to get that fixed first,” she said, “and get some more air to you.”

“How long will that take?” Lenson asked.

“Not long,” Gonre promised. “Can you be brave until then?”

“Sure,” Lenson said.

But after two hours and the air growing noticeably thinner, Lenson stopped being brave and began to cry a little. After three hours he had a full-blown panic attack and it took everything Tans Ornill could do over the tablet connection to keep his son from hyperventilating away the dwindling supplies of his oxygen.

After four hours, and for the first time in his life, Lenson prayed to the Prophet Rachela.

After five hours, she came to visit.

Lenson looked up at the smiling visage of the Prophet, who had a serene, calm smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, keeping in the best traditions of religious iconography through the ages, in which the gods, goddesses and prophets could manage, at best, a disinterested upturning of the lips. Nevertheless Lenson was quieted and warmed by it.

“I’m scared,” Lenson admitted to the Prophet. She just smiled more at him, radiating comfort that was more reassuring than any words from her could be. It said to him, or so he believed (and in this particular moment, why should he doubt it?) that she came because he prayed to her, that she came just for him, and that her presence here was proof that he, Lenson Ornill, would survive, and not just survive, but was destined for great things.

It was there, lying quiet in his cabin, gazing up at the Prophet and blinking so very slowly, that Lenson Ornill dedicated his life to the Church of the Interdependency.

The Prophet smiled down at him some more, as if accepting his gift of himself to her church.

Just then the vents clattered as they opened up, flooding the cabin with air. Lenson Ornill, gulping sweet oxygen and in the throes of religious ecstasy, passed out.

“That sounds like textbook hypoxia to me,” Tans Ornill told his son in the ship’s small infirmary, later that evening. Tans had been the first to enter Lenson’s cabin, his immediate terror assuaged when he heard his son snoring. When Lenson woke up in the infirmary, he had immediately told his parents of his miraculous visitor. “You were short of oxygen and you’d been reading about the Prophet just before the attack. So it makes sense you might hallucinate her.”

Lenson looked up at his father and his mother, both hover ing over his infirmary cot, both so immensely relieved that their son was alive, and realized that they would never appreciate nor understand the experience of his visitation, and (rather maturely, he thought, at the time) decided to let them off the hook, nodded in apparent agreement with his father, and then let them both change the subject to that bastard Witt, upon whom they vowed certain revenge, and who would, Lenson learned much later, somehow find himself on the wrong side of an airlock roughly a year after the Agreed was attacked. The rumor was that Witt had once again slept with the wrong someone else’s spouse, but Lenson thought other factors might have been in play, which his parents may or may not have been involved with.