The Loneliest Girl in the Universe(17)

I move from one job to the next, replacing air filters, cleaning solar panels and telescope lenses, lubricating joints in the boiler and the water recycling unit, then checking the pressure of the liquid oxygen tanks. I don’t find any major problems. The ship has been working for years without anything going wrong.

I ignore the voice in the back of my head that never leaves, telling me nothing has gone wrong yet. When it does, it will be up to me to notice it. NASA used to monitor the system data, which is regularly transmitted back to Earth, but now the war has started there’s no one analysing the data except me.

My final task is to remove static from the ship by cleaning up the charged particles of dust that cover each surface. The air filtration automatically picks up most of the dust, but there’s always places where it clings determinedly. If the dust built up, the static could cause a fire, so I have to check everywhere myself, just to be safe.

I wander around with a duster, getting into all the nooks and crevices of the floors and walls. When I reach the gene bank, I check that the panel on the door is green, which means that everything is fine with the terrible cryopreserved human spawn inside.

The room contains one thousand cryogenically frozen human embryos, eggs and sperm samples, taken from loads of different countries on Earth before the ship launched. It was supposed to be a secondary source of DNA, to guarantee genetic diversity on Earth II. Now that the astronauts are gone, the embryos will be the only way that we can establish a colony on Earth II. Without the samples, this whole journey would be pointless.

The embryos will stay in long-term cryogenic storage until the ship gets nearer to Earth II. Then I’ll have to set up an enormous artificial womb in the labs. It will incubate a few of the embryos until they are fully grown babies.

There was supposed to be a whole community of astronauts to adopt the children. Instead I’m going to be responsible for raising an entire generation, to make sure that there are people to work on Earth II and make it liveable. It has a hospitable atmosphere – oxygen, water, nitrogen … all of the essentials – but we’ll still need to build housing and set up agriculture. There’ll be a lot to do.

I could start off an embryo now and bring up the first baby, if I wanted to. Maybe I would have, if J hadn’t been sent to save me. Luckily, The Infinity will have joined up with The Eternity long before we need to start caring for children.

With any luck, J knows how to burp a baby. I’m not exactly qualified. I can barely even look after myself.

I’m running the duster along the edges of the floor in the corridor when I find it. It’s leaning against the inner edge of the doorframe of the gene bank, tucked neatly up by the wall. It’s so tiny that it isn’t a surprise I’ve missed it all these years.

It’s a shard from some kind of metallic container; a curved fragment of a larger cylinder, broken unevenly along a fracture line. I only notice it at all because the sharp edge catches the side of my thumb.

When my fingers touch the roughness of the engraving, I realize immediately what it must be. Slowly, I turn it over to see the letters:


vers, M.D.

Gasping, I drop it like I’ve been burnt.

Dr Silvers, M.D. It’s a fragment of the oxygen tank from my mother’s spacesuit.

I thought I’d found them all. I’d been so careful, all those years ago. I never wanted to see any reminder of my mother ever again. But apparently I missed this shard, lingering at the scene of the crime like evidence waiting to be found.

I can taste the sour tang of vomit in the back of my throat. I have to get rid of it. Now. Just knowing that it is on the ship, on my ship, makes me shudder.

I tuck it into my palm so I don’t have to look at it, feeling the metal leach the warmth from my skin, and walk as fast as I can to the airlock.

The seal hisses when I pull open the inner door of the pressurized airlock. I step into the chamber set into the hull of the spaceship. Through a porthole in the outer door, I can see straight out into space. If I opened that door now, I’d be dead in less than a minute as the vacuum pulled the air from my chest, taking my lungs along with it.

I don’t.

Instead I place the shard on the floor of the chamber, and return to the safety of my ship, closing the inner door. Looking through the window, the fragment seems harmless. It’s impossible to imagine the damage it caused.

I swallow, hard. I seal the airlock, and the system pumps to remove the air from the chamber.

In my mind, I watch the tank break, the way I have time and time again since it first happened.

I’d forgotten how cold it was against skin. I’d forgotten how shiny the steel looked when it was covered in blood.

The outer door of the airlock slides open in a silent, easy motion. The last remaining piece of my mother’s oxygen tank slips out into space. I catch a flash of light gleaming off its surface before it’s left behind in the wake of the ship.

Gone.





DAYS UNTIL THE ETERNITY ARRIVES:


314


From: The Eternity Sent: 30/11/2065

To: The Infinity Received: 17/04/2067

Attachment: L&N.zip [3 GB]

Good morning Romy,

I have some questions for you today, since I was so considerate as to answer yours. Even if yours were hypothetical and uninvited, it still counts. Promise.

Why do you like Loch & Ness so much? (I’ve attached the rest of the latest series, by the way. Enjoy!)