Syn let her arms down. It wouldn’t be her. She wasn’t going to die. She’d listen to Blip and live, despite how much she hated to. She had no desire to be like the other fools on the ship—she didn’t want to be one of the other dead bodies she had discovered. She grinned and thought, sorry, Ship, I’m here to stay. You can try and get me to open up doors and kill myself, but handy Blip and I would always be there to thwart your plans. So keep on waiting. The rest of your plans can wait. I plan to live a long, old life.
Yet, Syn wasn’t sure how old she wanted to be. She was seventeen. Did she want to be alone for the next seventy to ninety years? When the ship had left Earth, the average person lived past 200. On the ship, the oldest person had been 120. There was something about space travel that limited the upper range. Would she want to live another 106 years all by her lonesome? She had Blip but…
The more she thought about it, the more tempting opening those doors and falling out into the airless space above the Disc became. She imagined it. She’d be the one survivor whose body they couldn’t process. If the ship were ever found, there she’d be, floating above the forest, above the great tree, like some watchful angel. Maybe the children who would find this place on some distant world would call her that. The Floating Angel.
“Syn?” Blip said.
Syn shook her head.
“Were you daydreaming?”
“No,” she lied.
Blip looked at her. Then he turned and went back to the control panel. “Besides, if you would give me just a few more minutes before you tried to kill yourself, you would have discovered—”
Suddenly, the elevator lurched forward. Syn floated back to the ground, and the sensation of gravity slowly increased. They were moving. Blip had done it. He had convinced the Jacob AI that they shouldn’t be stuck in the lift four kilometers above the ground. She thought, yay Blip! Although there was no way she was going to let him know how happy that made her.
She floated around. There was the pull to the floor due to the movement up, but they were still in low gravity, and she bobbed around easily. “Thanks,” was all she felt comfortable muttering.
“Want to know how I did it?” Blip said.
She glanced at him. She did. She was always fascinated how Blip worked with the other machines. But she didn’t want him to know that his stories were interesting. So she just gave a hrmpph and said, “How?”
Blip smiled. “I threatened it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You did what?”
Blip’s smile grew a bit more, “I threatened it!”
Syn smiled. Oh, the tiny robot is happy with himself. Big tough Blip has gotten tough with the elevator.
“How’d you threaten it?”
Blip chimed, “I told it that if it didn’t respond, we’d let Bob use it exclusively.” He winked at her, and she let loose a wild laugh.
“That’s mean.” Bob was one of the maintenance bots. A large puck-shaped thing, notorious for cleaning up messes and walking away dirtier than he had begun. He tended to drag the mess with him too. One of the other lions had killed an emu and dragged its corpse onto the south edge of the lake and then stalked off, obviously bored with its catch. Bob to the rescue. The mess was cleaned up, but Bob did not realize that part of the emu’s leg, the part shredded by the lion, was stuck to its back clamp, and he was dragging it wherever he went. A trail of blood and feathers. That was not the first time, either. Bob made more messes than he fixed. And the two could never talk to him about it. He was very focused on his tasks.
10
INTO THE NEEDLE
Obi nkyere abofra onyame
“No one shows a child the sky.”
“We’re here.” Blip moved up and stood in front of the doors. When he spoke next, his voice had grown quiet. Concerned. “I’m going to black out the lights. I want you to be cautious. I’m going first.”
“Blip, what are you scared about?” Syn asked but still picked up her spear and gripped it hard. She pushed toward him, now in full zero gravity.
Something had happened up here. Something big. Maybe space pirates! Syn thought. She knew there was no such thing and, if there were, Olorun was way too fast for anyone to intercept them. Besides, they were between the stars. A molecule in the sea—far away from anyone else. Nonetheless, something had happened. She risked Blip’s ire. “Space pirates?”
He sighed a great Blip sigh. “No.” Only one syllable this time. Definitely on edge.
“Fine,” she said and moved behind him. He dropped the lights, and they were plunged into complete darkness except for the amber glow of the control panel. Blip chirped something in its direction and that too went completely dark. Syn shivered—Blip was genuinely concerned.
The door to the elevator opened soundlessly, and they met an equally dark scene ahead. A few warning lights shone in different, scattered locations across the expanse, but they were small and red and didn’t provide any clarity of the actual scene.
“Blip?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. Without realizing it, and as much as it was possible in zero gravity, she had crouched into a fighting stance, ready to spring at whatever could be out there.
The lights were off, and they were entering a den where something perhaps waited. The entire ship had shaken in the wake of that explosion. The longer they stood there, the more she began to imagine that there was something dark and dangerous, with a predatory heart, on the other side of that blackness. Something waiting there for them. She couldn’t hear its beating heart, but she was sure could feel it. Feel its dark anger. Feel its hunger. She was sure it wanted them. Wanted her. Wanted to devour her.
Blip gave a brief hum. It was almost unheard. A thin red light, thin as a wire, moved across his back. He was scanning the area.
“Nothing there,” came his voice. Again, nearly a whisper.
Syn hated this—it was odd to feel frightened on the ship. The ship was hers.
The lion. The prowling pack of former house dogs. These were things they had expected or at least knew might be a problem. They had been given some warning.
“Can we turn on some lights?” Syn asked, keeping her voice as low as possible. She was avoiding another reprimand, and he wasn’t in the mood to ignore her.
Instead of answering, Blip shone a read spot beam from the center of his head, lighting up the area a few feet in front of them. They were in one of the access tunnels that led to the central hold and beyond that, the gate. There were still 200 meters of tunnel between them and the main gate room where the tunnel spilled out, joining with the others from the various towers across the Disc and several more dropping from the engine bay, electronics, and central computing hubs.
The access door to the bridge was directly above the gate. But beyond the gate? Syn had no idea. Neither she nor Blip had managed to open it. All of the scans and ship schematics simply showed nothing more than the access controls for the Bussard ramjet at the front of the ship. After months of consideration, she had assumed that the gate was impregnable because of the ramjet. The ramjet magnetically scooped up hydrogen to be used to power the engines. The amount of radiation near the ramscoop had to be incredible. Syn had been afraid she would light up like a candle if she were able to get there. So, she gave up trying. The ramscoop worked. The engines worked.
The ramscoop was gigantic. It was not the size of the Disc, but it was at least a fifth the size of the Disc, and the Disc was enormous.