“Let’s go,” Blip said as he floated out of the Jacob and down the tunnel. Syn floated behind, giving a small kick against the back wall. She trailed her spear next to her and readied herself.
Syn paused and thought, oh. Why hadn’t I connected the dots earlier? Space pirates might have been the preferable option. If the ramscoop was broken, this whole trip might come to a quick end. The scoop did more then pick up spare hydrogen—it also protected the ship from rocks and micro-meteorites. Perhaps that’s the source of the explosion.
They moved into the darkness. The air was still. Syn gripped her spear so tightly she thought she might squeeze straight through it, that it would crumble under her grip. She cringed and thought. Why? Why am I so scared? This wasn’t the first time she’d explored something unknown on Olorun.
This wasn’t even the scariest place in the ship. The body farms had to be the scariest. The thousands of corpses slowly turning into soil, the white skulls popping up from the ground like strange mushrooms. The body farms were bathed only in blue light until the planting began. It was always silent there. Always still.
She had zipped through these tunnels hundreds of times before. They would race these when they were bored, moving from the engine hold to the gate as fast as they could. Blip would take one tube and Syn would take the other. There was nothing here. The animals didn’t make their way up here and neither did the bots.
“What’s that smell?” Something sharp and pungent hung in the air, like fire. “Blip, something’s burning.”
“Give me a moment. I wasn’t focused on smells.” He paused and a moment later said, “That’s… That’s… No.” His speed increased, and he zipped through the tunnel. He could propel himself through the magnetic induction embedded in all of the ship’s surfaces.
Not Syn. She had to swim like a frantic fish. Or get to where she could push off of something and use that to increase her speed. “Blip wait! What is it?”
Blip then said something that was unbelievable. “Gunpowder.” Then he was out of the tunnel and into the main hold before the gate, a good fifty meters ahead of her.
Syn stood frozen. She knew what gunpowder was. In their constant visits to the theater, binging on film after film, they had gone through a western phase. She was particularly in love with the True Grit renditions. A lone young boy seeks to conquer the wild world around him. That theme resonated with Syn. In the third remake—the 2045 version with Caleel Wastonbi, there was a scene in which Wastonbi, reprising the classic role of Cogburn, decided that he wanted to send a message and loaded the mine under the hideout with gunpowder and set it afire. The land became a living hell. The final confrontation took place against that orange glow and the world itself had erupted. It was a twist that was not in the original two films, but it was beautiful. Syn knew the power of gunpowder. That was gunpowder: lighting the entire world on fire, turning the distraught wild west into an uncontrollable inferno. But gunpowder didn’t belong on starships. Syn was sure he had to have said something else. She had to have misheard him. There was no way that she was smelling gunpowder. And yet, as she thought of it, there was a smell of sulfur and fire, sharp and pungent. A tang that stung the inside of her nostrils.
Gunpowder.
Syn maneuvered to the floor, aimed, and pushed herself as hard as she could after the white little bot.
11
THE GATE
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
The tunnel opened into a cavernous room. In the vast steel room, floating aimlessly, Syn felt smaller than an ant. Though the ship was an unfathomable distance from Earth, Olorun still had bugs. The ship had quite a large array of insects. She hated most of them. So many of them were nuisances, but it had been decided by the Builders and explained to her in one of the introductory videos that certain insects were important to “the balance of the macro eco-system.” She was convinced the Builders were idiots.
The gate itself loomed before them. Not David and Goliath. This was David and Jupiter. The gate was over 100 meters high with a circumference of 314 meters. It was several meters thick and consisted of three different iris mechanisms—opening and closing upon the circular entry.
And something had dented it.
The gate’s irising blades were bubbled in its center. Something significant from the other side had pushed the blades in this direction.
“Whoa,” Syn said.
Blip wasn’t looking at the gate at all. Instead, he was carefully moving in a circle, scanning the edges of the gate room.
Blip finished a 360 turn and swiveled to point upwards. He searched through the dark corners below and above them. Syn didn’t need his sensors though. She could hear it. She could feel it. They were alone.
They were always alone.
“It’s fine, Blip,” Syn said as she pushed gently off of the metal floor and propelled herself up to the center of the gate.
“There’s no one here.” Blip circled one more time as if he needed to convince himself.
“Blip, who could be here?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, as he swung around, he zipped up toward her and stopped hard in the air. Syn felt a tinge of jealousy. She couldn’t do that maneuver. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. When Syn moved around in the zero gravity of the needle, she had grab something to slow her momentum. Not Blip. The little bot could stop hard. Syn shivered. It was creepy, as if the rules of physics didn’t apply to him.
“What caused this?” Syn held her hand above the oversized bubble in the gate. The large blister itself was localized. The entire gate hadn’t ballooned out. Just a small two or three-meter section in the center.
“An explosion.”
Syn glared at him and smacked him with the edge of her spear. He wobbled, straightened and looked back at her. “What was that for?” he asked.
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“An explosion caused this.” He moved closer to the center of the Gate. In her mind, Syn imagined themselves as Jack standing before the door to the Giant’s castle. So tiny as to almost be unseen. Yet, there they were. And judging by the dent, the giant on the other side was angry.
“You determined that before. I felt the explosion. What exploded? What went boom, Blip?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did a bot go boom? Did a bitty bot make a big boom?” Syn was having fun. It would annoy him. But he was the one with answers, and he wasn’t giving her any. She hated the way he parsed out info as if Syn had just woken from her crèche.
“There is nothing on the other side of this.”
“That can’t be.”
His voice firmed, and he repeated, “There’s nothing on the other side of this.”
Syn did the same. “There seems to be something on the other side. Big dent.” She pointed as if he couldn’t grasp what she was staring at. “Big dent. Big boom.”
“Syn, you are an annoying pest. Listen to me. There is nothing on the other side of the door. Something had to hit from outside. Maybe a meteorite.”
“Isn’t the ship supposed to protect against those? The ramscoop?”
“Well, obviously it did not.”
“Obviously what? You’re sure it’s a meteorite?” He was starting to make her angry.
“It had to be. What else could it be?” He spun and came to eye level with her. His words came out sharp and precise. “There. Is. Nothing. On. The. Other—”