CHAPTER FOUR
Maung spent his time in the entertainment and exercise rooms to avoid running into Nang, but boredom threatened to split his mind into fragments. There was nothing green here. The walls were either sterile gray plates, scrubbed clean and polished by microbots, or galleries of white pipes, red pipes, blue conduits—all of it man made and perfect, the temperature constant. There was no balance. He knew they were still close to Earth but were about to begin the acceleration phase where, as soon as the window opened for a safe path to Karin 2, the ship would activate its main engines and all of them would be confined to their quarters until they reached target velocity. He wanted to taste his mother’s soup again; Maung remembered what it was like to hold his son and to smell the boy’s hair, a scent which reminded him of springtime.
Maung now doubted he could handle running from his family and a sense of solitude crushed his chest.
Instead of knocking, someone used the button outside his cube; the bell chimed. Maung shouted “come in” and the hatch slid up. When Nang entered, the sadness left because here was something that made sense, which was strange because during the war she was the enemy and there was a time he would have gladly slipped a knife across her throat. Nang was a symbol. She represented a part of his past that he hadn’t recalled in years, and wasn’t like the American crew; she had a round, gentle face and her skin reminded him of home—of dead friends and his wife.
“You fought all right,” she said. Nang grasped the wall strap farthest from him, but this was only a meter away; she smelled clean and new. “The other day when you ran into those two crewmen who knocked you out. I haven’t seen you since then.”
“I wanted to kill them.”
“Maybe you’re ready for Karin after all,” she said and then laughed. “I’m sorry I pried, Maung. Into your past.”
“It’s fine.”
“No it’s not. I was there the same as you and the war got ugly. My unit forced the Chinese out of Laos and across the mountains, through the villages like the one my father was from. I saw what the Chinese did to civilians. I guess when I look at you I see them and the Tatmawdaw, and maybe it’s not fair; maybe that’s not who you are. But it’s hard to forget what happened.”
Maung couldn’t remember much from the war. He tried, but instead of memories a swarm of guilt and sadness overtook him, because he suspected the truth but couldn’t picture it, as if trying to watch a movie through smoked glass.
“I don’t remember much,” he said. “but you have to know, Nang: I think I was guilty of doing things that would make you sick and perhaps it would have been better had I died. I just don’t remember.”
He thought she would leave. The expression on her face broke a barrier in his mind and Maung remembered something small: the horrified look of mothers and fathers when they watched as his drones and bots swept into their village and extracted DNA samples and organs from their children. As far as his superiors were concerned, the war was one of resources—mineral and human—and little went to waste. But instead of looking disgusted, Nang’s face softened.
“I figured you had done awful things. They used to prosecute people like you and the Chinese, Maung; war criminals.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “But when we were training I noticed scars under your hair, the ones you try to hide, and I think you’ve been punished already. I don’t hate you, OK?”
Maung looked away, embarrassed, but for some reason there was no fear. He’d told the truth about what he’d done, without revealing the scars’ real meaning, that the Chinese replaced a part of him he could never recover, and she’d assigned a meaning of her own. For now his secret was safe.
“I was not wounded. But yes, they operated on me and I think the Chinese removed parts of my brain—without making me a vegetable. This is why I am so slow, why I can’t remember.”
Nang nodded. She slammed her fist against the hatch button and waited for it to open. “I won’t ask again. I promise. You aren’t the only one with secrets, Maung; let’s agree to just leave them alone.”
Maung nodded and before she left Nang said, “I’ll come back for training tomorrow; you still have a lot to learn. Maybe to relearn.”
“Why are you helping me?” he asked. “Someone who might be a war criminal?”
Nang said, “Part of me doesn’t want to help you, the part that hopes you die on Karin. But I’m done acting like a soldier—a murderer—and if I can help you gain at least a fighting chance, I’ll feel like for the first time I tried to save a life instead of take one. Plus, you’re just like how I imagine my dad was, when he was young.”
Maung couldn’t breathe. Their training session had ended and Nang had tried to pull her kicks but on the last one her foot connected with his solar plexus, hard, so that it knocked the wind out. Finally he caught his breath and smiled.
“You did that on purpose—didn’t try to pull your kick.”
“You almost beat me,” she said.
Maung nodded. “That must really make you mad.”
Nang laughed and plucked a towel from one of the room’s wall loops, then used it to wipe the sweat from her face. Maung watched while floating in midair; he was grateful. Time spent in the training room made him forget Earth, and for an hour or two he could stop worrying about his mother and son, and stop guessing what the Old Man would want once he reached Karin.
“How did you get sent out here?” he asked.
Nang wrapped the towel around her neck. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we both arrived secretly, in shipping containers and I think I’ve figured out why the Old Man sent me here; I was running from the police and he sent me away until he could figure out what to do. To buy time. You’re going back for a second tour because you have debts; I get that. But you were in a box too. So if you went to the Old Man, why? Why not just sign up for guard duty directly?”
“First, that’s not why he sent you,” said Nang. She stretched, and the movement sent her into a slow spin, which to Maung seemed graceful. “I was in a similar spot. The debt I couldn’t repay was a debt to him and the Old Man wanted me in one of his brothels; I told him I’d been to Karin before and would prefer a posting there. He agreed.”
“What does that have to do with why he sent me?”
Nang laughed again. “You’re not being sent here just so he can figure out what to do; he already figured out what to do. The Old Man gets a finder’s fee and three quarters of your salary; the rest you can try to send home since there’s nothing to spend it on out there, but he’ll likely intercept that too. And all that time you’re risking your life. So sending us here was a no-brainer, Maung; easy money for the Old Man, impossible for us. They pay an arm and a leg for guards to serve at Karin because nobody will take the job.”
Maung thought for a few seconds. All he wanted was to reach out and grab her, to pull her in close and shove his nose into her hair, to smell the mountains again and be connected to home—to her. Maung perceived a kind of beauty in Nang that even his wife never had, and he must have been staring for a long time because she finally said, “Stop it, Maung.”
“What?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“Sorry, but I was just wondering about what you said; how long were you on Karin the first time you went?”
Nang finished her stretching. “I went there straight out of the army when the war ended. I did six months as a guard, which, I later found out, was a record for volunteers.” She gestured for him to follow her out the hatch and back into the corridor. “We have one more day before they light the main engines. Let’s train some more. We’ll do it in the main corridor so you can get more practice in tight spaces; there won’t be much room to maneuver in Karin.”
“I don’t hate you. At all.” Even Maung was surprised he said the words; they came from nowhere and he wondered if the semi-aware somehow activated itself—but it hadn’t. He went cold with embarrassment when she giggled and punched his arm, sending him against the bulkhead.
“You will when I kick your ass again.”
As soon as he was through the hatch, Nang landed a punch to his ribs but Maung managed to push down from the overhead pipes and stop himself from flying away. He grinned and readied a counterattack.
“My turn.”
By the time he climbed into bed, Maung’s muscles ached and he imagined one or two might have been torn; at least one of his ribs was bruised. The ship thrummed around him and its walls vibrated at a frequency that translated into a warning of impending doom, and with every second the vessel brought them thousands of meters closer to a frozen asteroid. Soon they’d be hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth and sun, at a place where he was sure the spirits of unrest waited. None of his ancestors died on Karin; how would they know the way if he needed help? Maung said a prayer, asking for them to join him on the trip and to show Nang’s people—especially her father—the path too, so neither were alone. He repeated it, over and over, until sleep fought its way in.
Eight hours until ignition. Maung didn’t know what to expect and he couldn’t concentrate on training, waving Nang quiet so he could watch the news reports from Earth; soon these would be hard to get. Nang had begun telling him more about what to expect, and the captain had laid out the trip, which from here on out required them to stay strapped in.
“It’s not that you can’t, in theory, get the news on Karin,” she continued, crammed into a corner of his living space, “it’s just that they control it and keep a lot from people, including the guards.”
“Who are they?” he asked.
“The chief guard, the guy who runs Karin.”
“What about the warden?”
Nang shrugged and stabbed at a bowl of food paste, not really eating it. “The warden never showed up while I was there. Not once. He or she is a Carson Corp rep on Earth who manages remotely unless there’s something really important to attend to. And the chief guard usually makes sure those kinds of things—if they happen and they’re bad—don’t get out. The higher-ups are such cowards they have an emergency ship stashed in a hidden dock in case there’s a prison revolt and they happen to be there for some inspection.”
“So how do I survive?” asked Maung.
“You survive,” Nang said, “by not being noticed.”
“I can do that.”
Nang laughed into her bowl and looked up at him. “Somehow I doubt it; by now they’ll already know that a Tatmaw is on his way, and most of these guys will be survivors of the war. Americans and their Asian allies.”
Four hours until ignition. Maung did his best to flatten himself against the corridor bulkhead while an engineering team pulled their way past, too busy to even notice he was there. They seemed concerned about something. Maung was shaking by the time he reached the doctor’s cube and he pressed the door chime. A moment later he was inside, grabbing a wall loop and terrified to the point he forgot what he came for.
“Is something wrong with the ship?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Maung told him about the engineering team and the doctor laughed. “That’s standard procedure. Before lighting the main engines these guys have to reinspect them one last time and it was a process that took at least an hour, even with the help of bots. They’re under pressure, that’s all.”
Maung nodded but didn’t say anything and the doctor squinted at him, then leaned forward against his sleeping restraints so Maung suddenly understood he’d woken him; it was too late to go back now, he decided.
“Sorry I woke you.”
“Maung,” the doctor said. “There is nothing to worry about. The ship is basically a massive cylinder that consists of three layers. In the outer layer we carry slush hydrogen in baffled tanks that surround us on almost all sides. Inside that is a thin layer. We fill that with a self-sealing material and dormant bots so that if small ruptures occur, bots are immediately activated to fill the break with a metallic patch. Bots are also dispatched outside to patch external damage, and these are all designed to work at super-high g-forces. Maung, a micrometeoroid struck us a few days ago; the system worked and everything is patched, and it’s such a routine procedure that you never even noticed.”
“Where are we?” asked Maung.
“In the inner core. We’re in a small capillary in the center of the ship, and our engines and fuel tanks fill up the entire rear. We’re completely safe—encased in layer upon layer of metal.”
Maung nodded and apologized again for waking him up, twisted himself through the hatch, and made sure to thank the doctor one last time before the door closed. He began to shake again. If they’d already been hit once, what was to stop something from hitting them again, something so large that the entire ship was destroyed, or an object just large enough to penetrate and vaporize his head? Maung turned back to the doctor’s hatch, but the do not disturb lamp blinked on.
One hour until ignition. All had been confined to quarters except the captain and his on-duty crew. Maung jerked the straps tight across his chest and waist, then watched the tiny holo in the middle of his cube where a woman in a Carson Corporation jumpsuit confidently described the safety features; Maung guessed that she had never been in space.
“One emergency vacuum suit is located in the storage space over your head, and consists of a reinforced, pressurized jumpsuit with integrated boots and gloves, a two-hour oxygen supply, and a semiflexible helmet unit. In case of depressurization, this compartment will open automatically. Place the jumpsuit on first . . .”
Maung screamed when a roar filled his ears. G-forces slammed him backward against his mattress, which hardened and shaped itself to support his body in foam—with a curved pad that cradled his head. It helped. But the pressure only increased and soon it took effort to inhale and Maung barely heard the automated voice announce that additional oxygen was being pumped into living quarters and work stations, and that crew members were to be wary of the increased fire danger. Maung closed his eyes. But he opened them right away because he was sure that the g-forces were liquefying them and he had to make sure they were fine and that his room wasn’t engulfed in flames. The urge for a cigarette made him want to shout.
The ship’s computer chimed onto his cubicle speakers, and Maung barely heard it over the engines. “Administering first dose of acceleration drugs.”
Before he could react, a needle jabbed Maung in the back of his neck and then retracted, so that now his neck burned as the drug soaked through his muscles. But the needle had come too close. After living with it for so many years, Maung could almost see exactly where his semi-aware resided; part of it stretched from his brain to his spine, and down. The injection had just missed it. In the future, he decided, he’d be ready to move out of the way and he was lucky that none of the ship’s automated med sensors had found it. Yet.
The drugs made him sleepy and he barely recalled the video that had explained what was happening. The solution consisted of elastomer building blocks, which strengthened his connective tissues, and blood thinners that activated above one g so his heart wouldn’t beat out of his chest under sustained acceleration. They also included microbots—tiny factories that scavenged spare amino acids to build temporary protein supports around vital organs—and Maung imagined he could feel them but figured this was impossible. He prayed to his ancestors that they wouldn’t damage the nonorganic connections to his other half, rendering him stupid for the rest of his life.
Maung’s vision blurred. He shut his eyes and tried to pray, but had trouble concentrating through the constant pressure until finally he drifted off.
When Maung was in Myanmar, even during the war, it had never occurred to him that one day he would be strapped into a miniscule cube room, hurtling through space toward a prison station that nobody wanted to see. He could barely lift his arm. Everything he needed to do—brush his teeth and eat, go to the bathroom—involved pushing himself slowly up from the pad, struggling against two gees to reach the other side of his quarters, and then functioning there for as long as it took. Days passed before he acclimated and sleep only came in increments, interrupted by his body’s realization that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen, forcing him awake to gasp for breath every twenty minutes.
Maung was inching his way along the bulkhead to the toilet when a deafening clang sounded behind him, followed by a whooshing noise and then silence. The air went cold. A panel overhead dropped down and the emergency suit unrolled between him and his bed while the ship’s computer made a calm announcement as if everything was normal.
“Malfunction. Pressure and oxygen levels falling, please don your emergency suit.”
Maung panicked. He grasped the suit and crawled back onto his acceleration pad, turning onto his back to begin sliding the legs on, one at a time while his muscles fought against gravity. There was a black spot on the opposite wall. Maung squinted. What he originally thought was a mark was actually a fist-sized hole in the steel bulkhead, an inch thick panel bowing out toward him, and when he looked at his cushion he recognized that his head rest was gone; another fist-sized hole had appeared in its place. Maung finished pulling the suit on, gently forced the helmet from its overhead slot, and then sealed it. He clipped on the oxygen unit. A few seconds later he could breathe and collapsed back onto his cushion, already exhausted, so tired that not even being terrified gave him energy.
Maung was grateful when the announcements stopped, but the next one almost made him scream with joy. “Engine cutoff imminent; prepare for zero g.” It repeated itself three more times and then counted down, sending Maung into yet another panic while he struggled with his straps. The engines cut off and the change to zero acceleration barely sent Maung against his restraints with a return to weightlessness. Everything had gone silent.
Maung’s hands refused to work while he tried to unbuckle, and he cursed before pounding on the wall in frustration.
“Get me out!” he screamed.
Maung calmed down when the survival suit’s radio cut in and linked to the ship’s communications network, where he heard the captain giving orders. Finally the buckle gave and Maung kicked off toward the hatch; he pounded on the panel and as soon as it opened he saw Nang in the corridor. Her face looked pale until she took Maung’s hand, their environment suits preventing him from feeling her skin.
“You’re alive!” she said. Her voice come over his helmet speakers.
Maung laughed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“We’ve been hit by a meteoroid. As soon as I got my suit on I heard the computer list the compromised compartments and yours was on it. The doctor thinks you’re injured or dead.”
Maung had forgotten the holes in his bulkheads. Now he felt dizzy, and had to fight the urge to throw up since it could be potentially dangerous in the suit. “Well then where is he?” he asked. “Where’s the doctor?”
Nang towed Maung from his cube and then led him down the corridor. “He’s treating the crew; they’re more important right now. The meteoroid sliced right through the main crew area, and almost destroyed the bridge.”
“Nang,” said Maung. He heard the fear in her voice and it unnerved him. “What else is wrong?”
“We’re losing water. Coolant for the fusion reactors, and at least half the engineering crew is dead, maybe all four of them. The captain will need our help.”
“But I heard the captain giving orders to the engineers.”
Nang nodded. “He’s sedated now because he has a head injury, and didn’t know what he was doing. The first officer is taking command.”
It took a few minutes to reach the front of the ship, and when they passed through the crew berths, droplets of floating blood adhered to Maung’s suit. All the starboard cube hatches were open. It looked like the meteoroid went through the exact center of the ship, down its axis on the starboard side, and punctured the crew compartments one by one before heading out the rear and into the engine spaces.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered.
Nang asked, “What? What don’t you understand?”
“How it missed me. I had just gotten up to use the toilet when it hit and the thing whizzed past me. It must have missed by millimeters.”
Nobody on the bridge spoke. It was impossible for Maung to recognize anyone in their suits because the crew wore real ones with mirrored visors, the kind of suits capable of repair work inside and outside the ship. Including Nang and Maung, there were only seven people in the bridge. Someone sobbed. The urge to access his semi-aware hit with a force that Maung barely controlled, and he thought of it as an addiction, one that he’d never be rid of as long as the thing was attached to him. But he couldn’t risk it. All they could do was wait for the first officer and hope that, in the meantime, the bots were doing their jobs.
Maung grasped that the first officer was barely conscious. After pulling himself into the bridge, the man tucked his left hand under his belt and his labored breathing echoed over Maung’s speakers because it was loud enough to trigger his mic. But when the first officer spoke, it was barely in a whisper.
“I need you guys to stay focused. The bots should have the damage to the main crew section repaired within the hour and main life support will be able to repressurize this section within two. That’s the good news.” He paused to catch his breath before continuing. “The bad news is that we have a waterline rupture in the reactor area. The bots can’t patch it. Without coolant we can’t run the main engines, which means we drift until rescued.”
“Or we drift forever,” someone muttered.
The officer used his feet to hook under a console and punched on the touch pad with his good hand. A schematic holo popped up. Maung recognized the rear of the ship and the engine compartments, and the computer traced a red line to show the meteoroid’s path.
The first officer pointed to a blinking red dot in the engine area. “The rupture is right here. It’s in a spot too small for any of us to reach, and because the reactor still needs cooling the system won’t allow us to deactivate pumps, which means water is shooting at high pressure; none of the bots can seal it. So somehow we have to get a manual patch on there so the microbots can do their job, in a space that the crew can’t access.” He shut the holo off. “I’m open to suggestions.”
“Which idiot designed that system?” someone asked.
Nang raised her hand. “Where are we? Can we decelerate and get help?”
“Jennifer?” the officer asked.
The person who had been working at the control station was the navigator, who stopped, and Maung thought that she was looking at Nang but he couldn’t be sure. “If we begin deceleration now, there is enough coolant to bring us to a stop. After that we can maneuver with gas thrusters.”
“But would we be close to anything?”
“Europa,” she said. “Jupiter was part of our navigational path, which included a leg to use its gravity to slingshot us and save fuel.”
Maung’s skin went cold. “That moon belongs to the Chinese. It’s their main base in the system. Other than what they have on Earth and in orbit.”
“That’s right.” Jennifer turned back to the panel and continued working. “But Beijing granted permission for our navigational route and asking them for help may be our only chance. That’s all I can give you guys right now, but I’ll try for a plan B.”
One of the crew members muttered, “Chinese. I bet they put the meteoroid in our path. I mean, does anyone really think the peace treaty with them and Burma means anything?” He laughed then, but nobody else did, and Maung knew why: The Chinese were nothing to laugh at.
“How do I get one of those electronic cigarettes?” Maung asked.