Rowan Whitney pressed her forehead against the window, looking across the dark expanse at the gigantic station she and her brother were about to enter. Too far away from any star, the entirety of the station was nothing but a drifting black form, endless against space's darkness. Not even the landing bay was lit. Liv Whitney, hands wrapped around the control sticks so hard veins popped on his hands, snapped his finger at her. "Unless you activate the high-beams, I will certainly crash into that thing. Mom won't be pleased."
"Mom won't be pleased," Rowan said under her breath, mimicking her older brother's voice. She flipped a switch at her console and star-hot beams punctured toward the station. They'd gotten close enough for the powerful lights to illuminate part of it. "It's big."
"Biggest one out here," Liv replied, tension disappearing from his shoulders as he eased their ship toward the landing bay, much like a yawning mouth. "It'd take us weeks to see everything this place has to offer. The living quarters alone are big enough to hold over sixteen thousand people comfortably." He toggled something, and their ship slowed down, bringing itself into the landing bay.
"Any idea where we should start?" Rowan asked. "'Find out what happened aboard the Itzel' isn't the most direct of orders. You asked Captain Greenwich for more information, right?"
"Of course I did!" Liv said angrily. "He said he doesn't know either! He got the orders from above him!"
"You'd think they'd want more than just the two of us looking around." Rowan braced herself for her brother's landing. "Looks like there's still power, but it just isn't being directed correctly," she said, taking information from the screen in front of her. A blue light indicated the absence of breathable air around the ship. "No atmosphere, at least inside the landing bay, which, I mean . . . duh."
Her brother ignored her and stood after locking the ship in place. "Magnets are engaged. Are we going to need weapons?" Rowan asked.
"If I could tell the future, I wouldn't be a DSI," her brother said back. "We're going to take the guns, because it's better to have them and not need them than-"
"Need them and not have them," Rowan finished for him. "Yeah, yeah . . ." She followed him into the hallway of their ship and pulled on her spacewalk suit, frantically squeezing herself into it. It may have been her imagination, but the stomach area of the suit seemed to have shrunk. She hooked up her rifle to the box on the outside of the suit's wrist and rolled her shoulders, gathering her case of tools. As Liv waited, she fit the helmet over her head. "Testing," she said into her radio. "Testing."
"I hear you," was the impatient reply.
"Then after you," Rowan said, and Liv opened the doors into the landing bay.
He could have opened the door out into empty space. No light could be seen, and Liv only took his first step down the ladder after switching on his suit's helmet-light, forcing illumination into the blackness. "Damn. That's a powerful dark." Liv ignored her and floated down the ladder. Once he was at floor level Rowan followed him.
"Step one is get some lights on in here," Liv said as they looked around. The huge landing bay was entirely empty save their magnetized ship. "Looks like nobody wanted to stay around."
"This seems way to similar to those scare-novels dad liked reading," Rowan said, following Liv toward what he thought was an exit. "You know, monsters or robots or something took over the station and everybody tried to get away."
Liv replied in his normal humorless manner. "It was probably just a hull breech or bad engineering and people had to evacuate."
"Oh yeah? Then where did everybody go? Answer me that, smart guy."
"They probably got vented into space."
Rowan shivered and stuck her tongue out at her brother.
Liv reached a door and pressed a few buttons on the unlit panel. He sighed and tried to pry it open manually with his hands. "Options? No, we can't blast it."
"You're no fun."
"Give me the scanner." Live held his hand out without looking back, until Rowan failed to hand him the device he asked for.
"Hold on, hold on, everything got jumbled around," Rowan muttered, finally finding the small device. Liv taped a few buttons and held it in front of the door's panel, grumbling to himself.
"No power's getting to the door. We can try pushing it again, but I didn't feel like it even wanted to budge. Come on."
Liv again tried to pry the door open, this time with Rowan helping. The two strained for a minute, but couldn't even get the door to acknowledge their presence.
"Let's just-" Rowan gasped for air. "Let's just find another way in. No way is this the only exit. I won't believe that."
"This way," Liv said, similarly winded.
They floated with the wall on their left for a bit before Rowan broke the silence again. "What were they doing here? And don't you dare say 'experimenting on strange space diseases' or 'finding out how to re-animate the dead,' because if you do I am going back to the ship and leaving without you."
"They were studying deep space and anti-gravity on light-refraction techniques. Don't be so histrionic."
"They needed sixteen thousand people for that?"
"The ship is also at a gravity well, and is a part of the asteroid net for Heradon. I'm sure they did lots of things. Remember, we don't care what they did when things were working properly, we care about why they aren't doing it anymore."
"He said, before being ripped to shreds by horrible monsters."
"Be serious for once in your life!"
"No. You can't make me."
They walked until spying another door. Like the first, it had no power, but could at least be pried open with only minor effort.
On the other side was a dark hallway, lit only by their headlamps. They turned in opposite directions, looking away from each other. The hallway was free of obstruction.
"Which way to the bridge?" Liv asked. Rowan recalled the designs for the gigantic structure and pointed in her direction. "Follow me, I want to see about that other door. I could have sworn something was blocking it."
"If it's a ton of bodies pressed up against it-"
"I get it."
"That is . . . unexpected."
Liv reached out to touch it, grabbing a zipper head with his gloved hand. He pulled. "They're packed."
"Clearly we're dealing with incredibly OCD monsters," Rowan said. In front of them, taking up the entire hallway and arranged to create an impassable cube squeezing in all directions, was a collection of bags and luggage. "What's in 'em?"
"I'm hesitant to touch anything," Liv responded, scanning the barrier, an unknowable distance deep, with his lamp. "It looks hazardous. It's pressed so much it wouldn't let me open the door."
"Where are the bodies?" Rowan asked.
"What?"
"They're all packed, right? People wanted to go somewhere. Somewhere else. They wanted to get away from here, but they didn't. Nobody's been found. They weren't caught off guard -- they're packed up and everything -- but there are no bodies. Why not?"
Liv knew better than to interrupt his sister. Her train of thought if derailed, though powerful, does not jump back on the tracks easily.
"It's impossible for rebellious factions to take on something so gigantic as the Itzel, and even if they did there's no way they would manage to be so clandestine about it. If aliens, the first time they've ever been seen or heard of or discovered, came and kidnapped everyone aboard, we would be able to figure it out. Blast marks on the outside hull, traces of weapon fire, even biological traces."
Rowan had begun to pace, as well as one could without being able to walk.
"It obviously wasn't something as mundane as a hull breach, we can see that easily." She flicked a hand at the packed luggage, forming a solid wall. "It wasn't reanimated dead or mindless monsters either -- there would be blood. A-and bodies. Even dangerous carnivores leave bits and pieces lying around." Her eyes darted back and forth. "What about a mutiny? A-a revolution of some sort?" She halted in her step, then continued. "No, no, that couldn't be. We would -- we would have heard communications. Revolutions don't come out of nowhere. The captain would have asked for more security or something."
"Bring it home," Liv said.
"They packed up." She flicked her hand at the luggage again. "Clothes and supplies. The essentials. No scientific equipment. Things to survive and items of sentimental value. There was a-an emergency. Something stopped them, got rid of a-all the bodies, and then did . . . this."
She cooled down. "I don't know."
Liv thought she was joking at first. "What?"
"I don't know! I don't know what happened! This doesn't make sense! I know you're going to say something like but you always figure it out, that's the only reason I bring you along . . . but I don't know. Everybody on this station -- over sixteen thousand people -- are dead, and their bodies are gone, and I have no idea why."
"So what do we do next?"
"Man, I don't know!" Rowan said, going back to her normal frame of mind. "You decide."
"No, really, you think of something."
Rowan stopped. She was pointed away from Liv; he couldn't see her face. "We go to engineering and get power on in here."
Liv thought for a moment. "No, we go to the bridge. We can probably get emergency power working, and get reports from there, too."
"See, that's why I didn't want to say anything. I knew you'd just do something else. I could have said 'let's go to the bridge,' and you would have wanted to go to engineering."
"I can't help it if everything you say seems incorrect," Liv said, walking in front of here toward the bridge. Rowan exhibited a stunning medley of rude gestures behind his back.
On foot the trip took them more than an hour. They encountered more strange barriers in numerous hallways. None of the others were comprised of luggage -- furniture, wall segments, and frozen cafeteria food. They all made huge cubes, straining at the walls from every side, or so they thought. Liv peered close and found the segments to be slightly curved in a convex shape, like a soft ball stuffed into a square hole. They had to find alternate routes around these obstructions, but other than time nothing was lost.
"Nearly there?" Liv asked. They had just finished floating themselves up an elevator shaft.
"We are," Rowan said, winded, "at least we didn't have to climb up the ladder. Would have taken us an hour."
They found a set of double doors, bigger than others they had seen on the way up the station, and were able to pry them apart, the doors sliding open once pushed. They entered into a wide room with a multitude of screens, work stations, and empty chairs. A wide window showing them a view in front of the station for mostly aesthetic purposes was free of marks or holes. Like the entire trip, they saw no bodies.
"Power first," Liv told Rowan. "There should be a way to access it here."
"One that doesn't require power?"
"Stations like this have hundreds of redundancies. If we have to, we'll go down to engineering and switch out breakers ourselves, but I don't think we will." Liv looked around, taking a few steps toward what looked like the main console. "Start looking around."
Rowan wandered to one end of the room, and found it didn't end. Under the level on which she stood was a small walkway pressed against the wall with workstations. As Liv feebly pressed a few buttons on a panel she floated down. She scanned her headlamp over the workstations, looking for anything she could use to restore power finding an interesting panel on her left. Thick wires emerged from one panel only to curl back around and enter others; to Rowan it looked like a nest of matted hair. She stepped up to it, inspecting without touching.
"Have you found anything?" She asked into her radio.
"No, nothing. I can't get anything to work here." There was a pause. "Where did you go?"
"There's a lower level," Rowan said. "I think I've something related to power."
Quickly Liv joined her at the panel. "Looks like it could be." Liv leaned in to inspect. "Or it was, at least. This thing has been torn apart." Rowan looked closer and found several of the cords had been ripped or cut. Liv turned and walked away, but stopped when he realized Rowan wasn't behind him. "Come on."
She didn't move. She had a limp finger raised, pointing it at the wires. Liv heard her swallow in his radio.
"This is what caused the outage," she said. She continued without pausing. "I see some of the cords are cut cleanly, while others are pulled out of their ports. There are small marks -- scratches -- on and around the wires. Somebody used a blade or weapon to cut them, but then was reduced to using hands." She bent down, still talking, going to her hands and knees, roving her headlamp around. "The person was in a frenzied state." She picked something off the ground and tossed it in Liv's direction. A broken knife blade skittered to a stop by his feet. "The person wasn't worried about the knife; the only goal was to get the power off."
When the talking stopped, Liv looked up. Rowan was staring at him. "So someone on the ship wanted the power off," he said. "Sabotage."
"Probably," Rowan said, walking closer. "Don't know why though. Right now my money's on slavers, honestly."
"You already said nobody could attack a place like this."
"I got something wrong I guess. You of all people should be willing to point that out. Everybody was abducted, the ship was sabotaged so nobody remaining on board could contact anyone for help, and then they all left."
"We can figure it out later, after the power's back on."
"There should be another . . ." She gestured behind her, at the grid of cables " . . . one of these things somewhere else in here."
They found it quickly, on the other side of the lower level, and luckily it appeared undamaged. Rowan let Liv deal with it while she found a swiveling chair and spun herself in slow, weightless circles as she listened to him grumble in her radio. Out the front window was a wide field of nothing but tiny white dots of light. Other than her, and her brother's, headlamp, the room was fully dark.
She looked behind her quickly, wondering if the monster hid there. She found nothing, but it could have been invisible. She was moments away from waving her hands around, imagining connecting with scaly flesh, when her brother's voice drew her back into reality.
"Almost got it. I just need to -- there." Light flooded the room, blinding both of them, and slowly settling them onto the floor as gravity took hold. Liv cursed and Rowan shut her eyes painfully, hearing a recorded voice say something on the other side of their helmets. "Life support's back on, but it will take a few minutes." Liv climbed the stairs back to the main level. Computer monitors sprang to life around Rowan, and he went to one. "Should be able to find some information about what happened."
Sixteen levels below them, Delaney Corsair, wearing a suit and working to get the small communicator working again, after weeks of eking out a boring existence with scavenged tanks of air, water, and food, broke into a cold sweat when the lights blinked to life.
"What?" She shouted, getting to her feet. The door to her modified living quarters opened. "No! Not after all this time!"
"Here we are."
Thirty minutes had passed since the power came on, and Liv had spent the time searching through the captain's terminal while Rowan had played around with some of the other computers. The air had filled back in, and their helmets were off. "I found the reports," Liv said. He moved to select the newest one.
"Don't do that!" Rowan said, joining him. "We won't have any context for what's happening! It'll just be a bunch of voices shouting for help!"
Liv looked at her under his heavy brows, and made a show of being exasperated, moving up the list and selecting a report a few days older than the last one.
"Captain Duncan Albela, captain's report of Itzel, nine-seven-three eighteen. Doctor Kin has stated progress is good; we should be able to start within a few days."
Rowan grabbed Liv's arm and shook it.
"Project Rainbow's first test is a monumental step for science. To think we will actually-" Something stopped the captain. "Ah, here's Dr. Kin herself. How goes it, doctor?"
A voice sounding farther away came through, Liv and Rowan pressed themselves closer to the speaker. "There's been a setback, I'm afraid. The Lennium is breaking down too fast. We found a work-around, but it will take a little bit of time."
"A shame," the captain said, closer to the recorder. "Ensign Corsair, are we able to return to the gravity well at the proper time?" They heard a woman's voice, too distant to understand. "Excellent. Well, a setback but a minor one. Albela out."
"Project Rainbow," Liv said.
"I really don't like the sound of it," Rowan said. "I've never been so frightened by a rainbow."
"This station was conducting plenty of experiments and projects. Who knows what it could have been?"
"I'm sorry, are you trying to say Project Rainbow wasn't responsible for killing everyone aboard? Because it's pretty clear it was."
"Don't assume," Liv said. He selected the next report, and Captain Albela's voice returned.
"Captain Duncan Albela, captain's report of Itzel, nine-eight-three eighteen. The water tanks on level-"
What followed was an incredibly dry recount of standard events aboard any station or ship. Liv and Rowan had both lived through them, and Liv had helped to solve several of them as an engineer on the cruiser Nova. Eventually Albela got back to what interested them.
"Dr. Kin tells me the Lennium is behaving properly now; Project Rainbow is back on track. In three days the first test will being. The station is beginning to conserve power -- the pressure the laser array will put on our infrastructure will be immense. Any disruption in the electrical system will spell failure."
Rowan paused the report. "Now do you believe me? Something went wrong with 'Project Rainbow,' and they killed it the only way they knew how: cut the power here, in the bridge."
"Is that right?" Liv asked sardonically. "Then can you tell me why there were no reports sent, or survivors? What about those blocked passages? Do you have an explanation for those?" Rowan said nothing. Liv unpaused the report.
"The entire station is on tenterhooks about the experiment. For centuries man-made wormholes have all but been a dream; in a few days we look to create our own. A jump distance of a mere million kilometers is the perfect test: safe but clear in its success or failure. Albela out."
"A wormhole," Liv said.
"I don't see how it could have failed."
Liv glared at her. "I can't believe they were doing this. Have you ever heard of Lennium?" Rowan shrugged. "No, of course not." He selected the next report. After Albela's normal sign-on, and further information on the station's more pedestrian problems, he continued with Project Rainbow.
"Dr. Kin has assured me the experiment will happen on time, two days from now. The entire station has been notified, and preparations are in place. The calculations are being checked and double-checked. Proper placement of both ends of the wormhole are paramount, but there are a thousand smaller things to work out, I'm told." There was a pause. "I wonder what it will look like." Another, longer, pause. "If I sit here I'll start to pontificate; nobody wants that. Albela out."
"That was helpful," Liv grumbled, selecting the third-to-last report.
"The entire ship is abuzz with tomorrow's events. I suspect non-essential work has been put off, and have in fact encouraged it. It's somewhat like a holiday. I half-expect gifts to be exchanged. The experiment will take place tomorrow noon ship-time. I will make a live report documenting the formation of the wormhole. Albela out."
"Brace yourself," Liv said, finger hovering over the second-to-last report. "I suspect things will become serious in this one."
"Captain Duncan Albela, captain's report of Itzel, nine-eleven-three eighteen. 'Rainbow day,' as some of the crew and scientists have taken to calling it. Surely, a valid name. Dr. Kin tells me she will begin funneling power to the laser array in mere minutes. We in the bridge -- and I would guess anybody able to reach one -- are all watching through our window, where the wormhole's entrance will appear. Ensign Corsair has orders to take us through only when Dr. Kin says the wormhole is stable."
There was a pause. "Dr. Kin has announced the experiment has begun . . . we see nothing yet. Ah, there's something." A small cheer rose. "It seems the experiment is, at first glance, a success. I see a . . . a dark circle, much like a black hole would appear to be, but . . . yes, there are small stars visible through the wormhole . . . Dr. Kin tells me they should be the stars visible from the other side of the wormhole." Liv and Rowan heard gasps, and both visibly tensed. "Oh my. It appears the outer rim of the wormhole is sporting a brilliant rainbow -- a circle around it. The colors are mixing and flowing together and apart but the Roy-Gee-Biv can be easily determined. It's an incredible sight.
"The wormhole continues to grow larger in diameter . . . as it does so, the rainbow around its rim becomes thinner, but still present and catching to the eye." The siblings heard a blip. "I have skipped ahead ten minutes. The wormhole has continued to grow, larger than even this station. We are waiting for confirmation from Dr. Kin that we may proceed; Ensign Corsair is waiting at the helm. We-" There was a short pause. "Dr. Kin tells us it is safe to proceed. Ensign, if you will . . . Albela out."
"Why wouldn't he just keep the same recording going if he can skip ahead like that?" Liv said. He moved to select the final report when the door behind them slammed open.
"What are you doing?!" a voice shouted. Rowan fell out of her chair and scooted herself away with her legs; Liv spun quickly, standing, holding his weapon out in front of them.
A slender woman with pitch-dark hair and blue eyes stormed toward him, undaunted by the gun he pointed at her. "Get away from there!" she shouted, moving past him and sitting at the terminal they had been using. She hit a few buttons, expertly leaving the reports and going to another screen as information flicked past.
"May I ask you who you are?" Liv said caustically. "Are you someone from the Itzel?"
"Of course I'm from the Itzel, you moron! You think I just flew here?" the woman shouted back.
"And how did you survive?" Liv dropped his pistol. "Is there anyone else still on the station? Can you tell us what happened?" He glanced at Rowan, who was huddled in a corner, panting. "What are you doing now?"
"I'm keeping strangers from going through the captain's personal reports. My name's Delaney Corsair," the woman said, calmer. "I was the helmswoman here."
"From Captain Albela's reports?"
"Yeah, Captain Albela. That pompous asshole is one of the reasons I've been stuck here for weeks with nothing but tanks of air and a busted communicator."
"Would you be so kind as to explain what happened?"
Delaney looked at him without a touch of cheer. "Yeah. Yeah, I can tell you everything." She looked around, and seemed to see Rowan for the first time. "What's her problem?"
"You startled her. Start explaining."
Delaney hesitated. "Not here. Now that the power's back on, there are a bunch of things I want to do. Like eat hot food." She searched around on the terminal, and activated something. Above their heads, multicolored rows of lights came to life, leading out of the bridge. "Take the green lights to the closest cafeteria. I'll join you in a bit; I just have to make sure everything's all right here."
Liv gazed at her for a few seconds, then nodded and went to collect Rowan, who was slowly pushing herself up the wall to a standing position. Delaney watched them leave with a scowl. As soon as they were gone she went back to the reports on the terminal and deleted the last entry, seeing it had yet to be accessed. She stood and, picking her way, went to the remaining power bank. With a scowl, she turned and looked behind her, out the window, teeth clenched and tendons raised on her jaw.
"It was Albela, and resident quantum chemist Georgia Kin, that led to 'Project Rainbow.'"
Delaney sat across from Liv and Rowan. She appraised them carefully, from their standard-issue DSI spacesuits, to their yellow haircuts -- Liv's buzzed short, and Rowan's jagged, asymmetrical style. She had a plate of food in front of her: Corn, pasta, soup, and coffee. Rowan was sipping her own coffee; Liv had requested nothing. The cafeteria, a level down and in the middle of the station, was a huge, bright, white, empty room. The line of colored light had led them unerringly.
They had noticed other colors: red, blue, yellow, brown. They came in and out, and the siblings assumed they led to other rooms -- infirmary perhaps, or even just elevators.
"Kin discovered Lennium when working with her chemicals, and found it had special properties. I don't know what they were, or are, because I didn't care to listen to their endless prattle." Delaney scooped a forkful of pasta into her mouth and continued speaking. "Some stuff with light. The station has a huge array of lasers and mirrors on the underside which can be used to manipulate...things."
"Light, I assume."
"Sure. So, Kin did her thing and found that, somehow, Lennium could be used to rip holes in space."
"And that didn't terrify you...how?" Rowan asked.
"It's not my job to care what the scientists are up to," Delaney said. "It's my job to pilot the station. You listened to all the reports, right?"
"All but the last one."
"Then you know everything about it I do. Kin used Lennium to open wormholes. That's the extent of my knowledge."
"So?" Rowan asked. "What went wrong?"
"They fucked it up. Kin thought she was some sort of genius instead of just a lucky asshole. She got things wrong. They created two wormholes, yeah, but had no idea what would happen when we got too close. I don't know how it happened, but the wormhole started to change the station's gravity. It started tipping. The whole thing started listing toward the wormhole, practically falling inside. Small gravity wells appeared around and inside the station. You saw what they did on the way to the bridge, I suspect."
Liv raised an eyebrow. "The masses in the hallways?"
"The gravity wells grabbed everything nearby and squashed it into a small space. The gravity was so intense the items fused together. Anything, be them bulkheads or people, were crushed into a space, like a localized black hole."
"People?!" Rowan said. She clapped a hand over her mouth and grabbed her brother's shoulder. "The meat...I need to lie down." Her body disappeared from view as she laid herself down on the bench, putting her feet on Liv's lap and covering her mouth.
"At least you didn't have to see it happen." Delaney said this with a small voice, frowning at her empty tray. "That's not all. The wormhole was sucking the station through. It had a gravity. A few chunks of the ship were torn off and fell into it, crushed into specks."
"You didn't make a wormhole," Liv said. "You made a black hole."
"More or less," Delaney said. "People tried to get to the launch bays and leave the ship, using escape pods, scout ships, transports...anything they could."
"Why didn't they just stop the experiment?"
"Maybe they didn't have time. Maybe it didn't occur to them. It doesn't matter; people were just beginning to board the ships when the power went out. The ship died, and the force fields around the launch bays failed. Everyone was sucked out, into the closing wormhole. I was in the bridge when it happened, and I was able to get to a suit quick enough before the place depressurized...but no one else survived. I watched Albela suffocate."
The woman stared at her tray with a hard expression. After a few seconds she looked up at the siblings. "Is that enough? Can we go now?"
"Yeah. Anything you need to collect?" Liv asked.
"Only a few things. I'll just be a few minutes." Liv saw her out of the cafeteria and went back to his sister. "So? What's she lying about?"
"I don't like her."
"Neither do I. She's lying about something and she's in a rush to get away from here. I can understand that, at least."
"Let's go back to the bridge," Rowan said, slowly levering herself up to a sitting position. "We should copy them anyway for Greenwich."
"And we make an announcement over the ship, just in case anyone else is alive." Rowan nodded, remaining seated. She tapped a fist against her cheek, thinking. "No time for that now."
"She's dark," Rowan said. Her eyes roved up to find him. "Everything about her is dark. We don't trust her."
"Not even as far as I could throw her. Let's get back to the bridge."
"See if you can find some way to make an announcement over the station's system," Liv told Rowan as they entered the bright bridge. "I'll send the reports to the ship; they and Ensign Corsair's testimony should be enough to close this investigation. Do you know which color leads to the landing bay?"
"Blue," Rowan said, staring out the window.
"All right, back to reports. Back to reports, back to reports..." Liv found the reports once more, unaware there was one missing. "Any luck?"
Rowan tsked. "Not yet. So many buttons." She angrily swiped a hand across the screen she was at, then put her forehead in her hands, grimacing. She stood and went to another terminal, striding forcefully. Liv watched her pass in front of him. She activated the other terminal and tapped a few times. "Ah. Maybe...?"
"Testing." Her voice came through the ceiling above Liv, startling him. "Testing. This is Rowan Whitney, Federal Deep Space Investigator. If there is anyone still aboard the station, proceed directly to the landing bay on..." She thought for a moment. "Deck nine, starboard side. We have a ship prepared to take you back to federal space." She ended the announcement.
"There's no one else," Delaney's voice said from the door. "I was here for weeks."
"You didn't find anyone?" Liv asked.
"Oh, I found people, but they were dead." The woman entered the room, a backpack around her shoulders. "What are you doing?"
"Transferring these reports to our ship. Our supervisor will have our heads if we don't bring them. I'm sure he'll be very interested in meeting you." Liv stood from the captain's chair. "Do you have everything you need?"
"Yeah. All of my prized possessions." The woman could barely keep from rolling her eyes. Rowan, unnaturally subdued, watched her from the side of the room. "Can we leave now? I guarantee you there's no one else left on this ship."
"Is that right?" Liv said, glaring up at Delaney. "Well hate me if you wish, but we're going to wait and make sure."
"We can at least go to the landing bay, right?" Delaney shouted. "That's where she told them to go!"
"She's right about that, at least," Rowan said. "If anybody is still here, they should be going there."
"How long will we have to wait before you're satisfied? There are-" Delaney halted, a terrified expression on her face.
"Delaney?" Liv asked. "What's-" The station shook. Only then did Liv realize there had been another tremor, much smaller. Delaney had felt it. "What was that?"
Delaney whipped around, looking out the window. Liv realized Rowan was already staring through it. He looked and saw a small distortion in space, giving the feeling of growth but too slowly to see.
They said nothing. Two of them quickly figured out what was happening, the third relived the horror of the event in the speed of memory. Delaney ran to a cabinet and wrenched it open, revealing empty hooks.
"Dammit!" She shouted.
"The experiment?" Rowan said, still watching.
"Somebody started it! Somebody else is here! Why would they do this?" Liv ran to the terminal Rowan had used to make an announcement. "This is Liv Whitney, Federal Deep Space Investigator -- turn off the experiment immediately!" He looked out the window at the hole in space. A few out-of-place stars could be seen through it. "I repeat, turn off Project Rainbow immediately!"
"They aren't going to listen!" Delaney shouted. "We need to get out of here!"
"The power!" Liv said to Rowan. "Cut the power and the experiment will stop."
"The only way to cut the power from here is to cut it to the entire station!" Delaney shouted. "If you do that, we lose life support! I don't have a suit on!"
Liv glanced out the window. The hole in space had grown larger. "How much time do we have?"
"Fuck if I know!" Delaney spat. "Let's just get to the damn landing bay!"
"I think she might have a point!" Rowan said. "It's getting bigger fast, and I don't like the way the ship is moving."
"Well, let's go then! Lead the way!" Delaney said, trying to shoo them out of the bridge.
"Do you remember the way back to the landing bay?" Liv asked Rowan, when they stepped into the hallway. He looked at the blue light on the ceiling. "Our path might be blocked."
"I remember."
The station, floating in space, vibrated and shook, and they heard the heart-stopping sound of metal tearing apart, bringing tears to their eyes. Rowan covered her ears.
"What's happening?" Liv shouted. The lights flickered, and Delaney's frightened face blinked in and out of shadow.
"The wormhole must be creating small gravity wells like last time," she said. They heard a clunk, and the fact they were floating in space -- not inside a giant building as it sometimes seemed -- felt apparent once more. "It sounds like the ship is being ripped apart! They weren't this strong last time!"
"Fastest way to the landing bay." Liv pointed at Delaney. "Now!"
They made it down a few levels via claustrophobic elevator, exiting to find the atmosphere tearing past them in shrieking layers, pulling Delaney's hair toward a growing opening in the hull. Liv quickly attached his suit's helmet and pulled Delaney back into the elevator as Rowan did the same. "Another path!"
"Follow the lights!" Rowan said, jabbing her finger at the ceiling. "If I can recall a better path, I'll tell you."
The elevator's lights died, and the box jerked, throwing Liv against the wall. "Doesn't this thing have hull seals?" Rowan asked Delaney as she clicked on her helmet's light.
"I'm sure it did!" The woman responded, white in the face. "It hasn't exactly been kept up to code recently!"
"It doesn't feel like we're moving," Liv said. He opened the elevator's door and found a metal wall, with little space in between. "Great."
"Don't worry Liv. You know what they say...when God shuts a door, kick a hole in the roof." Rowan indicated a hatch in the elevator's ceiling. "Here's what we do. We get Delaney a suit, then we can safely cut the power to the ship. Once we cut the power to the ship we just need to make sure there's enough of it left for us to reach the landing bay." Behind her helmet, Rowan smiled. "Where's the closest place a suit would be?"
Delaney stared at Rowan for a second, then exhaled harshly. "A med bay I bet."
"Which color would one have to follow to get there?"
"Red. Follow the red lights and you'll be taken to the closest one."
"Good." Rowan spun to Liv. "I'll stay here with Delaney, you gather a suit. Better yet, see if you can find a way to get this elevator somewhere helpful." An impact shook them all. "Before we go spinning off into space."
"Give me a boost," Liv said. Rowan put her hands together and lifted her brother, who smashed through the hatch, revealing an empty, yawning elevator shaft lit by blue globes. "Don't go nowhere."
"Don't leave us here," Rowan responded, and Liv disappeared from the elevator.
He found the emergency ladder and started climbing, about twenty feet below the closest door. He had no idea where they were in the station -- only Rowan had internalized the plans.
He pushed open the doors and ejected himself into the hallway. This one was untouched so far, save the odd shake of the station. He wished he could look out a window and see the wormhole's growth, but instead looked up at the numerous lines of color running across the ceiling, and picked out the red one. It led him away from the elevator, and he ran as fast his suit allowed. He didn't want to leave Rowan alone with Delaney for too long.
"So what was that? Before?" Delaney asked. They were sitting against the walls of the cab, across from each other. Rowan had her helmet off again, hair sticking up at all kinds of odd angles. The only light in the cab came from the helmet's spotlight.
"What was what?"
"I thought Liv was in charge. Why did he let you order him around?"
"I dunno. I just do it sometimes. Liv says I'm smarter, but his head is screwed on tighter."
"And what was that about recalling a better path?" Delaney peered closer. "Did you serve here?"
"Oh, that. No. I memorized the plans for the station before we came here. Pretty standard."
"You memorized them. All of it?"
"Yeah. So what have you been doing since the accident?"
"Twiddling my thumbs," Delaney said. "You think I've just been waiting around? I was trying to get a long-rang transmitter to work without having to attach to the ship's power. I was getting closer, but then you two showed up."
"How did you eat? Or drink?"
"Emergency induction port. It wasn't easy, trust me. I existed on nothing but cold liquids for weeks. You have no idea how amazing it was to eat real food."
"You couldn't get power restored to the ship on your own?"
"Why do you assume I have the knowledge to do that? I told you, I'm not a magician, I'm a pilot. I can drive the station. I shouldn't have, but Captain Asshole wanted to test the wormhole with the entire station! How stupid can someone be? Just send a goddamn scout ship through it!"
"What about going to the bathroom? How did you sleep?" Rowan asked.
"What?! Oh . . . that wasn't as hard as you might imagine. Sleeping was annoying, but-"
"You killed Captain Albela, didn't you?"
Delaney looked at Rowan, astonished. The other woman watched her with an unblinking gaze. "Of course not! I didn't like him -- he was an idiot, as you should have been able to tell from his reports -- but I didn't kill him! Why would I kill him?!"
"Plenty of reasons. Maybe he attacked you first."
Delaney's face pulled into a hysterical shape. "What do you think, I'm some monster? Just because I'm the only one to survive Project Rainbow? The fuck is wrong with you?!"
"I'm sorry. I guess I was wrong."
"Yeah, I guess you fucking were!" Delaney crossed her arms and looked to the side, away from Rowan. Rowan continued watching her.
"I wonder how long it will take them to get at each other's throats," Liv muttered to himself as he reached the end of the red line. A door opened, revealing a well-stocked medical bay.
He'd caught a glimpse of the growing wormhole, passing a window. The momentary sight made him stop and go back, to reassure himself he had really seen it.
The wormhole showed strange stars. The glimpse of space around the hole seemed nothing more than a curtain, hiding the truth the wormhole revealed. The stars inside, though indistinguishable from those outside, appeared with a noticeable haze to them -- they seemed to understand their light had been redirected.
Around the outside of the wormhole was a twisted, mixing, rearranging rainbow. The colors could be perceived but never truly seen -- his brain told him all seven colors of the rainbow were there, but his eyes failed to distinguish them.
He had pushed himself away from the window, fearing the thing no less for its beauty.
The medical bay had everything an ailing person could need. Steeped in calming blue light, he searched for a suit of any kind, and eventually found them in a back room. One of them appeared to be Delaney's size, and he packed it under his arm in preparation for the climb back down the elevator shaft.
As he went back into the main area of the bay, the ship trembled and Liv's stomach turned over. One of the blue lights shattered and rained glass down on him, and a bed suddenly flipped onto its side and slammed against the wall next to it. Pressure pulled him toward the wall after the bed and the other items crashing into the wall, and his brain, struggling to reorient itself with this new, dire gravity, recalled the packed human remains he and Rowan had encountered.
The room turned. Two forces pulled him at perpendicular angles, but thankfully the one at the end of the room was weaker than the station's "natural" gravity. Grabbing hold of a cabinet bolted to the wall, he half-climbed and half-crawled to the exit. The station was in throes; Liv guessed small pockets of gravity were appearing all over the general area. He wondered how strong they would get, then remembered Delaney's description: The gravity was so intense the items fused together. He climbed faster, reaching the door and jamming it open. Air pulled across his face in the hallway, but it wasn't a breach. The small gravity pocket pulled the atmosphere through the hallway and left it nowhere to go -- the end result was nothing more dangerous than a stiff wind.
Able to right himself once he got far away, he re-traced his steps back toward the elevator. The other task Rowan had given him -- get the elevator to a safe level -- was out of his hands, unless he happened to run across some kind of control room.
He got lost. This in itself was not a surprise. Rowan had always had the better sense of direction, and over his life he'd learned how to find his way back to safety, but the idea of wasting time aggravated him. What was a surprise was the body lying in the middle of the hallway, slumped against a wall, cold, dried blood in a puddle around him, space suit still on. His badge read "Heinrick Barrows," and identified him as a janitorial worker. He was long-dead, and at first Liv assumed it was from a depressurization until multiple stab wounds showed themselves on the man's torso.
They meant the man had been murdered, and they meant the man had been murdered after the loss of power and atmosphere, but they didn't tell him why.
It didn't matter why. Liv stood and hurried to the last familiar place. There was now a chance he had left his sister alone with a murderer.
The woman hadn't said a word to each other. Rowan thought the other was being unreasonable. She had apologized, after all.
"I don't like silences," Rowan said finally. "I know you don't really want to talk to me. That's fine. I can talk for both of us." Delaney looked at her, disgusted. "I bet you'd like to know how my brother and I both became DSIs and became partners. It's interesting, actually. You see, he-"
"Shut up!" Delaney shouted, making Rowan jump. "I don't care! I don't care about you, or your brother, or anything else! I just want to get off this station!" Rowan imagined if the woman could force tears out, she would be crying. "Do you know what I've had to live through since Project Rainbow? I haven't seen anybody alive. I recorded myself talking just so I could have something to listen to. There have been no noises on the ship -- can you even imagine what that's like? The sound of my own heart filled my ears!" She gestured violently at her backpack. "I went around collecting audio recordings other people had made because I thought I was going crazy!" She opened the backpack and dumped it out; dozens of recording chips tumbled out. "Look! They each have days of recordings on them! Random assholes I'd never met talking about their bad knees, or how their daughter on Earth turned eight, or figuring out how to beat a friend at chess! I haven't even listened to all of them!" Delaney shook. "And now I'm stuck here with you, waiting for your brother, who may or may not even come back!"
"He's coming down the shaft right now," Rowan said simply. Looking at the recording chips. She picked a few up. "It looks like he has a suit for you, too. We'll be leaving soon, don't worry."
Delaney whipped her head up to gaze out the hole in the ceiling, noticing a figure making its way down the emergency ladder toward the cab with something tucked under its arm. Rowan threw the chips back onto the pile. "He wouldn't abandon me."
"That must be so nice for you," Delaney grumbled with her neck still craned up, watching Liv approach. She glanced at Rowan, who was staring at a corner, and shook her head. "I can't believe I had to be rescued by the two of you."
"You're not in the clear yet," Rowan said. She knelt by the recording chips again and fanned them out, picking several up. "We still need to get to the ship. We're getting closer to the wormhole all the time and the station's structure is becoming weaker." She tapped the small bud in her ear. "Liv told me he encountered one of the gravity wells right after he found your suit." To punctuate her statement, the station shook again. "As long as we don't run into anything, we should be able to get out of here quickly."
Liv stepped onto the top of the cab, and swung his legs inside, lowering himself down carefully. "Here." He handed the suit he carried to Delaney. "We'd better get moving. Fastest way?" He asked Rowan.
She thought for a moment. "Back up to the level the bridge was on. We go past it . . . there's another elevator that should be able to take us past the obstructions, as long as no new ones have appeared. It's a long route."
"Up, then," Liv ordered. "Ladies first."
The bridge's level was hundreds of feet above them, and they climbed silently, feeling the station's shaking increase around them. They all wore their helmets, in case of sudden accidents, and Liv tuned Delaney's transmitter to their frequency.
Delaney's stomach was caught in her throat. She'd lasted so long on her own, and now she was finally -- finally -- going to make it out of what had become a gigantic death trap for the last weeks. She kept climbing with furious enthusiasm. Hand over hand, foot over foot. She glared upward at the empty space, unwilling to let the station get the better of her after she'd lasted so long.
Behind her, staring constantly at her ever-moving rear end, Rowan wished she could communicate with her brother. Their next steps were laid out for them, but the future was an open book, ready to be colored in. Rowan smiled. She remembered her childhood, and her teacher's constant reminders she should color inside the lines. Such adherence to guidelines ran counter to Rowan Whitney since the very beginning. She did not simply think outside the box -- she broke the box down, constructed a new structure, and then thought outside of it anyway. Whatever happened once they reached the bridge, she would be able to deal with.
Last in line on the ladder, much more worried about the situation, Liv felt every minuscule tremor the station had. He wondered how firmly the ladder was attached to the wall, wondered how well the wall was attached to the main structure of the elevator, and, just to cover all his bases, wondered generally about the construction of the station. How strong was the pull of the wormhole, really? Strong enough to tear the station asunder, even this close?
The three climbed silently, blue globes illuminating the ladder and bare metal of the elevator shaft. The station hummed and groaned. Liv glanced down at the barely-visible cab, wondering if it would decide to suddenly come back to life and give chase, but before the fear could be realized they reached bridge level.
"I can't get the door open!" Delaney shouted in the transmitter, making Liv and Rowan wince.
"Not so loud!" Liv said. "We can hear you fine! Try and move aside and I might be able to get it open."
Rowan scooted over the side of the ladder and let her brother pass, both of them holding their breath. Delaney, arms wrapped around the ladder with all her strength, watched him carefully climb past with her customary hard eyes, until Liv was level with the doors. He took a tool from his suit's belt and unscrewed a panel, quickly forcing the doors to think a cab waited to unload. The doors opened, and he crawled out, giving helping hands to Delaney and Rowan.
They went down the hallway, but before they got far Liv felt the same odd gravity as he had in the medical bay. He looked around a corner and found a cluster of metal crawling over itself in the middle of the hallway, blocking their path. He glanced at Rowan, who pointed in a different direction. They took a step.
A terrible sound penetrated their helmets, and the station shook as if hit by a bomb. Delaney was thrown to the ground, bashing her helmet on the wall; Rowan fell over and bounced onto her stomach. Only Liv was able to stay standing. His sister picked herself up quickly, but they heard a pained groan through their transmitters. Delaney stayed on the ground.
"Get her up. Let's take her to the bridge," Liv said, not unkindly. "Delaney, can you hear me?"
"Yeah," came the reply. "Just a knock on the head. I'll be okay."
Rowan looked in the other woman's helmet and saw blood trickling down the side of her face. "You're bleeding."
"It's just a scratch. I want to keep going. There should be a medkit in the bridge."
"Okay," Liv brought her to her feet and kept her from stumbling over. "Rowan, lead the way."
The station's shaking had increased, and they couldn't run for fear of losing their footing, but they reached the big bridge without further incident. The wormhole held their gaze.
It was impossible to tell how big it was, or how far, but the mere spectacle of the thing couldn't be denied. The rainbow, as described by Captain Albela, had dwindled to a mere band of light around the rim. The interior -- looking through space an unknown distance -- looked to be nothing more than simple space.
Delaney pushed off from Liv and sat in a chair, removing her helmet. She looked away from the window at the front of the room and crossed her arms, lips a tight line. Rowan quickly fetched the medkit and let Liv tend to her.
"You're right. Just a scratch. It isn't too deep. Let's see..." He rifled through the contents of the med kit. "Here, this should do it." He applied a small antiseptic strip near her hairline. Over Delaney's shoulder, he saw Rowan come up the steps from the bridge's lower level and nod. "It's a good thing you had your helmet on, or we might be lugging your unconscious body around right now. Sure you feel alright?"
"I'm fine. We can keep going."
"Not just yet," Liv said, and Rowan hit a button on the terminal she stood by. A voice emanated from the terminal, filling the bridge.
"It's still amazing," a woman's voice breathed. "We're getting closer and closer to it the whole time." There was a pause. "The station is still shaking, but nobody seems to be worried. Mister-" Sudden screams spilled out all around them. Delaney's heart hammered. Liv stood blocking the exit. "Oh my God! There's something-" Shouts interrupted the speaker "Blaine, get away from...No!"
Delaney started shaking. She gripped the seat under her with white knuckles. "Stop it."
"Blaine..." the voice continued again. They heard tears in the voice. "Blaine got grabbed by something. I-It crushed him." The person recording was running. "The station is shaking harder now. Redmond, what's happening?"
A faint male voice entered. "The wormhole is doing something, we-" A garbled, staticky noise overpowered everything, filling the bridge with white noise. When it died, the recording was filled with nothing but voices trying to talk over one another, growing in volume and emotion.
"Turn it off!" Delaney shouted. Tears hung in her eyes. "Turn it fucking off!"
"Part of the station just came away!" The female voice shouted into the recording. "It looked like one of the port stabilizers! The wormhole's tearing it apart! It's just gone into the wormhole -- it's gone!" The fear was momentarily replaced by wonder and confusion, until a voice away from the recorder shouted: "It crushed it!"
"We're still getting closer!" Liv stared Delaney down as the latter sat.
"Tell them to turn it off!" Rowan had a hand over her mouth.
"Gravity wells are appearing all over the station! Stay away from them! Everybody get to the landing bays and escape pods, the captain's going to make an announcement!" Delaney tried to meet Liv's gaze but ended up squeezing her eyes shut. A chime came from the recording.
"This is Captain Albela," they heard from the recording, presumably originally emanating from overhead speakers. "All personnel proceed to the landing bays immediately. The station has taken structural damage. I repeat: All personnel to landing bays immediately. Take only emergency items."
The announcement ended, and the speakers played only general hurry and shouts. The person responsible for the recording said nothing. Liv noticed what he could only interpret as a glimmer of hope in Delaney's face, until Rowan fast-forwarded to a predetermined spot.
"We're in the landing bay now," the woman's voice said. "We saw a bunch of those gravity wells. They've hurt the ship, but we still have life support. They're loading everybody onto the ships now. We-" The same announcement noise came through. "Red alert." They heard Captain Albela shout. "I repeat, this is a red alert; everyone proceed to landing bays immediately. All color paths have been overridden to landing bay blue, do not -- Ensign, what are you doing?" The bridge, and the recording, were quiet. "Ensign Corsair, what are you doing?" They heard a short shout, too far away to be heard clearly. "Stop! I am ordering you to stop! You'll-"
The recording ended.
Delaney sat in her chair, not moving. Rowan took the recording chip from the terminal and threw it to Liv, who pocketed it.
"You cut the power," Rowan said, walking slowly to stand next to her brother. "You used a knife to do so, breaking it in the process." She showed the half of the knife she'd found their first time to the bridge, before turning the power on. "You used the other half to kill the others in the bridge as the loss of atmosphere flushed everyone in the landing bays out into space."
"But you had to make sure no one else had survived. If they did, they would but the blame on you." Liv watched the accused for a moment. "You got a suit, and hunted them down. Heinrick Barrows was one of them. You told us you were the only one left on the station alive, and you were right."
"You deleted the final report on the captain's terminal likely because it contained the same information we've just heard," Rowan said. "You thought you were safe when you deleted it, but you didn't think one of the recording chips had their own version of the events. Further, you didn't expect me to be able to find one after being told of the murdered body my brother found." The station shook harshly.
"Under our authority of the Deep Space Investigators, you're under arrest," Liv said. "Why would you do such a thing?"
"I saved my life," Delaney said under her breath. "The wormhole's gravity was too strong for the escape ships to break. Only cutting the power would stop the wormhole. I wasn't going to waste time arguing with Albela because I knew he wouldn't agree with me! I did what I had to do to survive, and I know it was the right choice, because at least one person survived!"
"You said you weren't a scientist." Liv leaned down and placed his hands on the armrests of Delaney's chair, face inches from hers. "You said you didn't know. How could you have been so sure?!" He shouted suddenly, making Delaney lean backwards. "But it doesn't matter now, does it? You're coming with us, to be investigated for the slaughter of over sixteen thousand people!"
She pushed him away, placing both hands on his chest and shoving. He stumbled backwards and fell over as she shot from the chair toward the exit with only Rowan in her way. Without pausing, Delaney launched her fist forward.
Though Rowan brought her arm up in time, the punch knocked her against the door; Delaney jammed the door open and jumped away from Rowan's reaching arms. The woman ran down the hallway.
"She's going for the ship!" Rowan shouted behind her as Liv got to his feet.
"Get your helmet on," he said quickly. "This place is coming apart."
"She doesn't have hers. If we lose atmosphere..."
"We'll have to catch up to her before that." Liv glanced behind him. The wormhole had grown large enough to take up the entire window; its overlapping gravities rattled the station without end. "After her, now."
They left the bridge, running in the direction Delaney did. They could hardly take two steps without feeling the floor shift under their feet.
Ahead of them, wishing she'd taken her helmet, Delaney tried to remember the path she had to take to reach the landing bay, but the finer details of the station's many levels and paths escaped her. She rounded a corner and found a pressure pulling her forward before she realized a gravity well inhabited the hallway about a hundred feet in front of her, already strong enough to entice her forward. She turned to go back and found two helmeted people in her way.
"Give it up, Delaney!" Liv shouted. "You aren't going to be able to leave the station unless you're with us!" He took a step forward, feeling the pull of the gravity well and bracing himself against it, hand reaching for Delaney's wrist.
Their vision melted for a moment; the station shook so hard everything blurred in front of them. To Delaney's right the wall tore open, showing space's open darkness and dumping the air out from the hallway. It was a small opening compared to the size of the station, but only meters away. Shrieking metal and rushing air covered all other sounds, including Liv's repeated order to submit. Delaney looked from him and his sister to the opening on her right. After a gap of about a meter, the hallway continued.
She ran and leapt. Liv shouted after her as shrapnel tore past, watching her body break over the gap, able to resist the tug of the air emptying into space. She landed and grasped the bulkhead next to her, looking back for a moment before moving as fast as she could away.
"Shit!" Liv yelled. "We can't make that jump in suits! We need another way!" He looked at Rowan after nothing but silence from her, and found her gazing into the open space revealed by the tear in the station's hull. "At least get away from the opening!"
She agreed silently, and they ran back toward the bridge, beyond the pull of the escaping atmosphere. "Another path, Rowan, quickly! If she gets to the ship before us she could figure out a way to take off!"
"I'm thinking!" Rowan shouted back, putting her hands to her helmet. "Okay. Okay. Follow me. I think I have one."
"Go, then! If we wait any long we're going to be riding this place into the wormhole!" Rowan started jogging down the hallway, hands out to her sides to keep from losing her balance. Liv followed her, wishing she could move faster.
She turned a corner, and his wish was granted. She broke into a run, as fast as she could manage in her space suit, and Liv suddenly found it difficult to keep up with her. Their arms pumped, and sweat collected inside their suits.
"We'll have to take elevators down to the right level!" Rowan shouted. "It'll be dangerous, but it's the fastest way."
"She'll have to take them too," Liv said, panting.
"Not the same ones!" Rowan said. "There are some closer to her, but the distance is the same to the landing bay. Hopefully she'll be confused and get lost."
"I'm not going to leave her here!" Liv said. "She's going to come with us and pay for what she did!"
"Then I guess we'd better hope we manage to run into her before we get to the ship!"
They got to the elevator after a few more minutes of running, and stood listening to the station crumble as it arrived at their level. Inside, it could almost be believed nothing outside was wrong. The cab did not feel the station's shaking, and sounds were muted even more than before.
The feeling didn't last. Halfway to the level of the landing bay, Liv felt himself tipping forward unconsciously, until he realized gravity was pulling him slightly. By the time they reached their destination, it felt like the entire ship had rotated forty-five degrees.
"It's the wormhole." Rowan spoke up, half-braced against the wall. "The station's getting closer to it -- it's acting like a planet." The cab's door opened and they had to nearly fall out, sliding against the far wall. "This way."
Another hideous grinding sound filled their ears, but they saw no destruction. The material under their feet felt less reliable by the second as they pulled themselves along, using the floor and wall. Liv saw they were now following the blinking blue light leading them toward the landing bay. He heard Rowan's constant panting, and felt the station vibrate as it was pulled apart.
They had to detour around an already-existent barrier in the hallway, and carefully pass by a forming gravity well -- strong enough to bend the walls it formed near into a foot-wide aperture quickly filling up with debris. Nearly on their hands and knees, they wound their way past the worsening destruction toward the landing bay. When they reached it they saw nothing but their DSI ship, standing tall on the wide, flat, tilting plain of the landing bay. There was nothing else in the landing bay -- a fact they had noticed when they'd first arrived, but only now knew the chilling reason why.
"We can't leave her here," Liv repeated. "We have to find her and make her come with us."
"What are we going to do, then? Go wander the disintegrating hallways looking for her?" Rowan said in response. She started off across the flat, featureless landing bay toward their ship, scuttling like a primate climbing a tree. Liv followed, worried about the station's continuous rotation. The opening for the landing bay, lit with blue lights now the power was running, was beginning to look like a growing hole at the end of a steep cliff.
"Liv!" Rowan shouted suddenly, pointing at the top of the room. He looked and saw Delaney peering out from one of the doors there. She was situated above their ship, and allowed herself to start sliding down the growing angle of the floor toward it.
Gaining speed, she struck one of the legs hard -- the siblings heard the sound and both winced. The woman didn't move. Liv and Rowan, now lacking a reason to stay around, picked up their speed as best they could, slowly closing the distance toward the ship. Rowan latched on to a leg first, reaching out to clasp Liv's hand and keep him from slipping. She looked down. "Liv."
He looked. He couldn’t tell at first, but he came to realize the wormhole now yawned up at them, growing ever larger as the station was drawn toward it. The space inside was full of airy color, as if paints were scattered across its surface area. He hung on to the leg, caught rapt. "Liv!"
"I'll get Delaney. You get inside and start the ship," he said, looking away from the wormhole. Rowan nodded, and started pulling herself up the ship's leg. The station had turned a full ninety degrees; their ship hung on only thanks to the magnets they'd enabled when landing. Rowan clung on with all her might, fighting the urge to look down at the wormhole, making her way for the ship's door as Liv figured out a way to get to Delaney.
Hooking her fingers under the door's catch, she swung it open; it nearly tore off its hinges thanks to the strange new gravity. As she worked to get herself inside the lights around them flickered and the station shook wildly. She looked out the landing bay door and witnessed a huge structure fall toward the wormhole with the slow, inexorable speed of a planet pulling something down. She saw the part of the station strike the wormhole's surface and disappear; it did not reappear. She swallowed painfully and climbed into the ship.
She had to reorient her mental image of the ship, but she was able to push herself up to the cockpit and climb into the pilot's seat. She started hitting a few buttons to power it up to full.
Delaney hung on to one of the ship's port side legs, unable to take her eyes away from the sight below her. As Liv got closer, edging under the now-active ship's body, he saw the scratch on her head had opened and worsened, sheeting dark blood down the side of her face. She heard him approach and brought her head up to gaze at him.
"Get in the ship!" He shouted, as the station shook once more. "This place is going to snap in half, and it doesn't matter what part you're on! Get in the ship and we can get to safety!" She looked at him with a harder, fiercer version of an expression he had seen on his sister many times. "Don't argue! Don't be a damn stubborn fool!" He shouted. "Just give it up! I'm leaving this station with you, and there's nothing you can do about it!"
The landing bay's lights flickered. "The power's going to go out soon!" Liv said. "Even if you aren't sucked out you'll suffocate in a minute! You aren't invincible!"
"I fucking know that!" Delaney finally shouted back. "Are you?!"
He was finally close enough; she kicked at him, smashing one of his hands and making him cry out in pain. She aimed another kick at his arm but it only grazed him. She tried one more kick, but instead of striking him and knocking him off, he caught it with a gloved hand. She tried to pull it out of his grasp and only succeeded in letting him jump closer, only a foot away. She swiped her hand but did nothing; he grabbed her arm, eyes set.
All Rowan had left to do was engage the thrusters and disable the magnets. She opened the port side door and spotted her Delaney struggling against her brother. "Ready to go!" She said into her transmitter. She started easing herself onto the ship as the station shook. One of the far walls of the landing bay cracked, revealing the guts of the ship. "This place is moments from a whole lot of space dust!"
"You think I don't know that?" was the only reply. Rowan saw Delaney risk a glance below her at the open door she occupied. Her face was a mask of anger and determination, half-covered in blood.
She let go of the leg she was attached to, and fell toward Rowan, who braced herself for an impact.
Delaney slammed into the open door, scrambled to grip it. For a moment Rowan saw fear in her eyes, then one hand latched on to the handle on the door's interior. The station shook as if trying to dislodge her, but she held on.
Rowan grabbed her wrist to pull her in, and Delaney allowed herself to be pulled at first, but as soon as she got the right leverage she reversed the grip, spinning her hand to grasp Rowan.
Her heart jumped as Delaney's pull made her lose her balance, and she tumbled forward for a long instant, before something caught her from behind. She twisted her head, suspended between the two forces, and found her brother holding her other wrist, allowing her to wrench herself from Delaney's grasp.
The station began shaking at a constant rhythm, turning everything into blurs. Like everything, the scene burned itself into Rowan's brain, leaving trails of light and color she struggled to follow. She began to feel disoriented and sick, but was able to fall into the tilted ship. Liv took her place at the door, grabbing Delaney's arms and hauling her aboard.
The woman tried to shake his grasp off, intending to enter the ship on her own power only. Her foot, planted against the side of the ship, lost its purchase as the station shook; she fell slightly, only Liv's strength keeping her still. The station shook harder, and Liv tipped forward out of Rowan's sight.
In an instant she was at the door looking down. Her brother hung on to the door like Delaney, fighting with the woman. Black hair whipping, blood staining her face, teeth clenched in fury, Delaney feverishly tried to shove Liv off. Rowan grabbed Liv and hoisted him just as he pushed Delaney; she fell a meter and snagged Liv's suit leg, ripping him away from his sister and letting both of them fall the distance out of the landing bay, into empty space, and through the crushing wormhole.
Left hanging half out of the ship's door, Rowan screamed at cold, dark space with no one to hear her. Before the shout had even ended, the station knocked her back into reality. She closed the door behind her and crawled to the pilot's seat, where her brother normally sat. Disabling the magnets in the ship's legs, it started sliding toward the landing bay; Rowan considered letting herself fall as her brother had.
He wouldn't want her to do such a thing. She activated the ship's thrusters and angled herself out of the wormhole's pull, straining on the afterburner until its fuel ran dry. The station, appearing like it had been torn with huge claws, shredded to pieces and flowed through the wormhole, disappearing. With its power and forming devices gone and destroyed, the wormhole swallowed itself, leaving no trace of the station responsible for birthing it.
Rowan sat in the pilot's chair, watching her brother fall into the wormhole over and over again, aware she would never be able to forget a single moment of watching her brother fall, aware she would watch him fall and be ground into a tiny point in her dreams, and when she closed her eyes. Even when her eyes were open, like two videos laid over each other, she relived the moments of watching him fall, lit by blue lights, as the colors swallowed him.
"Mom won't be pleased," Rowan said under her breath, mimicking her older brother's voice. She flipped a switch at her console and star-hot beams punctured toward the station. They'd gotten close enough for the powerful lights to illuminate part of it. "It's big."
"Biggest one out here," Liv replied, tension disappearing from his shoulders as he eased their ship toward the landing bay, much like a yawning mouth. "It'd take us weeks to see everything this place has to offer. The living quarters alone are big enough to hold over sixteen thousand people comfortably." He toggled something, and their ship slowed down, bringing itself into the landing bay.
"Any idea where we should start?" Rowan asked. "'Find out what happened aboard the Itzel' isn't the most direct of orders. You asked Captain Greenwich for more information, right?"
"Of course I did!" Liv said angrily. "He said he doesn't know either! He got the orders from above him!"
"You'd think they'd want more than just the two of us looking around." Rowan braced herself for her brother's landing. "Looks like there's still power, but it just isn't being directed correctly," she said, taking information from the screen in front of her. A blue light indicated the absence of breathable air around the ship. "No atmosphere, at least inside the landing bay, which, I mean . . . duh."
Her brother ignored her and stood after locking the ship in place. "Magnets are engaged. Are we going to need weapons?" Rowan asked.
"If I could tell the future, I wouldn't be a DSI," her brother said back. "We're going to take the guns, because it's better to have them and not need them than-"
"Need them and not have them," Rowan finished for him. "Yeah, yeah . . ." She followed him into the hallway of their ship and pulled on her spacewalk suit, frantically squeezing herself into it. It may have been her imagination, but the stomach area of the suit seemed to have shrunk. She hooked up her rifle to the box on the outside of the suit's wrist and rolled her shoulders, gathering her case of tools. As Liv waited, she fit the helmet over her head. "Testing," she said into her radio. "Testing."
"I hear you," was the impatient reply.
"Then after you," Rowan said, and Liv opened the doors into the landing bay.
He could have opened the door out into empty space. No light could be seen, and Liv only took his first step down the ladder after switching on his suit's helmet-light, forcing illumination into the blackness. "Damn. That's a powerful dark." Liv ignored her and floated down the ladder. Once he was at floor level Rowan followed him.
"Step one is get some lights on in here," Liv said as they looked around. The huge landing bay was entirely empty save their magnetized ship. "Looks like nobody wanted to stay around."
"This seems way to similar to those scare-novels dad liked reading," Rowan said, following Liv toward what he thought was an exit. "You know, monsters or robots or something took over the station and everybody tried to get away."
Liv replied in his normal humorless manner. "It was probably just a hull breech or bad engineering and people had to evacuate."
"Oh yeah? Then where did everybody go? Answer me that, smart guy."
"They probably got vented into space."
Rowan shivered and stuck her tongue out at her brother.
Liv reached a door and pressed a few buttons on the unlit panel. He sighed and tried to pry it open manually with his hands. "Options? No, we can't blast it."
"You're no fun."
"Give me the scanner." Live held his hand out without looking back, until Rowan failed to hand him the device he asked for.
"Hold on, hold on, everything got jumbled around," Rowan muttered, finally finding the small device. Liv taped a few buttons and held it in front of the door's panel, grumbling to himself.
"No power's getting to the door. We can try pushing it again, but I didn't feel like it even wanted to budge. Come on."
Liv again tried to pry the door open, this time with Rowan helping. The two strained for a minute, but couldn't even get the door to acknowledge their presence.
"Let's just-" Rowan gasped for air. "Let's just find another way in. No way is this the only exit. I won't believe that."
"This way," Liv said, similarly winded.
They floated with the wall on their left for a bit before Rowan broke the silence again. "What were they doing here? And don't you dare say 'experimenting on strange space diseases' or 'finding out how to re-animate the dead,' because if you do I am going back to the ship and leaving without you."
"They were studying deep space and anti-gravity on light-refraction techniques. Don't be so histrionic."
"They needed sixteen thousand people for that?"
"The ship is also at a gravity well, and is a part of the asteroid net for Heradon. I'm sure they did lots of things. Remember, we don't care what they did when things were working properly, we care about why they aren't doing it anymore."
"He said, before being ripped to shreds by horrible monsters."
"Be serious for once in your life!"
"No. You can't make me."
They walked until spying another door. Like the first, it had no power, but could at least be pried open with only minor effort.
On the other side was a dark hallway, lit only by their headlamps. They turned in opposite directions, looking away from each other. The hallway was free of obstruction.
"Which way to the bridge?" Liv asked. Rowan recalled the designs for the gigantic structure and pointed in her direction. "Follow me, I want to see about that other door. I could have sworn something was blocking it."
"If it's a ton of bodies pressed up against it-"
"I get it."
"That is . . . unexpected."
Liv reached out to touch it, grabbing a zipper head with his gloved hand. He pulled. "They're packed."
"Clearly we're dealing with incredibly OCD monsters," Rowan said. In front of them, taking up the entire hallway and arranged to create an impassable cube squeezing in all directions, was a collection of bags and luggage. "What's in 'em?"
"I'm hesitant to touch anything," Liv responded, scanning the barrier, an unknowable distance deep, with his lamp. "It looks hazardous. It's pressed so much it wouldn't let me open the door."
"Where are the bodies?" Rowan asked.
"What?"
"They're all packed, right? People wanted to go somewhere. Somewhere else. They wanted to get away from here, but they didn't. Nobody's been found. They weren't caught off guard -- they're packed up and everything -- but there are no bodies. Why not?"
Liv knew better than to interrupt his sister. Her train of thought if derailed, though powerful, does not jump back on the tracks easily.
"It's impossible for rebellious factions to take on something so gigantic as the Itzel, and even if they did there's no way they would manage to be so clandestine about it. If aliens, the first time they've ever been seen or heard of or discovered, came and kidnapped everyone aboard, we would be able to figure it out. Blast marks on the outside hull, traces of weapon fire, even biological traces."
Rowan had begun to pace, as well as one could without being able to walk.
"It obviously wasn't something as mundane as a hull breach, we can see that easily." She flicked a hand at the packed luggage, forming a solid wall. "It wasn't reanimated dead or mindless monsters either -- there would be blood. A-and bodies. Even dangerous carnivores leave bits and pieces lying around." Her eyes darted back and forth. "What about a mutiny? A-a revolution of some sort?" She halted in her step, then continued. "No, no, that couldn't be. We would -- we would have heard communications. Revolutions don't come out of nowhere. The captain would have asked for more security or something."
"Bring it home," Liv said.
"They packed up." She flicked her hand at the luggage again. "Clothes and supplies. The essentials. No scientific equipment. Things to survive and items of sentimental value. There was a-an emergency. Something stopped them, got rid of a-all the bodies, and then did . . . this."
She cooled down. "I don't know."
Liv thought she was joking at first. "What?"
"I don't know! I don't know what happened! This doesn't make sense! I know you're going to say something like but you always figure it out, that's the only reason I bring you along . . . but I don't know. Everybody on this station -- over sixteen thousand people -- are dead, and their bodies are gone, and I have no idea why."
"So what do we do next?"
"Man, I don't know!" Rowan said, going back to her normal frame of mind. "You decide."
"No, really, you think of something."
Rowan stopped. She was pointed away from Liv; he couldn't see her face. "We go to engineering and get power on in here."
Liv thought for a moment. "No, we go to the bridge. We can probably get emergency power working, and get reports from there, too."
"See, that's why I didn't want to say anything. I knew you'd just do something else. I could have said 'let's go to the bridge,' and you would have wanted to go to engineering."
"I can't help it if everything you say seems incorrect," Liv said, walking in front of here toward the bridge. Rowan exhibited a stunning medley of rude gestures behind his back.
On foot the trip took them more than an hour. They encountered more strange barriers in numerous hallways. None of the others were comprised of luggage -- furniture, wall segments, and frozen cafeteria food. They all made huge cubes, straining at the walls from every side, or so they thought. Liv peered close and found the segments to be slightly curved in a convex shape, like a soft ball stuffed into a square hole. They had to find alternate routes around these obstructions, but other than time nothing was lost.
"Nearly there?" Liv asked. They had just finished floating themselves up an elevator shaft.
"We are," Rowan said, winded, "at least we didn't have to climb up the ladder. Would have taken us an hour."
They found a set of double doors, bigger than others they had seen on the way up the station, and were able to pry them apart, the doors sliding open once pushed. They entered into a wide room with a multitude of screens, work stations, and empty chairs. A wide window showing them a view in front of the station for mostly aesthetic purposes was free of marks or holes. Like the entire trip, they saw no bodies.
"Power first," Liv told Rowan. "There should be a way to access it here."
"One that doesn't require power?"
"Stations like this have hundreds of redundancies. If we have to, we'll go down to engineering and switch out breakers ourselves, but I don't think we will." Liv looked around, taking a few steps toward what looked like the main console. "Start looking around."
Rowan wandered to one end of the room, and found it didn't end. Under the level on which she stood was a small walkway pressed against the wall with workstations. As Liv feebly pressed a few buttons on a panel she floated down. She scanned her headlamp over the workstations, looking for anything she could use to restore power finding an interesting panel on her left. Thick wires emerged from one panel only to curl back around and enter others; to Rowan it looked like a nest of matted hair. She stepped up to it, inspecting without touching.
"Have you found anything?" She asked into her radio.
"No, nothing. I can't get anything to work here." There was a pause. "Where did you go?"
"There's a lower level," Rowan said. "I think I've something related to power."
Quickly Liv joined her at the panel. "Looks like it could be." Liv leaned in to inspect. "Or it was, at least. This thing has been torn apart." Rowan looked closer and found several of the cords had been ripped or cut. Liv turned and walked away, but stopped when he realized Rowan wasn't behind him. "Come on."
She didn't move. She had a limp finger raised, pointing it at the wires. Liv heard her swallow in his radio.
"This is what caused the outage," she said. She continued without pausing. "I see some of the cords are cut cleanly, while others are pulled out of their ports. There are small marks -- scratches -- on and around the wires. Somebody used a blade or weapon to cut them, but then was reduced to using hands." She bent down, still talking, going to her hands and knees, roving her headlamp around. "The person was in a frenzied state." She picked something off the ground and tossed it in Liv's direction. A broken knife blade skittered to a stop by his feet. "The person wasn't worried about the knife; the only goal was to get the power off."
When the talking stopped, Liv looked up. Rowan was staring at him. "So someone on the ship wanted the power off," he said. "Sabotage."
"Probably," Rowan said, walking closer. "Don't know why though. Right now my money's on slavers, honestly."
"You already said nobody could attack a place like this."
"I got something wrong I guess. You of all people should be willing to point that out. Everybody was abducted, the ship was sabotaged so nobody remaining on board could contact anyone for help, and then they all left."
"We can figure it out later, after the power's back on."
"There should be another . . ." She gestured behind her, at the grid of cables " . . . one of these things somewhere else in here."
They found it quickly, on the other side of the lower level, and luckily it appeared undamaged. Rowan let Liv deal with it while she found a swiveling chair and spun herself in slow, weightless circles as she listened to him grumble in her radio. Out the front window was a wide field of nothing but tiny white dots of light. Other than her, and her brother's, headlamp, the room was fully dark.
She looked behind her quickly, wondering if the monster hid there. She found nothing, but it could have been invisible. She was moments away from waving her hands around, imagining connecting with scaly flesh, when her brother's voice drew her back into reality.
"Almost got it. I just need to -- there." Light flooded the room, blinding both of them, and slowly settling them onto the floor as gravity took hold. Liv cursed and Rowan shut her eyes painfully, hearing a recorded voice say something on the other side of their helmets. "Life support's back on, but it will take a few minutes." Liv climbed the stairs back to the main level. Computer monitors sprang to life around Rowan, and he went to one. "Should be able to find some information about what happened."
Sixteen levels below them, Delaney Corsair, wearing a suit and working to get the small communicator working again, after weeks of eking out a boring existence with scavenged tanks of air, water, and food, broke into a cold sweat when the lights blinked to life.
"What?" She shouted, getting to her feet. The door to her modified living quarters opened. "No! Not after all this time!"
"Here we are."
Thirty minutes had passed since the power came on, and Liv had spent the time searching through the captain's terminal while Rowan had played around with some of the other computers. The air had filled back in, and their helmets were off. "I found the reports," Liv said. He moved to select the newest one.
"Don't do that!" Rowan said, joining him. "We won't have any context for what's happening! It'll just be a bunch of voices shouting for help!"
Liv looked at her under his heavy brows, and made a show of being exasperated, moving up the list and selecting a report a few days older than the last one.
"Captain Duncan Albela, captain's report of Itzel, nine-seven-three eighteen. Doctor Kin has stated progress is good; we should be able to start within a few days."
Rowan grabbed Liv's arm and shook it.
"Project Rainbow's first test is a monumental step for science. To think we will actually-" Something stopped the captain. "Ah, here's Dr. Kin herself. How goes it, doctor?"
A voice sounding farther away came through, Liv and Rowan pressed themselves closer to the speaker. "There's been a setback, I'm afraid. The Lennium is breaking down too fast. We found a work-around, but it will take a little bit of time."
"A shame," the captain said, closer to the recorder. "Ensign Corsair, are we able to return to the gravity well at the proper time?" They heard a woman's voice, too distant to understand. "Excellent. Well, a setback but a minor one. Albela out."
"Project Rainbow," Liv said.
"I really don't like the sound of it," Rowan said. "I've never been so frightened by a rainbow."
"This station was conducting plenty of experiments and projects. Who knows what it could have been?"
"I'm sorry, are you trying to say Project Rainbow wasn't responsible for killing everyone aboard? Because it's pretty clear it was."
"Don't assume," Liv said. He selected the next report, and Captain Albela's voice returned.
"Captain Duncan Albela, captain's report of Itzel, nine-eight-three eighteen. The water tanks on level-"
What followed was an incredibly dry recount of standard events aboard any station or ship. Liv and Rowan had both lived through them, and Liv had helped to solve several of them as an engineer on the cruiser Nova. Eventually Albela got back to what interested them.
"Dr. Kin tells me the Lennium is behaving properly now; Project Rainbow is back on track. In three days the first test will being. The station is beginning to conserve power -- the pressure the laser array will put on our infrastructure will be immense. Any disruption in the electrical system will spell failure."
Rowan paused the report. "Now do you believe me? Something went wrong with 'Project Rainbow,' and they killed it the only way they knew how: cut the power here, in the bridge."
"Is that right?" Liv asked sardonically. "Then can you tell me why there were no reports sent, or survivors? What about those blocked passages? Do you have an explanation for those?" Rowan said nothing. Liv unpaused the report.
"The entire station is on tenterhooks about the experiment. For centuries man-made wormholes have all but been a dream; in a few days we look to create our own. A jump distance of a mere million kilometers is the perfect test: safe but clear in its success or failure. Albela out."
"A wormhole," Liv said.
"I don't see how it could have failed."
Liv glared at her. "I can't believe they were doing this. Have you ever heard of Lennium?" Rowan shrugged. "No, of course not." He selected the next report. After Albela's normal sign-on, and further information on the station's more pedestrian problems, he continued with Project Rainbow.
"Dr. Kin has assured me the experiment will happen on time, two days from now. The entire station has been notified, and preparations are in place. The calculations are being checked and double-checked. Proper placement of both ends of the wormhole are paramount, but there are a thousand smaller things to work out, I'm told." There was a pause. "I wonder what it will look like." Another, longer, pause. "If I sit here I'll start to pontificate; nobody wants that. Albela out."
"That was helpful," Liv grumbled, selecting the third-to-last report.
"The entire ship is abuzz with tomorrow's events. I suspect non-essential work has been put off, and have in fact encouraged it. It's somewhat like a holiday. I half-expect gifts to be exchanged. The experiment will take place tomorrow noon ship-time. I will make a live report documenting the formation of the wormhole. Albela out."
"Brace yourself," Liv said, finger hovering over the second-to-last report. "I suspect things will become serious in this one."
"Captain Duncan Albela, captain's report of Itzel, nine-eleven-three eighteen. 'Rainbow day,' as some of the crew and scientists have taken to calling it. Surely, a valid name. Dr. Kin tells me she will begin funneling power to the laser array in mere minutes. We in the bridge -- and I would guess anybody able to reach one -- are all watching through our window, where the wormhole's entrance will appear. Ensign Corsair has orders to take us through only when Dr. Kin says the wormhole is stable."
There was a pause. "Dr. Kin has announced the experiment has begun . . . we see nothing yet. Ah, there's something." A small cheer rose. "It seems the experiment is, at first glance, a success. I see a . . . a dark circle, much like a black hole would appear to be, but . . . yes, there are small stars visible through the wormhole . . . Dr. Kin tells me they should be the stars visible from the other side of the wormhole." Liv and Rowan heard gasps, and both visibly tensed. "Oh my. It appears the outer rim of the wormhole is sporting a brilliant rainbow -- a circle around it. The colors are mixing and flowing together and apart but the Roy-Gee-Biv can be easily determined. It's an incredible sight.
"The wormhole continues to grow larger in diameter . . . as it does so, the rainbow around its rim becomes thinner, but still present and catching to the eye." The siblings heard a blip. "I have skipped ahead ten minutes. The wormhole has continued to grow, larger than even this station. We are waiting for confirmation from Dr. Kin that we may proceed; Ensign Corsair is waiting at the helm. We-" There was a short pause. "Dr. Kin tells us it is safe to proceed. Ensign, if you will . . . Albela out."
"Why wouldn't he just keep the same recording going if he can skip ahead like that?" Liv said. He moved to select the final report when the door behind them slammed open.
"What are you doing?!" a voice shouted. Rowan fell out of her chair and scooted herself away with her legs; Liv spun quickly, standing, holding his weapon out in front of them.
A slender woman with pitch-dark hair and blue eyes stormed toward him, undaunted by the gun he pointed at her. "Get away from there!" she shouted, moving past him and sitting at the terminal they had been using. She hit a few buttons, expertly leaving the reports and going to another screen as information flicked past.
"May I ask you who you are?" Liv said caustically. "Are you someone from the Itzel?"
"Of course I'm from the Itzel, you moron! You think I just flew here?" the woman shouted back.
"And how did you survive?" Liv dropped his pistol. "Is there anyone else still on the station? Can you tell us what happened?" He glanced at Rowan, who was huddled in a corner, panting. "What are you doing now?"
"I'm keeping strangers from going through the captain's personal reports. My name's Delaney Corsair," the woman said, calmer. "I was the helmswoman here."
"From Captain Albela's reports?"
"Yeah, Captain Albela. That pompous asshole is one of the reasons I've been stuck here for weeks with nothing but tanks of air and a busted communicator."
"Would you be so kind as to explain what happened?"
Delaney looked at him without a touch of cheer. "Yeah. Yeah, I can tell you everything." She looked around, and seemed to see Rowan for the first time. "What's her problem?"
"You startled her. Start explaining."
Delaney hesitated. "Not here. Now that the power's back on, there are a bunch of things I want to do. Like eat hot food." She searched around on the terminal, and activated something. Above their heads, multicolored rows of lights came to life, leading out of the bridge. "Take the green lights to the closest cafeteria. I'll join you in a bit; I just have to make sure everything's all right here."
Liv gazed at her for a few seconds, then nodded and went to collect Rowan, who was slowly pushing herself up the wall to a standing position. Delaney watched them leave with a scowl. As soon as they were gone she went back to the reports on the terminal and deleted the last entry, seeing it had yet to be accessed. She stood and, picking her way, went to the remaining power bank. With a scowl, she turned and looked behind her, out the window, teeth clenched and tendons raised on her jaw.
"It was Albela, and resident quantum chemist Georgia Kin, that led to 'Project Rainbow.'"
Delaney sat across from Liv and Rowan. She appraised them carefully, from their standard-issue DSI spacesuits, to their yellow haircuts -- Liv's buzzed short, and Rowan's jagged, asymmetrical style. She had a plate of food in front of her: Corn, pasta, soup, and coffee. Rowan was sipping her own coffee; Liv had requested nothing. The cafeteria, a level down and in the middle of the station, was a huge, bright, white, empty room. The line of colored light had led them unerringly.
They had noticed other colors: red, blue, yellow, brown. They came in and out, and the siblings assumed they led to other rooms -- infirmary perhaps, or even just elevators.
"Kin discovered Lennium when working with her chemicals, and found it had special properties. I don't know what they were, or are, because I didn't care to listen to their endless prattle." Delaney scooped a forkful of pasta into her mouth and continued speaking. "Some stuff with light. The station has a huge array of lasers and mirrors on the underside which can be used to manipulate...things."
"Light, I assume."
"Sure. So, Kin did her thing and found that, somehow, Lennium could be used to rip holes in space."
"And that didn't terrify you...how?" Rowan asked.
"It's not my job to care what the scientists are up to," Delaney said. "It's my job to pilot the station. You listened to all the reports, right?"
"All but the last one."
"Then you know everything about it I do. Kin used Lennium to open wormholes. That's the extent of my knowledge."
"So?" Rowan asked. "What went wrong?"
"They fucked it up. Kin thought she was some sort of genius instead of just a lucky asshole. She got things wrong. They created two wormholes, yeah, but had no idea what would happen when we got too close. I don't know how it happened, but the wormhole started to change the station's gravity. It started tipping. The whole thing started listing toward the wormhole, practically falling inside. Small gravity wells appeared around and inside the station. You saw what they did on the way to the bridge, I suspect."
Liv raised an eyebrow. "The masses in the hallways?"
"The gravity wells grabbed everything nearby and squashed it into a small space. The gravity was so intense the items fused together. Anything, be them bulkheads or people, were crushed into a space, like a localized black hole."
"People?!" Rowan said. She clapped a hand over her mouth and grabbed her brother's shoulder. "The meat...I need to lie down." Her body disappeared from view as she laid herself down on the bench, putting her feet on Liv's lap and covering her mouth.
"At least you didn't have to see it happen." Delaney said this with a small voice, frowning at her empty tray. "That's not all. The wormhole was sucking the station through. It had a gravity. A few chunks of the ship were torn off and fell into it, crushed into specks."
"You didn't make a wormhole," Liv said. "You made a black hole."
"More or less," Delaney said. "People tried to get to the launch bays and leave the ship, using escape pods, scout ships, transports...anything they could."
"Why didn't they just stop the experiment?"
"Maybe they didn't have time. Maybe it didn't occur to them. It doesn't matter; people were just beginning to board the ships when the power went out. The ship died, and the force fields around the launch bays failed. Everyone was sucked out, into the closing wormhole. I was in the bridge when it happened, and I was able to get to a suit quick enough before the place depressurized...but no one else survived. I watched Albela suffocate."
The woman stared at her tray with a hard expression. After a few seconds she looked up at the siblings. "Is that enough? Can we go now?"
"Yeah. Anything you need to collect?" Liv asked.
"Only a few things. I'll just be a few minutes." Liv saw her out of the cafeteria and went back to his sister. "So? What's she lying about?"
"I don't like her."
"Neither do I. She's lying about something and she's in a rush to get away from here. I can understand that, at least."
"Let's go back to the bridge," Rowan said, slowly levering herself up to a sitting position. "We should copy them anyway for Greenwich."
"And we make an announcement over the ship, just in case anyone else is alive." Rowan nodded, remaining seated. She tapped a fist against her cheek, thinking. "No time for that now."
"She's dark," Rowan said. Her eyes roved up to find him. "Everything about her is dark. We don't trust her."
"Not even as far as I could throw her. Let's get back to the bridge."
"See if you can find some way to make an announcement over the station's system," Liv told Rowan as they entered the bright bridge. "I'll send the reports to the ship; they and Ensign Corsair's testimony should be enough to close this investigation. Do you know which color leads to the landing bay?"
"Blue," Rowan said, staring out the window.
"All right, back to reports. Back to reports, back to reports..." Liv found the reports once more, unaware there was one missing. "Any luck?"
Rowan tsked. "Not yet. So many buttons." She angrily swiped a hand across the screen she was at, then put her forehead in her hands, grimacing. She stood and went to another terminal, striding forcefully. Liv watched her pass in front of him. She activated the other terminal and tapped a few times. "Ah. Maybe...?"
"Testing." Her voice came through the ceiling above Liv, startling him. "Testing. This is Rowan Whitney, Federal Deep Space Investigator. If there is anyone still aboard the station, proceed directly to the landing bay on..." She thought for a moment. "Deck nine, starboard side. We have a ship prepared to take you back to federal space." She ended the announcement.
"There's no one else," Delaney's voice said from the door. "I was here for weeks."
"You didn't find anyone?" Liv asked.
"Oh, I found people, but they were dead." The woman entered the room, a backpack around her shoulders. "What are you doing?"
"Transferring these reports to our ship. Our supervisor will have our heads if we don't bring them. I'm sure he'll be very interested in meeting you." Liv stood from the captain's chair. "Do you have everything you need?"
"Yeah. All of my prized possessions." The woman could barely keep from rolling her eyes. Rowan, unnaturally subdued, watched her from the side of the room. "Can we leave now? I guarantee you there's no one else left on this ship."
"Is that right?" Liv said, glaring up at Delaney. "Well hate me if you wish, but we're going to wait and make sure."
"We can at least go to the landing bay, right?" Delaney shouted. "That's where she told them to go!"
"She's right about that, at least," Rowan said. "If anybody is still here, they should be going there."
"How long will we have to wait before you're satisfied? There are-" Delaney halted, a terrified expression on her face.
"Delaney?" Liv asked. "What's-" The station shook. Only then did Liv realize there had been another tremor, much smaller. Delaney had felt it. "What was that?"
Delaney whipped around, looking out the window. Liv realized Rowan was already staring through it. He looked and saw a small distortion in space, giving the feeling of growth but too slowly to see.
They said nothing. Two of them quickly figured out what was happening, the third relived the horror of the event in the speed of memory. Delaney ran to a cabinet and wrenched it open, revealing empty hooks.
"Dammit!" She shouted.
"The experiment?" Rowan said, still watching.
"Somebody started it! Somebody else is here! Why would they do this?" Liv ran to the terminal Rowan had used to make an announcement. "This is Liv Whitney, Federal Deep Space Investigator -- turn off the experiment immediately!" He looked out the window at the hole in space. A few out-of-place stars could be seen through it. "I repeat, turn off Project Rainbow immediately!"
"They aren't going to listen!" Delaney shouted. "We need to get out of here!"
"The power!" Liv said to Rowan. "Cut the power and the experiment will stop."
"The only way to cut the power from here is to cut it to the entire station!" Delaney shouted. "If you do that, we lose life support! I don't have a suit on!"
Liv glanced out the window. The hole in space had grown larger. "How much time do we have?"
"Fuck if I know!" Delaney spat. "Let's just get to the damn landing bay!"
"I think she might have a point!" Rowan said. "It's getting bigger fast, and I don't like the way the ship is moving."
"Well, let's go then! Lead the way!" Delaney said, trying to shoo them out of the bridge.
"Do you remember the way back to the landing bay?" Liv asked Rowan, when they stepped into the hallway. He looked at the blue light on the ceiling. "Our path might be blocked."
"I remember."
The station, floating in space, vibrated and shook, and they heard the heart-stopping sound of metal tearing apart, bringing tears to their eyes. Rowan covered her ears.
"What's happening?" Liv shouted. The lights flickered, and Delaney's frightened face blinked in and out of shadow.
"The wormhole must be creating small gravity wells like last time," she said. They heard a clunk, and the fact they were floating in space -- not inside a giant building as it sometimes seemed -- felt apparent once more. "It sounds like the ship is being ripped apart! They weren't this strong last time!"
"Fastest way to the landing bay." Liv pointed at Delaney. "Now!"
They made it down a few levels via claustrophobic elevator, exiting to find the atmosphere tearing past them in shrieking layers, pulling Delaney's hair toward a growing opening in the hull. Liv quickly attached his suit's helmet and pulled Delaney back into the elevator as Rowan did the same. "Another path!"
"Follow the lights!" Rowan said, jabbing her finger at the ceiling. "If I can recall a better path, I'll tell you."
The elevator's lights died, and the box jerked, throwing Liv against the wall. "Doesn't this thing have hull seals?" Rowan asked Delaney as she clicked on her helmet's light.
"I'm sure it did!" The woman responded, white in the face. "It hasn't exactly been kept up to code recently!"
"It doesn't feel like we're moving," Liv said. He opened the elevator's door and found a metal wall, with little space in between. "Great."
"Don't worry Liv. You know what they say...when God shuts a door, kick a hole in the roof." Rowan indicated a hatch in the elevator's ceiling. "Here's what we do. We get Delaney a suit, then we can safely cut the power to the ship. Once we cut the power to the ship we just need to make sure there's enough of it left for us to reach the landing bay." Behind her helmet, Rowan smiled. "Where's the closest place a suit would be?"
Delaney stared at Rowan for a second, then exhaled harshly. "A med bay I bet."
"Which color would one have to follow to get there?"
"Red. Follow the red lights and you'll be taken to the closest one."
"Good." Rowan spun to Liv. "I'll stay here with Delaney, you gather a suit. Better yet, see if you can find a way to get this elevator somewhere helpful." An impact shook them all. "Before we go spinning off into space."
"Give me a boost," Liv said. Rowan put her hands together and lifted her brother, who smashed through the hatch, revealing an empty, yawning elevator shaft lit by blue globes. "Don't go nowhere."
"Don't leave us here," Rowan responded, and Liv disappeared from the elevator.
He found the emergency ladder and started climbing, about twenty feet below the closest door. He had no idea where they were in the station -- only Rowan had internalized the plans.
He pushed open the doors and ejected himself into the hallway. This one was untouched so far, save the odd shake of the station. He wished he could look out a window and see the wormhole's growth, but instead looked up at the numerous lines of color running across the ceiling, and picked out the red one. It led him away from the elevator, and he ran as fast his suit allowed. He didn't want to leave Rowan alone with Delaney for too long.
"So what was that? Before?" Delaney asked. They were sitting against the walls of the cab, across from each other. Rowan had her helmet off again, hair sticking up at all kinds of odd angles. The only light in the cab came from the helmet's spotlight.
"What was what?"
"I thought Liv was in charge. Why did he let you order him around?"
"I dunno. I just do it sometimes. Liv says I'm smarter, but his head is screwed on tighter."
"And what was that about recalling a better path?" Delaney peered closer. "Did you serve here?"
"Oh, that. No. I memorized the plans for the station before we came here. Pretty standard."
"You memorized them. All of it?"
"Yeah. So what have you been doing since the accident?"
"Twiddling my thumbs," Delaney said. "You think I've just been waiting around? I was trying to get a long-rang transmitter to work without having to attach to the ship's power. I was getting closer, but then you two showed up."
"How did you eat? Or drink?"
"Emergency induction port. It wasn't easy, trust me. I existed on nothing but cold liquids for weeks. You have no idea how amazing it was to eat real food."
"You couldn't get power restored to the ship on your own?"
"Why do you assume I have the knowledge to do that? I told you, I'm not a magician, I'm a pilot. I can drive the station. I shouldn't have, but Captain Asshole wanted to test the wormhole with the entire station! How stupid can someone be? Just send a goddamn scout ship through it!"
"What about going to the bathroom? How did you sleep?" Rowan asked.
"What?! Oh . . . that wasn't as hard as you might imagine. Sleeping was annoying, but-"
"You killed Captain Albela, didn't you?"
Delaney looked at Rowan, astonished. The other woman watched her with an unblinking gaze. "Of course not! I didn't like him -- he was an idiot, as you should have been able to tell from his reports -- but I didn't kill him! Why would I kill him?!"
"Plenty of reasons. Maybe he attacked you first."
Delaney's face pulled into a hysterical shape. "What do you think, I'm some monster? Just because I'm the only one to survive Project Rainbow? The fuck is wrong with you?!"
"I'm sorry. I guess I was wrong."
"Yeah, I guess you fucking were!" Delaney crossed her arms and looked to the side, away from Rowan. Rowan continued watching her.
"I wonder how long it will take them to get at each other's throats," Liv muttered to himself as he reached the end of the red line. A door opened, revealing a well-stocked medical bay.
He'd caught a glimpse of the growing wormhole, passing a window. The momentary sight made him stop and go back, to reassure himself he had really seen it.
The wormhole showed strange stars. The glimpse of space around the hole seemed nothing more than a curtain, hiding the truth the wormhole revealed. The stars inside, though indistinguishable from those outside, appeared with a noticeable haze to them -- they seemed to understand their light had been redirected.
Around the outside of the wormhole was a twisted, mixing, rearranging rainbow. The colors could be perceived but never truly seen -- his brain told him all seven colors of the rainbow were there, but his eyes failed to distinguish them.
He had pushed himself away from the window, fearing the thing no less for its beauty.
The medical bay had everything an ailing person could need. Steeped in calming blue light, he searched for a suit of any kind, and eventually found them in a back room. One of them appeared to be Delaney's size, and he packed it under his arm in preparation for the climb back down the elevator shaft.
As he went back into the main area of the bay, the ship trembled and Liv's stomach turned over. One of the blue lights shattered and rained glass down on him, and a bed suddenly flipped onto its side and slammed against the wall next to it. Pressure pulled him toward the wall after the bed and the other items crashing into the wall, and his brain, struggling to reorient itself with this new, dire gravity, recalled the packed human remains he and Rowan had encountered.
The room turned. Two forces pulled him at perpendicular angles, but thankfully the one at the end of the room was weaker than the station's "natural" gravity. Grabbing hold of a cabinet bolted to the wall, he half-climbed and half-crawled to the exit. The station was in throes; Liv guessed small pockets of gravity were appearing all over the general area. He wondered how strong they would get, then remembered Delaney's description: The gravity was so intense the items fused together. He climbed faster, reaching the door and jamming it open. Air pulled across his face in the hallway, but it wasn't a breach. The small gravity pocket pulled the atmosphere through the hallway and left it nowhere to go -- the end result was nothing more dangerous than a stiff wind.
Able to right himself once he got far away, he re-traced his steps back toward the elevator. The other task Rowan had given him -- get the elevator to a safe level -- was out of his hands, unless he happened to run across some kind of control room.
He got lost. This in itself was not a surprise. Rowan had always had the better sense of direction, and over his life he'd learned how to find his way back to safety, but the idea of wasting time aggravated him. What was a surprise was the body lying in the middle of the hallway, slumped against a wall, cold, dried blood in a puddle around him, space suit still on. His badge read "Heinrick Barrows," and identified him as a janitorial worker. He was long-dead, and at first Liv assumed it was from a depressurization until multiple stab wounds showed themselves on the man's torso.
They meant the man had been murdered, and they meant the man had been murdered after the loss of power and atmosphere, but they didn't tell him why.
It didn't matter why. Liv stood and hurried to the last familiar place. There was now a chance he had left his sister alone with a murderer.
The woman hadn't said a word to each other. Rowan thought the other was being unreasonable. She had apologized, after all.
"I don't like silences," Rowan said finally. "I know you don't really want to talk to me. That's fine. I can talk for both of us." Delaney looked at her, disgusted. "I bet you'd like to know how my brother and I both became DSIs and became partners. It's interesting, actually. You see, he-"
"Shut up!" Delaney shouted, making Rowan jump. "I don't care! I don't care about you, or your brother, or anything else! I just want to get off this station!" Rowan imagined if the woman could force tears out, she would be crying. "Do you know what I've had to live through since Project Rainbow? I haven't seen anybody alive. I recorded myself talking just so I could have something to listen to. There have been no noises on the ship -- can you even imagine what that's like? The sound of my own heart filled my ears!" She gestured violently at her backpack. "I went around collecting audio recordings other people had made because I thought I was going crazy!" She opened the backpack and dumped it out; dozens of recording chips tumbled out. "Look! They each have days of recordings on them! Random assholes I'd never met talking about their bad knees, or how their daughter on Earth turned eight, or figuring out how to beat a friend at chess! I haven't even listened to all of them!" Delaney shook. "And now I'm stuck here with you, waiting for your brother, who may or may not even come back!"
"He's coming down the shaft right now," Rowan said simply. Looking at the recording chips. She picked a few up. "It looks like he has a suit for you, too. We'll be leaving soon, don't worry."
Delaney whipped her head up to gaze out the hole in the ceiling, noticing a figure making its way down the emergency ladder toward the cab with something tucked under its arm. Rowan threw the chips back onto the pile. "He wouldn't abandon me."
"That must be so nice for you," Delaney grumbled with her neck still craned up, watching Liv approach. She glanced at Rowan, who was staring at a corner, and shook her head. "I can't believe I had to be rescued by the two of you."
"You're not in the clear yet," Rowan said. She knelt by the recording chips again and fanned them out, picking several up. "We still need to get to the ship. We're getting closer to the wormhole all the time and the station's structure is becoming weaker." She tapped the small bud in her ear. "Liv told me he encountered one of the gravity wells right after he found your suit." To punctuate her statement, the station shook again. "As long as we don't run into anything, we should be able to get out of here quickly."
Liv stepped onto the top of the cab, and swung his legs inside, lowering himself down carefully. "Here." He handed the suit he carried to Delaney. "We'd better get moving. Fastest way?" He asked Rowan.
She thought for a moment. "Back up to the level the bridge was on. We go past it . . . there's another elevator that should be able to take us past the obstructions, as long as no new ones have appeared. It's a long route."
"Up, then," Liv ordered. "Ladies first."
The bridge's level was hundreds of feet above them, and they climbed silently, feeling the station's shaking increase around them. They all wore their helmets, in case of sudden accidents, and Liv tuned Delaney's transmitter to their frequency.
Delaney's stomach was caught in her throat. She'd lasted so long on her own, and now she was finally -- finally -- going to make it out of what had become a gigantic death trap for the last weeks. She kept climbing with furious enthusiasm. Hand over hand, foot over foot. She glared upward at the empty space, unwilling to let the station get the better of her after she'd lasted so long.
Behind her, staring constantly at her ever-moving rear end, Rowan wished she could communicate with her brother. Their next steps were laid out for them, but the future was an open book, ready to be colored in. Rowan smiled. She remembered her childhood, and her teacher's constant reminders she should color inside the lines. Such adherence to guidelines ran counter to Rowan Whitney since the very beginning. She did not simply think outside the box -- she broke the box down, constructed a new structure, and then thought outside of it anyway. Whatever happened once they reached the bridge, she would be able to deal with.
Last in line on the ladder, much more worried about the situation, Liv felt every minuscule tremor the station had. He wondered how firmly the ladder was attached to the wall, wondered how well the wall was attached to the main structure of the elevator, and, just to cover all his bases, wondered generally about the construction of the station. How strong was the pull of the wormhole, really? Strong enough to tear the station asunder, even this close?
The three climbed silently, blue globes illuminating the ladder and bare metal of the elevator shaft. The station hummed and groaned. Liv glanced down at the barely-visible cab, wondering if it would decide to suddenly come back to life and give chase, but before the fear could be realized they reached bridge level.
"I can't get the door open!" Delaney shouted in the transmitter, making Liv and Rowan wince.
"Not so loud!" Liv said. "We can hear you fine! Try and move aside and I might be able to get it open."
Rowan scooted over the side of the ladder and let her brother pass, both of them holding their breath. Delaney, arms wrapped around the ladder with all her strength, watched him carefully climb past with her customary hard eyes, until Liv was level with the doors. He took a tool from his suit's belt and unscrewed a panel, quickly forcing the doors to think a cab waited to unload. The doors opened, and he crawled out, giving helping hands to Delaney and Rowan.
They went down the hallway, but before they got far Liv felt the same odd gravity as he had in the medical bay. He looked around a corner and found a cluster of metal crawling over itself in the middle of the hallway, blocking their path. He glanced at Rowan, who pointed in a different direction. They took a step.
A terrible sound penetrated their helmets, and the station shook as if hit by a bomb. Delaney was thrown to the ground, bashing her helmet on the wall; Rowan fell over and bounced onto her stomach. Only Liv was able to stay standing. His sister picked herself up quickly, but they heard a pained groan through their transmitters. Delaney stayed on the ground.
"Get her up. Let's take her to the bridge," Liv said, not unkindly. "Delaney, can you hear me?"
"Yeah," came the reply. "Just a knock on the head. I'll be okay."
Rowan looked in the other woman's helmet and saw blood trickling down the side of her face. "You're bleeding."
"It's just a scratch. I want to keep going. There should be a medkit in the bridge."
"Okay," Liv brought her to her feet and kept her from stumbling over. "Rowan, lead the way."
The station's shaking had increased, and they couldn't run for fear of losing their footing, but they reached the big bridge without further incident. The wormhole held their gaze.
It was impossible to tell how big it was, or how far, but the mere spectacle of the thing couldn't be denied. The rainbow, as described by Captain Albela, had dwindled to a mere band of light around the rim. The interior -- looking through space an unknown distance -- looked to be nothing more than simple space.
Delaney pushed off from Liv and sat in a chair, removing her helmet. She looked away from the window at the front of the room and crossed her arms, lips a tight line. Rowan quickly fetched the medkit and let Liv tend to her.
"You're right. Just a scratch. It isn't too deep. Let's see..." He rifled through the contents of the med kit. "Here, this should do it." He applied a small antiseptic strip near her hairline. Over Delaney's shoulder, he saw Rowan come up the steps from the bridge's lower level and nod. "It's a good thing you had your helmet on, or we might be lugging your unconscious body around right now. Sure you feel alright?"
"I'm fine. We can keep going."
"Not just yet," Liv said, and Rowan hit a button on the terminal she stood by. A voice emanated from the terminal, filling the bridge.
"It's still amazing," a woman's voice breathed. "We're getting closer and closer to it the whole time." There was a pause. "The station is still shaking, but nobody seems to be worried. Mister-" Sudden screams spilled out all around them. Delaney's heart hammered. Liv stood blocking the exit. "Oh my God! There's something-" Shouts interrupted the speaker "Blaine, get away from...No!"
Delaney started shaking. She gripped the seat under her with white knuckles. "Stop it."
"Blaine..." the voice continued again. They heard tears in the voice. "Blaine got grabbed by something. I-It crushed him." The person recording was running. "The station is shaking harder now. Redmond, what's happening?"
A faint male voice entered. "The wormhole is doing something, we-" A garbled, staticky noise overpowered everything, filling the bridge with white noise. When it died, the recording was filled with nothing but voices trying to talk over one another, growing in volume and emotion.
"Turn it off!" Delaney shouted. Tears hung in her eyes. "Turn it fucking off!"
"Part of the station just came away!" The female voice shouted into the recording. "It looked like one of the port stabilizers! The wormhole's tearing it apart! It's just gone into the wormhole -- it's gone!" The fear was momentarily replaced by wonder and confusion, until a voice away from the recorder shouted: "It crushed it!"
"We're still getting closer!" Liv stared Delaney down as the latter sat.
"Tell them to turn it off!" Rowan had a hand over her mouth.
"Gravity wells are appearing all over the station! Stay away from them! Everybody get to the landing bays and escape pods, the captain's going to make an announcement!" Delaney tried to meet Liv's gaze but ended up squeezing her eyes shut. A chime came from the recording.
"This is Captain Albela," they heard from the recording, presumably originally emanating from overhead speakers. "All personnel proceed to the landing bays immediately. The station has taken structural damage. I repeat: All personnel to landing bays immediately. Take only emergency items."
The announcement ended, and the speakers played only general hurry and shouts. The person responsible for the recording said nothing. Liv noticed what he could only interpret as a glimmer of hope in Delaney's face, until Rowan fast-forwarded to a predetermined spot.
"We're in the landing bay now," the woman's voice said. "We saw a bunch of those gravity wells. They've hurt the ship, but we still have life support. They're loading everybody onto the ships now. We-" The same announcement noise came through. "Red alert." They heard Captain Albela shout. "I repeat, this is a red alert; everyone proceed to landing bays immediately. All color paths have been overridden to landing bay blue, do not -- Ensign, what are you doing?" The bridge, and the recording, were quiet. "Ensign Corsair, what are you doing?" They heard a short shout, too far away to be heard clearly. "Stop! I am ordering you to stop! You'll-"
The recording ended.
Delaney sat in her chair, not moving. Rowan took the recording chip from the terminal and threw it to Liv, who pocketed it.
"You cut the power," Rowan said, walking slowly to stand next to her brother. "You used a knife to do so, breaking it in the process." She showed the half of the knife she'd found their first time to the bridge, before turning the power on. "You used the other half to kill the others in the bridge as the loss of atmosphere flushed everyone in the landing bays out into space."
"But you had to make sure no one else had survived. If they did, they would but the blame on you." Liv watched the accused for a moment. "You got a suit, and hunted them down. Heinrick Barrows was one of them. You told us you were the only one left on the station alive, and you were right."
"You deleted the final report on the captain's terminal likely because it contained the same information we've just heard," Rowan said. "You thought you were safe when you deleted it, but you didn't think one of the recording chips had their own version of the events. Further, you didn't expect me to be able to find one after being told of the murdered body my brother found." The station shook harshly.
"Under our authority of the Deep Space Investigators, you're under arrest," Liv said. "Why would you do such a thing?"
"I saved my life," Delaney said under her breath. "The wormhole's gravity was too strong for the escape ships to break. Only cutting the power would stop the wormhole. I wasn't going to waste time arguing with Albela because I knew he wouldn't agree with me! I did what I had to do to survive, and I know it was the right choice, because at least one person survived!"
"You said you weren't a scientist." Liv leaned down and placed his hands on the armrests of Delaney's chair, face inches from hers. "You said you didn't know. How could you have been so sure?!" He shouted suddenly, making Delaney lean backwards. "But it doesn't matter now, does it? You're coming with us, to be investigated for the slaughter of over sixteen thousand people!"
She pushed him away, placing both hands on his chest and shoving. He stumbled backwards and fell over as she shot from the chair toward the exit with only Rowan in her way. Without pausing, Delaney launched her fist forward.
Though Rowan brought her arm up in time, the punch knocked her against the door; Delaney jammed the door open and jumped away from Rowan's reaching arms. The woman ran down the hallway.
"She's going for the ship!" Rowan shouted behind her as Liv got to his feet.
"Get your helmet on," he said quickly. "This place is coming apart."
"She doesn't have hers. If we lose atmosphere..."
"We'll have to catch up to her before that." Liv glanced behind him. The wormhole had grown large enough to take up the entire window; its overlapping gravities rattled the station without end. "After her, now."
They left the bridge, running in the direction Delaney did. They could hardly take two steps without feeling the floor shift under their feet.
Ahead of them, wishing she'd taken her helmet, Delaney tried to remember the path she had to take to reach the landing bay, but the finer details of the station's many levels and paths escaped her. She rounded a corner and found a pressure pulling her forward before she realized a gravity well inhabited the hallway about a hundred feet in front of her, already strong enough to entice her forward. She turned to go back and found two helmeted people in her way.
"Give it up, Delaney!" Liv shouted. "You aren't going to be able to leave the station unless you're with us!" He took a step forward, feeling the pull of the gravity well and bracing himself against it, hand reaching for Delaney's wrist.
Their vision melted for a moment; the station shook so hard everything blurred in front of them. To Delaney's right the wall tore open, showing space's open darkness and dumping the air out from the hallway. It was a small opening compared to the size of the station, but only meters away. Shrieking metal and rushing air covered all other sounds, including Liv's repeated order to submit. Delaney looked from him and his sister to the opening on her right. After a gap of about a meter, the hallway continued.
She ran and leapt. Liv shouted after her as shrapnel tore past, watching her body break over the gap, able to resist the tug of the air emptying into space. She landed and grasped the bulkhead next to her, looking back for a moment before moving as fast as she could away.
"Shit!" Liv yelled. "We can't make that jump in suits! We need another way!" He looked at Rowan after nothing but silence from her, and found her gazing into the open space revealed by the tear in the station's hull. "At least get away from the opening!"
She agreed silently, and they ran back toward the bridge, beyond the pull of the escaping atmosphere. "Another path, Rowan, quickly! If she gets to the ship before us she could figure out a way to take off!"
"I'm thinking!" Rowan shouted back, putting her hands to her helmet. "Okay. Okay. Follow me. I think I have one."
"Go, then! If we wait any long we're going to be riding this place into the wormhole!" Rowan started jogging down the hallway, hands out to her sides to keep from losing her balance. Liv followed her, wishing she could move faster.
She turned a corner, and his wish was granted. She broke into a run, as fast as she could manage in her space suit, and Liv suddenly found it difficult to keep up with her. Their arms pumped, and sweat collected inside their suits.
"We'll have to take elevators down to the right level!" Rowan shouted. "It'll be dangerous, but it's the fastest way."
"She'll have to take them too," Liv said, panting.
"Not the same ones!" Rowan said. "There are some closer to her, but the distance is the same to the landing bay. Hopefully she'll be confused and get lost."
"I'm not going to leave her here!" Liv said. "She's going to come with us and pay for what she did!"
"Then I guess we'd better hope we manage to run into her before we get to the ship!"
They got to the elevator after a few more minutes of running, and stood listening to the station crumble as it arrived at their level. Inside, it could almost be believed nothing outside was wrong. The cab did not feel the station's shaking, and sounds were muted even more than before.
The feeling didn't last. Halfway to the level of the landing bay, Liv felt himself tipping forward unconsciously, until he realized gravity was pulling him slightly. By the time they reached their destination, it felt like the entire ship had rotated forty-five degrees.
"It's the wormhole." Rowan spoke up, half-braced against the wall. "The station's getting closer to it -- it's acting like a planet." The cab's door opened and they had to nearly fall out, sliding against the far wall. "This way."
Another hideous grinding sound filled their ears, but they saw no destruction. The material under their feet felt less reliable by the second as they pulled themselves along, using the floor and wall. Liv saw they were now following the blinking blue light leading them toward the landing bay. He heard Rowan's constant panting, and felt the station vibrate as it was pulled apart.
They had to detour around an already-existent barrier in the hallway, and carefully pass by a forming gravity well -- strong enough to bend the walls it formed near into a foot-wide aperture quickly filling up with debris. Nearly on their hands and knees, they wound their way past the worsening destruction toward the landing bay. When they reached it they saw nothing but their DSI ship, standing tall on the wide, flat, tilting plain of the landing bay. There was nothing else in the landing bay -- a fact they had noticed when they'd first arrived, but only now knew the chilling reason why.
"We can't leave her here," Liv repeated. "We have to find her and make her come with us."
"What are we going to do, then? Go wander the disintegrating hallways looking for her?" Rowan said in response. She started off across the flat, featureless landing bay toward their ship, scuttling like a primate climbing a tree. Liv followed, worried about the station's continuous rotation. The opening for the landing bay, lit with blue lights now the power was running, was beginning to look like a growing hole at the end of a steep cliff.
"Liv!" Rowan shouted suddenly, pointing at the top of the room. He looked and saw Delaney peering out from one of the doors there. She was situated above their ship, and allowed herself to start sliding down the growing angle of the floor toward it.
Gaining speed, she struck one of the legs hard -- the siblings heard the sound and both winced. The woman didn't move. Liv and Rowan, now lacking a reason to stay around, picked up their speed as best they could, slowly closing the distance toward the ship. Rowan latched on to a leg first, reaching out to clasp Liv's hand and keep him from slipping. She looked down. "Liv."
He looked. He couldn’t tell at first, but he came to realize the wormhole now yawned up at them, growing ever larger as the station was drawn toward it. The space inside was full of airy color, as if paints were scattered across its surface area. He hung on to the leg, caught rapt. "Liv!"
"I'll get Delaney. You get inside and start the ship," he said, looking away from the wormhole. Rowan nodded, and started pulling herself up the ship's leg. The station had turned a full ninety degrees; their ship hung on only thanks to the magnets they'd enabled when landing. Rowan clung on with all her might, fighting the urge to look down at the wormhole, making her way for the ship's door as Liv figured out a way to get to Delaney.
Hooking her fingers under the door's catch, she swung it open; it nearly tore off its hinges thanks to the strange new gravity. As she worked to get herself inside the lights around them flickered and the station shook wildly. She looked out the landing bay door and witnessed a huge structure fall toward the wormhole with the slow, inexorable speed of a planet pulling something down. She saw the part of the station strike the wormhole's surface and disappear; it did not reappear. She swallowed painfully and climbed into the ship.
She had to reorient her mental image of the ship, but she was able to push herself up to the cockpit and climb into the pilot's seat. She started hitting a few buttons to power it up to full.
Delaney hung on to one of the ship's port side legs, unable to take her eyes away from the sight below her. As Liv got closer, edging under the now-active ship's body, he saw the scratch on her head had opened and worsened, sheeting dark blood down the side of her face. She heard him approach and brought her head up to gaze at him.
"Get in the ship!" He shouted, as the station shook once more. "This place is going to snap in half, and it doesn't matter what part you're on! Get in the ship and we can get to safety!" She looked at him with a harder, fiercer version of an expression he had seen on his sister many times. "Don't argue! Don't be a damn stubborn fool!" He shouted. "Just give it up! I'm leaving this station with you, and there's nothing you can do about it!"
The landing bay's lights flickered. "The power's going to go out soon!" Liv said. "Even if you aren't sucked out you'll suffocate in a minute! You aren't invincible!"
"I fucking know that!" Delaney finally shouted back. "Are you?!"
He was finally close enough; she kicked at him, smashing one of his hands and making him cry out in pain. She aimed another kick at his arm but it only grazed him. She tried one more kick, but instead of striking him and knocking him off, he caught it with a gloved hand. She tried to pull it out of his grasp and only succeeded in letting him jump closer, only a foot away. She swiped her hand but did nothing; he grabbed her arm, eyes set.
All Rowan had left to do was engage the thrusters and disable the magnets. She opened the port side door and spotted her Delaney struggling against her brother. "Ready to go!" She said into her transmitter. She started easing herself onto the ship as the station shook. One of the far walls of the landing bay cracked, revealing the guts of the ship. "This place is moments from a whole lot of space dust!"
"You think I don't know that?" was the only reply. Rowan saw Delaney risk a glance below her at the open door she occupied. Her face was a mask of anger and determination, half-covered in blood.
She let go of the leg she was attached to, and fell toward Rowan, who braced herself for an impact.
Delaney slammed into the open door, scrambled to grip it. For a moment Rowan saw fear in her eyes, then one hand latched on to the handle on the door's interior. The station shook as if trying to dislodge her, but she held on.
Rowan grabbed her wrist to pull her in, and Delaney allowed herself to be pulled at first, but as soon as she got the right leverage she reversed the grip, spinning her hand to grasp Rowan.
Her heart jumped as Delaney's pull made her lose her balance, and she tumbled forward for a long instant, before something caught her from behind. She twisted her head, suspended between the two forces, and found her brother holding her other wrist, allowing her to wrench herself from Delaney's grasp.
The station began shaking at a constant rhythm, turning everything into blurs. Like everything, the scene burned itself into Rowan's brain, leaving trails of light and color she struggled to follow. She began to feel disoriented and sick, but was able to fall into the tilted ship. Liv took her place at the door, grabbing Delaney's arms and hauling her aboard.
The woman tried to shake his grasp off, intending to enter the ship on her own power only. Her foot, planted against the side of the ship, lost its purchase as the station shook; she fell slightly, only Liv's strength keeping her still. The station shook harder, and Liv tipped forward out of Rowan's sight.
In an instant she was at the door looking down. Her brother hung on to the door like Delaney, fighting with the woman. Black hair whipping, blood staining her face, teeth clenched in fury, Delaney feverishly tried to shove Liv off. Rowan grabbed Liv and hoisted him just as he pushed Delaney; she fell a meter and snagged Liv's suit leg, ripping him away from his sister and letting both of them fall the distance out of the landing bay, into empty space, and through the crushing wormhole.
Left hanging half out of the ship's door, Rowan screamed at cold, dark space with no one to hear her. Before the shout had even ended, the station knocked her back into reality. She closed the door behind her and crawled to the pilot's seat, where her brother normally sat. Disabling the magnets in the ship's legs, it started sliding toward the landing bay; Rowan considered letting herself fall as her brother had.
He wouldn't want her to do such a thing. She activated the ship's thrusters and angled herself out of the wormhole's pull, straining on the afterburner until its fuel ran dry. The station, appearing like it had been torn with huge claws, shredded to pieces and flowed through the wormhole, disappearing. With its power and forming devices gone and destroyed, the wormhole swallowed itself, leaving no trace of the station responsible for birthing it.
Rowan sat in the pilot's chair, watching her brother fall into the wormhole over and over again, aware she would never be able to forget a single moment of watching her brother fall, aware she would watch him fall and be ground into a tiny point in her dreams, and when she closed her eyes. Even when her eyes were open, like two videos laid over each other, she relived the moments of watching him fall, lit by blue lights, as the colors swallowed him.