Pax Novis

Chapter Five

Riston

Terra-Sol date 3814.243

Something was wrong. The footsteps Riston heard when ze was close to a hatch—any hatch on the ship—were hurried. Conversations were happening in either whispers or shouts. Tension that bordered on anxiety seemed tangible, a buzz in the air that vibrated against zir skin until ze itched with it. The feeling was only made worse by how little information ze had on why the crew was so on edge. Cira normally messaged them when something important happened, just so they didn't accidentally run afoul of a sudden shift in the crew's routine, but so far zir comm had stayed stubbornly silent.

Impatience, worry, and the persistent itch drove zem to wander down to deck three, where Novis's general and crew storage rooms were. If Cira needed to talk to zem and couldn't send a message, this was where she'd leave a sign. Even knowing that, the sight of the small black R written on the inside of a maintenance hatch made zir heart jump. Ze hadn't expected to find anything. She'd never used the emergency signal before.

How long had it been there? More importantly, what the hell had gone wrong?

Taking the long way up grated at zir patience, but it was probably a worse idea than usual to be careless today. Ze traveled as quickly as ze could while keeping zir passage silent. The trip up to deck twelve still took far too long.

Twenty minutes. Riston crawled and climbed and scraped zir shoulders against walls in spaces too small for zem to comfortably fit through.

Thirty minutes. Ze shivered through sections of the ship that hadn't felt a blast of heat from life support since the full maintenance check a Terra-Sol cycle ago.

Forty minutes. One deck away—one measly deck—ze crouched in the dark waiting for a group to split up and go to their damn rooms instead of lingering in the hall talking. It was zir own fault. This path dead-ended, and ze'd forgotten. Worse, going backward wasn't an option because someone had entered the shafts a few turns back and was working on something back there. The only way forward was to wait for the way to clear and stroll across the hall like ze belonged there to the service hatch on the other side.

It was moments like this Riston wished harder than ever that ze really could belong here, that the uniform ze wore meant just as much as the ones covering the group in the hall. But if wishes were oxygen, no one would ever need a vac suit in space, ze thought bitterly.

Finally, they moved on, and Riston was able to finish the journey. Nearly seventy-five minutes after finding the tiny R nine decks below, ze arrived. Ze pulled zir tablet out of zir bag and stared at it, wondering if ze should message Cira to let her know ze was here. But no. There must be a reason she hadn't messaged zem for this meeting. Ze'd have to wait for some other sign that it was safe to come out.

Bam. Bam-bam. The pattern vibrated through the door two and a half hours later. It jolted Riston out of a fitful doze, and ze stared at the flat metal surface with wide eyes. That had sounded like someone slamming a metal pipe against the door. Or maybe like a girl knocking with her cybernetic arm. Tentatively, ze pressed the latch and opened the door.

Cira was waiting for zem, and yet this wasn't the Cira ze'd gotten used to. The girl who had nearly blushed at receiving a gift and impulsively kissed zir cheek was nowhere to be seen. Standing before Riston was an overstressed officer of the PSSC.

"Tink's been messing around in engineering," she announced as soon as their eyes met. Normally expressive brown eyes were hard and ringed in worry lines, and both hands—flesh and cybernetic—were trembling faintly. Her typically pristine uniform was mussed, and she was breathing as though she'd run the whole way here. "She can't do that. I'm not sure it's even safe for her to be listening through the air vents in the area anymore. Meida is suspicious. She's down to either ghosts or Novis growing an independent mind as her possible explanations, and when she eliminates those, she's going to start looking for an actual person again."