Even though it is years behind him, Ganax finds himself recalling the day he fell through the ice. The lake on their family’s property always froze over during winter, and usually stayed solid through the end of April. He and his sisters spent the cold months bundled and sweating, sliding across the glassy surface. They did this year after year, and sometimes even convinced their parents to join them. That day had started the same as any other. He ate his breakfast and kissed his mother and sped out the door, sisters in tow. He dashed across the ice as always, and decided it was no less sturdy than the day before.
The job had been a standard haul: deliver a Type 1 Fission Runaway Converter from Saturn to the mining colony in the Proxima Centauri system.
The journey started out by-the-book. He retrieved the cargo, then powered up the ship’s “white hole” drive, which emitted a gravity wave that carried him past where Neptune used to be, to the Oort Cloud. Once there, he found a sizeable planetoid to use as a slingshot and coasted the rest of the way out of the solar system. Then, he inputted his location and his destination’s coordinates into the onboard computer and fired up the drive again. This time, the computer automatically activated the resonance modifier.
He always hated what happened next. The ship accelerated as usual, and the stars streaked past him faster and faster. The resonance modifier initiated, and the entire ship began to vibrate. The hull, the controls, even the air around him. For a few seconds, hid body’s vibrations clashed with the ship’s, but slowly the two coalesced, and he and his ship were resonating at the same frequency – that of the cosmic background radiation. This frequency was too high for him to hear or even see, but he could feel the waves undulating beneath his skin, tickling his organs. The stars flashed by, forming a tunnel of light around him. The bright lines began, fractionally, to curve.
At some point, he stopped going forward, and started going through.
To his eye, the stars didn’t move past him, so much as around him, in a perfect inverted sphere. This was Subspace: if the regular, three-dimensional world was the skin of a balloon, he had sunk into the fourth-dimensional depths below. He was no longer traveling through space, but time as well. He closed his eyes to ward against a growing wave of nausea.
Then, the three shrill beeps sounded, letting him know that his journey was soon at an end. The craft started shaking. Ganax’s eyes flicked open. The cockpit was lit by the pale reflections of stars streaming past. On the dashboard were what looked to be normal readings, except for one blinking light: the resonance modifier.
It wasn’t initiating. He shut off the automatic systems and inputted the frequency manually: 160.23 GHz.
The modifier was not responding.
The ship shook harder and harder until suddenly—
It stopped.
He kept his gaze locked on the dash, but the stars’ reflections had stopped moving. He was drifting. He is drifting in a place that effectively does not exist.
The canned air takes on a sour taste in his mouth. The controls feel slick under his palms. His heart is pounding in his ears, like footsteps approaching from the dark.
Ganax steadies his breathing. The only issue is the resonance modifier. If he can get that working, he can simply initiate the Jump protocols again and escape.
He grabs his repair kit and pops open the maintenance panel at his feet. Beneath the flashing lights are hundreds of hair-thin, faintly glowing fiber optics. He sighs.
After an hour of fiddling and searching, he finds the problem: one of the fibers fused. The wiring is old, and it looks like the light burnt through the wire between two repeaters. The lengths of fiber on either side of the repeaters are untouched, so the repeaters did their job. He cuts off the spent fiber and tries to connect the remaining two lengths, but they are about six inches short.
He sits back, frowns. He always did plan on getting some extra fibers.
He doesn’t have much on hand. The wiring in the computers and the walls, some basic repair tools, a single EVA suit next to the airlock, and the cargo.
Once he completes the Jump, he will be close enough to the planet to make landfall and pawn a new suit. Yet, something is gnawing on the back of his neck. What if he did need it? The only other option is the cargo, but if it gets damaged, he’ll lose a good chunk of his pay.
He packs up the repair kit and stands. He keys open the door behind the pilot’s seat and starts down the small hallway connecting the cockpit to the cargo bay. He has to hunch to fit through it. The cargo door slides open, revealing the steel crate. It only reaches halfway up his chest, but it seems to fill the small space.
With a sigh, he turns to the airlock at his right. He unstraps the EVA suit from the wall and sets up a makeshift workstation on the floor. Out of the four main electrical systems in the suit, communications seemed the least useful for the time being. He cuts open the inner lining and snips through one of the comms fibers. He slowly pulls the wire from the arm of the suit and cuts off a length of it.
Ganax makes his way back to the cockpit, looking anywhere but out the front screen. He sets the new fiber and replaces the maintenance panel beneath the dash. After checking the other systems’ statuses, he tests the resonance modifier, and the telltale shudder tells him it’s working perfectly. He inputs Centauri b’s coordinates… and pauses.
Subspace trajectories are plotted before a Jump initiates. These tend to curve and weave around black holes and other gravity wells. When the computers plot a course, they do not simply calculate where these astronomical bodies are now. They account for where they were a week, a year, a century ago. When a ship dips into Subspace, it no longer exists in the present, but in the past. Computers are built to plot a course between two points that exist in the present. Trajectory calculations cannot account for a craft that is already in Subspace.
He is, in every sense of the word, lost.
Of their own volition, his eyes drift to his viewscreen. Beyond the thin pane of glass in front of him is that dark sphere, dotted with pinpricks of stars. He sits in a perfect bubble of time, with no idea which way is up. Once more, he has fallen through the ice, and finds himself alone and helpless in an endless black.
Corey Laisure 