Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

The silence was punctuated only by the groans of the ship’s axis slowing.

“Don’t say that, Lizzie.” Momma’s voice was hoarse.

“I have to, Momma,” Lizzie replied, feeling light-headed but oddly sure. “You can take two weeks’ supplies on the ship with you—that gets you to Swayback. And two people have to go to Swayback—without our usual bankfeed to draw from, one of you might have to stay behind at the station as insurance. And someone has to stay here, or we might just as well have traded our station to the Web. The math says one person stays.”

“That’s me,” she said, her voice only trembling a little bit. “I’m smaller than you. I eat less, I breathe less. Leave me with all the protein bars and the water in the sand, and I bet I could last for—for three, maybe four months. Someone’s sure to come before then.”

Lizzie tried to sound more certain than she was. Her plan assumed that nothing further went wrong with the station. That Lizzie didn’t go crazy from being cooped up in a lightless ship. That the soldiers who answered her distress call weren’t soldiers who thought it was okay to beat up a little girl. But Lizzie’s future was a teetering stack of uncertainties; this plan was the best of a bad batch.

Momma argued fiercely for a time—so furiously that Lizzie realized that Momma had already considered this plan. She just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. And when Momma was forced to admit there was no other way, Momma squeezed her tight and wept. It was only the second time Lizzie had seen Momma weep since Daddy had died, and both times in the same day, and that scared her to the core.

Momma took Lizzie in her lap and combed her hair one last time while Gemma finished soldering the junker into shape. “You know I love you, right?”

Lizzie did, but it was good to hear it now. She buried her face in her mother’s chest, trying to inhale Momma’s scent so deeply it would carry her through blackness and terror. All her life, Momma had always been just a couple of rooms away; now, Momma was going to be systems away, crossing the void in a half-dead ship, and Lizzie would have no way of knowing what happened.

“Maybe I should have gone to planetfall,” Momma muttered, rubbing her hands on her pants. “Maybe I should have—”

That questioning was the most terrible thing of all. Momma never doubted.

“It’s okay,” Lizzie said. “Daddy’s out there. He’ll protect me.”

Momma looked sad, and then desperate, and then she floated with Lizzie to the observation window—the only native source of light in the whole station now—and spread her fingers across the scratched window.

Momma said other things before she left, but that was what Lizzie remembered: the terrifying fear and love as Momma said a silent prayer to Daddy, the stars reflected her eyes.

Without electricity, the airlocks didn’t work. So Lizzie said her goodbyes, and then pressed her ear to the wall as Momma and Gemma welded themselves behind a door, then started up the ship, then rammed through a weakened hatch and into space. The only confirmation she had of their leaving was the hollow metal thoom that resounded through the station walls.

She prayed they’d make it. But whether they were alive or dead, for the first time in her life, Lizzie was alone.

Back when they’d had guests, Lizzie had bragged how even if all the servers crashed irrevocably, Sauerkraut Station would still remain a livable environment until rescue could arrive. The thermal hood that covered the axis like a great, trembling umbrella was the brilliant part of Great-Great Gemma’s design. It intercepted all the solar emanations that might otherwise cook the axis, transmitting both heat and electricity back into the station. It was an elegant design that required little monitoring, and no complicated circuitry; the core of the station’s axis served as a boiler room, keeping the station heated to human-habitable temperatures even in the deep cold of space.

But, Lizzie thought after the first day, it made for lousy viewing.

She pressed her nose against the observation deck window, looking for signs of Momma and Gemma. It was suffocatingly black; the thermal hood blocked all the sunlight, leaving Lizzie to strain her eyes to the faint illumination of reflected starlight. The only real light came from the sporadic purple bursts of the meteoroid shields zapping another microparticle.

Yet that was the only place that had any light. The rest of the ship, quite sanely, had no weak points to expose to the sucking vacuum outside. Every corridor was a lightless prison.

On the first day, Lizzie had to dare herself not to turn on her flashlight.

She hugged the hard plastic to her chest, shivering. For the first time in her life, nobody would answer if she called out for help. The emptiness of the station seemed to have its own personality—a mocking smirk, hidden in darkness.

By the time Lizzie half-skipped, half-floated up to the observation deck on the second day—at least she thought it was the second day, it was hard to tell without the usual lightcycles—the observation deck was tinged with a strange glow. It was her eyes adjusting, she knew that, but the deck felt like the ship’s lights during a brownout.

Part of Lizzie wanted to stay at the observation deck all the time. A wiser part understood that if she stayed there in the light, eventually she’d be too terrified to venture back down into the chill void of Sauerkraut Station’s hallways—and so she forced herself, trembling, back to where the water supplies and her bed and the repair kits were.

On the fifth maybe-day, Lizzie almost died.

The gravity had finally dropped to near-zero, and she’d let go of the doorway to push herself off the wall. But in the darkness, she’d misjudged her foot position, and instead of kicking off into space, she just stomped on empty air.

Lizzie tried to whirl around, to get ahold of something—but flailed and touched nothing but air. She knew she must be drifting, slowly, down the middle of the main corridor, towards the observation deck. But she could see nothing; this deep into the station, there was no difference between having her eyes open and her eyes shut.

From here, the observation deck was an eighth of a mile away.

How fast had she been going when she let go? It couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches a minute. She was drifting, slowly, like a speck of dust, down the middle of a long and empty hallway.

Lizzie shrieked. Her voice echoed back, colder and shriller, as if the station itself was throwing her words back at her. She punched, she clapped, she frog-kicked, hoping to feel the pain of her hands smashing against metal. Her hands only slapped the globs of water hanging in the air.

There was nothing to push off of. There was no way to get free.

“MOMMA!” she shrieked. “GEMMA!”

Lizzie saw it all in her mind; she was drifting down the dead center of the hallway, slow as syrup. She’d eventually brush up against the gentle curve of the western wall—but that might take weeks.

She might starve before her body bumped metal.

She pictured her dead body ragdolling slackly against the wall and rebounding, just another dead thing floating in a dead ship. The doc had told her what happened to dead men when they rotted…

She was still screaming, but now she was shrieking at the stupid Web. “I ROOTED FOR YOU!” she said. “I TRUSTED YOU! AND NOW YOU LEFT ME TO DIE, YOU STUPID… STUPID IDIOTS! I HOPE YOU ALL DIE LIKE ME IN YOUR HORRIBLE WAR!”

Then she realized it was only five days maybe five days and Momma hadn’t thought the Gineer would show for weeks and she was going to die and bounce around this ship.