Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

He got up and started walking toward Skidbladnir and her new shell. Saga remained on the ground. Her body felt numb. Novik went up to the building’s front door, which slid open, and he disappeared inside.

Season 1, episode 5: “Adrift.”

The captain’s wife dies. She goes into space on a private shuttle to consign the body to space. While in space, the shuttle malfunctions. The captain finds herself adrift between the stars. The oxygen starts to run out. As the captain draws what she thinks are her last breaths, she records one final message to her colleagues. Forgive me for what I did and didn’t do, she says. I did what I thought was best.

Life on the new Skidbladnir was erratic. Novik spent most of his time interfaced, gazing into one of Skidbladnir ’s great eyes in a hall at the heart of the building. Saga spent much of her time exploring. This had been someone’s home once, an apartment building of sorts. There were no doors or windows, only maze-like curved hallways that with regular intervals expanded into rooms. Some of them were empty, others furnished with oddly shaped tables, chairs and beds. Some wall-to-wall cabinets held knickknacks and scrolls written in a flowing, spiraled script. There were no means to cook food in any way Saga could recognize. She made a nest in one of the smaller rooms close to where Novik worked with Skidbladnir . The walls gave off a soft glow that dimmed from time to time; Saga fell into the habit of sleeping whenever that happened. Drifting off into sleep, she sometimes thought she could hear voices speaking in some vowel-rich tongue, but they faded as she listened for them.

Skidbladnir did seem concerned for Saga and Novik. She stopped at the edge of towns every now and then, where Saga could breathe and was able to trade oddities she found in the building that was now her new home for some food and tools. But mostly they were adrift between worlds. It seemed that Skidbladnir found her greatest joy in coasting the invisible eddies and waves of the void. Every time they stopped somewhere, Saga considered getting off to try her luck. There might be another ship that could take her home. But these places were too strange, too far-flung. It was as if Skidbladnir was avoiding civilization. Perhaps she sensed that Aavit and the old captain might be after them. That thought gnawed at Saga every time they stopped somewhere. But there was such a multitude of worlds out there, and no one ever seemed to recognize them.

She tore the Andromeda Station tapes apart and hung them like garlands over the walls, traced her finger along them, mumbled the episodes to herself, until Skidbladnir shuddered and she took cover for the next passage.

Each time Skidbladnir pushed through to another world, it was more and more violent.

“Is she going to hold?” Saga asked Novik on one of the rare occasions he came out from his engine room to eat.

Novik was quiet for a long moment. “For a time,” he said.

“What are you going to do when she dies?” Saga asked.

“We’ll go together, me and her,” he replied.

One day, improbably, Skidbladnir arrived outside a place Saga recognized. A town, not her hometown, but not so far away from it.

Novik was nowhere to be seen. He was sleeping or interfaced with the ship. Saga walked downstairs, and the front door slid open for her. Outside, a crowd had gathered. An official-looking man walked up to Saga as she came outside.

“What’s this ship?” he said. “It’s not on our schedule. Are you the captain?”

“This is Skidbladnir ,” Saga said. “She’s not on anyone’s schedule. We don’t have a captain.”

“Well,” the official said. “What’s your business?”

“Just travel,” Saga said.

She looked back at Skidbladnir . This was her chance to get off, to go home. Novik would barely notice. She could return to her life. And do what, exactly? The gathered crowd was all comprised of humans, their faces dull, their eyes shallow.

“Do you have a permit?” the official asked.

“Probably not,” Saga said.

“I’ll have to seize this ship,” the official said. “Bring out whoever is in charge.”

Saga gestured at Skidbladnir ’s walls. “She is.”

“This is unheard of,” the official said. He turned away and spoke into a comm radio.

Saga looked at the little town, the empty-faced crowd, the gray official.

“Okay. I am the captain,” she said. “And we’re leaving.”

She turned and walked back to Skidbladnir . The door slid open to admit her. The hallway inside thrummed with life. She put a hand on the wall.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Wherever you want.”

Pilot episode: “One Small Step.”

The new captain of Andromeda Station arrives. Everything is new and strange; the captain only has experience of Earth politics and is baffled by the various customs and rituals practiced by the other aliens on the station. A friendly janitor who happens to be cleaning the captain’s cabin offers to give her a tour of all the levels. The janitor, it turns out, has been on the station for most of his life and knows all of the station’s quirks. She’s confusing as hell at first, he says. But once you know how to speak to her, she will take good care of you.

Saga took the tapes down and rolled them up. It was time to be the captain of her own ship, now. A ship that went where it wanted to, but a ship nonetheless. She could set up proper trade. She could learn new languages. She could fix things. She was good at fixing things.

One day Skidbladnir would fail. But until then, Saga would swim through the void with her.

Malka Older (malkaolder.wordpress.com) is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews , Book Riot, and the Washington Post . With the sequels Null States and State Tectonics , she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station , and her short story collection And Other Disasters was published in late 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she is currently an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at Sciences Po, where her doctoral work explored the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments. She has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has written for the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy , and NBC THINK.

As a freelance marine behavioral researcher most of Natalia’s jobs went something like this: She swam around in some large but controllable environment with a cephalopod, paying attention to its body language and her own. She tried to make the octopus or squid feel as comfortable as possible, so that its behavior in response to stimuli might approximate what it would do in the wild. It wasn’t what she had expected when she trained as a marine biologist, but frankly she preferred it to dissection, experimentation by electric shock, or even anything that required interacting with animals captive in tiny tanks.

This particular job started out only slightly unusual. For most jobs she was given a specific research interest. Sometimes they told her exactly what to do to elicit the behaviors they wanted to study, and sometimes they let her design the approach, but either way it meant some narrow focus for her attention. Natalia always tried to give the cephalopod some playtime around their interactions—if challenged on this, she told her employers that it led to more natural responses than repeating the same cues over and over again—but their time was very much directed by research.