A billion stars are waiting to greet me. The Fold opens wide and swallows me whole, and in that moment, I can’t hear the roar of my thrusters or the ping of my navcom. My worries about the Draft or the memories of my dad.
For a brief second, all the Milky Way is silence.
And I can’t hear a thing.
•••••
I can’t hear a thing.
The blob of water creeping up the back of my head has reached my ears by the time I get the cryopod unlocked, muting my suit alarms. I shake my head hard, but the liquid just slips around on my skin in the zero grav, a big dollop pooling on my left eye and half blinding me. Doing my very best not to curse, I pop the cryopod’s seals and tear the door open.
The color spectrum here in the Fold is monochrome; everything reduced to shades of black and white. So when the pod lighting switches to a slightly different kind of gray, I’m not sure what color it’s actually turning until …
Red alert. Stasis interrupted. Pod 7173 breached. Red alert.
The monitors flash a warning as I plunge my hands into the viscous gel, wincing as the chill penetrates my suit. I can’t imagine what dragging this girl out prematurely is going to do, but leaving her for the FoldStorm is definitely gonna kill her. And if I don’t get this show on the road, it’s gonna kill me, too.
And yeah, that’s still really gonna suck.
Luckily, the Hadfield’s hull looks like it was breached decades ago, so there’s no atmosphere to leech the remaining heat from this girl’s body. Unfortunately, that means there’s also nothing for her to breathe. But the drugs they pumped into her before they froze her will have slowed her metabolism enough that she can survive a few minutes without oxygen. With my water reserves still leaking into my helmet, I’m more worried about myself in the whole Not Being Able to Breathe department.
She hangs weightless above the pod, anchored by her IV lines, still encased in freezing cryogel. The Hadfield trembles again and I’m glad I can’t actually hear what the FoldStorm is doing to the hull. A burst of jet-black lightning crashes through the wall beside me, melting the metal. The water leaking into my helmet is creeping closer to my mouth every second. I start scooping handfuls of goop off the girl’s face, slinging it across the chamber to spatter against yet more cryopods. Row upon row of them. Every one filled with this same freezing gel. Every one with a desiccated human corpse floating inside.
They’re all dead. Hundreds. Thousands.
Every single person on this ship is dead, except her.
The holographic display inside my helmet flashes as lightning liquefies another piece of hull. It’s a message from my Phantom’s onboard computer.
I should leave this girl here. Nobody’d blame me. And the galaxy she’s going to wake up to? Maker, she’d probably thank me if I just left her for the storm. But I look around at those corpses in the other pods. All these people who punted out from Earth all those years ago, drifting off to sleep with the promise of a new horizon, never to wake up again. And I realize I can’t just leave her here to die.
This ship has enough ghosts already.
•••••
My dad used to tell us ghost stories about the Fold.
We grew up on ’em, my sister and me. Dad would sit up late into the night and talk about the old days when humanity was taking its first baby steps away from Terra. Back when we first discovered that space between space, where the fabric of the universe wasn’t quite stitched the same. And because we Terrans are such an imaginative bunch, we named it after the single, magical thing it allowed us to do.
Fold.
So. Take a sheet of paper. Now, imagine it’s the whole Milky Way galaxy. It’s a lot to ask, but you can trust me. I mean, come on, look at these dimples.
Okay, now, imagine one corner of that paper is where you’re sitting. And the opposite corner is alllll the way over the other side of the galaxy. Even burning at the speed of light, it’d take you one hundred thousand years to trek it.
But what happens when you fold the paper in half? Those corners are touching now, right? One thousand centuries of travel just became a