Chapter 6: Drifting
701 Words
The asteroid came without warning, the way most disasters did.
A distant impact shudder ran through the entire ship — not like the atmospheric turbulence, but something harder and more final, a sound like something structural giving way. The three of them grabbed whatever was closest as the floor lurched, and from somewhere deeper in the ship came the sound of alarms activating and boots on metal and voices overlapping in the controlled panic of people trained for emergencies who were having one.
Ben pressed his ear to the wall, listening.
"Engine," he said. "Port side. Clipped."
"How bad?" Natan asked.
"Bad enough." Ben stepped back from the wall. "They've lost steering control. We're not heading anywhere specific anymore."
Through the porthole, the stars were moving in a slow arc — the ship rotating slightly, drifting off whatever trajectory it had been set to. The engine sound had changed pitch, one side now louder and more strained than the other, compensating for what wasn't there.
For a long moment none of them said anything.
Then Aria sat down on the floor of the maintenance corridor, back against the wall, knees up. "So now what?"
"Now we wait," Ben said. "And we stay invisible."
Staying invisible, it turned out, was a full-time occupation.
The maintenance corridor was theirs — no reason for the crew to come through it more than once a day, and Ben had identified the patrol timing within the first few hours. But food was a different problem. The ship hadn't been stocked for stowaways, and whatever they'd managed to grab before boarding hadn't lasted past the second day.
Ben went first. He was good at it — moved like someone who'd had practice being in places he wasn't supposed to be, low and unhurried, using the service passages that ran parallel to the main corridors. He came back with packaged ration meals from the galley storage, three of them, reporting the layout of the kitchen with the calm precision of someone filing a report.
He'd also seen something else on the way back. A room with government officers inside — five of them, from what he could tell. He'd avoided it and said nothing more about it, but Natan noticed the slight change in his expression when he mentioned it.
They developed a rotation over the following days. Ben first, then Natan, then Aria when they both felt the route was mapped well enough. The rhythm of it became strangely ordinary — the careful exits, the slow return, the quiet meals eaten in the red-lit corridor while the ship drifted through the dark.
It gave them time to talk, in the way that people only talk when there's nothing left to distract them.
Ben told them, one evening, why he'd built his own equipment. Not just the cloaking field and the paralysis device — everything he owned, he'd made himself.
"Government tech links to the neural system," he said. "All of it. The standard wrist-devices, the learning tablets, the implants people get voluntarily. They tell you it's for user experience. Personalization. Ease of use." He turned the forearm device over in his hands. "What it actually does is give someone else access. They can push suggestions. Suppress certain thoughts. And if you start resisting — really resisting — they can do more than that."
Aria had gone still. "How do you know this?"
Ben was quiet for a moment. "My mother was a systems engineer. She found it. She tried to report it." He set the device down. "She didn't get to."
Nobody asked anything further after that.
Natan nudged Aria's shoulder with his. "Good thing you're not dumb, right?"
Aria turned to look at him with an expression that said she knew exactly what he was doing. "It's not about intelligence."
"Sure it's not."
"I'm serious. Strong-minded doesn't mean smart. It means you don't — stop it, you're doing the face."
"What face?"
"The smug face. The face where you already think you've won the argument."
"I don't have a face."
"You absolutely have a face."
Ben watched them with something that might have been the early stages of a smile.
— End of Chapter 6 —
- Writer
