Belatedly, I realise that I’m drifting away from Tanisira a little. When I turn to look at her, to check if she’s as amazed as I am, the movement sends me on a small orbit. I don’t have time to panic about the sheer weightlessness of it all because the sun looms in front of me.
“Is that the fuckingsun?” I gasp.
That deep, honest laughter pipes through my helmet speakers. “Unless you know of another one.”
There must be some serious shielding on these visors because looking at it doesn’t burn out my retinas. I wish I could show Vee this wonder. It’s huge, dazzling, and humbling. My heart pounds a staccato beat against my sore ribs, but it’s no longer because I’m scared. I’mgrinning.
I couldn’t feel less remarkable, and yet nothing has ever felt so freeing. In the face of such brutal insignificance, how can anything seem more real than this? A sense of serenity settles over me as I float there, taking in the speckled darkness.
It starts as a sort of niggling in my head, a nip at the edge of my subconscious. Something I should be taking note of but can’t quite put my finger on. I try to drill down to that elusive thought, but it’s almost impossible when there is so much and yet so little around me. Every time I try, the gleam of a distant star draws my attention.
But when it hits me, I almost choke on my own oxygen. It’s not just that I feel weightless—there’s a distinct lack of pain in my body that I can’t remember ever experiencing. I can sense that it’s still there, but it’s more of a distant sensation. Thetenderness makes itself known behind a veneer, but the relief is overwhelming anyway.
It’s wonderful.
I seek out Tanisira and discover that I can spin, but I can’t seem to move in any other direction. My jerky movements snag her attention, and I see her amusement when she glides towards me with the sleekness of a wild cat. It takes everything in me not to pout like a child.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“How do I do that?”
She gives me a quick tutorial, and I immediately try to flip onto my back. The problem is that in space, there’s no up or down. If theMidas,sleek and streamlined, wasn’t alongside us as an anchor point, I wouldn’t be sure I’d moved at all. Still, I close my eyes for a beat and picture myself coasting in the void like the universe’s tiniest mote of dust. Tanisira lets me have my moment, but we did come to do a job, and I follow her to the nearest of many rungs fixed to the hull.
“I can’t believe the ship is moving right now.”
“I know. It never gets less awe-inspiring.”
We clamber up onto the surface of theMidas,and it stretches out ahead of us for what seems like miles. A setting on the gravboots allows us to move around. There are strips of lighting that run all along the ship and I blow out a raspberry as I take in the visible damage. Tanisira probably knew what to expect, but I’m floored by the sheer number of pits, dents and dangling equipment. A significant number of them are small and harmless in isolation, but there are some whoppers. I approach one such dent with a circumference three times the length of my body.
Trepidation sets my nerves alight.
“It looks worse than it is,” Tanisira says softly.
I must look daunted. Trying to rearrange my expression, I raise an inquisitive eyebrow. “How do we go about finding and logging Kit’s blind spots? Do you have a map?”
Now that I’m no longer so panicked, I can appreciate that I’ve been a bit of an amateur. First, coming up here without blueprints. The surface area we must cover is vast and doing it blind is a guaranteed waste of time. Second, though I imagine Kit’s capable of taking notes, I didn’t think about that until just now.
Tanisira taps on her screen, and an image emerges on my visor, overlaid on the expanse of the ship in my eyeline. I make an embarrassing sound, shift my field of view and watch the digital image move with me. I focus on the details themselves and notice markings that seem to indicate sections that have been surveyed. That just leaves several spots on this side of the hull that need investigating.
“I’ll go starboard, you go port,” I say. “Meet at the end and come at the ship from another side?”
That’s not going to be as simple as it sounds because of the shape, but we only have to map the blind spots, so it won’t be too awful. Tanisira’s helmet tilts to the side in response.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing, it’s just interesting to see you taking charge out here.”
“You mean,Captain, that it’s interesting to have a subordinate boss you about.”
The more time I spend with Tanisira, the more she grows on me. In retaliation, I find myself wanting to hunt for flaws—snuffle around in her psyche and root them out.
Tanisira shakes her head, looking amused, and heads towards the port side. “I mean,valeja, that you were a mess yesterday at the very idea of doing this.” Amusement laces her words, as tangible as a ribbon.
I’m smiling before I can hide it. Maybe she always had a sense of humour, and I just had to get her to like me before she would share it.
“Touché,” I say. I don’t know whatvalejameans, and I’m certainly not going to ask her. I’ll have to corner Devyaan later. “How do we go about logging the problem areas?”
“Get a good look at each of the relevant sections, and Kit will take care of the rest.”
