Authors: Marie Langager
Beyond Our Stars
For my husband Michael and my son Finn, I love you with everything I have.
Chapter One
I knew that we were all feeling the same thing, a communal cold sweat.
“You know what I'd really like right now?” Weeks asked me with a lazy drawl. He sidled up next to me, his bulky arm brushing against mine.
Not to be headed into a session there's no escape from, where your worst nightmares come to life?
“No, what?” I asked.
“A little tap on my tight buttocks for luck?” He winked at me. “You know you want to.”
I sighed. Then I swatted him on his ass as hard as I could.
He hollered and jumped up and down with glee. “Oh baby, that was just what I needed!”
I let him walk ahead of me to prevent him from returning the favor and kept my head down as he let out exaggerated moans of gratification.
Weeks got his name from parents who'd given in to the doomsday thinking on Earth, near the end. Some of the kids had names like his now. Days, Weeks, Hours. People named their kid after the amount of time they thought they had left. Instead of turning out gloomy and depressed the way his parents must have been, Weeks chose to be ridiculously, incontrovertibly optimistic.
His stupid jokes helped the mood of the group sometimes, but I didn't want to encourage him. No sense in utterly denying the truth. You could only pretend so much.
I slowed my pace so I could be the last one to walk into our Stack. The Local waited next to the entrance until we all walked inside.
They'd chosen ten from each age group. Ten children, ten teenagers, ten adults, and ten elderly. We were specimens, hence the name Specs.
The sessions in the Stacks were anything but pretend. We'd tried to see them that way, at first. We would tell ourselves it wasn't real, it was a holographic simulation that couldn't hurt us. Except it could.
They'd sucked all the air out of the room once. Let us slowly choke for oxygen. We survived but the memory of that slow choke stayed with you. It changed you. It was always in my mind now,
this is what it feels like to die this way
.
Running was pointless. Their technology was more advanced and the few attempts made in the beginning were laughable.
The Local remained standing at the slick white doors. I walked in and they sealed airtight behind me with a vacuum sucking sound and left us in blackness.
When we'd landed what was left of our fleet of ships after a five-year-long trek across the galaxy to our new home, the Stacks were our first greeting. Walls rising hundreds of feet made of huge metal cylinders, one on top of the other, spreading out like a puzzle and deeply disturbing us all with their sudden appearance from thin air.
The space inside a Stack was the size of a small stadium. Plenty of room for us to run from whatever was coming but never any escape. We'd figured out that they must have force fields that moved with us while we were inside. Whatever the environment was, I was carried with it. I tried not to picture myself floating in mid-air, suspended by a force field, as a session tossed me around in a tornado.
It was about to start. Weeks had already gone completely silent while we all waited.
Then, like every time during the last three months, the walls of the Stack gradually brightened. The inside was white when lit, and every surface from floor to ceiling was covered in small nodules. The walls were shaped in a circle, swooping around us. There was a black half-moon along one side of each of the interiors of the Stacks. We weren't sure, but I was starting to think it was a window, and they watched us from there.
I began the countdown in my head. Three, two, oneâ¦
The scene materialized. As usual it felt completely and totally real.
“Huh,” Weeks muttered. We were standing on the deck of a ship, in the middle of a strange ocean. It was night, the waves of light I'd grown accustomed to on Haven streaked across the sky. The sight of the greenish black water sent a tense shiver up my back.
Not drowning, no, please.
“Hope?” The small boy next to me said, reaching for my hand. His skin looked even paler in the dim light. I knew when he said my name to reach for his hand in return. He only did this when he was really frightened. Pilgrim had a name like mine, from hopeful parents. But unlike Weeks, neither of us was prone to extreme positivity. We both knew better.
“It's okay. It might be okay. Look at the water,” I said, keeping my voice even and soothing.
The boy hesitantly surveyed the dark water without unclenching his hand from mine. Grim wasn't that young. He was fifteen, only two years younger than me, but he was a bit of a runt and he had a sensitive nature that made him seem much younger than he was.
The dark water shimmered with hints of emerald, still and glassy. Maybe they were just letting us have a nighttime sail? That was fine by me. They'd done things like that before, though it had been a while. We were supposed to work together and figure out how to get the ship moving. If I was right, anyway. This could be a session about intellect, working as a team, who had leadership qualities.
Some people said the aliens did this to any new race that landed on their planet. The Locals toyed with them for their own amusement until they tired of them and exterminated the easy prey.
But the sessions in the Stacks were often terrifying and I couldn't continue without believing there was some other purpose. There had to be. If there wasn't, why have the sessions in these closed environments? Why wouldn't the Locals do their worst to everyone else while they had us all trapped at our landing site? I was sure this was a controlled test of some kind. Onlyâ¦that didn't mean that they weren't still trying to figure out the easiest way to kill us.
I ignored the chill that swept through me. I wanted this to be an easy session. It could be. Those sessions made me believe the Locals could be peaceful.
Chance yelled out an order for us to get started. He must have figured the same thing that I had. “Grim, you can take that⦠sheet and move it up front. I think. Someone help him,” he was saying in his best attempt at confidence as Grim struggled to lift the folded tarp lying on the wooden deck.
Chance locked eyes with me. “That's a sail, right?” His clear brown eyes bore into mine.
“I have no idea whatsoever,” I answered, wishing I wasn't always so affected every time he looked at me. I moved to help Grim, racking my brain. There hadn't been any ships left that âsailed' on Earth in a long time, even when I was a kid. But I'd seen one in a museum, the whole skeleton of an old wood ship with its sail billowing courtesy of a wind machine. And this ship wasn't even like that one. This one was tall with a rounded bottom, like a bowl. It was made of rotting, splintering wood that had moss and other things growing in every seam. It didn't seem like it would move very well and it was weird to be so high above the water. I tripped on a thick twisted pile of rope as we moved the sail. This was going to be a long day.
Movement in my peripheral vision stopped me and my eyes darted to the source. I squinted into the darkness. The lights above weren't helping enough, but there had been something there. Chance had his back to the movement, also helping drag the sail, but like he sensed my unease he looked up slowly, trying not to attract attention.
There were bulges in the water. Slowly sloping up and then disappearing again, moving toward us. I watched calmly, silently, trying to figure out what we were dealing with before I made any moves.
There were a lot now, and more of them coming. They were a different color than the dark waves, a light purple. One of them broke ahead of the pack. Its ghostly body flashed under the ship and out into the sea, faster than I'd ever seen anything move. They were animals, like big fish. I'd seen something like it in a movie. By the time I was born they were mostly gone, the sea creatures. A few in private eco-sanctuaries but the public wasn't allowed in.
I'd see footage of things called dolphins. But these long purple things didn't match. My breathing was too quick and I tried to slow it while I watched the horde of animals approach in the water.
One of them jumped, high into the air, causing every head on the ship to turn in its direction. It was at least two lengths longer than I was, with a big head and thick, rounded body that tapered into a triangular point. The animal soared into the sky and then began its slow fall back to the water. It began shaking, and parts of its skin pointed up like slender fingers rising from every inch of it, almost seizing, with water spraying everywhere.
And then it exploded.
No⦠It stretched its wings. A slippery looking body with two long flippers appeared underneath. Wide, arching wings that had been folded now spread out and the long fingers revealed themselves as feathers as the rest of the water dissipated.
Just as the animal was about to submerge again into the depths below it glided over the water, flat against the surface. It pulled up seconds before hitting the hull of the ship and sailed over our heads, wind gusting past my ears and making strands of my hair fly into my mouth.
Three more of the purple beasts leapt into the air and I turned to Chance. He was watching me, of course. There was nothing to do but wait.
I gave him a look. I didn't need to say anything. We had been a couple for so long before he'd ended things that we could almost communicate telepathically.
Why would sea creatures need wings?
I asked him with my eyes. He shook his head.
“They're like flying sea lions, I think,” Pilgrim said next to me, his eyes trained on the animals.
The boat began to rock. It was ever so slight of a change in the water, but every single one of us tensed. Looked like this was not going to be one of the simple days.
“Something's coming from underneath,” Weeks yelled in my direction. “Geeeeet ready!”
To my left in the water I heard a sound, like a gurgle. I tentatively took a few steps so I could see over the side. Another bubble popped on the surface, making the same gurgling noise.
Then another, larger one. All along the left side of the ship and reaching far out into the water bubbles rose from the depths and the water sloshed around them on the surface. The horde of purple beasts was now shrieking wildly in howling, trembling voices. A mass of them leapt into the sky and seawater showered down on us like rain as fifty or more of them shook off their clinging wetness.
Whatever this was, the animals were getting out. The gurgling noises began on another side of the ship. Dread filled me as a familiar scent filled my nose and made me cough. Sulfur. This wasn't a massive creature; it was some kind of geothermal activity, from below.
The sea was erupting in large bubbles like a boiling pot. The ship rose a few feet and then crashed back into the water. I spread my feet trying to stay balanced as we rose again, and grabbed Chance's hand as the wooden boat crested on a bubble. We jerked back down, the vessel tipping in different directions erratically before leveling again.
“It's a storm. But from beneath,” I yelled into his ear. I had to scream it to be heard over the shrieking purple sea beasts. “Do you think we go down below or tie ourselves off up here?”
“Tie off up here. In case it capsizes I don't want to be trapped down there, do you?” He didn't wait for my response. He grabbed me by the waist and pulled me toward one of the poles that rose from the deck into the sky while he found some rope. He began tying me to the largest, center pole.