Dead Reckoning

The engines died at 04:12 ship-time, and Ines Quay knew it the way she knew her own pulse stopping would feel — not as a sound but as an absence where a sound had always been. She was in the galley with a bulb of cold tea when the deck stopped trembling under her boots. Forty days on the Maren Ostragh and she had stopped hearing the engines weeks ago, the way you stop hearing your own breathing. You only noticed when it ended. She set the tea down. She did not run. Running was for people who thought speed could change arithmetic, and Ines had been a navigator for nineteen years. Arithmetic did not care how fast you moved toward it. The corridor lights were still on. That was the reactor, then, not the grid — the reactor was fine, the reactor would keep them warm and lit for a year if it had to. It was the drive that had quit. She walked the long curve of B-deck toward the bridge with her hand trailing the cold rail, and she did the sum as she went, the way she'd been taught at the academy on Ceres a lifetime ago. Where are you. Where do you want to be. What is between. Where they were: three weeks out from the Khelin transfer station, drifting on whatever velocity the dead drive had left them. Where they wanted to be: anywhere with a dock. What was between: nothing. That was the answer. Between here and Khelin there was nothing at all, which was the whole point of the route, which was why the Maren Ostragh carried forty colonists asleep in the cold cradles of D-deck and a crew of six awake to mind them. Five awake. Ines corrected herself on the bridge threshold. Voss had died on day twenty-six, and they had put him out the lock with the small ceremony the company manual prescribed, and now there were five. Captain Idris Rahn was already in the command chair when she came in, and he did not turn around. He was a big man gone quiet with age, and Ines had served under him long enough to read the set of his shoulders. The shoulders said he had also done the arithmetic. "Drive's gone," he said. "I felt it." "Telemetry's calling it a flux-coupler cascade. Bouchard's down there now." He finally turned. The bridge lights made his face look older than it was. "Give me the number, Ines. The real one." She went to the navigation console and woke it and let her fingers find the old shapes. The number assembled itself out of the dark — their drift vector, their reserves, the slow patient distance to Khelin. She checked it twice because a navigator who gave a captain a wrong number was worse than no navigator at all. "At current drift," she said, "we reach Khelin's orbit in eleven years and four months." Rahn did not flinch. She loved him a little, in that moment, for not flinching. "And our consumables," he said. "Air, with the sleepers down and the five of us careful — eighteen months. Water longer. Food shorter, call it fourteen months if nobody gets generous." She turned from the console. "We don't have eleven years, Captain. We have a little over one." Outside the forward port the stars hung in their billions, indifferent and very beautiful, and not one of them was close enough to matter. Ines had spent her whole life learning to love that distance. It had never once, until tonight, felt like a thing that wanted them dead. "All right," Rahn said softly. "All right. Then we stop drifting and start thinking." He keyed the all-call, and his voice went out through the cold and quiet ship. "All hands to the bridge. We have some arithmetic to do together."