The Six Directions of Space

“I blacked out. How long was I under?”

“Not long, sir. It can’t have been more than a minute since they hit us.” I started pulling myself toward him, propelling myself with a combination of vigorous air-swimming and the use of the straps and handholds attached to the walls for emergency use. “Are you all right, sir?”

“I think—” Then he grunted, not loudly, but enough to let me know that he was in considerable pain.

“Arm’s broken. Wasn’t quite secure when it happened.”

He was floating with his knees tucked high, inspecting the damage to his right arm. In the scarlet backup lighting, little droplets of blood, pulled spherical by surface tension, were pale, colorless marbles. He had made light of the injury but it was worse than I had been expecting, a compound fracture of the radius bone, with a sharp white piece glaring out from his skin. The bleeding was abating, but the pain must have been excruciating. And yet Qilian caressed the skin around the wound as if it was no more irritating than a mild rash.

I paddled around until I found the medical kit. I offered to help Qilian apply the splint and dressing, but he waved aside my assistance save for when it came time to cut the bandage. The River Volga continued to creak and groan around us, like some awesome monster in the throes of a nightmare.

“Have you see the others?”

“Uugan, Jura, and Batbayar must still be at their stations in the midship section.”

“And the pilot?”

I had only glanced at Muhunnad while I searched for the medical kit, but what I had seen had not encouraged me. He had suffered no visible injuries, but it was clear from his extreme immobility, and lack of response as I drifted by him, that all was not well. His eyes were open but apparently unseeing, fixated on a blank piece of wall above the couch.

“I don’t know, sir. It may not be good.”

“If he’s dead, we’re not going to be able to cut back into the Infrastructure.”

I saw no point in reminding Qilian that, with the ship in its present state, Muhunnad’s condition would make no difference. “It could be that he’s just knocked out, or that there’s a fault with his interface harness,” I said, not really believing it myself.

“I don’t know what happened to us just before I blacked out. Did you feel the ship twist around the way I did?”

I nodded. “Muhunnad must have lost attitude control.”

Qilian finished with his dressing, inspecting the arm with a look of quiet satisfaction. “I am going to check on the others. See what you can do with the pilot, Yellow Dog.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

He pushed off with his good arm, steering an expert course through the narrow throat of the bridge connecting door. I wondered what he hoped to do if the technical staff were dead, or injured, or otherwise incapable of assisting the damaged ship. I sensed that Qilian preferred not to look death in the eye until it was almost upon him.

Forcing my mind to the matter at hand, I moved to the reclined couch that held Muhunnad. I positioned myself next to him, anchoring in place with a foothold.

I examined the harness, checking the various connectors and status readouts, and could find no obvious break or weakness in the system. That did not mean that there was not an invisible fault, of course.

Equally, if a power surge had happened, it might well have fried his nervous system from the inside out with little sign of external injury. We had built safeguards into the design to prevent that kind of thing, but I had never deceived myself that they were foolproof.

“I’m sorry, Muhunnad,” I said quietly. “You did well to bring us this far. No matter what you might think of me, I wanted you to make it back to your own people.”

Miraculously, his lips moved. He shaped a word with a mere ghost of breath. “Ariunaa?”

I took hold of his gloved hand, squeezing it as much as the harness allowed. “I’m here. Right by you.”

“I cannot see anything,” he answered, speaking very slowly. “Before, I could see everything around me, as well as the sensory information reaching me from the ship’s cameras. Now I only have the cameras, and I am not certain that I am seeing anything meaningful through them. Sometimes I get flashes, as if something is working… but most of the time, it is like looking through fog.”

“Are you sure you can’t make some sense of the camera data?” I asked. “We only have to pass through the Infrastructure portal.”

“That would be like threading the eye of a needle from halfway around the world, Ariunaa. Besides, I think we are paralyzed. I have tried firing the steering motors, but I have received no confirmation that anything has actually happened. Have you felt the ship move?”

I thought back to all that had happened since the attack. “In the last few minutes? Nothing at all.”

“Then it must be presumed that we are truly adrift and that the control linkages have been severed.” He paused. “I am sorry; I wish the news was better.”

“Then we need help,” I said. “Are you sure there’s nothing else out there? The last time we saw it, the Mandate of Heaven was still in one piece. If she could rendezvous with us, she might be able to carry us all to the portal.”

After a moment, he said: “There is something, an object in my vicinity, about one hundred and twenty It out, but I only sense it intermittently. I would have mentioned it sooner, but I did not wish to raise your hopes.”

Whatever he intended, my hopes were rising now. “Could it be the Mandate?”

“It is something like the right size, and in something like the right position.”

“We need to find a way to signal it, to get it to come in closer. At the moment, they have no reason to assume that any of us are alive.”

“If I signal it, then the enemy will also know that some of us are still alive,” Muhunnad answered. “I am afraid I do not have enough directional control to establish a tight-beam lock. I am not even certain I can broadcast an omnidirectional transmission.”

“Broadcast what?” Qilian asked, drifting into the bridge.

I wheeled around to face him; I had not been expecting him to return so quickly. “Muhunnad says there’s a good chance the Mandate of Heaven is nearby. Since we don’t seem to able to move, she’s our only chance of getting out of here.”

“Is she intact?”

“No way to tell. There’s definitely something out there that matches her signature. Problem is, Muhunnad isn’t confident that we can signal her without letting the enemy know we’re still around.”

“It won’t make any difference to the enemy. They’ll be coming in to finish us off no matter what we do.

Send the signal.”

After a moment, Muhunnad said: “It’s done. But I do not know if any actual transmission has taken place.

The only thing I can do is monitor the Mandate and see if she responds. If she has picked up our signal, then we should not have long to wait. A minute, maybe two. If we have seen nothing after that time, I believe we may safely assume the worst.”

We waited a minute, easily the longest in my life, then another. After a third, there was still no change in the faint presence Muhunnad was seeing. “I am more certain than ever that it is the Mandate” he informed us. “The signature has improved; it matches very well, with no sign of damage. She is holding at one hundred and twenty li. But she is not hearing us.”

“Then we need another way of signaling her,” I said. “Maybe if we ejected some air into space…”

“Too ambiguous,” Qilian countered. “Air might vent simply because the ship was breaking up, long after we were all dead. It could easily encourage them to abandon us completely. What do we need this ship for in any case? We may as well eject the lifeboats. The Mandate of Heaven can collect them individually.”

After a instant of reflection, Muhunnad said: “I think the commander is correct. There is nothing to be gained by staying aboard now. At the very least, the lifeboats will require the enemy to pursue multiple targets.”