Free The Echo by James Smythe

arms reaching for the side. I wonder if I look as ungraceful as I feel. ‘You’ll get used to this,’ she says, meaning everything, not just the lack of gravity.
    ‘I’m no good at it,’ I say.
    ‘You’re getting there,’ she lies again. I wonder if it’s something she does a lot: professional falsity. Or, maybe, it’s something she does with me, to make me feel better. A happy leader is a successful leader.
    ‘I am useless. I have never been one of those people with balance.’ This hurts more than I thought it would, because I am tensing all my muscles. I let go of the side-rail and drift out, and I crane my whole body around, trying to turn. If I can turn I can control this better, I think. I see Tobi, still there on her bed. Her eye is as if she’s been shot. Wallace is with her, consoling her. He is making her laugh, or he is laughing and she is watching him, but she is moving on. Rallying herself. I get distracted, and suddenly I’m not near the rail. Inna’s hand grabs me and pulls me back.
    ‘Easy to get adrift. No walks until you’re steady with this, okay?’
    ‘Like you could stop me,’ I say.
    ‘Try me.’ I feel more stirring; my gut, my groin. My entire body, reaching out for something more than I currently have. I look away, towards the cockpit, where Hikaru is either still on duty or back on duty, and Lennox is keeping him company. They are not talking, though: instead they are running the tests. It’s constant, testing. This is the difference between our mission and whatever it was they were doing on the
Ishiguro
.
    ‘I should see if they’re all right,’ I tell Inna.
    ‘Want a push over there?’ She is playful with it, but I am too uneasy, still. I have no desire to make a fool of myself any more than I already have.
    ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll crawl.’ She pulls her hands back and swats them together, as if washing them clean of me, and she pushes off, back towards Tobi. She puts her hand on Tobi’s back to console her, and Tobi looks at her with her one bloody eye, and she pulls a face: resilient and powerful. I cling on for what feels like minutes, and then wonder if I can’t move on.
    This is a mission. It has always been clear to us, to Tomas and myself, that it is, and that it should be treated with the utmost seriousness. It may not be glorious, not yet, but there has never been an actual mission to space. Before this, everything was simply to see if we could do it. It was a desire, a proving of ourselves as a collective people. Breaking Earth’s atmosphere? We can reach it. The moon? We can land on it. It was showing off, puffing out our chests, planting flags. This time, there is a reason to be here. The
Ishiguro
was the most selfish, vainglorious expedition. Dr Singer’s research was only an afterthought, a bonus thing that he could do while they were up there. It didn’t matter, because what mattered was how shiny the crew were, how beautiful, how unstable.
    We have a task, and it’s hugely important. I look at the results of the anomaly while we are up here, and I think that we do not know what this is: that it is so far beyond our comprehension that this discovery, this mission, it could change everything. It could be the thing that realizes our position in the universe. People search their entire lives for an answer, and maybe this is it: maybe this anomaly might give us a clue as to our beginnings. It will not be showy, and it will not be glorious, but it might be an answer.
    A scientist wants nothing more.
    We spend the day running tests. One of the things that we can do, as we get closer to the anomaly, is to discover its span: to see how wide it is, what expanse of space it actually covers. We have measured it from Earth, of course, plotting the space that it doesn’t fill, but from here we can be exact. Accuracy is easier up close. Wallace and Lennox and myself establish the equipment and run the software. The ship will do everything once the programs start