Free The Echo by James Smythe Page B

cannot see, and you hope that you will somehow pick the right space. If you do, you extrapolate the rest of the ship based on that: moving up or down or left or right, assuming the likely choice that they have made, hoping for another hit and to sink their ship. We played it a lot, Tomas and I. It was the perfect way for us to test how much we thought alike: how much we had to work to outfox the other. I imagine him, watching these with me, or slightly delayed; or maybe not. Maybe gone from the lab, finally heading home to his baker, to spend time with her. Forgetting about me, about this, about us, for an evening. Thinking of this as work, not what it actually is.
    I switch the screens off. I don’t need to watch this. If he is still with me, so be it. I detach myself and push off, and I struggle at the ceiling, but then I push myself through to the corridor, and then down to the living quarters. The ship is quiet. Four of the bed lids are down and darkened, and only Tobi is still awake. I drag myself through, trying to make as little noise as possible, and she turns her head to watch me gracelessly approach. I settle in the seat next to her and clip myself in. She yawns and nods at me. I feel secure for a second. It’s nice, after the chaos of floating, to have this security. She is confident, and taking back control.
    ‘How long do you reckon we’ve been up here now?’ she asks. She puts her hand over the clock on the screen and looks at me. ‘No cheating, take a guess,’ she says.
    ‘What?’
    ‘See if you can guess. I couldn’t. I can’t tell if it’s only been a day, or if it’s longer. Everything becomes loose here, you know? Without the sunrise, without the sunset. Without defined bedtimes. And I feel tired all the time, whatever I’m doing. And that’s not my eye or whatever. Even just sitting here, that feels tiring.’ She turns back and looks at the screen, focusing on the expanse of nothing that’s in front of us. The view that offers precious little sensation that we’re even moving, so large is space and so small are we. She reveals the clock.
    ‘We should try to think of it in terms of hours here, hour to hour, rather than concentrating on the days. Back home, that’s where they need days,’ I say to her.
    ‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe.’ She yawns again. ‘But everything is looser. Time, speed, place. Everything. If you focus on a star you can see it move, if you stare at it. Or, you know, you can see us moving.’ I do as she says. I pick one – Algol, in Perseus – and I stare at it. I plot where it is in relation to the rest, and to the console and the frame of the window, and then I keep staring. Over time, and I have no idea how long that time is, it shifts, or we do. Such an infinitesimally small amount, barely perceptible. Barely registering. ‘It’s humbling, I think,’ Tobi says. ‘But at least we’re definitely moving.’
    ‘You walked away from two crashes,’ I say.
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Were you scared? How did you do it?’
    ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
    ‘You were scared, with your eye,’ I say. She reaches up and touches it. ‘But back then.’
    ‘Well, now. See, I couldn’t do anything about the eye. If something had gone inside me, that’s not a thing I alter myself. If I was dying, not like I could change that. If I was dying then, that was it. Boom, dead.’ She rubs it, as if she can feel the wound. ‘With the crashes, that was in my own hands. All I could do was try to save myself.’
    I stay sitting next to her. Neither of us talks after that.
    Wallace, when he wakes up, asks me to go to the engines with him. He is proud of them. They are one of the few parts of the
Lära
that we avoided directly working on, once we had told him our brief. We helped him assemble his team and they designed them. There were stipulations – cost, consumption, having to work alongside the piezoelectric life-support systems – but they had carte blanche after that. He shows me