nullspace

Six re-emerges through the hatch onto the cramped bridge, swearing in several languages.

“How bad is it?” Anya asks, tossing over a ration pouch.

Six catches it and takes a long swig before answering. “Fucked, is how bad. That missile the Blowjob Brothers hit us with had a bio payload, one of those engineered slime molds the fucking Accordance use for sabotage ops. Kill to know how the hell the bastards got their hands on that shit… Anyway, it ate half the engine before I could vent it, plus I think some of it might’ve gotten into the fuel lines, so I’m gonna have to empty the tanks, decontaminate the fuel, flush the whole system before I can even start on repairs…” She does some quick mental math. “Five days.”

“Five days?”

“Five days for me. Anyone else, it’d take a couple weeks.”

“So we’re out, then.” Anya slumps forward in her seat, forehead against the dashboard. “Even at max speed, we’ll just barely beat the last stragglers to Eris XIII. No first-place finish, no grand prize, no money to pay off the Ocelot before he harvests my organs…” She turns her head slightly, looking at Six out of one eye. Times like this, Six always has some sort of miracle waiting in her back pocket. Maybe, just maybe…

“How much do you know about nullspace drives?”

Anya sits upright slowly. “I know they’re fast. And I know they’re ridiculously illegal in pretty much every inhabited system. Six, you didn’t –”

“One of my guys had a find. I’d been wanting to try one out. Didn’t have any other ship I could install it into. You wanted fast, this whole race is illegal anyway, figured it couldn’t hurt.”

“The Andromeda Run is suspended pilot license illegal, not summary execution illegal! ‘Couldn’t hurt’ my ass, why the fuck would you…” Anya pauses, takes a breath. In… Hold… Out… In… Hold… Out.

“… Anyway. Fine. Here we are, out of options, you win. And it’s ready to go?”

“As soon as I get the engines up and running. Should be fast enough to make up for a five-day lead, if we really push it.”

Anya pinches the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Sure. Sounds like a plan.”

Six tosses her empty ration pouch into a waste chute and disappears back down into the engine room. Anya pulls up her offline library, and starts looking for anything that’ll help her operate the bombshell she’s been unknowingly sitting on all week.

“No, the red can. Should be in the middle front pocket.

Anya fishes around in Six’s bag some more, finally digging out a bright red canister wrapped in a thick blue band with a slowly-blinking indicator LED. “Found it!”

“Lifesaver. Just toss it down the hole.”

She steps over to the hatch and throws it in gently, watching it slowly drift downward in microgravity. “That’s one of those high-tech coolant sleeves, right? Some sorta heat-sensitive compound?”

A popping noise from down below. “Kaiju Energy++, Cherry Red Heartattack flavor. Tastes like shit when it gets lukewarm.”

Anya sighs. “And the engine, Six?”

“Yeah, yeah, almost finished, just running the final warmup sequence, aaaaand… Done. You’re all set, punch it.”

She sits back down, offering up a silent prayer, and hits the ignition. The Venus Line judders back into life after five days adrift, blanketing Anya in the comforting feeling of acceleration.

Six clambers up handholds to plop down in the seat behind Anya’s, unwrapping the coolant sleeve from the now-empty canister and tossing it back into her bag. “Once we get up to cruising speed, pop open the panel on your left.”

Anya checks the panel. Inside are several mismatched buttons and dials, and a large knob in the center that seems to have been cannibalized from an induction stove.

“Blue button is startup, the knob sets the target level, and the button labeled ‘HOT COFFEE’ applies the stepping toward the target. You step it, wait for the button to light back up, and then hit it again to do another step.”

“Got it. So level 5 is where we’re at right now, normal space, and level 0 is … the bottom?”

“Theoretically there’s no lower bound, but 0’s the lowest anyone’s ever been able to go, as far as we know. Shit gets weird at the low levels,” Six says, in the gleeful tones of someone showing a friend their extra-secret porn stash.

“Riiiiight.” Anya pulls up some calculations. “So, Mx. Tachyon, the Brothers, and the rest are five days ahead of us, which gives us a bit under thirty-six hours to catch up and pull ahead of them before they get to Eris. Can level 1 get us that fast?”

“Hard to say. From what I know, we’d be cutting it pretty thin. Also, I hooked up with Tachyon’s mechanic before the race, and she mentioned something about a new prototype vanadium ion thruster…” Six sighs dreamily. “So that might cut our window down to eighteen hours, maybe less.”

“You – … fine, whatever. Fuck it, I’m dead either way, level 0 it is.”

As Six pumps her fist in the air, Anya hits the blue button, sets the knob to point at the big red sharpied-on ‘0’, and waits for the HOT COFFEE button to light up.

“Here we go, I guess… Stepping to level 4, now.”

outside the ship, the view takes on a slight violet tinge, and everything seems to slip past just a little faster than it should. other than that, things look more or less the same.

“well. that was a lot smoother than i expected? everything just feels a little… off.”

“yeah, i’d heard level 4 is pretty boring, all in all,” six says in between checking readings. “should get more fun in another minute or two when we can step down lower.”

“i’m not sure i’ll ever understand your idea of ‘fun’.” anya doesn’t feel queasy exactly, it’s more like … a mild nausea in her brain, instead of her stomach. fuck it, they’ve come this far, she can tough it out.

“button’s ready, let’s go!”

“okay, okay, i’m on it, just gimme a second.” anya takes another deep breath, and hits the button again.

the stars outside are racing by much faster now in a sharply contrasting spectrum of purples throwing the darkness and light into harsh relief inside the ship as well as outside as anya clutches her forehead and swears and six grins wildly and says now this is more like it and anya says i hate this so much youre taking this goddamn drive off of my goddamn ship the moment we get planetside again and six says spoilsport and anya says yup thats me now lets just get this bullshit over with as she looks down and sees the coffee button glowing again and grits her teeth and brings her finger down fast like ripping off a bandaid

pushing the button again and again as anya screams at it to fucking light up already and six laughs maniacally until finally it blinks on

anya barely notices the step; she just keeps pounding on the button again and again. the knob is twisted all the way back to 5, plastic slightly cracked from the force.

The second they re-enter normal space, Anya immediately shuts off the drive and then flops back in her seat, shaky hands hovering over the controls.

“Six.”

Six is still coming down from her laughing fit.

“Six, what the fuck happened in there.”

Six looks up at Anya. “Nothing happened.” She bursts out laughing again.

“The fuck do you mean nothing happened, you call that nothing?!”

“No, no, you don’t get it… Nothing happened! That in there? Level 0? That was Nothing! Pure, absolute Nothing!”

“… what the fuck does that even mean, Six.”

“You don’t remember what happened. I don’t remember what happened. If you pull up the ship’s diagnostics, it won’t remember either! Because Nothing happened! There was nothing for it to happen to! As long as we were down there, we Weren’t! We didn’t exist!” She cackles.

“But, wait, no, that – If you didn’t exist, and I didn’t exist, then who was flying the ship?!”

“That’s easy, we were! After all, the ship didn’t exist either!”

“That doesn’t – … Fuck it. Fuck all that. I don’t care, I don’t wanna know, I don’t wanna think about it. Where the fuck are we now, and what time is it?”

Six pulls up a screen as her giggles slowly subside. “Looks like we’re just outside the edge of the Eris system, a couple hours after we got moving again. Lemme check the broadcasts… Yup, last recorded sightings have Tachyon in the lead, a couple thousand klicks behind us!”

“… Holy shit. Holy shit, we actually did it. We are never fucking doing that again.”

“So what now, boss?”

“Now? Now, we are going to sit tight right here for a few hours, so we can cut in ahead of Tachyon and keep it almost plausible we somehow made it here the normal way. At least keep ’em guessing long enough to ditch that fucking thing, before the Blowjob Brothers start putting pieces together and rat us out to the cops. And in the meantime, I am going to have a drink.”

Anya reaches into a drawer under the dashboard, and pulls out an unopened bottle of Martian whiskey. As she does, she notices something written on her arm.

She reads it.

She reads it again, eyes wide, bottle slipping from trembling fingers to float beside her chair.

Then she throws up.