Chapter 12

  Isaac

  Isaac Milton took his time comprehending his surroundings. He was curious, yes, but the moment he left Kate behind and stepped through the portal, he came under the conviction that there was no hurry. Everything seemed chill. He thought he could really savor this moment.

  Maybe it was the low gravity. That was the first thing he noticed when he stepped through the portal. He felt light. He bounced on the balls of his feet and drifted up as though he had jumped. “Whoa,” he said, though this did not do justice to the elation that surged through his veins at the new experience. The sensation was much, much cooler than the simple lack of gravity he’d experienced earlier with Kate. That was just falling. Anybody on Earth could fall. But minimal gravity…how many people got to experience that?

  Stars and darkness surrounded him. Many stars, bright and steady, in shades of pink, turquoise, green, all colors, like the glittering dust of crushed gemstones flung throughout the sky. He recognized no constellation, nor did he perceive a galactic plane. He studied these stars for a few minutes, possessed by the idea that recognizing a few patterns or constellations would be important somehow, perhaps for navigation? The scarcity of distinctly bright stars made it difficult. The apparent magnitude of all these stars looked pretty much equal. If anything, one entire side of the sky housed slightly dimmer stars, although this might have been due to the planet in that direction, and the distant pale sun off to the right of it.

  The planet, earth-like with its greens and browns and blues, partly obscured by cloud, filled a significant portion of the view in that direction. It was the size of a soccer ball held at arm’s length. Isaac knew this to be strange somehow. It took him a moment to identify the strangeness of it: the planet was too near for him to be viewing it from a moon, yet much too distant for him to be seeing it from any kind of orbital satellite.

  Therefore, in accordance with the logical procession of curiosity, he looked down from the sky at that on which he stood. It was a whitish platform, twenty feet square, engraved with the shape of a simple cube. The silvery hi-tech arch through which he had stepped gleamed in the center, now dormant. The surface of the platform looked strange, so he fell over in order to inspect it more closely. He fell facedown and drifted like a leaf until he stopped his fall easily with one hand. He amused himself for a minute by cranking out a few one-handed push-ups.

  The pearly surface beneath him resembled a circuit-board, the mazelike channels extraordinarily small. He could feel the minute texture by running his fingers over it.

  “What do you think, Charlie?” he asked. With a shove against the surface, he propelled himself upward with enough force to bring him back to his feet. He didn’t even overshoot. A natural!

  Objects arose into view from the other side of the platform. He saw a cluster of antennae and a photovoltaic solar array, just like on the ISS. “Satellite it is, I guess,” he said to Charlie, who preened with disinterest in hawk form. Isaac took another look at the planet. Way too far for them to be in orbit around it, right? Unless it was, like, very small? “A mystery!” he proclaimed, striking a single finger up into the air. He looked around at the void as he lowered his finger. Kate loved mysteries and could probably figure this one out in a snap. He looked back at the door. He’d go back and find her in a minute. First, he had to check this place out.

  A large and complex space station sprawled over the edge of the platform, more along the lines of Star Wars than NASA. But he recognized many elements nevertheless, such as docking hatches, thrusters, and long manipulator arms. And, um, defensive turrets.

  The platform he stood on had more than one side. He walked all the way around the edge and decided that he was on top of a cube. It gradually rotated at a skewed angle. Eventually, the surface he stood upon would end up facing the planet, and then the station below. He would either fall off or be upside down in some kind of tiny little gravitational field around the cube.

  Next: how to get down? He put this question to Charlie and, as would become common over the next few days, the bird showed him what to do. Charlie did it by stalking over to the edge of the platform and then walking right off the edge. The bird proceeded down the perpendicular face without falling.

  Isaac reached for his hat, hesitated, then took off a shoe instead. He dropped it over the edge. It fell until it came level with the vertical face of the cube, at which point it tumbled to a halt against the perpendicular face. Cool.

  Isaac jumped off the edge. The moment he fell past the edge, gravity shifted and pulled him gently to the surface of the side of the cube. This side had no door. It did have a simple, large picture of a heart etched into it.

  He circumnavigated the cube, practicing stepping over the edges to maintain relative uprightness. Mistakes hardly mattered because gravity was forgiving. Isaac thought all he would have to do to break the gravitational field completely was to put some effort into a jump.

  It hovered unsupported in the air near the space station. It was clearly supposed to be there; several large prongs jutted toward the cube from various angles, presumably keeping it in place. The whole cube’s surface appeared to be covered in tiny circuitry, and each side had a symbol–the same ones he’d seen on the hexagon. He stopped on the snowflake. This one was Kate. It looked no different from the rest, and he didn’t see her anywhere. No door. What had her door looked like? Colorful, right?

  Charlie came up to him, swooping easily through the air, as Isaac prepared to venture through the obvious entry hatch into the station. The bird, mysteriously mobile in low gravity, still had a hawk-like appearance, and offered Isaac something in its beak. A coaster, it looked like, for coffee mugs and the like. Hexagonal.

  “Aww, thanks,” he said to Charlie. He took the thing and stuffed it in his pocket. Good thing Charlie had picked that up! Space debris was dangerous. How had a coaster even gotten out here? Isaac visualized two astronauts in full space-suits sitting at a zero-g table out in space, clinking mugs and then splashing the liquid against their opaque visors.

  But wait. He wasn’t wearing a space suit, and he could breathe just fine. Funny what one overlooked when it was normally taken for granted. He smelled the air. It had a clean, vaguely chemical scent to it. Processed air. Sterilized air. Perhaps, Air of Synthetic Manufacture. There must be an invisible containment field around the cube which maintained breathable air. That would make a lot of sense, since people might come in from who-knows-where just as Isaac had. He wondered how many random visitors this station received. Who operated this station? Were they even…human? He shivered. Excitement.

  Various portals and windows dotted the station, all dark. Lights blinked on sensors and antennae, but no actual light seemed on within the station itself. Nighttime? Abandoned? Crew murderized by an alien monster?

  He glanced out again at the darkness of space and saw, for the first time, debris illuminated by the planet and the distant sun. Asteroids? It seemed dangerous to have a space station in the proximity of asteroids. Thus, perhaps, the turrets.

  Something moved among the far debris as he speculated on this mystery. He saw it only for a moment, but its movement burned a purple afterimage into his vision. He had seen it clearly, if only for a flash: a winged beast had swept from place to place out there in the star-speckled emptiness. Had it been white? It had been very, very bright, whatever it was, but something about that was wrong. The sight of it had left an afterimage, but had not hurt his dark-adjusted eyes.

  Isaac kept an eye in that direction as he positioned himself on the cube and launched himself with a strong jump toward the hatch. His jump had been a bit too strong; he approached the hatch headfirst at considerable speed rather than the intended casual drift. He twisted his body to receive the impact on his legs just in time. But the impact never came. The hatch opened and Isaac fell into a warm blue darkness. His momentum ceased, the hatch closed overhead, and he drifted lightly to the surface below. Gravitational brakes of some kind? Cool, cool.

  A door hissed open in front of him, and he stepped through into a dim corridor illuminated by myriad distant lights, like a tunnel of stars. White lights flickered on as soon as he set foot in the cylindrical hall, flashing down into the distance. Everything bright, sleek, shiny, clean.

  A screen on the wall beside him came to life. “ Welcome ,” it read in a digitized font. This faded, and several options replaced it: Directory, Services, Communication, Systems, ARKO. The last two were locked except to authorized access. A sensor pad below illustrated where an access card or something might go.

  “Very nice,” he informed Charlie.

  He began with the directory.

  It took him about an hour to explore all the parts of this station–all the parts, at least, which were not barred to him for lack of admin status. It took him less time than this to figure out that he was alone. It took him more time than this to figure out that he did actually possess admin status after all, courtesy of the ceramic coffee coaster.

  Shortly after he made this discovery, Isaac Milton realized that he was in a story, and that he was one of the main characters, as evidenced by the fact that this space station, which he had never seen before, nevertheless clearly, undeniably, and entirely, belonged to him.

  Communications were down, and he’d have to do something about that, somehow, but surprisingly, CHIME still worked here. He tried a message to Kate.

  IM: Hey

  KC: hey Isaac!

  IM: Are you in space?

  KC: we’re all in space Isaac.

  KC: EVERYTHING is!

  KC: *duh*

  KC: you of all of us should know about SPACE

  KC: ;)

  IM: Is that like my thing?

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  IM: Is that why I get a cube?

  IM: Will I get space powers?

  IM: Or, like, cube powers

  KC: wow Isaac!

  KC: pretty sharp

  KC: ;)

  IM: Cubes aren’t that sharp

  KC: ..........

  IM: ....

  KC: was that a joke?

  IM: No

  KC: LAAAAME

  KC: BAD JOKE ALERT!!!

  IM: Bad joke alert?!?!?

  IM: *dives for cover*

  KC: it’s too late!!

  KC: it’s got you Isaac!

  KC: :o

  IM: aargh!!!

  IM: I am crushed in its icy grip!

  KC: 8o

  IM: hang on

  KC: Isaac you can’t just pause when you’re in the middle of being crushed in the icy grip of one of your own bad jokes!

  KC: I wonder if that is a thing that can actually happen here

  KC: ?:\

  KC: hello?

  IM: Man you’re fast at texting

  KC: I’m using a computer

  IM: Oh cool

  IM: I wonder where I can get one

  KC: aren’t you on a space station?

  IM: Yeah

  IM: The Void Station

  KC: ...

  IM: Oh

  IM: Yeah I guess there’s a few computers here

  IM: What is your station?

  KC: I don’t have a station! I’m just down here on my moon like a boring plebian

  KC: BUT MY PALACE IS AWESOME

  IM: Whoa, palace?

  IM: Okay, I get it

  IM: We have themes

  IM: Mine is space so I get a space station

  IM: What is yours?

  KC: sky, I think?

  KC: I don’t know what that means though

  KC: have you seen your moon yet?

  IM: My moon

  KC: yeah, dummy!

  KC: you need to check out your moon!

  KC: I bet it’s full of nerds and pianos and dice with an unusual number of sides ;)

  IM: Well I haven’t seen any moon

  IM: Wait I get a moon?

  IM: Do YOU have a moon?

  KC: geez Isaac! get with the program!

  KC: eheheh!

  KC: my moon is called the Cloud Moon

  KC: it has a name, and the name is Theia I think

  KC: why are you talking to me when you could be exploring your moon?!?!?

  IM: All right, all right!

  KC: wait

  KC: why am I talking to YOU when I could be exploring MY moon?

  KC: ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?

  KC: i’m outta here!

  A moon? Isaac had been sitting in a squishy white chair, like a beanbag, which faced a huge bubble-window. This window provided him with a view of the stars, the blue-green planet, and the strangely pale sun beyond. The sun was dim enough to look at without damaging his eyes. More like a really bright star. Duh.

  “Computer?” he said out loud. “Uh, Void Station? Can you hear me?” It was a little awkward speaking to an empty room. Even though he was pretty sure by now that no one was here but himself, this was a strange place.

  He stood and approached the window. Yes, he saw something out there now. Other moons, perhaps, to either side of the planet. Other moons? Where was his moon? He hadn’t seen one.

  He traced his steps back to the observatory. This was the big domed room with telescopes. The interesting thing about this place was that there appeared to be no barrier between its contents and the void of space, much like on the floating cube. The better for viewing, he supposed. It also came with complex instructions on how to reconfigure its positioning onboard the station. He didn’t need to bother with that; its positioning already gave it a clear shot at the planet.

  Some telescopes needed to be activated or powered on somehow, but with trial and error he managed to get a simple reflector telescope pointed in the right direction. First, he looked at the planet. Nothing too interesting down there, not with the limited zoom on this telescope. It looked like a more colorful Earth, lit from the side by the sun. A large circular shadow darkened part of the sunlit side of the planet. He followed that direction until he found the object casting the shadow, a gray moon. He swung the view around to the other side of the planet and soon located another moon, also gray, but this time because of cloud cover. The moons orbited unusually near to the planet, and perhaps more strangely, in the same orbital path. In his orbital path, in fact. Hard to tell just by eyeballing it, though.

  Something fell behind him, startling him. A remote of some kind lay on the floor, apparently fallen from the command console in the center of the room. He suspected Charlie, but the bird had disappeared a while back and not yet returned. Another Intriguing Mystery. He picked up the remote, and a voice whispered in his head when he did so: config…

  “What?” he asked the empty room, just in case that would be any help at all. Config? Configure? He at once doubted whether he had actually heard something, or whether it had been his own imagination.

  He turned over the remote in his hands. It corresponded to one of the telescopes, but he needed to figure out how to turn them on first. This whole place seemed to be running on reserve power at the moment. Plus, if he knew anything about super-advanced space stations, there was probably a helpful AI somewhere.

  Isaac wandered around looking for the control center until Charlie found him and led him there. He considered that one of his first projects might be to get those defensive weapons online. That huge bird-like creature he had glimpsed among the asteroids had not strayed far from his mind.

  But first, and he was ashamed for not thinking of it sooner, he had to pray. But…what to pray? How to christen a space station? What would Dwayne Hartman do? The thought of Dwayne here made Isaac laugh. But he thought he knew, regardless, what Dwayne Hartman would do. He would take up his authority as a priest, for such he believed all Christians to be, and he would consecrate the Void Station as holy to the Lord. He would do it boldly, calling on his Father in faith. He would sing while he did it.

  Isaac didn’t sing, and he felt a bit embarrassed, and he was ashamed to be embarrassed, but he prayed out loud. He asked God to be in the Void Station, to protect it, to guide its foolish administrator. And just for good measure, he threw in some intercession for his friends, and for Dwayne and Jacob.

  Now. About those weapons systems…