“Let’s just find the space suits and go from there,” said Malcolm.
He wanted to keep Tapestry’s mind off the fact that they’d arrived on the ship through a portal, and would need a return portal to stand any chance at getting home. He wanted to keep his own mind off it too, he realized.
Malcolm pulled himself along the handholds, moving through the circular connecting hallway toward what he assumed to be the front section. It led to the ship’s main command center, where the astronauts strapped themselves in and did the real work of the journey. There was window set into the front of the command center, smaller than Malcolm would have expected, but with a view that more than made up for it. He gasped as he stared out into space.
Jupiter loomed in the distance, at least four or five times the size of the Moon in the night sky on Earth. He could see the Great Red Spot staring back at him, like an incomprehensibly massive eye, watching the approach of their ship.
It made the hair on the back of Malcolm’s neck stand up straight. He guessed that they were a couple of days out from the planet, calculating that it was a six-month round trip, launched nearly three months earlier.
“Wow,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Tapestry, who was making a concentrated effort to keep her gaze from the window.
“The spacesuits aren’t in here,” she said. “We have to keep looking.”
The next connecting hallway they went down ended with a series of four heavy hatches, two of them open, two of them closed. The open ones led to large storage rooms containing dozens of cryptically labeled supply crates. Malcolm glanced around, still not seeing what they’d come for. Tapestry’s anxiety was slowly beginning to infect him, too, but he did his best to shake it off.
Another hallway led to the crew’s sleeping area, which was an arrangement clearly designed with zero gravity in mind. Instead of beds, sleeping bags hung on tethers, with straps at the top to secure a person inside. Malcolm pictured what it would be like to sleep inside one, and it reminded him a bit of being a strand of seaweed, slowly swaying along with the current, tied down to the ocean bottom.
There was a hatch in the back of the sleeping area that led to a small exercise room, with a selection of different pieces of equipment. Some of them, like the stationary bike and elliptical, looked like anything else one might find back on Earth. Others were stranger, like a weird configuration of balls that Malcolm couldn’t guess at the proper usage of, and a long harness that would have made sense as a resistance line for squats, but was attached to the wall instead of the floor.
“Interesting,” said Malcolm. “I guess they really care about staying in shape.”
“They have to exercise to keep up muscle and bone density,” said Tapestry. “Weightlessness isn’t healthy for long periods of time. At least not if you’re planning on coming back to Earth.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes. Malcolm put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
There was one more hatch in the back of the exercise area, and it led to a tiny chamber barely big enough for a single person. The lights were completely off inside, and Malcolm couldn’t guess what it was for.
The sensation of floating was incredibly distracting, and Malcolm almost lost his sense of direction as they drifted back toward the main chamber. He found himself comparing being weightless to his wind manipulation. However, although they were superficially similar, the two couldn’t have been more different. It was like comparing a sketch with a statue.
They went down the last connecting hallway and finally found what they were looking for. The spacesuits, along with a wide variety of tools, medical supplies, and repair parts, were in a small room with a sealed hatch on one end that Malcolm could only assume led to the airlock.
“Well, here we are,” said Malcolm. “This is what we came for.”
It took him a minute to figure out how to release the suit from the latch holding it and pull it down. He passed it Tapestry, and then pulled one down for himself.
“We should head back to the room we first came in through to wait,” he said.
Tapestry nodded, but didn’t meet his eye.
Getting the bulky suits through the cramped hallways was challenging, but they managed it. When they returned to the conference room, Malcolm sat down at the table and strapped himself into one of the chairs. Though he was securely fastened into an upright position, he still felt loose and uncomfortable, his body shifting in the zero-gravity environment.
Lacking any other option, the two of them waited for something to happen. Malcolm kept thinking he’d glimpsed the return portal out of the corner of his eye, but when he spun his gaze to find it, it was never there. Slowly, over the course of an hour, he came to the realization that there would probably be no portal back to Earth.
CHAPTER 17
“Multi discovered us,” said Tapestry. “That’s what the commotion was in the hospital, right before we left. We were fools to go through that portal when we did.”
Malcolm shrugged, an underwhelming gesture in zero gravity.
“What other choice did we have?” he asked. “Stay, and let Multi capture or kill us? It’s not like we have our powers anymore, Tapestry. We couldn’t have fought our way out.”
“We could have gotten Jade to open a portal to somewhere else,” she said. “Somewhere safe.”
Malcolm frowned at her. “When have you been the type for regrets?”
She looked at him, and he saw a heartbreaking amount of despair in her expression.
“Ever since I led us both into a death trap, billions of miles away from Earth, with no way back,” she said.
Malcolm shook his head.
“First of all, we might still have a way back,” he said. “The fact that Jade hasn’t opened another portal doesn’t mean that she can’t. Just that she’s chosen not to.”
“Or that Multi’s killed her,” said Tapestry.
“Unlikely,” he said. “This isn’t the worst case scenario, remember? She could have opened up a portal for Multi and let him onto the ship to attack us, if she’d wanted.”
“And why doesn’t she?” asked Tapestry. “Who says she isn’t just waiting for more Multis to arrive on the scene so that she can do just that?”
“I do,” said Malcolm. “We trusted her to portal us here safely. That’s got to count for something.”
Tapestry looked like she was considering his logic, but her eyes remained dark. Malcolm had never seen her like this before. It was as though the hope had been burned out of her.
“This is all hypothetical,” she whispered. “It’s far more likely that Jade hasn’t opened a portal because she can’t. Because she’s dead. And so are we.”
“No, we aren’t,” said Malcolm. “We’re safe. At least for now.”
“Really?” Tapestry gestured to the LEDs, which seemed to be running on less than full power, resulting in the dim lighting conditions. “This doesn’t look like a ship in working condition to me, Malcolm.”
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t give up so easily.”
Despite his words, her cynicism was infectious. There wasn’t much either of them could actively do to improve their situation, and Tapestry was right. There was something wrong with the ship, and what chance did the two of them have of diagnosing it, let alone fixing it?
And even if the ship had been in pristine condition, what then? They weren’t astronauts. Working the instruments in the cockpit would be a guessing game.
If it’s a guessing game, then let’s go get lucky with a good guess.
“Come on,” said Malcolm. “If we’re stuck here anyway, let’s get familiar with all our options.”
He took Tapestry’s hand and pushed off in the direction of the hallway that led up to the command station. It was obvious which one was meant for the captain, given how it was oriented directly toward the observation window and had, by far, the most buttons and instruments on the panels on either side of it.