Erebus

From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night – Hesiod, Theogony

There’s a sound made by ships which is not unlike breathing. It is a slow breath, slower than a human could comfortably match. Fitting, for such a large beast; long ago, in a time when even the size of a blue whale was unfathomable, this thing would be utterly beyond comprehension, and in truth, even to those living centuries later within its gentle, humming skin, it still often is. The heart rate of a mouse is at least three hundred beats per minute. The heart rate of a starship is barely two. Uneasy in the middle lies a human, their blood turning to rust over nearly a hundred years. James sits in the navigator’s seat – never the captain’s chair, even now – and wonders how long it will take the ship’s veins to go the same way.

Some nights – insofar as there can be nights in a sky without a sun – James tries to slow their breath to match that of their home. They never succeed. The closest they came led the ship’s computer, in its irritatingly managerial tone, to wake them with a shot of adrenaline out of fear they were dying. Perhaps they’ll try again, and see what happens when the adrenaline runs out. Not now, though. Now the shipboard clock reads 0900 and the lights are a simulation of morning. There’s a flat-screened pad sitting on their lap. They blink at it until it awakens, images upon the surface scrolling upwards in a pantomime of opening curtains, and a facsimile of their handwriting shows upon the screen.

Today it is a Wednesday, which means nothing, but which has its own specific array of tasks and chores. They must check the food stores, which in practice means they must clean the pipes leading to the replicator and scrub the coding. A bug seems to have come up in the process of disconnecting it from the rest – all but one had been loaded aboard Terror, as with everything else; all but one – and no matter how many ways James tried to persuade it to construct the proteins, all that came out was something rather like, but not quite, macaroni cheese. Nothing wrong with that, as such, but they’ve been eating it for three perfectly-measured weeks. Any change at all would be a relief.

Once that is finished, there are star charts to be measured and logged, and mandatory sessions in the gym to ensure the crew’s continued fitness for duty. At the bottom of the list a line of text instructs James to check on Terror. They’ve been ignoring that instruction for precisely seven months and thirteen days. Today will be no different. 

The naming of the ships had been a matter of great pomp and circumstance, ancient as the days / as ocean large and wide. The Admiralty had been so very taken with the notion that once more, for the first time in centuries, they might once again be at the forefront of exploring, seeking new lands upon which to stake their proud, Imperial claim. Every vessel in the fleet had been thus named. There was Discovery, and Resolution, and Terra Nova. And of course, there was Erebus. She had, in a previous life, made the journey to chart a course to the furthest point South – wasn’t it something, gentlemen (always, still, gentlemen), that she might now venture to that unknown cold once more? James had straightened their back and bitten their tongue, and privately wondered if anyone else remembered what had happened the last time proud Erebus had ventured forth to seek new passages.

Perhaps it was the naming to blame.

James goes about their duties with careful precision. If they did otherwise they would go mad, and the counsellor had been first gone. None of them had known how to deal with grief without his guidance. There was irony in that, too. Is it called ironic because it tastes so much like blood?

As always, Terror’s airlock blinks softly at them, reminding them that there is a shuttle absent. Officially they’re shuttles; the older hands call them sloops, another part of the rolling chatter and slang of the sailors. Isn’t it strange, how much they all hold to their history? The camera room, with its telescopic lens and huge display screen, is always the spyglass, the enormous solar panels atop the craft its sails. Even the most hardened veteran of ion storms and meteor bergs calls the ship my lady, and doesn’t dare set out from port upon a Friday by her clock.

Engineering comes first. A diagnostic test run on the base components of the replicator, then a general maintenance inspection of the rest of the ship’s key components. As they check the function of the panels James wonders if it can still be called solar power when it does not come from the sun. In times past – eight months past, and for two years before – they might have turned to Tom or Moira with such a question, most likely to be called a fool for their trouble. Or John, who had a curious and easy smile, and might have suggested they call it celestial, for all the stars they were sure to pass. Do the three of them miss James’s chatting yet? The stories and jokes they told, the ones that always got as many groans as laughs? The arguments they all would have around the dining tables were legendary, in their way. It has been a long time now since James has spoken aloud to anyone, let alone themself. Some days they wonder if they can even remember how, and yet always they are too scared to try.

Terror is long gone, but fear remains.

When preparing to launch, much like the naming ceremony, the ships had been displayed as though they were an ideal home. No need to miss Earth, terra firma, when there were twenty-nine decks of studio accommodation, dining halls, workout spaces, whole sections dedicated to the science labs, the Eden deck in facsimile of nature and the industrial dreams of the engine rooms below. The recruitment tactics of the military have never been a secret to anybody except the commanders. Half the crew had never seen a flower before they enlisted. The cities, after all, do not have state-of-the-art air filtration units threaded through every wall. 

James thinks, a memory as bittersweet as the scent of nightshade, of the first time Harry had shown them around. She had been practically skipping with glee as she narrated the tour. The whole deck was her domain; the towering tree in the centre, spliced and painstakingly pruned to bear twelve different types of fruit, nicknamed Yggdrasil by the anthropologists, down to the precise nitrogen balance of the soil. She was experimenting with the way space travel affected plant growth, while her partner – James isn’t sure, even now, in what sense of the word – dedicated herself to investigating the effects of plant life upon the mood and wellbeing of the crew. Eden was their child, their precious and perfect world.

Over their first few months aboard, James had taken to drawing there – the most expensive item they owned, a brand new sketchbook purchased just before launch, filled up gradually with careful studies of the various plants. Most of those sketches were long gone, now. Pressed into Harry’s hands before she left. Even Terror needs some greenery, Harry. I can’t imagine you without your plants.

Take care of them for me? Until we get back?

And they will take care of you, too, added the voice which always made Harry blush.

James bites the inside of their cheek as they double check Eden’s atmospheric settings, and doesn’t open the door.

At least the gym doesn’t hold too many memories, though it is far too large for a single person. For a month after the others left James simply didn’t exercise, unable to face the eerie silence of forty machines running without anybody on them. Nowadays they have one of the smaller studios set up for their own personal use. Clark, who had been the crew’s de facto fitness instructor before they got sick, had curated a fantastic workout playlist which was still the default. James turns it on to maximum volume with a flick of their hand and runs until the roaring of their pulse and the steady hammer of the music almost fill the ship with life again.

They’re still humming one of the songs as they step out the shower an hour and a half later, wiping the last of the grime away with an artificially lemon-scented cloth and wishing they had something to tie their hair back with. They could always shave it, but the option still holds more revulsion than appeal. Instead they push it back and bundle it into a cap as best they can.

Even with nobody on the ship to reprimand them for laziness, James walks with purpose and efficiency, ducking underneath one of the lower beams in engineering as they check the status of the diagnostics. The small screen magnetically attached to the main protein tank gives a plaintive bleep, signalling that they must wait a while longer yet. A jet of steam hisses like a cut-off breath from a pipe by James’s ear and for an instant they turn around, half expecting to see Lin, laughing at their clumsy attempts at repairs and offering a condescending hand in correcting them. Instead there is only darkness and the unforgiving glint of dull steel. Not so unlike Lin after all, really. James misses his absence more than they ever thought possible.

They instruct the diagnostics pad to send them half-hourly updates and make for the spyglass, foregoing the lifts in favour of the maze of ladders and crawl spaces making up the bones of the ship. In here the drone of the engine is loud enough to ease away any and all conscious thought except for breathing, and putting one hand and foot in front of the other. They’re also significantly less likely to experience a sudden failure of artificial gravity.

To enter the spyglass this way James is forced to take a sharp starboard turn and drop down from a panel concealed in the ceiling. The day’s measurements are easily completed and, with a final check of the replicator’s diagnostics (still barely past sixty-five percent), James turns and makes for their rooms. Ensuring each crewmate is well rested and fit for duty is always a top priority on the daily list. Leisure activities provided include the option to test cognitive function and simulate therapeutic activities. Perhaps today James will finally beat the computer at chess.

That night – that time when the clock hits 2200 and the lights dim, red to purple to barely anything at all – James pulls up a book on their pad. There are thousands of pages of documents, both new and historic, fictional and functional, stored in the ship’s computers. It is another of the rituals which saves their sanity. This tells the tales and myths of long ago, on an Earth unrecognizable when compared with the one in their memory. James has chosen this one before. If they still used paper the book would fall open to this page, so often have they read it; as it is, they type in the reference number with ease, smiling at the familiar shapes upon the page.

There is a place between Earth and Hell, they read, as they have read a dozen times or more. There is a creature born of chaos and inextricably paired with night, who the dead must visit before they may rest. There is a darkness so complete as to be inescapable; it is the path and the guardian which takes the soul to Hell. His name is Erebus.

James has known this for a long time now.

When they sleep they dream of nothing, but in that time between sleep and waking they think of Eden. When they make landfall, they think, they will plant a garden. They don’t know how, but there is plenty of time to learn.

Every day they wake at 0730, and take to their chores by 0900. Most are unnecessary, laid down when the ship numbered a hundred and fifty and no longer of consequence now she numbers just one. James does them anyway. Always deliberately left to last is the logging of coordinates in the charts, the positioning of stars through the viewscreen. For the past two hundred and twenty five days, these observations have been identical. They measure them each time just in case.

It is day two hundred and sixty eight when they notice the anomaly.

They are late to their charts that day, having spent much of the morning dealing with the prolonged physical effects of such an isolation. In their logs this might sound dramatic; in reality it largely involves hacking blindly at their own hair until it no longer trails down their collar or falls in their eyes but instead is a more respectable, and approximately even, jaw length. The machines stopped making macaroni around three weeks previously, and the diet of vegetables and fruit salads since (because really, how it would look, to be aboard the most beautiful piece of technology, dead from scurvy) has cut their muscles fine and lean. Perhaps it is this lateness which accentuates the shock of the discovery – a routine twice deviated from in just one day. Perhaps all would have come about the same regardless. A universe not observed is a universe in which everything, all at once, is the truth.

The thing is a glimmer of light, a reflection off some half-seen star. The spyglass rolls and unfurls, stretching distant lights to full-formed asteroids and flickering stars. There are planets, too, of course. The spyglass can read such a thing for miles; 5.87×10¹², near enough. Too many to imagine. Of course, by the time anyone from those planets saw James and waved back, it would be two years. By the time anyone attempted rescue, even at warp speed – the fastest they could yet reach; or, at least, it had been when they left Earth – it would be another year at least before James might see another person. It would be at least two years before Terror made planetfall in that direction, and she had not headed for those distant worlds – she had traveled through an asteroid field, where there are around a tenth as many nearby trading outposts as there are chances of dying.

We’ve seen worse odds, the others had assured them. We will do what we can. And we will come back for you. We need someone here to keep things running – to ensure that the vessel is not entirely abandoned. Perhaps the engines will come back online. Perhaps the asteroid belt will clear. Perhaps a flare might come from a star astern, and blow you safely home. What a tale such a thing will make. Even Tom, stoic as he tried to be, had crushed James into an embrace and murmured I will never again tell you to shut up with your stories, so long as it’s your voice telling them.

It doesn’t do to dwell on such numbers. James shakes their head and pushes aside the mathematics of their misfortune, focusing again upon the stranger in their viewscreen. At such a distance, shapes cannot be made out. Is it regular enough to be a rescue ship? Irregular enough to be a mere lump of space rock? There is too much between them. Hope and dread wash each other aside until nothing remains.

A blinking light by their elbow informs James calmly that the object, whatever it may be, is on course to Erebus. On direct impact course, in fact. Engines inactive, shuttle launched, escape pods useless. It seems James will be receiving a visitor.

They tilt back their head and laugh. It’s the first sound they have made in uncounted days. The feel of it is rough and ill-fitting in their throat. Once started, they cannot stop – laughter spills forth, laughter which turns to sobs and still it comes, hollowing James out, leaving them empty.

Be it comet or rescue, they decide, they will name it Investigator.