The time had come.
Sleep had abandoned John Vilkas
long before the journey began.
He had spent months hovering
at the edge of consciousness,
never quite resting,
Never quite awake.
His nights had become
ccupied by impossible places.
Distant planets.
Black oceans.
Cities made of light.
Faces he had never seen.
And always,
beneath everything,
the same distant point of light.
Nova Centauri 2013.
The astronomers called it a supernova.
An extraordinary event, certainly,
but an event that had already been observed,
catalogued and explained.
At least, that was what they believed.
John had never believed them.
Something about it didn’t fit.
He could never explain what.
He only knew that whenever
he looked at the astronomical data,
something inside him reacted.
Recognition.
Not memory.
Something older.
Something deeper.
The voices had begun quietly.
At first they had been whispers beneath sleep.
Then they had become dreams.
Then nightmares.
Then they began speaking while he was awake.
His doctors had called them hallucinations.
The medical board had called them a safety concern.
The verdict had been simple.
He was not medically cleared to fly.
It wasn’t a punishment.
It was a precaution.
A pilot hearing voices
and seeing things that weren’t there
could not be trusted with a spacecraft.
John understood that.
Perhaps better than anyone.
He had been a test pilot.
He knew what happened
when a machine failed at altitude.
He knew what happened when a pilot’s judgement
failed before the machine did.
So he stopped flying.
He became a specialist instead.
He serviced Personal Interplanetary Transports.
PITs.
He knew their engines.
Their life-support systems.
Their navigation arrays.
Their retractable landing sleds.
Their guidance systems.
He knew every vibration a PIT
could make and what each vibration meant.
He could listen to an engine for thirty seconds
and tell a technician what was wrong with it.
It was the one thing in his life he still trusted.
Machines did not whisper to him.
Machines did not show him impossible worlds.
Machines obeyed laws.
At least, that was what he had always believed.
Now he was strapped inside one.
Beneath the cold glow of instruments,
John felt the old life loosening its grip.
A lifetime of illness.
A lifetime of worry.
A lifetime beneath the weight of a world
that had forgotten how to be kind.
With its wars.
Its hatred.
Its sickness.
Its endless arguments about
whose god was the righteous god.
Its borders.
Its armies.
Its prisons.
Its hospitals.
Its people.
Its fear.
He would leave it all behind.
All of it would soon remain below.
And soon, perhaps, he would sleep.
Not the restless sleep of a troubled man.
Something deeper.
The silence between worlds.
His eyelids grew heavy at the thought of it.
Then,
BEEP.
A sharp sound sliced through the darkness.
His headset crackled.
A synthetic voice began counting down.
John raised his hand.
He pressed the flashing white control beside him.
The transparent canopy changed.
What had been clear became white.
The world disappeared.
For a moment there was nothing
but the sealed darkness of the capsule
and the trembling beneath him.
Then the engines began.
A vibration travelled through his bones.
A rising hum.
A deeper shaking.
The whole machine seemed to tremble with anticipation.
Three.
Two.
One.
The PIT lifted.
The planet fell away.
The Personal Interplanetary Transport climbed rapidly,
burning through the atmosphere,
leaving behind the clouds,
the cities,
the oceans,
and the tiny lives that had filled John’s days
with fear and disappointment.
The vibration increased.
Then,
Silence.
The engines reduced their output.
The PIT entered its first transit phase.
John waited.
He pressed the white control again.
The canopy cleared.
Space appeared.
Endless.
Inky black.
Beautiful.
Earth hung beneath him.
From this distance it looked peaceful.
That was the strange thing.
There were no borders.
No armies.
No hospitals.
No prisons.
No shouting crowds.
No hatred.
Only a blue, silent sphere
turning slowly beneath him.
John touched the glass.
Text illuminated beneath his fingers.
SYSTEMS CHECKED.
ALL POSITIVE.
He activated the wayfinder.
The destination coordinates appeared.
Not Nova Centauri 2013 itself.
He had no intention of approaching the remains of the supernova.
No spacecraft could safely enter the region.
Instead, John had calculated
the safest known location
from which the remnants could be observed.
A distant observation point.
Far enough away to remain outside the dangerous region.
Close enough to see the remains of Nova Centauri 2013 clearly.
That was where he was going.
Or at least,
that was where he believed he was going.
He entered the coordinates.
The PIT accepted them.
The engines changed pitch.
John leaned back.
The canopy turned white again.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment he thought he heard them.
The voices.
But they were different now.
Not screaming.
Not warning.
Calling.
A few commands beneath his fingertips.
The PIT prepared for departure.
Then the engines began to vibrate.
Gently at first.
Then harder.
Acceleration pressed him into his restraints.
His eyelids grew heavier.
Stasis began to take him.
As consciousness slipped quietly away,
he thought of the stars.
Then,
He dreamed.
Bright impossible colours.
Cities made of light.
Oceans hanging upside down beneath violet skies.
Stars flowering like enormous gardens.
He dreamed of places where he had never been
and faces he had never known.
Then the colours darkened.
The dreams fractured.
The beautiful became terrible.
The nightmares arrived like shards of broken glass.
Dark corridors.
Falling.
Screaming.
A sky without stars.
A world collapsing beneath its own weight.
He slept through them all.
The PIT continued onward.
A sleeping cosmonaut hurtling through open space.
Toward a region from which he had hoped
to observe the death of a star.
Then,
A gasp.
John awoke as though breathing for the first time.
His chest rose sharply.
His eyes opened.
Red lights and text flashed across the canopy display.
WARNING.
WARNING.
An alarm screamed through the cabin.
John reached for the controls.
The canopy changed.
White became clear.
And he saw rock.
Everywhere.
Asteroids.
A vast field of them.
Spinning through the darkness.
John stared at the navigation display.
The coordinates were wrong.
No.
Not wrong.
The PIT was no longer travelling
toward the observation location.
It had stopped.
He checked the engines.
Nominal.
Navigation.
Nominal.
Power.
Nominal.
He stared at the wayfinder.
The destination coordinates remained
exactly as he had entered them.
But the PIT was nowhere near them.
A rock struck the hull.
THUD.
Then another.
CLANG.
Then another.
The machine lurched.
The asteroid field surrounded him.
John fought the controls,
forcing the PIT upright
or what he imagined upright to be
in a place without an up or down.
The rocks continued to pass.
Small.
Fast.
Deadly.
Each one a bullet without a gun.
Then he saw something enormous.
An asteroid so vast it could have been a tiny moon.
A floating monolith
turning slowly among the smaller stones.
John watched it for a moment.
Then realised.
In its shadow.
Was safety.
He guided the PIT toward it.
Slowly.
Carefully.
A burst from the thrusters.
A small drift.
Then another.
The enormous rock grew before him.
Its surface was black, scarred and ancient.
A great jutting section extended from its centre
like the broken tooth of some celestial giant.
John steered beneath it.
The PIT disappeared into its shadow.
The asteroid field continued raging beyond.
Rocks struck rock.
Fragments spun away.
But beneath the great stone there was safety.
All alarms stopped.
The spinning ceased.
The PIT settled.
John breathed a sigh of relief.
For a long moment he simply sat there,
listening to the sound of his own breath.
He ran a systems check.
One by one.
Everything appeared intact.
Nothing significant was broken.
He looked through the canopy
at the enormous rock hanging above him.
A dead world.
Or what looked like one.
A shelter in the middle of chaos.
In the middle of nowhere.
John smiled faintly.
“That was a close one,” he whispered.
Then he looked at the navigation display again.
Nova Centauri 2013 remained far away.
He had never reached the observation point.
He had never even come close.
Something had brought him here.
John stared at the asteroid.
And for the first time since leaving Earth,
he wondered whether he had travelled
all this way to escape his old world,
only to discover that something
had been waiting for him in the dark.
