Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — NV Erika Magnusdóttir
The boarding bridge was warmer than the hall — five degrees of it, the air pre-conditioned to the Erika’s standing pressure ahead of the cohort-officer arrivals, and it reached him the way warmth reaches a person who grew up in it and has spent three winters learning the other thing. Lagos in his lungs for a second, then gone. Idris stepped through the inner threshold and stopped at the boarding desk, because at the boarding desk you stopped.
The officer at the desk stood and offered a clipboard.
“Officer Fasola. Welcome aboard NV Erika Magnusdóttir.”
Mid-thirties. The kind of frame that read as careful rather than compact. Bergen vowels, lengthened slightly at the ends of the words — the accent of a man who had not lived in Bergen for years and had stopped trying to lose it.
“Officer Halvorsen.” Idris took the clipboard. ISNA 2134-CIO-2, Crew Member Boarding — he had only ever seen one in the procedural archive, which he had read because Mads said the archive was where you went to learn what a vessel actually did before you were standing on it. Mads had been right about that as well.
“Sign at the second line. The first is mine.”
Idris signed. The pen was institute issue, the one with the small drag at the start of every stroke that came from the cartridge seal and not the nib; his hand knew the drag and corrected for it before the loop of the F, the way it had learned to over forty weeks of signing rotation sheets at Tromsø. The pen was Tromsø’s. The form was the Erika’s. The first of the small displacements he would be making all day.
Reidar Halvorsen took the clipboard back, looked at the signature long enough to confirm it, and nodded once.
“You’re the first of the three.”
“Khalil and Yuan are at the second and third gates.”
“Good.” Reidar slid the form into a folder at the desk’s left. “I’ll walk you through. Halland’s at command in about ninety minutes — she likes to meet the new officers before the briefing rather than at it.”
“Acknowledged.”
Reidar lifted the desk’s handheld logger — ISNI issue, a model older than the one Idris had used at Tromsø — and held the inner door with his other hand. Long enough not to be a courtesy. Short enough not to be a comment. Idris stepped through and the door cycled behind them.
The corridor on the far side was lit at the Erika’s daylight tier, pale and even, warmer than the training floor he had spent two years on. The deck plates took his weight without the dull report of the simulator’s — quieter, denser, a surface that had been walked by people on actual missions and had given up nothing of it. He had stood on the simulator a thousand hours. The simulator had not been this.
Idris kept moving.
“Bridge first,” Reidar said. “Where you’ll spend most of the day, and where Halland will want you when she arrives. Then forward, aft, your quarters. The route’s not the short one. It’s the one that lets a new officer find a way back to anywhere by the second day.”
“Understood.”
The bridge was eight consoles in a shallow horseshoe, the navigator’s pair at the centre-front, the command position a single step up at the back. Idris counted from the door and found his without being told — Second Navigator, port side of the central pair, turned towards the secondary-stack readouts at the east wall. The console was warm under his palm when he touched it. Someone had brought the system up that morning, run the standby diagnostic, and left the readouts at parking display. The someone, he understood, was the courtesy: a warm console for a new officer so his first act aboard was not waiting for a cold one to wake.
“That’s yours.” Reidar gestured without breaking stride. “Halvard Eskildsen sits Second Drift, the seat off your right shoulder. You met him at the instructor rotation, I think.”
“I did.”
Reidar took the brevity for what it was and moved them on.
The harmonic array chamber was three doors aft. The hatch cycled and the room breathed out at them — ozone at warm-up baseline, the smell that lived under everything on a traversal vessel, and Idris had it now off the institute’s chambers and would have it off this one by week’s end. The array filled the space. He had built it a hundred times from the diagrams and the diagrams had told him nothing true. The coil housing was matte black; the diagnostic ring threw a ribbon of pale data across the deck the simulator had never bothered to draw, and the thing was large in the way a real instrument is large, the way that says people will die if the numbers off it are wrong.
Reidar paused in the doorway, a glance at the south-wall readouts.
“Yuan’ll live in here. Stack’s running nought-point-nought-four above at warm-up. Inside tolerance, logged.”
“She’ll want the log when she boards.”
“She will.” Reidar’s mouth did the thing that was not quite a smile — recognition of the kind of engineer Luo Jia was, no verdict attached. He led on.
The comms cabin was the next door. On the diagrams it sat well off the array, with a corridor and a service alcove between — but through the bulkhead, on the shortest line, the gap was seven metres at most, and the low ozone bled through it. Idris marked the thinness of the wall and kept it; a thin wall between comms and the array was the kind of thing that mattered later.
“My post.” Two stations: Reidar’s at the centre, and a second with Vesna Hadžić’s name on the headrest. “Hadžić’s Second Comms. Cohort 6. Came across in ‘thirty-nine. She’s in the medical bay this morning — the pre-departure interview’s the Second Comms’s standing duty. You’ll meet her at briefing.”
“Right.”
The drift lab was forward, two corridors along the dorsal spine: three calibration stations in a row, Halvard’s at the centre, Petra Sigurðsson’s at the right, set up in the configuration Idris knew from a year of watching her work — left hand to the scroll, right to the analytic input, both at the ready before she had a reason to use either. Petra was at the pre-departure conferences this morning, aboard later. He went past the station without slowing, but the configuration stayed with him: a familiar hand in an unfamiliar room.
The medical bay was further forward. The hatch was open. Amara was in.
“Officer Khalil,” Reidar said from the threshold, not entering. “Touring Officer Fasola through. We won’t keep you.”
Amara turned from the crew-readiness rack she was calibrating, ISNI green, her thumb staying on the dial. The thumb was the answer before the words were: a clinician does not break a calibration to be polite, and Amara, who had taken the count before every disclosure across the cohort year, would not be the one to teach Idris that on his first morning.
“Officer Fasola.”
“Officer Khalil.”
“Quarters tier two?”
“Yes.”
“Mine’s three. In by midday.”
“Understood.”
Amara turned back to the dial; the sequence had not paused for any of it. Reidar had him moving down the corridor before the hatch closed.
“You came up in the same cohort,” Reidar said as they walked. Not a question.
“Cohort 12. Three of us aboard.”
“It helps the first month. Less the third. By the sixth you’ll know everyone on this ship better than you ever knew them at the institute, and the cohort thing goes quiet. That’s T-class.”
“Understood.”
“I’m Cohort 7. Two postings. The Magnusson before this.” He said it the way a man names a town he no longer lives in. “It is what it is.”
The mess was the room he had not expected to feel the way it did. It was the warmest-lit space on the vessel, two long tables and a small round one by the galley pass, the pass open so the kitchen showed behind it. The tabletops were a matte composite chosen by someone whose job had not been to choose tabletops — too good for the spec, picked because a person aboard once cared what a crew put their hands on three times a day. Under the warm air there was the smell of bread from the pass and, under that, the metal-and-recycled-water smell every sealed hull carried and you only met again when you came back to one. He had it back now. He had not known he had missed it until it arrived.
Reidar gave him the doorway and moved them on.
“Observation deck. Last stop before quarters.”
The deck was the part of a T-class no one had ever found a reason to keep and no one had ever taken out. Twelve metres of viewport down the dorsal spine, polarised at the parking tier; two benches against the inboard wall; no consoles, no instruments, a single plaque with the commissioning date. Reidar stopped two paces in.
“Where you come when you want what the bridge doesn’t leave room for.”
Beyond the glass: the institute’s eight berthing cradles, the Erika in the third, the Magnusson in the fifth, the Aalbæk and the Lund-Karlsen small in seven and eight. Past the cradles, the dark curve of the polar evening; the institute’s superstructure off to port at half-tier for the standing watch. Reidar gave him the view, and the view gave Idris the one thing the simulator’s painted starfield never had — depth, the cold real distance to the next hull over — and then Reidar moved.
“Quarters.”
“Yes.”
The residential corridor was on the east wing of the cohort-officer tier, two corridors off the dorsal spine. Reidar stopped at the fifth door and pressed his thumb to the access plate.
“Yours till you’re not.”
The door cycled. The room was three metres by four. Single bunk against the inboard wall; small desk under the viewport; the viewport itself approximately twenty centimetres by thirty, set at standing-eye height in the external bulkhead. The viewport showed a sliver of the cradle structure and, past it, the same polar evening the observation deck had shown at scale. Functional, not generous. The ISNI standard brief had described the cohort-officer tier viewport as adequate to orientation, which was the institute’s way of saying it was the size it was.
His cohort bag was at the foot of the bunk. The institute had transported it from the residential block on the cohort-departure schedule — the bag had been at room 4-A-12 the previous evening; it was here now; the institute had moved it, without his presence. The desk was bare. The desk lamp was a standard-issue ISNI articulated unit, set at the angle the institute’s residential block had set it at, which was not the angle Idris read at.
Reidar held the doorway.
“Briefing at the bridge at eleven. Mess at nineteen. Welcome aboard, Officer Fasola.”
“Thank you, Officer Halvorsen.”
The door cycled shut.
Idris stood at the bunk three seconds and did not unpack. The air sat the way the institute’s residential block had sat — the same low circulation, the same humidity — and this was not the residential block. The desk was not his desk. The viewport was not his viewport. He took each piece in turn the way one took the components of a system before bringing it up, and then he set the cohort bag on the desk and opened it.
The assignment card was on top. He left it.
The bridge was full at eleven.
Idris had taken his console at ten-fifty, brought up the standby panel, and run the navigator’s pre-briefing diagnostic. The diagnostic ran clean. He had then sat the eight minutes between completion and Halland’s arrival with his hands flat on the console rim, watching the sequence of arrivals — Reidar at the comms station, Vesna Hadžić nodding to him from the secondary comms seat (she was younger than the cohort-six rotation roster suggested, dark-haired, the settled calm of someone years into the seat in the way she sat down); Halvard Eskildsen taking the seat off Idris’s right shoulder without a word; Reidun Skogli arriving from the engineering corridor with grease on the cuff of her uniform that she had not had time to clean; Kjell Stenberg, Run Physicist, settling at the physics console with a tablet already in his hand and a half-finished mug of something at the console’s left edge; Amara at the medical observer’s seat at the rear; Luo Jia at the harmonic-array post at the bridge’s east wall, already at the secondary-stack readouts.
The full crew was seventeen by the Erika’s manifest. Idris counted. He arrived at sixteen, recounted, found the second engineering hand who had come in last and was at the rear-port standing position. Seventeen.
Halland arrived at eleven precisely. The bridge stood. She held them at standing as she walked to the command position and then sat.
“Be seated.”
The bridge sat. Halland was fifty-six by the ISNA record, slightly taller than Idris had recalled her from the institute’s heritage-panel ceremony fourteen months earlier, the grey at her temples cut close. Cohort 1. Mads Tolfsen’s first advanced-navigation recommendation in 2127. The line that ran from Mads’s training-floor at the institute through this vessel to the eight-week observation window at Junction 14-A was a line Idris could trace.
“The mission is Junction 14-A. Proxima Centauri vicinity. Routine survey class. Eight-week observation post-arrival. Departure from this berth in three weeks. The pre-departure preparations run at the standard ISNA T-class — Officer Skogli has the engineering sequence; Officer Stenberg has the physics; Officer Yuan has the harmonic array calibration; Officer Halvorsen has comms verification; Officer Fasola is on the navigation set with me; Officer Khalil has the crew-readiness sequence. The detailed pre-departure brief follows this one at fourteen hundred. This is the standing introduction.”
Halland let the silence hold a moment.
“Three of you — Officers Fasola, Khalil, and Yuan — are at your first traversal post. The Erika has been running its post-2135 cohort-officer integration protocol across the past five rotations. The integration follows the institute’s standard. The crew, by the Erika’s practice, will accommodate. The three of you, by the cohort year’s training, will hold.”
Halvard, off his right shoulder, received it at the same level; Reidar at the comms station did not lift his eyes from the panel. The crew, by the small adjustment of seventeen separate postures, settled together.
“Welcome aboard. Briefing closes.”
The bridge stood. Halland left first.
The mess at nineteen was three-quarters full and the lighting was at the warmer tier the room defaulted to in the dinner hour. Idris collected a tray at the pass — fish, root vegetables, a piece of bread — and took the cohort-officer table at the east wall, which had been left empty by the standing arrangement Reidar had said nothing about and which was, by the second of the Erika’s generosities Idris had now noted, deliberate.
Amara arrived a minute behind him. Luo Jia, two minutes behind Amara.
The three sat.
“Halland,” Amara said, “is at Mads’s recommendation.”
“I read that.”
“Cohort 1. The first advanced navigation qualification sign-off he gave. I pulled the post-Academy file at the medical bay’s reference archive — it was open on the bay’s archive terminal.” She cut a piece of fish. “The line runs from him to her to this bridge.”
“It does.”
Luo Jia set her water down.
“Halvorsen spent five minutes on the secondary-stack offset.”
“He would.”
Luo Jia looked at him for a half-count. “It’s within tolerance.”
“You’ll keep an eye on it.”
“I will.”
The three ate. The mess shifted around them — the full crew was there now, a low constant of cutlery and quiet conversation, the kind of room-noise the institute’s refectory had never produced because the institute’s refectory had not been a vessel in a cradle three weeks from departure. Reidar was at the long table with Reidun and Kjell. Halvard was at the round table by the pass with two of the engineering hands. Halland was not at the mess. Halland, by the ISNI convention Idris had been briefed on and was now seeing in practice, took her dinner at the command quarter at the standard hour.
Amara cut another piece of fish.
“It is what it is,” she said.
It was the second time that day the phrase had landed. Reidar in the corridor; Amara at the mess. The phrase was not, by the cohort year’s idiom, common — neither he nor Amara nor Luo Jia had used it across the forty-two weeks. It was the Erika’s phrase, picked up at boarding by absorption.
“Yes,” he said.
Luo Jia, across from him, did not look up from her plate. The corner of her mouth did the thing it did when she had caught something and would not, in a public room, name it.
The three finished. Idris took his tray to the pass. Reidar nodded to him from the long table. Idris nodded back. The exchange was less than two seconds.
The corridor from the mess to the residential tier was a corridor he had walked once. The second walk was shorter than the first. By the seventh day, Reidar had said, the Erika would be the route he found his way back to anywhere from. Idris held the prediction and did not estimate it. He reached the door, pressed his thumb to the plate, and the door cycled.
The cohort bag was on the desk where he had left it. The viewport at the external bulkhead held the same sliver of cradle and the same dark beyond it, the polar evening having moved through its slow nineteen-hundred-hour shift. He set the bag down on the floor and opened it on the bunk’s foot.
Two notebooks. The institute’s pre-posting uniform, folded. The tea cup, wrapped in the institute’s residential-block towel he had not, by the post-Academy convention, been supposed to take with him. The cup at the bottom of the bag, the one that had taken forty weeks to settle at the temperature it was supposed to settle at. The assignment card. The cohort completion certificate, folded twice, which he had set aside the previous Saturday as a document he would not be opening again.
Idris set each item on the desk in turn. The cup at the desk’s left corner. The notebooks at the centre. The uniform on the bunk. The folded cohort certificate at the desk’s right edge, where he could see it without having to read it. The assignment card he kept the longest — NV Erika Magnusdóttir — Second Navigator — Mission Boarding 01 August 2142 — Original Posting 01 September 2140 — and then set it on the notebooks. The two-year gap between the dates was the institute’s pre-departure cycle: nearly two years of integration assignments, advance-reconnaissance work at the Svalbard junction, and harmonic-array calibration runs before the Erika lifted for an actual mission. He had earned the second date the long way.
The desk lamp was at the wrong angle. Idris adjusted it.
The window, the desk, the bunk. The cohort bag at the bunk’s foot, empty.
The fourteen months at Tromsø — the junior support post, the institute’s standard junior placement, the residential block at room 4-A-12, the tea at the kitchen counter at the temperature it had taken forty weeks to reach — were not, in the room, retrievable. The post was behind him. The cohort year was at the ISNI archive. Junction 14-A was three weeks from this hour.
Idris sat at the desk. The cup at his left hand, empty. The viewport showed the cradle and the dark and a single yellow indicator on the Magnusson’s lower hull two berths over, where the engineering watch was running its standing diagnostic.
The yellow indicator was the only moving thing in the viewport.
Idris watched it long enough for the cup at his left hand to cool. The polar evening did not move. The cradle did not move. The yellow indicator continued its slow standing-diagnostic cycle. He kept his hand on the cup.