Adrift

Milo sat on the asteroid and gazed listlessly out into the void before him. What once existed merely above him was now all-encompassing. An eternity of blackness in every direction enveloped him like a shroud. Sitting with his knees drawn to his chin, he was vaguely aware of the light of distant stars reaching him, yet not quite touching him. Not like they used to.

He recalled a similar sight from his youth; the night sky on his home planet (too unimportant to be given a proper name outside its basecode for the Home Coalition Directory). Where other boys his age would sneak out at night to chase their thrills, he would find his lying on his back in a crater near his confines. Hours would pass as he lay, eyes open wide in wonder, staring at the weaving channels of stars. He began to recognise the clusters and subsets of matter in the sky and, once sought out, would smile and greet them, the way he had seen boys greet each other down the pit. Eyes scanning, he would look for supernovae, black holes, nebulae – and wasn’t put off by the fact that he didn’t quite know what these things actually were. Sometimes, movement caught his eye and stories would unfold – fully formed in his mind’s eye – of intergalactic cruisers, Home Coalition cargo ships, and pirates that sought to make their voyages troublesome. The boyhood act of tricking himself that a thin trail of smoke from a nearby refinery funnel was really the trail of a distant launch carried on into his adolescence (despite knowing the only launch centre on the planet was miles from the quarry). For years, Milo conjured pictures of stories he had heard told of distant Systems: the Confederation of Universities studying the Epsilon Vortex; the magma planets home to some of the fiercest creatures in Omega System. The nights where the planet’s feeble moon graced the sky in its trudging, distant orbit were akin to winning the lottery. Or a full meal, which was just as rare.

Milo’s heart would sink as the sun rose. Dusting himself off in the early morning light, he would go to collect his equipment for the day before being directed down his allocated mine shaft to uncover the ore and minerals that were to be sent out for the betterment of planets in other systems. Never here, he often heard the boys say. As the excavation lift descended and shut off the light from the sky, one promise would see Milo through to the next sunset. One day.

One day.

Now, the beeping of The Mirage on the asteroid behind him pulled him out of his reverie. It was the ship’s failsafe measure – a warning that the power was ten minutes from dying. Keeping his eyes forward, Milo nodded in acknowledgement. Of course extending the oxygen bubble and gravity pocket would drain the power. It wasn’t even a ship, really. More of a pod. A cockpit with an engine. Only designed for short bursts from a cargo ship in orbit to a planet’s surface. Ten minutes.

Detachedly, he thought of that boy down the mine – not as himself, but as a separate entity. He was the kind of boy people didn’t take to. Most days he would do or say something that would push him further from the one thing that a crew of boys forced down a mine, seeing through their adolescence by gas light as they broke their bodies wielding mining tools bigger than their bodies, were searching for. Connection. It sometimes felt he was groping through the darkness, blindfolded while everyone else could see fine. From the sidelines, he watched as the others in his pit elicited laughter, touch, playfights and returned jokes from each other. It was like they had their own language, a form of magic only they were privy to. On a shift break, Milo would sit as he was sitting now, chin on his knees, gazing out, trying to make sense of what was before him. Once he felt he learned enough from observation, his attempt at joining the group was spurned. That he used the same words they did, made the same jokes, used the same insults, did not matter. They saw through his attempts and doled out their piercing scowls and turned backs as punishment.

Milo’s status as observer was challenged when the boys’ conversation turned cosmic.

They weren’t long down the pit, a few hours at most, when his thoughts were interrupted by conversation.

“There was an Alpha System cruiser landed here the other day,” said one.

“There was not,” replied the other.

“Was. Mica saw it. Great big metal thing with engines. Said it kicked up all the dust as they left.”

“Well Mica can’t tell an ankaramite crystal from his own fat one.” Laughter. “Wouldn’t trust him with topside matters.”

“He said they picked up some Home Coalition suits before they left.”

“Well, that explains it, then. Wouldn’t be here for us, would they? There’s none of us will be getting off this rock, that’s for sure.”

“I will.” Milo’s voice, unaccustomed to being spoken so loudly, hung in the air like an accusation.

“You? You’ll what?” The faint sound of tools being dropped was swallowed by the chalky walls of the mine.

“I’ll be the first. I’ll ride up in a liner or a cruiser and see it all. The stars and the pirates and the Honeycomb Nebula. I’ll get round all the Systems. Probably even see the Epsilon Vortex too.”

The boys knew his words were stolen from conversations he hadn’t understood and beat him for his foolishness. Most knew they could spin weeks’ worth of material from this. Others just looked at him with pity. They understood. Any hope of what lay beyond Pit 4 was beaten out of them long ago.

However, as Milo spat out a cracked tooth, things clicked into place; the words acted as an incantation. Once spoken, they bound him to this path. He was now sure, as sure as he had been about anything, that it was his purpose, not just to find his way among the universe, but to show them. Never here? He’d show them.

Every action of every day following this was made with the intention of getting off this rock. Once he aged out of his current pit crew, through quiet observation he found the best people to talk to about off-world transportation. With no wage, he knew he could never afford the fee as a passenger, let alone his own vessel. He knew that the punishment of smuggling excavated minerals was a public execution (they already belonged to the Home Coalition, after all) but each passing day felt like a tightening noose and soon the fear of staying where he was outweighed the fear of getting caught. As the years passed and his contraband grew, the feeling of being anchored pulled him further into the ground. It was as if he were buried alive and a new coating of dirt was laid above him every day. When he looked into the sky at night, it wasn’t just in wonder of what could be, it was the urgency of where he had to be. It wasn’t until he had finally bartered all he had saved for the hauler’s second-hand ship that he knew he would make it. Several shady deals and a lift into orbit later, he set out.

He shook with such excitement, he could barely hold the controls. The first few hours of his voyage passed in a blur as his home receded into nothingness behind him. But as the days stretched into weeks a hole opened in the pit of his stomach. At first he dared not admit it to himself but after a while it became an unavoidable fact. There was nothing out here. The stars seemed much closer in his crater but he made no progress towards anything. Without the onboard navigation, he had no indication he was even moving. No Honeycomb Nebula. No pirates. Even this asteroid was hard to come by. But, it being the only thing he had come across in a month of travel, he initiated a landing. After disembarking, he walked the length of it in a few strides. He sat on the edge and looked out into the abyss. The reality of swapping one rock for another turned his blood to ice. Rooted to the spot as the rock drifted through nothing, all he could see was emptiness. There was nothing out here. He could no longer even see where he had come from. The futility of his dreams lay heavy around his neck. His throat tightened as the realisation of all he had sacrificed for childhood stories. Fantasies. For a void. The promise of opportunity gave way to this cold reality of nothingness. Endless nothingness. An empty void whose stars’ warmth was too far to feel. He recalled the feeling of being rooted. Tied down; fixed; trapped. Now, he was adrift. Blindly groping further into an abyss hoping something made contact. As time slipped by, he plunged further into nothingness.

Sitting in the weak glow of The Mirage’s hull lighting, he thought again of that boy, lying on his back, looking up at all he had. When he looked up at the sky, he saw nothing but opportunity.

Now, he saw nothing.

The Mirage’s final whimpering beeps sounded behind him.

As the gravity began to weaken and the air started to thin, Milo closed his eyes and thought of the night sky from a planet he could no longer find his way back to.