The Long Forever. Eugene Lambert

slumps back in his seat with a satisfied sigh. ‘Relax. They’re still out there. We just can’t see them through the dee-emm, now that we’re shifting.’

      Dee-emm. Shifting. I’ve already passed on the little I know to the other kids. Like how suns are so far apart even light takes years to travel between them. How our dee-emm drive ‘shifts’ us into something called dark-matter space so we can go faster. Murdo calls it a sneaky short cut, a clever way of going behind the back of regular space.

      ‘I see weird stuff out there,’ a boy called Taka calls out.

      Me too. Mostly it’s darkness so deep it feels as if it’s sucking my eyeballs out of my head. But there’s something else. Oily and slippery, it oozes around the edges of my seeing. Look straight at it though and there’s nothing.

      ‘What the heck is that?’ I ask Murdo.

      He glances around. ‘Spacers call it “seeing the spooks”. It’s to do with the way the dee-emm drive operates. And why we leave the flight-deck lights switched up when we’re shifting, so we can’t see outside. Spend too much time watching them, you end up going crazy. Some say –’

      He hesitates, then flicks the lights back on.

      ‘Tell us,’ I say, catching his eye.

      He grimaces. ‘They say spooks are alien life forms. Monster space fish who swim around in dark matter.’

      ‘What do you say?’

      ‘I say we’ve plenty to worry about already,’ he growls.

      Life aboard our star freighter takes getting used to. The crew compartment would’ve been cramped for five, and there are thirteen of us. But the hardest thing is there’s no day and night, which makes it tough to sleep.

      Murdo’s feeling better though, and loving life.

      He says we have to wean ourselves off Wrath-time and onto the standard-time spacers use. Standard-hours are about the same length, but there are only twenty-four in a standard-day! We all moan like hell, feeling cheated, but he just laughs at us. Says standard-months have more standard-days in them, so what’s it matter anyway?

      Well it turns out it does matter!

      He re-calculated our ages in standard-time. I’d been looking forward to turning seventeen in two Wrath-months; now I’ll have to wait six more standard-months.

      The only person more fed up than me is Sky. She was seventeen, now she’s back to being sixteen!

      With bog all to do, we count the days down to Shanglo. I teach the others stupid games I played as a kid. They teach me some of theirs. By far their favourite thing is to get me or Sky or Murdo to tell them stories about our adventures. They never tire of listening. But three standard-days out of Wrath we hit our first snag. Anuk put Stitch in charge of the food because he’d done cooking duties back in her camp. Now she drags him in front of Murdo, a face on her like thunder.

      ‘Tell him!’ she rages.

      Shame-faced, Stitch admits we’re almost out of food.

      ‘He couldn’t be arsed to check,’ Anuk says.

      I figure Murdo will go off on one, but all he does is shrug. ‘Just as well we’re only four days out from Shanglo, not a month out from Enshi Four. Isn’t it, Sky?’

      Sky gives him a spike-eyed glare, but says nothing.

      Anuk says we’ll manage, but it’ll mean short rations and going hungry. Been there, done that, but it’s still bad news. Murdo reassures us we’ll be able to load up with food at Shanglo.

      Everybody settles back down.

      But when nobody’s looking, Murdo whispers that I should meet him outside the cargo hold. Before I can ask why, he slides off in that direction, real furtive.

      I tell Sky. She says she’ll come with me.

      The few kids that aren’t sleeping are playing games or taking it easy. Anuk’s in the galley, chewing Stitch’s ear off about the food, so nobody notices as we stroll out after Murdo. At the far end of the main companionway, we catch up with him. He’s outside the hold’s closed hatch, by the big red warning sign about the lack of shielding.

      When Sky goes to say something, he shushes her.

      ‘Keep it down,’ he hisses. ‘There’s something I have to do, but I’ll need Kyle to help.’

      ‘What with?’ I whisper, suspicious.

      Murdo glances past us, but we can’t be seen back here because of a dog-leg in the corridor. His lived-in face is less battered by now, but he looks uneasy.

      ‘These dark-market contacts of mine,’ he says. ‘They’re all chancers. With promethium being so valuable, there’s a risk they’ll just try to take it off us.’

      ‘Let them try,’ Sky mutters.

      Murdo grins. ‘All the same, I’d feel better if we had insurance. We should stash some of the cargo. That way, if we have to run for it, we won’t have lost everything.’

      Sounds reasonable to me. ‘Where would we hide it?’

      ‘In that escape craft, with the prisoners.’

      Sky sniffs. ‘Oh yeah, nobody would look there.’

      But Murdo’s no fool. He tells us that after we’ve loaded a couple of crates aboard, he’ll launch the escape craft. It can float about until we come back to retrieve it.

      ‘But what about the guys in stasis?’ I ask.

      He shrugs. ‘What about them? Won’t do them no harm.’

      ‘And you’re sure we can find it again?’ Sky asks.

      ‘They have distress beacons, but you have to be close to pick up the signal. We know where to listen.’

      ‘What if somebody else hears it?’

      ‘They won’t. I’ve altered course. We’re in dead space now. No starship has any reason to be out here.’

      ‘So how come we’re sneaking off to do it?’ Sky asks.

      Murdo glances past us again. ‘The fewer who know, the better. So don’t go telling anyone.’

      About now, the warning sign behind him catches my eye.

      ‘Will you shut the drive off ? Or we’ll be zapped.’

      He grimaces. ‘Best not to. The others would feel it and wonder what’s going on. It’s not like it’ll kill us.’

      I look at Sky, unsure.

      She shrugs. ‘Makes sense, I guess.’

      Thankfully, Murdo knows his way around handling cargo, so we’re not in the hold too long being fried. Using an overhead hoist we lower two of the massively heavy crates into the airlock compartment. Using levers, rollers and wedges, we sweat them into the pod. It’s heavy work and even I’m shaking by the time Murdo slaps a push-panel with a red handprint on it and the access lock snaps shut. We scramble back up into the hold and Sky lets us out.

      When she closes the hatch behind us . . . it’s bliss!

      After a breather we return to the crew compartment. We haven’t been missed. Murdo carries on through to the flight deck. A minute later, the deck shifts under me.

      ‘Did you feel something?’ Anuk asks.

      I look at Sky. She looks at me. We shake our heads.

7

       SHANGLO BACKWATER

      I don’t have a problem with heights, but