He threw his hands in the air and then brought them down on his controls, cursing loudly.
He finally switched to manual and tried to course-correct. Niko was frantically instructing the ship, which seemed unresponsive.
The hauler was coursing towards what looked like the target planetoid much, much faster than it should. She rolled out of bed and headed to the bridge, not bothering with magboots she propelled herself, weightless, as fast as she could. She woke up with a violent shake that made the straps holding her down in her bunk dig into her chest. Manos had always been a man of few words, his logs brief and impersonal. The sim flickered, pixels failing at her father’s edges, bits of him missing. “What would you have said to me, if I had come home before it was too late?” “I’ve only ever done what you wanted me to do.” “What more did you want from me?” She opened her arms, a motion meant to encompass it all: the room, the ship, the vast, cold space. This one she’d heard multiple times before. “You should try harder,” the holosim continued. She had tried so hard to forget so many things her father said-perhaps she had succeeded, after all. Or maybe he did, and she had forgotten it. “The sins of the father are visited on the son,” her father responded, and she kept herself from wincing at the mention of a son, at this lack, this deficiency that had been beaten into her since birth, and then she racked her brains for the source of that line, sure that she had never heard her father say it while he was still alive. “When were you going to tell me you were sick?” she asked. She studied her father’s paper-thin skin, the brown splotches and liver spots on the backs of his hands, looking for the signs of illness she had missed before and still failing to find them. He had stuck fluorescent stars to the ceiling of her room because she was afraid of the dark, and stars still seemed like a comforting thing to look up to, back then. “You should put on an extra blanket tonight, sweetbug.” A line from a much younger father, tucking his daughter in for the night after reading to her, back on Ceres. “Boreas is the god of winter,” the sim replied helpfully. Her father was dead in the ground and a pastiche of recordings grafted onto a chatbot does not a person make. This was nothing but a collection of everything he’d said or written that had been preserved in record. “Did you have a good day?” it asked back-one of his standard lines. “Are you sleeping, Daddy?” she asked, even though she knew holosims don’t sleep. She left the overhead lights off, so her room was illuminated only by the weak glow of the holosim. Ionna turned around and made her way back to her sleeping quarters, magboots clicking on the grid underneath. “Okay,” Niko replied, obviously resigned, obviously not wanting to punch and make up this time. “Let’s not get into this again,” Ionna said. “Long enough? What does that even mean? Long enough for whom?” She paused. This stopped being about processing your grief a long time ago. He looked at her a moment too long, seemed to decide not to say anything, then said it anyway: “Don’t talk to it, Ionna.” They had fought about this many times. He showed her his palms-a gesture that meant, how would I know? The concentration of platinum is absurdly high.” He magnified a quadrant and pointed at a small nothing in the corner. Niko tightened his ponytail to keep his long black hair from falling into his face. “I get great readings for platinum from less than a million kilometers away.” “So, where to?” Ionna asked after a while. Instead, they watched the darkness outside in tight-lipped silence. They left unsaid the conversation about the family he missed and the family she no longer had. “One more and we’ll be going home.” He ran his fingers over the faces of his daughters looking back at him from the photo pinned next to the navigation panel. “Won’t be long now.” Niko finished securing the cargo area and initiated a routine maintenance check of the entire ship. As if the cold of space had settled into her bones.
“It’s freezing today,” Ionna said, although she knew the temperature in the ship was always the same.