“Good morning! This is your twice-daily friendly reminder that the heavy ion thrusters-“

  “Mute,” Yatto Jurgens grumbled, then cursed immediately.

  “Critical messages cannot be muted or skipped,” the artificial voice intoned. “This is your twice-daily friendly reminder that the heavy ion thrusters are critically malfunctioning. Unless necessary repairs are made, sensors indicate the ESS Bern will cross an event horizon in One. Hundred. Point. Six. Cycles, resulting in a total loss of crew and vehicle.”

  Yatto rubbed his temples inside his sleep chamber. Everything hurt. He shouldn’t have spent the week’s alcohol rations in one night. In his defense, it had been an especially boring cycle.

  Fifteen minutes later, an alarm flooded the stasis room. Lights turned red and flashed. The door to his chamber hissed open. “Alright! Alright!” Yatto screamed back.

  “Propulsion systems critical,” the ship reminded.

  “I got the message,” he said, trying to work the sleep out of his eyes and the pounding out of his head.

  Yatto had been worried when he first heard the alarm upon waking from stasis 45.4 cycles ago. His two other shift-mates weren’t though. Their stasis chambers had failed between shifts. Yatto had worked through the crisis manual front to back for two sleepless cycles trying to resuscitate them. The other engineer and the Third Captain had died.

  Forty-three cycles later, all Yatto could focus on was how amazing a cup of coffee was going to taste. He tapped the stasis chambers out of habit on his way to the mess.

  Breakfast was as it had been for the last forty-five cycles, and the eleven shifts before that: flavored nutrient slurry of variable consistency. The ESS Bern served the best in the fleet, the other engineer had said near the start of their tour. Yatto never had any choice to take her word on that.

  Yatto ordered a gristly tomato-y brick with salmon pudding. It was as good as the other four times he’d had it. Even infinite variability grows monotonous after a spell. The coffee-tinged hot water was a shot of heaven, though.

  He placed the scraps and the sterile packaging in the Reclaimer and stretched. He had a good feeling about today. Maybe he could get the alarm to shut up. He looked at the countdown clock he’d installed after his unproductive fourth week. Exactly one hundred and a half cycles until mathematically certain doom.

  But Gods, he was stiff. The day would be an exercise in frustration and cramps if he didn’t warm up with some light exercise first.

  The rec room was pretty drab, adorned only a few series of elastic straps along the wall. The lack of aesthetic didn’t matter. That’s what the headset was for.

  He forewent the electrodes in favor of honest resistive aerobics. The headset placed him on a chromatic highway impossibly suspended among the stars. Yatto normally raced ghosts of his and the crews’ completion times, but not this time. There was enough lingering hangover to make just staying on the winding path a challenge.

  Afterward, Yatto bumped up the gravity for a session of yoga. The headset had placed him in a paper-walled studio and a suitably lean simulation for emulation and encouragement, in case he needed either.

  Always the clock he had placed in the corner of his HUD ticked toward the event horizon. One hundred point four-five cycles remaining. It did little to impact his serenity. He had gotten very good at yoga.

  Yatto was on his way to the engine room when he caught a whiff of himself. It had been several cycles since he’d showered. There wasn’t anyone to impress or disgust, but he’d get irritable if he were working around that smell all cycle.

  It ended up being an irresponsibly long shower. Yatto felt perfectly justified overriding the recommended of temperature, pressure, duration, and gravity settings. His other shift-mates would never come close to using their resource allotments.

  Besides, the ship's problem wasn't a lack of energy, but of power. Even in its broken state, the ESS Bern had the energy to tow a small planet out of the range of the black hole, given several hundred years. Unfortunately, at its current speed the ESS Bern had barely one hundred days. They needed more power. More energy, in a shorter window. More oomph. And their oomph-giver was on the fritz. If it remained so, the ESS Bern and everyone on it would be join the singularity, compressed into a small but increasingly hungry speck. That was the main problem.

  Yatto urinated in the shower, though he’d done that and worse when he’d had breathing shift-mates. What good is anti-microbial tiling if it isn’t put to the test?

  The ESS Bern seemed to groan and creak more than usual as the water shut off. It was an old ship with failing stasis chambers and a broken oomph-giver. Only groans and creaks meant the old bucket was aging gracefully.

  Yatto stretched and dressed. His stomach was full, his muscles limber, and his head clear. Solidly out of excuses, he checked the countdown clock in the mess. About one hundred point four-one cycles remaining, decrementing slowly over the long several seconds Yatto looked at it.

  It was as good a time to get to work as any.

  Yatto ran the full suite of diagnostics on the ship. The indicators next to HULL, LIFE SUPPORT, NAVIGATION, SENSORS, and even STASIS were all green. Only PROPULSION came up an accusing red.

  Same as the last thirty-six cycles.

  Yatto groaned. A selfish part of him had hoped for more criticals, or even one advisory to distract him from the Gordian knot of the propulsion micro-circuitry.

  In the first days of his shift, he frantically fixed and quadruple-checked the stasis chambers to spare the remaining crew the same fate as his shipmates. He had since tweaked or overhauled all of the other systems, turning them from various shades of yellow to a happy solid green.

  The heavy ion thrusters – the oomph-givers- were stubborn. Every time one issue was fixed, three more cropped up, more cleverly hidden than the last. It had been an achievement to trace the issues to one core cluster.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Waking the others would only put unnecessary strain on the ship’s Reclaimers. He was the de facto expert in this area, the Third Captain having died. He’d have to run into walls and chase ghosts all on his lonesome.

  Yatto resolved himself and kicked his way to the engine room. His tools were exactly where he left them, magnetically attached deliberately haphazardly around his toolbox. He preferred working amid an organized chaos. He grabbed his omni-meter and set to work.

  By all accounts, the problem should have been solved by now. The amount of blown fuses and radiation-damaged circuits he replaced in the first week was startling, but not unsurprising. The ship had either wandered through an undetected solar storm, or the previous shift was completely incompetent. The logs pointed to a mix of the two.

  The Reclaimer dutifully spat out fresh parts from the corpses of the old ones, but the circuits continued to fault and overload.

  To avoid further damage, Yatto shut off the damaged engines, except when testing a patch, and then activating only parts at a time. It had shortened the time remaining, but it was better than have the engine tear itself apart chip by chip.

  For the first time in at least four cycles, the omni-meter let out an agonized beep. Yatto’s heart leapt. That meant it found a broken thing, and broken things can be fixed. He traced the short from circuit to sub-circuit until he had it cornered. Yatto sighed.

  Of course it was in the exterior access panel. Easy to miss and hard to reach. He’d need to suit up for a spacewalk for the first time this shift.

  The Reclaimer needed time to fashion a replacement circuit, not having the broken one to work with yet.

  It was as good a time as any for a break.

  Yatto was back in the headset in the rec room. “Take me to my apartment,” he whispered. Even with no one around, it felt like a sign of weakness to miss a place he’d never see again with his own eyes. His flat materialized around him.

  It was a simple, open one-room flat, walled with the pale green brick characteristic of his homeworld. Gliders drifted in the Valhallan sky outside the window. Yatto tried not to mentally trace their preprogrammed paths through the sky. He wanted to believe, just for a moment, that he was actually lightyears away.

  A pre-colonial cat pawed at his leg, its scales iridescent in the evening light. Yatto picked her up and scritched behind her ears fondly as it purred in his arms.

  None of this was real. Technically, it wasn’t ever real. But it was home.

  Yatto sank into the feedback chair, made soft and poofy by the simulation. “Surprise me,” he said, and an opera projected itself onto the wall opposite his couch. Babs curled up in his lap.

  The opera told of two would-be lovers, separated before they professed their undying love. They had always sung to themselves how there would be time after the harvests, after the hustle and bustle of work, after they had sown wild oats. There was always one more after. Yatto suspected the “random” program selector was trying to impart a message again. The singing was quite nice, though.

  Midway through, a notification hovered in front of the screen that the Reclaimer had finished. Yatto checked the countdown timer. One hundred point three-two cycles left. There would still be plenty of time after the program finished. Yes, he understood the irony. You can’t just leave in the middle of a good story with a cat in your lap.

  The opera ended tragically. There was no climax, only singing fading away as the curtains dropped. Yatto stroked Babs for a few minutes more before begrudgingly re-entering reality.

  Yatto put on his spacesuit and grabbed the circuit. He stepped into the airlock and hit the button to evacuate.

  “Please secure helmet,” a voice advised. Yatto did so with unsteady hands, thanking gods that he added that safety feature several shifts ago.

  The air rushed out as the airlock opened, bringing the void in around him.

  Dozens of spacewalks had not alleviated his mild claustrophobia. It logically should be comforting to hear his lungs and heart still working so hard to keep him alive. Instead, it reminded him that they could easily stop any instant.

  Yatto inched himself along the hull, ensuring he kept his eyes down and he was triply fastened to the ship at all times. His suit informed him he was breathing much harder than normal as he neared the access panel. He screwed his eyes shut and calmed himself. He was used to being a brain in a meat suit in a shell. This shell was more snug than the ESS Bern, is all.

  Yatto pulled open the access panel and confirmed the faulty chip. He swapped it out, and verified the replacement. It took all of two seconds.

  After closing it up, Yatto took a moment to stare out into the void. The stars were infinite, closer than they had ever been on Valhalla, and yet still so far away. He was travelling at speeds that were not even possible in his home atmosphere, and it felt like they were standing still.

  Somewhere out there was the black hole that would kill them all. It couldn’t be seen with the naked eye yet, though Yatto had used the ships’s sensors to observe the space it had gobbled up. Entire cubic lightyears, and it was hardly more than a few pixels among millions.

  Yatto wondered, not for the first time, what would change if he cut himself loose right then. Not much in the grand scheme of things. The odds of mission success would drop a few points down to zero. The crew would not even stir as they were compressed to a singularity.

  Yatto would die a lot sooner, floating in the firmament as the ESS Bern shrank until it also wasn’t even a speck. And then he’d drift until his oxygen ran out. More likely, he’d get bored and tweak the gas mixture to suffocate him painlessly.

  He wasn’t even a bit suicidal, but one wonders when faced with eternity. Babs would miss him too much if he killed himself. She would wait in that simulated apartment forever, with no one to scritch her ears. Even if it was only a simulation, and a hypothetical one at that, the image broke his heart. Everything’s all zeroes and ones, anyway.

  To be or not to be. To scritch or not to scritch.

  Yatto exhaled, his breath lightly fogging his visor before the suit wicked it away. May as well go back inside.

  The short he had puzzled out earlier had gone away. All of the diagnostics were coming up green. Yatto tried to contain the excited pounding in his chest as he turned the engines back on. System after system came on without defect. The diagnostic progress bar slowed to a crawl in the final few pixels before the “Minimum Operational Level.” Then it passed it.

  Yatto’s heart leapt as the machinery whirred to life. “No way,” he exhaled softly. He hadn’t realized how long he’d been holding his breath. He ran his fingers through his hair. He’d finally done it.

  There was a spark. Then a loud clank. Then showers of sparks from the heat reservoir.

  Yatto automatically and repeatedly hit the emergency stop. The engine room turned dark and silent around him.

  His yells echoed around the dead ESS Bern. He screamed every obscenity he could think of. He chucked the omnimeter at the wall, where it bounced off in the low gravity. He pounded against the walls. He cried. He sobbed until there were no more tears.

  Then he went back to work.

  The heat reservoir was shot. He would have to catalog the fragments of the components and feed them to the Reclaimer one component at a time. It would take several hours each for the Reclaimer to work its magic. Not only was today a wash, but tomorrow would be, too. Zero steps forward, two steps back.

  Yatto grit his teeth and began piecing together the most intact component, cursing all the way to the Reclaimer. He didn’t trust himself to put on the VR headset. He wouldn’t want Babs to see him this angry.

  He went back to the mess for more flavored nutrient slurry of variable consistency. Almond and cricket soup. Yatto tried to persuade the computer to extend his alcohol rations, just for tonight. He was denied.

  Disappointed and painfully sober, he headed to his sleep chamber. “This is your twice-daily friendly reminder that the heavy ion thrusters are critically malfunctioning. Unless necessary repairs are made, sensors indicate the ESS Bern will cross an event horizon in Ninety. Nine. Point. Nine. Cycles, resulting in a total loss of crew and vehicle.”

  Yatto mumbled curses at the computer, the engineers, and black holes until he drifted off to sleep.