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“Steven!!!”
Sardonyx stared in horror as Steven vanished into space, Amethyst’s scream echoing in her ears.
Oh my stars! / Gotta go after him / What are we going to do?! / Need Pearl to pilot … Without warning, she unfused into Garnet and Pearl, Amethyst falling from her shoulder as she came apart. They all grabbed at the doorframe and each other, catching themselves before they flew out too.
“P— Amethyst! The door control!” Pearl was closer, but badly positioned, she’d never reach it without shapeshifting. Garnet had never seen her shapeshift — she wasn’t sure if she could.
Amethyst stretched an arm more than a meter, slapped the control. The door closed and they tumbled to the floor. “Come on, the ship! After him!”
They scrambled in, hurrying to the controls. “Pearl! Can you fly this thing?”
Pearl looked panicky. “I don’t know … let me look at it.” She sat at the controls, tentatively touching one control, then another.
Garnet endured this for all of three seconds, then stood over Pearl’s shoulder, using her future vision and pointing. “Here, this controls attitude. This one to accelerate, this one to decelerate, these are lateral thrust. Navigation is this section here. I think that one’s an autopilot. That one … no, don’t mess with that one. It’s something weird, maybe for interstellar travel. Get a feel for them and get us moving. Take us in the general direction he went. Not too fast.”
She turned. “Amethyst. You take sensors. Learn to use them, see how much range they have. I’m going to look for him with future vision, but we’ll need the sensors, they can see a lot farther than I can. There are already too many places he could be, and it’s getting worse every second.”
They looked doubtful, but started playing with the controls. Looking ahead ten minutes, they seemed more comfortable with them. Good enough.
And now it was her turn, to start the hardest task of all … combing billions of cubic kilometers of space for one small boy.
She looked at the Ruby-sized seats, shook her head, sat on the floor. Closing her eyes, she opened the metaphorical one that let her see possible futures. Where to start? Assume he’s in a bubble. If he’s not … there’s no hurry at all. No point worrying about it. So, a bubble. It’ll reflect light, we’ll see him, sensors will probably pick him up too.
Maybe he came back down? Yes. Probably. The Rubies were gems, holograms with mass, and not much of it; one atmosphere of pressure would push them hard enough to escape from this moon. Steven was another matter — no pun intended — it wouldn’t have pushed him nearly as hard. He might be only a few kilometers away.
Okay, then. She imagined Pearl taking the ship out in the direction he’d gone, half a kilometer up, looking downward. Further … further … no. He wasn’t there. She tried again, two degrees to the left … two to the right … five … ten … no, dammit. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere likely on the surface.
Well, hold on now. This was no billiard ball, it wasn’t a smooth surface at all. Craters all over the place, from four billion years of impacts with no atmosphere. Jagged mountains, higher than anything on Earth, in this low gravity. She explored every likely surface feature, from every angle. In these futures, they used the ship’s lights to illuminate every sharp-edged shadow. Sensors, too.
He still wasn’t there.
Dammit. Orbit, then. Had to be. Not very damned likely he’d reached orbital velocity, but if he’s not down here, he had to be up there. She envisioned the ship following various orbits in the general direction Steven had gone, speeding ahead of orbital velocity to catch up with him at every point in every orbit … circling the moon in a low-altitude, high-velocity orbit; others at greater altitude; various eccentricities; always with periapsis here, at the base.
Nothing. He wasn’t there, either.
Dammit! Where can he be?!
She felt herself breathing hard. He wasn’t on the surface. He wasn’t in orbit. That left … no, dammit! Not possible! One atmosphere of pressure would never push him that hard!
She couldn’t find him. He wasn’t anywhere. And his air was running out …
She clutched her head. We need to unfuse!
What?!
This isn’t working! Sapphire’s future vision works better than ours does. Not a lot better, but some, and we’re not finding him. Gotta try something else.
But …
We gotta find him fast, Sapphy! He'll die if we don’t!
Sapphy? She realized with a jolt that they were already starting to separate. Maybe you’re right … no, wait. Wait, Ruby. Don’t unfuse yet. Please, Ruby, stay with me. I need to think …
She took a deep breath. We need to calm down. Panic won’t help anything. Breathe with me, Ruby. Breathe … They breathed together, deep slow breaths, one, two, three, four. Again. She felt the panic receding, felt herself coming together again, no longer two, but one.
It’s the wrong answer. I don’t need to unfuse, I don’t need Sapphire’s better future vision. That’s the easy answer, but it’s the wrong one. My future vision is up to this. It’s not about how keen the vision is. It’s about focus. Concentration. Having the patience to keep looking, the will to keep at it, the creativity to think of the possibility I haven’t thought of yet.
Breathe. Ruby’s will, Sapphire’s patience, the creativity that came from two radically different minds working in harmony, each lending Garnet the best of themselves, making her so much more than the sum of her parts. Unfusing was the last thing they should do. They needed each other more than ever for this.
Breathe. She remembered the retreat Rose had dragged them along to, forty or fifty years ago, the new age hippie meditation thing or whatever it was. Long-haired humans smoking something that wasn’t tobacco, sitting on the floor, chanting “Ommmm.” Not really her kind of thing, but Rose’s enthusiasm was infectious as always. She’d learned a little about how to meditate, anyway, even if she hadn’t done it since then. She resolved to learn more about it, if they got through this.
Breathe. And think, calmly, without panic. He wasn’t on the surface. He wasn’t in orbit. So he must have reached escape velocity … over two kps for this moon, and she had no idea how that was even possible, but he must have … unless she’d missed some other possibility?
Can’t think of any. So, go with this, until something better comes to mind.
Okay. So, what affects escape velocity? Mass. Distance from center of mass. And that’s it. And everything’s affected the same by gravity … right?
Well … no. Gems aren’t. We automatically adjust to local gravity. That’s why we could walk normally on the moon, when Steven kept bouncing around like one of those astronauts on TV. He didn’t adjust like a gem. He was just like a human, that way.
In every way? Every way having to do with gravity?
It was on the tip of her mind. Something. It wouldn’t come.
Breathe. Don’t force it. Let it come up on its own.
Breathe.
… Floating powers!
Of course! Steven has floating powers! He doesn’t have to obey gravity at all, if he doesn’t want to.
Put yourself inside his head. I’m Steven. I’ve just been thrown into space, I’m flying away from the moon base at high speed, I don’t have a bubble around me yet. I’m in big trouble. What do I do?
If he was getting dopy from lack of oxygen … which he probably was … and felt like he was falling … which he probably did … then maybe, maybe he instinctively used his floating powers, and pushed himself away from the moon. That would explain it. It didn’t matter how hard the air in the base had pushed him, if he was pushing himself!
There we go. It hangs together, it makes sense. He did escape from the moon, and he’s out there somewhere.
But … dammit! That made the search space a billion times larger! A trillion times. Worse. He could be anywhere within a few thousand kilometers of the moon, or more.
Breathe. Don’t panic. Just keep looking. You saw the direction he went in. You know the gravity of the moon. Make some reasonable assumptions, and follow him.
She cast her mind out, looking at all the myriad possible courses they could take. No, wait. “Amethyst. Have you got the range of those sensors yet? Sorry, I’m not sure how long it’s been since I sat down.”
“Um, I think? We ought to be able to see him within about 600 kilometers, in Earth units. More or less.”
“Okay, that’s very good. That will help a lot. Thanks, Amethyst. You doing okay, Pearl?”
“I’m getting the hang of it now.”
“Okay. You’re both doing great. Hang tight, I’m going to look some more.”
Amethyst hadn’t sounded too confident. In her future vision, she entered a throwaway future, explained what they needed to do. Pearl moved them far from the moon, set the autopilot, curled up into a ball. Garnet bubbled her, pushed her outside. Amethyst tracked her as the ship moved away. The sensors picked her up with no problem out to 580 kilometers. Past that, it was iffy.
Okay. Back to the search. Follow his probable course, in lines 1,100 kilometers apart. The sensors will see anything within a cylinder that wide. No. Closer than that. Triangular grid, can’t leave a gap in the middle. There, it’s closed now. Not here … not on that course … not there, either … keep looking …
Ugh. A cluster of near-Earth asteroids. A big one, thousands of kilometers across. Too much space junk there, sensors’ll never find him in all that. He’d better not be there …
Well, what if he is? He could be. And there’s plenty of space, it’s not that dense. He could get through the whole thing without popping the bubble.
Can’t spend time on it yet. Focus on the places I can cover quickly. She kept looking at the empty areas, one after another after another.
No dice. She’d covered all the likely and near-likely paths, everything except the paths that went through the cluster. And it would take forever to check that …
Breathe. Don’t panic. There’s a way to do this. Keep thinking, keep looking for the creative solution. There’s too much space junk, makes it too hard to find him. Blow it up? No, terrible idea, that would just make more space junk. Yank them out one at a time with the tractor beam? Did they even have one? … Yes. But that would take forever, too.
Assume he’s in there somewhere, mixed in with thousands of rocks. How to pick him out? How to find the needle in the haystack? What makes him different from everything else there?
Another quick peek into a throwaway future. “Amethyst, figure out if the sensors can scan for organic matter mixed in with rocks. Take as long as you need, go back to Earth if you need a sample. We’re in future vision, the clock’s not ticking.” Wait twenty minutes for the answer. No good. The sensors could tell if a given object was organic, but they couldn’t scan for it.
Fine. What else was different about him? Mass? Volume? Density? Yes! … but they couldn’t scan for that either. Shape? Motion? Velocity?
Velocity! He was moving faster than the asteroids were. Significantly so.
He’d left the moon at something like two kps, and (she assumed) he’d entered the cluster at some high relative velocity. Not very high, it was moving away from the moon too, but there’d be some difference. Great, scan for that … no. Really? The sensors can’t scan for relative velocity either? Really, Homeworld? You’re supposed to be the ones with the advanced technology, and you can’t even do that? Goddamned, gem-cracked idiots …
Enough. Rant at them later, you’re wasting time. Okay. He’s flying through the cluster. He’ll keep going. He’ll eventually leave the cluster. Unless he smashes into something first.
But it would take too long. He’d run out of air first.
Okay.
Okay. He runs out of air. He dies. And his body still leaves the cluster, barring a collision, and that’s not too likely. Without future vision, there’d be no hope. But with it …
She winced. This was going to hurt.
She threw her future vision into the worst throwaway future so far, a terrible path, one she’d never take in reality. She ordered Pearl, the future ghost of her, to wait on the far side of the cluster, moving in a search pattern, with Amethyst looking for anything leaving the cluster. However long it took.
As they started to object, she explained. “It’s not real. We’re not real. We’re still near the moon, I’m looking ahead with my future vision. It’s like cheating in a computer game, where you save the game, and explore, then you go back to your save and you know what’s coming.
“I think he went through this cluster, and we’ll never find him in there, there’s too much junk, we have to wait for him to come out. And he’ll be dead by then. But it’s not real, you understand? It’s just future vision, just looking ahead. It’s one possible future, out of all of them. It hasn’t happened yet, and it never will. I won’t let it.”
They looked doubtful, but they did as she asked, Pearl on controls, Amethyst on sensors.
Seven hours later, well past the time any plausible air supply would have run out, they picked up a small mass leaving the cluster at over 200 meters per second. An organic mass. No bubble.
“Don’t go close,” she told them, her voice unsteady. “Don’t zoom in. We don’t want to see that. We don’t need to. Just measure his trajectory, as closely as you can. Backtrack it. Figure out the path he took through the cluster.”
She stared at the small image on the screen as they worked with the nav system, the image they didn’t dare magnify. He’s not dead. Not really, not yet. Not in all futures. In the real future, the one I haven’t found yet, by this time he’ll be back on Earth, safe in his bed, asleep. I swear it.
Once she had the data, she went back half an hour at a time, checking his position. Inside the cluster now, they had to get closer, picking him out by eye. Each time, she ordered Pearl and Amethyst not to look, just keep their eyes on their instruments. They wouldn’t remember anyway, this was all happening inside her head, but she couldn’t bear to have them see what she was seeing. She’d seen Steven dead before in future vision, any number of times, but this was one of the worst, and the images would haunt her forever. She gritted her teeth, ignored the sick feeling in her belly, kept at it. It was the only way to save him.
Three hours back, she lost him. She’d expected that, after seeing his body. She jumped forward at five-minute intervals until she found him again. Backtracked more slowly, lost him again. Followed the projected trajectory forward in “real” time, watching the screen.
There he was. She watched the desiccated body float in from the left, watched it carom off an asteroid, changing his course. She resolutely ignored the other things the collision did to his body. She’d already seen their effects. Backed up slowly, watching his less-damaged body move away from the projected course, until the details were too small to see. “Amethyst. Look at the screen. This dot here. Pick him up on sensors, compute his trajectory. Track it backwards.”
Data in hand, she continued jumping back a half hour at a time. Back. Back. Back …
Five hours back, two hours after the real present, he was in a bubble. Curled up, unmoving, looking very cold and gray … alive. She smiled at the image, kept going. Further back, further, until she reached the earliest instant they could catch up with him.
She returned to the present moment, opened her eyes. “I’ve got him! Pearl, lay in this course …” She read off the numbers Pearl had used in that future, waited until the course was engaged, followed it forward to check. Right, that was it. We find him. He lives.
She sagged back, exhausted. She hadn’t done a future search that hard since the Gem War. She’d be weeping tonight, in the privacy of her room. “How long was I at it?”
“Over ten minutes,” Pearl replied, her voice shaking a little. “I’ve never seen you take that long. Not even close. I was starting to get scared.”
“You and me both, Pearl. You and me both. I don’t ever want to do a search like that again. So much empty space … you think it was a long time, you should have seen what it was like for me. It felt like a couple of months.” And the last part was pure hell.
She sighed. “And when we get him back … I’ll have to do something even harder.”