Marrow

Each of my engines screams and spits fire, and those titanic, withering energies translate into the gentlest of nudges. I hear nothing but a quiet coaxing voice trying to whisper me nearer to that swollen, dying sun. And I obey the voice. I obey even when I foresee a collision with its tenuous atmosphere. Even as I feel pricks and little deaths within my body, I obey the simple laws of motion and force and inertia, dipping nearer to the sun, and nearer… a bracing, wondrous fear taking hold of me…

An engine dies.

Then, two others.

Deep inside me, a series of hard bright explosions collapse fuel lines and fuse screaming pumps. The surviving engines continue to burn, but softer now. The gentle nudge has diminished to a gentle breath from behind and beside me.

But still, I fall toward the sun.

My fear loses its wonder.

Gradually and thoroughly, a wild panic seizes me.

With a sudden clarity, I watch the great war against my engines. Every act of violence is too small to matter, or slightly misplaced, or simply ill-timed. The cumulative effects are slow to gather, hard to perceive. Finally, in agony, I rally myself trying to come to the aid of my companions.

Perhaps in tiny ways, I am felt. Heard. Believed.

A Remora considers a thousand valves, and as I whisper my advice, she closes the only valve that does lasting good.

A magnetic bottle, billions of years old and never ill, fails abruptly, at the best possible moment, spewing shards of anti-iron into a spiking facility working at full throttle.

Human engineers assassinate AIs who won’t listen to reason, then replace the machines at their posts.

Debris clogs a minor fuel line.

Harum-scarums attack my engines as if their brilliant fire and light are personal affronts to them.

One stubborn engine is tilted in the opposite direction, then fed all of the fuel that it can possibly consume.

And finally, the leech habitat is torn from the fuel tank’s ceiling, then shoved crosswise into the gaping throat of an enormous fuel line…

Two more engines sputter, good as dead.

But still I can nearly taste the sun, feeling its heat and breath against my great skin… and a moon-sized lump of iron and nickel plunges into my side, cutting deep but leaving me intact… lending just enough momentum to keep me out here… to make me miss the sun by what, when I consider the vast distances that I have covered, is nothing…

I miss by nothing.

And a little later, still celebrating my very good fortune, I pass near a tiny and black and enormously massive something… and again, my trajectory changes… and peering past the curtain of stars and whirling planets. I can see where I will be going next…

Blackness, again.

The sunless nothing, again.

And in a strange, almost unexpected fashion, I realize this is where I want to be…feeling as though I am happily falling toward home again…