I had brought the corpse of my soldier-sister Rhiis-2 a long way, suspended in a fluid of suppositions:If she examined the navigational display, she would advise that we route around this dwarf star in realspace, that strand of charged matter in shadowspace.
If I neglected to clean out the ship’s torchgun regularly, she would gum up the apertures with that horrifying squishy self-heal gel that we were supposed to use on the ship’s lenses so I really had to work to clean it out.
If the skimship’s power systems flashed that particular stress-alert, check the physical gauges before doing anything drastic, because the hookups sometimes lied to us.
A science-fictional retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, involving two female soldiers, decision trees, and black hole physics. Forthcoming from Clarkesworld.
Thanks to Joseph Betzwieser and Yune Kyung Lee for the beta. In particular, I will never forget that Joe and I both managed to forget about Hawking radiation when we were working out the relevant astrophysics! Whoops.
