The Farthest Tutorial: Hell Mode

Captain Jonah Park had flown the burn in the simulator until the simulator bored him, and it had never tried to kill him.

“Burn on your mark, Captain,” Dana Whitaker said at his side. “Drive board nominal. Guns secured, drill board clear. Everything’s nominal. Aggressively nominal.”

“That’s the idea,” Jonah said.

On the main display, the Moon fell away behind them — shrinking, grey, and done with them. They had looped it in lunar orbit until the ship knew its face better than the streets she had come from, and still the observation blister stayed crowded, watch after watch, bodies pressed to the glass with the lights down. The cadet division had sung the Moon up from the blister like a hymn. The newlywed junior officers by the glass had cried. A cadet had stopped Jonah in a passageway, hand hovering near his sleeve, and asked if the stars always looked like that, and he had told her only from out here.

Out of habit, Jonah checked the wing channel — a frequency from a younger uniform, empty for years now, no wing out here to answer it. He had never skipped it. Some things you kept doing because stopping felt like a confession.

Below the bridge the warship was full in a way no board could say. The embarked battalion filled its bays and berthing decks. The mess lines wound through passageways at every meal. Boots sounded on ladders and deck plates from bow to stern, and the muster Lena Okafor kept below took all morning to call. Decks full. Rails full. A whole company of souls living and drilling and sleeping inside a hull built for war, out here to learn how to do it together.

Now the loop was behind them and the exercise lay ahead: the rendezvous with the tender Charon. Routine. Unremarkable. The way the drill was written.

Jonah did what he always did before a burn. He didn’t count. He named.

The ship. The crew. The souls behind the wall.

“Mark,” he said.

The main drive lit, and the Meridian Skylark — every soul she carried, a warship with no landing gear and no earthly business touching atmosphere — pressed gently forward, riding her own fire.

It lasted long enough for Dana to start smiling.

The tremor came up through the deck plates before any light did. Then the master caution, then more behind it, and Dana’s voice went up — reciting, not understanding. “Chamber pressure spiking — Captain, the preburner—”

“Shutdown,” Jonah said. “Full shutdown, now.”

Her hands flew. “Feed isolated—” She stopped. Her head came up, tilted, listening to something that wasn’t on the board. “No. It’s still drinking. The board says shut and it’s still drinking — hear it? The deck hasn’t changed key.”

Jonah listened — the thrumming under his boots ran on, unbroken and hungry. The board was lying to them with a straight face.

“Engine room,” he said. “Kill it by hand. Now.”

She was already on the loop. “Engineering, bridge — manual scram, the board is lying to us, go, go—”

Aft, the turbopump burst. The ship yawed hard to port, and the shudder died as the turbomachinery tore itself apart and starved.

“Damage report,” Jonah said. “Slow.”

Dana did it properly, a hand flat on the console, feeling for the deck to agree. “Fire’s venting out the breach, temps falling. Life support green, power green, hull sound. RCS is holding attitude, but it’s drinking to hold it — when that feed runs dry, we tumble. Main engine is gone, Captain. Everything else is ours — and we miss the rendezvous by more than the Charon can chase. She doesn’t have the reach to come get us.”

“Options,” Jonah said.

“We coast. Air’s good, power’s good. We call it in and wait for a rescue burn from Earth — it just has to beat the tumble.” A pause, and this part wasn’t the board talking. “The Charon will wait the whole of her window anyway. Before she goes home light.”

“That’s the list?”

“There isn’t more.”

Jonah almost smiled. Almost.

He keyed the ship-wide loop. “Lena.”

“Here, Captain.” Lena Okafor’s voice came back steady — the chief of the boat, somewhere below with the muster in her keeping, and not a tremor in it. “We felt that. Talk to me.”

“Main engine’s gone. We’re stable, we’re safe, we’re going to miss our ride.” He kept it short. The company didn’t need orbital mechanics. “I need everyone settled and calm. Tell them the truth with the edges filed.”

“The truth with the edges filed,” Lena repeated. “My specialty. Anything else?”

“Tell me who we’ve got, when you can. Names. Everyone. I want names, not a tally.”

“Names,” Lena said. “Always do.”

He closed the loop. The Charon would arrive on schedule, match drift with an empty patch of vacuum, and wait.

They’ll wait, he thought. And then they’ll go home, and tell everyone the Skylark never came.

“Captain.” Dana’s voice had changed.

She wasn’t looking at the plot anymore. She was looking out the forward glass, past the nose, at the stars ahead — and the stars ahead were wrong.

Not gone. Wrong. The forward scope showed clean sky and said so in green. The lidar reached out and came back with nothing at all, not even the courtesy of an error. But with his own eyes Jonah could see it: a seam across the black, horizon to horizon, and widening. The stars along it hadn’t been pulled apart. They had stopped — fixed where they hung, while every star astern still slid past with the ship’s drift, as if the sky ahead were a held breath and the sky behind still breathing.

On the nav board, the attitude ball was leaning. Slow, steady, rolling toward the seam — though the RCS held them true and nothing in creation was pulling. The hull’s note, the low song every ship sings through her bones that you only ever hear when it stops, bent downward like a slackening string and did not come back.

Something small ticked against the forward glass.

Jonah looked down. His stylus had slid the length of the console — uphill, by every right the deck possessed — and fetched up against the glass, pointing ahead like a needle that had found a new north.

“Captain,” Dana said quietly, “your stylus just fell up.”

Jonah read it the way he’d read weather in his flying years. No engine. No thrust. Whatever that was, they were falling toward it on rails.

He had made a vow, years ago, in a younger uniform, on the channel he still checked before every burn — and kept it across a whole life in uniform by being the most prepared man in any room he stood in. Nobody dies on my watch.

There was no litany for this.

“All hands — brace,” he said, and his voice was the calm voice, the naming voice, the voice that held.

And the Meridian Skylark — every soul she carried, no engine, nowhere else to go — fell forward into the rip in the sky, falling out of lunar orbit toward a planet, carrying a war.