I had never considered myself claustrophobic, but being trapped inside a roughly sarcophagus-sized space-kayak was enough to bring the phobia forward. Did this thing even have an air supply or were we stuck with whatever was in here when we departed? My mind jumped to Loricifera, a phylum of sediment – dwelling microorganisms that can live in anoxic environments. How fitting to daydream on such a thing as we suffocated.

“I’m glad you got the pickles,” said Patton from beside me in the dark. He reached over and caressed the lid. “I liked the protein bars fine, but they made me gassy. I’m glad to be out of that fart jar.”

“Give it time,” I said. “This thing is smaller and there are two of us.”

Distracting myself from the disorienting dark and strange alterations in momentum, I explained to Patton everything I’d learned from Aptat. He took it all in relative stride, including that no one believed that he was me and that he’d likely end up getting tortured if I didn’t give freely of whatever treasures my mind possessed.

The interior became lambent, exposing black spans of something stretching from wall to wall, weblike. I reached out and touched one, expecting it to give, but found it inflexible. There had been nothing like this on Silent Child. That ship was – and I feel the use of this word odd under the circumstances – conventional. Expected. Regular old spaceship stuff. This though... different.

The lights dimmed and rose as before, with the black material shifting along the walls. It must have been softening or liquifying and then resolidifying. The strands processed toward us, changing orientation each time the lights strobed. One strand pulled down across our shins, another across our laps. A biomechanical seatbelt?

“Just like a rollercoaster! Wee!” Patton crowed, shooting his arms up in amusement park form, only to have one of the strands force them back down against his sides. “Ow.”

Several others swayed into position at about chest height, then pulled across our chests and foreheads, effectively sealing us to the structure of the voidscull. I couldn’t turn my neck. “Rollercoaster, huh?”

I held Pickles with my thighs. Inhaled, exhaled. “Breathe. I think we’re supposed to–”

And then it was like we were catapulted, launched. Shot from a gun. Fast. Like skin-of-face-stretching-backward kind of fast.

Acceleration can kill, you know. The human body can only handle about nine longitudinal g’s – nine times Earth’s gravity – before the heart can’t pump blood to your brain. Fourteen lateral g’s will tear your organs loose. Naturally, this is the type of information I am privy to as an expert in the watches worn by pilots experiencing heavy forces during maneuvers. Swiss watchmaker IWC,65 for instance, builds its best timepieces to withstand around seven sustained g’s.