The Return of Tomorrow

 

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson “Ulysses”

 

Chapter 1: Flight Prep

 

The day the Tomorrow exploded in the sky like a meteor incinerating in the atmosphere, I was both horrified and relieved. Horrified, because I lost my best friend and my father in the rocketship’s fire. Relieved, because my ship would be the first to leave the solar system. And maybe that’s all you need to know about me.

 

It had started as a day not dissimilar to any other. Newspapers all over the country published letters threatening terrorist activity, but the board of directors of the Tomorrow projects had decided to go through with the launch as planned. My father, Daguerre Edison, and my only friend, Jin Tesla, boarded the bus that would take them to the launch facility at 0400 hours. I could not go with them, and I could not see them off, but I awoke early. I would have preferred to have gone with them, but I was training to be part of the crew of Tomorrow II, the sister ship setting off eight months later.

I watched the Tomorrow lift off from the courtyard of our training facilities. It was a rectangular space in the middle of the project’s headquarter building, decorated with trees cast out of copper and bronze and white stone benches of poured concrete. Many of us gathered there. Half a mile away, the great ship lifted itself into the sky as easily as a duck diving beneath the surface of the water, and I made notes to myself on how to keep the ship more level and more fuel efficient, and suspected that the captain of our ship was, too.

The ship breached the mesosphere, and a rocket came screaming up from one of the innumerable gray condemned buildings in the city ten miles away from the launch site. The rocket struck the hull of the Tomorrow and I found that I had stopped breathing, although I did not know what benefit my passing out could possibly serve.

Perhaps the fire would not spread, I thought; the Tomorrow’s surface was designed to endure temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. But this rocket’s fire was no ordinary fire: it was Greek fire, rediscovered and rebuilt from ancient times.

Still an effective weapon.

Sheets of intense flames spread across the hull and brought the ship crashing back down to the surface of the Earth with the screeching, tinkling sound of shattering glass, and the collision of ship on earth sent out a concussion wave just like an earthquake. Seismologists picked up the shockwaves all the way across the country, on the western seaboard.

There had been nothing of either Daguerre or Tesla to bury, which was fine; I saw no point in visiting a graveyard anyway.

And, as we found out, their lack of gravestones was on par with the lack of effect their deaths had on the project. The Tomorrow II, the Tomorrow’s sister ship, was still slated to launch eight months later, with me on the crew.

The Hercules Project – consisting of the two spaceships, their cargo, and their crews – first came into being twenty years ago. Unmanned exploratory droids sent back information from our solar system and beyond, and had been doing so for centuries. With Earth’s resources expended and spread too thin across a globe that was smaller and smaller, not to mention the needs of the colonies on the moon, the need for the expansion of Earth’s dominion and manned exploratory and colonizing missions became incontrovertible. The missions would begin with the TI and TII.

We couldn’t have known that the missions ended with us, as well.

 

Three Years Ago

 

Tesla’s fist slammed onto the desktop and sent a pen skittering for cover beneath his chair. “Dammit, Isley! Get those shields turned around now or the whole ship will burn up!”

I kept pounding on my keyboard. The commands showed up in my sequence on screen for a split second before I sent them jetting off to the second lieutenants I commanded. “The shields cannot withstand a full-on, Captain.” They protected the ship from starlight alone.

“I’m well aware of this,” he informed me, his voice taut.

“If an asteroid punctures the shield and reaches the ship, the ship could be destroyed,” I said. I ignored his impatience. At thirteen, I was one of the youngest cadets on the bridge participating in this simulation. Fifteen year-old Jin Tesla took his first turn as simulated captain.

The simulation could have been going better, I admit.

The problems started when our astronomer-navigators got lost. One of the complications of traveling six hundred light years across space were extinguished stars. Maps reflected the constellations that existed when we set out, but not even the best of us could discern with any real authority which stars were still burning and which had already burnt out until we got to where they were meant to be. Navigating was difficult when the signposts kept disappearing.

“I know,” said Tesla. I heard his fingers drumming on his heavy plastic belt, as usual. Our ship had wandered into an asteroid field. If we failed to protect the ship, the ship would be destroyed, and we would fail the simulation. As captain, Tesla and everybody else knew that the bulk of the blame rested on him.

I ignored the other first lieutenants’ tittering over the comm and told Tesla, “We could repel these asteroids, Captain. The computer’s analyses show them to be mostly iron.”

Impatience throttled Tesla’s words like creeping ivy. “Magnetizing the shields is a huge expense of power. One that we can’t afford.”

I took my hands off my keyboard. “With all due respect, Captain, we can’t afford the ship to be destroyed, either.”

Tesla must have sighed, because a wave of static passed through the ear piece I wore. The five of us engaging in the simulation worked in separate rooms. Onboard the ship, four first lieutenants and one captain would spread out among thirty floors of spaceship. On earth, however, we took part in the simulation from five different labs, each a short walk from the other. The holograph signal beaming in the others’ appearances, hunched over their desks in desperation, would shine bright and clear for Tesla. I could almost feel his eyes burning holes into my holograph’s back. As captain, only Tesla saw all of us; we first lieutenants merely had audio.

“I have given you an order, First Lieutenant Edison,” Tesla said.

My fingers hung over my keyboard. The plan of action stood out in my mind with all the clarity of the screen in front of me. “I know,” I said, and entered my command.

The shields protecting the ship from starlight began to hum, charging up with electrical energy.

Tesla roared in my ear. His own fingers hammered at his keyboard, but I had prepared for that, and the firewalls I designed and installed stood up to his assault. “This is mutiny! A first lieutenant cannot steal control of the ship from the captain. Step back from your console, First Lieutenant!” I heard a clatter, and I could almost picture Tesla tearing his comm out of his ear and throwing it on the ground.

I pushed myself away from my desk, took out my comm, and stood up, clasping my hands behind my back.

The scientists and teachers sitting in on my simulation exchanged glances with each other. They did not engage in the test; they sat in to observe. After years of dealing with them, I had stopped paying them any attention at all.

Tesla burst through the doors into the lab in a towering temper. A flood of onlookers from his room followed, each taking furious notes. Assessing us. Grading us. Deciding who best fit the roles of captain, first lieutenant, second lieutenant, and midshipman.

My father drilled into me again and again that these assessors knew nothing about space travel, that the board of directors only allowed them to hang about so that research institutes would fund the project, that, if I proved myself invaluable, I could choose the captaincy for myself.

Be valuable, Isley, he urged me. Only be valuable. My father had been one of the first stellaucts. He was there the day construction on the biodome on Luna, our moon, was completed. Now 500,000 Lunars lived on the satellite roving around Earth like a dog chasing its tail. Like Sally Ride or Neil Armstrong, the Confederate people saw my father as a national hero.

You could say I had a lot to live up to. As far as I was concerned, I had a lot to surpass.

I drew myself upright, spread my feet, and tilted my chin up.

“You directly disobeyed orders, Edison! In the field, your actions constitute mutiny. I could have you sent to the brig.” Tesla’s dark skin hid the flush creeping up his neck and suffusing his cheeks. But I knew, if I pressed my hand to his face, I would feel it.

My chin jutted out another inch. “I saved this ship, Tesla. Captain. That’s all I care about.” I could see the projection of our ship on my monitor, cruising past the asteroids repelled by the magnetic charge with ease. Well worth the cost, I thought.

Tesla opened his mouth to ream me out, and one of the assessors spoke up. No, not one of the assessors. He had hid himself in the back, but now I recognized his deep, rumbling voice, and the salt-and-pepper he kept cropped. My father. Daguerre took his glasses off. They dangled from a little metal chain around his neck. “That’s enough,” Daguerre said. “The simulation is over.”

I searched his face for any hint of approval. Maybe I had even impressed him. Tesla snapped a salute, cast me one last rueful look, and left. The room cleared. Daguerre looked down at me, his face set in harsh lines.

“I saved the ship!” I finally said. I hated the way he looked at me.

“You were disobedient. You cannot usurp the chain of command.”

“If I were captain,” I began, my voice losing some of the polish that buffed away the highness and a faint accent.

Daguerre held up his hand. “If you were captain,” he said. “Exactly.”

My shoulder slumped, but my hands balled into fists.

My father kept watching me. “You did well,” he said. He touched my chin with one finger and tilted my face up to him. I smelled the familiar scent of his aftershave, and the cryogenic serums he worked with; they smelled like rubbing alcohol and acidic berries. “If you had been captain, you would have made me proud.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

He put his hands in his white lab coat’s pockets, and patted me on the shoulder once.

Lunch time for the little girl, then. Impotence turned my blood to fire. But I turned on my heel and set off for the cafeteria.

Tesla set his lunch tray down next to me at our usual table. The rectangular tables lined the room in two long rows, providing enough seats for almost two hundred people.

In the beginning, four thousand project hopefuls cycled through these tables every day. Now, more than ten years later, the one hundred of us remaining didn’t even fill the room.

In the far left corner the engineers clunked to their seats in ten-pound iron boots that clamped them to the surface of their rigs. Oil smeared their skin and leaked into their specialty jumpsuits. Tesla told me their black jumpsuits could withstand the bitter cold of a sunless galaxy and the scorching heat of direct sunlight so that they might maintain the integrity of the Tomorrow I and II. Next to them, nuclear engineers who maintained the nuclear core of the ship sat, shuffling papers scrawled with equations back and forth. They reeked of anti-radiation cream.

Closer to the kitchens, agriculturalists, metalsmiths, aerospace engineers, zoologists, biologists, mechanics, electricians, and astronomical navigators spread across several tables. A small group of artisans made up the last of our denomination, photographers, writers, and cinematographers, meant to document the history-making venture of the two ships making the pilgrimage. Untrained and unprofessional, Tesla and I agreed that in the event of catastrophe, our resulting cannibalism would begin with them.

As for Tesla and I, we trained to become starship captains, lieutenants, ensigns, and midshipmen, and we were called stellaucts. Of the four command bridges and one supreme bridge, each of us vied for the highest post on the main bridge: captain. Since Tesla staffed the Tomorrow I and I the II, we both had a shot at captaincy.

First, we had to meet the assessors’ requirements. The way my father put it, intelligence was only one factor in a child’s suitability for the project. Physical fitness, endurance to both physiological and psychological stress, and the capacity to give and to take commands weighed in, too. So, too, did other things. One’s pain threshold. How many days one could go without sleeping.

I asked Tesla, “Do you think we’ll be awake in there the whole time?”

He cut me a sideways look, speared a carrot from his salad. “You mean, in cryostasis? Of course not, Edison. Why? Did your father say something?”

I shook my head. “Of course not.” We had some iteration of this conversation at least once a week. Tesla might still be mad at me. Best to distract him with something that terrified him.

“Thirty years will pass in an instant for us,” he said. “A third of a century gone like a dream. It’s a shame…It’s a shame we can’t live it all, though. I should quite like to live longer.”

What an understatement, I thought. Tesla would prefer to live forever. “You’d get bored.”

“Not with you around,” he said, and gave me another sideways glance.

I suspected he was referring to the simulation. “You should have listened to me.”

“I was in charge. You should have taken my order.”

“We would’ve died.”

“Even then,” Tesla shrugged.

Tesla never backed down from a decision. I didn’t think he ever doubted himself. Project Hercules probably loved that about him. Project Hercules didn’t easily give its love away, either.

From the moment Project Hercules had been dreamt up, the project board deemed a collaboration by Earth’s two governments, the Confederation and the Archontite necessary. Neither country alone had the resources or the necessary laborers to construct the project alone. The Archontite crews trained in Russia, and our crews would unite for takeoff when construction and our training finished.

Sometimes I overheard other stellaucts talking about Archontite, whose vast standing armies often deployed to quash rebellions on the extreme edges of their empire. Some stellaucts were convinced that Archontite would deploy those troops to quash the Confederacy, as well.

My father told me not to pay any attention to that philosophical nonsense and to focus on my studies.

Tesla was less dismissive, though. He said Archontite stellaucts had a better, more rigid training program. He said Archontite’s emphasis on socialism and cohesion made them closed ranks, and he doubted we would mesh well. He said he hoped his crew would be mostly Confederacy, since most of them already knew him. Tesla knew lots of people.

Both Daguerre and Tesla noted that the Archontite crew members were our competition for upper-level positions.

Scheming and jockeying for power ran rampant through the base. Those who ran the program encouraged it, since competition pushed us to work harder, faster, cleverer.

I didn’t give these tensions much thought. I just wanted to go to space. I didn’t think I needed much help, either.

“Hey,” Tesla said, and reached over to clasp my hand with his empty one, his right hand still holding his fork. “If I were in charge, we’d both be going on the Tomorrow I. I’d want you on my crew, Isley. When you weren’t mutinying. I know your dad does, too.”

I felt myself defrosting a couple of degrees. “Really?”

“Absolutely.” He held my gaze, and I had to look away. He saw right through me. My face warmed. The happiest times in my life, Daguerre and Tesla and I ran drills in perfect synchronization. I felt myself submerged in a world bigger than me, like my brain now took charge of a much larger organism than my skinny, coltish body, and I could affect the enormity of what we could accomplish could just by flexing.

Tesla wove his fingers through mine. “Absolutely,” Tesla repeated, and leaned in to kiss me.

I kissed him back, and wondered how much longer it would be that we were stuck on this planet.

 

Present Day

 

Three years later, I watched the Tomorrow I crash back to Earth in a fireball.

Until the stellauct program accepted me, Daguerre had been my constant companion and teacher. Even after I began my formal space training, he made additions to my curriculum, like teaching me the basics of electrical engineering and the thermodynamics that regulated the temperature of the ship.

Strange, that he was gone. To say the least. I missed his constant guidance, his vaguely disapproving eyebrows, the way his lips pursed beneath his bristling mustache when he was amused, with a ferocious intensity.

I noticed Tesla’s absence less, or more, depending on how one looked at it. He worked elbow to elbow with me among the rest of the crew, I thought. Or I pretended he did, as training came an end.

I found no other way to survive it. To survive them. So I locked them in a little box in the back of my mind, and decided I could go on.

With no distractions, I found that I could function even more efficiently. I gave myself over to my studies because they were all I had left, and physics and astronomy and electricity welcomed me with open arms. I felt my skin dry into paper, my eyes into sparks from a transistor. I became what I gave my life to. A part of the ship. A few things I had to do just to keep up appearances. I might well be a captain on the return voyage of the Tomorrow II, set to occur twenty years after the new human colony had been established, and it wouldn’t serve for me to be absent from my officers. So I showed up to intramural scrimmages and social gatherings and even mealtimes.

The one thing I now refused to do was stray from base when on leave Sunday afternoons. There was nothing I wanted to see, and no one I wanted to be near.

I sat with my class in the cafeteria at lunch. Ten boys and ten girls made up the final cut. I suppose you could call us friends, although only in that we knew each other and got along so that our crew would function productively and efficiently in space. Some of us had dated others, but deep attachments and relationships took up significant amounts of time otherwise used for our studies.

And, after a lifetime of conditioning, our studies bore more importance.

In the months since the Tomorrow lit up the blue sky in red and yellow, the crew of the Tomorrow II had been quickly coming to the end of space flight preparation. There was only a week until the sequel to the burned airship took its place in the sky.

Some concern propagated that this ship might be targeted by terrorists as the last had been, but we were told that new security measures and less publicity would render us safe. It would certainly not have been wise to be overly concerned, because our final exam scores would determine our placement aboard the ship. Those scores took precedence over everything else in our lives.

The testing consisted of several different sections. Some were as simple as mathematical equations and practical chemistry assessments; others were more interesting. To demonstrate our proficiency at actual stellauct duties, we took to the zero-gravity room one last time and performed a series of tasks, like repairing leaking pipes and resetting broken life support systems.

Strange, I thought, to know that I would never be in this zero-gravity room again. The perfect cube mimicked the contours of a room on the actual ship, lined with shelves and sinks and computers and instrument panels. Rods were drilled into each of the six sides of the cube that we could attach our ratlines to so that we might move faster around the ship.

I had grown up in this little space module; in this place, I’d knocked out my last baby tooth by kicking off from a wall too hard and smashing my face into the edge of the counter. I still had the scar on my lip. We had each had our turn in the local command chair in the middle of the room, practicing leadership skills.

In the very early days of our training, it had been a great comfort to have someone with greater seniority in that seat, giving us orders. Usually, the commanding officer had only a couple of years of seniority on us: Tomorrow I stellaucts in training. Once, it had been my father. Besides his cryogenics research, he had been responsible for training us as one of the main caretakers of children like myself and Tesla, the first generation of space explorers.

My father had been famous among the small circle of our trade for his groundbreaking contributions to theories of cryogenics that solved problems of overpopulation and population instability aboard the then-hypothetical spacecraft on their thirty-year sojourn across the stars. If Daguerre Edison had an impressive career, I wanted a jaw-dropping one. He encouraged me, teaching me aerospace and nuclear engineering and Morse code, and I never once felt like an ordinary child.

Then Daguerre died, and I became an orphan. And let me tell you, there is nothing ordinary about being an orphan.

I could have been on board the Tomorrow I. I was only a year and a half younger than Tesla. But my father kept me back so that my chances at command on the Tomorrow II would be maximized. I could have been on board the Tomorrow I, and like them, I would have been suffocated by great whirls of black smoke and crushed into oblivion by two hundred thousand tons of collapsing spaceship.

Snapping back to the present, I saw again, as if for the first time, the soup on my tray at lunch. Thick and white and oily, I didn’t eat much.

Halfway around the world, I wondered, did an Archontite stellauct look at her soup and feel just as disgusted? Did she worry about her exams, or did she have Tesla’s confidence?

While the official report on the attack on the Tomorrow I placed blame on the occupants of the government-less residents of the badlands located in Western Europe, some among us still suspected that the Archontite may have had something to do with it.

When I was a child, I would not have known better than to point out that the disaster had occurred on our own soil. There was a far greater chance that a Confederate had been involved in the terrorist act than that an Archontite had.

Statements such as those were unpopular, and unpopularity invites officers to disobey a leader for purely personal reasons. I was not to be unpopular.

Someone called my name, and I looked up from my foul-looking chowder. “Isley Edison.” A professional-looking project staffer wearing their traditional black, long-sleeve jumpsuit uniform repeated my name. Crew members wore orange, and only insignia and badges differentiated one rank from another.

I stood up and saluted by touching two fingers to my chin and bringing my arm down forty-five degrees away from my chin. In the old American Sign Language, it had meant thank you. Since Archontite’s official language was Russian, both crews were trained in ASL and Latin, the two shared languages.

My father told me that we were not trained to speak their language, and they not ours, for fear of coidentification. It was necessary for stability among the crew that loyalties be set early. Although it did not entirely make sense to me, I followed the rules and kept from studying Russian.

My class looked at me with interest. Surely they suspected, as I did, that I was being called out to partake in the special officers exam qualifying me for captain eligibility. Did they begrudge me it? I did not think so, but then, all I saw when I looked at them was nineteen faces: eyes, lips, noses, and mouths. Someone would have to shout at me before I was certain. But no one did, so I shook off the question.

“Yes, sir?”

The staffer handed me a slip of paper. He had begun to walk away when I called, “Wait!” The form did indeed request my presence at the captaincy eligibility exam at 1700 hours two days later. But the form did not specify where. I hated to ask questions since most answers could be deduced from given information, but given my deduction, I had to be sure. “Where?” I asked.

The staffer allowed himself a smile. “The bridge of the Tomorrow II, cadet.”

Two days later, I was ready for my first look at the ship that would be my home for the next five to six decades. Neither I nor my classmates had ever been allowed the privilege of seeing it before, so they gave me looks that I guessed were envious. A security risk of blueprints getting out and falling into the hands of Waywards, those occupants of the no-man’s-land that was ungoverned in Western Europe, kept the ship under strictest protection.

The program arranged transport to pick me up and convey me to the hangar half a mile away. The drive ran through security protocol with me before we arrived. I did not mind the tedious procedure; redundancy was part of safety.

As we approached the hangar, I found it harder and harder to keep myself from asking questions. The building was a half-circle, about a hundred yards long, twenty yards wide, and…that was all. Where was the rest of it? Where was the rest of the ship? Perhaps the command center had not yet been installed, I thought. There were three layers of fences surrounding the hangar, each requiring us to hand over our identifications for validation and one voice recognition test. Finally, we entered the compound itself. My driver pulled the cart up short just a few yards from a regular-sized door on the hangar wall, though it looked very small in comparison. I stepped off the cart and walked to the door, not hesitating as I pushed it open. My driver tagged along behind me.

I expected to see wires, ropes, and chains running to and from the command center, holding it stable in the air before mechanists soldered it to the Tomorrow II. I knew that the outermost plates of the ship were tungsten, so I expected to see the dully lustrous silver of tungsten. I had expected, perhaps, a dozen or so construction workers putting the finishing touches on this part of the ship.

Instead, the floor fell away thirty floors down. The whole ship sat in front of me. I couldn’t help it; my jaw dropped. I hurried to the edge of the precipice to see the ship in its entirety. The door at ground level leading outside opened immediately onto a winding set of stairs that led, by catwalks, off to scaffolding speckled with hundreds if not thousands of construction workers. They all wore the green jumpsuits of construction teams. The vast hangar smelled of sweat, oil, the peculiar fire smell of welding, and filtered oxygen.

But the ship itself – oh, it was impossible to look away from. Huge steel girders kept it off the ground in the hangar. The ship resembled a bowl with a three-tier cake-stand standing the middle. In dock, it was parked with the pointed side up, but in space, it would fly bowl-side up. The bowl would act like an umbrella, protecting the main body of the ship from full starlight. The edges of the bowl that curled around the internal structure radiated heat into the intermediary space like a black umbrella, minimizing the energy used to heat us in the icy frontier of space.

More importantly, the bowl or umbrella shielded the nuclear core occupying part of the column. Tiers encircled the central column, which held our living quarters, our greenhouses, our market, our entertainment venues – everything, in short, a growing society needs. But, of course, the Confederacy wouldn’t have wasted millions of dollars training us stellaucts only to become child-producing factories. That job belonged to our cargo of colonial citizens. We had to take the ship to space, find a hospitable planet, and plant the center of the Tomorrow II in the ground like a combination flag and seed.

Seeing the ship made the mission seem very real. The lot of us will leave Earth behind for another planet in another solar system.

I was ready to go. The weightless zero-gravity chambers in our training facilities felt more familiar than anywhere on Earth, anyway.

Some of the other stellaucts, I knew, felt more trepidation at this prospect than me. They seemed to want to colonize another planet for the sake of Earth, because they loved Earth.

The only memories I had of this place consisted of a spaceship blowing up, and I couldn’t wait to get away from that.

Older memories, too. Other memories.

Once we arrived on the destination planet, the ship would begin terraforming, and we would establish a colony. Then, twenty years later, the crew of the Tomorrow II would break the return vessel off of the TII and return to Earth with our findings.

Had the Tomorrow I not been blown up, the process would have taken half as long, and there would have been twice as many people.

My driver led me down the snaking staircases clinging to the edge of the giant pit dug for the Tomorrow II, and I craned my head to search every facet of the TII’s surface. An antenna array was missing, I noted, and suspected that it had been moved from our initial schematics to the bottom of the machine where excessive temperatures could not most easily reach it.

The umbrella portion of the ship reminded me of the simulation Tesla and I had done together, wherein I thwarted his commands polarized the shields. We called them shields, but in reality, they were sunscreens. They moved, too, to protect the portion of the ship in most direct starlight. Our path to the new planet, named Vesta, had no need for full shielding at any time.

We entered the TII by means of a door in the tungsten panels halfway down the ship. The heavy door had a wheel in the middle of it, like an old airplane door. My driver stepped aside to let me do it, and I gladly opened the door myself. I wanted to feel the weight of it, how difficult it would be to get open, and whether or not I could get it closed again on my own. Many things onboard the ship were meant to be operated by at least two people simultaneously. This door, I noted, I could manage alone.

Once inside the ship, similarities to our training facilities made themselves immediately apparent to me. There were the rods attached to the walls and floor for our harness clips. We all had boots that kept us attached to the walls, floor, and ceiling, but without them, we would be untethered. The rods were in place in case we needed to hurry. Lots of my classmates preferred the boots to zero-g, but I didn’t. With boots on, it was much easier to fall into the trap of conceiving of space as up and down.

I had grown up with the fabrication of the walls and floor of plastic, slightly spongy tiles. Their color depended on the sector of the ship, and my driver and I entered through the yellow command sector. Glowing phosphorescent fungi called foxfire that lived within tubes running all over the ship backed up soft electrical lights. Save for their sector coloring and the signs attached to the walls halfway down each that gave directions to whomever might become lost, the sectors were indistinguishable.

I’d dreamt of this ship. I had one last test, one last challenge. I squared my shoulders.

My escort followed me down the hall. I made a right turn, then a left. We climbed two flights of stairs – stairs that operated, as did the doors, no matter which direction the ship turned. The doors were rounded circles, and the stairs were zigzags drilled into the walls. Decks were assigned numbers for organization only. Deck 30 could be the bottommost deck of the ship, or the topmost. The only thing that mattered was knowing that Deck 30 was 28 floors from the command deck.

Two floors from where my driver and I began, we left the stairwell and came to the end of a long hallway. I wondered if my driver had expected me to know the layout of the ship as well as I did, but then I reconsidered not getting lost as better than nothing. At least he couldn’t report that I didn’t know where I was going.

I knocked on the door of the captain’s bridge. “Enter,” someone called, so I did.

I knew all about the captain, of course. Evangeline Grey. According to my father, Captain Grey was a highly decorated soldier with the Defense department of the Confederacy. The department’s soldiers of peace were purely defensive soldiers tasked with guarding our sensitive locations from Wayward attacks. She had been forced to retire when a bomb, incorrectly neutralized, blew off her lower leg and arm.

That the Tomorrow I blew up would not have affected Grey’s career outlook, since she had already been out of the defense department. The captain of the TI, however, another highly decorated soldier named Dorian Walker, would have had a lot of explaining to do. If he hadn’t been incinerated at temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees, that is.

Captain Grey had been the first crew member established. She did not have to vie for her position as I was doing now; she distinguished herself from a pool of thousands of possible captains, both Archontite and Confederate. She had a strong say in her four first lieutenants, the commanders of the other four bridges located throughout the ship. Two of those first lieutenants, Marx and Gonzales, had been soldiers, too. The other two first lieutenants were scientists, heads of their fields: Tomlinson was the greatest astrophysicist in an age, and McLeod was a leading biologist.

Like my father, McLeod had contributed greatly to life aboard the ship; his specific field was the life-supporting part of cryogenics. Each scientist had needed each other to successfully freeze and unfreeze an individual without incurring permanent damage. For that reason, both McLeod and my father, Daguerre, were named first lieutenants, albeit on different vessels.

“Captain,” I saluted. Despite all I knew about Captain Grey, I had not known that she would be here. And I had not known how young she was. By my estimation, she was only in her early thirties.

I realized something that the public was not privy to. She may well have been selected from birth to lead this mission. Perhaps her career in defense had only been part of her training. That would explain why Project Hercules had paid for the replacement of her lost limbs. I spotted the telltale wiring behind transparent plastic between the end of her sleeve and the bottom of her glove, and she was standing. To stand, she had to have a false leg. And to captain the TII, with its command boards of hundreds of  touch-sensitive holo-displays, she needed all ten of her fingers. I thought about getting myself blown up as part of my own training, and trembled right there on the captain’s bridge.

Knock it off, Tesla said, inside my head. I told my knees to stop shaking, that I hadn’t blown up, and that I would blow this if I didn’t get my act together. I imagined ice spreading up from my feet to lock my knees into place. 

The captain held her hand out to me. I shook it, eyeing her with interest, having only ever read about the gesture in a history book. “Isley Edison,” she said, looking me over critically. “I knew your father. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

She didn’t know about Tesla, I thought. She couldn’t have been sorry enough. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Your exam will consist of scenarios programmed into the computer. Stellaucts will be sitting in as your four first lieutenants, second lieutenants, and ensigns. Remember, each lieutenant has their own midshipmen and cadets too numerous for you to command directly, so you must dictate responsibility. I will be watching you, here but not here. Understand?”

“I’m – I am going to be you, Captain? I thought I was going to be tested as a first lieutenant for captain’s eligibility.”

“Captains don’t have the luxury of taking orders. Unless you would rather withdraw your bid for eligibility, Cadet Edison, please sit down so we can begin.”

Imagining all my joints iced over, I sat down in the captain’s chair. And as I prepared to give orders that could hypothetically get thousands of people killed, I wished my father had thought to advise me on this.

Tough luck, Tesla snarled. At least you aren’t already dead. 

2: Chapter Two

Chapter 2: The Test

           

The three-hour test seemed to last forever. My hands sweated fiercely the whole time. I was sure Captain Grey caught me wiping them on my pants, but then, I let her see. Better that I could grip the controls than that I look good and lose control.

There had been no training in school for commanding this vessel. Knowing the ship inside and out as stellaucts, though not engineers, taught us everything we needed to know about its integrity. Anything we did not know we could ask one of our lieutenants. And yet I found glaring gaps in my education. How did one explain, in fewer than a thousand words, how to check the tungsten skin of the ship for heat damage? The heat blisters would create ripples in the metal and popped rivets that left black streaks on the surface of the ship, but how was I supposed to explain the difference between those black streaks and the streaks that came from burning through an asteroid field with the wide-field lasers attacked to the ship’s umbrella shield? Just feel it, I wanted to say in exasperation.

Finding the right words for problems such as these annoyed me, and that I had to annoyed me even more; all stellaucts had the same training, which meant we all knew what we were looking for.

A captain had to deal with these problems. Engines failed. At one point, the shield’s rails broke and had to be repaired. The biology department demanded more water than the ship had to spare, so I ordered one of my first lieutenants to siphon water away from the showers.

The stellaucts acting as my lieutenants did not look pleased about that call.

On the screens of the command bridge, holographs projected stars to supplement the illusion of the simulation. Astronomers, and the ship’s computers, were in place to keep the ship from getting lost. But when the stars outside of the portals didn’t match with those we ought to have seen, I alerted the astronomers. The test had gotten the ship lost, but for how long? How long had we been burning fuel going in the wrong direction?

How long had I failed at this exam without knowing it? I balled my hands into fists, scraping the plastic desktop, and breathed in tasteless, filtered air.

The ship had drifted only six hundred thousand miles off-track – not that great a distance among hundreds of millions of miles. We weren’t that far off. I put the ship back on course and reassigned one of my engineers to screen-watching duty.

After that, I had to command my ship to deal with an unexpected array of stars that threatened to melt us down. The shields, the umbrella, could not be everywhere at once, and I let the ship hang in space for half an hour, my lieutenants waiting, before I decided on what to do. Our target planet, Vesta, lay just beyond these stars. “How much fuel do we have, Mr. Fowler?”

Fowler was one of my first lieutenants. His training emphasized engineering. Through the comm device I wore in my ear, I heard his answer. My four lieutenants stood post on their own bridges, but holographs projected them at their work stations on my bridge. Three of them were in my class. Tesla would have known their names; I didn’t care.

Mr. Fowler reported that there was only enough fuel to get us to Vesta, and the stripped-down Tomorrow II needed all the fuel in the reserve tank to get back to Earth when the mission was over. The ship was designed to carry an excess, but that had been spent when the Tomorrow II got lost. I cursed myself for not noticing sooner, and for falling right into the test’s trap.

There was only one thing to do. “Full speed ahead, Mr. Fowler.”

“But, Captain –“ he protested, his sixteen-year-old voice cracking. This simulation felt very real to me, too.

Yet I could not air my fears, could not show that I had any misgivings whatsoever. A light tingle of anger ran under my scalp, and for a second, I felt like the old me. “That was an order, First Lieutenant Fowler. Mr. Trudeau, please alert the crew to buckle in.”

“Yes, Captain.” Trudeau’s voice, too, was frightened. Worried. Doubtful. But obedient. And that was enough.

We waited as an alarm rang throughout the ship – and would have rung, if this was real – for our crew to secure themselves.

Mr. Fowler said, “Ready at your command, Captain.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fowler. Full power to engines. Mr. Fowler, take the Tomorrow II to maximum velocity.”

He revved the ship to the maximum output of its thrusters. We leaned against the straps on our shoulders buckling us into the ship, watching the screens with bated breath. The portals showed us space flying by so fast that stars became blurs that became phosphenes, shadows of light. And then, with the whole fuel stores expended, the ship slowed to a halt. Engines that had been roaring so ferociously that they could be heard all throughout the ship sputtered out. We had crossed five hundred thousand miles in three seconds, literally melding time and space together. Now we watched as our ship felt the gentle tug of Vesta’s gravity.

“She’s pulling us in, Captain,” Mr. Trudeau informed me.

I sat back against my seat and felt my eyes burn with relief. We had had to speed past the stars to avoid melting the ship, but that had required all of our fuel. Our only hope that was that we could come close enough to Vesta for her to pull us down to her. I had gambled, but I could see only one way out. I still wanted to pass this exam, but I was more relieved that I hadn’t had to watch my ship and crew melt down in front of me. I gathered myself. “Very good, lieutenants. Wonderful work. Ms. Dasgupta, please redirect the shield. A little polarization, I think. Protect us from debris in the planet’s atmosphere. Mr. Trudeau, please deploy the parachutes at 80,000 feet. Mr. Fowler, access energy reserves from the four command bridges to soften our landing.”

“What!” he yelped. “We’ll go dark here, Captain!”

“And we will lose each other,” I acknowledged. “Trust me, Mr. Fowler. Leave enough power for the chutes to deploy, then give the engines the rest. Vesta’s gravitational field is stronger than ours, and I do not want to crash upon landing.”

Silence on his end, but I knew why. He had forgotten that Vesta was not Earth, that this planet with its rust-colored winds and grey-blue mountains did not have the 9.78 meters per second squared we were accustomed to calculating with.

Ms. Dasgupta spoke up. “Will we have enough energy to establish ourselves and begin terraforming, Captain?” A legitimate concern, but not one I had forgotten about.

“Yes. Ms. Dasgupta, I was hoping that your team could flip the solar panels. We don’t have enough power to do it electronically. But we need those solar panels.” If we had the solar panels, we would have plenty of power. The problem with the solar panels was that they were breakable, so most of the time, they were flipped face-down. Now that we were clear of pure starlight and atmospheric debris fields, I felt safe enough to uncover them.

There was silence on her end for three seconds. “Isley, we only have six minutes until the atmosphere outside the ship incinerates us.”

I frowned, wondering why she had switched to my first name. Perhaps she did not want to go? She was scared, so what was I supposed to do about it? I struggled to think of what someone had done for me the last time I was scared. Just stop being scared! I wanted to say.

“In six minutes, or in six hours,” I said, struggling to find a tone that intimated joking, “what does it matter?” We needed power for oxygen. We needed what power we had to go to those engines. I needed Dasgupta to do what she was told.

The flush of anger from earlier had gone, and I felt only drained.

“Aye, Captain,” she said, and I heard her communicator fall to the floor as she dropped it and went sprinting for the suit shop. She and five of her second lieutenants and midshipmen would be climbing out to the umbrella and flipping the solar panels open. Once they got started, it would be easy. But getting into a spacesuit was no small ordeal. It would be easier, I thought to myself, trying not to tap my foot, not to suit up at all.

Dasgupta’s bridge was closest to the umbrella, on Deck 30. That’s why I picked her. I ordered Mr. Trudeau to track Dasgupta and her team with security cameras, and we all leaned forward to watch her and her team pelt down the hall, getting suited up along the way. They jumped into the sealed weigh room that kept oxygen from leaking out of the ship. As soon as the external door opened, they jumped out and started running down the side of the ship to get to the solar panels. Their boots held them by force of static electricity to the side of the ship, so their steps had the peculiar motion of someone picking up their feet to walk through a meter of snow without snow actually being there. But we practiced this, and they reached the the edge of the umbrella quickly. The panels of the umbrella flipped, one after another, the way the scales of a fish would if fish scales had hinges. Or like a deck of cards, maybe.

“One minute,” Mr. Fowler told me.

“There’s a port –“ I grabbed my comm, knowing Dasgupta’s suit had an audio lead wired to receive and respond to communication, “There’s a portion unturned!”

She saw what I meant instantly. They had had to push the first panels of the umbrella themselves to get the ripple effect started, and there hadn’t been enough force in their exertions to reach a round patch on the side of the umbrella.

All five of us sat and calculated furiously. Exactly how many of those solar panels did we need?

“Thirty seconds.”

I listened to radio silence while Dasgupta made a decision. She took a step toward the patch, and my hand slammed down on the control panel in front of me. My body flushed cold, then hot, and I felt my heart pounding in my chest. “Dasgupta, stop! Come back to the ship, now!”

“Can’t,” she panted. “The ship isn’t secure.” She flat-out ran across the surface of the umbrella for the dark portion.

I shouted at her team to get back inside the ship. “Dasgupta, it’s fine! The ship can take the heat. Get back inside, immediately, or I will have to write you up!” I turned away from the mic and swore. Mutinying damn girl!

She half-laughed. “Isley, you gave me this order in the first place. Don’t chicken out on me now.”

I leaned so far forward in my chair that the straps holding me into it cut into my shoulders. Did she not understand? Had she never thought of this herself, in the months and months after the Tomorrow I crashed? “You will suffocate, and then freeze, Dasgupta! Or melt – and it will be horrible – so you get back into this ship right now! I will not watch this happen to you!”

“Five seconds,” Mr. Fowler said, whispering somberly into his mic. Although the five of us spread out across some thirty decks of ship, I felt as though the others stood on my bridge with me. There was something very intimate about having these people wired into my head.

Mr. Trudeau’s chutes opened, and Mr. Fowler’s engines began to push against the powerful tug of Vesta’s gravity. We sank to half a mile from Vesta’s atmosphere, and as soon as we breached that mark, we would begin to fall very fast. Vesta filled the screens from bridge to bridge, and each of us fell silent looking at it, even Dasgupta, who was busily flipping the last panels, too. The winds swirled with rust-colored windstorms. A star – one of its three suns – peeked out behind the edge of the planet. Somewhere on Vesta, a new day dawned.

The ship began to fall.

Knowing it was too late, I told Dasgupta anyway, “You’ll burn alive, Lieutenant.”

Calmly, her voice tinged with sarcasm so thick that even I could hear it, Ms. Dasgupta said, “Thank you, Isley.”

“Zero,” Mr. Fowler said. Dasgupta’s radio fell all to static. I punched my desk, split my knuckles open, swore again. My heartbeat slowed down, the battle won. I sat back down in my chair.

I didn’t have to give another command. Just twenty minutes later, the Tomorrow II began landing procedure. Without full use of our engines, we landed slightly more heavily than planned. But we did not crash into the surface of our planet, and the probes we sent two miles down into the crust reported that this terrain was a solid foundation for the ship to plant itself.

“My readings are good,” Mr. Trudeau spoke up, after almost half an hour of radio silence.

“Same here,” Mr. Fowler reported.

The fourth first lieutenant acceded the same. It occurred to me that I had not had to speak to him or her personally, which meant he or she was a very good first lieutenant.

“Excellent. Well done, Lieutenants,” I said, and signed off by taking out my earpiece.

All of a sudden, reality swirled back in. It was just a test, I remembered. It was just a test. I climbed to my feet, intending to look for Dasgupta, when I discovered her standing in the doorway to the bridge. She must have wanted to see landing procedure. When she saw me looking at her, she gave me an anxious smile.

I had to grab my chair for support. When I could take a level breath, I said, “Don’t disobey orders ever again.”

Captain Grey stepped smoothly between us before she could respond. She had follow-up questions for me after my less than perfect arrival at Vesta. “You burned out all your fuel,” she said. “You would never be able to get back to Earth.”

“It was the only option.”

“Was it?”

I thought hard, happy to be asked questions I liked thinking about rather than more crewmates incinerating to death in a spacecraft. “Yes,” I said. She gave me a look I did not understand, then asked me more questions. What other options did I have to those that I had taken? What, if given the chance, would I do differently the next time?

Again and again, I felt compelled to tell her there was nothing I would have done differently. I had done the only thing that I could. The only thing I didn’t understand was Dasgupta, sacrificing herself so that the Tomorrow might live. It had made sense when we were flying through starry black space. But here on Earth, I could not make sense of it. For a brief, shining moment, I’d known and I’d understood, but it had passed, and now my head was full of gray wool.

What kind of person had so little self-concern? And yet I was sure I heard fear from her out there, too. And anger. I had asked her to risk her life, but she had chosen to give it herself.

“Did I pass?” I asked.

Captain Grey raised an eyebrow at me. “I think the better question to ask me is, Can I think of any scenario in which Ms. Dasgupta didn’t have to sacrifice her life?”

I didn’t like that tone in her voice at all. It sounded like…disapproval. Like my father’s tone, when I was a girl, when I told him that I wanted to play hooky from school that day. It sounded the way Tesla had sounded sometimes when I said the wrong thing. “Yes, Captain.”

She smiled tiredly at me, then folded her arms behind her back and called, “Mr. Bachman.” A cadet who had been ogling at the displays turned to us. At Grey’s call, his hand jumped away from a display console. He saw Captain Grey and smiled. It struck me as somehow dishonest. Not dishonest, but…insincere? I didn’t know.

Mr. Bachman greeted us. He used sign language with me, but held out his hand for Captain Grey to shake. “Captain Edison,” he said, surely mocking me, “Captain Grey.”

“Isley, this is Noah Bachman. He’s –“

But I had seen the insignia. “Archontite.” I had never seen one of them in person before. They had their hemisphere of the Earth, and we had ours. He looked weirdly…normal. Bachman had curly brown hair and green eyes. He smelled like fresh-cut grass and breakfast tea and paper. Freckles speckled the bridge of his nose, and he wore a camera around his neck. “A photographer?”

I was reminded of Tesla. Not another one of them, he would have muttered to me, and we would have shared a smile that our teachers couldn’t see. More to eat, I would have shrugged, and then we would have gotten in trouble for laughing.

Bachman watched my expression change with observant eyes. Grey stayed silent, her silence tinged with anxiety; perhaps she feared that this foreign boy and I would not be able to get along. Certainly one of her fears about commanding an international crew was that the crew would destroy each other. I had thought of that, too.

But until I had absolute proof that the Archontite were responsible for the Tomorrow I’s destruction, I had to reign in the seething desire in the pit of my stomach for revenge. Today, I had it less compressed than usual, less a diamond sitting hard and sharp just under my lungs than something dark and furious and alive and trying to get out of me.

With a little grin on his face, Bachman said, “Not quite. I’m a historian.” At that point, I couldn’t quite keep my dismay to myself. Bad enough that the crew split evenly into two unfriendly nationalities. But that he was a useless artisan!

My dismay went up another notch, too, when I thought of the fact that all of my own class had not yet seen the Tomorrow II, but that this unprofessional had. He wasn’t even trained for zero-gravity! Of what use could he be in maintaining this ship when he was as good as a civilian?

I turned to Captain Grey. “Captain, is it Archontite policy for their crew to see the ship before launch day?”

Bachman laughed. “No, no. I got special permission.”

I checked my memory for the last name Bachman. I couldn’t think of any officials on either side who would have bought this privilege for their son or nephew. So how had he gotten on board the ship?

“How?” I demanded, hating asking any question.

Bachman raised his camera and took a picture of my face before I could compose it. “I asked.” Another proctor of the exam called Captain Grey away – I had been sharing my exam time with other hopeful officers, like the classmates acting as my lieutenants – leaving me with Bachman. I saw no polite way to disengage from him at once, so I forced myself to wait a polite amount of time before finding something else to do.

I made myself not look for my father, who would have stood right here beside me if only he lived. I didn’t want to look, too, for fear of finding, instead of him alive and well, him, alive but burned to char, raised from the dead by my ill-begotten wish.

Once Grey was out of earshot, Bachman asked, “Were you scared?”

“Wh-What?”

“Here. Now. Or,” he added, “ever?” He turned his camera in his hands, and I stared at it distrustfully. He caught me looking. “Do you hate me so much because I’m Archontite, or because I’m a historian? Come on, Miss Edison, give me some credit. Just because I’m not one of you doesn’t mean I’m stupid. So, which is it?”

Flabbergasted, I collected my scattered thoughts and drew myself up. “I do not care that you are Archontite,” I said, and that was partly trued. I cared that someone saw fit to kill my father and friend. I cared that they pay for it dearly. But it could have been Confederates just as easily as Archontite forces. I only cared about who I had to revenge myself upon.

The angry animal inside of me stretched, searching for weak points in the prison I locked it in. This boy annoyed me, and damn me if I didn’t enjoy the warmth coursing through my veins just a little bit. “I care that your ineptitude might prove a hazard to my crew.”

Bachman grinned and turned his head to the side a little, and I had a sudden vision of his head falling right off of his skinny neck. It certainly looked imbalanced, with his curly brown hair so expanding the size of his head, and his neck so slender and vulnerable-looking. How was his skull staying on at all? The longer I looked, the more improbable I found it. Perhaps, Tesla’s voice suggested teasingly in my head, it is because his skull is hollow.

Bachman said, “Well, I care that you’re Confederacy. And that you obviously don’t care why this ship is taking off. Have you asked how Project Hercules can be so certain that terrorists won’t target this ship, too? There was a reason the TI was targeted. Have you wondered at all why the ship has to launch now? Isley Edison, have you ever thought to ask why the ship has to come back?”

I drew back from him as if slapped. No, I had not asked those questions. The answers to them did not fall within my mission parameters, so they didn’t matter. Right?

No, I told myself, no questions without answers.

I felt myself seized with a sudden fear that he might ruin this for me; he had already ruined my captaincy exam, why – how? – could he ruin the Tomorrow II, too? He couldn’t take it away from me. The ship was all I had left.

I muttered something polite about being happy to have met him, and he cut me off halfway through. “Can I interview you sometime, Captain?” Yet again, the rank sounded mocking. I checked his insignia again, just to be sure. There was a little A on his collar. A Crew.

A Crew ran things for the first thirty years away from planet Earth, at which point they went into cryostasis and B Crew took over. B Crew, my crew, took the TII to Vesta, spent twenty years building a new society, and got the ship back underway again. 

“Yes,” I said. “You can interview me in thirty years, when Rotation B takes over for Rotation A.”

It served him right.

Bachman glanced down at the insignia on his collar, then up at me. I was already moving away, and he hurried to keep up. “Wait, wait. Five minutes? Two? Look at it this way. We won’t see each other again for thirty years, and so we probably won’t be the same people as we are now. Which means that what we say to each other now will be a conversation held with a ghost. You’ll remember it, and I will, but it’ll be a long, long way away. That’s the point of a good secret, isn’t it? When one of you is about to leave, like I’ll be gone to you when I’m thirty years older and you’re still a teenager, then you can say anything you want to each other. It’ll only be the two of you that know, but there’s no risk in it.”

And, although I didn’t know why, I stopped just outside the door of the captain’s bridge. Bachman nearly walked into me, stopped himself, and backpedaled quickly. “I don’t have any secrets.” Bachman gave me a doubtful look, and although there was no reason for me to, I said, “I want to know why they died.”

He made an X over his heart. “I’ll take that to the grave. You do realize this makes us friends.”

I scowled. Duplicitous English-speaking Archontite. “I’m not your friend.” And I let the door to the bridge slide shut between us. 

3: Chapter Three

Chapter 3: Flight of the Tomorrow II

 

Eight months to the day since terrorists bombed the Tomorrow I out of the sky, the crew of the Tomorrow II amassed, at long last, at the ship for boarding.

Launch day.

Sitting on the bus that would take us the half a mile to the hangar of the ship, I found myself worrying at my uniform, obsessively fussing over the wrinkles on my knees. This marked first time I’d worn the orange polyester uniform, and I had not expected it to feel so bright, so flamboyant. I felt like one of the flashing neon signs that came on just as Tesla and I hurried back to base before curfew on Sunday evenings. He had a ferocious love of old things: marble statues in the park, old books behind display cases in the library, and museums – all museums, even the ones that specialized in such bizarre things as clothing and footwear.

One Sunday, we’d stopped at the pier before taking the bus back home. Project Hercules recruits always met in front of the movie theatre because it was the most popular place for young cadets to visit. I had never seen a movie myself. Tesla always wanted to do different things. Tesla entertained himself by walking on the railing that marked the edge of the pier. On his left side, the wooden planks gave way to churning gray ocean. Sunset made the cold, hard water look gilded with gold. Tesla’s balance was perfect, so he anted up the challenge a little bit by tossing his ice cream cone from hand to hand and talking to me.

The pier ended abruptly at a roped-off defunct amusement park. Once, it had been built over the ocean, presumably to make it more exciting or scenic. But it bankrupted, so the Ferris Wheel drooped into the salty water, and most of the rides rotted black with dust and dereliction. Police tape warned pedestrians that this part of the pier had been condemned to demolition. Few holdovers like this remained: examples of former ages’ vast and inexplicable largesse. I studied the failed park with interest.

Tesla’s arms dropped to his sides. “What lasts?”

My bangs blew into my eyes on the salty breeze, and I blinked hard at him. “What?”

He took a brochure from the Natural History Museum out of his pocket. We’d visited it that day. I liked the exhibit on automobiles. My fingers itched to climb into the Plexiglas box and poke around under the hood of the antique Model T. Tesla’s hand on my arm held me back. He looked down at the brochure, spread his arms, walked the other way down the pier.

Finally, he turned so that he faced the ocean, his toes hanging over the edge of the dock, his arms by his sides.

He held out one hand, the brochure fluttering from his grasp. “I mean,” he murmured, “that no matter how well you live, no matter how much you do, a little bit of bad luck can still bury you under a sheet of ash. Throw you in front of a train. Send a clot to your brain.”

I pulled my shoulder away from the lamppost I leaned on and walked down the dock, my hands out of my pockets in case he fell. The muscle in Tesla’s jaw jumped, but he didn’t look down at me.

Tesla said, “At some point, we and everything we do and love become pulvis et umbra, shadows and dust.” His hand sprang open, and the brochure fluttered out across the waves. It spread out on them like an empty raft. “Stardust.”

The van trundled to a halt. I carried nothing with me; I had no keepsakes. All of us exited the van empty-handed and filed into a line leading into the hangar. The rest of the crew arrived before the stellaucts, but even for a project as advanced as ours, procedure consumed more time than originally thought. I wished that we could just get on with it already. I wanted desperately to board and set off. The Earth seemed to me a blue and green marble, pretty, and perhaps precious; but not the only special planet – not anymore.

Allegedly, understanding the transition of human life from Earth to the stars justified artisans like photographers and historians coming with us. Stellaucts trained their whole lives, but the rest of humanity needed a little help coming to terms with the ways in which the universe changed due to our expedition.

I paused at the door to the hangar for one last look at Earth. I saw rolling grass hills, the rough gravel path the bus had taken, and a fleet of buses from which disembarked the crew of the Tomorrow II. The day simmered in humid heat, and our polyester suits clung to us with sweat. Bugs buzzed around the long grass growing on the hills.

I turned my back on all of that and walked into the hangar.

 

Half of my class and I boarded the Tomorrow II on Deck 23, one of the cryo-decks. Half of us would be on active duty for the next thirty years taking care of the ship, its occupants, and its cargo.

Thirty years would take us out of our solar system. Then B Crew rounded out the final six months of the sojourn before the Tomorrow made landfall on Vesta. A Crew would spend the next twenty to thirty years in cryo-sleep, and B Crew would guide the Tomorrow II back to Earth. In eighty years, my classmates and I would be in our fifties.

Myself and classmates Dasgupta, Trudeau, and Warner had all been assigned to Rotation B. The other half of our class drew assignments on A Crew. Both A Crew and B Crew consisted of international crews of both Confederate and Archontite stellaucts.

According to my teachers, we stellaucts would provide an invaluable resource for future expeditions, which explained the philosophy behind splitting the crews. No reason for us to die before we returned to Earth, since on that planet, we would teach the next generation of stellaucts. We would lead research laboratories and think tanks. Any well-funded governmental or private institutions would pay handsomely for our experience.

Ironically, the job I wanted most guaranteed to whomever held it. The captain, like our Captain Grey, never entered cryo-sleep. She would probably live long enough to see the Tomorrow II set back off for Earth. But she would not live to see the blue and green planet ever again.

Of course, neither Captain Walker nor my father nor Tesla had lived to see Earth again.

The cryo-sleeping decks took up one shared open space of successive layers of cryo-pods. The vast, echoing hall rang with heavy metal-plated boots and the low murmur of excited voices. Stellaucts accessed the four levels of cryo-deck along lightweight aluminum catwalks. Tesla had called these halls the refrigerated section of the grocery aisle. My stomach rumbled. None of us had eaten in three days; any undigested food in our stomachs would rot and kill us.

In the old days, the biggest problem of cryogenics – after resurrecting the frozen at all – was resurrecting the pod person without destroying their mind. Brains preserved with surprising ease; one merely had to cross the blood-brain barrier with a preservative chemical. Dr. McLeod, my father’s colleague, developed the chemical pumped into my arm through the needle attached to my pod.

My own father had figured out how to unfreeze a frozen mind. Instead of keeping the body on ice for however many years, my father had thought to flash freeze a body and suck all of the oxygen out of the cryo-tank. Just as with the lack of oxygen in space, the body would be preserved. Rehydration was all the body and mind necessitated for reawakening.

Space mummies, one idiot civilian newspaper put it.

That was the theory, anyway.

I stepped into my pod after connecting myself to my intravenous drip of Dr. McLeod’s brain serum. A member of the medical staff checked on me quickly and efficiently, then moved on. Medics wore blue because, allegedly, blue calmed people down. Blue made me think of the doctor’s office and many, many needles, and I did not calm at all. My body seemed to be having some sort of reaction to the drip; I felt like running, even though I was right where I usually pretended to run to. In the end, I ignored the feeling as best I could.

The metal catwalks rang with the sound of dozens of pairs of boots: the medical staff hurrying about. They had already had a busy few days; our cargo was now stored in bays on Decks 25 through 29. Ten thousand space colonists, frozen and ready to go. The windows of pod doors were tinted yellow, unlike the blue lights overhead. I guessed that the same principle for medical staff lighting went for medical staff dress.

All around me, hundreds of other crew members – mechanics, physicists, fellow stellaucts, biologists – connected themselves to drips like mine and shut their pod doors. So I stepped into my pod and closed the door in front of me. Through the thick yellow glass, I saw the last of the medical check-ups and fellow crew B members shutting their doors. A sound hissed behind my left ear with a jet of cold air. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. And I slept for thirty years. 

4: Chapter Four

Chapter 4: B Crew

 

My pod door unsealed itself with a hissing sound, like a vacuum-sealed door finally opening. Actually, that’s exactly what it did.

I jumped into consciousness instantaneously, fighting a panic. My body’s natural reaction to suffocating meant total batshit flailing, and I forced myself to calm down. To rehydrate me, a thick, gel-like substance had flooded the pod. I could breathe it just fine; my body just didn’t want to, instinctively rejecting breathing anything but oxygen.

Many of my fellow crew had fallen right out of their pods on stiff legs and now lay on the metal catwalks that showed the slightest hints of rust. I bent my knees and crouched in my pod as the gel sloshed out past me in a torrent through the catwalks and to the bottom of the chamber, where it would be collected and used as fertilizer for the plants.

The thick, gelatinous goop reminded me of an animal’s placenta; it smelled like nutrients; if you have chewed a vitamin, you know what I mean. I retched, trying to get the goo out of my throat.

Decades of disuse weakened my limbs, so I stretched my arms across my chest and behind my head until my legs felt steady enough to stretch. My brain felt like an engine surging while still in park. I wanted to be everywhere: on the captain’s bridge, seeing everything of the ship from a bird’s eye view; but also on every deck, revisiting the ship that I hadn’t seen in thirty years, seeing, for the first time, my ship doing what it had been designed for: flying through space.

I had only one regret: that I had not been conscious for takeoff. That we hadn’t been exploded signified proof enough to me that the Tomorrow II had better luck than her sister ship, and the relief waylaid some of the anxiety that followed Noah Bachman’s questions.

Those questions had chased themselves ceaselessly around my head for the five days between hearing them and boarding this ship.

Something else, too, had made an impact on me only in retrospect. There was a strange sort of anxiety on Captain Grey’s face that day. Perhaps it was only nerves, but it seemed more ominous than that to me. I put my feeling down to my own anxiety about maybe exploding on launch, but when that hadn’t happened, and my certainty hadn’t faded away, I forced myself to accept that the captain’s anxiety must have another source.

And anything that worried her, worried me.

My body acclimated to the new environment, although it didn’t seem happy about it; I would probably have arthritis as I grew old and migraines for the rest of my life.

The boots I wore into the cryo-tank were the same boots that bound Dasgupta to the ship in our simulation, so I did not float away. I stepped out of my pod and considered taking both feet off of the floor, however. If my boots lost contact with the ground, I would float away; that’s why these boots, rendered running, which required both feet be off the ground at the same time, impossible. Medics and B Crew crammed into the metal catwalks. And many A Crew members, too, trying to force their way past us into our recently vacated pods. The tone of the tumultuous crowd outside my pod finally reached my ears.

Busy didn’t fully describe the people on the catwalks. They were scared.

There was something very wrong with the Tomorrow II.

 

I jumped with the full force of my legs and broke away from the metal catwalks. I drew my knees toward myself and somersaulted slowly a few times over the heads of the crowd. Dasgupta did just as I, and together, we stretched our feet out for the ceiling. We landed lightly, and then our boots clamped us to the ground; we crouched to absorb the impact with our knees. She and I looked at each other – an acknowledgement, as much a hello as either one of us cared about – then looked directly above ourselves, at the chaos all over the pod bay. A slow trickle of people thought to do as we had done and break for the ceiling, so with a shared nod, we headed for the captain’s bridge.

That was the other thing I thought about constantly. Did I pass the test? I still wasn’t sure. But I had been assigned as a second lieutenant to the captain’s bridge. I knew now that Dasgupta had been given the same assignment. Had she not burned alive during my exam, I thought she would have made a fine second-in-command. Top of the class, Tesla commented, resurrected for a brief moment by my memory. His voice had that faintly impressed tone that it took when I had really impressed him, although it was covered, as always, by snark. I didn’t mind. He was right; we were.

Or my memory of him was right, anyway. Which meant I was right.

Whatever.

Dasgupta and I exited the pod bay and hit the stairs flying. We pulled our boots from the floor again and unwound some of the Teflon wire in a spool on our belts. The wires had magnets on the end to clamp down on the metal rods drilled along every hallway and stairwell. Dasgupta and I kicked off from the ground and let our wires guide us up as far as we had thrown; then we repeated the procedure. At the end of our throw, we had to stop, rewind, and throw our magnetic grappling hooks again – frustratingly slow going – but we still moved much faster than most of the people crowding the stairwell. The orderliness pounded into all of us by years of training evaporated in the heat of the moment, and I was careful not to look anyone in the eye as we climbed up in the empty space in the middle of the room that the stairs did not occupy. I did not want to invite hop-ons. They played with my perspective, too, and threatened to make me nauseous; these people hurriedly climbed down to Decks 25-29, whereas Dasgupta and I rode our wire pulls, feet-first, down to Deck 2.

Other stellaucts like Dasgupta and myself would have known not to use the stairs in the event of an emergency, which meant the rest of us had found our way to our own bridges. Engineers and physicists, though well and good, had hardly been designed for space travel, like us. Where they worried about their lives, we worried about our ship. I felt the suggestion of the loss of it like a personal blow. Like the loss of my limbs.

Dasgupta and I wound our wires up and took to running the rest of the way to the captain’s bridge: we came to the end of the hallway and put our hands on the pads to be scanned. Before the scan could even be completed, the door opened and people spilled out. Mechanics, an engineer, an astronomer – I didn’t worry until I saw stellaucts hurrying out of the captain’s bridge, too.

There should never have been so many people awake on the Tomorrow II at once. Right now, we operated at double the crew – which meant two people working the same job instead of one. Only half my class of stellaucts crewed the ship on purpose; our crews very much needed to be small.

Dasgupta had a similar thought. “Why are so few sleeping?”

We pushed our way onto the bridge just as a collision with something threatened to unglue our feet from the floor. Luckily, nothing loose laid about to hit anyone. But I saw some people smack their heads against others’ with a sound like coconuts clopping together.

“Captain Grey!” I called, my high voice piercing the gurgle of many others speaking. Usually, I tried to keep my voice low. Today, my high, almost childish voice made me happy.

Captain Grey snapped her head up. I was glad she did, too, because she had aged significantly since the last time I saw her. I wasn’t sure I would have recognized her. For some reason, I still expected her to be thirty years old. Instead, she approached her middle sixties, and her crop of dark hair had given way to the same shade as her last name. Wrinkles furrowed her eyes and mouth – probably worn into place by the same expression she wore now: dissatisfaction.

“Second lieutenants,” she said curtly, and nodded to direct us to move apart from the rest of the crew – those who were not stellaucts, that is. Most of them were adults, but age meant less than knowledgeability. We shuffled apart obediently, and Grey caught us up. “Solar winds are buffeting the ship,” she said.

I frowned. “We’re thirty years out, Captain.”

She rolled her eyes, a stray hair sticking to her forehead with sweat. “Yes, I know. It seems to be seasonal, or perhaps the solar flares – I do not know.” Solar winds buffeted our spaceship like a marine ship at sea, forcing the TII to rock and shift. Solar winds were sheets of charged particles emitted by the sun. The metal skin and bones of the Tomorrow II groaned and stretched. Three of the monitors on the captain’s bridge blew out sparks and went black entirely.

The captain turned back to us. “But what I need the two of you to do is to do your jobs. Crew A has been pushed too hard.” She waved her hand. “Let them run off to their cryo-sleep.”

So Dasgupta and I sat down at our banks of monitors to oversee the other departments. Only four of us second lieutenants staffed the captain’s bridge, so we each had wide swaths of the ship. Dasgupta’s monitors oversaw the agricultural sector, on Deck 30, where a forest was growing in a gigantic glass terrarium, half of the engineering sector, where dozens of men and women clung to steel bars within the walls of the ship in dim lighting and fought desperately to hold the ship together, and parts of nuclear.

I had a quarter of the nuclear engineering department, which had preemptively dressed in their radiation-proof suits, and half of electrical engineering, most of whom shouted frantically at each other.

I had just focused my attention on electrical engineering when I spotted a familiar face. A face too familiar. Thirty years should have stretched between us, but amongst all the flying sparks and generators in electrical engineering, I spotted Noah Bachman, his tongue sticking out of his mouth while he scribbled on his notepad.

For the first time, something occurred to me, and I felt sick to my stomach. Noah Bachman was Archontite. And Archontites did not speak English.

What had I thought? That chances were much more likely that there was a conspirator amongst the Confederacy than that there was one among the Archontite.

Had I found that conspirator?

Better yet, could I stop him before he took advantage of this situation and destroyed our ship?

Things didn’t line up perfectly, I knew. For one, he was still only sixteen years old. For another, he certainly didn’t look dangerous. And if the captain had spoken to him, as I knew she had, then she would have noted, too, that he spoke English.

My heartbeat accelerated. Was Captain Grey in on it?

What if we hadn’t even travelled thirty years from Earth? What if we were but an hour or two, and this attack was going to be even more massively destructive because the citizens down below now earnestly believed that this ship would make it to space?

I could not let anything happen to this ship.

I jumped to my feet, and another electrical display blew out. Half of the holo-panels flickered out. Captain Grey gritted her teeth and said, “Quick! I need a volunteer to get down to engineering and reset these panels!”

My hand shot into the air faster than I could think. “I volunteer,” I said unnecessarily. “But, Captain, I know a faster way to reset these panels. I can access the back-up generator switch.”

She eyed me up and down. “Can you fit?” she demanded, knowing what I was thinking. She and her crew had been aging slowly around her for more than a quarter of a century, and so she had forgotten that teenagers like me could be so fit and so slender. String-bean, Daguerre called me. My eyes burned as though I had been around onions or lemon juice, but I didn’t know why. “Then go,” Captain Grey said.

I spun on my heel and bolted back down the hallway. I pelted into the stairwell and jumped for the railing. I rolled over it, so that my feet pressed against the side opposite from the direction I’d come in. I kicked off and surged down four floors. I hooked my foot around another railing, drew myself toward it, then kicked off again. I leapfrogged four floors at a time that way until I got down to Deck 18.

I dashed into the hallway, my feet sticking to the floor, and stopped halfway down. Engineering’s sector was colored violet, so I felt as though black lights lit the whole corridor. I keyed my code into a little access panel near the floor. The hatch sprang open, and I pulled it away and set it beside the wall. Then I climbed inside the walls of the ship.

Most stellaucts knew nothing about this part of the ship. In fact, Tesla and I had only stumbled across these byways by accident. We had been playing around with ship schematics one day after school. Since my father lived in a house on compound grounds, I was allowed to live with him. So I didn’t have to live in the barracks; I had my own bedroom. I knew Tesla envied me, but I shared the space with him, so half of the stuff in my room belonged to him.

He flopped down on my bed, a lollipop in his mouth. I never could figure out where he got his hands on that stuff. “Remember when we used to want to be animals?”

“Sure,” I said. “You wanted to be a ferret. I wanted to be a tiger.”

“Tigress,” he corrected absently. “Imagine how much easier it would be to get around if you were a ferret.”

I muttered, “For you, maybe.” I came up to the collarbones of most of my colleagues; I had no desire to be any smaller.

And we had created hallways out of ventilation shafts and showers out of drainage hatches and tiny little ferret-sized boots out of washers and screws. It was as much fun as I could remember having.

I thought about that ferret as I squeezed through the small space between the walls of the Tomorrow II. The wall of my left led back to the hallway I began in. The wall on my right gave way to outer space. I tried to ignore the frigid cold emanating from it; the seeping chill made my just-unfrozen bones ache to be so near. At the end of the hall, where the stairwell led up and down on the other side of the wall, a precipice gave way to the decks below.

These very narrow hallways were only built to give construction workers a place to stand as they built the ship from the inside out, but the ladders and lights they’d used had been left in, so I pushed myself down parallel to the ladder that was drilled to the side of the precipice.

My sense of up and down kept changing. We all had different ways of accommodating to the ship without gravity, and I just pretended that wherever I meant to get to was down.

This construction shaft showed signs of damage from the solar winds, too. Frayed wires threw out sparks, and a dull banging on the metal panels told me not all of our equipment was tied down.

Because of the sheer size of this ship, some of the electrical wiring met in intermediary hubs like the one I raced toward to be sent along in bundles of wires to the main electrical generator nearer to the core of the ship. Reboot switches equipped these hubs.

Intermediary hubs seemed like a minor design flaw, since their ease of access exceeded that of the electrical department. I figured out two reasons for them to exist while I raced toward the nearest hub: one, no one could be expected to fit into this place, and two, the ship would be better protected by declaring clear spheres of influence. Engineering’s business was engineering’s business.

Also, robots probably managed this part of the ship. Several different types maintained the ship, but if solar flares wrought havoc with our electronics, then those robots might well be toast.

I climbed about halfway down the ladder when I kicked off from it, scraping my shoulders and hips and knees on the narrow walls as I tried to accelerate myself by flying to my destination. I could see the electrical hub, a metal clamp holding a bunch of wires together, with a tiny little display on the top that held all of two buttons on it.

I tensed to kick out for the hub when a panel from inside the ship burst into the hollow space between the ship’s walls and smashed into the outermost hull.

“Gah!” I shouted, surprised; then I thought, I should have held my breath. The outermost wall of the ship hadn’t fractured. Still, the portion of the wall that had blown out now floated in my way. I kicked up to climb over it and another panel popped off and almost smashed my body into the hull of the ship.

I made a frustrated sound and kicked straight up; then I oriented my body to use the walls at my sides to propel myself forward. I jetted straight down. I crashed into the hub and bounced off, missing it in the dark. Lightbulbs shattered up and down the little construction space, and I knew if I breathed too much of the released gas I would die. I held my breath, then, as I slid my security card into the hub. Then I pressed the reboot button.

All in all, I had only needed sixty-five seconds to hit the reboot. I imagined it would have taken much longer for someone to get all the way to Deck 23 and explain the situation to electrical engineering, but I should have been practicing how to maneuver within these walls. I made a mental note for next time.

Now, to my next stop. I kicked out of the space between the walls, using the gap left by a panel that had exploded toward the hull of the ship. I crawled out into the hallway of Deck 18 and dove for the stairwell. I went along, propelling myself with a kick again, until I got down to electrical engineering.

An electrical engineer opened the door for me when I knocked, and I loaded authority into my voice, explaining that I had the captain’s permission. I shouldered him aside to get into the dark, rubber-insulated electrical engineering wing. After a sweep of the room that only took me sixty-three seconds, I knew one thing. Noah Bachman had already left.

I backed out of the room, feeling officially worried. I needed to inform Captain Grey of my suspicions. She could handle them from there.

A massive influx of people jam-packed the hallways. I felt more comfortable using the space between the halls to get back to the captain’s bridge, so I went back to Deck 18. There, I found a pair of legs sticking out of the space. When I grabbed the back of the uniform and gave an unceremonious tug, Bachman popped out.

“You!” I said, not happy.

“Isley Edison,” he said, pleasantly surprised. “Can we have that interview, do you think?”

I grabbed him by the front of his uniform and slammed him against the bulkhead. It would have been a more frightening gesture if we hadn’t both began to float toward the ceiling. I mustered up extra bravado to compensate. “You! What are you doing on this ship?”

“Have you hit your head? I told you, I’m an historian.”

“I know what you told me. That doesn’t mean it was true.”

Another panel crumpled toward the hull, and I realized something. My stomach lurched toward my throat. “Oh, no,” I breathed, and took off at a full-on sprint for the captain’s bridge. When both of my feet slipped off of the floor, I twisted myself and pushed off from the wall itself.

Bachman, to the best of his abilities, tried to keep up. “Isley! Wait! Where are you going? What’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer him. I had too many computations to do in my head. I kept running the numbers again, reluctant to accept the reality I knew must be true. Too much evidence weighed in its favor. These popping panels. Malfunctions in our electronics. A distant ringing in my ears that I thought had been alarms.

I had a bad feeling about what we were going to have to do. 

“Get back to your pod,” I told him.

An engineer headed in the opposite direction from us, probably toward engineering, when I heard the hissing sound that I learned preceded an exploding panel. I grabbed his collar and threw my Teflon guidewire with my other hand; I yanked as hard as I could on the wire, and we went shooting off away from the panel. If I hadn’t grabbed him, he would surely have been smashed. The engineer thanked me, sounding shaky, and kept going, albeit sticking much closer to the walls.

“To hell with that. I’m sticking with you, Isley.”

I rounded on Bachman. “I will not protect you, if that’s what you are thinking. What are you, really? Archontite? A terrorist? Why do you speak English, Mr. Bachman? Why haven’t you aged?”

“You haven’t hung out with many guys, have you?”

Well, my father had once said, I’m relieved you have one friend, anyway.

I shook my head and kept on hurrying toward the captain’s bridge. We had a crisis on our hands, I knew. But I couldn’t shake the heavy weight of dread that this boy might pose another untold threat, and I couldn’t wait to have it out of him. His nearness made my blood itch against my veins, like a boxer rubbing her knuckles before a match.

As soon as I got him to the captain’s bridge, I would have the Midshipmen hold him down while I tortured the truth out of him, if need be. But for now, I needed him to follow me into the trap. Or, at least, the room filled with my allies.

Right before we crossed the threshold into the captain’s bridge, Bachman finally caught up to me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry. I meant that men generally age better than women, but that’s probably not something you would have noticed. That’s all. As for the rest of it…” He frowned, and his face creased into lines I didn’t expect him to have. “I don’t know. I truly don’t. Isley, what is going on? What do you know?”

“After you,” I said curtly, and gestured for him to enter the captain’s bridge. Bachman gave me a skeptical look and entered. As soon as he was three feet into the room, I whistled twice, hard and loud. Two middies came running up to me. They were stellaucts around my age, although not from my class. I pointed at Bachman. “Hold him, please.” On my command, they whipped out plastic zip-ties and locked Bachman’s hands behind his back. We all carried around those zip-ties to attach ourselves to the railings in case we needed to stay grounded. Then I turned to Captain Grey. “Captain,” I called, trying to make my tone respectful but also let her know that my business was urgent. When she saw me, I led her to the lower level of the captain’s bridge, down half a flight of stairs, where there two astronomers sat at consoles frantically typing in coordinates.

“I don’t have much spare time, Second Lieutenant,” she told me. Her hair looked frizzy, as though she stuck her finger in a socket, and sweat permeated her uniform.

I imagined today had been pretty stressful for her.

“Yes, Captain. Captain, I know what the problem is. We’re leaking oxygen.”

There was a moment of silence as she tried to comprehend what I told her.

I forged ahead in desperation. In class and in practice runs, I hated being so young. Cleverness and experience should count for more than the number of years one has survived. Life wasn’t a war zone. Anymore. Either way, I needed the captain to believe me.

“The pressure in the ship is all wrong, isn’t it? Panels are breaking. Panels with oxygen pipes all through them. Oxygen is leaking from its tanks, Captain, and the ship can’t take this pressure. There must be a leak somewhere onboard the ship, too – otherwise the oxygen pressure would be flattening us.” Oxygen seeped from the tanks into the innards of the ship and escaped from a hole in the hull. It was the only explanation.

“The solar flares, Isley,” she reminded me, her tone inching toward desperation. We had too many problems, and so she was trying to prioritize. I would have done the same thing. “We can’t hover in space without electricity forever.”

“If we don’t have air, Captain, we’ll die,” I reminded her. “Those leaking tanks have to be fixed.”

She was dogged. “But the solar flares? Every time we think we have the situation under control, we’re hit again. Our systems keep forgetting what they were working on. Only the most basic of systems work. And…why are my middies holding that boy?”

I looked to where she was and saw Bachman and his two guards. Apparently determined to annoy his guards as much as possible, Bachman had taken his feet off the deck and was slowly floating upside down. His behind was at eye-level, his head somewhere below. His camera floated about around his neck.

I hesitated. I had had an idea, but she had distracted me. What was it…? “This is Bachman, an Archontite. He speaks English, Captain. If you know what he’s about, then, please, reprimand me. I welcome it. But I cannot let anything happen to this ship.”

Captain Grey looked down on me, her countenance stern. Her gray eyebrows and hair drooped, tired and listless. But something in her eyes – or in the set of her mouth, or something –looked as young as five year-olds on the playground planting their tiny feet shoulder-width apart and their hands on their hips.

I thought about the tiny children I had been able to see from my room on the second floor of my father’s house, and how I had once seen a very small girl wearing sparkling red Mary Janes to the park. I saw her again, glancing to my window from out of my textbook, an hour or so later. She’d scuffed and dusted her sparkly red shoes. It was those shoes that I was thinking about when the idea lurking in the back of my brain sprang forward.

The captain’s eyes. Red shoes. Dasgupta’s bravery flaring like a fire. “Captain, about those solar flares. Do you remember my exam?”

She nodded impatiently. Then, looking at me, she understood. “Isley, we...that’s… Those are not our orders!”

“Could you think of any alternative, then?” Both of us had had days to think it over. I knew I had. And if the captain and I were anything alike, she had, too. She had had years.

Bachman’s feet slowly floated back toward the floor. I saw him watching us from a few feet above. There was no way he had heard us, but he was watching our faces, and I had the distinct feeling that he knew what we had said.

I turned my eyes back from Bachman’s face to the captain. “It doesn’t have to be exactly the same. On my exam, we had no power because of the damage to my battery tanks, remember? But, us – we’ve got plenty. If we just burn all the energy we have now, we can get past these flares.”

That was my plan, then. To do as I had done before, and burn up all we had to get past the obstacle at hand – in this case, solar flares instead of too many stars. The ship had come so close to breaching the extent of the flares’ reach, and if we gave it all we had now, we could break free of the flares’ hold on us. With our systems online, we might even be able to repair the ship and put this behind us.

We had better chances than in my exam, anyway. Energy stores could be replenished rapidly with solar panels. And we had enough energy in the tank to get us well past these flares. But the leaking oxygen reserves posed another problem, one I already knew the solution to. I just pretended I didn’t, locked it into the box with Daguerre and Tesla and buried it beneath my work.

Captain Grey ushered me up the stairs. Her hand on my back, I climbed slowly, reluctant to let her shove me away before she gave us new orders. We had gardens, of course. And they could produce a lot of oxygen. But not enough for hundreds of crew members. And we were spread too thin – all over this thirty-story tall, twenty-story wide ship – because we had to be. The oxygen that the garden had to offer would be too thin.

Captain Grey left me near Bachman, and I stopped automatically, waiting for her. She put her communicator back on and spoke to her first lieutenants, her voice too low for me to hear.

“Isley,” Bachman said, “should I be scared?”

I glanced at him. “Should I?”

Bachman smiled unexpectedly, and his eyes crinkled. It made him look familiar and broken-in, like the tattered copy of my favorite book I’d read too many times to count. “Ah, so you are the Byronic hero. ‘Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt / From all affection and from all contempt.’”

Before I had a chance to respond, Dasgupta entered the captain’s bridge and drew to a halt next to me. She let her boots stick her to the ground. Bachman went back to floating annoyingly from his captors. “Did you do it?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Something still need fixing?”

I nodded again.

“It’s hard to believe we slept for thirty years. All this action is making me itch for a nap,” she said. And although it was purely bravura, I laughed. To hell with what I’d thought before – she’d make just as good a captain as me. I felt glad that if we were going to die, at least we were going to die together, like the last time we flew the Tomorrow II. There was something very comforting at the thought of dying with the ship, and with others who considered it a part of them, like I did.

The captain finished speaking to her lieutenants. She set her headpiece back on her desk with a shaking hand. Was her robotic limb malfunctioning, or was she simply tired? Could it be that she was scared?

Why was it these people were always getting scared, and all I could think about was that I had loved being on this ship?

I glanced at Bachman, who was paying close attention to everything around him – presumably to write it all up later.

Perhaps I was not scared because I had nothing to lose.

“This way,” the Captain told us, hurrying over to our little cluster. The middies gave Dasgupta and I questioning looks. What were they to do with the boy I’d brought them?

“You, too,” Dasgupta said firmly.

We followed the captain the way she and I had come: down to the lower deck, where the astronomers still worked hard at charting a course away from the flares. If our course had been set even a percentage of a degree off when we burned up all of our energy getting past the solar flares, we would be hundreds of thousands of miles off of our destination.

All over the ship, the captain’s orders took effect. The lights and holo-panels flickered as power all over the ship was siphoned toward the electrical thrusters. Red emergency lights flickered on overhead. Dasgupta’s, the captain’s, and Bachman’s pupils flowered open and stole their irises.

The captain turned toward the wall between the two astronomers’ workstations. She touched it at a very specific point, and the wall split into two. We were left looking at a very small room. No…an elevator.

I didn’t understand at first. There was still at least five crew members on the bridge, including the captain and the two astronomers. A physicist and an engineer, too, if I remembered correctly.

“All the way down, children,” said the captain.

Bachman’s feet started to float upward again, and I realized he wasn’t doing it on purpose. He just couldn’t keep both feet on the ground.

Slowly, the penny dropped. “Where will this take us, Captain?” I asked.

“And why aren’t you coming?” Dasgupta inquired.

“Will someone please get these zip ties off me?” Bachman asked. We ignored him.

The captain looked at us. “We are old, stellaucts, and you are young. All the way down. Make it fast. There won’t be… Well, you don’t have long.”

Something passed between the captain and Dasgupta, because Dasgupta shoved the middies and Bachman onto the elevator. Then she stepped onto it herself.

I set my feet; moving me wasn’t about to be so easy. My blood rushed, hot and fast, in my ears. I had a feeling I knew what was down that elevator shaft. I knew my father pretty well. Memories of him and Tesla bubbled up to the surface of my mind, but when I ran hot like this, remembering them didn’t burn me. I said, “Captain, please, I beg you. Take my place. You’re our captain.”

She smiled down at me. “Do you know what I love about this ship, Isley? I love the people that it carries.” For a moment, her professional exterior broke down. She stood before me an old woman nearing the end of her final shift, and I thought nothing would ever be as terrible as watching Daguerre’s and Tesla’s ship catch fire and crash back to Earth. “You know, I never had children. But thirty years ago, if I did, I’d bet they’d have been just like you.” She cocked her head. “Maybe I’m glad I didn’t. How could I have raised them up?”

Captain Grey took a deep breath, and I felt the inhalation steal breath from my own lungs, the two of us wired into this ship. My hands unballed themselves. I understood now. This wasn’t quite the passing of the captain’s badge on her shoulder. Close enough. “Take this elevator all the way down. Give Mr. Bachman the benefit of the doubt. And don’t forget what I told you after your exam. Make me proud, Isley.”

“But –“ And even as I said it, I wondered, what could I say? I understood. The fight leaked out of me.

Dasgupta grabbed the back of my uniform and hauled me onto the elevator. Then she pressed the button and the doors slid shut. The last thing I saw was the captain, watching us fall. 

5: Chapter Five

Chapter 5: Daguerre’s Gift

 

“Isley,” Bachman began again, quietly, “do you know what’s about to happen?”

“I’m scared,” one of the middies confessed.

Our breathing filled up the small elevator and made it feel claustrophobic. I couldn’t help but count breaths. All that wasted oxygen, I thought.

The elevator came to a stop what felt like a moment later. We couldn’t have crossed to more than Deck 4. We had all been piled, floating, into the top of the elevator, and when it stopped, I pushed myself out and landed catlike on my boots, attaching myself to the floor. Dasgupta followed me, and the middies had to grab Bachman before he smacked into the ceiling and lost a tooth.

In front of us stood four cryo-tanks identical to those upstairs: blue light, yellow window. They formed a semi-circle on the other side of the room. The other half of the room held lockers full of spare uniforms and helmets. The only illumination came from a single blue light in the middle of the formation, and the yellow light that shone out from the windows of the tanks. Pools of black shadow draped over everything else. I couldn’t see the ceiling, and I could barely see the floor. The chiaroscuro made the walls look gray, although I suppose they might have had color. The elevator doors sealed behind us and I thought I heard the elevator climb back up.

For the first time, my surroundings genuinely seemed unearthly.

“Where are we?” one middy whispered.

“Beneath the captain’s bridge,” Dasgupta answered, her voice tight.

“My father’s work,” I sighed softly. My father. Daguerre, besting me from the grave. I should have known he would have thought to have these emergency pods placed on the bridge. Prepare for everything, was one of his mottoes.

Bachman observed, “These aren’t escape pods.”

“No. They’re waiting pods. The captain wants us to sleep until… Until there’s oxygen to breathe again. I guess.”

We stood staring at the pods. None of us was all that eager to climb back in. Was it really just a couple of hours ago that I had climbed out of one? Could it really have been so little time? And now, after thirty years of sleeping, to sleep again…

“How many of the crew are going to die?” Bachman asked, his voice so sad that I doubted, for the first time, that he was an Archontite terrorist. Or maybe he only worried for his Archontite brethren.

Dasgupta replied, “There are emergency pods all over the ship. But there aren’t enough for two crews simultaneously. So, probably half. Half of B Crew, and whatever of A Crew that couldn’t steal a pod in time.”

We stood in sickened silence for a moment. Dasgupta turned toward the midshipmen. “I don’t even know your names,” she said. “The only names I know are my class. Oh, God. How many of them are going to die?”

One midshipman said, his voice shaking terribly, “Hough. My name is Hough. And this is Leucaspis.” Hough had dark brown hair and blue eyes. Leucaspis had rust-colored hair and blue eyes. Maybe they were cousins.

I cleared my throat. “There are only four tanks.”

“Probably I’m not meant to have one,” Bachman volunteered. “I’m only here because Isley arrested me.” He swallowed hard. “I won’t fight you. You can all have your pods. I don’t – I mean, bogami, I can’t ask anyone to die for me. I’ll stay, long as I can, to keep watch. I guess it’ll be quick, right? And I’ll write it down, in case no one else has.”

In case, I knew he meant, something else went wrong and the ship never regenerated sufficient oxygen. In case the only way the history of the destruction of the Tomorrow II could be known was if he wrote it down and some other spaceship found us.

I wasn’t sure if we could get freezer burn, but I knew that no one was meant to be frozen forever. “I mean, I doubt your captain meant for an Archontite to live when her people died.”

“I think she did mean for you to live,” I said unexpectedly. Bachman’s questions, the captain’s complicity, Give Mr. Bachman the benefit of the doubt; I hadn’t forgotten the questions surrounding this mission, even in a crisis situation. Tesla used to say that I was like a bulldog, and perhaps he had been right.

I looked to Dasgupta. She nodded. “Okay, everyone, pile in. Start your transfusions.” She followed her own orders and plugged herself into one of the tanks.

At long last, I finally cut Bachman’s hands free. “What’s the plan here, Isley?” he muttered.

“My father helped design this ship,” I told him.

“I know.”

“So I know what it’s capable of.”

“Okay.”

I took a deep breath and found the oxygen too thin. We had been leaking oxygen for hours. I lowered my voice. “You are going to live, Bachman. Do you know why? Because I want the satisfaction of arresting you again. Next time, I want answers. And because I want to see your face when we wake up and find this ship full of dead bodies. I want to see your face, because I don’t think that even an Archontite terrorist could witness that and still be a terrorist. And if I believe that you aren’t, then you’ll give me the answers to every question I ask. And maybe I won’t send your Archontite corpse back to Earth as payment for every single crew member your countrymen killed on the Tomorrow.”

And I didn’t much care if he didn’t come out of cryo-stasis in perfect condition.

His voice soft, as well, Bachman said, “I’m just a historian, Isley.”

“And I’m just a girl,” I countered, and pushed him into the last pod. Then I stepped in, as well.

Dasgupta raised an eyebrow. “Will that work?”

I shrugged. “I hope so.”

“We are both going to die,” Bachman reflected, not understanding. Or maybe he understood, and he didn’t trust me. That was fine. I had just threatened to murder him. Might murder him still, by forcing him into the pod with me.

“We woke up a few hours ago,” I informed him. “There should be enough of Dr. McLeod’s serum left.”

“In whom?” he asked, sounding as politely interested as, perhaps, a mailman being asked about his industry. I couldn’t imagine anyone loving to be a mailman.

“Well, you. You haven’t been running all over the place.”

Bachman didn’t argue. I suppose he must have understood that sharing this pod at all was as much as I could bear to give him. But right before the door closed, he said, “Don’t send my body back, Isley. My family can’t pay to bury it.”

And liquid nitrogen rushed in and flash-froze us.

 

“Uuughhh,” I said, pushing the door open. I fell out, soaking wet, mindless of my grace this time around. I didn’t think that those pods were designed to be used by anyone so quickly in succession. I felt like I had freezer burn. The insides of my nostrils felt burned from the cold liquid nitrogen, and I smelled hair burning.

Bachman landed on top of me. I collapsed back onto the chilly metal floor, bruising my elbows and knees. “I’m so heavy,” he complained. I pushed him off of me.

This time, I didn’t care about stretching. I wanted to know how long I had been asleep. I checked my watch. It had been a gift from Tesla, the first watch he had ever built, and he’d worn it himself for years before he gave it to me. For that reason, the watch was extra special to me; it belonged to me because it didn’t. Tesla’s watch told me the star date. “Two years!”

Bachman rolled onto his back. He giggled to himself. “Hey, Isley. We slept together for two years. Ha! Heeheehee…” Then, still staring at the ceiling, “I really thought I was going to die.” His thin chest rose up and down, sure and slow, and at least I didn’t have his death on my hands. Yet.

“You still might,” I told him, feeling surly, and punched in the OPEN code for Dasgupta, Leucaspis, and Hough. When I turned around, Bachman was looking at me and frowning. I glared at him.

“Hey, Isley. Have you noticed…why aren’t you flying?”

Shock drained all the blood from my face. I looked down at my feet. They stuck to the ground, of course. I kicked, and my feet came right back down to the floor. Were pulled there, actually. By gravity.

Dasgupta clung to the door of her pod. Her long, dark hair hung over her face, and she looked as shocked and frightened as I felt. “Isley,” she breathed, “what planet are we on?” 

6: Chapter Six

Chapter 6: Crew of Five

I scrambled to get to the elevator that would take us back up to the captain's bridge. Dasgupta grabbed my hand before I could punch the button that would call the elevator back down to us. "Wait," she said. "Prepare yourself first. Dead bodies…"

I glanced over my shoulder at the midshipmen. "Leucaspis, Hough," I said, and the boys jumped to attention, "keep an eye on Bachman." Leucaspis glanced, surprised, at the Archontite boy. He still sat on the floor, but he had taken out a pad of paper and scribbled down notes.

Figures. Bring an artisan aboard, and he's useless in a crisis.

So why did the captain want me to save him?

"Ma'am?" Leucaspis asked. A reddish-brown curl tumbled down over his forehead, and his eyes spread open very wide and blue. He looked incredibly young, like a toddler. I felt a surge of protectiveness for him, and for Hough, who didn't look any older. And, oh, but why did they look at me with so much desperation on their faces?

My temples throbbed, my joints ached, and I had to pee worse than ever in my life. But my head cleared, little by little, from the aftereffects of cryo-stasis, and I remembered Captain Grey towering over everyone else on the bridge by sheer force of will. Protect the crew. Save the ship. Everything else came second.

All of us trained as stellaucts, but Dasgupta and I wore the lieutenants' blue badge; as officers, though just a couple of months older than the others, we had rank. We were the closest things these teenagers had to commanders. And if they needed orders, even from someone who knew as little as they did, then the least I could do was give them.

"Just keep an eye on him," I said. "We're going to have a quick look around, and we'll be right back."

Hough was on his feet and raring to go. "I'll come with you, second lieutenants." Then his professionalism gave way to the argumentativeness of a child. "Look, in zero-g, I'm sure you can hold your own. But you weigh, what, ninety pounds? Dasgupta looks to be about the same. I can keep an eye out for you," he finally offered.

I examined him. True, he weighed at least double what I did. But when had that ever stopped me? As a stellauct, I had self-defense training. Thanks to Tesla, I knew my way around firearms and knives both. But, oh, no, something else went on here. Hough wanted to come. It was how he would feel best.

I wondered at that. Why did some people feel better when they attacked someone else? Did it distract them, or did they just feel the need to disprove their own fears more than the rest of us? Why couldn't they recognize that surviving life in these shambolic human bodies constituted an achievement in itself? I didn't understand it. And I didn't fully understand how either wispy Leucaspis or rumbling-voiced Hough made the ship.

In my head, Tesla said, I don't know about Leucaspis yet, but I'd wager Hough's a grade A muscle man. Simple psych profile, too. Mommy issues, one of the common phobias – arachnophobia, maybe – and no close relationships. A standard antisocial loner; a basic trooper. Easy to command.

I trusted the Project Hercules board, and I didn't mind the extra muscle, so I agreed. In part, at least, to shut Tesla up.

My head had just defrosted from a flash-freeze, and my crew and I had washed up on some unknown planet. Give me a break.

"And, Bachman," I added, "don't think about wandering off." He was too busy writing to even hear me. Leucaspis looked happy playing babysitter. "Off we go, then," I said, and the three of us stepped into the elevator.

I sagged against the elevator wall. Launch, my racing around the ship, and Captain Grey's death drained my batteries. The whole way up, Dasgupta stood with her arms across her chest and tapping her foot. She dealt with stress by taking it as a personal insult, something she could fight with teeth and nails, then, I guessed. Very well. At least we would probably win a fight. But I made sure to lead the way. My own violence upon Bachman was worthy of an official write-up; the ship had a strict zero-violence policy.

Unless absolutely necessary.

We stepped out of the elevator.

Dusted with cobwebs, the bridge looked to have been abandoned. Blaring red emergency lights flickered despondently. I took a deep breath. I couldn't tell, with the dark lights and the darker shadows, if they lay there. The bodies. What would a body two years dead look like? Would it be just bones yet? I could deal with just bones. But if –

"Isley," Hough said. "Come see." He ushered me over to the captain's chair, upon which sat a single key. The start-up key.

We could turn the ship back on.

Was this Captain Grey's last gift?

Do you know what I love about this ship, Isley? I love the people that it carries.

Make me proud, Isley.

I wanted to scream, Well, you know, that's goddamn hard to do when all of you keep dying.

A burning sensation started in my eyes. I swallowed hard, flexed my fingers, and forced the rattling box in the back of my head closed. Shut up. Go away. Leave me alone.

I turned the key in my hand. After a time, I closed my hand around it and looked up at my crew. My crew of two people. "Let's get a look around first. I want to know what we're dealing with before anyone else knows what they're dealing with."

"Aye, Captain," Hough said quietly.

I rounded on him instantly. "Don't call me that, Hough. It was only two years. They might still be alive." And it was true that I hadn't yet seen any bodies. But as we exited the bridge, I saw one in the brief flash of red light that came on just as we left. I knew at a glance that it wasn't the captain. But it was someone. My crew.

Out in the hallway, I tried to punch in my access code to get the narrow emergency hatch recessed into the wall open. We needed those flashlights, and these emergency hatches held other stuff, too – stuff we could have used. I punched my code in three times. Nothing happened.

"Ship's not on," Hough said, clutching a jagged piece of metal he'd picked up from the floor. Wrecking on this planet tore up the hallway; floor and ceiling both missed tiles, and panels had popped out of the walls. I frowned and spread my feet, momentarily distracted. Whatever planet we landed on, the ship had settled at a steep degree. Hanging out in the belly of the ship made the tilt more difficult to discern, but now that we stood looking down a long hall, I gauged the angle of tilt at about forty-five degrees. My boots clung to the ground, of course. But I wondered about the colossal greenhouses and terrariums we carried.

Two years? Two years had been all it took for this ship to fill up with oxygen? I took a deep breath. Stale oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. Any planet could be Earth, I thought, by that one watchword alone. Human beings breathed on it.

I swallowed hard against a wave of vertigo. My ship had no power and tilted at a precarious angle, and we had crash-landed on a foreign planet. Half of my crew had died, and at the end of the hall, I could see another body draped over the stairway railing.

Thirty-two years, eight months, and four hours ago, Daguerre and Tesla had died.

"Emergency power should open this," Dasgupta frowned, and stepped forward to try her own access code.

"The ship is in lockdown," I realized suddenly. "The captain – she must have locked the ship down before oxygen ran out."

Dasgupta wondered aloud, "So she left us the key to turn the ship back on?" She, too, sounded as though she didn't quite believe this logic. We thought it plausible, but…pain spiked through my skull. I wondered suddenly if, as Bachman's brain defrosted, he would die slowly. What a ridiculous thought – he had only been frozen for a split second before the vacuum of oxygen preserved our bodies – but my stomach turned.

I hadn't eaten in a quarter of a century.

"Hough," I said, "break open the emergency hatch."

He swung his hunk of metal like a baseball player. Muscles rippled up and down his back and arms. A clenched grin of grim pleasure bent his face.

Perhaps I ought to have brought Leucaspis along instead of Hough. What was I letting Hough's fear turn him into?

Let him, said Tesla. He could be extraordinarily destructive, if you encouraged him.

The emergency hatch broke open, and Dasgupta and I stuck our arms into the wall and fished out the supplies. We found a small fire extinguisher, a medikit, and several flashlights. That was all. I gave flashlights to Dasgupta and Hough with orders to keep them turned off unless necessary; I didn't want to waste any resource that we had.

We stopped at the stairwell and looked down. Seeing the corpse, Dasgupta murmured a low oath and something that sounded strangely like a prayer. Hough turned pale and shoved the body over the railing before I could stop him. The angle of the ship forced the body to smash into the railing on the floor below and fall behind the rail. Getting to the stairwell had been an uphill climb.

"We should split up," I decided.

Dasgupta and Hough stared at me wordlessly. I forged on. "The ship is quiet. Our food system is only accessible on the main power grid." And I had been thinking a lot about food since I had woken up. "Everybody else onboard has been dead or asleep for a very long time. We'll each take ten floors and do a sweep. We'll meet up here in two hours. Agreed?"

Dasgupta challenged me. "The ship is broken, Isley. We should power on and do a scan before we go wandering around."

I drew back, surprised. I had expected Dasgupta to wordlessly back me up; I had not expected to have to win my way with her. I debated what to do next. If I steamrolled over her by force, she would come to resent me. I had seen this happen with instructors and students. If I let her have her way, she would not respect me. I actually needed to win the argument. Why did she have to argue with me at all? Was it about pride, or doubt, or something else? I had always had Tesla to explain things like that to me. Gravity pulled on my heavy, room-temperature limbs, and I fought to pilot my body the way I'd pilot the ship. I pushed my shoulders back and tilted my chin up, softening my harsh tone before I spoke.

We were all stellaucts here, I told myself. There was no reason not to tell the truth. "We may not have enough power to turn this ship back on. The captain lived long enough to lock down the ship and leave us the key. She must also have lived long enough to program our pods."

Hough gasped, seeing where this headed. "We might be on a dark planet."

I nodded grimly.

"Dark planets" was the name coined by young stellaucts for comets flying through space on an inevitable collision course with something or other out here in the infinite black void; comets, by virtue of lacking suns, couldn't sustain life. On rare occasions, "dark planet" was a term we attributed to planets with never-ending storms on their surfaces, too. Either way, without solar power to recharge our power stores, we might not have much time until we could get down to engineering and assess how much fuel we had left.

Even I had not the stomach to voice our final alternative. If we hadn't traveled too far away from Earth, we could abandon all but the part of the ship intended to take us stellaucts back to Earth after twenty years of colonization on Vesta. But that meant consigning our cargo to an eternity of frozen sleep on a dark planet.

"Okay," Dasgupta relented, and we split up.

I gave Hough the bottom ten floors. All he had to do was walk through the pod bays and ensure that the cargo and stellaucts slept well in hand. The pods, too, could not be opened without main power. He also had a couple of greenhouse floors, but I ordered him to stay out of those. The greenhouse might have become a vacuum for oxygen if the reinforced glass that made up its structure had shattered.

Most of Dasgupta's assignment, floors 11-20, were greenhouse. But she also had two floors of engineering.

The top ten floors were mine. I assigned myself the captain's quarters, the crew's quarters, and the nuclear core. I made the assignments deliberately, knowing exactly what nightmare I sentenced myself to. That's what a captain did, though, I thought, and reached out from within myself to find my fingertips and my toes. Otherwise, I might have curled up in a ball and sat beside the commander's console for several hours. Besides, I couldn't afford to shrink into myself much further. I was already the smallest person in my class. If I shrank any more, I might cease to exist altogether.

We split up with the promise to meet at that spot in two hours.

I began my search by working my way through the captain's quarters with care. It took me fifteen minutes to get through her door. I could get in just fine; it was that, staring at the knob, I could not make myself want to go in. Finally, I pushed the door open and took three long strides into the room.

Stellaucts' quarters consisted of a single room with a bed, a sink, and a portal in the wall for deliveries of food and clothing. The captain's quarters were more spacious; she had a double bed, a wardrobe, and even a nightstand. The lamp had slid off of the table and shattered on the floor.

Shattered on landing, perhaps? I needed to get a good look at my ship the way a doctor needs to look at her patient's injury. I had to know how damaged the ship was.

The captain's quarters held her things, but not her. The bed had been stripped bare of its coverings, although I could not figure out why. The wardrobe drawers hung open. Rifling through them, I detected no absence of clothing. I surprised myself by finding that the captain had civilian clothing, not something I had. Perhaps the drawers, too, had fallen open during landing.

I left her dark and cool quarters, not bothering to close the door behind me.

Cool, I realized suddenly. The ship held steady at a temperate seventy degrees. But as I climbed back uphill to the stairwell, I felt the temperature steadily climb. It seemed as though there might be a leak in the nuclear core. Or perhaps it was simply my imagination, I reminded myself, taking note of my own pulse. It raced feverishly, and my empty stomach roiled with digestive juices.

I stopped down on Deck 3, bemused. Was I scared? I couldn't remember what scared felt like. Maybe I was nervous.

"Stop biting your fingernails," Tesla rolled his eyes and pulled my hand away from me. He rolled back onto his stomach and played with the tablet he held in his hand. I tucked my hands under a pillow to keep them out of sight and joined him. "Honestly, Isley, I don't know why you're so nervous. You know you aced this." Our exam scores loaded on the screen. I had bested him by three points. He shook his head slowly, then smiled. "Captain Isley Edison," he said, tasting the words for the first time. They sounded fitting in his mouth, and I felt as if I had actually been promoted. He reached under the pillow and squeezed my hand. "My brilliant captain."

I kept going until I reached the lead doors that led to the nuclear core.

The stellaucts' quarters had been clear of living tenants. Dead stellaucts piled up on their bunks, halfway off them, against the door, against the closet. Every time I had to open another stellauct's door to look in for their dead body, I wondered which I feared more: that another dead body would greet my eyes, or that someone living would attack me.

I recalled the captain giving quiet orders to her first lieutenants. Her orders must have been for them to tell their stellaucts to prepare for certain death. So they had gone to their quarters to keep out of the way. I closed the door to this dormitory wing firmly behind me, my hands cold and slick with sweat. Leucaspis and Hough were never to see that. We'd have to clean it out at some point, though. Many of the bodies hadn't finished decomposing, and the rooms reeked of bile and rot.

Twice I heard the ship groan, settling into the ground, and jumped, thinking one of the dead bodies tried to speak. Flesh hanging in loose rivulets from their cheeks, eyeballs hanging from their sockets halfway down his or her – I couldn't tell anymore – face, jumpsuit soaking wet with decay, I swallowed convulsively over and over again.

The nuclear core's heavy lead doors had been engraved with swirls and spirals; the pattern was a contribution from a local elementary school wishing us well on our project. Usually, the arching lines looked childish to me. Today, they looked the way stars looked when you burned up your energy supply and shot through solar winds and stars so fast that your eyes cannot process the information.

I pushed against the lead doors experimentally. My body was heavier on this planet, I noted. I had been waiting for weariness from the cryo-pod to wear off before I committed to the notion. But, no; gravity was stronger here. And I was even heavier wearing the radiation suit worn by nuclear engineers. I pulled the heavy plastic suit on over my orange jumpsuit. The nuclear engineer's suit should have been connected to an oxygen tank, but the dead bodies draped over the oxygen tanks too unnerved me to check any of them for any dregs of oxygen.

Two years was not enough to turn a body into a skeleton, I had learned. I locked the lesson away in the back of my mind with all the other stuff I didn't want to remember.

So I sealed off the hole in my suit for the oxygen tube, held my breath, and pushed open the lead door. Once inside, I took the time to close the door after me.

The nuclear core was a giant tube that ran through the middle of the ship from Decks 4 through 6: thirty feet of glowing green uranium pellets sealed within a pulsing translucent tank.

I checked the Geiger counter attached to my suit. Trace radiation, nothing more. I checked the glowing crystalline tube for leaks. Clear.

For two years this very delicate nuclear core sat unattended, and time had done no damage at all. I glanced again at the pile of bodies just to make sure that they were dead. I was running out of breath, so taking heavy steps across the room, I made myself walk all the way around the core, searching the levels above and below me for any movement at all. The core chamber glowed the sickly green light of the uranium pellets. If the ship was ever to melt down, the released radiation from this chamber could melt down the landmass of middle North America.

I was glad to get out of the chamber, taking panting breaths as I leaned against the lead doors, but I felt poisoned with radiation sickness. My stomach churned violently. Either I was extremely hungry, which was a possibility, or I was sure that there was indeed someone else alive and awake on this ship.

Best-case scenario: both possibilities were true.

At least, then, my nausea was purely physical and not psychological.

Decks 7-9 yielded up nothing of particular interest. More exploded panels; more fallen tiles on from the floor and ceiling. Wiring spewed out of the walls on every level – surely an electrical nightmare. Wires snaked all throughout this ship; the leaked oxygen would have affected every single damn system on this ship.

If we turned this ship back on, there was every chance that we would blow it up and wipe the landmass of Russia off of this planet, or comet, whichever the hell it was.

Failing, and letting something happen to the ship, frustrated me.

Deck 10, the Archontite crew quarters, yielded something of particular note. Here, too, there dead bodies proliferated. I stopped, standing over one; there were pieces ripped out of it like something had eaten this body. I was glad I forbade Hough from investigating the greenhouses, but it seemed as though what lived there had accessed the rest of the ship. I put my hand on the wire on my belt, which could be used as a whip or a garrot. The main problem with the Archontite quarters was that the crew's bodies had slid around even more than Confederate crew due to the ship's tilt. They blocked the doorways, so I had to step over them when I entered; and sometimes they slid past me, out of the open door, and ran up against the stairwell railing.

I only had interest in one Archontite, though. Like Confederate quarters, each room was marked with the name of each tenant, so Bachman hadn't been hard to find. There were two names to each door: one for A Crew and one for B Crew.

What was the point of befriending anyone on A crew? I wondered. Bachman had lied to pull a statement out of me after my exam and declared that the basis of a friendship. But A Crew and B Crew would not meet again for decades. They would meet again only when the ship returned to Earth, and by then, the most interesting part of their life would be over.

None of this explained just how an Archontite had come to sleep with B crew when he should have been taking records with A crew. Either Bachman really didn't know what had happened, or he was an excellent liar. And I did not think he could lie very well, since he hadn't lied to me before. Which meant that someone onboard this ship had reprogrammed his pod. But for what purpose? I didn't know.

I pushed Bachman's door open. Unlike anyone else, he'd strewn his personal belongings all over the room. Notes, mostly – scribbles on paper he had made to himself. I picked up one piece, intending to read it, only to find the characters unrecognizable. Russian? Probably. He'd piled dirty laundry on his bed. Amazing. In a few hours, he had generated this much garbage. The only other thing of note was a small, glossy black box with a closed lock at the front of it. I zipped it into the pocket at my hip and left.

Any Archontite had as much right to be a part of the crew as any Confederate did, as far as I was concerned, as long as he intended to do his job and do it well. When Bachman proved that to me, he would earn the right to be treated like a part of the crew. Until then, he did not have my trust.

Artisans, I thought. What a useless trade. Couldn't have said it better myself, Tesla would have grumbled to me.

Two hours had gone by. I returned to Deck 2 to wait for Dasgupta and Hough. Dasgupta showed up right on time. Her report was that the engineering department sealed itself tight due to the lockdown of the ship. The huge batteries there, and the colossal fuel tanks, were useless to us if we could not access them. We spoke a little about burning a hole into the wall with a blowtorch to get at those batteries and tanks, although both of us doubted that a blowtorch could get through the lockdown walls. And where would we get a blowtorch? Perhaps there was another way in, like my hidden access to the electrical engineering hub behind the wall of the hallway.

Finally, after half an hour of waiting, she and I had to agree that Hough should have shown up. "Should we get Leucaspis and Bachman first?"

Safety in numbers, I suspected she thought. Dasgupta's presence calmed me; I knew her, at least, to have the same priorities as myself. She didn't have to like me. She only had to complete the mission. But Dasgupta was proving to be an excellent officer, and her instincts for reaching out to more of the crew complemented my own approach.

Just one thing. Dasgupta was keeping secrets. I became aware of them when she fell silent and clenched the zipper of her jumpsuit at her throat with one hand. And she wouldn't look at me.

Now, Isley, my father said in my head, you mustn't cover for him. Tell me now, did you hack my computer?

My crew, I thought in despair, are they all so terribly fallible?

"I can't see how either one of them could help. But…yes, I agree. There's no point leaving them there any longer." These top twenty decks, anyway, we knew to be safe.

"I'm hungry, Isley," Dasgupta warned me. "And so are you. So keep your temper in check if you're going to talk to any of us. This is a five – four – no, five-man crew operating a ship designed for hundreds of crew members. I see your frustration. We can do almost anything, Isley, but they will not do it for you unless you prove to them your value."

Her confrontation, again, surprised me. But she had a point. And I had just noted how well she could serve as a binding agent among the crew. But her last words – "your value" – were too much like words of my father's, and I refused to acknowledge them, the way I refused to acknowledge memories of him. "Have I proved my value to you, then?"

Dasgupta's eyes lost the hard, flinty look one wore into a fistfight. My father taught me that; he said, True authority bends the wills of the others. Think of yourself as a captain, and watch them fall in line. That was about the extent of his social advice, too. I guess he hadn't been one to talk. He spent too much time in his lab, and around kids, to socialize much.

She didn't answer, and the longer the silence went on, the more I realized she didn't have to. She followed my orders in the simulation, and she picked up the slack for me with the others when I got beyond my depth.

"How?" I asked.

Dasgupta just shook her head.

"Where's Hough?" Bachman asked the moment we walked in. He had been lying on his back – the laziest person I've ever met, I grumbled to myself – and he sat up worriedly when Dasgupta and I arrived. Leucaspis looked up from his lap. He had been sitting, his hands on his forehead, and I noticed, again, unsettled, how terribly fragile he looked.

Dasgupta had value that I had not been able to assess at once. Leucaspis must, too, I thought. If only I could see their files. I wouldn't have to pay such close attention to them.

Leucaspis launched to his feet. "Edison, wh-where is he?"

"I don't know. We're going to go get him. And then," I sighed, thinking of all the work we would have to do on this ship before we could even turn it on, "we'll eat."

Leucaspis and Dasgupta led the way to Hough's decks. Both of them looked edgy with nervousness, and I knew better than to force them to bottle their anxiety from years of practice drills. Better to let them vent it here and think clearly in a moment of crisis, even if they did annoy me.

"You're learning," Bachman said, his voice pitched very low. He studied the other two stellaucts, as well. "Their strengths, and their weaknesses, probably."

"Why do you say it like that?" I demanded.

"No reason," he shrugged. "It's just that it's like you're assimilating them, like the ship can be repaired with Dasgupta's dogged loyalty or Leucaspis's bleeding heart. That's just not like the captain I saw at your exam," he shrugged again.

As captain, I had to command a whole ship. It was for lower officers to get to know their underlings. Was Bachman recommending I be demoted, then? Did he think I was not up to the task at hand?

Bachman prattled on, "I've been studying Leucaspis, too. Sweet kid. Rubs his left shoulder like he hurt it, so don't assign him to your left guard. If I were you, I'd put him on offense and Hough on defense. Leucaspis will act quickly and efficiently; Hough would take too much pleasure in attacking. Hough strikes me as the kind of guy who needs a purpose in a crisis so's not to spin out."

I kept walking, setting my lips and not looking at Bachman. My pulse raced, and my stomach finally settled. "You have experience with tactics?" I had noticed Leucaspis's nervous tic. But I had not thought to swap him with Hough. Their characters had not presented themselves to me so clearly.

Bachman put his hand on my shoulder. "I'm just trying to be useful to you, Isley. History books. Reenactments on Tuesday evenings, too – I got to play Ivan Durak."

"Why?" I asked, suspicious.

"I dunno. I don't even look Russian. Oh, you meant –" He snorted. "Are you kidding? Sticking to you the first time undeniably saved my neck. I'm sticking with you to the bitter end."

"You forget I threatened to kill you myself."

Bachman's tone changed. "Look, Isley. Leucaspis saw his first body. He's going to cry – go comfort him." And he nudged me forward until I stood beside Dasgupta, who held Leucaspis by the shoulders. He didn't pay me any attention; he was too preoccupied looking at the dead body beside him.

We don't have time for this, Tesla sighed.

Hough, I thought. We just have to find Hough, and then we can get back to work. Finally, we can get to work.

"Did you know him?" I asked Leucaspis, guessing that the body was a man. Mutely, horrified, he shook his head. I massaged my temples. "Then why are you crying?"

"Because I could have!" he said, his voice watery. Ah, I thought, understanding in a single, dazzling thought. This was empathy. Was this what earned him a place with Project Hercules? But why? What use was this to a crew?

I still didn't understand. I tired of not understanding, and I tired more of asking questions. "Leucaspis, I am sorry. But these men and women are dead. And we are alive. There is nothing that they could offer you now, so you must turn away from them and to us."

I hadn't finished speaking before he broke free of Dasgupta and threw his arms around me in a hug. There was nothing inappropriate about it; although he was a teenaged boy, and I was a teenaged girl, Leucaspis clung to me like I was his mother. "Sorry, Isley," he hiccupped against my orange jumpsuit.

Bachman pantomimed putting his arms in a circle in front of him – like a ballerina? No, hug the boy back – so, bemusedly, I wrapped my arms around Leucaspis's shoulders. It was as if my touch revitalized him completely; he straightened and seemed to grow several inches, until he towered over me, and all of the fragility about him crystallized into marble-esque steadiness.

I stopped, amazed and confused, as I watched Dasgupta point Leucaspis back on track and hurry to keep up. "Way to go, Isle," Bachman said, clapping me on the back. "You just validated his existence. Very Moby-Dick, sans whale." And he hurried after the others.

Shaking my head, I broke into a jog.

I had three things on my mind.

Find Hough. Eat. Fix my ship.

Not necessarily in that order.

7: Chapter Seven

Chapter 7: Hough

When we got down to Deck 21, I made Dasgupta fall back to guard our rear. I put Leucaspis on point, Bachman on our left flank, and myself on our right. True, we stellaucts had had some combat training, but it wasn't at all advanced. We had what training police officers did. Without smoke bombs or tear gas or flash-bang grenades, we hardly posed a formidable threat.

But Bachman's battle advice had piqued my interest. I found the advice strangely helpful, and I was not fool enough to ignore him. Of course, we would have to be tested in this arrangement, but I wondered what else I could use from his strange unscientific mind. As soon as we had a moment of rest, I intended to get him alone and start getting answers. There was a reason the TI was targeted, he had said.

There was a reason my father and best friend had died.

There was someone I could punish for it.

The greenhouse and wildlife sector was green. The hallways glowed eerily with flashing red emergency lights, and misfiring electrical systems sometimes caused the emergency claxon to screech out a few notes. The first time it happened, Dasgupta jumped and turned so pale that I thought she might be dying of exsanguination. Bachman reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, and the next time the siren rang, Dasgupta's eyes darted to him, and then to me. But she didn't jump, and she stayed focused.

My temper began to run a few degrees hotter. Dasgupta's insubordination had been annoying but forgivable. Bachman's subtle insinuations that I ought to be demoted were infuriating, but, ultimately, without foundation. But if he was planning to usurp me, he was out of his Archontite mind. I had earned the right to someday be captain. I had studied the necessary skill set for years. I would smother him to death with a pillow before I saw him lead my crew to their certain, stupid deaths.

I took two deliberate, deep breaths.

At Deck 24, I considered splitting up the crew again. I would take Bachman, and Leucaspis and Dasgupta could go on together. But I didn't want to risk losing another portion of my crew. So we tread down the tilted stairs, and across the hallway leading to the wildlife sanctuary, together.

Dr. McLeod's serum was not designed for any other species but human. Animals could not be frozen. This meant that the livestock that the Tomorrow II carried had to be cared for across thirty years of interstellar space travel by the teams of wildlife care that made up a portion of the standard crew.

Unlike our orange jumpsuits, and Bachman's white artisan one, theirs were green. I saw no green-suited bodies in the hall, and guessed that all of the dead wildlife crew would be in the colossal terrarium behind the double-weight steel doors, the main entrance into the terrarium. The walls in this portion of the ship were translucent, so as we approached the doors, all four of us craned our necks to look through the see-through walls of the hallway.

I had seen blueprints of this part of the ship, of course. But I had never had the chance to see it in person. And it impressed me.

It was as if the TII transported several square kilometers of rainforest in the largest cargo bay we had on the ship. The terrarium constituted one wide-open space that housed thousands of species of fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Hundreds of thousands of plants generated oxygen in this room that fans piped to the rest of the ship. It had taken two years for this room to compensate for the loss of oxygen the ship endured when it leaked and Captain Grey froze us again.

The forest, replete with green trees – palm trees, perhaps? There were large fronds near the top, and I could not think of the right word – and vines, was also steeped in a thin layer of fog. Perhaps it was morning on this planet. We would know for sure what planet we were on when we turned the ship back on and checked the onboard computer's flight history. The humid air weighed against my skin, even inside my suit, but my skin retained the chill from the hall. I never felt at home in nature; I didn't know why.

Leucaspis stopped at the doors and stepped aside to let me open them. Good, I thought. That's what I want him to do. Dasgupta said, "These doors should be locked." These were some of the few doors on the ship that could only be accessed with a passcode. "And they aren't open," Dasgupta went on, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself of something she knew not to be true. We all saw the ivy growing under the cracks at the bottom of the door. "Perhaps Hough never came down here."

Without waiting for my command, Bachman pressed a button on the panel beside the door. The doors split open laterally. None of us walked in, and the doors closed after a moment. "Electrical damage?" he suggested, and started to press the button again.

"Stop!" I snapped, and his hand froze. "There are living things in there, Bachman, creatures that can kill you in a moment's thought. We should prepare ourselves."

He frowned. Wrinkles sprang into existence on his forehead. "Creatures? What do you mean, like hippos and stuff?"

"Hippos," Leucaspis snickered.

"Hippopotami kill more people per year than sharks," Bachman answered primly. "Hippos can be dangerous. Shut up, Leuk."

I put my head in my hands. "Would you two be quiet! Yes, Bachman, creatures. Chimeras." My lip curled. "A detestable science, if you ask me." The words were a direct quote from my father, but I agreed. The purpose was to create sheep that produced twice as much wool – which meant cross-breeding them with animals much larger, like rhinosceri and, indeed, hippos. There were other animals, too, bred for other purposes. Supposedly they were to aid with the colonization and domestication of the planet, but I did not need very much battle training to recognize that reindeer bred to never lose their antlers and grow to the size of dump trucks were not just for pulling sleds. Especially when their antlers had been sharpened to knife-points.

Bachman's face darkened. "I didn't know this ship carried chimeras."

"Well, you do now," Dasgupta sighed. From her glance, I knew that she was wondering what I was: did all Archontite not know, or was it just the artisans who were not informed? And what did it mean that they weren't? Now, more than ever, I wanted to extract those answers from Bachman. But first, Hough.

I strode down the hall and went down another floor. In the wildlife sector's offices, I found several weapons. There were two tranquilizer-firing rifles, an electrified stun baton, and something that looked like a cross between a spear and a harpoon. I also found several boxes of syringes with tranquilizer drugs inside of them. Leaving the caps on over the needles, I pocketed at least half a dozen. We divvied the supplies up among ourselves; Bachman got a few of the syringes and the stun baton, and Dasgupta and Leucaspis got the rest of the syringes and the rifles. I took the spear-harpoon for myself.

Back at the doors to the terrarium, I said, "Be on the lookout for Hough. At the first sign of a chimera, fall back. If they are free from their cages, Hough is as good as dead. Got it?"

No one looked happy about the commands, but they didn't argue with me, either. I did not want to abandon Hough, but somebody had to make the tough call and preserve the few lives we had left. I wondered why the captain had not frozen herself in a pod below her bridge. Four stellaucts and a historian were hardly more valuable than a captain. I thought again about the orders she had given her first lieutenants. What else had she told them in those last moments?

What did I not know?

I leveled a suspicious look at Bachman. "What are you eyeing me for, Edison?" he asked.

"We'll deal with this together, but make no mistake," I said, keeping my voice low, so that the others couldn't hear it. "You once told me the Tomorrow I had a reason for crashing. I still want to know what it is. I don't much care how I get it out of you, either."

Bachman hooked his elbow over the top of a filing cabinet and crossed his ankles. He didn't move, didn't speak; just watched me walk out of the room. And, somehow, I felt like he had won that round.

The way one corner of his mouth tilted up, his clever green eyes, his dark, unbrushed hair all annoyed me. He reached right into my internal thermostat and turned it up, and I had to take several deep breaths before I could be certain I wouldn't blow. Ribbons of steam curled off of my skin in wispy tendrils in the humid, balmy room.

Bachman pressed the button on the panel again, and the doors whooshed open. The four of us stepped over the threshold. The smells of the jungle hit me like a wave of water at the beach. The forest was hot and damp and so richly oxygen-laden that I struggled to breathe for a moment. It smelled lush and earthy and wooden. Bachman breathed deeply, as though this smell was something he had dearly missed.

The doors opened immediately onto an overgrown path. I craned my head back, searching for a catwalk that I knew should have been suspended from the ceiling. This was the one room on the ship where up was always up. It was a perfectly cylindrical room with curved walls, floor, and ceiling. No matter which direction the ship moved, the orientation of this terrarium never changed. To get the trees to climb upwards, they had had to be planted years before the ship took flight. To trick them into continuing to grow in that same direction, light panels stretched across the ceiling. They were not on now, however. The rainforest was dimly lit with grey light.

"Starlight?" Dasgupta suggested, her face set seriously. She held her rifle, pointing downward, at her shoulder. She positioned her finger safely over the trigger guard. She was used to firing guns, then. Interesting.

"Or an emergency light," I pointed out. "This could still be a dark planet." The plants were still alive, yes, but the sprinklers that fed them were on automatic timers and back-up power. It was possible that the lighting on the ceiling had only just given out.

Bachman tried to take a step, holding his stun staff uncertainly, and tripped over the end of it. At the same time, he whacked himself on the head with the other end of his staff. Stupid, useless artisans, I muttered to myself.

Leucaspis took a breath and shouted, "Hough! Ciaran, are you here!?"

Something big and heavy moved in the trees, and we all froze. "Maybe shouting like that isn't such a good idea," Bachman said nervously.

We still clustered close to the door. So close that it would have been foolish to leave before we saw what we were dealing with. I stared hard at the trees, waiting to see what would come out, when I saw something move in the grass marching away from the trees. The grass led to a little swamp, I remembered vaguely from the maps of this place. Somewhere in here, there were real glass greenhouses where food was grown. The crew would never eat any of that, but the colonists had a jump-start on their new civilization. I leaned forward and narrowed my eyes, focusing on the movement in the brush.

It was a hand, waving. A hand with blood running down from the palm and wrist. A dark-skinned hand I recognized.

"Hough," I breathed, and bolted before I gave myself another moment of thought. The trees were between the rest of us and this wounded boy. If I could just get him back to the door before whatever it was came out of the trees, then we could lock down this part of the ship forever. Or perhaps burn it out and put it to some other use, like a baseball field or a bowling alley.

The grass was strangely thick and soft and springy under my feet. I was used to the hard metal and plastic surfaces of the ship, and my movements were off. A twig snapped on the ground behind me, and I shot a frightened look over my shoulder. It was not the giant chimera monster lumbering out of the trees just yet. It was my crew, Leucaspis and Dasgupta and Bachman, pumping their arms and legs to keep up with me.

Following me, even though they didn't know where I was going.

We splashed into the swamp and I told the rest to stay back, knowing that if I fell into quicksand I would need a lot of help getting out. In the dim light, I lost track of where I had seen Hough. We all kept shooting nervous looks at the trees, hoping the monster would go back to sleep and stay away from us. "Hough," I said, as loudly as I dared. "Hough, where are you?"

"Isley," he croaked back. Leucaspis darted forward, into the swamp, to reach him. As if he was expecting it, Bachman threw his arm out and both boys fell down at the edge of the swamp. Grudgingly, I was grateful to Bachman. "Isley," Hough croaked. "Isley…"

I brushed away what he was saying. "Hough, how badly are you hurt?" He was lying down in the steeped, smelly water of the swamp. I could not see him among the dark shadows and the darkness of a sunless sky. I began feeling around the grainy mud, searching for my lost crew member.

My hand touched something slimy, and my heart began to beat faster. "H-Hough, is that you?"

The mud bubbled and frothed, and small black things crawled out of the mire and swarmed up my arm. Before I had a chance to react, Hough's recognizable dark-skinned arm rose out of the growing hole in the middle of the swamp, as well. It was severed at the shoulder. "Isley, Isley, Isley," chimed the little black creatures bubbling out of the swamp, a chorus of my name. "Isley, Isley," said the giant chimera ants. Part bug, part songbird, part swamp beetle, maybe. An ant bit my arm and ripped away a chunk of my sleeve. And all the while, Hough was calling my name, or had been calling my name, somewhere in this terrarium, as he lay dying.

I screamed.

"Isley!" Bachman shouted, and the chimeras' voices shifted to mimic his voice, higher and clearer than Hough's. Bachman began cursing fluently in Russian. All three members of my crew rushed into the swamp to reach me.

"Stop!" I cried, blinking back burning tears of pain as the ants ripped away more of the fabric of my uniform. They wormed their way into the holes of my jumpsuit and began biting my flesh. Biting, not tearing away. Perhaps there was something of a spider in them, as well, and they were planning to paralyze me and eat me alive, slowly.

I ground my teeth together. I sank calf-deep in mud and bracken, and the sting of a dozen mutated ant bites cut into my concentration. But if my crew came down into this mud with me, they would surely become trapped, as well. "I'll come to you," I ground out. Leucaspis and Bachman fell over – no, got on their stomachs – and reached out to me. Dasgupta ran in the other direction.

"Isley, Isley," Bachman's voice called. Not his voice. The bugs'. I tried to take a step toward them and tripped. My right knee began to sink, as well. Was this how Hough died? Well, it wasn't how I was going to die. Black spots danced in my vision. My consciousness started to slip away from me. Even if I got out of this muck, the poison stinging in my veins might kill me. Still, I kept trying to dig my left foot out and take a step. "Isley!" the bugs cried.

"Stop!" I shouted, desperate that my name stop being called. There was too much fear and panic in that voice. I could not save anyone. "Make them stop!" My voice broke. I fell over and my hands sank up to my wrists in the writhing black mud. All around me, more holes opened up in the mud. More bugs climbed out. They tore at me inside my suit.

My vision flickering in and out, I thought I saw Dasgupta return. A snake writhed in her hands! No, not a snake. A rope? A vine. A rescue. She made a loop at one end and threw it out to me; when I tried to reach out to it, an ant bit my hand. "Gah!" I smacked my hand against the mud to detach the bug, and my hand began to sink, palm up.

My joints felt weak. I was doomed, I thought.

Where was the rest of Hough's body? I imagined that I felt it under my hands and knees, that his cold dead corpse, and not the mud, was embracing me and dragging me down.

"Isley!" the bugs kept shouting. Then, "Dammit, Isley, listen to me! Pick up your head!" But my held felt too heavy. It was too full of cotton. I don't know why that made my head feel heavier, but I knew it was too late. I had walked right into this trap. I sighed a little, wishing I could tell the others that. Wishing I could tell them that I wasn't afraid; it seemed there was some sort of drug in the poison. "I'll tell you why he died!" Bachman offered frantically. "Don't you want to know what your father died for?"

I lifted my head, looking up from the writhing black mud. And someone started trying to strangle me.

I gasped and flailed and pulled with numb fingers at the rope around my throat, but I couldn't get it off of my head. I saw Leucaspis shouting at Dasgupta, who held the other end of the rope in her hands. I saw Bachman, talking to me. But all I heard was Hough's voice, crying out to me. Crying out for me to save his life. To know what to do. To have a solution.

And I had nothing.

I fell onto my stomach, and the pressure around my neck did not let up. The last thing I remember was Bachman putting his lips to my ear and saying, "Your father was allowed to die, Isley. Our governments allowed the Tomorrow I to crash."

8: Chapter Eight

Chapter 8: Trade-Off

I woke up in bits and pieces. First my right leg, tingling with pins and needles because I'd been laying on it. Cold seeped into my skin, and I wished I had a blanket. Then, later, my left hand. My nose itched, and I reached up to scratch it. I tore off a scab over my upper lip, and a massive black beetle crawled out of the oozing wound. It cried my name, but with Tesla's voice, and then my father's, and then a woman's voice from so far back in my past that I couldn't recognize it. My head felt light, so I went back to sleep, my heart pounding a red tattoo against my chest.

The last time I woke up, I thought, I have just slept for thirty years. Finally, I can have my shift on the Tomorrow II.

And then I remembered the terrarium running wild and gasped. My eyes shot open, eyelashes torn out of the follicle with a ripping sound like wet paper; my eyes had crusted themselves over with gunk. I found my right and left hands exactly where I left them, at the ends of my arms, and I dragged them up at my face and rubbed at my eyes. I couldn't form fists with my hands since I'd just woken up, like always, and that annoyed me. I ground into my eyes with the heels of my hands.

Finally, when I could blink without my eyes gluing themselves shut again, I lay on my back and waited impatiently for the ceiling to come into focus. Dark, shadowed. Green.

Oh, no, I thought, my heart hammering in my chest. The forest! I was still – was I still? No, no, I thought, scrabbling at the ground with my fingertips. I tried to sit up and my back and stomach rebelled, spasming in pain and soreness. I clawed at the blanket under my back and forced my screaming neck to lift my head so that I could know where I was.

I swept my surroundings with frantic, rapid glances. Everything I saw was in pieces. Tiled ceiling. Paneled walls. A flashing red emergency light. Green walls.

Sudden fear blossomed in my chest. Green walls. The wildlife sector. I found a hatred for this part of the ship coursing through my veins like fire. If the ship had power, I would detach this part of the ship from the rest and watch it crumble to dust over a thousand years on the surface of whatever planet we were on. And I would enjoy it.

Unable to move, I lay on my back, breathing hard. My mouth tasted like milk – not when it's good and cold, but after you've finished drinking it, and the taste left over in your mouth is of rot. And blood, too. My mouth tasted like rotten milk and blood, and my tongue cracked and bled from dryness. I guessed that explained the taste.

Get up get up get up get up, my body said, ready to fight for my life.

You're hurt lie still you're hurt lie still, said another, smarter voice.

I needed to get a handle on myself. I closed my eyes and took deep, even breaths. I hauled the same old fantasy to the surface of my mind. In the dream, a four or five year-old version of me swung her tiny legs on a swing set. She couldn't reach the ground, but she didn't need to; a smiling man took hold of the chains stretching above her head and pushed and pulled. The little girl wrapped her tiny fists around the serious metal chains and leaned forward, eager to launch herself at the top of the swing's arc and see how far she could jump.

The dream expanded, and I recognized in a distant sort of way the uneven wooden fence bordering the backyard. Every six months or so, Dad had to go out and reseal the redwood posts with varnish to protect the wood. A smattering of girls' toys lay around the backyard like a tornado had hit them. A woman in a dark skirt waved from the back porch of the cozy-looking yellow-and-white house.

My brow furrowed, and I opened my eyes. She had never been there before. I guarded that earliest memory of myself and Daguerre like a secret, revisited it time and again, and who did she think she was to barge in on it like that?

A sudden pain shot through my stomach. I gasped, and a new fear popped into my head, shoving the little-girl memory back into the box. Perhaps the beetles hadn't stung me. Perhaps they had infected me. And now the little ants that I had played host to and incubated would emerge from the flesh of my stomach and infect the rest of the ship. I turned my head and gagged onto the floor beside me, but I hadn't eaten in days.

"Isley?" A familiar voice. The voice of a very bad dream, the voice that the bugs had used. Bachman's. I heard a shuffling sound, and then he was sitting on his heels beside me.

I willed my aching, creaking neck to turn so I could look at him.

He smiled down at me. "Well, hello, there." His voice was soft. But from this day on, to the rest of my life, I would never be able to hear him say my name and not remember the frightening, horrific sensation of myself being eaten alive.

I cleared my throat, not sure which question to ask first. Where were we, exactly? Why were we here? For how long had I slept? Most importantly, What did he mean, our governments allowed my father to die?

My father was a valued scientist. My father was valuable. He couldn't just be dead.

But the box just would not stay shut. And I was six years old, sitting at our white molded kitchen table, drawing on a piece of paper with a yellow crayon. My father stood at the counter, heating up the vacuum-sealed packets that held our dinner. "What are you drawing, Isley?" he asked.

I held up my drawing to show him. Just a rough child's drawing of a couple of butterflies. "They're prettier in real life," I allowed.

"Is that why you drew them?" he asked.

I looked back at the paper. "Yes."

He carried the steaming packets to the table and sat down adjacent to me. "These are pretty, Isley. But nothing can be valuable for prettiness alone. You must understand what matters, and what doesn't. I see this butterfly has purple and blue wings. That's lovely, but is that what you saw, Isley?"

I set my jaw and shook my head.

"No, I thought not. But, Isley, a single butterfly can affect the whole world with nothing more than by beating its wings. Beauty contributes nothing to the world, do you see what I mean?"

Doodling with the crayon on the corner of the page, I shrugged. But I was listening intently.

My father went on, "Beauty cannot change anything. But these big wings; these can change everything. A single butterfly can change the entire world. That butterfly would be infinitely valuable, don't you agree?"

And, sure, he had been right. But part of me couldn't help being mad at him for misunderstanding me. I didn't mean to draw something that changed the world; I just wanted to draw the pretty bug, that was all.

My father patted me on the head with a large hand. When I was very small, I thought his hands were the size of catcher's mitts. Gigantic. It turns out, they were actually average-sized. I had just been so small. "You'll understand someday, Isley. Butterflies are pretty, but that's not what makes them special. A single butterfly can change the entire world. You have a great deal of purpose, Isley. And you can do what you want with it. But use those wings to be valuable, dear, and let your inimitability make you a singularity."

Be valuable.

Bachman waved his hand in front of my face. "You don't have brain damage, do you?"

I summoned up a glare, thrust it at him like a rusty sword. "No. How long was I asleep? Where are we?"

"You've only been asleep about eight hours. After you passed out, we dragged you out of the mud. Dasgupta cut your uniform off and hosed you down with a fire hose." He pointed at a hole smashed in the wall; with such a great extent of damaged wiring in this part of the ship, emergency power had been cut to the fire hatch. A hose dangled out of the hole, haphazardly shoved back into the fire hatch. The water pressure and my tango with the beetles must have bruised me something fierce. I tried to examine myself, but the black one-piece I wore under my uniform was in the way. The beetles had bitten sizable chunks out of it. They'd probably been trying to get at my skin and take me apart.

"My stomach hurts. Are – am I –"

"As far as we can figure, you are fine. Mostly, the poison was a paralytic. Your heartbeat got really slow a few times, but Dasgupta said as long as it didn't fall too low, you'd be fine. She said athletes like you normally have really low blood pressure. By the angels, it was scary. I haven't wanted to look away from you; I feel like the father of a newborn, frightened of crib death. I could use a sip of vodka, I tell you." He babbled on.

I cleared my throat, a weird feeling rising up the surface of my skin. "You took care of me?"

"Not me. Dasgupta. Did you know that she has medical training? She said she was going to be a medic onboard before she transferred to stellauct. I wonder why."

Mutely, I shook my head. I didn't know that. But I thought again of Dasgupta's face in the hall before we went to collect Leucaspis and Bachman to find Hough, and wondered if that was part of the secret she was keeping. "Why are we here?" I asked, finally recognizing the specifics of my surroundings. I was laying on the floor in one of the offices of the wildlife sector. "Why didn't we go back to the bridge?"

"Well, for one, you're really heavy. I mean, I'm not calling you fat or anything – if anything, I'm calling myself weak –" I forced myself to take deep breaths and not punch out with the heel of my hand and smash Bachman's nose into his brain. I wanted to know what I could. "Right. So Dasgupta sent Leucaspis and me to check out the mess hall. We couldn't even get in. Then we went down to the cargo bay that should hold the food, and that was locked, too. If we had bombs we could get in, maybe."

"Why haven't you turned the ship on?" I demanded, frustrated. I hated lying still, but every movement caused me a great deal of pain. I wouldn't be able to stand without blacking out, and I didn't want to risk brain damage. I would have thought, given Hough's severed arm and my own medical condition, that they would have known to turn the blasted ship on. Our own defense was the last thing they should have been thinking about.

"If you remember, you had the key. And, ah, Isley, I'm sorry, but…I mean, most of your uniform was torn apart, and it's not your fault, and we don't blame you…" Bachman grimaced. It took me a moment to understand. The key was in my pocket. And most of my uniform was…

Was in the mud. With the ants.

I took a deep, rattling breath. "We have to go get it."

"Maybe. Dasgupta told me there's a secondary start-up protocol, though."

"Five bridges. We need five people." My mind raced ahead. We could start the ship without the key if we had one pilot at every bridge. But there were only four of us.

Which still meant going back into the terrarium. I didn't bother asking Bachman if he thought Hough was still alive. I knew he would say yes.

Bachman nodded. We heard footsteps in the hallway outside of the office acting as my hospital room, and then Dasgupta came in. Her face lit up when she realized I was awake. She didn't say anything, and neither did I. I could see the relief on her face, and so surely she could see the relief on mine.

I was even glad that I had been out of commission for a few hours. Dasgupta had had a taste of leadership and naturally assumed command of our crew. From now on, she would be watching me closely for future reference. And she had seen what being in command meant, and how dangerous it could be. Wisely, it scared her. But next time, if I did die, I would know for certain that my vessel was going to be guarded. I breathed more easily.

"What are we doing in these offices?" I demanded, hopefully for the last time.

Dasgupta answered, "It was his idea." She tilted her head at Bachman, her face pinched like she didn't want to look directly at him. So she had heard him. Our governments allowed the Tomorrow to crash. "We couldn't find food anywhere else on the ship. So he volunteered to go into the terrarium and bring back whatever he could."

I stared at him. "What?" he shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "Lord of the Flies."

I knew something about that one. "You killed a pig?"

"Are you kidding? I gathered some melons and bananas. And some green stuff that gives you terrible gas, but don't tell Leucaspis that. He tried it first and we exiled him to another office, and he's still sensitive about it. Poor little guy."

This distracted me for a moment. So, Bachman had been busily endearing himself to my crew. Making himself necessary, even. If I didn't find a way to co-opt him soon, the others would promote him to leader based on sheer popularity, even if he had no idea what he was doing. Unthinkable.

The shooting pain in my stomach began to make sense. "I think I'm hungry," I confessed. "Uh, but – I mean, I've been on the project since I was five. I don't know…" I trailed off. I'd lived at Project Hercules my whole life. I had never had normal food before. Even my classmates, who had left home as early as five to join the project, had tried regular food. They used to talk for hours about tastes they could barely remember. When we were finally allowed to go out on Sundays for a few hours, most of them spent the first few weeks gorging themselves. They staggered back to the van at the end of the day holding their stomachs, having made themselves sick.

"I'm sure you can digest it," Dasgupta shrugged, but I wasn't listening.

Tesla had had food. But Tesla had come from an ordinary family. Ice cream was the only thing he let himself eat. All other normal food he viewed as a form of slavishness to the human body. He had been in perfect shape. He probably could have pulled himself from the mud. He probably could have gotten us something more substantial to eat than fruit, too.

And yet I found myself grudgingly admiring Bachman for his courage. True, he had not suffered what I had. But he had seen it done. He had even won Dasgupta's respect, although not yet her trust.

Somehow, he was winning mine.

My father was allowed to die. They were the last words I wanted to hear, but Bachman would not take them back. He must have believed them. And he must have known he was risking my wrath by telling me something I didn't want to hear. Whatever Bachman was doing onboard this ship, he believed in what he was doing more than he cared for himself. And by saving my life and allying himself with a group of stellaucts, he aligned himself with the ships' protectors, too.

I did not like his answers. But I needed to know them. Perhaps even more than I needed to know what planet we had crashed on and where Hough was, I needed to know for what reason Daguerre and Tesla died. Dasgupta helped me eat a couple of mashed up bananas, which I ate mechanically, holding my nose shut. Then I asked her to close the door behind her and leave me alone with Bachman.

"You speak Russian," I kicked off the conversation. I hoped the metal door shutting sounded like the first nail in his coffin. I wished I could manufacture the temperature I wanted, and the coloring, too; I missed the yellow shade of command sector. Even if the ship had been on, though, I couldn't have done that.

His eyes lit up at once. "You thought I might have been lying about being Archontite. Clever. I wasn't, of course. I was raised there. If you want more proof, stick me in a freezer. I swear, I'll freeze to death before I notice it. The cold in Russia is awful."

"I don't care about Russian winters. I want to know why you speak English."

He sighed, staring up at the ceiling in thought. "I lived among people who spoke English."

"Like scientists?" I asked. All of our staff on the project base were Confederates, but often, they taught Archontite concepts. I frequently thought how useful it would be to have a founder of the concept teach it to us.

Bachman's lips twitched. "Yeah. Like scientists."

"And they were those who got you on Project Hercules?"

"No. No, that was all me. You win enough essay-writing competitions, and eventually they run out of ideas and start taking requests on what prize you want to win. So I announced I wanted to be a historian on this voyage. The newspaper in my hometown was delighted. They kept writing about it, and then somebody in Stalingrad started listening. I left home when I was thirteen."

I frowned. I didn't know that artisans had to leave home. I didn't know that they had to qualify at all. I thought that artisans were politicians' children, allowed onboard the ship to buy grants from the government. Where had I gotten that idea, though? Not my father, surely. He had no time for anything but my education. Tesla, then. Funnily, I didn't remember him saying anything on artisan training.

Bachman kept talking. "Like you, I guess, I lived on the base. I shared a dorm with ten other Archontite boys. A dorm meant for ten boys, not eleven, I must point out. Artisans, you know – they don't plan for us, even when they expect us. I went to classes. I read a lot. And I paid attention. That's how I got here."

I shook my head. He was skipping over things and pretending that he wasn't. Why did he want to come on this voyage in the first place? Why had he wanted a tour of the ship the day I had my exam? Why had Captain Grey acted as though an aberration like Bachman – an Archontite who spoke English, and a historian who was interested in the ship – something she expected? There was really only one important question, though. "What does any of this have to do with my father?"

Bachman hemmed and hawed, turning the camera around his neck in his hands. How he still had that camera, I did not know. "To be honest, I wasn't expecting you to be able to corner me so quickly. I hadn't decided what I was going to say to you." We stared at each other for a moment in a stand-off. I could force Bachman out of the crew. Even exile him to the surface of the planet. But he had answers that I wanted to get.

"See, I know what you're thinking. But, believe it or not, I will not harm your crew, Isley. So stop trying to get rid of me on that count. And if, by the end of it, you still want to – by all means, go ahead. But until I run out of answers to give, how about this: I'll tell you a little more of the whole story every day. But you can't bully any more than that out of me." He sighed. "Anyway, I can't tell all of it to you at once, anyway. If I had told you what I told you on the banks of that bog the day we had met, would you have believed me?"

I thought that over. "What are you getting out of it?"

"Like always, Isley, you."

My protection, then. Not that I had done a very good job of protecting anyone when I blindly waded out into that swamp, I thought. But I could see what he meant. My disdain for him was the only thing keeping him from bonding with the non-officers Leucaspis and Hough, at least. And that alone could get him killed. I couldn't imagine actively liking him, though. He was too useless in a crisis and too uneducated to fix the ship. But he had promised not to harm the crew, and we could take care of the ship. "If you renege," I warned him, "on any part of your promise, I will kill you."

"And if, by the time the story is over, you don't want me around, I'm as good as dead, anyway," he replied sardonically. We shook hands to seal the deal. "I will throw in a bonus for today," he added. He looked around as if he had forgotten what his surroundings looked like. I found this small office, littered with desks bolted to the ground and computers bolted to the tabletops, on a map of the whole ship in my head. One floor up, down the hall – yes, the terrariums. Below us, the engine rooms. Above us, twenty-odd floors of engineering, electrics, experimental labs, living quarters, cargo bays, and one and a half frozen crews. My ship.

Bachman said, "The name, Project Hercules. Do they tell you why they use it? In the myths, Hercules was the greatest hero of them all. He slayed the Nemean Lion and took part in the voyage of the Argo, and the battle for Helen of Troy. In the end, he was such a great hero that as he lay dying, the gods took him up and cast him into the heavens; he became a constellation." He had been looking up as if at stars; his sharp jaw bristled with five o'clock shadow. "Greatness so extraordinary that it becomes a fact of the universe. Not very creative people, the project board."

I gave myself a moment to respond; for a little while, I imagined just what he spoke of, and I didn't want to let the mental picture fade. "What was the point of that, Bachman?"

He shrugged, but of course he had a reason. "Call me Noah," he said, rather unexpectedly. "I'm tired of you being the only one who gets to go by their first name. It's very lonely just being a Bachman all the time."

"That's against regulation."

"I'm not calling you Edison."

I sighed. "Fine. Noah. Go get Dasgupta and Leucaspis – I don't care how much he's farting. We're going back into that terrarium."

9: Chapter Nine

Chapter 9: Leucaspis

"Get out of my way, Leucaspis. I'm coming."

"But you don't look well, Isley. Make you should take another nap," he suggested, as nervous as a pig in a slaughterhouse.

Dasgupta interceded on my behalf. "It's good for her to get up. We don't want that poison sitting in her veins any longer. Come on, help me grab her other arm, Leucaspis."

"No. Bachman." They looked at me. "I want Leucaspis out in front. The doors to the wildlife sector hadn't been locked." So Dasgupta and Noah tucked themselves under my arms, human crutches, and we followed Leucaspis down the stairs.

Noah was breathing heavily by the time we got to the cafeteria. "How are you planning to get these open, Isley?"

The answer came to me as I lay on the floor of the office. Noah and Dasgupta leaned me against a wall and Dasgupta went off to pry a lunch table from the bracket drilled to the far wall. She hauled it over to the doors and Leucaspis helped her open it and get it set up.

I began to hobble over to the rectangular hole in the wall, behind which lay all the stored food on the ship. Iron sheets partitioned the kitchen from the dining area. The cafeteria sat at the center of the ship; if a crash seemed inevitable, or if it came under attack, then the cafeteria was where all those the crew could spare would go.

No corpses littered the cafeteria grounds, though. I noticed. Noah hurried over to help me cross the cafeteria; I pushed him away. "Stop touching me. What do you want?"

"Where are you going? Why didn't anybody die here?"

I went still, secretly appreciating the moment to take a break and rest my muscles. I felt like they had melted and then frozen again, back into solids. My bones burned like ice. My scalp itched with caked mud. Finally, I said, "No one died here. Have you looked into the pod bays yet?"

"Oh, dear," he murmured. He understood. I wondered how fierce the fight over the pods had been. People turned to beasts pretty quick when their lives were in danger.

My feet dragged against the floor. I needed a good look at those sheets of iron. I could use the dumbwaiter next to the window, where dirty dishes were sent up to the dishwashers one deck above. But the ship had no power, so that wasn't a viable option. Fortunately, I had another idea.

A memory.

Every system has a weakness.

I couldn't even remember who said it.

But I did know what to do. I rapped on the iron sheets with one knuckle. "Do you know how much this ship weighs, Bachman?"

"Noah. And, uh, no."

"Five hundred thousand tons. Each pound thoroughly vetted, the benefits measured and weighed. Each pound, deliberate." I stroked the metal panel. Thinking of the ship made my brain feel bigger, wider, and deeper. It was the only way I could think of to explain it.

He gave me an exasperated look. "Your point, Isley?"

"My point is, this sheet is solid iron. The wall around it? Drywall." I knocked on the wall beside the iron sheet. Even the brightest minds of the age were vulnerable to simple disguise. Noah straightened up, excited. "Go get something hard," I ordered him.

I supervised my three-man crew whaling at the wall. Noah tried to get a labor gang song started, but quit when he realized no one else knew it. I hoped there was water behind the wall into the kitchen. Sweat beaded Noah's brow, and dark stains spread under Dasgupta's arms. I was going to kill them if I wasn't careful.

The thought jarred me. "Leucaspis," I called. "Come sit down. Take a break."

"I'm fine," he told me, dropping his pickaxe on the floor. He sat down at the table beside me.

"You could overexert yourself. Just sit, Leucaspis." He sat down beside me, drew his knees up to his chest, and rested his folded hands on top of them. I'd never seen a human being so closely resemble a pretzel. His burnished, red-brown hair hung almost in his eyes. "You need a haircut," I told him.

He grinned at me sideways, a surprisingly young expression. He looked like a thirteen year-old boy, not a trained professional. "I know."

I sighed. "This is taking longer than I expected."

"Don't worry," Leucaspis said, reaching over to put his hand on top of mine. "I know you want to get back to work, and we'll do that soon. We'll get through this wall just as for sure we'll get the ship back on."

I covered my face with my hands, rubbing my eyes. "How can you be so sure?"

Leucaspis opened his mouth to respond and Noah gave a shout of surprise. I could see a faint glow of white kitchen light in the hole the crew had made in the wall. But that wasn't what frightened Noah. No, it was that something on the other side was helping to break the wall down.

Leucaspis sprang at me, and we tumbled to the linoleum floor. I flailed beneath him, my muscles screaming, and I saw Dasgupta throw her arms up. Noah's grip went slack, and he dropped his chunk of metal railing. A dark shape flung itself through the wall, shouldering aside drywall like it was a sheet on a clothesline. One, two more shapes followed.

My head cracked on the floor and I saw stars, and my fight against Leucaspis's protective weight all but petered out. Leucaspis took advantage of the moment and sprang to his feet, bending down to lift me up from under my arms. "I'm not a baby," I mumbled, my words slurred.

Noah had taken one look at our adversary and fainted; he lay in a puddle of weakness and fear near the wall. Idiot. Dasgupta fared better; she raised her own chunk of metal railing, hefting it in her hands like a baseball bat.

Leucaspis tucked me under his left arm and stooped to pick up another piece of railing with his other hand. I could feel him trembling. He acted on autopilot, just like Dasgupta, his body trained for any situation. His mind? That was the difference between them.

I tried to piece together what I saw with blurry eyes. A chimera. Of course. But this one was…weird. Blood vessels, bones, and organs pumped and rolled and contorted beneath skin entirely transparent. I felt like I looked at a glass full of quadripedal mammal. Or four of them. Their teeth, however, seemed entirely solid.

"What the hell is that?" Leucaspis gasped, right in my ear. Noah moaned and writhed on the floor. I wanted to kick him. His eyes fluttered open, he paled, and I thought he might faint again.

The three strange transparent creatures circled us. Predators versus prey, all our human intelligence so much wasted effort. "What are they going to do to us?" Dasgupta asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

The first transparent creature answered the question by opening its mouth and inhaling. It's mouth opened and opened and opened until two dozen teeth distended from its jaws like a python. "Ohhh," Leucaspis whispered, shrieking quietly, and clutched me to himself like his favorite teddy bear.

The monster drew in its breath, sucking in air like a vacuum cleaner. Its lungs expanded like a parachute bursting open, and the pigment of the monster's skin shifted to match the dark mauve of the cafeteria walls. It almost disappeared before our eyes. It paced back and forth in front of Dasgupta, eyeing her. Noah pushed himself up against the wall, drenched in sweat. Leucaspis shuddered, clinging to me even though he held me up.

I reached down and plied the hunk of metal from his grasp. I was so close to the ground anyway, I banged the pole against the floor. A booming toll echoed around the room, and the creatures converged on me…and Leucaspis.

Noah stirred against the wall. He twisted his hands, anxious. No. He sent me a message in sign language.

I got the message. I cursed the stupid boy. The damage to my ship was going to be an absolute mess. But I didn't have any better ideas.

"Let me go," I hissed at Leucaspis.

"Your knees won't hold you," he answered me.

I could make it an order, I knew. And he would follow it. But that wouldn't mean he was wrong. His arm tightened around me. "On my count," I said, "we run for the door." Only Leucaspis and I stood with our backs to the door; the animals cut both Dasgupta and Noah off from any means of escape. "Now!"

He and I bolted for the door, me limping and struggling with my unreliable legs, Leucaspis clinging to me like a kite on a string. He kept me up, though, too.

And then one of the monsters pounced, and Leucaspis and I went sprawling. I curled into a ball and slid across the ground, my suit soft and slick and having very little friction. I scrambled, pinwheeling to find the right limbs and push them under me, searching for Leucaspis. My eyes remained blurred, and something hot and wet poured down my face from my hairline.

Dasgupta let out a cry and gave chase. One of the monsters pinned Leucaspis to the floor; I saw his wide eyes watching me as I ran away from him. I hobbled for the panel by the door, one that we had to hope emergency power hadn't failed.

I was almost there. I heard Dasgupta grunt. She collided with the monster on Leucaspis's back. But at the same time, another one of the creatures dove for me. I screeched, rolling over on my back. It hovered over me, jaw distended, teeth dripping saliva. It lunged for my throat and my fist shot and slammed into its teeth like a piston. My knuckles broke open and my whole head filled with the smell of copper.

A flash of metal, the crunch of bone, and the monster rolled away, screeching. Noah stood over me, his thin chest heaving. We stared at each other. For the first time, I was thankful he was a part of my crew.

I rolled over and walked on my knees and elbows to the wall. Then I climbed up the wall, reaching for the panel. I heard the desperate intake of air from the two other creatures, and the room became difficult to breathe in. I punched in my second lieutenant's code and the sprinklers overhead screamed on. They sprayed sheets of water all over the room.

As soon as the liquid touched the creatures, they hissed and reduced themselves in size. And I understood that they couldn't maintain their expanded size in a room so devoid of oxygen. They were some kind of oxygen-consuming creature, like a human being, but ratcheted up to the nth degree. Like inverted plants, they inhaled gusts of oxygen rather than producing them.

I slid to the ground, my knees, shaking, failed. The creatures recoiled and gathered to flee, and I croaked, "Wait. Stop. We need to…stop them." But no one on my crew was listening. Noah had sunk to his knees, scared out of his mind. Dasgupta remained on her feet, breathing hard; she looked scary, even to me. And Leucaspis rolled over, his eyes finding mine.

You okay, boss? he mouthed to me.

I nodded. And for once, I didn't feel so much like a disconnected part of the ship roaming around on my own. I felt connected, somehow.

Dasgupta kicked at an empty bag of flour. "Goddamned chimeras." Water dripped from her sopping uniform. We were all drenched.

"They really wrecked this place, didn't they?" Noah asked. He leaned against my legs in the doorway.

I clung to the doorframe, cursing my stupid muscles for failing at their one function. Useless, overly valued hunks of meat. My knees bumped Noah in the head, but the monsters dazed him too much for him to move.

Leucaspis looked up from his crouch in front of the shelves. "Most of the food is gone. Most. Not all."

"And there's plenty of water," Dasgupta crowed, delighted. I realized that Dasgupta had gone hungry before.

So we sat on the floor and had a picnic. If nothing held him up, Noah keeled right over, so we propped him up against the shelves. And the three of us talked.

"How long can this last?" I asked Dasgupta.

She took careful measure of the store. "Weeks. Somewhere between two and three."

"We have a lot of work to do, then," I said, just as Leucaspis asked, "Jeez, what're we gonna do when it runs out?"

Noah pried his head off of the shelf, where he'd been staring at the ceiling like an idiot, absent-mindedly eating a pouch of cinnamon apple oatmeal. "Dear lord," Noah said. "We're going to have to farm. I travel millions of kilometers across space and I'm still going to end up tending potatoes. Isley, that'll drive you mad," he mused.

"Shut up, Noah."

"He has a point," Dasgupta countered.

Leucaspis, my self-appointed defender, said, "She'll figure it out. And we can always brave the terrarium." He twisted around to look at me. "Right?"

"Yeah, Luke," I sighed. "Speaking of, everybody eat up. I'm done waiting. We're going into that terrarium now."

Leucaspis and Dasgupta each had one of my arms pulled over their shoulders. The soreness and pain faded out of my body in increments, and I chewed a couple of pain pills I found in a bathroom along the way, but they were nice to have.

The terrarium was still dark, although the mist had faded away. The heat of the room weighed more heavily against my skin, too. I tried not to put it down to a sun. It was possible that the surface of this planet was still magmatic, and the terrarium was closer to the surface of the planet than any floor we'd been on but the offices. And the nature sector offices were made with metal, not glass.

Noah was on point until he tripped over a rock and almost poked his eye out with the butt of a rifle. After that, I made him switch places with Leucaspis.

When we stepped into the terrarium, my human crutches quietly and pointedly steered us away from the bog. I craned my head to look over Dasgupta's head at the forest. She saw me looking. "We never found out what it was," she said.

We traveled as far into the terrarium as Noah had been to gather food. A wild patch of fruit trees grew about half a kilometer further in than the bog. When I turned around to face the door, the bog and trees rolled out on my left. Somewhere beyond the trees, agronomists had grown a grassy plain for cows and sheep to graze. The grassy plains resembled savannah in that portion of the terrarium, and lions and zebras and other African animals roamed. To my right, another bank of trees marched away down the length of the cylinder. They drew the eye with bright fuchsia leaves and gray bark, like the soot of a fireplace. Did these trees grow on Earth?

Nervously, Leucaspis glanced back at me. "Isley?"

I studied all three directions, not including the way back to the hallway. They each looked about as promising as any other direction. Bachman craned his skinny neck, a thoughtful expression on his face. Leucaspis watched me. But Dasgupta's focus was somewhere else entirely. "Isley," she began, "I wonder why Hough came in here at all."

My blood ran cold. I thought again about the nuclear reactor in no danger of exploding, even after two years minus crew. "We should start from the swamp," I said. "Maybe there's a blood trail. Dasgupta, could someone survive having their arm taken off?"

She didn't look surprised that Noah had shared his newfound medical knowledge about her with me. "If he got a tourniquet around it, yes. But not for long. Infection will have already set in."

I didn't listen much further than "yes." I was thinking about the first lieutenants' bridges, and whether someone could pilot one one-handed. It would take substitutions, I thought. We would have to rework the power-up sequence to allow him to press every button in the same sequence we were. But it could be done.

Dasgupta and Noah helped me hobble unsteadily over to the swamp. It stank; it reeked of blood, both mine and Hough's. The arm was rotting. I saw maggots climb out of it. So, bugs had gotten loose, too. Had anything remained safely locked up in their cages on this ship? This is what we get for putting a damn forest onboard a ship, Tesla would have muttered. Privately, I agreed.

We fanned out and searched the swamp for a couple of hours. All of us were very, very careful not to get anywhere near the mud. With my sore muscles and recently poisoned body, I was moving more slowly than the others. I guessed my temperature was a little above average, too, because I stood up and wiped sweat off my brow. Shadows fell over my back and stretched out in front of me, and I allowed myself a small moment of rest while I leaned on a branch I picked up from the ground.

Dasgupta, Leucaspis, and Noah looked hard at the grass. Without the fog of…yesterday, I supposed I could call it, visibility was better than it had been. But it was still dark inside this ship. Perhaps it really was a dark planet. Noah would become even paler, and even Dasgupta's tea-colored skin would sallow out. Human beings were as fragile as plants, I thought. Too fragile.

Leucaspis wiped his hands on his pants. Habitually, he glanced back at me, as if to make sure that he didn't get too far away. He was the ideal second officer.

I waved my hand at him to tell him that I was fine, just resting. But his eyes widened to the size of golf balls. He took a step toward me, stopped, glanced down at the mud, then looked back up. "Isley!" he shouted, and pointed at me.

Well, yes. I knew where I was. Duh. Unless…unless he was pointing at something near me. I glanced down at my feet. Green grass. Nothing on my feet. Suddenly, frightened of something burrowing out of the grass at me, I missed the boots that I had lost in the mud. I hated being in my socks. The emergency jumpsuit we had gotten from the hatch was red, and I was almost afraid to look down at myself and see blood.

All clear.

I began to feel even worse, not relieved. Slowly, I turned around.

The fuchsia-and-gray trees were now right behind me. Did this swamp back into the glade, perhaps? No. No, these trees had not been there a few minutes earlier. Which meant that these trees had moved. It was almost too ridiculous a thought to allow. Plants didn't move except to follow the sun with their petal-rimmed faces.

Gingerly, I took a step to the side. Skirting the swamp. Moving parallel to the trees. And a branch swung out like a club and caught me across the chest.

CHIMERAS! I cursed to myself. More frightened of the mud than of these lumbering trees, I clung to my branch. I could not get my legs up to wrap around the branch, so I clung to it with my arms, glad that I had been hit from the front and not the back. Hoarsely, I started shouting orders. "Leucaspis! Do not attack, lead them away from the swamp! They'll chase us into it otherwise! Ba-Noah, try to circle around the back! Stun them!"

As if the stupid tree knew that I was enforcing order, it tried to shake me loose. Normally, I could have held on. But I had just been injured. My body failed me. Knowing that it would happen eventually, I tried to time the moment when I would have to let go. I waited until the branch was at the peak of an arc, and then I let go. I fell to the ground and had my breath knocked out of me, but curled into a ball to avoid injury.

Instead of flying free of my attackers, I had landed among them. Now I was surrounded by a grove of highly agitated, highly mobile trees. With nothing else to do, I struggled up to avoid getting crushed and tried to keep up. We were all following Leucaspis, then. I hoped desperately that the boy wouldn't lead us into another swamp, or something else as bad. The trees thundered around me, their movements jagged, ungraceful, and their leaves issued music as if each were a musical note. The effort of running made me light-headed, or maybe even I couldn't grasp how otherworldly this was.

We ran for what felt like five miles, but was probably just a mile. As hard as I was willing my body to move, I could not will it to surpass its own limitations, and my knees buckled. I slid to the ground in the middle of a racing pack of pink and grey trees, and I thought how ludicrous a way to die this was. A foot – really, it was the roots of a tree, still clotted with clods of dirt like cholesterol clinging to the walls of a vein – rose up, and there was not even anywhere that I could roll to for safety. I got back into my feet, at least.

And somebody grabbed my hand. I clung to the hand I held and let myself be pulled along, doing my best simply to keep picking up my feet. I saw a head of dark hair and thought, Tesla. No. He was too winded. Noah Bachman. "You disobeyed orders," I ground out, wheezing.

He rolled his eyes. "Shut up, Isley."

I spotted something out of the corner of my eye. It was Dasgupta, and she had found an opening in this tightly-packed grove of trees. If we left this little spot in the middle of it, we were in danger; they had only not gotten us sooner because they would not risk injuring each other. Interesting, I thought. And not good news for us. I tugged on Noah's hand, and he saw Dasgupta, too.

"When I say so," I told him, "dive for her." He gulped and let go of my hand. The trees, lumbering on their roots, spread apart like a window. "Now!" I shouted, and we scraped by the rough bark of the disturbing trees with centimeters to spare. Our bodies plowed furrows into soft, loose dirt. Noah was so out of shape that he let himself lay on the ground and catch his breath. But Dasgupta was on hand to help me back to my feet. When I saw what I did, I gasped, frozen. The scene crystallized so that it might cut into my mind like the shadows of stained glass on the backs of my eyelids forever.

Dasgupta helped me stand near the edge of a precipice. Dark green moss-grass rolled as short and smooth as carpet right up to the end. The arching glass wall and ceiling of the terrarium that made up several decks of the Tomorrow II was broken, and crisp night air rolled in. My mind couldn't process it. The TII was broken. The sky was blacker than the sky back on Earth; there were plenty of stars, many bright and visible, but no moon. An alien sky, and I saw it plainly through the hole in the TII.

But that wasn't all. The vicious grove of trees was still running. They lumbered on their roots instead of undulating, which was somehow more eerie. It was almost as if they had legs. And leading them, distracting them, just as I had told him to, was Leucaspis.

He was heading straight for the precipice. My breath caught. Beside me, Noah sat up fast. "Leu-" he gasped, pained.

At the last second, Leucaspis dove to the side, just as Noah and I had. It was almost as if he flew; his tall, skinny body arced and he rolled beautifully to a stop several feet from the trees. And the trees – the trees didn't stop. Of the dozen that there were, ten ran right over the precipice of the ship and fell to the planet below. One tried to stop itself right at the very edge by plunging its roots into the soil, but the final tree was not so wise and careened right into its brother. The eleventh tree plunged out of sight. But the one that hit it had lost all momentum in the push.

Leucaspis, elated, was not watching us. He clambered to his feet and pumped his fists over his head. "Get down!" I shrilled at him. His face fell a little in confusion. And the twelfth and final tree ran him through from behind with a spear of bark and wood. Blood spurted out of Leucaspis's mouth.

Noah got up to run to him, but I threw out an arm. The tree was still there, still connected to Leucaspis; still holding his body upright when he should have been on the ground, dying. Was still keeping him alive. Then the tree's roots curled inward, turned black, and died. All at once, the tree shriveled to death. It collapsed like a log and smashed into the mossy grass, and most of its leaves fell off in the process. They sounded like rain when they touched the ground.

"Suicide?" Dasgupta guessed, her voice tight. I lurched for Leucaspis. She held me back, kept me away from him for fear of some trick by the tree. Noah got up and sprinted for Leucaspis. When he got close, he collapsed to his knees. Noah could not pull the other boy onto his lap; the branch holding him up had snapped, and Leucaspis lay uncomfortably on his side, run through by a piece of wood.

Finally, Dasgupta had to let me go.

I was moving desperately with an unfit body, and she was moving slowly, fearfully. Still, we drew close at the same time. Noah turned on Dasgupta. "You were going to be a doctor!" he cried. "Save him!"

Mutely, Dasgupta shook her head. She looked down, her eyes filling with shame. She had not the courage to have failed and try again. That was her secret. She had burned out of the medic program and knew she still had the potential to do the same in ours. She was as frail and undependable as a rotten limb, and just as dangerous to lean on.

Leucaspis tried to speak through lips bubbling through blood, his eyes wide with fear. We were making him afraid, I realized. He was empathetic. And despite all the fear and conflict, Leucaspis looked to me. I could not make myself move closer to him, could not bear to have his blood stain my clothes and hands and never wash out. But he had forgiven me that, was forgiving me even as I watched him die. He was looking to me to take away all his fear, just as the secondary officers would to a captain.

Flexing muscles inside of me that I did not know I had, I wiped all fear off of my face. I imagined it was like windshield wiper blades wiping a windshield clean. And he looked at me, and there was a little peace and a little smile on his face.

The Byronic hero, Noah called me.

I struggled with a strange lump growing in my throat. Noah and Dasgupta looked at Leucaspis with nothing but sadness on their faces. The loss of a friend. But I had not the luxury of feeling anything at all. He was not my friend the way these three had suddenly, in this moment of crisis, become friends with each other. Bonded by trauma. Not now, never before, and never after, would I have been a regular crew member like them.

Daguerre and Tesla were really dead. Everybody I knew or will ever know will be my subordinates, and will be depending on me. I would be alone for the rest of my life.

But I kept all of that off of my face. And I knew that was the best thing I could have done, because the last thing Leucaspis needed right now was to be afraid. I read somewhere that drugs released by the body in the moment of death could make the dying person feel as though a very large amount of time was passing, rather than very little time. And it was just that Leucaspis and I should suffer through separate eternities forever because it was I who had doomed him. So I made myself brave, and that gave him courage, and the light faded quickly and easily out of his eyes.

I took a deep, deep breath. I realized that my hands were clenched. Clenched so tight that blood formed in droplets from eight little half-circles.

Dasgupta looked to me. "What do we do, Isley?"

Deep breaths were the key. Breathe deep, and I could get air past the lump in my throat. What I felt had to be kept separate from my crew. "We put his body back in the pod under the captain's bridge, Ms. Dasgupta. That's what we do now."

Noah had struggled to his feet and taken a few steps away from us. Even though I was only looking at his back, I saw his shoulders tremble and knew that he was crying. Then something seemed to surprise him, for he lurched forward. "Isley," he called, his voice distant. "I think you're going to want to see this."

Leaving Leucaspis's body on the ground, Dasgupta and I approached the hole in the wall of the ship. There was a city laid out in front of us. Dasgupta staggered and caught herself on a piece of exposed steel frame. My knees felt weak. There was a city just outside of the ship; in fact, the Tomorrow II had landed on top of the city. Standing a hundred feet over the city in dim gray light, all I could ascertain was that the city looked…familiar. "Is this…Earth?" Dasgupta asked uncertainly.

Noah shook his head. He pointed up at the sky. "Look."

Two stars were struggling over the horizon. No, not stars. Suns. On the opposite of the ship, a third star was breaking over the edge of the planet. Three suns.

I shook my head in disbelief. Ah, but of course. Of course our ship would take us just where we needed to go. "Vesta," I voiced what we surely must have all been thinking. I said the word flatly, like a declaration. If I had been the first person to touch the ground of this planet, I might have sounded like I was naming it. "We're on Vesta."

Noah and Dasgutpa looked at me, then back outside of the hole in the ship. It was growing lighter and lighter outside on the surface of a planet we thought we might never reach.

A planet that someone, somehow, managed to reach before us. Who? From where? Those were questions I could not answer. There was something we had to do before we could begin.

And so, struggling with and hefting his body, the three of us manhandled Leucaspis's body up twenty decks to the captain's bridge. It had had to be me that got the branch out of his body. It was too wide for the pod to seal with him inside. The sound as the branch exited his body, a hollow, wet slurping sound, made Noah turn and vomit into the grass.

Dasgupta had entered into a loop of time from which she might never leave. She was failing in medicine again, failing to save a life, and that failure was destroying her. Be valuable. Be valuable, I wanted to shout at her, and at every stupid, sleeping, lucky bastard that we passed.

Before we sealed Leucaspis away, I took his boots off of them. I needed a new pair. Looking at me, Noah shook his head like he was going to be sick again.

We pushed Leucaspis's body into the pod and sealed the door. He leaned forward against the window as if he was trying to see out of it, like a little boy taking a ride on the train, too small to see out of the window from his seat.

Long after the others had taken the elevator back up to the bridge to sleep, I stood with my forehead pressed against the other side of the glass.

10: Chapter Ten

Chapter 10: Vesta

I let Dasgupta and Noah sleep for six hours. Then I kicked them awake. They sat up and rubbed their eyes. "Did you sleep at all?" Noah asked.

"Here's the plan," I said, ignoring him. "I've got Leucaspis's guidewire. I'm going to connect its length to my guidewire, and then I'm going to rappel down the ship. And I'm going to explore the town."

They dissented. Actually, only Noah spoke, but Dasgupta did not actively agree with me, and that was what she should have done. "Not alone. No way, Isley – we're coming, too."

"You can't. I want you to stay on the ship. All of us keep walking into dangerous territory, and we keep losing people every time. This time, it's just me. And if I don't come back, freeze yourselves again. Sleep until someone wakes you up."

"Isley," Dasgupta said quietly, her voice heavy. "There are things we need to do around the ship. The solar panels. I need to go flip them if they aren't exposed already. Otherwise, the pods will open themselves."

"Wait, wait," Noah said, "isn't that a good thing? Two hundred of us sounds a lot better to me than three."

I shook my head slowly. "The pods will open, and the inhabitants of them will die. That they open when they are disconnected from a power line is a safety meant to keep anyone from thinking that they can board a pod and ride it to another planet. Our mission was very clear. We have arrived where we need to be. Ours is not to wander the galaxy. But Dasgupta is right. Noah, you should help her with the solar panels. If the umbrella itself needs to be moved…" I stopped. It would take much more strength than we three had between us.

Noah watched me closely. Too closely, in fact. "Can we have a word in private?" he asked curtly. I nodded, sighing through my nose, and Dasgupta went to sit at the top of the stairwell at the end of the hall. "You're being a shitty leader," Noah said.

My nostrils flared. "If I wanted your opinion, Mr. Bachman, I would ask for it."

"Don't 'Mr. Bachman' me, Isley. What happened to you? It's almost like…like you cared as much about Leucaspis as we did."

I said nothing.

"I'm sorry, Isley, but you don't have the luxury of mourning him when so much is counting on you. Do I really have to tell you this? Dasgupta took one look at you when she woke up and now she thinks she's doomed. If you've given up on us, then we're dead, Isle. She knows that." He took a measured breath and put his hand on my shoulder. "Someone has to save the people in those pods. You. Us, whatever. Someone. Otherwise, our crew and who knows how many thousands of people sleeping in cargo are as good as dead."

Frowning, I asked, "What do you mean?"

"Oh, come on. Obviously you're going to look for replacements for Hough and Leucaspis so that we can get this ship started again."

"That town did not look populated."

"It could have been a trick of the darkness," he suggested, then deflated. "Yeah. You're right. But what else are we going to do? Dasgupta and I will flip those panels, and that means, what, two or three hours of dim sunrise light every two days?" There were two nights to one day on this planet, rather than an equal ratio of nights to days. That was why the terrarium had been dark for two days. I clenched my bruised knuckles into fists. "How long will that last us, Isley?"

"Not long enough. There isn't even enough power left in the ship to activate the wake-up sequence for another crew member. We were lucky the pods detected oxygen when they did. Otherwise, we might never have made it out of our own pods."

There were so many things we could do, and there was so little good that could be gotten out of any of it. We could set fire to the entire terrarium and redirect the smoke to the turbine room of the ship to generate a little power. We could rotate the solar panels for a little power. We could turn off the emergency systems to reserve what little power we had left, but in ten hours, when the sky went dark, that would leave us in darkness for two days. If we couldn't find some way of generating power soon, the food in the terrarium would begin to die, and, just as slowly, so would the people in the pods.

"You're missing something obvious, though. We were in that terrarium for days. The ship woke us up because we had oxygen, not because we were still leaking it. Which means…"

I stiffened. I had been such a fool. I was settling into patterns of thought, not progressing and changing and evolving. Failing, in short. "This planet is oxygenated."

"Or terraformed." Noah hesitated. "Okay, can I just be the one to suggest freaking aliens?" I rolled my eyes and left the bridge to go get Dasgupta. "Alright, alright. I'm being serious again. Really, though, Isley." He raised his head slightly. "Keep your chin up."

"I don't take orders from Archontite artisans."

He snorted. "I'm only one of those things, sorry to say. Make it back alive and I'll tell you what I promised."

And although there was no way for him to know for sure that I wouldn't torture it out of him, the promise of answers was cheering. When we met up with Dasgupta in the stairwell, I announced a change of plans. "Come with me," I told her. I was a little worried that she might need me around to keep her morale up. And if she was there, I had no choice but to keep mine up. "Noah can flip the panels for us."

"Noah can also help you from here," said Noah, being funny, I guess. "When you and Hough were searching the ship a few days ago, Leucaspis let me talk him into letting me search the bridge. Here." He passed electrical devices the size of a fingernail to Dasgupta and me. They were communicators. These were so small that they could be worn within our ears.

"Our suits have comms," Dasgupta pointed out. It was true. Our suits were wired with communications systems.

Noah pulled down his collar and showed us the inside of his shirt, near his throat, where there should have been a little speaker. "Mine doesn't. And, anyway…those suits record what you say. It might be best if what you find out there stays off the record."

I frowned. This was what I was afraid of. Noah Bachman the Archontite artisan who was either not an Archontite or not an artisan, apparently, and could weasel his way into my crew only for it to bite me in the end. I shared a hard look with Dasgupta. The Tomorrow I had been destroyed by terrorists. I had little doubt that there could be more of them anywhere, even here, on a planet that should have been unpopulated. A boy offering answers was suspicious; a boy disregarding orders was unthinkable. Any "help" he offered us was to be taken with a grain of salt. And if he burned us, we would no longer hesitate to kill him.

Noah didn't seem to be aware of the shift of our thoughts. We parted ways on Deck 2; Dasgupta and I would rappel out of the hole in the terrarium, and Noah could access the umbrella from Deck 1. From the vantage point of the umbrella, he could help us map our way across the town.

As Dasgupta and I busily wound our guidewires around the exposed steel frame of the ship in the terrarium, neither of us knew exactly what we were looking for below. People, perhaps? It was hard to say that they would be human. We were supposed to be the only humans to have ever traveled this far from Earth. Noah's suggestion of aliens seemed ridiculous.

Both Dasgupta and I wore his communicators in our ears. We'd already tested them out, and they worked well. As it had been on the bridge during my test so long ago, the acoustics of other voices inside my head felt strangely intimate.

Maybe I wanted to trust Noah. Maybe I wanted to be led as much as everybody else did. He was too stupid by half to lead anyone, though, and too cowardly to do what had to be done in times of catastrophe. As soon as he was done telling me his story, I decided, I would kill him. I was tired of being suspicious of him. Best to get rid of him as soon as possible, rather than waiting for him to prove to me that he was corrupt. Even a terrorist.

Because if he was a terrorist, I would make him pay for what he'd done.

We tested our knots one last time, and then Dasgupta and I backed up toward the hole in the wall of our ship. Then we stepped over the edge, and we fell toward the surface of the planet. The air rushed by my ears in a dull roar, and my hair fluttered wildly against my skull. My eyes burned. And yet falling was almost as enjoyable as flying around in zero-g. Dasgupta let out a whoop of exhilaration, and I nearly smiled.

The ship seemed to rise up as we fell. I imagined this was what it was like to be nearby when the ship had taken off in the first place. All anxiety and tiredness faded away from me. My ship was on Vesta, where it was meant to be, and everything else I could deal with.

Deal with well. Even like a captain.

"A captain?" My father repeated, finally looking up from the reports spread out all over our kitchen table. "Isley, you are three years old. You cannot be a captain." I pouted, and he smiled. "Not yet, anyway. Perhaps in a few years, if you earn it. You know, a captain is the most important person onboard a ship. Are you sure that you want the pressure of an entire crew weighing down on you?"

I folded tiny arms across my tiny chest. Beside me, Tesla huffed. "Plebs," he muttered. Plebs was Tesla's favorite insult. It meant commoner. If there was one thing Tesla couldn't stand, it was ordinariness. Mediocrity.

My father laughed. "Well, you're on the right track, anyway. As long as you do as much as you can, you're as valuable as you can be."

"How valuable is valuable enough?" I murmured.

Radio static gurgled in my ear. "What was that, Isley?" Noah asked.

I stared down at the rising ground. "Nothing."

We stopped our wires ten feet up from the ground. Then we let them out very slowly. The first fifty feet of the fall had been a pure drop; the wires we had taken from Leucaspis and the dead crew member in the captain's bridge had been fully extended, since we couldn't reach them to descend slowly. Our own guidewires, however, we could control. We let them play out slowly until we reached the surface of Vesta, and then we disconnected themselves from our wires. "Retract them a few feet," I instructed Dasgupta by instinct. "We don't want anyone else getting on our ship." Nodding, she obeyed my direction.

Noah hmmed. "From what I can see, there are a lot of buildings sort of in a grid pattern."

"Sort of?" Dasgupta pressed.

Perhaps she and I ought to have seen the city at a distance from ourselves. But there were so few hours of daylight, I hadn't thought we had time. Did we have time to stand around and talk to an Archontite, though?

"Yeah," Noah said. "Sort of. Some blocks, I guess you could call them, are double-wide. Hey, you know what. It kind of looks like…a symbol." His line fell silent as he surely drew out what he saw. We could look at it when we got back, though. Right now, we needed to scrounge up two crew members to help us restart the ship. Or we needed to find something that would help us generate energy.

Pessimism weighed heavily on me. Cities had to have generators and things, and power plants, but this was hardly a city. And it was dark, and deserted, and windswept; I could see where there had once been flowers growing in boxes beside windows and trees in spaces on the concrete, but they were all long-dead. The buildings themselves were simple, easy-to-construct models just like our own ship carried. These structures were designed to be quickly constructed by the colonists that came to this planet. They were lightweight, but they were anchored deeply into the surface so as not to blow away. The walls were made of plastic – light blue, light green, and light red – and the roofs were flat and tiled with solar panels. These buildings could be stacked as high as the builders wanted. They were, I realized, quite a bit like child's toys. What were they called? Legos?

Specialty buildings had been erected, too. There was a bike shop. Juice bars. All the signs were in Latin, and blacked out television monitors would have shown sign language had they been on.

What. The. Hell.

Even the part of my mind dedicated to constructing Tesla's likely responses was silent. No memory of him had any suggestion. Except, Isley, what are we going to do?

Frustrated, I turned to Dasgupta. This was what we were supposed to be building on the surface of this planet. And yet it was already here. Was it possible that most of the crew had been awake, and done this, and gone back to sleep? How had we not been awakened? Perhaps the pods beneath the captain's bridge were more secret than we knew. Or perhaps the only people who knew about them – the captain and her four first lieutenants – were all dead.

And what about our ship? We had slept for two years after we lost oxygen! Surely she had stored up some power since then? Unless, I thought, suddenly deflated, our solar panels didn't work. Noah wouldn't be able to tell that. I should have left both him and Dasgupta on the ship. They could check these things for me. I needed answers almost as much as I needed oxygen.

I started to get an uneasy feeling. An idea floated around the back of my mind, but before I could pull it forward, movement at the corner of my eye drew my attention.

"Who -?" Dasgupta began to ask. And then the figures we saw fell into an easy lope and moved out of the shadows in an alley between two buildings, and we could see them. Had they been watching us since we came out of the ship? Did they see how easy it was to get back on?

Dasgupta and I broke into a sprint away from the ship. Protect it at all costs. Words to live by. Words to die by. I threw a glance over my shoulder.

They looked like men. Sort of. But their hair was purple, and it grew thickly all over their backs and shoulders; only their bellies and faces were free of the hair.

No, not hair. Fur. But where had the man-like DNA come from? My stomach turned. I thought about all the dead crew missing from the wildlife sector.

No - more – bloody – chimeras!" Dasgupta puffed, airing the same thoughts I was having.

"Slow down!" I ordered her. I knew something about primates. Human beings were bipedal, which meant they had much more endurance than their quadripedal ancestors. Our only chance was to outlast these freaks of nature. Except, of course, that they ran on two feet, as well.

Still, Dasgupta did just what I ordered her to. Even though it was the wrong order. Gritting my teeth, I turned hard on my heel and reoriented my body to face my left; then, running past Dasgupta, who had been on my left, I grabbed her arm and pulled her after me, and we darted into an abandoned building.

Once inside, I had such a strong sense of vertigo that I had to pause for a moment and press my hand against the wall for balance. These rooms were our rooms – they were just like the houses in the urban portion of the Project Hercules base. This was just like the house I grew up in. Just like the house the project took away from me when my father died. I was supposed to live on the ship – I never thought I would see this place again – my childhood bedroom…

The interior walls were white; it kept the buildings cooler, since they had no windows, only holes in the wall. Liquid plastic frames could be put in to seal them off, but bad weather was never an issue. Not when the government could control the weather itself. My desk had been positioned just to the right of the hole, and I could see out of it when I looked up from my books. I could see over the wall of the project complex and into the park that existed just across the street.

My earliest memory. I was two years old. My mother woke me up from my tiny toddler bed in our little house just like this one. She tickled me to wake me up, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled me into her arms. I was a soft, warm, sleepy little girl. She was cool and gentle. Nestled against her chest, I could feel her heart beat against the side of my head. Thump. Thump. Thump. She smoothed down my hair. "Happy birthday, Isley."

My second birthday. The last birthday she was there to see.

Dasgupta was staring at me. I hadn't slept the night before. And even though I could hear the chimeras climbing the steps after us, I didn't think I could move. I was tired. My ship was where it needed to be. I was done.

"Isley," Noah spoke into my ear and, judging by Dasgupta's expression, my ear alone. "I don't think your father is dead. Run."

Despite the fact that his words were almost certainly a false incentive to get me to do what he wanted me to do, I listened. Maybe Tesla was right; maybe we all did just listen for what we wanted to hear and ignored everything else. But right then, I didn't care. I didn't even care that I was behaving like – like a pleb. I just needed Noah to make me an empty promise.

Dasgupta and I pounded up the stairs to the roof. A sea of matching solar panel roofs rose up to greet us like an ancient video game, with just a few pixels. We ran across the block until we got to the street on the other side of the apartment complex, and then I spotted a garbage dumpster. "There," I pointed, and Dasgupta changed directions and followed me as I ran along the edge of the building.

We were still being pursued. I couldn't figure out what these chimeras were. Some form of higher primate, and…what? Mole, I thought suddenly, watching them. Their eyes were milky and white; in time, I was sure, their species would lose their eyes completely. They were useless now; all these creatures needed to navigate was the tips of their fingers. They ran like apes but they sensed with their highly sensitive little fingers the way a mole sensed with the tip of its puckered lips. Ape-moles, I thought. Okay. What other hideous monstrosity would unchecked years of development and the Tomorrow II bring?

Even I knew that these sickening monsters were the TII's fault. The organisms onboard the ship had been treated with chemicals that targeted the bonds of their DNA. It made cross-breeding much easier. Scientists were attempting to create the ultimate beast of burden. Even in our time, machines gave less back to the world than the energy they consumed. But living creatures were the gift that never stopped giving. After death, even, organisms were useful. Food. Leather. On Vesta, where there was enough ground for them to graze, cows and sheep would live again. They hadn't lived on Earth in decades. I was stupidly jealous of these dumb creatures for a moment. Their lives were so easy, so decent. They had never fallen into a swamp they were convinced would eat them alive. That had already eaten someone else alive.

I knew how to defeat these chimeras, however. Once I knew that they were part mole, it was easy. I was glad for that. The thinner oxygen on this planet combined with the increased gravity made for an exhausting chase. An interesting question was, what did these bastards of evolution want once they caught up to us? I was more than a little leery of finding out. Dasgupta and I jumped from thirty feet high and landed in the dumpster. Reusable garbage bags burst open beneath us and spilled rotten food all over our boots and the legs of our pants. A thick, foul-smelling liquid best defined as gloop seeped into my boots.

She and I climbed out of the dumpster. It was good that we did without pausing for a breath, because the mole-men were jumping after us instantly. They landed in the dumpster, all six of them, simultaneously. They screeched meaningless howls and clambered uneasily out of the dumpster.

A-ha, I thought. They had proved me right.

Noah babbled, concerned. "I can see you with my binoculars from here. Nice landing, Dasgupta. But what are you going to do? Maybe you can – no, there are no windows… Well what about –ah, never mind…"

"Noah, do me a favor. Shut up," Dasgupta snapped.

Good girl, I thought, impressed. I couldn't have said it better myself. Noah pouted in silence. I led Dasgupta up a side-street that led to a small park I knew would be there. She vaulted over the decorative fence after me without pausing a beat. There, in the middle of the park, was just what we needed. A statue to Project Hercules. A statue of our mascot.

The stars.

They weren't really stars, of course. They were some artist's interpretation of stars; when you rocket past them at hundreds of kilometers a second, stars look like streaks of light. And so our mascot had become these ridiculous, non-realistic figures.

They looped, suspended between six stone pillars, in the middle of the park. There was a little fountain just beneath the crisscrossed ribbons of "stars" that represented Earth, the blue pearl. Fresh water had not run in ages, and the water was thick with algae.

Dasgupta and I splashed into the fountain. I think she was beginning to see where I was going with this, because she ran to the star formation and started climbing the slim metal arms rather like a monkey. I was right behind her.

Moles could sense vibrations, and thus movement, with their noses. These chimeras could do the same with their hands. But if we were off the ground, and if we did not emit any vibrations, they were blind to us.

Dasgupta and I climbed to the top of the star formation. I was glad neither of us were overweight. These stupid strings of metal were not very thick. I hoped very, very much that Noah would keep his mouth shut. These ape-moles were blind, not deaf.

The six of them approached the statue in the middle of the park apprehensively. We had just vanished off of their mental sonar, and that probably didn't happen very often. Clinging to the metal bars, Dasgupta and I watched them begin to sniff around the six pillars holding up the array. Their fur seemed only vestigial to me; I could see their bodies much more clearly than I would have wanted. One thing I did notice, however, was that they had scars. The slim, straight scars of blade wounds.

People had been on this planet at some point.

Unless some other chimera had developed blades for hands.

I sighed, then tensed, afraid that they had heard me. Interestingly, the ape-moles did not even dare to venture into the water. Belatedly, I recognized that as a solid plan B. As far as I could remember, moles were not fans of the water.

Frustrated, their search proving fruitless, the chimeras reunited just at the edge of the fountain. They screeched at each other for a while, and I began to rethink my assumption that these screams meant nothing. It sounded an awful lot like language. They even waved their arms around, as if to prove a point.

My mouth fell open, and my skin crawled. I whispered. "Noah." I was confident they couldn't hear me over their own raucous. Too horrified to reach full volume, I whispered. These creatures are too intelligent to be part ape.

"I can see," he whispered back. "Isley, don't turn around. But someone is coming up behind you."

My heart started pounding in my chest. Evidently Dasgupta had been in on that transmission, because, very stiffly, she glanced behind herself. Even though we weren't supposed to, we couldn't just let someone sneak up on us. We wanted to see, at least.

It was Bigfoot.

And, judging by the long, silver knife gleaming harshly in Bigfoot's hand, he was going to kill us.

Killed by Bigfoot, I fumed. What an embarrassing way to die.

11: Chapter Eleven

Chapter 11: Captain Grey

Bigfoot abandoned all pretense of sneakiness and jumped into the fountain with a roar. The gathered chimeras shrieked and turned, but Bigfoot was upon them in minutes. Still bellowing, the legendary monster swung his knife around and invaded again and again the chimeras' personal space, spreading his arms wide to seem bigger.

All typical aggressive behavior, the scientific part of me noted. I pushed my brain to open up like an application on the computer. Think. Think.

What did Bigfoot want with us? Perhaps he wanted to eat us. Perhaps he was simply being territorial to the chimeras. I didn't care. As soon as Bigfoot had scared away the chimeras with his ridiculous show of largesse and masculinity, I jumped off of the art piece and onto his back.

"Isley!" Noah and Dasgupta shouted simultaneously.

I wrapped my legs around Bigfoot's neck and squeezed until he dropped to his hands and knees. I kept squeezing until it lay panting on the ground, weak and dizzy from asphyxiation. We fell together into the algae-infested water. It occurred to me that I could let the monster suffocate to death in the water. It would be easy. But something wasn't adding up. This town. The intact nuclear core. The idea lurking around the edges of my brain shone with a new edge, then vanished again. I growled in frustration and kicked the Bigfoot monster over onto its back. Somewhere in our tussle, I had ripped off the fur at his throat. Annoyed, I glanced into the water for it.

What was I doing? Why did this not seem right?

Ah, I thought. This was all too familiar. I was on an alien planet, surrounded by never-before-seen creatures, and it was all much too familiar. Not the planet, really. Not the monsters. But this monster. It was ripped right out of my childhood. Men in ghillie suits mistaken for Bigfoot; villains in children's TV shows unmasked and revealed to be human beings.

Well, I could unmask a villain, too. I took hold of the edge of Bigfoot's chin and pulled.

Just as I (half) expected, the mask pulled free of its wearer's face with a damp sucking sound. His face pearled with sweat and algae-water, Hough panted for breath.

I pulled my fist back to punch him.

"Isley!" Noah snapped. "He just saved your life. Cool it!" Grudgingly, I lowered my fist. Having Noah watching over my shoulder all the time was too much like having a physical manifestation of my conscience. If he was Jiminy Cricket's size, I would have stepped on him by now. But as it was, I couldn't reach Noah, and Hough had just saved us.

So I crossed my arms over my chest and stepped back, closer to the center of the fountain. "What the hell are you doing, Hough?"

He was elated to see us. As if he couldn't even tell that I was furious, he bounded up to his feet, staggered a little, and threw an arm around me. Then he turned and did the same to Dasgupta. His eyes lingered on her face for a split second. Turning back to me, Hough enthused, "I can't believe you're finally here! I've been waiting – hoping – you would show up for days. I was afraid I'd missed you in the darkness."

I rested my head in my hands for a moment. "Hough," I said, "you went missing days ago. Report. What happened between the last time we saw you and now?"

"Ah." He hesitated, then winced. "Well, the thing is, Isley, I've been ordered not to tell."

My temper flared. "By whom?" Who outranked me?

"By me." The three of us turned to see who had spoken. It was a woman with choppy, shoulder-length, frizzled gray hair. Her face was long and pointed, her eyes almond-shaped and sad. Wrinkled. More wrinkled than I remembered.

My mouth fell open, and my arms dropped to my sides. "C-Captain Grey?"

She smiled. "As a matter of fact, yes, Second Lieutenant."

"Well, shit." Noah's mutter stirred me from the rushing amazement in my ears. "I was not expecting that."

The thing about not having found her body was that I couldn't be certain she was dead. She and my mother merged into one person in my head on that basis, my mother having been lost to the Wasteland. This whole planet was a Wasteland. Why hadn't I seen that before?

Dasgupta turned wide eyes on me. She deferred to me, I realized. I wished I could ask Tesla why she had decided to trust me. "Welcome back to the land of the living," she said, turning back to the captain.

"Where were you?" I asked, in a less polite tone. More demanding, perhaps, than I should have been. "Cool it, Isley," Noah murmured to me. I grit my teeth. I made my fists loosen.

"It isn't safe here," she told us. "Follow me. Then we'll talk." And so Hough, Dasgupta, and I followed Captain Grey through the town. We didn't run across any more chimeras, but maybe Hough's ghillie suit was scaring them away. His right arm stuck straight out, and eventually I realized this was because there was a stick inside his suit holding it there. His real right arm still lay trapped in the mud with the key to the ship and several chunks of my uniform. The town itself wasn't very interesting to look at. Neat, economical, environmentally-friendly. Boring. Not like a spaceship at all.

Noah had much the same to say. Captain Grey led us further into the city, and Noah lost visual. I could imagine him laying on his back on the umbrella, though, thinking out loud and listening in. "How do you think she survived? Maybe the captain has her own private oxygen store or something. She did have her own personal pod room. I bet you anything that Hough fell out of the ship and the captain rescued him. Which, don't get me wrong, was good of her. But it doesn't qualify her as a good guy. I've seen how you guys are about your ship. Can you imagine her leaving it willingly?"

I had been half-listening, letting the wash of Noah's wondering voice soothe my nerves. But his last question was too pertinent not to catch my attention. We could be walking right into a trap. But Noah was listening.

Noah was useless.

So I could turn back now, or I could trust my captain, even if she didn't seem like my captain anymore. Even if she had turned her back on her duty and abandoned ship.

I wrestled with the two alternatives as we walked; my pace slowed, and then the group slowed as a whole, affected by me. They didn't seem to recognize it. If I thought Dasgupta or Hough was in danger from the captain, would they listen to me? Would they let me save them? If not, leaving now was my only choice. She outranked me. She had more authority. But I thought of Dasgupta leaning over the railing that morning as though she was about to be sick, and seeing me, and straightening. And I thought of Hough's cry as his arm had been torn off. "Isley!" Even Noah, too far away to be of any help, doing everything he was capable of.

We arrived at the captain's quarters. She wasn't living in an apartment; no, she was living in the back room of a bakery. When we pushed our way in through double-doors and crossed to the back of the ship, where there were a couple of cots pushed into a corner and a bucket and wash rag obviously meant for washing, the captain explained, "There are lots of vacuum-sealed food packets here. I find it's calming to live close to my next meal."

As if, I noted, she'd been close to starving before.

I carefully looked around for garbage, or for extra clothes, or even for keepsakes. Evidence of the captain's activities. "How long have you been here, Captain Grey?"

She sighed and sat down on her cot. She settled in and waved her hand to indicate that we should do the same. Hough and Dasgupta shared a cot, and I sat down on the floor and leaned my back against the doorframe. If she had another accomplice, she couldn't lock us in here without my noticing. The backroom had probably once held extra food, but since the kitchen wasn't actually in use, all of the boxes had been shuffled there. "Two months."

"We slept for two years. How much of that were you awake for?"

"Two years," the captain replied, sounding amused. "I didn't freeze myself, Isley."

Dasgupta leaned forward and said, "Then how did you –"

But I lost the rest of her question in a rush of cursing from Noah. I sat up and leaned forward, listening hard. "Sorry, sorry. I tripped. But, Isley, if she survived –"

"Shut up," I snapped, relieved. When I glanced up, I realized everybody was looking at me. "I'm sorry. I was…thinking of something else. And I thought I heard something. Sorry, Dasgupta. Go on."

Uncertainly, she turned back to the captain. "How did you survive?"

"Those pods you all sleep in. The air is vacuumed out of them. Do you have any idea where the air goes?"

Hough hazarded a guess. Of course he hadn't bothered to ask this sooner; judging by the way he looked at the captain, he was too devoted to her to question her at all. Somehow, she had taken my fierce bloodhound and broken him into a slobbering puppy. "With the rest of the oxygen in storage?"

"Normally, yes. But in an emergency, I can reroute it. So I sent it to the tanks charging on Deck 1." Deck 1 was the deck devoted solely to the outside of the ship. It housed the medic bay and our flight suits, and the vast array of things the ship might need for fixing. Deck 1 was the most important deck on the ship.

I shook my head a little. "But how did you get up to Deck 1? I saw you on the bridge when we went down, and the oxygen must have run out so quickly."

"I held my breath," she shrugged. She looked down at her lap. What was that on her face? Could it be…sadness?

"Ask her why she didn't freeze herself," Noah told me.

"Why didn't you freeze yourself?" I asked.

The captain's head snapped up. "I wanted to give you children a chance. I told you that."

Noah pressed, "Ask her why we were more valuable to her than the rest of her crew."

"Why us, why not anybody else on the bridge?" I paraphrased.

Captain Grey's face tightened. "Can't you just thank me, Isley? Do you really have to know why I did what I did?"

I hesitated – but only for a second. "Yes." Like I'd thought with Noah, it would be better if I could just know. Even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear.

Captain Grey shut out the other people in the room and studied me intently. I felt the rest of the world fall away. It was just she and I, and was I going to give her whatever she was trying to pull out of me? In the black vacuum of space between us, I felt my heart give a nervous little skip. "Let me guess," said the captain. "Noah Bachman is listening in."

With nothing left to lose, I nodded.

"Can I speak to him?"

"Give me to her," Noah told me. I removed the little communications device from my ear and watched the captain put it in hers. Then she left the room, talking quietly with Noah. What did she have to say to him that she couldn't say to me? Were they coconspirators on something? Should I have let her borrow it? What if she asked to be brought back onto the ship – should I let her?

I turned my inward questions outward, and asked them to Dasgupta and Hough. "What do you think of her?"

"She abandoned the ship," Dasgupta said at once. "That's strange."

"Well, if you haven't noticed, the ship isn't very friendly of late," Hough shrugged. He rubbed at the end of his shoulder, where his arm would have begun.

"How do you think the Tomorrow II got to this planet? Do you think she flew it here?"

Dasgupta's eyebrows rose with surprise. "Do you think the ship had power that long?"

"I don't know. Something isn't adding up here. The ship couldn't have recharged – so that fits. And yet, without power, we landed safely. And without power, a city was built. Not the city carried onboard our ship, so what city? And built by whom?" I concentrated, thinking hard. "Maybe there was another mission to space. A secret one. But if it was a secret to dissuade terrorist activity, why were the Tomorrows so popularized? No, there was no secret mission. It's something…else…" I don't think your father is dead.

The idea lurking around the edges of my mind burst forward. I gasped and put one hand to my ear. "Noah?" Oh, of course. He wasn't there. Nervous, I glanced out into the hall. The captain was there, still speaking with Noah. "Dasgupta," I said quietly, "tell the captain I went to the bathroom." Then I got up and left the bakery using the back entrance.

I needed eyes in the air. Noah was busy, so I would just have to give myself a vantage point. The town was built into a symbol. I knew now just what that symbol was. I stopped in the middle of the street and looked around for the nearest tall building. There was one just across the street; an office building, maybe an apartment. I didn't care. The door wasn't locked. I pushed open the door to the stairwell and started climbing. I didn't stop until I was on the roof. Sweating slightly, still not entirely accustomed to this new, powerful gravity, I stepped up to the edge of the building.

My hope died in my chest. It wasn't there. What I thought would be located at the heart of the city wasn't there. I had thought, maybe – maybe – there was a third a first one, and this was the third – whatever. And my father and best friend had been aboard a ship that didn't explode. If so, a ship would have been planted in the center of the town: the hub of the wheel, so to speak, the source from which civilization grew, like a new flower rising out of the stem of the old. But it wasn't there. The town was just a town, and at the center of it was nothing more than a little park. Pointless. Useless. I groaned, and when that wasn't enough, I screamed.

All of the rage I had been repressing – against the other, sleeping crew members, against Noah, against Leucapsis and Hough and even Dasgupta, and now against the captain, and my father, too, and Tesla – came out of me in screams that tore up my throat and stole my voice away. In the dreadful quietude of this dead town, my voice was shockingly alive. I hated it. It was unfair. I screamed until my voice went away.

Then I went back downstairs and across the street.

"Trouble going?" the captain suggested innocently. Ha. She was amusing herself. Well, I was done being anyone's amusement.

"Come on, Dasgupta. Hough."

"Where are you going?" the captain asked, rising from where she'd seated herself back on her bed. Dasgupta and Hough, half-risen, stopped and looked back and forth between us.

I narrowed my eyes. "I'm going back to the ship I still need to save."

"Noah told me you lost the key. You need my help."

"The hell we do," I snarled. "You abandoned the ship. You left us in freezers for two years while you ran around doing whatever you wanted. You just…you just walked away from us, not knowing whether or not we would be okay, and that – is – not – FAIR!"

The captain's face shuttered up. "Step into the hallway with me, second lieutenant."

Exhausted, and winded, I obeyed the command. Like a sullen child, I said, "What?"

But she wasn't looking at me with the white-lipped fury of my father. She looked…sad?...again. No. Regretful. I knew that expression. Regretful. "I'm sorry, Isley. At the time, I thought it was the only solution."

"You thought what was?"

"I have done things," she allowed, her voice shaking, "Things that were not right. Not fair. Believe me when I tell you that letting you sleep was one of the most fair things that I have ever done."

Doubt wriggled through my mind like ant chimeras through my suit. "Do I need to check on the cargo, Captain?"

She laughed hollowly. "No, Isley. No, they are all just fine." She sighed and ran her hands through her hair a few times. I wondered why she didn't shave it. It was so much easier to manage. "Listen to me, Isley. You're right. You should go. I'm glad you found Hough; I'm sorry I made him worthless to you. He is still brave, though. And bravery is a valuable trait. When you decide you need me, you know where I am."

I frowned. "This town, captain, and the ship – how it landed – and the nuclear core – you aren't going to answer any of my questions?"

"You don't want to question me, Isley. You want to fillet me. Take a day or two to ask yourself why you can't treat me the way I should be treated." Toward the end of her statement, she began to sound like the captain again, and I relented.

"I do hope our professional relationship hasn't been ruined," I managed to mutter. It was what Noah would have told me to say.

Captain Grey grinned wearily. "Go on, Isley."

"But, wait. Do you know how to recharge the ship?"

Captain Grey shook her head. "I've been puzzling that out for months. Most of the science buildings were Archontite design. I can't figure them out." She shrugged. "I guess that's why I'm just a captain, and not an engineer."

I held out my hand. After Captain Grey shook it, I called for Dasgupta and Hough. "Wait," said the captain. She handed me back the comm device. "Take Noah."

"What about you?" asked Hough, concerned.

The captain smiled, then leaned over and hugged him. "I'll be just fine. I'm stepping aside to let you all have a whack at it. I'll be right here."

"That's very kind of her," Noah opined to me, once he was back inside my head. "It must be hard."

Dasgupta nodded, listening to the transmission. I had forgotten she had an ear piece in. Had she heard what the captain was saying to Noah? As if she could read my mind, she shook her head. The three of us wandered up the street, saying little. "You never said what happened to you," Dasgupta eventually said to Hough.

"Oh. Yeah. I saw movement in the terrarium, so I went in to investigate. You won't believe this, but it was a tree! I didn't know that until too late. They chased me into the bog, and the bugs there…" He stop and shuddered. His voice was quiet and hoarse as if from screaming when he said, "They took my arm. They were targeting all my limbs, but I punched first, and so that's what they got to first."

Dasgupta shuddered. "And they let you go?"

Hough shook his head. "No. Their venom, or poison, whatever it is, paralyzes you. I was just laying there, completely helpless, screaming. Just screaming, but it was all inside my head. I couldn't even make a noise. And then, I don't know, it was like they all got scared. They hid in the mud. When the paralytic wore off, I got up. I was bleeding like crazy, and I could barely tell up from down. I fell out of the hole in the wall. How I got there, I have no idea. And when I woke up, I was in the hospital. Captain Grey took care of me, and then she took me home." His voice was warm with fondness.

With Hough trailing along behind us as our rear guard, Dasgupta and I put our heads together and spoke quietly. "Isley," she said, "while you were gone, I heard some of what Noah and the captain were saying."

"Hey," Noah protested. "That was private."

"What were they talking about?" I asked.

"I don't know. I didn't catch much. But I'll tell you what kept popping up: theWasteland."

The Wasteland. Where Waywards lived. My blood ran cold thinking about it, although I wasn't sure why. I didn't know very much about the Wasteland. It was the way everyone spoke about it, even stellaucts. Like there was something to be afraid of.

Dasgupta put her hand on my arm. "Isley," she said, her voice low but intense, "all I want to know is, are you sure we can trust Noah?" I saw the wince she was trying to hide. She did trust Noah. Somehow, Leucaspis's death brought them together. And Hough was so softened he probably trusted everybody. Noah stayed quiet. He was probably listening as closely to my response as Dasgupta was.

Despite his uselessness in the field, I had nothing personal against Noah. It was the information in his head I didn't agree with. He knew things I didn't – things that could prove very dangerous, indeed.

No. The problem wasn't in his head. It was in mine. I couldn't trust anyone. Captain Grey said I wasn't treating her the way she should have been treated. So, what was wrong with me?

Tesla, angry with me in the zero-g training room. "Can't you for once be normal, Isley?"

"I thought you said you didn't like normal."

"I don't, but – sometimes you don't even act human. I was just trying to tell you that I wished we were going on the same ship, not because it's better for the ship, but because I want to be close to you. And all you can think about is what's best for the crew." He kept flying around the room, collecting the balls we'd been throwing around to simulate jetsam in the ship at zero-g.

"It's what a captain would do."

"I know. And I know that's what you want to be. I used to love that about you. But lately, Isley, I don't know…it's like nothing else even matters. You don't even look at me anymore."

I sighed, frustrated. "I am looking."

He dropped the bag holding the simulated jetsam. He put his hands on my shoulders. "Not like you used to."

Shaking my head in confusion, I stepped up on tiptoe to kiss him. For a moment, he kissed me back. Then he pushed me away. "That can't fix everything between us, Isley."

"Then explain what's wrong!" I shouted, exasperated.

"You don't look at me like you used to! Like I amazed you. And that's what I loved. What lasts, Isley?" His favorite question. At every museum and art exhibit and library we went to. "Not us. I tried so hard, Isley. I did." He kicked the bag holding the balls and they went skittering loudly around the room. It was an awful sound. "And that's not enough for you!"

His final exams. His captaincy exam. He hadn't scored well enough. By the time we got back to Earth, I would be ancient, and he would be in his sixties or seventies. We could have had ten or so years together on Earth. We were on separate ships. That was all we could have. And now even that was gone.

I hesitated, then said, "I might not pass them, either."

Tesla snorted. "Come on, Isley. Of course you will." He stopped in front of me. He held my face between his hands. "I'm sorry I wasn't enough for you." He kissed my forehead and shouldered the bag.

"Wait, wait, wait. Tesla? Where are you going?" And no matter how many times I asked, he never answered. He was just gone. And then I saw his ship fall, burning, from the sky.

I took a deep, steadying breath. Noah had made me a promise, but that didn't mean I wanted to kill him any less. I wanted everyone around me farther away, because apparently that was the effect I had on everyone in my life. I was antigravity. But there was one person in my life who had never purposely abandoned me, and I couldn't let my father's death so unanswered for. "Noah and I have an agreement." Then, figuring that wasn't enough, "We can trust him."

Honestly, I still wasn't sure about that. But how could I be sure? There was no way I could crack his skull open and divine the truth. I'd known Tesla my whole life and still not known everything about him. If Noah was my inferior officer, I could order him to tell me the truth. But I couldn't do that. So, I would just have to take Noah's word.

Was this how all relationships worked? Ugh, how awful it was. They operated by nothing but trust?

I breathed again, then checked our surroundings. "Noah, do you see a building with red walls? It should be wider than the others, and not very tall…" There came the sound of him shuffling. I was struck by the mental image of him falling right off of the side of the ship. "Don't trip," I ordered him sharply.

He muttered something vaguely misogynistic, then was quiet for a moment. "Yeah, okay. It's got kind of a weird symbol on the wall?" I acceded yes. "Yep. Let me see if I can find you again…there you are. It's about four blocks to the east, maybe one block north."

We started walking that way. "The power plant?" Dasgupta guessed. "What's the use of going there without Noah?"

"Oh," Noah said, suddenly realizing. "I should warn you, I don't know how to read blueprints. And I don't know the first thing about electricity."

"But you do speak Russian," I pointed out calmly. "We're going to scope the place out. There are three English-speakers awake, and only one Russian. We are comparatively expendable."

One Russian-speaker awake. The more I looked around, the more questions I had. Why was the electrical engineering building all in Russian? And what turn of fate or coincidence or plotting had brought Noah to be awake when he and all of his countrymen ought to have been sleeping, waiting for the day to come when we arrived back on Earth?

There is no such thing as coincidence, Tesla would have said. Noah definitely knew more than he was letting on.

Neither Dasgupta nor Hough flinched at my words. It was true. What mattered was the ship and her cargo. Still, I turned to Dasgupta. "Thank you," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"No, thank you. I'm sorry that I…well, I'm sorry I…"

I shook my head. "You're only human. I'm sure we all have our breaking points, Dasgupta. What you must realize is that you can work through it. A breaking point is just like a broken bone, and you can forge a stronger one if you push it hard enough."

To me, Noah muttered, "That's the most disturbing simile I've ever heard."

Dasgupta said, "Thanks, Isley. But I think – well, maybe I hope that'll help."

"Very good," I said, and nodded. I studied my shoes as we walked to relay the fact that I didn't want to talk anymore.

The power plant was just as I knew it would be, and as Noah described. It was only two stories tall, with a repeated symbol on the walls. It looked like a bolt of electricity. And it was a warning: electrical engineers only. It matched the badge on their jumpsuits. There was a door on one side of the building; other than that, all four sides were the same. "Better hurry," Dasgupta said, pointing at the sky. "It'll be dark again soon."

So we circled the whole building. It was clear. I approached the door warily. Your retinas had to be programmed for entrance; otherwise the security system would shock you fiercely. But when I went up to the door to examine it, the retina scan didn't even initiate, which means I didn't even get shocked. "Power's off," I muttered. I studied the door.

"Um, Isley," Noah said.

I jumped up, glanced around. I was afraid of another chimera attack. "What is it?" I asked, my voice low and taught. Dasgupta and Hough shot me nervous looks and pressed closer, reaching for me.

Noah rustled. Was he in bed? Was he sleeping? I was going to murder him. "I don't know if this is the right time, but something just occurred to me. If this building is in Russian, then maybe others are, too. Which means maybe this base is Archontite. Which could mean that the moment we wake up the crew and tell them that this is Vesta, we'll have declared a war on."

I sagged against the door. "Would Archontite do that?"

"Would the Confederacy?" he asked me levelly. There was only one answer to that. Yes.

I was still reeling from Noah's question when Hough broke the door open with a hammer he'd gotten from Captain Grey. We went into the power station. The door opened into a little reception room. We marched past the desk and into the plant proper. The floor was sunk into the ground; it held a vast and complex series of pipes cooled by the water in what was effectively a giant pool. At the far end of the room, huge wheels turned. There was an entire corner of the complex devoted to gauges and needles and buttons. On the second floor of the building, which we could see, since it only extended from ten feet up to about halfway across the floor, there were more workstations.

The floor was muted brown tile. After ransacking the back room for all the vacuum-sealed food it held (two full meals, a packet of pasta, and one strawberry jello), we lay down to sleep. With darkness falling, it would be no easier to get back to the ship tomorrow than it was today. And there was no point in going back until we could devise a power source.

The others lay down, anyway. I couldn't sleep. I climbed the stairs to the second floor to get a better look at the complex as a whole. We needed power to wake up the electrical engineers. We needed the electrical engineers to turn on the power. I sighed, frustrated. I sat down on the floor by the railing and draped my legs over the ledge and wrapped my hands around the bars. "Noah?"

"I'm here."

"What have you been doing all day?" I wondered.

I could almost hear him smile. "I spent most of it looking for a book, sadly. I packed my copy of Catch-22 with me, but I can't remember where I put it."

We sat in silence for a moment. "Where are you?" he eventually asked.

"Walking around. Outside. I don't like being…"

"Inside. I know. You should have seen your face when you were looking out of that hole in the wall in the terrarium. I thought hard about grabbing you right then and there; I was scared you were going to jump."

I sniffed. "No, no. The ship…that's different. It's like…I'm connected to the ship. It's being anywhere else that I don't like."

He thought about that. "Are you looking at the stars?"

I was sitting on the steps in front of the electrical plant, actually, but if I tilted my head back, I could see them. "Yes." Strangely, these were not the same stars visible from Earth. Although chances were good that some of these stars, too, had burned out; but their light would keep coming to us until even that faded away. I sighed. "What lasts?"

"What lasts?" Noah repeated. I hadn't intended for him to hear that. But I was interested to hear what he said. "I guess it depends on who you ask. My favorite answer is Tennyson. He wrote this long, long eulogy for his friend, called In Memoriam. In it, he wrote,

"Of those that, eye to eye, shall look

On knowledge, under whose command

Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand

Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did,

And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed

Of what in them is flower and fruit…"

I looked at the stars. "The Earth is just a planet now."

Noah snorted. "I guess leaving it was easier than changing it for the better."

"Tesla – my friend Tesla – I think he believed that nothing lasted. There's just the present. And then it's gone. But he believed in history. And I always thought…what if the present isn't good enough? What are you supposed to do then?"

Noah answered, "You know poets have a name for what you're talking about. Carpe Diem. 'At my back I always hear / Time's wing'd chariot drawing near.' Andrew Marvell. It's all about making today count because tomorrow might not come."

"Of course tomorrow will come," I said irritably. "It is a fact that the Earth will continue to revolve around the sun until the sun itself burns out billions of years from now. Whether or not you are there to see it." There was an inherent selfishness in Noah's speech that I shied away from.

I could practically hear Noah roll his eyes. "That's the point, Isley. You won't be there. It doesn't happen for you." I thought again of my mother, and the way she had been haunting me with her non-presence for years, and knew that he was wrong. "I'm serious," he pounded on, anyway. "We are beyond the sun and the stars. But we take it on faith that the Earth is still out there somewhere. We take it on faith that everything we know is true. What I mean, Isley, is that anything you haven't seen is just like history: presumably true, but essentially something you have to believe simply because so many other people agree that it happened."

My mind worked that over for a while. "What's your point?"

Noah answered, "My point, Isley, is that nothing lasts. That's my answer. What lasts? Nothing. Planets wear out and we leave them. Stars burn out and navigators get lost. Even the eternal things find their end."

"I thought you were supposed to be a historian."

"All stories are just documented change," Noah said patiently. "And history is just a compilation of stories. My purpose is to find the truth in the stories we remember. Nothing lasts, but something can always be saved. History saves all the things we fear we'll forget, and some things we'd like to, because when it's true, it can't be forgotten. I don't think any of us really create truth, or find it; we just…discover it, like it's been there all along. And the truth survives where everything else changes.

"It's sort of like learning that the Earth travels around the sun. Who told you that first? I can't remember who told me. God knows I haven't ever tried to prove it. But I know it to be true, so I'll tell my children that the Earth rotates around the sun. And they won't have to prove it; it'll be obvious to them. I'll have saved them time and energy they can use to discover new things."

My brow wrinkled. "Like what?"

"Oh, I don't know. Like what it is to live in a planet where there is no Wasteland, maybe. Humanity doesn't need a receptacle for its trash, Isley. Or maybe what it is to travel in space and not sleep for almost half a century. That would be nice. To go back to the world you left, and for the people you left not to have grown old…"

But I wasn't listening anymore. I had grown tense at the mention of the word Wasteland. "You owe me another part of the story today," I reminded him.

He sighed, sounding tired. "Yes. I was getting to that. I'll start at the beginning. Please save your questions for the end. And keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times." Noah waited.

I huffed. "I don't get it."

"Never mind. Let's see…from the beginning, then."

A couple of hundred years ago, the world was in pretty bad shape. World War III had just gone down, and things were starting to look nasty for World War IV. Countries had lined themselves up the same way they did in the First World War. They were all connected to each other, like the most bizarre set of dominoes you've ever seen, so that if you so much as touched one domino, the whole world falls to war. I don't know why no one thought to look back and see how well that worked out last time.

With the world on the brink of collapse – remember, there was hardly enough food being produced to feed 60% of the global population of 10 billion people – another world war could very well have decimated the human race. Overpopulation, malnourishment, disease; people forget that the slow killers are as much a problem as the wars that wipe out tens of millions.

At the last possible moment, two global organizations stepped up to prevent war. To prevent the eradication of civilization and the human race, without overstating it. Okay, maybe overstating a little. I like hyperbole. The truth is, humanity always survives. We're like cockroaches. But there's a huge difference between the civilizations that cockroaches built and the ones humans built.

It's an interesting philosophical quandary, isn't it? What inherent value does culture have? I'm a historian; I could say that the importance of culture is within history. But I don't think so. I think it's in identity. Who am I? It's a much easier question to answer when you know where you've come from. I am Noah Bachman of the Archontite. And I'm not. But that's a topic for another day. Have you ever asked yourself how much of who you are stems from the soil you were planted in? That's a metaphor, by the way. I know you're not a tree. It's just – I've just figured something out. The real value of culture is history. What we forgot earlier is that I have to tell my kids that the Earth travels around the sun. It's a fact, and it is true – but it has to be passed down.

Books are good for that. Some books last for years. I can't believe I've been wrong all along, but I have. That the Earth travels around the sun – who cares? Well, you do. I don't. It doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is the nature of humanity. History gives me that. But if I have to be there to tell my kids the truth, then that's not very good history, is it? There are new planets and an entire generation of colonists, and knowledge gets lost. What I didn't know is that the knowledge that becomes inherent is most important.

I do have a point. Let me get back to it.

The value of culture is the collective knowledge of the human race. And surely by now you must know that I am not just referring to questions of physics. I mean ethics, too. And what lasts is what becomes a part of our makeup. There, that's a better answer. Humanity can be changed, Isley. It's just a matter of how.

So, two organizations. You can see where I'm going with this. They were the League of Eastern Nations and the Union of Western Republics – Canada and Mexico were, by this time, republics. And South America was united under the Free Trade Act of 2102 as a democracy, but keep South America in mind – it'll be important. The League of Eastern Nations had a lot of square miles but not the greatest environment, and not much money. The Union had exactly the opposite problems. They were inclusive organizations; the Union was only Canada, the USA, and Mexico – they did not include South America. And the League consisted only of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Romania. Poor Poland was their first target.

See, these two organizations figured, What the hell, we can take over the world if we can just decide how to carve it up. All these delicate contracts that nations had with each other that would have led them into World War IV disintegrated in one terrible moment of greed.

Poland fell. Then Cuba. Hungary. The Bahamas. And on and on it went, until two organizations controlled the entire world. Well, with the exception of South America, England, and France. You know, the French don't get enough credit in war. See the Hundred Years' War if you really want proof.

The Union's and the League's blitz of the globe came to a sudden, grinding halt in a war of attrition that lasted twenty years. Three little plots of land – honestly, how hard are they to kill?

Well, when you drop half a dozen nuclear missiles on them, they aren't much of a problem at all.

This is the world you're familiar with. The League became the Archontite, and the Union became the Confederacy. Why these changes happened, I'll tell you next time.

But now you know. Our governments, Isley, came to be out of really amazingly excessive greed. These are the governments that got rid of unemployment and disease and overpopulation. You only think that they've done good. But they've done as much bad as good. So the higher in esteem you hold them, the lower they've sunk to get there.

"I want to know about my father," I said softly.

"I know. I'm working up to him."

I took a deep breath. "Do you really think he might still be alive?"

"It's been a long day for me, Isley. I need to think." He needed time to weigh the odds. But if there was any tiny chance at all that my dad was alive…

That was the thing about Noah, I thought. He demanded that you take him on faith. He made no attempts to prove anything. And the annoying part was, I thought he could, if he wanted to. He was always taking notes to himself about something, after all. But I suspected that he was actually guessing what would happen next, and didn't want to ruin the surprise for me.

Could someone really know the future from the past? It seemed an unfair advantage to me. But maybe he needed time to be all twisted around in his head for him to pull the truth out of it.

"What's the truth of this mission, Noah?"

"I dunno, Isle. It isn't over yet. Get some sleep, cara."

So I went back inside and lay down with the others. "I don't take orders from you," I felt compelled to remind him.

And he started humming a lullaby for me. His singing was so terrible that I fell asleep faster just to get away from it.

Yeah. That's why.

12: Chapter Twelve

Chapter 12: The Captain's Log

Hough shook me awake in the morning. Morning to us, anyway. It was still dark outside, of course. Vesta circled around not one sun, but three, bounced among them like a pinball. Because the stars were so close together, the planet did not turn as much as Earth, nor as regularly. Hence the unusual solar patterns.

I sat up, my eyes gummy, my mind clouded; the quest for a good night's sleep continued. We had so much to do, and I didn't know where to begin. There was a rushing sound in my ears that I thought might be the blood rushing down to my lower half as I sat up, but was actually Noah's deep, regular breathing. Hough sat nervously on his knees, watching me. "What is it?" I asked.

"I just," he took a deep breath, "I wanted to talk to you."

"About what?"

"You. And Captain Grey. And how I – how I messed up by going into that terrarium even though you told me not to. I'm so sorry that I did, Isley. Dasgupta told me about how you followed me and that you got hurt, and I'm so sorry. I promise I won't let it happen again. But if you don't want me to be a part of your crew anymore, I can accept that." He looked as though he meant what he said, but Hough and Dasgupta and I – we were the same. We could no sooner stop being what we were than those freak mole-apes could stop being an affront to nature. We were the children of the ship. And yet, where was this offer of kind surrender coming from? Captain Grey had been lax with him, I knew. What had Noah told me? I validated Leucaspis's existence. Maybe Grey had done the same for Hough. So why was Hough looking at me with such trepidation?

He feared me. I had gotten Leucaspis killed. Dasgupta was clinging to a thread; if I pushed her any harder, or for any longer, she would certainly crack under the pressure.

We had an entire crew and thousands of people in cargo depending on us. What was it about that that they couldn't understand? Frustrated, I clenched my jaw. I gave myself a split second to listen for Tesla's or Noah's voice. But it was my father who spoke up out of my memory. Fear nothing, Daguerre said. Do not fear anything, and no one can touch you. But Hough did not have this option.

"You are my midshipman, Mr. Hough. You are my crew. You are mine. I need you." It was as true as anything I had ever said. But I thought of the time he had spent with Grey, and the way she had treated him, and knew that the words might not be true for him.

I didn't even know if they were true for me. Not that Hough was my crew member, but whether I was part of Grey's. Leaving the ship, abandoning us – it smacked of going AWOL.

Noah needed to finish telling me his story. The sooner I knew what was really going on onboard the Tomorrow II among hundreds of sleeping people, and what was going on with the explosion of the TI, the better.

Hough bit his lip. He was making a decision. "Thank you, Isley. I promise I won't let you down again."

My shoulders slumped with relief. So he had chosen me. Never mind that he was as harmless now as a kitten – he was mine, and I was his.

It was four against one.

Dasgupta woke up soon after, and we set about performing simple maintenance on the machinery. There were rusty pipes and bolts, and many of the readouts had to be cleaned up.

"Just when I was going to be useful, you decide you don't need me," Noah sighed dramatically in my ear. "Damn."

"We might still need you," I puffed, up to my waist in the water in the pool in the floor. It was there to cool the pipes. There was only a little algae growing in it, so this plant hadn't been abandoned for long. But whose was it? Was it Archontite, really? But Noah had made a good point. The Confederacy wouldn't hesitate to use the Archontite to get to this planet, only to massacre them upon arrival. I imagined the space fleet that would return from Vesta to Earth in two hundred years with half a dozen generations of Archontite soldiers burning for the kill.

Dasugpta, nearby, voiced some of my same concerns. "All of this is in Russian," she said, gesturing at a display.

"Maybe there's an English mode," Hough suggested.

"At this point, it doesn't matter what language it is in. What matters is that we get it on."

Sounding hopeful, Noah asked, "So you're coming to get me?"

Dasgupta looked at me. I didn't know how Noah isolated the transmissions. He was suspiciously familiar with this technology, and I made a mental note to ask him about it the next chance I got. I returned Dasgupta's look, and she balanced along the pipes and crouched next to me where I floated in the water. "What is it, Isley?" she whispered.

Noah sighed. "Shall I just remove my comm, then? Honestly. How you can have a private conversation – you could just tell me…" And then there was some colorful swearing in Russian.

Stupid boy. It wasn't Noah that I didn't want listening in; it was Hough. There was no telling what he would report back to Captain Grey. "There are vast battery pacs here. I saw the floor plan yesterday night on my way back into the building. They don't have nearly enough to power up the whole ship, but then, I don't want the whole ship back online just yet. I want the captain's bridge."

"The captain's log," Dasgupta understood immediately. And even if we had found her limit much too soon, I was glad that she was there to understand.

"I'm tired of not knowing everything. And I don't want the captain to return and change the log before we learn everything."

Dasgupta nodded in agreement. She caught my curious look. "No, I like the captain. But I like you more. You wouldn't ever abandon the crew."

I blinked, flattered. "Alright, then. Let's get the battery pacs out. We can carry them back to the ship. Noah. Noah! You can guide us back to the ship, can't you?"

"Of course I can. See how that works? You ask, and I do. There's no need for hurtful whispering…"

Dasgupta and I rolled our eyes at each other.

We pulled up tiles from the floor that Noah dutifully translated from Russian. We were forced to describe the words to him, so we came up with alternate names for Cyrillic letters. There was the flat-top "n" with a curve on the right leg, and the backwards "N"…by the time we finished, I suspected Noah wished he didn't speak Russian at all.

Still, we managed to enter into the basement of the power plant, where plant operators here stored battery pacs. They were bigger than I thought they would be – about as tall as my waist, and equally as wide. It was a black matte rectangle with several ports for plugs on one end. The batteries were stored in a caged room. The basement was dark, and we had no flashlights, so it took longer than it should have to get our hands on them. Hough flinched when he broke the padlock on the cage doors open, and I frowned. He couldn't even hurt a lock.

Hough and Dasgupta and I loaded up two of the batteries onto a cart with wheels on it, like the ones bellhops used to carry baggage around a hotel. Then we carefully dragged it up the stairs and onto the street. As expected, it was still dark outside. I was hit with a wave of weariness. A tiredness that went all the way down to my bones. There was so much work to be done, and I was just so tired. I couldn't do it all.

Dasgupta eased the handle of the cart out of my hands. "I got it," she told me, and together, she and Hough carried the cart holding two batteries the rest of the way out of the electrical engineering building.

"Thank you," I said.

She and Hough shrugged. "Just doing our jobs, boss. No need to thank us."

And that, if anything, just made me feel more tired. They were just doing their jobs. These demanding, exhausting jobs. Jobs designed to kill us.

We set about pushing the cart back to the tomorrow. We figured that two of us could rappel up with the wires we had used to come down from the ship with, and the last person remaining could secure the wires to the battery cart. Then the other two people could retract the cart and the final person with the wires.

I had a quiet conversation with Noah. "My father's not alive, is he?" I muttered under my breath.

Noah heaved a sigh. "If he is anything like you, Isle, he might well be. I don't know." He hesitated before speaking again, as if he thought what I did. If we said what we must both have been hoping aloud, then it might not come true. It was a ridiculous superstition, but I did not want to jinx us. It couldn't be true, anyway. And yet I hoped. I guess that was the point of giving survivors the bodies of their loved ones. Once you saw them cold and hard, there was no denying the truth. "One thing I keep coming back to. Why did I freeze?"

I clenched my jaw. "For thirty years, you mean? Do you not remember going into the pod?"

"Yeah, and that's the weird part. I do. I remember launch day. The bus smelled like ass. I remember boarding the ship, finding my room, unloading my stuff. I even remember going to work, at least for a few days. I was interviewing some of the stellaucts. And then, I don't know. It's sort of like going to bed in the dark – I remember being tired, and I remember climbing into the pod. But I can't remember who told me to. I can't remember why."

Hough looked tired, so I took over pushing the cart for him. It must have been difficult to do with only one arm, anyway. "What did you and the captain talk about?" I needed the answer to this question. What had they been talking about yesterday when I gave her my comm?

Noah worked his answer into something I would want to hear. Or that he thought I would want to hear. "We talked about you. She was worried about you."

What? No one had ever worried about me. You worried about something that could be broken. Ah. The ship. "She's old. She's dying. She wants to know if I am up to the job at hand."

"Well, are you?"

At the foot of the ship, I sent Dasgupta and Hough back up on the wires. I gave myself the task of tying up the cart. The ship was incredible; it was all I had been able to do not to run to it at the first chance I got. Even with the broken glass arm that was the terrarium, and with it listing at a steep angle against a shorter mountain of the range of them spiking up away from the ship, it was a masterpiece of technology. Pure and refined progress. An attempt to exceed all limits with a goal – now, that was something to admire, unlike Noah's strange books. The umbrella at the top of the ship cast shade down in front of us – faraway stars cast down dim light from millions of light years away. If we had power, we could right the ship and plant it. It would become the center of the town. That would be my job, if I was captain. If I was captain, every job was my job; I had to oversee everything.

But I wasn't captain. Not really. Not yet. There were still four first lieutenants, probably frozen somewhere onboard the ship. And Captain Grey was still alive.

Not for much longer, Tesla would've reminded me. Living things don't last, Isley. And Noah, True things do.

I cleared my throat and sent the cart with the batteries up to the ship. "I think so." But I was beginning to think that I wasn't.

Finally, we hauled the batteries from the town below up into the captain's bridge. Dasgupta and I started popping panels off of the console in front of the captain's chair and disconnecting wires.

"What are you going to turn back on?" Noah asked.

I jumped. It was a shock not to hear his voice in my head, but from across the room. He was sitting with his legs crossed, Indian-style, to keep out of the way. Hough sat down beside him, and Noah offered him a banana he must have gotten from the terrarium. Noah had ditched his jumpsuit; the arms were tied around his waist, and he wore a white t-shirt with a plaid button-up over it. He wore a cap to shade his face from the sun; there were uneven tan lines all over him from the hours he'd spent on the top of the umbrella, guiding us around town.

Hough placidly ate the banana, sweating slightly from the strain of hoisting the cart up the wires and two dozen decks of the ship.

"Just the bridge," Dasgupta told him. "The captain's computers, some of the navigation equipment, that sort of thing."

Noah tilted his head toward the four empty desks in front of the captain's. During my captaincy exam, holograms of Dasgupta, Trudeau, and Fowler had been projected from their various bridges. "What about those?"

"We'd need Captain Grey," I said shortly. "I want a look at the log first."

"All right. I was just wondering. Can we get the kitchen open, do you think?"

Dasgupta and I stopped what we were doing and glanced at each other. "Why?" she asked warily.

"Because Ciaran here just ate our last banana."

We three stared at Hough. He swallowed hard. "He didn't tell me that before," he whispered, his voice cracking.

I rolled my eyes as hard as I possibly could. "Fine. Yes. Food, whatever. The captain's log first. Now shut up."

They obediently fell silent as Dasgupta connected the last wire to the battery. We had isolated power only to the captain's command station on the captain's bridge. Now that it had power, it began the boot-up sequence all on its own. Before too long, we were examining the captain's hologram displays.

Hough volunteered first, "Vesta. It looks like it took us two years to drift here after the fuel blitz."

Dasgupta nodded once. "Onboard computers guided us to the chosen landing zone."

"Fuel stores are better than I thought they would be," I noted. I pulled up the oxygen stores; as expected, many were only half-filled, and most were entirely empty. "Broken, I expect," I sighed.

"How long was the ship without oxygen?" Dasgupta asked.

"It couldn't have been more than a few weeks," I murmured absently, seeking the information from the computer. We were both wondering the same thing: how long had the captain had to live off of the oxygen pumped out of cryo-pods?

"Weeks?" Noah shook his head. "You just said it took us two years to get here. Where did she get air to breathe?"

"Maybe she sealed herself off somewhere," I thought aloud, weighing my options. The ship was littered with security cameras. We could call up the footage from the oxygen leaks and on, if we wanted to. But the cameras were on the main power grid, not an isolated one, like the captain's. I wasn't sure how long a battery would give us to examine the footage, or whether we had a battery to spare. No, I thought. Better to conserve resources. "We must be able to reason this out. The ship was devoid of oxygen until it landed on Vesta; as soon as the ship reached equitable atmospherics, we were awakened. How long did the captain say she had been living on the surface again?"

"Two months," Hough volunteered.

Noah said, "But I thought that the ship was in lockdown. Shouldn't that mean that oxygen can neither get out nor in?"

I nodded, chagrined. I had forgotten about that. "Right. So someone disabled lockdown, which is when we were awakened."

"Then how did the captain get off the ship sooner than we were awakened?" Dasgupta challenged me. We were all trying to encourage each other to come up with answers. "Suture walls in the ship cut off one hallway from another, let alone one sector from another."

Shrugging, Noah said, "There was a cryo-chamber under her bridge. What else is hidden on this ship that we don't know about?"

I shook my head. "Okay. So she was alone for two years. We landed two months ago, and the captain evacuated herself from the ship. Lockdown was disabled. And then we woke up."

The whole time I was speaking, Noah was shaking his head. "That makes no sense, Isle. How did the captain survive all that time? Who landed this ship? Even I know it's not a one-man job."

I leaned forward, pressed a button on the console. "Computer, call up the captain's personnel file."

What we saw made no sense. Evangeline Grey, born sixty-five years ago in Great Falls, Montana. Died sixty years ago in a car accident. Died thirty-six years ago in an explosion on the border of the Wastelands.

"Who dies twice?" Dasgupta whispered hoarsely.

Noah leaned forward. "Someone who is not what they appear. Isley, I think I owe you another piece of the story."

13: Chapter Thirteen

And a bonus chapter this week! Happy New Year, folks, and many happy returns! 

 

Chapter 13: The Return of Tomorrow

 

Noah and I were two decks down from the captain’s bridge. I sat on the floor in the hallway, surrounded by broken panels, dangling tubes of shattered phosphorescent light, and dust. He paced nervously in front of me, and when he spoke, his voice was more angry that I had ever heard it.

Anger is just the weak man’s fear, Tesla reminded me.

 

Okay. Last time, I left off just before the formation of the Confederacy and the Archontite. I’ll pick up there.

The League and the Union had won a war with the rest of the world at great cost to themselves. Many millions of soldiers were dead. Many more civilians died from the nuclear bombs that the League of Eastern Nations and the Union of Western Republics dropped on them, unable to defeat them in a fair fight. Britain, part of Western Europe, and South America, reduced to radioactive rubble.

So, things were looking good for the Union and the League. They had just won and unwinnable war and each kept their contracts with the other, having divided the world into two parts. Right away, they began consolidating power. Whole languages died in a single generation. You don’t have to love words, but just be human, to mourn that. Russian became the dominant language of the League, English the dominant language of the Union.

Very quickly, however, things turned sour. Both the Union and the League wanted more of each other’s territory. It started over a squabble for Alaska. When the Russia attacked the United States for it, the Union overreacted. Luckily, most of Russia has always been Siberia. Unfortunately, the Union didn’t know how much that land meant to the League. It was meant to be the foundation of  their new society; it would only take a few generations to cultivate a more stable environment out of wintry wasteland. And now that hope was dashed.

The League and the Union clashed like a lion and a bear out of Roman gladiatorial fights. A world that had only just ceased fire began it again, redoubling their attacks.

And then something even worse than any war rose up from the graves of 900 million people. The Plague. Like a lumbering giant, it stumbled across the Wasteland in fits and starts. There were still people there, of course – horribly disfigured, burned to cinders yet still, somehow, alive, and worse – and they carried the disease on twisted legs. It was already the Wasteland by then, you see. It wasn’t yet the place the Archontite and the Confederacy would send their criminals and their insane and their unworthy-of-civilization, but it was a wasteland nonetheless. And it gave birth to a plague the likes of which the world had never seen.

More terrified of this new disease than they were of each other, the Union and the League called an armistice while they devised a plan to stop the spread of the plague.

Walls came up, roping off the League’s and the Union’s nations from the Wasteland and the monster they inadvertently created. Programs were put into place everywhere to remove slums and tenements, dwelling places where disease normally festers like an oozing sore.

Can you see your country taking shape? I can. The Union became the Confederacy, the League the Archontite. For the first time ever, unemployment, infant fatality, overpopulation, poverty, and disease reached less than five percent.

I told you that as good as you think your country is, the things it has done to become so are just as bad. And I wasn’t lying. Because while the Confederacy and the Archontite were busily saving themselves, they abandoned the Wasteland to ruin. Unbelievably, there are still people who live there. Naturally immune to a plague neither the Confederacy nor the Archontite could cure, they seethe with rage and a thirst for revenge for what was done to them.

 

I snorted. “Captain Grey is not a Wayward.”

He snapped back, “Oh, yeah? Then how did she die twice, Isley? Hm? Because I’m seeing a criminal history. I’m seeing someone using the birth certificate of a dead kid to gain access to this ship.”

“But she’s lived a life. Her DNA, her photograph, Project Hercules has it all. There is no way that she could have slipped through their screenings.”

Noah threw up his hands. “Don’t give me that. Could you do it? Just for a second, pretend this ship isn’t your soul. If you wanted to infiltrate it, could you?”

I gave him a look of stony silence before I retorted. “What would be the point, Noah? Isn’t this your job? To find the truth? Well, find it now. What could her motivation possibly be?” I stood up and wiped off my hands. “She has none. And you are out of your mind.”

Noah had had enough. “Goddammit, Isley! In my job, this is what we call a fatal flaw. You are so proud. I’m not asking you to ask for my help, Isle! Just let me be near you, and you don’t even have to ask. But if you can’t do that, if you can’t admit that you’re human enough to like havingsomeone around, then I have to know, what did you do any of this for? And don’t say it’s all to be captain. I know that’s bullshit.”

I looked away from him. “To be valuable,” I muttered. I felt, rather than saw, his shoulders fall.

“Spend your talents,” he muttered, surely half an idea pillaged from somewhere. When he spoke again, he sounded calm, even kind. “Have I ever told you about The Canterbury Tales? Well, one story, in particular. The Wife of Bath’s tale.”

Annoyed, and tired, and unsettled, I shook my head. “No. Of course not.”

“It’s about making yourself useful in this life. It’s about spending your talents. That must be something your father said to you. Isn’t it? What were the words? Be valuable. How many times a day did he have to say those words to you to get you to keep studying, keep reading, keep working, to keep you from ever once looking up and thinking for yourself?”

Furious, I snapped, “I think for myself.”

But he wasn’t finished yet. I wasn’t sure why I let Noah blow up on me. Maybe it was because I knew he was right. Maybe it was because I wanted him to give me an excuse to kill him. “I bet I can guess where those words came from. Hm? Do you think I can’t? What happened to your mother, Isley? I know you don’t have one. Look at yourself. No mother’s child is as isolated as you are. What did she leave him for? Was he too obsessed with his work? Did he not pay her enough attention? Or worse, was it about you? Your dad saw a second chance at his own life with his brilliant daughter, and your mother didn’t want your life to be his? Either way, she left him. Ha! Honestly, Isley, it’s obvious. Be valuable. Be too valuable to leave. Be so valuable that no one could dream of abandoning you. Oh, yes. His words, but they’re true for you, aren’t they? Oh, Isley. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I never would have thought it was as simple as abandonment issues. Ah, but that would explain Captain Grey, wouldn’t it? She must be just like your mother. No wonder you wanted to kill her. No wonder –“

I pulled my hand back and slapped Noah across the face so hard that I saw his head snap back with enough velocity that he stumbled backwards and hit the wall behind him. “That – is – enough,” I said, breathing hard.

Holding his face with his hand, Noah pushed himself up the wall slowly. Now that the maddening river of his words had stopped, I could breathe again, think again. I stopped feeling as though I was being run through with a steel beam. His green eyes burned in his face, but with what, I couldn’t possibly tell. Regret? Anger? Hatred? Something. “I truly am sorry for you, Isley. But I am trying to warn you.” He looked away from me. I listened to his breathing return to normal. I hoped the others hadn’t heard us arguing. I didn’t want to explain. And if they asked what Noah had told me, I wasn’t sure I could say. “I’m not supposed to do that. Historians, they’re meant to sit off to the side and write in their notebooks and keep their mouths shut. But, you know. Sometimes, I can see the truth now. Why shouldn’t I change the future if I can?”

“You want to change my future?”

He shook his head, looking away, like he was fighting the words that wanted to come out of him. Finally, admitting defeat, he went still and looked at me. “I want to change my future.”

 

The stellaucts and I accomplished a lot over the next two days. On the first day, when we had sunlight to work with, we wound great spools of electrical wires and hefted them over our shoulders.

It was time to turn the TII back on.

With one end of the cable tethered and plugged into the ship, we ran the other end of the wire all the way to the electrical engineering building. Using Noah’s translations, he and Dasgupta reported back to the ship that the building itself was sitting on a gigantic battery. That was a lucky break; if there hadn’t been a battery like that, we would be forced to work with dozens of small ones.

There was no sign of the ape-moles, or any other chimera, on either day. There was also no sign of Captain Grey. With our own food stores down to nothing, it had occurred to me that we might have to seek food from the bakery she was holed up in. But we found a market as we unwound the cables on our backs from the ship to the giant battery, and vacuum-sealed pouches were pretty much interchangeable.

I had forbidden Hough from making any visits to the captain. As far as I was concerned, she had exiled herself. As long as she stayed away from my ship, she was of no matter to me.

Dasgupta, Hough and I hooked up the cables to the giant battery. It wasn’t really a battery so much as it was an intermediary between the generators of the power plant upstairs and the cables that carried that power out to the town. But once we disconnected all the other power lines from the intermediary, we had a giant battery.

On the second day, I woke up early to check on the battery. I was worried that Captain Grey might attempt sabotage. Slowly, very slowly, the power tanks of the Tomorrow II were filling up. We had had to go through the base of the ship, and rerouting the hierarchy of what was recharged first had been a grueling 12-hour process that called on Dasgupta, Hough, and I. Noah was willing enough to work when called upon, but he made himself scarce otherwise. I didn’t know what he was doing, and I didn’t care. I was done with him. He didn’t offer to keep up his end of our bargain, and I didn’t ask him to.

Although I had just woken up, the sky outside was dim with twilight. It hadn’t occurred to me to reorient my Circadian rhythm. We worked until we fell asleep on the machines of the ship, and when we woke up, we got back to work. Nothing else mattered.

It was strange for my work to finally be done. For now, at least. The ship was powering up. Deck 1 was even already back online.

I heard a crackling broadcast across the comm in my ear. Someone else was putting theirs on. My heartbeat inexplicably accelerated. Dasgupta said, “You haven’t been sleeping, Isley.”

“I’m fine.” I sighed. “Dasgupta, I am going to ask you a question.” I cleared my throat. “What do you think it’s going to be like when everybody else wakes up?”

This was something I couldn’t stop thinking about. What if Archontite meant to declare war on our Confederates? What were we supposed to do about Captain Grey? It would be both crews, too, I knew. In the chaos surrounding the leaking oxygen two years ago, there was no doubt in my mind that some people had wound up in the wrong pod. The crew was all jumbled. And, at this point, I wasn’t sure anyone should be made to sleep, either. Strange things were happening.

Dasgupta answered, “I don’t know. But whatever happens, I’ll do what you tell me to.”

She let me process that in silence. Why couldn’t Noah have that kind of hard-won trust in me? No, not trust. Dependence. What had been holding Dasgupta together but me? No wonder she wanted to speak to me, even using these comms. She was relying heavily on me.

The same, I supposed, went for Hough. Without the captain around to comfort him, he turned to me. I was not comforting. But I was able to give orders and see them carried through, and I figured that was about the same thing. Anyway, he wasn’t like Leucaspis. He hadn’t adopted me. Hough had simply decided to make me his conscience. If ever a problem cropped up, his first thought was always to look to me. Complete and utter obedience, and he was almost as inefficient as Noah.

I closed the door to the engineering building and set back across town. The ship loomed over it all like a great mechanical, metal tree. So much more beautiful than anything nature had built. I played my flashlight across the ground in front of me as I walked, sometimes swinging it up to swipe over a wall or a balcony or a railing. This place was a ghost town; there weren’t even skeletons to show for it.

Skeletons, I thought, my head aching. We should probably take care of the dead crew of the Tomorrow II. Take down their names and burn them in the incinerator, maybe. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen to people who had died aboard the ship, to be honest.

A gentle breeze lifted my hair off my scalp. It felt good. Dust and debris kicked up in the street around me. Habitually, I glanced up at the sky to check the time of day. Two of the suns were out of sight; one was just sinking below the horizon. On this planet, sunsets and sunrises did not have the same glorious effect on the sky as on Earth. It probably had something to do with the lack of pollution on this planet.

Anyway, all that really happened was that the starlight struck light off of the mountainous purple dust that this area was so full of. The dawn and dusk became moments of earth in suspension, glimmering in the air not like glitter, but like rain. This was not the dust of Earth, born from exploded stars that created that planet and thus gave rise to men and animals and returned to the earth in dust again. On Earth, we are all stardust, and most dust is human. But on this planet, dust was ancient life, long forgotten, never known, and I liked to think that even ashes could live again for a moment twice a day.

There was a large, dark storm front moving in overhead. Was there really going to be rain on this waterless planet? I hurried, not wanting to be caught out in it.

“What?” Dasgupta demanded. I hadn’t spoken, so I listened intently to her half of a conversation with someone else. Clearly she, like me, had no idea how to work these comms. Only Noah did. “What do you mean?” There was quiet, urgent speech. “Are you serious? What?”

“Dasgupta,” I asked, tense as a bowstring. “What’s wrong?”

Her breath was short, as though she was running, when she answered me. “Hough saw something on the computer in the bridge. We don’t know what it is yet. Hold on.”

I grit my teeth and forced myself not to go bolting off to the ship. If I tripped and fell, we had no time for a broken ankle. So I broke into an easy, loping trot back to my ship. Was this how Noah had felt? How did he bear all this idleness?

“Oh, my God,” Dasgupta gasped.

Breathing harder than I should have been, I demanded, “What?”

Her voice was airy with amazement. “Look up, Isley.”

So I craned my head back. All there was in the sky was a sinking star and that cloudbank. Its shadow moved over the small town, casting it further in darkness. No, wait. That shadow. There was something familiar about its edges. My heart pounding in my chest, I looked up again, this time without assuming that it was a cloud.

Oh, yes, I knew those edges well. Looming over the small town was no cloud at all. It was the Tomorrow I, the name painted in two-story-tall letters on the side of the ship in three languages. It was an exact twin to the Tomorrow II: battleship black, with one glass arm for the terrarium. The umbrella was spread wide over the top of the ship, as if to slow its descent. It hovered motionless in the air several hundred feet over the town.

The Tomorrow I had come to Vesta. 

14: Chapter Fourteen

Chapter 14: Containment

 

            I stopped running. I couldn’t move if I wanted to. The Tomorrow. My father’s ship. Daguerre, and Tesla. Was it possible that they were alive, after all?

            It was what I wanted more than anything. It was the idea I couldn’t bear to say aloud. That this town was created by the Tomorrow was both the only possible explanation and impossible. Yes, this town was identical to the one onboard the Tomorrow II. But the TI was not scheduled to leave Vesta for two decades. That it would leave early was unthinkable. The only reason it would was because of some catastrophe, and in that case, the ship couldn’t have gotten in the air. What had happened?

            “Isley?” someone asked, their voice high and tight. I realized they must have been speaking to me for some time.

            “What? I didn’t hear.”

            “What should we do?” Dasgupta. She was asking me what to do. What they should all do.

            Once it had broken through the planet’s atmosphere, the ship came to a gentle stop. I could imagine the powerful anti-grav magnets working inside the ship to keep it aloft by the force of polar repellant. This town, and the TII, were sitting on a gigantic deposit of iron. I searched the ship overhead for any sign of life. There were no thrusters firing up, no sign that landing procedure was taking place. Even the terrarium, just as green as ours, but hopefully less dangerously populated, was still.

            A ghost ship, hanging lifelessly over a ghost town.

            There was a skirmish over the comm, and then a new voice spoke to me. “It’s Ciaran Hough, not Dasgupta,” he told me. “Isley, the onboard computer. I didn’t touch anything, I swear.”

            I shook my head. Now was no time to stop and stare, slack-jawed, for an eternity. “Yeah. What is it?”

            “The pods are opening,” he said.

            Despite my resolution, I ground to a halt again. The pods were opening?

            I could practically feel Hough sweating over the radio-waves. There was a conversation happening around him – Dasgupta and Noah debating what to do, arguing with each other, probably. “The emergency power must have run out. The pods accessed the battery power, and the pods think that that power is the ship.”

            “Isley,” Hough said, cutting through my spoken thinking process, “they’re all waking up.”

            “I’m coming as fast as I can.” I broke into a sprint. But I was still about two miles away from the ship. I breathed evenly, glad for hours and hours of physical conditioning. “Give me back to Dasgupta. Dasgupta, take command. No, I mean it literally. The officer’s body on the bridge – you must remove their insignia. You must orient the sleepers to their new surroundings. Use their mystification against them. Open the kitchens, send them to eat instead of to their posts,” I advised her grimly, wishing I hadn’t had to take that goddamned field trip this morning. Why did I leave the ship?

            “Isley?”

            “Don’t tell them we’ve landed. They may not all be friendlies, Dasgupta.”

            Her voice was higher than normal. She was scared, then. If I could only use her once, then I would just have to use her here. If she broke, then hopefully, she finished her job first. “What about you?”

            “I’m boarding the Tomorrow I.”

            And I tuned out all transmissions to my comm until I was rappelling up the ship and flinging myself around the stairs at maximum speed. I glanced into the the cryo-decks, where doors were unsealing with a hiss and spilling out gel-soaked civilians and crew members onto the floor.

            What if the Archontites had a kill order? How long would it take them to get themselves organized?

            Where was Captain Grey when I needed her?

            When I finally got up to the captain’s bridge, I grabbed Hough’s shoulder. “Go find Captain Grey,” I told him.

            “But you said –“

            “I know what I said. I still don’t trust her. But there should always be a captain onboard a ship.”

            All three of them – Dasgupta, Hough, and Noah – were on the captain’s bridge when I arrived. I sent Hough away, and the other two followed me up the stairs as I hurried up to Deck 1. I wished we were in zero-g. It was so much easier to move.

            “Dasgupta,” I told her, “you have your orders. Get down to the cryo-decks, now.” And she turned around and started jumping whole flights of stairs to get there. “When Hough gets back,” I went on, talking to Noah, “have him get down to Dasgupta to help her out. Let him be her relief for five minutes. We have classmates, Trudeau and Fowler, who will help her.”

            Noah nodded shortly. “Why do you have to board the other ship now, though?”

            “The thrusters aren’t on. Nothing is on. The anti-grav charges don’t last forever.”

            Noah was so shocked that he froze mid-step on the stairs and almost fell over. We were nearly to Deck 1. “What?” he choked out. “You mean to tell me that the ship is going to fall right out of the sky?”

            “Like a stone,” I told him, turning back just long enough to grab his shirt and pull him along after me. “I need to get onboard and secure the fuel tanks in the next half an hour. If they aren’t secured, the ship could implode on impact.”

            “Why hasn’t that ship already exploded?” Noah demanded, his voice cracking. “What ship did we watch fall and burn eight months – no, thirty-two years ago?”

            I shook my head. “I don’t know. Not my father’s ship. Here,” I pointed at a door. Noah opened it for me while I started zipping myself out of my jumpsuit. I kept my black one piece on, but Noah put one hand up to cover his eyes.

            “Um, Isley. Why are you taking your clothes off?”

            “Look,” I told him, having very little patience today. Noah peeked between his fingers at me, and I redirected him to the door to the storage closet he had just opened for me.

            Space suits were black. They were thicker and heavier than our standard jumpsuits. They were wired with comms, for oxygen, and for heat regulation. The oxygen was the most important part for me today.

Noah looked at me inquiringly. “The ship looks damaged. If it was just in space, and then burning through the atmosphere, then –“

            “It’s a black hole for oxygen,” he surmised, showing surprising intelligence. “And with the anti-magnetism whatever on, it doesn’t have gravity, either?” he guessed.

            Pursing my lips, I shook my head. I stepped into the suit and pulled my arms through the sleeves. The tank on my back was heavy. I zipped up the front of the black space suit. “Not really. Our magnetized boots will push me off of the surface of the ship, rather than help me cling to it. Help me with this, please.” I had gotten the helmet portion of the suit tangled around one of my oxygen tubes, and Noah hurried to fix it for me. His breath, spilling over the back of my neck, was fast and stressed.

            None of the questions I might have asked him seemed relevant now. Is this what he guessed when he told me my father might still be alive? How did he even know anything to guess about? What did Captain Grey have to do with the return of the TI?

            For surely it had been the TI that had founded this town. Just like the TII, it had been the central aspect of the town. The hub from which all grew around it. When I looked at the center of the town, I saw a park. What I should have seen was an empty lot that grass had taken over. I should have seen the scar of this ship leaving the planet, only to return again.

            My father. I had to find my father. As soon as I did that, I could secure the ship. I didn’t care about anything but him. Him and Tesla.

            When Noah spoke, his voice was both inside and outside of my head. Had he been listening in to me and Dasgupta all along? I realized I didn’t care. Trying to keep Noah out was as pointless as trying to keep fire from spreading. At the end of the day, it did what it wanted. “Be careful out there, Isle.”

            He moved around to face me. I needed his help with my helmet – that was why I brought him along. I needed him to fasten the screws that held the helmet on for me. I couldn’t do it myself, wearing the thick, temperature-resistant gloves that came with the suit. “I’m sorry,” I ground out. It was difficult to apologize. But I recognized that I had done wrong. That was why I couldn’t face him. But now, both literally and not literally, I had to. He should never have shouted at me, but I should never have hit him. I could really hurt him. I could have killed him by accident. His head could finally have fallen off that skinny neck of his.

            “Are you kidding? I got Isley Edison to apologize to me. This is the best day of my life.” He grinned as he slid the visor shut over my helmet. The world went tinted. It was a black tint, ostensibly to keep any star from burning my eyes. “Go get ‘em,” he told me.

            “Go help Dasgupta,” I told him. “I’m promoting you, second lieutenant.”

            “Consider it a favor for a friend,” he said, and shook his head. He took off running down the stairs, and I headed for the door that led outside.

The Tomorrow I was still several hundred feet higher in the air than the Tomorrow II. I had a rappel line on my suit, of course, and I intended to let it fire at the TI. From there, I could swing onto the other ship. I pushed open one of the access hatches on Deck 1 and pulled it open. Crisp evening air rolled in, as did the smell of exhaust and burning metal. The TI hung heavily in the sky. At the last moment, I grabbed a parachute. It fit uncomfortably over the oxygen tank on my back. Standing on the threshold of the ship, twenty-nine stories high in the air, I aimed my guidewire and fired.

            The same little motor that we had used to draw ourselves up and lower ourselves down onto Vesta propelled the wire hundreds of feet into the air. It fastened to the surface of the Tomorrow I by locking around something I couldn’t see. The end of the wire was like the fasteners that hikers used. I could only hope that it was something strong. I tugged experimentally on the wire, and nothing happened. There wasn’t even a little give.

            So, taking a deep breath, I took a few steps backward into the ship. And then I took a running leap right out of the side of the Tomorrow II, clinging by a spider’s thread to the Tomorrow I. I swung out wide under the bottom of the ship and the motor on my belt kicked in, drawing me up. It had the strange effect of increasing my velocity, so that I swung back toward the Tomorrow II at a greater velocity than I left it. I just brushed the edge of the umbrella of that ship, and I kicked off of it with all of the force in my legs. The motor of the rappel line on my belt drew me in even more quickly, and soon I was being retracted all the way up to the Tomorrow I.

            Through the comm in my ear, I was treated to updates from the situation down below. It sounded like Dasgupta, Hough, and Noah were maintaining control. I began to hope that there was no kill order out at all and that Noah had simply jumped the gun. I heard Hough tell the others he was going for Captain Grey, and when I looked down, I saw a little dark ant-sized figure that may or may not have been him.

            My rappel line had hooked onto an exhaust pipe leading out of the ship. It was very near the bottom of the ship entirely. I would have to stretch just to reach up to Deck 30. As soon as I got a grip on the exhaust pipe, I unhooked my rappel line. I bore my full weight on my arms. Normally, I wasn’t very heavy, but with this suit on, with this planet’s increased gravity, I was much heavier than I used to be. So I hurriedly pulled myself over the lip of the exhaust pipe until I was standing on it. Then I edged sideways, searching for the door that would open onto the ship. It was bound to be another one of those doors with a wheel on the outside, and I grumbled to myself about outdated romantic notions of space travel as seafaring.

            My breaths left puffs of condensation on the inside of my space suit. As hot as I was in my heavy suit, I was much cooler than the air around me. I opened the vents on the back of my suit with a flick of my eye. The holoscreen on the inside of my helmet obeyed at once, and I rejoiced at having access to real technology again.

            The wheel turned with a great deal of effort, and the door opened with a groan. I stepped inside the ghost ship.

            The corridor was dark and cool, glowing with flashes of red light. I was half-listening to the conversations happening around Dasgupta and Noah, who were both wearing comms. “Where’s Isley?” I heard Dasgupta ask.

            “Being heroic,” Noah told her, with a long-suffering sigh. “She’s climbing into the other ship.”

            I could practically feel Dasgupta shaking her head. “You! There! I told you, captain’s orders. Everybody grubs up before reporting for duty. There was something wrong with Dr. McLeod’s latest dose. Yeah, yeah, Doc, tell that to all the vomiting I did when I woke up. Do you think they’re alive on that ship, Noah?”

            “If you consider frozen alive, probably. I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder at what our definition of ‘alive’ should be. I think I know how Captain Grey survived. In the Romantic era, the Frankenstein’s monster creature was –“

            “Chimeric,” I cut in. “I’ve read that book. That monster sounds like a chimera. Stop gossiping with each other and get back to work, you two.”

They laughed and obeyed, and I started climbing stairs. The only difference between the two ships was that the informational panels on the wall named the ship as the first, rather than the second. This ship wasn’t damaged, either. My ship was half-exploded, but this ship was in remarkably good shape.

            First things first. The fuel tanks. On Deck 29, I jumped off the stairs and bolted down the hall to the mechanical engineering room. My boots were incapable of sticking to the surface of the ship, but I couldn’t take them off. The airtight seal on my suit would break. So I was forced to reorient the way I moved, again.

            It was less like swimming this time around. I was forced to rely on my arms to move myself, rather than my legs; it wasn’t exactly instinctive movement. But I used the rods drilled into the floor to push myself along, and I drew my feet up under me to keep myself from slamming into the floor. I was skateboarding without a board, effectively. After a little practice, it was less awkward than I thought it would be.

            The violet walls of engineering were just as eerie as they were the last time I had come down to this part of a spaceship. I walked down the hallway as confidently as I could, which wasn’t very confidently.

            The buzz of conversation my comm was picking up kept getting louder. I was too distracted, and too unable to be of any help, to listen in very closely. But I was listening for a few key words. Captain Grey, the Tomorrow I, and “Attack!”, namely.

            At the end of the hall, I threw the double doors open. I was in the engine room, which was where the fuel was stored. The fuel was stored in great tanks the size of rockets. It had always seemed an incredibly glaring flaw to me: why put the flammable part of the ship at the bottom of it, surrounded by metal, where it would invariably spark and catch fire in the event of an explosion? Even on the day I thought I had seen the Tomorrow I crash, I could not help noticing this. So it was this very same problem that I had to fix now. The Tomorrow I was going to crash. In fact, it was going to make landfall in less than twenty minutes now. So I had to do something about this fuel. I supposed I could leak it all. But then, when the ship crashed, it would just set fire to the entire town below. No, I couldn’t evacuate the fuel from the ship. I needed to store it in one place, far from the bottom of the ship, where…where…

            Where it would be as safe as a nuclear reactor behind lead walls.

            I took off at a run for a first lieutenant’s bridge. There were four of these on the ship, but there was one in particular I could use to affect the nuclear core. And there were several things I had to do before I flooded that sealed chamber with hundreds of thousands of gallons of rocket fuel. For one, the ship wasn’t designed to push the hydraulics that way. So I needed to override the fuel maintenance protocols from the first lieutenant’s bridge, then somehow climb to the captain’s bridge to isolate just the pipes I needed to send the rocket fuel to the nuclear chamber. All in under twenty minutes.

            The first lieutenant’s bridge was on Deck 4; there was a huge window on the bridge that overlooked the nuclear core. Of all four secondary bridges, it was the most specialized. I pushed myself with great yanks of my arms up the stairs. I turned myself around backwards so that I was watching the stairs trail out behind me as I climbed them; it was the easiest method of getting my useless feet out of my way. I disembarked on Deck 6, where I pelted from the stairwell to the heavy double lead doors that led into the radioactive chamber. I didn’t bother with a specialty suit. My space suit would have to do; there was no time for another layer. I pushed the double doors open, noting absently that this ship, too, was on emergency power.

            Emergency power. How could I have been so stupid? Of course that was what woke up the men and women on my ship. The pods had run out of their own power and unsealed themselves to avoid killing their occupants. I was so, so stupid. Dasgupta and the others wouldn’t have to be dealing with the chaos on the TII if I had just taken better care of the cargo.

            I pushed into the nuclear core containing-room. Just like onboard the Tomorrow II, it was a three story tall room with a gargantuan tank in the middle containing the radioactive rods that formed the basis of any nuclear reactor. It was a sealed tank that glowed with unearthly energy.

            I made myself go through the standard security protocol before I flooded the room with fuel. I gave myself a strict deadline of thirty seconds, and that was what I used. It seemed in order. I couldn’t tell, and I was out of time, anyway. There was just one last thing to do. I climbed to the top of the nuclear reactor using the staircase that twisted in a tight spiral in the back corner of the room. Now on Deck 4, I clambered over the top of the nuclear reactor. There was a lid that hovered just a couple of inches over the tank. It hung, suspended, from wires like the one looped on my belt. The hovering platform shook as I jumped onto it, and I forgot that my feet had no traction, for they slid out from under me and I went sprawling nerve-rackingly close to the edge of the platform. I could have fallen three stories. Or worse, I could have fallen into the tank. Instead, I got to my knees with care. I needed to get on my feet. I had to do it. So very carefully, I pushed myself back up. My feet were as steady beneath me as those of an ice skater on a partially melted lake. Then, calling on muscles I had to simply hope existed, I jumped.

            There was a grille over the tank. It was a vent for leaked radiation in the event of a containment fail, and normally, it was open. Fans inside would suck out the radiation and vent it out of the ship into space. But I needed our fuel not to leave the ship. So, clinging to the grille with one hand, I accessed the computer inside my suit. Once the computer got sight of the grille, it panicked.

            Warning, it flashed across my visor. Danger imminent. Recommend full shut-down.

            The computer was going to protect the anti-radiation protocol by getting rid of what was threatening it – my full weight clinging to this metal grille. I gave the computer my permission, and the slats of the grille turned sideways and became an airtight lock. Perfect.

            Except that now I had nothing to cling to, and I fell toward the suspended lid of the tank. My weight broke the chains, and the lid snapped onto the tank. A white foam exploded around the margins of the lid and the top of the tank, sealing it off. Luckily, the ship was already preparing to seal up the nuclear core’s tank. If it hadn’t been, the lid might have broken the tank by falling onto it. Or maybe not. I wasn’t that heavy. Still, my feet slid out from under me once again and I quickly rolled onto my belly to keep from sliding away.

            Once I could maneuver myself again, I crawled to the door beside the window of the first lieutenant’s bridge and went inside. I closed the door behind me. Okay. I was now at the first lieutenant’s bridge. Things were looking up.

            “Isley.” Dasgupta’s voice, sounding perfectly serious, perfectly calm. A false calm, the kind of calm one put on to keep some sort of deadly internal strife from revealing itself. She had broken. “Hough brought Captain Grey back, but she’s not really doing anything. The crew is not happy. Most of them are upset with others for taking their pods and leaving their crewmates to die. I don’t know what you and Noah were expecting, but if it was a fight, we almost certainly have one on our hands.”

            “I – I…” I had no one else to turn to.

            “Dasgupta,” someone said sharply. Noah’s voice. I didn’t know he could sound that authoritative. His voice came across her comm, not into my head. Ah, I thought: he had been trying not to distract me. “Dasgupta, this is First Lieutenant McLeod. He can help. Turn off your damn comm. Isley’s busy.”

            Spurred from my silent, unhelpful mental pandering, I jumped back into action. I ran to the lieutenant’s console and punched in my father’s boot up sequence. My own lower-ranking ID numbers would never suffice. While I frantically typed commands into the computer to reroute the fuel to evacuate the fuel tanks, I was listening in to McLeod. “First lieutenants, take command of your inferior officers! Second lieutenants, find your first lieutenant. Midshipmen, fall in! Line up. Yes, that’s good.” He was organizing them not by nationality, but by rank. It was not inflammatory, as nationality would have been. It was even kind. Find your friends, he was telling them. My knees felt soft with relief. I forgot how much I liked McLeod.

            Nearly finished with my computer work, I stood up to close the window between the bridge and the nuclear core. It wasn’t until I had pushed the appropriate button that I realized my boots were sticking to the floor. Slowly, almost casually, the ship began falling. The Tomorrow I was really coming down. I rushed back to the console and completed the final coding sequence. On the other side of the window, the nuclear reactor room was filling up with rocket fuel.

            Breathing very hard, I sat down in the first lieutenant’s chair. I buckled myself with trembling hands into the seat and gripped the bottom of the chair with all the strength in my hands.

            The last thing I remember from before the ship hit the ground was relief. 

15: Chapter Fifteen

Chapter 15: Cooperation

 

            “Isley!” someone kept crying my name, and I was hit with a wave of nausea as I considered it might be those beetles from the terrarium again. They even still had his voice. Not Hough’s. Noah’s.

            I coughed and groaned, sitting up. A jagged crack ran down the side of my helmet. How could I pay that back? The first lieutenant’s bridge had shattered around me. Most of the hologram display panels now lay on the ground in icy-looking shards of glass. Oxygen masks dangled pointlessly from the ceiling. Even the emergency power had been shut off, so I was in darkness. I told my suit to turn the lights on my suit on, and when it didn’t respond, I turned them on myself. My gloved hands were even clumsier than usual.

            Meanwhile, someone kept trying to get my attention. His voice was loud and piercing and giving me a headache. “Isley! Are you alive in there or not, Isle? Don’t make me come and find you.”

            “You couldn’t if you tried,” I coughed, my voice choked with dust. This room shed dust like corrugated iron molted flakes of iron. There must have been a leak somewhere on the hull, because the grainy particles were the purple dust from Vesta’s mountains. “You are terrible at navigating this ship.”

            “Ah. You would never believe how happy I am to have you insulting me again. Are you okay in there, Isle?” Noah’s voice was permeated with relief.

            “I’m not hurt.”

            He paused. “That wasn’t the question.”

            With shaky limbs, I pushed myself up. “I’m so tired.”

            “McLeod seems to be handling it all now.”

            “Good. Good.” And it was. Good. Someone else could shoulder the captain’s responsibilities for a while. It had exhausted me.

            Noah’s voice was quiet and thoughtful when he spoke again. I suspected he may have been taking notes aloud. “I wish you had seen the ship crash. It floated like a leaf right onto the ground. It crushed an entire city block, of course. Oops. I can see it now, from a porthole on Deck 16. It looks like a great beached battleship. I feel our ship looks more like a whale sunning itself. Does that sound biased to you?”

            But I wasn’t listening anymore. With the familiar wash of Noah’s words came the reassuring sense of my own drive. I had to get down to the cryo-decks. I took the door out of the first lieutenant’s bridge that led to the hallway, not the one that led to the nuclear core chamber that was now full of fuel. When I hit the stairs, my body took over, and I started listening again.

            “Isle?”

            “I’m listening.”

            “So, there was no kill order from the Archontite. We were wrong about that.”

            “We weren’t wrong about Captain Grey, though, were we? What did she say to you?”

            “I don’t know, Isle. I think maybe she just panicked. She’s not looking so young these days. What did she say to me? I’ve already told you – we were comparing notes on the formation of the Wastelands. I suppose I owe you the rest of the story –“

            I stopped listening again. “Shut up, I’m not listening.” I had found the cryo-decks. I started running down the metal catwalks, my footsteps ringing. I could only barely remember how these blasted things were organized. By surname. I was in the Gs. I had gone too far. Cursing myself, I turned around, ran back the way I’d come. When I got to the Es, a strange little sound escaped my chest.

            “Isley?” Noah demanded, obviously listening hard. “Isley, are you okay? What’s going on? Where are you? What –“

            I took my helmet off, tucked it under my arm, and pulled out my comms. For once, I didn’t want Noah’s voice in my head. I put my hand against the door of the pod, unwilling to blink out of the fear that if I did, what I was seeing might not be there.

            It was my father. Frozen, sleeping, but alive. Not burned to a crisp. In the sudden silence of the ship, I considered what to do next for barely half a second before I was off and running again. This time, I was on the wrong level. Without giving it a second thought, I wriggled between two of the bars of the railing and jumped down to the catwalk below. I didn’t have time for stairs. I tore my eyes away from the little nameplates on the front of the pods and started scanning faces as I rushed past them. Ps, Qs, Rs, Ss, Ts! I almost missed him. Then I ground to a halt, nearly fell over, righted myself, walked back. Tesla. I pressed my hand against the glass of the window of his pod like I could reach in and pull him out.

            The Tomorrow I had not crashed, and my father and best friend were alive.

 

            The next few weeks passed very quickly. Almost as though the Tomorrow I had never crashed, or never seemed to, Vesta became the home of two Earth spacecraft.

            I was there the day Lieutenant Esser gave his official report of the Tomorrow I on the bridge of its sister ship. Captain Grey requested that I be there; it was her final act as captain before she handed the reins over to First Lieutenant McLeod. While we waited for Esser to start speaking, Noah began jabbering my ear off. He was green with jealousy that I was allowed to be on the bridge and he wasn’t, and he pouted until I promised him extra rations for dinner. “What do you think happened to the TI, Isle? I mean, the version of the ship that crashed back on Earth. Was that a projection? And what do you think happened to Dorian Walker? How did he die? Most importantly, why do you think there was such a great need for all this subterfuge at all?”

            “Why do you have to ask so many questions?” I murmured, trying not to be noticed. I tended to wear the collar of my jumpsuit unbuttoned now, so that my conversations with Noah couldn’t be recorded.

            His answer, as usual, was archaic and not useful in maintaining a spaceship. “Amplificatio, my dear. It’s hard to come to the truth head-on. Why do you think I spent so much time figuring out what this ship meant to you? It’s a lot easier to come at the truth from an angle, like sailing toward a storm by tacking into the breeze. You zig and you zag and you’ve always got the wind at your back. T.S. Eliot.” He was really getting excited now, and I settled in for a long lecture. If I let him go on like this for long, he usually talked himself to sleep, soothed into it by the very ideas he was explaining to me.

            “Amplificatio is an old word for an old idea: that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Every question is another change of direction, another tack into the wind. See, the truth is a difficult thing to name. The more questions you ask, the more a storm builds up around the eye of the hurricane. You don’t even know it’s the eye at first. But every question is another wind, and then the circle forms. The more questions you can ask, the bigger the storm – the bigger the eye, the bigger the truth. Asking questions is just another way of making a world out of a grain of sand to figure out what it is.”

            I shook my head. “You are terrible at metaphors.”

            “I’m a historian, not a writer.” Noah sighed, and I heard it as a wave of static through my comm. “You are right, though. I’ll be blunt with it, then. You are a world, Isley Edison. You and everyone else. As much as I talk about ideas and peoples, you are all that really matters. As much as I talk about discovering the eye of a hurricane or the core of a planet, I am talking about finding out your truths. Oh, hey, he’s talking. Shush now.”

            It was hard for me not to roll my eyes. I needed to look professional, so I straightened and made sure that my face was placid and smooth. Esser was indeed speaking. He had a high, faintly reedy voice that I disliked at once. His face was long and narrow, as though he had had to squeeze through a narrow canyon before the pieces of his skull had fully grown together. He loomed several inches over Captain Grey, who stood beside him on the bridge. His uniform was crisp and neat, his shoes neatly polished. He seemed uncomplicated: duty first, and then everything else. Normally, I would have liked his style. But I found myself leery of the apathy with which he spoke.

            There was just one other thing of note about First Lieutenant Esser.       He was still just thirty years old.

            I stood at the back of the bridge with some of the first and second lieutenants come to listen to the proceedings. The only people sitting were civilians unfrozen from their pods.

            “Greetings, crews of the Tomorrow I and II, and our notable civilians.” He dipped his head nervously toward the seated civilians. Apparently, they were pretty valuable. “I am here to make my official, public report on the voyage of the Tomorrow I.” Esser glanced sideways at Captain Grey, who stared ahead with an empty expression. Why was he looking at her? “It is with great sorrow that I begin with the death of Captain Walker. We were just three weeks out of port when leaking oxygen in the ship caused problems for us. I understand the same phenomenon happened to your ship. Our method of dealing with it could not be so patient, but it was also not so costly. You see, we had Dr. Edison on the ship.” I perked up at once. My father? What did my father have to do with this? “He and his colleague, Dr. McLeod, had hypothesized on theories of traveling faster than light.”

            In my ear, Noah demanded, “Is he talking about warp speed? Finally, my years of reading Star Trek novels pay off.”

            Esser held up his hands as the crews besieged him with questions. “I know that it may be hard to believe, but I understand that you emptied your energy reserves on your own ship in one massive burn. One of our potential captains –“ his eyes flicked toward me “- had even done the same thing in the exams. It was my belief, and Dr. Edison’s, that we had unknowingly already achieved warp speed. And both the crew onboard and the ship itself survived.”

            This was all very interesting, but one part in particular stood out to me. Esser knew about my exams. Unless someone had told him about them, did that mean he somehow had access to my exam results from the Tomorrow I? And if he did, did that mean my father saw them? Had my father been keeping up with me all along?

            “Fortunately, we had Dr. Edison on hand to guide the retrofitting of our nuclear core prior to the time at which we implemented faster than light, or FTL, travel. With only hours in which to prepare our ship, we burned both all of our energy, and then all of our fuel, at once.”

            Several people gasped at this news. If I hadn’t been clenching my fists so hard, I might have, also. As usual, the historian in my ear was throwing questions around like dodgeballs. “Does this mean what I think it means? Bog na nebesakh, Isle. Your father – I see where you get it from. But how were they so sure that it worked? Are you positive that you found no other damage to the ship? I thought you said that their ship was in much better shape than ours. Maybe they had time to fix it. Why would they risk warp drive, though? They were only three weeks out; why not just turn around?”

            Under my breath, I answered, “FTL travel is theoretically possible. These ships have a greater energy-to-mass ratio than anything mankind has ever created. But ours is not an experimental vessel; we were instructed not to test our limits. There was too great a risk we might destroy ourselves or get lost.” I fell silent as Esser finished his report.

            And yet Noah whispered, “Why do I get the feeling someone wanted this ship to be prepared for things even the crew didn’t know about?”

            Esser went on, “We were able to come within two hundred thousand miles of Vesta before our fuel and energy stores were depleted. From there, it only took us six months to drift into Vesta’s atmosphere. We used our solar panels to take in energy as we fell, and the ship was able to complete landing procedure with little damage.”

            Almost before he was done speaking, my hand shot into the air. Several people gave me surprised looks, but no one called me out. That surprised me. I guessed that having something to do with rescuing the ship was working in my favor. Excellent. Good gossip was better than a medal any day. Esser shot me a reproachful look, however. I thought that was the word for it. Reproachful. “How many years ago did you first reach Vesta, sir?”

Esser glanced around the room. Doing what? I wished Noah was there to see so that he could tell me. “Five years, Second Lieutenant.”

            Everyone in the room gasped. Traveling faster than light speed had gotten the Tomorrow I to this planet three years ahead of schedule. “Nice going, Isle,” Noah murmured.

            One of the civilians spoke up. “And Captain Walker?”

            “Ah. Yes.” Esser dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. He was sweating furiously. “Within three months after we landed, crew and civilians began falling ill.”

            Another gasp. My stomach churned. Maybe it was spending so much time around Noah, but I could guess what sickness had erupted.

Esser held out his hands to quiet the crowd. His handkerchief dangled from his fingertips, and several of the people nearest to him drew back in fear of his germs. “I can assure you that myself and the rest of the Tomorrow I crew currently free from cryo-sleep have been thoroughly tested and quarantined until proven healthy.”

            “And the rest of your crew?” a civilian demanded. “How many died, Captain Esser?”

            Captain Esser. I guess it was good that his new role was officiated, but I would have appreciated the promotion not come from a civilian. And that it not go to Esser. My father, for example, would have made a great captain.

Esser drew in a shaky breath. “Two hundred fatalities. No doubt some of our number currently in cryo-sleep are sick, as well.” He shook his head. “We ran out of ideas. We ran out of time. We just packed up and set off for home, planning to harness the energy gathered by our solar cells. We knew it was a journey that would take decades. Myself and some of the others who weren’t sick planned to crew the ship until we died of old age. Our younger crew would hopefully live long enough to finish the job. But we couldn’t get past the first star. This planet’s suns have a more complex rotational pattern than we thought. That’s how we came back to Vesta: we fell.”

            Noah said softly, “Did you notice how he didn’t answer the question about Captain Walker?”

            But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was wondering, at last, if my father was sick. I was wondering how these people planned on testing the crew for whatever sickness had been killing them, too. Those pods were impenetrable. Surely Daguerre hadn’t fallen ill. Tesla hadn’t. He was wide awake, and I planned to visit him in the medical bay as soon as this meeting was over.

            “Now…” Captain Esser cleared his throat. “I know the TII’s crew was scrambled by the emergency circumstances that led to your own massive energy burn. More crew members are unfrozen than should be unfrozen. If it serves, those excess crew members would be invaluable on our understaffed ship.” His eyes scanned the crowd. What was Esser thinking? Although many on our crew had died, everybody on the crew – A and B Rotation – was awake. Sending some of our crew over to the Tomorrow I was a natural thought. The ships were practically interchangeable. So why did his face look wrong? I wished I had Noah’s camera around my neck so that I could take a picture. Esser asked, “Are there any volunteers?”

            Without even thinking about it, my hand shot into the air. A little more slowly, perhaps, some of my fellow crew members volunteered themselves, as well. Neither Dasgupta, nor Hough nor any of the others I was familiar with were on the bridge. Esser scanned the waving flags of volunteers’ hands. “We’ll start with you, you, and you,” he shrugged, pointing at the appropriate people. None of them were me.

            Noah sounded weary when he spoke. “Did you volunteer, Isley Edison?”

            “Why didn’t he pick me?” I asked back. The meeting over, everybody began to stand and mill about or leave, rushing off to report for duty for their next shift. I struggled across the ambling crowd until I got close to Esser. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he flinched, spinning around like he expected to be attacked. When he saw me, his nose wrinkled. “Excuse me, sir. May I ask why I was passed over for the Tomorrow I?” My voice was as polite as could be, but I imagined clubbing him over the head with one of the wildlife sector’s stun batons, and apparently, he saw that.

            “Don’t ask questions, Edison.” He ducked out from under my hand and slipped away into the milling crowd of people.

            I had an argument with Noah as I stormed up to the medical bay on Deck 1. “I have my reasons, Noah. I can crew whatever ship I want.”

            He made a little huffing sound. “Sure, you can. But not if you don’t think. I am still just as invested as I ever was in finding out the truth. For a while, it seemed like you might be willing to find it with me. But if you’d rather go mack on Second Lieutenant Deep Voice and wait for your dad to magically unfreeze himself, fine by me. Just –” His voice changed. “Just don’t let them turn you back into what they wish you were.” And for the first time in a long time, he flat-out turned his comm off.

            Reaching the top of the stairs, I just shook my head and pocketed the device. Noah could be as immature and pouty as a child. Dasgupta was standing just inside the medical bay, and when she saw me, she uncrossed her arms and smiled. For some reason, she even hugged me. “Here to see Tesla?” she asked. I confirmed her guess.

            “What are you doing here?”

            She grinned, chagrined, and looked down. I looked down, as well. There was a metal brace on her knee. It was like a little iron halo, except with screws that drove right through her skin and into her bone. I felt as though all the wind had been knocked out of me. “I fell over the railing on the cryo-decks. The doctor thinks that I should be fine in a couple of weeks, though.” Even if the ships were in disarray due to all the damage and crew changes, at least the medicine was still good. I guessed Dasgupta was practicing hobbling along on her damaged knee.

            “I am – I am so sorry. I didn’t know. I sent you there.” I was reminded forcefully of my captaincy exam. No stellauct ever just fell. She was pushed. By the mob, or on purpose, she was pushed. “I sent you there, and you got hurt.”

            Dasgupta shrugged. “What was that thing you used to say to the new Project Hercules recruits that you trained? Progress demands sacrifice.”

            I shook my head. “Your well-being was never mine to sacrifice.”

            “It’s okay, though. We saved the ship.”

            “I’m sorry I could never figure out a way to save you, too.”

            Dasgupta grinned again. Although it was a little breathless with pain, and a little false, it was a little genuine, too. We had come through the worst of it. All she had to do now was be a regular stellauct. A parting of the ways had come upon us. I was not the sort of person who asked for anything less than all, and Dasgupta had run out of anything to give me. She didn’t say anything more. I guess that was appropriate. We had saved the ship. And if I had broken her in the process, she was glad the ship was safe.

            I don’t think that I could have faced the truth then. The truth was, I hadn’t had anything to do with burning her out. Everybody has their limit, and it’s a tragedy when children discover theirs, because children think they can do anything, be anything; and realizing that they can’t is one of the first steps to adulthood.

            It wasn’t really our youth that made us so important to the ship. It was our belief in impossible things.

            At the time, I just couldn’t face that. And Dasgupta was kind enough to let me go on in my way.

            Tesla lay in a bed at the end of the ward. Hanging sheets separated one bunk from another, but the one at the front of his little cubicle was pushed back. The sheets were stark white, as were his flimsy top and pants. He almost looked too clean. I was used to the people around me being covered in dirt and sweat and blood. And when we found him, Tesla had been covered in worse than that. He was barely recognizable inside of his pod; that was why he had been unfrozen first. Those pods were good at preserving a body, but they stopped the body’s healing process. There was a gaping wound on Tesla’s calf, and when I looked into the window of his pod, his clothes were soaked in blood. Luckily, he was cleared of any disease. Esser told us he was positive that Tesla had never gotten ill, but the crew was determined to run the tests, anyway. I was glad Tesla was safe and clean in his white medical bed. He had been charred and blackened for too long.

            When he saw me, he smiled widely. “Isley.”

            I leaned in close to give him a hug. He returned the gesture slightly uncertainly, as though I had never initiated contact before. “How do you feel?”

            Tesla grimaced. “Embarrassed, mostly. I can’t believe I got stabbed by a screwdriver. When the ship was launching for takeoff, my guidewire wasn’t attached to anything. It’s such a newbie mistake.”

            Smoothing his hair back, I said, “It could have happened to anyone.”

“Not to you.” He forced a smile. “So, tell me what you’ve been up to. You’re all anybody talks about.” He amended in his head. “Well, all that anyone who matters has been talking about.”

            “It’s been a busy few days,” I murmured. I was strangely reluctant to get him up to date on the mysteries Noah and I had uncovered. In the harsh light of day and civilization, my confidence in our claims had begun to waver. We were pointing fingers at everyone with any power, and if we were wrong, I knew it wouldn’t end with me as the captain of a ship.

            So Tesla and I passed a few hours reminiscing about the lifetime of training we’d spent together to get to this planet. He asked when my father would be unfrozen, and I had to tell him that he wouldn’t be unfrozen until the medical staff could figure out how to test someone without opening their pod, or, at least, waking them up. Ironically, my father was the perfect person to ask on that count. He was the cryogenics man, after all.

            Or was he? Perhaps there were two of them. I left Tesla around eight in the evening. There were two cryogenics men: my father, and Dr. McLeod. I could go to him, thank him for stepping in to take charge for Captain Grey while I was onboard the Tomorrow I, and, in the meantime, ask him about getting my father out as soon as possible. I desperately wanted to talk to him. I just wanted to hear his voice again.

            McLeod, like all stellaucts, lived on the ship. Many of the cargo – the colonists that we had been hauling in cryo-pods as cargo, anyway – had moved out into the city. After being abandoned for a couple of years by the Tomorrow I, the city was declared free of infectious disease. Already, it was looking less dusty and more alive. From what I could see from the ship, anyway – I hadn’t left it since I had helped manhandle pod after pod after pod from the Tomorrow I to the II to be unfrozen. The first ship’s colonists now sat in our cargo bay, the lights on their pods blinking complacently while we tried to figure out how to screen them for disease. The work had been sickeningly exhausting; when it was over, I slept for two days straight. As soon as I woke up, I kicked up a fuss to make the child version of myself proud unfreezing Tesla.

            But McLeod didn’t live in any old residency. In fact, I had been in his quarters before. They were Captain Grey’s old quarters. I remembered all too well how nervous and wary I had been of going in as I stood in her hallway, my hand on the doorknob. This time, as soon as I approached the familiar door, I knocked.

            As I waited for him to open the door, I tried to figure out what felt like it was missing. I had my jumpsuit, Leucaspis’s boots were on my feet, my belt carried the familiar guidewire and my portable holo-screen computer.

It was Noah’s voice. He should have been talking. If not talking to me, then to the countless individuals he had been interviewing as part of his duties as a historian. He left his comm on as he asked his subjects questions about how they felt about this new planet and the journey here, etc., etc. I missed the sound.

            Captain McLeod opened the door. I saluted smartly. “Sir.”

            He smiled widely. “Isley! Come in, come in. What can I do for you?”

            I entered tentatively. That was pretty much the warmest greeting I had ever gotten. “Well, I…er, I wanted to say that I am glad you are well, sir. And I wanted to thank you for taking command. Without you there, there may well have been worse than cracked knuckles and, er, broken legs.”

            McLeod smiled again. He had a warm, genuine smile, and I remembered again just how much I liked this friend of my father’s. He had been Uncle Ulrich when I was a girl, but as I grew older, my father made sure I respected him as a superior officer, not a family member. It seemed an important distinction. But all I could think about now was how much I missed his warm smile and how high he’d pushed me on the swing when I was small. He was a friend of my mother’s, too, I remembered suddenly. When she was alive, they would both be there at the park with me. “It’s my pleasure, Isley. Is that really all you came to say?”

            “Not entirely,” I admitted. I waited for Noah to speak up, but he wasn’t there. I would have to interact with another person by myself. “I had a few questions, actually. May I sit down?”

            McLeod gestured graciously to the two poufy armchairs in the corner of his room beside a lamp throwing out a wide corona of gold light. I perched on the edge of my seat. “Go ahead,” McLeod said with a wave of his hand. He settled back into his chair.

            Without meaning to, the whole story came out. I told him everything, starting with waking up thirty-two years ago to a ship panicking, and winding down with seeing the Tomorrow I in the sky. I didn’t leave anything out, not even Captain Grey or Leucaspis. The only thing I glazed over was Noah. The things that were obvious, and the things that were not so obvious. He spoke English. He obviously read English, as most of the books he referenced were English. He thought wrong. That would have been too hard to explain, anyway. But he didn’t think as a historian or even an artisan. He thought like someone accustomed to filling in gaps in knowledge with clever guesses and experimentation. Dr. McLeod listened attentively; sometimes he winced, like when I was almost eaten alive, and Leucaspis died, and other times he laughed, like when Dasgupta and I had had to climb a sculpture to survive.

            “Well,” he sighed, when I was finally done. “You have been busy, haven’t you?” And he had to laugh to himself for a minute. I didn’t really get what was funny, but as long as he was in a good mood, I restrained myself from complaining. McLeod rubbed his chin. “Okay. Why don’t you start by asking questions? I will answer what I can. And what we don’t know, we’ll save for later.”

            “You sound like Noah,” I said, surprised. I cleared my throat. “First of all, who exactly is Captain Grey?”

            Dr. McLeod almost choked on the sip of tea he had just taken and set the cup and saucer aside before he answered. “I do know the answer to that one. But I recommend that you ask Grey herself.”

            Grumbling to myself, I subsided. “What happened to the Tomorrow I we saw crash and burn?”  

            Dr. McLeod rubbed his chin again. “I have been thinking about that, myself.”

            I was surprised. “You don’t know?”

            Grimacing, he shook his head. “No. It would be up to the civilians to tell us. I don’t suppose you know who we were hauling around as cargo for almost half a century?” I frowned, and he almost smiled. “I sometimes how obsessed you can be about your work. Just like your dad in that respect. I’ll leave that, too, to you.”

            “What good are you?” I muttered under my breath. Then, “The electrical engineering building outside was strictly in Russian. Do you know why?”

            He nodded. “Sure, I do. The Tomorrow II is carrying the other electrical engineering station, the one in English. They have the same schematics, but they were constructed on opposite ends of the Earth. The TI was carrying the Russian one because most of them are Confederate. And we are carrying the English one because most of us are Archontite.”

            I shook my head. “What does that have to do with anything?” It was true that the crews were evenly matched. But I had never looked at the cargo roster, so I had to rely on McLeod. I didn’t doubt him. I didn’t know why it would be so, but I was sure he had accurate information.

            He answered, “It has to do with power, Isley. What has your dad always told you?”

            “Be valuable?”

            “No. Well, that, too. Knowledge is power. Information is power.”

            “So the Archontite were trying to make themselves more powerful?” I guessed, confused.

            McLeod shook his head. “No, no. They were keeping the playing field level. One electrical engineering building per ship, one hospital, one school, one supermarket. One of everything per ship, each ship in one of two languages.”

            I felt like if I thought hard enough, my brain would be forced to solve the problem and give me the answer. But my brain was a computer, and the circuits were programmed to function in a certain way. I had been neglecting the organic part of my mind for a very long time. “I don’t know.” The words were acid in my mouth.

            “Forced cooperation,” McLeod said, spreading his hands wide.

            “Two of everything doesn’t sound like cooperation to me.”

            “It does if cooperation is the first step toward peace.”

            I frowned again. “The Confederacy and the Archontite haven’t been at war for generations.”

            McLeod tore off a piece of paper from a notebook sitting on the end table beside him and wrote down a phrase. “I’m writing that down,” he said, “for later. Not because I don’t know, but because you should ask Captain Grey.”

            “Why her? Why do you want me to talk to her so badly?”

            McLeod capped his pen and studied me seriously for a moment. “Do you know what your father said about you when you twelve years old? You had just outscored every other kid in your class. You were a sweet kid, too. I remember you and Tesla were joined at the hip, and there was nothing you wouldn’t do for your dad. I still think of myself as your uncle, so I don’t know if you were pretty, but I’m sure you were. Your mother was beautiful. All that, and do you know what your dad said to me? He turned to me on the back porch of your house and said, ‘She’s too much like me, Ulrich. I’ve made her become too much like me.’”

            On a backpacking trip with my father to practice our survival skills once, he had stooped over on the mountainside and scooped up a dull rock. “Do you know what this is?” he’d asked. “This is petrified wood. When a tree is buried and preserved, it petrifies. It becomes stone.” And while I was bored at once, my father looked at the rock with the same sadness that he looked into the mirror with.

            That’s what McLeod made me sound like. 

            “We saved this ship. We saved the ship.” Isle, Noah would have said, take a breath. What had Dasgupta said? Progress demands sacrifice. Good girl, Tesla would have murmured to me. Let him see that you haven’t sacrificed anything.

            But I have, I thought. I have. I never had a childhood. My mother abandoned us because my father and I were freaks. My own best friend had given up on ever being able to understand me completely.

            Then again, I thought, I could fill those gaps in my life. Dasgupta, Leucaspis, Hough, even Noah and Captain Grey; they weren’t blood, but they were what I had. They were what I had chosen.

            “Are we in danger, Captain? The crew?”

            And I could have sworn that the man’s eyes glinted with victory as he smiled. “Oh, yes. Always.” He smiled more widely. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t be of more use to you. Go see Captain Grey, Isley. She’s somewhere below, in the town.”

            “Thank you, sir.”

            I’m not sure why I thanked him. He had offended me. But my father used to do that. “Yes, very good, Isley,” he’d say. “You’ll do better next time.”

At the end of a long day, when I finally made it back to my room, there was a note tacked to my door. Red-cheeked, and furious that anyone might have seen it, I snatched it from the door and barricaded myself inside my room. Then I read the note. It was from Noah, of course, and it read:

Isle –

remember, “No man is an island, / Entire of itself.” -John Donne

Come find me.

– Noah

16: Chapter Sixteen

(A/N: Hey, guys! I'm coming up on the end of my pre-written material, which means that Part Two will be starting soon. If you've made it this far, and you like it, or even if you don't, please feel free to leave a review or send me a PM with your critiques. I can't promise to follow every one, but I will take them into account. Who knows, you might even save a character's life. ;) )

Chapter 16: The Truth Comes Out

I nearly overslept the next day. I woke up with just half an hour till the start of my shift, so I hurriedly threw my jumpsuit on, and Leucaspis's boots, and raced up to the captain's bridge. I had had to forego breakfast to be on time.

The day passed in a hungry blur. There was still much work to be done to get the ship back in tip-top shape. Electricians were all over the inside of the ship's walls, like rats, making repairs. Our nuclear physicists were hard at work turning the nuclear reactor back on.

On my lunch break, I went to visit Tesla in the medical bay. Then back to work again.

By the end of the next day, I still hadn't heard from Noah. I decided to go by his room after my shift. Clearly, I had done something to hurt his feelings, even if I didn't know what that was. But when I knocked, no one answered. So I looked for him in all his normal places onboard: the cafeteria, where he sat and took interviews, beside the bank of windows on Deck 13 where he took naps in the sunlight like a cat, in the mechanical engineering rooms, where he went to listen to the machines grind as he took notes from his recordings of the interviews. He was nowhere to be found. Slowly, thinking hard, I walked back to my room. My next shift didn't start for eighteen hours. I had stayed awake longer than three days straight before; I just didn't like to. But I very much wanted to see the Captain.

No. As I thought about tracking her down, probably in her bakery again, I knew I had to find Noah first. If I wanted answers, he needed them. And he had earned them. Somewhere on that vast planet beneath my ship, he was there. Finding him was going to be the difficult part.

In my room, I changed jumpsuits. I still had the black spacesuit I had worn to help transport the pods from the TI to the TII. I swapped my orange command suit for the black space one, knowing its thicker composition would protect me almost as well as the navy all-terrain suits. I could have gotten one from the wildlife sector, but I didn't want to go back down there again. At the last minute, I grabbed a bag and stuffed a few things into it. The dinner I hadn't eaten and the breakfasts I hadn't been able to. An extra loop of wire. And a knife. So far, none of the civilians had reported seeing any of the chimeras let loose from the terrarium of the TII when the translucent wall broke. But I wasn't taking any chances.

As I was taking the stairs down to the bottom level of the ship, where an elevator could transport me to the surface of Vesta, another thought occurred to me. These ships were practically interchangeable. Perhaps I had just been searching the wrong ship for my friend. I shifted my pack on my back and stomped down the street that led to the other ship.

Although both ships had effectively crashed onto Vesta, they had both landed very conveniently. The TI had indeed crushed an entire city block, but that only made it easier to reach. One street ran straight from my ship to its sister. It was perhaps a quarter of a mile walk. As the bag bounced against my shoulder blades, I noted with smug gladness that my body had finally acclimated to the increased gravity of this planet. I could hardly remember what Earth's gravity felt like. And yet, as I stared up at the dark sky, not sure whether we were in day one or two between a day of starlight, I did miss zero-g.

Why would Noah have come to this ship? I knew his work required that he often leave the ship and interview the civilians down below. Perhaps he had re-boarded the wrong ship by accident. Or perhaps he was interested in speaking to them, and to the Archontite crew who were awake on the other ship. Sometimes I heard him having conversations in Russian through the comms in our ears. The conversations were usually quiet and dry-sounding, and he never translated them for me after he had them. I wondered when I had stopped demanding he explain himself. Either he had worn me down, or I trusted him. I wasn't sure which prospect was more horrifying. Whatever the case may be, Noah was just clueless enough to land himself in a life-threatening situation without knowing it.

There was no official explanation on why Noah was awake at all. He should have been awake for thirty years and gone to sleep just as I was waking up for the first time. There wasn't even evidence that the unfreeze date on his pod had been changed. A hacker, then. Noah and I had agreed as much, although he mutely vetoed all of my theories and never offered one of his own.

At the base of the Tomorrow I, I waited for a ladder to descend to let me up. There was a traffic jam, so to speak, of civilians and crew needing to get on and off the ship. We had maintenance work, and our normal work, to get to. Civilians just couldn't decide where they wanted to be. It was a frustrating problem for both ships. The solution was to divide the means of getting onto the ships. Civilians had access to the stairs that descended from the ship up to Deck 30. Crew members took ladders that bypassed Deck 30 and led straight up to Deck 29. The ladders actually forced us into the belly of the engine rooms, but it was a short walk to the hallway outside.

On this ship, I searched more thoroughly. I glanced into the terrarium on the lower decks, not really intending to go inside, and kept moving up. Their terrarium was intact, however; and I had to hope that there were no bastardized chimeras running around inside. I wasn't about to check and make sure. There was no sign of Noah anywhere, and I was beginning to get annoyed with him. Finally, I broached Deck 4, where the first lieutenant's bridge was. It was Esser's old post, before he was made captain. I wanted to apologize to the lieutenant for flooding his chamber with fuel. And I wanted him to know that I was the one who had done it. I wanted credit where credit was due.

When I knocked on the door, no one answered. So I went in, anyway. As second lieutenant, I had guaranteed access everywhere but the captain's bridge – and that was my assignment. There was no one in the first lieutenant's bridge. Frowning, I drifted into the bridge. Where was Esser? Where was his staff?

Movement caught my eye. It was a flash of bright, unnatural color: someone's orange sleeve being waved around. Inside the core chamber, someone was having an argument. I leaned against the wall and peeked around the edge of the window.

One of the people was Esser. That was to be expected. But the other person was a second lieutenant from Tesla's class: Prollet, I thought. Trying very hard not to be noticed, I pressed the intercom button. Sound went two ways, so I had to be careful not to make any noise while I eavesdropped on them.

Esser's unpleasant voice was loud and nasally. "Stop, stop, stop. I already know this. You've said this before, for Christ's sake. We are moving as fast as we can without raising any alarms."

"It's not fast enough," Prollet snapped. "There isn't time for this, Esser. It's only a matter of time until we are discovered."

"'Nothing in this world is hidden forever,'" someone said in my ear. "'Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.'"

I gasped, stifled a scream into a squeak, and dropped to the ground. "Hey, Isley," Noah said.

"Where were you?" I demanded. "Shut up, don't talk to me."

"Everyone has fights, Isley," Noah sighed. "Shutting me out is no way to –"

I spat, "I am sneaking right now. Shut. Up."

Down below, Esser and Prollet must have decided my outburst was just a puff of escaped gas from a pipe. That sound was alarmingly like a scream. "Listen, Prollet, I have enough on my plate right now. I've just been named captain. You think that isn't stressful? Besides, the second lieutenant is even more impatient than you are. He's heading out now, and he'll be back tonight. One week from now, we can meet up. The usual place. The usual time. And we'll decide what we're going to do next."

Fascinated, I leaned in closer. I came too close to the intercom, as a matter of fact. Feedback between it and my earpiece burst out, and this time there was no way Esser or Prollet would dismiss it.

In an instant, I was crawling as fast as I could to the door. I stayed on my belly so that neither of them could see me, and then I reached up and yanked the door open. For a moment, my arm was visible to them. I was so glad for my standard orange jumpsuit. Then I crawled until I reached the hallway. As soon as I felt I could, I jumped to my feet and started running.

Out of sheer instinct, or habit, I ran to the captain's bridge. I was halfway there before I remembered that it was locked, inaccessible to me. That was good, I realized, puffing and out of breath. My body was responding to the stress of the situation, even when I didn't want it to.

You can't control everything, Noah might have reflected, and written it down.

I turned around and went back the way I came. I forced myself to move slowly, to take casual steps and breathe casually. What did I usually do with my hands? Why did my jumpsuit feel like it fit wrong? Casual is very hard to pretend at. I stepped off of the stairs at Deck 3. I was concentrating so hard on my feet and my hands and the ways my knees normally bent when I walked and how fast I should be breathing that I was genuinely surprised when a hand clapped down on my shoulder. I whirled at once.

It was Esser, of course. He was breathing heavily, and I knew that, just as I expected, he had run up and down the stairs looking for anyone nearby enough to have been his eavesdropper. That would be me, of course. But no criminal hangs around with the scene of the crime. "Isley Edison." He sounded angry. "What are you doing here? Have you seen anyone else in these halls?"

Playing at helpful second lieutenant, I shook my head. "Sorry, sir, no."

His head coiled back like a viper's, and Esser looked into my eyes. I tried not to blink, not to flinch. I could win a staring contest. That wasn't insubordination. That was acting my age. But as I looked into Esser's eyes, I saw what was really inside of him.

Fear. It screamed and howled inside of him like a deranged mental patient. He was positively terrified. Of what? Not of me. I was just a sixteen year-old second lieutenant on another ship. But I could see it as surely as it was there. Fear.

He drew back from me a step, scowling. Internally, I fumed. I should have looked away. He must have been able to tell that I was lying. But I couldn't look away, either. That wouldn't have been who I was. I may creep around two ships, be friends with an Archontite, and investigate conspiracies, but my integrity was important to me.

"You were the one who landed the ship, weren't you?" Esser asked. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I wasn't sure what I would say. "How did you score on your captaincy exam?"

Surprised, I told the truth. I had aced it.

"And your personality work-up? I trust Captain Grey shared that with you."

Bristling, I said, "I have strong leadership skills. I am intelligent. But I have weak…interpersonal skills."

Speaking up for the first time in half an hour, Noah reflected, "Did they say anything about your ambition? I mean, can a test assess how much of a threat you are to his control? Maybe that's what he's really asking, Isle. Tell him something about it."

"I will do everything I can to improve," I told Captain Esser. "The people of this ship are as important as the ship itself to me."

"Almost," Noah amended thoughtfully.

Esser responded simultaneously, so I missed his first few words. "…my new first lieutenant?"

My heart accelerated. "Could you repeat that?"

"My promotion has left a hole in my crew. How would you like to fill it and become my new first lieutenant?"

I could scarcely believe my ears. "You…I…what?"

"You did volunteer to join my crew, didn't you? Well, do. As my new first lieutenant."

"Yes," I said immediately. "Yes, I would be delighted. Thank you, Captain. Sir." Esser waited, and I snapped a salute. He turned sharply on his heel and marched off wherever he had come from.

Noah sounded weary when he said, "Congrats, Isle."

I took several deep breaths, walking on air. "You're back on the ship, then?"

His voice warmed a few degrees. "Did you miss me?"

"Where are you, then?"

Noah started speaking, and then his voice suddenly stopped. It wasn't as if he had fallen silent, but as if the communication itself had broken down. Oh, no. Not as if. My comm hadn't been charged since Noah stopped talking to me. The battery flared again. "- by the old center. Isley? Did you get that?"

"No, my battery is dying. Say again?"

I didn't even hear Noah's first syllable completed. I waited several minutes, but the audio was gone. I would have to find Noah on my own. All I had to go on was by the old center. The old center of what? The residential district? The park? The zoo?

Frustrated, I left the Tomorrow I. I stormed up and down the small town for hours, hoping to somehow run across him. I was glaring daggers at an information booth when I realized something. I stepped into it, punched in my crew ID, and called up a map of the town. What was the exact center of the town? I asked the computer to locate it for me.

It was a patch of cement on the sidewalk outside of two tall buildings. Business buildings in the business district, if I had to guess. I cocked my elbow to punch the computer screen, then forced it down. There was someone in line behind me; a witness.

The center. When did Noah talk like that? When he picked up English terms from me. Otherwise it would have been "the epicenter" or "the middle." The center. It had to be the place that the Tomorrow I first settled down at. The ships were always meant to be both flag and seed on Vesta. The town emanated from the ship like waves on a lake from something splashing into it. I shouldered my pack, stepped out of the booth, and set out for the old center of town.

I noticed that there were more buildings than the last time I was on the surface. Despite the lack of sunlight from Helios, Apollo, or Sol, Vesta's three suns, the town was well-lit by the buildings themselves. The walls emanated light; it was some sort of chemical process that I had not been taught. There were Bott's dots in the middle of the road, too, which shone furiously with white light. It was like nothing on Earth, and I found that I liked it for no other reason than that it was pretty.

The old center of town was a grassy knoll that had grown to cover the scar from the ship's stay. I expected to find Noah somewhere nearby, probably scribbling down notes as fast as his brain processed them. But I didn't see him. Frustrated, I turned in a circle. This spot wasn't exactly the center of town. The town had moved its growth to stay on the shelf of iron beneath the crust. I was actually pretty near the edge of the city. The idea of leaving it made me edgy. The ship was what I knew. The ship was my life. This town was a weakened extension of it. Beyond the edge of that…

Gritting my teeth, I set out for the edge of town. There was nowhere else in this area that Noah would be; there was only a school, a playground, a hospital, and a hospice center. There was no one old enough to need hospice yet except maybe Captain Grey, and I foresaw that she would sooner die than have someone else take care of her.

The playground was the last thing on the edge of town. I stopped beside the slide, looking for any sign of Noah. If he led me out here to murder me, I was taking him with me. To my left. Movement? No, not quite. Some other kind of action. Light moving. That was it. A flashlight? Probably. I set out for it.

As I crossed the boundary of the town, I felt the shift from urban terrain to completely foreign wilderness. The ground was barren, bereft of any greenery at all. It was just dirt. Orange dirt on the ground, mixed in with the purple dirt of the mountains. A strange and foreign world. I was outside the world of the ship.

When I reached the spot that it seemed like the light had come from, I realized that the light had come out of a hole in the ground. It was some sort of naturally occurring geological phenomenon, like the holes made in rock by a waterfall above. Perhaps there had been a river and a waterfall here. Who knew?

I crept to the edge. "Noah?" The light swept around the stone passageway. It led down and out, further away from the city. I clenched my jaw and jumped the few feet down into the tunnel. Then I crept along, listening hard. I wasn't worried about being caught, which perhaps I should have been. What could any of the crew tell me?

Something about the way the air sounded told me as I approached that the tunnel ended in a much larger cavern. The tunnel was only a few feet wide, and I had to stoop to walk along. I would be glad for the space, once I knew what it held. There was a familiar rushing sound, as well, but between the rush of blood in my ears and the sound of myself breathing, I couldn't place it. At the end of the tunnel, I stopped and looked out.

It was a cavern two hundred feet tall – so this tunnel had been sloping downward; it felt so – and at least four hundred feet wide. An underground river snaked through the cavern in a gentle arc, closer to the opposite wall than to the tunnel. On the other side of the river, there was a rock formation. Water trickled down from it and bled into the river. The stone of the cavern was a warm golden brown, and so the water looked incredibly blue. Aquamarine, I think it is called. Although the cavern was dark, I could see as much based on the flashlight beam focused on the stone.

I made a sound of admiration, and the beam swung over to me. Blinded, I flung up my hand to shade my eyes.

"Oops, sorry," someone said, and the light moved away from me. When I could see again, I edged around the corner of the tunnel, having given myself cover. I guess that policemen's training was paying off, after all. The beam of light returned to my feet, lighting me, I guess. I could imagine the smile on his face when he said, "Hey, Isle. Took you long enough to find me."

I rolled my eyes and walked over to him, careful not to trip on anything. But there was nothing to trip over. "I'm not the one who wouldn't talk to me."

He turned the flashlight on himself so that I could see him smiling. Lit from below, Noah's face became a shadowed mask. It should have been scary, but there was nothing scary about him. "You did miss me."

"Did you hear I got promoted? Did you hear that?"

"Yes, and I have to say, Isle, I think he's buying you off. Esser must know you were listening in. Why were you, by the way? He wants you to owe him. More than that, he knows how important that ship is to you. Nothing is more important. You will lose sight of the truth just trying to hold on to what you have." Noah's voice was serious, and my temper flared.

Cruelly, I told him, "The truth is, you are all alone. Nothing will ever change that."

"You are just as alone as I am. The difference is, you can't admit it. Your dad raised you to be a freak. Oh, don't look offended. You are. And that's great. And Tesla –"

I snapped, "Tesla is my friend."

"Tesla is jealous of you. He has been your whole life. The least he could do is have the decency to admit it. The boy is so human that he reeks of the sea that humanity crawled out of." Noah's lip was curled in distaste.

It was a strange expression on him. Or maybe it was that I wasn't used to his face, but to his voice. I closed my eyes to focus on that. It wasn't anger he was speaking from, not totally. It was a different kind of anger. Indignance. The anger one felt that was rightful, protective, even. I opened my eyes. "At least I have people in my life, Noah. Tesla. Captain Grey. Dasgupta. You have no one."

"No one but you," he said curtly, and rearranged his limbs so that he was sitting with both his arms and legs crossed. Pouty child, I grumbled to myself, and sat down beside him.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. "You know, I don't like arguing with you."

"Obviously. Probably it's all the repressed sexual tension in the room."

I snorted. "Very funny."

But he was clambering to his knees and ducking behind a boulder punching up from the ground near the wall. When I was slow to follow, he grabbed my sleeve and pulled me after him. "I wasn't joking. Shhh, I hear something. Stay low."

"You are full of wayward beliefs and misled convictions," I informed him. We huddled behind the boulder and waited for whoever it was to come down the tunnel.

Smugly, Noah said, "I told you I heard someone. It's because I was raised in the tundra, you see. When I was a kid, my dad made me and my sister hunt for rabbits with him. I spent the whole trip nursing a cold and complaining bitterly, and I kept trying to scare the rabbits away before they got killed. It culminated with me letting a shot off into the air and the kickback breaking my nose."

I rolled my eyes. Why did his dad take him hunting? Why didn't he want to kill a rabbit? Why did he have a compulsive need to talk? Sometimes, there was no point in asking Noah questions.

Someone came out of the tunnel and into the cavern. I was surprised by how quickly and confidently they had crossed the tunnel, and I shrank further behind the rock. One of their feet was wrong, because it dragged in the dirt on the ground every time they took a step.

He carried an all-terrain lantern in his hand – one of the ones that was stored in a panel in the wall in case of emergencies; it emitted a corona of light for a wide swath of illumination – and halfway across the cavern, he set it down. He was grunting and sweating, struggling with his leg.

It was Tesla.

I jumped out from behind the rock to talk to him, and Noah tackled me from behind. We went down hard; my chin was burned by friction with the dirt. I opened my mouth to cry out or shout obscenities at Noah, I wasn't sure which, but he put his hand over my mouth and held on even when I bit him. Using a strength I didn't know he possessed, he hauled me back behind the boulder.

"Get off of me!" I snapped, infuriated. But whispering. I wasn't sure if I was ashamed that Tesla might found out this moron beat me in a fight, or if Tesla's circumstances were strange enough that I wanted to find out why he was here. How he had known this place existed. Why he hadn't told me about it. Many things.

Noah caught my fist in midair. I'd already given him one black eye; I guess he didn't want two. "Stop! This is my job, Isle: watch and listen. Help me do my job." I elbowed him in the ribs, but we sat up and stayed hidden behind the boulder. Noah straightened his t-shirt, and I fought the urge to slap his face again.

Tesla was busily taking his pants off. For a moment, I reflected upon how inexplicable the behavior of boys was. As always, Tesla took his shoes off only once his pants were pooled around his ankles. He folded them up neatly and set them aside next to the river coursing through the cavern. Then, still hobbling, he approached the riverside. With Noah and I watching, our breath bated, he lowered himself into the water.

Tesla lingered in the water for about five minutes. I got bored, and restless, and I felt rather like a voyeur, but Noah was deadly focused. Finally, Tesla pulled himself out of the water. With water still streaming down his legs, he pulled his pants and boots backed on. There was something strange and different about him, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

"He's walking normally," Noah whispered seriously.

There was a marked improvement in Tesla's gait. It was almost as if his leg didn't hurt him at all. Feeling increasingly guilty about not calling out to him the moment he walked in, I watched as he picked up the lantern and walked back out of the cavern. Just as soon as his steps stopped echoing back to us, I pushed Noah over and stalked back and forth across the cavern. Noah stayed on the ground, merely folding his legs beneath him.

"I do not like wronging him," I told Noah. "You were wrong to ask me to." He said nothing. When he reached up to scratch his nose, his sleeve pulled back a little. His wrists looked bonier than I remembered. Had he lost weight? "What have you been doing out here?"

Noah waved a hand. "I'm thirty years too young and all my friends have forgotten me. I knew I wouldn't be missed if I took a field trip for a few days."

"That wasn't what I asked."

"I know. But I thought it was the answer you wanted. Sometimes, it's easier to get the answer you most want to know by asking indirect questions. The fastest way to get to the truth is by tacking into the wind. T.S. Eliot, remember?"

"Again, not what I asked."

Noah stuck his tongue out and mumbled a few half-hearted curses in Russian. "I'm here because I was on the job – interviewing a history teacher up at the school – when I went outside to eat my lunch. I saw Esser coming this way yesterday, and I waited for him to leave. Then I came in. I've been waiting to see who else would come."

"Why?"

"I have reason to believe that this cavern is important." He smacked like there was a bad taste in his mouth. "Important? Is that the best English can do? Hm. This cavern is kairotic."

I was impatient. "I don't know what that word means, and I don't care. You know how to talk to me so that I understand, Noah."

"Right, okay, cleaning it up. What I mean is, I've seen Esser in here. The man who replaced the captain of the Tomorrow I. 'Power corrupts,' Isle. And the pursuit of power corrupts absolutely." He fell silent as he thought best about how to convey his suspicions to me. "I've seen you at the end of a shift. Your skin turns grey, you have black shadows under your eyes, and you look like a stiff breeze could knock you over. Honestly, could I have beaten you in a fight in fair circumstances?" His eyebrows quirked inquisitively toward his hairline. "I thought so. So when I saw Esser come in here, I knew that he was coming off a long shift. I thought perhaps he came here when the TI was in port the last time, or something. Anyway, I couldn't figure why any of you would stray so far from the ship. So I followed him. When he went in here, he looked terrible. When he came out, he looked great. Well-fed, well-rested, glowing with health. You know, Californian."

"What, you think these springs have healing power?" I asked, crossing my arms. People always thought that springs had special powers. Minerals in the water often had supplementary benefits, but nothing like what Noah was describing. Bodies were complex machines that broke down constantly; there was more to fixing them than putting gas in the tank.

"Can you explain to me how Tesla's leg is all better now?" Noah leaned back on his hands and cocked his head.

I bit my lip. "We should test it. Have you drunk any of the water?"

"Nope. I'm from the tundra, darling. Half the time, melted snow is reindeer piss. There's no way I'm drinking anything but filtered water from the ship."

"Then I'll try it. We'll see if it works on me like it did for Esser."

"I don't know, Isle. It really could be reindeer piss. Or alien, like, saliva. I know. Let's go see Tesla. He had a huge gaping gash on his leg, right? I want to go look at it."

I rubbed my hands together to get the dirt off. "Let's go."

"Can we wait till dawn, though? I want to know what this place looks like in the light."

We had had too many arguments already, and I was exhausted. I sat down hard and folded my legs. "Fine." I shrugged my pack off my back and opened it, rooting around inside for food. I was starving. I ripped open a packet for myself and started eating, and Noah helped himself to one, too. Clam chowder. I was glad he was eating that meal and not me. "Do you think Tesla and Esser are doing something wrong, Noah?"

"I think a lot of people died. I think dead folks have a lot of untold stories. I am trying to hear those stories, but I don't have anyone's ear. With no one to pass the story on to, what was the point? What lasts?"

"You have my ear," I told him, scraping the bottom of the packet for the last bit of food. Then I set it down. "I came to find you. I'm going to see Captain Grey."

Noah set his packet down, as well. But slowly. "There's something you should know about me before we go. I'm not Noah Bachman, Isley. That's probably why the pod messed up. That tube in your arm is a safety measure; it scans your DNA. My pod was hacked – but to my benefit. Captain Grey pulled me aside that day on the bridge and told me about the DNA scan. It must have been the good captain that fixed it for me. Then, on launch day, she found me again. I was sitting in the windowsill watching the sky fade away, and she brought me to a pod."

My brain worked that over for a moment. "What do you mean, you aren't Noah Bachman?"

"Noah Bachman died twelve years ago. He was four, and it was pneumonia. It broke his parents' hearts. Maybe it broke their minds, too. They were approached by government officials who suggested replacing their son. It was an ongoing experiment having to do with the plague raging out of control behind extremely fallible walls."

That sounded familiar. "Behind walls. Walls barring our countries from the Wasteland?"

He nodded slowly. "The very same. The Bachmans agreed to the idea. They paid the government two hundred thousand dollars to have a helicopter fly over the Wasteland. They scoped for about six days until they found a ramshackle substitute of a town. A little boy lived there. He was about four, too. Dark hair, same as Noah; even the same green eyes. If you look at Noah's baby pictures, you could believe they are the same person. In the middle of the night, the helicopter dropped two government agents. They snatched the boy, hopped back onto the helicopter. And Noah Bachman was alive again."

I was horrified. "He's you. You aren't Noah. You're a…Wayward?"

Noah shrugged. "I told you I grew up around people who spoke English. It was Central America, but Spanish was long gone. I told you I was an Archontite artisan, and that one of those things was not true. I am not Archontite, not really. I still remember who I used to be. I couldn't forget. I thought I was going insane. My parents kept telling me You are Noah, you are Noah, and I had no reason to believe that I wasn't. But I couldn't believe it. I felt crazy. Eventually, I had my little sister hypnotize me. Gave her a set of questions I wanted her to ask. Little Anya. She was my secret-keeper, and my dear little friend. She'll be going on forty by now, I think."

"But…why?"

"Like I said, the plague. I think that everyone left in the Wasteland is immune."

Grasping the implication of his words, I shrank away from Noah. He had come from a place riddled with insanity, cannibalism, anarchy, and disease.

He grinned sarcastically. "You aren't sick. I went to the doctor all the time as a kid. I think they were taking my blood to synthesize an inoculation to the plague. I wonder how many kids like me there are out there, how many doctors there are trying to do the exact same thing."

I shook my head. "So if the plague died with the last of the Waywards who were not immune, what is the point of synthesizing a cure?"

Noah studied me for a moment. Now that I knew who he was, I looked at him differently. I knew that I did, too. He still had the same heart-shaped face, the same dark curly hair, the same clever, cat-like green eyes. But now I saw not Russian features, but Hispanic features. His tan skin was hereditary, not granted by the sun glinting off of snow. He smelled different to me, like spruce trees and soil and honey, not the wood-burning, cinnamon-like scent I had come to associate with him. Maybe both sets of smells had been there all along, or maybe I'd made them up, the way I'd made up so many of the facts of my life.

"Before I boarded the Tomorrow II, I thought the Archontite and the Confederacy were racing to develop a cure so that when they deliberately released it, their countrymen wouldn't die. Is there a neater way to eliminate the competition?" he reflected. "But when the Archontite and the Confederate passengers meshed so peacefully, I started to think differently."

I swallowed. "What – what do you mean?"

"Well, think about it. There was an outbreak of some disease onboard the Tomorrow I. Somehow, it was carried onboard the ship."

"By Waywards? Is this another terrorist act?" I demanded, my breath coming faster.

Noah knotted his fingers together until they turned white as bone. "The explosion of the Tomorrow I wasn't terrorists. If you ask me, I think that was done to appease terrorists. It sounds to me like our governments want the Waywards off their backs. But, why? Because they don't pose a significant threat? Or because they do, and our governments are running out of time? I think it's the latter. I think, for all the safety protocol of this ship, nature is more clever."

I seized on the real meaning of his words. "They were running from the plague?"

Noah shrugged. "That's the conclusion I've reached. But where Esser and Tesla figured into this, I don't know. And I'm starting to suspect that is of even more importance."

"Why?"

Noah's eyes were serious, his mouth a harsh, downward-curving line. "Because, Isley, where are all the graves?"

17: Chapter Seventeen

Sorry for the short chapter today! The next one will be longer, and the one after that is going to be massive.

Chapter 17: Evangeline Grey

We crashed on the floor of the cavern that night. I woke up blearily, with sunlight streaming into my eyes. I blinked, sitting up, and held up a hand to spare my sight. Noah was standing in the middle of the cavern, his head cocked. "What are you doing?"

He turned around to look at me. "Did you know you talk in your sleep?"

I levied myself onto my feet and stretched out my sore bones. My mattress on the ship was only slightly softer than the ground, but it made for a hell of a difference.

"Right, sorry. Not the question you asked. I was thinking."

"So, sun's up. Can we get back to the ship?" I shook my head. "I meant to Captain Grey?"

Noah shrugged. "Take a look first, Isle. Haven't you ever heard of smelling the roses?" He pointed to the back wall of the cavern. I followed his direction. Sunlight was glinting off of the far wall of the cavern, where water trickled over stones into the river below. The stone walls, which were golden brown, looked warm and dusty. But the waterfall rocks were spectacularly green. They were glowing with phosphorescence. It even seemed as though the rocks were translucent, they radiated so much illumination. The water, probably carrying the same bright mineral, glowed, as well. It seemed…magical.

"This is…not earthly," I managed to say.

Noah smiled. "Well said, my friend."

We ate breakfast as we walked over to Captain Grey's bakery. "How you lived on this stuff your whole life, I'll never know," Noah whined.

I knocked on the door to the bakery. "I like it better than bananas, if you must know."

Footsteps sounded to us through the structure. Captain Grey's face showed through a crack, then she widened the door to reveal herself. "You're back."

"Well spotted, Arthur Conan Doyle," Noah quipped. "Can we come in?" With a grunt, the former captain acceded, and she stepped back to let us in. Noah shrugged off his puffy vest and hung it up on the rack beside the door. "So, are they letting you have this place? What, like, American settlers who earned the land they cultivated?"

"That's a terrible example, Noah, as no one knows what you are talking about," I told him shortly. "Captain Grey, we've come for the facts. We want to know everything."

Noah glanced at me sideways. Captain Grey studied us both. "Take a seat, then." So we sat down at a table next to the hole in the wall that served as a window in front of the bakery counter. I wished that the place smelled like baking bread and frosting and hot coffee. I had read about those smells, but suddenly I wanted to experience them myself. "So, where should I start?"

"At the beginning," Noah said at once. After making an adjustment to the comm in his ear, he folded his hands in front of himself and fell silent.

Captain Grey sighed. Her gray hair was even more frazzled than ever, and there were liver spots and gruesome-looking veins tracing along the backs of her gnarled hands. My stomach curled. "You must know by now that the Archontite and the Confederacy created the Wasteland, so I won't waste time on that. What you don't know is that they created the plague, as well." Noah and I traded shocked looks. I studied the captain carefully to assess whether she was lying to us or not. Her face was so lined with wrinkles that every expression was amplified ten times over, like waves on a lake, and I suspected that her words were genuine. "Your next question will probably be, Which one? That doesn't matter. The two are basically one; they're just kept apart to leave an enemy for each country." She sighed heavily. "One thing you discover about people is that they do not do very well without a problem to contend with. Idle hands aren't the devil's playthings; they are the roots of anarchy."

"Is that where it started in the Wasteland?" Noah asked. He took his notepad out of his pocket and uncapped the pen he kept behind his ear.

Grey shrugged and settled back against her chair. "Maybe. Probably. I'm old, but I'm not that old," she joked weakly.

"You died twice," I said to her.

She waved a hand. "I'll get to that. Now, the plague –"

Noah stopped her again, shaking his head. "Wait. When? Will you explain the chronology to me?"

"Oh, of course. The plague came just before the war. Just after the Union and the League became the Confederacy and the Archontite." Again, Noah and I shared shocked expressions. Grey quirked an eyebrow. "You had it wrong, eh? What were you going off of? History books and interviews?"

"Birth records," Noah answered numbly. "And death records."

"You were looking for mass deaths," Grey understood.

Noah shrugged, uncomfortable. "It's why I joined this mission. I needed security clearance."

It was my turn to frown. "What was your next move, then?"

He waved my question away, and Grey went on. "Well, that was clever, anyway. But you were wrong. The plague, the disease, was so much more destructive than any war. Billions died, compared to the millions that the war took from us. Then your Archontite and our Confederacy won the war."

Noah shook his head. "You're leaving things out."

"I left out that the plague was much more powerful than they thought it would be. I left out that they atom-bombed two continents for fear of the plague reaching them. I left out that their original means of transmission were prisoners. Asylum tenants. The poor, the wouldn't-be-missed." Noah recoiled, and I thought of his words earlier. I missed him, but then, that had been like rubbing his nose in it, hadn't it? I was the best he could do.

Grey groaned, a high little noise in the back of her throat that conveyed grief right through to me. "Those walls they put up – pah!"

I tilted my head. "They don't work?"

Grey waved her hand again. "There is no wall high enough, no wall wide enough. Trust me. I worked on that wall." She fell silent, then began again. "No, it works. Sometimes we had to gun down anyone who came to close to it, but it works. It's a functioning system."

"I'm from the Wasteland," Noah told her. He took a chance; now we had to hope we could trust Grey. "I need to know now. Am I a carrier? Is that why they took me? Are we…" He swallowed hard. "Are we the newest type of transmission?"

Captain Grey grimaced. "You have a dark imagination, my boy. You are immune. You are not a carrier. But there are some who are not immune, who are not carriers."

"I thought they all died out?"

Captain Grey snorted. "No. Not when people keep getting shipped to the Wasteland." Noah and I sat back, already guessing what she was going to say. All those people who got sent to the Wasteland for being ruled insane, or falling into poverty, or disagreeing too loudly with the government. I always just assumed that the stories about people being sent to the Wasteland were there to scare children straight. But now I knew the stories to be true. And I was horrified. I knew people who had been sent away. Coworkers of my father's. He would mention their recent absence at the dinner table, shrug out the newspaper, and turn the page, thinking nothing of it. My father…I suddenly wished that I could just unfreeze him, and speak to him for five minutes, and smell his familiar smell. Strangely, I couldn't remember it now. I just knew that he smelled like home. "The people they keep sending to the Wasteland are keeping the plague alive. But it is growing out of control. There are too many people in too little space. There have been too many generations of immunity cultivated."

"My parents," Noah realized. "My parents are immune? It's hereditary? So, I…I could find them again?"

"It's been thirty-two years, Noah," I murmured. "However you remember them, they are different." Captain Grey or I had to say it, and I preferred it to be me. His shoulders slumped in defeat. I sensed his desire to put his head down on my shoulder and sleep as if his desire was my own. Something about learning unpleasant things was exhausting.

The captain went on relentlessly. "Nah, it's not hereditary. They're just getting good at keeping the plague away from their kids. The Waywards, I mean. Like you, your parents. And me."

Open-mouthed, I stared. It made sense that artisans could be Waywards. Their admission standards must have been catastrophically low. But us? Stellaucts? I thought we had to be trained from birth, like my dad trained me. I didn't know that we could be…that we could have other lives.

Now Grey looked uncomfortable. "I would've thought it was obvious by now. I died twice, you see. The first time, it was Evangeline Grey; a little girl in a car accident. I'm sure Noah's told you by now. I remember there being a helicopter ride, and not much else. I don't know what it is about flying that so makes an impression on a child. My parents were middle-class; they worked hard, they earned everything they had. I joined the military because I wanted not to be a burden to them. And then I died a second time."

She grit her teeth for courage and pulled back her sleeve, and yet again I saw the telltale biomechanical blue color of her arm between her sleeve and her glove. But she didn't stop there. With Noah and I looking on, Captain Grey removed both gloves. She rolled her sleeves up to her elbow, and unfastened the topmost button of her shirt to lay bare the skin of her throat. Only one arm was blue, but I had the sense that my perception was about to be changed. As Captain Grey took hold of her own pale, wrinkly skin and pulled savagely on it, Noah took my hand. We stared in horror as her skin tore away from the plastic surface of her biomechanical limbs and torso.

"Are you…robot?" Noah barely strung the words together.

"I'm a cyborg," she said. "That's the technical word. Part robot, part human. Mostly robot, at this point. My brain is intact. It's inside my skull. I still have a heart, a circulatory system. But I don't have a respiratory system in the usual way. That was the second time I died, you see. The government effectively bought me to keep me alive. It turns out a captain's psychological makeup is more rare than you'd think."

I understood. "That's how you survived the deoxygenated ship. You didn't need to breathe. For two years?"

The old captain shrugged. "I didn't know, either. I was guessing. But apparently I need far, far less. When the ship crashed, I thought it was finally my reckoning. After all the horrible things I've done in my life, the people I've killed, the secrets I've kept, it seemed a fitting punishment to die alone on a foreign planet, surrounded by ghosts." She shrugged. "And then you kids woke up."

"You set it so that we would, didn't you?"

The captain grinned. "Just because you hope something will happen doesn't mean you actually want it to."

"That makes no sense," I said, just as Noah said, "Yeah, Isle." When I glared at him, he shrank against the hole in the wall. "What? I was, erm, being facetious?" I rolled my eyes.

"But what about the cargo? I mean, the passengers?" I corrected myself.

Captain Grey eyed me ponderously. "Have you ever, once, looked at the passenger list?"

I glanced at Noah. That was his job, his sort of thing, not mine. He shook his head. "I don't have access to a passenger manifesto. I just have a phone book. Most of the names are redacted."

"Well, I recommend it."

"First you, then McLeod, then you again. Don't any of you believe in straight answers? Why must you all give me the runaround?" I demanded.

Noah held up a finger. "You learn more by doing things for yourself. Samuel Clemens, maybe? Thoreau? Don't you just hate when you can't remember whether you've come up with something yourself, or riffed it from someone else?"

I shook my head. "Shut up, Noah. I'm not letting you get us off track today. I want to know if my father is sick, and if so, how. I want to know how to fix him if he is, and I want to know how he got sick in the first place. That's all I care about."

"Yeah, and I want to know about that cavern on the horizon and the passenger manifesto and how we can keep kids like us from ever being taken from the Wasteland again. But, yeah, I'm worried about that disease, too." Noah's contribution, of course. "I'm worried that Esser has something to do with all of this." I was glad he left out Tesla's name, but I knew he only did it for me. Because I was there.

Captain Grey waved her hand. "You two have gotten everything out of me that I have to offer, at this point. Run along, do what you do. Come back to me only when you really get desperate."

Standing on her doorstep, Noah remarked to me, "You'd think she doesn't like visitors."