With shaking hands, she pressed the button to activate the shield controls and pushed the slider up.
With a groan and a series of clanks, the shutter began to withdraw.
It peeled back to reveal not a vast tapestry of stars, as she had expected, but a planet looming massive before her, all hues of blue and green and violet.
Lapillus should have been little more than a speck in the distance as they approached. They were meant to have two days to adjust after their cryosleep before the crew had to navigate a landing. More than that… the planet looked nothing like the images she’d been shown of Lapillus, a little marble of a moon that was mostly ocean with little swaths of green denoting landmass. This planet had huge, sprawling continents.
An uneasy feeling crept up her spine, setting the little hairs at her nape on end.
“What the fuck is that?” someone rasped from behind her, making her jump in her seat.
“Eunha!” Cordelia eased her death grip on the arms of her chair. “You scared me.”
Eunha leaned against the back of her own chair to Cordelia’s right, gesturing toward the planet before them. “Maybe I’m still messed up on all the drugs they pumped into us, but that does not look like the planet they showed us.”
Her short black hair stuck out wildly all around her head, more a mass of cowlicks than curls. The reflection of the planet glowed in her dark eyes.
“What did you say?” someone else asked hoarsely. The railing creaked as Nyx climbed the stairs. Her prosthetic leg clicked, metal to metal, with each step. The prosthetic was the most basic on the market—a curving blade with a bit of give to it. She slumped down into the seat to Cordelia’s left, sighing hard. Her olive-toned skin was sallow with the lingering effects of cryo sickness. She stared at the planet before them, rubbed her eyes hard, and stared at it some more.
“Um, what the fuck is that?” Nyx asked, sitting forward.
“That’s what I said.” Eunha blew a wild curl out of her eyes.
“It’s Lapillus,” Cordelia said impatiently. “It has to be.”
“If that’s Lapillus, I’m the pope.” Nyx tapped the screen in front of her. “Look at this. We’ve got like fifteen alerts.” She opened the messages Cordelia had skimmed over. Most were system alerts.
Warning: exceeding safe travel speed. Warning: unusual pressure readings. Warning: navigation cannot be calibrated. Warning: communication with mission control has been lost.
Eunha slid into her seat, tapping rapid-fire on her screen to pull up the navigation.
Error: Navigation cannot be calibrated.
“That’s not ideal,” Eunha muttered, staring at the red words on the screen.
“We have seven missed messages from mission control,” Nyx said, pulling it up and sending it to Cordelia’s larger screen with a flick of her finger.
The first few were standard messages, reporting yearly updates on their mission status and letting them know of a few staff changes.
Then came the first warning—the software for the ship’s AI was behaving erratically, so mission control had taken manual control over the ship, leaving them in stasis amid reassurances that the issue would be resolved long before they woke.
Another warning: the erratic behavior of the AI was being caused by hackers. They were cutting off remote access to the ship until further notice.
The last message was no more than a few lines, sent nearly five years after the first. It was an audio file. The quality was terrible, and crackling.
“It’s over. It’s all over. Earth is… Oh, God. I’m sorry. I hope you never wake up. I’m so sorry.”It cut out with a shrill static sound.
The hair on Cordelia’s arms stood on end as her lungs tightened until she couldn’t draw another breath. The ship wavered around her.
“What does that mean?” Nyx turned on Cordelia, reaching out to claw at her arm. “Commander,what the fuck does that mean?”
Cordelia jerked her arm out of Nyx’s grip, sitting forward to leaf frantically through the alerts, searching for answers she already knew weren’t there. “We need to find our bearings,” she said, barely able to get the words out around the lump in her throat.
All systems came back normal, except that the navigation couldn’t calibrate, and their communication link with mission control was down. She pulled up the navigation history, playing back their departure from Earth.
A tiny blip on the screen skated away from Earth and trailed past the elliptical markers for the paths of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—on and on until they had passed Pluto. The ship ventured out into the deep, empty space beyond the Solar System. They watched silently as the little ship marker approached the Hyperion System where Lapillus was located and carried right on past it. Past the edge of explored space, past anything that their navigation system could make sense of. The replay ended.
Error. Navigation cannot be calibrated.
