ONE
FALLING STARS
Sabrina
“Swerve left!They’re going to hit us!” Tata yells to our captain, Weston, at the front of the ship. She’s in the seat in front of me, across the aisle and to my right, yet her booming voice still makes me wince.
“Stop distracting me! There’s another coming from above, you idiot!” Weston yells back.
“You’re not going fast enough!”
“I'm going as fast as I fucking can!”
“Right! Right!” Annora, our crew’s best navigator and tracker, is currently in the middle of a panic attack, yelling at him from his other side, her shrieks conflicting with what Tata’s shouting more often than not.
I block out the noise of my crewmates, trying to focus on keeping my breakfast from coming up while watching the chaos on the system’s radar. Navigational numbers flicker across the panel station in the cockpit, resetting each time Weston dodges another ship and it changes our course,almost too fast to keep up with. Not that that matters. We have our coordinates. We know our destination. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that it’s everyone else’s destination too.
“We have to get clear of them! Now!” I add into the shouting match. “Slow down!”
“That’s what I’m trying to do!” Weston snaps back at me, then curses. “Dammit, it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of them!”
Our small ship jerks, nosediving downward with an especially low gravity pull as a sudden burst of light blinds us through the viewport. Annora and Mickie, our chief gunner and an operator like me, scream in unison. My belly flips and, gripping my buckles tightly, I press my lips firmly closed, fighting another surge of nausea.
“A collision!” Tata shouts out unnecessarily.
With a growl, Weston levels out the ship, and a breathless sigh falls across the group in the momentary lull. I glance at Blat, our muscle, across the aisle to my right, and find his knuckles white from clutching his straps and his eyes closed tightly. I look away again before he catches me checking on him. He hates when I do that.
“Fuck,” Weston and Annora expel at the same time.
“I think we’re free of the worst of it,” our captain adds.
Annora sags into her seat in front of me. “I’ll reset our coordinates to someplace close but not too close. It’ll be safer anyways, when everyone starts to land. Not everyone’s going to make it, and depending on how much clear space there is, it might get bad.”
“Well, we fucking will. I didn’t get gravity stabilizers put onThe Wreckfor nothing,” Weston grumbles. “Though good idea, might as well play it safe until we can get in touch with Mr. Whicker again.”
Glancing once more at Blat, I notice he’s putting his headphones on. Following his lead, I go back to tuning out Annora and Weston as well. I’m useless on the ship, just like he is. He and I are sourcers, procurers, not pilots, navigators, engineers. Blat and I are on Weston’s crew to do the offship jobs: investigate the leads and interrogate those in our way to the items we need to retrieve. We handle the dirty work—which is why we also often team up to take care of the cleaning and the cooking too. Tata and Mickie join us when we need back up on the outside missions, but asThe Wreck’sclosest thing to a mechanic and engineer as well as not only being the crew’s gunner and operators, their jobs mostly keep them around the ship.
Our home away from home…The Wreck.
Weston, our boss and captain, procured the shoddy spacecraft nearly three years ago, and hired me to his crew on the first day. Since then, nothing’s held me back. Leaving the trudge of a single colony ship to roam the triad of them freely, life’s been better. Even if the work isn’t always honest.
Our main business is procurement. And, on occasion, we smuggle what we procure between ships or between castes—often between castes. Contraband, drugs, the works… At least that’s what we were doing beforeThe Wreckbroke down onThe Dreadnautand we got stuck.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, we were stranded at the exact timeThe Dreadnautwas scheduled to leave the colony ship triad for good. Unable to getThe Wreckup and running in time,The Dreadnauttook it—and us—with it on its mission to Earth.
Which is how we ended up… here.
“Everyone, hold on tight! We’re about to enter the atmosphere!” Weston hollers over his shoulder.
I press back in my seat and take a deep breath, trying to ignore the ship’s shuddering and the frighteningly unknown world ahead. Still, a sense of relief—the same relief I’ve been feeling since we escaped from the ancient colony ship—resettles inside me. I hatedThe Dreadnaut.
Breaking down while on the larger ship had been annoying enough. But being stuck on it for nearly two full years? That had been hell. Just waiting and working, taking every job we could find, all of us pooling our incomes to help earn enough back to afford the fuel to fly the ship… was only one long reminder of my life before getting a job on Weston’s crew in the first place—of being trapped in a place I couldn’t escape.
I spent my childhood stuck on a single lower-caste floor. Eleven long years stuck in several square miles of ship, locked out of others for being a child and, more importantly, for being a child who refused to enter the military.
Sure, the military is one of the only routes an orphan like myself could take to make a better life for themself. But it’s a better lifethroughslavery, slavery that almost always ended up with a bloody, terrifying death at the front lines. Even as a kid, I’d been warned against joining, told it was a trap. Instead, I ran with the other beggars and thieves, desperately surviving until I was old enough to hold down a real job and could afford my own water rations without stealing them. I was lucky enough to be given a courier position that had me traveling between the other lower caste floors. I spent years doing that. Once I’d saved up enough money to buy myself passage off my old colony ship, I met Weston. Right there at the port, both of us ready to start new lives.
