“A simple multicellular organism that, like the plants of Earth, takes in carbon dioxide and produces oxygen through respiration. This one does so, notably, without chlorophyll or sunlight. Your predecessors took it on board twelve thousand years ago, and it has been thriving here ever since, despite Rover’s best attempts to weed it.”
My eyes open wide as I look at the leaves before me. Alien leaves.
Moving is agony, but I can’t stay still, not when I’m lying in some extraterrestrial meadow. I manage to get to my feet.
“The alien plant is part of our trouble, actually,” OScontinues. “It raised the oxygen concentration in theCoordinated Endeavor’s atmosphere to unstable levels. Oxygen is a free radical, corrosive to my wiring and dangerous to your own cells. It is also highly explosive in this proportion, greatly increasing our risks as we enter the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Already, the hull of theCoordinated Endeavorhas many surface damages, any one of which could prove catastrophic during the stress of landing.”
My thoughts refuse to knit. Am I on a beach, am I in the past or the future, am I alive only in my own mind? That’s the closest to what this feels like. My panicking brain tells me that I’m discovering what the moment of body death is like, that the neurochemistry of my mind is screaming nonsense into the dark until its electricity blinks out.
I roll against a wall, sending crackles down my spine. “Minerva,” I try again.
“Your sister has been dead for almost thirty thousand years,” my mother’s voice says flatly.
My mouth opens and closes.
“All humans are dead, except for you and Kodiak.”
My gut took a little journey into my mouth before the ship started this latest screeching, but now it’s living there, stomach acid all I can taste and smell, steam all I see. I retch.
“I am sorry,” OS says.
I hurl vomit into the rusty moss coating the walls andfloor, stagger forward a few paces before the moss reaches back up to stroke me as my vision goes black.
_-* Tasks Remaining: N/A *-_
“Brace! Brace!” comes my mother’s voice. I open my eyes to a new darkness: thick smoke, grays riddled with blacks. “My wiring is on fire. I do not know how much longer I can speak to you.”
When I cough, the individual lines of pain from my feet connect. I’m a bright and bloody net of pulsating nerves. The ship rotates, sending me tumbling through the smoke as wall becomes ceiling becomes floor.
I’m being pulled. Rover is yanking me somewhere.
A horrible rending sound, and then the hull shakes, the walls increasing their spin. The smoke clears as a cold wind passes through the ship. Not the explosive torrent of an opened airlock, but the breeziness of a neglected room that’s gone crumbly around the windows.
We have a draft.
A spaceship should not have a draft.
“OS!” I cry.
There’s no reply. Lights click out, click on, click out. Rover releases me and scuttles elsewhere in the ship. Thesmoke clears enough that I can see my bunk. The last thing OS asked me to do was brace, so I should brace. I manage to drag myself onto my bed, to fit the restraining belt over my body. The ship’s lights are milky behind the polluted air. Even in the chaos of the moment, I notice that the belt is polycarb—it must have been reprinted on board. It, too, is covered in a layer of the rusty alien moss. The ship pitches, thrusting my body against the belt, stretching the material thin before I fall back against the bed.
I spit out the stomach acid in my mouth. Smoke fills the air again, the stench a combination of burnt rubber and something indescribably primal. A sort of high-octane freezer burn.
Then the wind is back, blowing through the ship. I gasp as fresh air hits my face.
Contrails in the ship.
A spaceship should not have contrails.
It no longer pitches side to side—instead I’m pressed flat against the bunk, my lips drawing away from my teeth as the g-forces increase. Then it starts rotating, and I’m hurled against the restraint, against the wall, against the restraint, against the wall.
My blood feels solid, entering my heart as a stream of bullets and leaving it just as violently. My veins balloon and collapse, balloon and collapse. Whether it’s from the pain or the pressure, my thoughts fragment, go to beachesand Minerva and the hulking stranger half glimpsed in the strobing emergency lights. Throughout it all are the voices of my mother and me and someone named Kodiak, all fighting for my attention.
I dream of Titan, of descending toward black lakes of liquid methane, the only lights in the soupy atmosphere from the lamps of my craft—oddly enough, a submarine.Ambrose, the black lakes cry in Minerva’s voice.Race me to the point. Find me in here. Bring me home to you.
When I blink awake again, the air is clear. Something that might be moonlight edges the ship’s surfaces in pearly tones. Walls rise around me unbroken, though the ceiling is gone. Gulping against the throbbing pain in my skull, I lean out from the bunk.
The hallway leads not to the next chamber, but to stars. An astounding bath of lights, swirling through a twilight sky. Clouds wisp before them.
