Chapter 1
Dr. Sylvia Cohen hoped the cameras couldn't see her hand shake as she held the "thumbs up" pose for the crowd of photographers and journalists. She was to be the first woman ever to set foot on an inhabited planet. The thought filled her with such excitement and anxiety that she had been averaging three hours of sleep a night for the past week. Now the big day was here, the shuttle was about to blast off, and she wondered for the thousandth time if she was making a huge mistake.
Her sister, Jamie, hadn't been shy in listing the myriad reasons why Sylvie shouldn't be heading off to explore a new world all alone. Most of them seemed to boil down to, "you could be eaten by some alien monster with acid blood and three rows of razor-sharp teeth."
Jamie watched too much Holo-TV.
She scouted the crowd again for a glimpse of her sister, but didn’t see her. It seemed Jamie had better things to do than see Sylvie off on the greatest adventure of her life. Jamie usually had better things to do. Better things named Steven. Or Douglas. Or Jimmy.
One more reason to risk a horrible death by an alien monster.
No one would miss her much back on Earth.
Soon she was inside the small craft, going through her pre-launch checklist, breathing deep and reminding herself that she'd been training for a mission like this for years. As soon as faster-than-light travel had been achieved, it was only a matter of time before they found a planet capable of sustaining life, but that time had finally arrived.
JL-398 was a planet comprised mostly of water. It had an atmosphere similar to Earth, and NASA's probe had discovered evidence of microorganisms on the planet's surface. Life!
As MIT's premiere astrobiologist, she had been consulted about the next phase of exploration. NASA had been planning on sending their robotic scavengers to the surface first, but Sylvie had convinced her colleagues to support her proposal of sending a team of scientists to investigate.
Sylvie had testified in front of the committee charged with planning the mission. "The scavengers are not far enough advanced to perform the type of critical thinking that would be required. We need someone who can troubleshoot, someone who can respond on the fly."
The issue was safety. It always was. While there had been plenty of landings on uninhabited planets, this mission had the potential to be more dangerous. NASA wasn't ready to risk the lives of an entire team.
Then an idea popped into her head and flew out of her mouth before she could stop it. It had the power to turn her life upside down, but that was a problem for later. Surely they would choose someone far more qualified than her.
"What about a single human volunteer?"
It made sense. A scientist would be much more efficient at scouting the best areas for potential life, and at making the split-second decisions that might be necessary in the survey of a new and unknown world. In the end, the committee had agreed with her.
She was the chosen volunteer.
Now it was lift-off, and before she realized it, she was out of Earth's atmosphere and into the darkness of space.
"Wow." It was awe-inspiring. The void burned with countless points of light. In the distance, the moon was looming larger by the second. "Just... wow."
"Please repeat your query."
Sylvie laughed. She'd forgotten about Magnis.Multi-Access Generative Networked Information System. The ship's computer.
"Nothing, Magnis. Just taking in the sights." She punched in the command for the view screen to shift, pulling up the image of Earth shrinking behind them. It was beautiful, a swirl of white, blue, and brown.
A pang of homesickness hit her in the chest but it didn't last long. The ship was shooting through space at such a speed that before she knew it, Earth was just another point of light.
