Time to Orbit: Unknown

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“Okay,” I explained to Glath, “so I need 240 volts, 10 amps to connect to these bits of metal on this plug here, as AC – uh, with the electrons zigzagging back and forth.”

“What are volts and amps?” he asked, crossing his front legs in what I was beginning to recognise as an inquiring gesture. Once I’d realised that Glath was way more comfortable imitating a giant mantis than a human, I’d explained that I didn’t expect him to look human just for my sake. You’d think that hearing my exact voice coming from an alien spider cloud imitating a huge mantis would be creepier than coming from one imitating a human, but it wasn’t. Nothing is creepier than an alien spider cloud talking in your exact voice while trying, and failing, to look like you.

He – I didn’t know if Glath had a single sex or gender, but the mantis he was trying so hard to emulate was male – watched patiently as I scrolled though a basic physics textbook, frowning. I’d prioritised finding a way to keep my devices charged over mere trivialities like finding out what I could eat without dying or whether it was possible to catch some sort of weird alien infection that my immune system would be powerless to resist. When my laptop died, my knowledge died with it. That laptop battery was the most important clock I was on.

“Okay,” I said eventually, “so in terms of electrons I need… hmm. What the hell is a Coulomb?”

“6.242×10¹⁸ protons,” Glath said after some internal translation rustling. “What is a proton?”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure we care about the electrons,” I mumbled. “Current is backwards because somebody guessed wrong before we knew what an electron was. If I’m reading this right.”

“What is an electron?”

“It’s… you know, an electron,” I said, waving my hand in what I was sure must be an informative manner. “The little balls whizzing around atoms. Makes electricity. Everyone knows what an electron is.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t know about electrons, but you know their unit of measurement?”

“My information for translation is incomplete.”

“No shit.” I scrolled through the textbook some more. “Okay, an electron is the smallest subatomic particle, it has a charge of negative 1 and orbits the nucleus of the atom.”

“Oh! The [untranscribable alien clicking sound]. Did you just describe this as a particle?”

“Probably. Your expression is getting better, by the way. That sounded almost like something a human would say, without sounding like a creepy recording of something I said.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, so one Coulomb is on amp per second, meaning…” I did some quick calculations on the back of a receipt I’d found in my glove compartment. “Does this look right to you? I haven’t done algebra since high school, so…”

Glath absorbed the receipt. “And you need this charge moving back and forth?”

“I… think so?”

“It is easy. I will make sure the correct voltage and amps are available and source the materials for you to build a device to connect the supply to your machine.”

“A socket. It’s called a socket.”

Glath rustled. “Ah. Yes. Socket.”

While Glath was off collecting materials or whatever, I noted what pages of what books I’d probably need to build the socket and started to memorise the details. I, with my usefulness to the ship hinging on me being a master engineer, could hardly claim not to be able to do this trivial task. Once I was sure I knew enough of the basics that anything complicated enough to need checking wouldn’t be suspicious, I addressed my second most important problem: trying not to get randomly poisoned. Food turned out to be a way more complicated matter than I thought it would be, so I started with water.

Turns out, there’s all kinds of horrible things that can kill you in water, but I doubted most of them would be a problem on the spaceship. I didn’t think there were industrial solvents being dumped into the water supply and biological infection seemed unlikely; the water on the ship would have to be sterilised.

I did wonder, vaguely, whether I might catch something off the crew or vice versa, but I’d heard Kate rant enough to know that even on Earth, just because a bacterium or virus could live in one species didn’t mean it could live in another, so the chances of me being able to catch anything from an alien were remote. Besides, I was pretty sure the crew would’ve considered that when they abducted me.

All in all, and assuming the aliens didn’t have weird chemicals that did horrible things to the body that human science had not yet encountered, there were only two things likely to be in the water that I thought I would have to worry about – plastics, and heavy metals. Both were long-term poisoners, the heavy metals slowly collecting in the body and fucking shit up, and some plastics being mildly carcinogenic. So realistically, if I didn’t manage to steal the ship and fly it back to Earth fairly quickly, I probably wouldn’t live long enough for either to be a problem anyway.

At this point, Glath returned with a small pile of wires and clips, and helped me lever off a wall panel. He showed me a wire. “The requires electrical motion – ”

“Current,” I said.

“ – current is moving through this wire.”

“Great. So, just to get this straight, there’s an electrical network in this wall.”

“Yes.”

“And flowing water, because I took a shower earlier.”

“Yes.”

“In a rotating ring. Which I assume is supplied through the non-rotating central axle, or another place rotating at a different speed.”

“Yes.”

“How is it that my species can’t seem to get past our own moon if interstellar travel is a problem solvable by people who build ships like this?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Of course you don’t, buddy, you’re not a master engineer. Would electricity earth in this floor I’m lying on?”

“We are quite far from Earth.”

“No, I meant that in the case of me… you know what? I’m just gonna assume the worst and try not to die. Hand me those wire cutter things and that strippy thing.”

Glath did. I prepared to cut, then a horrible thought struck me. “The electricity is off, right?”

“No.”

I blinked. “You mean this wire is live right now? And you were just gonna let me cut it? With my hands?”

“I assumed that was procedure. I am not a master engineer.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being funny or not, Glath, but if you are, that slight change on my inflection is perfect for it. Could you please have somebody shut off the electricity while I do this?”

“I will.”

Once the electricity was off, the project was pretty simple. Turns out alien wire was an awful lot like Earth wire – metal for the electricity, surrounded by some kind of rubber or plastic to stop the electricity. I cut the wire, added some more wire to each to make a cord, and ended each end of the cord with a bit of metal shaped to clip around one of the laptop charger plug’s prongs. Glath had brought me some kind of non-conductive putty that started to harden when you took it out of the packet, so I shaped a blob of that around my work, taped my two wires leading from the wall together to make a single chord, and gave Glath a thumbs-up, hoping that my hands weren’t shaking too obviously.

I then explained the meaning of a thumbs-up to Glath, so he could go and get the power turned back on.

“Okay,” I said once I’d confirmed that the socket was working, “Next problem. Water.” I pulled up a picture of the periodic table. “Anything here,” I said, circling quite a lot of the bottom of the table with my finger, “will kill me quite fast, maybe, I think, if there’s too much of it. And anything here,” I added, circling the heavy metals, “will kill me a lot slower.”

Glath reached out a long arm and poured some spiders over my laptop screen. I resisted the urge to drop the laptop or start frantically crushing spiders. The first time Glath had looked at my screen had resulted in a few crushed spiders, a terrified interpreter (letting me learn several of Glath’s body language cues for shock and terror, which I hoped never to see again), and a long, apology-laden talk about different senses in different species. Glath’s sight, as it turned out, wasn’t great; they could make out shapes through a combination of sight and a few other senses based on sound and pressure, but colour was harder. Turns out computer screens only emit three colours, none of which Glath had much luck using to discern the shape of letters or diagrams; it was far easier to simply pour himself over the surface and have his spiders compare notes.

This time, Glath briefly flowed over the screen, pulled back, and said, “I do not know these symbols.”

I reread the paragraph under the periodic table. “Okay, um, so the number is how many protons, which means… those electrons we talked about before? The number on each element should be how many electrons, too, then.”

“Which number?”

“Uh, the top one. The other is atomic mass, which… for the most common isotope… nope. Not going there. Let’s stick with electrons.”

“But such a field can easily shift… I mean… the electron amount can change. Easily at any given place.”

“Hmm. Is there a chemist on the ship?”

“The filtration expert has a lot of chemical knowledge.”

“Oh, good, he’s exactly who we need for this water stuff anyway, right?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Then let’s go see the filtration expert.”

————

I was trying to ignore the itch in my scales.

It had been getting worse. I wanted to shed, and the Stardancer had no core tree to scrape the scales off. Some of my colleagues had started to shed anyway, pulling theirs free on whatever rough surface was available for the task, but I’m somewhat of a purist and wasn’t about to engage in such perverted nonsense. I could see why they had been tempted, though; the itch was getting distracting. Soon enough, I’d have to shed at least one layer.

A few of my colleagues had shed several, peeling off layers almost as soon as they matured. They’d had the decency to be ashamed at first, and tried to hide their habits, but we’d been in space a long time and the resulting accelerated maturity was starting to show; their wings were shrivelling and crumbling, their bellies becoming heavy with the core seeds growing inside them. At this rate, they’d be fully female before the captain ever made good on its promises and landed us.

The rest of us said nothing about the shedders, of course. After all, when we did land, we wanted people in separate stages of maturity. We wanted a few people ready to lay core seeds so that the rest of us could shed properly when the trees were strong enough. What was the point of a single-sex colony? It would be nonsense.

But to get far enough to make a colony, I had to keep everybody alive. And my scales were distracting me.

So was the thing that marched into my office behind Ceramic.

Yes, ‘office’ was a grandiose term for the small section of my people’s ring that I’d walled off to work in, but it was still mine, and I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I flicked two of my tails at the intruders to show displeasure and returned to my screens. But Ceramic was already dissolving out of its template’s shape and into a shape that more mimicked mine; four legs, four tails, two big wings. It was preparing to speak with me. I wondered whether ignoring or acknowledging them would get rid of them faster.

“Yarrow, this human needs your help,” Ceramic said, in a mixture of vocalisations and tail-gestures.

Acknowledging it was, then. I hoped it would be brief. Ceramic could never get our tail-gestures right, which garbled its language somewhat. I’d had the pleasure of talking to an ambassador colony who had used one of ours for its template for ten years, once, and the conversation had been smooth and clear all the way through. Ceramic spoke like an injured child in comparison.

“And just how can I help this…” the meaning of my words only hit me halfway through my own sentence … “human? Really? The captain actually took one?”

“You didn’t know? It wasn’t a secret.”

“I assumed the captain would change its mind!”

“The human’s been wandering around the ship.”

“I’ve been in here for days, I haven’t seen anybody on the ship!” I inspected the beast. It was a lot taller than me, but this was largely because it was balanced up on its hind legs for some reason. It was able to hold its body very straight on just two feet, with no wings or tail for balance. It appeared to be doing this because it had an electronic device cradled next to its body with one foreleg, much in the way I might carry something with a wing. It wore most of a flight suit, missing only the helmet. No… on closer inspection, it seemed to be breathing with its clearly visible mouth, meaning that it was missing its breathing apparatus, too. The parts of it that I could see were covered in smooth skin, somewhere between pale yellow and pink in colour, and fine brown filaments growing above what were presumably eyes and from the top of its head. The eye filaments were much shorter than the head filaments, which were tangled and knotted like uncombed bark fibres and hung a little lower than the human’s mouth. It was ludicrous-looking, certainly, but not dangerous. It bared its teeth at me, briefly; I decided that this couldn’t possibly be a threat, because they were clearly blunt and ineffective as weapons.

Of course, most of its body was obscured by the suit and whatever it was wearing underneath. It could be hiding all manner of natural weapons. If the story of Jupiter told us anything, it was not to underestimate humans.

Ceramic said something to the human. It didn’t change shape, but the human seemed to understand anyway, bobbing its head and saying something back.

“Charlie wants to know if anything in the sections being indicated on this chart is in the ship’s water supply in significant quantities,” Ceramic said.

Charlie. I tried pronouncing the name. With effort, I almost could. I looked at the chart. “What am I looking at?”

“It is a layout of all individual chemical elements arranged – ”

“Oh, yes, I see the pattern.” The elements were arranged by proximity to stable charge cloud counts, ordered by increasing internal charge. I had been momentarily mislead by the fact that the central columns had been removed from the table and lined up underneath it for some reason. I examined the two groups that Charlie had indicated with a long, flexible foretoe. The bottom group was largely irrelevant; most of those elements were either extremely rare, highly unstable at local conditions and wouldn’t last in water for long enough to be a problem even if they got in somehow, or already filtered out due to their danger to life aboard the ship. The second group indicated were a contamination possibility, but also filtered due to their potential danger to certain life forms. I made a note to check on those filters, in case they were more dangerous to humans than the other life aboard. I explained this to Ceramic, who flicked its wings to indicate satisfaction.

“Can I be of any further service?” I asked.

“Not right now,” Ceramic said. “Thank you.”

“Do try not to get murdered,” I advised politely.

“It’s been perfectly compliant,” Ceramic assured me. “I see nothing to indicate danger.”

“Neither did the Jupiterians.”

—————–

The filtration expert turned out to be one of the dragon people. Glath led me onto their ring in the ship (gravity and air pressure still too light for my taste, but better than the bridge) and led me through a small maze of colourful hand-woven tapestries, some anchored to make walls and some dangling to make curtains, depicting various geometric patterns that, if they had any meaning, I couldn’t interpret. Occasionally was an actual picture of a sunset or something that was probably some kind of alien animal or tree, but mostly it was lines and shapes, ranging from blocky things you’d buy for a preschooler to straight lines shot through a tapestry at random in various beautiful colours to intricate details diagrams that looked like magic demon-summoning circles from TV.

I made the mistake of paying too much attention to the tapestries and not enough to where we were going, and got lost immediately. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Glath led me under a woven curtain into the office of the filtration expert.

Said expert was one of the dragon aliens, like those I’d seen on the bridge. I’m no expert in alien body language, but as they simply refused to look at us until Glath coaxed them to start talking, somehow I don’t think they wanted us there.

Talking seemed to be a full body experience for dragons. The pair used wings, tails and voice, and probably a bunch of other stuff I didn’t notice, to have a brief conversation. It wasn’t long before the filtration expert started, and stared at me.

“He did not know you were aboard,” Glath explained.

“Oh.” This seemed like a problem to me. Wasn’t that the sort of thing the filtration guy needed to know? What if there was something in my body that wasn’t being filtered out of the water supply and could kill aliens? “Well, uh, now he does.” I gave a halfhearted smile and wave to the stocky dragon who was very openly looking me up and down. He seemed to take everything in, immediately lose interest, and turn to the problem at hand.

I could respect a guy like that.

The whole issue was resolved very quickly. Apparently those things weren’t in the water, but the filtration expert would check the filter systems to be sure. Okay then. I carefully watched how Glath and the expert moved their tails at the end of the conversation and experimentally copied the gesture with my fingers to say ‘goodbye’, but my gesture seemed to go unnoticed, so I’d probably gotten it wrong.

Glath’s translator fluttered as we left, so I kept quiet and let him assemble his sentence in peace. As we entered the shaft to the central corridor and the gravity began to drop, he said, “Does your water’s acidity need to alter chemical?”

“You mean, does it need to be a specific acidity? I… don’t think so? I mean it didn’t melt my skin off when I showered or anything, so I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Even for digestion?”

“Well water’s water, isn’t it? We can drink it from rivers and pipes and the sky and stuff so I’m sure whatever acidity it normally has is fine.” My laptop slipped from my hands in the dropping gravity; I grabbed it and did a quick search of the high school biology books I had open. “So, uh, the pH scale – that’s the scale we use for acids – has water at around 7 if it’s clean, but we can drink up to 8.5 or even higher. And apple juice is 3.3, so there doesn’t seem to be any trouble with low pH either.”

“How does this pH represent acidity?”

“Good question.” Looking that up filled in the journey back to my ring and then some, during which time I learned some extremely boring things about the importance of hydrogen and how logarithmic scales work. I summarised this for Glath.

Glath’s volume contracted briefly in what I’d started tentatively theorising was a gesture of disbelief. “You are certain of this scale?”

“Well, I dunno, that’s just what the book says.”

“That is more acidic than digestive acids!”

“Not our digestive acids,” I said. “I mean, I think they’re less potent when we’re not digesting? But on this scale, when they are, they’re around 1.5, so – ”

“There is clearly a misprint in this formula.”

“I’ll check the other books and get back to you on that.”

“An acidity that low should burn your flesh.”

“Oh, yeah, it totally does. I mean it’s fine in our stomach but if it gets out, man does it burn. I used to go to school with this girl who had an eating disorder and she’d make herself throw up and her vomit started to dissolve away the enamel on her teeth after awhile.”

Glath took a long time to translate that. When he was done, he just stared at me. At least I assumed he was staring. It’s kind of hard to tell when you’re being stared at by someone with millions of too-small-to-see eyes all over his amorphous body. His faux head stayed pointed at me, anyway.

“I’ll check the books, anyway. Let’s move onto food. I could eat a horse.”

The sense of being stared at intensified. “How would you fit it inside you? Your clothing did not look designed for expanding.”

I laughed. Glath’s spiders shifted in a sort of flinch. “No, no, it’s an expression. Exaggeration. Uh, it’s like saying something is bigger than it is, for emphasis,” I explained, to save Glath the bother of translating. The internal rustling told me that perhaps I shouldn’t have used a word as obscure as ‘emphasis’. “I just meant that I’m getting hungry.”

“I will allow you to find this information,” Glath said, heading for the shaft. Was it my imagination, or was he moving faster than his normal comfortable pace? Well, maybe faster was his normal comfortable pace. Maybe he just walked slower with me so that I could keep a comfortable pace.

“Okay, textbook,” I mumbled to myself, scrolling through pages about photosynthesis that had no relevance whatsoever to my current situation, “divulge your delicious secrets. Human’s gotta eat.”

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“Okay, look,” I say. “There’s something you should probably know.”

I explain the synnerve experiment. The Leadership stare at me with uniformly horrified expressions.

“We’re so, so sorry that that happened to you,” Tana says. “We should have picked up on what was happening. That should never have happened to you.”

“Is that why you were so upset about your friends getting treatment?” Spruggent asks. “Did you think they were being experimented on, too?”

I frown. “Do you honestly think that what happened to them was any better than what happened to me?”

“Do I think that giving someone healthcare is better than doing experiments on them? Yeah!” Spruggent’s pacing becomes more agitated. “We can’t tolerate this sort of thing! We have to take Kim to task.”

The other Leadership all hesitate. Glance at each other. Glance at me. And I know that if I take Spruggent’s side here, they’ll follow. If I want justice for what happened, they won’t refuse it. But I kept this secret for a reason, and everyone except Spruggent, judging by their hesitation, seems to have reached the same conclusion.

“We have a lot of chaotic things going on right now,” I say, “and an important goal to work together on. Antarctica will figure out what we’re up to pretty soon; they have to. And just because we have a food source that isn’t the Vault now doesn’t mean that we can be independent with all materials. Antarctica aside, the culture down here is changing rapidly with new information and will change even more rapidly with new colonists, and Dr Kim seems to be, so far as I can make out, your most respected and most skilled medical professional. Recent actions of sabotage and soforth have put stains on a lot of reputations and upset social structures enough, and my question is: is this something we want to address right now? If what she’s done is this horrifying, do we want to make it a known issue that she defied you all, ran these experiments without the knowledge and approval of the Leadership, and got away with it until I escaped? If you guys want to make this public, I’m all for it. I’m just saying that she was acting for Hylaran independence, which means that our goals are aligned. But I’m not giving her any more DIVRs.”

Spruggent looks annoyed, but the others all relax slightly, apparently relieved that I reached the same conclusions of them. Spruggent scowls. “We can’t have people going behind everyone’s backs and doing evil stuff.”

“This will be addressed,” Celti says firmly. “It absolutely will be addressed. But it’s not a danger for now, and for now, we don’t need that kind of unrest. We get this spaceship on its way, and then we can focus on Kim. Aspen, who else knows about this?”

“Dr Kim’s cronies, presumably, but I have no idea who they are. The rest of the ground crew. And Max. We’re all in agreement that pulling this up right now isn’t helpful.”

“Right. Well, let me promise you: once we have this spaceship ready, you will have justice.”

The meeting continues, but I can’t stop dwelling on Celti’s words. Specifically, ‘It’s not a danger for now’. It’s not a danger for now. Dr Kim isn’t in a position to experiment on any more DIVRs right now; if we don’t give her more, the issue can be delayed.

Except. She was running more than one experiment.

Dr Kim had claimed that her agelessness experiments were only being run on volunteers, and I’d taken her word on it – after all, everyone would notice if a bunch of Hylarans were being isolated for long enough to o that. But she’d only eventually isolated me because she was worried about my safety, what with the unrest. Until then, she’d run her tests under the guise of normal medical checkups. Couldn’t she be doing the same to them? And even if they are volunteers, do they understand the risks? We still don’t know what those anti-ageing genes will do to our own infected crew members. We know that the Hylarans grow and develop differently. Those genes could be fatal to them in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

I want to put the whole experiment thing behind me, for now. We don’t need to address any of that right now. We have other things to focus on. But…

I don’t know most of these people, I don’t know how they’ll react. So I wait until after the meeting and take Celti aside, and explain the situation. His face looks more and more troubled as I talk. He gives me a sharp nod, a stiff word of thanks, and walks away.

Well. It’s out of my hands, now.

I don’t see Dr Kim for a while after that. That’s not necessarily surprising; she’s a busy person, and she’s not my care provider any more. Maybe she has a lot of patients. Maybe she’s spending a lot of time in training, for treating the colonists when they arrive. Maybe she’s really concentrating on how to get a modern autodoc up to Captain Kae Jin. Whatever the reason, she isn’t around.

The first root vegetables are harvested, and the Hylarans universally hate them. That really shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. They’ve spent their whole lives eating one specific thing; throwing them a radically different taste and texture probably defied all experience of what they’ve come to think of as ‘food’. Frankly, it’s a miracle that they didn’t hate the liquid meals from the biotanks.

They’re only eating very small amounts of the new foods in with their normal fare, to give their bodies and microbiomes time to adapt to the concept of variety, and they do so with the grim determination of a soldier training for war. The palpable threat of their Antarctic food source being cut off the moment somebody slips up and gets the wrong thing in the frame of a photograph looms over everyone, the knowledge that they will have to adapt to other sources and do so as quickly and easily as they can manage. So they do, with very little joy, and a lot of duty.

I try not to be too disappointed by this. I’ve sort of gotten used to seeing the Hylarans being awed and overjoyed by the things previously denied them. I was hoping that the first bite of carrot would be like the first glimpse of a flower, but of course, food doesn’t work that way, not to a population raised entirely on one unvaried food source. They’ll acquire tastes for other things as they go.

A few days later, we receive bad news from the ship. Mama can’t run it. I ask Tal and Asteria why not, and immediately regret it as they simultaneously launch into explanations of AI architecture that I don’t even try to understand. Mercifully, Captain Klees cuts them off after a mere eight minutes that feels like eight hundred.

“How vital is the AI?” he asks. The ground crew and our scattered Hylaran liaisons are gathered, as usual, in the radio tower to talk to the ship. “Humanity went into space long before we invented AI, and we were able to limp the Courageous on the last leg of the journey here without any serious problems that weren’t caused by the AI itself. I know it’s a big workload, but can a crew manually handle the ship, aided by individual computer programs, like we did?”

“For hundreds of years, forget it,” Tal says, “especially if they’re darting around asteroid fields and stuff. Those early astronauts you’re talking about were aided by hundreds of engineers on the ground. And their ships were way, way less complicated. If you want to strip this ship down to something simple enough to run with bots and crew members, it’s not gonna last more than a few decades. It just isn’t. Amy’s completely nonviable without plugging brains into her, she digested the AI she used to be and someone destroyed the backups so we don’t have those, and wrangling Mama’s code to do it would be almost as hard as building an AI from scratch, which is another task beyond us unless there’s several dozen surprise AI genuises in chronostasis up there. This is no mass market apartment complex assistant. We need Mama-level sophistication for this kind of AI.” Ke pauses a moment. “Although an AI that I could hack to play Doom on the side of the Courageous would be really cool.”

“The other exoplanet colonies might have backup copies of their AI, if they decided to bring them down from the ships with them,” Dandelion says thoughtfully. “Unfortunate that we have no way to contact them.”

“Antarctica would have access to all kinds of AIs that could do this,” Hive says. They exchange a grim glance with Celti, who bites his lip.

“You guys think it’s time to tip our hand to them?” Captain Klees asks.

“The longer we can keep them ignorant, the better,” Celti says. “Their only move is resource restriction, so when they find out we disobeyed orders and let you land, they might try that again, and it won’t kill anyone but it will be a serious inconvenience. The more advanced our farms are before then, the better, if only to avoid having to take too much food from the ship. But they do get a fair amount of data from us, and somebody’s going to slip up at some point; they are going to find out, and soon. It’s better for us to control that release of information, especially if we can get something out of it.”

“They have no stakes in the ship leaving,” Tal says. “Who says they’d help?”

Captain Kae Jin comes over the radio, her voice slow and breathless. “They’ll help if it costs them less to send us back into space than it would cost to supply the colonists on the ground, unless they decide to be vindictive and restrict resources. Which I think will depend on how they expect that to affect the operation of the Vault. The Hylarans were easy to bully with a famine the first time, because they weren’t expecting it, and they had no other source of food; they may or may not risk that again. They might decide we’ll be harder to bully, or better to deal with if they’re expecting a small number of cooperative managers of a convict colony. Or they might decide the opposite and restrict resources to try to incite violence between the two populations or something. Or they might decide to stay out of everything and focus on keeping things moving through the Vault until we’ve sorted everything out ourselves, way out here.”

“We don’t really know enough to predict their reaction,” Captain Klees agrees. “But as Celti says, they will find out, so we might as well be in control of the news and try to find a way to do things that gets us some help. An AI would be inexpensive to copy and send, surely. Could they send one through the Vault? I can’t imagine it treats electronics well.”

“We have the hardware,” Tal says, “they just need to send data. You can encode data in anything. They could send a really really big stack of paper and have us manually input it at this end, which would take forever and suck, but could be done.”

“If we can convince them to send it,” Captain Klees says. “We’re in the odd position of neither side really having all that much leverage, and it’s all going to come down to what cost-benefit calculations they make regarding our project.”

I don’t want to say anything aloud, since I’m pretty sure the ship and most of the Hylarans don’t know yet, but I touch the port on the back of my skull and shoot a meaningful glance to Celti, who exchanges a look with Max and the rest of the ground crew. Nobody looks happy about it, but nobody raises any objections.

If we get pushback, Dr Kim might have something to trade for our new AI.

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From the outside, the Stardancer was ugly.

I guess I’d grown up looking at spaceships in fiction, with the occasional video of a shuttle launched from Earth for good measure. But what space needed, apparently, was neither style nor aerodynamics. The Stardancer was a big fat cylinder with rounded ends, and out of those ends stuck long poles, perpendicular to the rest of the ship. There were four poles sticking out of each end, sandwiching the ship between two giant metal X’s, each pole about twice the width of the ship itself. They were rotating slowly, although I knew (from the lack of artificial gravity) that the middle of the ship wasn’t. This did not look like a good ship for ambushing people in space and demanding their cargo. It did not look like it should have ‘dancer’ anywhere in its name.

But I wasn’t inclined to reflect on that too much, because I didn’t want to spend any more time out in space than I had to.

The space suit wasn’t too bad. It was more comfortable than most of the ship, actually, largely because it was pressurised at a level that didn’t make me feel nauseous. Maybe I should just wear it whenever I was outside my own ring. It did not, contrary to my explanations, cling anywhere, even on the hands; a thin layer of air sat between me and the suit all the way around, provided I stayed completely still. It was a little unnerving to have something lightly brush any joint I bent as I pushed elbows, knees and fingers into the fabric, but that was surprisingly easy to get used to. I had explained to Glath just what I needed free to be able to breathe and see, and the mouthpiece I was gripping in my teeth was vaguely the right shape to be able to breathe through. The tank strapped to my front under my suit (not so much a tank as a pouch made of the same material as the suit, the only hard bit being what I assumed a system of fancy valves or something near the pipe to my mouth) seemed way too small, but Glath had insisted that it had enough air and explained something about inert gas recycling that I didn’t try all that hard to remember. The helmet was basically a big plastic fishbowl. The plastic was dark (there had been some confusion over just what light I could see with and what was deadly radiation to a human, not helped by the fact that I had no clue), an issue resolved by making sure that the light strapped to my forehead was really, really bright. It barely reflected off the inside of the helmet at all, a phenomenon I decided not to ask about in case Glath actually tried to explain. Even the belt of tools around my waist was reasonably comfortable, with everything secured so it wouldn’t flail about and tear my suit.

No, the suit was, although clearly designed by somebody who wasn’t human-shaped, generally fine. It was space itself that I had a problem with.

It’s really big, as it turns out.

There was no sun. We were far enough from any star that the sky was a dark blanket seeded with millions of bright points like dandruff on black felt, and the only light to see the ship by was the one strapped to my face, sweeping a wide, white band over the hull. There was the ship, and me, and nothing. So very, very much of nothing, and the only thing keeping me from it was a very short tether of the same material as my suit.

You might be wondering how, if I was tied closely to this giant spiky cylinder in space, I was able to observe its general shape so easily. This amazing privilege was courtesy of the position of the bent bar I needed to replace. The damaged ‘rocket’ was not conveniently stuck to the hull next to an airlock. No.

As it turned out, those big protruding poles were hollow. They were about three metres thick with the two metres inside being void. As in space. As in, not accessible from the inside of the ship.

Oh no, the only way to access the inside of these bars, and therefore the repair I needed to do, was to exit through an airlock at the end of the filter room, which took you outside one of the rounded ends of the ship. Then my tether had to be secured to a pole about the width of my arm to hold me near the hull as I made my way over the dome and up the 3 metre thick hollow bar, regularly untying and re-tying the tether every time I had to get it over a bracket securing the pole to the ship.

Oh, and of course the support pole didn’t extend over the lip of the tunnel I had to slip into. Oh no, it stopped a little way away, and a new one started a little way on the inside. Which meant that I had to wrap my body around the half-metre-thick lip, stretch down to untie the tether, and then very carefully inch inside backwards and catch the new rail with my foot. In the two-metre tunnel, I might be able to brace my hands and feet against the walls and stop myself from floating into space if it came to it… if I happened to float away at the right angle. It wasn’t something I wanted to try.

Inside the tunnel, the gravity didn’t bother me so much. It was basically like being in the tunnel of the central axle of the ship, if I was careful not to glance out into space, and the support pole seemed secure enough. I forced myself to calm down and keep my eyes on that pole as made my leisurely way in. The rocket I was looking for was supposed to be about five metres in, and it was going to be pretty much directly above or below the support pole, depending on how I’d oriented myself coming in.

I found it without too much trouble. It took up a good half of the tunnel. It looked pretty much like I expected a rocket to look, a cylinder with one rounded end. The other end was covered in a metal grille.

The bar I needed to replace was securing some kind of balancing mechanism to the back of the rocket. It looked vaguely like one of those ball-knocking physics toys, crossed with a gyroscope. At least I think so. I don’t see many gyroscopes. It was frozen, the bent bar stopping it from moving.

Very gently, I unscrewed a cap holding the bar in place and pulled it out. Everything stayed vaguely in the right place – good. I took the replacement bar from my belt.

And that’s when everything went to shit, because that’s when I happened to glance up.

I’d sort of forgotten about the previous engineer, the one who had been crushed by some sort of rotary arm. I remembered him rather suddenly when my light glanced off the mess of pale blue chitin and yellow blood jumbled with ripped space suit fabric about two feet from my face.

Now, the thing about suddenly confronting a mashed-up alien you’d forgotten about in a confined space is, your first thought isn’t ‘oh, it’s a harmless corpse, how sad.’ Your first thought is ‘Aaah fuck that nightmare monster is attacking me!’, which is why I screamed and raised my arms, reflexively, to hit it.

Both metal bars slipped out of my gloved hands. They dinged off the currently motionless giant fan the poor engineer was caught in and sailed away over my shoulder, down the tunnel. By the time I realised what was happening, they were out in space.

Well fuck.

I tried to ignore the corpse and focus on the problem at hand. This, by the way, is a very difficult thing to do. He had clearly been one of the praying mantis people, his colour and height (as best I could tell) about identical to the one who had given me my suit. There were streaks of sticky blood on his suit, where he’d struggled, and on the inside of his transparent fishbowl helmet. It clung to the fan blades, and big streaks of it made a rough ring around the tunnel that the fan completely took up; he must have been dragged around the walls until he’d finally jammed something up. Poor bastard. Whatever blood wasn’t stuck to a surface must have drifted into space a while ago, because I couldn’t see any of it. (But then, why hadn’t I noticed any on my way in? Had it drifted deeper into the ship instead? Ew.) Some of his limbs had been broken at the joints, and two of his forelegs (or forearms?) were completely torn off.

He wasn’t my problem right now, though. The weird physics thing was. I’d only brought one bar, and now it was off in space, beyond reach.

I made a mental note for future repairs: bring spare everything.

What could I do here, though? Could I go back and get another? No; I had a feeling that the parts of the physics thing, which were already drifting slowly out of place (I lined them up again so I wouldn’t lose track of what went where) would drift all over the place by the time I got back. We’d lose some deeper in the tunnel, and some into space, I just knew it.

Could I carry it back with me? No; it was too bulky and in too many pieces. Not a chance. I glanced at the dead engineer. In extremis, I reflected, a corpse could be a lot of things. A spiritual anchor, in most societies. A food source, to people starving. And to someone in my situation, a torn pace suit was essentially a giant pocket.

“Say, buddy,” I mumbled around by breathing apparatus in a voice only I could hear, “can you hold something for me?” I took a photo of the physics thing with my phone so I could reference where all the parts went, and pulled the engineer forward, looking for a tear big enough to stash the parts inside.

I was partway through this operation when I realised that if I dislodged whatever part of him was jamming the fans, there would be two half-pulped engineer corpses in this tunnel.

Right. Solve that first. He’d clearly been dragged around the tunnel several times, from the delightful blood painting, and the corpse seemed pretty loosely attached to the machinery. What was jamming it? Nothing at the edges. I examined the central axle and found my answer.

He’d tried to grab at the middle of the fan for stability. There were multiple layers of fan, it seemed; at least two. His forearm had been torn off, and went between both sets of blades, jamming them.

I couldn’t help but notice that the blades were probably pretty powerful, but that arm had held them for the time it took the Stardancer crew to abduct me and get me out here.

I also couldn’t help but notice that, the arm was both pretty uniformly round, and about the width of the metal bar I needed.

I pulled the bulk of the corpse out, tucked a couple of stray limbs under the tether support bar to hold him in place, and inspected him. His limbs were broken, leaking what little blood he still had. His wings were pulp, a mix of bug blood and fragments of gossamer like the world’s most poorly maintained windshield in mosquito country. Several of his eyes had ruptured, beaten against the inside of the helmet. But all of the external damage seemed to be in these vulnerable areas; wings, eyes, joints. Nothing made of blue alien chitin was even cracked.

Good enough.

Making sure my tether was secure, I reached up to the part of alien arm sticking out of the fan, ground my teeth on my breather, and yanked sideways and out as quickly and powerfully as I could.

The fans knocked the arm in my hands back, pushing me away, and I flew to the end of my tether before I could get a grip on anything. I managed to keep a grip on the arm and braced myself to face the sudden onrushing gust of the fan… only to realise that there wasn’t any. Oh, right. No air. The fan blades whirred silently, smoothly, in the vacuum. So long as I didn’t touch them, they might as well not be there.

So what were they for, then?

I put all the physics bits where my photo said they should go and slid the arm between them. I had to break the mantis claw off the end to fit the cap back on, and it wasn’t exactly a pretty repair – it seemed a little loose, for one thing – but it fit, and it stayed, and the parts moved in ways that looked intentional.

It would do, until I had to make this journey all over again with another damn bar.

I used torn, empty bits of the ex-engineer’s space suit to tie him to my back. “Let’s go home, buddy,” I mumbled. “You deserve it. You just saved the ship.”

—————————————————-

Charlie dropped through the airlock, fell through the filter room, and did not stop until they reached me in the centre axle. As it approached, I noticed that it had rather more bulk than when it left. Was this an unknown human trait? The suit was not designed to handle such drastic changes in volume!

But then I saw the blood, and Charlie untied the lifeless Kakrt from its back. It spat the breather from its mouth and tried to pull its helmet off, and there was a tense moment where I tried frantically to explain without sound (which would be very difficult to hear through the suit) that Charlie would probably cause a lot of physical damage to itself if it suddenly went from a high-pressure suit to a lower-pressure environment. I do not know if my message got through, but I managed to persuade Charlie to keep the helmet on until reaching their own ring of the ship.

When it was finally safe to do so, Charlie removed the helmet with excessive force, spat out the rebreather, and contracted multiple muscles around its mouth and nose.

“I probably have to go back out there,” it said. “I lost the bar I needed. It’s in space somewhere.”

“And the stabilising aperture?” I asked.

“Seems to be working for now. I used the arm of that… of the previous mechanic.” Its face became paler.

“I do not yet know your body language. Are you experiencing a problem?”

Charlie swept its head in a half-circle a few times, which did nothing to aid my understanding. “I just… haven’t seen a body before,” it said.

“You are a carnivore,” I pointed out.

“An omnivore, yeah, but animals are different. I haven’t seen a dead person.”

Of course. Charlie was not a warrior. I realised that bringing an unaccompanied engineer on board might not have been fair. We knew so little of how human castes worked; what if it could not adapt?

“He did not die in battle,” I reassured Charlie. “His death does not indicate increased danger for you.”

“Not really the point, but good to know. I brought him back so you guys could… I don’t know, do whatever aliens do for funerals.” Charlie bunched its upper face muscles and looked at me. “Did you drag him on board against his will, too?”

I took some time to assemble my sentences in a clear way that would not provoke further questions. “He was of the original crew,” I explained. “He… helped to plan our mission out into space, beyond the law.”

“To be pirates.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck him with the rest of you, then.”

“Charlie, do you need to eat?”

“Hmm? Yeah, probably. I’m hungry, but I don’t feel like it after that.”

Hungry, and yet not wanting to eat? I ignored this puzzling inconsistency for now. “What nutrients do you require?”

“Fucked it I know. Why would I have an answer to that? Told you, you should have taken the biologist.”

“We needed an engineer.”

“Ah, yes; I’m sure the task of replacing a simple bar would blow a biologist’s mind. We need, you know; sugars, fats, vitamins.”

I checked for a translation of these terms. The translation did not give me the context I needed. “It is very important that we find out – ”

“Okay, you know what, Glath? Why don’t you go find the most delicious thing you have, and I’ll eat it, and if I die, we’ll know that was the wrong thing. Hmm?” It bared its teeth at me, eyes flared and cheek muscles stiff. “I mean, it seems to me that this is the sort of thing you should work out before you abduct someone, but what do I know? I’m just some dumb disposable engineer, aren’t I?”

“No member of the crew is – ”

“No? Then tell me this, Glath – how did you guys know what needed doing out there? How did you know how that other poor bastard had died?”

“I do not understand.”

“Really? Then let me break it down for you. This suit you’ve got for me here doesn’t have any kind of way to communicate with the ship in it. No radio or nothing. Given that your guys were able to whip it up in no time and it’s got this nice fancy bubble helmet, which I notice is different to the previous engineer’s helmet since I could easily see through that glass, I’m going to go ahead and guess this isn’t a matter of difficulty or a resource problem. So I’m guessing that that kind of equipment just isn’t part of your standard setup for space suits, right?”

“I do not know of any space suits with such a feature.”

“Sound weird and inefficient, but okay, I’m sure that makes alien sense. So you send me out there and say ‘this bar, in this spot, is busted’, and tell me how to fix it. You tell me that the previous engineer got caught in a ‘rotary arm’. But you don’t tell me that I’m going to run straight into his fucking corpse out there, or that there’s a fan thing that needs to be unjammed – I did that too by the way – and I’m guessing that fan thing was important or it wouldn’t be there. So, I’m thinking, why wouldn’t you tell me about that shit? You didn’t know, did you? And yet, you had so much information about this repair? When you knew how that engineer died?” Charlie stepped toward me, lips still pulled back to bare teeth, gloves still coated in its predecessor’s blood. I pulled back.

“I didn’t see anything like a camera out there,” Charlie continued, its voice lowering significantly in volume. “I admit I don’t know what your cameras would look like, but everything in front of the rocket thing was smooth metal and everything behind would be blocked by the fan and very obvious alien corpse complete with horror-game blood splatter. So how did you know how they died, Glath, and how did you know about the repair, if you didn’t know about the other stuff?” Charlie stepped forward again. “There was a witness, wasn’t there? A second engineer? See, I can’t help but notice that the part where you have to untie from the outside tether rail and slip inside to retie would be so much easier with a tethered buddy to hold onto. It’s a two-person job, isn’t it?”

“Tyzyth tried to pull Kakrt from the rotary arms,” I explained. “It was impossible. He was forced to withdraw. I assume he did so before Kakrt became stuck; we assumed he would be flung into space.”

Charlie bobbed its head down. Its eyes had started leaking fluid, and when it spoke, its voice increased dramatically in volume. “Then why the fuck,” it said through bared teeth under a scrunched nose, “would you send me, some random alien who has never been in space before, out there to do it alone without this Tizzy… this other engineer for backup? You clearly weren’t going to send them out alone, you had to rope me into it. See what I mean? Disposable.”

“Charlie, your eyes are compromised.”

“There is nothing wrong with my eyes!” Charlie rubbed a blood-free part of its forearm across its eyes, clearing most of the fluid. “You want to know what I eat, Glath? Take some of my blood – anything in that is probably fine. Our blood takes food and stuff to our cells, so… wait, I’m pretty sure it takes garbage away, too… fuck, I shouldn’t have dropped out of high school. Fuck it. We’ll figure it out later. Right now, I’m going to take a shower, and then go to sleep, and you’re going to leave me the fuck alone for about ten hours unless there’s another engineering emergency that your other engineer can’t, for some reason, do. Like if that arm I stuck in there breaks or something. If not, putting a real bar in is just going to have to fucking wait.”

There were a lot of unfamiliar words in Charlie’s speech. I started to translate. Charlie pulled its eyelids close together. “Just go away, Glath,” it said loudly. “Is that fucking simple enough for you?”

I went away.

I had to present Kakrt to the Princess.

—————————

As much as I wanted to tear the space suit off immediately, I took the time to wash the alien blood off it first. I didn’t want that stuff spreading all through my clothes or sticking to my skin. The hygiene facilities weren’t exactly set up for somebody human-shaped, but that was something to fix later; for now, I figured out how to turn on and combine the very hot water and the quite cold water in a combination that didn’t hurt, and stood under it.

I’d calmed down a little while taking the space suit off. Breathing on the seam to release it took quite a while when you had a whole suit to take off. My clothes underneath were, apart from a little sweat, the same condition they’d been in when I went in. Apart from a couple of small bloodstains from where I’d slammed my face into things, they mostly carried the evidence of my time on Earth. They smelled of dirt and crushed grass where I’d knelt to adjust my cameras. I put them carefully aside. I was going to have to wash them eventually, but not yet.

There was no soap. I didn’t care. I rubbed steaming water into my skin, closed my eyes, and sighed.

Okay. I needed to calm the fuck down. I needed to get a handle on the situation. I couldn’t let a little thing like being graphically confronted with my predecessor’s violent death unseat me. I was in an unstable situation, and I needed to get out of it. I needed to get a fucking grip. I needed to figure out how the ship worked, find where Earth was, and get home.

I needed to figure out how to not starve or poison myself, too. Were vitamins and proteins the same over or were they an evolution thing? Would every planet with life, say, a vitamin A, or were there just too many possible vitamins that could exist? I didn’t know. I didn’t know how complicated vitamins were.

I also didn’t know how restricted water use was on a spaceship, I realised, after I’d been standing motionless in my makeshift shower for several minutes. I sighed, stepped out, and used my shirt to dry myself.

I’d probably need towels and clothes and stuff, too, I realised. The crew had previously been using my ring as storage to random goods, and there were a lot of big cubic containers lying around; they might contain something. But that could wait.

For now, I went and sat in my car.

And I opened my laptop.

I knew I shouldn’t be using my electronics so much. They were going to run out of charge at some point, and while I could charge my phone from my car, that too was going to run out. And then I’d be stranded, electronically. I didn’t think there were too many car batteries and Australian power points on the Stardancer. But for now, fuck it. I put the laptop on my knees, sat back…

And realised that I didn’t have an internet connection. Of course. What else did I have on it? Some movies, I supposed. Probably some music. I clicked around my downloads, and froze. I reflected briefly that exorbitant textbook prices had very probably save my life.

Because a couple of months ago, I’d been very annoyed about the apparently compulsory and very important textbook that I needed to buy for uni, and turned to the less property-respecting part of the internet for help. And while I hadn’t found the textbook I needed, I had, in the way you do, found a few other interesting torrents. Which was why my laptop contained a folder names 1001.high.school.and.college.textbooks[pdf-king] .

I had a look. Physics, biology, engineering, and a smattering or other disciplines. All high school year levels and beyond.

I grinned. “Hooray for piracy,” I muttered.

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I stare at Dandelion. “Reaching another exoplanet is the entire plan.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t actually solve anyone’s problems, does it? The Hylarans want to avoid having their settlement overwhelmed by a refugee population five times the size of their own, but don’t want to kill anyone. Captain Kae Jin’s crew are used to the spaceship and don’t have all that much interest in leaving it, and her crew and ours both want the sleeping colonists under our care to live out their full natural lives and not die in chronostasis. All of those goals will be achieved before the ship gets anywhere near its new destination. Those colonists have to be woken up fairly soon, they’ve already been in chronostasis far too long. And then it’s just a matter of keeping the ship together and comfortable for a single human lifespan.”

“They can have kids to run the ship after they’re gone. That’s the whole plan. They have artificial wombs and freezers full of embryos. A lot of the colonists are in repro, or at least on reversible birth control. As many generations can live on the ship as need to.”

“They can, yes. But that’s not relevant to the problems anyone’s trying to solve. If the ship can last long enough for that to be a possibility, great. If it can make it to another exoplanet, fantastic. But my point is that that might be our goal, but we don’t have to reach it to actually solve the problems we’re trying to solve. The crew up there might have a different bar for mission failure than you – you’re talking like if we can’t be confident in reaching another planet, we should scrub the mission. There’s a good chance – I’m not sure, nobody’s actually said it out loud, but a good chance – that Captain Kae Jin’s crew, at the very least, would disagree. They might want to launch even if there’s not a good chance of reaching another exoplanet. So long as the ship can hold together for one human lifespan, that might be enough. So the things that you’re considering a dealbreaker on this mission, they might not.”

“I wonder,” Captain Klees says thoughtfully, “if their great-great-whatever grandchildren to make it to the next habitable exoplanet… if they’ll decide to land or not.”

“The whole point is them landing,” I say. “Why wouldn’t they land? They can’t just live in space forever.”

“If they make it to the end of the journey, they’ll have proven that they can just live in space forever. It’s not like an unterraformed exoplanet would be any easier to live on, especially without a Vault.” (He’s right about that; we’d asked the Hylarans if they could build Vaults, with the hope of maybe linking the Courageous’ new home to Hylara, and they’d said they absolutely do not have either the technology or the industry to do that. Which is what we’d expected.) “Planets are home to us because we grew up on them, but one without a breathable atmosphere – and it’s not going to have a breathable atmosphere, any more than Hylara would be able to have one without a Vault – wouldn’t be all that different to living on a ship. It’d be harder to get resources, in fact, than just parking the ship in an asteroid field. Would someone raised on a spaceship, by multiple generations raised on the same spaceship, recognise a planet as a home? We have people up there already who have only been living on a spaceship for a couple of decades, and are already more comfortable up there than on an exoplanet. Even if they reach the goal, they might change their minds. Or the direction of the spaceship mid-journey. They might just park in an asteroid field for centuries at a time if they can get enough resources there. And if they have the technology to indefinitely repair the courageous, they might also be able to use it to build more ships, provided they can source enough nitrogen and soforth to fill them. Antarctica changed its whole plan with Hylara when we didn’t show up, and that was after what, one century? We can’t predict the goals of what we’re seeding if things do go for that long. And if they don’t… Dandelion’s right. One lifespan solves everyone’s problems, at least from the perspectives of the Hylarans and Captain Kae Jin’s crew. It would be fantastic to build something that can live out there until it gets to a new home, but if that’s impossible, that’s probably not the end of the mission.”

I scowl at my pancakes. What they’re describing, drifting lost in space in a ship until you all die or the systems fail, sounds depressing as fuck to me. A dead end life.

But isn’t this colony the same thing? Isn’t life everywhere the same thing? We all keep going until we die. Maybe I’m just spoiled, growing up on Earth, a place so saturated with life in general and humans in particular that we can behave as if everything will last forever. Out here, being cut off from the possibility of repopulation from other populations of people, they’re right; there’s nothing all that different between Hylara, or another exoplanet, or the ship itself, in terms of perpetuity. If we’re careful and lucky, Hylara will spread into new settlements and stay populated through crises that can wipe out just one. And maybe the Courageous’ new planet can do the same, or maybe the Courageous can do the same, by building new ships. Or maybe it won’t. But the idea of launching if we can’t be fairly confident in keeping the ship together in perpetuity… that plan, I can’t get behind. Sending off the crew and colonists to live out their lives in space and then leave behind a dead, empty ship out among the stars where it will never be found in the vast distances of space? That’s way to depressing. There’s no way that Kae Jin’s crew would go ahead with a mission like that, surely. It’d be better to scrub the mission and drop the colonists on Hylara and deal with the social fallout. Dandelion has to be wrong about that part.

If we do our jobs right, then we’ll never need to find out.

“With all this, it sounds like it’s not even worth launching,” I shrug. “Just fix up the ship and keep it in orbit around Hylara indefinitely. Or stay in this system, at least, harvesting local asteroids.”

“They very well might do that,” Captain Klees shrugs. “The ship might hover around this star system for decades. Or maybe the next generation will give up on their mission and turn around and come back to orbit Hylara, where they know people already live. Who knows? They’ll do whatever makes the most sense to them at the time, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Maybe I should never have suggested this plan. This conversation is making me uncomfortable, although I’m not certain why. Maybe it is my bias, as someone born on Earth, that makes all these possibilities other than successfully populating a planet sound so unsettling, especially the idea that they might launch with the expectation of simply living their lives out in space and then dying and that being it.

But there’s no way to cancel the plan now, not with everyone behind it. So if Dandelion is right, if the crew really would launch even if they can only get a century or so out of the ship, then my only choice is to solve all the problems and do the impossible and make sure the ship can survive the whole journey. So that’s what I’ll do. It’s what I was going for anyway.

It’s the least I can do for the colonists still in chronostasis, most of whom won’t get a choice. The people currently awake can choose to launch or to come down here and watch the ship launch into whatever future they want, even if it’s just a century on a dying ship, but for the people who won’t get to choose, I owe them perpetuity. If I’m taking Hylara away from them.

“Right!” I leap to my feet, rubbing my hands together. “Let’s get to work solving every single problem ever!” Everyone looks a bit startled, except for Tal, who doesn’t even disengage from the computer as ke raises a fist for a fistbump. I cross the room to provide it.

Of course, my skills aren’t all that relevant to the spaceship work. I’m much better employed working with the Hylarans to arrange things so that the introduction of the colonists they’ll need won’t result in any further miscommunication-based disasters. So I have a meeting to get to.

The Leadership I’m meeting with are a group of four – Celti, who I know, and Tana, Bentlebob, and Spruggent, who I don’t. The four wait for me in another living dome, presumably belonging to one of their sets, that everyone else has vacated for out meeting. I see signs of life everywhere; someone’s embroidery left on a chair, unpacked supply boxes against one wall, dirty dishes in a tub waiting to be washed. Bentlebob looks very old by Hylaran standards, and we might be in his home simply so he doesn’t have to move around too much. Spruggent, by contrast, couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve, and is already pacing energetically when I enter. Tana, closer to Celti’s age, sits very still, only moving her eyes to keep them on whoever’s speaking, looking very focused at all times.

“We absolutely can send people down and house them in set of eight,” I find myself explaining, “but it’s not going to stick. The colonists won’t think of a ‘set’ the same way you do. In time, they’re going to want to peel off into the sort of family structures they’re used to, which for the vast majority of them is between one and three adults raising their children, possibly with their own parents (once they’ve been here long enough for that to be a possibility) and maybe some adult friends to help out. They can be housed in groups of eight, that’s no problem. But most of them won’t want to stay that way forever, and will fall into stronger social connections with other people, in smaller groups. And most of them absolutely will want to raise their own children, or have a say in how they’re raised. They won’t leave them to Mama and the nursery. They’re from cultures with parents. Most of them won’t fall into your system.”

“They’ll want to raise children in their own homes, like in the books and movies?” Spruggent asks.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Tana asks. “I understand that that’s how things had to be done on Earth, for whatever reason, but we’re more advanced than that here. Why would they want to spend so much time and energy on something so primitive?”

“Not primitive, just different.”

“Wouldn’t the children get in the way? And how can you be sure they’re all getting looked after, and taught properly?”

“It’s messy and dangerous,” Bentlebob agrees. “I’m sure they’ll listen to reason.”

Which is probably what they thought about forcing surgery on my crewmates, too, but I don’t say anything, because I know these people still don’t understand why we’re so upset about that. Instead I say, “They’ll think the same about the way you do things. But I’m telling you right now: neither culture is going to completely sway the other, at least not quickly. In four or five generations, maybe we’ll all do things the same way, although personally I have my doubts given the reproductive and lifepsan differences between us. It’ll be an interesting sociology study for somebody either way. But I can tell you that the people who come down, and their children, and possibly their children’s children, aren’t going to merge completely into your culture, and your children aren’t going to merge completely into theirs. All we can do is make sure that there is space for both ways of doing things, and allow them to grow into each other, or not, over time. And I can tell you right now that however we house these people, most of them will fall into the family structures they’re used to over time, and want to live accordingly. Within a few years they’ll start to build their own smaller homes, or move around in the ones they have. They won’t stay in sets. Your government, specifically your setmeets and leadership structure, will need to account for that, unless you want them to form their own government, which I don’t recommend.”

“Right,” Bentlebob says, not sounding convinced but making a note. “So we can house a lot of them in our existing spare housing for now. There’s plenty of room to expand, if they want to do that later. We need to start negotiating a lit of the sorts of people coming down. Dr Kim has specifically requested colonists with the DIVR-32 geneset, which sound like a very good idea for – ”

“No,” I cut in.

The others look puzzled. “Why not? Given the better chances of waking up and the low oxygen environment, they’re perfect candidates.”

“There aren’t all that many DIVRs,” I say, “so we have to plan for non-DIVRs anyway. And you all lack the geneset, don’t you? And do just fine here. There’s no reason to prioritise DIVRs.”

“If this is an issue of unfairly prioritising people,” Celti says, “the fact of the matter is that some colonists are going to be prioritised, whether for their DNA, their health, or their expertise.”

I’m not worried about unfair priority. I’m worried about what Dr Kim, specifically, wants as many DIVRs as possible for.

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Sometimes I look back on my life and try to figure out exactly how I ended up on the edge of charted space with the Princess, outrunning the authorities. It is not, I suppose, a difficult question; every step in the sequence makes sense. I chose my Template because he caught my interest. I followed the Princess because my Template did. I was here, on a poorly maintained biohauler that was dangerously unfit for the flight-and-raiding work to which we were pressing it and inefficiently over-outfitted for out small crew, because the previous two Stardancers had been lost and we had had no choice but to commandeer the only oxygen-supporting ship within reach. I was skirting a dangerous fringe to outrun the authorities pursuing the Princess, and now, here, a dangerous creature from a quarantined world was loose on our ship, meekly following me about while I explained the basic ship’s design and function.

“So let me get this straight, Glath,” Charlie the Engineer said after attending to some personal tasks and meeting me back in the filtration area, “there’s no actual gravity on this ship? No weird scifi space magic?”

I still did not have a translation for the term ‘scifi’. I assumed unimportance from context and answered the main question. “All objects have gravity,” I explained. I knew that human technology was unsophisticated – we would never have dared to capture a human had they technical competence, imminent shipboard failure or not – but this was even more primitive than I had expected.

Charlie waved a hand in a gesture I did not yet know. I carefully observed the movement of arm segments. “I meant,” it said, “strong gravity, like in the control room and the dome thing.”

I assembled my sentences. “That is false gravity built from inertia,” I explained, “due to the orbits of metals and plastics.”

Charlie flicked its eyelids at me. I waited for further communication. After a few more seconds it said, “I didn’t understand that.”

“The outer areas rotate,” I explained. I quickly shifted my mass into the shape of the station to demonstrate, and when this proved confusing, into one ring. Charlie’s eyelids pulled back from its eyes.

“Oh! Like clothes in a washing machine. Or one of those spinning rides at the show that plasters you against the wall. That explains the sideways movement in the shafts when the gravity is coming on… yeah, okay, I think I get it. Rotating rings around a still central tube, right. So what’s with all these pipes and shit?”

I translated the most important-sounding parts of the speech and guessed the rest. “These are for filtration, to collect and purify the station’s materials.”

“Right. Vacuum of space and all, probably hard to resupply. How do… no, never mind, I probably wouldn’t understand. But why not spin the whole station? I mean I’m no highly advanced space traveller, but the less moving parts, the less something can break, right?”

“This ship is for transporting sensitive cargo,” I said, “which many need to be stored under various levels of gravity.”

“Cargo? We’re the U-Haul of the galaxy? I mean we, uh, we transport goods for people?”

“The previous owners of this ship did. It is not ideally suited for our purposes. We acquire what we need to survive.”

“From other ships?”

“When we need to.”

“We’re space pirates? I’ve been shanghaied by fucking space pirates?” Charlie bared its teeth, a gesture that had been confirmed as aggressive by its previous attack on me, but made no move to attack again. It simply tipped its head back, giving a loud, vocalised shudder. I memorised the sound and the jaw placement while translating ‘pirates’. “Somehow, this seems to be getting weirder and fucking weirder. Just so we’re clear, I’m not murdering anyone for shiny pirate booty. Don’t… don’t bother translating that. I promise it’s not worth the effort. So the station spins – what needs fixing?”

“A rotor.” I used my mass to show what it looked like. “It is not part of the rotation apparatus; it is a direction stability maker for the… rocket.”

Charlie bobbed its head up and down and said, “Okay. And what do I do?”

“There will be a bent pin, this long.” I aligned some of my community into a bar to demonstrate. “It will be bent. You will remove it and join a replacing.”

“That’s it?”

“It is not complex. You were chosen for being good at this.”

“Good at this? Why the hell do you think I’m good at this?”

“You were observed quickly and precisely fitting modular items. This is how we known you are excellent in your caste tasks.”

Charlie watched me an unusual span of time, several of its facial muscles subtly changing position. I tried to memorise the sequence, but with neither context for the movements nor an ability to replicate movement at such a small resolution, the information was not useful to me.

“Are you telling me,” Charlie said slowly, “that you thi – that you guys knew I was an amazing engineer because you watched me put a camera together to photograph space?”

I translated ‘camera’ and ‘photograph’. These must have been the devices that Charlie had been assembling. “Two cameras,” I clarified.

“Man,” Charlie muttered, angling its face away from me. “Fuck photography.” None of those words made sense in sequence, so I ignored them. Charlie entangled its fingers and pushed its arms forward, bending them back and producing several mildly alarming cracking sounds from inside its hands. “Okay then. Take out bendy bar, put in straight bar, don’t drop anything in space. One question, Glath – you said earlier that there was no longer anyone in this ship who could go outside to do this repair. So, just out of curiosity… what happened to the other engineer? Shot by space cops? Decided life in Weird Bug and Dragon World wasn’t worth living any more and ended their own life?”

“He was crushed by a rotary arm while attempting this repair,” I admitted.

“Of course he fucking was.” Charlie pressed its fingers into the sides of its face at eye level. “Just once, I want my pessimism to be proven wrong. Is that too much to ask?”

I had no answer to that question, so I explained that I needed to measure Charlie for a space suit, and it let me, barely making more movement than the occasional shudder as I moved over it to determine the appropriate dimensions. I supposed that it was probably meek and obedient because we had taken care to get an engineer while it was separated from any warriors, but I was still a little surprised. I was beginning to wonder why the Earth was quarantined so heavily; sure, their warriors were fearsome, but this engineer seemed safe to handle with a little care. What was everybody so afraid of?

——————————————

According to Glath, my “appropriate protection” would still take a bit of finagling, as alien space suits apparently weren’t one-size-fits-all, especially when four limbs was seemingly an unusual number to have. (Pro tip: don’t let spiders measure you.) So I spent the time indulging in a tour of the ship and taking photos of everything on my phone to show people later. What? Denial is an emotionally healthy response to abduction.

Captain Nemo in her Mattel Twist-Tie Interface had cleared me access to certain parts of the ship, so Glath had to show me how to actually open quite a few doors. This mostly involved sticking my hand through the empty space over specific areas of wall, which was apparently very clearly signposted if you happen to be able to see in the infra-red spectrum. The unlock zones to the hatches from the main corridor were under the lips of the handles, which made them easy to unlock, but the rest of the doors weren’t all that well set up for my poor little human eyes. I decided that ensuring appropriate telegraphing of affordances of ship electronics fell into my role as ship engineer and clearly marked and labelled the areas with my permanent marker. If Captain Nemo had a problem with it, she was welcome to just drop me home.

That would save me having to initiate my Plan for that. It wasn’t a very complicated plan. It probably didn’t justify the capital letter. But the situation was dramatic enough, I decided, that anything that had a chance of working could get a capital. The value of the capital had dropped due to dramatic inflation. The Plan was, in fact, very, very simple: learn how the ship works. Steal the ship. Take it home.

Simple was good. Less moving parts meant less things to break.

So I paid attention as I was shown how to access the bridge (Glath had some complicated term for the ring full of dragons where Captain Nemo worked, but there was no way I was going to pass up the chance to refer to it as the bridge), the engineering equipment storage area (most of which I didn’t recognise), and the ring calibrated to my preferred air pressure and gravity. This, as it turned out, was a full ring as large as the bridge and not a single glowing dome, which had apparently been erected “for my comfort”. After some confusing conversation I was able to determine what had led to this idea and patiently explained to Glath that while our sun can get quite bright, humans do not necessarily like average midday strength sunlight blasted at them uniformly from all directions. It took some effort to convince Glath that I actually did want dimmer, unidirectional lighting that I could turn off at night.

“Why do you wish to handicap your primary long-distance sense?” Glath asked, having finally mastered enough tonal inflection to properly ask a question.

“It’s just how it works,” I shrugged. “Humans sleep better in the dark.”

“But there is no need to sleep. Energy and safety are provided.”

“It’s not… wait, don’t you sl – ugh, never mind. Humans sleep regularly. Every night when we can. If the light’s always on, I’ll still sleep, I’ll just sleep badly and not be able to work properly.”

“If you can see, you will feel safer,” Glath stated, “and feel better.”

“Is anything likely to attack me on this ship that bright daylight would help me deal with?”

“No, you are safe.”

“Then how would light help? I don’t… I’m not a psychologist, okay? I just know that we sleep better in the dark, and we need sleep to make our brains work properly, and if something I can take on in the light attacks me, I guarantee I can take it on in the dark, too.” I grinned, and Glath shifted; were they flinching back, or did I imagine it?

Glath didn’t seem to understand, but they took my word for it, so I was given control of the lighting and the limited temperature control that was allowed on the ship. There was no set mess hall, but my ring included bathroom facilities, which meant I could shower in decent gravity if I could figure out how to pipe the water in such a way to create a shower. I had the whole ring to myself, apparently; I was the only member of the entire crew who was comfortable in such high gravity and air pressure.

Lucky me.

After explaining several relevant physiological details to Glath – yes, I was sure about the lighting; yes, I could see in low light too, so long as it was in my visible spectrum; yes, I could tolerate a fairly broad range of temperatures and I generated my own heat even while sleeping so if I had insulation I wouldn’t freeze to death; no, I didn’t know much about human nutrition so we were going to have to figure out Food Or Poison Roulette later – a pale blue praying mantis found us and presented me with a space suit. The mantis was smaller than Captain Nemo, about two thirds her height with thicker limbs and little mantis claws instead of intimidating lances for hands. (Not that I know exactly what praying mantis claws look like. They probably didn’t have weird skinny tentacles in the middle, but hey, I need something to compare these things to.) Its wings were longer and thinner; at least, the casing protecting them on its back was. I realised that it was this sort of mantis alien, not Captain Nemo herself, that Glath had been imitating earlier. Probably some sort of political thing there that wasn’t any of my business. This one definitely had less jewels plastered on its face, bearing only a couple of fragments of ruby, or at least something red, each about a third the size of my fist. This may have been because its face was covered in way more eyes. Not just compound and red blob eyes, but little blue blob eyes, black slit eyes, and a few tentacles on each “cheek” that, if I was interpreting the way they moved about correctly, were also tipped with eyes.

Well, at least its mandibles were much smaller.

I took the suit from the mantis. Glath whistled at it, and it left. It didn’t seem to be able to walk very easily in my high-gravity environment. I turned the suit over in my hands. It wasn’t bad work, I thought, for somebody who had only just learned what humans looked like, but it also wasn’t anything any human would ever expect someone to wear. It looked… well, it looked like a human skin. Like somebody had sliced a human from throat to crotch, sliced down each arm, and removed the body from inside before sticking a helmet on top. It was wide enough to give me some freedom to move, probably because Glath had measured me clothed; it looked like it would only cling like a creepy extra skin on the hands.

The texture wasn’t doing it any favours, either. It was rubbery and just a little bit moist, sort of squishing under my fingers as if it’d just been lifted off a person and had the blood quickly washed off. I reasoned that real human skin probably wasn’t that thick. I reasoned that it just smelled like plastic, and probably was. I reasoned that one would want a space suit to be flexible, their own body shape, and peel off and on easily.

This reasoning did not help.

I pressed edges of what I couldn’t help thinking of as the incisions in the suit together. They knitted firmly, leaving a tiny seam. I pulled; they didn’t come apart.

“Breathe to remove,” Glath advised.

I breathed deeply a few times. Then my brain kicked in and I breathed out onto the seam. It sprang open again after a couple of breaths.

“And this is safe, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll hold air?”

“Yes.”

“It won’t feel the air inside it and bust open in the vacuum of space?”

“It will not.”

“It’’ll definitely keep me alive in space, right?”

“Yes.”

“Only you said your previous engineer, who I’m sure had a lot more experience at this, died doing this repair.”

“He did not die because asphyxiation or suit failing. He died when his organs were crushed by a rotary arm. I am confident that his suit was completely intact for several minutes after his death.”

“Oh. Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”

“Good.”

“I didn’t… no, never mind, I’ll teach you sarcasm later. For now, it’s time for me to go out there and try not to die.”

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It takes about two weeks for Captain Klees to find an algae pancake recipe that’s halfway tolerable, and by then the first hydroponic root vegetables are almost ready. By order of our dear captain, we ground crew are barred from eating the root vegetables beyond a sort of good faith first taste (just in case any particularly paranoid Hylarans are worried we’re trying to poison them or something), which we joke about as him wanting to get as much mileage out of his new recipe as possible, but we all understand the logic of it. The hydroponics aren’t extensive enough to feed everyone on the ground yet, especially when the novel crop is probably going to be very popular among a population that’s only ever had protein loaf. A lot of people aren’t going to get vegetables for a long time, and the simple truth is that we’ve had vegetables before and the Hylarans haven’t. So nobody protests when Captain Klees makes sure we’re at the bottom of the priority list.

Tinera stabs one-handed at a pile of green pancakes only marginally more palatable than the food blocks that Antarctica sends and frowns. “This spaceship mission is still fucking impossible.”

“We’ve only just started,” I point out, spearing a forkful of my own. The two of us are sharing a late breakfast, the rest of the crew already out and about. “It costs us nothing to try but time.”

“And the little fact that if we fail and have to set all the colonists down here anyway, the Hylarans might think they were betrayed and we failed on purpose.”

“How? They know more about the tech we need than we know. They’d understand the reasons for failure better than us. And even if we fail, we’ll work out a lot of social issues simply working together on this project. Besides. What if we succeed?”

She gives a little dismissive snort. I don’t respond. Tinera was one of the people most enthusiastic about this plan; if she’s getting all pessimistic, it means that a specific problem is bothering her. I just wait, and after a few seconds, she speaks.

“Have you heard Denish’s latest proposal?”

“I haven’t.”

“He thinks we should cap the speed of the ship at 20% of C.”

“Well, when it’s in systems looking for asteroids and soforth, it can hardly be expected to go faster than that without an acceleration rate too high to – ”

“Not just in systems. Altogether. Including between stars.”

“A maximum of twenty per cent? No! Not possible.”

She shrugs. “He insists it’s necessary.”

“Why? The Courageous did just fine getting here going much faster than that. Twenty per cent means you’re getting negligible advantage from time dilation, not to mention the actual increased time of the journey as the star systems experience time. These stars are twenty to thirty light years away. He’s talking about putting a full century between any chance at resource collection.”

She shrugs again. “He says that without it, resource collection is a no-go anyway. The Courageous was designed so that most parts were potentially disposable if the strain of high speed relative to the interstellar medium caused serious issues; it could drop whole rings, as you well know. On a journey like this, we absolutely cannot afford to rely on gimmicks like that; we can’t afford to expect to just drop bits off the spaceship to solve problems. They have no central AI, damaged engines, and have had to weld the spine for structural safety, so there’s no remotely realistic way of adding mass to the cylindrical shape of the ship as it stands; our choices are to be limited by the space we have, or build onto the outside, losing the streamlined shape. Furthermore, asteroid mining means creating mining craft, which frankly I think it an impossible ask but even if we do do that, our choices are to bolt them to the outside of the ship or put them in the pod launch rings for intersystem travel, and those pod launch doors are far too small for useful mining craft. If you want useful asteroid mining, we’re losing the shape of the ship, which means that the interstellar medium is a serious danger at high speed. And that’s not even getting into the electrostatic shielding. That shielding is the only thing stopping the outside of the ship from being torn apart as it gets near c. It also means that robotic repairs can’t be done on the hull. Which was a stupid risk to take on the way here and an even stupider one to take on this journey.”

I groan. She’s right. If only we had a fully functional, brand new javelin up there, all of this would be so simple – do basically the same thing that was planned to bring us here from Earth. Twenty or so years in space, give or take, depending on how far away the new expolanet is (we haven’t picked one yet). But everything wrong with the javelin that slows it down means more time and more stress on other things, more need for materials, more things to slow it down further. Until we’re at a maximum speed of twenty per cent of the speed of light.

“The reactor,” I point out, “is built to be safe for at least a hundred and fifty years. We have a bit more than a century left in it. We need to update that, or make sure that the ship has the means to repair it indefinitely. We need to check what the disposable parts are and if we can be certain the ship will have access to replacements. Moving to an older reactor is out of the question because they would require far too much fuel. But updating means the crew up there building new reactor parts from scratch for a system almost a century and a half more advanced than the tech we’re used to. We’d better hope that the current design is easy to repair and replace so they can just keep that indefinitely.”

“If it’s not, solar panels might be a better bet.”

“Solar panels don’t last forever either. How easy is it to recycle all parts of the Hylarans’ solar panels? They’re incredibly efficient, but are they infinitely recyclable? The glass and soforth, yes, sure, but we need one hundred per cent recyclability if we’re capping the ship speed that low. More importantly, how feasible is it to recycle them after a few dozen years of being immersed in potentially radioactive space dust? Without the electrostatic shielding, every foray outside, or bringing anything in, is a potential radioactivity hazard. Also, without the shielding, there’s mechanical wear from space dust to worry about. The panels would be torn apart at high speeds. We might be looking at ten, maybe even five per cent of c as a maximum speed, which more than doubles the journey time, which causes problems with wear in themselves… although if the ship is slow enough, it can probably save a lot of fuel by deploying solar sails instead.” I give Tinera a little grin to let her know I’m joking. If we’re reduced to solar sail speeds, we might as well give up now.

“They’re waking an astronomy expert to try to predict the resource availability out there,” Tinera continues, “and trying to see what they can get on the Kleiner array. But at that distance, getting an accurate read on something as small as asteroids…”

“Waste of time to try,” I agree. “Even I know that. The planets should allow some estimate of what any asteroids might have, though.”

“We can’t even be certain how much material we can expect to find in each star system. Every step of this is another uncertainty that we’ll be gambling lives on.”

“We don’t have to launch until we have enough information to be sure it’s worth it.”

“Some of that information is just impossible to get. There’s going to be some level of gamble no matter what we do.”

“I know.” I chew a mouthful of pancake. “You know what really kills me?”

“What?”

“If we do eventually get the Courageous out and about again… we’ll never know if they are successful. We’ll be dead long before it’s possible to even predict that.”

“Unless they blow up a year or so into the journey. They’ll still be in radio communication then. Maybe even visible with a really sophisticated telescope.”

“Ha. Yeah, let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”

The rest of the crew return from… whatever their errand was. “Ah, you guys are up,” Captain Klees says, while Tal heads straight for the computer.

“We’re talking about transportation and supply issues for the Courageous,” I say. “Twenty per cent of c? Really?”

“I know,” Captain Klees says. “But they’re right; this is going to be a whole lot harder if they have to put everything inside the existing hull and can’t use robotics or half of the optics in flight.”

“The time between supply stops – ”

“I don’t see the issue,” Tal says, booting up the computer. “Asteroids are huge. Just grab a big chunk of iron and ice and take it the whole thing between stars with you.”

“The fuel requirements to drag along chunks of iron tens or hundreds of kilometers in diameter are not insignificant. And fuel has to be irrevocably lost; you need to dump it out the back to push the ship forward, no matter what propellant you’re using. Because of physics.”

“Unless you move it with solar sails,” Tinera says very quietly with a little smile, and I’m struck with the absurd image of a huge asteroid covered in comparatively teeny tiny solar sails and a bunch of astronauts yelling at it to move.

Dandelion pulls a liquid meal out of our little refrigerator, stabs a straw into it and takes a pensive sip. “I don’t think it’s going to come up,” she says.

“Not for us, but I imagine it’s going to become pretty relevant for the ship pretty quickly!” I point out.

“Nah. We can build a ship that’ll stay together for a century or so. That’s all they really need.”

“A century?! It took us forty years just to get here! With the distances involved, and moving as slowly as Denish wants to, there’s no way they’ll get to a habitable exoplanet in that kind of time!”

Dandelion looks at me in some surprise. “Yeah, that’s impossible in these circumstances. But do you think most of the people up there actually care about reaching another exoplanet?”

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The interpreter led the way down the tube. I followed closely, taking the opportunity to study them. They must have been watching me, too, because even though I was kind of drifting between hatches rather than actually walking, the interpreter’s faux-arms and legs moved in a noticeably more humanlike manner over our journey. The spiders, despite their wings, didn’t seem to be able to fly very well; probably the air pressure. They instead clung to each other, and used the interpreter’s height to brace it against the tube wall from the head and legs, spreading out a little to hold it in place and creating the bleeding shadow effect I’d noticed earlier. It was, being perfectly honest, creepier than a shadow; I’ve never really liked spiders. But at least they were real, discrete things, and not a sign of me being completely nuts or in some kind of underedited horror movie.

No, I was in some kind of alien B-movie. Or maybe a book. The movies tended to go more for invasions than abductions.

Focus, Charlie. I was about to go talk to the alien leader. I was going to get some answers. I had to make a good impression for humanity’s sake, probably. Or at least convince them to send me home. Or find out what they wanted. I figured it wasn’t for weird experiments or as a delicious snack or alien zoo or anything – they would’ve just left me locked in the dome for that. I hoped they didn’t want me to be a diplomat and introduce them to humanity or something. I would be a really shitty diplomat.

I needed a lot more time to adjust to the situation, but it didn’t look like I was going to get it.

“So, uh, interpreter,” I said, “do you have a name?”

“Yes,” the interpreter said in that creepy, perfect imitation of my own voice.

“What is it? I can’t just call you ‘the interpreter’.”

More rustling. “I have many. The one most close to your pronunciation is…”

I’m not going to try to transcribe what the spiders said next. It was a jumble that sounded vaguely like something a human might be able to train themselves to pronounce with a few years’ practice and perhaps some minor surgery.

“Right. Uh. Glath…strer…”

The interpreter took pity on me. “It translates to…” more rustling inside the mass, for longer than usual this time… “‘facsimile of a perfect ceramic bowl with a fine white rim.’”

I blinked. “It does?”

“Approximately.”

“Okay. Glath, then.”

Glath accepted this nickname without comment. They stopped walking about halfway down the corridor and reached out to open a hatch on the right wall, spiders climbing under the handle en masse to lift it. Glath poured into the shaft. I followed.

It was, as I’d expected, pretty much identical to the shaft leading to my car’s dome. I dropped with rather more dignity than my initial shaft trip, pressing my hands against the walls to land gently on the bottom. I was feeling pretty good about myself when the hatch closed and a whole heap of spiders suddenly poured over me.

I fought the urge to scream or start mercilessly crushing bits of Glath as they reformed into a humanlike figure. The shaft was very confined, and I tried not to look too obvious about squeezing myself into a corner away from the tower of spiders. It’s not like I could really squeeze into anything without floating away, anyway.

“Prepare for gravity,” Glath said.

“What?” I managed to ask, before the room lurched and slammed me into a wall. It wasn’t that forceful, more sort of like a bus suddenly stopping when you’re not expecting it. It did press me into the corner away from Glath, which I guess was what I was trying to achieve. The force didn’t let up, but kept pressing me quite gently into the wall as gravity, blessed gravity, started to pull me down once more. Brilliant!

It was still sort of light for my taste when the sideways force stopped and the door opened into a room that was rather larger than the little glowing dome had been, lit by the sort of harsh white glow I’d come to associate with fluorescent lights. It was about as wide as the dome, but instead of being a… well, dome, it stretched out to either side, the floor curving upward at an incline I couldn’t feel so that the ceiling eventually blocked my view of the rest of the room to either side. It took me a moment to process what I was seeing; I was in a bigger ring, wrapped around the central tube corridor at quite a distance away. I jumped experimentally. The gravity was fairly light, but whatever was going on, it was pulling me to the floor somehow, and from the look of the machines and the dragons scuttling about, this seemed to be true all the way around.

Oh yeah, there were dragons. Well, giant lizards, anyway. From shoulder to hip, they were about my size, but their tails were rather longer than my legs which gave them a bit of a boost in overall length. They had bodies like pale yellow goannas, with four stumpy legs and thick round middles under dry scales, but their legs didn’t look to be positioned right. However their bones worked under there, it wasn’t something I was familiar with. This was probably to make room for the wings, which were longer than my arms and were clearly limbs in their own right, not something plastered on over the shoulder and held in place with magic like winged reptiles in cartoons. Those wings were… bizarre. I could see something batlike in their basic shape, with hooked little thumbs at the joints and long supporting filaments that I suppose could be mutated fingers if you squinted, but the skin stretched between them was covered in something shimmery. Red and orange tinted with flashes of blue rippled along the surface of the wings as the beings moved under the harsh lighting of the room. Their heads were a bit goanna-like, too, although their eyes were far more prominent and their jaws were heavy and large. Despite the wings, these creatures were obviously far too dense to fly. As for their tails…

You ever seen a picture of a cat-o’-nine tails? Imagine it only has four tails. And those tails are most of your body length. And they’re black and red and yellow, and attached to the arse of a dragon, and obviously prehensile. And the ends look like tiny maces.

Wow, that was a lot easier to explain than I thought it would be.

Anyway, I saw four of these things walking around and poking at various machines that I’m not going to begin to guess at, brushing the thumb-hooks on their wings and the little maces on their tails through various areas above mysterious panels and somehow causing things to beep. Glath politely gave me a few moments to take all of this in before continuing to walk around the room. I tried to look as dignified as I could while strolling through unfamiliar gravity, but really I was taking long sort of hopping strides. Glath, eerily, took to imitating my movements, and we hop-strode around the room until the next ridiculous piece of nonsense came into view.

Said piece of nonsense was the biggest insect I’d ever seen, wired to the wall with bundles of fine white filaments. You know how toys are wired into their boxes with those little twist-ties? Well, imagine you were buying a toy six-legged praying mantis with a body length twice your height, a bunch of weird filaments dangling from its knees, and instead of those little claw things they have on their front legs, said legs just tapered into long, very pointy-looking lances. The mantis had two big, segmented, jewel-like eyes. It also had a bunch of random jewels stuck to its face, all cut to show off smooth, glittery facets, all different shapes and sizes.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If I was gonna be abducted by aliens, I was very happy that it wasn’t an entire ship full of flying spiders. That would have sucked. But I also didn’t want to have to meet an encyclopedia’s worth of aliens right then. What happened to ships full of big-headed grey people with laser guns? I should’ve brought a camera from the car to photograph everyone. I wondered if it would be rude to take a picture on my phone.

Before I could decide, the filament bundles tying the alien to the wall released, and it dropped to its four back legs. Even with its back vertical, it was still taller than me. It stepped forward, dipping so that one of its huge compound eyes (which was about the size of my head) was a handspan or so from my face. I would’ve flinched back, but that would’ve involved walking through a huge pile of spiders again; Glath had moved behind me.

It tilted its head; it wasn’t watching me with the compound eye, I realised, but with an assortment of gelatinous red blobs directly below it. (Note to self: all aliens are gross, apparently.) The few seconds before it pulled back felt like forever. It opened a set of wings I hadn’t noticed before and started to flutter them. So far, on my Grand Tour of the Breadth of Life in the Cosmos, the only thing without wings was me. I was beginning to feel a bit left out. I consoled myself with the fact that these didn’t look any more aerodynamic than those on the dragon-things; they seemed to be dozens of layers of very fine gossamer protected by a thick casing, so that when they fluttered they created vaguely pretty golden blurs behind the insect but not much in the way of lift.

Apparently satisfied with whatever it had wanted to see in my face very close up, the insect somehow produced a series of clicking and whistling sounds from its oversized mandibles. Behind me, Glath responded; they had changed shape, and if their two-metre human form had loomed, this one took it up to eleven. Glath’s spiders now formed the spindly limbs of an imitation giant praying mantis, about two-thirds the height of the original. I knew I was effectively cornered wherever I went on the ship, but being sandwiched between these two wasn’t doing my mood any favours.

Glath spoke in my voice once more. “This is Captain Faceless,” they said.

“Captain Faceless?” I asked, bewildered.

“Yes.”

I pointed at the captain’s huge compound eyes and impossible-to-miss mandibles. “It has a face.”

Glath considered this a moment. “She is Captain Anonymous,” they corrected.

A nameless captain. Hooray. “Captain Nemo,” I muttered under my breath. “Wait, hold on, don’t – ”

But Glath was already clicking and whistling. I distinctly heard the word ‘Nemo’, creepily pronounced with my exact intonation, before the captain’s response.

“Captain Nemo is an acceptable designation,” Glath told me.

Fine. Whatever. Being on Captain Nemo’s spaceship made about as much sense as anything else.

Captain Nemo did some more clicking.

“You are the engineer of the spaceship Stardancer,” Glath translated. “You will be outfitted with appropriate protective equipment to scale the outside of the ship and repair – ”

“Wait,” I said. “Hold on. No. No, I’m not fixing anything for you fucks. You’re taking me home.”

A pause. More of Glath’s internal rustling.

“You are the engineer of the spaceship Stardancer,” Glath repeated. “You will – ”

“I am the copy editor of some shitty magazine on Earth,” I corrected. “And part-time uni student, I guess. I will be outfitted with appropriate transportation to get back home to my kids, who are probably worried sick by now because I left them with my sister and promised to be back by morning. Is it even morning yet? At home, I mean.”

“The Stardancer is now your home,” Glath told me. “You are the engineer of the spaceship – ”

“I heard your little speech the first time, stop sounding like a broken fucking record. I said no.”

Glath rustled. They spoke to the captain. The captain spoke back. Then, suddenly, she turned and darted away.

“Tell me, Glath, is this a promising sign or – ”

But she was already back, moving easily in the low gravity as if born in it (she probably was, I realised; why else would it be set so low?), a large bag dangling from one lance arm. It was one of those stripy canvas bags that some people use for storage, the kind that can fit a whole closet’s worth of clothes inside. It was, without a doubt, from Earth.

“We have the appropriate exchange,” Glath explained. The bag was dropped at my feet. I opened it.

It was filled to the brim with American money, the notes just tossed in on top of each other without being bundled. I scooped out a few handfuls. It looked to be all hundred dollar bills.

“Um,” I said.

“You are the engineer of Stardancer,” Glath said. Their tone hadn’t changed, so I had no idea if it was a question, or an order, or hope, or what. I stared.

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Couple things. First, you can’t just show up on Earth with a huge bag of cash. If you give me this I basically have to launder it and I really don’t want to do that. I mean, sure, I’m all for money, but maybe something more subtle would be good so I don’t have to explain the pile of money in my basement until it’s all safely filtered into the economy one extra cup of nice coffee at a time. Second, this is American money. I’d have to exchange this. Do you think I can just dump this on the counter of a bank or money changer and be like “this in Australian money, please!” and they’ll just go “okay, sure” and not call the cops? That’s not happening. Third: you keep calling me the engineer of the Stardancer. That’s making me pretty nervous. Now, if you yanked me out here to pay me a ridiculous bunch of money for a few hours’ work and then send me home, well that’s a really weird choice since I’ve never been to space and don’t know how your ship works, but okay, whatever. So I’m hoping that’s what you mean, but just to be absolutely sure: just how long is this going to take?”

“You are the engineer of – ”

“Yes, fine, but how long do you want me to be the engineer of the spaceship Stardancer?”

A pause.

“How long does human live?” Glath asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I was fucking afraid of.” I rubbed my temples. “Hey, Glath, do me a favour. Use your weird scifi translator tech to translate the word ‘Shanghai’.”

More rustling. “A large city in Cheena by the Yangste – ”

“It’s pronounced ‘China’, and no, the other definition. Is that pretty much what’s happening here?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Just fucking great. Okay, guys, look… I’m as happy as anyone that aliens turned out to be real and they finally decided to drop by our little planet, but this is a really shit first contact scenario. I mean, the world is full of people who would love to work on an interplanetary ship full of all sorts of cool unseen species for a bag of cash they’d never actually be able to spend in space, and when I was fourteen I probably would’ve thought this was the coolest thing ever, but I’ve got too much on Earth for this shit. There are smarter people, more sciencey people, people who are going to be a lot more cooperative than me, because they actually want to go see the cosmos or whatever with alien life forms. I’m a really bad choice for this. How about you drop me home, find someone better, and we’ll say no more about it, hmm? Actually, I can introduce you to my sister Kate. She’d be wetting herself right now. Also she’s a biologist, so I bet that’d be a bonus.”

Glath, who had been rustling the entire time I spoke, translated this for the captain. After a brief discussion, Glath switched back to English. “Earth is no longer within range. The cordons have closed.”

“Yeah, well, get it within range again.”

“You are the engineer of – ”

“Ok, fuck you!” I stormed off back to the exit shaft, which was still open. The door closed behind me; I waited for the gravity to drop and jumped up to the central tube corridor. It was at this point that I realised I’d run out of places to petulantly storm off to. I wasn’t sure how to open the door back to my car dome, which was a pity because my car was a fantastic place to sulk. I didn’t want to go somewhere new and perhaps get trapped and need rescuing. I still needed to piss, but I had no idea where the toilet was or how alien toilets even worked. Which left the huge room of mysterious pipes. That seemed like a suitably broodable place.

Lit phone between my teeth, I pushed myself down the corridor, making it almost all the way to the end without smacking into something, and out into the pipe room. It was far easier to navigate when I wasn’t fleeing a mysterious shadow figure. I found a couple of pipes that crossed in a way that approximated a seat shape and sat down, or at least floated in the seat space. I was really getting the hang of the lack of gravity, which pissed me off. That was a space skill. I didn’t want space skills.

And why the fuck did Captain Nemo and Glath the Spider Monster think I could be their engineer? I knew nothing about engineering. I barely remembered fractions. I was pretty sure engineers needed calculus and shit. If they were happy to go around abducting people, why not just abduct a bunch of humans and have a better chance of getting one who could actually help them?

But I was going to help them, wasn’t I. I was going to learn everything I had to to fix their stupid broken machine, because I had no choice in the matter. I couldn’t exactly hijack the ship; I didn’t know how to fly it. No; for now, I was stuck. So for now, if first contact was gonna be between some clueless chump like me and a ragtag ship of spiders and dragons and giant bugs, then we were just going to have to make do with what we had. No matter how much I might had the crew of the Stardancer right then.

Glath settled beside me in their approximately human shape, imitating my pose.

“Hypothetically,” I said, “if I refused to do any engineering, what would happen here?”

After considerable rustling, Glath responded, “the Stardancer would either break down in space or find an appropriate engineer elsewhere.”

“And what happens to me? I mean in the situation that we don’t all die in a broken ship?”

“That would depend on the value of your bodily materials on-ship compared to off-ship.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but it seemed like my interpreter might have just threatened to eat me, or possibly sell me into slavery. I decided not to ask for clarification in case I was right.

“You know I don’t know any of the machines you’re going to want me to fix, right?”

“The process will be explained to you. We need an engineer because we no longer have any crew capable of scaling the outside of the craft.”

‘No longer have’. I filed that away to ask about later. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Here’s how we do this. You’re going to show me where the toilet is. And then…” I gave a grin that I hoped looked a lot more sincere than it was… “you’re going to start teaching me how this spaceship works.”

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The dandelions have started to bloom. Specks of yellow dot the patches of green spread across the largely dead sands on the slopes just out of sight of the colony, and it’s well past time to take samples to see how the seeded microbial communities in their roots are doing. Hwaseonge Hnmang dandelions will grow in dead, borderline toxic soil with little complaint, but the same isn’t true of the complex ecology we’ll want to seed after them. That is, indeed, their job – to make the soil habitable for other living things.

The ground crew are out with Hive, Celti and Elenna, taking such samples (it’s an easy job that different sets do in shifts, and the Hylarans are still a bit nervous about letting us go too far from the settlement without a couple of Hylarans tagging along, although I’m not sure what danger they’re supposed to protect us from or how) when we crest a slope and spot them. Hive gives a strangled little cry, and they and Celti dash for the plants; Elenna following at a more sedate pace. Hive’s fingers close around one of the blossoms and crushes it immediately; devastation clouds their features as they stare at the yellow stain on their fingertips. “I’m sorry! I didn’t – I thought it would be as tough as the leaves! I didn’t…”

“It’s just a dandelion, Hive,” I say, putting a reassuring hand on their shoulder. “Look, there’s already a dozen more out there. In a few years, these bastards will be thick over the hills and you’ll never want to see a yellow flower again.”

“When there’s more of them, we’ll show you guys how to make daisy chains,” Captain Klees says.

“They’re dandelions,” Elenna points out. “Not daisies.”

“Dandelions are the best flowers to make daisy chains out of.”

“But they’re not daisies!”

“We need to get the number of blossoms up to three thousand, nine hundred and seventy,” Tal says firmly.

Captain Klees raises an eyebrow. “We do?”

“Yes. We should start another round of seed spreading right away.”

“In a different location,” I say. “We should leave this place alone to verify that the seeds these flowers will produce can germinate in this sand without our interference. If they can’t, this whole process becomes a lot more complicate. All kinds of things can affect plant fertility so verification is vital.”

“Why do we need three thousand, nine hundred and seventy dandelion flowers?”

Tal looks at Captain Klees like he’s just asked the most obvious question in the world. “So that every person on the planet can have a flower crown.”

“What’s a flower crown?” Elenna asks.

“I’ll show you when we have three thousand, nine hundred and seventy dandelion blossoms.”

Taking our samples takes far, far longer than it should, because the Hylarans don’t want to leave the dandelions. Eventually, it’s Celti who suggests that we should be getting back, with a concerned look at the flower that Hive crushed by accident; there’s already a ‘no picking the flowers’ rule in place, but Celti (presumably mentally multiplying that damage by 392 Hylarans) says that he needs to get back quickly to call a setmeet and propose a ‘no touching the flowers’ policy, at least until there are a lot more of them. “We’re not the only group out taking samples,” he points out. “People elsewhere might be seeing these too, and might have beaten us back, meaning that the whole colony will be out poking and prodding them soon enough.”

So we get back, and hand off our samples to the scientists, a group of volunteers rapidly trained by Mama to do this sort of analysis. The original plan was to terraform Hylara if possible, or at least parts of it in domes if it couldn’t be done on the surface, so the ship files have information on how to do this using the plants expected to be brought from the Courageous decades ago. The Friend’s and my childhood training are some use for this, but not all that much; it doesn’t take long to teach someone how to take a sample, and once they know how to do that, the differences between soil and ocean ecology start to diverge pretty sharply.

And Captain Klees is doing some mad science of his own. Later that day, he slams a small plastic container down on the table in our living dome with a flourish. “Flour,” he announces.

“We’re not supposed to pick the flowers,” Tal says.

“No, no. Flour.” He opens the container to show us.

“Why is it green?” Tinera asks. “Even mouldy flour can’t get that green.”

“When did you eat mouldy flour?” Tal asks.

“Moon convict,” she says, like that explains everything.

“It’s green,” the captain says, “because it’s made from dried and ground up moss. There’s no gluten, but otherwise I think the chemistry is close enough. We might have to treat it like a cornflour, perhaps.”

“So it’s not mouldy flour, it’s floury mould,” Tinera says.

“Mould and moss aren’t the same thing,” I feel compelled to add. “Moss is – ”

“The point is,” Captain Klees cuts in impatiently, “that if this behaves how it should, we now have all the ingredients to make pancakes. Moss and algae pancakes. The ship is conserving all its food stores for the next journey, and I’m not waiting until we can grow grains down here. I am going to cook. Tonight. I’m going to cook pancakes. They will be fucking terrible, probably. But I’m going to find out. As your captain, I order you to enjoy pancake dinner with me.” His eye twitches. We all lean back a little bit.

“Of course, Captain,” I say quickly.

“I love pancakes,” Tinera nods.

“Green food counts as vegetables, right?” Tal asks. “So they’ll be healthy pancakes. Ironclad logic.”

And we all break off to do other things before he can order us to help gather ingredients or cook the pancakes. I don’t know if Hylara even has any frying pans. What would they use them for?

I’m halfway through my afternoon eye exercises when I notice that I haven’t seen the Friend around for awhile. It’s not unheard of for someone to run off on their own, but the Friend’s behaviour can be erratic sometimes these days. I should probably check up on it.

A quick ask around reveals that none of the crew know where it is, so I grab an oxygen tank and check the settlement myself. Not in the meeting area, not in the radio tower, not with any of our usual associates. Hmm. I’m almost about to brave the underground tunnels once more (there’s no danger there, nobody’s going to grab one of us now, not when we’ve got this widely agreed-upon project to work together on), but there’s a more likely place to check first – a place that any Earthborn person would go if they were upset, and wanted peace and familiarity. I head out to where the only plants on the planet are blooming.

Some Hylarans are out and about still, marvelling at the flowers, but I find the Friend situated on the edge of a slope just out of their sight. It’s crying.

I hover for a second, no sure how to help. Does it want company? It must have come out here to be alone, right?

“Do you need something?” it asks. Ah, it noticed me. It stands, and makes a visible effort to calm down.

“I came to see if you were okay, actually.”

“Everything is fine.”

An obvious lie, but okay. The Friend frantically brushes tears from its face as it walks toward me. “Listen,” I say. “I don’t completely understand the side effects of what you’ve been through, but – ”

“Insignificant, mostly. Adaptation was pretty easy, with so many years of experience before becoming a – ” its breath hitches, and it takes a second to calm its breathing.

“Adaptation? You’re constantly crying. I know you have nightmares. Have you been picking at your arms again?”

“That’s not because of…” It avoids my gaze. It’s within arm’s reach now, so the avoidance is obvious. “It’s hard to be around you. You and the captain and Tiny and Tal. It’s… have you ever had your entire self stolen, Aspen?”

“Normally I’m the one abandoning it,” I admit. “Friend, nobody expects you to – ”

“Don’t call me that!” it snaps, and I step back. In a more moderated tone it says, “It’s not –I’m not – what I was. After everything, after the work and the commitments and years and years of life, in the space of an hour or two they just – ” It dissolves into tears again, and I step forward to put my arms around it. It presses its face into my shoulder.

“You did the work,” I remind it. “You took the vows. Surely there’s more to being a Friend than just the Lyson alteration.”

“There is. There’s so, so much more. But the Lyson alteration is one of the critical parts of it. And no matter how much this Fr – no matter how much I keep thinking or hoping they made some mistake, everything that’s happening lines up, well, not exactly with my memories of before, but pretty fucking close. I can’t be a Friend like this.”

I tighten my arms around it. “What’s your name, then? From before?”

“No.” It pulls away like it’s disgusted by the suggestion. I let it go, and it steps back. “No. She made the commitment. She chose to become something else, and she gave herself to be something that did good and valuable work. And they can reverse whatever procedures they want, but they can’t change the past. She gave that up. That still happened.”

“Okay,” I sigh. I turn to look over the hills. Here and there, Hylarans stare at dandelions, not touching them, with fascination, and I fight the urge to uproot the sunbleached things. I spent years patiently pulling these dandelions out of the greenhouse rings, and someday, these people will feel just the same. A mismatched lingerer that will be a detriment to the ecology it’s building, something that they’ll want more than anything to replace with something else.

But for now, they’re still building that ecology, their roots doing critical work down in the sand, and the Hylarans are looking at them like they’re the most beautiful thing in the world. I take a moment to watch them and try to commit their expressions to memory. To remember just how critical these plants are, how the immense value of the work they’re doing is something that, if we do our job right, our great great grandchildren won’t value or understand. Because they won’t have to.

I put an arm around my friend’s shoulders. “Come on then, Dandelion. We need to get back so that Captain Klees can make us the worst pancakes we’ll ever eat in our entire lives.”

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As any decent stargazer will tell you, you can’t do it in the city. You can’t do it in a town either, really, not properly. Too much light pollution. No; to properly see the stars, you have to wait for a moonless night and head out far from any electric light source and wait for your eyes to adjust and then, then you can see the majesty of the heavens.

I’m a stubborn person, so I had to have casual beers with three different groups of over-enthusiastic stargazers and amateur astronomers and spend quite some time on google before actually accepting the necessity of leaving the kids with Kate and driving out into the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere for my precious photographs. Now, a sensible artist would’ve just changed the focus of their piece. Or borrowed a telescope from one of those hobbyist friends and used that to make some kind of point about technology helping the appreciation of spiritual beauty or something. They might even have constructed something to block the light around the camera and give it a clear shot of the stars from within the city. But not me. No, I had to go for the pure shot. I had to be high-achieving. I had to treat a uni photography project that nobody was going to give a shit about as if it were some deep statement about the purity of all art. I had to see and appreciate what I wanted to photograph, for some stupid reason.

I know, I sound bitter. I wasn’t actually this regretful when I drove out, even thought it was cold and I was bored because all my friends had found better things to do than drive with me for three hours on a Saturday night. When I was setting up my equipment, turning off everything that had any kind of light, and puzzling over what exposure times I should use for my shot series (I’ve never been much for planning in advance), I still thought this was a great idea. Hell, even packing it all away again after the twelve minutes of actual photography and huddling down in my piece-of-junk car to close my eyes for just a quick second before the drive back, I was feeling pretty good about the project.

The regret didn’t hit until I woke up again.

I woke in my car, which was unsurprising. The surprising part was that the rest of the world seemed to have vanished around it, replaced with a uniform pale yellow glow. After checking that I wasn’t dreaming and that the engine was definitely off (I didn’t know the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning and for all I knew they could include vivid hallucinations), I took another look out through the windscreen, this time trying to focus on more than just the thought What the fuck? playing on loop in my head. Yep, pale yellow. Glowing. Uniform. There was a sort of edge all the way around quite a ways below my eyeline, and without much except the car for reference, it took a bit to force my still-waking-up brain to parse what I was seeing: it was where the wall met the floor. I was in a dome. I twisted to look through the back window. Yep. Big empty dome. When playing with the rear view mirror failed to provide any further information, I steeled myself and actually got out of the car.

With my new, mobile vantage point, I was able to gleam that I was definitely inside a big dome, the walls and floor of which were a uniform pale yellow, and faintly glowing.

Okay then.

There was no obvious door. So. What did I have? Limited information. A car. A lot of cheap photography equipment on loan from the university, better be sure to get that back. Laptop and phone, the normal pens and papers and painkillers and coins that accumulate in any car, the clothes on my back, half a packet of potato chips and a few starbursts left over from my drive snacks, and a quarter of a thermos of cold coffee.

I drank the coffee.

Right. Okay then. Back to work.

Fancy glowing and featureless space seemed pretty afterlifey to me, so perhaps I was dead, but only if the afterlife was the schmaltzy home movie version. I put that theory into the ‘maybe’ pile. Hilarious prank seemed pretty far-fetched, too, because even if I had friends willing to drive three hours out into nowhere to scare me, I certainly didn’t have any who could afford a setup like this. You might be able to get glowy plastic off ebay or something, but using it to build a huge dome and move a car containing a sleeping person inside seemed like a pricey endeavour. One of those prank TV shows? Didn’t they have release forms and stuff you needed to sign?

The dome itself turned out to be rather smaller than it had looked from inside the car. It was, near as I could tell, somewhere between 10 and 15 meters wide. I touched the wall. This yielded less information than one might expect. It was vaguely staticky, so something electrical might’ve been happening in there, but without being able to see or feel anything clearly, I couldn’t tell if it was plastic or glass or what.

That seemed like all the information I was going to glean from inside the dome. Time to find the door. I closed my eyes against the glow, which was starting to give me a bit of a headache, and paced around the room, fingertips trailing gently along the wall. The static left my fingers numb about a third of the way around, but only a few paces after switching hands, I found the seam, barely more noticeable than the stuck-down end of a roll of tape. There was no way I could get anything under it to wedge it open. A key or a credit card just wasn’t going to fit.

I rummaged through my miscellaneous car pens until I found a black permanent marker and used it to outline the door. There, now I couldn’t lose the door. Actually opening it could be a later problem. It was barely wider than my car. I let myself imagine a handful of drunk teens (hey, I had no idea who was responsible for my current predicament, I could imagine them as drunk teens) trying to very quietly push my old clunker through that door without scraping the sides or waking me, and laughed. I briefly considered kicking at the door. No… all of the available explanations for my situations fell into two groups: one where kicking at anything was ineffectual, or one where getting me to freak out was playing right into some idiot’s hands. I wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. I smiled to myself, trying to look vaguely amused by what was going on, and sauntered back to my car.

I finished off my travel snacks.

I was making my very last starburst last and mentally hating all of photography in general and my life choices specifically when a loud thud reverberated through my dome. Truth be told, it probably wasn’t actually all that loud, but in a featureless space with nothing but my chewing to fill the silence, it sure sounded like it was. Before I could be properly irritated by this, a door opened. Not the door I’d marked out; one further along the wall, where I hadn’t checked after being so damn pleased with myself for finding the first door. Beyond the door was metal. An actual room of actual metal. On the off-chance that I was being filmed for television, I tried to look calm and unfazed as I got smoothly out of the car and strolled over.

The room was only about the size of a very small elevator. I could easily brace my shoulders against one wall and touch the other with my feet if I wanted. I stepped in, and the door closed behind me, looking like a piece of featureless sheet metal indistinguishable from the others. The whole room was made of panels of sheet metal, interspersed here and there with dim LEDs. It looked like some kind of industrial cyberpunk nightmare on a budget, but that was still a step up from mysterious glowing. Looking up, I realised that it was also a lot taller than an elevator. More like an elevator shaft.

I did not have time to consider the implications of this cheery thought before noticing a couple of rather more concerning things. Firstly: I was getting lighter. This is a difficult thing not to notice, no matter how stressful and confusing the situation, and in my case it was made all the more insistent by the fact that some kind of force was pushing me into one of the side walls at the same time. My chips and starbursts were sending insistent messages that they regretted their recent pasts as much as I did and would very much like to return to the open air, thank you very much; I was trying to properly focus on denying this request when my feet left the floor for a few seconds, before graciously agreeing to make friends with it again. I hadn’t even intended to jump or anything.

I was still getting lighter. Soon there wouldn’t be anything to persuade my feet and the floor to maintain friendly relations at all. The sideways force vanished, leaving me adrift in the shaft and barely touching the floor; I pressed my hands and feet against the walls to hold myself down, and fought the panic that was making me light-headed. Or was that light-headedness the lack of gravity? I gulped for air.

This was the point where I noticed that the air was pretty thin. This is something that’s somewhat harder for the human body to make sense of than a lack of gravity, but survival-wise, it was rather more concerning. That was probably contributing to the light-headedness. It was probably also contributing quite a bit to my panic, and thus contributing secondarily to said light-headedness, but hey, I’m not a doctor.

I pushed hard on the door to the glowing room – at least, I assumed it was the door; I could easily have lost track between it and the other bits of identical sheet metal – but it wouldn’t budge. I looked for another way out. Up above me, the top of the shaft seemed to be open; I pushed off the floor and launched myself skyward.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if I was in an area with low air pressure and no gravity, then heading for an opening would put me, at best, in an area with low air pressure and no gravity. It would not solve my problem so much as potentially introduce new ones, such as the lack of handy nearby walls to hold myself in place, and quite possibly dangerous pointy things and/or the ire of anyone who intended for me to stay in the shaft. But I think I can be forgiven for not thinking straight at this point.

I was not forgiven for not jumping straight, at least not by the shaft walls. I slammed into them three times on my way up, like a bowling ball rolled down a bumper lane by a severely concussed child.

It is an appropriate metaphor, okay? I hit my head on the way up.

The shaft was only about 15 metres high, which is still way too far to be freefalling face-down through a narrow steel tube (you think that jumping in zero gravity feels like moving up? It doesn’t). I hadn’t put very much force into the jump, so when I rose (fell?) above (below?) the open mouth of the elevator shaft, realised far too late that there was nothing to grab, and smacked right into the opposite surface, I didn’t immediately die of befuddled stupidity. I was even smart enough to grab at the lip of the shaft when I bounced back down in that direction.

Go me.

Okay. Time to look around. Get my bearings. I found my phone, which thankfully wasn’t broken, and turned the light on.

I was in a tube.

I can’t really think of a better way to describe it. You could call it a corridor, I suppose, if there was gravity, but it was round and long and made of rings of something white and smooth. Some kind of fancy plastic, I assumed. Each “ring” was about two metres high (that is, the corridor was about two metres high), and about five metres long. Every three rings or so was a square hatch door with what looked like a car door handle, all currently closed, none of them seeming to agree on what part of the tube was floor.

My elevator shaft had a hatch. I conscientiously closed it. I wasn’t too worried about being able to find where I was parked; my ingenious forethought in jumping up the shaft had left some clear blood smears where I’d busted my lower lip open on the wall above the hatch. So long as I still had the light of my phone, I’d be fine.

I checked the charge. Eighty per cent. Yeah, I was fine.

It was at this point that I figured it was probably a good idea to face reality. I was in the middle of a hotshot escape, and the idea of this being a TV show prank was starting to look pretty unlikely. No, one somebody starts playing with the gravity and the atmosphere… well, at that point, the list of possible scenarios gets pretty damn small. I felt stupid for thinking it, but… I had to say it. I made myself say it.

“Aliens,” I hissed through my teeth. “Fuck.”

With that little detail out of the way, I turned my attention back to looking for an exit. I swept my light down the tube one way; it opened into some kind of confusing network of bars and pipes. Perhaps not the best destination for somebody who couldn’t navigate an empty shaft. I turned and swept the light in the other direction, which gave me my first glimpse of the shadow person lurching towards me.

It was taller than me, about two metres tall – I could tell because its head touched the top of the tube-corridor and seemed to sort of spread out, leaking out along the sides like an otherworldly shadow bleeding into our narrow, circular reality. Its feet bled into the scenery where they touched it as well. If it had stood still, it probably would have looked like a vaguely odd silhouette, with arms a bit too long and legs a bit too thick and no apparent hands or feet, but it moved, and it moved wrong. I couldn’t tell you how, but knees and elbows didn’t bend right. The weight didn’t transfer right. Even squinting down a corridor in bad light I could see that.

Now, at this point, I was not in what you might call my most stable state of mind. The lighting changes and narrow shafts was giving me somewhat of a horror movie vibe. I was gasping in the thin air, unable to tell if I was suffocating or hyperventilating or both, I’d just taken a couple of sound knocks to the head and face, and my heart felt like it was trying to learn to pole dance inside a ribcage that was too narrow and kept getting clumsily kicked. If the universe or a god or even my own damn body had had any shred of mercy, it would have let me pass out. But it did not. For some reason my body decided that survival was more important than my own precious little feelings, and I was up, shot full of adrenaline.

Now, adrenaline is a great thing. It’s saved many a person from enemy spears or big tigers or whatever people used to have to use it for in the old days. But the ability to focus more keenly on the approaching horror was not an ability I particularly relished, a slight strength boost is a terrible thing to give somebody who’s had less than two minutes to learn how to move in zero gravity, and if my limbs weren’t already shaking, they definitely were now, which made grabbing the hatch I’d recently closed and launching myself as fast as I could out into the tube and away from that thing an even more difficult task. I did not want to go banging into the walls again; I wanted to zoom smoothly out of the end of the tube and into the area with bars and things and grab onto one and… and figure out what to do next from there.

Physics, as it turns out, didn’t care what I wanted. What physics cared about was that the corridor was quite long and my aim wasn’t great. It introduced me to the tube walls a few more times before dumping me into a wide open space filled with the pipes of all sizes that I’d glimpsed. They crossed the room, stretching to walls that I wasn’t going to waste time trying to make out with my phone light when I should be fleeing for my life; I put the phone between my teeth and snatched for the nearest one that was small enough to grab.

The pipe shuddered alarmingly as it stopped my flight, but held. My phone slipped from my teeth, clattering away into the darkness. It occurred to me that I had grabbed the pipe without knowing how strong it was, what was inside, or indeed whether it was going to burn the skin off my hand. Fortunately, it hadn’t.

Okay, now what?

A shadow being was hunting me through a shitty factory-style FPS environment, in the dark. I couldn’t really move; walking was out of the question and I wasn’t going to blindly jump into the darkness and hope to slam bodily into another pipe. At most I could slide back and forth along my pipe, but this struck me as monumentally pointless. I hadn’t, I’d noticed, passed out, despite the thin air, and my heart’s acrobatics had nothing to do with actual physical activity, of which I’d done very little. I was… probably fine, until the shadow thing caught me. I did need to piss though. That could wait.

It would have to, because something was approaching. A clear beam of light cut through the darkness, turning the pipes around me into a cluster of sharp angles and moving, segmented shadows. The light didn’t hurt; I hadn’t been in the dark long enough to properly adjust. Forcing myself to try to calm down. I leaned out from my pipe until I could see the source.

It was the shadow creature. It had a glowing head now, a bright searchlight right in the middle of its fucking face sweeping the area as it swung from pipe to pipe with its arms like a monkey. Those arms would whip out like tentacles, wrap around a pipe and draw it closer, then release and approximate the shape of a human arm again until they once more had to whip out. Its head turned… no, nothing turned, the neck didn’t move like a neck. The light just migrated around the head, until it was pointed at me.

Oh, FUCK no.

I turned, looked for a new pipe, but… then what? I was fleeing from the only light source, and I couldn’t really escape to anywhere. I had the vague notion of finding an escape pod or something, but it was becoming clear that I wouldn’t even know what one looked like, or how to program it to go to Earth, or even how to launch it. No, there was only one way I was going to be able to get rid of this fucker.

I turned back. I aimed my jump very carefully. He was getting closer, so close that I couldn’t possibly miss.

I leapt, snarling, hands closing around a throat. Hands moving straight through a throat. I plunged straight through the figure, bits and pieces of something sticking to me as I hurtled for the wall and was able to grab a pipe at the last minute, lit by the head-light which had followed my movement. In that light, I was able to see that I was a scant couple of metres from the long tube corridor. I was also able to get a closer look at the bits of the shadow-thing that had clung to me. They were not shadow, but something small and hard, with very black wings. Moths? No. No, they were tiny winged spiders, each about a centimetre long, clinging to my arms and face and neck. I roared in surprise and brushed them off firmly. I did not, no matter what anyone might think, shriek in terror and start smacking at my arms and waving my hands ineffectually in front of my face, losing my grip on my pipe. You can’t prove otherwise.

The rest of the spider-being was quickly beside me, pulling me safely into the corridor. The spiders on me joined the main mass, apparently picking up on my subtle little hints that I might prefer some personal space. The light dropped out of its head to be caught by its stumpy, too-long arm, sinking into the spider mass like a spoon dropped into pudding. The spiders held it out to me.

It was my dropped phone. The screen wasn’t even cracked.

I took it. Then I took a long hop backwards, grabbing at hatch cover protruding from the tube wall to avoid just stupidly floating away.

“Thanks,” I said, to break the awkward silence. I cleared my throat. “So, uh… hello.”

“Hello,” the mass of spiders repeated in my exact voice. I blinked. The mass hadn’t opened any sort of mouth or anything. It had just… made sound. Somehow. Sound emanated from somewhere in the spider cloud, and I wasn’t about to get close enough again to tell where.

I thumped my chest. “I’m Charlie,” I said. “Char-lie.” Best to start with the basics.

“Hello Charlie,” the spiders said. “I am interpret.”

“You are interpret?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

The spiders hesitated. There was a faint rustling of some kind in the spider mass. I felt like I should know the sound, but it was pretty low on my list of priorities right then. “I am the interpreter,” the mass corrected.

“Oh. Well then. Good.”

The interpreter rustled again. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” I brushed my busted lip. “I mean, nothing that won’t heal. I, uh… did I hurt you?”

“No.” The interpreter paid no attention to a dead spider that drifted past it at that particular moment. “I mean, nothing that won’t heal.” A pause, more rustling. “Can we stop fighting?”

I nodded. My heart was settling down for the first time in what felt like forever, and while I wasn’t too happy about the air pressure, I seemed to be getting better at the gravity. I grinned wide, ignoring the pain in my lip. Pain didn’t matter; not when I was just realising that I was about to have to say something I’d always wanted to say.

“I come in peace,” I said. “Take me to your leader.”

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The next day is full of preparation. The first thing we do is set up a meeting between our ground crew, a handful of Hylarans (Hive, Celti, Elenna, Max and Dr Kim, chosen for their existing proximity to us and expertise in relevant fields), and the shipboard crew via radio.

“So the plan, as I understand it,” Captian Kae Jin says over the radio, “is to take advantage of modern technology to rebuild the Courageous to be able to last in space indefinitely. We need to redesign systems to make anything disposable as recyclable as possible, reallocate enough space and energy to be able to grow enough food to feed the crew, and set things ups so that anything disposable can be resupplies by harvesting asteroids. And outfit the ship to be capable of harvesting from asteroids.”

“That’s pretty much it,” I say. “Elenna, what’s the composition of the meteorites you guys get down here?”

“Primarily iron and titanium. We don’t know if there’s water, since that would burn up long before it reaches the ground. Little to no radioactives.”

“A lot of iron and titanium up here is a good start,” Captain Kae Jin says. “We can build a lot with that, and it allows us to test harvesting and manufacturing systems before leaving the area, as well as get stuff built up here without having to launch a whole lot of dense metal from the planet. But you all see the problem with this harvesting plan, right?”

There’s a lot of problems with the project, but one completely inescapable one related to the harvesting. “You can’t harvest asteroids at near-light speeds,” I say. “Doing this would mean stopping and starting on the journey, from star to star. If we’re really lucky, you might be able to get everything set up in this star system and make a straight run, but much more likely, this is going to be a slow, slow journey. Much slower in Earth or Hylaran time, and much, much slower in ship time, because you lose the benefit of time dilation.”

“Generations will live and die on this ship,” Captain Kae Jin agrees. “My crew are willing to do that. But the chronostatic colonists simply cannot stay in chronostasis for that long.”

I nod, although Kae Jin of course can’t see me. They’ll live and die on the ship, too. They’ll have to be revived on the journey, not at the destination.

“And more time is more resource consumption, more wear to the equipment, more time that we need these systems to keep going, more food we need to produce, more resource harvesting that we need to do. If we’re doing this, we can’t rely on an irreplaceable consumable resource at all. Everything needs to be harvestable from space or growable from things that are. Carbon, metals, and ice are abundant out here, but…”

“Nitrogen,” I say. “Helium should be harvestable, but…” Nitrogen is relatively abundant in space… in planetary atmospheres. Outside of those gravity wells? Much harder to come across. “Nitrogen’s a serious limiting factor down here, too.” Limited nitrogen aboard the Courageous isn’t necessarily a critical problem. It does mean using means of manufacturing that don’t use nitrogen, or at least don’t turn any of it into unrecoverable waste, but its main use for us is biological, and the biological systems aboard the Courageous should be as close to closed systems as we can get. If you’ve got your 70% air saturation and you’ve got your living soil, you don’t need more nitrogen except for in emergencies; it moves in a cycle. Depending on how much they modify the ship, the Courageous should already have enough nitrogen stored to do that.

The problem is airlocks. No airlock is one hundred per cent efficient. You lose a little air, a little water, every time the airlock cycles. There’s also the issue of hull leaks, and of nitrogen-consuming accidents. A problem on the short jaunt from Earth to Hylara? No; just bring spare air. A problem in a ship travelling through space indefinitely? Absolutely.

They won’t need much nitrogen. But they’ll need a source of it.

“That’s a late-stage problem,” the Friend says, leaning against an unused control panel in the radio tower and adjusting a bandage on its arm. (It had woken up that morning with deep scratches on its face and arms, but hadn’t wanted to go back under medical observation, so we’d helped it dress the wounds, grabbed breakfast and come here.) “We can’t launch without solving it, but there are so many other problems that need solving before it’s even a factor.”

“Definitely,” Captain Kae Jin says. “I just want to be sure that we all understand the magnitude of what we’re trying to do here. Earth was able to take a lot of shortcuts with the Courageous, because it was a single trip vessel that could carry its own supplies. We can’t take those shortcuts. If there’s anything here not renewable or replaceable, we run the very real risk of condemning our descendants to die in space. The immediate concern, of course, is getting this thing worthy for space travel at all.”

“You need Hylara’s metal manufacturing tech and a working AI,” Tal says. “Have you guys had any luck putting Amy back together? I’m not getting anywhere with the parts you’ve sent me.”

“I’m afraid not,” Asteria says. “It does look like Cory ate up significant parts of kes own programming to replace it bit by bit with what it was offloading to brains. Absolutely stupid experiment. I wish the people who came up with this were still alive and on board so I could shake some sense into them. Tal and my stopgaps are working for what they were designed to do, but…”

“You’ll want a working, coordinated AI for a long journey,” Tal says. “There are too many systems to trust to human oversight and individual programs.” Ke turns to the Hylarans in the room. “Mama piloted your ship, right?”

Hive nods.

“A small ship with no living crew is much, much less complicated than the Courageous,” Captain Klees points out. “But some kind of AI pilot is better than nothing. Mama might be able to be trained to use all the relevant Courageous systems. It was smart enough to raise children.”

“And it got them here with no human oversight, which is much better than anything our AI could manage,” I add.

Elenna nods. “We can transmit that program after this meeting. It’ll take…” ke checks some instruments… “probably about sixty four hours to transmit at maximum transmission rates. And we’d need to make the copy first. I don’t know how long that takes.”

“Double the transmission time for error checking,” Tal says. “It’s be best to just prearrange and block out a few days where we’re out of contact just for the transmission.”

“We’re somewhat off the equator here, too,” Sam says from the ship. “We’re not stationary above you, and with the weather patterns, we have to expect interruptions over a period of time that long. Best to triple the time, to be sure.”

“Let’s arrange as much as we can to prepare for a long period out of contact, then,” Captain Klees says. “It’s a good thing we’re not in a hurry. My main question right now is, is any sort of material transfer from Hylara to space viable? Building modern tech from the resources aboard the Courageous is its own chain of building better machines to build better machines. If there’s some way to re-aim the Hypati launcher to get things into orbit, we could send up some printers…”

Denish speaks over the radio. “We would need to make small craft up here, to get the package. Unless you want to just throw it into the side of the ship, which as an engineer I can tell you, is bad idea. We need to make ships to harvest materials anyway, but to make one before getting modern manufacturing equipment to pick up the modern manufacturing equipment is much harder.”

“Like when you lose your login details so your company sends your login details to your account for you,” Tal says. “And you have to hack to get them anyway.”

“I’ll ask about the launcher,” Celti says. “Even if they have to make one harvesting craft with their primitive technology, it’s probably easier to do that than to catch up to modern tech without us sending them anything. But the Hypati launcher doesn’t do gentle. Whatever we send you will have to be something that can be packed up to withstand the dangers of rapid acceleration. Or at least be something you can repair up there.”

Yeah, that’s a point. And it’s going to make my immediate plans more complicated. I should check how viable they are anyway.

After the meeting, I try to get Dr Kim alone for a quick chat. This is remarkably easy to do, since it turns out she wants to see me, too. We lag behind everyone else leaving the building and she hands me a small bag.

“Your things,” she says, “that you had when you collapsed.”

Ah. I’d almost forgotten about that. I tuck the bag into my belt. “Can we talk?”

“Of course. I can’t help noticing that the Leadership hasn’t shown up to yell at me about medical experiments.”

“It seemed an unnecessary complication. Unless you’re going to make me regret it. Your immortality experiments…”

“Volunteers. And going decently, by the way.”

“I don’t particularly care. I want to ask you about brain surgery.”

Dr Kim sighs. “I know your Friend is having a difficult time adjusting to a more healed brain, but I’m not going to mutilate it again just because – ”

“Not what I was going to ask. I want to know how you did it. I’m not a brain expert, but I can’t figure out how you’d even reverse a Lyson procedure.”

“We don’t know how successful the reversal was, yet. There’s marked improvement, but we don’t know if there’ll be a full recovery.”

“Nevertheless. The surgery did something. And, frankly, that sounds absurd to me. I simply don’t see how putting new brain tissue where the damaged brain tissue was can possibly restore lost functions like that. It’s a brain, it can’t possibly be a case of just sticking fresh tissue in the right spot granting function. There’s no way it works like that. Or does it? Explain it to me.”

“It’s very complicated.”

“Exactly. You don’t know how it works either, do you? You claimed my optic nerve was too damaged for you to work with, which I assume was a lie so I’d agree to the artificial eye you needed for your experiment, but everything else you’ve done is, frankly, remarkable. The range of tests and scans you can run by pushing a few buttons is unbelievable. You took a crash course in surgery for a few days and then grew and grafted a new foot to Captain Klees’ leg with no complications. Tinera’s hand must have been even harder. And the Friend’s brain is, frankly, ridiculous. So quickly? On barely any training?”

Dr Kim shrugs. She seems baffled by my amazement. “Is this going somewhere?”

“Yeah. Just how good are your medical robots? How much has autodoc technology improved since we left Earth? Because, correct me if I’m wrong, but if one doctor can do all this with minimal training and no noticeable errors, I’m guessing that it’s your machines working miracles.”

“Is basic surgery a miracle?”

“Don’t give me that. You know how much more advanced your tech is than ours, or you wouldn’t have lied to me about my eye.”

“That doesn’t mean our tech is miraculous, it means that yours is bad. But if you have a health complaint that you think we can solve, drop by and I’ll – ”

“Not me.” I point up to the station above us. “Captain Kae Jin. Do you hear how out of breath she always is on the radio? That means they haven’t fixed her lungs, and given how much her whole crew care about her, that must mean that they can’t. That’s a big risk with post-chronostasis organ failure; stress on the body increases the odds of further problems, so not fixing failing organs is a risk, but the trauma of serious surgery is also a risk. And I’m looking at my crewmates walking around with new functional limbs so soon after surgery and I have to wonder – is your surgery as traumatic as ours? Do you think that your machines could safely replace Kae Jin’s lungs?”

“I don’t know, Aspen. I don’t know anything about the effects of chronostasis that wasn’t in your medical records.”

“Your machines would, or Mama would. This colony was built expecting to receive people from chronostasis. You have the knowledge somewhere.”

“I’ll find out.”

“Thank you.”

I make my way back to our dome, glancing up at the clouds above like I expect to be able to see the Courageous through them. The chances of the Hypati launcher being able to launch something as delicate as surgery robots is very, very low. Maybe they can be packaged up in some way that resists that kind of acceleration, but I doubt it. So if Hylaran medicine can help her, then she has a very difficult choice to make.

Twenty years, that crew served together on that ship, and then more after we revived them. They’ve made no secret of the fact that that tube is more of a home to them than any planet can ever be, and Captain Kae Jin’s life’s mission was to safeguard those colonists and see them awake, a duty that should have ended here at Hylara but thanks to this new plan will extend back out into the stars. If the Hylarans can heal her and the Courageous can’t, then she has a hard choice ahead of her – a life here, abandoning her mission and her home and very likely her crew, or a much, much shorter one up there.

And it’s hard to feel too sorry for her, because at least some people get a fucking choice. The Hypati launcher’s acceleration is too much for delicate machinery and it’s absolutely too much for delicate humans. We might be able to send some equipment up to the ship, if we’re careful and lucky, but we have no way of sending ourselves. The trip down to Hylara is one way, same as it always was.

And the people we were supposed to prepare for and call down after us, we’re sending away. Away to try again, somewhere else. Leaving us stranded down here. Ha, look at me, all self-pitying and using terms like ‘stranded’. I need to keep my head in the game. Everyone’s agreed that the best thing to do is send down a small number of colonists, enough to lend their experience and knowledge with new equipment and procedures to the Hylarans but not enough to completely overwhelm and drown their culture, and as a sociologist, my skills are going to be critically important in ways that they never would have been if we’d been the first to land. My real life’s work begins when that ship leaves orbit again. This isn’t going to be any sort of end, it’s going to be the beginning.

So why doesn’t it feel like it?

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