Lieutenant Commander Jose Carriles watched as his coffee mug spun at eye level, tendrils of the black liquid spiraling off the white ceramic and shimmering in the flight-deck lights. He figured they had about twenty minutes until every single person on the Mosaic was dead.
Carriles felt himself float off his seat. Not good. He nudged himself back and tapped the small button on his wristband that activated the magnets in his boots, clamping him to the iron plates in the floor.
One problem solved.
But his stomach still felt like he’d just gone over the dip on a roller coaster, proof the engines were powering down.
And without those, three things were about to go wrong.
The ship was blasting through a gravity manifold at close to light speed, like a race car barreling down an empty highway. First, with the engines gone, they risked careening off the safety of the track—leaving them stranded in the area between lanes referred to as “dark space.” A gray zone too far from rescue, resources, or hope.
Not that it would matter for long. Second, the engines also powered the entire ship—from the artificial gravity that had kept him firmly planted in the chair where he had been dozing, to more important things, like the life-support systems.
That wasn’t the real problem, though.
With the engines went the shields. If those dropped at this speed, even a miniscule piece of space debris would cut clean through the ship like a superheated razor.
The console gave a little ping every time the shield deflected something of notable size—like a giant asteroid chunk or space trash. The rhythmic tone of it, every few minutes, was actually what had put Carriles to sleep.
Now every ping made his shoulders bunch up. Each one could be the last thing he’d ever hear.
That led to the third problem: the alarms weren’t going off.
The Klaxons should be blaring, threatening to burst his eardrums—and everyone else’s on the damn ship. But the deck was dim and silent. Not that the rest of the crew couldn’t tell something was wrong—this early in the morning, a lot of them would probably find out as they floated to the tops of their bunks. But it would be helpful if they knew how wrong it was.
He yanked his foot off the floor and threw it forward. It came down in front of him with a hard clank, which made him wobble and nearly fall. After he regained his balance, he worked on freeing the other foot.
It was a laborious task—he’d only ever used the magnet boots at the academy, and even then, just for a few minutes, so he didn’t really have a feel for them. He tugged and lumbered his way to the next console over, where he could throw himself forward just enough to hit the round maroon button he had hoped he would never have to hit.
BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
A few moments later, the double metal doors whooshed open and Captain Wythe Delmar strode in, buttoning his navy-blue service jacket. If Delmar was feeling the same deep well of terror that was chewing at Carriles’s gut, there was no way to tell.
Carriles couldn’t tell if the man was already awake, or just efficient. He looked fresh-eyed, his sculpted blonde hair perfectly in place. The man’s chest was out and his square chin was high, and he looked like he was surveying a leaky faucet.
Delmar was also having a much easier time with the magnetized boots, and barely slowed down as he weaved around the various chairs and consoles in the cramped space.
“Turn that damn thing off, Carriles,” Delmar said, without making eye contact, and Carriles dutifully canceled the alarm. “Anyone who was sleeping certainly isn’t sleeping anymore. Gimme a sit-rep, will you?”
“Engines are going fast,” Carriles said. “Alarm didn’t go off, either. I had to hit it manually.”
Delmar surveyed the flight deck, which at this point was mostly lit in blues, yellows, and greens, from the glittering array of switches and console screens. He raised his chin and said, “Lights,” and the overheads brightened, washing the space in harsh amber.
The Mosaic’s main flight deck was far from luxurious, but not as cramped as some of the ships Carriles had seen in his career. Each major department—from comms to engineering to ship controls—had a terminal, and there was a central command seat behind the dominant terminal. Close enough to smell your neighbor’s cologne, but it only got tight when there were more than half a dozen people taking up space.
That would be pretty soon, Carriles thought.
He remembered, a second too late, that he had been projecting his bootleg copy of The Orbital Children anime against the porthole window. The sound was off and the subtitles were on, something to keep him entertained on the graveyard shift, but it was also against protocol. It had been easy to forget about when his coffee mug started doing somersaults.
Delmar zoned in on the screen and arched an eyebrow. Carriles swiped away the projection, leaving just the darkness of space and the faint blue glow of their failing shields.
“Sorry, Captain,” Jose said.
Delmar didn’t say anything, but he certainly filed it away.
“Anything of note happen beforehand? Warning signs?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Delmar finally made eye contact. “And you were awake.”
Not a question, but not really a statement, either. More like an accusation. “Of course,” Carriles said, which was a half-truth, but Delmar didn’t half-believe it.
Delmar leaned forward and hit the comms button as he swiveled the stalk mic over to his face. “This is Captain Delmar. Engineering, I want a status report on the ship’s core and shields. First Officer Wu, report to the flight deck immediately. Doctor Liu, please report to the med hall and make sure we’re up to speed. Everyone else, await further instruction, and unless you’re standing next to that engine, keep the ship-wide comms clear unless it’s an emergency.”
He ended the communication and turned to Carriles. “How are the shields?”
Carriles pulled up the holo-screen and swiped panels until he landed on the shield integrity display. A schematic of the entire ship popped up, like an X-ray of the Mosaic’s hull, with a long sphere around it. Sections of the sphere were in various colors, delineating shield integrity. Some were blue—many were red, which meant those sections were weakening. Fast. There was a lot of data, but the only thing he concerned himself with was the blinking 82 PERCENT down in the bottom right-hand corner.
Almost immediately, it clicked down to 79 PERCENT.
“Can we stop the ship?” Delmar asked. “I’d rather sit and lose a few days on our arrival time while we assess the situation.”
“It’s not that easy, Captain. We’re a few days out from Esparar and just started deceleration. Trying to come to a full stop now is either going to rip us apart or send us spinning off into space. We might go so far we can’t get back in.”
“Dark space, you mean,” Delmar said, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
“Yessir.”
“And the chance of us picking up another manifold?” Delmar asked.
“We don’t even have charts for this far out,” Carriles said.
Delmar nodded, taking it in. He was lost, but Carriles could tell he didn’t want to say it. There was a tension in his brow that made Carriles’s heart sink.
Humanity’s first mission to a livable planet beyond the solar system, and there was only one person qualified to lead it: Captain Wythe Delmar. The man once held his breath for four and a half minutes when his EVA suit malfunctioned during the rescue of a school trip on the lunar surface. Their module was stranded and hissing oxygen, and anyone else would have turned back to the air lock, but Delmar made the save.
Twenty kids and two teachers, alive, thanks to him.
Delmar, the man who’d led expeditions to every corner of the known solar system. Who’d battled Titanian pirates en route to Pluto to deliver much-needed supplies to a stranded French science ship. Delmar, who would surely snag a seat in the Senate, if not the Interstellar Union itself, when he retired. A man so beloved he needed a security detail to get him through the docking bays on New Destiny. The rare blend of ability and fame. People loved him because he was great at what he did.
There was no runner-up pick for this gig. No one else was suggested. Even China was good with it, and China was rarely good with anything the United States wanted.
If Delmar didn’t know what to do next, then the mission would be over before it started.
68 PERCENT.
Delmar hit the comms button again, paging engineering directly.
“Awful quiet down there, folks.”
Static, and then a voice. Chief Engineer Tommy Robinson responded: “Still not exactly sure what’s going on, Captain. According to my readings, the engine just shut off. No issues detected.”
“Well, something is quite wrong, Chief,” Delmar said. “I want an update in five minutes, if not sooner.”
“Copy that.”
55 PERCENT.
Delmar let out a long, controlled sigh.
“So, we can’t stop, and pretty soon we won’t be able to protect ourselves,” Delmar said. “Feels like there should have been some kind of contingency plan for this, but we work with what we’ve got. Suggestions?” Delmar looked around. “And where the hell is Wu?”
Wu was a heavy sleeper, thanks in large part to mixing booze with sleeping pills. The artificial gravity generated by the engines affected everyone differently, and for some people, the constant hum of it made it hard to sleep, so you had to medicate just to get down for the night.
It’d be nice to have Wu in here brainstorming, but fortunately, this was Carriles’s wheelhouse. He wasn’t some schlub who lucked into piloting the star of the fleet into unknown space. Jose Carriles may not have anything close to a spotless record, but he had the skills to do the job, and everyone knew it. If Delmar was the star power hitter, Carriles was at least the dependable utility infielder—clever and sharp in a pinch. He racked his brain for some kind of answer.
There wasn’t any kind of maneuver they could pull at this speed that would help. Rather, the slightest deviation could create a cascading series of problems. Traveling across space via gravity manifolds was a delicate process—like sprinting across a circus high wire, except millions of miles above the surface. They couldn’t risk falling off their lane.
He knew engineering would find the problem, but they had to do so carefully and deliberately, especially while they were moving, or they would risk damaging the engines and hastening their demise. But slow and steady didn’t sound great right about now.
What they needed was time.
51 PERCENT.
Time.
Like Delmar with those kids.
“Yeah,” Carriles said. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Hit me.”
“The engines are failing, but they still have some power. If we drop them completely, we would still continue to move due to inertia. So we could divert most of the ship’s remaining power to the shields, just to keep the pathway clear until we get this figured out. That way, it’s not a sudden stop, and we do it slowly enough to stay in the lane.”
“And what’s that gonna cost?”
“Pretty much everything else, including life support,” Carriles said. “Shifting power drains in the process, so you have to basically assume you’ll lose about a third of whatever you’re moving over—like a tax. But we should have enough to keep the shields going and stay on track.”
“Do it.”
“Should we get in suits first?”
Delmar nodded toward the screen. 40 PERCENT. “Welcome to the burden of leadership. Can’t move around worth a damn in those suits anyway. How long can we hold out?”
Jose tried to figure it out in his head—there were fifty-eight people on board, all of them breathing, probably faster from panic, and they had a robust system of CO₂ scrubbers with redundancies built in, but the math eluded him. It was too much to calculate on the fly. “Life support is going to cut out almost immediately. We’ll still have whatever oxygen is circulating in the air already, but once that’s gone, it’s gone.”
“If we get everyone into EVA suits, that’ll alleviate some of the burden,” Delmar said. “They’ll be on a contained system, so instead of the entire crew sucking up air, it’ll be us and engineering.”
Carriles nodded. “That buys us a little more time, yeah.”
36 PERCENT.
Delmar clicked on the ship-wide comms again.
“This is your captain speaking,” he said. Carriles felt a wave of admiration hit him as he heard the man talk into the mic, his tone flat but reassuring. “I have some tough news to share. We’ve encountered an unexpected problem that is draining our shields at a level that will not allow us time to diagnose the problem. As you can imagine, at this speed, our shields are literally keeping us alive. We must maintain them at any cost, which means we’re diverting all power to them. Including life support. Please begin suiting up in your EVAs as soon as possible. I understand it’ll be tough to work in them. On the bright side, you’ll be able to breathe for a little while longer. Again, I suggest you get into a suit now. If you or anyone needs an assist, say the word, and I’ll come down there myself to figure this out.”
Static.
More static.
Then a chime from engineering. It was Robinson: “We’ve got the whole team present and working on this, Captain. We’ll find the fix. Just keep the ship together, you hear?”
“You’re a bunch of goddamn heroes,” he said. “Gonna make me look bad. Now get to work.”
Delmar clicked off as Carriles pulled up the internal systems that would let him divert the power. He glanced up at the screen: 28 PERCENT.
Diverting power wasn’t a simple procedure, and Carriles typed furiously, trying to distract himself from the knowledge that once the shields were down, he was sitting squarely in the ship’s point position, which meant a front-row seat to the first projectile to knife through them.
That’s if he even saw it. This fast, a speck of dust could do them in.
“Carriles?” Delmar asked.
Carriles shook his head, trying to focus on the task as the shield integrity clicked down.
21 PERCENT.
17 PERCENT.
5 PERCENT.
Damn it, they must have just hit something big. Bad timing.
Carriles pulled up the final screen and entered the necessary commands to divert power, his fingers flying. He hadn’t expected the shields to drop so fast. He did some quick and dirty math. He wasn’t sure they’d make it—but it was too late for alternatives.
Carriles didn’t want to die out here. He had known there was a chance of that happening, but it had seemed worth the risk, to be one of the first humans to step onto an alien planet. To breathe what was supposed to be breathable air, bask in the light of a different sun. To be a part of history after a life spent dodging it.
To accomplish something great, just by being there. Especially when just being there was usually what got him into trouble.
Even dying on the surface of Esparar was preferable to dying in a void.
“Carriles . . .”
The final command prompt shined a bright yellow. Jose pushed it as the integrity panel read: 2 PERCENT. The button lit up under his fingertip. There was a moment of silence, and he held his breath, waiting to die now or live for another few minutes.
The thought that came to him in that moment was Corin Timony, back on New Destiny. He wished he could have one last drink with her. Hear her laugh.
Tell her he was sorry.
The lights on the flight deck dimmed again, in unison with the integrity panel clicking its way back up, all the way to 100 PERCENT.
Carriles let the accumulated air out of his lungs, but on his next breath, took a shallow one. There wasn’t a whole lot to go around at the moment.
“I’m going to hit the wire and report in to New Destiny, see if I can’t raise someone with a brain,” Delmar said. “You make sure this ship stays straight. Okay, Carriles?”
Carriles turned to the screen, then flinched when a hand landed on his shoulder. It was Delmar, giving him a reassuring squeeze. “You got this, kid,” he said.
“Thanks, Captain,” Carriles said, and he actually believed that he did, Delmar’s praise giving him a little boost of energy. He gripped the steering gimbal tight.
But as Delmar left the deck, and with a very temporary order restored, Carriles raked the stubble on his face and pushed his hair back onto his head so it would stay out of his eyes. He was free to articulate the thought that’d been nagging at him for the last few minutes.
Why didn’t the alarm go off?
Of all the things to fail accidentally, that’s a hell of a thing to go, especially in conjunction with the gravity engines, which were an entirely separate system. Jose didn’t like the shape of the idea that was forming in his head, so he pushed it aside for the moment as the shield integrity clicked down.
97 PERCENT.