The alarm starts blaring a split second before the shaking starts.
Aaron Carver is floating in the centre of the ship’s medical bay, and Prakesh Kumar and I get thrown right into him. Everything else in the room is strapped down, but I can see the instruments and the bottles shaking, threatening to tear loose.
“What the hell?” Carver rolls away from us, putting his arms out to stop himself from crashing into the wall. The ship is rattling hard now, the metal bending and creaking, caught in the fist of an angry giant.
“It’s re-entry,” Prakesh says. He’s holding onto the ceiling, and his body is swinging back and forth as the pull of gravity increases.
“Can’t be,” I say, my words almost swallowed by the noise. “It’s too soon!”
But it isn’t. We’ve been in Earth orbit for a week. Normally the ship would be spinning to generate gravity, but we’ve spent the past day in zero-G as we prepare to plunge through the atmosphere. There was supposed to be plenty of warning before we actually started re-entry–enough time for everyone to get into the escape pods. It shouldn’t be happening this fast. The G-forces were supposed to come back gradually.
My stomach is doing sickening barrel rolls, and my hands feel heavy, like my fingers are weighed down with rings. “I thought this was supposed to be a smooth ride,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “The asteroid—”
“No good,” Carver says. He grabs hold of a strut on the ceiling, the muscles standing out on his powerful upper arms. His hair is almost as long as mine now, although he doesn’t bother to tie it back, letting the blond strands float freely.
“I told them,” he says. “You can shape the damn asteroid as much as you want but if you’re using it as a heat shield, things are going to get–shit!”
He spins sideways as the ship jerks and kicks, flinging him against one of the cots bolted to the floor.
“It’s OK,” says Prakesh, sweat pouring down his dark skin. Neither he nor Carver have shaved, and bristly stubble covers their faces. “We just sit tight. They’ll come get us.”
We all stare at the door. The alarm is still blaring, and the hull of the ship is screeching now, like it’s being torn in two.
“They’re not coming, are they?” says Carver.
“Just hang on,” says Prakesh. “Let’s not—”
“They would have been here by now,” says Carver, horror and anger flashing across his face. “They’re not coming, man.”
I close my eyes, trying not to let frustration overtake me. He’s right. The Earthers–the group who took control of this ship to get back to our planet–don’t trust us. Not surprising, given that I tried to destroy the ship’s reactor in an attempt to prevent them from leaving.
There’s no way of stopping the ship. It’ll be travelling at 18,000 miles an hour, even after it’s passed through the upper atmosphere and burned off the asteroid it’s tethered to, acting as its makeshift heat shield. Getting off the ship means being in one of the two escape pods, and it’s easy to picture the chaos as the Earthers rush to get inside them. They’ve either forgotten us, or decided that we aren’t worth saving.
I scan the walls and the ceiling, looking for an escape route that we missed the previous dozen times we tried to find one. Not that we tried that hard–after all, if we got out of the medical bay where else would we go?
Carver half swims, half crawls his way over to the door, pushing Prakesh aside and twisting the release catch up and down. When that doesn’t work, he kicks at it, but only succeeds in pushing himself away.
Prakesh stares at him. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think?” Carver makes his way back to the door, kicks it a second time. It shudders but stays firmly shut.
“It’s locked, Aaron.”
Carver swings round, staring daggers at Prakesh. “You think I don’t know that?”
“Then why are you still doing it?”
“Because it’s better than doing nothing, like some of us!”
“I’m trying to—”
“Both of you! Shut up!” I shout. I can’t afford to have them bickering now. They’ve been sniping at each other ever since we were locked in here–Carver has feelings for me, and he’s still furious that I turned down his advances to stay with Prakesh. It’s something I’ve tried not to think about, a problem I’ve pushed to the back of my mind again and again, not wanting to make a choice, not even knowing how to start.
“We kick together,” I say. “All at once.”
I don’t have to explain. I see Carver’s eyes light up. He moves next to me, bracing himself against the wall.
“Aim for just above the lock,” I say, as Prakesh gets into position on my left. “Hit it on zero. Three! Two! One! Zero!”
The door bangs as our feet slam into the space above the handle, but remains stubbornly shut. The force pushes us backwards, nearly knocking us over. Somehow we manage to stay upright.
“Again,” I say. There’s a hold on the wall, and I grab onto it with an outstretched arm, bracing us.
“Three! Two! One! Zero!”
The door explodes outwards, the lock ripping off the wall, and we tumble into the corridor. The alarm is piercing now, ear-splitting. Carver pumps the air in triumph.
The ship jerks sideways. For a second, the wall is the floor, and everything is a nightmare jumble of limbs and noise. Prakesh falls badly, his head slamming into the metal surface with a clang that I feel in my bones. In the moment before the ship flips back, I see his face. His blank, uncomprehending eyes. A trickle of blood runs down his forehead.