Thirty of us had managed to claw our way to one of the shuttles attached to the outside of our drifting ship. The auxiliary power inside still worked. We had air to breathe, and the pressure held.
As the damaged cylinder stopped rotating, we lost our gravity. Over what must have been about ten minutes but felt like eternity, we got lighter and lighter until the cylinder ground to a halt. Everyone that wasn’t strapped in began drifting around the cramped interior, pulling themselves along from seat to seat, hand over hand. Shane and I stayed buckled in, ducking as people and debris banged around our heads. I had always enjoyed traveling to the center of the Delta, where I could float and bounce down the core of the ship. It never upset my stomach like it did so many others. But now my stomach churned, and the back of my throat tasted like the algae I’d eaten for breakfast. My heart was light in my chest—not from joy, but from the lack of gravity pulling it down. My sinuses felt stuffy.
And of course, none of that mattered.
Thirty people were crammed into a tiny shuttle meant to carry our descendants down from the orbiting Delta to a new planet. It wasn’t packed with food. We had a couple of bottles of water bouncing around with us. The power might last a month, but we’d starve to death much sooner.
Intellectually I knew all this. But my brain was still in shock, reeling from the terror of those last moments before the hatch slammed shut.
I hadn’t even begun to process the loss of my parents and all my friends. Sooner or later it would hit me, but for now, the only thing I could focus on was keeping my brother alive. Keeping him from falling apart in the hopeless few days before we joined our parents in the stars. Shane was all I had.
Doc Walsh tried to keep our spirits up.
He floated at the front of the shuttle’s open cockpit and put on a brave face. “I know this looks bad,” he said, and we waited to hear the “but” we hoped would follow. “It looks very bad. But we’re alive, and where there’s life, there’s hope.”
Oh boy. Relying on old clichés. Life and hope. That was the best he could do.
“What hope?” The voice from the back sounded like we all felt. Like the speaker was wishing this were all a horrible dream and he’d wake up back on the Delta heading for Chara d.
I wrapped my arm around Shane’s shoulder and gave him a little squeeze. He was being so brave, never complaining though his wrist was still swollen and painful.
Doc Walsh gave a little smile. “I don’t know what hope. But we’re here. We’re still here. And I guess that’s all we have.” He sank back into the cockpit.
My little brother piped up from beside me. “Maybe someone will rescue us.”
Everyone turned to look at him, but no one bothered to answer. In two hundred years of travel, the Delta had never encountered any other spaceships. The Horizon Alpha, one of our sister arks, should have landed by now on the other side of the galaxy, and the Beta would still be underway toward Omicron Eridani. Neither was heading in remotely the same direction as we were. And as much as I wanted to believe there were friendly aliens zipping around, the chances of any of them stumbling across our dead, drifting ship were basically zero, if they existed at all.
I strapped myself in and threw an arm around Shane. “Maybe someone will.”
And if they didn’t, we’d all starve in the shuttle, or die of dehydration when the water ran out.
Oh, Shane. I would do anything to spare you that fate. But there was nothing I could do. Nothing any of us could do but wait in the tiny shuttle. Wait to die, like everyone else we’d ever known. I made up stories to keep him amused but struggled to think of happy endings.
We talked about freeing the shuttle from the side of the Delta and trying to fly it somewhere. But we were light years from any known planetary system. The shuttle would never make it anywhere near a star. We stayed attached to our mothership, hoping against hope that if anyone was looking, the Delta made the biggest target.
There were whispers around the cabin that we should just open the hatch. Make it quick, instead of suffering. When we started to die off, we’d be stuck in the shuttle with the dead. Someone would be the last to go. The last person alive from the great Horizon Delta, doomed like the Earth we came from. People muttered about opening that hatch and popping out into the vacuum. Quick, but not painless. People whispered about it, but nobody was brave enough to reach for the hatch control.
We made it three days.
I was dozing when Shane nudged my arm. It was nearly impossible to sleep without gravity, with only the shuttle’s seatbelt preventing me from bouncing around the cabin. My stomach had given up growling and the shuttle reeked of frightened people with no toilet facility. The grumblings about opening the hatch were getting louder. It was the day the water would run out, and we’d eaten nothing for seventy-two hours.
“Jonah?” Shane nudged me again. “Jonah, you awake?”
I muttered and opened my eyes.
He was looking out the window at the black sky full of stars.
“Try and sleep, buddy,” I said, and turned away from him.
“No, Jonah, you have to look. I saw something.”
He’s getting delirious. Little kids can’t go very long without food.
“It’s nothing. Just close your eyes.”
He punched me in the shoulder. “Look out there.”
The punch didn’t hurt. Without gravity, he couldn’t get much force. I looked out the tiny porthole, following his pointing finger.
“There’s nothing there, buddy. Just black sky.”
He nodded. “Yeah. No stars. And the no stars are moving.”
It was such an odd thing to say that I made the effort to focus my eyes. Doc Walsh had started teaching me about medicine. I was going to be the ship’s next doctor before we lost propulsion. He insisted I start learning anyway, and I humored him even though we had all known for the past year that we were never going to make it. One of the things I learned was that human eyes had evolved for gravity, and in a no-gravity environment, they swelled up. It’s why they had built the med bay on the outer edge of the cylinder, where gravity was strongest. More gravity helped people heal faster.
The stars out the window were blurry, and I squinted to see where Shane was pointing.
Black sky, just like all the black sky around it.
But as I watched, a star winked on right in the middle of the sky. Another blinked off. My heart pounded in my ears as I watched. It was a black, empty space in the sky, and it was moving. Stars in the front went out, and stars behind flicked back on.
I had no depth perception. It could have been tiny and close, or far away and huge.
But the longer I watched, the surer I became.
Something was out there. Something black, blocking the stars as it moved across the sky.
And it was heading straight for us.