DAKOTA BANDICUT DREAMED of comets, and space, and celestial collisions. She dreamed of dandelions blowing through an endlessly long, endlessly lonely night as their starship sailed helplessly into the deeps of infinity, having lost their heading and missed Alpha Centauri by several trillion miles. She dreamed of clamoring alarms, and strobing emergency lights, and frantic repairs in the cold and lonely dark . . .
And then it all dissolved in a milky mist. Somewhere she was aware that she was being brought slowly out of slowsleep.
In the mist, she had time to remember her dreams, and to wonder if they were all actually dreams.
Had those alarms and flashing lights been real?
***
She lurched, gasped, then fell back and groaned.
Her eyes slowly opened.
A young woman’s face was peering down at her. Dakota didn’t know her.
“Dakota Bandicut?” the face said to her.
She tried to breathe, and felt fire in her throat. She coughed convulsively. A mechanical arm slid into view and misted something at her. The pain in her throat and chest subsided.
The voice spoke again, but to someone else. Then it came back to her. “How are you feeling? You’ve been asleep a long time.”
The face dissolved as she drifted back off to sleep.
“Miss Bandicut? Can you hear me?”
Miraculously, this time she was able to answer, though in a voice like a dying man’s. “Where are we? How long? Is the ship fixed? Control restored?”
Voices, multiple; and then a different voice from the first: “Tell her.”
Tell me what? Meteoroid strike! Control section smashed. How many lost?
The face beamed at her. “Oh yes, the ship was fixed. According to this, you helped fix it. Do you remember waking up to do that?”
Dakota blinked hard, several times. Did she remember? She thought she did. But it seemed to be fading now, less like a hazy memory than a dream. She stopped blinking. “Where are we?”
“Why, you’re in orbit around No Pain No Gain! That’s what we call it! Alpha Centauri Four! We had to keep you asleep for a little while, so preparations could be made down on the ground. But you’re a Centauran now . . .”
***
Had to keep me asleep?
Nearly ten years, as it turned out, they’d been kept on ice in orbit around the virgin colony planet. Except . . . it wasn’t, anymore. The colony was settled and thriving.
The next shock was a visitor who came into the recovery room. It was Jenny Ferguson, from Earth 3. Jenny Ferguson who had grabbed her old job when she’d left. “Dakota!” she said cheerily. “Remember me?”
“Um—” Am I dreaming?
She was not dreaming; it was the same Jenny, except that she looked older than Dakota now, with wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and considerably more maturity in her expression. How was that possible?
“Dakota, I’ve been waiting for a chance to greet you. When you come down to the surface, I want you to meet my husband and boys.”
Oh no . . .
***
“How many ships?” Dakota asked. Now there was a roomful of them, new Centaurans, being briefed as a group. Some of them looked happy, but more than a few had the same shocked expression that Dakota felt on her own face.
The briefer—a different face—spoke with practiced ease. They weren’t the first group to have been awakened. “Endeavor was the twelfth ship to arrive from Earth.”
“But we were the first!” cried a still-raspy voice in protest.
“First to leave Earth,” the briefer affirmed. “You blazed the way for all of us. The third and fourth are still on their way in. The second, I’m sorry to say, was lost.”
“But how—?”
“We got better at it. The ships that followed were faster. Some of them much faster. It was actually number seven that got here first. I guess they had it figured out before it was launched, because they named it Leapfrog. It came with the best ground-breaking and terraforming equipment that any ship had ever carried.”
She sort of stopped listening after that. Her translator-stones had buzzed back to wakefulness, and she hoped they would have better things to say to her.
***
Dakota lasted as a Centauran for two years. During that time, she threw herself into life as a colonist—or tried, anyway. She formed some relationships, none of them especially close. She became friends, more or less, with Jenny, who had matured considerably over the years; it was like talking to a different person. Several attempts at romance ended in failure or disappointment. She worked as a tele-operator on residential fabrication, as a drone pilot on geographical survey flights, and even briefly as a remote operator of tunneling equipment working on underground transport and shelter projects. The work was okay, if boring, and she was good at it—more than good at it, in fact. But truth was, it wasn’t all that different from the life she’d lived back home, in the shadow of Earth.
She’d left everything behind to become a pioneer on the edge of human exploration. And here, she had arrived to find the groundbreaking work already done, by the twenty-four thousand colonists who had arrived before her, and their progeny. What she was doing instead was support ops: helping to build on the foundation that the real pioneers had begun. Sure, there were frontier settlements on No Pain No Gain, continents to cross and seas to conquer, and would be for the next hundred years. But the spark of exploration had gone out of it for her. She felt cheated.
By the time she was desperate for a change, there was other handwriting on the wall. Eighty-two years had passed on Earth since her departure. Everything and everyone she had known were now history. She wondered why she didn’t feel more regret. Earth was in turmoil, all interest in sending people to the stars lost, or submerged under the politics of unrest. The next expedition to other stars would be launched, not from Earth, but from right here at Alpha Centauri. The real edge was moving farther out, to the next nearest star with a habitable planet: Barnard’s Star. It was time to move on.
Her translator-stones, still her little secret, seemed to agree.
And so she had signed up for the first ship to the new colony.
***
Two years and one month to the day after her arrival groundside, she stood on the tarmac of the No Pain No Gain spaceport for the last time. Dakota gazed at the rocket on the pad and thought, That should be a great and beautiful starship, poised for launch. It wasn’t, of course; it was a personnel shuttle, poised for launch. The real starship was in orbit, where it had been built in record time with automated nano-constructors. Back to where I came into this scene. She felt a heart-flutter of trepidation. Once more unto the breach.
Her last interview still echoed in her mind. A bored bureaucrat—already, they had bored bureaucrats out here in the stars!—had wanted to clarify her skills and fitness for certain work before signing off on her for the mission. “You have plenty of drone experience, yes? But it’s all on buildings and tunnels. Can you do maintenance and repair on a ship?”
She managed to contain a harsh laugh. Can I do repairs? The memory was now as clear as yesterday: the mid-flight emergency that nearly ended Endeavor’s mission. A meteoroid strike had smashed Endeavor’s control module and killed most of the watch crew, and the ship’s emergency AI had called up Dakota and thirty-some others to deal with it. Numb with confusion and fear at first, and then increasingly buoyed by confidence, they had labored for the better part of a year to rebuild the controls and restart the ramscoop and fusion drive.
The drugs that had put her back into deep sleep had nearly robbed her of the long-term mental record—but not quite. The memories had come back over the course of her time here, with shocking clarity. Her trip to Alpha Centauri had nearly ended in disaster. She had been part of the reason they’d made it. That fact gave her pride, but also contributed to her feeling that she didn’t have much to add to a settled world.
Instead of answering her interviewer’s question directly, Dakota reached over his display slate and pointed on her profile to the commendation she’d received for helping to save the ship. “Ah,” he said. “Yes, I see.” And approval was hers.
And now, standing on the tarmac, she shook her head at the thought of the interview and tugged on the lead of her floating luggage carrier. With a cluster of other departing mission members, she strode toward the shuttle.
Soon, she would be settling in for another long winter’s nap, while racing onward, to the more distant stars.
Barnard’s Star, here we come.