Ash

I've been in charge of the Persephone for less than a day and already I have a mutiny on my hands.

I'm sitting alone in the dark on the bridge. Everyone else is restricted to their cabins until we can figure out how to get some of our more crucial systems back on line. Hartley assures me it's possible, but it'll take time.

I should be thinking about how to get this ship back in working order but the only thing that keeps going through my mind is Jordan. Those last fifteen minutes have been looping in my brain for hours. Was there anything I could've done differently so that she was here now in charge instead of me?

There's only so much oxygen in those escape pods, enough to last two days at most. Maybe less with Sarka. And instead of getting out there and looking, we're stuck here with no way to move this damn ship.

Less than a day in charge and I've crippled the ship, doomed the crew, and lost their captain.

We've removed all the bombs on the ship. The only critical bomb was the one attached to the main computer, the rest were mostly distractions. I've got to hand it to Sarka, he knows how to make a getaway. With the ship crippled, we won't be going anywhere until Hartley can rig a new computer to replace the previous one. A quantum computer that can handle trillions of simultaneous functions at the same time. As Hartley explained it, that's like asking third graders to build a fifty foot bridge with pipe cleaners and ribbon. It can be done, it'll just take a hell of a lot of time. Probably years, which we don't have.

In the right corner of the main observation port a tiny burst of light ignites. Here and gone in a flash. And that's the end of our main computer. I lean my head back against the headrest and stare up at the ceiling. It's eerie in the dark. The only light comes from the far off sun through the bow porthole, which takes up most of the front wall. All the consoles stand dark and silent. It's the silence though that gets to me most. You don't realize how accustomed, how reliant you are on those sounds until they're gone. With nothing to fill the empty space my head fills with dark thoughts.

What if they do mutiny? Maybe it would be better. Anyone in charge would be better than me.

There's a loud screech behind me, I turn to see Hartley manually pumping the bridge door open. He locks the door in the open position and we stare at each other from across the bridge. He's outlined by the green emergency lights lining the hall. I feel like I've been caught sneaking pudding from the mess after hours.

"Why'd you turn the emergency lights off?" He stomps onto the bridge. I like the guy, but sometimes Hartley is too much Hartley for my liking. He's loud, arrogant, and obnoxious, not to mention the slowest eater I've ever encountered.

I shrug.

He slaps me on the side of my head. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself."

"I'm not." I sink lower in the command chair. "I'm regrouping and coming up with a killer plan to get us moving again."

Hartley sucks on his lips staring out at the expanse of stars before us. I hope he's about to say he has an idea. But he shrugs and walks toward the observation port. "The main computer is gone."

"I know. I saw." I bite at the cuticle of my thumb, debating if I want to ask my next question. I've never been one to shy away from bad news, but the longer I hold off from knowing, the longer the panic stays off shore. I sigh and ask. It's better to know. "How long do we have until we run out of emergency systems?"

Hartley leans his forehead against the thick metallic glass. "Depends on a lot of variables. Each system uses a different amount of power and then on top of that, each system is taxed different. For instance—"

"Hartley?"

"Yeah?" He turns. There's a slump in his shoulders that isn't normally there. And I know if I could see him better I'd see stress lines along his forehead.

"Give me the worst case scenario. I want to have a solution in place before that happens."

He doesn't hesitate. "Two days."

Shit.

"What if we send a team out to unfurl the sails manually? Can we pull in more energy, buy us some time?"

"The energy conversion system isn't an essential. Even if we could get the sails open, there's no way to convert that energy to power our systems."

"What about rigging something from the escape pods? They're built to be self contained."

He shakes his head. "Ash, that's like trying to squeeze a soccer ball through a grey water pipe."

"Women do it every day. It's called giving birth."

He rolls his eyes. "We'd blow the converter in two seconds."

I bolt out of the command chair. There has to be something. "Work with me, Hartley. I'm bouncing ideas back and forth only you keep dropping the pass."

"All right. I think we should take the escape pods and land on the planet."

I'm shaking my head before he's even finished. "No. We're not abandoning the Persephone. We'd have no way of getting back up here. We'd be stranding the crew on the planet for the rest of their lives."

He laughs. It sounds strange in the silence and dark of the bridge, like it came from somewhere else. Another time when things weren't so shitty. "That was the whole idea of this mission. To find a planet and settle there."

"Not as a last resort. We'd have nothing. You were on the planet, we are so not prepared to live the hunter gatherer life." I do a brief tally in my head of the number of times I almost died on the planet in a few days. I'm close to double digits. "That's a suicide mission."

"Our ship is sinking. If we don't abandon it, we'll go down with it. And we wouldn't have nothing. There are systems we can take with us that we can eventually use to convert solar power to energy. We have brains and each other, we'll survive."

"Not all of us."

It's a sobering thought, but true. Inevitably, as we learn how to live in a totally different environment than any of us are used to, there will be casualties. That's what happens when you take a group of people, most of whom have never even been on a planet, and drop them into a foreign world.

"No. Not all of us. But most of us would survive. We'd find a place as far away as possible from the avians and start a new life."

"And the avians? Are our lives more important than theirs? You know what will happen, eventually we'll force them into extinction. Jordan didn't want this."

"The captain's not here. You are. It's your decision."

It may be my decision, but the only thing that keeps going through my mind is what would Jordan do in this situation? She wouldn't just let the crew die. And then I have an idea. "Is it possible to put the ship into hibernation? We could bring supplies with us to build a new quantum computer and rig the escape pods to get us back to the ship."

"That could take years."

Jordan doesn't have years. But maybe I could rig an escape pod to navigate and go in search of her myself. Before I have a chance to expand this plan, the ship lists.

I seize the arm rest of the command chair and hang on as the we tilt, and keep tilting until we're almost standing on the ceiling. Hartley slides along the wall and hits the navigation console with a dull thud.

"What the hell was that?" I ask.

"I think we just lost stabilizers."

"You said two days was worst case scenario until we started losing back up emergency systems."

"I also said there was no way to know for sure. The stabilizers must have needed more energy than the others. These systems are not meant to be used at the same time."

"Okay. Go see if you can bring them back online. I'm going to prepare us for evacuation to the planet. We need to bring everything we'll need to survive, plus equipment to make it back here and get the Persephone up and running again."

Hartley nods and scrambles along the ceiling, holding onto different stations, to get off the bridge.

It wasn't the emergency stabilizers. Sure they went off line, that's what caused us to list. It's why we're still adrift, alternating between upside down and leaning to port. But they were just a side effect.

We missed a bomb.

Sarka had planted a bomb in the waste management system. You don't realize how important that system is until it's spewing grey water through vacuum tubes all over the ship. It's also got a fail safe that opens vents to divert that water off the ship because too much water is dangerous on a ship. And that's why we listed. There wasn't enough power for the ship's stabilizers to compensate for all that extra strain as the water rushed through the corridors pooling against the port side bulkheads.

I hope to God Jordan never sees her ship like this. I've turned it into a foul useless heap of junk.

Our current goal is to prepare for evacuation. I had expected the crew to be upset. To demand we do everything we could to save her and go after Jordan, but most have realized what I refuse to admit. We need to think about saving ourselves. We're in no position to rescue Jordan. I don't want to believe that so I'm making my own preparations. I'm going to go after her myself. The crew will be fine on their own. In fact, they'll probably be better off without me to fuck everything up.

As I'm stocking my escape pod I feel someone hovering behind me. I assume it's Hartley, but when I turn around, I find QuinnYakovich leaning against the wall watching me. Her leg is still in a heavy duty brace from when she broke it on the planet.

"Going a little overboard on that one aren't you?" She points to several large bins strapped to the cargo hooks in back of the pod. They're filled with a bunch of tins of tofuloaf—the food that the crew felt wasn't worth bringing—and back up oxygen and a small generator to keep the pod going.

"You've been on the planet. What would you consider overboard?" Things have been frosty with Yakovich since we left her behind to die on the planet. That's how I feel about it. Jordan would say we had no choice. The avians captured us and left her, with a broken leg and no way to defend herself in a harsh jungle. She wasn't worth the effort apparently. I can understand how she feels. She should be pissed.

Sarka found her and brought her back on board. That should endear the man to me a little. But it doesn't. Not even a little. He only did it because he thought she'd be on his side. But she turned on him, so now I'm left wondering where her loyalties lay.

"Listen, Quinn. About what happened—"

She waves my words away with her hand. "I know you guys would've taken me if you could. I'm not an idiot. I don't blame you for leaving me." She scrubs at her shaved head. "I'm sure as shit happy I didn't end up dead in a humid as fuck jungle, but I know it wasn't your fault if I had."

I nod but don't say anything. We've lost too many people in the past month, you'd think I'd be numb to it by now. But if anything it makes me appreciate how fragile everything really is. And also how crazy we are to be doing this. Anything can happen. One tiny mistake and we could all die. Humans have been testing the boundaries of space for hundreds of years. The casualties are high. Since humans first started exploring space in the mid twentieth century, thousands have died. In the first hundred not many, even though it seems more dangerous, but that's only because the science was young. But as we started colonizing the moon and building stations around other planets and their satellites, the casualties grew. Since we've migrated to the Belt the numbers have become unacceptable.

"Do you need help?" She points to the rest of the bins I'm trying to stuff into the tiny escape pod. "I'm assuming you're going after the captain."

I freeze. Have I been that obvious? Do other crew members know?

"If I was in your place I'd be doing the same thing. It's not really the Persephone without the captain here." She pauses for a second to think about that. "That is if we ever make it back."

"We'll make it back. We have to."

"How will you know? You'll be floating dead somewhere in space in this piece of shit." She points to my escape pod.

"You just said this is exactly what you'd do."

"I didn't say it was the smart thing. But fact is, we'll be on the planet and you'll be out there somewhere. What if you do find her. Is she still alive? The escape pod she left in has already run out of air by now."

I've been trying desperately not to think about that.

"But of course she must have been picked up by one of the many many ships in this system."

"Are you trying to talk me out of going?"

"Of course not. I think it's great going after the captain. I mean, it's not like they create contingency plans for things like that. The crew will be fine without you. I'm sure Hartley will have no problem keeping everyone in line."

"I see what you're doing. You're trying to make me doubt this plan."

She holds up her hands and backs away. "Not at all. Knowing you, you've thought this through and your mind is made up. I wouldn't dream of changing it." She turns to leave and even makes it a few feet before she stops. "Although I thought you'd like to know that Hartley put Vasa in charge of packing our communications gear."

"What?" Vasa has been confined to his cabin since we discovered that he was behind the last attack on me. Why would Hartley trust him with something so important?

"Just thought you should know," she says and walks away.

Goddamn it.

As I set my manifest down on a container to go look for Hartley and kick some sense into that thick head, the ship shutters. This isn't like before. It's much more subtle like passing through a tunnel on one of the maglevs back home. But then another shutter, much more serious than the last, stops me from going for Hartley. Instead I'm heading in the opposite direction looking for a porthole.

I climb down two decks to the running track. The three hundred and sixty window span will give me the best view. I stop frozen at the doorway. Instead of stars and a green and blue planet with purple haze, I see darkness. At first I think everything's vanished, like Jordan and Sarka. But as I run to the window patterns and lights come into focus. I see windows and decks and if I crane my neck up there are two green fluid arms connecting us to this contraption.

It looks like we've been sucked inside of another ship.

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