“ALL SYSTEMS ARE go for launch. Over.”
Strapped in, on my back, looking straight up into the sky—if the sky were a curve of metal instead of atmosphere, and the twinkling status readouts from the instrument panels were stars.
We’d been sitting here for two and a half hours already, going through endless rounds of safety checks, but to me it had felt like nothing. I had no fear, just an urgent desire for liftoff.
Okay, so maybe there was a little fear.
The official line was that we had only a certain window of time for the launch, to coordinate with local weather patterns and the gravity well of the moon—that was the reason for the night launch. The launchpad was lit by so many stadium lights it was like a hundred miniature suns bearing down on us, but outside of the pad was utter darkness and quiet.
Night launch meant secrecy. Obviously they weren’t going to be able to keep the noise a secret, but as long as no one saw the ship, they could pass it off as a routine satellite launch.
I’d been to a few launches as a kid. This time there were no crowds in lawn chairs and bleachers to watch. No press conference. No press at all. Only one picture of the crew before takeoff. The official photographer showed it to us after he’d taken it, and no one was smiling. There were no mission patches, no names on suits.
In all the launches I’d ever been to, the mood had been excited, jubilant. Command and crew spoke over the radio conversationally, spoke as friends, used nicknames and call signs.
This was entirely different. No one was joking to try to lighten the mood. Everyone was somber, resolute. Maybe they were summoning their bravery.
We pulled up to the launchpad. I saw the ghostly white form of the Odysseus for the first time, lit like a massive metal angel in the darkness.
It was shaped roughly like the old space shuttle—aerodynamic, like a plane or a bird. But these wings were short, stubby, rounded. The hull was smooth and unblemished except for a few NASA insignias on the wings. The middle was elongated and bloated, like a huge egg that the ship had swallowed whole. That was the habitation module, where five HHMs waited to insulate us for the long journey. The egg could detach and become an escape pod in an emergency.
The entire ship was encircled by a thick white ring, like a halo of steel. The Alcubierre drive. Which, according to hypothesis, could bend reality and take us to another star.
It was glowing faintly, the shining surface reflecting the bright lights of the launchpad. White vapor was emanating from the boosters like the breath of a sleeping dragon, shrouding Odysseus in a veil of dissipating fog. It looked mystical, magical. Like something from another world.
It had been designed on another world, I reminded myself. And when I woke, I’d be there.
Or maybe that ship was about to be our grave.
I’d stared at it until my eyes unfocused. Odysseus was my destiny. And whether my destiny called for me to make human history or to die trying, I realized it didn’t matter. Either way, I was meant to be on board. Everything from my birth until now had led up to this.
When it was finally my turn to crawl into the launch module, I wasn’t scared anymore.
The voices of multiple levels of command quipped back and forth in my ear, but I had trouble focusing on what they were saying.
In between the preflight checks, a voice would cut in to announce the time remaining. T-minus ten minutes and counting. T-minus five minutes. My limbs were shaking uncontrollably inside my suit as I could do nothing but listen and wait as the rockets below us roared and churned to life. I couldn’t help but think again of being strapped into a living dragon.
Voices in my radio checked and rechecked and confirmed and double-confirmed, endlessly, over and over again, until finally . . .
“T-minus fifteen seconds.” The voice in my comm was male, absurdly calm.
How many times had I watched videos of this online? The last time humans had taken off to a faraway destination, I’d been eight years old, in my pajamas, and watching it live on TV. Sitting in my grandma’s lap while my mom made popcorn in the kitchen.
And now it was happening in real life. To me.
I was strapped in tighter than a race-car driver, wedged in the second row behind Jeong and Bolshakov, pushed against the curved bulkhead on my right, with Copeland and Shaw on my left.
The bright orange, modified Advanced Crew Escape Suits we wore in case we needed emergency ejection were like puffy, extremely expensive exoskeletons. Outside the tiny round window to my right there was nothing but black night and some white drifts of condensed air floating upward from the idling engines below. I did a breathing exercise and I tried to relax. Mission Control was watching our heart rates.
“Ten. Nine. Eight.”
I tried to think of the faces of my family. My friends. Everything I loved on this planet I was about to leave.
“Seven. Six. Five.”
Inside my head was quiet. Inside my chest my heart was stuttering wildly, adrenaline surging in my veins.
“Four. Three. Two.”
The Odysseus began to shake. The dragon roared violently to life.
“One. Liftoff.”
WOOOOOOOMPH!
Four rocket boosters roared with the intensity of thousands of tons of fuel, lifting us off the launchpad with a wall of fire. I was shoved into my chair as if an elephant had dropped onto my chest. My stomach jumped from the turbulence that shook us from side to side.
The rattling was so intense it felt like a separate earthquake inside each of my limbs. I exerted all my energy on inhaling and exhaling, forcing the air in and out of my lungs.
The voices in my ear gave status updates, but it was hard to hear over the roar. In twelve seconds, we’d exceeded a hundred miles per hour. In thirty seconds we were two miles off the ground. Six and a half minutes to reach orbit. I tried not to think of how many things could go catastrophically wrong at any second. But in spite of the danger, my heart swelled. I wanted to laugh from the sheer joy of it. We were doing it. What I’d always imagined, always dreamed, it was happening!
We were already going faster than I’d ever traveled. Higher than any plane I’d ever flown in.
A boom shook the entire craft as we broke the sound barrier. Now I couldn’t lift my arms. Breathing got difficult. The g-forces tripled. My ears popped; my vision spotted.
But I’d practiced this. I knew what to do. I concentrated on my breathing, pushing with my diaphragm, forcing my lungs to open against the multiplied press of gravity. In and out. In and out.
The pressure steadily eased back to normal. We were still speeding away from Earth, but we were escaping gravity, fighting less resistance and needing less forward thrust.
I watched the numbers on the control panel fly upward as we pierced the sky. Thousands of miles per hour and still going up. So unbelievably fast.
Forty miles above Earth now. Nothing below me but a massive column of fire and smoke, a deep ocean of air.
Breathe. Breathe.
The cabin was strangely quiet. We could have been sitting on the tarmac except for the eerie silence that meant we were no longer fighting the atmosphere.
The shaking subsided. The g-load relaxed. I could expand my lungs a little easier.
“Odysseus, negative return,” came the voice in my radio.
Bolshakov responded. “Roger, negative return.”
We’d passed the point of no return. There would be no abort to the launchpad in case an engine failed.
There were a few short back-and-forths from Bolshakov and command, confirming everything was nominal.
And short minutes later, an engine cut off, completely emptied of its tons of fuel. There was a gentle jolt as the booster separated and began its slow fall back to Earth.
We’d done it. We were in space.
My restraints felt suddenly loose. I checked to make sure they were still connected, and realized I was floating a few inches above my seat. Zero-g.
Then Bolshakov again. “Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned off the seat belt sign. You may now move freely about the cabin.”
There were some combined chuckles over the comm as Jeong and Shaw unbuckled beside me. This was like a walk in the park for them. Just another day at work.
“Easy as pie,” Jeong said.
I was frozen in my seat, disbelieving, my body still in shock. That had just happened. It’d been over in minutes. Less than ten minutes. That was all it took to leave Earth below us. It had taken less time to leave Earth than the flight my parents had taken to see me one last time. Less time than it usually took me to drive to school in the morning.
We flew for what felt like ages and, simultaneously, no time at all. The cabin was almost utterly still. We were beyond turbulence now. The forward momentum of the boosters still carried us, even though the boosters were long gone.
“Come on, Cassie. You won’t get this chance for very long,” Shaw said.
I couldn’t get my sausage-glove hands to work. I’d been gripping the armrest so tight my fingers had gone stiff. Shaw had to help me jimmy open the latches. And then I was flying free in the cabin in a rocket far above Earth.
I’d done this before, of course, but only for forty seconds at a time. And the cabin was so much more cramped than the Vomit Comet. I constantly bumped into something or part of somebody else. But what did it matter? I was floating!
I had only a few minutes to enjoy it, before the second set of boosters powered up to send us in the trajectory of our destination—away from the light of our sun, into the vast dark places between the stars.
Then we’d transfer to the habitation module, change out of our protective launch suits into our black honeycomb Space Activity Suits, or SASs, and climb into the HHMs. And once we slept, once we were far enough from Earth to put a buffer of safety between us, the Alcubierre drive would initiate.
And then human history would be made, and laws of physics rewritten.
“Houston, everything still looking good down there?” Copeland asked over the comm.
There was a second of silence where I imagined her voice traveling the many miles down below. “Odysseus, flying beautifully. All systems are go. Second booster separation in three hours. Have a nice flight.”
“Cassie, look.” Shaw was floating over by the bulkhead on the left, motioning with his arm. “You’ve got to see this.”
I pulled myself hand over hand with the grips built into the bulkhead and floated over to see out of the small plexiglass window. We were still so close to Earth that all I could see was a curve of blue that seemed to go on forever, a sea of planet that we were falling into, filling up the entire half of the window. I could see daylight dawning in some part of the world, dazzling sunlight brighter than any light I’d seen in my life. Unfiltered by atmosphere, the sun was pure white, a blinding spotlight in the deepest dark.
The night side of Earth was not dark, but lit with artificial light. The mark of the one planet we knew that held life. But there was another out there, somewhere far, far away—and the five of us would be the first humans to see it. And maybe the last.
For a long time I couldn’t say a word. I could only stare and stare until the image of our world burned into my retinas.
The light from the sun traveled eight minutes to brighten the horizon of our slowly rotating world. I could see the pale blue fuzz where life ended and dead space began, the fragile envelope of atmosphere that protected us from the void. It seemed as thin as a fingernail. My breath caught in my chest and I found myself sending waves of gratitude to whatever miracle had allowed life to flourish in relative safety all these centuries.
Beyond that edge of blue, darkness stretched endlessly in all directions. A thousand lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to explore all that was out there.
“Houston, Odysseus,” Bolshakov said. “Scheduled separation in ten. Nine. Eight.”
Back into our seats, strapped in, still in our bulky escape suits. The last boosters were about to drop away, our last chance to redirect our course in a land without edges. A strange euphoria had come over me. I was feeling light-headed, impervious to danger, impatient for the booster separation to get over with so I could get out of this seat belt again.
“. . . two. One.”
Odysseus trembled as it broke away from the boosters. I was already fumbling with my seat belt latch, ready to be free of it, when the ship rocked, a metallic clang echoed, and the interior lights and holo panels flickered.
My mortality came rushing back to me.
The booster separation in low gravity was so much more dangerous than in the atmosphere—the release mechanism had to push the canisters away from us with enough force that they wouldn’t just hover there beside the ship, unanchored. If they didn’t drop below us, they’d remain in an unstable orbit until eventually falling to Earth.
Or they’d hit us.
“Maneuvering,” Jeong said, her voice taught like a bowstring. Her fingers descended expertly over the controls, twisting the Odysseus using the tiny army of auxiliary boosters—little more than mini shots of air used for fine-tuning our movements.
Nothing I could do except hold my breath and watch the exterior monitors.
The cabin tilted to the right. The exterior cam showed the left booster hadn’t properly disengaged and was hovering exactly where it had been connected. We were moving away from it, but slowly. This ship wasn’t designed to make small, precise movements.
For a few minutes I didn’t breathe, watching the booster inch away. Finally the computer blinked green, showing the booster had cleared.
Everyone seemed to exhale at once.
“Damage?” Bolshakov demanded.
“Minimal,” Jeong said. “Doesn’t look like any critical systems were affected.”
“Let us be more careful in the future,” Bolshakov said, his voice heavy like my father’s when he was upset with me.
“View screen up,” Bolshakov said. The holographic field of instruments over our heads temporarily thinned and became transparent, giving way to a live transmission from the exterior cameras. “Everyone, look. This is the closest humans have been to the moon since the 1970s.”
“Hello, old friend,” I heard Jeong whisper over the radio.
I couldn’t help the smile on my face. The view screen was dominated by a pale disc straight ahead, immeasurably huge and bright. But it wasn’t a disc anymore; it was a giant sphere, a real 3D object. We were so close! The moon had never filled my entire field of vision before. I couldn’t believe how many details I could see from here that were impossible to view from home. It was like I had been nearsighted my entire life, and now I could finally see.
I’m sure Mission Control was taking note of my increased heart rate.
“It’s gorgeous.” The first words I spoke in space. Even my own voice sounded different, not weighted down by gravity.
But we didn’t have all the time in the world. We had forty-five minutes to hang suspended, orbiting Earth, before the ship computer took over and turned on the experimental engines that would take us far away. A few minutes of moon gazing, that was all I got.
“Come on, Cassandra,” Jeong said, her overlarge head bobbing in front of the port toward the habitation module. “Time to go.”
Reluctantly I took one last look at the moon. Bolshakov still sat in his pilot’s chair, gazing at it. He’d remain there as everyone else entered the HHMs one by one, until he was finally all alone. He’d pilot the ship until the last second, when he’d turn it—and all of our lives—over to Sunny, the computer.
We would all be asleep. I guess that’s a good way to die, if you had to choose. Asleep, hanging in space between Earth and the moon.
Not that I planned on dying.
I followed Jeong through the hatch, pulling myself along with conveniently placed handholds. Through the narrow passage, just wide enough to accommodate our bloated, suited selves, and then it opened up to the habitation module. Five silver tubes, seven feet tall, stood in a solemn circle like some new-age Stonehenge.
I felt a stab of cold anxiety. “Is it time? Already?” I asked, even though I knew full well.
“What, you want to go to the bathroom first?” I heard Shaw’s laughter over the comm and thought momentarily about flying over and kicking him. “This is the easy part.”
“You’re not scared, are you?” Copeland asked, floating in behind me. “You were always the best one at this. That’s why you get to go first.”
I sighed. This was where I’d spend who knew how long asleep and floating in muck while a computer controlled whether I lived or died. Who wouldn’t be excited?
No going back now. “Okay, let’s get me out of this thing, then.”
Copeland and Jeong helped lift me out of my suit. No need for it now. If we had to jettison—if, for some reason, the computer found it necessary for us to leave the ship after we’d entered hibernation—the HHMs would be our life support. They would keep us alive as long as Sunny had access to any measurable amount of light.
I shivered as I emerged from the crumpled white cocoon, like a caterpillar in reverse. The air in here was kept in a survivable temperature range, but we were still on the night side of Earth and it was about as cold as a winter basement.
I floated, finally free, in a flight suit that was the only thing keeping heat against my skin. “Okay, I’m ready.”
I stripped off the flight suit, as fast as possible, eager to spend the fewest number of seconds with my arms and legs bare. Jeong and Copeland helped me into the skintight SAS and I was instantly warmed. The material fit like patterned silk against my skin. The suit moved with me, stretching when needed and snapping back into place, allowing me almost perfect dexterity.
Copeland nudged my back gently, sending me careering toward the nearest HHM. I caught myself and eased backward into the upright pod. I tried not to think the word coffin. Copeland settled the narrow helmet over my head and tested the seams to the suit. The oxygen kicked on with an industrial stale scent, like airplane air-conditioning.
“All right so far?” she asked, doctorly concern etched into her knitted brow.
“So far,” I murmured.
She patted my shoulder encouragingly. “You’ve got this.”
Inside the helmet, the neural network descended and threaded through my hair like spaghetti fingers, tickling my scalp. In practice I’d worn a breathing mask and goggles, but now the helmet provided my oxygen and my protection. Sensors inside the HHM monitored and controlled my temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, hormone levels. Together with the neural network, the computer would be able to know everything that was going on inside the tubes. So many variables. So many things to keep in check to maintain homeostasis.
So many things that could go wrong.
The others would get to sleep through it. They would be completely sedated. But I would hover somewhere in between, in a gray space that humans weren’t supposed to live in. Their welfare would be my responsibility.
“Breathe deep and slow,” Copeland said. Her comm was linked to my ear. Her voice was warm and strong, and I took comfort in her composure. “Your heart rate is a little high.”
“Of course it is,” I muttered, hating the way my voice fell flat and full inside of the helmet. Like being locked in a box. “Isn’t yours?”
She smiled without showing teeth. Tense. I saw beads of sweat on her brow. We were all sweating. From excitement, but from fear, too.
Right now there was a fine line between those two emotions.
“All right, looks like you’re good,” Shaw said. He was hovering across the room, looking into the control console. The computer inside had the processing power of a five-year-old human brain—though not the maturity, I hoped—and enough backups and solar batteries to make it effectively immortal, so long as we weren’t stranded in deep space. It would directly interface with my brain through the neural network and keep me updated on the stats of the others. It would watch over us while we slept.
Hopefully, it would keep us alive.
Shaw’s helmet rotated an inch so he could look over his shoulder at me. “Nothing’s gonna go wrong, Cassie. We’ll be awake a few minutes after you go under while we finish setting up the autopilot. We’re here if you should need us.”
“But you won’t,” Copeland said, with finality born of confidence.
“Use this time to try to get acclimated to Sunny,” Jeong said. “I know you’ve worked with her to some extent before, but the longer you’re interfaced, the more you and she will both learn. She adapts to your brain waves over time.”
I flinched as Copeland stuck a needle into my arm—the first of the tubes that would be my umbilical. My digestive system wouldn’t quite work the same way when I was under; the drugs would slow peristalsis to barely more than a ripple. My heart would go sluggish, my conscious brain dim. The things I needed to stay alive would come directly into my veins.
“I’m so ready,” I said, forcing bravado. In reality, I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. “Let’s do this.”
Jeong smiled, a gesture that was supposed to reassure me. “See you soon.” She closed the door with a soft, permanent click.
I was prepared for the gel filling the tube. I had done this already on Earth. What I wasn’t prepared for was the lack of gravity. The gel didn’t sit at my feet and rise; it floated up all around me—solid bubbles, shifting and changing like life-forms.
It was fascinating and strangely beautiful; the light catching, glinting, in the gel bubbles, throwing miniature rainbows that lasted milliseconds. For a few minutes it was like I wasn’t alone in the tube, but accompanied by a few members of a lovely alien species.
Aliens. That was who we were going to meet, why we were taking such risks. I could only hope they were as benevolent as Crane believed.
Eventually the gel bubbles formed conglomerates, until they filled every inch of empty space between me and the cushioned walls. The drugs began to seep into my blood, and as much as I wanted to stay awake and watch the blurry shapes of my human caretakers move about and check on me, I couldn’t fight the cocktail of psychoactives for long.
This is it, I realized, as one by one partitions of my brain signed off. This is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve worked for. I made it. It doesn’t matter what happens after this; I’ll go into eternity with the image of Earth imprinted on my soul.
I tried to call up the image of a friend, of a familiar face, to ease me into sleep. I saw my family, crowded around the phone back at quarantine, smiling with happy tears. Mitsuko, basking in the sun with those giant sunglasses. Emilio, laughing. He always seemed to be laughing.
My eyelids grew as heavy as stones, and finally I let them fall. I heard music in my head, an instinct now as I descended to the place I’d worked so hard to find. Sinking down into the dark, deep ocean. Reaching out with my mind—out to the outer reaches of my conscious self, the nerves firing across synapses and into electrodes, to find the other awareness waiting to be let in.
Sunny. The real Sunny. Full-powered intelligence embedded in the most powerful ship built by humans.
She was there waiting, just on the other side of the door, just beyond the reach of my brain.
I opened the door and let her in.
My mind blinked out like the last light in a window, and it was quiet.
But then a voice—unfamiliar, distant, stilted. Like an echo from the end of a long hallway. The sound wasn’t in my ears. There was a voice in my head that wasn’t my own.
Neural handshake initiated. Loading.
Connection established. System initialized.
Then—
Hello, Cassie.