Adrift

by Rob Boffard

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi; Space Exploration

Synopsis

"An edge-of-the-seat epic of survival and adventure in deep space." - Gareth L. Powell, BSFA Award-Winning author Sigma Station. The ultimate luxury hotel, in the far reaches of space. For one small group, a tour of the Horsehead Nebula is meant to be a short but stunning highlight in the trip of a lifetime. But when a mysterious ship destroys Sigma Station and everyone on it, suddenly their tourist shuttle is stranded. They have no weapons. No food. No water. No one back home knows they're alive. And the mysterious ship is hunting them. For more from Rob Boffard, check out: The Outer Earth Trilogy Tracer Zero - G Impact Outer Earth (Omnibus Edition)

Release date: June 5, 2018

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 421

Sample

Rainmaker’s heads-up display is a nightmare.

The alerts are coming faster than she can dismiss them. Lock indicators. Proximity warnings. Fuel signals. Created by her neurochip, appearing directly in front of her.

The world outside her fighter’s cockpit is alive, torn with streaking missiles and twisting ships. In the distance, a nuke detonates against a frigate, a baby sun tearing its way into life. The Horsehead Nebula glitters behind it.

Rainmaker twists her ship away from the heatwave, making it dance with precise, controlled thoughts. As she does so, she gets a full view of the battle: a thousand Frontier Scorpion fighters, flipping and turning and destroying each other in an arena bordered by the hulking frigates.

The Colony forces thought they could hold the area around Sigma Orionis—they thought they could take control of the jump gate and shut down all movement into this sector. They didn’t bank on an early victory at Proxima freeing up a third of the Frontier Navy, and now they’re backed into a corner, fighting like hell to stay alive.

Maybe this’ll be the battle that does it. Maybe this is the one that finally stops the Colonies for good.

Rainmaker’s path has taken her away from the main thrust of the battle, out towards the edge of the sector. Her targeting systems find a lone enemy: a black Colony fighter, streaking towards her. She’s about to fire when she stops, cutting off the thought.

Something’s not right.

“Control, this is Rainmaker.” Despite the chaos, her voice is calm. “I have locked on incoming. Why’s he alone? Over.”

The reply is clipped and urgent. “Rainmaker, this is Frontier Control: evade, evade, evade. Do not engage. You have multiple bogies closing in on your six. They’re trying to lock the door on you, over.”

Rainmaker doesn’t bother to respond. Her radar systems were damaged earlier in the fight, and she has to rely on Control for the bandits she can’t see. She breaks her lock, twisting her craft away as more warnings bloom on her console. “Twin, Blackbird, anybody. I’ve got multiples inbound, need a pickup, over.”

The sarcastic voice of one of her wingmen comes over the comms. “Can’t handle ’em yourself? I’m disappointed.”

“Not a good time, Omen,” she replies, burning her thrusters. “Can you help me or not? Over.”

“Negative. Got three customers to deal with over here. Get in line.”

A second, older voice comes over her comms. “Rainmaker, this is Blackbird. What’s your twenty? Over.”

Her neurochip recognises the words, both flashing up the info on her display and automatically sending it to Blackbird’s. “Quadrant thirty-one,” she says anyway, speaking through gritted teeth.

“Roger,” says Blackbird. “I got ’em. Just sit tight. I’ll handle it for y—. Shit, I’m hit! I—”

“Eric!” Rainmaker shouts Blackbird’s real name, her voice so loud it distorts the channel. But he’s already gone. An impactor streaks past her, close enough for her to see the launch burns on its surface.

“Control, Rainmaker,” she says. “Confirm Blackbird’s position, I’ve lost contact!”

Control doesn’t reply. Why would they? They’re fighting a thousand fires at once, advising hundreds of Scorpion fighters. Forget the callsigns that command makes them use: Blackbird is a number to them, and so is she, and unless she does something right now, she’s going to join him.

She twists her ship, forcing the two chasing Colony fighters to face her head-on. They’re a bigger threat than the lone one ahead. Now, they’re coming in from her eleven and one o’clock, curving towards her, already opening fire. She guns the ship, aiming for the tiny space in the middle, racing to make the gap before their impactors close her out.

“Thread the needle,” she whispers. “Come on, thread the needle, thr—”

Everything freezes.

The battle falls silent.

And a blinking-red error box appears above one of the missiles.

“Oh. Um.” Hannah Elliott’s voice cuts through the silence. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. One second.”

The box goes away—only to reappear a split second later, like a fly buzzing back to the place it was swatted. This time, the simulation gives a muted ding, as if annoyed that Hannah can’t grasp the point.

She rips the slim goggles from her head. She’s not used to them—she forgot to put her lens in after she woke up, which meant she had to rely on the VR room’s antiquated backup system. A strand of her long red hair catches on the strap, and she has to yank it loose, looking down at the ancient console in front of her.

“Sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” she says again. “Won’t be a minute.”

Her worried face is reflected on the dark screen, her freckles making her look even younger than she is. She uses her finger this time, stabbing at the box’s confirm button on the small access terminal on the desk. It comes back with a friend, a second, identical error box superimposed over the first. Beyond it, an impactor sits frozen in Rainmaker’s viewport.

“Sorry.” Stop saying sorry. She tries again, still failing to bring up the main menu. “It’s my first day.”

Stony silence. The twenty tourists in the darkened room before her are strapped into reclining motion seats with frayed belts. Most have their eyes closed, their personal lenses still displaying the frozen sim. A few are blinking, looking faintly annoyed. One of them, an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard, catches Hannah’s eye with a scowl.

She looks down, back at the error boxes. She can barely make out the writing on them—the VR’s depth of field has made the letters as tiny as the ones on the bottom line of an eye chart.

She should reset the sim. But how? Does that mean it will start from scratch? Can she fast-forward? The supervisor who showed it to her that morning was trying to wrangle about fifteen new tour guides, and the instructions she gave amounted to watching the volume levels and making sure none of the tourists threw up when Rainmaker turned too hard.

Hannah gives the screen an experimental tap, and breathes a sigh of relief when a menu pops up: a list of files. There. Now she just has to—

But which one is it? The supervisor turned the sim on, and Hannah doesn’t know which file she used. Their names are meaningless.

She taps the first one. Bouncy music explodes from the room’s speakers, loud enough to make a couple of the tourists jump. She pulls the goggles back on, to be greeted by an animated, space-suited lizard firing lasers at a huge, tentacled alien. A booming voice echoes across the music. “Adventurers! Enter the world of Reptar as he saves the galaxy from—”

Hannah stops Reptar saving the galaxy. In the silence that follows, she can feel her cheeks turning red.

She gives the screen a final, helpless look, and leaps to her feet. She’ll figure this out. Somehow. They wouldn’t have given her this job if they didn’t think she could deal with the unexpected.

“OK!” She claps her hands together. “Sorry for the mix-up. I think there’s a bit of a glitch in the old sim there.”

Her laugh gets precisely zero reaction. Swallowing, she soldiers on.

“So, as you saw, that was the Battle of Sigma Orionis, which took place fifteen years ago, which would be …” She thinks hard. “2157, in the space around the hotel we’re now in. Hopefully our historical sim gave you a good idea of the conditions our pilots faced—it was taken directly from one of their neurochip feeds.

“Coincidentally, the battle took place almost exactly a hundred years after we first managed to send a probe through a wormhole, which, as you … which fuelled the Great Expansion, and led to the permanent, long-range gates, like the one you came in on.”

“We know,” says the man with the salt-and-pepper beard. He reminds Hannah of a particularly grumpy high school teacher she once had. “It was in the intro you played us.”

“Right.” Hannah nods, like he’s made an excellent point. She’d forgotten about the damn intro video, her jump-lag from the day before fuzzing her memory. All she can remember is a voiceover that was way, way too perky for someone discussing a battle as brutal as Sigma Orionis.

She decides to keep going. “So, the … the Colonies lost that particular fight, but the war actually kept going for five years after the Frontier captured the space around Sigma.”

They know this already, too. Why is she telling them? Heat creeps up her cheeks, a sensation she does her best to ignore.

“Anyway, if you’ve got any questions about the early days of the Expansion, while we were still constructing the jump gates, then I’m your girl. I actually did my dissertation on—”

Movement, behind her. She turns to see one of the other tour guides, a big dude with a tribal tattoo poking out of the collar of his red company shirt.

“Oh, thank God,” Hannah hisses at him. “Do you know how to fix the sim?”

He ignores her. “OK, folks,” he says to the room, smooth and loud. “That concludes our VR demonstration. Hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them while our next group of guests are getting set up.”

Before Hannah can say anything, he turns to her, his smile melting away. “Your sim slot was over five minutes ago. Get out of here.”

He bends down, and with an effortless series of commands, resets the simulator. As the tourists file out, the bearded man glances at her, shaking his head.

Hannah digs in her back pocket, her face still hot and prickly. “Sorry. The sim’s really good, and I got kind of wrapped up in it, so …” She says the words with a smile, which fades as the other guide continues to ignore her.

She doesn’t even know what she’s doing—the sim wasn’t good. It was creepy. Learning about a battle was one thing—actually being there, watching people get blown to pieces …

Sighing, she pulls her crumpled tab out of her pocket and unfolds it. Her schedule is faithfully written out on it, copied off her lens—a habit she picked up when she was a kid, after her mom’s lens glitched and they missed a swimming trial. “Can you tell me how to get to the dock?”

The other guide glances at the outdated tab, his mouth forming a moue of distaste. “There should be a map on your lens.”

“Haven’t synced it to the station yet.” She’s a little too embarrassed to tell him that it’s still in its solution above the tiny sink in her quarters, and she forgot to go back for it before her shift started.

She would give a kidney to go back now, and not just for the lens. Her staff cabin might be small enough for her to touch all four walls at once without stretching, but it has a bed in it. With sheets. They might be scratchy and thin and smell of bleach, but the thought of pulling them over her head and drifting off is intoxicating.

The next group is pushing inside the VR room, clustered in twos and threes, eyeing the somewhat threadbare motion seats. The guide has already forgotten Hannah, striding towards the incoming tourists, booming a welcome.

“Thanks for your help,” Hannah mutters, as she slips out of the room.

The dock. She was there yesterday, wasn’t she? Coming off the intake shuttle. How hard could it be to find a second time? She turns right out of the VR room, heading for where she thinks the main station atrium is. According to her tab, she isn’t late, but she picks up her pace all the same.

The wide, gently curved walkway is bordered by a floor-to-ceiling window taller than the house Hannah grew up in. The space is packed with more tourists. Most of them are clustered at the apex, admiring the view dominated by the Horsehead Nebula.

Hannah barely caught a glimpse when they arrived last night, which was filled with safety briefings and room assignments and roster changes and staff canteen conversations that were way too loud. She had sat at a table to one side, both hoping that someone would come and talk to her, and hoping they wouldn’t.

In the end, with something like relief, she’d managed to slink off for a few hours of disturbed sleep.

The station she’s on used to be plain old Sigma XV—a big, boring, industrial mining outpost that the Colony and the Frontier fought over during the war. They still did mining here—helium-3, mostly, for fusion reactors—but it was now also known as the Sigma Hotel and Luxury Resort.

It always amazed Hannah just how quickly it had all happened. It felt like the second the war ended, the tour operators were lobbying the Frontier Senate for franchise rights. Now, Sigma held ten thousand tourists, who streamed in through the big jump gate from a dozen different worlds and moons, excited to finally be able to travel, hoping for a glimpse of the Neb.

Like the war never happened. Like there weren’t a hundred different small conflicts and breakaway factions still dotted across both Frontier and Colonies. The aftershocks of war, making themselves known.

Not that Sigma Station was the only one in on the action. It was happening everywhere—apparently there was even a tour company out Phobos way that took people inside a wrecked Colony frigate which hadn’t been hauled back for salvage yet.

As much as Hannah feels uncomfortable with the idea of setting up a hotel here, so soon after the fighting, she needs this job. It’s the only one her useless history degree would get her, and at least it means that she doesn’t have to sit at the table at her parents’ house on Titan, listening to her sister talk about how fast her company is growing.

The walkway she’s on takes a sharp right, away from the windows, opening up into an airy plaza. The space is enormous, climbing up ten whole levels. A glittering light fixture the size of a truck hangs from the ceiling, and in the centre of the floor there’s a large fountain, fake marble cherubs and dragons spouting water streams that criss-cross in midair.

The plaza is packed with more tourists, milling around the fountain or chatting on benches or meandering in and out of the shops and restaurants that line the edges. Hannah has to slow down, sorry-ing and excuse-me-ing her way through.

The wash of sensations almost overwhelms her, and she can’t help thinking about the sheets again. White. Cool. Light enough to slide under and—

No. Come on. Be professional.

Does she go left from here, or is it on the other side of the fountain? Recalling the station map she looked at while they were jumping is like trying to decipher something in Sanskrit. Then she sees a sign above one of the paths leading off the plaza. Ship Dock B. That’s the one.

Three minutes later, she’s there. The dock is small, a spartan mustering area with four gangways leading out from the station to the airlock berths. There aren’t many people around, although there are still a few sitting on benches. One of them, a little girl, is asleep: curled up with her hands tucked between shoulder and cheek, legs pulled up to her chest. Her mom—or the person Hannah thinks is her mom—sits next to her, blinking at something on her lens.

There are four tour ships visible through the glass, brightly lit against the inky black. Hannah’s been on plenty of tours, and she still can’t help thinking that every ship she’s ever been on is ugly as hell. She’s seen these ones before: they look like flattened, upside-down elephant droppings, a bulbous protrusion sticking out over each of the cockpits.

Hannah jams her hand in her jeans pocket for the tab. She wrote the ship’s name for the shift in tiny capitals next to the start time: RED PANDA. Her gaze flicks between the four ships, but it takes her a second to find the right one. The name is printed on the side in big, stencilled letters, with a numbered designation in smaller script underneath.

She looks from the Panda to its gangway. Another guide is making his way onto it. He’s wearing the same red shirt as her, and he has the most fantastic hair: a spiked purple mohawk at least a foot high.

Her tab still in hand, she springs onto the gangway. “Hey!” she says, forcing a confidence she doesn’t feel into her voice. “I’m on for this one. Anything I need to know?”

Mohawk guy glances over his shoulder, an expression of bored contempt on his face. He keeps walking, his thick black boots booming on the metal plating.

“Um. Hi?” Hannah catches up to him. “I think this one’s mine?”

She tries to slip past him, but he puts up a meaty hand, blocking her path. “Nice try, rook,” he says, that bored look still on his face. “You’re late. Shift’s mine.”

“What are you talking about?” She swipes a finger across her tab, hunting for the little clock.

“Don’t you have a lens?”

This time it takes Hannah a lot more effort to stay calm. “There,” she says, pointing at her schedule. “I’m not late. I’m supposed to be on at eleven, and it’s …” she finds the clock in the corner of her tab. “Eleven-o-two.”

“My lens says eleven-o-six. Anyway, you’re still late. I get the shift.”

“What? No. Are you serious?”

He ignores her, resuming his walk towards the airlock. As he does, Hannah remembers the words from the handbook the company sent her before she left Titan: Guides who are late for their shift will lose it. Please try not to be late!!!

He can’t do this. He can’t. But who are the crew chiefs going to believe? The new girl? She’ll lose a shift on her first day, which means she’s already in the red, which means that maybe they don’t keep her past her probation. A free shuttle ride back to Titan, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

Anger replaces panic. This might not be her dream job, but it’s work, and at the very least it means she’s going somewhere with her life. She can already see the faces of her parents when she tells them she lost her job, and that is not going to happen. Not ever.

“Is that hair growing out of your ears, too?” she says, more furious than she’s been in a long time. “I said I’m here. It’s my shift.”

He turns to look at her, dumbfounded. “What did you just say?”

Hannah opens her mouth to return fire, but nothing comes out.

Her mom and dad would know. Callista definitely would. Her older sister would understand exactly how to smooth things over, make this asshole see things her way. Then again, there’s no way either her parents or Callie would ever have taken a job like this, so they wouldn’t be in this situation. They’re not here now, and they can’t help her.

“It’s all right, Donnie,” says a voice.

Hannah and Mohawk guy—Donnie—turn to see the supervisor walking up. She’s a young woman, barely older than Hannah, with a neat bob of black hair and a pristine red shirt. Hannah remembers meeting her last night, for about two seconds, but she’s totally blanking on her name. Her gaze automatically goes to the woman’s breast pocket, and she’s relieved to see a badge: Atsuke.

“Come on, boss,” Donnie says. “She was late.” He glances at Hannah, and the expression on his face clearly says that he’s just getting started.

“I seem to remember you being late on your first day.” Atsuke’s voice is pleasant and even, like a newsreader’s.

“And,” Donnie says, as if Atsuke hadn’t spoken. “She was talking bakwas about my hawk. Mad disrespectful. I’ve been here a lot longer than she has, and I don’t see why—”

“Well, to be fair, Donnie, your hair is pretty stupid. Not to mention against regs. I’ve told you that, like, ten times.”

Donnie stares at her, shoulders tight. In response, Atsuke raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow.

He lets out a disgusted sigh, then shoves past them. “You got lucky, rook,” he mutters, as he passes Hannah.

Her chest is tight, like she’s just run a marathon, and she exhales hard. “Thank you so much,” she says to Atsuke. “I’m really sorry I was late—I thought I had enough time to—”

“Hey.” Atsuke puts a hand on her shoulder. “Take a breath. It’s fine.”

Hannah manages a weak smile. Later, she is going to buy Atsuke a drink. Multiple drinks.

“It’s an easy one today,” Atsuke says. “Eight passengers. Barely a third of capacity. Little bit about the station, talk about the war, the treaty, what we got, what the Colonies got, the role Sigma played in everything, get them gawking at the Neb … twenty minutes, in and out. Square?”

She looks down at Hannah’s tab, then glances up with a raised eyebrow.

“My lens is glitching,” Hannah says.

“Right.” This time, Atsuke looks a little less sure. She reaches in her shirt pocket, and hands Hannah a tiny clip-on mic. “Here. Links to the ship automatically. You can pretty much just start talking. And listen: just be cool. Go do this one, and then there’ll be a coffee waiting for you when you get back.”

Forget the drink. She should take out another loan, buy Atsuke shares in the touring company. “I will. I mean, yeah. You got it.”

Atsuke gestures to the airlock at the far end of the gangway. “Get going. And if Volkova gives you any shit, just ignore her. Have fun.”

Hannah wants to ask who Volkova is, but Atsuke is already heading back, and Hannah doesn’t dare follow. She turns, and marches as fast she can towards the Red Panda’s airlock.

“Mom, check out that star!”

Corey Livingstone leans way back, pointing straight up through the tour ship’s viewing dome. The star is the lone red one in a black void filled with thousands of dim, white pinpricks. It’s just beyond the other ships cruising above their docking station. He can see himself there, too, reflected in the glass, the Apex Space logo on his white T-shirt just visible. And he can see the top of his mom’s head, which means she either didn’t hear him, or is pretending not to.

“It’s not a star.” Malik sounds bored, his eyes fixed on his hologram in front of him. “Just a mining ship.”

“How do you know? You didn’t even look.”

Malik shrugs. Like always, he has the movie editor open on the holo—Corey can see footage of their dad on the diving board of the hotel pool, running on a silent, three-second loop. No sooner do his feet leave the board than he’s back on the edge, right foot forward, making the jump, over and over again.

Corey wrinkles his nose. Malik is fifteen, only five years older than him, but sometimes he acts like he’s thirty. And, of course, he thinks he’s so bàng because he uses outdated tech like the hand-held holocam, a stick of black plastic with a big hologram display floating above it. He claims it’s because it has better image quality than his lens, which isn’t true. Malik is only doing it because Shanti Evans at school did it first.

He looks back up through the dome. “Mom, you see it?”

“In a second, honey,” Anita Livingstone says, not looking at him. She and his dad, Everett, are arguing about the return tickets. Again. They’re doing that weird thing where they both speak quietly without looking at each other. Their index fingers are touching, linking their lenses, which they wouldn’t even have to do if they’d just let them all get neurochips like everyone else. His mom had the thirty-day trial shot last year, which she claimed gave her a headache, and that was the end of that discussion.

“No, seriously, check it out,” Corey says. “Is that Phobos-B? I think it might be, but I don’t know if—”

“Dad.” Malik doesn’t look up. “Could you tell him to go bother someone else please?”

“But, Dad, look, it’s—”

“Very nice, Corey,” his dad says, glancing up towards the dome for perhaps a third of a second. As always, he’s wearing an old denim shirt and faded jeans, although at least he didn’t bring his nasty work shoes on this trip, with their spatters of reactor sealant. He squints, frowning at something on his lens. “They’re supposed to be here,” he says. “The station cloud should have them.”

“Well, it obviously doesn’t.” His mom drops her finger from his. She’s wearing a green shirt, unbuttoned, over a tank top and slim pants.

“But they were there when we checked in. I even said …”

Corey’s finger wavers, then drops. He slouches in the bucket seat, one of about two dozen on the tour ship’s main deck.

His gaze drifts to the ships crossing above them. Antares D6 cruiser, cold fusion drive, three hundred crew capacity. AI-controlled, minimal range. A big cargo carrier slides into view, and Corey blanks for a second before the answer comes—of course it does, it’s on the big poster on his wall at home showing all the main Frontier ships, upper left corner. Vector Leviathan. Got a hold big enough to take an entire squadron of Scorpion fighters.

His imagination lights up with scenes of a quiet cargo hold, the fighters stacked like toys, flight-suit-clad pilots waiting silently for their go signal. Fat chance. These days, it’s probably just hauling asteroid slag or something. That’s what a lot of the old combat carriers are doing—getting rented out to the big companies as freighters. It’s kind of sad, even though it’s still pretty crash seeing one up close.

At the edge of the dome, he can just see the tip of the Horsehead Nebula, a tight cluster of stars that glow like a fistful of diamonds. Corey lingers on them for a second, then looks back at the cargo carrier.

The Neb is amazing, but once you’d been looking at it for a week solid, you kind of got over it. And it was just getting to that point of the trip where they’d run out of stuff to do, which was why they were on this lame tour in the first place.

Man, he’s looking forward to going back to Earth.

Sigma was pretty cool—at first, anyway. It was the only place in the whole Frontier that you could actually get a good look at the Neb, and getting here had felt like an actual adventure. There’s only one jump gate—the other one got blown up in the war—and it cost a lot to get this far out. It’s weird how people can invent something as amazing as a jump gate network, and then spend almost thirty years fighting over it and blowing it up, but whatever.

They’d gone swimming, and eaten in some OK restaurants, and—of course—spent hours looking at the Neb from every angle they could. The only time he’d been really bored was when Mom and Dad had sent them to some dumb kids evening, where a bunch of the staff did this really embarrassing play with audience participation.

They’d almost called on Corey, but if there was one advantage of the growth spurt that had propelled Malik to nearly six feet, it was that Corey could hide behind him when he had to. He still couldn’t wait until he got his own spurt—he hated his body, hated his pudgy five-foot frame and his stupid hair that his mom wouldn’t let him get cornrows in, like Malik had.

He hadn’t wanted to go to the kids’ thing—he doesn’t even like thinking of himself as a kid—but Mom and Dad said they wanted some alone time. That meant s-e-x, but when they got back to the room it didn’t smell like s-e-x. It didn’t smell like anything.

What if the Vector did have a fighter or two in the hold? One they hadn’t decommissioned yet? Maybe if he was nice to Mom and Dad, they’d let him go ask. Maybe whoever owned the Vector would let him sit in a Scorpion fighter cockpit—he’d done that once, in the Frontier War Museum on Europa, and it was awesome. Totally zhen.

Besides, what if aliens attacked the station or something? They’d need somebody to fight them off, and he could definitely fly one of the Scorpions, if he had to. Well, they wouldn’t let him, not at first, but if all the other pilots got blown up, and there was one ship left … He smirks as he imagines his brother filming him doing it, swooping back and forth. Much better than their dad on a stupid diving board.

He’ll have to time it right. No point asking while Mom and Dad are like this. Maybe later, when they’re back in the room …

The ship rumbles, jerking him out of his thoughts. He shifts on the uncomfortable seat, folding his arms, his gaze tracking back to the red star. Malik was right (not that he’d ever admit it—he’d rather get called on at the kids’ evening). It is a ship, the shape starting to form as it closes on the station. Probably just another Antares.

The tour ship they’re on is old. Really old. They came in through the airlock in the bar on the lower level, and most of the lights were off, which meant his mom nearly lost her balance on the stairs. Corey doesn’t know why. They’ve been on a bunch of these ships before, and they’re all identical. Same bar, same stairs leading to a big main deck on the upper level, same grimy walls. Same rows of scratched and dented plastic bucket seats, bolted to the floor. Each of the rows has seats back-to-back, which is annoying, because you’re always bumping someone’s head when you tilt yours up. There aren’t any safety straps on the seats, although Corey can see the brackets for them. Either they took them out, or never bothered to put them in in the first place.

Without even trying, Corey can picture the layout of the rest of the ship in his head. Cockpit in front of the main deck, with a small passage leading to it. Bathroom under the stairs in the bar. The rest of the lower level taken up by astronautics and the fusion engine—you can’t get there through the bar, but there’s a trapdoor on the floor of the main deck, just off to his right.

There’s an escape pod at the back of the m