The Deep Sky

by Yume Kitasei

Genres: Space Exploration

Synopsis

“Sarah Skaer uses her considerable vocal skill to make each crewmember instantly recognizable. Asuka is strongly characterized by her insecurity and self-doubt, though listeners will likely have more faith in her.”- Library Journal

Yume Kitasei's The Deep Sky is an enthralling sci fi thriller debut about a mission into deep space that begins with a lethal explosion that leaves the survivors questioning the loyalty of the crew.

They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first.

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

As the mystery unfolds on the ship, poignant flashbacks reveal how Asuka came to be picked for the mission. Despite struggling through training back on Earth, she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left.

With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

Release date: July 18, 2023

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

THE PHOENIX * 3,980 CYCLES AFTER LAUNCH, B SHIFT

There were many things Asuka did not consider when she agreed to travel from one sun to another. That is, did not allow herself to consider. Like would she miss lying on her back in rough grass, the scent of damp earth in her nose as she scraped her nails against a real, periwinkle sky. Like would missing her brother sometimes still feel like a hole in her gut (she did not miss her mom). Like did she actually want to live the rest of her life jogging the circumference of a spaceship’s habitat wheel like a hamster looking for a missing drill for Lala Williams.

Problem was, Lala’s missing drill could be anywhere. All Lala could tell her was that it had a red handle and that Sam may have borrowed it to fix a shelving unit in Agriculture Module C. But it wasn’t among the plants or trays of soil, and Sam swore that Red had borrowed it after her. Red remembered using it to fix a vents issue before returning it to the Bot Maintenance Shop. Where it definitely wasn’t.

Asuka slowed to a walk.

The thing about saying yes to the first (and probably only) one-way interstellar voyage to settle a new world was that there were no takebacks.

But at least there was DAR, Digitally Augmented Reality, which meant she never had to consider anything she didn’t want to. On Earth, they had had to wear clunky headgear that enabled the wearer to access DAR, but before they’d left, the crew had chips implanted in their temples that could pipe an alternative reality directly into their brains.

So instead of jogging through a spaceship, Asuka hiked along a worn forest trail, ship invisible underneath. The light was a soft, mottled olive. She wore an old pair of jeans and a faded Del Mar Exotic Bird Sanctuary T-shirt. In the distance, a wood thrush sang hello-goodbye. Soft shadows enveloped her, and she could almost smell the pines, wet after rain. Almost. Also, there were no pesky rocks strewn across her path. She’d deleted them a week ago after tripping over one that wasn’t really there.

Like the rest of the crew of the Phoenix, she had grown up with DAR and was proficient at modifying it, though the base of this one had been designed for her by a professional—only the best for Earth’s heroes.

“Alpha,” Asuka said, as if it was ever necessary to summon their omnipresent ship AI.

Asuka. Alpha’s voice in her ears would be inaudible to the two women flirting in the middle of the trail, too preoccupied to make room for Asuka to pass. She gritted her teeth and said “Excuse me” as she pushed around them, banging her elbow painfully against a protruding branch—a water pipe or something underneath the DAR. This was what had allowed DAR to surpass other augmented realities to dominate the global market: it could wrap the whole skin of the world in somewhere else. Perfect when stuck in a small spaceship for decades.

“I’m done looking for Lala Williams’s drill. You got any other jobs for me?” she asked Alpha. Her eye caught a flash of blue in the branches, and she stopped to look. As a child, she had loved birds the way other kids loved dinosaurs, saving all her money to buy a single robin for her DAR. Now that she was an adult, her DAR was stocked with the full catalog of RealBirds, and even so, she didn’t tire of the thrill of spotting the denim-blue jacket of a male western bluebird alight on a stump.

I’ll change your status to “available.” Should I mark your current job as “complete”?

“Mark it as ‘I give up,’” said Asuka. “That drill has fallen into another dimension.”

While theoretically

 possible, that seems unlikely.

Asuka was about to snark back when a message appeared from the Captain in the left side of her vision. Alt. Need you in the EAM five minutes ago. The EAM was the Exterior Airlock Module. They wanted her to do a spacewalk outside.

Asuka shaped words with her hands, composing and deleting several irritable responses, including Then you should have asked me five minutes ago and Sorry, I’m busy and Go jump into space, before settling on: Yes, Captain. Because she did like spacewalks.

Unlike the other seventy-nine crew on the Phoenix, Asuka was an Alternate, which meant she didn’t have a job exactly. Her job was just to do whatever was needed and be grateful she’d made the cut by the most microscopic of margins. Her job was not, as Captain McMahon often reminded her, to question orders or her place in the ship’s claustrophobically small community.

Asuka found two of the Ship Maintenance crew and First Vice Captain Ying Yue in the middle of the woods standing between an old cabin and a plywood outhouse, which were, underneath the illusion, the ship airlocks. The airlocks exited out onto the bow and stern sides of the wheel, respectively. On one side of the clearing, heavy black compression suits hung from a clothesline between two fir trees.

Ying Yue was tall, with perfectly shaped eyebrows and a long face that made her seem perpetually surprised. Her hair was close shaven. Buzz cuts weren’t mandatory, but they were popular among the crew. Easier to care for in space. Asuka had grown out her hair instead, and she was teased for being a rebel.

They were already suiting up Kat, one of the Australian reps. She had light blue eyes, picture-perfect freckles, and an impressive quantity of natural self-confidence.

“Look who decided to show up,” Kat said, without maliciousness. “Susie. You’re just in time to witness my last spacewalk.”

“Last one?”

“I’m scheduled for Medical next cycle.” Insemination appointment, she meant. All crew were required to have a baby as part of the mission. And once pregnant, Kat would no longer be eligible for walks.

“It might not happen right away,” said Asuka, for whom it hadn’t.

“It will,” said Kat, fluttering her eyes with pleasure. “My mother had four of us, and each time it was like bam, missile lock. You could say fertility is one of my key qualifications. Well, that, my ability to do multivariable calculus in my head, and my amazing biceps.” She flexed a bare arm and winked at one of the crew trying to fit it into a suit.

“Oh, I thought it was your fully developed ego.” Asuka kept her tone light, but annoyance bubbled up like acid reflux.

Kat laughed.

“All right, Susie?” Ying Yue asked, coming over. She was eight months pregnant with twins, and she was asking Asuka that?

“What’s the mission?” Asuka asked, stripping off her clothes and holding out her arms, then legs, for the other crew to squeeze into a compression suit, size extra small.

“We spotted a thing on the side of the hull in NorthQuad H-18,” said Ying Yue.

“What do you mean, a ‘thing’?” After spending the first ten years of their mission in hibernation, they had woken eleven months ago, as planned, flying through deep, empty space, light-years from anything. Radiation, cosmic rays, stardust, and junk were always a concern, considering the speed they were traveling. The ship was equipped with a radiation windscreen, nose shield, magnetic field, and advance warning system to protect them, as well as an army of bots and drones to repair any problems as quickly as possible. But they were literally in uncharted territory. The farthest humans had traveled up to this point was Jupiter, so no one really knew what they might find out here.

“Unclear. We can’t tell what it is from the cameras. Looks like a shadow or a smudge. Same when Yaz investigated with a bot. So anyway, the Captain wants you and Kat to go put some au naturel eyeballs on it.” Asuka caught a roll of Ying Yue’s eyes. For some reason, Ying Yue and the Captain didn’t get along. Which was the main reason Asuka liked Ying Yue.

“Is it—does it look artificial?” Something alien, she meant.

Kat laughed. “You’ve been reading too much science fiction. We’re in the literal middle of nowhere.”

Ying Yue offered Asuka a heavy pair of boots.

Hey. What’s the holdup? No time for gossip. The Captain’s words appeared in front of all of them. Despite regularly telling herself she didn’t care what Captain McMahon thought—that her name was only Becky and that she was the same age as the rest of them—Asuka felt her gut tighten.

Just following protocol, Ying Yue replied. And then added something aloud in Mandarin for their ears only, which appeared as subtitles for those who needed it: “You should try it sometime.”

One of the maintenance crew snickered.

“Hold still,” someone said, and the helmet came down over Asuka’s head. She felt them strap the heavy oxygen pack to her back.

“Which of you is carrying the tool kit?” Ying Yue asked, unhooking one of the cases from an old hitching post.

Asuka reached for it, but Kat intercepted. “I’ve got longer arms,” she said. “One of these days you’re going to drop it, and then you’ll be crying ice crystals all the way home.”

“Okay,” Ying Yue said. “But Asuka is Mission Lead.”

Asuka suppressed a groan as they clipped the kit to Kat’s chest. Kat never listened to her.

“They’re good to go,” the other crew confirmed.

“Alpha, last check?” said

 Ying Yue.

Asuka and Kat obediently held their arms up. The ship AI didn’t see things on the ship in the human sense, but she could sense the nanochips in the clothing they wore and could tell if the suit components were properly fitted.

Everything appears normal.

“All right, then. Everyone clear the EAM.” Ying Yue gave them one last look.

Be careful out there, said Alpha. It’s dangerous.

The cabin door opened, and beyond it was a chamber with cold, white metal walls and a door at the other end with a thick glass window. They stepped inside, and all DAR evaporated. It didn’t work outside the ship.

They waited impatiently as the air hissed out of the airlock. Given the cramped size of the chamber, Asuka was forced to spend this time contemplating the back of Kat’s suit.

“Sounds like the situation in the Pacific is getting spicy,” said Kat.

“Yeah,” Asuka agreed, unsure what Kat was talking about. The typical tension between the usual countries probably. Namely, China and the United States. Asuka didn’t really follow the news as much as she should, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Kat.

“Your mum still live in Tokyo?” Kat asked.

“Maybe,” said Asuka, like she didn’t care. She didn’t know where her mom was now, and it hurt too much to think about.

“What do you mean? Don’t you talk?”

“Nope.”

“I thought you two were close.”

“Actually, we’re not.”

Kat contorted herself, but she couldn’t turn her head in the close quarters to look at Asuka. She settled for twisting her faceplate to the ceiling. “What—”

“Can we not, please?”

“Fine. Sorry.” Kat gripped the wheel attached to the door, waiting for the light to turn green. “I broke my cat,” she said softly, like she was making an offering. Her pain for Asuka’s. Except what she was talking about was her truly hideous, pink ceramic cat.

“I’m … so sorry?”

“I know, me too.” Kat’s voice caught like she might cry. She was serious. “I tried to fix it, and I made a mess of it. And I keep thinking how I can’t get another, you know? Because we’re never going home.”

The hexagonal light on the door turned green, and Kat turned the wheel. “Anyway. If this thing out there is something extraterrestrial, I’m going to be the first one to see it. Try and keep up, Susie.”

And Asuka retorted, in a moment she’d regret for the rest of her life: “I’ll race you.”

 

CHAPTER TWO

THE PHOENIX * 3,980 CYCLES AFTER LAUNCH, B SHIFT

They stepped out of the airlock onto a metal scaffold facing the stern of the ship, small headlamps flicking on. Without the proximity of the sun or any other star, the Phoenix didn’t have a light side. It was all dark side. And cold as nothing, though she didn’t feel it.

Absence was what Asuka liked best about space. The forced perspective of hearing nothing but her breath in her ears, the blackness, and the billions of distant stars wheeling around them as the ship spun.

“See you later.” Kat took off jogging along the scaffold.

“Hey!” Asuka started after her, already sinking into the familiar rhythm of attaching and detaching her two safety clips—on-off, on-off—as she moved, careful to stay tethered to the safety rail at all times. Kat was getting farther ahead.

The Phoenix was constructed like an umbrella: a protective radiation windscreen and nose shield in front, directly under which were tucked forward-facing engines, ready to deploy for deceleration. The shield was at the front end of a metal shaft that stretched the length of a sports field to the back of the ship, which had immense, retracted, paneled solar sails followed by four rear engines. Between the solar sails and the forward engines, in the middle of the shaft, was their great, spinning habitat wheel, where the crew lived. The wheel spun, generating enough centrifugal force to simulate gravity for the occupants inside—and those standing on the scaffolding that ran along the outside of it on its bow and stern sides.

Asuka imagined the scaffolding that ran on the inside and outside of the wheel looked like lips, and the various modules attached in intervals to either side of the wheel rim—for Crew Quarters, Sanitation, Drone Operations, et cetera—like the teeth.

The scaffold extended a shoulder width past the widest modules, giving crew easy access for exterior maintenance. The thin metal grate shook with each step, which wasn’t nerve-racking at all. Thanks to the gravity from the spin, they could have been out for a stroll on Earth. If an endless void didn’t surround them on all sides.

“Ladies. Slow down,” said Ying Yue from her spot in the Drone Ops control room inside the ship. She had direct access to their suit and ship exterior camera feeds. She sounded rattled. “Kat, are you not using your clips?”

She wasn’t. Dammit, that’s how Kat was moving so fast, the cheater. Asuka swore and dropped her own clips and began to run faster, but it was hard because she was laughing. The whole thing was absurd. Childish. And it felt good.

Kat whooped so loud the radio squealed. Sure, they were taking risks fooling around like this, and Captain McMahon was definitely going to tear them to pieces after, but for a moment, everything felt normal. Except they were running through space.

Kat reached NorthQuad just as Asuka’s boot caught against the scaffold grate, and she stumbled against the outside of Crew Quarters D. Her heart leapt, but she was all right, totally fine. She gripped the waist-high safety cable that ran along the outside of the scaffold and forced herself to keep moving.

“Need a status update,” said Captain McMahon. She was chewing something, and the wet, smacking noise set Asuka’s teeth on edge. A loud swallow right in her ear. “Do you have eyes on the anomaly yet? Give me details.”

“Almost there, Captain,” said Kat. She began climbing one of the many maintenance ladders a couple of meters past the spot to get closer to the location where the thing had been spotted.

Asuka sprinted the final meters to the bottom of the ladder and clipped herself back on.

She was just ascending as Kat used metal rungs affixed to the ship’s body to maneuver out to the spot.

“You ever think about how we live our life in constant motion?” Kat’s voice asked in her ear. “Born on a rock spinning through space, and now here we are, rushing off to another. How come we can never just be? We’ve always got to go somewhere.”

Asuka stopped and turned, trying to penetrate the deep darkness all around them. She imagined she could feel the pinpricks of heat from so many stars out there, forming and dying millions of years ago. If she looked backward (she didn’t), she might see how far they’d come—and how insignificant that was against the scale of the universe.

She heard Kat say: “Where did you say it was, Ying Yue? Hang on, I’m caught on something. Okay, but I’m telling you—”

There was a flash of something bright as a sun, and then

nothing.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Fledgling Arctic terns made their first journey from the South to North Pole without their parents, finding their own way over tens of thousands of miles. Before takeoff, the entire colony would fall silent—this moment was called the “dread.”

 

CHAPTER FOUR

THE PHOENIX * 3,980 CYCLES AFTER LAUNCH, 0 CYCLES AFTER EXPLOSION, B SHIFT

The high-pitched siren went on and on. Asuka blinked and tried to focus her eyes. Her vision doubled, then resolved. Must have hit her head. Concussion? Felt like she’d been kicked in the sternum.

Debris from the Phoenix floated away, illuminated by a penumbra of blue light spilling out of a hole in the hull about a meter wide. She wanted to vomit, but that would be a bad idea in a spacewalk helmet.

This was bad. This was bad to the nth degree.

She surveyed the stern of the ship toward the four tulip-shaped rear engines. Everything in that direction seemed intact, at least.

“Cut alarm,” she said. The alarm stopped. Her breath sounded ragged and loud. “Can anyone hear me?”

No answer. Her radio must be down.

“Alpha?” The ship’s AI couldn’t hear her out here, of course. Alpha communicated via DAR, and DAR didn’t work outside the ship.

Did anything hurt? Just her head and maybe her back, and everything. But otherwise, okay.

Okay then.

She tried to reset the radio but got only static. For a panicked moment, she thought everyone was dead. But no, the transmitter on her wrist was broken. Must have smashed against the side of the ship when—

She checked her short tether. Attached. And to a part of the ship that was still there; otherwise, she’d be falling away from the Phoenix. As it was, she was meters out into space, being towed around by the spin of the ship’s habitat wheel.

Where was Kat? She looked out at the receding debris.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

Asuka rolled her tongue across her teeth. Copper and salt.

She flipped back and hooked a boot on the tether to stop herself from spinning. Her whole body screamed in protest. Only seven meters from the ship, and it felt like a kilometer.

Things were coming back to her in bits.

Something had exploded. A piece of broken-off hull had slammed into her chest, knocking her back against the ship. But what happened? And how could everything go to shit like that?

Asuka was panicking, guzzling oxygen. She unhooked her boot from the cable, and she began to spin again, arms and legs out like a sacrifice.

She forced herself to narrow her focus, to calm down. The small spear of her headlamp pierced the dark. It caught a boot without a foot in it, small and tumbling away, and her chest ached with a hollowness. So. Kat was dead, and who else? She liked Kat—even though she was so patronizing when she discovered something else that Asuka didn’t know or hadn’t done, which was often. But Kat fixed Asuka cups of tea after meals, and she was always up for simulation trips to places they would never go in real life, even if Kat only ever wanted to go to Europe. And now here Asuka was, with a feeling like she needed to howl, or she would burst.

A new alarm pinged in her suit.

She checked her suit metrics: oxygen, carbon dioxide, and battery level, which powered her propulsion pack and air scrubbers and regulated the temperature in her suit. Oxygen and battery were low, and her carbon dioxide was getting up to the danger zone.

Fantastic. Super.

Time to get back inside. Asuka hauled herself in, hand over hand on her lifeline, to the rim of the ship. It took nearly everything in her to do it. At last, Asuka was clinging to the outside of the spinning habitat wheel, in a constant state of being thrown away from the ship.

With a groan, she hauled herself up onto the scaffold. She gave thanks to the fact that she could still do a pull-up.

Gasping, she stared into the void where the section of scaffold used to be. A chunk of the Phoenix was no longer there. Emergency lights blinked and shuddered from the hole the explosion had torn in the ship. She gazed at what was left of their Dining Module. One long table was still intact and bolted to the floor, either a testament to the quality engineering that had gone into it or the fact that it had been partly shielded from the blast by the other tables. Otherwise, the mod was a wreck. No fire—the atmosphere was gone. There was soup all over the floor. In the dim blue light, she saw feet behind the half-demolished serving counter, and another arm sticking out at the far end near the door. Two bodies.

She narrowly missed getting beaned by a box of un-meat patties. She snagged it and slung it back into the hole.

She eyed the gap and doubted she could make it with a running jump. Her mind flashed back to the scrawny girl she had once been, hopping over big puddles after a rain and coming home streaked with mud from head to foot. Papa plucking her up and slinging her over one shoulder and marching her straight to the shower, calling her sweetmuddypie.

She could take the long way around, but she wasn’t sure she had enough oxygen. She was down to 5 percent. There was supposed to be extra in the tank for an emergency, but she’d never cut it this close before.

Would this be the moment that proved she wasn’t good enough? She was out of time.

She backed up, braced herself, and unclipped. Her boots on the metal made no sound at all. She leapt, and then she was falling and flying, and she juiced the gas jets of her propulsion pack, using precious battery. In the split second as she crossed the gap, a memory came to her of a goose taking off from the flat face of a warm pond, wings beating furiously, feet dragging as it tried to climb air. Then Asuka slammed into the other side. She nearly lost her grip, but she got the clip of her tether above the knot of the safety cable, thinking about how infinite her journey might have been if she had missed.

She hung there, panting into the hollow of her helmet.

Her compression suit was much more flexible than those clumsy bags of pressurized air astronauts used to wear, but at the end of the day, she was still wearing a big bubble on her head and thick insulation from finger to toe. She got back up.

Oxygen at 3 percent.

The emperor penguin could slow its own heart rate while plunging through dark, cold waters for almost half an hour.

Exhale. Keep moving.

It took a few more minutes to work her way back to the airlock, clipping and unclipping to the safety cable, and trying not to guzzle her remaining oxygen. She’d bitten her tongue, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. Shock, maybe.

The airlock door should have opened for her, but when she reached it, it was sealed. Nothing.

She tried twisting the handle of the airlock. It didn’t give. She fumbled again. It wasn’t the door; it was her hands. She couldn’t do it.

“This is Asuka.” Her voice was thin, more like a gasp. “Does anybody copy?” Static.

She checked her oxygen. One percent. Nearly out. Carbon dioxide in the red. Battery drained. Shit.

“This is Asuka. Does anybody copy? Can anyone hear me at all?”

She banged on the door, tried the broken radio. And again.

She touched her faceplate to the door. Turn, and she might catch a last glimpse of Kat, receding into that deepness of nothing. The pieces of her would last forever like that in space even as they spread millions, billions, then trillions of miles apart. But the whole universe could never put her back together. Humpty Dumpty. Entropy. Law of everything.

And yet we bother, thought Asuka. It should have been me. Not Kat.

She banged the door again, weaker, dizzier, colder. It’d be hours before she completely froze out here. She’d asphyxiate before that.

“I’m scared,” she had told her mother as everything burned. Heat pressing down against her face. Her mother’s voice firm and hoarse in her ear: “Sh. Sh. Picture a box.”

Asuka shut her eyes, obedient for once, and pictured her mother’s black and crimson-red lacquer jewelry box.

“Now, think of pearls. That is your fear, okay? Put them in that box one by one. Count them.”

One. Two. Three.

Asuka straightened, hammered on the door. No one was coming.

Her heart thudded. Darkness ate at the corners of her vision. She could lean back and fall, into the great Milky Way. It wasn’t her fault. She’d done her part and made it home.

She sank to her knees and looked back toward Earth. Couldn’t see it. Something, she thought distantly, was wrong with the stars.

Her last thought was of her mother, light-years behind her, growing old watching the night sky. 

CHAPTER FIVE

USA * 13 YEARS BEFORE LAUNCH

Asuka was in their neighbor’s pool; it was dark, and her mom’s arms were around her. They floated listlessly in the cold, cold water. She couldn’t see the stars. Smoke burned her lungs and made her eyes tear.

Everyone else was gone. Everyone but Asuka and her mom, and somewhere out there, maybe, her dog Inu. Left alone in a neighborhood on fire.

Asuka tasted bitter ash and chlorine. The jet-black water lapped gently against the side of the pool. She was mad at her mom for not letting her go after Inu when the dog escaped.

The whole family had been on their way out the door, headed for the autobus waiting to evacuate them to safety. And then her mom had stepped on Inu’s tail, and Inu yelped and ran off, leash tearing from Asuka’s hands, and she had tried to run after, but her mom had grabbed her and wouldn’t let her go.

And, and, and—she bit her mom’s arm and tasted blood; she screamed that she hated her, that she would never speak to her again; she cried big, dirty tears, and still her mom held her tight.

Wasn’t she mad at Asuka?

All this was Asuka’s fault, wasn’t it?

It wasn’t. (It was.)

And now she’d never see Inu again. The bus was gone, with Papa and her brother on board, and it was just she and her mom in this pool, waiting for California to stop burning.

They drifted toward the edge of the pool.

What if her mom got tired? Would they die?

She didn’t want to die.

“Asuka, don’t!”

She’d grabbed the side of the pool with both arms. Her mom snatched her back from the heat of it, too late. Asuka shrieked, more from the knowledge that she’d made a terrible mistake than from the pain. No pain yet; that came later. Just a minute later. Maybe more.

They were underwater again. And Asuka was aware only of her mother’s arms, and her mother’s legs, and how they kept her alive, kicking, slapping, pushing back against the water and the soot and the pool and the fire and the clouds that hid the moon.

CHAPTER SIX

THE PHOENIX * 3,980 CYCLES AFTER LAUNCH, 0 CYCLES AFTER EXPLOSION, B SHIFT

Bright light stuck to Asuka’s eyelashes like pollen. ...