Tangled Planet Read online

  Docking is quiet. The usual chatter and laughter have been drained from the shuttle by our collective shock, leaving an unnatural silence. We latch onto the side of the Venture and begin to spin with her. My weight returns, and I settle back down in my seat. There’s a hiss as the airlocks open. I take a deep breath and taste the familiar air of the ship.

  There’s clacking as everyone unstraps, and the rustle of fabric and grunts as we stand and file off. Celeste waits until almost everyone else has left, so I do too.

  Stepping through the airlocks and into the clanging echo of the Venture’s loading bay, Celeste pauses, watches them unload Orion’s coffin from the hold. They’ll take him to the medcarriage and conduct an autopsy, just like with Maia and Seginus, then return him to the planet for burial. A session of the council has been convened to investigate. Perhaps we’ll get answers then. People squeeze past us respectfully as they move the other cargo into the ship.

  Astra puts her arm around her daughter and leads her away, which is almost a relief. Astra’s better with people than I am. But she looks more stooped than ever. It’s lucky that we abolished the Exit when we landed, or she wouldn’t have long left.

  Mom’s silent next to me, standing tall, back straight and long arms hanging at her sides like someone forgot to wind her up. “This must be hard for you, after Maia,” she says, eventually. “Are you coming back to the cabin?”

  I can’t think of anything worse. Sitting in silence with Mom in that tiny space. And anyway, I need to clear all this nonsense of forest monsters from my head before I speak to the council.

  “I’m going to head up to the engine room. Check in on the air circulation data. See how the new rotors are working.”

  Mom sighs, like I’ve said the wrong thing. “I suppose it is best to keep working. If you’re sure you don’t need me, I’ll get back to the medcarriage.”

  I nod, turn away, and head along the corridors, turning my body toward the wall as I pass other people in the narrow passageways. It must be break time for basic training, as the children run up and down the corridors, bouncing off each other and giggling.

  Several of them clutch new colorful objects — balls, spinning tops, and dolls, freshly printed — and they squabble over them. There were no toys when I was growing up, nothing to spare. Dad was mad at me for a week after he caught me twisting a short length of wire into a makeshift bracelet. And I’d only meant to wear it for a minute.

  Even with the resources of the planet to reshape in our printers, the toys seem like a waste when there’s so much that needs to be done around the ship. Lights burned out, casting the corridor in pools of darkness. Doors stuck permanently open. Creaking fans in the vents above me, old rotors we haven’t been able to fix yet. We need more power. We’re wasting most of the generator’s output ionizing fuel into plasma to send the shuttle to and from the surface. Captain Cassius gives too many resources to the agricologists and builders. Squanders resources on toys for his children and their friends.

  But it’s good to be back. It smells right, here. Not like the empty scent of Beta.

  It’s the smell of hundreds of years of skin cells, waste reclamation pipes, and generations of people stuffed in a cramped space. I never noticed it until we went to the planet, where the air is so cold and clear I choked on my first breath. Here it’s rich and musky. The smell of home. The Venture is cozy, human-sized, lived-in, unlike the muddy mess of the planet below.

  The walls around me are decorated with engravings, memorial panels and stories of those who lived and died on the Venture. To my right is the tale of the Clearsighters. They didn’t believe in the reality of the ship. They thought it was a trick, a social experiment, and that we’d never left Alpha. The scene on the wall is the twelve of them crammed into an airlock, smiling and laughing, moments before they opened it into the emptiness of space and proved themselves wrong.

  We’re surrounded by our ancestors up here. Cradled by the journey we all took, welded into the walls around me. I can walk the Venture’s passages with my eyes closed, reading my route by the grooves and ridges of the engravings at my fingertips. It was a game Maia and I played when we were younger, giggling as we roamed the vents and passageways. We didn’t need toys. We had the Venture.

  I run my hand along the cool metal. Let my fingers tell me the story of our launch, of the crowds who gathered to watch my ancestors blasting off into the skies. Then I’m at the elevator.

  I hit the call button, it takes a moment to come, and the doors slide open. I step inside, hold on to the strap, and stare at the padded walls as the doors close. The stuffing is coming out in a few places. I’ll have to check that’s on the maintenance lists. My spirits rise with the elevator, weight decreasing as I move closer to the ship’s axis. The centrifugal force that creates the Venture’s artificial gravity grows weaker toward the center of the ship. It’s one of my favorite feelings. As if my cares are lifting from me along with my weight.

  By the time I reach the heart of the Venture, there’s no gravity at all. It’s only the strap that’s stopping me from bobbing freely around the elevator. The doors open. Aldrin is on duty in the chair.

  “Want a break?” I ask.

  He stretches. “I wouldn’t say no. Nessus was awake half the night; he’s teething. And Mira kept having to get up to use the wash cubicle.”

  “She must be due soon,” I say.

  His smile makes the bags under his eyes disappear for a moment. “Two months left,” he says. Then he unbuckles and pushes himself toward me. “Ping me when you need me back. Thanks, Ursa.”

  I swing out of the elevator to make room for him, then wait until the doors close. I should be glad Antares lets us get away with anything. When Dad was Head of Engineering, he’d never have allowed an unapproved break for the engineer on duty.

  But things were different then. The urgency of repairs was a panicked rhythm throughout my childhood, the stress etched into my father’s forehead as he tried to eke out the supplies through force of will. I joined in the bustle as soon as I was old enough, rushing from one repair to the next as we tried to hold on long enough to make it to the planet and the resources that saved us.

  Now the corridors are quiet. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who sees that the ship is slowly falling apart. The bustle has moved to the planet: building, planting, and fixing the endless injuries.

  The moment Aldrin is gone I kick off the wall and float into the engine room. I do a clumsy somersault in midair and spread my arms and legs out, stretching properly, drifting across until my hands touch the opposite wall. I push against it gently and drift backward to the operator chair, mounted on a bar that extends out from the curve of the wall.

  My aim is nearly perfect, and I twist my legs up in front of me, knees bent, to land butt-first in the bucket chair. I slide my arms through the straps and buckle them at my waist.

  “Did you see that, Maia? Bull’s eye.”

  I should keep this visit short, try to catch the start of the hearing. Also, Aldrin’s comments reminded me I didn’t use the wash cubicle before I came up here, and you don’t know when your bladder is full in zero-G. I’ve made the mistake of waiting too long before.

  But it’s so good to be home. The engine room sparkles with thousands of lights on the curved walls around me. Control panels blink opposite me, display screens glow above me. Tickers below me scroll the temperature, speed, rotation, all updating constantly. Three hundred and sixty degrees of activity, of reassurance that the Venture is operating as it should. I try to ignore the niggling doubts. The radiation shielding coil in ecocarriage 6 seems a little weak, but since we’re within Beta’s magnetic field, it’s not an issue. A water discrepancy in habitation carriage 2 suggests a leak. That would have been an emergency once, but now we’ve got plenty on the planet. It literally falls from the sky. So I’ll get to those later.

  I clos
e my eyes, savoring the weightlessness.

  The repairs are never-ending. Our tech is basic, compared to what they had on Alpha Earth. It has to be. No AI. No nanobots. Nothing so complicated that we couldn’t fix it ourselves with the printers and supplies onboard. We’re on our own out here. Just one tiny flame in the dark.

  The main engines are offline now that we’re at our destination, so every other sound is clearer. The clicks and whirrs as the Venture adjusts her orbit, her rotation. If you listen carefully, you can tell whether the shuttle is docked or not by the tiny countermeasures her boosters take to even out the extra weight on the hub. You can tell the time of day by the water reclaimer use. It’s all there in the sound of the Venture. The sound of home.

  Dad taught me to diagnose faults from the sounds the ship makes. The Venture talks to me, tells me what she needs. Unlike the planet. Down there the wind and the trees speak a foreign and sinister language.

  I’m going to lose all this. When the Venture breaks herself apart and falls to her final resting place on Beta, the engine room, her golden heart, will be wrenched out. We won’t need it down there, and the main propulsion system is too radioactive to risk on the planet. So while the carriages will land on Beta, the engine room boosters will fire one last time to propel this perfect place into the void.

  Gone forever. I shiver at the thought. There are too many memories here.

  Dad’s baritone used to fill the engine room. He knew all the songs. I can almost hear him now. When I’m here, I feel as if he’s just out of sight. I close my eyes tight, hoping that when I open them again, he’ll be here and everything will be the way it was four years ago. Before my small world fractured. Before Dad’s Exit, Celeste’s marriage, Maia’s death. Before we arrived at this stupid planet.

  The whoosh of the elevator doors makes me turn.

  Astra is there, holding on to the strap. She always looks dignified in weightlessness. I look like a toddler bobbing around. But Astra soars when she’s moving and floats like a ghost when she’s still.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” she says. “Your father came here to think, too. Want to float in the middle?”

  She always understands me. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  You can’t float in the middle of the engine room on your own, as you need someone to position you, then to push you back to the side when you’re done, or you get trapped in the weightlessness because you can’t reach the walls.

  I used to do it all the time with Dad. It was my favorite game when I was a little girl. Although Maia thought it was funny to leave me here, stuck in the middle, pathetically flailing. She could be a jerk sometimes.

  Astra pushes herself gently from the elevator wall and allows the inertia to bring her across the space toward the operator chair. I unbuckle myself, and she gives me a big hug, her copper-brown cheek squishing against mine.

  “I love you, Little Bear. So much.”

  “Love you too,” I say.

  She holds on to the operator chair with one hand and guides me out to the middle of the engine room with the other, steadying me when I get there. I float, suspended in the weightlessness, then curl into a ball, hugging my own legs. It feels good to hide my head in my knees, to close my eyes and feel nothing.

  “How’s Celeste?” I ask. My voice is muffled in my clothes.

  Astra pauses. “Heartbroken. Scared about the baby. She wanted a moment alone before the hearing starts, so I came to see you.”

  “Poor Celeste,” I say, staring into the darkness of my arms. “I mean, I didn’t like Orion, but he didn’t deserve …”

  “It’s a terrible thing.” I hear Astra buckle herself into the seat. “How do you feel about the council meeting?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think Captain Cassius will be fair?”

  “He’ll pretend to be impartial, but I’m sure he’ll value what his daughter has to say.”

  And Vega doesn’t like me. Great.

  Astra continues. “They’ll find the DNA of whoever did this.”

  That’s not reassuring. My DNA will be all over Orion, for starters. But what if they find other DNA? What if I didn’t imagine the thing in the woods?

  “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  Astra’s good at listening. It’s her job. She’s too old for the more physical aspects of protector duties, so she specializes in questioning. I have to tell her the truth. She can always tell when people are lying.

  I peek out from behind my knees. I let my eyes wander over the ecocarriages’ fogponics feeds, the tank readings, air composition stats, the output rating of our generator. I can barely see any of them, but I’d notice if any were outside normal parameters.

  I clutch my legs tighter. “I thought I saw a creature.”

  The pause before she speaks feels very long. “Describe it.”

  I exhale. I knew I could talk to her. Knew she’d take me seriously.

  “It had teeth. It was just an impression in the flash of the headlight. It was almost as large as the landbike.” It seems dumb now, in the safety of the engine room.

  “Fur or scales?”

  “Fur. Like a wolf. But bigger, I think, from what I’ve seen on the Alpha vidstreams. I guess it was my subconscious, after you men-tioned the big bad wolf. I probably saw a tree moving or something.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a tree.”

  “But the forest is uninhabited. They haven’t started releasing animals yet.”

  “We know something killed Orion,” Astra says. “And obviously it wasn’t you.”

  “Of course not!”

  She’s silent for a moment. “Are you going to tell the council?”

  “No one will believe me. They’ll think I’m insane.”

  “If you have worries about the safety of the planet, it’s your duty to share them.”

  I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. I hide my face in my knees.

  “What is it, Ursa?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say into the darkness of my knees. “Even if it isn’t safe, we’ll still have to live there, won’t we?”

  “That’s the intention, yes.”

  I want to kick at something, like a child. “But what’s the hurry? Why don’t we patch up the ship and wait a bit? At least until the landclearers are fixed and have done their job?”

  “Most of the crew want to live on Beta now. We have to stick together. Remember Venture 2? We don’t want our own civil war, and Cassius would never agree to delay the colonization.”

  “But maybe he would if they realized how dangerous it is! Look at what happened to Maia! Or Seginus and Orion!”

  “So the more we know about the dangers, the better.”

  There’s a beeping on the comm screen. I keep my eyes closed, arms wrapped tight around my knees. I can’t see Astra, but I hear the rustle of movement as she checks it.

  Maybe she’s right. Maybe people would consider delaying full settlement if they knew what I saw. Or maybe they’d think I was a traitor, trying to start a war like the Returners who destroyed our sister ship. Or they’d think I’m crazy, like the Clearsighters.

  Crazy enough to have killed my brother-in-law.

  Another rustle and the clank of Astra’s seatbelt. Her fingers grip my shoulder, and I open my eyes and uncurl as she pulls me out of my floating position at the center of the Venture. I straighten up. She brings me within reach of the control chair, and I grab it.

  “It’s time, Ursa,” Astra says. “You’re being summoned to the hearing.”

  Astra hurries off, taking the elevator down to her daughter, while I ping Aldrin and wait for him to return to work. Then I descend in the elevator, down the spoke that’ll take me closest to the council room. The centrifugal force of the spinning Venture grows the further I get from the axis of the ship, increasing the gravity and p
ushing me slightly to the side on the way down. Soon my feet are stuck to the floor once again, and I release the strap.

  The elevator slows, and the doors swish open to reveal my mom. I was expecting her to be inside already, with the other heads of sectors. But it makes sense that she’s waiting for me, since I’m not of age yet. I’m seventeen in Alpha Earth years. Or I was, until we got here. This planet makes me younger: thirteen in Beta years, because of its stupid overlong rotation around Sol 2.

  “Don’t worry,” Mom says. “They’re not accusing you of anything. This is purely a fact-finding meeting.”

  But her words make my stomach clench. People love to jump to conclusions.

  She takes my hand, our fingers entwining. She’s taller than me, her skin a warmer tone of brown. She’s wearing her hair loose today, and it stands out around her head like a dark cloud. Together we stride down the patched and dim corridor. We pass the carving of Eve, the first baby born on board; I turn toward the carving as we squeeze past other people. Her face is angelic, eyes too wide to be real, and she’s not screaming like babies usually do.

  We pause at the engraving of my father. The light panel above it is out, so his familiar face is shadowed, the thin carved lines that make up his features almost invisible, fading him into a ghost in the wall. But still, I run a hand over the grooves, press my palm against the cold alloy that is his face, younger than I remember it. But his eyes stare into the distance, over my shoulder.

  “I’ll fix the light,” I say.

  Mom nods.

  I pull strength from Dad. I am the old captain’s daughter. I am an engineer. This is my ship. I square my shoulders, and we start walking again. When we reach the double doors at the end, I don’t pause. I hit the opening panel, the doors slide apart, and I stride in.

  The council is already in session, the dining tables folded away in storage and the benches rearranged into rows facing the front. But the space still smells of chickpea stew, and I realize I’m hungry. Captain Cassius is standing at the front, beneath the giant steel orb of Beta. He’s shorter than my father was. Too small behind the podium. Trying to make up for his lack of gravitas with insincere smiles as we come in.