Chapter One

The woman breathes deeply, the walk around the block having tuned into just a few steps out the door into the fresh air. The sun, coming magnified through the biome’s glass was just about to poke behind the mountain. It had been a big reason to buy this house, here. He’d insisted, the beauty of the tallest mountain on Mars, taller than Everest. She couldn’t argue with that. But the stark shadowed line of the sun disappearing behind it had always given her a bad feeling. The line advances slowly up the road between houses, closer and closer. Taking another step the woman puts her hand on her swollen stomach, and whispers, “You better believe we’re gonna go on longer walks than this, you and I.”

There’s a shifting under her hand, since it started kicking the girl inside had been a big fan of hearing people talk, especially the lovely low hum of her father’s voice, his ear pressed against the flesh between him and his daughter.

“Training for a marathon are we?” the hands on her hips grip her tightly, trying to take some of her weight off her feet.

“Shut up, you. This is all your fault anyway.”

He comes around to face her quickly, “Fault? My fault. What kind of offensive way is that to talk about our firstborn.”

“Not yet.”

The man takes a moment to figure out what she means then frowns, “What’s got you so dark-eyed and dark-minded, my dear? Especially on a day when I have such great news.”

Her eyes narrow, she’d noticed the lighter way he’d been moving the past few days, avoiding arguments, bending even to her most irrational moments. She’d asked him if something was different and all he’d said was that he was happy.

“I’m not dark-minded, I’m just not happy, big difference.”

“I know there was one objection to living here. The way people act, the way they treat each other, no community. I got a call the other day about a position. Since the MFA passed and the capital ships’ redesign there’s a civilian deck now. Right next to the medical wing, it’s the ship’s disaster pod, the safest place on the ship by far. I’ve seen the designs, I have a say in them, in fact.”

“What position?”

Daughtery smiles faintly and moves around his wife to look down into her skeptical eyes, “The one I was offered before we moved here. The big one. Commander of the Flagship. The Vonnegut. It’s gonna be crewed by the best people in the fleet. Our ship is supposed to be an example, the symbol for what all our capital ships will be like. For now we won’t even be leaving orbit. Safe as down here but the neighbors will be a hell of a lot nicer.” He bends down and rests his ear on her belly, “What about you, little girl? You better be excited to live on a spaceship.”

Erica smiles down at her husband, slowly running a hand through his hair. The line of the mountain’s shadow slowly encompasses them as they stand, the tram making it’s quiet glide away from their block.

“Let me put an arm around you, let’s see if we can make it to the end of the block.”

“We never even went to the colony museum, I wanted to see that rover from the 21st.”

“We’ll find a day, my dear. You know, I know you’re scared of the idea. You don’t have to passive aggressive about it.”

She doesn’t react, just keeps walking.

“Aw, come on, give me something here.”

“I understand the logic well enough, you’ve man-splained it to me repeatedly. Family units and all that jazz. I just wonder about a kid growing up only on a ship. Never feeling a sturdy planet beneath them. And the environment, I’ll spend her whole childhood terrified she’ll join up at 18.”

“There are worse things to be than in the military.”

“We’re about to be in the middle of a war.”

“Seriously Angela? One skirmish doesn’t make it a war. A couple Admirals on both sides got antsy. The Mayflower will finish its test successfully and then there will be no reason left to fight. They’re desperate to do it now, population on its steady upward run but that ship takes human territory from limited to unlimited. Give it six months and they’ll be outfitting the Vonnegut with an FTL of her own. Having a planet beneath your feet is one thing. I’d envy her, getting to spend her life boldly going.”

“You don’t serve in Starfleet, you serve in a military. And you want your daughter aboard a military ship.”

“The civilian decks are entirely their own vessel, nothing but armor and an engine. And schools. And a park. With real trees. We don’t even have a real tree.” Daughtery leaves his wife for a moment and grabs a handful of grass. “This isn’t even real grass, just some weird algae that produces oxygen.” He opens his hand but the light breeze doesn’t carry the algae, he has to throw it, the clump impacting the ground wetly. “This planet isn’t for us. It’s not for anyone.” He turns back to his wife and sees her subtly teetering from heels to toes. “Sorry.” He wraps his arm back around her and they silently agree to turn around and head back to the house.

“I’m not asking your permission. I’m asking you to come with me. Because it wasn’t posed as a question. They’re sending me no matter what I do, short of defecting to the mother planet, it’s gonna happen.”

“I don’t understand. Why?”

“I’ve been groomed for years for the job, I just didn’t realize it. After putting together the boarding security protocols, I had a name people recognized. Someone in the Admiralty decided I could serve do better as an engineer than a secondary helmsman, then a security chief, then a gravity controller, I’ve done every job except be a missile shepherd. They’ve invested in me.”

“So then why not run? What has Mars given us that’s so valuable?”

“Precisely this, Angel.” He indicates the house.

“If you call me that again in this argument, I am gonna ensure your firstborn is your lastborn.”

“Like I’ve said, I know this ship, deck by deck. The best of the best are gonna be crewing it, as selected by me. And we won’t be going anywhere, it’s the flagship. I want it. Who the hell doesn’t want it? If I have to go without you, I will hate it. And I have never simultaneously wanted something as bad as I want this and also hated it. I have no clue what it will do to me. Please, please, please.”

The door of the house snaps open with a crisp whistle, and the house coos a welcome to both of them, “Alright, but we’re burning this fucking house down when we go.” The sun slips beneath the horizon as the door slips closed behind them.

#

The boarding party jogs past the door, footsteps falling all as one. The Captain does his best to stand silently and leave the boy to his sleep.

“Dad? No, seriously, don’t go yet. Please, daddy, tell me the story again.” The Captain could have sworn a moment ago the boy was asleep, the peculiar hum of the ship around them louder than in the next room. The two sounds: the ship’s and the boy’s deep breaths had meshed together perfectly. The plain metal bulkheads around them had left nothing to stare at and the Captain had found his head lolling.

There’s a slight smile in his response, “which story, Aaron?”

“The big important story, your first mission. The thing you did that no one else had ever done. Leading a successful boarding party.”

“Not really the first,” The Captain trails off, seeing the boy already has the story memorized, he decides to add some previously untold details. “I wasn’t like you, son, I grew up poor. I had to fight to survive. And when I did the wrong thing I was sentenced to fifteen years, with the possibility of release from service in five.”

“You never told me that before, it was like a punishment?”

“Yes, it’s something they do if they think you can redeem yourself, serve the Commonwealth & Protectorates.”

“15 years seems like a long time, did you kill somebody?”

“Son, there’s a very important thing you need to always remember about a war in space: that you fight it months and even years down the road. A (finger quotes, which go right over the kid’s head, but he nods emphatically) ’convict’ today can be a Sergeant on an important boarding party by the time there’s an actual fight. Once I started to look at it the right way, stopped treating it like a punishment and more like an opportunity and after a few people saw a little potential in me, I quickly got out of the menial jobs most convicts get assigned and became a proper soldier.”

“Or the most important soldier in the whole war.”

“Let’s not get out of hand, here.” The Captain’s face heats lightly, that particular compliment never having sat well. The migration back to sitting on the bed was a stealthy but well remembered one. The boy is rapt but holding his eyes open out of nothing but respect. He’s dreaming with his eyes open: the most dimly remembered detail from a thousand tellings ago defining every critical aspect.

The Captain had spent a lot of time telling the story since the events had occurred; the boy was by far the most common member of the audience and usually got the most heavily edited version but there were always omitted details, even in the official report. The things that would make children lose sleep instead of grab hold of it. Things that wouldn’t be good dinner conversation to impress the Admiral’s friends; things that wouldn’t help people smile and sip their cocktails; once or twice the Captain had come some tiny measure closer to being able to tell the truth to a class of Marines being training to be Boarders but to be perfectly honest with them would have been to decimate the class’s size. The report that had made it into the official record was as close as the Captain had ever gotten to being able to tell the whole truth, slightly medicated and in a room with only a sympathetic ear.

“The ship, my ship--”

“Our ship.”

A short laugh, “It wasn’t our ship then. Even now, gotta keep her in the sky another year before she’s officially ours.”

“We aren’t in the sky, Dad, we’re in space. There’s nowhere for us to crash and nothing we could hit could hurt the ship bad enough.”

“Hey, knock on wood, Aaron, they said the same thing about the Titanic.”

“The what? No, never mind, talk about the scientist, the guy you’ve been talking about with mom all the time the past few months.”

“He designed the shuttle, or, as we called them back then, the Invaders.”

“But he did that a long time ago, right?”

The Captain sometimes finds himself wondering if his son is capable of pumping him for information, as every day passes, he thinks it’s more and more certain the boy isn’t only capable but quite skilled at it.

“He did that when he was very young, yes. Now-- let’s just say he’s doing something a little more important than that.”

“What?” Again that demanding tone, and again he finds himself immediately inhaling to start explaining but dangerous territory here, the Captain steers away.

“Don’t worry about it, that’s not in this story, it’s in another one. So, we landed, on the ship.”

“Their ship, the Vonnegut.”

“Yes, we were the first people doing it, successfully at least. Even though the shuttles had been trying for 5 years in simulations and never done it successfully. Boarding an enemy ship is very difficult when it’s yanking and banking and trying to keep you off. The pilots that fly the shuttles are in a class all their own and since no one had done it successfully, everybody had their own idea of how to do it. My pilot, Ian, was dead-clever and had reflexes that put your cat, where ever she is on the ship, to shame. No matter how you’re trying to do it, you’re trying to land a very fragile object on something that is anything but fragile, very dangerous. Except for one thing.”

“Say it.”

“All the right pilot needs is a couple chances, and then, once you’re inside--”

“The pilots stop mattering entirely” The boy finishes the sentence insistently, demanding that the Captain hurry, it’s the boy’s favorite part of the story. The words are also the Captain’s favorite part of the story and at the time, it felt like a miracle. It’s his story, this one, because he says it the way he said it the first time, on the ship, years of tension suddenly relaxing with one drop of his shoulders, rifle quickly falling to his side.

“Holy fuck. Where is everybody?” a moment passes, the boy thrills at the proper version instead of the toned down one.

“And then, Aaron, everything went crazy. The thing is they control their gravity. Concentrate it in a certain very controlled way on their ships and we knew that, so everyone was terrified. So, after a few moments, the quiet stopped being so comforting. What turned out to be exactly a minute after I said it, an alarm went off. Then after another minute it went off again. We knew that there was a reason no one was around. So we all silently agreed that we needed to move quickly. Doors kept shutting in front of us and shepherding us in circles and every minute that alarm went off.”

“This is the boring stuff.”

“Okay, okay. So we decide to go as far toward the center of the ship, where the weapons and engine controls and central systems are kept and that whoever was shutting the doors in front of us did not have our best interests at heart, so we just started cutting through doors. We thought, maybe we’d gotten lucky. The other side of the ship was where they all hung out maybe and all we had to do was cut the right door open and plant some explosives. Then the alarm didn’t go off and a couple seconds after it was supposed to, the gravity shot up. It was like the air tackled us to the ground all at once. And it quickly became clear that none of us could move easily. We could just sort of shuffle along the ground. After a little while, or really it could have been hours for how scared we all were. They came to get rid of us, they took their time about it, joking from the other side of the door. While they were cycling the door open, I managed to get ahold of my pistol. Once the door opened, so they wouldn’t slam to the ground, these four guys started killing my squad from where they were standing. Every inch felt like a foot, my weight multiplied a few times keeping the pistol pinned against the floor. But I had time, the cocky bastards. And once I had the gun leveled, I shot all four of them, boom, boom, boom, boom.”

The boy says it along with him in a way that makes the Captain want to suppress a shiver and fail to when he notices the boys hand under the covers making that classic finger and thumb gun.

“It took a long time to get out of the corridor we were in, where they’d turned the gravity up. But once I was out of it, I knew the only way I would be able to complete the mission was to give up on taking the ship and just commit what was left of the squad to blowing it straight to hell. We weren’t far from the armory the men who had been sent to kill us had gotten their arms from. The place was packed with explosives. All I had to do was open the bo--”

“But then the other alarm goes off.”

“Yes. Their sensors were tuned to alert them if explosives were armed. If I had used one of their detonators, they’d have been able to turn it off, no problem. But I was smarter than that, I’d brought a special bomb for just such a use, I could set it off and it would trigger the rest of the explosives. So then it’s a race, everyone on the ship trying to get to the bomb before me and the rest of the squad got to the shuttle. You could almost feel the beat of thousands of running feet headed toward me as the hurried clapping of my boots was racing blindly, running and running through the maze of the ship’s interior.” The Captain stops short, images coming forth unbidden, as they always do when he has to tell the story of how he became a hero. After a few seconds searching for the next words, how to tell truth. He looks down at his son, chest moving smoothly up and down, the deep breaths of sleep. Just before he shuts the door behind him the Captain whispers, “Sleep well.”

“You too, Dad.” The Captain smiles over his shoulder as he shuts the door behind him.

#

The light on the door turns from red to green.

“Alright,” the speaker behind Sam squawks, “we’re docked. It’s late enough that there shouldn’t be anyone on the other side, in the airlock, just somebody on the other side of the inner door, to question you.”

Sam grimaces for a moment at the should before lifting his hand to the door’s lever. With all the seals made and power on both sides the lever takes next to no pressure to throw open. Sam thinks for a moment and realizes that he’s exerting effort not to open it, so he lets his arm go and the lever goes with it. There’s a heavy inward breath as the pressure between the ship and the station’s airlock completely equalizes. Sam pushes the door open. The chamber on the other side is darkened, the only light Sam sees is from the screen on door opposite him, the word, “LOCKED” in a friendly font. Sam holds his breath without meaning to and bends under top of the hatch and steps onto the station. He takes a massive breath in and is astonished that the air doesn’t taste any different, the gravity doesn’t feel different.

They had waited until late to dock, hoping that the station’s guards would just fall back on protocol with its crew tired. The airlock would be locked until whichever guard drew the short straw came and would communicate through the speaker while standing on the other side of the double-thick door, hand on his sidearm. Titan and Mars were the only two colonies who had adopted the policy of offering unconditional assistance to any ship which requested it at a station, and to do this without a fair amount of security would be suicide, an open invitation to the pirates humanity had wasted no time in having plenty of again. Sam takes a few more deep breaths, wondering internally if the CO2 scrubbers are the same as on the ship, work as well or better even.

“Long haul, huh?” The voice comes from the shadow behind the outwardly opened airlock door. The room is nearly pitch black but behind the door it’s somehow even darker. Sam can barely make out the shape of the man there, leaning against the station’s bulkhead, at his full height Sam thought he’d probably stand a few inches taller but they were always built more or less the same, broad shoulders. The figure has a holstered pistol but his hands look empty, crossed as his arms are across his chest.

Sam’s voice cracks a little, “Ne-Never been off of it actually, if you can believe.” Sam winces, hearing the crew in his head drilling him not to say anything he didn’t absolutely need to. Keep quiet, fuel up, leave, no details. He bends his knees awkwardly and straightens them, bouncing to test the gravity.

“I actually don’t believe you. No ship that small stays out that long.”

Sam jumps a few times before he’s satisfied that gravity does feel stronger. He stares deeply into the darkness, his eyes adjusting he can just make out the tiny points of reflected light that must be the man’s eyes. “The gravity feels stronger. I didn’t expect that.”

“Makes sense, that’s an earthling model you flew in on. Titan Station keeps to the Titan norm. 9.9 something something meters per second per second.”

“Instead of good old 9.8 per second per second? You fucking heathens.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

The eyes narrow, “Why would your crew send a kid to ask for a refuel?”

“Because my crew operates under the belief that they don’t have a better option. Any chance you care to turn the lights on? I’m suddenly terrified I’ve stumbled into a horror movie and you’re just wearing some poor guy’s skin over your scaly reptilian face.”

There’s a stifled laugh before the figure, staying in the darkness and skirting the edge of the room, moves around to the locked door and after a few curt gestures on the pad next to the door the lights click on, blinding both men for a moment. The definitely-not-a-guard turns around and they size each other up, the man gives Sam a few entirely unsubtle but quick up-downs, eyes flitting to the open airlock behind him. Sam does his very best not to react when he figures out why the man looks so familiar, his poker face feeling like the only thing between him and disaster.

At the same time, the man can’t deny it, he knows this kid from somewhere and from that look, the kid knows him too.

“So, are you gonna give us the fuel and food and water fill up we requested?”

“You used a high-level Titan governmental intelligence ID code from when the station was built, of course you’ll be resupplied, protocol says you have to shut the airlock behind you before it can start though.”

Sam does so, and smilingly says to himself, “It’s an old code but it checks out.” After a few more complex finger dances on the blank pad next to the still-locked inner door both men hear a soft whirring and then loud metallic snap as the three hoses connect to the Mayflower’s receivers.

Locked as they are together in the airlock, both look up from the floor to each other once more. Sam doing his absolute best to suddenly look different, anything to dodge the growing suspicion in the other man’s eyes. For almost a full minute Sam holds the silence thinking that saying nothing might just be the best. Without prompt, his mouth starts producing sounds though. “Best not to think about it too much. That thought you’re having. Can only lead to bad things.”

The man nods that been-doing-quantum-math-for-three-days nod that Sam knows so well. “Should only take 5 minutes for the resupply to finish.” His lips curl slightly into a curt smile and Sam feels a rush of fear edged with conspiracy, the man scribbles on the pad once more and the “Locked” on the screen becomes “Unlocked”.

“Wanna come in?” The door flashes open in an eerily silent way.

Sam smiles, “You know it’s funny you ask. I was trying to think how many years I’ve been hyped up for this, told the dangers and risks. How important it was not to do anything I didn’t have to. The whole crew spending nearly seventeen years stressing constantly how dangerous it would be.”

“What’s dangerous?”

“Nothing, I realize, that’s the point. I’m Sam by the way.” He extends his hand to shake, the man grabs it and they both grip the other’s hand oddly without shaking, neither forcing that ages old masculinity test.

“I’m Dan, good to meet you.” They finally shake their hands, one short perfunctory up and down and Dan lets go and extends the hand through the door, after you, inviting Sam on to the station’s proper deck. They step out and the long four steps to the railing and look down through the great hollow of the station to the hundreds of decks stretching down and down and down below them.

Sam blinks and grips the rail tightly, Dan nudges him trying to draw his gaze away from the distance below them. “Not scared of heights are you?

“I’ve never been in an open space anywhere near this large. Very disorienting.”

Dan drops his head slightly and looks at Sam in wonder, “You really have been on that ship all of your life, haven’t you?”

“Well, I mean, so far. Yeah, I have.”

“I can’t for the life of me fathom that. How--”

“No questions, please, even with how well we’ve done so far, that can only lead to disaster.”

“There you go again with that word disaster, we’re just talking. So, you were born on it. Ever seen it from the outside?”

“No. There’s no windows in the emergency airlock we’re docked in or I’d have taken a look while I had the chance.”

“Come on. Let’s take a look.” Sam and Dan start walking around the diameter of the top deck, Sam looks puzzled when they don’t stop at the elevator and keep walking to almost the opposite side of the station. Dan starts scribbling a complex combination into the pad of the door they stand at, marked in a large and less friendly font, “Authorized Personnel Only.” The pad buzzes angrily and sighs, “Incorrect Combination”, Dan returns the sigh and starts again, the correct sequence taking almost a full minute for him to complete as he slowly and delicately gets all the tiny movements correct. The door snaps up silently just like the first one.

Dan says, “She’s docked one deck down, this is just for observation. Showing off in case anyone shows up hoping to take some of their scientists back.”

Sam leaves him behind, rushing to the window and pressing his nose flat against it. Down beneath him, long before his birth floats the ship he’s never left before today, the stenciling of the name begun but uncompleted only “MAYF” colored in.

“Already started painting that shitty name on the side.”

“What?!” Dan joins the boy at the window, incredulous, “The Mayflower is a great name. Got that new beginning Spring metaphor plus an excellent historical reference.”

“Pretty unambitious though, that ship lives up to and far beyond the legacy you’ve picked for it. A continent for the oppressed to become the oppressors. That ship gives us entire solar systems. I mean shit, even fucking NASA had the ambition to name their trip to the Moon after a god, and you went for a ship propelled by the shifting of air from high to low pressure areas and prayer.”

“More than that, kid. So what would your moniker be?”

“I always had an idea, it’s one of the first specific memories I have. That ship should be named for what it represents, what it carries. I’d call it The Galaxy. Only name that ever seems to properly capture what the ship can be to my mind.”

Dan stands in jaw-dropped awe for a moment before grinning widely, “Too late to change it now.”

They both hear the bleeting of the airlock’s computer, announcing the resupply complete. Sam turns to start going back. Dan grabs him.

Thousands of things running through his mind. A dozen different questions and fears and pleas jumping through his mind, “You don’t have to stay on her if you don’t want to, you know, Titan is really easy going about asylum and I have some clout around here.”

Sam smiles and returns to the window. “I’ve always wanted to see her like that, the engine not in place. The way it’s one huge detachable piece has always fascinated me. I always figured I’d only see it like that if both sides of the war had come to some peace that the crew was satisfied with. But there she is. Heartless.” Dan leans forward, closer to the boy, trying to force a connection to manifest in his brain, to understand who this boy would be. “All through my adolescence I’ve wondered how I would feel in this moment. Because you’re right, I could never step back on the Mayflower the crew would be damaged, hateful even. But they’d leave without me. My father might even understand. Here I am now and there’s only one thing going through my head.”

“What is it?” The question comes out pleadingly like a child begging for another bedtime story.

“You know this station was built top to bottom? That emergency airlock was the only complete piece for the first 5 years of construction, it was a complete piece, the airlock. By design it had this square meter of steel jutting out so you could start building a structure around it. Titan had been claimed by a bunch of idealists and it was before the first war, before the geothermic engines made living on the surface possible. So the station was to be their home. Artists that the architects considered themselves, the first to bulkheads welded together, they had something written on them, that no one would ever read, know what they say?”

“No clue.”

“’Here, on this station, may humanity learn not to overcome its differences or be an unattainable version of itself but to work together and to never be held back by fear or avarice or isolation. Together, always together. All or none.’ All or none, Dan. That’s not about all of humanity or none of it. It’s about individuals. You’re either all guided by fear and avarice and isolation or guided by nothing but each other.” Sam turns to start walking back to the airlock. Dan follows closely, feeling like little brother to this kid barely half his age.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m sure you will one day, Danny.” They walk back to the emergency airlock together in silence, Just before the boy steps back onto the ship Dan speaks up, grabbing the boy’s elbow, “Wait.”

Sam opens the airlock and steps on board his ship and smiles back at his father. “Save it. You’ll have plenty chance to say it later.” Sam smiles and pulls the airlock door shut, the smile breaking the moment the ship detaches and begins moving away from the station, out into the Big Deep Empty, disappearing from view of the station after a dozen minutes pass, and from that corner of space in general a few moments later.