D.A.N.I.

Something was going to hit them, and DANI wasn’t sure if he could dodge. It was tiny, it was dark, it was dense, and it was fast. All those things combined meant his usual margins for error had been completely used up. If it had been larger, brighter, or slower…

As it was, they had twenty minutes. Which sounded like plenty, except Dandelion’s titanic volume and abysmal thrust-to-mass ratio were working against them. DANI stressed the power grid and cranked his frame speed to the fastest it could possibly go. As far as his subjective sense of time was concerned, the milliseconds were now flowing by like minutes. The crew were statues, even their fastest and twitchiest movements happening at a torturous glacier pace.

He’d bought himself time to think. Time to calculate.

First, full power to the main engine. Plenty of power there, but it could only thrust along the ship’s long axis. Where was the object going to hit? Insufficient data. Resolve that. He set every sensor he had on that side of the ship to tracking the incoming threat, resolving its precise trajectory down to a fraction of a millimeter.

While he waited for that to return, he referenced his long-term memory and called up several old calculations he’d made years before they’d even left Earth. Emergency measures: how much extra thrust could he squeeze out by jettisoning water, firing out the launches in escape pod mode, and even venting atmosphere. He even factored in the tiny amount of thrust he could get from the little cold-gas jets on the surface that kept Dandelion’s spin from slowing.

The LIDAR pings finally came back, having narrowed down the object’s vector to within a few centimeters. He plugged it into all his calculations. With moderate measures, he could just get out of the way. In fact, he could make it miss by almost a hundred meters, but in orbital terms, that was grazing the skin. If it turned out to be a bomb of some kind, or if it was a guided weapon—

He calculated possible outcomes and assigned values to each branch based on probability versus risk versus secure options. By the twenty-millisecond mark, he had reached his conclusion. He set alarms blaring across the ship and ordered the crew to their emergency stations. This was no time for half-measures. He was going to do everything he could and pray. If the object turned out to be a guided weapon of some kind, even his best might not be enough. Certainly the human race had built weapons he would never be able to dodge in this situation.

Which meant the first and most important step was to evacuate the children.

Amber Houston

“One, two, three…” Walker was tense. He’d appeared from nowhere at a dead run to meet the Rangers as they formed up at their emergency station, and he was taking the quickest headcount Amber had ever seen him do. He didn’t look scared. At least, he wasn’t crying and shaking like Amber wanted to. He was grim-faced, focused, sharp.

The gravity was all wrong. There was a definite pull toward the back of the ship and down through the soles of Amber’s boots. Whatever was happening, DANI was accelerating harder than he’d ever accelerated before, even on a thrust day. It was making Amber’s stomach turn over on itself and adding to her stress.

“Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four…”

She hated standing there, she hated waiting. That was their job right now, to stand there and be ready for whatever orders Walker gave them, but right now that was the worst thing for Amber. She needed to be doing something, to have something to focus on other than the mournful wail of the siren and the gnawing knowledge that something, somehow had gone very wrong.

“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

There was a lurch in the deck this time, and DANI’s voice changed its message.

“All Ranger troops, prepare to abandon ship. You have ten minutes. Repeat, all Ranger troops, prepare to abandon ship. You have ten minutes.”

“Oh, Authors…” Amber turned to the frightened squeak from over her shoulder. She held out a hand and Nikki took it, squeezing so hard it hurt. She looked terrified.

“Forty-eight!” Walker reached the end of the line. He marched back down it with a hand pressed to his ear. “DANI, Walker Torres. Troop all present and accounted for, proceeding to our launch.”

He listened to something, then nodded sharply. “Rangers! Our launch is number Seven-Three-Two! Read back!”

Something to do at last! Amber had to shout to be sure she was heard over the sirens, as the whole troop chorused, “Seven! Three! Two!”

“You got it! Roy!” Walker ordered. “You’re lead! I’m tail-end Charlie! Double time!”

Amber’s feet moved of their own accord. Roy looked just as grateful as she felt to have something to focus on, and along with his sister, knew the outerdecks better than anyone else. Emergency elevators had thrust up from under the streets all over the city, leading down to the launch gantries. He took them off at a brisk jog, with Amber and Nikki on his heels at the head of a column of terrified Rangers, and with Walker at the back to ensure nobody was left behind.

The elevator was little more than a claustrophobic metal cage. Orange flashes highlighted a rail at Amber’s chest height, and large signs instructed them to grab hold of it and tuck their feet under another bar at ankle height. Numbly, she obeyed. They all knew the drill, but this was the first time they’d done it for real.

Walker was the last in and took position at the rails himself.

“DANI! Troop Seven-three-two, ready to drop!”

The word “ready” wasn’t even fully out of his mouth when the gate clattered shut and the elevator…dropped. Several of the Rangers yelped, and Amber shut her eyes. They were almost in freefall, held back only by the pneumatic pressure in the shaft.

It was a long fall. For nearly a minute, there was only the fight to stop her stomach from crawling up her throat and the sound of her friends making terrified noises all around her. Every so often there was a bright red streak as they plunged past an emergency light, or a squealing sound of metal knocking sparks off metal as they rattled against the guide rails.

Then the brakes engaged. Gravity returned with a vengeance and ramped up staggeringly hard. Roy put a steady hand at the top of Amber’s back and did the same for a pair of the youngest on his other side. Amber gritted her teeth and fought to remain standing as what felt like a copy of herself settled on her shoulders.

It kept getting worse, and right as she felt her legs begin to tremble, the ride came almost to a stop. The last few meters were practically sedate as the elevator settled into its landing, with the brakes glowing bright orange from the friction.

The gate dropped with a crash. They were right opposite their launch.

“Seven three two!” Roy called and pointed to it. He stooped to sweep Rose Durand up into his arms and carry her aboard as Nikki sprang forward nimbly under the heavy G-load, and stood at the launch’s ramp to urge the troop in.

“Amber, help them strap in!” she barked.

Amber wanted nothing more than to slump into one of the acceleration couches that lined the launch’s walls. The middle of the floor was densely packed with crates and a stack of cargo containers, all the supplies they’d need to set up a town when they landed. The launches were there for colonization, after all, and had been carrying the necessary supplies for first-wave colonists since they’d left Earth.

That allowed them to serve double duty as lifeboats. Amber squeezed down one side of the pile of cargo and somehow found the strength to buckle Rose into the seat Roy had dumped her in. The little girl was looking pale and scared, but gave a small, brave nod as Amber strapped her in and made sure she was properly secured.

She locked in Arianna Mayweather, Floyd Harris, Kelly Liu, Danish Abbasi, Tony Stokes, Steve Evans, Marie Baker, and Doug Locklear before Roy tapped her on the shoulder and ushered her into a couch of her own. By the time she crashed into it, her arms and legs were starting to feel like rubber.

He got her seated properly, double-checked her belt after she did it up, put a hand on her shoulder, and vanished sideways to work on somebody else. A few seconds later, Nikki sat down to Amber’s right and fastened her own straps.

The ramp was rising. Some part of Amber had been hoping against hope this was some kind of drill or exercise, but the ramp changed that.

This was real, this was really happening.

Judging from Nikki’s expression, she’d felt the same way. She gulped as she watched it close, watched the seals engage and bathe the rear of the launch in red light as they locked down. Walker spun by to check their straps one last time as Roy finally took a seat next to Nikki. He said something encouraging that Amber didn’t really hear, and then took his own seat at the front.

“DANI! Seven-three-two, all aboard and ready!” he declared the moment his own seatbelt was securely buckled across his chest.

If DANI replied, Amber didn’t hear it. Instead there was the whining, terrible crescendo of powerful engines coming online, and the deep, primal vibration of the onboard fusion reactor spinning up to its almost incomprehensible full output. Nikki’s hand found Amber’s as their launch swung out onto the catapult rail. There was a jolt, a clang, the engine whine mutated into a blasting roar…

Pure bruising force mashed her down into her chair. There was a suggestion of incredible speed past the tiny portholes, other launches whipping by until they became a blur, and then—

Darkness. Darkness full of tiny points of light.

For the first time in her life, Amber Houston saw the stars.

D.A.N.I.

Two hundred lifeboats were already gone, a tenth of the total. DANI was being careful to stage his launches for maximum effect—each one that went thundering out of a launch tube was a little extra thrust, a little nudge that pushed Dandelion that extra bit further out of harm’s way.

A subroutine in the back of his awareness was noting their growing deviation from Newhome approach. Already it was ruined. Rather than arriving sometime next year, he was going to have to calculate a whole new navigational solution once this was over.

He didn’t care.

Captain Torres was watching her own readouts with white knuckles clenched on the desk in front of her.

“How many?”

“A thousand Rangers launched already.” DANI kept his voice calm and reassuring. “All Rangers should be evacuated within the next three minutes. We can begin launching second-stage evacuees in approximately five minutes and thirty seconds.”

“Time to impact?”

“If it’s unpowered, it will miss.” DANI promised her.

“And if it isn’t?” Torres insisted.

DANI ran some uncomfortably slapdash calculations based on far too many assumptions and wild guesses for comfort. He didn’t like any of the answers he got.

“Four minutes.”

Torres swore.

“Is there anything the rest of the crew can do?” she asked.

DANI didn’t see any point in anything other than brutal honesty. “Captain…if it hits us, it will tear through us like a rifle bullet through a water bottle. Crew casualties will be total.”

He watched Torres absorb that. Even at the incredible rate of evacuation they’d achieved with the Rangers, there would still be nine hundred thousand people aboard.

“…Let’s hope it’s unpowered, then.”

“Indeed. Half the lifeboats are away.”

The object wasn’t showing any signs of accelerating or changing course, he noted. It might not need to. If the device was a sufficiently large bomb, a shaped charge, or simply equipped to create dense shrapnel, it would still be quite lethal.

Still, as each second crawled by with no change in the object’s velocity, DANI allowed himself to feel some faint hope. He wasn’t going to feel safe until it was twenty minutes away and receding, but the seconds ticked by without incident.

“The last Ranger troop is away,” he announced at the two minutes and thirty-seven seconds mark. More than twenty seconds ahead of his estimates. He had to hand it to the Rangermasters and their troops—when the proverbial had hit the fan, they had risen to the occasion and surpassed his calculations.

“Object tracking?” Torres asked.

“No change.”

“Take a message for my husband, please.”

DANI devoted a fragment of his time to recording her words. He’d burst-transmit them in the ship’s dying microseconds if need be, but he was becoming increasingly convinced that wouldn’t be necessary.

It was a lovely message, though. Raw. Heartfelt. He decided he’d save it for posterity, if nothing else. “Message saved, Captain,” he said once she’d finished. “T-minus twelve seconds to closest approach.”

Torres nodded.

“Ten…nine…eight…”

Outside, the last of the launches boosted up to cruise mode, a solid three-G acceleration, and flashed away. At least, DANI comforted himself, the future of the Human race in the Newhome system had been secured. Dandelion’s mission was technically complete.

“Six…five…”

People were hugging all over the ship, holding each other tight, or sitting curled up and lost in their own private despair.

“Two…one…” He paused, and then suffused his voice with relief. “…T-plus one. Plus two. Plus three…the object is receding.”

Torres let out a tense held breath.

“Stand down any remaining launches,” she said. “Can you recall the Rangers?”

DANI turned his attention to a trajectory projection he’d been running in the background throughout the crisis. He considered it for a few milliseconds, and then reached a crucial decision.

“With all due respect, Captain, I think that might be a bad idea…” he said slowly.

Torres frowned at her monitor. “Why?”

DANI called up the projection. She stared at it for a terrible long moment.

“I see,” she said at last. “You’re…I hate to ask, but are you absolutely certain?”

DANI wasn’t offended in the slightest. The implications of what he was showing her were grave enough that he didn’t blame her at all.

“Yes, Captain,” he said instead. “The object originated on the surface of an inner-system planet.”

“You know what that means, right?” Torres pressed.

“Yes, Captain,” He mimicked taking a deep breath and suffused his voice with grim concern. “It would seem that someone, or something, shot at us.”

Amber Houston

Amber had slept, or at least dozed, somehow. Or maybe she hadn’t had a choice, given that even just sitting in her acceleration couch and breathing was a punishing effort. Maybe her body had decided the best way to endure it was to make her sleep.

Her back hurt. Her limbs felt leaden, and her feet felt swollen and numb inside her shoes. And she had a splitting headache. The moment it all went away was…it was like the biggest sneeze, or finally taking off a tight shirt. She actually gasped.

It hadn’t all gone away, in fact. When she sat forward and sighed with relief as her spine relaxed, she realized they were under normal gravity, one-G acceleration.

The safety light above her head went green, and a countdown started: eight hours and thirty minutes.

“Okay, Rangers, listen up!” Walker stood up, and forty-eight heads turned to look at him. “This is gonna be our pattern over the next few days. We’re accelerating hard toward Newhome, with breaks of regular one-G acceleration twice a day! Use this time wisely! This is your bathroom break, food break, exercise break, and sleep time! By the time that countdown reaches half an hour remaining, I expect you all to be rested, fed, hydrated, and back in your couch. Roy!”

“Yessir!”

“You’re safety officer! Everything we use gets packed and stowed ahead of the next three-G phase. Nikki!”

“Yes, Walker!”

“Break out the bedrolls and meal packs; make sure everybody’s fed and hydrated and gets their head down. Amber!”

Amber jumped. “Yes?”

“Make sure everyone is stretched out and healthy. Check carefully for bruising, sores, and blisters.” He gave her a nod, then turned to the rest of them. “Everybody else, find a clothing pack in your size and change into your PT gear. Any questions?”

A unanimous “no, Walker” rippled around the launch, and he nodded.

“Good. Go ahead and unlock your seatbelts.”

Gratefully, Amber released herself and stood up with a groan. Nervous chatter filled the launch as the Rangers stood up, massaged their aching bodies, and tried to stamp some life back into their feet.

She jumped to her task quickly, starting with Roy and Nikki, who were both stretching out and rolling their necks and shoulders.

“Any pain? Any bruising anywhere?”

“Naw! See?”

Naturally, Roy tore off his ruined school shirt to show her, and show off a little, too—he was Roy, after all—then turned and opened an overhead locker. He pulled out an obviously non-standard bag from one of the ship’s supermarkets and dug around inside it.

“What are you doing?”

“I hid some clothes and stuff back when I found out this would be our launch!”

“Why?”

“Dude. None of the standard-issue stuff fits me besides, like, the socks sometimes. Good boots are hard to find for a bear like me, too. I like these! They’re the only brand I ever tried that fits me right.”

He pulled off his shoes and socks, slipped on the pair he had stuffed into the boots, and jammed his feet in with a happy sigh. “See? Comfortable!” He then pulled it all right back off, stuffed his socks back in his boots, and carefully stowed them under his couch. “Ooh, that reminds me. Walker, sir!”

“Yes, Roy?”

“Nobody here is used to high gravity ‘sides me and Nick. They’re gonna get swollen feet pretty bad if they wear anything but socks.”

“Good point. Rangers! Socks only, keep your boots stowed! The long ones, Roy?”

“No, sir, those can pinch, too! Short socks, or nothin’ at all!”

“You heard him, Rangers. Short PT socks only!”

“Yes, Walker!”

Amber complied and nodded at Roy, who really was more thoughtful than she gave him credit for. “Thanks.”

Roy grinned hugely for her and bounced heavily on his toes. “Naw!”

“Don’t tell me you actually had some forethought, lil’ bro?” Nikki’s inevitable tease sounded a little more shaky than usual.

“Yup! Like always!” He reached up and pulled out another pair of bags. “These are for you two.”

When Amber checked hers, it contained a complete set of well-made clothing in exactly her size, including a good pair of new boots. There were some of her favorite snacks and energy bars, a hat…and Mister Wiggle. She stared at the long-lost blue-grey toy rabbit for a second in sheer disbelief, then pulled him out of the bag and ran a thumb through his fur. It was exactly as soft as she remembered.

“I thought I lost him ages ago!” Years ago, in fact. She’d been a little girl, and inconsolable at the time, but over the years had completely forgotten about her favorite bunny…until now.

“Uh, I found him wedged up against the wall behind my bed one day, and, I dunno.” Roy went beet-red and grumbled like he was all kinds of embarrassed. “I figured if something like this ever happened…”

“You seriously worried about this happening?”

“Uh, yeah!” Roy took the moment to unselfconsciously strip to his skin and step into his favorite PT shorts: close-fitting and breathable, with an amusingly impressive emphasis on short. “That’s the whole point of why we’re constantly rebuilding and maintaining the launches, right? Why would we do that if we wouldn’t maybe need them right away? So, uh…I’ve kept these bags stashed away and up-to-date.”

“And you worried about this?” Amber brandished the rabbit at him.

Roy for once had no answer. He went crimson and stared at his big, sturdy feet.

“Thanks, Roy. Really. I…” She looked down at it, smiled wistfully, and set it on her couch. “Thanks.”

Nikki gave the two of them a completely unreadable look, while Walker caught Amber’s eye and grinned knowingly. Confused and not knowing what else to do, Amber cleared her throat. “Don’t we have jobs to do?”

“Right! Jobs.” Roy’s questionable taste in shorts carried over to his trademark stretchy tank tops. He claimed they were cooler and stayed out of the way, but Amber suspected he had other reasons; Roy was an incorrigible show-off, after all.

That done, he got to work on the task Walker had given him.

Meanwhile, Nikki finished changing and immediately leapt to the task of unpacking their food and beds, and Amber found the simple fact of having something to do helped focus her mind. Up until now she’d just been suffering. Now, as she did the rounds and checked that everybody was healthy, she really started to think.

Okay. They were overboard. Or evacuated—whatever. They were en route to Newhome and apparently, they hadn’t turned around to go back to the ship, which was…worrying. The launches certainly had the thrust and fuel to do that…

So why hadn’t they?

The obvious answer was that DANI and Captain Torres must have felt there was some pressing reason they shouldn’t. Which meant Newhome colonization was going forward way ahead of schedule, and rather than being second-wave colonial apprentices, they were all going to be first-wave pioneers.

Actually…that was quite something. She’d accepted her position in the second wave as a consequence of her age and the realities of getting a working colony set up before the administration could send down apprentices. But if she’d had her way, she would have been on the first drops. She’d been a little disappointed that all the rivers, mountains, forests, and plants and stuff would be named by others first.

Now, suddenly, the prospect of being a real pioneer beckoned.

She finished checking everybody and made her report to Walker just as the countdown passed the seven hours and twenty minutes mark.

“Everyone seems okay,” she told him. “I found a few marks from clothing and stuff, and everybody’s kinda stiff and sore, but I didn’t find anything alarming.”

“Good.” Walker gave her a small smile, and to her shock she realized he looked stressed. He’d set a tablet aside as she approached, and she saw him make sure she couldn’t see its screen even as she was standing there.

Just how badly wrong had things gone? She decided to ask.

“Walker, is the ship okay? Are my parents—?”

“The ship’s fine,” Walker promised her instantly. “Everybody’s fine.”

“So why aren’t we going back?”

He glanced down the launch, then sighed and lowered his voice. “Amber, I’m only telling you this because I trust you to be discreet, okay?” He waited for her to nod and explained. “DANI thinks there might be danger. He hasn’t told me exactly what, yet, but it’s serious enough that we aren’t going back. We’re going to land.”

“Don’t we all deserve to know that?” she asked, indicating the rest of the troop. They were talking quietly among themselves and preparing ration packs as they got ready to get some sleep, and they all looked scared and tense.

Walker nodded. “You do,” he agreed, “and I hope I’ll be able to tell you everything in the next one-G phase. But I want to tell you the facts, and I’m afraid we all must wait for those. Go ahead and let the twins know their parents are okay, but other than that, can you keep it to yourself for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.” He turned and picked up a meal pack. “You’d better find your bedroll, which is doubtless directly between Roy and Nikki’s. We’ll need to eat, clean up, and do some PT before the next three-G phase, so the sooner you go to bed, the more sleep you get.”

Amber nodded. “Got it. Don’t neglect your own.”

That got him to smile, at least. “Yes, ma’am. I won’t.”

Feeling a little better, Amber sniffed out the twins, who sure enough had set up a kind of nest in a spot at the back of the launch that was almost private. As predicted, Amber’s bedroll was between theirs. She could tell it was hers, because Mister Wiggle had been placed neatly on the pillow.

They were warming up a meal pack for her as she joined them.

“Good news,” she reported as she sat.

Roy looked up. “Yeah?”

“Dandelion’s fine. It’s still there, everybody’s okay.”

They both sighed a little and relaxed.

“That is good news,” Nikki agreed. “I didn’t wanna think about…wait, how come we haven’t turned around, though?”

“Walker’s not sure, exactly. He said he hopes to have the facts tomorrow but, uh…we’re definitely going to Newhome, he says.”

“We’re not going back? Definitely?”

Amber shook her head. “He was pretty clear about that one.”

The twins looked at each other.

“Well…crap,” Roy ventured after a few seconds.

“Yeah, you said it.” Nikki poked listlessly at her food and then tried to set it aside. She looked like her appetite had totally fled her.

Amber couldn’t let that happen. “Nikki. You need to eat.”

“I’m not hungry right now.”

Roy thrust her pack back into her hands. “Eat, sis. I ain’t hungry either, but…”

“Oh, please!” Nikki scoffed, but took the pack at least. “You’re always hungry.”

“Well…we gotta keep our strength up,” Roy said. Amber had to admit, though, he dug into the rations with way less gusto than he usually showed.

Nikki at least forced down the whole pack with a little prompting, while Amber picked steadily through hers. None of them had much to say.

Roy disposed of the packaging with about seven hours left on the countdown, and by unspoken agreement, they bedded down. Amber wriggled into her bedroll and was reminded of Mister Wiggle’s presence when she put her head down and felt him as a squishy, fluffy lump under her skull.

She pulled him out and looked at him again. Funny, that; they’d all lost their home today, and here she was carrying a little piece of it that she thought she had left behind a long time ago.

She didn’t get much time to think about it, though.

“C’mere, dork.”

And there, as expected, was a Nikki-snuggle. Followed a second or so later by a Roy-snuggle from the other side.

Okay. She had brought at least two other bits of home with her as well as the rabbit. There was going to be a lot of hardship ahead of them, and that was just the trip to Newhome in the launch. Probably they were in for years of hardship after that. Founding a colony wasn’t going to be easy, not even with all the equipment and supplies they were carrying down with them.

But the thought that chased Amber down into a surprisingly restful and relaxing sleep was that she was looking forward to what was coming.