Chapter 2

Cleo blinked. Breathed hard. "Are you the computer?"

The hologram hesitated, her eyebrows knitting together like she had to think about it. "Apparently."

"Well, can you stop the ship?" Cleo shouted over the noise, gripping the sides of her seat as the pressure built against her fragile, squishy body.

The hologram's head froze for a few frames, like a badly buffered video. "No, I can't," she said, looking around like the four of them and their situation was a puzzle she was trying to put together. "Please stop asking stupid questions."

"Excuse me—"

"Wait!" Kaleisha cried. Cleo turned her head with some difficulty to face her friend, who was looking at the hologram with wide eyes. "Why do you look like Captain Lucas?"

"Now, that's a better question." The hologram ran a hand over her mouth, in a gesture that made Cleo astral-project back to being seven and watching the woman's TED Talk fifteen times in a row. "I'm... I'm"—her head twitched again—"I am a perfect replica of Captain Lucas's consciousness, programmed to act as the interface for the Providence operating system." She looked down at her own hands, then back up at Kaleisha. "For simplicity's sake, you can just call me Captain Lucas."

"Are you still technically the captain if you're just a replica?" Cleo asked through gritted teeth.

Lucas raised an eyebrow. "Since you don't look particularly equipped to take up the mantle, I'm going to go with yes. So as long as we're speaking technically, you're in my chair."

Cleo couldn't believe that she was about to spend her last moments being insulted by a dead woman in a computer, but before she could say anything to that effect, Kaleisha yelled at Lucas for her. "Okay, so, if you're the captain and the computer, are you going to do anything?"

"I told you, I can't stop the ship. At this point in the trajectory, with the Providence"—Lucas's irises went blurry, like they were flicking back and forth inhumanly fast—"hmm, about sixty-four kilometers in the air, there's not much I can do without, you know, letting you all plunge to your fiery deaths." Her eyes landed on Abe and Ros, who were still pressed against the floor like swatted flies. "I can probably bring out the extra chairs for your companions. If that would help."

"Yes!" Cleo and Kaleisha shouted in unison.

Lucas waved a hand dispassionately, and out of the corner of her eye Cleo saw a panel in the floor slide open. Two more big, padded chairs rose out of it, and Ros and Abe reached for them, dragging themselves into the seats. Cleo sensed rather than heard it as they exhaled in relief.

She refocused on the hologram, who was now frowning at her. For reasons she couldn't quite place, the intense scrutiny filled Cleo with rage, or maybe panic. "Okay, you want a useful question?" she shouted, over the roaring of the engine and the blood in her ears. "Riddle me this, Captain—"

"You could thank me," Lucas cut in, "for saving your friends. Or at least their spines."

"Are you serious right now?"

"It would be the polite thing to do."

"Tell me," Cleo bellowed, "what is going to happen to us!"

Lucas heaved out a beleaguered sigh. "In the short term? You're on track to achieve escape velocity with, I'm thinking, minimal-to-survivable damage to your circulatory and nervous systems—"

"Damage to our what now?" Ros yelled, and Cleo was sure she heard Abe whimper behind her.

"It's not my fault you decided to launch yourselves into the stratosphere without taking any safety precautions," Lucas said. "Long term, once you leave the Oort Cloud the dark matter engine will kick you into near-lightspeed, and you should arrive at Proxima Centauri B in precisely seven years, three months, and twenty-four days." She plucked at her own sweater, then at her jeans. "Do you think I chose this outfit because it's easy to animate?"

Cleo's chest tightened and the edges of her vision started to go gray, whether from the mortal terror or the g-force, she couldn't tell. "Christ on a cracker."

"This isn't happening," Kaleisha babbled, more to herself than anything. "This wasn't the plan, we can't go to another planet—"

"Yeah, well, I'm not too happy about being a computer," Lucas grumbled, "but we'll all just have to muddle through."

Cleo squeezed her eyes shut and stretched out her hand. Despite everything, through everything, Kaleisha took it. Cleo could suddenly think of nothing but Kaleisha's dad, of Kaleisha's house that stood up on that hill against the levees, clean and warm inside even when the streets were flooded and the sky was grimy.

"I know this isn't ideal."

Cleo squinted through her twitching eyelashes. Captain Lucas was staring at her.

"You obviously didn't sign up for this," she continued. "So. Sorry."

Cleo blinked. Lucas looked regretful, she looked angry, she looked—she looked lost, maybe, standing there with the sky behind her growing darker, clearer, more speckled with the shining watercolor spray of stars. Behind the ship, the atmosphere would be gritty and glowing with the flames of a forest burning somewhere. Cleo wrenched her head around to lock eyes with Kaleisha, ready for the desperate fear on her face. But she only looked as grimly certain as Cleo felt, as they'd maybe always been.

"This is happening," Kaleisha said, squeezing her hand.

Cleo squeezed back. "This is happening," she echoed, right before she passed out.

***

Here's what everyone on Earth knows about the late Captain Lucas. They're all woefully misinformed, of course, but that's not entirely their fault.

Any massive public undertaking that involves a lot of money from taxpayers and venture capitalists needs a human face. For the Providence I project, that face was Captain Wilhelmina Lucas. She was a wunderkind physicist, a veteran of the Erecura Deep mission to Europa, and even at the tender age of thirty she was the obvious choice to lead the most carefully selected and painstakingly trained crew in history. It didn't hurt that she looked good in a suit and could be blindingly charming when she needed to be, or that she had a hilarious and equally exceptional younger brother who was coming along on the mission, or that her fiancé had died three years previously and the whole world had decided that made her a better person for some reason.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Captain Lucas was a major reason the world fell so hard for the Providence mission. It was going to be a big goddamn deal no matter what, obviously. But Lucas gave them a hero to revere, an avatar of all their last, best hopes for the survival of the species, and a friend to make them feel like they understood what was happening in those deepest, darkest halls of impossible science and corporate secrets.

They didn't understand. Not by a long shot. But the important thing was that they thought they did.

When Captain Lucas disappeared with the other 202 crew members on Launch Day, she was mourned just a little bit more than the rest, because humans have no sense of proportion when processing large-scale tragedy. Wings of universities were named after her. She got a statue in front of the Air and Space Museum. And for years afterward, people like Cleo McQueary, even if they didn't consciously realize it, applied to tech schools so they could one day be just like her.

Here's what only four people on Earth (if rapidly tearing through the thermosphere even counts) know about the late Captain Lucas:

In the weeks leading up to the launch, she spent what precious spare time she had uploading every gigabyte of her brain processes into Providence's operating system. Which was an odd thing to do, considering that Lucas thought she was about to spend the next seven years, three months, and twenty-four days on that ship. There was no reason to make a copy of herself.

Unless she thought something else.

***

ARCHIVED: Medical Report — Veronica Ruiz, MD, to Chief Engineer Kristoff Halvorsen, PhD, September 26, 2040

***

When Cleo came to, she couldn't feel anything. It wasn't that her nerve endings had gone numb—she could still wiggle her fingers, and she had a shredding headache—but she wasn't touching anything. No floor under her feet, no pillow under her head, no chair under—

Her eyes flew open. She was still on the flight deck, floating weightlessly a few feet over the captain's chair she'd been sitting in, her hair swirling in a dark, curly halo around her head. Through the window she could see a curving, fuzzy blue strip of the Earth's horizon, and above it, nothing but black.

"Guys," she said aloud, something hot and intoxicating bubbling in her stomach, "you gotta see this."

No one answered. Cleo twisted her neck to the right and saw Kaleisha, still unconscious and hovering above the pilot console. Shit. She knew that Abe and Ros must be behind her, but however she paddled her limbs or contorted her back, she couldn't spin herself around to look at them. Cleo's heart started galloping against her ribs. Ros should have been the one to wake up first. They would know exactly how worried to be about, like, swelling? In everyone's brain membranes, or something?

Okay. Small problems first. Then the big problem.

Wishing for the millionth time in her life that she'd gotten proper zero-gravity training like the astronauts on TV, Cleo folded her knees into her chest so she could untie one of her sneakers. Once she had it off and in her hand, she wound up, said a little prayer that it wouldn't hit any important buttons, and threw the shoe at the window.

It worked just like Cleo had known it would—thank you, Isaac Newton, you brilliant gay bastard—and she drifted slowly backward in the opposite direction of the sneaker, laughing in relief. It was a lot lazier of a pace than she would have liked, but after a few moments she passed Abe's gangly, suspended form, then Ros's ample one, just before she bounced back-first against the rear wall. They were both still unconscious, like Kaleisha, but the three of them looked like all the important parts of their bodies were still in the right place, so Cleo's heart stopped palpitating.

"Hey, Computer?" she called out.

A pop, and there was Captain Lucas, arms crossed, mouth set in an unamused line. She looked at the sneaker floating by the window, then at Cleo drifting away from the wall, half shoeless, and drew a few conclusions.

"You proud of yourself?" she said, deadpan.

Cleo wrinkled her nose at the hologram. "Yeah, quite a bit, actually."

Lucas's frown deepened. "What do you want?"

"Are you gonna be like this every time we call you?" Cleo asked, trying to project competence despite the fact that she was slowly rotating sideways relative to the hologram. "Because I know that you're going through a lot right now, waking up as a computer and all, but I'm not sure I want to deal with your attitude for seven years or whatever."

Lucas glowered at her. "Then stop calling me ‘Computer.'"

"What, you don't like that? What if I did it in my Scotty voice? I can do the accent and everything—"

"I have a name, dipshit."

Cleo went quiet, partly because internationally renowned astronaut and genius Wilhelmina Lucas had just called her a dipshit. But also because, she thought a bit abashedly, twenty-seven years of watching Star Trek should have prepared her for the possibility that this hologram would have feelings. Even if this hologram was also kind of an ass.

"Okay, sorry," she said in what she hoped was an honestly apologetic tone, "but do I have to do the formal thing and yell ‘Captain Lucas' every time? Can I call you Billie? I feel like I read somewhere that—"

"My friends call me Billie." The hologram blinked at her. If Cleo hadn't known any better she would have said that the mildly aggravated slouch on Lucas's face had softened, but then the impression was gone. "Sure. Whatever."

"I'm Cleo McQueary."

"I'm calling you McQueary."

"Suit yourself. So, Billie," Cleo said, blowing a curl out of her face and trying to ignore the fact that she was now fully upside down, "you may have noticed that my friends and I are in a bit of a situation here."

"Yes."

"Is there anything you can do to help us?"

"I'm having trouble—" The upper half of Billie's body waved like an image on an old television. "It's taking some time to reorient myself to my own situation. This may shock you, but a lifetime of memories and a couple hundred gigabytes of extraneous data is a lot to sort through. You'll have to be more specific."

Cleo sighed. "The ship has an artificial gravity drive, right?"

"No, we were all going to spend seven years losing bone mass and bouncing off of each other like MM's. Of course there's a gravity drive."

"Why haven't you engaged it, like, yesterday?"

"I didn't want you all to fall and injure yourselves," Billie said gruffly, which almost made Cleo soften a little toward her, at least until she kept talking. "If you had strapped yourselves into your seats, like, I don't know, people with brains—"

"Hey now—"

"—then we wouldn't be having this conversation, and I'm sure we'd both be a lot happier for it."

Cleo pinched the bridge of her nose, trying not to think about how much more her head would hurt when she landed on it. "You know what, just do it. Ros is a doctor. We'll be fine."

Billie looked skeptically at Ros, who had a small solar system of drool globules orbiting their head, and sighed.

"Okay."

And before Cleo could so much as put her arms out to break her fall, Billie had flicked her head and the floor had come up and whacked Cleo in the face. Ow. Cleo may have been pretty solidly built for someone so short, but that was still going to hurt in the morning. She heard the others hit the floor too—heard Abe yelp as he landed on his chair and rolled off, actually—and then she heard Ros's groan and Kaleisha's whispered "Jesus fuck," and she couldn't even be mad, because she knew they were all safe.

Rolling onto her back, Cleo saw Billie walk with silent footsteps to stand over Ros, who was pushing themself up to a sitting position.

"Are you Ros the doctor?"

"Yes?" Ros said, rubbing their head.

"You should examine your accomplices for head injuries and g-force shock. Meet me in the med bay and I'll, um. Try and answer any questions you might have."

And with a tiny sigh, Billie popped away again. Ros turned to stare at Cleo, their eyebrows crawling up toward their red hair, and Cleo couldn't find it in herself to do anything but shrug back at them.

***

ARCHIVED: Providence Intracrew Messaging Service Conversation — Capt. Wilhelmina Lucas and Mission Specialist Elijah Lucas, April 24, 2041

Elijah Lucas

Hey Bilbo

Wilhelmina Lucas

I told you never to call me that at work, dumbass

Elijah Lucas

What is "at work," really?

Can a digital message ever truly inhabit the imagined, though indisputably physical, community we call "the workplace"?

Wilhelmina Lucas

You're texting me on our work comms. Stick that up your indisputably physical ass

Elijah Lucas

Now you're thinkin like a philosophy major!

Wilhelmina Lucas

God, I hope not. What do you want?

Elijah Lucas

Alright alright

So you didn't hear this from me, but a few of the other mission specs I hang with have been rumbling about some ALLEGED health issues among the engineering team

And I was wondering if you knew anything about why those four got put on leave

Wilhelmina Lucas

Sorry, Eli, but that's classified.

Elijah Lucas

Yeah but is it Baby Brother Classified

Wilhelmina Lucas

I haven't even seen the report to the board. That's how classified.

Elijah Lucas

Ah

Kris handled?

Wilhelmina Lucas

Yeah.

Elijah Lucas

Fascinating

So, hypothetically speaking, if those techs got sick because of a problem with the engine or, like, some heretofore undiscovered dark matter disease, said problem would have been quietly fixed by now, right

Wilhelmina Lucas

[... ]

[... ]

Elijah Lucas

Ignore me

My lunch buddies are very conspiracy-minded

Of course it would be fixed

They wouldn't send us off on a seven-year deep-space mission with a faulty ship, obviously

Wilhelmina Lucas

Yeah

Obviously

Elijah Lucas

And you'd tell me if there was a problem that you knew of

Wilhelmina Lucas

Of course

Always

***

Cleo saw Ros's knees literally go weak when the elevator deposited them in the glittering med bay. Rows of plush beds filled the room, all of them with screens and panels and other digital doodads built into the headboard, and the soothingly green walls were lined with cabinets and diagnostic machines. Ros ran over to one of the hospital beds and immediately started pressing buttons to see what they did.

"Oh man," Cleo said to Kaleisha, who had stopped next to her, "I knew they'd love this."

"Yeah." Kaleisha's voice went rough and quiet the way it did only when she was angry. "Glad you two are having such a blast."

Cleo turned to her friend to see her face drawn tight. "Are you okay, Kal?"

"I'm stuck on a one-way flight to another godforsaken solar system, Cleo. In what universe would I be okay?"

"I'm sorry, did I miss something? Has something gone down since you were holding my hand, all, like, we'll get through this together, Cleo?"

Kaleisha blinked slowly. "Now, I know you didn't interpret that as an acknowledgment that I'm cool with dying in deep space so you can have the interplanetary adventure you've always wanted, Cleo. I know you're not that selfish."

Cleo's lungs seemed to suddenly clench around nothing. "Did I do something? Something that made you think I'm deliberately, callously dooming you to a gnarly space death?"

Kaleisha flexed her fingers and breathed deeply. "All I meant is that this is happening, and we will get through it together, because we have no choice. But in between touching all the deadly machines you can reach and chatting it up with your childhood hero and, apparently, assuming we're all content to fly to Proxima Centauri B on a lark, have you been able to spare a single, measly thought about how, exactly, we're going to get through it?"

"Uh." Cleo ran a hand agitatedly through her hair. "I know we'll figure it out?"

"See?" Kaleisha said, her voice growing louder than she usually allowed it to. "You can't even pretend that you've taken the rest of us into consideration."

"Jesus, Kal, we've been awake for all of fifteen minutes, I don't see why you're already jumping down my throat—"

"Because I know it hasn't occurred to you for even a second to wipe the stardust out of your eyes and think!" Abe came up behind Kaleisha to put a calming hand on her waist, but she shook him off. "We have lives, Cleo, despite your best attempts to escape yours at every opportunity. My Annals of Botany article is supposed to publish in a few weeks. I told my dad I would call him in the morning. Abe's already planning his family's mid-autumn festival party, Ros was supposed to go to Alabama for their grandma's ninetieth next month, and now we're going to spend seven years—"

"Hey. Hey." Cleo tried to ignore the queasy swoop of her stomach that accompanied any mention of her friends' sickeningly healthy relationships with their families. "We'll find a way to radio your dad. And shit, Kal, would it really be so bad to see another planet? Maybe we could even find out what happened to the crew along the way, and show everyone that the space program is worth another shot."

Cleo had been sure that would help, but Kaleisha's glare just grew darker. "Great," she said. "You can get on that. Meanwhile, I'm going to ask Ros if there are any goddamn HRT meds for me on this ship, because I guess I'm the only one here thinking pragmatically."

Kaleisha stomped off toward Ros. Abe followed close behind her, but threw Cleo a look over his shoulder that was half You should apologize, bud, and half You should really apologize, dumb-dumb.

Cleo mentally kicked herself in the shins as Ros squeezed Kaleisha's hand and immediately started searching the shelves for hormone pills. Of course this situation sucked in so, so many ways. Of course she should have thought of Kaleisha's hormone pills, and their families, and their lives.

But the way the Earth had looked as they soared above and away from it—God, it was like all the longing she'd ever done was pressing back into her at once.

"Hey, Cleo," Ros called over their shoulder, standing on their tiptoes to rifle through a cabinet. "How did you summon that Captain Lucas hologram? ‘Computer'?"

Pop.

"What did I just tell you?"

Ros, Abe, and Kaleisha whirled around to see Billie leaning against the elevator door, glaring at them.

"Dude, slow your roll, I haven't gotten a chance to debrief them yet," Cleo said. Billie's eyes narrowed when they met hers, and Cleo got the very skin-crawly feeling that Billie could tell she was upset, even though that was silly, because Cleo was an absolute legend at hiding it when she was upset. She distracted herself by gesturing dramatically between her friends and Billie. "Guys," she said, "this is Billie. I've been informed that calling her ‘Computer' is not very polite. Also, it's taking her a little while to figure out her computer brain, so be gentle."

Billie's eyes un-narrowed, which Cleo took as a win.

"Billie," she continued, "these are my friends and, uh, partners in space crime, I guess. Abe Yang, who's a historian, Ros Wheeler, who's a doctor, as you know, and Kaleisha Reid, who's a botanist and the most badass person I know." Kaleisha rolled her eyes, and Cleo's eyelid twitched involuntarily.

Billie nodded at the others, eyes still on Cleo. "And how about you, McQueary?" she said. "What are you?"

"I have a PhD in computer engineering. And also sneaker physics, obviously."

Billie's eyes crinkled again, but in a smiley way, almost, right before Abe stepped forward and poked at Billie's arm. His finger slid right through, and Billie fizzed into static again. She yelped.

"Oh no! Sorry! I just, there was nothing in any of my research about the ship having a holographic operating system—"

"Do that again, Yang, and we'll both find out if I have the power to sic all the ship's chairs and forks on you, Beauty and the Beast–style."

Ros laughed in a breathy, bewildered way, looking shocked that it had even occurred to someone to be rude to Abe. "Easy, tiger. Was the real Captain Lucas this much of a grump?"

"The real—" Billie's head twitched, and she clenched her jaw. "I don't know. Why don't you ask her?"

Out of habit, Cleo glanced out of the corner of her eye at Kaleisha, who was frowning uneasily at Billie. It hadn't occurred to Cleo—though it should have—that the hologram probably hadn't come online since before Launch Day. Billie would have no way of knowing what had happened.

"Billie," Cleo said, trying to keep her voice neutral, "do you know what year it is?"

"I—" Billie sucked in a breath, and her eyes started buzzing back and forth again. "I don't—"

"It's 2061," Kaleisha said gently.

Billie blinked, and her eyes went still. "What."

"One sec." Abe pulled out his phone to tap through what Cleo knew was the massive drive of files for his postdoc project, "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone: Understanding the Providence Disaster." "Let's start, um—here."

He held the phone out to Billie so she could watch as the headlines scrolled by. All of them had been burned into Cleo's brain long ago.

disaster: "providence" crew vanishes

erebus ceo: no results in hunt for lost crew

ten years on, still no answers for families of "providence" victims

Billie read with her lips just parted, her breath growing quicker and tighter by the second.

"I'm so sorry, Billie." Abe reached out a hand like he was going to pat her shoulder, then thought better of it. "It must be awful to find out this way."

Billie looked up from Abe's phone, and Cleo thought her eyes might have been watery. Except Billie was a hologram, and that would be silly. "They're just—gone? No one's ever found them, or at least figured out..."

She choked on the end of her sentence, looking hollowed out. She'd had—or Lucas had, anyway, though the distinction didn't seem important—a brother on the ship, Cleo remembered with a sinking feeling. Elijah.

"What, ah—" Billie took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, hard, her fingers trembling. "What is Erebus doing to find out what happened to them?"

"Nothing." Abe stowed his phone and eyed Billie cautiously. "They tried for a few years and then gave up."

"They what?" Billie let her hand fall and glared at Abe. Her eyes were definitely wet, and Cleo wondered distantly why Lucas would have programmed her hologram to cry. "Kris would never let them just abandon everyone."

"Kristoff Halvorsen, you mean? The chief engineer? He also went missing a year later, unfortunately." Abe frowned slightly. "Took his own life, is what they ended up deciding."

"What? No—that can't—fuck."

Cleo almost didn't want to disturb Billie further, but she had to know, had to ask—

"Do you know why it might have happened?"

Billie blinked, her bloodshot eyes starting to vibrate again, searching for something. "No, I don't—there's too much, I can't—"

"Are you sure? Could it be in a memory you're still downloading?" While Billie's irises flickered, Cleo sucked in a breath and held it till it hurt. The best chance of her lifetime to understand what happened on the Providence was standing in front of her; Billie had to know. She had to.

Billie's eyes came to a stop. "I seriously doubt that I would have forgotten something like that." She straightened up, apparently deciding that the time for telegraphing even the tiniest bit of despair was over, and scanned the group imperiously. "But here's something I know for sure: You idiots knew what could happen, and you still started up the engine."

There she went again, making it impossible to like her. Cleo opened her mouth to rage at Billie, or maybe to start crying, but Ros cut her off, trying to head off an argument as subtly as an eighteen-wheeler skidding into a U-turn. "Oh, Billie, what do you know, I almost forgot why I called you! Did your medical team stock estrogen? Spironolactone?"

Billie jerked a thumb at a cabinet to the right of the machine.

"We absolutely did not think that this would happen," Cleo said as Ros clattered past. "We had a plan. It was a great plan. Kaleisha's whole thing is plans."

"Don't patronize me right now, Cleo—"

"Well, clearly," Billie interjected, "the plan was bullshit."

Kaleisha redirected her affront at Billie. "Hey!"

"You should have at least been self-aware enough to realize that you don't know jack about the Providence. But you're postdocs or whatever, so I guess that was too much to ask."

"And where did self-awareness come in," Cleo shot back, "when your engineers inexplicably decided to design the dark matter engine to turn on at the touch of a hand?"

Billie's brow furrowed. "What are you talking about, McQueary?"

"A brush. A caress. A gentle graze of lovers' fingers." Cleo stood aside, not breaking her eye contact with Billie, to let Ros noisily bustle past her so they could noisily hand Kaleisha the pills they'd found. "I wasn't anywhere near a switch or a big red button or anything else one would conventionally take to mean press here to launch yourself into space. I put my hand on one of those particle tubes and the thing started up all by itself."

"That's impossible."

"No, Billie, we all saw it happen," Kaleisha piped up, crossing her arms. "Why would it do that?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know that either, huh?" Cleo said with a humorless laugh loud enough to carry over the sound of Ros noisily putting a blood pressure cuff on Abe's arm. "What's the point of having the brain of the lady who was in charge of this whole operation if you don't remember anything useful?"

"You tell me," Billie said through clenched teeth. "You're the computer wizard—what's my purpose? My program directive? Is this a Three Laws of Robotics situation or do I get a little more leeway than that?"

"I don't know, man!" Cleo threw her hands up in exasperation and tried to ignore whatever was twitching across Billie's face, because it was something less than angry and maybe a little sad and she did not have the time or energy to parse it even if she wanted to. "I would be more inclined to help you figure it out if you weren't such an asshole—"

Kaleisha cleared her throat loudly, and Cleo realized that she had somehow gotten all up in Billie's space without noticing. She felt her face get hot, and tried to ignore that too.

Kaleisha swallowed her pills dry and looked at them both like she was already bored of their bickering. "Not to break up whatever this is, but we have a few more pressing questions on our hands right now."

Cleo ran a hand through her hair and tried to let some of the tension seep out of her shoulders. "You're right, Kal. What are you thinking?"

"I, for one, would like to know how we're expected to live on this ship. Billie, can you take us to the food stores so we can check that they're still okay?"

Billie blinked and, miraculously, didn't argue. "Sure."

"Great." Kaleisha flicked a loc out of her face and fixed Cleo with a glare. "After that, Billie, you should teach Cleo about how the ship works. She's our best shot at keeping this thing running." Cleo smiled a tiny smile, and Kaleisha pursed her lips in return. "Ros and Abe can go check the quarters for other supplies, possibly clues, and I will try my best to radio Earth."

Abe took Kaleisha's hand. "Sounds good, babe."

"Do you want my help with the radio?" Cleo blurted, knowing as soon as she said it that she was pushing her luck.

"No, I think you should focus on the ship with Billie." Kaleisha's expression would have been unreadable if Cleo didn't know her so well.

"Kal, please—"

Kaleisha was already walking toward the elevator. "No time, babe. I need brain food if I'm gonna come up with a plan to get us home."

***

There was one person who might have known why the dark matter engine did what it did, and it wasn't Wilhelmina Lucas. The original, not the hologram. But also not the—whatever. You get it.

Remember, Lucas was only one half of the dream team leading the Providence mission. She was the captain and media darling, but she didn't build the ship or its engine. Wasn't down in the engineering trenches, so to speak.

No, the man leading that charge was Lucas's co-commander, the chief engineer. He was the soft-spoken visionary to Lucas's intrepid explorer, the leader of the underground lab where scientists learned more about dark matter and dark energy than anyone could have previously imagined. The man did more to advance human knowledge than possibly anyone who had ever come before him, and he never even seemed to care about getting the credit for it. His TV appearances were largely limited to guest spots on PBS shows for children, and he was happy to let Lucas do the schmoozing at all those black-tie fundraisers. He told her what to say about how the engine worked, and she said it. He just wanted to focus on his work, and science, and progress.

Their partnership was perfect like that—both bringing skills to the table that, together, made them an unstoppable juggernaut of genius and charisma. They had started out as colleagues, thrust together by Erebus Industries' need for both the energy of a hot up-and-comer and the gravitas of a veteran physicist. But they quickly became friends, odd couple though they were, each finding that they enjoyed the other's company through the years of all-night work, endless training, and coauthored papers even more than they respected their drive and expertise.

He may have shirked the spotlight, relatively speaking, but McQueary and her friends would still recognize him on sight. They'd seen his recurring educational segment, Quantum Chatter with Dr. Dark Matter; they'd seen the press conference where he'd announced, tears gleaming in his brilliant blue eyes, that the dark matter engine was fully operational. They'd also watched as he counted down on Launch Day; they'd been unable to look away as he watched his life's work obliterated in a flash of light with cameras from every major news network on Earth trained on his face. They'd also seen the news when, a year later to the day, he disappeared from his home as if he had never been there and was officially declared dead.

They knew his name: Kristoff Halvorsen. They couldn't have known that his friends called him Kris. Lucas, specifically, had called him Kris.