The Pioneer Read online

  Dedication

  For my parents, who taught me to build worlds

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Bridget Tyler

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  My earliest memory is riding on my mother’s shoulders late at night. Dad was walking ahead of us with Teddy and Beth. We must have been in one of the depopulated zones, because it was dark enough to see the stars in the sky. That was the first time I’d ever seen them.

  I held on to Mom’s hands and leaned back to soak in the starlight. It was so beautiful it made my stomach ache, but in a good way.

  “Our home is out there, Joanna,” Mom whispered. “A brand-new planet orbiting one of those stars. All we have to do is find it.”

  My mom never lies to us. It took twelve years of searching, but we found it. We found it. Just thinking the words makes me smile. In forty-eight hours our ship, the International Space Agency ship Pioneer, will leave Earth. Seventy-two hours after that we’ll leave this solar system, possibly forever. The next time I tether into this chair, we’ll be orbiting our new world.

  Shuttles don’t get official names, but Dad dubbed ours the Wagon. Get it? Pioneer? Wagon? My dad is kind of a dork.

  As the Pioneer’s cadet pilot, I’m in charge of shuttle runs. There are a lot of shuttle runs. The Pioneer is way too big to land—it was built in space and it’s going to stay there.

  I must have made the trip from ISA Mission Control up to the Pioneer and back three dozen times in the last week, ferrying people and cargo up to the ship. I’ll have to do the same thing in reverse when we get to our new home. But I don’t mind. I’m always happy when I’m flying.

  This is my last run before we leave Earth, and the Wagon is mostly empty. My sister, Beth, is the only other person in the passenger cabin, and she’s totally lost in whatever she’s working on. Teddy and Miguel are messing around in the cargo hold. I could make them come strap in, but we’re all going to be in insulated deep sleep for the next eight months. They might as well blow off steam while they can.

  Beth and Teddy remember a time before we were pioneers. I don’t. My parents were already running the Galactic Frontier Project when I was born. Dad is the GFP’s primary investigator (that’s science for “boss”), and Mom is pilot commander of the Pioneer. She’ll also be planetary governor until the population is big enough to hold elections.

  Being raised to pioneer human life on new worlds was not a leisurely childhood. Some Project kids resent that, which is fair. But I’ve never wanted to be anything other than a pioneer. Most little kids draw their families standing in front of a house. I didn’t. My family portraits featured five crayon stick figures labeled Mom, Dad, Beth, Teddy, and Joanna, holding hands in front of a wobbly spaceship on a different world. The only thing that changed from picture to picture was what new and bizarre ecosystem I’d invented for our future home.

  Luckily, our new planet is nothing like the ones I dreamed up as a kid. Its official name is Tau Ceti e because it’s the fifth planet from a g-type star called Tau Ceti. Creative, the International Science Foundation is not. But despite its less than poetic name, Tau is kind of perfect. Scratch that. It isn’t “kind of” anything. Tau is perfect. It has tons of biodiversity, a gentle yellow sun, a twenty-two-hour day, a 225-day year, and plenty of oxygen and water. And, most important, there’s no intelligent life. Nobody thought we’d find an uninhabited world so like Earth.

  “Computer,” I say. “Can you bring up a three-sixty of the Diamond Range on Tau Ceti e?”

  “Certainly, Joanna,” the computer’s crisply artificial voice replies. The cabin explodes into a thousand shades of green as a panorama of our new world covers the walls, ceiling, and floor. If not for the rows of high-backed white passenger seats, it would look like Beth and I were sitting in a lush valley instead of a space shuttle.

  The ISA Rangers who did the preliminary survey of Tau described it as “verdant.” If the rest of the planet is anything like these recordings, that’s an epic understatement.

  My sister’s voice hooks me out of my daydream. “I’m trying to focus, you know.”

  Beth came straight from her doctoral thesis defense. She’s still all dressed up, but she’s been dissecting her long French braid as she works, so her muddy-red hair is a hurricane. Beth’s advisers at MIT didn’t think she could finish before we left. She ignored them, of course. Beth has more than her fair share of the Watson family cockiness. But she just completed a PhD in biological engineering at nineteen, so I guess she’s earned it.

  “How can you be working?” I fire back, without changing the display. “Today of all days?”

  “How can you be so emotionally compromised by a transition we’ve been anticipating since before you were born?” She punctuates the question with a single raised eyebrow.

  “I am not emotionally compromised! I’m excited.” I throw my arms wide to take in the panoramic image of our new world. “Aren’t you excited?”

  “Of course,” Beth says. “But our long-term food supply depends on my Stage Three genetic calculations being right. So can we just—” She gestures to the wall screens, rather than finishing the sentence.

  My flex buzzes gently on my wrist. It’s an alert from the navigation app.

  “We’re approaching the Pioneer anyway,” I say. I call to the computer, “Switch to exterior cameras, please.”

  “Certainly, Joanna,” it replies. The wall screens flicker from the rich tapestry of green to the view from the Wagon’s exterior cameras.

  As always, the black glitter of space fills my stomach with butterflies. Near-Earth orbit is crowded with stations, ships, and space junk, but it’s still beautiful. Below us, dawn looks like an ultraviolet rainbow sliding the dark back across the planet.

  The Pioneer is in orbit just beyond that bright line, basking in sunlight. Deep bellied and trailing long space-time stabilizer fins, she looks like a luminescent space whale. The silver flecks of her satellites cling to her back like bubbles running over her skin.

  “This is just as distracting,” Beth mutters as she goes back to scribbling on her flex tablet. “And totally unnecessary to complete docking maneuvers.”

  “Yup,” I say. “But it’s cool.”

  I unwrap my flex and shake the velvety sheet of touch screen until it snaps stiff into tablet form. I press one edge firmly against the arm of my seat. It bonds with the ergofoam and stays upright, leaving my hands free to work. I tap the nav app icon, and a control panel blooms across the screen.

  My grandfather taught me to fly in his antique Cessna. The cockpit was full of levers and handles and gauges you had to keep track of all at the same time. Modern spacecraft don’t have any of that. Just apps you use to give the computer instructions. That’s why Grandpa taught Teddy and me to fly his ancient airplane first. He says flying and programming a computer to fly for you are two different things. That’s why I like three-sixty mode. It’s the closest I can get to the cockpit of the Cessna.

  I wish Grandpa was coming with us. Mom asked, but he wouldn’t even consider it. I’ll miss him, but I
understand. Fixing Earth up is pretty much his life’s work. Grandpa retired from the ISA to run the Earth Restoration Project. He and his team developed a set of nanoscopic scrubbers that filter carbon out of the air. They deployed them into the upper atmosphere thirty years ago, and it worked. Planetary temperatures are back into normal ranges, and the reforestation of the Amazon is almost complete. The ERP is going to launch a nanofiltration system into the oceans next year. We should be able to start breeding programs to reverse the twenty-first century extinctions by 2120. But I should say they, not we. Earth isn’t my world anymore.

  “Almost home!” Teddy calls as he climbs through the hatch from the cargo hold. We’ll all have to shave our hair off before we go into insulated deep sleep for the trip, so he hasn’t bothered to cut his floppy, red-brown hair in a while. He’s wearing a gray ISA flight suit too, but his isn’t zipped all the way up, so you can see the classic NASA logo on his T-shirt underneath. My big brother is a sucker for nostalgic space program crap.

  “If by ‘almost’ you mean seven months, twenty-eight days, and thirteen hours,” Beth snarks, giving up on work and folding her flex around her wrist. “Give or take roughly fifteen minutes for docking maneuvers.”

  “Twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds.” My brain supplies the number automatically. I may not be able to do high-level math in my head, but I’m kind of obsessed with the Pioneer. I’ve memorized every detail of her specs. It’s almost as good as getting to fly her myself.

  “Nerd,” Teddy says cheerfully as he drops into the seat next to mine and taps the tether controls on his utility harness. The black straps that run over his shoulders extend a fine webbing of nanocarbon filaments that bond with the seat.

  “No. Pilot,” I fire back as I request docking clearance from the Pioneer. “A pilot who fully qualified for solo suborbital, orbital, and open-space flight before my fifteenth birthday, thank you very much.”

  “Which is almost a year younger than you qualified, isn’t it, bro?” Miguel Silva points out, swinging his med kit up onto the deck before hauling himself through the hatch after Teddy. The top half of Miguel’s flight suit is tied around his waist, and his thin black undershirt does beautiful things for his shoulders.

  Miguel grew up in Mexico City, but he spent his summers in the little beach town where his grandparents live. His grandmother taught him to surf as soon as he could swim, and it shows. Don’t get me wrong, Miguel is almost as much of a brother to me as Teddy. But that doesn’t mean a girl can’t admire what a lifetime of surfing does to a guy’s physique. He drags his shaggy, rainbow-dyed hair back into a ponytail and throws Teddy a playful smirk. “Kind of embarrassing, getting one-upped by little sis like that.”

  “Joanna was sixteen months younger,” Beth corrects. “He failed the first time, which was embarrassing for us all.”

  Teddy shoots her a good-natured glare. She tsks. “The occasional challenge to your ego is healthy, Theodore.”

  “Some people don’t feel the need to compete with their siblings,” Teddy grumbles.

  “You’re right,” I say. “But none of them are members of the Watson family.”

  Teddy bursts out laughing. My face splits into a grin. I can’t help it. What is it about making your big brother laugh? It always feels like a tiny victory.

  “You’re cleared, Wagon,” my mother’s voice flows over the comms. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Enough funny business, Watsons,” Miguel says, carefully stowing his med kit under his seat before tethering in. “You heard the lady. Let’s get our dock on. I gotta put these civvies on ice before they go bad.”

  Since Tau is so similar to Earth, almost two-thirds of our Exploration and Pioneering Team are civilians. There are almost two hundred of us now, including fourteen kids. The other E&P team is restricted to ISA officers and engineers. Their planet, Proxima Centauri b, needs a lot of terraforming. It won’t be safe for civilians for a while. Not like Tau.

  Everyone except the Pioneer’s crew went into insulated deep sleep back on Earth and won’t come out until we’re on our new planet. We’re carrying the last group of civilians in deep-sleep crates. Miguel is with us in case a crate malfunctions. He’s seventeen, like Teddy, but he just finished medical school. Project kids complete training in our fields of choice as quickly as we’re able. The less unskilled dead weight an E&P Team has to support, the better.

  “Don’t have to ask me twice.” I swirl my fingers across the navigation app to put the Wagon into a lazy spin, matching the Pioneer’s rotation. I know this shuttle well enough now that she moves like an extension of my own body. Docking is like dancing—a harmony of metal and electricity that makes my heart thump in time with the gentle roar of the engines. There’s barely a shimmy as our docking clamps connect with the Pioneer.

  This must be the fiftieth time I’ve successfully docked the Wagon on my own. You’d think it would get old.

  It doesn’t.

  “You know, you used to make that same face when Dad bought us ice cream,” Teddy says, smacking the control panel on his harness to release his tether. The web of black nanotubules slithers back into his shoulder straps, and he bounds out of his seat.

  I toss him a narrow glare as I untether. To my surprise, the look on his face is mushy rather than mocking. He catches me looking and covers the sentimental expression with an eyebrow quirk and grin. “Nerd.”

  “No,” I repeat, heading for the rear airlock. “Pilot.”

  I swipe my hand across the door to bring up the lock screen and enter my code. The seal releases with a hiss of pressurized air. The others file into the cubical white chamber, and Teddy seals the door behind us before I open the other side and step into the Pioneer’s loading bay. That’s the whole point of an airlock, to keep pressurized vessels like the Pioneer and the Wagon from losing too much atmosphere when people pass from one to the other.

  The air on the Pioneer is different than it is on the Wagon. It’s softer and warmer thanks to the huge algae tanks that surround the engine’s electromagnetic core, absorbing radiation and giving off humid, oxygenated air. Every breath sings with the vibration of the engines. You can’t really hear it so much as you can feel it. Like the ship is a bell that’s just stopped ringing.

  If not for the warm air, I’d think I just stepped into space. The loading bay wall screens have been set to a huge three-sixty panorama of the view from the ship’s exterior cameras. Earth rolls under my feet, brown and blue and gray. The moon glitters with artificial light overhead, and beyond it the stars beckon.

  Leela Divekar and Chris Howard are sprawled on the floor at the center of the bay, looking down at Earth. They’re both in uniform—Leela is a Marine Corps cadet and Chris is a cadet engineer. Leela’s long, black hair is loose, falling around her head in thick waves. She’s been my best friend since her family moved from Pune to Frontier Project HQ in Australia, when we were both five. Chris’s flight suit is a little too short. Again. He just turned eleven and he keeps hitting these crazy overnight growth spurts. Chris is like a little brother to Beth, Teddy, and me. His mom, Chief Engineer Penny Howard, is my mother’s best friend. They grew up together in base housing at the Langley Research Center.

  “About time,” Leela says, yanking her hair back into its usual ponytail as she rolls to her feet. Between her dance classes and the martial arts belts Leela’s been stacking up since we were kids, she moves like flowing water. “We’ve been waiting to help you unload for like an hour.” Her dark eyes are red rimmed. She’s been crying, but she wouldn’t want me to notice.

  “’Cause you’d rather be inventorying freeze-dried beans and rice?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, Divekar,” Teddy says as he seals the airlock behind us. “Always have been.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you,” she fires back.

  He grins. “You should. Honesty is hot.”

  He crosses the bay in a few long strides to kiss her. With
tongue.

  “Gross,” I say. They’ve been dating for almost a year, and I’m okay with it. I guess. But she’s my best friend and he’s my big brother. It’s not something I need to watch.

  “Whatever,” Chris mutters. “I have to get back to engineering. Mom has a deadly to-do list for me.” He enjoys Leela and Teddy’s public displays of affection even less than I do. Chris has had a hopeless crush on Leela since forever. It’s not that Chris isn’t cute. He is, or at least, he’s going to be. But he hasn’t even hit puberty yet.

  “This is mega-awesome,” Miguel says, drinking in the view of the stars around us.

  “Chris set it up,” Leela says, coming up for air. “Isn’t it cool?”

  Chris flushes a deep plum. Poor kid. “It’s just a live three-sixty. No big deal.”

  “Yes, it is,” Leela says. “It’s a big deal to me.” She gazes down at Earth. “You think we’ll ever see it again?” There’s longing in her voice, but I don’t think it’s the blue marble haloed in space junk and satellites she’s been crying over. Everyone I love is on this ship, except Grandpa. But that isn’t true for Leela. I got half the flight time I needed for my clearance taking Leela back to India to visit her cousins and grandparents. I can only imagine what it must be like for her, thinking she might not see them again.

  Teddy wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “You will. If you want to, you will.”

  “It’s not like it’s going anywhere,” I say, staring down into the blue globe. It’s beautiful. It’s home. I can’t wait to leave it. “And there’s a whole universe out there just waiting for us.”

  Chris makes a face. “Are Watsons even allowed to have doubts?”

  “Nah,” Leela says. “It’s in the Project bylaws.”

  “What is there to doubt?” Beth says. “This is who we are.”

  “That’s right. And this new world is going to be ours,” Teddy says. “Not a hand-me-down that’s held together with solar paneling and wishful thinking.”

  Everyone gets quiet then.

  The moment shimmers around us. Endless and fleeting. Soaring. The six of us, standing together, surrounded by the infinite stars. Our home already behind us. The great wide unknown stretching in front of us.