The Pioneer Read online

  Leela disengages the docking clamps and we swing down and away from the Pioneer. Piloting is mostly aim and gravity, when you’re working this close to a planet. If you point the ship in the right direction, the planet’s gravitational pull will reel you in like a fish on a line. Tau’s gravity well isn’t quite as strong as Earth’s—Leela will have to compensate for that in her atmospheric entry trajectory.

  It was over two years ago when I did the math for this flight, but I think I still have the calculations memorized. I did them so many times. I wanted to have it perfect, so I could prove to Mom that I was ready to pilot the Wagon’s first descent.

  Now we’re finally here, and I’m just a passenger watching Leela do it.

  I should have stayed home with Grandpa.

  I shake my head hard, like I can hurl the thought free. Miguel is right. Teddy would kick my ass if he knew I was missing this because I’m moping.

  I look away from Leela and focus on the planet turning below us as we drop toward it in a slowly descending spiral. Tau has three continents, one of which is huge and looks kind of like someone smooshed Australia into one side of Africa and Europe into the other. That’s where we’re going to land—specifically, on an empty swath of brown-green prairie land that stretches inland from the mountains on its western coast.

  Turbulence slams me back against my seat as hot-pink flames lick their way up the shields. We’re crossing into the atmosphere.

  Leela’s entry vector is a little bit off, which perversely makes me feel better. That, in turn, makes me feel like a jerk. What kind of person is glad when the pilot of the freaking spaceship that they’re flying in makes a mistake?

  The shaking stops abruptly. The flames clear, and the wall screens reveal a panoramic view of the planet below. It’s all color and light from here, because we’re still a thousand meters up. And dropping. I feel my body pressing slightly upward against my harness as we accelerate toward the ground.

  Sparkling whiteness blooms across my field of vision. We’re losing altitude too fast—my pacers can’t keep up with the change in atmospheric pressure. I pass out.

  For a few head-spinning moments, I am nowhere and nothing as the pacers in my blood struggle against the shifting atmospheric pressure, and my brain gasps for oxygen. When the world fades up and I regain consciousness, we’ve already landed.

  The wall screens are a riot of color and light. This is what sunrise looks like on our new home.

  The cabin buzzes with voices as the others untether from their seats and gather their things. Everyone is excited. I am too, I realize, tapping my harness to release my tether. The tight, tingly feeling is so unfamiliar, I almost don’t recognize it.

  I grab Beth’s hand and tug her along as I follow Mom to the airlock. Dad comes to stand beside us as Mom pulls up the lock screen, then turns to face the crowd.

  “My friends! We have come to the edge of humanity’s newest frontier.” She unseals the airlock doors behind her. “I can think of only one thing to say.”

  Brilliant sunshine floods in as the airlock swings open and the landing ramp unfolds, smacking down into chunky, silver-brown soil. I expect Mom to start walking down the ramp. Instead, she looks to me and makes a go ahead gesture.

  She wants me to go first.

  Adrenaline surges over me. This is the moment. The moment we’ve been working toward my whole life. The moment Teddy died for. The moment we truly become pioneers.

  Miguel nudges me. “Dude. You’re killing the mood.”

  I walk through the airlock and step out into the sunlight. My heart is pounding so hard, it’s overwhelming my pacers. I can hear the blood thudding against my eardrums, and hot white sparks are dancing in the corners of my vision.

  I reach the bottom of the ramp.

  Mom calls out, “This is one small step for a young woman . . .”

  My sneaker presses into the soft soil of Tau Ceti e.

  “And one giant leap for humankind!”

  I can hear the roar of cheers behind me. But I don’t look back.

  I turn my face up to the cloud-speckled sunlight and breathe in air that smells like salt and pine sap and something I don’t have a name for yet. I am standing on a new world. Our world. And just for this moment, nothing else matters.

  We’re finally here.

  Two

  There were so many little things about Earth that my mind took for granted, like white noise my brain just edited out. It’s not like that here. Everything is new. I notice every color, every smell, and every sound. Even the breeze feels different. Like it’s dancing across the back of my neck. If I had a comparative analysis of air currents on Earth and air currents on Tau Ceti e, I could figure out why. But I don’t want to know. Not yet. I just want to feel it.

  The sky here is a brighter, greener blue than the sky back on Earth. The color is hard to describe. It’s sort of like turquoise, but not really. I don’t think that shade of blue exists on Earth. The sun is rising over the prairie, but the twin moons are still visible, hanging low over the western horizon. They have low orbits compared to Earth’s moon. It makes them look huge in the sky. They’re close enough that you can see the pits and craters etched across their fat, silver bellies.

  The Diamond Range is even more beautiful than I expected. The mountains sparkle in the early-morning sunshine like someone tossed glitter across green velvet. Ribbons of gray and blue twist down through the hills and wind together into a river that runs just to the south of us. The trees that cluster on its banks are tall and delicate. Their long branches are dusted with tiny flowers in neon colors so bright they hardly look real. In contrast, the tough, springy prairie grass is such a dull green it’s almost gray. It grows in low clumps that end in pink-tinged yellow seedpods.

  The Wagon looks starkly out of place here, looming over the prairie with its wings folded back and the sun casting dark rainbows across its iridescent black skin. I guess that makes sense. It is out of place, like the spaceships that are always attacking Earth in the twentieth-century movies Dad loves. Only it’s our ship. We’re the aliens here.

  “Idle hands ruin plans, kiddo.” My father’s voice pulls my soaring thoughts back into the present. “Save the woolgathering for another day.”

  Dad is living his lifelong dream right now, and it shows. He has his favorite wide-brimmed, dorky dad hat pulled low over his red-brown hair and a goofy, too-happy-to-hold-it-in grin on his face.

  “We just landed. Can’t we . . . I don’t know, take a second to deal with this?” I say, gesturing to the world around us.

  “We’ll have a lifetime to ‘deal with this,’” Dad says. “We’re pioneers. Not tourists. And we’ve only got eight hours to unload the Wagon before the next launch window.”

  The Wagon isn’t nearly as delicate as old-school, rocket-propelled spacecraft used to be—you can fly her in pretty much any atmospheric conditions. But you waste a lot of fuel if you don’t work with the pull of gravity, so you want to sort of spiral around the planet to get into orbit. That’s why we schedule our launches at the times in Tau’s rotation that will give us the shortest possible path from here to the Pioneer in orbit. Scratch that. We don’t schedule launches, Mom and Leela do.

  “Is Leela taking it up?”

  I didn’t mean to let the bitter taste in my mouth flavor my words, but it does. Sympathy floods Dad’s face. “I’m so sorry it isn’t you, Joey.”

  Dad has no poker face. I can see him aching for me.

  I open my mouth to tell him that it’s no big deal and I’m fine. Then I realize that I’m going to cry if I actually try to say anything. I hate this feeling, like I’m being held hostage by my own sadness. I shrug, hoping it comes off as casual, but I inherited Dad’s total lack of chill. Everything I think and feel shows up in my face.

  He pulls me in for a hug. I don’t mean to, but I hug him back. I lean my head on Dad’s shoulder, and for a few seconds it feels like it used to, when I was small and he could fix every problem
. Sadly, I’m old enough to know better now. I push him away. “Idle hands ruin plans, remember?”

  His favorite made-up cliché lures a smile to his lips. “That’s right, baby girl,” he says. “And we have a whole lot of plans. A whole lot of plans.”

  We part ways and I go looking for Chief Penny.

  As head of engineering, Chris’s mom is in charge of the duty roster. Chief Penny puts me on unloading duty. The Wagon’s hold is packed with huge crates of raw plastic and four disassembled industrial-size 3D printers.

  We unload the printer components first, so the engineering team can start assembling them. The 3D printers are the only equipment we brought from Earth. We’ll use them to make everything else we need—including our cabins. We have a lot of printing to do if we want to have a place to sleep tonight.

  While the engineers assemble the 3Ds, the rest of us use the Wagon’s hover carts to unload the crates of raw. A hover cart looks sort of like a really uncomfortable black mattress that floats a meter off the ground. They’re standard equipment for shuttles like the Wagon.

  Even with a hover cart, unloading the big crates of raw is hard work. Five hours later, I’m sweaty and sunburned, and I have epic blisters on my palms and the backs of my heels, where my sneakers are slowly rubbing the skin away.

  I’m halfway down the ramp, pulling a huge load of raw, when there’s a loud, metallic coughing sound and my hover cart sags to the left.

  “Crap!”

  The cart’s field generator is dying. I swear, fighting to control my cart. These crates are heavy enough to crush me. I’m not strong enough to push this cart back up the ramp, and I won’t have time to jump free if I let go and it slides down. I’m screwed.

  There’s another sharp, metallic cough, and then the hover cart dies altogether.

  I brace myself for impact, but nothing happens. The cart doesn’t move a centimeter.

  I lean around the loaded hover cart, which isn’t hovering anymore. A marine I don’t know well is holding up the other end. He smirks like this is the best joke he’s heard all day. “Shall we?”

  “If you insist.”

  He snorts a laugh as we wrestle the busted hover cart to the bottom of the ramp. I lean against the crates of raw to catch my breath. He isn’t even winded.

  “The word you’re looking for is thank you,” the marine says.

  “That’s two words.”

  “Touché,” he says, chuckling the word. “But you must admit, I saved your butt.”

  It takes me a second to remember his name. Lim. Private Jay Lim. He’s one of the new recruits they brought in to replace the four marines who were killed in the accident on the Pioneer. He looks like he’s about my age, maybe a year or two older. He’s Korean, but he must have grown up somewhere in the So Cal Metro, judging by his blunt California accent. He’d be hot if he didn’t look so pleased with himself.

  I really should say thank you. He might have saved my life. But I just can’t give him the satisfaction. “Nah. I’m stronger than I look.”

  “Mutant superpowers?” he says.

  I shrug, like for all you know. He grins. Damn it. He’s enjoying this.

  Lim pulls a bag of water from the cargo pocket in his pants and takes a swig. “That how you ended up on fetch-and-carry duty?” He offers me the water. I accept. “You’d think they could find a better gig for the daughter of the commander and the PI.”

  “I’m a pioneer,” I say, taking a swig and handing it back. “Not a princess.”

  “From what I hear, you’re kind of a hotshot,” he says. “Did they really give you the Medal of Honor at fifteen?”

  “Yeah,” I say, working really hard to keep my voice casual. “But I don’t fly anymore.”

  “Cool.”

  “That’s it?” I say. Disinterest is not the usual reaction to that statement. My heart condition isn’t public knowledge, so people get all surprised and curious when they find out the ISA’s junior hero quit. “You’re not going to ask why?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  Yes.

  I bite down on the word before it charges out of my mouth. What is wrong with me today? I didn’t even want to tell the ISA counselors about the accident. I certainly don’t want to discuss the worst day of my life with this guy.

  Do I?

  “Jo!” Chris calls, jogging down the ramp from the Wagon behind us. “What did you do to your cart?”

  Just like that, the weirdly intimate moment evaporates. Chris and Lim help me haul the busted hover cart out of the way, and then we all get back to work.

  The sun is hanging low over the mountains by the time we’re done. I snag a bag of water and collapse in the tall grass to watch the light show. The jagged peaks of the Diamond Range were pretty during the day, but now they’re dazzling. They look like huge prisms buried in the prairie, shattering the dusky light into rainbows full of colors I’ve never seen before.

  “Howdy, squirt,” Chief Penny says, settling cross-legged beside me. A little smile slips over her face as she takes in the spectacular evening light. “Not half bad, is it?”

  The chief is shorter than I am, but you’d never describe her as petite. She has too many muscles. She has dark-brown skin, like Chris, and there’s a little gray woven through her black curls.

  Most people recycle their utility harnesses every day, along with their uniforms, but Chief Penny doesn’t. The straps of her harness are lined with Eagle Scout achievement badges. She always says that she and Mom learned more about running a spaceship in the Scouts than they did in the academy.

  “It’s . . .” I don’t have the words for how strange and perfect this place is.

  She nods in agreement with my speechlessness. “Indeed.”

  We sit there quietly for a while, breathing in the evening air.

  “Chief!” Sergeant Kaeden Nolan calls. “We’re ready for liftoff.”

  “You’re going back up?” I ask, trying not to sound disappointed. Of course Chief Penny has to go up. She’ll have days of work to do, putting the Pioneer into standby mode so it can stay in orbit uncrewed after we bring the rest of the E&P team down in their inso crates.

  “An engineer can’t leave her ship for too long,” she says, bouncing to her feet and holding a hand out to me. I take it and let her pull me up.

  “Safe flight,” I say, fighting to smother the sparks of jealousy in my head.

  The chief sees right through me. She tugs at the end of my ponytail. “New world. New start. Who knows what you’ll turn out to be?”

  With that, she jogs to the Wagon.

  The others are already on board, so the ramp folds up into the Wagon as Chief Penny seals the airlock behind her. The engines are already firing. Dad waves everyone else back to a safe distance. The others linger to watch the launch, but I keep walking. If I watch, I’ll just keep wishing I was on the Wagon with them. And I don’t want to wish that I’m somewhere else. For once, I want to be glad to be where I am.

  I walk until I reach the river, then turn toward the mountains and keep going, weaving through the neon-flowered trees. The air smells like peppermint. The long, flexible branches of the trees float out to brush my hair and shoulders as I pass below them. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were dancing on the wind. But, according to the survey report, these trees are carnivorous hybrid plants that photosynthesize like normal plants but also eat the tiny, bright-winged insect analogs that flit through the branches around me. Kind of like Venus flytraps and pitcher plants back on Earth, but a lot prettier. Their taxonomy classification is Chorulux fidus, but the ISA Rangers refer to them as fido trees in the survey report. I guess the nuzzling branches must have reminded one of them of a childhood pet.

  There are a lot of hybrid plants on Tau. Something about the intensity of the light from this sun and the mineral-poor soil. I wasn’t paying that much attention when Beth explained it to me. But whatever the reasons, these trees are perfectly adapted to their environment.


  I used to feel that way. I don’t even remember when I decided I wanted to be a pilot commander like Mom when I grew up. I’ve just always known what my future was going to be. Knew. I should use the past tense. Now I have no idea. But as I walk through the brilliant trees, it doesn’t matter so much. I’m here. I’m finally here.

  “We made it.”

  I feel kind of dumb, whispering the words out loud. But the words feel good, too. Painful and pleasant at the same time, like stretching after you’ve been sitting too long.

  Right before he died, Teddy made me promise him that I’d be okay. For the first time since I made it, that promise doesn’t feel hollow. This feels like a place where I could be okay. Maybe even better than okay.

  This planet is nothing like I imagined it would be. It has blue sky and green plants and water and air, just like Earth. I assumed it wouldn’t be that different. But it is. I can’t even put it into words. The words for this place don’t exist yet. They’ll grow up as we explore Tau. Who knows what they’ll be? There’s so much possibility here. This can be the home Teddy imagined. The home he died for. I’m sure of it.

  The neon-flowered trees are starting to thin out and mingle with another type of tree. Except, if I’m remembering the survey report right, these aren’t actually trees—they’re plants the size of trees. I forget what they’re called. They look like a cross between the fleshy, teardrop-leaved jade plant my dad used to have in his office and the orchids that Leela’s grandmother keeps in her sunroom, except they’re twice my height, and the leaves are so broad I could use one for an umbrella—an excessively large umbrella. The flowers—I think those are flowers—are a slightly paler shade of green than the towering stalks and huge leaves. Their petals form deep cups the size of my head that furl out into ruffled edges, like gathered lace. Bright-green vines crawl over the ground between them.

  The grove is like a tiny world all my own, built of green and quiet and shade. I’m tempted to find an orchid to sit under and stay awhile, but I keep moving.