The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

  Dedication

  For Toni. This isn’t our world. It’s yours.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Bridget Tyler

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Earth is dead.

  That’s not my biggest problem right now.

  My family left Earth two years ago. Our team’s mission was to establish human life on a new, uninhabited world: Tau Ceti e. Unfortunately, it turns out that Tau isn’t uninhabited. It belongs to two species who have nothing in common, except for the part where they don’t want to share their planet with invaders from outer space.

  Which would be us.

  We never meant to be invaders. We were pioneers. Explorers.

  Now we’re refugees.

  Wow. It’s not often you can use the word we and mean every human being in the universe, but we’re all in the same boat now. Well, spaceship, if you want to be literal about it.

  The ISA Colony Ship Prairie is the biggest spacecraft humanity has ever built. Maybe the biggest we’ll ever build, now. She’s also an unfinished prototype. The Prairie was supposed to have years of testing and redesign before attempting this journey. But “supposed to” isn’t a thing in the apocalypse.

  The actual trip went fine. The Prairie survived the twelve-light-year trip from Earth to Tau. Then her computer automatically woke the crew, and they tried to bring the huge ship into orbit.

  That’s when things started to go wrong.

  Turns out the Prairie’s solar sails are screwed up. Without the power they provide, the colony ship can’t maintain a stable orbit. She can’t pull out of Tau’s gravity well either. If we don’t fix her, she’ll fall through the atmosphere and crash into the planet, causing a mass extinction event.

  But that’s not my biggest problem right now either.

  My mom knows how to fix the sails because she commanded Prairie’s last test flight. At the time, I hated her for it. Three years ago, before our team left Earth, a solar flare almost destroyed our ship, the Pioneer. Mom ordered my siblings and me to evacuate with the other kids. Instead, I figured out how we could save the Pioneer, and our families.

  With my brother Teddy’s help, my crazy idea worked. We saved everyone, but it cost my brother his life. I almost died too. I was in the hospital for four months after the accident, and then I spent five more in full-time physical therapy.

  Mom wasn’t there. For any of it. She took command of the Prairie and headed for Saturn the day after Teddy’s funeral. She was gone for a year. Back then, I figured she left because she couldn’t stand the sight of me. I thought she blamed me for Teddy.

  I know Mom better now.

  I’m pretty sure she left because she blamed herself. And we’re lucky she did, which is messed up but true. If Mom hadn’t taken that assignment, she wouldn’t know what’s causing the Prairie’s sail to glitch. No one would. Five of the six engineers who designed the Prairie died racing to make her spaceworthy in time to get the survivors to safety. The sixth, our chief engineer and my mom’s best friend, Penny Howard, died here on Tau. In my arms.

  So, basically, my mom’s lack of healthy emotional coping mechanisms is going to save the human species.

  The catch is, the repairs have to be done on the Prairie’s hull, and they require at least two people. Mom and I are alone on our shuttle, the Trailblazer, and there’s no time to go back to the surface for the engineering team.

  That means I have to do an EVA.

  As in extravehicular activity. As in go outside. In space.

  And I’m afraid.

  In order to save the Pioneer, Teddy and I had to eject ourselves into space without our suits. It sucked. I can’t even begin to explain how much. I never expected to do an EVA again. I never wanted to. Now I have to. The survival of my whole species depends on it, and I’m afraid. I don’t think I’ve ever been so afraid.

  My fingers are shaking as I smooth the last seal on my pressure suit closed. The slippery gray fabric vibrates gently against my skin, and the suit’s internal computer whispers, “Seal failed. Please reapply.”

  I’m glad Mom is still up on the bridge and not here to witness this. She’s got enough to worry about. She doesn’t need to add me to the list.

  I shake my hands out, swearing quietly as I rip the seal open all the way down to my belly and start over.

  I hate spacesuits. I always have. I hated them before the accident. Now I feel like this thing is a python and I’m helping it swallow me.

  With a thin hiss, the suit sucks tight against the body stocking I’m wearing underneath. I breathe a sigh of relief and pull on my EVA utility harness, snapping the sturdy straps around my thighs and over my shoulders. I look like someone melted a wrapped candy bar and let it harden again all lumpy. I can’t believe my brain even has the bandwidth to notice right now. I guess worrying about my thighs is one way to avoid having a panic attack.

  “Okay, Trailblazer is on autopilot,” Mom says as she steps through the interior door of the airlock and seals it behind her. “This is as ready as we’re going to get.”

  She keeps talking, but I can’t hear her over the remembered roar of explosive decompression. It’s more than a memory. I’m drowning in a sound that isn’t there. Deafened, even though I know it isn’t real.

  I’m so not ready.

  “What did you say?” I ask, trying to sound like I’m not shaking.

  “I said, ‘Cross check?’” Mom is fully suited except for her helmet. Her face is almost the same shade of gray as her gear.

  “Right. Sorry.”

  My voice catches on the words. Mom flinches, like I’m a sore tooth.

  She looks away as she raises her arms, holding them away from her sides so I can check her seals. Then she spreads her legs so I can check the seals between her suit and her boots.

  Breathing feels harder than it should, like the airlock is already venting atmosphere, which it isn’t. I know it isn’t. The exterior door is still red. The airlock is still sealed.

  So why can’t I breathe?

  “Check,” I say, managing not to gasp the words. “Cross check?”

  Mom runs her hand over the seal at my throat, down my arms to the seals on my wrists that bond the suit to my gloves.

  Her hands are shaking, too.

  Fear arcs between us.

  “Mom—”

  She pulls me close. Our suits wheeze over each other as we cling.

  Then she steps back.

  “Okay, Joanna,” Mom says. “Run me through it.” Her voice, at least, is calm. Like it’s being piped into her shaking, red-eyed body from a distance.

  I breathe.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  I can do this.

  I can’t do this.

  I have to do thi
s.

  “We are currently matching orbital velocity with the ISA Colony Ship Prairie at a range of twenty-five kilometers.” The words snag at each other, tangling in my mouth as I yank them into order. “We will tether to the airlock and make a controlled—”

  “Skipped a step,” Mom interjects. “Sloppy.” Her tone strikes my anxiety at just the right angle, throwing sparks of irritation. I glare at her. A tiny smile flashes through her pallor.

  “That’s better.”

  “Fine,” I say, backtracking. “First, we tether in, then we decompress the airlock. Open the doors. Then we will make a controlled jump to the Prairie’s hull and tether to the Prairie. Once we’re secured, we fix her solar sail so she doesn’t crash into the planet and wipe out three sentient species in a single, spectacular moment of dumb.”

  Mom is right. Irate is better than afraid. My words are getting smoother with every phrase.

  “How do we do fix the sail?” she asks. This is helping her, too. Color is flushing back into her face, like someone’s changing the filter on the scene.

  “First, we attempt to reboot the sail deployment app,” I say, feeling the words gain velocity. “If that works, we’re golden. But what are the chances?”

  “Gonna have to brush up on your optimism, kiddo,” Mom says, a wry smile coasting over the words.

  “All evidence to the contrary?” I say, feeling an answering grin teasing at my lips.

  She rolls her eyes and makes a tumbling motion with her hands. Keep going.

  “Okay, so pessimistically, let’s assume the reboot doesn’t work,” I say, the words building pictures in my mind. “In that case, we would extend the sail by hand. There are thirty-eight joints in total. It should take roughly six hours to manually unfold them all. Exhausting. Boring. But not hard. Just like pitching a tent. On a moving spaceship. In space.”

  The sarcasm doesn’t land. Or at least, not like I intended it to. Mom’s gone all pale and gray again.

  “Mom, what’s—”

  “I’m sorry, Jo.”

  The thin veneer of humor I’ve managed to paint over my terror evaporates. I wish she’d just put the damn helmet on so I don’t have to see how terrified she is. I’m scared enough for both of us.

  “You’re not the one who put the last survivors of Earth on an unfinished prototype, Mom,” I say, grabbing my helmet with both hands. I’m afraid I’ll drop it otherwise. “Everyone on the Prairie is fresh out of inso and you can’t fix that sail alone. That means I’m going outside. Which is fine. I’m okay.”

  Mom turns away and grabs her helmet from the locker behind her. I still hear the little sob she’s trying to hide.

  She doesn’t think I’m okay.

  Neither do I.

  I jam my helmet over my head anyway. At least in the featureless gray bubble I can’t see Mom looking at me like I’m as broken as I feel.

  Maybe I am broken. Maybe we all are.

  Earth is uninhabitable.

  I know it’s true, but I’m still having a hard time believing it. Our home planet is gone. Ruined by the automated systems we built to preserve it. Once the ISA realized the end was literally nigh, they crammed as many survivors as they could into the only-mostly-finished Prairie and sent her here, under the command of my grandfather, Admiral Eric Crane.

  That’s weird, thinking of him that way. He retired when I was a kid. But now he’s back in the ISA, and he’s here.

  Grandpa is here.

  I thought I’d never see him again, and he’s here.

  The thought is like a tiny spark in the darkness.

  Grandpa is here.

  I get to show him Tau. That makes me feel . . . I don’t know, like I’m not just a hollow shell of skin that’s about to collapse. I just wish . . . I don’t even know where to start wishing. I wish the ISA hadn’t lied to our Exploration & Pioneering team about Tau’s inhabitants. I wish their lies hadn’t caused us to nearly wreck our new ecosystem. I wish that mistake hadn’t wrecked our relationship with the Sorrow. And I really, really wish the colony ship wasn’t broken.

  “Beginning decompression.” Mom’s voice slips through the speakers in my helmet, bringing me back into the moment.

  “Three-sixty mode, please,” I say, and the blank gray bubble I’ve been hiding in flickers into a 360-degree view of the airlock around me, composited from the cameras that wreathe the outside of my helmet.

  Mom is standing at the airlock’s exterior door watching the hatch fade from red to green. That means the air around us is getting thinner and the pressure is falling to match the airless vacuum that’s waiting for us.

  The thought makes my lungs burn, so I focus on the Prairie instead, on the task ahead of us. Mom has the airlock set to three-sixty mode now, so the view from the Trailblazer’s exterior cameras covers the wall, floor, and ceiling.

  The Prairie blocks out the stars. She’s so close. And massive—a golden disk three kilometers across and five stories deep. She should be rolling through orbit like a wheel on a track, the motion creating gravity in the ship’s outer ring where the crew lives and works. But the great ship is staggering through orbit, wobbling like a top. That’s why we can’t just land the Trailblazer on her hull. She’s too unstable.

  We have to jump.

  Remembered pain blasts over my skin. I bite my lip, using the real pain to remind my body that I’m in a perfectly good spacesuit. The visceral memory of being frozen and fried at the same time is just that. A memory. It isn’t real.

  But I can still feel myself burning.

  The airlock is almost green.

  “We’re T minus eighteen seconds,” Mom says.

  She must have opened a shared channel between our suits and the Prairie, because Grandpa answers her.

  “I’ve got eyes on, Alice.”

  He’s still hoarse, even though he’s been out of inso for nearly twenty-four hours. But he’s seventy-four. Recovery takes time. And his crew has been in deep sleep for almost six months. That’s why we’re doing this, and they aren’t. Going straight from inso to EVA would be way too hard on your cardiovascular system.

  A full-body memory of my heart imploding rips through my chest.

  Stop it, Joanna.

  My heart is fine now. The Sorrow healed it. But my brain isn’t convinced. I feel broken.

  Stop it, Joanna.

  The hatch starts to flash as the last bits of red are eaten up by green light. In case we didn’t get the color-coding memo, the computer chimes in, “Decompression in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

  Mom taps the autoconnect button on her suit. Black filaments flow from her EVA harness and spin together into a tether line that shoots up and bonds with the frame of the airlock.

  “Six . . . five . . .”

  I hit my autoconnect. My tether flares out, twisting up to bond with the airlock beside Mom’s. The thin black cables look delicate, but they aren’t. These tether lines are made of nanoactive Kevlar. That means nanoscopic robots spin our tethers like tiny robotic spiders. This tether could hold our entire shuttle. It’s plenty strong enough for one seventeen-year-old pilot.

  “Three . . . two . . . one. Lock pressurized,” the computer crows. “You are clear for extravehicular activity.”

  Mom triggers the door release. The hatch swings open. I resist the urge to clamp my eyes shut.

  That’s a mistake.

  The endless view shoots my heart into a racing thud. My legs tense, like they’re preparing to run. But there’s nowhere to go. Nowhere but out there.

  I force myself to breathe. The air is a little musty, like whoever used this suit last had bad breath. But it’s still oxygen. My suit works. I have a tether line.

  I can do this.

  Teddy knew he was going to die when we blew ourselves into space to save the Pioneer. He told me to do it anyway. If he could do that, I can do this.

  Except I don’t think I can do this. The shuttle isn’t rotating, but in my head I’m spinning. Tumbling in ever
y direction at once. Remembered cold burns my skin and boils my blood.

  “Jo!”

  Mom’s voice blasts through my helmet at top volume, snapping me back into the present like a verbal tether line.

  “Talk to me, Joanna.”

  “Here.” I gasp. “I’m—”

  “You’re here,” she says, lowering the volume a little but keeping her voice sharp. “You’re here, now. Be here. Now. In your suit. Next to me.”

  “I’m here,” I say. But my body isn’t convinced. It’s still feeling the memory, not the reality. No matter what I say, what I see, what I know, it feels like I’m still tumbling through the dark. Still alone. No. Not alone. Teddy is there, dying just beyond my reach.

  I stumble back, skittering across the airlock and pressing my body against the sealed hatch that leads back into the ship.

  Mom’s sigh soaks through my helmet, drenching me in shame.

  We don’t have time for this.

  I need to get over myself and get out there. My species is depending on it. And so is my mom.

  But I can’t move.

  “Situation report?” Grandpa rumbles through the open comms feed.

  “It’s just a temporary delay, Dad,” Mom says. “This is the first time Jo’s done EVA since the accident. She needs a minute to get her head around it.”

  Oh good, so now I’m not just disappointing my mother and putting my whole species in danger. I’m disappointing Grandpa, too.

  Mom comes to stand in front of me. Helmet to helmet, like she’s looking into my eyes, though all I can see is the octagonal camera lenses that tile over her helmet.

  “I wish you were still a little girl,” Mom says. “If you were, I could leave you here, safe and sound on the shuttle. But you aren’t a child anymore. And I need you. I need the clever, rule-breaking young woman who figured out the ISA’s darkest secret. I need the brave young woman who got herself and her friends out of an extraterrestrial city and back to camp in time to stop us from making a catastrophic mistake. I need the daring young woman who faced off with an extraterrestrial king to stop him from destroying his own world. I need you.”

  I know what she’s trying to do, but those memories are just memories. Some of them are pretty screwed-up memories. But they aren’t enshrined by trauma. Not like the accident.