“I’m telling you, we’ve been up and down this section three times. There’s nothing down here but coral and fish,” a frustrated voice explains over the speaker in the Hangar’s command center. Xander huffs out a breath, throwing his hands in the air. “Well, it must be somewhere. Shipwrecks don’t just disappear.” I put a ...

“Emily!” Sophie screams in the dark. I scramble off the floor as vertigo races through me, feeling my way back onto the couch. “I’m here.” Holding her shaking form, the world stops spinning. She sniffles. “What is going on?” “I have no idea.” I gulp around a wave of nausea. The whir of an engine ...

“It can’t be,” Sophie whispers for the seventh time, eyes glued to the computer screen on the desk in front of us. “Y’all are seeing this, right?” Nathan runs a hand down his face. “It’s not just me?” Xander blows out a breath, his broad shoulders connecting with the back of his chair with an ...

Peris and Alfie sat facing each other on Nor’s ribs, their feet dangling. They continued to orbit the yellow star while Nor lapped at its energy, half-asleep. On a normal day, they’d be underway as soon as they woke up, but on this occasion, they let her doze.  “It feels wrong to exercise control over ...

“She’s gotta be at least five hundred years old.” Nathan rechecks the sample of organic material on his desk for the fifth time. Sophie digs her palms into her eye sockets. “That’s impossible.” “I know.” Nathan huffs. I stare at the three-dimensional image on our photogrammetry software. The jagged remains of an immense vessel lay ...

“Can you zoom in right here?” Nathan points to a shadow on the computer screen. Sophie clicks to make it larger, the image morphing into thick towers of coral reaching towards the sky. “Damn! Just another coral shelf.” Nathan rubs a palm down his face. He leans back in his chair and rolls his shoulders. ...

Peris couldn’t remember feeling more relieved than she did when Nor disengaged from the rusty hatch and they put the whole dirty-minded, overheated space station behind them. Let’s get away from here! She transmitted, but she barely bothered to stay engaged after they cleared the arms of the flimsy metal snowflake.   Nor glided blithely ...

“It’s been two days!” I tuck my feet under me and hand Sophie the TV remote. “How long does it take to make a simple decision?” “Now you know why I don’t get along with my dad,” Xander huffs. He lay sprawled on the adjacent couch with a bowl of popcorn in his lap. His ...

“What the fuck is going on? Where’s Xander?” Sophie and I follow Nathan into a sea of crewmembers, who are moving debris and medical equipment through the halls of Deck Two. The air is thick with the remnants of smoke, making it difficult to breathe. “Over here, Emily!” Xander waves to them from the medical ...

They could always feel the difference at the heliopause where they stopped riding the system’s solar winds and Nor could stretch herself out and approach lightspeed. It was a limitless expanse of possibility. Neighboring stars elongated into streaks of plasma and Doppler shifted blue as they drew closer and red as they passed. But the ...