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“Ship?” he asked again; there was still no response. “What happened?” he asked the other two.

“We’ve lost main power,” said Sol Norton, his voice coming clearly through Toby’s glasses. “But I don’t know why, and I don’t know how long ago.”

“What does that mean? Did we miss Rockette?”

There was a long pause. “I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” said Sol curtly.

Rockette was the dormant comet their little ship had been headed to. It had just been discovered, and Dad suspected it might be in a very long orbit around the dwarf planet Sedna, which would make it a moon. In order to keep their family’s claim on Sedna, all the little world’s moons had to be claimed by a McGonigal. Because Dad was on his way to Earth to formalize the claim, Toby had been sent to rendezvous with Rockette. His job was to claim it and then turn around and return to Sedna.

It was a pretty big responsibility; he was only seventeen. He was getting used to doing stuff like this, though. Helping run his parents’ colony on Sedna was all-consuming, just as taking care of his traumatized brother, Peter, had been in the year leading up to their leaving Earth.

“We’re going down to the bot room,” continued Sol. “See what else we can get under manual control.”

“Thanks.” Toby wasn’t surprised that all the other ship’s systems might have failed but that his cicada bed had worked just fine. The hibernation beds—technology his parents had bought and perfected—were amazingly reliable. They were what had made it possible for the family to homestead here, with a couple dozen close friends and volunteers, far beyond the orbit of Pluto.

“Well, we can use some of this stuff,” said Miranda as she and Sol cast their helmet lamps into the bot room. She sounded optimistic and calm, as always. That was why he’d thought of her when he’d called on his Consensus allies; Miranda, like Sol, was always able to encourage Toby when things became difficult.

Toby bounced over to perch next to them at the hatch. “Why were we woken up? And what’s all this weird frost all over everything?”

“It’s air, Toby,” Miranda said. “Frozen air. Sol, do you see that?”

“Yeah.” Sol flipped through the hatch and kicked off through a constellation of motionless robots. These were mostly maintenance and repair bots that were supposed to be able to fix anything that went wrong with the ship. All were dark and lifeless.

He leaned close to the wall to look at the frost. The little forest of white spikes was perfectly clear for a second, then it began to shimmer. The little light on his helmet was enough to evaporate it. Toby had seen that before, back on Sedna. It meant the temperature in here was not far above absolute zero.

“Hey, wait up!” He clumsily batted aside the dead bots, following the guide of the others’ lights. He found them at the back of the bot room, which was the aft-most living chamber in the ship. There was an airlock here, and lots of stowage and tools. And …

A hole in the back wall.

It was about a meter across, with odd blocky edges, and outside it he could see stars and the black silhouette of the ship’s engine spine.

“The bots tried to patch it,” said Miranda, pointing to the squared edges of the hole, “but it was too big. Anyway, all the air would have gone out in the first few seconds.”

Sol was cursing under his breath. “But what made it?” He jumped back the way they’d come and after a minute shouted, “Found another!”

It turned out there was a coin-sized hole, clogged with frozen air, through the wall between the main chamber and the bot room. And when they went to the front of that room they found a tiny, pinhead-sized hole there, too.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” said Toby. Miranda was moving kind of slowly; he hoped her suit wasn’t running out of power. “What happened?”

“We hit a pebble,” said Sol. “More of a sand grain, actually, from the size of that first hole. We’re going so fast that it hit us hard as a bomb. See that first hole? By the time it came through, it was exploding, but it went through us so quickly that the explosion was only this big”—he spread two fingers just a bit—“by the time it hit the back wall there, and only this big”—he spread his arms to the width of the hole in the back of the bot room—“when it left us. That’s okay—we can patch up Life Support. The big question is whether it hit the drive unit.”

“Oh…” And that was all Toby could say, as it began to finally sink in just how much trouble they were in. For the next few minutes all he could do was follow the other two back and forth as they tried to revive parts—any parts—of the ship’s systems. It turned out their suits really were getting low on power, like Toby’s. If it ran out, he’d lose both of them.

Funny, though, that the first coherent thought Toby over the next while was, Peter, I’m sorry I left.

How long now had his brother had been clinging to Toby like a life raft? So long that his emotional dependence had come to define both of them. Having Toby leave him for a few months for Rockette had devastated Peter. The separation was supposed to help Peter rebuild his own coping abilities. Their mother and sister would help, and Consensus was part of the plan, of course.

Toby had stayed awake as long as he could. During the weeks of the engine burn, Toby hadn’t once switched off his virtual views to look at the real ship that surrounded him. Peter had demanded that he stay awake, stay in Consensus and keep their versions of the gameworld synced.

So as he traveled he’d tangled anxious Peter up with the discovery of fantastic alien planets, and despicable enemies, cunning plots and rousing battles in a universe more colorful than the real one they lived on. Their shared world kept Peter focused and able to cope. What Toby hadn’t counted on was how the communications lag with the game servers back home kept growing. After twenty days, his version of Consensus was totally out of sync with Peter’s back on Sedna. And the math couldn’t be second-guessed: the tug’s life support was nearly half used up. It was time to enter cold sleep.

“Guys, we need to get communications up!”

“We know that, Toby.”

If the tug’s engines had died, if they’d missed Rockette … they could keep on speeding on their course for another ten billion years and never encounter another grain of sand the size of the one they’d hit, much less another planet or a friendly spaceship ready to rescue them.

Toby suddenly had an overwhelming need to do something—anything. Sol and Miranda kept talking about power couplings and radioisotope generators as Toby knocked his way through the dead machines in the bot room. Their calm focus wasn’t reassuring anymore; after all, there was nothing really at stake for them. He reached the hole in the rear bulkhead and paused to inspect its edges. They were smooth, but he knew he should check for any razor-sharp edges. It wouldn’t do to cut his suit open.

He poked his head outside, and there were the stars—brighter and more overwhelmingly numerous than he’d ever seen on Earth. He’d seen them like this on the surface of Sedna, and they always seemed unreal, a fantasy painter’s version of the sky. But no. This was the reality of where he was.

Toby had looked up the distances once—just once. Light that could zip around Earth seven times in one second would take eleven hours to go from there to Sedna. After reading that, he’d stopped trying to picture the scale of their isolation. Yet the knowledge always hung there like a weight in the back of his mind.