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He aimed his fading headlamp down the long open-work girder that joined the ship’s passenger unit to the drive section. He hadn’t spent much time inspecting the ship during the flight out, but still knew what things back there should look like.

“Hey, guys.”

“Just a minute, Toby.”

“No, really. You should see this.”

There were a bunch of bot-shaped silhouettes clustered around the engines. And they were moving.

“I think some bots are repairing the engines!”

What?” In seconds, Sol was pushing past him, shining a blinding light out that erased the stars. “I should have been in the loop! Why can’t I get a signal out of them? Out of the way!”

Toby spotted a handhold on the outside hull; impulsively, he grabbed it and flipped himself out through the hole. Sol’s helmet appeared and he shone his own lamp at the bots. He cheered.

“Go, little guys!” Miranda’s helmet appeared next to his; for a while they chattered about rerouting power and recharging stuff. The lamplight turned the slowly working bots into dazzling white shapes, throwing everything else into blackness. Toby watched them for a while, then thought of the stars again. He turned away.

Reflected light outlined the ship’s curves in ghostly gray. You could still see stars beyond that, of course. He continued turning, following the twisting banner of the Milky Way as it wove toward the ship’s bow …

… And disappeared into a giant arc of blackness that took up a good third of the sky.

“What the—?” He looked around for a better vantage point. Belatedly he remembered that these emergency suits had coils of cable at their waists; he hooked one end of his to the first handhold and then launched himself around the tiny horizon of the ship. Now he could see the length of the bot room and past the living section beyond it to the tug’s bow. He should be seeing the cluster of telescopes and other instruments there, as silhouettes against the stars. There were no stars. Instead, a vast circle of perfect black loomed up ahead, with the ship aimed at its center like a dart.

He’d seen the radar profile of Rockette. It was a lumpy potato shape. This perfect circle … you only got that crisp perfection in things that were really, really big. Things like planets.

“Guys? Guys! We’re … I think we’re back at Sedna!”

THERE’D ALWAYS BEEN THE chance that their little colony of one hundred people would end up frozen and dead. Maybe Pluto was as far as humans would ever get from Earth; maybe the stars really were too far away. Nobody had ever come up with a magical means of going faster than light, after all. Only governments and a few trillionaires could afford to send probes to Alpha Centauri or the other nearby stars, and even then they took decades to reach their destinations.

But it was still possible—barely—to stake your own claim on an entire planet. Out past the edge of the solar system, thousands of orphan worlds drifted. The known ones had strange names like Quaoar, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. All were impossibly cold and distant, but if you could be the first person to step onto one, you could own it.

Toby’s parents owned Sedna.

Back home on Earth, if you weren’t already one of the trillionaires, you’d never be more than a servant to those who were. So his parents had scraped together several generations’ worth of inheritances and come to homestead in a vast region of space so empty that you could hide a thousand solar systems in it with room to spare. Out here, the nearest boulder-size object was probably farther away than Jupiter was from the sun. Toby had once heard that the Eskimos had fifty words for snow. Out here, you needed at least fifty for empty.

The calm tones of Miranda’s voice were reassuring. She and Sol were excitedly reviewing the work the repair bots had done back at the engines. Maybe they could tease some power out of it—get working laser comms going, maybe some heat and light. Unfreeze the air in the cabin.

While they did that, Toby perched on the nose of the ship and stared down at the planet. It was a big black nothing, of course, but he’d watched Sedna recede through the ship’s telescope when they’d first left, and he knew one thing should be visible in that vast round cutout in the star field.

There should be a single tiny, forlorn pinprick of light down there, near the equator. Home.

“Let’s fire it up. Toby, you coming in? We’ll get a better view through the light amplifiers.”

“Sure.” Sol and Miranda were getting more optimistic by the minute, but Toby’s heart was sinking as he flipped back through the hole in the hull and went forward to the inflatable airlock Sol had glued around the main compartment hatch. Toby decided not to mention the absence of the little star that should be down there.

He stayed silent as the other two tested then started the power diverters. Lights flickered on throughout the long cylindrical cabin, starkly gleaming off the frozen sides of the butlers and grippies. Sol and Miranda cheered.

“Now to get some communications going,” said Sol.

“Oh, heat and air first, please,” pleaded Miranda. “Toby needs to get out of that suit!”

Heating the crew quarters took a long time, as the interstellar cold had to be driven out of everything in the place. Heaters roared, the hoarfrost melted, and eventually the temperature edged up above minus fifty. Sol took of his helmet and gave a virtual sniff. “Like breathing fire,” he said. “But it’ll get better. And now that the primary CPU’s online…” He moved to a metal keypad and touched a few buttons.

All around Toby the butlers and grippies were stirring, but Sol quickly shut them down, too. “We don’t need more of them going than we’ve already got,” he pointed out.

“Now to see where we are.” Sol connected the telescope feed to Toby’s glasses; the tug’s walls faded and the pale curve of the planet appeared.

The ship’s telescope could amplify the thin trickle of starlight touching this world and make out color and detail thousands of kilometers below. For a minute or so, Toby, Sol, and Miranda all stared in silence at what it showed. Then Sol said, “Well…”

Toby shook his head; it was just what he’d feared. “That’s not Sedna.”

It was a crimson world. The screen showed mountains, canyons, and vast flat plains that might be frozen oceans. All were painted in shades of rust and scarlet, as if a vast drop of blood had been hung here in deep space, scattered perhaps by some wounded god a billion years ago.

In this way the planet was exactly like Sedna, or Eris, or any of the millions of comets that peppered interstellar space. All had this bloodred hue. Somebody had explained to Toby that over aeons of time, the slow trickle of cosmic radiation cooked the surfaces of these worlds, producing complex organic molecules—tholins, they called them—that were deep red.

In every other respect, this place was unlike Sedna. Sedna was tiny, its gravity barely able to keep it round. It was absolutely featureless, like a billiard ball. This planet had mountains.

“It’s as big as Earth!” Sol was reading the other instruments. “If we can get the engines running … find out where we are…”

Toby had been examining the mysterious orb. Now he pointed at the image. “What’re those?”

“What?” Sol seemed eager for the distraction.

“Those … pits? Circles?”

There were more than a dozen on the visible hemisphere: circular white formations, each two hundred or more kilometers across, surrounded by curls and lines of white like splash marks. “Meteor craters,” said Miranda dismissively. “Sol, what did the GPS say?”