And We Were Off

I, Emmeline Scales, had never expected anything to come of it. It was a perfectly ordinary, terribly routine off-planet jaunt, and it had started out in an immensely boring manner. 

Clara Tinsworth and Sophronia Prescott accompanied me. Truthfully, if it weren't for them I never would have left that day. Clara has always been awfully curious, and Sophronia just likes the way taking off feels, like an entire stack of books has been placed on your chest. They were the ones who planned the whole thing, from the destination (an as-yet unnamed planet with what Clara, a botanist, deemed "fascinating flora") to the food (crackers--Sophronia, who was beginning a career in the medical sciences, was trying out a new-fangled sort of diet). 

And that was it, really. We stepped onto the ship, an old, rather shaky bird but one that we had thought reliable, and set off, Clara at the wheel, Sophronia at the rigging, and me with the map. We called her The Blackbird for the carving at the bow. In those days, we powered the ships with coal and through some mechanism I still don't quite understand, they flew. We needed helmets out of the atmosphere of Earth, but we were all used to those. 

After approximately twenty minutes, we began to notice that something was strange. 

"I can't steer properly," Clara called, her voice scratchy through the sound system in the helmets.

Sophronia nodded and returned, "Something's off where I am, too."

None of us could see the mammoth crack in the hull that was forming on the underside of the ship, but we all realized that there was no way we would make it to our destination.

"We could stop off at Blue-IV," Clara offered coolly, naming a terrestrial planet in the solar system we were currently traveling through. "It's not inhabited, but we should be able to contact home."

We agreed. Within five minutes, we were on solid land. 

"That's a bloody big break," Sophronia said cheerfully. She and Clara were not panicked in the slightest. I was.

"Do you realize we're ages from home, with only your damn crackers and not a farthing among us?" I said, quite out of my mind. I do have a rather unladylike temper in times of emergency.

"Oh, just call up your brother," Clara said. "And leave Sophronia's crackers out of it."

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. "Fine."