Chapter 1

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In the copious preparations I made for this journey — the numerous hours spent surveying top-secret documents, burning my fingers against the overheated bits of alien weaponry, sharpening my mind for hairpin-turn reactions in the event of Xani encounters — no one told me how fucking boring space travel would be.

At a minimum, I expected a brighter show from the passing stars in their natural habitat. I expected I'd have a front-row seat on our celestial safari, but their lights blur behind the filter of our impossible scopes. The portholes, every single one of them, is thick with orange gel, distorting the sky for our jelly-covered eyes. I didn't realize we'd be making this whole trip blindfolded. There's nothing to do. I rest my head against the heel of my hand and heave a boisterous sigh, shoving my frustration out through my lungs.

"Would you mind doing that somewhere else?" Knuckles' voice floats from his workstation at a long table lining the back of his grungy lab. A single pendant bulb hovers over his head as he bends forward, fully immersed in his tinkering. A clinking melody from his old stereo bleats out in the corner, pinching my nerves.

My face slips from the precipice of my palm, bunching my cheek against it, causing my slack mouth to open. I breathe the warm air and return it warmer. He peers over his shoulder and shakes his head when he sees me in my condition.

"You're worse than fungus. Don't you have somewhere else to be?"

As Janika Lorn, Commander of ARC10, yes. I have plenty of places to be. Aboard this loose-screwed pile of congealed space-litter, I should be patrolling the halls at this late hour in the event that our hostile hosts, the Xani, clank out from their segregated quadrants to annihilate my civilians in their sleep. I should check-in with my elite special forces unit, the SOCOM VIPERs, who are stationed throughout ARC10 to protect our two thousand civilians—ensuring they have not somehow managed to kill themselves in some gruesome fashion or another. I should also head to the Nest to question whether or not the vigilant operators of SCOPE are—

"You may not be aware, but pregnant women do need sleep. What with the ungrateful parasitic barnacle sucking essential resources from its interminably vexing host and whatnot. Go do that and get the hell out of my lab with your insufferable breathing."

I exhale with gusto one more time — just for fun — and pull my leg through the bench. The distance between the table and the sliding door of Knuckles' personal workspace is minuscule. Three steps and I'm out. We're clustered here, thrown in like spare bolts in a junk drawer. The misshapen metal protrusions of the bulkhead poke out above our heads. Some rooms are nothing more than a door that leads to a jutting angle of rust-brown metal. Daily, the people of ARC10 dodge the sharp edges of the ship, attempting to avoid touching the gooey orange substance that slides over the walls from globulous pustules. Knuckles, however, prefers to obsessively rid his lab of the stuff and, with welders gloves and goggles, scrapes it from his sight with the sharp edge of a shovel. Maybe it's why I spend so much time here. It's the least ugly cabin on the entire ship.

Besides my own private haven.

When I get to the door, it slides open to release me. I pause, grin, gulp in a noisy breath of air. . .

"Don't you dare." He spins around in his swivel stool, pointing a pair of needle nose pliers at me. "Honestly, you're a worse headache than dropping a cinderblock on my frontal lobe." His fluffy white eyebrows sag over his dark eyes and dark skin, giving him the appearance of the tired old man. At his age, I know that's exactly what he is, but the dark eyes don't fool me. They're luminescent with lightning behind them. He returns to his previous position, hunched over his gadgets. "By the way," he mutters. "Happy Christmas."

"I thought Christmas was only celebrated by those who can experience joy."

He drops his tools. "It's only been two weeks, Lorn. Two weeks. If this is some horrid portents of what I can expect for the next four years and eleven and a half months, then please, find me the nearest airlock and let me take my chances." He pauses, his gaze focused on the pieces of his project before him. I can see the frown form from where I mock him in his entryway. "Oh, Holy Saint Harriet. And by the end of this, there will be two of you."

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