Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The impact they felt was so hard that Jesse’s skull slammed back against his headrest, stars exploding behind his eyelids. When he came to, four different pressure alarms were roaring and Harry’s gloved hands were covered in blood.

‘Shepp?’ Harry said. Their commander’s body was slumped forward in his seat, limp. ‘Commander Sheppard?’

‘What’s happened?’ Poppy asked. Harry twisted around in his seat to face them.

‘I think he hit his head, just now. Trying to save me.’ He shook the commander again, but Sheppard rolled across the dashboard. ‘He’s not conscious, I don’t think.’

‘Is he dead?’ Poppy asked.

‘Oh God. I don’t know.’

‘Check!’

‘We don’t have time,’ Jesse said. Consciousness was rolling back to him on waves of panic.

‘We’re dead,’ Poppy said, her breathing coming fast and irregular. ‘Dead.’

Jesse knew that it was true. It was as if they’d driven a car into an ocean and the sea was bursting in with constant and deadly force. Time was running out with the same speed.

His heart was thundering so hard that he was sure it would burst in his ribs. He was terrified, paralyzed. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself to breathe, to work the problem as they had been taught in school, to think of a solution. And as he did, it began to resolve before him. Jesse had been here before. He had been on this ship a thousand times, looking out at a sky that blazed destruction. During the game, Jesse had piloted his virtual crew through dusty asteroid belts when they were running low on oxygen. He’d navigated his way through space junk and landed in deserts without his ship burning up like a firecracker in the atmosphere. At least – not every time.

Jesse saw, again, that his time had come. As adrenaline roared through his veins, he started to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘I can do it,’ he said, lunging forward, just as he had the night of Ara’s death. ‘I can get us through this, Harry.’

‘But—’ Harry turned to Jesse to protest, but then realized he had no choice. ‘If you can, you’re a genius.’

Jesse fought hard against the dizziness and the acid boil of nausea in his stomach. ‘I can do this. I’ve done it before.’ Together they pulled their commander’s body from the front seat and then Jesse strapped himself into Sheppard’s chair. Pulling off his gloves, he worked to keep his trembling hands from slipping off the controls. Before him, in the window, huge chunks of delicate, brutalized machinery were crashing into each other and erupting into splinters of white hot metal. In space, a little acceleration went a long way, so by the time he was ready to fly, the wreckage was coming at the shuttle from all directions. Jesse fought the urge to abandon the controls and cover his eyes.

He took a deep breath and mustered his courage, determined to believe that this was not the day he would die. That a burnt-out canister would not crash through the window of the cockpit and suck him silently screaming into the hard vacuum of space. He and Harry could save themselves, and the rest of the crew. They would burn the engines until they were free. They would make it back to Damocles. They would make it to the sun-warmed earth of Terra-Two.

So he flew. He was playing the game then, the simulator. Working in harmony with Harry to execute joint commands, his fingers flying across the control panel as if it was a fretboard.

Something hit the shuttle and it shuddered. Jesse heard the scream of torn metal and his heart crashed beneath his sternum. Was death coming? Harry ignored it and kept yelling commands, his face red, veins bulging from his neck. They dived out of the way of a swinging truss. If he could conquer the game, he could conquer this – the asteroid belt of destruction. The sky flinging splinters of sparkling metal at them.

‘This is not how we die,’ Jesse declared as they soared.

‘Damn right!’ Harry said with an ecstatic howl of relief. And then he and Jesse were aware only of the flight. They ducked and weaved through the debris, Jesse’s subconscious drawing trajectories, calculating where the junk was flying, following Harry’s lead and then indicating where to go next, their hands listening as they dived and careened left, then right, but always up, up. Soon, the remains of the station were only blips on the radar and their shuttle rose out of its orbit and into the clear open space beyond.