Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The entire crew were swept into a flurry of action after they realized what had happened. Poppy ran up to the communications deck, checking different channels to see if anyone had replied to their distress signal. Over the headset she could hear nothing but a vicious hiss of static, although a data file with a Russian title was loading on one of the monitor screens. Hope flushed through her. Was rescue coming?

As she reach over to grab the mouse, Harry burst into the room and shouted at Astrid, who was seated on the control deck opposite, transcribing figures from one of the screens.

Jesse ran in behind him, his face red, and grabbed Harry’s wrist as if to hold him back. Harry twisted free. ‘You realize,’ he shouted, ‘that it’s an offence to disobey direct orders from your acting commander.’ Igor and Eliot entered the room behind him. ‘Igor said that you weren’t to touch the service module. We were ordered to leave. To return home.’

‘I know—’ Eliot stepped between Harry and Astrid, his hands up as if to defend her. ‘But we just couldn’t.’

‘Couldn’t obey orders,’ Fae said, her face pale. ‘Back on Earth, this would be considered mutiny.’

‘That’s right,’ said Harry. ‘You’d be court-martialled.’

Astrid stood up. Poppy could tell that she was stunned by their reaction. It was the exact opposite of the one she had been expecting. ‘But we saved you all.’

‘Saved us?’ Juno’s voice was simmering with rage. They had all entered the room now, everyone but Commander Sheppard, who was still unconscious in the infirmary. It felt strange to gather like this without him.

‘Do you realize what was about to happen?’ Astrid asked. ‘Do you realize what we were about to do? Leave this ship. Leave Igor – I mean, Commander Bovarin – and Fae and Cai and Sheppard to die. Go home. Only it’s not home anymore. If we stepped out now, do you think we’d have a chance to go to Terra-Two ever again? Do you think they’d choose us? All those years of work, everything we did would be wasted. Our whole lives…’

‘It will be wasted when we die here!’ Harry shouted.

‘Astrid was just doing what she thought was right,’ Jesse said.

‘No.’ Juno slammed her fist against a desk. ‘Astrid was just doing what she wanted. Being selfish and reckless.’

Astrid let out a cry of indignation, and stepped closer to her sister. ‘Do you even want to be here, Juno?’

‘What?’

‘On this ship. On this mission. Did you ever really want to go to Terra-Two or did you just want to go because I wanted to go? Because you’ve never been able to stand being alone. You slept in my bed until you were twelve.’ The expression of betrayal on Juno’s face made Poppy ache. ‘Maybe this is what this is about,’ Astrid continued. ‘You went to Dalton because you need me. Not because you have a higher purpose.’

‘Oh, and you do?’

‘There’s a whole planet waiting for us, Juno. This is our only chance to go there. And you’re all too cowardly to fight for it.’

‘Die for it, you mean,’ said Juno. ‘Do you realize what you’ve chosen for us, now? The Russian expedition still haven’t responded to our message. We only have a few weeks of oxygen left. They might not come in time. Or at all.’

‘They will.’

‘You better hope so. Because if you’re wrong, it’ll be your fault. You’ll have all of our deaths on your hands.’

‘We have three months of oxygen,’ Eliot reminded them.

‘No, we don’t have three months,’ Fae said. She sank down in the chair next to Poppy and put her fingers between her eyebrows as if she was nursing a headache. ‘The volume of this ship is larger than the volume of the shuttle. So the partial pressure of oxygen will already be a lot lower. We have half that time or less, because once the oxygen is lower than 50 per cent of normal levels, we’ll start to die.’ Her words made dread and bile creep up in Poppy’s throat.

‘Remember what we learned in Sunday school about the Israelites?’ Astrid said to her sister in a low voice, taking her face in her hands, willing her to recall it. ‘Who trekked for generations in the desert, or the Mayflower pilgrims who crossed an ocean in the winter to found a new country. History will remember us. This is the day our descendants will sing about and rejoice.’

‘The Mayflower pilgrims were religious nuts, and half of them died of scurvy, pneumonia or tuberculosis,’ Juno listed on her fingers. ‘And that land that they found—’

‘What happened to your faith, Juno? Did you think this would be easy?’

‘Can I be the first one to say,’ Harry interrupted, ‘that I have no plans to die here, or for this mission. Not now, or ever. And going back to Earth – going back home – would it really be so bad?’

‘This isn’t a holiday, Harry,’ Astrid said, letting go of Juno and narrowing her eyes in disgust. ‘It’s not some ski trip you can return from when the going gets tough.’

‘You made damned sure of that, didn’t you,’ Harry said, his voice low and deadly.