Roger sat up in the cold sleep pod, fully alert at last, if a little drowsy. Michelle stood beside him, stretching, reaching as high as she could before bending over to touch her bare toes. He watched her for a minute before realising that, if he wasn’t being vigorously active, it was still very cold.

“Hey,” he said, “is it any warmer outside, do you know? Kind of freezing in here.”

“Hmm?” she asked languidly. “Oh yeah, I forgot. We’d better go out anyway.”

He followed her through the door. “Why do you say that?”

“It slipped my mind earlier, but I came here with some other people,” she said. “We’re waking everyone we can find; hopefully we’ll get someone who knows what’s going on. So we split up, but a few minutes later, there was something like an earthquake, and then I think I heard an explosion outside.”

“An explosion?” he repeated. “You’re just telling me this now?”

“I did tell them I’d wait with you until you were properly warmed up. Besides, you know how they say you should never run toward an explosion? I figured I should at least wait until I had a guy with me. And, you know.”

He couldn’t argue with that, so they walked down the main hallway, instinctively keeping quiet and very close to each other, sometimes jostling one another in the twilight. A minute later, they came to a piece of wreckage. Roger nudged it closer to a patch of the glowing fungus for a better look. The biggest part was a twisted metal cylinder, together with fins, wires, bits of assorted electronics, and a mangled corpse of something biological, with lots of slimy tentacles and blubbery sinew strewn across the floor. On seeing the tentacles, Michelle leapt backward: this was worse than spiders.

“!” Roger choked out, skipping back and crashing into her. They struggled to keep their balance. “What is this place?”

“We thought it was an apocalypse vault,” she said, eyes fixed on the thing on the ground, “for a nuclear war or something, but okay, apparently it was actually a cyborg facehugger invasion. Honest mistake.”

Roger looked along the corridor and saw more of them further along. “Hang on. I think I see another in better condition.” Reluctantly, he approached one. “… These aren’t aliens. These are squids or octopuses.”

She followed and took a closer look of her own, then slumped. “Neither of us admits this to any of the others. Deal?”

“Deal. Followup question, though, why are there squids and … exploded missiles? all over the floor?”

“Whoever was using them last clearly didn’t put them away when they were done.”

He gave her a look.

“I have no idea,” she admitted. “I get the feeling Sue and Lottie went through here, though.”

He blinked. “Lottie … you mean Charlotte? My sister?”

“Did I forget to mention that earlier? I think I forgot to mention it earlier.”

He gave her a dirty look.

“What?” she said innocently.

He let out an irritated huff. “Let’s just find her.”

They proceeded along the hall. At one point, they passed a destroyed door leading to a room full of shattered glass tanks and a huge cluster of broken rockets and dead octopuses; dead or not, Michelle flatly refused to get near it, which Roger was glad of, because he didn’t want to go in either.

“My sister and that other girl,” he said. “They didn’t have a gun, did they?”

“No. Why?”

In the light spilling out of the room, he’d finally got a proper look at one of the rocket octopuses. He approached and fished a metal slug out from it, then held it up to the light. “Because someone does.”

Michelle put a hand to her temple. “Ooh. That probably isn’t good.”

Roger thought for a moment. “The other girl …”

“Sue.”

“Right, Sue. Does she have any enemies, do you know?”

Michelle blinked. “You mean, like, girls who pull her hair enemies, or people who’d attack her with jetpack squids enemies?”

“The latter. Or anyone who carries a gun.”

“What am I, a cowgirl? Nobody in a proper city carries a gun except a cop, and I don’t know any cops. I’ve barely ever even seen a gun, not counting video games and movies.”

“Because if she doesn’t, then the gunman is probably looking for Charlotte,” he said, increasing his pace. “I don’t think he’s found her, because we haven’t run into Sue or any of Sue’s blood, but he’s clearly looking for her. And he has, what, a fifteen minute head start? Let’s hurry.”

“Uh,” said Michelle, uncertain about how wise it was to move toward a possibly hostile man with a gun, but she kept pace with him.

They hurried down the corridor. The hall curved upward as they went, enough so that they couldn’t see the light of the rocket room. Eventually the trail of destroyed rockets and octopuses petered out, leaving them in gloom. Presently, there came an irregular pounding sound. Michelle gave Roger a look of ‘Are we really going toward that?’, but he didn’t look her way and kept going.

They followed the sound to a circular steel door that was already ajar, and looked through. It opened to a huge gallery, full of crates and chunky machinery, lit by red emergency lighting, with rows of catwalks leading to different levels. There were two obvious vehicles among the piles of equipment. One was the size of a bus, shaped like a jelly bean, silver-grey, covered in exhaust nozzles, wings shaped like a fish’s fins, sensor dishes, and other paraphernalia. On one side was stamped the word TCHAIPROSS. The other vehicle looked like a very fat three-storey-tall human, a two-legged mass of engines connected by cables. Roger briefly mistook it for a giant with bare muscles and sinews: they had the same layout as a human’s musculature, and even looked pink in the red lights. It had a trowel for one hand and what looked like a giant ratchet spanner for the other. This one drew their attention first, because it was moving.

Being so big and heavy, it made a racket, so they sneaked inside and hid behind a crate to observe it. It would use its right hand to help scoop a crate into its left, then turn and plod over to the far wall and slide the crate onto a raised platform with a row of others. Despite looking organic, it was quite clumsy; Roger had the impression that it wasn’t really designed to be elegant, and its pilot wasn’t particularly graceful either. It had an open cockpit for a head, but they couldn’t make the pilot out properly in the bad light.

“What do you think?” Michelle asked, pitching her voice low.

Roger watched the mech for a few more seconds. “I think I want to take a look inside that … submarine thing? Whatever it is.”

“Hey, wait,” she said, catching his sleeve before he could move out of cover. “Don’t run off on some whim without saying what you’re doing. That’d be stupid and annoying.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“See the name on the side? That’s the name of the organisation that’s after my sister and used to be after me. I need to find out whether they’ve got her on board.”

He made to move out again, but she kept her hold. “Don’t be an idiot. If she is, that guy’s with them too. Do you want to fight a giant mecha without even having pants?”

“Pants are optional,” he said, tugging at his sleeve. He could yank away, but she’d likely overbalance and make a noise that the walker’s pilot would hear.

She held fast. “Agreed, but you’re skating past the part with the giant mecha. What are you going to do, punch it?”

“Run around it, if it even sees me. That thing isn’t anywhere near as nimble as a human.”

“This is the difference between boys and girls,” Michelle muttered with exasperation. “Look over there.”

She pointed at a near corner, where a steel table had a laptop open, its screen a conspicuous blue glow in the red-tinted room, plugged into a power outlet.

“I think we can make it over there without being seen,” she said. “If we’re lucky, it’ll have some more information before you go charging in like an idiot.”

“Okay, fine. Will you let me go already?”

They waited until the mech turned around again to load another crate onto the platform, then ran over to the table. Michelle stopped behind a crate ten metres away, but Roger went right up to it. He yanked out the power cord and took the laptop, and it promptly gave a loud alert sound; the mech turned to face them, and he and Michelle turned and sprinted for the door. They made it through before the mech had taken three ponderous steps, skidding to a stop in the stone and steel hallway just outside.

Michelle panted and glared at him. “I meant that you’d read it inside, so you wouldn’t give yourself away,” she said.

“What, in thirty-second snatches while that guy was facing the other way?” Roger asked, reasonably in his mind. “That would have taken ages and we probably would have slipped up and been caught anyway.” He flipped the computer over and read the screen. Luckily, it was just an alert that it had switched to battery power, rather than an anti-theft measure that might have locked the computer altogether.

“Are we not going to keep running from the giant mecha?”

“It can hardly fit through the door, and if he tries to punch through the wall, he’ll bring the ceiling down on himself.” He was right; the sound of its great footsteps had stopped. “Also, this isn’t a Tchaipross operation. He’s moving terraforming gear.”

“I – what?” Michelle, surprised enough to drop her train of thought. “Terraforming? Like in science fiction?”

There came a burst of human-scale footsteps from inside the room. Roger quickly set down the laptop and got down into an athlete’s crouch. A moment later, a man ran out the hatch; Roger tackled him, bringing them both to the ground with a crash. The two of them scuffled, until Michelle ran over and kicked the second man in the back. He gave a whoof and went limp enough for Roger to get on top and put him in a headlock.

“Ow! Uncle!”

Roger loosened his grip, but kept it firm. “Do you have Charlotte?”

“Who?” asked the man.

“Small girl, dark red hair. One of Tchaipross’s persons of interest.”

“Tchaipross? I’m not with them.”

“There’s a Tchaipross submarine in that room.”

“Submarine? That’s a spaceship. We’re in space. Do you both have amnesia?”

Roger and Michelle exchanged glances, but they were hard to read in the gloom. “I’m no physicist,” said Michelle, “but isn’t space known for not having gravity?”

“The ship is spinning. It acts like a giant centrifuge. That’s why the halls slope upward, see?”

They looked around. That had been puzzling them both.

“Okay, let’s accept that for now,” said Roger, leaving the thought abstract. “There’s a Tchaipross spaceship in that room. Aren’t you working with them?”

“I didn’t even know they were a group. I just saw that and figured it was an acronym or company name or something. Who are they?”

Roger let him go and stood up. “Never mind that. So what were you doing in there? Who are you?”

The man got to his feet. He was a bit shorter than Roger but heavier, on the chubby side. He was younger than Roger had realised, judging by his round, almost cherubic face. He wore business shoes with coveralls that looked black in the dim hallway. His hair was medium brown, but again looked much darker.

“Just loading stuff onto another ship,” he said. “I’m Jason Fisher.” Then, with dignity, “You took my laptop.”

“Uh. Sorry about that,” said Roger.

“And … is this … butter?” he asked, noticing that some had smeared onto his suit. “Why are you covered in butter?”

“We got hit by a butter bomb,” Michelle supplied.

“Yeah, that,” said Roger. “Have you seen anyone else lately? The girl with dark red hair, possibly a very large man or a severe-looking woman, maybe … what does Sue look like?”

“Half-Chinese,” Michelle said, “glasses, talks nonstop.”

“Nope,” said Jason, “I’ve just been keeping to myself.”

Roger opened his mouth, before something clicked. “Have you been loading the people in cold sleep onto this other ship as well?”

Jason gave him a very confused look. “Definitely not. And it’s called cryostasis.”

Roger kept talking. “But you are taking terraforming gear off it. And if there are people in cold sleep, this is probably a colony ship that needs that gear.”

Jason suddenly looked very uncomfortable. “Uh, don’t get the wrong idea. The second ship is supposed to go on ahead. Technical reasons. The machines need lots of time to get set up. It takes time to generate an atmosphere and biomes and stuff, and we don’t want people to have to spend years stuck inside while everything’s getting set up, right?”

“Then why were the machines loaded into here first, rather than being put onto the second ship back on Earth? For that matter, why not launch the second ship at the same time as the first?”

“Well the ship uses a special high-tech gravity drive, that accelerates as you go along, so it lets you move incredibly fast, but it doesn’t scale down, so they have to put both ships on the same engine for most of the trip. Er, they have to use the same engine for both ships.”

“Do you know how fast we’re moving now?” Michelle asked. “Out of curiosity.”

“Uh, we’re moving at about ten percent of the speed of light right about now.”

“This is from the destination’s reference frame, I assume?” she asked.

“Yes,” Jason said.

“So how were you planning to stop?” she asked sweetly. “At that speed, your kinetic energy would be about” she did some mental arithmetic “two hundred million times the chemical energy of the same mass of dynamite. If you want to use atmospheric braking, you’re going to need a lot of atmosphere.”

They stared at her.

“I said I wasn’t a professional physicist,” she said. “I never said I didn’t pay attention in class. Or that I couldn’t tell a bad liar when I heard one.”

Jason blushed, angry. “Look, this is none of your business. You’re both fresh out of cryosleep and don’t even have pants. Just leave –”

There was a jolt, and all three of them staggered.

“The heck was that?” Michelle asked.

“Space debris,” Jason said. He cast an uneasy look back into the loading bay. “It can cause a little damage, but there are systems to fix it, they should hold awhile longer.”

Roger gave him an unliking look. “Even if I thought you were telling the truth –”

“Hey, Roger?!” called a girl’s voice from behind them.

They all turned to see Charlotte running down the hall toward them, wearing a black bodysuit which looked like it was made of spandex.

“There you are!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been looking all over for you! Why didn’t you wait in the cold sleep room, like we agreed? And how did you get covered in butter, too, Roger? It was all over the room, you even got it into the pod somehow.” She moved to hug Roger, then decided that it could wait until he was cleaner.

“I slipped and fell onto him when one of those shocks hit,” Michelle said. “Where’s Sue? We’ve got a bit of a situation here.”

“No kidding. She’s upstairs, or downstairs, depends how you think of gravity, with Mum, taking a nap. I promised I’d bring you both back to them. Um, you’re welcome to come too?” she added to Jason, not knowing who he was but reasoning that he couldn’t be too bad if Roger and Michelle were talking to him.

“I’d rather stay here,” Jason said.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Michelle said to him.

“Mr Truth is on board this ship,” Charlotte said. “Uh, he’s a bad man, and this is actually a spacecraft, if you didn’t already know. So I’d rather not stand here in the middle of the main hallway arguing.”

Roger looked up and down the hall, making a mental note to think more about being on a spaceship as soon as he had time. She had a point, though; this was about the most conspicuous place possible, especially given that was probably Truth’s personal ship just inside.

“Well,” he said, looking unhappily at Jason. If he was stealing important pieces of equipment, Roger should probably stop him, but he couldn’t think how, short of murder. He didn’t have any way to take a prisoner without physically dragging him upstairs, which would surely be loud enough to attract Mr Truth, and it’s impossible to reliably knock someone unconscious for more than thirty seconds without putting them into a coma or killing them outright.

“Why are we all still standing around instead of getting out of the open?” Charlotte said. “And what about Sue and Mum? They’re alone, and both are probably asleep now.”

He looked at Michelle, hoping she had ideas, but she just shrugged. “… Right,” he said. “They come first. We’ll see you around,” he added to Jason, turning to leave with the girls.

“Maybe,” Jason replied.