I twisted around until our foreheads were touching. “What?”
She kissed me. “How many women have you been with on this trip?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A few?”
She kissed me again. “All of them since the collision, right? All of them since you went through the tank?”
I didn’t answer. It was pretty obvious that she knew.
“Ghost chasers,” she said. “To a Natalist, you’re some serious forbidden fruit. I’ve heard them talking.”
“But that’s not you.”
“No,” she whispered. “That’s not me.”
* * *
IT’S KIND OF tough to date on a colony ship. There just aren’t a lot of options, activity-wise. You can eat together, but sucking food out of a plastic bulb while attached to a tether in the mess so that you don’t float into somebody else who is also sucking food out of a plastic bulb is even less romantic than it sounds. You can take walks together, but the only place where walking is possible is around the carousel, and you spend most of your time there slightly nauseous while you put more time and attention to avoiding the squat thrusters than you do to your date. You can star-watch at the forward viewing ports, but I couldn’t do that without thinking about the stream of high-energy protons flowing past, and what they would do to me—again—if something happened to one of the field generation units. PTSD-related panic attacks are also not romantic.
So mostly, we banged.
When we weren’t doing that, we spent a lot of time talking. Nasha had stories. Her parents were immigrants, which, given the colossal expense and time required to get anywhere in the Union, is something that almost nobody other than beachhead colonists can say. They’d come to Midgard thirty years earlier on the Lost Hope, a refugee ship from New Hope, the world that had been, up until its inhabitants decided to kill one another, Midgard’s nearest neighbor.
You wouldn’t think a place like Midgard would be hard on immigrants. It’s not like we didn’t have the room or resources to take in a few hundred lost souls. You’d be wrong, though. Humans are tribal, and the refugees’ accents were enough to mark them as outsiders, even setting aside the fact that the majority of them had skin a few shades darker than most of Midgard’s original population. They hadn’t been on Midgard for a month before anonymous articles started popping up on the feeds arguing that they were carriers for whatever lunacy had engulfed New Hope, and that if they were allowed to insinuate themselves into our social and political life, they’d drag Midgard down that same path. The government set them up with basic stipends and places to live, but right from the jump it was almost impossible for them to find real jobs. Two years after they landed, a few dozen of them staged a sit-in that turned into a protest that turned into a minor riot. After that, they had a hard time even getting their kids admitted into the general schools.
It was right about then that Nasha was born.
Nasha never told me much about her childhood, but she dropped enough pieces here and there for me to figure out that it was rough. She was pretty up-front about why she learned to fly, though. She’d known since she was a kid that this mission was coming, and she wanted to be on it. She couldn’t get into the kind of academic track that would have ended with a doctorate in exobiology, and she didn’t have the connections that would have landed her a slot in Security or Command—but she could learn how to pilot a combat skimmer. Killing stuff was the one thing the people from New Hope were good at, right?
“Midgard was never my home,” she said to me one night as we curled around one another in her sleeping mesh. “It was never going to be. This place where we’re going, though…”
“It’ll be good,” I said. “Warm breezes and white sand beaches, and nothing that wants to eat us.”
Famous last words, right?
* * *
I WAS WITH Nasha and maybe twenty or thirty other people in the forward common room when we finally shut down the main torch and switched over to ion thrusters for orbital insertion around Niflheim. We hadn’t been able to make any kind of observations of our new home yet through the glare of our own exhaust, and everyone was pretty excited to finally see where we were going. A free-fall warning popped up in our oculars, and then thirty seconds later our weight eased away, and we drifted free of the deck. A minute or so after that, an image of the planet we’d crossed almost eight lights to colonize popped up on the main wallscreen.
Someone up front tried to start a cheer. That died away almost before it began.
I don’t know what we were expecting. Green continents and blue oceans? City lights?
What we saw was white. We were still several million klicks out, but from here the planet looked like a pog-ball—smooth, white, and featureless.
“Is that…” someone said. “Is that … clouds?”
We watched in silence as our maneuvering and the planet’s rotation slowly shifted our viewpoint. Nothing changed. After what felt like hours but was probably actually more like ten minutes, Nasha said, “That’s not cloud cover. It’s ice. This planet’s a snowball.”
We were holding hands then, mostly just to keep from drifting apart. I squeezed her fingers. She squeezed mine back. I was thinking about all those stories I’d read about colonies that had failed to take root for one reason or another. This didn’t look like the sort of place that would welcome us with open arms, but maybe …
I pulled her close, and brought my mouth next to her ear.
“This is doable,” I said. “Old Earth was like this once, just before life took off. There’s plenty of water here, and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. That’s all we really need.”
She sighed, and turned her head to kiss my cheek.
“I hope so. I’d hate to come all this way just to die.”
Those words were still hanging in the air between us when my ocular pinged.
<Command1>:Report to Biology immediately. Come prepared to deploy.
013