Halfway there, Nicci started bawling. That helped. There was enough misery around here that no one wanted to see any more of it. The people who had been dully watching her found other places to send their thousand-yard stare.

Nicci…

Amber dropped back a little and put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. Nicci hugged on her like a child wanting to be carried and cried the same way, loud and graceless, soaking heat and wetness into Amber’s shirt.

“It’s okay,” she heard herself say inanely. She rubbed at Nicci’s shaking back and watched smoke fly away in wind-blown stripes from the ship. So much smoke. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay.”

“I didn’t want to be here!” Nicci brayed. “I didn’t want to do this!”

Guilt knotted at her heart and sank all the way down into her stomach. “I know.”

“You made me! Why did you make me?”

“Nicci…please, it’ll be okay.”

“I want to go home!”

“I’m sorry, Nicci. I am. Come on.”

The two men who seemed to be doing the deep talking stopped as Amber approached them. She recognized the Manifestor up close—Crewman Everly Scott, who she’d made such a great impression on at boarding—but not the Fleetman he was with. If she knew how to read pips, she’d know his rank at least, but all Amber could see was an older black man of distinctly military bearing, with a worried face and smudges of soot along the left side of his mostly-hairless head. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, once it must have been obvious that she was really coming to talk to them.

“I can’t think of how,” Amber replied honestly enough. She rubbed Nicci’s back some more, trying to quiet her so that they could talk without shouting too hard. The wind made that difficult enough. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but if you guys are talking about plans, I’d like to hear them.”

“Go sit down,” said Scott firmly. “As soon as we’ve debriefed ourselves on proper procedure—”

“No offense,” Amber said, looking at him. “But I don’t believe for a second you actually have a procedure that covers something like this. I am all for postponing the main panic, but we all need to know what happens next.”

“Go find a seat,” Scott began again, but the soldier stopped him there.

“At this point, ma’am,” he said, “all we’re doing is talking out the situation.”

“But we’re going to get rescued, right?” Nicci reached out to grab at his uniform. He gave her hand a pat. He did it a lot better than Amber had, using the gesture not only to pry her off, but also to sit her down on the ground.

“If you’ve got any ideas,” the soldier went on, taking off his jacket to drape around Nicci’s shaking shoulders, “I’m willing to hear you out. But if I can be as blunt with you as you’ve been with us, if you haven’t got something to say, you need to move on and let us try to do our job.”

“You can tell us how you’re going to sue us later,” Scott added derisively.

Amber shot him an angry glance, then redirected herself to the other man. “I feel like I need to get the stupid questions out first, just so we’re all on one page, okay?”

“Fair enough.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“More or less. We were hit by some sort of unmapped interstellar traffic…an asteroid field or maybe we passed through the tail of a comet or something. The shields are supposed to be able to repel collision, but…the hull was penetrated in a number of places…a lot of systems took heavy damage. There was massive explosive decompression. None of the active crew appear to have survived it.”

“Is this…all of us?”

“I don’t know.” The Fleetman’s gaze skewed away to stare at the ship, at the men’s dorms in particular, burning so hard they could actually hear it, even over the wind. “The military mods survived the crash more or less, but the asteroids…or whatever they were…” He trailed off, then shook his head and looked at her. “Most of the Sleepers I saw in my unit looked like Swiss cheese, ma’am. So did the people inside them. People I knew.”

“I…I’m sorry.” The smallness of that sympathy could not stand against the present horror. Amber groped for something better, then gave up and simply said, “So we’re it?”

“There could be others. I just don’t know. The mods sealed themselves as part of the emergency lockdown. None of the communication stations appear to be working. I have no idea what the situation is…underground. For all I know, parts of the ship could still be intact, but it’s…not likely. I’ve got some men trying to organize a search and rescue operation, but it’s been…slow starting.”

Amber nodded. “How long have we been flying blind?”

“I don’t know how long, but we can’t have been entirely blind or we wouldn’t be breathing this atmosphere, we’d be melting in it.” He broke off there, ran one hand over the side of his smooth head and started again, more calmly. “The ship has several emergency failsafes in place. Locating an Earth-class planet and landing was one of them, but…I don’t even know off the top of my head how many others had to fail for that one to engage. In the event of any major incident, the ship was supposed to take us home.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“No, although the guidance system itself has to be functioning or we never would have made it here. This planet is very Earth-like. And before you ask me which world it is, understand that there are over seven thousand Earth-like planets in the Fleet’s database, and we’ve mapped less than one percent of one percent of this galaxy. Without a working guidance system’s interface, we have no way of discovering where we are.”

“Can anyone repair it?”

He spread his hands, his expression pained. “With what?”

“All right. I have to ask. Is there an emergency beacon or any way to send a transmission of any kind back home?”

The Fleetman nodded back in the direction of the fractured ship while still holding her eyes. “At the very best, we have lost thirty percent of the ship’s structure, including the entire command center, and the primary and tertiary lifeboat launching bays. That number could be as high as seventy-five percent if none of the structure below the surface has survived impact. Even if the halls have collapsed, the skeleton could be intact. Right now, I have to hope that it is, because only if we can tunnel our way in to certain engineering portals do we have any hope of making the necessary repairs to the guidance system.”

“You said the primary and the tertiary bays were out. What about the secondary lifeboats?” Amber asked. “Is there a beacon or anything with them?”

“There is. And that—” The Fleetman pointed up at the extreme tip of the blazing men’s dorm. “—is the bay where it is located. It looks like it might be intact and if it’s locked down like the rest of the compartment doors, it might not even be burning. Getting to it is going to be a process, but I have to tell you, ma’am—”

“Amber. Amber Bierce.”

“Amber.” His brows furrowed slightly. “Jonah Lamarc, Lieutenant Junior-Grade.”

That was a lot further down the authority ladder than she’d been hoping to hear, and by the look on his face, he knew it. But he struck her as a thoughtful man and definitely not prone to panic. She put out her hand impulsively.

He shook it while Crewman Scott watched.

“It’s going to be a process?” Amber prompted.

“But I believe it can be done, once the fire burns itself out,” he finished, and then gave his head a grim shake. “Miss Bierce, I don’t think I’d say this to anyone else out there, but you seem to have a level head and I want to be honest with you.”

“Go on then. I’m braced.”

“I’m not sure we can launch a beacon from this location—planet-side, I mean—but assuming that it is possible, we first have to get guidance repaired, online and talking to the beacon so that it can orient itself to Earth. After that…” He paused again, looking down at Nicci, who had drawn up her knees and was now resting her head atop them and lightly rocking. He looked back at Amber, his expression drawn and greyed with strain. “I haven’t talked around much yet, but I served my second shift before the incident, so I know it’s been at least two years, plus however long the ship was flying blind to get to this planet after it was hit. But even if we magically crashed the instant after I went back in Sleep, we’d still have been Tunneling for two years before that. We can’t be less than five hundred light-years from Earth,” Lamarc said softly, slowly. His eyes communicated far more than his careful words. “And that is way more than we have mapped out along our pre-arranged route. Even if we were only knocked a little bit off-course, which I’m guessing—” He looked pointedly around, taking in the whole planet at a glance. “—may be overly optimistic, our guidance system might not be able to find Earth.”