The roar was deafening. This time the movement was anything but subtle. All of them were pushed back into their seats hard.

  Over the comms came Cat’s tense voice.

  “Dragon still incoming.”

  There wasn’t much they could do now.

  “How close?” Dash asked back over the comms.

  He didn’t get an answer.

  “Base?”

  Silence. Except for the roar of the engines. Or was it a dragon?

  Odessa waited for inevitable tearing of claws or teeth that would throw them out into open air or the belly of the beast. Either would be just as deadly.

  “We just passed Max Q,” Dash reported. “10 km and rising. Base do you copy?”

  Comms dropout wasn’t completely unexpected, as long as it only lasted a few seconds. Despite knowing that Odessa still breathed a soft sigh of relief when Stella’s voice filtered though the comms again. “Sorry crew, had a brief blip in the comms there. Telemetry still looking good. Dragon still on approach for now. You should clear the safe zone in 30 seconds.”

  Stella’s voice had an edge to it that Odessa wasn’t used to hearing. Sure, they were all under exceptional circumstances right now but Odessa couldn’t help thinking something was wrong for Stella to be sounding like that. She wondered if the others noticed it. Probably not. Odessa had lived with Stella. She liked to think she knew her pretty well, even if Stella could be very good at hiding things.

  Odessa couldn’t see the controls that Dash and Jade could. The dials and knobs in front of her were repeats of a subset of those up the front. Her control module included things like cabin pressure and O2 levels. General life support stuff. But every few seconds Dash would give an update on their flight readings.

  She listened as he read out increasingly higher values of altitude. The numbers became her eyes. But no one had numbers on the dragon.

  “Altitude 20 km.”

  “Dragon still in pursuit, below you and climbing,” reported Cat in a more relaxed tone than earlier. She almost sounded bored again.

  “Directly below us?” Dash asked.

  Stella answered this time. “Negative. The dragon has not reached the rocket corridor yet. Below you, as in your altitude now exceeds its altitude.”

  “Rodger that,” Dash replied.

  Odessa smiled. There was no way it was going to reach them now. Right?

  “Did you guys hear that?” Carmen suddenly asked over the intercom.

  “Hear what?” asked Dash.

  “I didn’t hear anything unusual,” reported Jade.

  Odessa listened hard but all she could hear was the engines. “Nor me.”

  “Nada,” agreed Athena.

  “Carmen, what did you hear?” asked Dash.

  “I don’t know. It sounded like a bump behind us or something,” Carmen said.

  “Well, everything’s reading okay and I didn’t feel a jolt. Let me know if you hear it again,” Dash said.

  Had there been a jolt? Odessa didn’t think so, but chikari tended to have a different tier of senses. It was one of the few things they had in common with vampires, although with chikari it seemed to relate more to touch. They didn’t hear extra well with their ears so much as they felt vibrations through their skin. It was possible there had been a jolt and only Carmen had felt it. But whatever it was it seemed to be gone now, and Carmen didn’t report anymore unusual events.

  Dash exchanged read outs with Stella like they were still on Earth and not pressed hard into the backs of their seats with a roaring rocket behind them, surrounded by the smell of ozone.

  They were almost certainly out of reach of Amanda’s powers now and were still steadily accelerating. The heavy feeling was getting heavier and heavier.

  Then the first burn ended, jolting them all into their straps and granting a brief reprieve before the second burn kicked in.

  “Ohmygosh!” muttered Athena in surprise.

  Dash continued his reports back to base with barely any signs of interruption.

  “Dragon’s going for the booster,” Stella let them know a little while later.

  The dragon going for the spent booster meant both they, and likely ground control, were in the clear. As that thought went through her head, Odessa looked out the front window and found she could see stars against a black sky. Odessa grinned. “We’re flying!”

  “Not quite yet,” replied Dash, but she could hear a grin in his tone. “Base, I tell you you’re missing some fine weather up here.”

  Stella’s voice came through the comms line, “Unicorn One, this Base. We’re about to lose contact with you. Relay on LEO sat should give us comms again in about 30 minutes. I’m handing over to Indi so she’ll be your contact during the TLI in about 90 minutes. Best of luck. Fates be with you.”

  Once the comms cutoff Dash gave a shake of his head and muttered under his breath. “Unicorn.”

  “It is the best name,” replied Odessa.

  “The ship’s called Unicorn?” Athena asked.

  “No,” said Dash.

  “Yup,” said Odessa.

  “I preferred Opossum myself,” said Jade

  “But it doesn’t look like an opossum,” replied Odessa.

  “It doesn’t look like unicorn,” argued Dash.

  “It does,” Odessa replied. “It looks like the horn part.”

  “No it doesn’t.”

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t just call it Ship One,” said Carmen.

  “Opossum is also a terrible name by the way,” added Dash. “Ship One would have been okay. It’s certainly better than The Odysseus.”

  “Sorry I asked,” remarked Athena in a tone that was both amused and slightly strained from the gees they were pulling.

  “Ship One is not a cool enough name,” replied Odessa. “The Odysseus would have been amazing though.”

  “Yeah well you were outvoted,” Dash reminded her.

  “So were you.”

  “What did you want to name it?” Athena asked Dash.

  “Red One.”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “It’s not red,” said Odessa.

  “We could have painted it.”

  “We could not. Are you insane?”

  “Even just a small stripe, or a door, or something. We could have had a whole rainbow of ships.”

  “You know what else had rainbows?” Odessa replied. “Unicorns!”

  “What about Red Unicorn?” Athena asked.

  “I think it at least needs some alliteration,” Dash replied. “Like Red Raccoon.”

  “Red Raccoon Ron!” Odessa grinned.

  “Oh man, we totally should have named the ship Ron,” said Dash.

  Odessa opened her mouth to argue with that.

  Around and around they went, debating the name of the ship all through burn two and most of burn three, the latter of which was a far more gentle ride.

  The weight lifted off their chests which did nothing to slow the conversation until it ceased entirely.

  “Base, we have entered parking orbit,” reported Dash just in case they had contact. They didn’t.

  The others went quiet.

  Odessa couldn’t wait any longer. She was the first to take off her helmet and breathe in the cabin air. Slowly she released her hands from her helmet and grinned like mad when it just floated free in front of her. They were in microgravity.

  She unbuckled her restraints and floated out of her seat. She giggled. “How cool, is this.”

  “You’re gonna get sick getting out of your seat that fast,” Dash replied.

  Odessa snorted and did a forward roll. “I am invincible!” she declared.

  The others removed their helmets but stayed in their seats a little while longer.

  Odessa floated forward to get a better look out the windows.

  A black expanse filled with stars spread out before her.

  Realising she’d been staring in awe out the window too long, Odessa turned her eyes down to the readouts on the main panel and then she froze. “Uh, guys, CO2’s reading 30.”

  “Bullshit!” Dash replied immediately, even though he was now looking at the same dial she was. “We’re not feeling that.”

  “We’d be dead if we were,” Jade added. “Too dead to feel anything.”

  “It’s gotta be instrumentation then,” Dash said.

  As they stared down at the readout, Odessa found she wasn’t feeling very well at all. The world was swimming before her eyes and she felt suddenly all cold and hot at the same time.

  She turned away from the control panel and vomited right toward the pilot’s chair.

  “Whoa!” Dash remarked as he dove out of the way just in time. Floating globules of vomit only just missed him. “I told you not to get up so fast.”

  The normally completely sensible and practical Jade was at Odessa’s side in an instant. “Oh be nice. Poor thing’s not feeling well.” Jade stroked Odessa head like she was patting a cat but it was strangely comforting.

  “We need to bag that,” Dash said. “Don’t want vomit on the electronics.”

  “Already on it,” replied Carmen, who was indeed already wearing elbow length gloves and carrying a plastic bag.

  Carmen floated around the room, and with a delicate ease and remarkable grace, she caught the vomit globules using the bag like a net. Athena turned away with a groan and retreated down the ladder to the lower deck.

  “Feeling alright, Athena?” Dash called after her.

  An indecipherable reply came back up the stairs.

  Dash went after her to check, grabbing another bag off Carmen on the way.

  Odessa groaned and fixated her eyes on the pilot’s chair which had somehow managed to escape mostly unscathed.

  Jade kept stroking her hair. “Feeling better?” she asked.

  Odessa nodded slowly. She was actually starting to feel better but she waited until she was sure before she dared to remove her eyes from that rigid uncomfortable looking structure. The space seats looked more like what went in a racing car than anything you’d want to watch a movie in, but they protected the body from high gees better than any comfy couch would have. Even the seats in Cat’s track cars were more comfortable than these.

  Dash had wanted to paint the ship’s seats red too. The Chief Engineer had put his foot down. Odessa was surprised the Chief hadn’t at least stayed to watch the launch. He’d been a very practical and safety conscious guy, and with years more experience than any of the rest of them. That was why Odessa had picked him, because if it had been up to her, the seats probably would have ended up pink and they probably would have spent weeks arguing about the colour. She kind of wished they had painted the seats now.

  But as her gaze found its way back toward a window, the colour of the seats paled in comparison to the view.

  “Whoa! I can see Earth.”

  Carmen and Jade floated over beside her.

  “You know,” Carmen said. “I always thought it would be more green.”

  “You’ve seen pictures though right?” Odessa asked.

  “Of old Earth, yeah.”

  The three of them stared down at the big blue planet for several seconds in silence. Odessa felt like she was standing on top of the world’s largest mountain and she wondered what it would feel like the next time she stood atop a snowy peak. If it would feel small in comparison.

  “The clouds look so small,” said Jade.

  “There’s just so much blue,” said Carmen very slowly, as if she thought speaking too fast might disrupt the moment.

  “Do we have more land or less than old Earth?” asked Odessa.

  “I don’t know,” replied Jade. “I don’t think anyone’s ever measured. Who knows if the planet’s even the same size.”

  Odessa frowned. “It has to be. All our math, gravity, everything relies on it. Plus our solar system maps to theirs, mostly.”

  “Mostly. Exactly. What if it’s slightly different? I mean, our land masses are.”

  Odessa groaned. She didn’t like thinking about missing something like that. A lot of what they’d done relied on Absentia being similar to old Earth. It had been an assumption, but nothing they’d done had suggested it was an incorrect one. Or anything anyone else had done. Their satellite hadn’t been the first one sent up, even if there hadn’t been a lot of information sharing going around. She shook her head. “We’d have noticed during testing. Besides”—She glanced toward the control panel—“We’re at the right altitude now so it has to be the same size. Our trajectory calculations would have been off.”

  “Mmm, could be the same mass but more loosely spread,” Jade replied. “We do have different compositions of minerals in the soil. Way more osmium and diamond. And Jade.” She grinned at that last one.

  Odessa shook her head again. “It still would have messed up our orbital trajectory.”

  “Unless it was magically bigger.” Jade raised a finger.

  Odessa groaned. Now that was something she really really didn’t want to think about. No one really understood how magic worked. Why Amanda could create and control fire, why Cat could enter other people’s dreams, or why Jade could lift stupidly heavy stuff. Sorcerers studied it but they didn’t like to share what they learned and they had excessively stringent entry requirements.

  Absentia was still relatively young too. It had only been a few centuries since the vast and sudden propagation of magic had resulted in what was now known as The Great Splice. The population this side hadn’t grown like it had in the old world. When children were born able to set things on fire just by thinking about it or magically throw large objects across a room, it tended not to bode well toward the survivability into adulthood odds of a population.

  “Speaking of magic,” said Carmen. “We should probably get the payload door open.”

  “We should probably figure out the issue with the CO2 first,” Jade said.

  “We’re breathing okay now,” Odessa said, but she knew they needed to get onto it soon.

  “We don’t want to miss a real issue,” Jade said.

  Odessa nodded to show she agreed.

  “What about the payload doors. We’ll need the panels out for electricity, plus I need the UV on,” Carmen added. “We’ve got maybe 75 minutes before TLI. We should do things in an order that minimises any last minute fixes right before the next burn.”

  “We’ve got time,” Odessa reassured her, but Carmen had a point too. Priority was important. Carmen needed a certain amount of UV per day just for survival so she was probably quite keen to make sure the UV was working. They couldn’t leave Earth’s orbit without that. The payload doors also needed to be opened to expose the solar panels for electricity generation and Stella’s experiments to the vacuum of space. Plus there were several other little jobs that needed doing before the next stage of the mission. They had enough people to do several things at once though. Odessa started giving orders. “Alright, Carmen, you open the payload doors. Jade you get Dash to get the UV kickstarted while you check the wiring to the CO2 sensors. We’ve got multiple sensors so I doubt it’s a sensor issue. It’s gotta be either a cable, the MUX, or the software. I’m not sure what the default is if the software detects no signal but I wouldn’t be surprised if Indi just set it to the worst case. There should be a way to get an error code. I’ll check the manual.”

  “On it,” Jade reported. She turned to head toward the deck ladder, her long green braid flying out behind her.

  Carmen nodded and returned to her control panels.

  Odessa hunted down the manual. There was one dedicated to the error codes of every single thing on the ship, everything that could have an error code that was, which was a surprisingly high number of things. Find the right page and it would tell her where to look next for more details.

  Odessa got as far as the contents page before deciding to just do a quick check of the power supply at the sensors first. When they’d designed this ship they’d made damn sure that everything could be probed easily from multiple points. She was almost certain it was a wiring issue. It almost always was and she hated reading documentation unless she had to.

  She’d just grabbed the multimeter when Athena popped her head up through the hatch in the floor. “Dash wants to know why the shelves were designed with such a small gap behind them.”

  “What?” Odessa stopped, half confused for a moment before she realised what the problem was. “No, there’s a latch...” She rushed toward the ladder.

  Athena moved aside to let her past.

  Odessa reached the lower deck just in time to hear Jade say, “Here let me help.”

  “Wait!” Odessa cried. “There’s a latch. You have to undo the latch.”

  SCREECH!

  It was too late.

  “Oops.” Jade stood there, holding the entire electronics shelving which she had just pulled right off its rails.

  “You were supposed to undo the latch,” Odessa said.

  “Well, at least we know magic works in space,” said Athena in a peppy tone. Apparently she was feeling a lot better.

  A worried looking Carmen poked her head down through the hatch.

  Odessa was about to reassure Carmen that everything was fine and that they had spare parts somewhere. They should be able to fix the shelf. Probably. Worst case, there was plenty of extra strong duct tape.

  But it turned out that wasn’t what Carmen was worried about. “Guys, I can’t get the payload doors to open.”

  That was when Odessa heard it. Coming from somewhere behind her. On the other side of the wall perhaps. Or maybe even in the ship, just around the corner of the sleeping cove. A subtle scratching sound, like claws on metal.

  She spun to face it but could see nothing immediately obvious. And then it was silent again. “Did you guys hear that?”