and yelled. The mob gasped, and Chrysta took advantage of the moment of surprise. She dashed down the corridor, hoping to find a lift that still worked.
After a century-and-a-half of fruitless searching for a viable planet, the Burton was low on resources and badly in need of repairs. Decades of poor management and turmoil had depleted the ship’s reserves of fuel or food, and many systems had already broken down. The descendants of the original crew were lost among the stars, no longer confident they would find a parklike new world. According to their long-range scans, there was not a habitable star system within reach. At a minimum, they had another fifteen years before the next star was even in close observation range.
And then an ion storm had ripped past them like a flash fire, a surge of energetic particles rolling across space from some cosmic catastrophe. Many of the ship’s electrical and life-support systems were fried. Barely limping along with emergency repairs, using spare parts stolen from other systems and hammered into place, their hope was at its fragile end. Aboard the Burton , the colonists had already lived for decades on minimal rations, reduced power consumption, virtually no comforts. Just surviving. As captain, Chrysta was forced to impose even stricter conservation measures. And the situation kept getting worse.
Eighty years after departure, the ship’s compy was destroyed in an engine accident, which left the people aboard without an anchor, without a teacher. Many of the crewmembers, generations away from Earth, still tried to learn from the library databases, but they were outdated and of little practical use. So much of the information relied on planetary references that meant little to families so far removed from solid ground.
Several previous captains had been assassinated or forced to resign as the circumstances grew even more dire. Chrysta gave pep talks, hoping to rally the crew to work together for the common good—all for one and one for all!—but spirits were low and emotions ran high. It was easier to blame her than to offer suggestions.
Even a captain could not control the sheer emptiness of space. She hoped that at least some of the other generation ships from Earth had found viable planets by now. The Burton certainly had no chance.
Chrysta ran down the corridor, hearing the shouts behind her. The weapon blast had cowed the mob for only a few seconds, and now they were after her again. Maybe she shouldn’t have intentionally missed Dario Ramirez after all. “Oh well, maybe next time.”
When the lift doors failed to open, yet another malfunction, she found an emergency hatch and slid down the drop ladder to the next deck. Chrysta ran as fast as she could. A red headband held her shaggy honey-blond hair out of her face, but sweat dripped down her cheeks.
A voice shouted over the intercom, “She’s on deck five. Converge there!”
She remembered how much these people had admired her, at first. She was young and attractive with a likeable personality, a salty sense of humor. Half of the young men aboard the Burton had a crush on her.
But when the ship’s problems didn’t magically get better under her command, the doubts had emerged. A clear case of buyer’s remorse. One biting critic said that the ship needed a strong leader, not a beauty queen.
However, a strong leader needed the nerve and the guts to impose hard measures, asking the crew to accept more and more austerity because that was the only way. But the colonists were hungry and tired of rationing. They had had enough.
People came toward her now from two different corridors; some rode down a functional lift farther down the hall. Where had they found so many weapons? Her grip on the blaster butt was sweaty. The shouting mob came forward and threw empty ration cans, a pipe elbow from a dismantled water system, a used-up battery pack. Chrysta ducked, and the debris clattered on the decks and the walls. Most
Maurizio de Giovanni, Anne Milano Appel