Space, somewhere in the Proxima Centauri Galaxy, four-point-two light-years from Earth. The year—2101. Middle of September.

“Nick, we may have found a home.” 

I was in the cockpit of our vessel, the Valkyrie, and Captain Teller Adams, usually a gruff, taciturn sort, seemed to be in a good mood for once. He’d had a lot to contend with these past six months. Being the leader of a group of disparate personalities wasn’t easy, nor was it a job for the fainthearted.

My heart jumped at those words. Half a year in space, no planet capable of supporting human life, and now this. “Are you sure?”

The captain’s gaze never strayed from the console, and he spoke without looking up. “Did you clean the cryos?”

Way to change the subject! “Yes, sir, that’s where I just came from.” 

By cryos, he meant the four hundred cryogenically frozen people on board. We called them cryos as a nickname. Their outer shells and circuit boards had to be kept clean at all times. The slightest bit of dust inside the equipment could short everything out.

Captains Adams swiveled around to favor me with a small smile before turning back to the console. “Good. Where’s Julie?”

He meant his daughter. “Uh, she’s in the animal section.”

We didn’t carry any live animals onboard. The section that Julie took care of held vials of the DNA of a hundred-plus species of animals. We also had cloning equipment on board. If we ever found a habitable Class M planet to live on, perhaps the animals would find a new home, too.

It was difficult to contain my excitement, but I managed—barely. “You’re sure about this?”

He nodded. “Our long-range sensors have detected a Class M planet. Not in range, yet, perhaps forty minutes until we get more details, but what we know is that it’s third from the sun, has lakes and oceans similar to what Earth has, and we’re pretty sure that it has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.”

“So, it’s a wait-and-see job?”

His manner changed back to his usual gruff mode. “Don’t get your hopes up too high. I’m just saying that this might be our new home.”

I hunched forward to get a better look at the screen. I couldn’t see much. Captain Adams ran his hands over the console, pressing buttons here, twisting levers there. 

In his forties, Teller Adams had a head full of graying dark hair, a grizzled beard, a powerful six-foot-two-inch build, and thick hands and forearms. 

He’d been an ex-soldier, a pilot with the US Air Force, and a champion boxer and judoka in his younger days. Not many men half his age wanted to tangle with him, and what he said was the law on our ship.

The cockpit of the Valkyrie, our vessel, was filled with instruments and cramped, with room enough for three people at most, and I had to stoop to fit inside. Fortunately, whenever Julie visited with me, I didn’t have to scrunch up too much. She was on the short side of five-three. That saved some space.

Captain Adams continued to speak while shifting his gaze from the console to the viewscreen. “I’m thinking that this might be the place. It looks to be like our world, except for no moons orbiting it. But other than what I just told you, I can’t give you any extra information.”

He jerked his thumb behind him. “I still need you to work. Check on the people back there, but don’t tell anyone, not even Julie. I don’t want any major disappointments.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and exited the cockpit.

As I walked through the ship’s narrow corridors, I thought about our past half-year in space and hoped that things might work out. 

Julie and I, along with everyone else, had been in a quarantine facility with around two thousand others, trying to stay safe from a highly contagious and deadly virus that had killed three-quarters of the world’s population. 

Manufacturing and animal husbandry went first, and the virus killed off most of the domesticated animals, too. Our world was on its way out. After so many billions of years of existence, Earth was about to be no more. Since our world was effectively dead, the leaders of our planet had decided to seek greener pastures elsewhere.

We’d blasted off along with the frozen occupants and our animal clones. Our main crew consisted of Doc Barton, our nurse, Emily Claiborne, Professor Marks, the captain, and Julie and me. 

Oh, wait. Initially, there’d been more, one co-pilot and four technicians. The latter group members were experts in mechanical engineering, along with Tom Konnry, a guy in his mid-twenties who’d also said he was a technician. 

Soon after we’d left Earth, we found out that he didn’t know anything about fixing machinery. He’d just managed to finagle his way onboard.

A strapping six-footer with overdeveloped pecs and biceps—and a total lack of any other developed body part—he’d first hit on Emily, who was in her mid-thirties, and then he’d tried to hit on Julie.

Captain Adams had come to his daughter’s defense when he’d seen Konnry massaging her shoulders in our cafeteria and the look of disgust on Julie’s face. She tried pushing him away, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The captain immediately slapped the man’s hands away and rammed him up against the wall, practically choking him. “My daughter is seventeen. Touch her again, you won’t be able to feel your extremities—ever.”

The message got through, and Konnry held back…only to go space-happy in month number three. I should have seen the signs. We’d all been told to watch for excessive nervousness, anxiety, withdrawal from social situations, and lowered comprehension ability. The captain told me later that he should have seen them as well.