She thought she had already observed the full spectrum of his emotional extremes, all the way from hyperproductively manic to nearly suicidal. But she hadn’t seen him look so stricken, so blasted—so old—since just after the war had broken out.

“What’s happened, Zee?” Lily prompted, her voice catching in her throat.

Cochrane pulled a beat-up metal flask from his jacket pocket and took a huge quaff before replying. “The colonies aren’t up there anymore, Lily. There’s been ... an accident.”

Lily’s heart sank. Old vids of Ares IVand Columbia and [78] Challengerinscribed arcs of fire across her memory. The realization hit her like a punch in the stomach—some five thousand of the Earth’s best and brightest were gone, probably vaporized, just like that. The flight of the Phoenix would surely be held up for years, the antimatter fuel stocks the O’Neill particle accelerators had created for the project lying unused in a rusty Titan V missile silo. The project might even be canceled altogether, now that Team Phoenix could no longer count on exotic materials or replacement parts from the orbital factories. Sure, Lily knew she could cobble together a serviceable cockpit out of scrap titanium, given enough time. But Zee couldn’t just whip up the really weird engine-related stuff—say plasma coolants, or crystallized dilithium, or unobtanium-plated warp-field frammistats—in his garage.

Project Phoenix was effectively grounded. And a lot of good people were gone.

Lily reached for Cochrane’s flask. Maybe we humans just don’t have the right stuff to reach for the stars,she thought, then emptied the battle-scarred container in one long, bitter swallow.

Chapter 9

Friday. 9 August 2058

“What the hell just happened to us?” Zafirah said, pulling herself unsteadily to her feet in Vanguard’s darkened central control room. A confused moan was the only response she heard. Unseen broken things crunched beneath the springy soles of her sneakers.

The emergency circuits restored the lighting a few seconds later. The place seemed to have been turned completely upside-down, then abruptly righted.

Avram Baruch lay stunned on the floor, a heavy desk pinning him there. Kerwin McNolan, the small Irish engineer, strained against the asteroid’s spin-generated gravity to free the dour Israeli. Zafirah wasted no time helping McNolan shove the desk aside.

“What happened?” she repeated, her eyes on a trio of shell-shocked-looking junior technicians who were returning upended pieces of equipment to their proper places. A few other technical people milled about, looking disoriented. But no one seemed grievously injured.

McNolan was helping the disoriented Baruch to his feet. Apparently satisfied that the physicist was all right, he turned to Zafirah. “This is just an educated guess, Zaf, but I’d say [80] something must have gone very wrong with the warp-field experiment.”

Lidia!Zafirah thought with a start. Lidia had been working outside the shell when all six O’Neills had linked to form the continuous toroidal warp field. And moments after that—

Zafirah rushed to the communications console, which displayed a green “power-on” light. “Al-Arif to Wu,” she shouted into the microphone. “Wu, do you copy? Wu, come in!”

The only response was a wash of static.

Zafirah bolted toward the array of consoles that monitored the asteroid’s surface, and the space beyond. Three of the half-dozen monitors there had toppled onto the decking, and now were so much scrap. Though the remaining screens didn’t look damaged, they displayed only snow.

She noticed that Director Mizuki was already busy at one of the consoles, obviously trying to bring in a view of the outside. The darkness of deep space slowly coalesced across two of the still-functional screens, with numerous fixed stars shining invariantly in the distance. Zafirah stood beside the director before the large, flat screens, with Baruch and McNolan flanking them.

Zafirah’s stomach suddenly became buoyant. Something wasn’t right with the image before her.

Baruch seemed to notice the same thing. “This is as wrong as a Russian rock band. What’s happened to the Roykirk colony?”

The nearest other O’Neill habitat was nowhere to be seen. And none of the other four hollow-asteroid colonies was visible either. If debris from any of them remained, there wasn’t sufficient light present to make any of it visible. The infinite abyss seemed to have swallowed them all whole.

Zafirah felt sick at heart. I hope you died quickly, Lidia. Like Sabih, and little Kalil.Inshallah.

“Gone,” McNolan said, his voice a rasp. “All of them are gone. Probably blown to hell when the warp field collapsed.”

[81] A terrible silence descended. It was the director who broke it. “I’m not so sure the other colonies went anywhere—unless everything else did, too.”

It was only then that Zafirah noticed that both the Earth and the Moon were also missing. And that Bellatrix and Rigel, the left shoulder and legs of Orion the Hunter, were visibly out of position relative to giant Betelgeuse, as though the constellation had been distorted by a funhouse mirror of time, distance, or perhaps both.

The next half hour was a blur, as the survivors checked in with the director’s office and began a frantic checkout of the habitat’s status. Zafirah was surprised by how little serious damage the Vanguard facility had actually sustained, at least in terms of its physical plant. Especially considering how far the entire asteroid had evidently traveled after the torus-shaped warp field had collapsed against it.

More than sixty-one parsecs. Approximately two hundred light-years.

No one had believed that figure at first. It wasn’t until after Director Mizuki and Zafirah had both taken separate measurements of several of the most readily identifiable first-magnitude stars—compiling a three-dimensional model that the computers could compare with the constellations as seen from home—that the truth at last began to settle upon the 827 asteroid dwellers who had survived Vanguard’s unprecedented transit.

They were now stranded two hundred light-years from Earth. Sol was a distant ember, lost among countless others in the infinite night.

We’ve gone farther than anyone has ever gone before,Zafirah thought, looking back at tiny, dim Sol through one of Vanguard’s surviving optical telescopes. Trouble is, nobody back home knows about it. They must think the collapsing warp field destroyed us.

[82] And what of the other five O’Neills? Were they, too, dispersed through the void? Or had the failed experiment blasted them all to rubble?

There was simply no way to know.

Zafirah felt a bizarre exhilaration, a feeling she thought might be an amalgam of wonder and dread. On one hand, seventeen of her Vanguard colleagues were either dead or missing, the dead apparently killed by the sudden inertial effects of the asteroid’s breakneck passage. On the other, the collapse of the warp-field bubble had proved one thing conclusively—that travel via subspace over interstellar distances was indeed possible.

The director had given everyone aboard a couple of hours to consider Vanguard’s weirdly altered circumstances before summoning the senior staff to her office for an extremely tense meeting.

She must have spent the last two hours picking everything up in here,Zafirah thought as she entered the large, immaculate chamber alongside several of her colleagues. She found herself grateful for the feeling of normalcy and order fostered by the room’s tidiness, and realized that such must have been Dr. Mizuki’s intention. Zafirahhad always thought that Mizuki’s keen understanding of crew morale was one of the talents that made her so well suited to her job. Zafirah had once entertained the notion of eventually becoming director herself.