The Lost Ship of the Tucker Rebellion - Marie Sexton Page 0,104
And yet now, Denver didn’t sense concern coming from his twin. He didn’t sense anxiety over their journey, or irritation over dealing with douchenozzles. He sensed…
Something that felt like elation.
Denver pulled away so he could look at his brother. “What’s going on? I get the distinct impression I’m missing something.”
Laramie glanced at Spence. “He doesn’t know?”
Spence shook his head, smiling. “I haven’t really had a chance to tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Denver asked.
“Come on,” Laramie said. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“Believe what?”
But Laramie wasn’t talking, so Denver followed him through the cargo hold, which was now mostly empty, to the door.
“You ready?” Laramie asked, grinning.
The cargo bay door slid open. Light brighter than Denver had ever experienced streamed through. Denver gasped and held up a hand to shield his eyes. His first thought was that the lights in the Legacy’s docking bay had gone haywire. But as his eyes adjusted to the blinding brilliance, he realized he wasn’t seeing a docking bay at all.
That wasn’t just light. It was actual, honest-to-god sunlight.
Denver stepped through with Laramie and Spence at his side. He took a few steps past the cargo that had been unloaded onto the ground, struck speechless by the landscape before him. The pictures and movies from Old Earth had never captured just how huge a planet felt when you stood upon it. He’d never realized how far human eyes were supposed to be able to see or how many colors existed in nature.
And then he made the mistake of looking up.
He reeled, suddenly unable to breathe.
Somehow in movies and pictures and things he’d read, the sky had always seemed like an actual thing—a substantive structure between the earth and space. But there was no lid holding them in. What appeared to be a blue dome was only a trick of light through the atmosphere. The sky was nothing more than an illusion. It was vast and intangible. It was only air.
Nothing but air separating Denver from the deadly vacuum of space.
Denver stood frozen, unable to take a single step for fear of falling off this spinning bit of rock, plummeting into the sky with no suit to protect him. He was tiny. Utterly powerless against that gaping blue nothingness.
A wave of dizziness drove him to his knees. He gulped air, desperately clutching the ground. Gravity existed. Of course it did. And yet standing under that endless expanse, it was hard to count on. Some primal part of his brain was sure he’d eventually plummet upward into the blackness. His stomach heaved, but there was nothing in it to come up.
“You’re not the first person that’s happened to,” Spence said. “It took me a good twenty minutes to look up again.”
“I puked,” Marit said, without embarrassment. Denver hadn’t seen her arrive, but he knew her voice. “I still get dizzy if I don’t keep my eyes on the ground.”
“It’s even worse at night, when it’s black and you can see the stars,” Spence said. “Treesa refused to leave the ship.”
“Jesus,” Denver mumbled, shaking his head. He was afraid to take his eyes off the ground, terrified of staring into that void a second time. How in the world had humans endured eons under that gaping nothingness without going mad? He concentrated on his hands.
His own hands, resting on an actual ground. It was surprisingly cool against his skin. Bits of gravel dug into his palms. Spiky, slender blades of green twined through his fingers.
Grass.
A breeze ruffled his hair. A gentle gurgling reached his ears—running water, not far off.
“Am I dreaming, or we are we really on a planet? I assumed we’d be traveling for months.”
“Everybody did,” Laramie said, “but it turns out you were right about the wormhole. Remember how the path on the star map seemed to just end? That was the entrance.”
Denver took a few deep breaths until the dizziness passed. OPAL’s spider body scuttled into his view.
“Would you like me to explain gravity to you, as described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity?” OPAL’s voice sounded smaller and tinnier than normal coming from the bot instead of the ship’s speakers. “There’s also a video in the Jiminy’s database. Treesa seemed to find that most reassuring.”
“No, I got it. But, uh, gravity never stops working, right?” He knew it was a ridiculous question, but the horror of the sky compelled him to ask anyway. “Like, nobody can accidentally bump the off switch?”
“There is no ‘off switch,’” OPAL said. “Your question implies a deep misunderstanding of the—”