The Lost Ship of the Tucker Rebellion - Marie Sexton Page 0,106

breaking, but Denver took a deep breath and swallowed the fear down, focusing on the tangible things around him that grounded him while he cast his eyes upward.

The contrast of the velvety black sky generously sprinkled with radiantly bright stars still took his breath away, even after the dizziness had passed. Low-hanging clouds obscured a few stars and one of the two closest moons, and he made himself focus on them. This galaxy was a lot different from their old corner of the Milky Way. A day’s rotation was fast enough that he could almost see the stars changing positions with his bare eye, a slow stream of twinkling colors that made whole new constellations, just waiting to be named.

A few points of light didn’t move like the rest—not stars or planets, but the Legacy in her geosynchronous orbit, along with a handful of the colonist’s ships. It had been a month since the Legacy’s arrival at the planet intended for the people of the Tucker Rebellion.

A lot had happened in a month.

The biggest thing to happen was populating the town of Legacy, or as Zahn kept trying to insist it should be called, Earth Two. It had taken the better part of a week to shuttle everyone from the ships to the planet’s surface. Even then, a good third of the population had taken one step onto real, actual ground and promptly turned around and marched right back onto their ships, or broken down crying so hard they couldn’t breathe, or in a few cases fainted. One older man had suffered a heart attack, which made his entire family declare that being planetside was clearly unsafe.

The majority of people had eventually gotten over the terror invoked by the sky and the dirt beneath their feet by now, dirt that was made of rocks and sand and strange, organic compounds that none of them had ever mined an asteroid for. It took them longer to get used to plants, longer still to see something moving that wasn’t a person or a cockroach and not run from it, or simply stare in bewilderment, but progress was being made. The doctors and counselors were swamped, but then again, so was everybody else.

Clearing the plants from the buildings and making them livable again had taken a ridiculous amount of work. Some of the colonists had chosen to live out of Houck’s ship, which sat on the edge of town, treating it like some kind of apartment building. But that didn’t mean they got out of helping. There was just too much to be done. They had to clear the land for farming and get Gru set up in a greenhouse and the biologists set up in labs and build corrals for animals they hoped to grow and figure out which building to use as a school and who was going to teach. They’d elected Dusty mayor of Legacy in the first week, and Denver was glad for it because he’d be damned if that was a responsibility he cared for. She was fair and far more patient when it came to petty bullshit like who got to live in which house than he would have been.

“Hey.” Spence’s fingers brushed lightly through Denver’s hair, bringing him back to the present and his place on their shared front porch. “You ready to go?”

“I am.”

They held hands as they walked. Spence could look up now without getting dizzy, but Denver kept his eyes on the path in front of them. Treesa ran ahead of them, heedless of the vastness of space over her head. Of course. Children were resilient. It may have taken adults weeks to get used to being on a planet, but most of the kids had adapted in a matter of days.

Ahead of them, light danced through the trees. Music reached them as they neared the party. One of the bigger buildings in town had been appropriated as a meeting hall. And now, a month after arriving, they were finally going to celebrate for real. After all the stress and the work, they were all ready for a break.

“Dancing,” Spence said quietly. “Just like the night we met.”

Denver laughed. “Not quite like that.”

The music that reached them from inside was lively, but nothing like club music. This was being played by actual musicians on instruments Denver couldn’t even name, and it was acutely reminiscent of Old Earth. Outside, in the center of town, somebody had built a huge bonfire. Tables sat scattered around