Chapter I
Three Hundred Days Out
by @vega_lines, , opening chapter
1 min read
The Small Mercy had been falling toward Kestrel's World for two hundred and twelve years, and for the last nine of them Dr. Ines Okafor had been the only person aboard qualified to keep its passengers alive.
She did her rounds by the ship's false dawn: hydroponics, the nursery deck, the long cold corridors of the cryo bays where eleven thousand sleepers waited for a planet none of them had seen.
Three hundred days out, she told herself, as she told herself every morning. Then the alert chimed from Bay Nine, which had been sealed since before she was born.