The Reclamation was in a state of chaos as the colonists prepared to make landfall, straining to finish all the preparation Lucy’s team was supposed to have finished months ago. It took some doing for Lucy to shake off the Reclamation’s scientists, who were boiling over with questions for the only surviving member of the prep team. She’d tried to tell them she wasn’t the only surviving member, but none of them knew or cared anything about Simone.
All anyone knew about Simone was that she’d had been taken to Repair Bay 6 for “evaluation.”
The colony ship was a warren every bit as sprawling and labyrinthine as its point of origin, the Earth resettlement on Kepler where Lucy had grown up. The ship was cleaner, having had only a few years rather than generations to stew in its own juices, bu
