A Million Suns Read Free Page A

isn’t exactly new. You know about the laws of motion, but have you studied entropy?”
    â€œI . . . um.” I glance around at the other first-level Shippers. They’re all watching me, waiting, and I don’t have the answer they want to hear.
    â€œEverything’s constantly moving to a more chaotic state. A state of disorder, destruction, disintegration. Elder,” Marae says, and this time she doesn’t stutter over my chosen name. “
Godspeed
is old. It’s falling apart.”
    I want to deny it, but I can’t. The
whirr-churn-whirr
of the engine sounds like a death rattle ricocheting throughout the room. When I shut my eyes, I don’t hear the churning gears or smell the burning grease. I hear 2,298 people gasping for breath; the stench of 2,298 rotting bodies fills my nose.
    This is how fragile life is on a generation spaceship: the weight of our existence rests on a broken engine.
    Eldest told me three months ago,
Your job is to take care of the people. Not the ship.
But . . . taking care of the ship
is
taking care of the people. Behind the Shippers are the master controls, monitoring the energy sources applied to the rest of the ship’s function. If I were to smash the control panel behind Marae, there would be no more air on the ship. Destroy another panel, no more water. That one, light. That other one, the gravity sensors go. It’s not just the engine that’s the heart of the ship. It’s this whole room, everything in it, pulsing with just as much life as the 2,298 people on this level and the one below.
    Marae holds her hand out, and Second Shipper Shelby automatically passes her a floppy already blinking with information. Marae swipes her fingers across it, scrolling down, then hands it to me. “This past week alone we’ve had to perform two major fixes to the internal fusion compartment of the solar lamp. Soil efficiency is way below standard specs, and the irrigation system keeps leaking. Food production has barely been sufficient for over a year, and we’ll soon be facing a shortage. Work production has decreased significantly in the last two months. It’s no small thing to keep this ship alive.”
    â€œBut the engine,” I say, staring at the floppy, full of charts with arrows pointing down and bar graphs with short stumps at the end.
    â€œFrex the engine!” Marae shouts. Even the other Shippers break their immobile masks to look shocked at Marae’s cursing. She takes a deep, shaky breath and pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes. “I’m sorry, sir.”
    â€œIt’s fine,” I mutter, because I know she won’t go on until I say this.
    â€œOur duty,
Elder
, is clear,” Marae continues, clipping her words and holding her temper in check. “Ship over planet. If there is a choice between improving the life aboard the ship and working on the engine to get us closer to Centauri-Earth, we must
always
choose the ship.”
    I grip the floppy, unsure of what to say. Marae rarely reveals what she’s feeling, and she never loses control. I’m not used to seeing anything on her face beyond calm composure. “Surely we could make
some
sacrifices in order to get the engine back up to speed. . . .”
    â€œShip over planet,” Marae says. “That has been our priority since the Plague and the Shippers were developed.”
    I’m not going to let this go. “That’s been . . .” I try to add up the years, but our history is too muddled by lies and Phydus to know exactly how long that’s been. “Gens and gens have passed since the ‘Plague.’ Even if the ship is the top priority, in that amount of time, we
must
have come up with
some
way to improve the engine and get us to the planet.”
    Marae doesn’t speak, and in her silence, I detect something dark.
    â€œWhat aren’t you telling me?” I