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But the awkwardness was soon overshadowed by the sight before her. Kaia had a three-sixty view of the entire top of the ship beneath them, all five thousand feet of it stretching to her left and right.
“There’s… no shields here?” She frowned. There couldn’t be since they had a clear view of everything around them, except for the circular floor delineating the extent of the small space.
“That’s why it’s so small,” Orion’s breath whispered against her ear. “Smaller attack vector.”
Kaia tensed as he wrapped his arms to the front of her stomach, shuffling them around in the capsule to turn her the other way.
“Holy shit.”
A massive craft hovered next toColossal’sstarboard side. Some kind of tube, a thick, ribbed cable, ran from a bulbous protrusion on the craft’s end—Kaia couldn’t tell if it was the bow or stern—into a circular port insideColossal’shull. The tube pulsed and jerked, and when she took in the whole scene, she noticed it was semi-transparent.
“Is that…” She narrowed her eyes.
“Water.” She realized Orion had put his chin atop her head; his tenor vibrated against her back.
“That’s what an icebreaker looks like?”
She felt him shake his head against her hair. “Icebeaker stays on world. This is an H2O transport tanker. From Arvex.”
All that water… Was that entire bulb filled with it? Was it all going toColossal?
“They’re restocking for the expedition,” Orion continued. “See that speck on the right? That’s a smaller trade transport bringing supplies. Nutrigel rations, oxygen, meds, stuff like that. The expedition isn’t for another four months, so they’re early this time. But sometimes it’s like that, with the scheduling ops.”
Kaia hummed her acknowledgment. She couldn’t get much more out, awed by the sheer size of the operation.
“All that for one ship.”
“The one ship supports thousands of civilians,” Orion said. “With an expedition, we’ll be off-grid for years. It’ll take us two Old Earth years to get to X1s, another two back if we don’t find anything. That’s whyColossalhas to be so big. It’s not because we love living in luxury—”
“Yes, you do.”
“Fine, maybe I do. But we need the space to store the rations needed to support ourselves while we explore for humanity.”
Right. For humanity.
He sounded invested in this endeavor now. A far cry from the whining he did when she first met him. Kaia had already realized Orion cared more than he had originally let on.
A couple of months ago, Kaia would’ve scoffed at the thought of silly colonies acting like they’re doing “humanity” a favor. A real favor would be to share some of this massive amount of water they were siphoning for themselves. Send some of those ration transports to places like Artega Seven or Riker 109, where people scraped by in a chronically dehydrated state and lived off nutrigel their whole lives. Where they died from radiation poisoning while digging for what little food they could find in a dangerous desert.
Now Kaia was almost starting to see where these people were coming from. She wasn’t sure if she liked her newfound sympathy, but she was at least willing to admit she had some. The thought ofColossalspending years preparing for this huge journey to chase New Earth, and the residents taking that massive risk… Well, she had to give them some props.
“It’s what I think about, you know.” Orion’s voice drew her out of her thoughts.
“What?”
“When I need to calm myself down. When that part of me takes over and I can’t let it. I just think of forests. An actual sky that isn’t all black.”
Was he thinking of that when he was doing what he did on theZenith? Did it fail, or would it have been worse if he hadn’t?
“I hope you find it.”
His arms tightened around her, squeezing her closer against him. “You mean we. You hope we find it.”
“Yeah,” Kaia muttered, blinking the sting from her eyes. “That’s what I meant.”
CHAPTER45
ORION
