Palila scowled through the thick glass of the maintenance bay doors of the Hephaestus. She watched as the grey, patchy generation ship hung there like a piece of rotting meat. Supply ships hovered around it like buzzing flies, welding sparks flashing bright in the darkness, and construction crews crawled over its surface like maggots.

 

“Hey, Islander!” A husky North African voice shouted in between hammer blows. Chike stood on top of the next drone along, fixing a bent hull panel. “Drone B-6VS88F in Dock Sixteen needs a few patches in its cargo bay. Get it done. PHI wants it heading out towards Callisto in four hours!”

 

“K-den, Chike,” she replied and raised her hand in acknowledgement. Palila turned back to squint inside the cargo bay of the heavy-duty truck-sized drone. It could hold 50 tonnes of material that had been drilled and extracted from anything from an asteroid to a Jovian moon. 

“Looks pretty dinged up, might need more time.”

 

“Just get it done,” shouted Chike, hammer blows falling.

 

She could still see the generation ship outside, hiding the stars behind it. Born on Lauru, a South Pacific Island, Palila had a great affinity for the stars. Her people were carried from island to island for generations, navigating by the stars and the swells of the sea. When she could no longer see the stars, she felt their loss in her soul.

 

Seafaring was in her blood. In her genes. That was until Alexander Pantano, the CEO and owner of Pantano Heavy Industries, destroyed her family’s livelihood and devastated entire communities on Lauru. For decades, PHI’s ravenous deep-sea mining had ruined the ecology of the sea around much of the Solomon Islands, bleaching the reefs and abandoning barges to rust in the sea. With the empty nets hanging in the wind came the collapse of most of the local economy.

 

She’d had to find a job to keep her family fed. After working around ships her whole life, the newest form of shipbuilding, ships for space travel, felt like a natural fit. It was only when the company got bought up by PHI and turned from leisure ships to asteroid mining that she truly felt how alien the company and its trillionaire owner had become to her way of life. Now the guilt of working for the very man who'd ruined much of her hometown was unbearable.

 

She curled her lip in distaste as she remembered her home in the shadow of the vibrant mountains decaying and dying. She forcefully unscrewed the bolts of a panel, floating in the dusty cargo bay of the drone. It had transferred from one of the manufactories that orbited the generation ship, feeding it steel and components like an insatiable wolf in the sky.

 

She pulled off the door, letting it float next to her as she wrestled with the enhanced particulate and impact protection.

 

* * *

 

On her last shore leave, she’d been approached as she sipped a cool beer at a sticky bar in Mombasa.

 

“Palila Mae?” A small woman sidled up to her and, with the smell of whiskey on her breath, began whispering. “I’m from a group called Terra Nova. We’ve been watching you. We think you can help us.”

 

“Why would I help you?” Palila stood up from her chair.

 

“Because we know what Alexander Pantano has taken away from you. From your island. From your family. We know about the life you lost on Lauru and the years of fighting PHI through international courts, whittling away what resources you had. We know you watched as your home died around you and the anger you must feel having to work for him.”

 

“How could you know what I feel?” Palila spat.

 

“Because it happened to me too.”

 

Palila stood silently, and the woman grabbed her arm.

 

“We know how you might be able to get back. At him…”

 

Palila slowly sipped her beer, watching through narrowed eyes before sitting back down. “I’m listening.”

 

“We want you to help us get a… package… on the generation ship.

 

“I don’t go to the ship. And even if I did, the security’s airtight. The crews and supply ships going to the ship from Earth are searched and scanned in every way possible.”

 

“We’ve been trying that way for years. We know that won’t work.”

 

“Then why do you need me?”

 

“We’ve found out how one of the construction crew smuggled drugs aboard the ship. All we want you to do is pick up a package and hide it on a drone. Nothing more. We’ll do the rest.”

 

Palila hesitated.

 

“He’s going to leave with his generation ship that’s taken decades to make. It’s going to take nearly a thousand people five hundred years to get to the nearest habitable planet, if it makes it at all. Just for one man’s vanity. He’s an egotistical narcissist who plans to escape the damage he’s done. Like none of it matters.”

 

* * *

 

The panel in the drone’s cargo bay hovered next to her. She struggled to shift the colourful wire looms inside. With one hesitant hand, she made just enough space in the hull behind the panel. Someone shouted down the bay, and her heart jumped in her chest. She furtively looked around. No one was in sight. Her other hand drew the dense package out of her toolbox. She slipped it in the cramped space she’d created and released her hands. Palila took a deep breath, remembering her island. The calmness of the sea, the feel of grainy sand between her toes, the breeze through her hair. They’d chase her to the end of the Earth for this.

 

Package secure, Palila carefully bolted the panel back on. She took out a UV pen and marked the wall. Her job was done. She would be long gone before they’d worked out what had happened.

 

She hesitantly tapped the door.

 

“Pantano,” she whispered, smiling. “I hope you go down with the ship.”