‘It’s us,’ my father said on the day they told me the news, and though he was trying to look serious, I could tell he was hiding a smile. We were having dinner, and under the table, his leg was bouncing up and down.
‘It’s us what?’ I said, though I could easily guess.
‘We’ve been selected,’ my mother said. ‘We’re the landing party.’
‘We leave in 91 days,’ my father said.
I looked down at my plate, which suddenly held a bunch of food I didn’t want to eat. ‘I thought it was going to be Steff Taylor’s parents.’
My father stifled a laugh. Steff Taylor’s father was such a bad pilot he could barely fly from ship to ship in the convoy without wrecking a shuttle.
‘It’s us, sweetheart,’ my mother said, my mother the pilot, my mother who was so much better at it than Steff Taylor’s father that she was almost certainly the reason we’d been chosen. ‘Remember we talked about this. You were excited.’
And that’s true. I was excited when they’d first told me they were going to put themselves forward. I was even more excited when Steff Taylor started bragging that her father was obviously going to be chosen.
The job was vital. We’d leave the sleeping settlers and the other caretaker families behind, speeding into the empty black beyond in a small scout ship. The convoy was still twelve months from the planet. We’d make the journey in five and spend seven months there – not just my parents, I’d have work to do, too – finding the best landing site for the five big settler ships and starting to prepare the ground for the first landings.
But it was more exciting when it could have been us. It was surprisingly less so when it was actually us.
‘You’ll get more training,’ my mother said. ‘You’ll learn a lot more, just like you wanted.’
‘It’s an honour, Viola,’ my father said. ‘We’ll be the first ones to see our new home.’
‘Unless the original settlers are still there,’ I said.
They exchanged a glance.
‘Are you unhappy with this, Viola?’ my mother asked, her face serious.
‘Would you not go if I was?’ I asked.
And they exchanged another glance.
And I knew what that meant.
***
