Chapter 2: Minnesota

It's dark when Minnesota wakes. She feels lost, disoriented. When she looks around her, she realizes she fell asleep in the engine compartment of the old ship. Shaking the last of the weariness from her mind and stretching out the kinks from sleeping against the hard metal hull, she makes her way to the corridor and the exit hatch. Her parents will be very worried about her. They don't know about her visits to the abandoned colony ship, Horizon. As a matter of fact, if they found out, she'd be in big trouble. The ship is supposed to be off-limits, though she knows not everyone obeys the rules.

Minnesota looks outside as the first explosions bloom in the night. She stares, mouth gaping open, as her colony is attacked by tiny, whirring ships bobbing and dodging against the darkness, spewing fire. It takes her a long moment to understand what is happening. When she does, terror rips through her and moves her forward, to leap to the ground and run for home.

A shadow emerges from behind her, engulfing her in arms of black before hauling her back inside the darkness of the silent ship.

***

Seven Hours to Contact

Minnesota happily leaned back from her examination of the fuel pump and gave her father a big smile.

"No problem, Dad," she said. "Just needs a new bearing. Give me a minute, okay?"

"You got it, kiddo," Noah Jordan grinned back at her. "My little genius. You must get it from your mother."

"Nope," Angelique flashed her very white teeth at her pale, red-haired husband as she leaned in to kiss his cheek, her jet-black skin on his a startling contrast. "This woman is strictly theoretical engineering, no getting the hands dirty." She winked one deep brown eye framed in thick lashes at her daughter. "This need to do things the old fashioned way is your fault, husband."

Minnesota loved the way her mother talked, her deep voice and accent still strong despite fifteen years on the colony. Angelique Mombasa arrived unannounced on a cargo ship and made

a niche for herself in the tight-knit community, immediately attracting the attention of the handsome head of mining and marrying him shortly thereafter.

"Well, wherever she gets it," Noah said, slipping one arm around his wife's thin waist and pulling her close, "I'm damned grateful. Got it fixed yet, muffin? Shaft two is shut down until I get that part in and we're already behind quota."

Her father constantly fretted about quota and was the source of endless teasing from his wife and daughter.

"The cargo ship just left," Angelique rolled her eyes, one hand on her hip, the other stuffed into Noah's back pocket. "I think we have time to catch up in the next ten months."

Minnesota giggled as she fished out a bearing from her stockpile of new and scrounged parts and finished installing it in the pump. "All done, Dad," she said, handing him the part, good as new. Noah bent and kissed her soundly on the cheek, did the same for his wife, only on her full and waiting lips, then strode out of Minnesota's workshop, already on the com to the mine telling them he was on his way.

Angelique blew her daughter a kiss. "Don't stay in the shop too long," she told Minnesota. "Dinner at dusk, don't be late, bad child." She winked and grinned before retrieving her own recently repaired part and leaving for her office.

Minnesota sighed, content. Only thirteen, she showed such knack for repairing equipment from a young age that by the time she was ten she tackled jobs other mechanics couldn't fathom. A master scrounger and repair artist, Minnesota took great pride in her work. So did her parents, who willingly set her up with her own shop and left her to do her thing, knowing her sense of responsibility when it came to mechanical objects was far stronger than to living, breathing beings.

Caught up for the day, Minnesota shut up her little shop, stuffing a pair of thick gloves in the pockets of her dull brown coveralls and headed for the scrounging ground. She capped her short mess of tight black curls with a woven hat her mother made for her, dark eyes shining in anticipation. While she looked more like her mother with her dark, glowing skin and full, wide lips and nose, Minnesota took far more after her father when it came to dedication and focus. She knew the cargo ship carrying the most recent load of siminite from the processing factory made a dump just prior to leaving, like they always did. She hadn't had a chance to scour their new pile

since they departed two days before. Cargo ships always unloaded their unwanted goods before leaving a planet, all the better to take on more product and increase their weight limit.

Their loss meant the colony's gain, and Minnesota's. By the time she rounded the last of the warehouse buildings and reached the edge of the dump, the skinny girl practically skipped with excitement through the red dust of the street.

The dump pile wasn't as huge as it could have been, sorted and recycled by the colony. It hunched, a blot against the pink tinted sky, bulking high compared to the flat plain where the colony perched. The empty, red-soiled landscape reached as far as the eye could see in every direction, not a scrub brush or hill in sight. The vast, open expanse covered half of the planet and happened to be the perfect place to mine. Minnesota had never been to the lush, tropical part of her world and didn't see the point. To her and most of the colonists, the wasteland was home.

The dump itself was well contained within a bunker of locally mixed concrete. The deep orange walls were intended to contain the waste, not keep anyone out. The pile was usually quite small, dwindling as the contents were reused. But to Minnesota's delight, it seemed substantial again. For the most part, the dump contained the refuse left behind by the cargo ship. New Paltos was the first colony ever established and despite its unforgiving seasonal changes, from desert conditions to arctic winters in a matter of days, the colony huddled, deeply embedded and more important than any others. It was the source of the mineral siminite that, when refined, powered the great star drive engines allowing humans to explore the rest of space.

Minnesota loved her home despite its drawbacks. She didn't like the freezing cold so much, or the searing heat. But there was a bare, stark beauty to the place, the deep red of the ground, the pink tinted skies blazing like fire when the sun set and rose. An inbuilt sense of freedom to the colony, something Minnesota took for granted. Everyone was so close and knew each other so well there was no theft, very little crime of any kind at all, and children were allowed to roam free when they weren't put to work or in school learning how to help the colony grow and prosper.

Minnesota felt perfectly designed for life on New Paltos. She loved to find new and exciting things in the junk pile sharing secrets with her about life elsewhere, but her heart was in her home.

She hopped over the concrete wall and gazed up with sheer pleasure at the heap of junk, feeling acquisitive and eager to unearth new possibilities. She scrambled up the pile, ticking off

her wish list as she thought ahead to what she needed when she heard laughter nearby. Pausing, she slipped around the side and caught sight of Miguel and Manuel, the Diego twins, messing around in her dump. The fact made her instantly cranky and it took her a minute to shake it off.By then, Miguel noticed her and waved an object in her direction. She moved closer, trying to keep her temper in check. Miguel had a habit of not valuing the colony or the things it took to keep it going. She always thought he was lazy and his casual sprawl on an abandoned ship seat didn't change her opinion.

"Found a magazine!" He said, holding it up again. "Real paper in plastic!" Minnesota came to an angry halt, fists on hips and glared at him.

"Aren't you to supposed to be at the mine today?" She knew she sounded crabby and bossy, but she didn't care. She wanted the dump to herself and hated that the Diego twins beat her to it.

Miguel, the wiry, skinny twin with the big mouth and bad attitude made a face at her, dropping the book into the pile of junk at his feet.

"Piss off," he said, suddenly sullen.

His giant brother, Manuel, towered over his twin. Some accident of growth genetics made them so different no one outside the colony ever believed they were identical twins. He simply looked at her, dark eyes quiet. He rarely spoke, at least to her, but she caught him staring at her a few times and wondered why he didn't just talk to her.

"Your father will be furious," she told them. "You skipped out yesterday, too, and the whole colony heard him yelling at you."

Miguel shrugged his skinny shoulders. "So what?" He grinned at her, good humor returning. "How come you're not working either, smart ass?"

"I am," she snapped. "I'm scrounging. It's part of my job." Time to get back to it and leave these losers to get in trouble. She turned her back on them when Miguel took another shot.

"Freak girl," he snapped. "Heard you like stuff better than people. Heard Kurt Martin tried to kiss you and you hit him with a wrench."

Minnesota's cheeks burned. It wasn't that she didn't want him to kiss her. But she was in the middle of a repair he pretended he was interested in and when he leaned toward her so quickly she panicked.

"Piss off yourself," she fired off over her shoulder, putting distance between them. She threw a glance at them just before she rounded the pile again.

Manuel still stared at her.

Frustrated and out of sorts, Minnesota wasn't in the mood for picking over the dump after all.

She quietly cursed Miguel Diego for being such a jerk and ruining her day. A pile of refuse offered her a seat where she sighed deeply, eyes scanning the sky. When she did, her gaze caught a familiar sight out on its own on the other side of the junk pile.

The huge, wasting hulk of the Horizon stretched across the dirt, filling half the distance with its bulk. Her heart lifted as she looked at it.

She loved the ship, loved everything about it. New Paltos may have been her planet, but Horizon felt like a home. Every time she snuck on board the old colony ark, she felt a thrill of history, like she was walking through the spirits of the colonists who came to New Paltos first with all their hopes and dreams.

Knowing she only had a couple of hours until supper and would be in big trouble if she was caught, Minnesota gave in to the pull of the vessel and went to hang out with her old friend, remarking wryly to herself as she made her way across the distance maybe Miguel was right about her and machines.

***