THE GALAXY, AND THE GROUND WITHIN
Becky Chambers
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Becky Chambers 2021
The right of Becky Chambers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 9781473647657
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For the strangers who helped.
Contents
Cover
Prologue: Opening Hours
Ouloo
Day 236, GC Standard 307: Course Adjustments
Speaker
Roveg
Pei
Speaker
Day 236, GC Standard 307: Shelter
Roveg
Speaker
Pei
Roveg
Day 236, GC Standard 307: Please Remain Calm
Everyone
Part 4: Attempted Repairs Day 237, GC Standard 307
Pei
Speaker
Pei
Roveg
Pei
Speaker
Day 237, GC Standard 307: Your Continued Patience
Roveg
Pei
Roveg
Pei
Speaker
Pei
Day 238, GC Standard 307: These Disruptions were Unanticipated
Speaker
Pei
Roveg
Pei
Daily 238, GC Standard 307: Compounded System Failure
Roveg
Pei
Speaker
Roveg
Speaker
Dys 238–239, GC Standard 307: In the Event of an Emergency
Everyone
Speaker
Roveg
Pei
Speaker
Pei
Day 240, GC Standard 307: All Clear
Everyone
Epilogue: Thank you for Supporting your Local Planetary Co-Op
Day 240, GC Standard 307: Pei
Day 267, GC Standard 307: Roveg
Day 16, GC Standard 308: Speaker
Day 119, GC Standard 308: Ouloo
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Becky Chambers
Prologue
OPENING HOURS
Received message
Encryption: 0
From: Goran Orbital Cooperative Info Team (path: 8486-747-00)
To: Ooli Oht Ouloo (path: 5787-598-66)
Subject: Possible service outage today
This is an update from the Goran Orbital Cooperative regarding satellite network coverage between the hours of 06:00 and 18:00 today, 236/307.
We will be performing routine maintenance and adjustments on a portion of our solar energy fleet. While we hope to avoid any disruptions in service, there is a possibility that residents and business owners in Neighbourhoods 6, 7, and 8 (South) may experience a temporary decrease or loss in power during the hours stated above. Our maintenance crew will do everything in their ability to prevent this from being the case, but please prepare accordingly. We recommend activating and testing your back-up power system ahead of time.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our info team via this scrib path.
Thank you for supporting your local planetary co-op!
OULOO
In the Linkings, the system was listed as Tren. The science section in those same files was remarkable only for its brevity, as even the most enthusiastic astronomer would find it hard to get excited over this lonely section of the map. Tren’s namesake star was middle-aged and run-of-the-mill, and when you discounted the assorted dust and debris you could find in any stellar system, the only thing orbiting it was one bone-dry planet of mediocre size, possessing no moon, no rings, nothing to harvest, nothing worth mining, nothing to gasp at while on vacation. It was merely a rock, with a half-hearted wisp of atmosphere clinging meagrely to its surface. The planet’s name was Gora, the Hanto word for useless.
The sole point worth noting about poor Tren and Gora was that on a navigation chart, they had the accidental chance of falling at a favourable distance between five other systems that attracted a lot of to-and-fro. The interspatial tunnels branching from these more vibrant ports of call were old, built with technology that lacked the range of modern wormholes. Tunnels couldn’t stretch as far back in the day, is what it came down to, and the old routes from the Harmagian colonial era were commonly punctuated with spots where ships could pop out into normal space before heading down the next leg. At last, the boring little rock that spun around the drab little sun was given a use: that of an anchor between the places people actually wanted to visit.
Traffic at a tunnel hub like Gora was complicated, as the comings and goings through wormholes had to be meticulously tracked. Swooping out of one tunnel and into the next without any sort of regulation was a perfect recipe for accidents, particularly if you were entering a tunnel someone else had yet to exit. As was the case in all such places, Tren was under the watch of the Galactic Commons Transit Authority. Any ship exiting or entering had to first submit a flight plan indicating their time of arrival, their point of origin, and their final destination. The Transit Authority would then grant access to the destination-bound tunnel in question and assign a departure time. Crossing normal space from one tunnel to the next would only take a few hours, but waits in the Tren system were rarely that short. A layover of at least half a day was common, unless traffic demand was unusually light. And so, the solitary planet had acquired much more company over the decades. Gora was flocked with bubbled habitat domes, each containing diversions and services of varied flavours. There were hotels, tech swaps, restaurants, repair shops, grocery vendors, sim vendors, kick vendors, smash vendors, gardens, tet houses, and swimming pools, each courting weary spacers in need of some real gravity and a brief change in scenery.
One of these domes, on a flat plain in the southern hemisphere, encased a modest-sized establishment. Its name – as was painted in a wreath of multiple languages on the shuttlepad outside – was the Five-Hop One-Stop.
It was Ouloo’s self-appointed mission in life to make you want to land there.
She awoke, as she always did, before dawn. Her eyes opened easily in the ebbing dark, her body long accustomed to transitioning out of sleep at this exact hour in this exact lighting. She stretched against the nest of pillows heaped in her sleeping
