Book Five, Chapter 26: Countdown to launch
Words couldn't convey the feeling coursing through me—excitement, wonder, and abject fear—but they were all there.
I knew that horror movies could take place in space, but I still never pictured myself traveling there. I thought that the small town of Carousel would be the limit of our exploration. As I walked up to the giant ship, I almost forgot that I was in a horror movie, and I was thrilled.
But that feeling quickly left me because, in space, small mistakes could become big mistakes, and whatever lay in the stars waiting for us would be deadlier than I could imagine.
"So, what's the story, you think?" Isaac asked nervously. It was on everyone's mind as we were waiting to load onto the ship, which was leaving much sooner than the tour guide Tripp would have seemed to suggest.
"Are we going to fight aliens?" he asked before I could answer. “In space, they have a home-field advantage."
"Well, to them, we'll be the aliens," Antoine said, "which means we have the home-field advantage in space."
Isaac laughed.
"I don't know," I said. "Aliens are likely, but there are other possibilities, like robots—which got name-dropped. We could be dealing with something like interdimensional demons, but I haven't seen any clues for that yet. Of course, there are always environmental disasters in a closed space like this. Maybe we hit an asteroid field, or we get stranded on a moon. But yeah, aliens seem most likely."
No one was comforted, but then I wasn't trying to comfort them.