A HOLE IN THE SKY

Introducing Hazel, a sixteen-year-old girl living in the Daedalus, a starship that is flying to a new world. The ship has been travelling for five hundred years, since the first world it reached was found to have indigenous life.

Everyone on board Daedalus lives a very simple existence in farming villages. The age of machines supplying their needs was lost during a mutiny five hundred years ago. Some of the crew wanted to go back to the first world, no matter it was already inhabited. The captain regained control, but after a huge struggle. Now, with finite resources, everything in the habitat is Cycled, including humans, who essentially suicide at sixty-five so they don't deplete the biosphere.

Hazel encounters some Cheaters, people who refuse to Cycle, who tell her the Daedalus has been damaged, and its atmosphere is leaking away. When her brother has an accident which condemn him to be Cycled, Hazel runs off with him to join the Cheaters. She discovers an old computer, which tells her about the repair mechanisms in the forward section of the ship which was sealed off after the mutiny.

Hazel and her friends set off to try and fix the starship, chased by the police force. On their journey they discover there never was a mutiny, and the Daedalus is actually under the control of aliens, called the Yi. Hazel succeeds in starting the repair systems, and sealing the puncture. In doing so she antagonizes the Yi, and just manages to escape.