A school trip to an uninhabited planet becomes a survival journey when a mysterious sphere throws nine young travellers thousands of light years away. A spacecraft offers a way to stay alive, but not a direct route home. Kanata, Aries and their companions have to turn a camp group into a crew capable of crossing unfamiliar space.
The ship cannot carry all the supplies the return journey will require. Landing on strange planets to find food and water makes exploration a practical necessity, with new environments bringing risks the students have not learned to anticipate. Their different skills become useful because no single passenger can solve every problem of keeping the group alive.
The spacecraft shown against a planet is the group’s shelter and its means of moving on. Having it does not remove the distance between them and home; it gives that distance a route, divided by the resources they can gather along the way. As the travellers learn to cooperate, questions about how they were stranded remain alongside the immediate work of surviving the next stop.