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chimcess · 14 days ago

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⮞ Chapter Eight: SOL 320 Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Boss!Yoongi, Commander!Jimin, Astronaut!Jimin, Doctor!Hoseok, Astronaut!Hoseok Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 17.1k+ Summary: When a deep space transporter crash-lands on a barren planet illuminated by three relentless suns, survival becomes the only priority for the stranded passengers, including resourceful pilot Y/N Y/L/N, mystic Namjoon Kim, lawman Taemin Lee, and enigmatic convict Jungkook Jeon. As they scour the hostile terrain for supplies and a way to escape, Y/N uncovers a terrifying truth: every 22 years, the planet is plunged into total darkness during an eclipse, awakening swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating creatures. Forced into a fragile alliance, the survivors must face not only the deadly predators but also their own mistrust and secrets. For Y/N, the growing tension with Jungkook—both a threat and a reluctant ally—raises the stakes even higher, as the battle to escape becomes one for survival against the darkness both around them and within themselves. Warnings: Strong Language, Blood, Trauma, Smart Character Choices, This is all angst and action and that's pretty much it, Reader is a bad ass, Survivor Woman is back baby, terraforming, some mental health issues, survivor's guilt, lots of talking to herself, and recording it, because she'll lose her mind otherwise, fixing things, intergalatical politics, new characters, body image issues, scars, strong female characters are everywhere, cynical humor, bad science language, honestly all of this has probably had the worst science and basis ever, I researched a lot I promise, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: Will she make it or not?

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Inside the sealed cocoon of the Speculor, the rest of M6-117 faded to a low hum.

Y/N adjusted the volume dial on the rover’s console with a gloved hand, tuning the half-busted stereo with the care of someone who’d done this ritual a hundred times before. The speakers crackled, fought her for a second, then gave in. David Bowie’s “Starman” poured into the cabin—grainy, warbled around the edges, but intact. The first familiar notes stretched through the air like a warm thread pulling taut.

She leaned back in her seat and let the music fill the empty space around her. It wasn’t loud. Just enough to soften the edges.

Seven months.

That was how long it had been since the mission trajectory changed—since NOSA had quietly shifted from contingency to possibility, and finally, to planning. Seven months since she’d stopped thinking about dying here and started thinking—cautiously, carefully—about leaving.

Now it was close. The actual launch was days away, maybe less, and Y/N was almost too tired to process what that meant. She’d expected emotion, something big and cinematic, but mostly she just felt blank. Not numb. Just emptied out. Worn smooth by repetition.

In that time, she’d spoken with CAPCOM every day—lagged, distorted, half a minute behind real conversation. Still, it was something. The Starfire crew’s updates. Mateo’s cautious optimism. April’s careful questions, always logged, always transcribed. They’d become part of the routine. A strange kind of company.

Inside the Speculor, the air was dry and recycled, the temperature cranked just high enough to keep the frost at bay. Her gloved fingers twisted the volume knob on the console. Static at first, then the music settled into clarity: Starman, again. The same bootleg copy she’d looped more times than she could count. Bowie’s voice filled the cabin, staticky and familiar.

She let her head lean against the side panel for a moment, just listening. The song didn’t feel triumphant anymore—not like it had that first week after contact—but it still felt right. Like a rhythm she could breathe to. Something just hers.

Beyond the windshield, M6-117 spread out in all directions. A quiet, unforgiving ocean of red dust and fractured rock. Nothing moved except wind and memory. No birds, no trees, no clouds. Just light—too much of it—poured from twin suns that hovered low on the horizon like sullen watchmen. The shadows they cast were long and doubled, stretching at awkward angles.

The land looked ancient. Like it had been waiting a long time to be seen.

The Speculor groaned under her as it crawled up a slope she knew by heart. She’d rerouted this leg of the journey after last week’s storm took out the northern ridge. Her notes were accurate. They always were now. She didn’t have room for error.

The rover’s suspension—rigged together with leftover couplings and patched metal—complained as it dipped into a shallow trough. She adjusted the throttle gently. The vibrations traveled through the seat and into her spine.

“There’s a starman… waiting in the sky…”

She didn’t sing along. Her throat was cracked from the dry air, and her voice didn’t sound like her own anymore. But she tapped her fingers against the throttle in time with the chorus.

Some things became ritual. The song. The route. The moment right before she checked the nav screen, pretending she didn’t already know what it would say.

Battery: nominal. O2: green. Power margins: close, but acceptable.

Everything holding, for now.

The route she followed traced along the eastern lip of Sundermere Basin, skirting the high plateau where thermal anomalies had been pinging weak but persistent signals. She’d flagged it a week ago. Maybe residual power from a buried unit. Maybe nothing. But “maybe” was enough to justify the trip. Any task was better than sitting still, waiting for time to pass.

Because the truth was, after seven months, she’d gotten very good at surviving.

She’d fixed the antenna four times. Rebuilt the filtration unit twice. Repaired the rover’s lateral drive with nothing but a welding arc, spare bolts, and one of her own belt loops. She’d catalogued every sample she could reach. Updated the entire geological substrate map for the quadrant. Even completed two of Oslo’s abandoned mineral tests, down to the data formatting.

She’d done it all mostly to keep her mind from slipping.

Being alone hadn’t turned out to be the worst part. Not exactly. It was quieter than she’d feared, but not in the way people imagined. Not peaceful. There were no clean silences, no meditative stillness. It was crowded in its own way—crowded with memories, with thoughts that looped and snagged and repeated themselves until they lost shape. Some nights, lying on her bunk in the Hab, she’d listen to the wind battering against the canvas wall and pretend it wasn’t real. Pretend she was back in the deep quiet of space, where nothing moved unless you told it to.

She hadn’t cried in months. Not because she didn’t want to. Because crying felt indulgent, like something you did when there was room for it. And she didn’t have that luxury. There was always something to fix, something to check, something to prepare. Emotion was a liability. She couldn’t afford to dissolve—not when she had to be ready to get off this rock the moment the window opened.

And now, finally, they were close.

Close enough that NOSA had started using language she hadn’t heard in over a year—terms like maneuver window and vector drift allowance showing up again in the reports. The tone of the transmissions had shifted, too. Koah’s voice had taken on a subtle urgency. He sounded focused. And hopeful.

That part scared her more than anything.

The rover crested the rise with a long, slow groan. She tightened her grip on the controls, steadying the frame as dust curled up from the tires and blurred the windows. Beyond the glass, a new stretch of Martian terrain unfolded—deep ochre and rusted red, horizon layered with jagged ridgelines that looked like broken bones under the hard light of the twin suns. Shadows stretched in every direction, stark and sharp-edged.

She didn’t speak. Not yet.

In her mind, she’d pictured rescue countless times. She’d let herself imagine the roar of thrusters, a hull breaking through atmosphere like a second sunrise, the sound of someone—anyone—saying her name over comms. Something cinematic. Big. Emotional. Deserved.

Instead, it had come in pieces. Quiet, unremarkable pieces. Data packets. Checklist confirmations. Engineering logs buried in jargon.

And now she was preparing to launch herself into orbit in a vessel that was never meant for a second use. A stripped-down ascent vehicle rebuilt out of scavenged parts and crossed fingers. One shot. That was it. The math didn’t leave room for mistakes. If she missed the intercept by even a second—or came in too hot, or caught the wrong wind shear—it was over. They wouldn’t be able to course correct. She’d drift, and Starfire would keep moving, and it would be no one’s fault.

She could hear that knowledge in the way Koah paused at the end of every transmission. In the way Mateo no longer filled the gaps with empty reassurances.

They knew.

But she also knew this: if it failed—if she didn’t make it—they’d still try to bring her home. She believed that. Her body, her suit, the black box of sensor data she’d logged with religious devotion. They wouldn’t leave her here to vanish under the sand. They’d find a way to retrieve her, even if it took years.

There was something oddly calming about that.

She reached for her water tube and took a long sip, swallowing slowly as her eyes drifted to the sky through the rover’s sloped windshield. The upper atmosphere shimmered faintly, copper-hued and blinding at the edges. Too bright to be beautiful. Too dry to feel real. There was something about it that always looked fake to her—like a badly rendered simulation of sky instead of the real thing.

Somewhere above that sky, Starfire was moving into position.

Somewhere, someone she hadn’t touched in over a year was punching burn times into a nav system and checking the margin for intercept.

She tapped the screen to bring up her next waypoint. A new line of coordinates blinked back at her, hovering like a challenge. This stretch would take her closer to the MAV site. She knew the route by now—every rock, every soft patch of sand that could tangle a wheel or throw her off-course. It wasn’t a road. It wasn’t even a path. Just something she’d made up as she went.

Outside, a dust devil spun briefly to life, danced across the basin, then collapsed into stillness.

She watched it for a long moment, then blinked and let her breath go slow.

“Almost over,” she said. Not a wish. Not a hope. Just a fact.

She adjusted the throttle, checked her oxygen levels, and logged the next coordinates.

And then she drove on, toward the place where everything would either begin again—or end clean.

Far above the scorched horizon of M6-117, past the reach of its sulfur-tinged winds and the shifting red haze that rolled endlessly across its broken terrain, the Iris-2 probe slipped free from its booster with a silence only space could provide.

There was no flare, no echo. Just the faint tremor of separation—a soft pulse through the clamps, a subtle release of inertia. One moment the booster held it; the next, it was drifting on its own, untethered, alive with purpose.

It had taken seven months to reach this moment. Seven months since Y/N’s first garbled transmission managed to claw its way out of the storm-battered surface and into NOSA’s deep-space relay. Seven months of restructured flight plans, emergency committee briefings, late-night simulations, and orbital trajectory scrubs. Seven months of wondering if they were already too late.

But now—now it was real.

Koah Nguyen leaned in over the Starfire’s flight deck interface, his back rigid, shoulders braced like a sprinter in the blocks. The booster telemetry had already zeroed. Now it was just Iris—free, exposed, and on approach. The margin for error was thin. Technically, the docking could’ve been automated. But Koah didn’t trust automation when the numbers were this tight, and when the payload was carrying a woman who hadn’t heard another voice in nearly a year.

His fingers hovered above the haptic interface. Every subtle shift of thruster power, every microdegree of drift correction—it was all on him now.

“Velocity differential .0025,” came Cruz’s voice through comms. “Approach vector within limit.”

“Still too fast,” Koah murmured, mostly to himself.

He nudged the left lateral thruster with a feather-light tap, correcting the probe’s arc. A flick of a button dampened yaw drift. The image feed from the hull camera refreshed, showing Iris-2 gliding in slow, steady increments—like a needle threading an invisible eye.

Behind him, Commander Jimin Park stood at a respectful distance, arms crossed, a silent sentinel. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. This was Koah’s op. But he was there, steady as gravity, watching the same numbers tick past. Ready, if needed.

Inside the airlock prep chamber, silence reigned. No chatter. No alarm bells. Just the deep, consistent hum of ship systems and the soft tap of Koah’s inputs.

“Switching to visual,” Koah said. He pulled the camera feed into full resolution, bringing Iris-2 into clearer focus.

The probe was sleek and small, more skeletal than anything designed for people. Its primary hull shimmered under the binary light of the two suns, panels catching the harsh white-blue glare in sharp angles. It was close now. Too close for hesitation.

Koah swallowed. “Clamp arms deployed.”

Onscreen, the Starfire’s docking arms extended like the limbs of some patient, mechanical insect—open, waiting.

“Approach… good,” Cruz said, breath tight. “Hold your line.”

Koah’s eyes flicked to the distance meter. Ten meters. Seven.

His voice dropped. “Five… three… steady…”

Then, softly: a clack. Followed by a second, heavier thunk as the magnetic locks triggered and the alignment ports sealed.

A tiny green light blinked alive on the deck screen. Docking complete.

For a beat, Koah didn’t move. He stared at the light, at the clean diagnostics flickering to confirm: pressure seals holding. Hull connection stable. No deviation in thermal equilibrium.

Then, finally, he exhaled—and leaned back, dragging a hand across his face.

“…Alright,” he said, voice low but calm. “We’re on.”

Jimin let out a quiet breath of relief, his lips twitching into the first real smile Koah had seen from him all day.

“That was smooth,” he said. “Stupid smooth.”

Koah allowed himself a small smile. “If it wasn’t, I’d never live it down. Not with Bao watching.”

Jimin chuckled. “No pressure.”

Koah didn’t respond right away. He was already leaning into his terminal, posture tight with focus as his eyes moved steadily across the rows of readouts. Internal diagnostics were holding—so far. Docking pressure looked clean. Hull temperatures stable. Battery output nominal.

The Iris-2 probe was more than a delivery system. It was a lifeline. It carried compressed rations—enough for a six-week extension if she rationed aggressively. Oxygen scrubber refills, thermal patch kits, reentry stabilizers for the MAV, a replacement navcore chip for the flight interface. Things no human should’ve had to live without this long.

And buried in the center supply bay, packed deliberately between a vacuum-sealed cluster of electrolyte gel tubes and a bag of freeze-dried vegetables labeled "PASTA—MAYBE" in Val’s handwriting, was something smaller. A note. Handwritten. Folded and secured with a strip of recycled polymer tape.

Koah hadn’t asked what it said.

He hadn’t wanted to know.

It wasn’t cowardice. Not exactly. More like self-preservation. Valencia Cruz had been the most unwavering presence in his life outside of this ship—and one of the most unpredictable. They’d worked together for four years now. Long missions. Endless briefings. Inside jokes and midnight coffee rants and more engineering arguments than he could count.

For most of that time, she’d been engaged to a man who’d never set foot in orbit. That ended months ago. Quietly. Without explanation. And he hadn’t asked. Not because he didn’t want to know. But because when it came to Val, timing was everything—and pushing was how you got shut out. When she was ready, she’d tell him.

And maybe—if they were lucky—he could open her letter in front of her and see what happened next.

“Telemetry check in ninety seconds,” Koah said, eyes flicking to the countdown icon in the corner of the screen. His voice was steady again, pulled back into rhythm.

Jimin was already there. He shifted slightly at his own station, fingers dancing across a field of translucent data. Orbital maps, storm models, launch windows—each one another layer of the puzzle.

“Sundermere’s heating up faster than expected,” he said, not looking away from the screen. “Atmospheric shear’s rising. We’ll be inside the corridor for twenty minutes. Maybe less.”

Koah gave a small nod. “She has to be ready to launch the second we clear.”

Jimin paused. Then said it like it didn’t need to be said. “She will be.”

Koah didn’t answer. Not with words. His gaze moved to the monitor again—one of the external cams feeding a constant image of the probe, now firmly docked beneath the Starfire’s main cargo cradle. It looked small compared to the bulk of the ship. Delicate. Temporary. But there was power in it. And purpose.

And inside, packed with quiet care, was everything that might keep one woman alive long enough to come home.

He tapped through the flight logic menus, making sure the data packets were queued correctly. Command chains, safety interrupts, hardware checks.

They were ready.

She would be ready.

The MAV on the surface had only ever been designed for one ascent. A precise launch, a short burn, and a controlled interception at low orbit. What they were asking it to do now—what Y/N was being asked to pull off with half a crew’s worth of gear, an aging suit, and the worst terrain in NOSA’s catalog—was borderline absurd.

And yet.

She hadn’t quit. Not once. Not in the footage. Not in the comm logs. Not in the whispered scraps of signal that crawled through the storms.

She was still there. Still building. Still thinking five steps ahead. Still surviving.

Koah leaned forward again, hands steady as he keyed in the final approach command.

Inside Airlock 3, the world was stripped down to essentials—light, metal, breath.

Hoseok floated just off the deck, his boots loosely hooked into the restraints, waist tether coiled at his side. The overhead lights cast a hard gleam across his visor, blurring his reflection into a ghost hovering behind the HUD readouts. His EVA suit was snug but familiar, worn in all the right places, and silent now but for the low hiss of life support in his ears.

Just ahead of him, suspended in the docking corridor, the Iris-2 probe waited—sleek, burnished, and utterly still. It hovered inches from the port like it belonged there, though everyone on the ship knew better. This part wasn’t automated. This part relied on human hands.

He exhaled through his nose, steady and slow, eyes narrowing on the alignment grid overlaying his screen. No error margin. No wobble. No alarm tones. A clean approach.

“Five degrees counterclockwise,” Cruz said in his ear. Her voice was flat and even, but Hoseok had worked with her long enough to hear the strain buried under the calm. Not fear—focus. Like she was holding her breath through her teeth.

“Copy,” he replied, reaching for the guide arm. His gloved fingers curled around the control joint with practiced ease.

The movement was subtle. Delicate. A feather’s weight of torque to rotate the probe just a hair to the left. The probe responded with elegant grace, drifting that final fraction into perfect alignment.

A small vent of nitrogen hissed from the attitude jets—barely audible, barely visible—but it was enough.

In the observation alcove just beyond the airlock, Cruz leaned forward against the glass. She didn’t speak. Her fingertips tapped out an unconscious rhythm against the edge of the display—counting maybe, or praying. Her eyes were locked on the seal point. Her other hand clenched tight around the metal railing in front of her, as though she could muscle the docking into place just by willing it.

They all knew what was riding on this. Iris-2 wasn’t just carrying spare parts and food pouches. It held the only atmospheric sweep array that could scan Sundermere before the stormfront made landfall. If it missed, if they lost sync, the window closed—and so did their shot at recovering Y/N.

Outside, the planet rolled beneath them. M6-117, red and raw, broken by tectonics and stripped bare by wind. The storm was visible from this altitude now—like a bruise spreading across the horizon.

Hoseok leaned into his final adjustment. His wrist flicked, just slightly. Then—

Click.

The probe settled into the collar. The magnetic latches extended from the Starfire’s hull, reached out like fingers, and grabbed hold.

A deeper thud followed—one that vibrated faintly through Hoseok’s suit.

Seal engaged.

Green lights blinked across his HUD in rapid sequence: docking clamps secured, pressure gradient stabilized, power sync initialized.

Still floating, still tethered, Hoseok stayed perfectly still and let the final status pass.

“All green,” he said, voice low. Measured. “We’re locked in.”

For a beat, there was nothing.

Then Val let out a breath like she’d been holding it for hours. Her hand slid from the railing, her shoulders dropping as tension drained out of her in one long wave.

“Thank God,” she whispered. “Nice work, Hobi.”

His mouth twitched in the closest thing to a smile the helmet cam could pick up. “You were a great audience.”

“I was trying not to pass out.”

“Appreciated.”

From down the corridor, someone whistled—a short, sharp note that turned into a wave of claps and shoulder pats from the nearby crew. No whooping. No shouting. Just the kind of shared relief that came from people too tired to celebrate but too proud not to show it.

Even Koah, the most seasoned engineer, let himself breathe.

Val wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her jumpsuit. “We’re officially online. I’ll initiate payload unlock.”

“On your signal,” Hoseok said, already unfastening the tether and reaching for the interior bulkhead grips.

A voice crackled in over comms. Koah, dry and efficient, but with a faint lift at the edge of it.

“Good seal. Get the diagnostics rolling. We’re up against Sundermere’s last pass in six hours. That sweep data needs to be live before then.”

“Understood,” Val answered. “We’re already on it.”

The pressure in the room eased, just a fraction. The tension didn’t vanish—it never did—but it reshaped itself into forward momentum. They had the probe. They had time, if only barely. Now it was just a matter of moving fast enough to make it count.

Hoseok floated back from the hatch and turned his head just enough to see the curve of the planet out the small viewport behind him.

It didn’t look like a place anyone could survive.

But Y/N was still down there, somewhere in that rusted wasteland, defying every expectation.

The suns of M6-117 hung low in the bleached-orange sky, casting long, rust-colored shadows across the desert. The planet didn’t just look lifeless—it felt it. Wind tore across the endless dunes in soundless sheets, carrying with it a fine red dust that settled into every crack, every crevice. It was a world built from silence and scorched stone, unforgiving and unchanging.

But she had changed.

Y/N sat cross-legged on the floor of what was once the main operations hub—now little more than a cracked shell stitched together with thermal blankets, sealant foam, and salvaged wiring. The walls creaked under the strain of too many pressure shifts. Sunlight leaked through patched seams, casting jagged lines of gold across the dust-caked floor. Inside, the air was dry, metallic, and heavy with the scent of old wiring and recycled oxygen.

She adjusted the angle of the camera, then sat back, letting it focus. Her face filled the frame: leaner than it used to be, the softness worn away by hunger, exposure, and time. Her eyes were sharp now—not hard exactly, but watchful. Alert in a way that came from sleeping with one ear open and always knowing how many hours of oxygen she had left. Her hair was wild, hanging in uneven waves to her collarbone, tangled in places where she’d given up trying to tame it.

The corners of her lips twitched up into a crooked smile. “So,” she said, her voice scratchy from days of silence but steady, “I’ve been thinking about space law. You ever hear of the Treaty of New Hope?”

She let the question hang for a moment. Outside, the wind howled against the Hab’s patched outer shell.

“It’s this old international agreement—was supposed to prevent exactly the kind of thing I’m about to do. Basically, no planet or government can lay claim to any celestial body beyond its own solar system unless they’ve got approval from a special council. Sounds bureaucratic as hell, right?” She reached over, picked up a wrench, then set it down with a quiet clink on the table beside her. “And yet, here we are.”

She gestured loosely around the space. “M6-117? Technically, it's unclaimed. That makes it... international waters. A lawless sandbox floating in the middle of nowhere.”

The camera feed jumped to an exterior shot. Her two speculors stood side by side, their once-pristine frames warped and beaten. Speculor One bore the scorched wreckage of Prometheus’s stabilizer fin bolted onto its chassis like some kind of makeshift figurehead. Speculor Two had been transformed into a mobile life-support depot—tubes, solar panels, and crates of salvaged supplies lashed down with webbing, its interior barely holding together.

It looked more like a junkyard on treads than a research vehicle. But it moved. And in a place like this, movement meant survival.

Y/N leaned in closer to the lens. “Technically, NOSA still owns the Hab. Aguerra Prime funds it, insures it, claims jurisdiction over it. But the moment I walk out that airlock?” She pointed over her shoulder. “I’m in the wild. No flag, no oversight. Just me, a couple of Frankensteined rovers, and a whole lot of empty red sand.”

She exhaled slowly, looking off-camera for a moment before glancing back. “And that brings me to today’s little project.”

Her expression shifted—something between excitement and resolve. “There’s a Helion Nexus lander at the edge of Sundermere Basin. It was part of a failed recon drop a few years back. Long story short: it’s still out there. Mostly intact. And I’m going to take it.”

She said it plainly.

“Not borrow it. Not radio in for authorization. I’m going to walk up to it, override the lockout codes, and take control. And technically... that makes me a pirate.”

There was a beat of silence after she said it. The word just hung there, lingering in the dry air of the Hab like a joke no one had laughed at yet.

Pirate.

It sounded ridiculous. Out of place. Like something out of an old holo-serial—leather jackets, glowing blades, dramatic standoffs on the hull of a freighter. She almost laughed at how far from that image she really was.

She exhaled through her nose and let the smallest smile tug at the corner of her mouth. “I always thought space pirates had flashy ships, called each other by code names, maybe carried sidearms they didn’t know how to use,” she muttered, her voice quiet, worn at the edges. “Turns out, all you really need is a wrench, a patched-up suit, and no one left to stop you.”

The Hab groaned as if in reply, the metal frame straining under the pressure difference outside. A gust of wind smacked the outer wall with a dull, thudding resonance. Something metal—a panel, maybe a loose strut—clattered loose in the corridor behind her. It struck the floor with a single, hollow bang and then went still.

She didn’t even blink. Not anymore.

“Y/N Y/L/N,” she said quietly, almost like she was testing the sound of it. “Space pirate.”

Her voice wasn’t proud, not really. There was no grandeur in it—just tired honesty. The title fit, in its own twisted way. No one had granted her authority. No one was watching. Whatever rules had once existed out here had dissolved the moment the resupply missions stopped.

She stared past the camera lens, her gaze drifting toward nothing in particular. Maybe out the small port window, maybe into memory. The expression on her face changed—just slightly. A softening around the mouth, a release of the tension in her brow. The guard she wore like armor seemed to ease, just for a moment.

It had been a long time since she’d let herself feel anything.

She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d smiled like this—really smiled. Maybe it was back when the comms were still up and she’d trade messages with Earth. Maybe it was before the storm fried the signal tower and left her to rebuild the antenna with parts scavenged from broken rovers. Or maybe it was even earlier—before she started counting the days not by dates, but by how many liters of filtered water she had left, how many oxygen canisters she had to seal by hand.

Back then, there had been routines. Schedules. Hope.

Now? Now there was just this strange quiet. And the freedom that came with having absolutely nothing left to lose.

She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh, wasn’t quite a sigh. “Honestly,” she said, more to herself than to the camera, “it’s better than a Nobel.”

It was a joke, sort of. She’d once dreamed of those things—awards, recognition, her name in journals and press conferences and history books. It had all felt so important. Necessary. Now, it seemed absurd. What was a prize compared to surviving six months alone on a planet no one was coming back to?

She leaned back slowly, her shoulders brushing against the cold metal of the Hab’s rear wall. Her eyes drifted around the space—at the tangled wires stuffed into ceiling panels, at the insulation duct-taped to the window seams, at the corner where the water recycler had leaked for three days before she managed to reroute the flow with plastic tubing and sheer guesswork.

The Hab looked like hell. Worn down. Held together by nothing more than willpower and the leftover scraps of a better plan. But somehow... it had become hers. A shelter. A prison. A home.

And as ridiculous as it was, she felt a twinge of sadness settle in her chest at the thought of leaving it behind.

Not enough to stop her, of course. She had somewhere to be. Something to take. But still—she hadn’t expected to feel anything when she finally walked away.

She closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the soft whine of the fans, the hum of the power cells she’d rebuilt twice now. The Hab breathed like something alive. Flawed. Fragile. Just like her.

When she opened her eyes again, her voice was quieter. “Guess I’m gonna miss this place after all.”

Then she stood, grabbed her helmet, and reached for the hatch controls.

The airlock hissed.

And just like that, the pirate stepped into the desert.

The last day in the Hab didn’t feel like a goodbye. Not at first.

It felt... disjointed. Like she was moving through someone else’s memory. The edges of things were too sharp. The air too still. Everything was quiet in the way things are just before they disappear. Y/N moved slowly through the cramped living quarters, half-expecting someone else to emerge from behind one of the bulkheads. But of course, there was no one. There hadn’t been anyone in a long time.

She sat on the edge of her bunk, knees drawn up, one foot resting on the makeshift water crate she’d repurposed as a stool. The cold metal handle of her razor pressed against her palm as she tilted the blade, dragging it carefully along her calf. The skin prickled in protest. The act was mundane, almost absurd. Shaving. On her last day. On a dead planet. She hadn’t touched the razor in weeks. Months, maybe. There hadn’t been a point. But today, somehow, there was.

It wasn’t about vanity. There was no one here to notice if she was clean-shaven or covered in patchy stubble. She wasn’t doing it for an audience. She wasn’t doing it for NASA, or NOSA, or anyone watching from Aguerra Prime. She wasn’t even sure the cameras still worked. This was for her.

It was the movement, the familiarity. The echo of Earth routines. A way of reminding her body that she was still human. That she still existed in a way that wasn’t only about surviving.

The razor made soft, whispering strokes along her thigh, and she worked in silence, methodically. She checked her arms next, running her fingers over the fine hairs that had gone unnoticed for too long. The action was precise, mechanical. Muscle memory from a world that felt galaxies away. The kind of world with mirrors, and warm running water, and idle mornings where grooming was just a part of the day—not an act of defiance against desolation.

When she was done, she rinsed the razor in a shallow tin of recycled water and set it down with care on the tiny metal shelf beside the sink. Her fingers lingered on it for a moment longer than necessary, like it might vanish if she looked away.

She moved on.

The Hab was barely holding together, but she still walked its length like a steward. Every corner bore the marks of her time here—scorch marks from the battery incident, a tear in the flooring she’d sealed with epoxy and hope, the scratched notes she’d carved into the bulkhead with a screwdriver when the pen ink dried up. She paused at the stack of crates where she’d stored what remained of her research—dozens of boxes sealed in vacuum wrap, carefully labeled in her blocky handwriting.

Some labels were purely scientific. “Regolith Core B12.” “Atmospheric Trace: Western Quadrant.” Others bore the weight of her humor, dry and necessary. One in particular made her huff a quiet laugh through her nose: "Das Soil Samples."

She shook her head. God, that’s stupid. But it had kept her sane on nights when the storm screamed outside, and the Hab felt like it might fold in on itself. It had been just her and the sound of the wind, and her own voice narrating nonsense to the camera because silence had become unbearable.

Each box she packed felt like tucking away a piece of her life. Data. Debris. Documentation. It wasn’t just science—it was evidence she had been here. That this had all happened. That she hadn’t imagined it.

By the time the final crate clicked into place, a strange calm had settled in her chest. Not relief. Not even closure. Just... quiet acceptance.

She suited up with practiced efficiency. The MAV suit was stiff, but familiar. She knew the feel of every joint, every seal. As she clicked her gloves into place, she glanced around the Hab one last time. The lights flickered as she powered down the systems one by one. Air filtration. Oxygen cycling. Communications—already long dead. She hesitated at the heaters, watching the indicator lights blink out like stars snuffed from a night sky.

And then the lights dimmed for good. The whir of machinery faded into silence.

The Hab was still.

She stood in the airlock for a long while before cycling it open. The suit insulated her from the raw bite of the planet’s thin atmosphere, but she still felt the temperature drop. The sun hung low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the red, cracked terrain. The dust stirred under her boots as she stepped out. The wind was nothing more than a whisper here, but it carried weight—a dry breath from a planet that had been waiting four and a half billion years for someone to hear it.

She turned once, looking back at the Hab—its patched panels, its makeshift antenna straining upward.

“Thanks for keeping me alive,” she murmured, her voice muffled inside the helmet.

She made her way across the stretch of dust toward the speculors. Speculor 2 sat half-buried in windblown grit, holding the last of the rations and samples. She secured the final crate with practiced hands. Among the bland, utility labels, one box caught her eye: "Goodbye, M6." Just black marker on a storage lid, but it hit harder than it should have.

She lingered over it. Let it settle. Then climbed into Speculor 1 and powered up the system.

The familiar hum vibrated through her boots. The engine engaged with a low, steady growl, and the treads rolled forward, carving a new path through the empty landscape. She didn’t look back.

She didn’t have to.

The Hab was done. It had been her shelter, her cage, her sanctuary. But it wasn’t hers anymore. Now, it belonged to the silence again.

The terrain ahead was endless. Red and cracked and ancient. As the vehicle crawled across the dust, Y/N watched the ground roll past beneath her, and for the first time in months, she felt something like purpose return.

She stopped the speculor near a shallow rise and stepped out. Her boots pressed into the soil, leaving fresh imprints where no human had ever stood.

She looked down at her feet. “Step outside the speculor?” she said, the words dry in her throat. “First girl to be here.”

The hill was steep, but she climbed it anyway. The suit resisted her movements, each step a deliberate struggle, but it was worth it. At the summit, she paused and looked back.

Nothing. Just dust and sky.

“Climb that hill?” she whispered. “First girl to do that, too.”

The loneliness hit her harder up here, maybe because the view was so vast. It swallowed her. The wind blew gently against her helmet, like the planet was breathing around her. She rested one gloved hand against a jagged rock and stood still for a long while.

Above her, the smaller sun hung low—soft and bluish, casting a pale glow over the land. She’d named it “Bubble.” It reminded her of Earth somehow. Fragile. Distant. Constant. It was always there, tracking her through the days and nights like a silent guardian.

She stared at it for a while, letting the strange comfort of its light settle over her.

“I’m the first person to be alone on an entire planet,” she thought. The words felt like they belonged in a history book. But they were just hers.

No crowds. No cameras. Just the sound of her own breath, the press of the suit, and the impossible stretch of a world that had never known life.

She was the first. And she was alone.

The speculor’s solar panels were out, angled toward the faint sun, drinking in what little energy Hexundecia had to offer. The motors had gone quiet, the systems at rest, the caravan still and grounded for the next recharge cycle. Out here, time didn’t pass with the urgency of a ticking clock—it stretched and drifted, wide and open like the desert around her.

Y/N sat a few meters from the vehicle, suited up and leaned against a slab of fractured basalt that jutted from the earth like a half-buried monument. Her knees were drawn up loosely, arms resting on them, hands relaxed. The pressurized joints of her suit creaked softly when she moved, but for the most part, she didn’t. She simply sat there, head tilted back, eyes closed behind her visor.

The sounds were minimal. The low hiss of her rebreather. The occasional chirp from her suit’s diagnostics. Farther off, the gentle ticking of the speculor’s cooling systems. It was white noise to her now—background ambience that had faded into familiarity. What she focused on wasn’t sound at all, but presence.

The planet stretched in every direction, its reddish soil and dust-coated rock formations glowing faintly under the soft light of the smaller sun she’d dubbed Bubble. The sun’s blue-tinged glow bled across the ridgelines, casting long shadows that shifted almost imperceptibly as the hours passed. It was beautiful, in a way that didn't care whether anyone saw it or not.

She inhaled, slowly, deliberately. The oxygen from her suit system was clean, filtered, cool against her throat. It wasn’t fresh—nothing here was—but it was breathable. Reliable. She’d come to appreciate that more than she ever had back home. You learn not to take air for granted when it’s something you have to ration.

There were no thoughts of mission logs or data packets or next-stage objectives just now. No status checks. No timelines. Just her. Her, the suit, and the silent gravity of a world that had never known the touch of human life until her boots cracked the crust.

This planet wasn’t lifeless. Not really. It breathed in its own way—slowly, deeply. It had its own rhythms: the rise and fall of light, the cycle of wind carving its signature across stone, the whisper of ancient minerals shifting beneath the surface. It had been here long before she arrived. It would be here long after she was gone.

And yet, for this moment, it was hers.

She opened her eyes, and the horizon blurred in heat shimmer. There was a strange peace in knowing how small she really was. Not irrelevant—just tiny, and in the best possible way. There was no audience here. No live feed. No applause. Just the quiet realization that this... this was what exploration really looked like. Not flag-planting or dramatic speeches. Just being here. Alive. Observing. Bearing witness.

She let her helmet rest back against the rock behind her and murmured, more to the suit than herself, “Still beats the office.”

The sun shifted a fraction, casting a new shape across the dust. Y/N sat in silence, absorbing it all. This was the kind of stillness you only found when the nearest person was 40 million kilometers away.

The speculor rattled gently as it picked its way along the ragged rim of Marth Crater. Even with its stabilized suspension, every jagged rock and uneven slope sent a tremble through the metal frame. Inside, Y/N sat with her boots planted and hands on the console, watching the terrain roll by. The sun had dipped lower now, painting everything in muted tones of burnt sienna and faded rust.

The landscape was a frozen sea of iron-rich dunes, crumbling cliffs, and wind-shaped ridges. To anyone else, it might’ve looked like a wasteland. To her, it was a kind of poetry—brutal, ancient, and honest.

The lights in Mission Control were dimmed to reduce eye strain, but the room still hummed with quiet focus. A soft, bluish glow came from the wall of screens lining the front of the command floor, each of them tracking some fragment of a much bigger picture—system vitals, solar intake graphs, environmental stats, satellite relays. But the one April watched most closely was centered on a single blinking dot, creeping steadily across the digital topography of M6-117.

She leaned in closer, forearms resting on the edge of her console, her eyes narrowed behind the thin-framed glasses perched on her nose. The arc of telemetry traced the slow, deliberate curve of Y/N’s path around Marth Crater. One rover. One person. A single line of movement on a planet that had otherwise never known life.

It was a small signal on a massive canvas, but it was moving. That was enough.

April’s fingers moved across the touchscreen with practiced precision. She pulled up the diagnostics feed and ran a quick check—battery health, suit vitals, cabin pressure. No red flags. No anomalies. Everything looked clean.

So far.

Beside her, Mateo stood with a half-empty mug of coffee in one hand and the other shoved into the pocket of his jacket. He hadn't taken a sip in at least fifteen minutes. The drink had gone tepid a long time ago, but he kept holding it like he might remember to drink it eventually.

His eyes flicked toward April’s screen. “How’s she doing?”

“Still on schedule,” April said without looking away. “She shut down at eleven-hundred local, angled the solar arrays by about twenty-two degrees. Charging’s underway now.”

Mateo tilted his head. “Vitals?”

“She’s stable. Oxygen levels are good. Hydration’s down a little, but within threshold. Pulse is resting at seventy-nine.” She glanced at the biometric overlay, frowning slightly at the uptick in cortisol, then dismissed it. “No spikes. Nothing that says she’s in distress.”

He nodded slowly. “Holding it together.”

April finally leaned back, stretching her shoulders with a soft crack of tension, then gave a dry little smile. “She sent a message this morning. Said she wants us to start addressing her as Captain Blondebeard.”

Mateo blinked. “Wait—what?”

“She said since M6-117 isn’t under any planetary jurisdiction, it technically counts as international waters,” April said, arching an eyebrow. “She’s invoking salvage law. Claimed if she makes it to the Nexus site and gets the lander operational, it counts as a lawful prize.”

Mateo stared at her for a second, then huffed a short laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not,” she said, already pulling up the message thread. “‘Henceforth,’” she read aloud with mock seriousness, “‘I am to be recognized in all official comms as Captain Blondebeard of the Free Hexundecian Territory. Long live the Republic.’”

He gave a low whistle, the kind that said that’s insane, but I get it. “That woman has officially been out there too long.”

“She’s coping,” April said, quieter now. “Making jokes, building little myths around herself. It’s how she keeps her head straight. I’d be more worried if she wasn’t doing that.”

Mateo sipped his coffee and grimaced. “Cold,” he muttered, then gestured toward her screen. “Solar efficiency?”

“Still solid. Panels are at full capacity. We might see a dip after nightfall, but she has a reserve buffer if things slow down.” She flicked through the energy graph, tracking the intake curve. “She’s pacing herself. Four-hour drives, long recharge windows. It’s working.”

He nodded again, tapping his thumbnail against the side of the mug. “She’s about halfway to Nexus Five, right?”

“Just past the midpoint now,” April said. “Three clicks out from the rough terrain at the edge of the basin.”

Mateo leaned forward slightly, squinting at the updated satellite overlay. The crater’s rim was jagged, uneven—sections of it scattered with sharp ridges and loose shale deposits. The kind of terrain that could break an axle if you weren’t careful. “That’s going to be a tight run.”

“She knows,” April said, her voice steady. “She’s seen the topographic scans. She’ll take her time.”

Mateo exhaled, slow. “Still,” he said, more to himself than her, “she’s out there. Just... one person. Alone.”

“Alone,” April repeated, a bit softer now. The word felt heavy every time they said it.

They both watched the blinking signal for a moment. It moved at the slow, deliberate pace of someone with nowhere else to be—and all the time in the universe to get there.

“She’s going to be fine,” April said at last.

Mateo didn’t answer. Not because he disagreed, but because there wasn’t anything more to say.

They just stood there, side by side in the dim light of the command center, watching that little dot crawl its way across an alien world—quietly willing it forward.

Out on M6-117, the speculor crept forward, one cautious meter at a time.

Y/N sat at the helm, her gloved fingers hovering just above the control panel, ready to correct if the suspension caught on something unexpected. The terrain ahead was uneven—loose shale sloping downward into a shallow depression, just steep enough to be unnerving. Beyond it, a low ridge cut across the horizon like the edge of a broken plate, and she couldn’t see what waited on the other side.

She leaned in slightly, squinting through the viewport. The external cameras confirmed what her gut already told her: unstable ground. Could be a minor inconvenience, or it could be the kind of problem that ended her progress for good.

Still, she pressed on.

Not recklessly. Not out of impatience. Just... forward.

There was no deadline here. No finish line. No one waiting at the other end with banners or applause. But each meter gained was one more mark on a world no one had ever touched. The simple act of moving through it felt important. Not just survival. Something deeper.

She adjusted the throttle slightly and the speculor responded with a low hum, its wheels biting into the dust with steady determination.

Out the side viewport, the solar panels caught a glint of Bubble’s soft light—the smaller of the two suns that loomed over this planet like a pale sentinel. It was low in the sky now, casting long, diffuse shadows across the red dust, turning every ridge and rock into sculpture. She paused for a moment to watch it.

Always there. Bubble had become a strange kind of compass for her—a reference point in a world that offered few.

“This is your captain,” she murmured, mostly to herself, lips curling faintly into a crooked smile. “Course laid in. Planetfall... ongoing.”

Her voice crackled through the helmet’s mic, but no one responded. She didn’t expect them to.

She toggled the next waypoint, and the speculor rolled ahead with its usual quiet determination, the tracks crunching softly over dust and fractured rock.

Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was warm and dry, thanks to the internal regulators still holding steady. The hum of electronics was a constant backdrop—cooling fans, battery feedback, and the subtle rhythm of the environmental system circulating air. After months, the mechanical noises had become comforting, almost like breathing.

Her own breathing was slow and measured. The suit’s monitors recorded everything—oxygen levels, hydration, core temperature—but it was the old pilot instinct that kept her tuned in. Feel the road. Listen to the machine. Watch for patterns.

Outside, the wind had picked up. Dust skittered across the surface in short, chaotic gusts. The external sensors detected a minor pressure drop—nothing serious, just the planet reminding her that it was still indifferent to her presence.

Y/N kept one hand lightly resting on the control yoke, the other hovering near the manual override. She didn’t need to steer constantly; the speculor handled most of the navigation itself. But she preferred to stay alert, to feel connected to the movement of the machine beneath her. Autonomy was great. Awareness was better.

Her eyes tracked the outline of the cliffs ahead—Marth Crater rising in jagged, broken layers, throwing long shadows that danced across the red earth as the sun moved. The geology here fascinated her in a quiet, persistent way. There were ridges that looked like wave crests frozen mid-motion, deep gashes in the rock that hinted at ancient violence. Once, she might have stopped to take more samples, but today was about distance. Efficiency.

Still, it was beautiful in its own way—harsh, yes, but undeniably beautiful.

As the rover climbed a shallow slope, she allowed herself a brief mental detour. Not memories exactly, just echoes.

Mission Control. The soft rustle of bodies leaning over keyboards. The hum of ventilation systems. April’s voice on comms—precise, calm. Mateo muttering about stale coffee. People who couldn’t see her, but still cared. Still watched.

And then there was Captain Blondebeard—the half-joke she’d tossed into the void weeks ago, a silly placeholder to make the isolation feel less heavy. It had stuck, somehow. Maybe because they all needed it—something a little ridiculous to hold onto amid the silence.

She smiled at the thought, just briefly, and shook her head. “Captain Blondebeard,” she muttered. “Defender of dust. Ruler of red rocks.”

No audience. Just her and the rattling hum of the speculor.

She checked the diagnostics again. Solar intake: optimal. Battery: 92%. Environmental systems: nominal. No signs of mechanical stress. For now, everything was working.

That meant she could keep going.

The next waypoint lit up on the map—marked with a dull amber glow. Just over the ridge. She exhaled slowly, letting the air hiss softly through the suit’s filters, then leaned forward and tapped the throttle. The rover surged forward a little harder this time, climbing the incline with a low growl.

Dust kicked up behind her. The sky stretched pale and infinite above.

Mateo barely had time to sit before a heavy binder slammed onto his desk with enough force to rattle his coffee. The mug wobbled, then steadied. He glanced up with a sigh, already bracing himself.

Marco stood across from him, posture too casual, arms folded like he was trying not to smile. There was a spark in his eyes—half brilliance, half mania—the kind that made engineers dangerous in the best possible way.

“You’re not going to like this,” Marco said. No preamble. Just straight into it.

Mateo raised an eyebrow, flipping open the first page of the binder. “Why does that always seem to be your opening line?”

“Because I’m usually right.”

Mateo didn’t respond. He just scanned the schematic diagrams on the first few pages—wiring, load calculations, modular systems torn down to their bones. It looked like someone had disassembled the MAV with a crowbar and a grudge.

In the corner of the room, Creed stood with his arms crossed, expression unreadable. Always the measured one. Where Marco was all spark and adrenaline, Creed was the one you sent in to keep the reactor from melting down.

“The problem,” Creed said, stepping forward, “is velocity. More specifically, intercept velocity.”

He tapped the tablet in his hand, bringing up a holographic projection of the M6-117 Ascent Vehicle—its sleek body now marked in red and yellow overlays. Next to it, a ghostly outline of the Starfire hung in orbital trajectory. The gap between them wasn’t just spatial. It was mathematical.

“The MAV is rated to hit 7.8 kilometers per second at peak ascent,” Creed explained. “The Starfire’s intercept window requires at least 9.2. And we can’t dip the Starfire lower. Not without burning half the return fuel and risking re-entry on a compromised arc.”

Mateo leaned back slowly, processing. “So… the MAV needs to go faster. But it can’t. Not as is.”

Marco stepped in again, voice animated now. “Exactly. So we make it lighter.”

Mateo looked up. “How much lighter?”

“Five thousand kilograms.”

There was a long silence.

Mateo let out a low breath, staring at the screen. “You’re serious.”

Marco nodded. “Dead serious. But don’t worry. We’ve already found two-thirds of it. The MAV was originally specced for six passengers. Y/N’s solo, so that’s an immediate thousand kilos—crew support systems, internal seating, storage compartments.”

“Fair enough,” Mateo said cautiously. “What else?”

“We’re pulling the scientific payload,” Marco added. “Soil, core samples, atmospheric sensors. All of it. It’s dead weight now.”

“That’s another... what? 500?”

“More like six-fifty. Then we strip internal comms—no need for multi-band systems. She won’t be piloting anyway.”

Mateo frowned. “What do you mean she won’t be piloting?”

Creed stepped in again, quiet and calm. “Nguyen’s going to fly the MAV from orbit.”

Mateo blinked. “You’re talking about a fully remote-controlled launch? With a human on board?”

“It’s been done in simulations,” Creed said. “The theory is solid. Remote guidance with live telemetry. As long as we maintain lock from Starfire, we can get her into intercept range. There’s a latency window, but it’s manageable.”

Marco waved that part off. “Honestly, it simplifies things. If she’s not flying, we can rip out the cockpit interface. Panels, redundant circuits, glass—gone. Another 400 kilos easy.”

Mateo’s jaw worked. “She’s going up in a vehicle with no controls, no backup comms, and no seats.”

“Correct,” Marco said brightly. “Also, no airlock.”

That stopped him.

“I’m sorry—what?”

Marco walked over to a scale model of the MAV sitting on the table, casually popping off the nose section like he was dismantling a toy. “The nose airlock’s nearly 400 kilos by itself. Hull Panel 19 adds another 200. And those windows?” He plucked one off the model. “Decorative. Total waste of mass.”

Mateo stared at the half-gutted model. “You’re launching her into space with a hole in the front of the ship?”

“Not a hole,” Marco said quickly. “A reinforced pressure barrier made from Hab-grade canvas. Layered, sealed, and structurally supported with internal cross-bracing.”

Mateo was silent for a long beat. “So... a tarp.”

Marco smiled. “A flight-tested environmental membrane.”

Creed, to his credit, didn’t flinch. “The structural integrity holds up at altitude. Once she clears the atmospheric drag—which on M6 is minimal—it’s all vacuum. The canvas doesn’t need to withstand pressure from the outside, just keep the inside pressurized.”

Mateo shook his head slowly. “And this is the plan you’re bringing me. After thirty years of aerospace development and risk management protocols, this is what we’ve come to.”

Marco shrugged. “You want to get her home or not?”

Mateo pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closed. “You didn’t even get to the worst part yet, did you?”

Creed hesitated. “Well...”

“Oh, come on,” Mateo muttered.

Marco dropped back into a chair opposite him and spun the model slowly in his hands. “We’ll need to pre-load her EVA suit with everything she needs. She won’t be able to access the cabin once it launches. No movement. No cabin pressure.”

Mateo looked up, eyes narrowing. “So if something goes wrong—”

“She’s dead,” Marco said plainly. “But if we don’t do this at all? She’s also dead.”

The room went quiet again.

The logic was brutal. But clean.

Mateo stood in silence at the wide observation window overlooking the control bay. Rows of terminals blinked below, casting soft glows onto the operators’ faces. The quiet hum of the operations floor, the muted rustle of people moving through data, speaking in low tones—it all felt distant. His eyes tracked the orbital map, projected across the far wall. One small blue marker labeled Starfire. Another in orange: Y/L/N – MAV Prep.

Just two dots, drifting across the edge of a planet no one had ever intended to be a rescue site.

He didn’t speak. Not right away.

Behind him, Creed stood with arms folded, still, waiting. Marco was halfway through unscrewing the cap of a protein bar, but had forgotten about it, caught in the quiet tension that had settled over the room.

Then Mateo inhaled slowly and spoke without turning.

“Start building the launch profile. I want a complete risk breakdown—every failure mode, every backup system we’re cutting, and how long we think that tarp will hold under load. Flight surgeon and engineering get briefed at sixteen hundred. No exceptions.”

The wrapper crinkled, finally splitting under Marco’s thumb with a soft snap. The faint smell of synthetic peanut butter wafted out, but he barely noticed—already hunched over the console, typing fast, his mind three steps ahead.

“Copy that,” he mumbled, not looking up, already pulling up the MAV’s mass budget and internal schematics.

Creed stood off to the side, more deliberate. He pulled out his tablet, fingers tapping rhythmically as he opened a clean modeling slate and began sketching out the updated launch profile. No one needed to ask if he was running simulations—he always was.

Mateo stayed still.

He stood at the edge of the room, eyes fixed on the massive screen on the far wall—Earth to the left, M6-117 hanging silent and red to the right. Two markers moved in parallel arcs above it: Starfire, already in decaying orbit, and the blinking orange dot that marked the MAV’s last position. Y/L/N – Ready Hold. It hadn’t moved in six hours.

His reflection stared back at him in the dark glass, half-obscured by the flight data.

“And someone get her on comms,” he said finally, his voice level, clipped.

Marco glanced over his shoulder. “You want to tell her?”

Mateo turned slowly, just enough to meet his gaze. The expression on his face wasn’t one of authority or resolve. Not entirely. It was the look of someone who was doing the math—risk versus time, life versus chance—and coming up short on both columns.

“No,” he said. “I want to ask her if she’s willing to launch into orbit under a tarp and a prayer.”

Then he walked out.

The hall outside the planning bay was quiet, sterile, and dimly lit. A few staff moved briskly from station to station, heads down, focused. No one stopped him. He crossed the length of the control floor with long strides, ignoring the buzz of conversation and telemetry chatter around him.

NOSA Mission Control was housed in the heart of the Aguerra Prime complex—underground, shielded, secure. It was built like a vault, and today it felt like one. A place built to preserve life, now trying desperately to save just one.

He stepped into the comms wing and paused for a second in the threshold of April’s unit. She was already hunched forward, scanning her screen, lips pressed into a hard line. Her hair was pulled back into a quick knot, and the half-empty thermos beside her keyboard said she’d been at this since before dawn.

April glanced up as she felt him approach. “I already sent the initial uplink,” she said. “Low-band width, direct ping. She’s on reply hold.”

“She read it?”

A nod. “I think so. Just one line so far.”

Mateo exhaled. “I need you to be straight with her.”

April’s brow creased slightly. “She already knows we’re scraping the bottom of the playbook. You want me to sugarcoat it?”

“No,” Mateo said, stepping around to lean beside her console. “The opposite.”

She studied him. There was something in his face she hadn’t seen before—not panic. Not resolve either. Something heavier. A tiredness that came from trying to beat physics with ingenuity and spreadsheets.

“I want you to tell her exactly what we’re doing,” he continued. “The canvas patch. The missing control panels. That she’ll be sealed into a pressure suit with no way to pilot the MAV, no physical interface, no real fallback.”

April leaned back slowly. “That’s a hell of a sell.”

“I know.” He looked at the screen again. A message was still blinking in the inbound queue. “But I need her to say yes on her own. No pressure. No angle. She deserves that.”

April turned back toward the console, jaw set. “She’ll ask why we’re even considering this.”

“Because it’s the only window she has.” Mateo’s voice was quiet now, almost too soft to hear. “The Starfire won’t last another full orbit at that altitude. If we miss the next intercept burn, we’re not getting a second chance.”

April’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. “So what happens if she says no?”

“Then we stop,” Mateo said. “We scrub the launch, pull Nguyen back into safe orbit, and pray the resupply launch next month doesn’t get delayed again.”

April didn’t move for a moment. Then she sighed, rolled her shoulders, and cracked her knuckles.

“Alright,” she murmured. “Let’s ask the girl if she wants to fly a missile wrapped in tent canvas.”

Mateo let out the smallest laugh, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ll be on the floor.”

He turned to go, but April caught him just before he crossed the door.

“Mateo,” she said, quietly. He paused.

“She trusts you,” she added. “You know that, right?”

He nodded once, without turning around. “That’s why I’m not the one asking.”

Back at her console, April read the message again.

Are you fucking kidding me?

There was no punctuation. No follow-up. No emoji. Nothing to signal tone. Just those five words.

She stared at them for a long moment, then leaned forward, her fingers moving carefully across the keys as she began to compose her response.

She typed, paused, deleted, retyped.

We know how insane it sounds. You don’t have to do this. There’s no protocol for this kind of ask. But if you say yes, we’ll make it work. And if you say no, we’ll find another way. No one’s giving up on you.

She hesitated again, then added:

But we need your answer soon.

April hit Send, then leaned back in her chair, rubbing a hand across her forehead. The cursor blinked on the screen, waiting for a reply.

Y/N stood just outside the MAV, the wind tugging at the loose ends of her suit hood and streaks of red dust whispering past her boots. The Helion Nexus site was empty—eerily so. The dunes stretched out in every direction like a sea frozen mid-tide, the early evening light casting the terrain in muted copper tones. She stared straight into the lens of her camera, visor up, her eyes locked onto the feed as if the people on the other side could feel the weight of her stare.

She wasn’t smiling.

She hadn’t smiled much in days.

But her expression now—that flat, tight-lipped calm—wasn’t anger. It was disbelief. Controlled, deliberate disbelief.

“This,” she said, after a long pause, her voice dry and low, “is what we’ve come to.”

The wind rattled against the MAV’s lower hull behind her. One of the loose external thermal blankets snapped like a sail.

“I read the specs,” she continued, shifting her weight slightly, eyes still locked on the camera. “And for the record, yes, I understand the mission parameters. I understand the orbital window. I understand why this launch has to happen now or not at all. I get it.”

She took a breath, steadying herself, and then—just barely—she let a flicker of something wry creep into her voice.

“What I don’t get,” she said, “is how we went from 'cutting-edge escape system' to... ‘canvas and sheer fucking luck.’”

She shook her head slowly, almost laughing—but it didn’t come out that way. Not quite.

“They’re calling it the ‘lightweight launch revision.’” She looked off for a second, as if picturing the phrase on a government memo. “Translation? We’re stripping everything non-essential. Seats, insulation, pressure seals. Controls. Windows.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Because who needs windows when you’re flying into orbit at nine-point-two klicks per second?”

Another gust of wind swept through. The MAV loomed behind her—tall, white, sterile. Unwelcoming. It looked like a machine built for six. Not one.

She glanced at it, then turned back to the camera.

“So here’s the plan,” she said, more quietly now. “They’re going to fly this thing remotely from orbit. I’ll be inside. Not piloting. Not navigating. Just... sealed in a suit, strapped in tight, and praying Koah doesn’t sneeze while he’s on the joystick.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, but again, it wasn’t quite a smile. It was more like disbelief wrapping itself in the thinnest layer of humor to keep from cracking.

“There’s no cockpit. No redundancy. And the nose panel?” She paused. “Gone. We're replacing it with three layers of Hab canvas and a reinforced support frame. Which, to be clear, I stitched together yesterday with thermal glue and what used to be my sleeping bag.”

She stepped toward the camera now, voice still level, but her eyes sharper.

“I am, effectively, going to space in a sealed tin can with no front door. And the part they seem most excited about?” She leaned in slightly, as if sharing something private.

“I’ll be the fastest human being in recorded history.”

She let the words hang in the air for a moment. The absurdity of it settled around her like the Hexundecian dust clinging to her boots.

“I guess that’s supposed to be the upside,” she added. “A footnote for the textbooks. My name next to some velocity record no one will remember.”

She folded her arms, staring past the camera now, into the nothingness stretching beyond the ridge.

“But I didn’t come here for records,” she said. “And I sure as hell didn’t come here to die wrapped in duct tape and space-grade nylon.”

She paused, and then finally, something shifted in her expression. Not quite resolve. Something messier. Acceptance, maybe. Something that resembled courage, if courage wasn’t always so clean.

“But I did come here to finish what I started.”

She didn’t bother to say more. She didn’t sign off.

She just reached out and shut off the camera.

The MAV’s outer shell still looked intact—at least from a distance—but the closer she got, the more the damage and modifications became apparent. One panel had been pried off to make room for the external fuel purge; another was half-covered with what looked like insulation tape. The “canvas” they were so excited about was already prepped in a neatly folded stack near the nose—thin, reinforced, flexible, held together by thermal gluing agents she’d tested twice already, just to be sure it wouldn’t split during ascent.

She stood at the base of the ladder for a moment, helmet tucked under her arm, toolkit heavy in her other hand.

Up close, the MAV looked nothing like the sleek, composite-shelled ascent vehicles she had trained in back on Aguerra Prime. The ones in the simulations had been graceful—modular, insulated, and precisely engineered to cradle human beings through the brute violence of launch. They’d had padding and ergonomic seats, clean touchscreen interfaces, carbon-slick handholds designed for comfort under G-force compression. Everything had a place. Everything made sense.

This one didn’t. Not anymore.

This MAV had been stripped bare.

It stood squat and pale under the low red sun, a skeleton of what it had once been. The heat shielding was intact, but the skin panels rattled softly in the wind. Most of the insulation had been ripped out for mass reduction. There were exposed wiring bundles at the base of the hull, sealed hastily with patch tape and thermal epoxy. The side hatch was propped open with a metal brace that should’ve been part of the original ladder assembly, but even that had been cannibalized and reattached by hand, joints imperfect and scorched.

She stood at the base of it now, helmet off, toolkit in one hand, the other resting against the first rung of the ladder. The sunlight caught on her visor, throwing a dull amber reflection across the metal. She glanced up at the hatch. It looked like a mouth. Black inside, open. Waiting.

Y/N took a slow breath and climbed.

The rungs flexed slightly under her boots. The structure moaned—just a little—as she pulled herself up and stepped inside.

The air inside was still and heavy. Not from lack of oxygen—the filters were operational, barely—but from disuse. It smelled of cold metal and polymer outgassing. The kind of dry, stale odor that got into your nostrils and stuck there. It was like stepping into the bones of a machine that had forgotten it was ever meant to hold a person.

The interior was gutted.

No seats.

No panels.

No foam padding, no modular cabin walls, no interface displays.

The cockpit was nothing more than a narrow chamber of exposed beams and equipment housings now. Every surface that could be removed had been. The floor plating was gone. The wall paneling too. Even the soft sealant around the window apertures had been stripped away—there were no windows left to seal.

There was just metal, wiring, the occasional warning sticker half-peeled off, and the sound of her own breathing as she stepped deeper into the vehicle.

She crouched by the side wall and set the toolkit down. The foam inside was worn and cracked, and the latch had started to loosen weeks ago, but it still held. She unclipped the wrench—carbon-steel, standard hex-head—and got to work.

The first bolt came loose with a metallic groan. Then the next.

The remaining seats hadn’t been designed for easy removal. They were bolted directly into the structural base—six of them, each one reinforced to handle launch stress and vibration. It took her nearly an hour to pull the first one free. She had to brace herself against the bulkhead, digging in with the heels of her boots, twisting the tool with both hands until her wrists ached. When the last bolt finally came free, the seat tumbled awkwardly to the side. She grabbed it, shoved it toward the hatch, then crawled over to the edge and pushed.

It hit the ground outside with a muffled thud, sending a puff of dust into the air.

One seat down. Five to go.

She didn’t stop. Didn’t even look at it. Just moved to the next one.

Every minute was precious now. The launch window was fixed. The Starfire would pass into final intercept in twenty-two hours. Koah’s orbital drift correction had already been executed. Once the line closed, it wouldn’t reopen for another 18 days—and there was no chance the MAV would survive that long in its current condition. Not with the limited onboard power. Not with what little she had left to eat. And not with the storm systems brewing again on the eastern ridge.

Another bolt. Another pop. Another seat came free.

She shoved it toward the hatch, muscles burning. It was heavier than it looked.

Outside, the wind had begun to pick up—more sand drifting across the horizon, loose pebbles bouncing softly against the MAV’s hull. Every few seconds, the gusts made the outer structure creak. It sounded like the ship was breathing. Or groaning.

Y/N pulled her suit collar down, wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of one wrist. It clung there—salt and dust and heat.

She turned back to the third chair.

The wrench slipped once, barking her knuckles on the raw edge of the bolt. She hissed, shook her hand out, and went back in.

No complaints. No curses. Just movement.

She didn’t bother checking the comms feed. There wouldn’t be any new messages from April for at least another hour. The distance, the relay lag, the signal decay—it all meant she was on her own now. No lifeline. No hand-holding. No updates.

Just her, and the wrench, and the cold echo of metal against metal.

By the time the last seat came free, her shoulders were burning, and the back of her neck throbbed with tension. She dropped the final chair out through the hatch and leaned back on her heels, staring at the empty space she’d cleared.

The MAV was down nearly four hundred kilos already, by her rough count. Another couple hundred from the stripped wiring. Maybe more, depending on what else she could cut before the systems started to protest.

She turned to the forward cockpit interface.

The main control assembly was still mounted to the wall where the pilot’s seat had been. The screen was dark. Inactive. Most of the data routing had already been disconnected from the ship’s mainframe—April and Koah had walked her through the shutoff protocol the night before.

Still, it looked wrong, somehow. Like it still thought it was meant to be used.

She studied it for a second. Then reached forward and began to dismantle it.

One panel at a time.

She took no pleasure in it. There was no thrill, no rush of rebellion or recklessness. Just the cold understanding that it had to go. Every ounce she stripped now was one less kilo for the rockets to lift.

The screen popped free after two minutes. The control column took another five. She snipped the cabling with wire cutters, bundled it into a rough coil, and set it aside. It would make a decent handhold if she needed one during launch.

The MAV was quieter now.

Hollow.

The wind outside had picked up into a steady moan, the dust slapping against the outer skin in brief, muted bursts. Occasionally, she heard something shift on the landing struts—some subtle tension in the way the wind pressed against the upright body of the vehicle.

Y/N sat back, leaning against one of the inner support beams. Her shoulders were soaked through. The EVA undersuit clung to her, the cooling pads barely keeping up with the heat she was generating. Her breath echoed in the silence.

She let herself rest there for a moment. Not sleep. Just stillness. Just one minute of stillness.

She looked up at the interior of the MAV. It didn’t look like a spacecraft anymore.

It looked like an escape pod built in a garage.

She reached for her comm tablet. The screen lit up, the signal flickering once before stabilizing.

No new messages.

She flipped open the reply channel anyway and typed with slow, deliberate fingers.

Interior’s stripped. Control interface removed. All six seats gone. Pressure barrier is still holding. Will install final harness next. Wind’s picking up. If this thing doesn’t fall apart, I’ll be ready to light it when the crew is. Tell Koah I hope he remembers how to fly blind. Because this ship’s not going to hold my hand.

She hit send, then turned off the display.

By the time she stepped outside again, the light had shifted. The sun—low and pale-blue on this side of the planet—was dragging the long shadows of the MAV across the dust. It cast the stripped-down vehicle in stark relief: every exposed rib, every bolt she hadn’t had time to replace, every scar left from the dismantling process. The ground was littered with the remnants—seat brackets, cracked insulation, lengths of coiled cable, and one final wrench she hadn’t bothered to bring back inside.

Her arms ached. Her back felt like it had been through a hydraulic press. There was a raw spot under her left elbow where the EVA suit padding had bunched up during one of the anchor installs, and her hands were trembling with the aftershock of muscle fatigue, the kind that didn’t fully hit you until the job was done. Her visor was streaked with fine red grit, the kind that clung to everything, the kind you’d still find in your boots six months after you’d left the planet.

The MAV loomed behind her—unfinished, exposed. It looked less like a spacecraft now and more like something welded together out of salvage parts in the middle of a desert. The kind of machine desperate people might have built after the end of the world. Everything extraneous had been pulled: life-support subsystems, insulation, windows, comm redundancies. Even the pilot’s control column had been replaced with a blank wall and a data plug tied directly into its core systems.

There was no illusion left. No polish. No design elegance. It wasn’t a vehicle anymore. It was a shell. A slingshot with just enough thrust to throw her back into orbit—if the math held.

Y/N stood in the silence and stared up at it.

And for a long time, she didn’t move.

Wind brushed past her legs, carrying dust across the flat expanse of the launch site. The air was so thin it barely had weight, but it was just enough to make the suit’s outer fabric shift against her skin. She flexed her fingers once, twice, trying to ease the burn in her knuckles. She felt tired all the way through. Not sleepy—just... used up.

She reached down into her toolkit, fumbled past a spare patch kit, a pair of stripped fasteners, until her fingers closed around the compact speaker unit. She hesitated, just for a second, then pulled it free.

She rubbed a tired thumb across the surface of the speaker, clearing a streak of dust from the side panel. The LED took a second to respond, then blinked on—soft and green, like it was waking from a long nap. The speaker had been through a lot. It had fallen off shelves during storms, been buried under equipment, and once—briefly—served as a weight to keep down an emergency tarp in a wind event. It wasn’t meant to last this long, but like everything else out here, it had adapted.

No ceremony. No speech. No last rites.

Just habit.

She tapped through the tracklist, muscle memory guiding her. Most of the audio files were practical: suit diagnostics, training walkthroughs, comms recordings she’d archived months ago. But tucked near the bottom of the directory was a small folder labeled simply Misc—leftovers from a data transfer, probably. A few compressed files, an outdated playlist from her tablet. Nothing she’d listened to in weeks.

She hovered over one of them.

It was a dumb choice. Something absurdly out of step with the dry, red world around her. Upbeat to the point of satire. But that was kind of the point. When you were about to launch yourself into orbit in a ship held together by glue, canvas, and a few good intentions, irony wasn’t just a luxury—it was armor.

She tapped Play.

The speaker chirped once, then crackled. And then came the unmistakable first notes of Waterloo.

The music was grainy, a little warped at the high end, like it was playing from inside a tin can—which, technically, it was. But it was there. Real. Loud enough to carry.

Y/N let out a small, involuntary snort. Not quite a laugh—she was too wrung out for that—but something close. A dry, exhausted sound that cracked in her throat before it fully formed.

“Of course,” she muttered, barely audible over the hiss of her suit. “Why the hell not.”

She turned her face to the sound, let it roll over her like a warm breeze. The melody skipped slightly as the speaker rebuffered, then found its footing again. It echoed out over the flats, skipping across dunes and bouncing faintly against the far wall of the crater.

It sounded completely ridiculous.

She could only imagine what it might look like from above—the MAV standing like some stripped-down monument to desperation, half-disassembled, with ABBA blaring into the Martian dusk. But she didn’t care. No one was watching. No one was here.

Except the camera.

The old Hab cam had been hauled out from storage that morning and mounted onto the tripod she’d built from three scavenged rover legs. It had taken three tries to get it to stand upright in the wind. The joints were loose and she hadn’t been able to stabilize the footing without wedging a rock beneath it. The lens was scratched at the corners, fogged with grit. But the recording light was on. That was enough.

She turned to face it.

Her visor was up, streaked with a smear of red dust she hadn’t bothered to clean. Her face was drawn, jaw tight, sweat-matted hair sticking out from under the edge of her helmet ring. There was a tiredness in her eyes that couldn’t be faked. The kind that didn’t come from a single long day—but from all of them.

And still—after everything—she found something like a smile.

Not much. Just a flicker. A small, human thing that tugged briefly at the edge of her mouth and vanished again.

She looked into the lens and said, quietly, “If this is how it ends... I’m at least going out with a beat.”

She didn’t stay to dramatize the moment. There was nothing left to say. No pithy sendoff. No final look back. She adjusted the straps on her suit, flexed her sore fingers once, and turned toward the MAV.

The music kept playing behind her as she walked. Her boots crunched over loose grit, and the wind swept her footprints away almost as quickly as she made them. The speaker fought to keep up, the chorus jumping slightly with every gust, but it held. Just barely.

She reached the base of the ladder and stopped, one hand resting on the rung.

The MAV loomed above her like a relic. The tarp covering the nose cone flapped gently in the breeze, held in place by thermal glue, epoxy seals, and a prayer. The hull creaked faintly as the wind pushed against it. She’d sealed the hatch an hour ago and double-checked the pressure rings, but she still felt that pinch of doubt in the back of her throat. The kind that whispered what if it doesn’t hold?

She didn’t answer it.

Instead, she climbed.

Her arms protested the movement, joints tight and sore, but she moved deliberately. One step. Then another. By the time she reached the top, the sun had slipped closer to the horizon, the shadows stretching long behind her like threads pulled from the sky.

She placed her hand on the outer hatch and paused. Not to deliver a final line. Not to think of Earth. Just to breathe.

The MAV groaned softly under her weight.

The tarp held.

She ducked inside.

The music continued for a few more seconds outside—one final chorus warbling faintly through the thin Hexundecian air—before the speaker choked on a memory buffer and went silent.

She heard the cut from inside the MAV. A sudden, brittle silence where the absurdity had been.

She blinked. Then, after a long pause, she let out a sound halfway between a breath and a laugh.

“Figures,” she said, voice echoing faintly in the hollow chamber. “Survived a year out here. Dies right when I need it.”

She eased herself down into the harness. Felt the straps bite into her suit. Tensed her shoulders, then relaxed them.

Outside, the wind kept blowing. Inside, the MAV was quiet. And for the first time in a long while, everything was still.

Koah’s jaw was clenched tight, his shoulders stiff, his fingers working furiously over the simulated flight controls. A soft sheen of sweat glistened along his temple, and the soft hum of the Starfire’s artificial gravity system did nothing to mask the rising sound of his own pulse in his ears.

Then—red.

COLLISION WITH TERRAIN.

The alert flashed across the screen with an abrupt, terminal finality. The simulator screen froze, the MAV’s virtual ascent freezing mid-frame as the telemetry dipped off its plotted trajectory and straight into the surface of M6-117.

Koah swore under his breath, leaning back and scrubbing a hand through his hair.

Val, standing behind him with arms crossed and a silent kind of patience, finally spoke.

“Well. That’s one way to kill her.”

Koah didn’t turn around. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Val cocked an eyebrow. “You grazed the ridge by sixty meters and still lost control.”

“I misjudged the crosswind,” Koah muttered, already rebooting the program. “There’s a lateral shear the moment she clears the crater’s upper edge. I didn’t compensate fast enough.”

“You didn’t compensate at all.”

Koah didn’t argue. He just started again.

Across the room, Jimin was watching quietly. Always watching. His arms were folded, a tablet resting against his hip. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just watched the new simulation load in—silent desert terrain unfolding on the screen, the crude profile of the MAV climbing into view.

Then, calmly: “Run it again.”

Koah gave a tight nod, jaw grinding. “Already on it.”

No one said it aloud, but they all knew: he wasn’t just practicing for a sim anymore. The next time he guided the MAV, it wouldn’t be theoretical. Y/N would be inside. And if he screwed it up—if he overcorrected or waited a half-second too long—he wouldn’t be watching a failure animation.

He’d be watching her die.

Far below the slow arc of Starfire’s orbit, deep in the wind-scoured silence of M6-117, Y/N wasn’t thinking about flight paths or burn trajectories. She wasn’t thinking about orbital windows or the terrifying precision of a rendezvous 200 kilometers above her head.

She was thinking about the last bolt.

The MAV no longer resembled a spacecraft—at least not in the traditional sense. Its body had been stripped to the skeleton, gutted of everything not absolutely essential to flight. The clean panels, the instrument clusters, the ergonomic chairs—all gone. Dismantled. Ejected. Abandoned in neat or not-so-neat piles outside the hatch. The floor was bare save for hardpoints and wiring channels, some of which she’d rerouted by hand. Others she’d torn out completely, judging them expendable.

Anything that didn’t help her leave this planet was dead weight. And dead weight didn’t fly.

Inside the airlock, the carnage was undeniable: bundles of severed cables coiled like veins, seat frames stacked like broken bones, polycarbonate display shells cracked and tossed against the far wall. Her makeshift bin overflowed, and the overflow had started to scatter—bits and pieces rolling down the slope toward the edge of the launch pad in lazy arcs. To anyone else, it would’ve looked like the wreckage of a crash. But it wasn’t. It was controlled destruction.

Intentional.

Necessary.

Y/N leaned back against the inner hatch rim, trying to catch her breath. She’d been working for hours without pause, and her body was registering its protest in every possible language: throbbing shoulders, forearms trembling from tension, joints stiff with grit and fatigue. The wrench in her hand felt heavier than it had any right to. Her grip had started to falter an hour ago. She kept working anyway.

Her gloves were caked in rust-red dust, fraying at the fingers. Her right thumb was raw—no skin left on the pad, the fabric beneath damp and tacky. Every time she flexed the joint, it stung like fire, but she didn’t have time to think about that now.

She looked down at what was left: the forward access collar—what had once housed the MAV’s primary nose airlock. The interface was compromised. She’d known that for days, ever since she first checked the weld seams and found stress fractures spidering out from the lower ring. The airlock itself had always been heavy, armored to resist high-speed debris during ascent. But now it was just another liability—too much mass, too many structural risks. And completely useless.

It had to go.

She dropped to one knee with a hiss of effort. The joint in her suit pinched, and her back seized as she twisted awkwardly to brace herself. The fasteners weren’t difficult, not anymore. Four had already been loosened days ago during prep. Only two remained, and the metal was corroded enough to complain with every turn.

She grit her teeth and leaned into it.

The first bolt groaned, spun twice, then popped loose with a sudden give that nearly threw her off balance. She planted a hand against the inner bulkhead to steady herself, breathing hard through her nose.

The second bolt was more stubborn. It refused to move at first, stuck tight by a decade of cold and pressure and the fine silicate dust that wormed its way into everything on this planet. She repositioned the wrench, dug her boots into the deck, and hauled.

One turn. Two.

Then—snap.

The final bolt sheared away. The access collar sagged, shifted, and with a dull metallic pop, it tore loose from the surrounding frame. For a heartbeat, it hovered there—still clinging to its old shape, its old function.

Then it dropped.

The mass of it caught a gust of wind as it fell. The panel spun as it tumbled, crashing to the ground with a heavy, final thunk that reverberated across the dry surface. The noise wasn’t loud, not really. But in a world so quiet, so still, it felt seismic.

Y/N stepped back automatically, too fast, and her knees buckled.

Her legs simply gave out.

She hit the ground sideways, dust puffing up in a loose swirl around her, the wrench slipping from her hand and bouncing once before it landed beside her in the dirt.

She lay there, unmoving for a long moment, face turned to the sky.

Her pulse was in her ears. Her arms refused to lift.

Everything ached.

She could feel the crust of sweat drying beneath her undersuit, her body swaddled in fatigue and grime and the kind of exhaustion that made the idea of standing again feel almost hypothetical.

She didn’t bother trying to sit up.

Instead, she tilted her head back just enough to see the MAV above her, its patched-together body silhouetted against the dimming sky. The canvas at the nose—once her sleeping tarp, now layered and bonded with thermal glue—fluttered slightly at the edges. It held.

Somehow, it held.

The whole thing looked absurd. Makeshift. Unbelievably fragile.

But it was all she had.

She let out a sound. It wasn’t quite a laugh—too hollow, too dry—but it came from somewhere near the part of her that used to have the energy for humor.

Her gaze drifted sideways, to where the old speaker still sat on the ground a few meters away, half-buried in dust. It had been playing earlier—something upbeat and ridiculous, a holdover from her playlist of songs she’d used to fill the Hab with noise when the silence became too loud.

She hoped Waterloo had been the last thing it played. That felt appropriate somehow. Too bad.

She closed her eyes, her breath coming in slow, shallow pulls.

“Finally facing my Waterloo,” she murmured.

Her voice didn’t carry far. The helmet mic was off. The camera wasn’t rolling. There was no audience this time. No log entry. No flight team monitoring her vitals.

It was just her.

Just the dust, and the ship she’d rebuilt by hand, and the infinite silence of an alien world that didn’t care whether she lived or died.

The wrench lay beside her, forgotten.

And for a while, Y/N didn’t move at all.

Onboard Starfire, the mood had shifted.

Gone was the casual rhythm of deep space routine. No idle chatter, no coffee mugs clinking against console rails, no playlist humming through the speakers. The rec deck had been empty for hours. Everyone had drifted toward the core of the ship—the main operations bay—drawn there by necessity, by duty, by the quiet pull of something heavier than protocol.

The gravity was steady, calibrated to Earth-norm, but it still felt like the floor had tilted slightly. Like something was waiting.

Overhead, the orbital burn countdown ticked down in cold blue digits.

Jimin stood at the forward console, his hands braced against the reinforced edge, leaning slightly as if anchoring himself. The navigation display glowed in front of him, lines arcing across the interface: the MAV’s projected trajectory, the intercept corridor, and Starfire’s adjusted orbital path. Three bodies, four variables, one window.

The final window.

Behind him, the others moved in quiet coordination.

Cruz was already seated at Systems Two, hunched over a terminal, rerouting power protocols through the MAV telemetry relay. Her fingers moved fast, practiced. Efficient. There was no margin left for error. Anything they didn’t handle before launch would have to be handled mid-flight—and there were too many unknowns between now and then to trust in mid-flight.

“Nguyen’s got full remote,” Jimin said, his tone even but clipped, his eyes not leaving the screen. “Cruz, you’ll manage override routing from Bay Two. Keep a hard link to the MAV all the way through primary burn.”

“Copy,” Val replied, not looking up. “I’m tying in emergency telemetry now. One-minute intervals on the backup ping. It’ll lag by three seconds on the fallback line.”

“We’ll take it,” Jimin said.

He turned, scanning the rest of the crew.

“Hoseok. Armin. Airlock Two. You’ll be suiting up once we hit the two-minute mark before MAV ignition. Tether lines stay deployed. Outer door stays open.”

Armin nodded once, already halfway through checklist sync. “Lines are staged and calibrated. Anchor’s clipped. The MMU packs are charged.”

“Good.”

Hoseok leaned forward, his tablet on his lap, ascent data scrolling in a slow, inevitable stream. His brow furrowed as he traced the curve of the launch.

“She’s going to hit twelve Gs during the climb,” he said, voice low. “She’ll black out somewhere between eleven and twelve if the suit’s not aligned perfectly. Even if she doesn’t lose consciousness, she’s going to be borderline hypoxic by engine cutoff. Muscle tremors, potential cerebral edema, disorientation.”

He paused. No one filled the silence.

“She might not be coherent when we make contact.”

Jimin didn’t react. Not outwardly.

“That’s why you’re going out,” he said. “That’s why it’s you.”

Hoseok met his gaze. “You’re assuming she’s still conscious when we dock.”

“I’m assuming she’s alive,” Jimin said.

Hoseok nodded once, accepting the weight of it.

“We’ve got a 214-meter tether,” he said. “I’ll be in the MMU. If we hold her velocity at five meters per second or lower, I can intercept manually. Any faster, and it’s going to feel like jumping onto a moving train. With no brakes.”

Jimin shifted his attention back to the trajectory map. The MAV’s projected arc skated along the edge of the capture envelope. Tight. Risky.

“And if she’s coming in hot?”

Hoseok didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was quiet. Not afraid. Just honest.

“Then I miss. Or I grab and get pulled. Or we both spin. Worst case, we bounce off the line and watch her drift out into space.”

Another silence.

Jimin exhaled through his nose, measured and slow. “Engine cutoff gives us a 52-minute window before intercept. That’s our margin. Cruz will give you live telemetry as soon as thrust cuts. Until then, you’re just watching the clock.”

He turned to Armin.

“You’re backup. Stay tethered. If anything goes wrong, you stabilize and pull him back. No solo retrievals. No free-floating. You don’t follow unless he’s secured.”

Armin, already double-checking MMU thruster settings, nodded once. “Understood.”

Jimin finally stepped away from the console, circling toward the center of the room where the rest of the crew had settled in. Koah stood near the wall, pale but steady, his hands tucked under his arms. His eyes were fixed on the simulator feed looping in the corner screen—replaying the MAV’s predicted trajectory frame by frame.

“You ready, Nguyen?” Jimin asked.

Koah nodded slowly. “Ready or not, I’ll fly it.”

“You’ll fly it.”

There was no encouragement in Jimin’s tone. No pep talk. Just fact.

He looked around the room one last time.

Cruz, fingers still moving. Hoseok, pulling on his gloves. Armin, checking O2 flow levels. Koah, staring at the screen like he could will the outcome into submission.

They were tired. Stretched thin.

But they were here. Focused. Professional.

Jimin straightened.

“One shot,” he said. “That’s all we’ve got. We do this clean. No improvising. No ad-libbing. Stick to the numbers.”

A pause.

“Let’s bring her home.”

Inside the pop-up shelter, the air felt heavy despite the pressure regulators still holding steady. Not hot. Not thin. Just dense in the way quiet places get when they've been silent for too long. The fabric walls rustled faintly in the wind, a soft, steady whisper that only made the silence inside more absolute.

Y/N sat cross-legged on the floor, the knees of her suit stained from weeks of kneeling, crawling, wrenching, fixing. Her back pressed against the outer curve of the tent wall, the thin material bowing slightly behind her. It wasn’t a real shelter—just the emergency module meant for temporary use while a permanent hab was being assembled. She’d been using it on and off for weeks now. Long enough that it had started to feel like her shadow.

The floor beneath her was a layer of insulation fabric over packed dirt, the dust already seeping through at the edges. She barely noticed anymore.

In her lap, she held a ration pack.

Foil-wrapped. Worn soft at the edges. The printed label had faded in the sun, but she could still make out the marker she’d scrawled across it months ago, back when she'd still thought labeling it would be funny, or maybe meaningful.

GOODBYE, M6.

She hadn’t meant to save it this long. At the time, it was just something she did—something to help her hold onto a timeline. A plan. Something resembling control.

She turned the pack slowly in her hands, thumb grazing the corner seam, feeling the slight give in the foil where it had crinkled. She could remember labeling it. She’d been tired even then, but not like this. Not spent. Not stripped to the nerve.

She had thought she’d open it on her last day here. Maybe even in orbit, on the way back. That it’d be part of a ritual. A small victory meal. A full-circle moment.

Instead, she was on the floor of a half-collapsed tent, staring down at a meal that hadn’t changed, even though everything else had.

Her fingers hesitated on the tear notch.

It was a stupid thing to hesitate over.

But still, she did.

Not because of what was inside. Just... because once she opened it, there’d be nothing else left to mark the moment. No more lines between before and after. Just the long blur of now.

She broke the seal with a jerk.

The foil hissed and gave. The sound was too loud in the confined space, and she winced instinctively, though she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like anyone could hear her.

She stared down at the contents for a long time. Rehydrated rice. Some kind of protein paste. Technically flavored, but she’d stopped believing the labels weeks ago. Food wasn’t about enjoyment out here. It was function. And now, even that was ceremonial.

She took the first bite without thinking. It was automatic. A routine. Chew. Swallow. The texture was soft and faintly gritty, like every other meal. It filled her mouth with the memory of nothing. No comfort. No warmth. Just fuel. The bland kind.

She kept eating, mechanically. Chewing slower with each bite.

She didn’t want it. She wasn’t hungry. But there was a gravity to finishing it now, to not leaving it half-eaten like so many others. If she was going to say goodbye to this place, she’d do it clean.

The name on the packet felt like a joke now. Goodbye, M6.

As if a single meal could contain all that. As if the act of opening it, eating it, could somehow make peace with everything this place had taken.

The dust storms. The silence. The endless repairs. The isolation so thick it had begun to feel like part of her own skin.

She glanced around the tent. It had held up better than she’d expected, all things considered. One corner had a slow leak that never quite sealed, and the interior fabric was stained along the floor seam from some leak weeks ago that had never quite dried. Her helmet sat nearby, a faint film of red dust still clinging to the visor.

There was no light here, not really. Just the pale wash from the tablet screen on standby mode across from her, casting a soft glow over her boots and the half-empty water pouch at her side.

There were no clocks anymore. Not physical ones, at least. Just the countdown in her head. The one that had started ticking the moment the mission shifted from survival to escape.

She took another bite. Slower this time. Her jaw moved like it was made of something heavier than bone.

How long had it been since she’d last spoken to someone face to face? Since someone had looked at her and not through a camera feed? The last message from April had been clipped like all messages from the girl were.

We’re locked in. Launch is yours. Be safe.

That was hours ago.

Possibly longer. Y/N had long since stopped being able to tell the passage of time on this planet. She did not even know if the days on her camera were correct. She would not know until she was on the Starfire, truly, if she'd been out here for over a year.

Y/N swallowed the last bite, feeling the dense weight of it settle in her stomach. It sat like lead. Not unpleasant. Just... full. In that way things only feel full when you know there’s nothing else coming.

She held the empty foil pouch in both hands for a moment. Then flattened it. Folded it once. Then again. The label was barely visible now. Just a faint smudge of black ink against silver.

She placed it carefully beside her helmet.

She leaned back against the wall of the tent and let her eyes close for a moment. She didn’t sleep. Didn’t even try. Just let her mind rest against the quiet.

The wind rattled faintly outside. The fabric creaked. Somewhere deep in the MAV’s systems—now half a kilometer away—the flight prep sequence was probably already ticking through a checklist.

She’d get up soon. She’d suit up. She’d climb inside that gutted, patched-together vehicle, and trust it to hold long enough to throw her into the sky.

But for now, she stayed where she was. Just a woman in a tent, finishing her last meal on a planet that never welcomed her.

She looked at the empty ration pack one last time.

“Goodbye,” she said quietly. Not to the food. Not to the tent.

Just to the dust.

To the silence.

To the part of her that would always stay behind.

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